Intermolecular hydrogen bonding of the two independent molecules of N-3,5-dinitrobenzoyl-L-leucine

The title compound, C₁₃H₁₅N₃O₇, crystallizes as two independent molecules which differ in their conformation. Intermolecular hydrogen bonding between the amide and carboxylic acid groups as N-H...O=C interactions results in the formation of one-dimensional chains with N...O distances of 2.967 (6) and 3.019 (6) Å. Neighbouring chains are linked by C=O...H-O interactions to form a two-dimensional network, with O...O distances of 2.675 (6) and 2.778 (6) Å

Automatic Extraction of Commonsense LocatedNear Knowledge

LocatedNear relation is a kind of commonsense knowledge describing two physical objects that are typically found near each other in real life. In this paper, we study how to automatically extract such relationship through a sentence-level relation classifier and aggregating the scores of entity pairs from a large corpus. Also, we release two benchmark datasets for evaluation and future research.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2018. A preliminary version is presented on AKBC@NIPS'1

A physiologically inspired model for solving the cocktail party problem.

At a cocktail party, we can broadly monitor the entire acoustic scene to detect important cues (e.g., our names being called, or the fire alarm going off), or selectively listen to a target sound source (e.g., a conversation partner). It has recently been observed that individual neurons in the avian field L (analog to the mammalian auditory cortex) can display broad spatial tuning to single targets and selective tuning to a target embedded in spatially distributed sound mixtures. Here, we describe a model inspired by these experimental observations and apply it to process mixtures of human speech sentences. This processing is realized in the neural spiking domain. It converts binaural acoustic inputs into cortical spike trains using a multi-stage model composed of a cochlear filter-bank, a midbrain spatial-localization network, and a cortical network. The output spike trains of the cortical network are then converted back into an acoustic waveform, using a stimulus reconstruction technique. The intelligibility of the reconstructed output is quantified using an objective measure of speech intelligibility. We apply the algorithm to single and multi-talker speech to demonstrate that the physiologically inspired algorithm is able to achieve intelligible reconstruction of an "attended" target sentence embedded in two other non-attended masker sentences. The algorithm is also robust to masker level and displays performance trends comparable to humans. The ideas from this work may help improve the performance of hearing assistive devices (e.g., hearing aids and cochlear implants), speech-recognition technology, and computational algorithms for processing natural scenes cluttered with spatially distributed acoustic objects.R01 DC000100 - NIDCD NIH HHSPublished versio

Night Thoughts

Poem by Maurice Kenn

Using Problem-Based Learning in Online Courses: A New Hope?

In this chapter, I argue that instructional designers must use research and theory to guide them to new and justified instructional practices when designing e-learning. I introduce a well-established pedagogy, Problem-Based Learning (PBL), in which complex, ill-structured problems serve as the context and stimulus for learning and students work collaboratively to understand the problem and learn about the broader related concepts. I describe the structure of PBL and discuss Barrow’s (1998) concept of “authentic” PBL. I then review the support for PBL in the research literature and describe its relationship to cognitive and constructivist learning theory. I conclude the chapter by demonstrating how authentic PBL can be applied to e-learning using supporting examples from an undergraduate online course in Agriculture

Bohemians: from the Four Corners of the Land

Non-fiction by Maurice F. Kenn