Staging Transformations for Multimodal Web Interaction Management

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -- a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.Comment: Describes framework and software architecture for multimodal web interaction managemen

What Is Essential Is Invisible To The Eye : Culturally Responsive Teaching As A Key To Unlocking Children\u27s Multiple Literacies

Refugee students, language learners, and students in poverty are often viewed through a deficit model of everything they do not have in the way of school preparedness. However, many of them are survivors who possess courage and resilience. They also possess exceptional visual literacy developed through experiences with video and other images. Leveraging their visual literacy builds a bridge to help them understand text, which in turn helps them understand how literature reflects all of our experiences. Increased textual literacy helps students engage with vexing human questions. These questions form an inquiry base from which students can approach writing as an authentic task for self-expression. Student voice and culturally responsive teaching is valued in this model, which counters the experiences with failure that so many immigrant and low-income students learn when standardized testing is the focus of school. Inviting students to co-create literate spaces honors them, their families, and their cultures

Using Dual-Language Books to Preserve Language & Culture in Alaska Native Communities

“Children learn their language on their mother’s lap.” This conventional wisdom from a Cup’ik Elder describes the approach used by many Alaska Native peoples to promote native language acquisition. Presumably, the children learn by listening to stories and tales from a trusted parent or caregiver. However, what happens when the caregiver does not speak the native language? This chapter describes an effort to address this issue while also promoting better educational outcomes by providing access to diverse dual-language books in Alaska Native languages through the use of a digital children’s library. Potential benefits from these efforts include an increase in resources for schools, a revitalization of Indigenous languages, and an increase in access, with hopes that future work will show evidence that using these dual-language books encourage greater parent support and involvement in education, support second language acquisition, and promote a strong sense of identity. Implications and future efforts follow.Ye

Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF) implementation: policy update issue 5

"This Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF) Policy Update is the fifth in a series of regular communications from the Skills Funding Agency (the Agency). The QCF is a part of the Vocational Qualification Reform (VQR) Programme... This update highlights key areas of work and progress with regard to implementation of the QCF so far, including any appropriate aspects of wider Vocational Qualification (VQ) Reform. This update focuses in particular on areas that will be impacted in the delivery year 2010/11." - Page 2

A free real-time hourly tilted solar irradiation data Website for Europe

The engineering of solar power applications, such as photovoltaic energy (PV) or thermal solar energy requires the knowledge of the solar resource available for the solar energy system. This solar resource is generally obtained from datasets, and is either measured by ground-stations, through the use of pyranometers, or by satellites. The solar irradiation data are generally not free, and their cost can be high, in particular if high temporal resolution is required, such as hourly data. In this work, we present an alternative method to provide free hourly global solar tilted irradiation data for the whole European territory through a web platform. The method that we have developed generates solar irradiation data from a combination of clear-sky simulations and weather conditions data. The results are publicly available for free through Soweda, a Web interface. To our knowledge, this is the first time that hourly solar irradiance data are made available online, in real-time, and for free, to the public. The accuracy of these data is not suitable for applications that require high data accuracy, but can be very useful for other applications that only require a rough estimate of solar irradiation.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, conference proceedings, 29th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition, 2014, Amsterda

Minimum levels of performance and notices to improve: guidance applying to the 2011/12 academic year

"This document sets out how the Skills Funding Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency (YPLA) intend to approach identified provider underperformance in the 2011/12 academic year in respect of: financial health and financial management and control; the analysis of success rates against minimum levels of performance; inspection outcomes" - Page 2

Вивчення антифрикційних властивостей полімер-композиційних матеріалів

Openratio offers a mobile platform as a service (mPaaS) to build secure enterprise apps that use legacy systems from vendors such as Microsoft, IBM and SAP. The platform creates native mobile applications and mobile websites using a simple drag and drop interface without writing code. Openratio continuously develops their platform in short design cycles, and started a major system upgrade in 2014. The old mobile website was incompatible with the new specifications and upgrading it was time intensive, leading to a 6 months delay behind other system components’ progress. This thesis covers the process of analyzing the previous mobile website server and implementing a new mobile website rendering server. The server is developed from scratch using node.js, a javascript platform for developing web applications, and jQuery mobile, an HTML 5 based interface for responsive mobile websites. The designed server uses real-time configuration settings to dynamically render each page’s layout, navigation and content with enterprise-grade security. In addition, the server handles user authentication and session management, content fetching from external data sources and uses styling and website templating engines. The new implemented server shortened the updating time for each development cycle and decoupling the mobile website rendering server from the main server allowed team members to work on several platform components in parallel