3,334 research outputs found
Extracurricular Science Labs for STEM Talent Support
No full textIn the past decade, a growing lack of engineers, natural scientists, information technology experts, and mathematicians has been noted, especially in Europe. Corresponding to the need to attract young people to science and technology, numerous extracurricular science labs
(“out-of-school labs”) have been established, especially in Germany. One of these initiatives is the DLR_School_Lab Oberpfaffenhofen, operated by Germany’s national research center for aeronautics and space, DLR, and a typical example of such an out-of-school lab. It offers hands-on experiments for secondary-school classes, advanced teacher training, and, as a special feature, enrichment courses for gifted students. In this article the concept behind the DLR_School_Lab is described, as well as the suitability of this lab to offer enrichment projects for talented school students. Other aspects discussed are its teacher education concept and the
effectiveness of the concept of extracurricular science labs
MINT Talent Support in School Labs – New Perspectives for Gifted Youth and for Teachers of the Gifted
No full textIn the past decade some 300 extracurricular education facilities have been established in Europe, most of them in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The majority of these facilities are so-called ‘school labs’, their mission being to increase the awareness for mathematics, informatics, natural sciences, and engineering (MINT) and, correspondingly, attract young people to these faculties. The origin of this development is a pronounced and growing lack of engineers and scientists; the present (2012) engineers’ gap in Germany is about 100.000.
Several of these school labs focus on MINT talent support, offering a diversity of special enrichment programs and projects to gifted and motivated students. The DLR_School_Lab Oberpfaffenhofen, operated by Germany's national research center for aeronautics and space, DLR, is a typical example of such a school lab devoted to both objectives of broad education and focused MINT talent support. The lab’s expertise has been gained in the past decade with approx. 18,000 secondary school students and about 50 enrichment projects for gifted students.
MINT talent support means, on the one hand, institutions and measures for gifted students. In this paper examples of respective curricular and extracurricular activities will be described, emphasizing the special synergy of the Hector Seminar and the DLR_School_Lab. On the other hand, the role of talent supporters – especially teachers – is crucial in the process of attracting young people to the MINT disciplines. An example of good practice is the inclusion of the DLR_School_Lab in the ECHA advanced teacher education at the ICBF in Münster, which will also be addressed
An Author Profiling Approach Based on Language-dependent Content and Stylometric Features
No full textWe describe the approach that we submitted to the 2015 PAN competition for the author profiling task. The task consists in predicting some attributes of an author analyzing a set of his/her Twitter tweets.
We consider several sets of stylometric and content features, and different decision algorithms: we use a different combination of features and decision algorithm for each language-attribute pair, hence treating it as an individual problem
Data from 617 healthy participants performing the Iowa gambling task: a "many labs" collaboration
No full textThis data pool (N = 617) comes from 10 independent studies assessing performance of healthy participants (i.e., no known neurological impairments) on the Iowa gambling task (IGT) - a task measuring decision making under uncertainty in an experimental context. Participants completed a computerized version of the IGT consisting of 95 - 150 trials. The data consist of the choices of each participant on each trial, and the resulting rewards and losses. The data are stored as .rdata, .csv, and .txt files, and can be reused to (1) analyze IGT performance of healthy participants; (2) create a "super control group"; or (3) facilitate model-comparison efforts
Measurement of fluence at the D-line fast neutron facility at iThemba LABS
No full textMeasurements of fluence were made for the neutron beams produced at the fast neutron beam facility of iThemba LABS, using an NE213 organic liquid scintillator detector and a 238U fission ionisation chamber. Neutron beams were produced by irradiating a 6 mm natural lithium target with pulsed proton beams obtained from the k = 200 separated sector cyclotron. Three incident proton beam energies were used in this work, namely 65.99 MeV, 99.44 MeV and 203.33 MeV. From time-of-flight measurements with the NE213 scintillator, the spectral fluence of the neutron beams was obtained. Pulse shape discrimination was used to correct for gamma ray induced signals in the NE213 detector. Simultaneous measurements of the neutron beam flux were performed at 0° and 16°. The 238U detector was used to obtain peak fluence measurements relative to the 238U(n,f) cross section
Data from "An Infrastructure to Deliver Synchronous Remote Programming Labs"
