Learning with Latent Language

The named concepts and compositional operators present in natural language provide a rich source of information about the kinds of abstractions humans use to navigate the world. Can this linguistic background knowledge improve the generality and efficiency of learned classifiers and control policies? This paper aims to show that using the space of natural language strings as a parameter space is an effective way to capture natural task structure. In a pretraining phase, we learn a language interpretation model that transforms inputs (e.g. images) into outputs (e.g. labels) given natural language descriptions. To learn a new concept (e.g. a classifier), we search directly in the space of descriptions to minimize the interpreter's loss on training examples. Crucially, our models do not require language data to learn these concepts: language is used only in pretraining to impose structure on subsequent learning. Results on image classification, text editing, and reinforcement learning show that, in all settings, models with a linguistic parameterization outperform those without

Unmet Needs of Unaccompanied Minors from Central America: Perceptions of Professionals from Multiple Sectors

Background: In recent years, there has been a significant influx of Central American youth who cross the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian. While federal procedures are established to oversee the treatment and placement of unaccompanied minors, less is known about the needs of unaccompanied minors and available services afterthey are placed in appropriate custody. Methods: Purposive and strategic sampling of professionals from medical, social work, education and legal fields was conducted. Fourteen informants were recruited across the U.S. for confidential semi-structured interviews, which were audio recorded and transcribed in 2016 to 2017. Standard anthropological methods were employed, including immersion and crystallization techniques that incorporated within-case and across-case analytic strategies. Results: Recruited informants had previous or current direct experience working with immigrant minors for three or more years in addition to extensive public health experience. Unaccompanied minors were described as predominantly adolescent boys, ranging from 2 to 18 years old. Children faced unmet mental, medical and psychosocial needs that are interconnected and largely unmet due to children’s legal status and ineligibility to access services in most jurisdictions. The most pressing challenge affecting the health of youth was their immigration status. Across sectors,informants revealed an imbalance between the growing demand for services, including legal counsel, and the limited supply of professionals and well-funded services to meet children’s complex needs. Informants emphasized the value of trauma-informed practice, Spanish language proficiency, child-informed practice and intercultural awareness and humility towards their clients as key features of equipped professionals working with this vulnerable population. Regardless of sector, professionals emphasized the importance of culturally-informed care to immigrant youth. Building these skills is associated with greater confidence to provide services to unaccompanied minors, many of whom have experienced as significant burden of childhood trauma. Conclusions: The health needs of unaccompanied minors are complex and span across medical, social work, education, and legal fields. Interdisciplinary collaboration is needed to address the challenges faced by unaccompanied minors in their efforts to integrate themselves into their new communities and promote their resilience. Promising initiatives include co-location of inter-sector services for increased access and efficiency of services and development of professional trainings and resources for professionals in sectors that serve this population

A new methodology for learning design

This paper describes the development of a new methodology for learning design. Our approach is predicated on the view that no one, simple, view of design is appropriate, because of the inherently messy and creative nature of design. Instead we are adopting an interactive and multi-faceted approach which consists of a series of cycles of user consultation, focus groups and workshops alongside the development of learning design tools and resources. In particular we will describe how we have adapted an existing mind mapping and argumentation tool, Compendium, so that it can be used as a means of guiding designers through the learning design decision making process in the creation of learning activities. We will describe the initial evaluations of the use of this tool, along with our findings to date on a series of fact finding exercises to better understand individual and team approaches to design

Metacognition and Reflection by Interdisciplinary Experts: Insights from Cognitive Science and Philosophy

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article

Harmonised Principles for Public Participation in Quality Assurance of Integrated Water Resources Modelling

The main purpose of public participation in integrated water resources modelling is to improve decision-making by ensuring that decisions are soundly based on shared knowledge, experience and scientific evidence. The present paper describes stakeholder involvement in the modelling process. The point of departure is the guidelines for quality assurance for `scientific` water resources modelling developed under the EU research project HarmoniQuA, which has developed a computer based Modelling Support Tool (MoST) to provide a user-friendly guidance and a quality assurance framework that aim for enhancing the credibility of river basin modelling. MoST prescribes interaction, which is a form of participation above consultation but below engagement of stakeholders and the public in the early phases of the modelling cycle and under review tasks throughout the process. MoST is a flexible tool which supports different types of users and facilitates interaction between modeller, manager and stakeholders. The perspective of using MoST for engagement of stakeholders e.g. higher level participation throughout the modelling process as part of integrated water resource management is evaluate