EFL TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS AND THEIR REPORTED PRACTICES OF ENACTING THE COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE SECTION IN THE NEW ENGLISH TEXTBOOK

The development of globalization and integration requires a modern workforce with 21st-century skills, especially intercultural communicative competence (ICC). Thanks to the National Foreign Language 2020 project, the new English textbooks were introduced to Vietnamese students with the hope prepare them for ICC. Research on how EFL teachers explored the new teaching materials has been made, but previous findings show limitations on EFL teachers’ practices in the communication and culture section. Hence, this descriptive research was conducted to investigate EFL teachers’ perceptions and their reported practices of enacting this section. A mixed-method approach was employed to collect quantitative and qualitative data. Seventy-two EFL teachers in the Mekong Delta responded to the questionnaire and seven of them joined the semi-structured interviews. Results revealed various EFL teachers’ perceptions and high levels of agreement on their practices of four dimensions of ICC. The study also suggested further research should look into students’ perspectives.  Article visualizations

Face Swapping as A Simple Arithmetic Operation

We propose a novel high-fidelity face swapping method called "Arithmetic Face Swapping" (AFS) that explicitly disentangles the intermediate latent space W+ of a pretrained StyleGAN into the "identity" and "style" subspaces so that a latent code in W+ is the sum of an "identity" code and a "style" code in the corresponding subspaces. Via our disentanglement, face swapping (FS) can be regarded as a simple arithmetic operation in W+, i.e., the summation of a source "identity" code and a target "style" code. This makes AFS more intuitive and elegant than other FS methods. In addition, our method can generalize over the standard face swapping to support other interesting operations, e.g., combining the identity of one source with styles of multiple targets and vice versa. We implement our identity-style disentanglement by learning a neural network that maps a latent code to a "style" code. We provide a condition for this network which theoretically guarantees identity preservation of the source face even after a sequence of face swapping operations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantage of our method over state-of-the-art FS methods in producing high-quality swapped faces

G-CAME: Gaussian-Class Activation Mapping Explainer for Object Detectors

Nowadays, deep neural networks for object detection in images are very prevalent. However, due to the complexity of these networks, users find it hard to understand why these objects are detected by models. We proposed Gaussian Class Activation Mapping Explainer (G-CAME), which generates a saliency map as the explanation for object detection models. G-CAME can be considered a CAM-based method that uses the activation maps of selected layers combined with the Gaussian kernel to highlight the important regions in the image for the predicted box. Compared with other Region-based methods, G-CAME can transcend time constraints as it takes a very short time to explain an object. We also evaluated our method qualitatively and quantitatively with YOLOX on the MS-COCO 2017 dataset and guided to apply G-CAME into the two-stage Faster-RCNN model.Comment: 10 figure

A Novel Explainable Artificial Intelligence Model in Image Classification problem

In recent years, artificial intelligence is increasingly being applied widely in many different fields and has a profound and direct impact on human life. Following this is the need to understand the principles of the model making predictions. Since most of the current high-precision models are black boxes, neither the AI scientist nor the end-user deeply understands what's going on inside these models. Therefore, many algorithms are studied for the purpose of explaining AI models, especially those in the problem of image classification in the field of computer vision such as LIME, CAM, GradCAM. However, these algorithms still have limitations such as LIME's long execution time and CAM's confusing interpretation of concreteness and clarity. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new method called Segmentation - Class Activation Mapping (SeCAM) that combines the advantages of these algorithms above, while at the same time overcoming their disadvantages. We tested this algorithm with various models, including ResNet50, Inception-v3, VGG16 from ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) data set. Outstanding results when the algorithm has met all the requirements for a specific explanation in a remarkably concise time.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of FAIC 202

A Design of Similar High-gain and Dual-band Frequency/Polarization Reconfigurable Antenna for ISM Band Applications

