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Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) is a globally recognised publication outlet for the field of Computer Science, including in South Africa. In this study, spanning from 1973 to 2022, we investigated the research participation of South African based authors in LNCS. The publication output and citation impact of these authors were compared to the global Computer Science and LNCS output. The authorship patterns and collaborative behaviour of South African LNCS papers were explored, and a keyword or topic analysis also conducted. Of the total of 518 662 LNCS papers published globally between 1973 and 2022, South African based researchers contributed 1150 papers (0.22%). The LNCS papers from South Africa exhibit a strong collaborative publication culture, with 1043 (91%) co-authored and 107 (9%) singleauthored works. Local LNCS researchers prefer institutional collaboration (43%), followed by international (37%) and national collaboration (11%). Europe emerged as the most significant collaboration partner for LNCS researchers in South Africa. Of the 1150 papers, 836 (73%) had received citations, while 314 (27%) had not. On average, papers published by South African based authors received 6.05 citations, compared to the global LNCS average of 9.49 citations per paper. A keyword analysis revealed that the majority of papers by South African authors focus on artificial intelligence. The results indicate that, although LNCS serves as a reputable dissemination platform for Computer Science research output both globally and locally, South African authors should consider publishing more journal articles to build and improve their researcher profiles. Significance: * The study shows that LNCS is the most frequent publication outlet for Computer Science researchers, globally and in South Africa. * The study offers insight into the publication output, authorship patterns, collaborative behaviour and citation impact of South African based Computer Science researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a preliminary comparison of citation impact between two types of Best Paper Awards recipients: pre-and post-publication peer-selected best papers. Two hundred and ninety-nine pairs of pre-and post-publication peer-selected best papers from 15 highly prestigious computer science conferences spanning more than two decades were gathered for empirical analysis. Each pair was published in the same proceedings, and their citation information was collected within a 10-year period after their formal publication. A series of pairwise comparisons were performed in order to unbiasedly uncover their differences in citation counts (i.e., a good proxy for citation impact), as well as in citation speed, citation diversity, and citation location distributions (i.e., three characteristic properties of citation impact). The empirical results demonstrate that in computer science, the post-publication peer-selected best papers receive significantly more citations than their pre-publication counterparts, with an estimated probability of up to 0.79 (95% CI: 0.74 ~ 0.83). Meanwhile, they tend to accumulate their citations more quickly in the later (versus earlier) stages—they can scarcely be fast-aging papers, and their accumulated citations tend to cover a broader scope of academic disciplines. Overall, however, the pre-and post-publication peer-selected best papers have very similar citation location distributions. Both of them are most frequently cited in the Background sections, followed by the Methods sections, and finally the Results sections. In addition, the citation impact superiority of the post-publication peer-selected best papers remains consistent across different fields of research and over a long period of time, from 1997 to 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as an innovative technology with the potential to revolutionize various industries including libraries and information science. Academic libraries are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance services, improve efficiency, and enhance user experience. This study utilizes a bibliometric approach to comprehensively analyze current research on AI in academic libraries (AI in ALs). This study employed bibliometric indicators to identify key trends, patterns, and research gaps in the existing literature. A comprehensive dataset of 373 research papers on AI in ALs published between 2002 and 2022 was collected and analyzed using the Scopus database. Various bibliometric tools, such as Biblioshiny, VOSviewer, and BibExcel, have enhanced this analysis. The findings of this study provide important insights. By 2022, there were 64 publications, constituting 17.16% of the total corpus, accompanied by 65 citations. In contrast, 2019 witnessed only 33 publications yet accumulated a substantial number of citations, amounting to 294, representing 8.85% of the overall citations. Conference papers exhibited the highest frequency among different publication types, with 165 publications, whereas journal articles had the highest citation count, accumulating 217 citations. Geographically, China emerged as the leading contributor with 119 publications, and Wuhan University stood out as the most prominent affiliation. Notably, the "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" series emerged as the most prolific source title, publishing 15 articles, of which eight were cited. The authors Wang J., Wang C., and Wang X. from China demonstrated significant contributions, consistently publishing four papers annually from 2010 to 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: The retraction of research papers, for whatever reason, is a growing phenomenon. However, although retracted paper information is publicly available via publishers, it is somewhat distributed and inconsistent. Objective: The aim is to assess: (i) the extent and nature of retracted research in Computer Science (CS) (ii) the post-retraction citation behaviour of retracted works and (iii) the potential impact upon systematic reviews and mapping studies. Method: We analyse the Retraction Watch database and take citation information from the Web of Science