Authentication of Students and Students’ Work in E-Learning : Report for the Development Bid of Academic Year 2010/11

Global e-learning market is projected to reach $107.3 billion by 2015 according to a new report by The Global Industry Analyst (Analyst 2010). The popularity and growth of the online programmes within the School of Computer Science obviously is in line with this projection. However, also on the rise are students’ dishonesty and cheating in the open and virtual environment of e-learning courses (Shepherd 2008). Institutions offering e-learning programmes are facing the challenges of deterring and detecting these misbehaviours by introducing security mechanisms to the current e-learning platforms. In particular, authenticating that a registered student indeed takes an online assessment, e.g., an exam or a coursework, is essential for the institutions to give the credit to the correct candidate. Authenticating a student is to ensure that a student is indeed who he says he is. Authenticating a student’s work goes one step further to ensure that an authenticated student indeed does the submitted work himself. This report is to investigate and compare current possible techniques and solutions for authenticating distance learning student and/or their work remotely for the elearning programmes. The report also aims to recommend some solutions that fit with UH StudyNet platform.Submitted Versio

Unification of Flavor SU(3) Analyses of Heavy Hadron Weak Decays

Analyses of heavy mesons and baryons hadronic charmless decays using the flavor SU(3) symemtry can be formulated in two different forms. One is to construct the SU(3) irreducible representation amplitude (IRA) by decomposing effective Hamiltonian, and the other is to draw the topological diagrams (TDA). In the flavor SU(3) limit, we study various $B/D\to PP,VP,VV$, $B_c\to DP/DV$ decays, and two-body nonleptonic decays of beauty/charm baryons, and demonstrate that when all terms are included these two ways of analyzing the decay amplitudes are completely equivalent. Furthermore we clarify some confusions in drawing topological diagrams using different ways of describing beauty/charm baryons.Comment: 36 pages, 6 figures, 16 table

Mesopic visual quality after three kinds of aspheric acrylic monofocal intraocular lenses

AIM:To evaluate best corrected visual acuity(BCVA)and contrast sensitivity(CS)under mesopic condition with no glare in patients following implantation of three different kinds of aspheric acrylic monofocal intraocular lens(IOLs).<p>METHODS: Seventy-seven cases(90 eyes)of age-related cataract patients were selected, who were undergone phacoemulsification and intraocular lens(IOL)implantation in our hospital during December 2011 to November 2012. Preoperatively, the patients were randomly divided into three groups: 30 eyes(25 cases)were implanted with hydrophobic yellow-tinted acrylic(HOYA)IOLs in group 1; 30 eyes(28 cases)with hydrophilic acrylic IOLs(Rayner)in group 2; 30 eyes(24 cases)with hydrophilic acrylic surface heparin processing IOLs(XO)in group 3. All eyes were evaluated at 1 month and 3 months postoperatively. The BCVA and CS under mesopic condition without glare were measured and underwent statistical analysis.<p>RESULTS: There was neither statistically significant difference in the BCVA(<i>P</i>>0.05), nor statistically significant difference in CS results(after standardization of contrast sensitivity value: lgCS)(<i>P</i>>0.05)between groups under mesopic condition, but the lgCS of the HOYA group decreased slightly. <p>CONCLUSION: There were not marked differences of BCVA and CS between groups of patients at the follow-up intervals of 1 month and 3 months under mesopic condition. The blue-filter type artificial lens may protect the retina, thus, it is advisable to implant yellow-tinted filter blue artificial lens, especially for patients who are children or young persons

Gapped spin liquid with Z2\mathbb{Z}_2-topological order for kagome Heisenberg model

We apply symmetric tensor network state (TNS) to study the nearest neighbor spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on Kagome lattice. Our method keeps track of the global and gauge symmetries in TNS update procedure and in tensor renormalization group (TRG) calculation. We also introduce a very sensitive probe for the gap of the ground state -- the modular matrices, which can also determine the topological order if the ground state is gapped. We find that the ground state of Heisenberg model on Kagome lattice is a gapped spin liquid with the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-topological order (or toric code type), which has a long correlation length $\xi\sim 10$ unit cell length. We justify that the TRG method can handle very large systems with over thousands of spins. Such a long $\xi$ explains the gapless behaviors observed in simulations on smaller systems with less than 300 spins or shorter than 10 unit cell length. We also discuss experimental implications of the topological excitations encoded in our symmetric tensors.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Systems Biology of Gastric Cancer: Perspectives on the Omics-Based Diagnosis and Treatment

Gastric cancer is the fifth most diagnosed cancer in the world, affecting more than a million people and causing nearly 783,000 deaths each year. The prognosis of advanced gastric cancer remains extremely poor despite the use of surgery and adjuvant therapy. Therefore, understanding the mechanism of gastric cancer development, and the discovery of novel diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutics are major goals in gastric cancer research. Here, we review recent progress in application of omics technologies in gastric cancer research, with special focus on the utilization of systems biology approaches to integrate multi-omics data. In addition, the association between gastrointestinal microbiota and gastric cancer are discussed, which may offer insights in exploring the novel microbiota-targeted therapeutics. Finally, the application of data-driven systems biology and machine learning approaches could provide a predictive understanding of gastric cancer, and pave the way to the development of novel biomarkers and rational design of cancer therapeutics