GAME ART PRESERVES CULTURAL AESTHETICS AND IMPLICATIONS

This paper summarizes what game artists perceive on their own work and how game art may affect the society. It is intended to provide insight on artists¡¯ views on the game industry. This research also covers how players view game art of the same genre

The first 40 million years of circumstellar disk evolution: the signature of terrestrial planet formation

We characterize the first 40 Myr of evolution of circumstellar disks through a unified study of the infrared properties of members of young clusters and associations with ages from 2 Myr up to ~ 40 Myr: NGC 1333, NGC 1960, NGC 2232, NGC 2244, NGC 2362, NGC 2547, IC 348, IC 2395, IC 4665, Chamaeleon I, Orion OB1a and OB1b, Taurus, the \b{eta} Pictoris Moving Group, \r{ho} Ophiuchi, and the associations of Argus, Carina, Columba, Scorpius-Centaurus, and Tucana-Horologium. Our work features: 1.) a filtering technique to flag noisy backgrounds, 2.) a method based on the probability distribution of deflections, P(D), to obtain statistically valid photometry for faint sources, and 3.) use of the evolutionary trend of transitional disks to constrain the overall behavior of bright disks. We find that the fraction of disks three or more times brighter than the stellar photospheres at 24 {\mu}m decays relatively slowly initially and then much more rapidly by ~ 10 Myr. However, there is a continuing component until ~ 35 Myr, probably due primarily to massive clouds of debris generated in giant impacts during the oligarchic/chaotic growth phases of terrestrial planets. If the contribution from primordial disks is excluded, the evolution of the incidence of these oligarchic/chaotic debris disks can be described empirically by a log-normal function with the peak at 12 - 20 Myr, including ~ 13 % of the original population, and with a post-peak mean duration of 10 - 20 Myr.Comment: accepted for publication, the Astrophysical Journal (2017

Semiconductor Electronic Label-Free Assay for Predictive Toxicology.

While animal experimentations have spearheaded numerous breakthroughs in biomedicine, they also have spawned many logistical concerns in providing toxicity screening for copious new materials. Their prioritization is premised on performing cellular-level screening in vitro. Among the screening assays, secretomic assay with high sensitivity, analytical throughput, and simplicity is of prime importance. Here, we build on the over 3-decade-long progress on transistor biosensing and develop the holistic assay platform and procedure called semiconductor electronic label-free assay (SELFA). We demonstrate that SELFA, which incorporates an amplifying nanowire field-effect transistor biosensor, is able to offer superior sensitivity, similar selectivity, and shorter turnaround time compared to standard enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). We deploy SELFA secretomics to predict the inflammatory potential of eleven engineered nanomaterials in vitro, and validate the results with confocal microscopy in vitro and confirmatory animal experiment in vivo. This work provides a foundation for high-sensitivity label-free assay utility in predictive toxicology

Functional characterization of the DNA glycosylase; Methyl-­‐CpG binding domainpProtein 4 (MBD4)

DNA methylation is a major form of epigenetic modification and involves the addition of a methyl group covalently to the 5-position of the cytosine pyrimidine ring, mostly within the context of CpG dinucleotides in vertebrate somatic cells. Methylation of CpG dinucleotides at promoter regions is generally associated with transcriptional repression. In this context, the methyl-CpG binding proteins (MeCPs) that are capable of recognition of methylated CpG dinucleotides are proposed to play a central role in DNA methylation associated transcriptional repression. Methyl-CpG binding domain protein 4 (MBD4) is an MeCP that possesses a glycosylase domain at its C-terminal, which can excise and repair both G:T and G:U mutations derived from DNA deamination at CpG dinucleotides, in addition to its Nterminal MBD binding domain. MBD4 has been associated with a number of pathways including DNA repair, apoptosis, transcriptional repression, and possibly DNA demethylation processes. However, the precise contribution of MBD4 to these processes remains unclear. To explore the functional repertoire of MBD4 I decided to undertake multiple protein interaction studies to identify potential partner proteins. I performed yeast 2-hybrid screens with an 11.5 day mouse embryonic cDNA library and multiple mass spectrometry of immunoprecipitates of tagged versions of MBD4 that were over-expressed in human cell lines. I detected ~380 potential interacting candidates with these assays. A significant number of candidates were detected in both assay systems. Chosen candidates were further validated by reciprocal co-IP of expressed partners and by immunofluorescence (IF) microscopy to determine their potential co-localisation in mouse and human cell lines. Subsequently, I identified the intervening domain of MBD4 as a novel protein interaction region for tested candidates. My analysis suggests that MBD4 can have a role in regulation of post-replication methyl-error repair/methylation machinery through its direct interaction with DNMT1 (previously shown), UHRF1 (novel) and USP7 (novel), as well as possible cross-talk to histone modification and chromatin remodelling pathways, through partners such as PRMT5 and ACF1. Interestingly the transcription regulatory components KAP1 and CFP1 not only interact with but also dramatically influence the stability of exogenously expressed MBD4 in human cells. In general positive validation by IP and IF demonstrates the robustness of the initial screens, and implies that MBD4 may impact upon several transcriptional and epigenetic networks along with a number of nuclear pathways that include transcriptional repression, DNA repair and RNA processing. To test for transcriptional aberration in the absence of Mbd4 function I profiled two independent mouse cell lines that lack MBD4 activity using Illumina MouseWG-6 v2.0 Expression BeadChip arrays. A number of genes were identified that are significantly up- or down- regulated in both Mbd4-/- MEFs. This included mis-expression of insulin-like growth factor-binding proteins and two paternally imprinted genes Dio3 and H19. The cohort of genes that were mis-expressed in the Mbd4-/- MEFs overlap with genes that responsed to tamoxifen exposure in an ER-positive ZR-75-1 xenograft model. In response to this observation I identified a potential interaction between MBD4 and estrogen receptor α (ERα) by co-IP and IF co-localisation. This suggests that MBD4 might potentiate transcription of estrogen regulated genes via a direct interaction with ERα, supporting a possible link between replication repair remodelling and steroid/thyroid hormone receptor transcriptional regulation. Additionally I performed a pathway analysis by which several developmental genes including Sox9, Klf2 and Klf4, were prioritised as possible MBD4 targets. On this basis I propose a role for MBD4 in acquired diseases such as cancers and autoimmune diseases via transcriptional regulation. I also performed a comparison of MBD4 DNA binding activity with MBD4 homologues from the Medaka fish (Oryzias latipes) and the amphibian, Xenopus laevis. I could show that DNA binding specificity to a series of methylated and mismatched probes is conserved regardless of the poor sequence conservation of the MBD domain of MBD4 between the species. I conclude that MBD4 is integrated in multiple pathways in the nucleus that includes DNA repair, chromatin remodelling, transcriptional regulation and genome stability

