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The rise of the Internet and social media (i.e. reviews, forum discussions, blogs and social networks) constituted an interesting source to detect user opinion trends. This study examines the global publication output on opinion mining and sentiment analysis from documents published in 2000 to 2020. Bibliometric indicators on the trends, most cited papers, authors, institutions, countries, funding agencies and research subject areas were independently screened and analysed using bibliometrix package in R. A total of 7603 eligible documents were identified from 2000 to 2020. The total number of citations for all publications was 129,251, with an average of 17.0 citations per publication. About 14,629 authors wrote those documents with 1.93 authors per document and a collaboration index of 1.98. The most prolific author was Cambria Erik, with 47 publications and h-index of 42. The leading countries for research were China with n = 824, India with n = 576 and the United States with n = 244 publications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science proceedings was the top-ranked venue for publications with n = 434, h-index of 32 and 4598 total citation scores. National Natural Science Foundation of China was the top-ranked funding agency for research, and most of the publications were computer science (n = 6320) documents. The study provides an in-depth assessment of the landmark of the hot research topic and acknowledges the contribution of the most productive and active authors across different countries in the world. In addition, the findings could support the younger scholars in their future research direction and improve the efficiency in potential future research collaborations and projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital false information is a global problem and the European Union (EU) has taken profound actions to counter it. However, from an academic perspective the United States has attracted particular attention. This article aims at mapping the current state of academic inquiry into false information at scale in the EU across fields. Systematic filtering of academic contributions resulted in the identification of 93 papers. We found that Italy is the most frequently studied country, and the country of affiliation for most contributing authors. The fields that are best represented are computer science and information studies, followed by social science, communication, and media studies. Based on the review, we call for (1) a greater focus on cross-platform studies; (2) resampling of similar events, such as elections, to detect reoccurring patterns; and (3) longitudinal studies across events to detect similarities, for instance, in who spreads misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become quite popular. Such courses are either completely free or cost nominally. Generally, the MOOCs face the challenge of not being recognized as 'regular' courses (i.e., the ones taken at the traditional learning institutions). One of the main reasons for this lack of acceptability is the assessment in an unsupervised environment, which is prone to the problems of test-taker's online lookups or interaction with others for finding the answers to the test questions. A few ways of alleviating this problem include: limiting the time for answering the questions, the avoidance of repetitive questions, and the creation of a large number of questions. This paper presents a tool named QAgen that enables the automatic creation of a large number of questions and answers related to different topics in computer/electrical engineering (ECE), computer science, physics, etc. Specifically, the tool is related to the courses on digital logic design, computer architecture, etc. The generated questions are in a format that is suitable both for learning management system (LMS) based and/or non-LMS-based assessment in conventional courses or MOOCs. The proposed tool is based on open-source software, thus eliminating the need for any commercial software packages. The underlying principles of QAgen are applicable to other engineering/science courses as well, if the assessment methods require the creation of some connected-object diagrams, tables and equations. For assessing the usefulness of QAgen, practice question sets were created for three different courses. The student surveys for these courses indicated that the questions helped students prepare for actual tests/examinations. Especially favored by the students was the availability of correct answers at the end of each practice test/examination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our study, we examine the impact of citation network structures on the ability to discern valuable research topics in Computer Science literature. We use the bibliographic information available in the DBLP database to extract candidate phrases from scientific paper abstracts. Following that, we construct citation networks based on direct citation, co-citation and bibliographic coupling relationships between the papers. The candidate research topics, in the form of keyphrases and n-grammes, are subsequently ranked and filtered by a graph-text ranking algorithm. This selection of the highest ranked potential topics is further evaluated by domain experts and through the Wikipedia knowledge base. The results obtained from these citation networks are complementary, returning valid but non-overlapping output phrases between some pairs of networks. In particular, bibliographic coupling appears to capture more unique information than either direct citation or co-citation. These findings point towards the possible added value in combining bibliographic coupling analysis with other