Digital Commons Network^™

Student Bonding As Community-Building, James Edward Martin

Research Collection Centre for English Communication

The concept of student bonding is likely to be supported by most teachers. It is quite clear that student attitudes influence learning, and bonding is often seen as a way to help create a positive atmosphere that will promote participation in class (i.e., making students more comfortable in the often “socially risky” environment of the English language classroom). For this purpose and to maximize bonding, cooperative language learning techniques, for example, have sometimes been used (see, e.g., Wichadee & Orawiwatnakul, 2012).

In this article, however, I will focus my discussion on a related but somewhat different rationale for bonding and …

Systematic Reflection: Implications For Learning From Failures And Successes, Shmuel Ellis, Bernd Carette, Frederik Anseel, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Drawing on a growing stream of empirical findings that runs across different psychological domains, we demonstrated that systematic reflection stands out as a prominent tool for learning from experience. For decades, failed experiences have been considered the most powerful learning sources. Despite the theoretical and practical relevance, few researchers have investigated whether people can also learn from their successes. We showed that through systematic reflection, people can learn from both their successes and their failures. Studies have further shown that the effectiveness of systematic reflection depends on situational (e.g., reflection focus) and person-based (e.g., conscientiousness) factors. Given today's unrelenting pace …

The Price Discovery Puzzle In Offshore Yuan Trading: Different Contributions For Different Contracts, David K. Ding, Yiuman Tse, Michael R. Williams

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The People's Bank of China (PBC) lifted yuan trading restrictions in July of 2010 that led to offshore yuan spot trading in Hong Kong. Based on causality analyses, we find that price discovery is absent between the onshore and offshore spot markets. However, we document the presence of price discovery between onshore spot and offshore nondeliverable forward (NDF) rates. These seemingly inconsistent results present a puzzle wherein one offshore market appears to be more informationally integrated with the onshore market than another. We conclude that price discovery differences in the offshore markets stem from the offshore spot and forward contracts …

Emotional Intelligence Predicts Success In Medical School, Nele Libbrecht, Filip Lievens, Bernd Carette, Stephane Cote

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Accumulating evidence suggests that effective communication and interpersonal sensitivity during interactions between doctors and patients impact therapeutic outcomes. There is an important need to identify predictors of these behaviors, because traditional tests used in medical admissions offer limited predictions of "bedside manners" in medical practice. This study examined whether emotional intelligence would predict the performance of 367 medical students in medical school courses on communication and interpersonal sensitivity. One of the dimensions of emotional intelligence, the ability to regulate emotions, predicted performance in courses on communication and interpersonal sensitivity over the next 3 years of medical school, over and above …

Integrating Water Exclusion Theory Into Β Contacts To Predict Binding Free Energy Changes And Binding Hot Spots, Qian Liu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chee Keong Kwoh, Limsoon Wong, Jinyan Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Binding free energy and binding hot spots at protein-protein interfaces are two important research areas for understanding protein interactions. Computational methods have been developed previously for accurate prediction of binding free energy change upon mutation for interfacial residues. However, a large number of interrupted and unimportant atomic contacts are used in the training phase which caused accuracy loss. Results: This work proposes a new method, β ACV ASA , to predict the change of binding free energy after alanine mutations. β ACV ASA integrates accessible surface area (ASA) and our newly defined β contacts together into an atomic contact vector …

Representative Discovery Of Structure Cues For Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation, Luming Zhang, Yue Gao, Yingjie Xia, Ke Lu, Jialie Shen, Rongrong Ji

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Weakly-supervised image segmentation is a challenging problem with multidisciplinary applications in multimedia content analysis and beyond. It aims to segment an image by leveraging its imagelevel semantics (i.e., tags). This paper presents a weakly-supervised image segmentation algorithm that learns the distribution of spatially structural superpixel sets from image-level labels. More specifically, we first extract graphlets from a given image, which are small-sized graphs consisting of superpixels and encapsulating their spatial structure. Then, an ecient manifold embedding algorithm is proposed to transfer labels from training images into graphlets. It is further observed that there are numerous redundant graphlets that are not …

Livelabs: Building An In-Situ Real-Time Mobile Experimentation Testbed, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Archan Misra, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present LiveLabs, a mobile experimentation testbed that is currently deployed across our university campus with further deployments at a large shopping mall, a commercial airport, and a resort island soon to follow. The key goal of LiveLabs is to allow in-situ real-time experimentation of mobile applications and services that require context-specific triggers with real participants on their actual smart phones. We describe how LiveLabs works, and then explain the novel R&D required to realise it. We end with a descriptionof the current LiveLabs status (> 700 active participants to date) as well as present some key lessons learned.