and Google scholar. Results: We find that of the 33,955 entries in the Retraction watch database (16 May 2022), 2,816 are classified as CS, i.e., ≈ 8%. For CS, 56% of retracted papers provide little or no information as to the reasons. This contrasts with 26% for other disciplines. There is also some disparity between different publishers, a tendency for multiple versions of a retracted paper to be available beyond the Version of Record (VoR), and for new citations long after a paper is officially retracted (median = 3; maximum = 18). Systematic reviews are also impacted with ≈ 30% of the retracted papers having one or more citations from a review. Conclusions: Unfortunately, retraction seems to be a sufficiently common outcome for a scientific paper that we as a research community need to take it more seriously, e.g., standardising procedures and taxonomies across publishers and the provision of appropriate research tools. Finally, we recommend particular caution when undertaking secondary analyses and meta-analyses which are at risk of becoming contaminated by these problem primary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science as a whole is organized into broad fields, and as a consequence, research, resources, students, etc., are also classified, assigned, or invited following a similar structure. Some fields have been established for centuries, and some others are just flourishing. Funding, staff, etc., to support fields are offered if there is some activity on it, commonly measured in terms of the number of published scientific papers. How to find them? There exist well-respected listings where scientific journals are ascribed to one or more knowledge fields. Such lists are human-made, but the complexity begins when a field covers more than one area of knowledge. How to discern if a particular paper is devoted to a field not considered in such lists? In this work, we propose a methodology able to classify the universe of papers into two classes; those belonging to the field of interest, and those that do not. This proposed procedure learns from the title and abstract of papers published in monothematic or "pure" journals. Provided that such journals exist, the procedure could be applied to any field of knowledge. We tested the process with Geographic Information Science. The field has contacts with Computer Science, Mathematics, Cartography, and others, a fact which makes the task very difficult. We also tested our procedure and analyzed its results with three different criteria, illustrating its power and capabilities. Interesting findings were found, where our proposed solution reached similar results as human taggers also similar results compared with state-of-the-art related work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the differences between conference papers and journal papers in the field of computer science based on Bayesian network. This paper investigated the differences between conference papers and journal papers in the field of computer science based on Bayesian network, a knowledge-representative framework that can model relationships among all variables in the network. We defined the variables required for Bayesian networks modeling, calculated the values of each variable based Aminer dataset (a literature data set in the field of computer science), learned the Bayesian network and derived some findings based on network inference. The study found that conferences are more attractive to senior scholars, the academic impact of conference papers is slightly higher than journal papers, and it is uncertain whether conference papers are more innovative than journal papers. The study was limited to the field of computer science and employed Aminer dataset as the sample. Further studies involving more diverse datasets and different fields could provide a more complete picture of the matter. By demonstrating that Bayesian networks can effectively analyze issues in Scientometrics, the study offers valuable insights that may enhance researchers' understanding of the differences between journal and conference in computer science. Academic conferences play a crucial role in facilitating scholarly exchange and knowledge dissemination within the field of computer science. Several studies have been conducted to examine the distinctions between conference papers and journal papers in terms of various factors, such as authors, citations, h-index and others. Those studies were carried out from different (independent) perspectives, lacking a systematic examination of the connections and interactions between multiple perspectives. This paper supplements this deficiency based on Bayesian network modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The superiority of BWM over other weighting methods for obtaining the weight values of the attributes is that it achieves high-confidence results with a reasonable number of pairwise comparisons. Although the best-worst method (BWM) is a well-known multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method that has been successfully utilized in almost all scientific areas to solve challenging real-life problems, no research has comprehensively examined the state-of-the-art in this regard. The present study depicts a detailed overview of publications concerned with BWM during the period 2015–2022. Based on the information obtained from the Scopus database, this work presents a big picture of current research on BWM. In other words, this paper analyzes the existing literature about BWM and identifies thematic contexts, application areas, emerging trends, and remaining research gaps to shed light on future research agendas aligning with those gaps. Further, the most recent BWM research is analyzed in the top ten scientific areas, from engineering to materials science. “Engineering”, “computer science”, and “business, management, and accounting” are the hottest fields of BWM research. China is the most active country regarding “engineering” and “computer science”, whereas India is the leader in “business, management, and accounting”. The study also reveals that there are still many research gaps in BWM research. The big picture taken in this study will not only showcase the current