Employer Collaboration In Developing Graduate Employability: A Pilot Study In Ireland, Miriam O'Regan, Aiden Carthy, Colm Mcguiness, Philip Owende

Articles

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact on student work readiness outcomes of collaboration with employers in developing and delivering tailored graduate employability workshops in socioemotional skills for work (SES4Work).

Design/methodology/approach – Framed by the CareerEDGE model of graduate employability, the authors piloted a five-session module for near graduates in five disciplines. The research included an online employer survey (n 5 128), employer interviews (n 5 21) and tailored workshops for near graduates, culminating in a mock competency-based interview. Using a pre/post-test design, participants (n 5 24) also completed the CareerEDGE Employability Development Profile (EDP) …

The Nonlinear Impact Of Payment System Innovation On Financial System Stability In The Asean-4 Countries, Mahjus Ekananda

Economics and Finance in Indonesia

The increasing growth of financial system encourages payment system innovation that can affect financial system stability, particularly in ASEAN countries. This study explored a variety of payment system innovation, i.e. debit cards, credit cards, electronic money, and RTGS. The financial system stability index is measured by calculating the composite indexes of non-performing loans, Z-score from ROA and CAR, share price volatility, and yield bonds. The components of the indexes are structured to reflect risks from the banking, stock, and bond markets. The resulting index value indicates the level of risk in the financial system. A higher index specifies a higher …

Investigating The Role Of Cryptochrome Activity In Arabidopsis Plant And Blue Light Exposure In Saos-2 Cell-Mediated Mineralization, Maria Nijr Albaqami

Theses and Dissertations

Cryptochromes (CRYs) are flavoproteins that absorb blue light and are associated with the perception of electromagnetic stimuli in a variety of organisms including animals and plants. When exposed to blue light, CRYs undergo flavin redox cycles and form radical pairs intermediates that are assumed to be magnetically sensitive as predicted by the radical-pair hypothesis. However, it is unknown if CRYs fulfill the criteria to act as biological magnetosensors. In the first aim, Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings were exposed to blue light and a time-dependent weak magnetic field at radiofrequency (RF) of 7 MHz as a diagnostic tool to test the radical-pair …

A Hybrid Model Of Event Comprehension Predicts Human Activity At Human Scale, Tan Nguyen

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

To act effectively, humans store event schemas and use them to predict the near future. How are schemas learned and represented in memory, and used in online comprehension? One means to answer these questions is modeling event comprehension. What are, then, computational principles of event comprehension? We proposed three candidate properties: 1) abstract representation of visual features, 2) predictive mechanism and prediction error as feedback, and 3) contextual cues to guide prediction, and adapted a computational model embodying these properties. The model learned to predict activity dynamics from one pass through an 18-hour corpus of naturalistic human activity. Evaluated on …

Dei Without Equity: Lab Coat Culture And Persistent Racism In Bioengineering Laboratories, Janet Canady

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

From biased algorithms to discriminatory devices to medical racism, it is clear that biomedical products are created in ways that reproduce racial disparities in access and use. Yet the most common solutions recommended by biomedical research institutions emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion practices that research has already proven ineffective and sometimes harmful. In fact, labs rarely scrutinize whether and how their research products reflect racial bias, assumptions, or ideals. In this paper, I shift the focus to consider how bioengineering laboratories function as a site in which racial processes contribute to product outcomes. I ask, what are the racial dynamics …

Construction And Use Of Cognitive Maps In Model-Based Control, Ata Karagoz

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

When making decisions, we sometimes rely on habit and at other times plan towards goals. Planning requires the construction and use of an internal representation of the environment, a cognitive map. How are these maps constructed, and how do they guide goal-directed decisions? We coupled a sequential decision-making task with a behavioral representational similarity analysis approach to examine how relationships between choice options change when people build a cognitive map of the task structure. We found that participants who encoded stronger higher-order relationships among choice options showed increased planning and better performance. These higher-order relationships were more strongly encoded among …

Effects Of Home-Based High-Intensity Interval Training Versus Continuous Walking On Cognition In Overweight And Obese Women, Kelsey C. Bourbeau

