68,826 research outputs found

    Reprogramming the hand: bridging the craft skills gap in 3D/digital fashion knitwear design

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    Designer-makers have integrated a wide range of digital media and tools into their practices, many taking ownership of a specific technology or application and learning how to use it for themselves, often drawing on their experiential knowledge of established practices to do so. To date, there has been little discussion on how digital knitting practice has evolved within this context, possibly due to the complexity of the software, limited access to industrial machinery and the fact that it seems divorced from the idea of 'craft'. Despite the machine manufacturers' efforts to make knitting technology and software more user-friendly, the digital interface remains a significant barrier to knitwear designer-makers, generally only accessed via experienced technicians

    Exploring Students\u27 Perceptions of Academically Based Living-Learning Communities

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    This qualitative study employed focus group interviews to explore students\u27 perceptions of three well established academically based living-learning communities at a large, land-grant university in the Midwest. Three themes emerged that illustrated students\u27 perceptions of a culture that promoted seamless learning, a scholarly environment, and an ethos of relatedness among faculty, staff, and peers. Implications for practice and future research are discussed

    The seamless integration of Web3D technologies with university curricula to engage the changing student cohort

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    The increasing tendency of many university students to study at least some courses at a distance limits their opportunities for the interactions fundamental to learning. Online learning can assist but relies heavily on text, which is limiting for some students. The popularity of computer games, especially among the younger students, and the emergence of networked games and game-like virtual worlds offers opportunities for enhanced interaction in educational applications. For virtual worlds to be widely adopted in higher education it is desirable to have approaches to design and development that are responsive to needs and limited in their resource requirements. Ideally it should be possible for academics without technical expertise to adapt virtual worlds to support their teaching needs. This project identified Web3D, a technology that is based on the X3D standards and which presents 3D virtual worlds within common web browsers, as an approach worth exploring for educational application. The broad goals of the project were to produce exemplars of Web3D for educational use, together with development tools and associated resources to support non-technical academic adopters, and to promote an Australian community of practice to support broader adoption of Web3D in education. During the first year of the project exemplar applications were developed and tested. The Web3D technology was found to be still in a relatively early stage of development in which the application of standards did not ensure reliable operation in different environments. Moreover, ab initio development of virtual worlds and associated tools proved to be more demanding of resources than anticipated and was judged unlikely in the near future to result in systems that non-technical academics could use with confidence. In the second year the emphasis moved to assisting academics to plan and implement teaching in existing virtual worlds that provided relatively easy to use tools for customizing an environment. A project officer worked with participating academics to support the teaching of significant elements of courses within Second LifeTM. This approach was more successful in producing examples of good practice that could be shared with and emulated by other academics. Trials were also conducted with ExitRealityTM, a new Australian technology that presents virtual worlds in a web browser. Critical factors in the success of the project included providing secure access to networked computers with the necessary capability; negotiating the complexity of working across education, design of virtual worlds, and technical requirements; and supporting participants with professional development in the technology and appropriate pedagogy for the new environments. Major challenges encountered included working with experimental technologies that are evolving rapidly and deploying new networked applications on secure university networks. The project has prepared the way for future expansion in the use of virtual worlds for teaching at USQ and has contributed to the emergence of a national network of tertiary educators interested in the educational applications of virtual worlds

    PanDA: Panoptic Data Augmentation

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    The recently proposed panoptic segmentation task presents a significant challenge of image understanding with computer vision by unifying semantic segmentation and instance segmentation tasks. In this paper we present an efficient and novel panoptic data augmentation (PanDA) method which operates exclusively in pixel space, requires no additional data or training, and is computationally cheap to implement. By retraining original state-of-the-art models on PanDA augmented datasets generated with a single frozen set of parameters, we show robust performance gains in panoptic segmentation, instance segmentation, as well as detection across models, backbones, dataset domains, and scales. Finally, the effectiveness of unrealistic-looking training images synthesized by PanDA suggest that one should rethink the need for image realism for efficient data augmentation

    Institutional legacies in TNCs and their management through training academies: the case of transnational law firms in Italy

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    This paper highlights the effects of heterogeneous institutional contexts on transnational professional service firms, a relatively understudied issue. Specifically the paper provides empirical analysis of how the specificities of the Italian institutional context affect the activities of English legal professional service firms in Milan. This reveals the intimate connection between varieties of capitalisms, place-specific workplace cultures and practices, and the institution-related challenges transnational professional service firms and all transnational corporations (TNCs) face. The paper also reveals the way institutionally generated differences at the level of work practices are managed in transnational law firms through worldwide training programmes designed to ‘govern’ the practices of workers in different parts of the TNC’s network. This highlights the importance of studying attempts to manage institutional heterogeneity at the level of workplace practices, something often missed in existing meso-scale studies of TNCs’ governance structures. Consequently, detailed empirical archaeologies exploring the direct links between institutions and practices are highlighted as being an important as part of future research analysing the effects of institutions on TNCs

    Unsupervised Neural Hidden Markov Models

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    In this work, we present the first results for neuralizing an Unsupervised Hidden Markov Model. We evaluate our approach on tag in- duction. Our approach outperforms existing generative models and is competitive with the state-of-the-art though with a simpler model easily extended to include additional context.Comment: accepted at EMNLP 2016, Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP. Oral presentatio
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