Tailoring the curriculum to fit students’ needs: Designing and improving a language course at Dhaka University - Bangladesh

The assessment of students’ language needs is a crucial pre-requisite in EAP (English for Academic purposes) curriculum development. Effective needs analysis leads to the specification of objectives for a course at the same time considering the available resources and existing constraints. This leads to curriculum design and choice of methodology, which is implemented through appropriately selected teaching materials. This paper presents the findings of a research study undertaken at the Business Studies Faculty of Dhaka University. A needs analysis was conducted on ninety students of three departments of the Business Studies Faculty to assess their English language needs. A corresponding needs analysis was conducted on faculty members to find out their perceptions of their students’ English language needs. Several procedures, namely questionnaires, interviews and classroom observations, were used to gather information about the objective needs of the students and teaching staff. Analysis of the findings of this needs analysis revealed that some perceptions of the two groups converged to some extent but there was also some incongruency that needed to be addressed. The EAP course that was being used was evaluated in order to negotiate a more effective curriculum that would address the needs of all the stakeholders involved

Fast and Accurate Bilateral Filtering using Gauss-Polynomial Decomposition

The bilateral filter is a versatile non-linear filter that has found diverse applications in image processing, computer vision, computer graphics, and computational photography. A widely-used form of the filter is the Gaussian bilateral filter in which both the spatial and range kernels are Gaussian. A direct implementation of this filter requires $O(\sigma^2)$ operations per pixel, where $\sigma$ is the standard deviation of the spatial Gaussian. In this paper, we propose an accurate approximation algorithm that can cut down the computational complexity to $O(1)$ per pixel for any arbitrary $\sigma$ (constant-time implementation). This is based on the observation that the range kernel operates via the translations of a fixed Gaussian over the range space, and that these translated Gaussians can be accurately approximated using the so-called Gauss-polynomials. The overall algorithm emerging from this approximation involves a series of spatial Gaussian filtering, which can be implemented in constant-time using separability and recursion. We present some preliminary results to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm compares favorably with some of the existing fast algorithms in terms of speed and accuracy.Comment: To appear in the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2015

Macbeth in Nineteenth-Century Bengal: A Case of Conflicted Indigenization

Adaptation, a complex bilingual and bicultural process, is further problematised in a colonial scenario inflected by burgeoning nationalism and imperialist counter-oppression. Nagendranath Bose’s Karnabir (1884/85), the second extant Bengali translation of Macbeth was written after the First War of Indian Independence in 1857 and its aftermath - the formation of predominantly upper and middle class nationalist organisations that spearheaded the freedom movement. To curb anti-colonial activities in the cultural sphere, the British introduced repressive measures like the Theatre Censorship Act and the Vernacular Press Act. Bengal experienced a revival of Hinduism paradoxically augmented by the nationalist ethos and the divisive tactics of British rule that fostered communalism. This article investigates the contingencies and implications of domesticating and othering Macbeth at this juncture and the collaborative/oppositional strategies of the vernacular text vis-à-vis colonial discourse. The generic problems of negotiating tragedy in a literary tradition marked by its absence are compounded by the socio-linguistic limitations of a Sanskritised adaptation. The conflicted nature of the cultural indigenisation evidenced in Karnabir is explored with special focus on the nature of generic, linguistic and religious acculturation, issues of nomenclature and epistemology, as well as the political and ideological negotiations that the target text engages in with the source text and the intended audience

Fast Separable Non-Local Means

We propose a simple and fast algorithm called PatchLift for computing distances between patches (contiguous block of samples) extracted from a given one-dimensional signal. PatchLift is based on the observation that the patch distances can be efficiently computed from a matrix that is derived from the one-dimensional signal using lifting; importantly, the number of operations required to compute the patch distances using this approach does not scale with the patch length. We next demonstrate how PatchLift can be used for patch-based denoising of images corrupted with Gaussian noise. In particular, we propose a separable formulation of the classical Non-Local Means (NLM) algorithm that can be implemented using PatchLift. We demonstrate that the PatchLift-based implementation of separable NLM is few orders faster than standard NLM, and is competitive with existing fast implementations of NLM. Moreover, its denoising performance is shown to be consistently superior to that of NLM and some of its variants, both in terms of PSNR/SSIM and visual quality