Health, Exercise, and Sports Sciences ETDs

Objective: The purpose of the present study was to determine whether six weeks of home-based high-intensity interval training versus six weeks of moderate-intensity walking improves cognition, depression, and anxiety in women that are overweight or obese. Design: A randomized control trial design. Subjects: Twelve sedentary women characterized as overweight or obese were randomized into either a six-week home-based high-intensity interval training (HIIT, n = 6, 26.6 ± 8.9 years, 37.4 ± 4.9% body fat) group or a six-week moderate-intensity walking (Walk, n = 6, 22.5 ± 3.7 years, 40.2 ± 4.1% body fat) group. Main Measures: Pre- and post-intervention, participants …

Writer Identity Construction Of Thai Efl Students: A Phenomenological Study, Kittika Limpariwatthana

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

ABSTRACT

This empirical study uncovered Thai English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writer identity construction and revealed how Thai culture plays a role in the development using a sociocultural perspective. Data collection for analysis includes interviews with nine Thai college students, a group interview, English writing essays, and artifacts they provided throughout a 15-week English writing course. The focus of this study was to gain insight into the phenomenon of identity construction among EFL writers from perceptions of their lived experiences.

Based on the description of identity development, the research findings focus on two different ways the participants perceived their …

Assessing Knowledge And Perceptions About Cancer Among American Indians Of The Zuni Pueblo, Nm, Safia Safi, Donica Ghahate, Jeanette Bobelu, Andrew L. Sussman, Joseph Rodman, Angela Wandinger-Ness, Shiraz I. Mishra, Thomas Faber, Cheryl Willman, Vallabh Shah

Pathology Research and Scholarship

American Indians (AIs) in New Mexico have lower cancer screening rates compared to other populations and are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer at an advanced stage of the disease as reported by Li et al. (Archives of Internal Medicine 163(1):49-56, 2003). AIs also have the lowest 5-year cancer survival rates compared to any ethnic/racial group in the USA as reported by Clegg et al. (Arch Intern Med 162:1985-1993, 2002) and Edwards et al. (Cancer 97:1407-1427, 2005). Numerous barriers such as cultural beliefs, fear, fatalism, mistrust, stigma, and lack of culturally appropriate interventions could contribute to low cancer screening …

‘Gentle Humour’ To ‘Savage Satire’: Austen Obituaries On Her Death, Its Centenary And Bicentenary, A Bautz

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

A ‘modest and retiring lady novelist’, ‘the adored aunt of boisterous nephews and nieces rather than a blue stocking’ to some, to others an author with a ‘strong feminist streak’, ‘biting irony’, and ‘imperishable wisdom’: this essay investigates cultural perceptions of Austen at three points in time as evidenced through obituary articles published on her death in 1817, at the 1917 centenary, and at the bicentenary in 2017. Rather than focusing on how her texts are interpreted by readers or critics of her novels, by viewers and consumers of tv, film, and multimedia adaptations, websites and other media, the chapter …

Compressed Federated Learning Based On Adaptive Local Differential Privacy, Yinbin Miao, Rongpeng Xie, Xinghua Li, Ximeng Liu, Zhuo Ma, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Federated learning (FL) was once considered secure for keeping clients’ raw data locally without relaying on a central server. However, the transmitted model weights or gradients still reveal private information, which can be exploited to launch various inference attacks. Moreover, FL based on deep neural networks is prone to the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a compressed and privacy-preserving FL scheme in DNN architecture by using Compressive sensing and Adaptive local differential privacy (called as CAFL). Specifically, we first compress the local models by using Compressive Sensing (CS), then adaptively perturb the remaining weights according to their …

Enhancing Literacy Education With Narrative Richness In The Metaverse, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Daniel Jiandong Shen, Umawathy Techanamurthy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Through an education-centric metaverse learning application, this research aims to assess the use of narrative richness to deliver media, language, and sustainability literacy education. The 21st-century learning needs require teaching and learning resources to be shared and managed more effectively across institutions. The use of metaverse features can help to manage varying narrative richness to boost learning reflection and attitude. Despite its potential, it is unclear how narrative richness in the metaverse can enhance teaching and learning. The study proposed in this research, which includes institutions from four Asian countries, is driven by this knowledge and evidence gap. Module leaders …

