Polish Python: A Short Report from a Short Experiment

Using a programming language based on English can pose an obstacle for learning programming, especially at its early stage, for students who do not understand English. In this paper, however, we report on an experiment in which higher-education students who have some knowledge of both Python and English were asked to solve programming exercises in a Polish-language-based version of Python. The results of the survey performed after the experiment indicate that even among the students who both know English and learned the original Python language, there is a group of students who appreciate the advantages of the translated version

Symbiosis between the TRECVid benchmark and video libraries at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Audiovisual archives are investing in large-scale digitisation efforts of their analogue holdings and, in parallel, ingesting an ever-increasing amount of born- digital files in their digital storage facilities. Digitisation opens up new access paradigms and boosted re-use of audiovisual content. Query-log analyses show the shortcomings of manual annotation, therefore archives are complementing these annotations by developing novel search engines that automatically extract information from both audio and the visual tracks. Over the past few years, the TRECVid benchmark has developed a novel relationship with the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision (NISV) which goes beyond the NISV just providing data and use cases to TRECVid. Prototype and demonstrator systems developed as part of TRECVid are set to become a key driver in improving the quality of search engines at the NISV and will ultimately help other audiovisual archives to offer more efficient and more fine-grained access to their collections. This paper reports the experiences of NISV in leveraging the activities of the TRECVid benchmark

A Strategy for the Promotion of Computer Programming Using Urdu Language in Pakistan

Software industry has proven to be a stepping stone towards changing the rank of a country in the comity of nations. In South Asian region, India has immensely excelled her economic growth by increasing its revenues with the help of software export. The development of software involves man power with technical support, where the premier focus in on computer programming. Therefore, producing a large number of skillful computer programmers in Pakistan would certainly help the cause of establishing software houses, which in turn, will attract the western world to outsource their software projects to Pakistan. Like India, this can certainly act like a game changer for Pakistan’s economy by earning a huge revenue. In this research we have presented a methodology to increase the interest of Pakistani people in computer programming by providing a bilingual computer program development environment in Urdu and English languages. This act may certainly open new dimensions of teaching computer programming, for instance, by introducing computer programming at school level. Furthermore, it may increase the interest of students and teachers to learn and teach computer programming while experiencing to program in their national language. Lastly, in technical terms, we have presented the visual design of such bilingual environment along with architectural modification in the preprocessor for C++ language to support both Urdu and English languages for writing computer program

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 2 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division 9 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 12 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 14 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 16 Advertisements IEEE

Building and Using Digital Libraries for ETDs

Despite the high value of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), the global collection has seen limited use. To extend such use, a new approach to building digital libraries (DLs) is needed. Fortunately, recent decades have seen that a vast amount of “gray literature” has become available through a diverse set of institutional repositories as well as regional and national libraries and archives. Most of the works in those collections include ETDs and are often freely available in keeping with the open-access movement, but such access is limited by the services of supporting information systems. As explained through a set of scenarios, ETDs can better meet the needs of diverse stakeholders if customer discovery methods are used to identify personas and user roles as well as their goals and tasks. Hence, DLs, with a rich collection of services, as well as newer, more advanced ones, can be organized so that those services, and expanded workflows building on them, can be adapted to meet personalized goals as well as traditional ones, such as discovery and exploration

Enhancing Arts Teaching and Learning Through Mooc

This project is a collaborative effort by a group of Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts lecturers whom were involved in a MOOC project titled Application of ICT in Applied and Creative Arts. The objectives of this present project are twofold. First, it strives to identify problems rendered by using MOOC in the process of teaching and learning arts courses. Secondly, to enhance the use of MOOC by proposing solutions to the problems. Throughout the implementation of our MOOC project, it was found that while we were able to assess students’ understanding of the theoretical part of the project through quizzes, essays and polls, it was rather difficult to observe their overall process of completion such as drawing techniques, lighting set-ups for video production, reading notes and playing musical instruments, character design and other crucial elements that needs to be assessed