CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Linking Research and Policy: Assessing a Framework for Organic Agricultural Support in Ireland

This paper links social science research and agricultural policy through an analysis of support for organic agriculture and food. Globally, sales of organic food have experienced 20% annual increases for the past two decades, and represent the fastest growing segment of the grocery market. Although consumer interest has increased, farmers are not keeping up with demand. This is partly due to a lack of political support provided to farmers in their transition from conventional to organic production. Support policies vary by country and in some nations, such as the US, vary by state/province. There have been few attempts to document the types of support currently in place. This research draws on an existing Framework tool to investigate regionally specific and relevant policy support available to organic farmers in Ireland. This exploratory study develops a case study of Ireland within the framework of ten key categories of organic agricultural support: leadership, policy, research, technical support, financial support, marketing and promotion, education and information, consumer issues, inter-agency activities, and future developments. Data from the Irish Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority (Teagasc), and other governmental and semi-governmental agencies provide the basis for an assessment of support in each category. Assessments are based on the number of activities, availability of information to farmers, and attention from governmental personnel for each of the ten categories. This policy framework is a valuable tool for farmers, researchers, state agencies, and citizen groups seeking to document existing types of organic agricultural support and discover policy areas which deserve more attention

Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments

The field of shared virtual environments, which also encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model

Analogical reasoning in children's reading and addition

The purpose of the research was to examine the role of analogical reasoning in children's early reading and addition and to look for possible commonalities in children's performance across these two educational contexts. The research comprised four studies. Study I was a preliminary investigation of individual differences in children's use of analogies in beginning reading. In this study, 55 five-to six year-old beginning readers were presented with the traditional clue word analogy task incorporating either real word or non-word test items. After the presentation of an initial clue word that was decoded for them, children were asked to read a series of related and unrelated target words. Distinct patterns of analogy emerged with regard to the children's ability to use different combinations of orthographic and phonological relations using cluster analysis. The findings illustrated the usefulness of identifying profiles of orthographic and phonological relations for characterising children's development in learning to read. Study 2 was designed to extend the findings from Study 1 by examining whether children's traditional analogical reasoning abilities, short-term memory and their reading related skills could provide some explanations for these patterns of individual differences in reasoning skills in beginning reading. The results of Study 2 supported those of Study 1 revealing distinct patterns in children's use of orthographic and phonological relations. Although single word reading and early phonological knowledge were systematically related to these different patterns of analogy, measures of traditional analogical reasoning skill were unable to account for differences in children's profiles. The purpose of Study 3 was to systematically explore the possibility that analogies are important for children's addition. In this study, 66 five-to-seven year-olds were given an addition-based analogy task designed to assess their ability to solve series of addition problems that were either conceptually related or unrelated to a solved addition problem. Similar to Study 2, children also solved a series of traditional analogical reasoning tasks, designed to assess their ability to solve analogies based on thematic, causal and visual relations. The results indicated that children's use of analogy to solve commuted addition problems was systematically related to their profiles of addition problem solving skills, although no relation was found between children's use of addition analogy and traditional analogical reasoning tasks. In Study 4,69 five-to-six year-olds were given a revised version of the reading and addition analogy tasks presented in Studies 2 and 3 to examine possible similarities in children's analogical reasoning skills across the two domains. Individual self-reports of strategies showed that the children relied on a wide repertoire of strategies for solving related analogy problems in reading and addition. Furthermore, children's patterns of responses to solving analogical problems indicated that most children who reported using analogy strategies in early reading had high levels of analogical reasoning in addition. The findings suggest that there may be a common analogical reasoning component underlying the two domains of reading and mathematics. Overall, the four studies suggest that children's ability to reason about conceptual relations are an important aspect of their development in reading and addition and that the study of analogical reasoning across different educational contexts can provide important insights into children's cognitive development

The Influence Of Gestural Learning On Oral Reading And Reading Comprehension

The purpose of this study is to evaluate how gestural training may facilitate oral reading and reading comprehension of single words. For example, it is not clear whether multi-modal cues such as gesture provide an advantage over verbal cueing alone, or which type of multi-modal cues may be more effective than others in visual-verbal learning. This study examined language learning in healthy volunteers to be able to apply the effective methods for language intervention in individuals with language difficulties. Thirty-two healthy adults were selected to participate in four different learning conditions including verbal alone, visual cue, meaningful gesture, and meaningless gesture. The participants were trained to correlate a verb with the matched nonsense symbol(s). After the 4 training conditions, the participants completed a final comprehensive yes/no verification task. It was predicted that participants would perform most accurately in orally reading novel script that was trained using meaningful gesture, followed by training with the visual tracing cue, then verbal training alone, and finally, verbal plus meaningless gesture. It was also predicted that participants would perform fastest in orally reading novel script that was trained using meaningful gesture, followed by training with the visual tracing cue, then verbal training alone, and finally, verbal plus meaningless gesture. The results of this study did not support the assumption that training with meaningful gestures facilitates learning of visual-verbal associations more than verbal training alone. Also, the assumption that training with a visual tracing gesture would aid learning more than training with the verbal cue alone was not supported by this study. The assumption that training with meaningless gestures would interfere with learning compared to training with the verbal cue only was supported by this study. These results suggest that the addition of a gesture with the verbal production of the word divides the participants\u27 attention between two items rather than one. These results also suggest that the nonsense symbols were vastly unfamiliar and therefore taxing the process of language learning. It would be beneficial for future studies to use the theory of these training tasks with young children who have increased mental flexibility and are better able to learn language when using combined gestures and/or movement with verbal production of words

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 338)

This bibliography lists 139 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during June 1990. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

Applying science of learning in education: Infusing psychological science into the curriculum

The field of specialization known as the science of learning is not, in fact, one field. Science of learning is a term that serves as an umbrella for many lines of research, theory, and application. A term with an even wider reach is Learning Sciences (Sawyer, 2006). The present book represents a sliver, albeit a substantial one, of the scholarship on the science of learning and its application in educational settings (Science of Instruction, Mayer 2011). Although much, but not all, of what is presented in this book is focused on learning in college and university settings, teachers of all academic levels may find the recommendations made by chapter authors of service. The overarching theme of this book is on the interplay between the science of learning, the science of instruction, and the science of assessment (Mayer, 2011). The science of learning is a systematic and empirical approach to understanding how people learn. More formally, Mayer (2011) defined the science of learning as the “scientific study of how people learn” (p. 3). The science of instruction (Mayer 2011), informed in part by the science of learning, is also on display throughout the book. Mayer defined the science of instruction as the “scientific study of how to help people learn” (p. 3). Finally, the assessment of student learning (e.g., learning, remembering, transferring knowledge) during and after instruction helps us determine the effectiveness of our instructional methods. Mayer defined the science of assessment as the “scientific study of how to determine what people know” (p.3). Most of the research and applications presented in this book are completed within a science of learning framework. Researchers first conducted research to understand how people learn in certain controlled contexts (i.e., in the laboratory) and then they, or others, began to consider how these understandings could be applied in educational settings. Work on the cognitive load theory of learning, which is discussed in depth in several chapters of this book (e.g., Chew; Lee and Kalyuga; Mayer; Renkl), provides an excellent example that documents how science of learning has led to valuable work on the science of instruction. Most of the work described in this book is based on theory and research in cognitive psychology. We might have selected other topics (and, thus, other authors) that have their research base in behavior analysis, computational modeling and computer science, neuroscience, etc. We made the selections we did because the work of our authors ties together nicely and seemed to us to have direct applicability in academic settings