structures. At the same time, combining direct citation and co-citation is put into question. We expect our findings to be utilised in method design for research topic identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article defines and explores the direct citations between citing publications (DCCPs) of a publication. We construct an ego-centred citation network for each paper that contains all of its citing papers and itself, as well as the citation relationships among them. By utilising a large-scale scholarly dataset from the computer science field in the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG-CS) dataset, we find that DCCPs exist universally in medium and highly cited papers. For those papers that have DCCPs, DCCPs do occur frequently; highly cited papers tend to contain more DCCPs than others. Meanwhile, the number of DCCPs of papers published in different years does not vary dramatically. This paper also discusses the relationship between DCCPs and some indirect citation relationships (e.g. co-citation and bibliographic coupling). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the landmark papers in scientific disciplines? Which papers are indispensable for scientific progress? These are typical questions which are of interest not only for researchers (who frequently know the answers – or guess to know them) but also for the interested general public. Citation counts can be used to identify very useful papers since they reflect the wisdom of the crowd – in this case, the scientists using published results for their research. In this study, we identified with recently developed methods for the program CRExplorer landmark publications in nearly all Web of Science subject categories (WoS-SCs). These are publications which belong more frequently than other publications during the citing years to the top-1‰ in their subject area. As examples, we show the results of five subject categories: 'Information Science & Library Science', 'Computer Science, Information Systems', 'Computer Science, Software Engineering', 'Psychology, Social' and, 'Chemistry, Physical'. The results of the other WoS-SCs can be found online at http://crexplorer.net. An analyst of the results should keep in mind that the identification of landmark papers depends on the used methods and data. Small differences in methods and/or data may lead to other results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, students of electronics, electrical and computer science engineering are very much curious to know about the various security issues in wireless communication. Therefore, these students require a platform (i.e. by using Matlab software) that can fetch knowledge about the security issues in wireless communication. The Matlab software will give a perfect understanding about the mathematical concepts through a graphical representation. Therefore, students can understand the typical mathematical equation very easily. The main objective of our paper is to create a countermeasure environment that would protect the sensitive information passing through the multi-input and multi-output (MIMO)-OFDM channel. A novel remote steganography method is proposed, and the essential execution of the system was assessed. In this research work, a remote steganography utilizing the MIMO-OFDM structure, the sensitive information processing and also an Eigenbeam-space Division Multiplexing conveyance are proposed. Based on the Matlab simulation results, our proposed technique aims to reduce the bit error rate. In addition, SNR values for different modulation techniques successfully retrieved from the original information are analyzed. And finally, we make two project groups: one is related to the cryptography method and the second group is related to combining the cryptography and steganography methods, and we differentiate which group information is more secure in the wireless communication platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent public controversies, ranging from the 2014 Facebook 'emotional contagion' study to psychographic data profiling by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 American presidential election, Brexit referendum and elsewhere, signal watershed moments in which the intersecting trajectories of psychology and computer science have become matters of public concern. The entangled history of these two fields grounds the application of applied psychological techniques to digital technologies, and an investment in applying calculability to human subjectivity. Today, a quantifiable psychological subject position has been translated, via 'big data' sets and algorithmic analysis, into a model subject amenable to classification through digital media platforms. I term this position the 'scalable subject', arguing it has been shaped and made legible by algorithmic psychometrics - a broad set of affordances in digital platforms shaped by psychology and the behavioral sciences. In describing the contours of this 'scalable subject', this paper highlights the urgent need for renewed attention from STS scholars on the psy sciences, and on a computational politics attentive to psychology, emotional expression, and sociality via digital media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The technological world has witnessed many revolutions since the beginning of the 21st century, such as mobile development, cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and also the Internet of Things. The internet of things revolution is driven by a broader access to internet and versatility of programmable hardware devices that can communicate between each other. In order to make internet of things devices, a technical background is required in many fields, especially