situation of BWM research but will also positively impact the direction and quality of new research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buildings are complex structures composed of heterogeneous elements; these require building management systems (BMSs) to dynamically adapt them to occupants' needs and leverage building resources. The fast growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has transformed the BMS field into a multidisciplinary one. Consequently, this has caused several research papers on data-driven solutions to require examination and classification. This paper provides a broad overview of BMS by conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) summarizing current trends in this field. Unlike similar reviews, this SLR provides a rigorous methodology to review current research from a computer science perspective. Therefore, our goal is four-fold: (i) Identify the main topics in the field of building; (ii) Identify the recent data-driven methods; (iii) Understand the BMS's underlying computing architecture (iv) Understand the features of BMS that contribute to the smartization of buildings. The result synthesizes our findings and provides research directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the future, intelligent machines will replace or enhance human capabilities in many areas. Artificial intelligence is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software. It is the subfield of computer science. Artificial intelligence is becoming a popular field in computer science as it has enhanced the human life in many areas. Artificial intelligence in the last two decades has greatly improved performance of the manufacturing, service sector and so in the field of education. Study in the field of artificial intelligence has given rise to the rapidly growing technology known as expert system. Application areas of artificial intelligence is heaving a huge impact on various fields of life as expert system is widely used in these days to solve the complex problems in various areas as education, engineering, business, medicine, weather forecasting etc. The areas employing the technology of artificial intelligence have seen an increase in the quality and efficiency. This paper gives an overview of this technology and the scope of artificial intelligence in different areas with special reference to the use of this technology in the field of education along with its meaning, searching techniques, inventions and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Digital Studies / Champ Numérique is the property of Open Library of Humanities and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Decentralization is a pervasive concept found across disciplines, including Economics, Political Science, and Computer Science, where it is used in distinct yet interrelated ways. Here, we develop and publicly release a general pipeline to investigate the scholarly history of the term, analysing 425 , 144 academic publications that refer to (de)centralization. We find that the fraction of papers on the topic has been exponentially increasing since the 1950s. In 2021, 1 author in 154 mentioned (de)centralization in the title or abstract of an article. Using both semantic information and citation patterns, we cluster papers in fields and characterize the knowledge flows between them. Our analysis reveals that the topic has independently emerged in the different fields, with small cross-disciplinary contamination. Moreover, we show how Blockchain has become the most influential field about 10 years ago, while Governance dominated before the 1990s. In summary, our findings provide a quantitative assessment of the evolution of a key yet elusive concept, which has undergone cycles of rise and fall within different fields. Our pipeline offers a powerful tool to analyze the evolution of any scholarly term in the academic literature, providing insights into the interplay between collective and independent discoveries in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standards are ubiquitous in contemporary society and play a clear role in technological development, organizational functioning, and business success. Standards are very diverse and often boundary crossing in terms of stakeholders and impact, but are such diversity and range reflected by academic studies? We take stock of standardization research over the past decade, considering the full interdisciplinary breadth of this growing field. We use bibliometrics and network analysis to map emergent trends, and conduct an in-depth review of the literature. In doing so, we find thatmanagement science, along with economics, is at the core of work on standardization, bridging academic disciplines, and leading theoretical development. Technical disciplines, such as engineering and computer science, supply the largest body of literature, but rarely cross disciplinary boundaries and remain rather isolated. Building on our review, we discuss current debates and controversies and distill four interpretative perspectives on the recent and current developments of standardization research. Finally, we propose a research agenda for standardization research and practice for the years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

System Software is a fundamental core course for undergraduate students of Computer Science and Engineering. The traditional approach to teaching the System Software course within the School of Computer Science and Engineering lacked a meaningful connection to real-world machine architectures, leading to disinterest and reduced engagement among undergraduate students. This paper introduces an innovative teaching method designed to empower students to grasp the system programs of real systems effectively. Our approach involves effortlessly integrating the delivery of system software content with the Atmel AVR ATmega32 real-time machine, which students have previously encountered in a prior semester. Moreover, this paper provides a detailed examination of the use of a hypothetical machine in traditional teaching methodologies. While this method allowed for a more in-depth exploration of system software concepts, it struggled to establish a practical