51,686 research outputs found
Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts
This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach of using software
development artifacts to gauge student behavior and the effectiveness of
changes to curriculum design. There is an ongoing need to adapt university
courses to changing requirements and shifts in industry. As an educator it is
therefore vital to have access to methods, with which to ascertain the effects
of curriculum design changes. In this paper, we present our approach of
analyzing software repositories in order to gauge student behavior during
project work. We evaluate this approach in a case study of a university
undergraduate software development course teaching agile development
methodologies. Surveys revealed positive attitudes towards the course and the
change of employed development methodology from Scrum to Kanban. However,
surveys were not usable to ascertain the degree to which students had adapted
their workflows and whether they had done so in accordance with course goals.
Therefore, we analyzed students' software repository data, which represents
information that can be collected by educators to reveal insights into learning
successes and detailed student behavior. We analyze the software repositories
created during the last five courses, and evaluate differences in workflows
between Kanban and Scrum usage
Viewing the Future? Virtual Reality In Journalism
Journalism underwent a flurry of virtual reality content creation, production and distribution starting in the final months of 2015. The New York Times distributed more than 1 million cardboard virtual reality viewers and released an app showing a spherical video short about displaced refugees. The Los Angeles Times landed people next to a crater on Mars. USA TODAY took visitors on a ride-along in the "Back to the Future" car on the Universal Studios lot and on a spin through Old Havana in a bright pink '57 Ford. ABC News went to North Korea for a spherical view of a military parade and to Syria to see artifacts threatened by war. The Emblematic Group, a company that creates virtual reality content, followed a woman navigating a gauntlet of anti- abortion demonstrators at a family planning clinic and allowed people to witness a murder-suicide stemming from domestic violence.In short, the period from October 2015 through February 2016 was one of significant experimentation with virtual reality (VR) storytelling. These efforts are part of an initial foray into determining whether VR is a feasible way to present news. The year 2016 is shaping up as a period of further testing and careful monitoring of potential growth in the use of virtual reality among consumers
Challenges in Developing Applications for Aging Populations
Elderly individuals can greatly benefit from the use of computer applications, which can assist in monitoring health conditions, staying in contact with friends and family, and even learning new things. However, developing accessible applications for an elderly user can be a daunting task for developers. Since the advent of the personal computer, the benefits and challenges of developing applications for older adults have been a hot topic of discussion. In this chapter, the authors discuss the various challenges developers who wish to create applications for the elderly computer user face, including age-related impairments, generational differences in computer use, and the hardware constraints mobile devices pose for application developers. Although these challenges are concerning, each can be overcome after being properly identified
Crowdsourcing in Computer Vision
Computer vision systems require large amounts of manually annotated data to
properly learn challenging visual concepts. Crowdsourcing platforms offer an
inexpensive method to capture human knowledge and understanding, for a vast
number of visual perception tasks. In this survey, we describe the types of
annotations computer vision researchers have collected using crowdsourcing, and
how they have ensured that this data is of high quality while annotation effort
is minimized. We begin by discussing data collection on both classic (e.g.,
object recognition) and recent (e.g., visual story-telling) vision tasks. We
then summarize key design decisions for creating effective data collection
interfaces and workflows, and present strategies for intelligently selecting
the most important data instances to annotate. Finally, we conclude with some
thoughts on the future of crowdsourcing in computer vision.Comment: A 69-page meta review of the field, Foundations and Trends in
Computer Graphics and Vision, 201
How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests
Requests are at the core of many social media systems such as question &
answer sites and online philanthropy communities. While the success of such
requests is critical to the success of the community, the factors that lead
community members to satisfy a request are largely unknown. Success of a
request depends on factors like who is asking, how they are asking, when are
they asking, and most critically what is being requested, ranging from small
favors to substantial monetary donations. We present a case study of altruistic
requests in an online community where all requests ask for the very same
contribution and do not offer anything tangible in return, allowing us to
disentangle what is requested from textual and social factors. Drawing from
social psychology literature, we extract high-level social features from text
that operationalize social relations between recipient and donor and
demonstrate that these extracted relations are predictive of success. More
specifically, we find that clearly communicating need through the narrative is
essential and that that linguistic indications of gratitude, evidentiality, and
generalized reciprocity, as well as high status of the asker further increase
the likelihood of success. Building on this understanding, we develop a model
that can predict the success of unseen requests, significantly improving over
several baselines. We link these findings to research in psychology on helping
behavior, providing a basis for further analysis of success in social media
systems.Comment: To appear at ICWSM 2014. 10pp, 3 fig. Data and other info available
at http://www.mpi-sws.org/~cristian/How_to_Ask_for_a_Favor.htm
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