electronics and Computer Science. Therefore, many efforts are put in place to develop educational kits that simplify the basics of these two fields so that everyone can make his internet of things prototype without technical knowledge. The authors present their own initiative: IOIOAI that simplifies the programming process for the input output input output electrical board. The service has been tested successfully on children and young students. In this paper, the authors present a wider adoption for their initiative. The IOIOAI service is imple- mented in introductory course to embedded systems for electrical and computer science students during the 2016-2017 academic year in the National Engineering School of Sfax, Tunisia. The efficiency of the solution is analyzed based on the students' marks and feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a discussion and analysis of methodological issues encountered during a scholarly impact and bibliometric study within the field of Computer Science (TRECVid Text Retrieval and Evaluation Conference, Video Retrieval Evaluation). The purpose of this paper is to provide a reflection and analysis of the methods used to provide useful information and guidance for those who may wish to undertake similar studies, and is of particular relevance for the academic disciplines which have publication and citation norms that may not perform well using traditional tools. Scopus and Google Scholar are discussed and a detailed comparison of the effects of different search methods and cleaning methods within and between these tools for subject and author analysis is provided. The additional database capabilities and usefulness of ‘Scopus More’ in addition to ‘Scopus General’ are discussed and evaluated. Scopus paper coverage is found to favourably compare with Google Scholar but Scholar consistently has superior performance at finding citations to those papers. These additional citations significantly increase the citation totals and also change the relative ranking of papers. Publish or Perish, a software wrapper for Google Scholar, is also examined and its limitations and some possible solutions are described. Data cleaning methods, including duplicate checks, expert domain checking of bibliographic data, and content checking of retrieved papers, are compared and their relative effects on paper and citation count discussed. Google Scholar and Scopus are also compared as tools for collecting bibliographic data for visualizations of developing trends and, owing to the comparative ease of collecting abstracts, Scopus is found far more effective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The objective of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of tags in facilitating resource discovery through machine learning and user-centric approaches. Drawing our dataset from a popular social tagging system, Delicious, we conducted six text categorization experiments using the top 100 frequently occurring tags. We also conducted a human evaluation experiment to manually evaluate the relevance of some 2000 documents related to these tags. The results from the text categorization experiments suggest that not all tags are useful for content discovery regardless of the tag weighting schemes. Moreover, there were cases where the evaluators did not perform as well as the classifiers, especially when there was a lack of cues in the documents for them to ascertain the relationship with the tag assigned. This paper discusses three implications arising from the findings and suggests a number of directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports an investigation on how and why computer science in Malaysia is dominated by women. Inspired by recent critical interventions in gender and technology studies, the paper aims to open up more culturally situated analyses of the gendering of technology or the technology of gendering, with the Malaysian case exemplifying the core of the argument. The paper argues along four different strands of critical thought: (1) a critique of the analytical asymmetry in the process of co-production in gender and technology studies; (2) a critique of a western bias in gender and technology studies, advocating more context sensitivity and focus on the cultural embeddedness of gender and technology relations; (3) a critique that pays more attention to spatial practices and body politics in regard to race, class and gender in relation to technology; and (4) a critique of 'western' positional notions of gender configurations that opens up for more fluid constructions of gender identity, including the many crossovers between relational and positional definitions of femininity and masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health Information Managers (HIMs) are responsible for overseeing health information. The change management necessary during the transition to electronic health records (EHR) is substantial, and ongoing. Archetype-based EHRs are a core health information system component which solve many of the problems that arise during this period of change. Archetypes are models of clinical content, and they have many beneficial properties. They are interoperable, both between settings and through time. They are more amenable to change than conventional paradigms, and their design is congruent with clinical practice. This paper is an overview of the current archetype literature relevant to Health Information Managers. The literature was sourced in the English language sections of ScienceDirect, IEEE Explore, Pubmed, Google Scholar, ACM Digital library and other databases on the usage of archetypes for electronic health record storage, looking at the current areas of archetype research, appropriate usage, and