The relationship among beliefs about problem solving, epistemological beliefs, grade level, sex, and problem solving achievement: A study in secondary school

The first purpuse of this investigation was to study the effects of sex and grade level on secondary students’ beliefs about epistemology and problem solving. The second purpuse was to analyze the contribution of both belief systems, grade level, and sex to problem solving achievement. One hundred and forty-four High School students, 9th and 11th grade students, took part in the study. Two questionnaires (Schommer and StageKloosterman’s questionnaires) and a problem solving test (two word problems of the PISA tests) were administered to these students. Two ANOVAs, an ANCOVA, and a multiple regression analysis were carried out from data obtained in the investigation. In the light of the foregoing, it can be concluded that: a) The higher is the grade level of secondary students, the more appropriate are beliefs about epistemology and problem solving; b) Students’ sex has a significant influence on epistemological beliefs, but not on beliefs about problem solving; and c) Students’ problem solving achievement depends on grade level and their beliefs about problem solving, and these beliefs are themselves dependent on students’ epistemological beliefs.El primer objetivo de este trabajo fue estudiar los efectos del nivel académico y del sexo sobre las creencias epistemológicas y sobre resolución de problemas de los estudiantes de educación secundaria. El segundo objetivo fue analizar la contribución de ambos sistemas de creencias, del nivel académico y del sexo sobre el desempeño en la resolución de problemas. Han participado 144 estudiantes de 3º de ESO y de 1º de Bachillerato, que han cumplimentado los cuestionarios de Schommer y de Stage-Kloosterman. Además, se les ha administrado una prueba de resolución de problemas, con dos problemas PISA. A partir de los datos obtenidos, y realizados dos test ANOVA y un ANCOVA, junto con un análisis de regresión múltiple, se puede concluir que: a) A mayor nivel académico de los estudiantes de secundaria más adecuadas son las creencias epistemológicas y sobre resolución de problemas; b) El sexo de los estudiantes tiene una influencia significativa sobre las creencias epistemológicas pero no la tiene sobre las creencias sobre resolución de problemas; y c) El desempeño de los estudiantes en la resolución de problemas depende del nivel académico y de sus creencias sobre resolución de problemas, y estas creencias dependen, a su vez, del conjunto de creencias epistemológicas de los estudiantes

A Web-Based Demo to Interactive Multimodal Transcription of Historic Text images

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04346-8_58[EN] Paleography experts spend many hours transcribing historic documents, and state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems are not suitable for performing this task automatically. In this paper we present the modifications oil a previously developed interactive framework for transcription of handwritten text. This system, rather than full automation, aimed at assisting the user with the recognition-transcription process.This work has been supported by the EC (FEDER), the Spanish MEC under grant TIN2006-15694-C02-01 and the research programme Consolider Ingenio 2010 MIPRCV (CSD2007-00018) and by the UPV (FPI fellowship 2006-04).Romero Gómez, V.; Leiva Torres, LA.; Alabau Gonzalvo, V.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal Ruiz, E. (2009). A Web-Based Demo to Interactive Multimodal Transcription of Historic Text images. En Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: 13th European Conference, ECDL 2009, Corfu, Greece, September 27 - October 2, 2009. Proceedings. Springer Verlag (Germany). 459-460. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04346-8_58S459460Toselli, A.H., et al.: Computer assisted transcription of handwritten text. In: Proc. of ICDAR 2007, pp. 944–948. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2007)Romero, V., Toselli, A.H., Rodríguez, L., Vidal, E.: Computer assisted transcription for ancient text images. In: Kamel, M.S., Campilho, A. (eds.) ICIAR 2007. LNCS, vol. 4633, pp. 1182–1193. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)Toselli, A.H., et al.: Computer assisted transcription of text images and multimodal interaction. In: Popescu-Belis, A., Stiefelhagen, R. (eds.) MLMI 2008. LNCS, vol. 5237, pp. 296–308. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Romero, V.: et al.: Interactive multimodal transcription of text images using a web-based demo system. In: Proc. of the IUI, Florida, pp. 477–478 (2009)Romero, V., et al.: Improvements in the computer assisted transciption system of handwritten text images. In: Proc. of the PRIS 2008, pp. 103–112 (2008