Assessment Design For Digital Education: An Analytics-Based Authentic Assessment Approach, Lim Ming Soon Tristan, Gottipati Swapna, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Christopher Pang, Jun Wei Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study looks to identify an assessment design construct that overcomes known issues in authentic assessment design practices in digital education. These include lack of "freedom-of-choice", lack of focus on multimodal nature of the digital process, and shortage of effective feedbacks. This study proposes an authentic assessment, that combines gamification (G) with heutagogy (H) and multimodality (M) of assessments, building upon learning analytics (A), known as GHMA. Proposed assessment design is a skills-oriented game-based assessment approach. Learners can determine their own goals and create individualized multimodal artefacts; receive cognitive challenge through cognitively complex tasks structured in gamified non-linear learning paths; …

Learning Generalizable Models For Vehicle Routing Problems Via Knowledge Distillation, Jieyi Bi, Yining Ma, Jiahai Wang, Zhiguang Cao, Jinbiao Chen, Yuan Sun, Yeow Meng Chee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent neural methods for vehicle routing problems always train and test the deep models on the same instance distribution (i.e., uniform). To tackle the consequent cross-distribution generalization concerns, we bring the knowledge distillation to this field and propose an Adaptive Multi-Distribution Knowledge Distillation (AMDKD) scheme for learning more generalizable deep models. Particularly, our AMDKD leverages various knowledge from multiple teachers trained on exemplar distributions to yield a light-weight yet generalist student model. Meanwhile, we equip AMDKD with an adaptive strategy that allows the student to concentrate on difficult distributions, so as to absorb hard-to-master knowledge more effectively. Extensive experimental results …

Appearance-Preserved Portrait-To-Anime Translation Via Proxy-Guided Domain Adaptation, Wenpeng Xiao, Cheng Xu, Jiajie Mai, Xuemiao Xu, Yue Li, Chengze Li, Xueting Liu, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Converting a human portrait to anime style is a desirable but challenging problem. Existing methods fail to resolve this problem due to the large inherent gap between two domains that cannot be overcome by a simple direct mapping. For this reason, these methods struggle to preserve the appearance features in the original photo. In this paper, we discover an intermediate domain, the coser portrait (portraits of humans costuming as anime characters), that helps bridge this gap. It alleviates the learning ambiguity and loosens the mapping difficulty in a progressive manner. Specifically, we start from learning the mapping between coser and …

On The Merge Of K-Nn Graph, Wan-Lei Zhao, Hui Wang, Peng-Cheng Lin, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

k-nearest neighbor graph is a fundamental data structure in many disciplines such as information retrieval, data-mining, pattern recognition, and machine learning, etc. In the literature, considerable research has been focusing on how to efficiently build an approximate k-nearest neighbor graph (k-NN graph) for a fixed dataset. Unfortunately, a closely related issue of how to merge two existing k-NN graphs has been overlooked. In this paper, we address the issue of k-NN graph merging in two different scenarios. In the first scenario, a symmetric merge algorithm is proposed to combine two approximate k-NN graphs. The algorithm facilitates large-scale processing by the …

Conreader: Exploring Implicit Relations In Contracts For Contract Clause Extraction, Weiwen Xu, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Wenlong Zhao, Tat-Seng Chua, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study automatic Contract Clause Extraction (CCE) by modeling implicit relations in legal contracts. Existing CCE methods mostly treat contracts as plain text, creating a substantial barrier to understanding contracts of high complexity. In this work, we first comprehensively analyze the complexity issues of contracts and distill out three implicit relations commonly found in contracts, namely, 1) Long-range Context Relation that captures the correlations of distant clauses; 2) Term-Definition Relation that captures the relation between important terms with their corresponding definitions; and 3) Similar Clause Relation that captures the similarities between clauses of the same type. Then we propose a …

