Is there a net generation coming to university?

This paper reports the first phase of an ESRC funded research project to investigate first year students' use of technology in relation to the idea of young people born after 1983 forming a distinct age cohort described variously as the Net generation or Digital Natives. The research took place in five English universities in the spring of 2008. The research found a far more complex picture than that suggested by the rhetoric with student use of new technologies varying between different universities and courses. Some of the more discussed new technologies such as blogs, wikis and virtual worlds were shown to be less used by students than might have been expected. The Net generation appears if anything to be a collection of minorities with a small number of technophobic students and larger numbers of others making use of new technologies but in ways that did not fully correspond with many of the expectations built into the Net generation and Digital Natives theses

Piano Genie

We present Piano Genie, an intelligent controller which allows non-musicians to improvise on the piano. With Piano Genie, a user performs on a simple interface with eight buttons, and their performance is decoded into the space of plausible piano music in real time. To learn a suitable mapping procedure for this problem, we train recurrent neural network autoencoders with discrete bottlenecks: an encoder learns an appropriate sequence of buttons corresponding to a piano piece, and a decoder learns to map this sequence back to the original piece. During performance, we substitute a user's input for the encoder output, and play the decoder's prediction each time the user presses a button. To improve the intuitiveness of Piano Genie's performance behavior, we impose musically meaningful constraints over the encoder's outputs.Comment: Published as a conference paper at ACM IUI 201

Autonomous Fault Detection in Self-Healing Systems using Restricted Boltzmann Machines

Autonomously detecting and recovering from faults is one approach for reducing the operational complexity and costs associated with managing computing environments. We present a novel methodology for autonomously generating investigation leads that help identify systems faults, and extends our previous work in this area by leveraging Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and contrastive divergence learning to analyse changes in historical feature data. This allows us to heuristically identify the root cause of a fault, and demonstrate an improvement to the state of the art by showing feature data can be predicted heuristically beyond a single instance to include entire sequences of information.Comment: Published and presented in the 11th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on Engineering of Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (EASe 2014

Designing scattering-free isotropic index profiles using phase-amplitude equations

The Helmholtz equation can be written as coupled equations for the amplitude and phase. By considering spatial phase distributions corresponding to reflectionless wave propagation in the plane and solving for the amplitude in terms of this phase, we designed two-dimensional graded-index media which do not scatter light. We give two illustrative examples, the first of which is a periodic grating for which diffraction is completely suppressed at a single frequency at normal incidence to the periodicity. The second example is a medium which behaves as a 'beam shifter' at a single frequency; acting to laterally shift a plane wave, or sufficiently wide beam, without reflection.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Zero reflection and transmission in graded index media

Graded index media whose electric susceptibility satisfies the spatial Kramers-Kronig relations are known to be one-way reflectionless to electromagnetic radiation, for all angles of incidence. We demonstrate how a family of these media, in addition to being reflectionless, also have negligible transmission. To this end, we discuss how the transmission coefficient for the propagation of waves through a medium whose permittivity is built from poles in the complex position plane, with residues that sum to infinity, can be controlled by tuning the positions and residues of the poles. In particular, we have shown how to make the transmission arbitrarily small, and hence maximise the absorption of the wave's energy. This behaviour is confirmed by numerical simulations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Multivariate GARCH Models: Software Choice and Estimation Issues

A large number of important practical tasks can be accomplished using a multivariate GARCH model. This paper examines the relatively small number of software packages that are currently available for estimating such models, in spite of their widespread use. The review focuses upon estimation issues and differences in available options for controlling the optimisation, and the review then considers an application to the estimation of optimal hedge ratios. Large differences in estimated parameters and standard errors are observed, but these are found to generate only modest differences in optimal hedge ratios and virtually indiscernible differences in model performance measures.

The CLIF Project : the repository as part of a content lifecycle

At the heart of meeting institutional needs for managing digital content is the need to understand the different activities that the content goes through, from planning and creation through to disposal or preservation. Digital content is created using a variety of authoring tools. Once created the content is often stored somewhere different, made accessible in possibly more than one way, altered as required, and then moved for deletion or preservation at an appropriate point. Different systems can be involved at different points: one of these may be a repository. To embed repositories in the content lifecycle, and prevent them becoming yet another content silo within the institution, they thus need to be integrated with other systems that support other parts of this lifecycle. In this way the content can be moved between systems as required, minimising the constraints of any one system. The JISC-funded CLIF (Content Lifecycle Integration Framework) project, which concluded in March 2011, was a joint venture between Library and Learning Innovation (LLI) at the University of Hull and the Centre for e-Research (CeRch) at King’s College London. It undertook an extensive literature review and worked with creators of digital content at the two host institutions to understand how they would like to deal with the interaction of the authoring, collaboration and delivery of materials using three systems used within Higher Education institutions that are targeted at the management of digital content from different perspectives and for different purposes: the Fedora Commons repository software, Microsoft SharePoint, and the virtual learning environment, Sakai. Each of these systems addresses a range of lifecycle stages in the functionality provided; yet they were not designed to encompass the whole lifecycle. Armed with this background information, the project team went on to design and produce software that would allow the transfer of digital content between the systems to meet lifecycle requirements: Fedora and SharePoint, on the one hand, Fedora and Sakai on the other. The CLIF software has been designed to try and allow the maximum flexibility in how and when users can transfer material from one system to another, integrating the tools in such a way that they seem to be natural extensions of the basic systems. This open source software is available for others to investigate and work with. This article draws on several of the pieces of documentation produced by the project

Renewable power for lean desktops in media applications

An integration of solar microgeneration to supply a low-power IT desktop, using the Power over Ethernet standards IEEE 802.3af/at as a low power distribution network avoiding transformer losses from DC generation to mains power AC and back to low-voltage DC and hence maximising efficiency. The resulting design points to applications in media technology where reducing grid power consumption is critical for improving sustainability, or where there are supply constraints, and indicates new directions in how we manage and consume power for IT devices