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Who’s Calling? Demographics of Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda

AAAI Conferences

But whereas in the general Rwandan populace males tend Despite the increasing ubiquity of mobile phones in the developing to be much better educated (76.3% of males are literate, but world, remarkably little is known about the structure only 64.7% of females), among mobile phone users it is the and demographics of the mobile phone market. While a women who achieve higher levels of education: the median few qualitative studies have detailed social norms of phone woman completes secondary school, while the median man use in specific communities (Donner 2007; Burrell 2009), does not (t 4.79). Table 1 shows a few statistics on asset and a handful of quantitative researchers have begun to analyze ownership, with associated sampling error.


Preprocessing Legal Text: Policy Parsing and Isomorphic Intermediate Representation

AAAI Conferences

One of the most significant challenges in achieving digital privacy is incorporating privacy policy directly in computer systems. While rule systems have long existed, translating privacy laws, regulations, policies, and contracts into processor amenable forms is slow and difficult because the legal text is scattered, run-on, and unstructured, antithetical to the lean and logical forms of computer science. We are using and developing intermediate isomorphic forms as a Rosetta Stone-like tool to accelerate the translation process and in hopes of providing support to future domain-specific Natural Language Processing technology. This report describes our experience, thoughts about how to improve the form, and discoveries about the form and logic of the legal text that will affect the successful development of a rules tool to implement real-world complex privacy policies.


Beyond First Impressions and Fine Farewells: Electronic Tangibles Throughout the Curriculum — Panel Discussion

AAAI Conferences

As educators, we have high hopes for Electronic Tangibles (ETs), we expect ETs to: Interest more students in the study of computing Broaden students' views of computing Invite non-majors to learn something about the computing Attract students to computer science as a major Help students learn about particular ETs Attract students to our classes by incorporating a flashy ET in the course material Improve student understanding of some difficult topics Maintain student interest throughout the class However some important questions arise: Can we and should we extend these benefits throughout the K-20 curriculum? And if we can't, are we guilty of bait-and-switch?


The Design Compass: A Computer Tool for Scaffolding Students' Metacognition and Discussion about their Engineering Design Process

AAAI Conferences

This paper reports on the Design Compass, a classroom tool for helping students record and reflect on their design process as they work on and complete a design challenge. The Design Compass software provides an interface where students can identify and record the various design steps they used while performing them, and add digital notes and pictures to document their work. In the Design Log view, students can review steps taken, and print the record of work done, which can be shared and discussed with their instructor or classmates. The paper describes the concepts underlying the creation of the Design Compass, its features as a metacognitive tool and how it works, and provides scenarios of its use as a teaching and assessment tool with eighth-grade technology education students, and in teacher professional development workshops.


Bitwise Biology: Crossdisciplinary Physical Computing Atop the Arduino

AAAI Conferences

We present the design and deployment of a physical computing platform developed for a crossdisciplinary introduction to biology and computer science. Using the accessible Arduino interface as its foundation, students instantiate increasingly nuanced physical interactions with the environment. Biological and computational ideas receive equal attention through three layered projects that span from circuit design through the co-evolution of predator-prey robot behaviors. The low-overhead platform presented here scales to support sophisticated projects at surprisingly modest time-and-money costs


C-Link: Concept Linkage in Knowledge Repositories

AAAI Conferences

When searching a knowledge repository such as Wikipedia or the Internet, the user doesn’t always know what they are looking for. Indeed, it is often the case that a user wishes to find information about a concept that was completely unknown to them prior to the search. In this paper we describe C-Link, which provides the user with a method for searching for unknown concepts which lie between two known concepts. C-Link does this by modeling the knowledge repository as a weighted, directed graph where nodes are concepts and arc weights give the degree of “relatedness” between concepts. An experimental study was undertaken with 59 participants to investigate the performance of C-Link compared to standard search approaches. Statistical analysis of the results shows great potential for C-Link as a search tool.


Stream-Based Middleware Support for Embedded Reasoning

AAAI Conferences

For autonomous systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles tosuccessfully perform complex missions, a great deal of embedded reasoning is required at varying levels of abstraction. In order to make use of diverse reasoning modules in such systems, issues ofintegration such as sensor data flow and information flow between such modules has to be taken into account. The DyKnow framework is a tool with a formal basis that pragmatically deals with many of the architectural issues which arise in such systems. This includes a systematic stream-based method for handling the sense-reasoning gap,caused by the wide difference in abstraction levels between the noisy data generally available from sensors and the symbolic, semantically meaningful information required by many high-level reasoning modules. DyKnow has proven to be quite robust and widely applicable to different aspects of hybrid software architectures forrobotics. In this paper, we describe the DyKnow framework and show how it is integrated and used in unmanned aerial vehicle systems developed in our group. In particular, we focus on issues pertaining to the sense-reasoning gap and the symbol grounding problem and the use of DyKnow as a means of generating semantic structures representing situational awareness for such systems. We also discuss the use of DyKnow in the context of automated planning, in particular execution monitoring.


Enriching a News Portal with Semantic Information: An Entity-Based Approach

AAAI Conferences

In this paper we describe the production and consumption of linked data in the scenario of the Italian news agency ANSA portal. The goal of the use-case is to provide viewers of a news item with background information and links to related news articles contained on the portal. This information enrichment process is entity-based: ANSA news archive is analyzed using Name Entity Recognition, and each detected entity is annotated with a unique identifier. These identifiers are obtained using the Entity Name Server developed within the scope of the OKKAM European project. Subsequently the news are published on the portal using RDFa and linked to a semantic search engine that provides background information harvested from sources such as DBpedia and links to additional news sources. The presented project has the potential to contribute to Linked Data by creating and publishing a large quantity of entities and assertions about them coming from the ANSA news archive.


Machine Learning Methods for Verbal Autopsy in Developing Countries

AAAI Conferences

Although the various VA methods do Challenges for Global Health (Varmus et al. 2003) have not predict causes of deaths with vague symptoms as helped to reinforce the need for evidence-based global accurately as laboratory diagnostics can, verbal autopsy health priorities. Accurate health metrics and improved can predict causes of death with distinct symptoms with statistics can provide crucial decision-making inputs that some degree of accuracy (WHO 2007). For some areas of enable more efficient allocation of scarce financial the world verbal autopsies provide the only information resources towards the most pressing health needs (Murray about mortality currently available. Provided they can and Frenk 2008). Mortality statistics are a widely-used match or improve upon the accuracy of physician-coded resource for setting spending priorities, but out of 192 VA and expert algorithms, data-driven methods should be countries worldwide, only 23 have high-quality death used because they require less time from doctors or registration data, and 75 have no cause-specific mortality medical experts, and may provide valid reproducible fraction information at all (King and Lu 2008).


The Debugging Task: Evaluating a Robotics Design Workshop

AAAI Conferences

Evaluating new educational programs and tools, especially those targeted at difficult-to-assess learning goals can be quite challenging due to the small number of participants typically engaged with pilot programs. The focus of the evaluation, then, should be on collecting rich data from each participant about their experience in the workshop and their progress towards meeting the workshop’s learning goals. We present a novel evaluation technique, the debugging task, that seeks to assess at post-workshop a participant’s independent ability to use the tools, skills, and materials of the workshop. The technique is presented in the context of Robot Diaries, a program to develop a robotics design activity centered on crafts materials and expressiveness, and targeted to middle school girls. The paper discusses the rationale for the debugging task, its implementation, and the results and analyses of girls completing the task.