link to real machine. The novel teaching approach employed in this study adopts a unique method that links all the system software concepts with the practical system program of a real-time machine. This paper also explains how the advances in Technology has played a crucial role in considering real-time machines as examples. And it also discusses the limitations of teaching concepts using only hypothetical machine and concise overview of the chosen real-time machine is provided, followed by the observation of enhanced knowledge of system software concepts through its integration. To measure the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, we also gathered valuable feedback from the students. The course result analysis shows substantial improvement in understanding the concepts, performance and lifelong learning of the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main scientific results of the 16th International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Information Processing (PRIP-2023), Minsk, Republic of Belarus, October 2023, are reviewed and analyzed. The history of this series of conferences is outlined, and its significant role in the development of the theory and practice of image analysis, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence is indicated. A list of articles in the special issue is provided, prepared from reports selected by the PRIP-2023 Program Committee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologia Italiana is the property of EGEA S.p.A and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Writing is a commonplace activity that individuals partake in regularly. However, the implications behind it are often overlooked. When we write, various psychological factors come into play as the pen creates letters on the paper. Handwriting analysis has long been a subject of study, attracting researchers from diverse disciplines such as graphology, psychology, paleography, neuroscience, criminology, and computer science. Among the promising applications of handwriting analysis is gender classification, where a system can predict the gender of a writer based on their handwriting style. Since each individual's handwriting is unique, and variations exist between the handwriting of different genders, an automatic gender classification system can exploit these differences to make predictions. This paper presents a deep-learning-based gender classification system specifically designed for Urdu handwriting. The proposed approach utilizes a CNN network trained and tested on a self-created dataset contributed by 200 distinct male and 200 female Urdu writers. Through this method, the gender classification system achieved an impressive overall accuracy of 99.63%. The results obtained demonstrate that our technique for Urdu handwriting-based writer identification surpasses existing approaches. In the future, we intend to explore transfer learning techniques to further advance this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neutrosophic topological spaces (NTS) offer a novel framework for uncertainty modeling by incorporating degrees of truth, indeterminacy, and falsity. This paper investigates the potential applications of NTS in computer science. We provide background on neutrosophic sets and their extension to topological spaces. We then explore how NTS could be used for uncertainty modeling in data analysis (e.g., handling noisy data in sensor networks), pattern recognition (e.g., improving image classification with imprecise features), and information retrieval (e.g., enhancing search results by considering relevance uncertainty). We discuss the challenges associated with applying NTS and highlight promising areas for future research, such as developing efficient algorithms for NTS operations. Overall, this paper aims to stimulate further exploration of how neutrosophic topological spaces can contribute to advancements in various computer science domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing diffusion of perspectivism within the debate on information system ontologies [ISOs] does not correspond to a thorough analysis of what perspectivism specifically consists of. This paper aims to fill this void. First, I show what supporting perspectivism in information system ontologies [PISO] means in terms of (minimal) claims and implications; then I argue that the definitions of ISO implicitly assume PISO's (minimal) claims or, in other words, that ISOs presuppose and maintain PISO. Section 2 presents the main definitions of ISO. Section 3 specifies what claims are common to all perspectivists in ISO. Sects. 4–7 analyze the implications of those claims. Section 8 explores the chance of multiple perspectivisms within ISOs' domain. Finally, Sects. 9–10 assume that, if PISO's (minimal) claims and (their) implications can be inferred from ISO's definitions, then ISOs are perspectivist, or PISO's minimal claims are assumptions underlying ISOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hour of Code is a widely recognized global event that aims to introduce programming to novice users and integrate computer science into education. This paper presents an analysis of the effectiveness of the support system and user interface of Minecraft Adventurer, a serious game designed for the Hour of Code global event. Although previous studies have primarily focused on the educational benefits of Hour of Code games, there has been limited research on their support methods. Therefore, this paper aims to address this gap with an empirical study of the experience of 104 students who played the game for one hour. Student progress was tracked by an administering teacher and after the game session, a questionnaire was administered to collect data on the participant's perceptions of the support system, interface efficiency, and overall experience with Hour of Code. The results of the study reveal significant problems with the aforementioned systems, which apply not only to Minecraft Adventurer but also to several other similar serious games. Additionally, the findings showed a correlation between the utilization of the support system and student performance, indicating that student's comprehension of the support