From Common to Special: When Multi-Attribute Learning Meets Personalized Opinions

Visual attributes, which refer to human-labeled semantic annotations, have gained increasing popularity in a wide range of real world applications. Generally, the existing attribute learning methods fall into two categories: one focuses on learning user-specific labels separately for different attributes, while the other one focuses on learning crowd-sourced global labels jointly for multiple attributes. However, both categories ignore the joint effect of the two mentioned factors: the personal diversity with respect to the global consensus; and the intrinsic correlation among multiple attributes. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel model to learn user-specific predictors across multiple attributes. In our proposed model, the diversity of personalized opinions and the intrinsic relationship among multiple attributes are unified in a common-to-special manner. To this end, we adopt a three-component decomposition. Specifically, our model integrates a common cognition factor, an attribute-specific bias factor and a user-specific bias factor. Meanwhile Lasso and group Lasso penalties are adopted to leverage efficient feature selection. Furthermore, theoretical analysis is conducted to show that our proposed method could reach reasonable performance. Eventually, the empirical study carried out in this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method

HodgeRank with Information Maximization for Crowdsourced Pairwise Ranking Aggregation

Recently, crowdsourcing has emerged as an effective paradigm for human-powered large scale problem solving in various domains. However, task requester usually has a limited amount of budget, thus it is desirable to have a policy to wisely allocate the budget to achieve better quality. In this paper, we study the principle of information maximization for active sampling strategies in the framework of HodgeRank, an approach based on Hodge Decomposition of pairwise ranking data with multiple workers. The principle exhibits two scenarios of active sampling: Fisher information maximization that leads to unsupervised sampling based on a sequential maximization of graph algebraic connectivity without considering labels; and Bayesian information maximization that selects samples with the largest information gain from prior to posterior, which gives a supervised sampling involving the labels collected. Experiments show that the proposed methods boost the sampling efficiency as compared to traditional sampling schemes and are thus valuable to practical crowdsourcing experiments.Comment: Accepted by AAAI201

How school Memories Inform Possible Selves of an English Pre-Service Teacher

Employing narrative prompting and interviewing, this qualitative study asked an English pre-service teacher to recall his memories of secondary schools and consider the significance of those memories. The participant recounted various memories related to the characteristics and behavior of his secondary school teachers, which fell into three main categories: “why did they ignore me”, “then they saw me” and “finally, he came and save me”. These memories revealed the barriers and supports the interviewee encountered in different educational environments, which greatly influenced the formation of his desired and feared possible selves. Moreover, the pre-service teacher recognized a conflict between the possible selves and teaching practices, and attempted to negotiate the past memories with future career, which was referred to as “no more acting against my beliefs”. The implications of pre-service teacher’s school memories and possible selves were discussed in the context of teacher development program

5,8-Dibromo-14,15,17,18-tetra­methyl-2,11-dithia­[3.3]paracyclo­phane

In the title mol­ecule [systematic name: 12,15-dibromo-52,53,55,56-tetramethyl-3,7-dithia-1,5(1,4)-dibenzenacyclooctaphane], C20H22Br2S2, the distance between the centroids of the two benzene rings is 3.326 (4) Å, and their mean planes are almost parallel, forming a dihedral angle of 1.05 (7)°. The crystal packing exhibits no inter­molecular contacts shorter than the sum of van der Waals radii