future research. We also used reference lists from the cited papers, papers referenced by the openEHR website, and the recommendations from experts in the area. Criteria for inclusion were (a) if studies covered archetype research and (b) were either studies of archetype use, archetype system design, or archetype effectiveness. The 47 papers included show a wide and increasing worldwide archetype usage, in a variety of medical domains. Most of the papers noted that archetypes are an appropriate solution for future-proof and interoperable medical data storage. We conclude that archetypes are a suitable solution for the complex problem of electronic health record storage and interoperability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to enrich our understanding of the history and substance of cybernetics. It reviews the work of three British cyberneticians — W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask — paying attention particularly to the materiality of their practice — the strange and fascinating devices and systems that were at the heart of their work — and to the worldly projects they pursued — scientific, technological, artistic, organizational, political and spiritual. Connections are drawn between cybernetics and recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, in the hope of illuminating key features of both. The paper concludes by suggesting that the antidisciplinary impulse of contemporary science studies might find inspiration in the work of cyberneticians — that theory does not have to remain confined to the realm of theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of incorporating and applying interdisciplinary concepts is an important objective in electrical and computer engineering education. In this sense, mobile robot platforms can be used as educational tools to promote and integrate different curriculum subjects. In this paper, the programme and experience of an optional course called Applied Mobile Robotics is outlined. The reported content is specially focused on the experiences of applying control theory to a mobile robot platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we use the algorithm SeqSLAM to address the question, how little and what quality of visual information is needed to localize along a familiar route? We conduct a comprehensive investigation of place recognition performance on seven datasets while varying image resolution (primarily 1 to 512 pixel images), pixel bit depth, field of view, motion blur, image compression and matching sequence length. Results confirm that place recognition using single images or short image sequences is poor, but improves to match or exceed current benchmarks as the matching sequence length increases. We then present place recognition results from two experiments where low-quality imagery is directly caused by sensor limitations; in one, place recognition is achieved along an unlit mountain road by using noisy, long-exposure blurred images, and in the other, two single pixel light sensors are used to localize in an indoor environment. We also show failure modes caused by pose variance and sequence aliasing, and discuss ways in which they may be overcome. By showing how place recognition along a route is feasible even with severely degraded image sequences, we hope to provoke a re-examination of how we develop and test future localization and mapping systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews two main strategies for dealing with the threat posed by radically enactive/embodied cognition to traditional cognitive science. Both strategies invoke action oriented representations (AORs). They differ in emphasizing different features of AORs in their attempt to answer the REC threat – focusing on their contents and vehicles, respectively. The first two sections review the central motivations and rationales driving the ‘content’ and ‘format’ strategies in turn and raise initial concerns about the tenability of each. With respect to the ‘content’ strategy, these worries ought to make us suspicious about the explanatory value of positing AORs. Although the ‘format’ strategy has a way of answering this concern, it raises a more fundamental worry about the motivation for even believing in AORs in the first place. Although these worries cast doubt on the feasibility of invoking AORs as a means of dealing with the REC threat, they do not constitute conclusive reasons for eliminating AORs altogether. There are other, stronger reasons for supposing that we should. The third section provides a sketch of a master argument, developed elsewhere, which makes that case in full dress fashion. The final section – ‘Resurrection?’ – considers and rejects the possibility that AORs might be resurrected, even if it is agreed that the master argument cited in the third section succeeds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the mid 1960s, researchers in computer science have famously referred to chess as the ‘drosophila’ of artificial intelligence (AI). What they seem to mean by this is that chess, like the common fruit fly, is an accessible, familiar, and relatively simple experimental technology that nonetheless can be used productively to produce valid knowledge about other, more complex systems. But for historians of science and technology, the analogy between chess and drosophila assumes a larger significance. As Robert Kohler has ably described, the decision to adopt drosophila as the organism of choice for genetics research had far-reaching implications for the development of 20th century biology. In a similar manner, the decision to focus on chess as the measure of both human and computer intelligence had important and unintended consequences for AI research. This paper