system significantly influences their learning outcomes. This paper concludes by providing potential solutions to address the identified insufficiencies, offering valuable insights for future researchers and game developers on the design and evaluation of serious games for educational purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current article discusses Sierpinski networks, which are fractal networks with certain applications in computer science, physics, and chemistry. These networks are typically used in complicated frameworks, fractals, and recursive assemblages. The results derived in this study are in mathematical and graphical format for particular classes of these networks of two distinct sorts with two invariants, K-Banhatti Sombor (KBSO) and Dharwad, along with their reduced forms. These results can facilitate the formation, scalability, and introduction of novel interconnection network topologies, chemical compounds, and VLSI processor circuits. The mathematical expressions employed in this research offer modeling insights and design guidelines to computer engineers. The derived simulation results demonstrate the optimal ranges for a certain network. The optimization assistant tool deployed in this work provides a single maximized value representing the maximum optimized network. These ranges can be put into service to dynamically establish a network according to the requirements of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of indistinguishability operator plays a central role in a large number of problems that arise naturally in decision-making, artificial intelligence, and computer science. Among the different issues studied for these operators, the aggregation problem has been thoroughly explored. In some cases, the notion of indistinguishability operator can be too narrow and, for this reason, we can find two different extensions of such notion in the literature. On the one hand, modular indistinguishability operators make it possible to measure the degree of similarity or indistinguishability with respect to a parameter. On the other hand, relaxed indistinguishability operators delete the reflexivity condition of classical indistinguishability operators. In this paper, we introduced the notion of modular relaxed indistinguishability operator unifying under the same framework all previous notions. We focused our efforts on the study of the associated aggregation problem. Thus, we introduced the notion of modular relaxed indistinguishability operator aggregation function for a family of t-norms extending the counterpart formulated for classical non-modular relaxed indistinguishability operators. We provided characterizations of such functions in terms of triangle triplets with respect to a family of t-norms. Moreover, we addressed special cases where the operators fulfill a kind of monotony and a condition called small-self indistinguishability. The differences between the modular and the non-modular aggregation problem were specified and illustrated by means of suitable examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a ranking and selection approach to psychoacoustic and psychophysical experimentation, with the aim of identifying top-ranking samples in listening experiments with minimal pairwise comparisons. We draw inspiration from sports tournament designs and propose to adopt modified knockout (KO) tournaments. Two variants of modified KO tournaments are described, which adapt the tree selection sorting algorithm and the replacement selection algorithm known from computer science. To validate the proposed method, a listening experiment is conducted, where binaural renderings of seven chamber music halls are compared regarding loudness and reverberance. The rankings obtained by the modified KO tournament method are compared to those obtained from a traditional round-robin (RR) design, where all possible pairs are compared. Moreover, the paper presents simulations to illustrate the method's robustness when choosing different parameters and assuming different underlying data distributions. The study's findings demonstrate that modified KO tournaments are more efficient than full RR designs in terms of the number of comparisons required for identifying the top ranking samples. Thus, they provide a promising alternative for this task. We offer an open-source implementation so that researchers can easily integrate KO designs into their studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important subconscious reactions, micro-expression (ME), is a spontaneous, subtle, and transient facial expression that reveals human beings’ genuine emotion. Therefore, automatically recognizing ME (MER) is becoming increasingly crucial in the field of affective computing, providing essential technical support for lie detection, clinical psychological diagnosis, and public safety. However, the ME data scarcity has severely hindered the development of advanced data-driven MER models. Despite the recent efforts by several spontaneous ME databases to alleviate this problem, there is still a lack of sufficient data. Hence, in this paper, we overcome the ME data scarcity problem by collecting and annotating a dynamic spontaneous ME database with the largest current ME data scale called DFME (Dynamic Facial Micro-expressions). Specifically, the DFME database contains 7,526 well-labeled ME videos spanning multiple high frame rates, elicited by 671 participants and annotated by more than 20 professional annotators over three years. Furthermore, we comprehensively verify the created DFME, including using influential spatiotemporal video feature learning models and MER models as baselines, and conduct emotion classification and ME action unit classification experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the DFME database can facilitate research in automatic MER, and provide a new benchmark for this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Computer Science and STEM-related fields were among the most resistant to online courses. This is because of a perception of the need for more hands-on instruction with labs, clinicals, field studies, etc. Additionally, many STEM students had perceptions based on limited experience of an online STEM course. Therefore, investigating how the pandemic affected students' perceptions over time is very important. This study investigates the evolution of student perceptions after one and a half years relative to synchronous courses, asynchronous courses, overall satisfaction with online courses, and lab and project-based courses. Our analysis is based on two surveys conducted in the Spring 2020 and Spring 2021 terms, i.e., the first and last semesters that the university converted to a fully online mode. We hypothesize why there were significant empirical shifts in some areas and not in others, and make recommendations based on the qualitative student responses relative to best, acceptable, and poor practices. Our main findings include: 1) Students' perceptions of online classes have improved but are far from equivalent for a lot of the students. 