No full textData from the article "M. Garcia, F. Ortin, J. Quiroga. An Infrastructure to Deliver Synchronous Remote Programming Labs. Transactions on Learning Technologies, Volume 14(2), pp. 161-172, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1109/TLT.2021.3063298"With the abrupt nationwide lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many universities suspended face-to-face activities. Some of them decided to continue their academic courses, adapting traditional approaches to online learning. An important challenge was to deliver programming labs over the Internet without important methodological changes, which might imply modifications of the learning outcomes. Most of the existing approaches to remote programming labs are based on asynchronous learning, where students work autonomously and contact the lecturers if they have any issues. The existing systems to provide synchronous programming labs are restricted to a single programming language or application type, and show significant interaction limitations. Therefore, we defined an infrastructure that allowed us to deliver synchronous programming labs over the Internet during the COVID-19 lockdown, as we used to do face-to-face. After using it for both programming labs and exams, students showed a high level of satisfaction. Compared to previous years, the use of our system produced no statistically significant difference in student's grades, pass and fail rates, or the number of students taking the lab exam. The network bandwidth, CPU, and memory resources consumed are sufficiently low to have allowed all the students to use it without any issues. Regardless of the pedagogical and methodological approach selected, our infrastructure provides the synchronous and remote delivery of programming labs, similar to the original face-to-face approach. Its features make it appropriate to deliver synchronous remote classes where strong lecturer-student interaction is required, and all the student work can be done with their computers.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Department of Science, Innovation and Universities: project RTI2018-099235-B-I00. The authors have also received funds from the University of Oviedo through its support of official research groups (GR-2011-0040)
An Author Verification Approach Based on Differential Features
No full textWe describe the approach that we submitted to the 2015 PAN competition for the author identification task. The task consists in determining if an unknown document was authored by the same author of a set of documents with the same author.
We propose a machine learning approach based on a number of different features that characterize documents from widely different points of view. We construct non-overlapping groups of homogeneous features, use a random forest regressor for each features group, and combine the output of all regressors by their arithmetic mean. We train a different regressor for each language.
Our approach achieved the first position in the final rank for the Spanish language
RLabs: A South African Perspective on a Community-driven Approach to Community Information
No full textStakeholders in a community project commonly include academics, businesses, and people from within the community. Community empowerment is a central motivation for community informatics; however it is debatable how the community is empowered and benefits from many community research projects. This paper presents a community-driven case study, Reconstructed Living Lab, identifying factors that aid or hinder community-driven technological innovations. The RLabs case study identifies the community as the main stakeholder and identifies the factors that aid or hinder community empowerment. The conclusion is that Living Labs is an appropriate and effective vehicle for community empowerment
Investigating Public Sector Innovation Labs as-an-approach toward Data and AI-centric innovations in European National Governments
No full textThe need of a successful transition of public administrations towards the digital government ideal model increasingly compels public administrations worldwide to address challenges that stand far beyond the dimensions of organizational and technological innovation (Leoni et al., 2023). Earlier e-government studies emphasized the importance of intragovernmental integration of public information systems and of specific ICT-centered solutions (Charalabidis et al., 2019). Today, a more contemporary sensibility seems to reinforce the need to look outside governmental boundaries in the digital transformation of the public sector (Ravšelj et al., 2022).
In fact, whilst boasting of positive potential to transform the paradigm of public, digital transformation exhibits the markings of a socio-technical problem, i.e., a problem that speaks to all public issues of high impact that are void of potential for incisive problem identification and solving (Rittel & Webber, 1973).
Data-centric public services and AI-based solutions in the public sector are, therefore, increasingly addressed as socio-technical challenges that require broad-level considerations on data ethics, algorithmic legibility, social acceptance of technology, and coordination across public bodies. It is expected that new forms of collaboration between government and other societal actors will emerge based on organizational and semantic interoperability, thus suggesting the need to experiment with new forms of governance based on co-designed and participated processes with the ecosystem of stakeholders and beneficiaries (citizens).
