Paris Declaration Country Evaluations: How Solid is the Evidence? META-Evaluation of the Country Evaluations of the Phase II Paris Declaration Evaluation

The evaluation of the Paris Declaration (PD) is one of the most important and challenging evaluative undertakings of the past decade in the aid sector. The PD evaluation commissioned by the OECD/DAC Evaluation Network consists of a set of independent crosscountry and donor evaluations which were carried out in two phases. The scope and importance of this evaluation makes it a particularly suitable subject for a meta-evaluation. Our 'evaluation of the evaluation’ complements the official meta-evaluation of the synthesis report in that it assesses all country evaluation reports available in English (15 out of 21 reports) using the OECD/DAC Evaluation Quality Standards. Two research questions are central in our undertaking: Is the quality of the country evaluation reports good enough to be included in the synthesis report? Do the reports properly comply with the evaluation framework to permit comparison of evaluation across countries? The findings of the meta-evaluation demonstrate that comparability of country evaluation reports is satisfactory. The quality of evidence, however, is questionable, due to various limitations and constraints that plagued several country evaluations. Therefore, the inclusion of some of the country reports in the evaluation synthesis report is questionable.

The Materials Science Procedural Text Corpus: Annotating Materials Synthesis Procedures with Shallow Semantic Structures

Materials science literature contains millions of materials synthesis procedures described in unstructured natural language text. Large-scale analysis of these synthesis procedures would facilitate deeper scientific understanding of materials synthesis and enable automated synthesis planning. Such analysis requires extracting structured representations of synthesis procedures from the raw text as a first step. To facilitate the training and evaluation of synthesis extraction models, we introduce a dataset of 230 synthesis procedures annotated by domain experts with labeled graphs that express the semantics of the synthesis sentences. The nodes in this graph are synthesis operations and their typed arguments, and labeled edges specify relations between the nodes. We describe this new resource in detail and highlight some specific challenges to annotating scientific text with shallow semantic structure. We make the corpus available to the community to promote further research and development of scientific information extraction systems.Comment: Accepted as a long paper at the Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) at ACL 201

Extension of PRISM by Synthesis of Optimal Timeouts in Fixed-Delay CTMC

We present a practically appealing extension of the probabilistic model checker PRISM rendering it to handle fixed-delay continuous-time Markov chains (fdCTMCs) with rewards, the equivalent formalism to the deterministic and stochastic Petri nets (DSPNs). fdCTMCs allow transitions with fixed-delays (or timeouts) on top of the traditional transitions with exponential rates. Our extension supports an evaluation of expected reward until reaching a given set of target states. The main contribution is that, considering the fixed-delays as parameters, we implemented a synthesis algorithm that computes the epsilon-optimal values of the fixed-delays minimizing the expected reward. We provide a performance evaluation of the synthesis on practical examples

Recent progress in the synthesis of six-membered aminocyclitols (2008-2017)

Aminocyclitols are of interest as glucosidase inhibitors, as probes for the study of pseudoglycosyltransferases, and as potential therapeutics for the treatment of Gaucher’s disease. The synthesis of these targets was reviewed in early 2008, and the aim of this review is to cover material relevant to the synthesis of aminocyclitols since that time. While not a focus of this review, biological evaluation of compounds will be presented where it is recorded in the literature

EVALUATION OF CRYPTOGRAPHIC ALGORITHMS

This article represents a synthesis of the evaluation methods for cryptographic algorithms and of their efficiency within practical applications. It approaches also the main operations carried out in cryptanalysis and the main categories and methods of attack in order to clarify the differences between evaluation concept and crypto algorithm cracking.cryptology, cryptanalysis, evaluation and cracking cryptographic algorithms

Principles in Patterns (PiP) : Project Evaluation Synthesis

Evaluation activity found the technology-supported approach to curriculum design and approval developed by PiP to demonstrate high levels of user acceptance, promote improvements to the quality of curriculum designs, render more transparent and efficient aspects of the curriculum approval and quality monitoring process, demonstrate process efficacy and resolve a number of chronic information management difficulties which pervaded the previous state. The creation of a central repository of curriculum designs as the basis for their management as "knowledge assets", thus facilitating re-use and sharing of designs and exposure of tacit curriculum design practice, was also found to be highly advantageous. However, further process improvements remain possible and evidence of system resistance was found in some stakeholder groups. Recommendations arising from the findings and conclusions include the need to improve data collection surrounding the curriculum approval process so that the process and human impact of C-CAP can be monitored and observed. Strategies for improving C-CAP acceptance among the "late majority", the need for C-CAP best practice guidance, and suggested protocols on the knowledge management of curriculum designs are proposed. Opportunities for further process improvements in institutional curriculum approval, including a re-engineering of post-faculty approval processes, are also recommended

Quarter car active suspension system design using optimal and robust control method

This paper offers with the theoretical and computational evaluation of optimal& robust controlproblems, with the goal of providing answers to them with MATLAB simulation.For the robust control, -synthesis controller and for the optimal control, LQR controller are designed for a quarter car active suspension system to maximize the ride comfort and road handling criteria’s of the vehicle. The proposed controllers are designed using Matlab script program using time domain analysis for the four road disturbances (bump, random sine pavement and white noise) for the control targets suspension deflection, body acceleration and body travel. Finally the simulation result proves the effectiveness of the active suspension system with -synthesis controller