2) Lab resources have improved a great deal, but lab experiences have only improved modestly. 3) Although students' preference between synchronous and asynchronous online modalities were evenly divided, it did not significantly affect students' perception of their learning experience. 4) Grading policies have left many students anxious and confused. Recommendations are provided at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homomorphic evaluation of hash functions offers a solution to the challenge of data integrity authentication in the context of homomorphic encryption. The earliest attempt to achieve homomorphic evaluation of SHA-256 hash function was proposed by Mella and Susella (in: Cryptography and coding—14th IMA international conference, IMACC 2013. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 8308. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 28–44, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45239-0%5f3.) based on the BGV scheme. Unfortunately, their implementation faced significant limitations due to the exceedingly high multiplicative depth, rendering it impractical. Recently, a homomorphic implementation of SHA-256 based on the TFHE scheme (Homomorphic evaluation of SHA-256. https://github.com/zama-ai/tfhe-rs/tree/main/tfhe/examples/sha256%5fbool) brings it from theory to reality, however, its current efficiency remains insufficient. In this paper, we revisit the homomorphic evaluation of the SHA-256 hash function in the context of TFHE, further reducing the reliance on gate bootstrapping and enhancing evaluation latency. Specifically, we primarily utilize ternary gates to reduce the number of gate bootstrappings required for logic functions in message expansion and addition of modulo 2 32 in iterative compression. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our optimization techniques are applicable to the Chinese commercial cryptographic hash SM3. Finally, we give specific comparative implementations based on the TFHE-rs library. Experiments demonstrate that our optimization techniques lead to an improvement of approximately 35–50% compared with the state-of-the-art result under different cores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of knowledge graphs in education. It covers the patterns and prospects of research in this area. A total of 48 relevant publications between 2011 and 2023 were collected from the Web of Science, Scopus, and ProQuest for review. The findings reveal a sharp increase in recent years in the body of research into educational knowledge graphs which was mainly conducted from institutions in China. Most of the relevant research work adopted a quantitative method, such as performance evaluation, user surveys, and controlled experiments, to assess the effectiveness of knowledge graph approaches. The findings also suggest that knowledge graph approaches were primarily researched and implemented in higher education institutions, with a focus on computer science, mathematics, and engineering. The most frequently addressed objectives included enhancing knowledge representation and providing personal learning recommendations, and the most common applications were concept instruction and educational recommendations. Diverse data resources, such as course materials, student learning behaviours, and online encyclopaedia, were processed to implement knowledge graph approaches in different scenarios. Relevant technical means employed for the implementation of knowledge graphs dealt with the purposes of building knowledge ontology, achieving recommendations, and creating knowledge graphs. Various pedagogies such as personalised learning and collaborative learning are supported by the knowledge graph approaches. The findings also identified key limitations in the relevant work, including insufficient information for knowledge graph construction, difficulty in extending applications across subject areas, the restricted scale and scope of data resources, and the lack of comprehensive user feedback and evaluation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By utilising the National Graduate Survey (NGS) – class of 2005 and 2009/10 – this paper examines the effects of fields of study on the time it takes to find full-time employment that lasts at least six months among graduates of Canadian Universities. Within cohorts, the results suggest considerable differences in the duration to first job after graduation for various fields of study – with 'Agriculture, natural resources and conservation', 'Health and related fields', and STEM fields like Math, Computer Science, and Engineering landing jobs the quickest, respectively. In contrast, the graduates of 'Humanities' and 'Education' had the longest duration of finding employment. The results also show large differences between cohorts, with the 2009/10 cohort taking much longer to find employment. Lastly, this paper did not find clear evidence that the effects of fields of study on the duration to exiting unemployment changed across the cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: This article aims to perform a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to better understand the structures of different methods, techniques, models, methodologies, and technologies related to provenance data management in health information systems (HISs). The SLR developed