EXPLOITING INTERNET & MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGIES TO ADVANCE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS

Internet technologies and multimedia applications are becoming the new trend in educational process. The number of schools, universities and other educational institutions that intend to adopt computerbased learning is being considerably increased. Thus there are some serious aspects to be discussed on this area. In our paper we present techniques incorporated in the organized design and the augmentative development of an adaptive web-based educational environment. We have included personalization characteristics in the educational objects and supportive communication services. This way the educational process is customized to the learning curve, the standards and the preferences of each user. Even more the opportunity to support virtual classrooms and tele-conference operations is given to the user. Due to the non-centralized character of the system such distributed actions are feasible to be done. Representative feature of our system is the application of innovative and well-known user interface and multimedia approaches where the latest and most modern technologies on the specific field are being considered and thoroughly used through the system’s interaction components. In this direction we have paid a lot of effort to control and enhance performance matters. The successful use of any web environment depends on its high-quality performance and availability even under the most aggravating circumstances. A combined web engineering methodology has been adopted for the theoretical and practical model standardization. The main goal of this is to support scaling, reusability and maintenance of the webbased learning environment both in users ’ terms and educational material so as to cover the fields of intelligence and adaptiveness

Reactively-sputtered super-hydrophilic ultra-thin titania films deposited at 120 °C

We investigate super-hydrophilic TiO _2 (titania) films for concentrated solar-thermal power applications. Reactive magnetron sputtering has been used to deposit 8 to 12 nm thick titania thin films onto borosilicate microscope glass slides, low-Fe extra-clear architectural glass, or Si(100) wafers with a 500 nm thick thermal SiO _2 layer. The effects of deposition temperature and O _2 fraction of the O _2 /Ar working gas were investigated. We demonstrate the importance of the O _2 fraction for obtaining optically transparent, super-hydrophilic (contact angle below 1°) thin films. In particular, we show that as the O _2 fraction increases, contact angle decreases, obtaining super-hydrophilic titania thin films at deposition temperatures as low as 120 °C. Our work enables to develop low thermal budget cost-efficient industrial synthesis processes, paving the way for commercial applications

Deep Visual Attributes vs. Hand-Crafted Audio Features on Multidomain Speech Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition from speech may play a crucial role in many applications related to human–computer interaction or understanding the affective state of users in certain tasks, where other modalities such as video or physiological parameters are unavailable. In general, a human’s emotions may be recognized using several modalities such as analyzing facial expressions, speech, physiological parameters (e.g., electroencephalograms, electrocardiograms) etc. However, measuring of these modalities may be difficult, obtrusive or require expensive hardware. In that context, speech may be the best alternative modality in many practical applications. In this work we present an approach that uses a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) functioning as a visual feature extractor and trained using raw speech information. In contrast to traditional machine learning approaches, CNNs are responsible for identifying the important features of the input thus, making the need of hand-crafted feature engineering optional in many tasks. In this paper no extra features are required other than the spectrogram representations and hand-crafted features were only extracted for validation purposes of our method. Moreover, it does not require any linguistic model and is not specific to any particular language. We compare the proposed approach using cross-language datasets and demonstrate that it is able to provide superior results vs. traditional ones that use hand-crafted features

Decomposition and evaluation of activity in multiple event-related trials

Summarization: It is generally accepted that evoked and induced activations represent different aspects of cerebral functions during an Event Related Potentials (ERP) experiment. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has been successfully applied to event related electroencephalography (EEG) to decompose it into a sum of spatially fixed and temporally independent components that can be attributed to underlying cortical activity. A major problem in the application of ICA is the stability of estimated independent components. In this paper we exploited the split-half approach to assess component stability. We used different measures quantifying both phase and energy aspects of the ERP, in order to distinguish evoked from induced oscillations. We applied these measures to the stable independent components derived from a dataset of progressive Mild Cognitive Impairment (PMCI) and elderly controls. We found reduced energy in the induced theta activity in PMCI subjects, in accordance with previous studies. In addition, PMCI subjects presented lower phase-locking values and diminished late alpha band energy in contrast to controls.Presented on

Pancreatic surgery outcomes: multicentre prospective snapshot study in 67 countries

Background: Pancreatic surgery remains associated with high morbidity rates. Although postoperative mortality appears to have improved with specialization, the outcomes reported in the literature reflect the activity of highly specialized centres. The aim of this study was to evaluate the outcomes following pancreatic surgery worldwide.Methods: This was an international, prospective, multicentre, cross-sectional snapshot study of consecutive patients undergoing pancreatic operations worldwide in a 3-month interval in 2021. The primary outcome was postoperative mortality within 90 days of surgery. Multivariable logistic regression was used to explore relationships with Human Development Index (HDI) and other parameters.Results: A total of 4223 patients from 67 countries were analysed. A complication of any severity was detected in 68.7 percent of patients (2901 of 4223). Major complication rates (Clavien-Dindo grade at least IIIa) were 24, 18, and 27 percent, and mortality rates were 10, 5, and 5 per cent in low-to-middle-, high-, and very high-HDI countries respectively. The 90-day postoperative mortality rate was 5.4 per cent (229 of 4223) overall, but was significantly higher in the low-to-middle-HDI group (adjusted OR 2.88, 95 per cent c.i. 1.80 to 4.48). The overall failure-to-rescue rate was 21 percent; however, it was 41 per cent in low-to-middle-compared with 19 per cent in very high-HDI countries.Conclusion: Excess mortality in low-to-middle-HDI countries could be attributable to failure to rescue of patients from severe complications. The authors call for a collaborative response from international and regional associations of pancreatic surgeons to address management related to death from postoperative complications to tackle the global disparities in the outcomes of pancreatic surgery (NCT04652271; ISRCTN95140761)