However, the public sector is still characterized by a functional 'silos' model, with a fragmentation of competencies and mandates (in Italy, for example, the National Statistical Agency counted more than 12,800 public bodies in a 2017 census). Several analyses carried out by international observatories indicate that the adoption of digital and data-driven solutions can improve the productivity and resilience of the public sector, as well as the perceived quality of its services (Ubaldi et al., 2019) when accompanied by horizontal organizational integration based on new institutional formulas, coordination mechanisms and policy tools that support a whole-of-government approach to digital governance (Dener et al., 2021).
Europe is encouraging this perspective with a series of dedicated strategies, which foster collaborative governance among public actors, inclusive towards other social partners, especially towards citizens, the ultimate beneficiaries of the digital transformation in PA (e.g., Data Governance Act). In this sense, it is also worth mentioning The European Digital Rights and Principles and the EU 2030 Policy Programme, whose vision of digital transformation is functional to a transition to a climate-neutral, circular, and resilient economy, to be achieved by "[...] pursue digital policies that empower people and businesses to seize a human centred, sustainable and more prosperous digital future." (EC, 2021, p.1).
In response to these challenges, public sector innovation labs (PSI Labs) or policy labs have been introduced in many countries, whose purpose is to research and test innovative practices and approaches for the transformation of the public system (McGann et al., 2021). In recent years, this phenomenon has become increasingly widespread internationally with different models of action, often as organizational units (teams) within the public sector function with a specific mandate to experiment with new forms of innovation related to governance and services. There are now several concrete examples of PSI Labs in various national states, implemented both within national ministries and agencies (e.g., the Laboratorio de Gobierno in Chile or LabX in Portugal) and in public and territorial agencies (e.g., the 27eme Région in France). In this sense, rather than identifying an absolute typology, PSI Labs seems to obey organizational constraints and opportunities peculiar and contextual to the ecosystems of subjects and practices in which they are introduced (Lindquist & Buttazzoni, 2021). Their establishment should, therefore be understood starting from a precise relation with a given institutional/public context.
On these premises, this paper proposes a study of PSI Labs as-an-approach; in other words, PSI Labs as an action of governmental bodies toward public sector digital transformation. While several mapping and listing of PSI Labs exist, little research that concentrates on how PSI labs can be used to address the complexities of digital transitions while affecting policymaking (Carstens, 2023; Kim et al., 2022; Sandoval-Almazan & Millán-Vargas, 2023).
To investigate this background, we ask the following: (RQ1) What are the main typologies of projects undertaken by PSI labs dealing with digital transformation at the central government level? (RQ2) What are the main characteristics of PSI lab as-an-approach to data/AI-centric innovations in the public sector? (RQ3) How are public bodies influencing policymaking through digital government initiatives by adopting PSI lab as-an-approach?
To answer these questions, we developed a qualitative analysis of desk research data regarding the project portfolio of 6 PSI Labs working within, or in close relation with, the central government (i.e., public agencies or in-line departments) across 6 different European countries (Germany, Portugal, Norway, United Kingdom, France, Scotland)
kowarik-labs/AI-reflectivity: v0.1
No full textAI-reflectivity is a code based on artificial neural networks trained with simulated reflectivity data that quickly predicts film parameters from experimental X-ray reflectivity curves. This project has a common root with (ML-reflectivity)[https://github.com/schreiber-lab/ML-reflectivity] and evolved in parallel. Both are linked to the follwoing publication:
Fast Fitting of Reflectivity Data of Growing Thin Films Using Neural Networks A. Greco, V. Starostin, C. Karapanagiotis, A. Hinderhofer, A. Gerlach, L. Pithan, S. Liehr, F. Schreiber, S. Kowarik (2019). J. Appl. Cryst.
For an online live demonstration using a pre-trained network have a look at github
</p
- …
