344 research outputs found

    Public Perception of Engineering Technology: A Literature Review

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    Engineering technology describes a field closely related to engineering in which practical application of learned concepts is emphasized over theoretical knowledge. Although an increasing amount of emphasis is being placed on the importance of this experiential learning in all engineering curricula, and the specifics of engineering technology’s place among engineering and technical fields is becoming clearer, there are still significant gaps in our understanding of several key aspects of this field. One of these aspects is its perception by the general public, which is important in, among other things, determining the employability of engineering technology program graduates and encouraging the development of engineering technology curricula. Currently, existing literature on the subject is sparse, especially compared to the number and extent of similar studies done in related fields; the studies that are performed on the topic are generally restricted to a very specific demographic, and are not easily applicable to the entire population of engineering technology students and professionals. However, what information does exist suggests that this lack of research impedes the professional growth of those who are involved in engineering technology, including restricting the ability of faculty to recruit students interested in engineering technology programs, decreasing the effectiveness of guidance available to those students through advisors and outside programs, and preventing inequities currently present in the engineering field as a whole from being addressed. By acknowledging the gaps in current knowledge, direction for future research may be provided; thus, this review seeks to outline what research already exists on the public perception of engineering technology, and thereby highlight specific areas in which our understanding of this perception is particularly poor

    Knowledge Extraction for Art History: the Case of Vasari’s The Lives of The Artists (1568)

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    Knowledge Extraction (KE) techniques are used to convert unstructured information present in texts to Knowledge Graphs (KGs) which can be queried and explored. Despite their potential for cultural heritage domains, such as Art History, these techniques often encounter limitations if applied to domain-specific data. In this paper we present the main challenges that KE has to face on art-historical texts, by using as case study Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of The Artists. This paper discusses the following NLP tasks for art-historical texts, namely entity recognition and linking, coreference resolution, time extraction, motif extraction and artwork extraction. Several strategies to annotate art-historical data for these tasks and evaluate NLP models are also proposed

    Multimodal Search on Iconclass using Vision-Language Pre-Trained Models

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    Terminology sources, such as controlled vocabularies, thesauri and classification systems, play a key role in digitizing cultural heritage. However, Information Retrieval (IR) systems that allow to query and explore these lexical resources often lack an adequate representation of the semantics behind the user's search, which can be conveyed through multiple expression modalities (e.g., images, keywords or textual descriptions). This paper presents the implementation of a new search engine for one of the most widely used iconography classification system, Iconclass. The novelty of this system is the use of a pre-trained vision-language model, namely CLIP, to retrieve and explore Iconclass concepts using visual or textual queries

    DDB-KG: The German Bibliographic Heritage in a Knowledge Graph

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    Under the German government’s initiative “NEUSTART Kultur”, the German Digital Library or Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) is undergoing improvements to enhance user-experience. As an initial step, emphasis is placed on creating a knowledge graph from the bibliographic record collection of the DDB. This paper discusses the challenges facing the DDB in terms of retrieval and the solutions in addressing them. In particular, limitations of the current data model or ontology to represent bibliographic metadata is analyzed through concrete examples. This study presents the complete ontological mapping from DDB-Europeana Data Model (DDB-EDM) to FaBiO, and a prototype of the DDB-KG made available as a SPARQL endpoint. The suitabiliy of the target ontology is demonstrated with SPARQL queries formulated from competency question

    DDB-EDM to FaBiO: The Case of the German Digital Library

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    Cultural heritage portals have the goal of providing users with seamless access to all their resources. This paper introduces initial efforts for a user-oriented restructuring of the German Digital Library (DDB). At present, cultural heritage objects (CHOs) in the DDB are modeled using an extended version of the Europeana Data Model (DDBEDM), which negatively impacts usability and exploration. These challenges can be addressed by exploiting ontologies, and building a knowledge graph from the DDB’s voluminous collection. Towards this goal, an alignment of bibliographic metadata from DDB-EDM to FRBR-Aligned Bibliographic Ontology (FaBiO) is presented

    Risk factors for COPD spirometrically defined from the lower limit of normal in the BOLD project.

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    To access publisher full text version of this article. Please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links field.Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is predicted to become the third most common cause of death and disability worldwide by 2020. The prevalence of COPD defined by the lower limit of normal was estimated using high-quality spirometry in surveys of 14 populations aged ≄ 40 yrs. The strength and consistency of associations were assessed using random effects meta-analysis. Pack-years of smoking were associated with risk of COPD at each site. After adjusting for this effect, we still observed significant associations of COPD risk with age (OR 1.52 for a 10 yr age difference, 95% CI 1.35-1.71), body mass index in obese compared with normal weight (OR 0.50, 95% CI 0.37-0.67), level of education completed (OR 0.76, 95% CI 0.67-0.87), hospitalisation with a respiratory problem before age 10 yrs (OR 2.35, 95% CI 1.42-3.91), passive cigarette smoke exposure (OR 1.24, 95% CI 1.05-1.47), tuberculosis (OR 1.78, 95%CI 1.17-2.72) and a family history of COPD (OR 1.50, 95% CI 1.19-1.90). Although smoking is the most important risk factor for COPD, other risk factors are also important. More research is required to elucidate relevant risk factors in low- and middle-income countries where the greatest impact of COPD will occur.ALTANA Aventis AstraZeneca Boehringer-Ingelheim Chiesi GlaxoSmithKline Merck Novartis Pfizer Schering-Plough Sepracor University of Kentucky Boehringer Ingelheim China (Guangzhou, China) Turkish Thoracic Society Pfizer (Adana, Turkey) Merck Sharpe Dohme Salzburger Gebietskrankenkasse Salzburg Local Government (Salzburg, Austria) Research for International Tobacco Control International Development Research Centre South African Medical Research Council South African Thoracic Society GlaxoSmithKline University of Cape Town Lung Institute (Cape Town, South Africa) Landspitali-University Hospital GlaxoSmithKline Iceland AstraZeneca Iceland (Reykjavik, Iceland) GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals Polpharma Ivax Pharma Poland AstraZeneca Pharma Poland ZF Altana Pharma Pliva Krakow Linde Gaz Polska Novartis Poland Lek Polska Farmaceutyczne Polfa Starostwo Proszowice Skanska Zasada Agencja Mienia Wojskowego w Krakowie Telekomunikacja Polska Biernacki Amplus Bucki Skrzydlewski Sotwin Agroplon (Krakow, Poland) Pfizer Germany (Hanover, Germany) Norwegian Ministry of Health's Foundation for Clinical Research Haukeland University Hospital's Medical Research Foundation for Thoracic Medicine (Bergen, Norway) GlaxoSmithKline (Vancouver, Canada) Marty Driesler Cancer Project (Lexington, KY, USA) Philippine College of Chest Physicians Boehringer Ingelheim (Phil) Philippine College of Physicians United Laboratories (Phil) (Manila, Philippines) Air Liquide Healthcare P/L AstraZeneca P/L Boehringer Ingelheim P/L GlaxoSmithKline Australia P/L Pfizer Australia P/L (Sydney, Australia) UK Department of Health's Policy (London, UK) Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation Swedish Heart and Lung Association GlaxoSmithKline (Uppsala, Sweden) Adamed Lek Polska Biogra
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