‘Diversity’ ‘Widening Participation’ and ‘Inclusion’ in Higher Education: An International study.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.This article emphasises the complex and critical realities of 'Diversity' and 'Widening Participation' (WP); policy, discourse and practice in higher education, as 'understood' and experienced by undergraduate students of education. Building upon previous work which engaged with questions of hegemony in education, this paper develops the argument that 'under-represented' voices need to take centre stage- and that HEIs should critically consider why and how they positon 'under-represented' student groups (Gibson, 2006; 2015). The article draws on an international study involving 373 undergraduate students of 'Education' and 8 academics in six universities; one in Cyprus, one in New Zealand, two in the UK and two in the USA. This paper tells a story of tension, division and exclusion for students who have, through WP discourse, been defined as 'non-traditional' and thus positioned by their University as 'diverse'. It argues that, at an international level, the HE sector needs to be more responsive and proactive in engaging with their key stakeholders, their students. Our study, which made use of questionnaire and focus groups (FG), suggests this is particularly the case when it comes to critical aspects of the student experience, specifically institutional labelling and student exclusion from university discussions on what is and what is not 'inclusive education practice'.This work was supported by the Higher Education Academy under grant number GEN 57

From Analog to Digital: Double Curved Lightweight Structures in Architectural Design Education

The paper describes an architectural design studio for 5th year students at the Department of Architecture of the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. The educational objective of the studio is the design of double curved lightweight structures, employing a creative methodology which instrumentalizes the study of nature as a source of inspiration. The objective of the course is to familiarize the students with curves and form-finding (analogue and digital) with the aim to design forms that display structural stability. The paper will highlight the educational gains from a hybrid design methodology which employs both analog (physical) form-finding tools and digital modeling for the design of double curvature surfaces. © 2020, Education and research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe. All rights reserved

Effects of Cable Sway, Electrode Surface Area, and Electrode Mass on Electroencephalography Signal Quality during Motion

More neuroscience researchers are using scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to measure electrocortical dynamics during human locomotion and other types of movement. Motion artifacts corrupt the EEG and mask underlying neural signals of interest. The cause of motion artifacts in EEG is often attributed to electrode motion relative to the skin, but few studies have examined EEG signals under head motion. In the current study, we tested how motion artifacts are affected by the overall mass and surface area of commercially available electrodes, as well as how cable sway contributes to motion artifacts. To provide a ground-truth signal, we used a gelatin head phantom with embedded antennas broadcasting electrical signals, and recorded EEG with a commercially available electrode system. A robotic platform moved the phantom head through sinusoidal displacements at different frequencies (0–2 Hz). Results showed that a larger electrode surface area can have a small but significant effect on improving EEG signal quality during motion and that cable sway is a major contributor to motion artifacts. These results have implications in the development of future hardware for mobile brain imaging with EEG

Generating Referring Expressions from RDF Knowledge Graphs for Data Linking

International audienceThe generation of referring expressions is one of the most extensively explored tasks in natural language generation, where a description that uniquely identifies an instance is to be provided. Some recent approaches aim to discover referring expressions in knowledge graphs. To limit the search space, existing approaches define quality measures based on the intuitiveness and simplicity of the discovered expressions. In this paper, we focus on referring expressions of interest for data linking task and present RE-miner, an algorithm tailored to automatically discover minimal and diverse referring expressions for all instances of a class in a knowledge graph. We experimentally demonstrate on several benchmark datasets that, compared to existing data linking tools, referring expressions for data linking substantially improve the results, especially the recall without decreasing the precision. We also show that the RE-miner algorithm can scale to datasets containing millions of facts

Keys and Pseudo-Keys Detection for Web Datasets Cleansing and Interlinking

Abstract. This paper introduces a method for analyzing web datasets based on key dependencies. The classical notion of a key in relational databases is adapted to RDF datasets. In order to better deal with web data of variable quality, the definition of a pseudo-key is presented. An RDF vocabulary for representing keys is also provided. An algorithm to discover keys and pseudo-keys is described. Experimental results show that even for a big dataset such as DBpedia, the runtime of the algorithm is still reasonable. Two applications are further discussed: (i) detection of errors in RDF datasets, and (ii) datasets interlinking.