THE REFORMS OF NATIONAL ASSESSMENTS IN MALAYSIAN EDUCATION SYSTEM

Although the impact of education policy reform could inform future policymaking initiatives, studies on education policy reform of student assessment are considered scarce. This study attempts to scrutinise the drivers, impacts, and challenges of education policy reform of the national assessment system in Malaysia based on policy documents and previous empirical studies. The findings indicated that the education policy reform of the Malaysian national assessment system is driven by the decline of pupils’ performance in international large-scale assessments. There are changes in content, format, and structure of the public examinations and assessment delivery procedures. The emergence of school-based assessment shows a paradigm shift from cognitive learning to a more holistic manner. Challenges arise included teachers’ extra workload, teachers’ readiness, lack of reference materials, and time constraints in implementing school-based assessment. Findings inferred the needs in refining the monitoring and coaching system in order to ensure the student assessment implementation does not diverge from the missions of education policy reform.  This study is hoped to provide useful insights for future policymaking initiatives, particularly in Malaysia. Keywords: Malaysia, policy reform, public examination, school-based assessment, student assessment. Cite as: Chin, H., Thien, L. M., & Chew, C. M. (2019). The reforms of national assessments in Malaysian education system. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 4(1), 93-111. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol4iss1pp93-11

Predicting student performance in interactive online question pools using mouse interaction features

Modeling student learning and further predicting the performance is a well-established task in online learning and is crucial to personalized education by recommending different learning resources to different students based on their needs. Interactive online question pools (e.g., educational game platforms), an important component of online education, have become increasingly popular in recent years. However, most existing work on student performance prediction targets at online learning platforms with a well-structured curriculum, predefined question order and accurate knowledge tags provided by domain experts. It remains unclear how to conduct student performance prediction in interactive online question pools without such well-organized question orders or knowledge tags by experts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to boost student performance prediction in interactive online question pools by further considering student interaction features and the similarity between questions. Specifically, we introduce new features (e.g., think time, first attempt, and first drag-and-drop) based on student mouse movement trajectories to delineate students' problem-solving details. In addition, heterogeneous information network is applied to integrating students' historical problem-solving information on similar questions, enhancing student performance predictions on a new question. We evaluate the proposed approach on the dataset from a real-world interactive question pool using four typical machine learning models.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, conference lak20, has been accepted, proceeding now. link: https://lak20.solaresearch.org/list-of-accepted-paper

Investigation of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units and its application to the finite element analysis of electromagnetic problems

In this dissertation, the hardware and API architectures of GPUs are investigated, and the corresponding acceleration techniques are applied on the traditional frequency domain finite element method (FEM), the element-level time-domain methods, and the nonlinear discontinuous Galerkin method. First, the assembly and the solution phases of the FEM are parallelized and mapped onto the granular GPU processors. Efficient parallelization strategies for the finite element matrix assembly on a single GPU and on multiple GPUs are proposed. The parallelization strategies for the finite element matrix solution, in conjunction with parallelizable preconditioners are investigated to reduce the total solution time. Second, the element-level dual-field domain decomposition (DFDD-ELD) method is parallelized on GPU. The element-level algorithms treat each finite element as a subdomain, where the elements march the fields in time by exchanging fields and fluxes on the element boundary interfaces with the neighboring elements. The proposed parallelization framework is readily applicable to similar element-level algorithms, where the application to the discontinuous Galerkin time-domain (DGTD) methods show good acceleration results. Third, the element-level parallelization framework is further adapted to the acceleration of nonlinear DGTD algorithm, which has potential applications in the field of optics. The proposed nonlinear DGTD algorithm describes the third-order instantaneous nonlinear effect between the electromagnetic field and the medium permittivity. The Newton-Raphson method is incorporated to reduce the number of nonlinear iterations through its quadratic convergence. Various nonlinear examples are presented to show the different Kerr effects observed through the third-order nonlinearity. With the acceleration using MPI+GPU under large cluster environments, the solution times for the various linear and nonlinear examples are significantly reduced