18,122 research outputs found
Evaluating the Comprehension of Euler Diagrams
We describe an empirical investigation into layout criteria that can help with the comprehension of Euler diagrams. Euler diagrams are used to represent set inclusion in applications such as teaching set theory, database querying, software engineering, filing system organisation and bio-informatics. Research in automatically laying out Euler diagrams for use with these applications is at an early stage, and our work attempts to aid this research by informing layout designers about the importance of various Euler diagram aesthetic criteria. The three criteria under investigation were: contour jaggedness, zone area inequality and edge closeness. Subjects were asked to interpret diagrams with different combinations of levels for each of the criteria. Results for this investigation indicate that, within the parameters of the study, all three criteria are important for understanding Euler diagrams and we have a preliminary indication of the ordering of their importance
Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author
The question motivating this review paper is, how can
computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn-
ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to
link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory,
and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional
question driving research in interactive narrative is, âhow can an in-
teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while
maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?â This question
derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that,
as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency.
Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip-
ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based
on Brechtâs Epic Theatre and Boalâs Theatre of the Oppressed are
reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the
conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question
that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional
question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in-
teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity
Expectations eclipsed in foreign language education: learners and educators on an ongoing journey / edited by HĂŒlya GörĂŒr-AtabaĆ, Sharon Turner.
Between June 2-4, 2011 Sabancı University School of Languages welcomed colleagues from 21 different countries to a collaborative exploration of the challenging and inspiring journey of learners and educators in the field of language education.\ud
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The conference provided an opportunity for all stakeholders to share their views on language education. Colleagues met with world-renowned experts and authors in the fields of education and psychology, faculty and administrators from various universities and institutions, teachers from secondary educational backgrounds and higher education, as well as learners whose voices are often not directly shared but usually reported.\ud
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The conference name, Eclipsing Expectations, was inspired by two natural phenomena, a solar eclipse directly before the conference, and a lunar eclipse, immediately after. Learners and educators were hereby invited to join a journey to observe, learn and exchange ideas in orde
Suitability of dynamic environments in virtual reality for schizophrenia therapies
Serious Games (SG) have a significant positive
impact on a wide range of purposes. Serious virtual games focused
on the rehabilitation of schizophrenia are able to bring
improvements to patients who require constant and individualized
rehabilitation. Schizophrenia is a mental illness that has no cure
and requires intensive rehabilitation for symptoms relief. Virtual
Reality (VR) has gained acceptance in the medical field for a
variety of rehabilitation by virtue of its immersiveness and
versatility. Virtual environments can assist this process, seeking to
contemplate important topics for their daily lives, facilitating the
understanding of their situation and difficulties. To achieve more
effective results, a virtual scenario must be dynamic and suitable
to each patient. Nonplayable Character (NPC), which in this work
can be human-like or pet-like representations, tasks, varied and
objective interactions, and the ambiance all play an important role
in determining the expected result. The work described in this
paper approaches previously mentioned topics by investigating
the contribution of previous works in this context for approaching
multiple elements that control the dynamic environment, bringing
new modalities and research for the development of a SG for VR
focused on the rehabilitation of schizophrenia by facilitating
schizophrenicsâ daily lives.This work is funded by the European Regional Development
Fund (ERDF) through the Regional Operational Program North
2020, within the scope of Project GreenHealth - Digital
strategies in biological assets to improve well-being and
promote Green health, Norte-01-0145-FEDER-000042.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Animating the evolution of software
The use and development of open source software has increased significantly in the last decade. The high frequency of changes and releases across a distributed environment requires good project management tools in order to control the process adequately. However, even with these tools in place, the nature of the development and the fact that developers will often work on many other projects simultaneously, means that the developers are unlikely to have a clear picture of the current state of the project at any time. Furthermore, the poor documentation associated with many projects has a detrimental effect when encouraging new developers to contribute to the software. A typical version control repository contains a mine of information that is not always obvious and not easy to comprehend in its raw form. However, presenting this historical data in a suitable format by using software visualisation techniques allows the evolution of the software over a number of releases to be shown. This allows the changes that have been made to the software to be identified clearly, thus ensuring that the effect of those changes will also be emphasised. This then enables both managers and developers to gain a more detailed view of the current state of the project. The visualisation of evolving software introduces a number of new issues. This thesis investigates some of these issues in detail, and recommends a number of solutions in order to alleviate the problems that may otherwise arise. The solutions are then demonstrated in the definition of two new visualisations. These use historical data contained within version control repositories to show the evolution of the software at a number of levels of granularity. Additionally, animation is used as an integral part of both visualisations - not only to show the evolution by representing the progression of time, but also to highlight the changes that have occurred. Previously, the use of animation within software visualisation has been primarily restricted to small-scale, hand generated visualisations. However, this thesis shows the viability of using animation within software visualisation with automated visualisations on a large scale. In addition, evaluation of the visualisations has shown that they are suitable for showing the changes that have occurred in the software over a period of time, and subsequently how the software has evolved. These visualisations are therefore suitable for use by developers and managers involved with open source software. In addition, they also provide a basis for future research in evolutionary visualisations, software evolution and open source development
Pathologies of Neural Models Make Interpretations Difficult
One way to interpret neural model predictions is to highlight the most
important input features---for example, a heatmap visualization over the words
in an input sentence. In existing interpretation methods for NLP, a word's
importance is determined by either input perturbation---measuring the decrease
in model confidence when that word is removed---or by the gradient with respect
to that word. To understand the limitations of these methods, we use input
reduction, which iteratively removes the least important word from the input.
This exposes pathological behaviors of neural models: the remaining words
appear nonsensical to humans and are not the ones determined as important by
interpretation methods. As we confirm with human experiments, the reduced
examples lack information to support the prediction of any label, but models
still make the same predictions with high confidence. To explain these
counterintuitive results, we draw connections to adversarial examples and
confidence calibration: pathological behaviors reveal difficulties in
interpreting neural models trained with maximum likelihood. To mitigate their
deficiencies, we fine-tune the models by encouraging high entropy outputs on
reduced examples. Fine-tuned models become more interpretable under input
reduction without accuracy loss on regular examples.Comment: EMNLP 2018 camera read
Game-Based Learning, Gamification in Education and Serious Games
The aim of this book is to present and discuss new advances in serious games to show how they could enhance the effectiveness and outreach of education, advertising, social awareness, health, policies, etc. We present their use in structured learning activities, not only with a focus on game-based learning, but also on the use of game elements and game design techniques to gamify the learning process. The published contributions really demonstrate the wide scope of application of game-based approaches in terms of purpose, target groups, technologies and domains and one aspect they have in common is that they provide evidence of how effective serious games, game-based learning and gamification can be
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