Learning Personalized User Preference from Cold Start in Multi-turn Conversations

This paper presents a novel teachable conversation interaction system that is capable of learning users preferences from cold start by gradually adapting to personal preferences. In particular, the TAI system is able to automatically identify and label user preference in live interactions, manage dialogue flows for interactive teaching sessions, and reuse learned preference for preference elicitation. We develop the TAI system by leveraging BERT encoder models to encode both dialogue and relevant context information, and build action prediction (AP), argument filling (AF) and named entity recognition (NER) models to understand the teaching session. We adopt a seeker-provider interaction loop mechanism to generate diverse dialogues from cold-start. TAI is capable of learning user preference, which achieves 0.9122 turn level accuracy on out-of-sample dataset, and has been successfully adopted in production.Comment: preference, personalization, cold-start, dialogue, LLM. embeddin

The 'Let Me Learn' professional learning process experience : a new culture for professional learning

The generation of professional capital, viewed in terms of social capacity building, has an important learning dimension. Teachers’ staff development is one area which can contribute towards social capacity building and socially committed teachers have an important part to play in generating capital for their profession. This paper provides a critical review of current professional development processes in Malta with a focus on how different provisions are successful, or limited, in generating further knowledge and professional learning. It also discusses the need for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) which capitalizes on practitioners’ experiences, realities and the knowledge of the social context of learning. Research data, in the form of teacher narratives and one longitudinal case study, reveals the importance of the social dimension in CPD. The involvement of teachers in the Let Me Learn Professional Learning Process marks a proactive stance in teacher professional development and transformation through its emphasis on teacher networks, partnerships and externalizing teachers’ knowledge base. It also demonstrates that teachers’ professional capital can be fostered when teachers learn together and collaborate.peer-reviewe

Former African-American Male Football Student-Athletes at Southeastern Conference Institutions and Their Transition From Athletics to Non-Athletic Careers

The problem of practice for this dissertation will address the perceived deficiencies in the cultivation of workplace readiness and the projection of career success among former African-American football student-athletes at Southeastern Conference institutions. The focus of this dissertation in practice will be to examine the perceived lack of development of academic, social and psychological skills in order to achieve a successful transition from athletics to non-athletic careers. This study will identify the applicable career and academic developments, discussed and articulated by former African-American male football student-athletes, which directly influence their employability qualities. Manuscript two will review data generated from the semi-structured interviews that will be conducted in order to identify best-practices that were important in assisting these former student-athletes with their transition from collegiate athlete to early career success. Manuscript three will discuss non-athletic career development considerations for former African-American student-athletes and how universities could better prepare such students for non-playing careers. The various experiences, the relationships and programs that influence early career success and methods of implementation for scholastic frameworks will be discussed and explained within an institutional context

La experiencia del “Let Me Learn Professional Learning Process”: Una nueva cultura para el aprendizaje profesional

The generation of professional capital, viewed in terms of social capacity building, has an important learning dimension. Teachers’ staff development is one area which can contribute towards social capacity building and socially committed teachers have an important part to play in generating capital for their profession. This paper provides a critical review of current professional development processes in Malta with a focus on how different provisions are successful, or limited, in generating further knowledge and professional learning. It also discusses the need for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) which capitalizes on practitioners’ experiences, realities and the knowledge of the social context of learning. Research data, in the form of teacher narratives and one longitudinal case study, reveals the importance of the social dimension in CPD. The involvement of teachers in the Let Me Learn Professional Learning Process marks a proactive stance in teacher professional development and transformation through its emphasis on teacher networks, partnerships and externalizing teachers’ knowledge base. It also demonstrates that teachers’ professional capital can be fostered when teachers learn together and collaborate.La generación de capital profesional, vista en términos de construcción de capacidad social, tiene una dimensión de estudio importante. La formación del profesorado es un área que puede contribuir a dicha capacidad además de promover profesores socialmente comprometidos. Este artículo proporciona una revisión crítica de los procesos de desarrollo de diferentes corrientes profesionales en Malta, con especial atención sobre cómo diferentes acciones son acertadas o tienen un alcance limitado en la generación de conocimiento y de aprendizaje profesional. También se pone de manifiesto la necesidad de un Desarrollo Profesional Continuado (CPD) centrado en la experiencia, la realidad y el conocimiento del contexto social. Los datos de la investigación, en forma de narraciones del profesorado y mediante un estudio de caso longitudinal, revelan la importancia de la dimensión social en el CPD. La participación de profesores en el Let Me Learn Professional Learning Process evidencia una postura proactiva en el desarrollo y transformación profesional del docente a través de redes de colaboración, lo cual pone de manifiesto que el capital profesional de los docentes puede ser promovido cuando éstos aprenden juntos y colaboran

The Tale of Two Managers: A Value-Based Saga

Human resource development managers are concerned about recruiting competent and value-based people in organizations. Values can be seen at the individual, organizational and corporate levels and also in a national context. Culture and society play an important part in shaping values and behavior. This paper relates the cases of two managers, born in different periods of time, having particular generational values, and consequently different dominant work values and personality traits. The interviews with stakeholders and other role holders also echo the same. Amongst a cross-section of employees, it is seen that some values are commonly found, whereas other values are unevenly distributed.  Personality attributes, as propounded by organizational experts - like Type A personality traits, proactive personality constructs, core self-evaluation risk-taking and high-flyer dimensions - are seen in varying degrees in the employees.  Again, there are issues like integrity, loyalty, and whistleblowing which are prevalent in a skewed manner. Organizational commitment is seen as responsible for bonding. Stories about the founder have kept the organizations surging forward. All these artifacts are seen suffused with values

Rights-Based and Tech-Driven: Open Data, Freedom of Information, and the Future of Government Transparency

Open data policy mandates that government proactively publish its data online for the public to reuse. It is a radically different approach to transparency than traditional right-to-know strategies as embodied in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legislation in that it involves ex ante rather than ex post disclosure of whole datasets. Although both open data and FOIA deal with information sharing, the normative essence of open data is participation rather than litigation. By fostering public engagement, open data shifts the relationship between state and citizen from a monitorial to a collaborative one, centered around using information to solve problems together. This Essay explores the theory and practice of open data in comparison to FOIA and highlights its uses as a tool for advancing human rights, saving lives, and strengthening democracy. Although open data undoubtedly builds upon the fifty-year legal tradition of the right to know about the workings of one\u27s government, open data does more than advance government accountability. Rather, it is a distinctly twenty-first century governing practice borne out of the potential of big data to help solve society\u27s biggest problems. Thus, this Essay charts a thoughtful path toward a twenty-first century transparency regime that takes advantage of and blends the strengths of open data\u27s collaborative and innovation-centric approach and the adversarial and monitorial tactics of freedom of information regimes