explores the emergence of chess as an experimental technology, its significance in the developing research practices of the AI community, and the unique ways in which the decision to focus on chess shaped the program of AI research in the decade of the 1970s. More broadly, it attempts to open up the virtual black box of computer software – and of computer games in particular – to the scrutiny of historical and sociological analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Virtual communities are centred upon computer-mediated communication, with participants interacting to provide specific knowledge to each other that enables them to perform common functions, to learn from each other and to build upon their collective knowledge. Without the existence of rich knowledge bases, computer-mediated virtual communities are of limited value. Therefore, the significance of member-generated knowledge cannot be over-emphasized. In this paper, our goal is to examine the roles of identity and organizational citizenship behaviour in facilitating knowledge transfer in computer-mediated communication contexts such as virtual communities. Our findings support the assertion that self-presentation and organizational citizenship behaviour are crucial determinants of important community outcomes. We concluded that self-presentation could be a key variable for contributing knowledge in online communities. This study has important implications for academic researchers and practitioners who seek to understand why community members share their knowledge with strangers in online communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Websites that provide content creation and sharing features have become quite popular recently. These sites allow users to categorize and browse content using 'tags' or free-text keyword topics. Since users contribute and tag social media content across a variety of social web platforms, creating new knowledge from distributed tag data has become a matter of performing various tasks, including publishing, aggregating, integrating, and republishing tag data. However, there are a number of issues in relation to data sharing and interoperability when processing tag data across heterogeneous tagging platforms. In this paper we introduce a semantic tag model that aims to explicitly offer the necessary structure, semantics and relationships between tags. This approach provides an improved opportunity for representing tag data in the form of reusable constructs at a semantic level. We also demonstrate a prototype that consumes and makes use of shared tag metadata across heterogeneous sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance of spatial queries depends mainly on the underlying index structure used to handle them. R-tree, a well-known spatial index structure, suffers largely from high overlap and high coverage resulting mainly from splitting the overflowed nodes. Assigning the remaining entries to the underflow node in order to meet the R-tree minimum fill constraint (Remaining Entries problem) may induce high overlap or high coverage. This is done without considering the geometric features of the remaining entries and this may cause a very non-optimized expansion of that particular node. This paper presents a solution to the above problem. The proposed solution to this problem distributes rectangles as follows: (1) assign m entries to the first node, which are nearest to the first seed; (2) assign other m entries to the second node, which are nearest to the second seed; (3) assign the remaining entries one by one to the nearest seed. Several experiments on real data, as well as synthetic data, show that the proposed splitting algorithm outperforms the efficient version of the original R-tree in terms of query performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-Paradigm Modeling (MPM) addresses the necessity of using multiple modeling paradigms when designing complex systems. Because of its multidisciplinary nature, the MPM field involves research teams with technical backgrounds as different as control science, model checking, modeling language engineering or system-on-chip development. In this paper, we propose to explore the MPM domain through a survey of existing techniques from different horizons. Since the heterogeneity of models is at the heart of MPM, we first identify the sources of this heterogeneity and introduce the problems it raises. Then we show how the different existing techniques address these problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language engineering is a key factor in Multi-Paradigm Modeling (MPM). Since MPM strongly builds on metamodeling, the applied language engineering methods must also be generic enough to support various metamodels. Besides the generic methods to build the abstract and concrete syntax of a visual language, only a few solutions are available to describe the dynamic behavior ('animation') of the models. The aim of this paper is to contribute (i) an event-based conceptual architecture to support animation, (ii) a set of visual languages to describe the animation of the models and their execution. These concepts were used to implement the animation support in our tool called Visual Modeling and Transformation System (VMTS). The VMTS animation framework introduces novel languages to describe certain aspects of animation, while integrating the benefits of the existing approaches. Our solution clearly separates the domain knowledge and the animation description both on a conceptual and implementation level. Thus, the VMTS offers a concise and systematic solution to provide a highly customizable animation framework for metamodeled languages with strong integration support to external systems such as