The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) - 2018 Summary Report

The Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) is a TeV-scale high-luminosity linear $e^+e^-$ collider under development at CERN. Following the CLIC conceptual design published in 2012, this report provides an overview of the CLIC project, its current status, and future developments. It presents the CLIC physics potential and reports on design, technology, and implementation aspects of the accelerator and the detector. CLIC is foreseen to be built and operated in stages, at centre-of-mass energies of 380 GeV, 1.5 TeV and 3 TeV, respectively. CLIC uses a two-beam acceleration scheme, in which 12 GHz accelerating structures are powered via a high-current drive beam. For the first stage, an alternative with X-band klystron powering is also considered. CLIC accelerator optimisation, technical developments and system tests have resulted in an increased energy efficiency (power around 170 MW) for the 380 GeV stage, together with a reduced cost estimate at the level of 6 billion CHF. The detector concept has been refined using improved software tools. Significant progress has been made on detector technology developments for the tracking and calorimetry systems. A wide range of CLIC physics studies has been conducted, both through full detector simulations and parametric studies, together providing a broad overview of the CLIC physics potential. Each of the three energy stages adds cornerstones of the full CLIC physics programme, such as Higgs width and couplings, top-quark properties, Higgs self-coupling, direct searches, and many precision electroweak measurements. The interpretation of the combined results gives crucial and accurate insight into new physics, largely complementary to LHC and HL-LHC. The construction of the first CLIC energy stage could start by 2026. First beams would be available by 2035, marking the beginning of a broad CLIC physics programme spanning 25-30 years

Multimodal interactive structured prediction

This thesis presents scientific contributions to the field of multimodal interac- tive structured prediction (MISP). The aim of MISP is to reduce the human effort required to supervise an automatic output, in an efficient and ergonomic way. Hence, this thesis focuses on the two aspects of MISP systems. The first aspect, which refers to the interactive part of MISP, is the study of strate- gies for efficient human¿computer collaboration to produce error-free outputs. Multimodality, the second aspect, deals with other more ergonomic modalities of communication with the computer rather than keyboard and mouse. To begin with, in sequential interaction the user is assumed to supervise the output from left-to-right so that errors are corrected in sequential order. We study the problem under the decision theory framework and define an optimum decoding algorithm. The optimum algorithm is compared to the usually ap- plied, standard approach. Experimental results on several tasks suggests that the optimum algorithm is slightly better than the standard algorithm. In contrast to sequential interaction, in active interaction it is the system that decides what should be given to the user for supervision. On the one hand, user supervision can be reduced if the user is required to supervise only the outputs that the system expects to be erroneous. In this respect, we define a strategy that retrieves first the outputs with highest expected error first. Moreover, we prove that this strategy is optimum under certain conditions, which is validated by experimental results. On the other hand, if the goal is to reduce the number of corrections, active interaction works by selecting elements, one by one, e.g., words of a given output to be supervised by the user. For this case, several strategies are compared. Unlike the previous case, the strategy that performs better is to choose the element with highest confidence, which coincides with the findings of the optimum algorithm for sequential interaction. However, this also suggests that minimizing effort and supervision are contradictory goals. With respect to the multimodality aspect, this thesis delves into techniques to make multimodal systems more robust. To achieve that, multimodal systems are improved by providing contextual information of the application at hand. First, we study how to integrate e-pen interaction in a machine translation task. We contribute to the state-of-the-art by leveraging the information from the source sentence. Several strategies are compared basically grouped into two approaches: inspired by word-based translation models and n-grams generated from a phrase-based system. The experiments show that the former outper- forms the latter for this task. Furthermore, the results present remarkable improvements against not using contextual information. Second, similar ex- periments are conducted on a speech-enabled interface for interactive machine translation. The improvements over the baseline are also noticeable. How- ever, in this case, phrase-based models perform much better than word-based models. We attribute that to the fact that acoustic models are poorer estima- tions than morphologic models and, thus, they benefit more from the language model. Finally, similar techniques are proposed for dictation of handwritten documents. The results show that speech and handwritten recognition can be combined in an effective way. Finally, an evaluation with real users is carried out to compare an interactive machine translation prototype with a post-editing prototype. The results of the study reveal that users are very sensitive to the usability aspects of the user interface. Therefore, usability is a crucial aspect to consider in an human evaluation that can hinder the real benefits of the technology being evaluated. Hopefully, once usability problems are fixed, the evaluation indicates that users are more favorable to work with the interactive machine translation system than to the post-editing system.Alabau Gonzalvo, V. (2014). Multimodal interactive structured prediction [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/35135TESISPremiad

Multi Optical Transition Radiation System for ATF2

In this paper we describe the design, installation and first calibration tests of a Multi Optical Transition Radiation System in the beam diagnostic section of the Extraction (EXT) line of ATF2, close to the multi wire scanner system. This system will be a valuable tool for measuring beam sizes and emittances coming from the ATF Damping Ring. With an optical resolution of about 2 {micro}m an original OTR design (OTR1X) located after the septum at the entrance of the EXT line demonstrated the ability to measure a 5.5 {micro}m beam size in one beam pulse and to take many fast measurements. This gives the OTR the ability to measure the beam emittance with high statistics, giving a low error and a good understanding of emittance jitter. Furthermore the nearby wire scanners will be a definitive test of the OTR as a beam emittance diagnostic device. The multi-OTR system design proposed here is based on the existing OTR1X