Key-Aggregate Cryptosystem For Scalable Data Sharing In Cloud Storage, Cheng-Kang Chu, Sherman S. M. Chow, Wen-Guey Tzeng, Jiangying Zhou, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data sharing is an important functionality in cloud storage. In this article, we show how to securely, efficiently, and flexibly share data with others in cloud storage. We describe new public-key cryptosystems which produce constant-size ciphertexts such that efficient delegation of decryption rights for any set of ciphertexts are possible. The novelty is that one can aggregate any set of secret keys and make them as compact as a single key, but encompassing the power of all the keys being aggregated. In other words, the secret key holder can release a constant-size aggregate key for flexible choices of ciphertext set …

Ropecker: A Generic And Practical Approach For Defending Against Rop Attack, Yueqiang Cheng, Zongwei Zhou, Yu Miao, Xuhua Ding, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Return-Oriented Programming (ROP) is a sophisticated exploitation technique that is able to drive target applications to perform arbitrary unintended operations by constructing a gadget chain reusing existing small code sequences (gadgets). Existing defense mechanisms either only handle specific types of gadgets, require access to source code and/or a customized compiler, break the integrity of application binary, or suffer from high performance overhead. In this paper, we present a novel system, ROPecker, to efficiently and effectively defend against ROP attacks without relying on any other side information (e.g., source code and compiler support) or binary rewriting. ROPecker detects an ROP attack …

Democracy Is Good For Ranking: Towards Multi-View Rank Learning And Adaptation In Web Search, Wei Gao, Pei Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Sinabro: Opportunistic And Unobtrusive Mobile Ecg Monitoring System, Seungwoo Kang, Sungjun Kwon, Sangwon Seo, Chungkuk Yoo, Kwangsuk Park, Junehwa Song, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose Sinabro, an opportunistic and unobtrusive mobile electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system that monitors the user’s ECG opportunistically during daily smartphone use. Daily ECG monitoring will open up an unprecedented opportunity for pervasive healthcare applications. It will enable the daily detection and prevention of heart problems and also allow inferences about stress, emotion, and even sleep quality. Despite its huge potential, daily ECG monitoring still has not become reality due to its obtrusiveness. In this paper, we first study the potential opportunity to capture ECGs from daily use of smartphones, without requiring the user’s explicit attention. Based …

Visual Typo Correction By Collocative Optimization: A Case Study On Merchandize Images, Xiao-Yong Wei, Zhen-Qun Yang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Near-duplicate retrieval (NDR) in merchandize images is of great importance to a lot of online applications on e-Commerce websites. In those applications where the requirement of response time is critical, however, the conventional techniques developed for a general purpose NDR are limited, because expensive post-processing like spatial verification or hashing is usually employed to compromise the quantization errors among the visual words used for the images. In this paper, we argue that most of the errors are introduced because of the quantization process where the visual words are considered individually, which has ignored the contextual relations among words. We propose …

Towards More Accurate Multi-Label Software Behavior Learning, Xin Xia, Feng Yang, David Lo, Zhenyu Chen, Xinyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a modern software system, when a program fails, a crash report which contains an execution trace would be sent to the software vendor for diagnosis. A crash report which corresponds to a failure could be caused by multiple types of faults simultaneously. Many large companies such as Baidu organize a team to analyze these failures, and classify them into multiple labels (i.e., multiple types of faults). However, it would be time-consuming and difficult for developers to manually analyze these failures and come out with appropriate fault labels. In this paper, we automatically classify a failure into multiple types of …

Sanctions Under The Eu's Generalised System Of Preferences (Gsp): Coherence By Accident?, Clara Portela, Jan Orbie

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article investigates the relationship between the European Union's withdrawal of trade benefits for developing countries under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) and its sanctions under the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Our expectation is that GSP withdrawals and CFSP sanctions will not cohere. However, our research reveals that GSP suspension has been coherent with CFSP sanctions when the latter exist prior to the decision-making process on GSP sanctions and when the International Labour Organisation has set up a Commission of Inquiry condemning the country, as with Myanmar/Burma and Belarus. The presence of separate institutional frameworks explains the …

Managerial Agency Costs Of Socialistic Internal Capital Markets: Empirical Evidence From China, Jiwei Wang, Kangtao Ye

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study provides empirical evidence of managerial agency costs in socialistic internal capital markets. Listed Chinese companies are required to disclose the amount of resources that are reallocated to other firms of the parent company, which provides us with a direct measure of the socialistic subsidization of weak member firms by strong member firms within a business group. We hypothesize that in strong member firms, managerial compensation is less sensitive to firm performance because cross-subsidization makes it difficult for group CEOs to hold the managers in strong firms accountable for their own firms' performance, and also increases the noise in …