simulation engines. The efficiency of the approach is illustrated with a rather complex animation case study implementing a model transformation debugger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HLA/RTI is one of the dominant middleware for large-scale distributed simulation. However, traditional RTI design and resulting implementations have been facing several difficulties, especially in satisfying the requirements for real-time distributed simulations. Many improved or novel RTI designs have been proposed in recent years, which aim to improve the real-time capabilities of RTI systems. Such designs are in general non-formalized, and the realizations of the designs are highly time-consuming and error-prone practices. In this paper, we propose a formal real-time RTI (RT-RTI) design approach using Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS). We discuss the feasibility of using DEVS and, as an additional step, we consider the case study of two recently proposed RT-RTI designs through a formalized DEVS model system. Our focus is how a DEVS component-based formalized design approach can predict some of the key design factors before the design is realized, or can further validate and consolidate realized RT-RTI designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massively multi-user simulations aim to support a large number of users while keeping the communication among the parties synchronous and highly interactive. In this paper, we present a collaborative virtual architecture that supports a large number of users by dividing the virtual environment into multiple adjacent hexagonal regions in order to manage the interest of the entities. A master node, called a hybrid node, constructs a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay network to connect and manage nodes that lie in its region. Messaging is done at the application layer rather than the network layer, and a node-joining algorithm is proposed to reflect the underlying network physical topology onto the data distribution pathways among the end hosts to enhance the system performance. In addition, the introduction of a buffer zone between adjacent zones reduces the number of connections and disconnections that occur when a node frequently moves at the boundary of the two zones and provides more resilience to the system. We also attempt to shift the messaging among parties in one region from a zone-based method to a visibility-driven method to refine their interest by enabling message filtering. The effectiveness of this collaboration architecture is tested through a prototype implementation and a high level application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time Warp parallel simulations need efficient schemes to cancel erroneous event messages in order to achieve acceptable performance levels. Lazy cancellation depends on delaying the cancellation of incorrect computations until rolled-back events are re-processed. An antimessage is then sent for cancellation only if an output message re-produced after rollback is found to be unequal to its counterpart produced before rollback. One drawback of this approach is that antimessages are sent too late to catch the wave of incorrect computations, which results in more rollbacks. In this paper, we suggest an enhanced lazy cancellation technique that aims to throttle incorrect computations. It asks logical processes (LPs) that have received any output messages, generated from the first execution of a rolled-back input event in some neighboring LP, to mark those messages as temporarily blocked. Those messages remain in a blocked state until it is later decided whether or not they must be cancelled. The receiving LP becomes blocked only after a blocked input message becomes the next message to process. After re-executing the rolled-back input event, the sending LP sends each of its receiving LPs either an `Unblock' message or an antimessage for each previously marked output message, depending on the result of the equality test of that output message's versions before and after rollback. Experimental results for a synthetic benchmark show that our technique can yield better performance than both lazy and aggressive cancellation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many algorithms have been proposed that create a path for a robot in an environment with obstacles. Most methods are aimed at finding a solution. However, for many applications, the path must be of a good quality as well. That is, a path should be short and should keep some amount of minimum clearance to the obstacles. Traveling along such a path reduces the chances of collisions due to the difficulty of measuring and controlling the precise position of the robot. This paper reports a new technique, called Partial shortcut, which decreases the path length. While current methods have difficulties in removing all redundant motions, the technique efficiently removes these motions by interpolating one degree of freedom at a time. Two algorithms are also studied that increase the clearance along paths. The first one is fast but can only deal with rigid, translating bodies. The second algorithm is slower but can handle a broader range of robots, including three-dimensional free-flying and articulated robots, which may reside in arbitrary high-dimensional configuration spaces. A big advantage of these algorithms is that clearance along paths can now be increased efficiently without using complex data structures and algorithms. Finally, we combine the two criteria and show that high-quality paths can be obtained for a broad range of robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates four different inclusion strategies used to recruit women to computer science: achieving a critical mass, educational reform, redefining the gendered symbolism of computer science and changing the content of the discipline. The relationship between and the relative importance of these four strategies are explored by looking at the extensive and successful Women and Computing Initiative (WCI) that was run by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), starting in 1996, to recruit and retain more women in computer science. The findings suggest that a direct effort to increase the relative number of women is the most important strategy. While raising the number of women recruited seems to affect the symbolic perception of computer science, this effect is difficult to achieve through attempts to directly change the symbolic image of the discipline. In addition, a substantial increase in the number of women appears to cause an improvement in their learning environment, probably because minority problems such as too much visibility and unwanted attention became less prominent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporal and sequential information is essential to any agent continually interacting with its environment. In this paper, we test whether it is possible to evolve a recurrent neural network controller to match the dynamic requirement of the task. As a benchmark, we consider a sequential navigation task where the agent has to alternately visit two rewarding sites to obtain food and water after first visiting the nest. To achieve a better fitness, the agent must select relevant sensory inputs and update its working memory to realize a non-Markovian sequential behavior in which the preceding state alone does not determine the next action. We compare the performance of a feed-forward and recurrent neural control architectures in different environment settings and analyze the neural mechanisms and environment features exploited by the agents to achieve their goal. Simulation and experimental results using the Cyber Rodent robot show that a modular architecture with a locally excitatory recurrent layer outperformed the general recurrent controller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of computer processors sold today are used as embedded controllers -devices which rely on a mixture of hardware and software in a real-time environment. The teaching of this subject falls somewhere between computer science and electrical engineering. This paper describes a laboratory developed to provide an easy-to-use solution to fill this gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our purpose in this paper is to offer an historical account of the relationship between basic, applied and technological research, as found in a case study of the Institute of Research in Applied Mathematics and Systems (IIMAS) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). We found that researchers who have dedicated themselves full-time to the development of technology related to computing science have, in their academic careers, faced a system of evaluation based upon an ideal of basic science: this results in an adverse environment for the development of technological research; and this, in turn, has negative consequences for basic research itself, as the achievements of basic and experimental science cannot be understood nowadays without any active collaboration between technology and theory. The concepts which give rise to the different forms of evaluation at UNAM resulted more from a value-ridden symbolic construction, than from the processes of the actual production of new knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparison between the development of cognitive science in France and the USA enables us to analyze some national differences linked to specific connections between the scientific, military, economic and political worlds. The influence of new practices and tools developed during World War II and the Cold War appears to be of crucial importance in understanding the development of this new field, as well as that of cybernetics, computer science, artificial intelligence and molecular biology. This paper can be considered as a study in how the differing contexts in France and the USA shaped the history of the construction of cognitive science in each of these two countries. In spite of various differences, some common aspects may be pointed out: in both cases, computer experts and psychologists using a computational modelling approach were those first engaged in the construction of cognitive science. If in France neuroscience-oriented cognitive science research was stronger than in the USA, it seems that the artificial intelligence orientation is also of growing importance in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author introduces the January 2004 issue of the "Journal of Information Science." The author says that a wide range of topics have been covered over the years. For some, the field is now too broad and has fragmented too far, losing the core of the discipline. There are still unresolved issues around the techniques and standards for encoding information. These are becoming more prominent as the world-wide standards for XML and metadata are emerging and having an impact in all fields of life. Search and retrieval techniques need to develop to encompass new information types and media. The theory and practical application of these new techniques is certainly of interest to the Journal but notably papers in this area have tended to find their way into other journals, a trend all are keen to reverse. Information communications is another rich theme and the focus of several papers in this issue. Information as an asset and studies on its overall economic impact will continue to interest researchers around the world.