Pacific: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering Over Tabular And Textual Data In Finance, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To facilitate conversational question answering (CQA) over hybrid contexts in finance, we present a new dataset, named PACIFIC. Compared with existing CQA datasets, PACIFIC exhibits three key features: (i) proactivity, (ii) numerical reasoning, and (iii) hybrid context of tables and text. A new task is defined accordingly to study Proactive Conversational Question Answering (PCQA), which combines clarification question generation and CQA. In addition, we propose a novel method, namely UniPCQA, to adapt a hybrid format of input and output content in PCQA into the Seq2Seq problem, including the reformulation of the numerical reasoning process as code generation. UniPCQA performs multi-task …

End-To-End Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning With Integrated Subgoal Discovery, Shubham Pateria, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chai Quek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is a promising approach to perform long-horizon goal-reaching tasks by decomposing the goals into subgoals. In a holistic HRL paradigm, an agent must autonomously discover such subgoals and also learn a hierarchy of policies that uses them to reach the goals. Recently introduced end-to-end HRL methods accomplish this by using the higher-level policy in the hierarchy to directly search the useful subgoals in a continuous subgoal space. However, learning such a policy may be challenging when the subgoal space is large. We propose integrated discovery of salient subgoals (LIDOSS), an end-to-end HRL method with an integrated …

Segment-Wise Time-Varying Dynamic Bayesian Network With Graph Regularization, Xing Yang, Chen Zhang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Time-varying dynamic Bayesian network (TVDBN) is essential for describing time-evolving directed conditional dependence structures in complex multivariate systems. In this article, we construct a TVDBN model, together with a score-based method for its structure learning. The model adopts a vector autoregressive (VAR) model to describe inter-slice and intra-slice relations between variables. By allowing VAR parameters to change segment-wisely over time, the time-varying dynamics of the network structure can be described. Furthermore, considering some external information can provide additional similarity information of variables. Graph Laplacian is further imposed to regularize similar nodes to have similar network structures. The regularized maximum a …

Scalable Distributional Robustness In A Class Of Non Convex Optimization With Guarantees, Avinandan Bose, Arunesh Sinha, Tien Mai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has shown lot of promise in providing robustness in learning as well as sample based optimization problems. We endeavor to provide DRO solutions for a class of sum of fractionals, non-convex optimization which is used for decision making in prominent areas such as facility location and security games. In contrast to previous work, we find it more tractable to optimize the equivalent variance regularized form of DRO rather than the minimax form. We transform the variance regularized form to a mixed-integer second order cone program (MISOCP), which, while guaranteeing near global optimality, does not scale enough …

Pickup And Multi-Delivery Problem With Time Windows, Pham Tuan Anh, Aldy Gunawan, Vincent F. Yu, Tuan C. Chau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper addresses a new variant of Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (PDPTW) for enhancing customer satisfaction. In particular, a huge number of requests is served in the system, where each request includes a pickup node and several delivery nodes instead of a pair of pickup and delivery nodes. It is named Pickup and Multi-Delivery Problem with Time Windows (PMDPTW). A mixed-integer programming model is formulated with the objective of minimizing total travel costs. Computational experiments are conducted to test the correctness of the model with a newly generated benchmark based on the PDPTW benchmark instances. Results show …

Conversation Disentanglement With Bi-Level Contrastive Learning, Chengyu Huang, Zheng Zhang, Hao Fei, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conversation disentanglement aims to group utterances into detached sessions, which is a fundamental task in processing multi-party conversations. Existing methods have two main drawbacks. First, they overemphasize pairwise utterance relations but pay inadequate attention to the utterance-to-context relation modeling. Second, a huge amount of human annotated data is required for training, which is expensive to obtain in practice. To address these issues, we propose a general disentangle model based on bi-level contrastive learning. It brings closer utterances in the same session while encourages each utterance to be near its clustered session prototypes in the representation space. Unlike existing approaches, our …

Authentic Assessments For Digital Education: Learning Technologies Shaping Assessment Practices, Tristan Lim, Swapna Gottipati, Michelle L. F. Cheong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Assessment is a powerful lever that affects learning. To better inform educators on authentic assessment practices within digital education in the higher education landscape, this paper takes us through a meta-analysis of existing literature between 2011 to 2021. The study evaluates the following research question: “How are emerging technologies shaping authentic assessment practices within digital education for higher education for the period between 2011 and 2023”. To aid with the forecasting, we utilize the EDUCAUSE Horizon Reports, which provide the predictions of emerging technology. This study affirms the importance of immersive learning technologies, followed by ubiquitous and adaptive learning technologies …

