Looking into the Freedom of Partner Choosing in Pair Programming

The published research studies to date indicate that pair programming has a positive impact on some aspects of students’ performance. In the normal practice of pairing programming in the academic field, the students were paired by assigning partners according to their level of programming skill. In other words, students were paired according to their programming compatibility that was perceived by their lecturers.However,research studies did not attempt to identify the main element that the student sarelookingintowhentheyaregiventhefreedomtoselecttheirpartnerinpairprogrammingpractice. Anexperimentwith76studentsduringaone-weekprogrammingworkshopshowsthat59.2%will choose their partner according to gender while 30.3% will choose their partner based on the ethnics group. The study shows that only 5.2% of the students focus on the skills of their choice of partner. At the end of the workshop, 96% of the students agree that pairing with a partner helps them in solving a programming problem. However, only 89.2% of the students prefer to work in pairs when solving programming while 5.4% prefer to work as an individual. This initial finding tallies with the other research whereby it shows that pair programming benefits the students in solving a programming problem.Despite the normal belief that the pairs are compatible if they are almost the same level in terms of technical competency in programming,students tend to choose according to gender when they are given a choice

A comparative study of interactive segmentation with different number of strokes on complex images

Interactive image segmentation is the way to extract an object of interest with the guidance of the user. The guidance from the user is an iterative process until the required object of interest had been segmented. Therefore, the input from the user as well as the understanding of the algorithms based on the user input has an essential role in the success of interactive segmentation. The most common user input type in interactive segmentation is using strokes. The different number of strokes are utilized in each different interactive segmentation algorithms. There was no evaluation of the effects on the number of strokes on this interactive segmentation. Therefore, this paper intends to fill this shortcoming. In this study, the input strokes had been categorized into single, double, and multiple strokes. The use of the same number of strokes on the object of interest and background on three interactive segmentation algorithms: i) Nonparametric Higher-order Learning (NHL), ii) Maximal Similarity-based Region Merging (MSRM) and iii) Graph-Based Manifold Ranking (GBMR) are evaluated, focusing on the complex images from Berkeley image dataset. This dataset contains a total of 12,000 test color images and ground truth images. Two types of complex images had been selected for the experiment: image with a background color like the object of interest, and image with the object of interest overlapped with other similar objects. This can be concluded that, generally, more strokes used as input could improve image segmentation accuracy

Rainfall Classification for Flood Prediction Using Meteorology Data of Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia: Backpropagation vs Radial Basis Function Neural Network

Rainfall is often defined by stochastic process due to its random characteristics, i.e. space and time dependent and it is therefore, not easy to predict. In general, rainfall is a highly non-linear and complicated phenomenon. In order to acquire an accurate prediction, advanced computer modeling and simulation is required. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been successfully used to predict the behavior of such non-linear system. Among the different types of ANN models used, Backpropagation Network (BPN) and Radial Basis Function Networks (RBFN) are the two common ANN models that had produced valuable results. However, there was no study conducted to research on which, among these two methods, is the better model for rainfall forecast. Therefore, this study will fill this gap by comparing the capabilities of these two ANN models in rainfall forecast using metrological data from year 2009 to 2013 obtained from Malaysian Meteorological Department for Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. From the research, it is concluded that, BPN (MSE≈0.16, R≈0.86) performs better as compared to RBFN (MSE≈0.22, R≈0.82). The strengths and weaknesses of these models are also presented in this paper

Sizes of Superpixels and their Effect on Interactive Segmentation

Semi-automated segmentation, also known as interactive image segmentation, is an algorithm that extracts a region of interest (ROI) from an image based on user input. The said algorithm will be fed the user input information repeatedly until the required region of interest is successfully segmented. Pre-processing steps can be used to speed up the segmentation process while improving the end result. The use of superpixels is one example of such pre-processing step. A superpixel is a group of pixels that share similar characteristics such as texture and colour. Despite the fact that it is used as a pre-processing step in many interactive segmentation algorithms, less studies had been conducted to assess the effects of the size of superpixels required by interactive segmentation algorithms to achieve an optimal result. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to address this issue in order to bridge this research gap. This study will be performed using the Maximum Similarity based region merging (MSRM) with input strokes on selected images from the Berkeleys and Grabcut image data sets, generated by superpixels extractions via energy-driven samples (SEEDS We infer from this research that an image with a minimum of 500 superpixels will aid the interactive segmentation algorithm in producing a decent segmentation result with pixel accuracy of 0.963, F-score of 0.844, and Jaccard index of 0.756. When the superpixels for an image are raised to 10,000, the segmentation results degrade. In conclusion, the size of the superpixels would have an impact on the final segmentation results

Sizes of Superpixels and their Effect on Interactive Segmentation

Semi-automated segmentation, also known as interactive image segmentation, is an algorithm that extracts a region of interest (ROI) from an image based on user input. The said algorithm will be fed the user input information repeatedly until the required region of interest is successfully segmented. Pre-processing steps can be used to speed up the segmentation process while improving the end result. The use of superpixels is one example of such pre-processing step. A superpixel is a group of pixels that share similar characteristics such as texture and colour. Despite the fact that it is used as a pre-processing step in many interactive segmentation algorithms, less studies had been conducted to assess the effects of the size of superpixels required by interactive segmentation algorithms to achieve an optimal result. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to address this issue in order to bridge this research gap. This study will be performed using the Maximum Similarity based region merging (MSRM) with input strokes on selected images from the Berkeleys and Grabcut image data sets, generated by superpixels extractions via energy-driven samples (SEEDS We infer from this research that an image with a minimum of 500 superpixels will aid the interactive segmentation algorithm in producing a decent segmentation result with pixel accuracy of 0.963, F-score of 0.844, and Jaccard index of 0.756. When the superpixels for an image are raised to 10,000, the segmentation results degrade. In conclusion, the size of the superpixels would have an impact on the final segmentation results

Effects of Different Superpixel Algorithms on Interactive Segmentations

Semi-automated segmentation or more commonly known as interactive image segmentation is an algorithm that extracts a region of interest (ROI) from an image based on the input information from the user. The said algorithm will be repetitively fed with such input information until required region of interest is successfully segmented. To accelerate this segmentation procedure as well as enhancing the result, pre-processing steps can be applied. The application of superpixel is an example of such pre-processing step. Superpixel can be defined as a collection of pixels that share common features such as texture and colours. Though employed as pre-processing step in many interactive segmentation algorithms, to date, no study has been conducted to assess the effects of such incorporations on the segmentation algorithms. Thus, this study aims to address this issue. In this study, five different types of superpixels ranging from watershed, density, graph, clustering and energy optimization categories are evaluated. The superpixels generated by these five algorithms will be used on two interactive image segmentation algorithms: i) Maximal Similarity based Region Merging (MSRM) and ii) Graph-Based Manifold Ranking (GBMR) with single and multiple strokes on various images from the Berkeley image dataset. The result of testing had shown that MSRM achieved better result compared to GBMR in both single and multiple input strokes using SEEDS superpixel algorithm. This study summary concluded that at different superpixel algorithms produced different results and that it is not possible to single out one particular superpixel algorithm that can work well for all the interactive segmentation algorithms. As such, the key to achieving a decent segmentation result lies in choosing the right superpixel algorithms for a given interactive segmentation algorithm