Early Confucian Concept Of Yi (议) And Deliberative Democracy, Sor-Hoon Tan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Contributors to the debates about the compatibility of Confucianism anddemocracy and its implications for China’s democratization often adoptdefinitions of democracy that theories of deliberative democracy are criticalof. Attention to deliberative democracy is timely given its importancein democratic discourses and recent experiments in “deliberative” or“consultative” democracy in China. Would Confucian understanding ofpolitical deliberation help or hinder deliberative democracy? This essaycompares the concept of yi in the early Confucian texts with a contemporaryconcept of democratic deliberation. The differences between the concept ofyi in early Confucian texts and the concept of democratic deliberation showthat the presence of deliberation, even when they meet stringent …

The Lasting Impact Of Parental Early Life Malnutrition On Their Offspring: Evidence From The China Great Leap Forward Famine, Seonghoon Kim, Quheng Deng, Belton M. Fleisher, Shi Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate whether the effects of parents’ in utero malnutrition extend to the second generation (their children). Specifically, we explore whether the second generation’s level of schooling is negatively impacted by their parents’ malnutrition in utero, using the China Famine as a natural experiment. We find that, the impact of mother’s in utero malnutrition due to the Famine reduced second generation male and female entrance into junior secondary school by about 5–7 percentage points. We measure famine severity with provincial excess death rates instrumented by measures of adverse climate conditions, which corrects for possible biases induced by measurement errors and …

X-Differencing And Dynamic Panel Model Estimation, Chirok Han, Peter C. B. Phillips, Donggyu Sul

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper introduces a new estimation method for dynamic panel models with fixed effects and AR(p) idiosyncratic errors. The proposed estimator uses a novel form of systematic differencing, called X-differencing, that eliminates fixed effects and retains information and signal strength in cases where there is a root at or near unity. The resulting "panel fully aggregated" estimator (PFAE) is obtained by pooled least squares on the system of X-differenced equations. The method is simple to implement, consistent for all parameter values, including unit root cases, and has strong asymptotic and finite sample performance characteristics that dominate other procedures, such as …

Judicial Inactivitism In Protecting Financial Consumer Against Predatory Sale Of Retail Structured Products: A Reflection From Retail Structured Notes Lawsuits In Taiwan, Chao-Hung Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article analyzes 310 structured note lawsuits in Taiwan between 2000 and 2013 to examine courts’ attitude in dealing with claims of misselling retail structured notes. We find that courts were generally not favorable to retail investors. This provides a contrast with the financial regulator’s efforts to improve financial consumer protection since 2008. By examining plaintiffs’ key arguments and courts’ rulings, we find that it was difficult for investors to fulfill their burden of proof and courts were reluctant to award remedies when investors did sign on a contractual document confirming his knowledge on a few matters. While regulators are …

The United States Supreme Court’S Decision In Kirtsaeng V. Wiley & Sons: An “Inevitable” Step In Which Direction?, Irene Calboli

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This opinion analyzes the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Kirtsaeng v. Wiley & Sons. In this decision, the Court ruled that the principle of copyright exhaustion as provided in Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act equally applies to products “lawfully made” in the United States as well as to products that have been “lawfully made” in foreign countries. This “revolutionary” decision came after almost two decades of conflicting positions, including two previous Supreme Court decisions that had failed to clarify the issue, notably Quality King v. L’anza and Costco v. Omega. Yet, a …

The United States Supreme Court's Decision In Kirtsaeng V. Wiley & Sons: An "Inevitable" Step In Which Direction?, Irene Calboli

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This opinion analyzes the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Kirtsaeng v. Wiley & Sons. In this decision, the Court ruled that the principle of copyright exhaustion as provided in Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act equally applies to products “lawfully made” in the United States as well as to products that have been “lawfully made” in foreign countries. This “revolutionary” decision came after almost two decades of conflicting positions, including two previous Supreme Court decisions that had failed to clarify the issue, notably Quality King v. L’anza and Costco v. Omega. Yet, a …

Streamlining Procedures For Judicial Review: Legislative Amendments To The Singapore Rules Of Court To Enhance Access To Justice, Denise Huiwen Wong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Judicial review cannot serve as an effective check on administrative action unless aggrieved applicants have a real way to access the courts to obtain relief. In an admirable, albeit belated move, significant amendments were made to the Singapore Rules of Court to remove the procedural strictures inherited from the pre-1977 UK system. The amendments allow an applicant to seek a declaration in addition to the traditional prerogative orders and recover damages within the same proceedings if the applicant can prove that he/she would have had a valid claim in a private law action. This article examines the mischief that the …

Deutsche Bank V Chang: A Dramatic Reversal By The Court Of Appeal, Kee Yang Low

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The 2012 High Court decision awarding scientist Chang Tse Wen US$49m for losses from investing in accumulators through Deutsche Bank has been overturned by the Court of Appeal. This article seeks to aid readers in understanding the CA decision and in appreciating the legal implications.