S-Prompts Learning With Pre-Trained Transformers: An Occam's Razor For Domain Incremental Learning, Yabin Wang, Zhiwu Huang, Xiaopeng. Hong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

State-of-the-art deep neural networks are still struggling to address the catastrophic forgetting problem in continual learning. In this paper, we propose one simple paradigm (named as S-Prompting) and two concrete approaches to highly reduce the forgetting degree in one of the most typical continual learning scenarios, i.e., domain increment learning (DIL). The key idea of the paradigm is to learn prompts independently across domains with pre-trained transformers, avoiding the use of exemplars that commonly appear in conventional methods. This results in a win-win game where the prompting can achieve the best for each domain. The independent prompting across domains only …

What Should Streamers Communicate In Livestream E-Commerce? The Effects Of Social Interactions On Live Streaming Performance, Danyang Song, Xi Chen, Zhiling Guo, Xiao Liu Liu, Ruijin. Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Compared with traditional e-commerce, livestreaming e-commerce is characterized by direct and intimate communication between streamers and consumers that stimulates instant social interactions. This study focuses on streamers’ three types of information exchange (i.e., product information, social conversation, and social solicitation) and examines their roles in driving both short-term and long-term livestreaming performance (i.e., sales and customer base growth). We find that the informational role of product information (nonpromotional and promotional) is beneficial not only to sales performance, but also to the growth of the customer base. We also find that social conversation has a relationship-building effect that positively impacts both …

Bank Error In Whose Favor? A Case Study Of Decentralized Finance Misgovernance, Ping Fan Ke, Ka Chung Boris Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) emerged rapidly in recent years and provided open and transparent financial services to the public. Due to its popularity, it is not uncommon to see cybersecurity incidents in the DeFi landscape, yet the impact of such incidents is under-studied. In this paper, we examine two incidents in DeFi protocol that are mainly caused by misgovernance and mistake in the smart contract. By using the synthetic control method, we found that the incident in Alchemix did not have a significant effect on the total value locked (TVL) in the protocol, whereas the incident in Compound caused a 6.13% …

Implementation Of Empath X Sla Predictive Tool For A Government Agency, Hui Shan Lee, Shankararaman, Venky, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Service Level Agreement (SLA) plays a significant role in the relationship between citizens and the government. It stipulates the quality levels required for the meaningful interaction between the two parties. Most SLA predictive models consider end-to-end duration and frequency of failed service requests as model inputs with little research on the analysis of textual details of the service request. This is an issue for government bodies as the latter do not just want to meet SLA, but also be proactive by knowing the citizens before assisting them. Inclusion of textual data potentially answer to this requirement of knowing the citizen …

Supply Regulation Under The Exclusion Policy In A Ride-Sourcing Market, Xiaonan Li, Xiangyong Li, Hai Wang, Junxin Shi, Yash P. Aneja

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On-demand ride-sourcing platforms have quickly emerged and become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Motivated by the rising public concern about service quality in the ride-sourcing market, this paper aims to examine the impact of exclusion policy that can serve as both quality management and supply regulation strategy. With an exclusion policy, the platform excludes low-quality service providers/drivers from the ride-sourcing market by setting a quality threshold of admission (QTA). We propose a model to describe and analyze the market equilibrium under the exclusion policy and present our analytical and numerical results – some of which are non-intuitive and intriguing. Considering …

Mining Competitively-Priced Bundle Configurations, Ezekiel Ong Young, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We examine the bundle configuration problem in the presence of competition. Given a competitor's bundle configuration and pricing, we determine what to bundle together, and at what prices, to maximize the target firm's revenue. We highlight the difficulty in pricing bundles and propose a scalable alternative and an efficient search heuristic to refine the approximate prices. Furthermore, we extend the heuristics proposed by previous work to accommodate the presence of a competitor. We analyze the effectiveness of our proposed models through experimentation on real-life ratings-based preference data.