1,371 research outputs found
Making Visible the Invisible: Social Justice and Inclusion through the Collaboration of Museums and Spanish Community-Based Learning Projects
Concerns about inclusion and social responsibility as conduit for social justice on university campuses offer a platform for interdisciplinary initiatives. Here we focus on one such initiative, which seeks to build community between University of Richmond students and local Latino and Hispanic populations using the University of Richmond Museum collection. Collaborations between museums and Spanish classes, including a community-based learning component (Spanish Community-Based Learning and Museums - SCBLM), provide outreach to the local community and might prompt dialogues about extant social injustices (however overt or subliminal). In these experiential learning projects, the museum serves as a communal resource to embody ACTFL’s Five C’s of language teaching (communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, communities). The SCBLM engagements, typically Spanish museum tours, encourage social awareness, connections, and social justice by way of empathetic inclusion. This paper explains the vision (objectives) of this practice (community-based learning) and the outcomes (implications) with university students; for support, we use research from museum studies, language teaching, and critical pedagogy. As a new endeavor in academic and museum scholarship, this paper provides a model for interdisciplinary teaching and research. Finally, we state the necessity for student-community inclusive projects within universities, as they allow for a more socially aware, empathetic, and connected community
Exploiting Action Impact Regularity and Exogenous State Variables for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Offline reinforcement learning -- learning a policy from a batch of data --
is known to be hard for general MDPs. These results motivate the need to look
at specific classes of MDPs where offline reinforcement learning might be
feasible. In this work, we explore a restricted class of MDPs to obtain
guarantees for offline reinforcement learning. The key property, which we call
Action Impact Regularity (AIR), is that actions primarily impact a part of the
state (an endogenous component) with limited impact on the remaining part of
the state (an exogenous component). AIR is a strong assumption, but it
nonetheless holds in a number of real-world domains including financial
markets. We discuss algorithms that exploits the AIR property, and provide a
theoretical analysis for an algorithm based on Fitted-Q Iteration. Finally, we
demonstrate that the algorithm outperforms existing offline reinforcement
learning algorithms across different data collection policies in simulated and
real world environments where the regularity holds
Postcard Memories: an interactive tablet application for elders with early-stage dementia
In this demonstration, we present ‘Postcard Memories’, an interactive
tablet application to create a social space for elders with
early stage dementia. The touchscreen tablet application encourages
people to create, organize, and send digital postcards that
combine photographs and short text with audio and video. Users
can send digital or print postcards to family, friends, and caregivers
to encourage memory recall and facilitate social interaction.
Results from a mixed method user study indicate that people find
the interaction with the application enjoyable and meaningful
Researching together:a collaborative research volunteer scheme and its student-staff partnership evaluation
This case study outlines a university-wide programme that brings together staff and undergraduate students in co-research projects. They argue that successful student-staff partnerships require a structured approach, clear communication about expectations and roles and due care taken with respect to power imbalances. If done successfully, programmes like this increase competence and confidence aiding students now, and in the future
NASA 2014 The Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI) - Science Impact of Deploying Instruments on Separate Platforms
The Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI) mission was recommended for implementation by the 2007 report from the U.S. National Research Council Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond, also known as the Earth Science Decadal Survey. The HyspIRI mission is science driven and will address a set of science questions identified by the Decadal Survey and broader science community. The mission includes a visible shortwave infrared (VSWIR) imaging spectrometer, a multispectral thermal infrared (TIR) imager and an intelligent payload module (IPM). The IPM enables on-board processing and direct broadcast for those applications with short latency requirements. The science questions are organized as VSWIR-only, TIR-only and Combined science questions, the latter requiring data from both instruments. In order to prepare for the mission NASA is undertaking pre-phase A studies to determine the optimum mission implementation, in particular, cost and risk reduction activities. Each year the HyspIRI project is provided with feedback from NASA Headquarters