20,927 research outputs found

    The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions

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    The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed, including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture. Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic, multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions, and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users, scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution

    An exploration of the language within Ofsted reports and their influence on primary school performance in mathematics: a mixed methods critical discourse analysis

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    This thesis contributes to the understanding of the language of Ofsted reports, their similarity to one another and associations between different terms used within ‘areas for improvement’ sections and subsequent outcomes for pupils. The research responds to concerns from serving headteachers that Ofsted reports are overly similar, do not capture the unique story of their school, and are unhelpful for improvement. In seeking to answer ‘how similar are Ofsted reports’ the study uses two tools, a plagiarism detection software (Turnitin) and a discourse analysis tool (NVivo) to identify trends within and across a large corpus of reports. The approach is based on critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 2009; Fairclough, 1989) but shaped in the form of practitioner enquiry seeking power in the form of impact on pupils and practitioners, rather than a more traditional, sociological application of the method. The research found that in 2017, primary school section 5 Ofsted reports had more than half of their content exactly duplicated within other primary school inspection reports published that same year. Discourse analysis showed the quality assurance process overrode variables such as inspector designation, gender, or team size, leading to three distinct patterns of duplication: block duplication, self-referencing, and template writing. The most unique part of a report was found to be the ‘area for improvement’ section, which was tracked to externally verified outcomes for pupils using terms linked to ‘mathematics’. Those required to improve mathematics in their areas for improvement improved progress and attainment in mathematics significantly more than national rates. These findings indicate that there was a positive correlation between the inspection reporting process and a beneficial impact on pupil outcomes in mathematics, and that the significant similarity of one report to another had no bearing on the usefulness of the report for school improvement purposes within this corpus

    One Small Step for Generative AI, One Giant Leap for AGI: A Complete Survey on ChatGPT in AIGC Era

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    OpenAI has recently released GPT-4 (a.k.a. ChatGPT plus), which is demonstrated to be one small step for generative AI (GAI), but one giant leap for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Since its official release in November 2022, ChatGPT has quickly attracted numerous users with extensive media coverage. Such unprecedented attention has also motivated numerous researchers to investigate ChatGPT from various aspects. According to Google scholar, there are more than 500 articles with ChatGPT in their titles or mentioning it in their abstracts. Considering this, a review is urgently needed, and our work fills this gap. Overall, this work is the first to survey ChatGPT with a comprehensive review of its underlying technology, applications, and challenges. Moreover, we present an outlook on how ChatGPT might evolve to realize general-purpose AIGC (a.k.a. AI-generated content), which will be a significant milestone for the development of AGI.Comment: A Survey on ChatGPT and GPT-4, 29 pages. Feedback is appreciated ([email protected]

    BotMoE: Twitter Bot Detection with Community-Aware Mixtures of Modal-Specific Experts

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    Twitter bot detection has become a crucial task in efforts to combat online misinformation, mitigate election interference, and curb malicious propaganda. However, advanced Twitter bots often attempt to mimic the characteristics of genuine users through feature manipulation and disguise themselves to fit in diverse user communities, posing challenges for existing Twitter bot detection models. To this end, we propose BotMoE, a Twitter bot detection framework that jointly utilizes multiple user information modalities (metadata, textual content, network structure) to improve the detection of deceptive bots. Furthermore, BotMoE incorporates a community-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layer to improve domain generalization and adapt to different Twitter communities. Specifically, BotMoE constructs modal-specific encoders for metadata features, textual content, and graphical structure, which jointly model Twitter users from three modal-specific perspectives. We then employ a community-aware MoE layer to automatically assign users to different communities and leverage the corresponding expert networks. Finally, user representations from metadata, text, and graph perspectives are fused with an expert fusion layer, combining all three modalities while measuring the consistency of user information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BotMoE significantly advances the state-of-the-art on three Twitter bot detection benchmarks. Studies also confirm that BotMoE captures advanced and evasive bots, alleviates the reliance on training data, and better generalizes to new and previously unseen user communities.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 202

    Efficacy of Information Extraction from Bar, Line, Circular, Bubble and Radar Graphs

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    With the emergence of enormous amounts of data, numerous ways to visualize such data have been used. Bar, circular, line, radar and bubble graphs that are ubiquitous were investigated for their effectiveness. Fourteen participants performed four types of evaluations: between categories (cities), within categories (transport modes within a city), all categories, and a direct reading within a category from a graph. The representations were presented in random order and participants were asked to respond to sixteen questions to the best of their ability after visually scanning the related graph. There were two trials on two separate days for each participant. Eye movements were recorded using an eye tracker. Bar and line graphs show superiority over circular and radial graphs in effectiveness, efficiency, and perceived ease of use primarily due to eye saccades. The radar graph had the worst performance. “Vibration-type” fill pattern could be improved by adding colors and symbolic fills. Design guidelines are proposed for the effective representation of data so that the presentation and communication of information are effective