Identity Based Identification From Algebraic Coding Theory, Guomin Yang, Chik How Tan, Yi Mu, Willy Susilo, Duncan S. Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cryptographic identification schemes allow a remote user to prove his/her identity to a verifier who holds some public information of the user, such as the user public key or identity. Most of the existing cryptographic identification schemes are based on numbertheoretic hard problems such as Discrete Log and Factorization. This paper focuses on the design and analysis of identity based identification (IBI) schemes based on algebraic coding theory. We first revisit an existing code-based IBI scheme which is derived by combining the Courtois–Finiasz–Sendrier signature scheme and the Stern zero-knowledge identification scheme. Previous results have shown that this IBI scheme is …

Integrating Water Exclusion Theory Into Β Contacts To Predict Binding Free Energy Changes And Binding Hot Spots, Qian Liu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chee Keong Kwoh, Limsoon Wong, Jinyan Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Binding free energy and binding hot spots at protein-protein interfaces are two important research areas for understanding protein interactions. Computational methods have been developed previously for accurate prediction of binding free energy change upon mutation for interfacial residues. However, a large number of interrupted and unimportant atomic contacts are used in the training phase which caused accuracy loss. Results: This work proposes a new method, β ACV ASA , to predict the change of binding free energy after alanine mutations. β ACV ASA integrates accessible surface area (ASA) and our newly defined β contacts together into an atomic contact vector …

Los And Nlos Classification For Underwater Acoustic Localization, Roee Diamant, Hwee-Pink Tan, Lutz Lampe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The low sound speed in water makes propagation delay (PD)-based range estimation attractive for underwater acoustic localization (UWAL). However, due to the long channel impulse response and the existence of reflectors, PD-based UWAL suffers from significant degradation when PD measurements of nonline-of-sight (NLOS) communication links are falsely identified as line-of-sight (LOS). In this paper, we utilize expected variation of PD measurements due to mobility of nodes and present an algorithm to classify the former into LOS and NLOS links. First, by comparing signal strength-based and PD-based range measurements, we identify object-related NLOS (ONLOS) links, where signals are reflected from objects …

Extended Comprehensive Study Of Association Measures For Fault Localization, Lucia Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Ferdian Thung, Aditya Budi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spectrum-based fault localization is a promising approach to automatically locate root causes of failures quickly. Two well-known spectrum-based fault localization techniques, Tarantula and Ochiai, measure how likely a program element is a root cause of failures based on profiles of correct and failed program executions. These techniques are conceptually similar to association measures that have been proposed in statistics, data mining, and have been utilized to quantify the relationship strength between two variables of interest (e.g., the use of a medicine and the cure rate of a disease). In this paper, we view fault localization as a measurement of the …

An Empirical Study Of Bug Report Field Reassignment, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ming Wen, Shihab Emad, Bo Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A bug report contains many fields, such as product, component, severity, priority, fixer, operating system (OS), platform, etc., which provide important information for the bug triaging and fixing process. It is important to make sure that bug information is correct since previous studies showed that the wrong assignment of bug report fields could increase the bug fixing time, and even delay the delivery of the software. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on bug report field reassignments in open-source software projects. To better understand why bug report fields are reassigned, we manually collect 99 recent bug reports that …

Parameter Synthesis For Hierarchical Concurrent Real-Time Systems, Étienne André, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling and verifying complex real-time systems, involving timing delays, are notoriously difficult problems. Checking the correctness of a system for one particular value for each delay does not give any information for other values. It is thus interesting to reason parametrically, by considering that the delays are parameters (unknown constants) and synthesizing a constraint guaranteeing a correct behavior. We present here Parametric Stateful Timed Communicating Sequential Processes, a language capable of specifying and verifying parametric hierarchical real-time systems with complex data structures. Although we prove that the synthesis is undecidable in general, we present several semi-algorithms for efficient parameter synthesis, …

Towards Verification Of Computation Orchestration, Jin Song Dong, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Xian Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, a promising programming model called Orc has been proposed to support a structured way of orchestrating distributed Web Services. Orc is intuitive because it offers concise constructors to manage concurrent communication, time-outs, priorities, failure of Web Services or communication and so forth. The semantics of Orc is precisely defined. However, there is no automatic verification tool available to verify critical properties against Orc programs. Our goal is to verify the orchestration programs (written in Orc language) which invoke web services to achieve certain goals. To investigate this problem and build useful tools, we explore in two directions. Firstly, we …