on the pre-phase A activities in the form of a guidance letter which outlines the work that should be undertaken the subsequent year. The 2013 guidance letter included a recommendation to undertake a study to determine the science impact of deploying the instruments from separate spacecraft in sun synchronous orbits with various time separations and deploying both instruments on the International Space Station (ISS). This report summarizes the results from that study. The approach taken was to evaluate the impact on the combined science questions of time separations between the VSWIR and TIR data of <3 minutes, <1 week and a few months as well as deploying both instruments on the ISS. Note the impact was only evaluated for the combined science questions which require data from both instruments (VSWIR and TIR). The study concluded the impact of a separation of <3 minutes was minimal, e.g. if the instruments were on separate platforms that followed each other in a train. The impact of a separation of <1 week was strongly dependent on the question that was being addressed with no impact for some questions and a severe impact for others. The impact of a time separation of several months was severe and in many cases it was no longer possible to answer the sub-question. The impact of deploying the instruments on the ISS which is in a precessive (non-sun synchronous) orbit was also very question dependent, in some cases it was possible to go beyond the original question, e.g. to examine the impact of the diurnal cycle, whereas in other cases the question could not be addressed for example if the question required observations from the polar regions. As part of the study, the participants were asked to estimate, as a percentage, how completely a given sub-question could be answered with 100% indicating the question could be completely answered. These estimations should be treated with caution but nonetheless can be useful in assessing the impact. Averaging the estimates for each of the combined questions the results indicate that 97% of the questions could be answered with a separation of < 3 minutes. With a separation of < 1 week, 67% of the questions could be answered and with a separation of several months only 21% of the questions could be answered
CAMRA: Copilot for AMR Annotation
In this paper, we introduce CAMRA (Copilot for AMR Annotatations), a
cutting-edge web-based tool designed for constructing Abstract Meaning
Representation (AMR) from natural language text. CAMRA offers a novel approach
to deep lexical semantics annotation such as AMR, treating AMR annotation akin
to coding in programming languages. Leveraging the familiarity of programming
paradigms, CAMRA encompasses all essential features of existing AMR editors,
including example lookup, while going a step further by integrating Propbank
roleset lookup as an autocomplete feature within the tool. Notably, CAMRA
incorporates AMR parser models as coding co-pilots, greatly enhancing the
efficiency and accuracy of AMR annotators. To demonstrate the tool's
capabilities, we provide a live demo accessible at: https://camra.colorado.eduComment: EMNLP 2023 System Demonstratio
Exposure to acetylcholinesterase inhibitors alters the physiology and motor function of honeybees
Cholinergic signalling is fundamental to neuro-muscular function in most organisms. Sub-lethal doses of neurotoxic pesticides that target cholinergic signalling can alter the behaviour of insects in subtle ways; their influence on non-target organisms may not be readily apparent in simple mortality studies. Beneficial arthropods such as honeybees perform sophisticated behavioural sequences during foraging that, if influenced by pesticides, could impair foraging success and reduce colony health. Here, we investigate the behavioural effects on honeybees of exposure to a selection of pesticides that target cholinergic signalling by inhibiting acetylcholinesterase (AChE). To examine how continued exposure to AChE inhibitors affected motor function, we fed adult foraging worker honeybees sub-lethal concentrations of these compounds in sucrose solution for 24 h. Using an assay for locomotion in bees, we scored walking, stopped, grooming, and upside down behaviour continuously for 15 min. At a 10nM concentration, all the AChE inhibitors caused similar effects on behaviour, notably increased grooming activity and changes in the frequency of bouts of behaviour such as head grooming. Coumaphos caused dose-dependent effects on locomotion as well as grooming behaviour, and a 1µM concentration of coumaphos induced symptoms of malaise such as abdomen grooming and defecation. Biochemical assays confirmed that the 4 compounds we assayed (coumaphos, aldicarb, chlorpyrifos, and donepezil) or their metabolites acted as AChE inhibitors in bees. Furthermore, we show that transcript expression levels of two honeybee acetylcholinesterase inhibitors were selectively upregulated in the brain and in gut tissues in response to AChE inhibitor exposure. The results of our study imply that the effects of pesticides that rely on this mode of action have subtle yet profound effects on physiological effects on behaviour that could lead to reduced survival
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