    Awareness and perceptions of Long COVID among people in the REACT programme: early insights from a pilot interview study

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    BACKGROUND: Long COVID is a patient-made term describing new or persistent symptoms experienced following SARS-CoV-2 infection. The Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission-Long COVID (REACT-LC) study aims to understand variation in experiences following infection, and to identify biological, social, and environmental factors associated with Long COVID. We undertook a pilot interview study to inform the design, recruitment approach, and topic guide for the REACT-LC qualitative study. We sought to gain initial insights into the experience and attribution of new or persistent symptoms and the awareness or perceived applicability of the term Long COVID. METHODS: People were invited to REACT-LC assessment centres if they had taken part in REACT, a random community-based prevalence study, and had a documented history of SARS-CoV-2 infection. We invited people from REACT-LC assessment centres who had reported experiencing persistent symptoms for more than 12 weeks to take part in an interview. We conducted face to face and online semi-structured interviews which were transcribed and analysed using Thematic Analysis. RESULTS: We interviewed 13 participants (6 female, 7 male, median age 31). Participants reported a wide variation in both new and persistent symptoms which were often fluctuating or unpredictable in nature. Some participants were confident about the link between their persistent symptoms and COVID-19; however, others were unclear about the underlying cause of symptoms or felt that the impact of public health measures (such as lockdowns) played a role. We found differences in awareness and perceived applicability of the term Long COVID. CONCLUSION: This pilot has informed the design, recruitment approach and topic guide for our qualitative study. It offers preliminary insights into the varied experiences of people living with persistent symptoms including differences in symptom attribution and perceived applicability of the term Long COVID. This variation shows the value of recruiting from a nationally representative sample of participants who are experiencing persistent symptoms

    Deontología educativa en el trabajo colegiado en docentes de una unidad educativa pública de Latacunga, Ecuador, 2022

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    El presente trabajo investigativo tuvo como objetivo determinar la influencia de la deontología educativa en el trabajo colegiado de docentes de una unidad educativa pública de Latacunga, Ecuador, 2022. En la que se consideró los conceptos de cada una de las variables y sus dimensiones planteadas en este estudio. Investigación que fue con diseño no experimental, de tipo aplicada, de nivel explicativo, de método hipotético-deductivo, con enfoque cuantitativo, correlacional causal, ante la utilización de recursos estadísticos para analizar los datos obtenidos. Usándose toda la población de la unidad educativa, conformada por 100 docentes, aplicándoles a los mismos dos cuestionarios, previamente validados por expertos, respuestas definidas mediante la escala ordinal de Likert, por medio del coeficiente de alfa de Cronbach se estableció el grado de confiabilidad para deontología educativa de 0,825 y para el trabajo colegiado de 0,872 Se aplicó la prueba de regresión logística ordinal, obteniéndose el resultado para pvalor = 0,000 < 0,05, probándose que la variable deontología educativa fue explicada mediante el modelo Pseudo R2 de Cox y Snell de 50,6 % y de Nagelkerke de 50,8 %, concluyendo que la deontología educativa influye significativamente en el trabajo colegiado de docentes de una unidad educativa pública de Latacunga, Ecuador, 202

    POLARIZATION OF LOCAL COMMUNITY PERCEPTION ON SOCIOCULTURAL DYNAMICS IN ECOTOURISM DEVELOPMENT OF BOPUNJUR, WEST JAVA

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    In addition to providing multiplier economic benefits, the tourism sector also has the potential to cause some latent and massive negative social impacts. For this reason, it is important to map out the orientation of the local community. This study analyzes the polarization of the local community's perceptions of sociocultural dynamics in the ecotourism development area. The local community that became the focus of the research consisted of five groups of respondents: traditional leaders, religious leaders, educational leaders, community leaders, and tourism actors. This research was conducted in the Bopunjur Ecotourism Area, Bogor Regency, West Java, precisely in seven ecotourism destinations, namely Ciawi, Caringin, Cibogo, Cipayung, Megamendung, Cisarua, and Tugu. This study used mixed methods, qualitative and quantitative approach. Data collection on social and cultural dynamics was done by distributing questionnaires to the respondents. The research instrument was a questionnaire designed closed-ended with guidance on one score-one indicator scoring system. The results showed that positive social situations, namely conducive situations, associations, cooperative situations, and productive collaborations were still more dominant than negative social situations: war, conflict, and dissociation. The polarization of the local community on sociocultural dynamics has a positive direction with a polarization scale that is aligned with each other so that there is an excellent opportunity to build productive collaboration among stakeholders in this are
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