This paper proposes a frequency/polarization reconfigurable antenna (RA) incorporating with Frequency Selective Surface (FSS) to achieve dual-band and similar high-gain characteristics. The proposed RA-FSS design using 4 PIN Diodes can switch between circular polarization (CP) at 1.8 GHz and linear polarization at 2.45 GHz. The fabricated prototype shows good CP performance at 1.8 GHz while the measured peak broadside gains are about 7.2 dBi at 1.8 GHz and 8.5 dBi at 2.45 GHz when PIN diode ON and OFF, respectively

Wideband Flexible/Transparent Connected-Ground MIMO Antennas for Sub-6 GHz 5G and WLAN Applications

A flexible transparent wideband four-element MIMO antenna with a connected ground plane is proposed with numerical computation and experimental measurement studies. The optical transparency is obtained using flexible conductive oxide material AgHT-4 and Melinex substrate. The radiating elements are in the form of circular stub-loaded C-shaped resonators, which are positioned in a carefully structured flexible Melinex substrate with an interconnected partial ground plane structured in the form of an L-shaped resonator, attaining an overall antenna size of 0.33 lambda x 0.48 lambda at the lowest operating frequency. The proposed antenna spans over a -10 dB impedance bandwidth of 2.21-6 GHz (92.32%) with an isolation level greater than 15dB among all elements. The maximum gain is 0.53dBi with a minimum efficiency of 41%, respectively which is satisfactory considering flexible structure and sheet impedance of 4 Omega/sq. MIMO antenna parameters in terms of the envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) and diversity gain (DG) are also extracted where all the values are satisfactory for MIMO applications. The bending analysis of the proposed transparent MIMO antenna along the X and Y axis has revealed good performance in terms of scattering parameters and radiation pattern along with MIMO diversity performance. All of these technical points make the flexible MIMO antenna suitable for smart devices using sub-6 GHz 5G and WLAN band in IoT applications where visual clutter and co-site location issues need to be mitigated with the integration ease of conformal placement on the curved component/device surfaces

Compact Wideband Four Element Optically Transparent MIMO Antenna for mm-Wave 5G Applications

A four-element compact wide-band optically transparent MIMO antenna with a full ground plane is proposed. The four elements transparent MIMO system has a compact size of 24x20 mm(2) with the undivided ground plane as most of the real-time systems demand a common reference. The complete antenna system achieves around 85% transparency due to a combination of AgHT-8 and Plexiglas which forms the transparent conductive patch/ground and substrate, respectively. The antenna geometry leads dual-band operation ranging from 24.10 - 27.18 GHz (Impedance bandwidth D 12%) and 33 - 44.13 GHz (Impedance bandwidth D 28.86%) targeting the mm-wave 5G applications. The 4-element antenna system achieves isolation between inter-elements > 16 dB and maximum gain value of greater than 3 dBi with more than 75% efficiency. The proposed transparent MIMO antenna is evaluated in terms of diversity gain (DG), envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), total active reflection coefficient (TARC), and mean effective gain (MEG) where decent MIMO performance with isolation more than >16 dB between the adjacent and other elements is achieved. Transparent MIMO antenna achieves directional patterns for the operating band with the value of DG > 9, ECC < 0.1, TARC value less than and the ratio of MEG within the agreed limit of +/- 3 dB conforming acceptable MIMO/diversity performance

Carbon Nanoparticle-Based Electro-Thermal Building Block

All around the world, researchers have raised concerns about the superlative geometrical, electronic, thermal, chemical and mechanical properties of carbon nanoparticles (CNPs). CNPs with low cost, high performance and prominent intrinsic properties have attracted extensive interest for numerous applications in various fields. Although CNPs have been studied mainly as transistors and sensors, they could also be considered as heat producers. However, this option has scarcely been studied. In this research, a CNP-based electro-thermal building block is synthesized by the arc discharge method in a carbonic medium (high-density polyethylene), and its behavior is investigated. It is shaped in the form of a metal–semiconductor–metal structure (MSM) between metallic electrodes, and in addition, the formation of two back-to-back Schottky diodes is analyzed and their use as CNP-based electro-thermal building blocks are reported