Who's there? Supporting audience awareness in creative content systems

In this poster abstract, we motivate and describe the design rationale for an approach to making audiences of creative content more visible and salient to producers contributing to user generated content and social media systems. Set in the specific context of digital photography, we discuss how this approach is appropriate for visualizing multiple audience types, thus supporting heterogeneous use models, relationship types and motivations. We also discuss the research questions and future assessment work through which this UI intervention will be evaluated.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90251/1/14504801292_ftp.pd

Improving Language Models Using Augmentation and Multi-Modality

Language models have become a core component in modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) as they constitute a powerful base that is easily adaptable to many language processing tasks. Part of the strength lies in their ability to embed associations representing general world knowledge. However, the associations formed by these models are brittle, even when scaled to huge sizes and using massive amounts of data. This, in combination with other problems such as lack of attributability and high costs, motivate us to investigate other methods to improve on these aspects.In this thesis, we investigate methods that augment language models with additional contextual information, for the purpose of simplifying the language modeling problem and increasing the formation of desirable associations. We also investigate whether multi-modal data can assist in forming such associations, that could otherwise be difficult to obtain from textual data only.In our experiments, we showcase augmentation to be effective toward these ends, in both a textual and multi-modal case. We also demonstrate that visual data can assist in forming knowledge-representing associations in a language model

Civil Society in Vietnam: Social Organisations and Approaches to New Concepts

The concept of civil society is not familiar in the Vietnamese context, which is based on Marxist-Leninist concepts in the official political terminology of the one-party state maintained by the Communist Party. However, the term is increasingly being employed by scholars and practitioners, and even the state is beginning to open up to its use. The reasons for the change in the way the concept is perceived are partly due to international debates, the increasing role played by non-profit organisations and the change in Party policy, accepting the necessity of social work and education by organisations outside the state administration. The Civil Society Index Project (CSI) is based on a common methodology developed by CIVICUS, a research NGO. This type of project has been carried out in almost 50 countries since 2004. The article presents the rationalities and methodology behind the project and the outcomes in Vietnam. The analysis is based on a combination of research using secondary sources and intensive assessments by the Stakeholder Assessment Group (SAG), which consists of members of civil society and a few representatives of the state. Civil society in Vietnam is felt to be of considerable size, with a multitude of organisations working at all levels. On the other hand, the organisations are limited by the rules and regulations in society, and in spite of their broad bases, the dedication they show is more pronounced in poverty-relieving efforts than in more challenging advocacy. The SAG pointed out limitations for the organisations, but by and large found that they had a reasonable amount of space in which to work in Vietnam. It was more negative as regards the broader impact of civil society

Collapsing D-Branes in Calabi-Yau Moduli Space: I

We study the quantum volume of D-branes wrapped around various cycles in Calabi-Yau manifolds, as the manifold's moduli are varied. In particular, we focus on the behaviour of these D-branes near phase transitions between distinct low energy physical descriptions of the resulting string theory. Whereas previous studies have solely considered quantum volumes in the context of two-cycles in perturbative string theory or D-branes in the specific example of the quintic hypersurface, we work more generally and find qualitatively new features. On the mathematical side, as we briefly note, our work has some interesting implications for certain issues in arithmetics.Comment: 77 pages, 15 figure

Ultrasound as an Aversive Stimulus for Use with Rats: A Novel Model of Aversive Control

Negative reinforcers serve to maintain or increase behavior through the removal of an aversive stimulus. The primary method of studying negative reinforcement in non-humans has been through the use of electrical shock. While this method has proven to be reliable, many negative reinforcers that humans and non-humans encounter do not elicit tactile pain. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore a novel, non-human animal model of aversive control without the use of electrical shock as the negative reinforcer. A considerable amount of research has shown that various strains of rats find ultrasonic tones of certain frequencies and amplitudes to be aversive. Furthermore, ultrasonic tones do not elicit tactile pain, and unlike electrical shock, escape from an unpleasant sound is more analogous to circumstances that both humans and nonhumans encounter in their natural habitats on a daily basis. For the purposes of this study, four rats learned to escape an aversive tone by poking their head into a receptacle equipped with an infrared beam. When the beam was broken, the tone was turned off. After 20 baseline sessions of escaping the tone, that behavior was placed on extinction. In other words, the tone was no longer played during the experimental session. Therefore, the subjects had no reason to make the previously learned escape response. Our results showed a significant decrease in the escape response during extinction sessions for two of the three subjects from which we were able to obtain useable data, as well as for the mean data. While further refinement of this model is recommended, the results obtained show that the use of ultrasound as an aversive stimulus with rats can be a viable alternative to current models that use electrical shock. This novel, nonhuman animal model will make it possible to explore new procedures for researching conditions where negatively reinforced, maladaptive behaviors are maintained through other means than tactile pain

Collapsing D-branes in one-parameter models and small/large radius duality

We finalize the study of collapsing D-branes in one-parameter models by completing the analysis of the associated hypergeometric hierarchy. This brings further evidence that the phenomenon of collapsing 6-branes at the mirror of the `conifold' point in IIA compactifications on one-parameter Calabi-Yau manifolds is generic. It also completes the reduction of the study of higher periods in one-parameter models to a few families which display characteristic behaviour. One of the models we consider displays an exotic form of small-large radius duality, which is a consequence of an ``accidental'' discrete symmetry of its moduli space. We discuss the implementation of this symmetry at the level of the associated type II string compactification and its action on D-brane states. We also argue that this model admits two special Lagrangian fibrations and that the symmetry can be understood as their exchange.Comment: 34 pages, 12 figure