here seeks to answer the questions that contribute to describing the results. Method: An SLR was performed on six databases using a search string. The backward and forward snowballing technique was also used. Eligible studies were all articles in English that presented on the use of different methods, techniques, models, methodologies, and technologies related to provenance data management in HISs. The quality of the included articles was assessed to obtain a better connection to the topic studied. Results: Of the 239 studies retrieved, 14 met the inclusion criteria described in this SLR. In order to complement the retrieved studies, 3 studies were included using the backward and forward snowballing technique, totaling 17 studies dedicated to the construction of this research. Most of the selected studies were published as conference papers, which is common when involving computer science in HISs. There was a more frequent use of data provenance models from the PROV family in different HISs combined with different technologies, among which blockchain and middleware stand out. Despite the advantages found, the lack of technological structure, data interoperability problems, and the technical unpreparedness of working professionals are still challenges encountered in the management of provenance data in HISs. Conclusion: It was possible to conclude the existence of different methods, techniques, models, and combined technologies, which are presented in the proposal of a taxonomy that provides researchers with a new understanding about the management of provenance data in HISs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have proposed different obfuscation transformations supported by numerous smartphone protection tools (obfuscators and deobfuscators). However, there is a need for a comprehensive study to empirically characterize these tools that belong to different categories of transformations. We propose a property-based framework to systematically classify twenty cutting-edge tools according to their features, analysis type, programming language support, licensing, applied obfuscation transformations, and general technical drawbacks. Our analysis predominantly reveals that very few tools work at the dynamic level, and most tools (which are static-based) work for Java or Java-based ecosystems (e.g., Android). The findings also show that the widespread adoption of renaming transformations is followed by formatting and code injection. In addition, this paper pinpoints the technical shortcomings of each tool; some of these drawbacks are common in static-based analyzers (e.g., resource consumption), and other drawbacks have negative effects on the experiment conducted by students (e.g., a third-party library involved). According to these critical limitations, we provide some timely recommendations for further research. This study can assist not only Android developers and researchers to improve the overall health of their apps but also the managers of computer science and cybersecurity academic programs to embed suitable obfuscation tools in their curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A drug molecule is a substance that changes an organism's mental or physical state. Every approved drug has an indication, which refers to the therapeutic use of that drug for treating a particular medical condition. While the Large Language Model (LLM), a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique, has recently demonstrated effectiveness in translating between molecules and their textual descriptions, there remains a gap in research regarding their application in facilitating the translation between drug molecules and indications (which describes the disease, condition or symptoms for which the drug is used), or vice versa. Addressing this challenge could greatly benefit the drug discovery process. The capability of generating a drug from a given indication would allow for the discovery of drugs targeting specific diseases or targets and ultimately provide patients with better treatments. In this paper, we first propose a new task, the translation between drug molecules and corresponding indications, and then test existing LLMs on this new task. Specifically, we consider nine variations of the T5 LLM and evaluate them on two public datasets obtained from ChEMBL and DrugBank. Our experiments show the early results of using LLMs for this task and provide a perspective on the state-of-the-art. We also emphasize the current limitations and discuss future work that has the potential to improve the performance on this task. The creation of molecules from indications, or vice versa, will allow for more efficient targeting of diseases and significantly reduce the cost of drug discovery, with the potential to revolutionize the field of drug discovery in the era of generative AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the classical problem of throughput maximization. In this problem we have a collection J of n jobs, each having a release time r j , deadline d j , and processing time p j . They have to be scheduled non-preemptively on m identical parallel machines. The goal is to find a schedule which maximizes the number of jobs scheduled entirely in their [ r j , d j ] window. This problem has been studied extensively (even for the case of m = 1 ). Several special cases of the problem remain open. Bar-Noy et al. (Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, May 1–4, 1999, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, pp. 622–631. ACM, 1999, https://doi.org/10.1145/301250.301420) presented an algorithm with ratio 1 - 1 / (1 + 1 / m) m for m machines, which approaches 1 - 1 / e as m increases. For m = 1 , Chuzhoy et al. (42nd Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) 2001, 14–17 October 2001, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, pp. 348–356. IEEE Computer Society, 2001) presented an algorithm with approximation with ratio 1 - 1 e - ε (for any ε > 0 ). Recently Im et al. (SIAM J Discrete Math 34(3):1649–1669, 2020) presented an algorithm with ratio 1 - 1 / e + ε 0 for some absolute constant ε 0 > 0 for any fixed m. They also presented an algorithm with ratio 1 - O (log m / m) - ε for general m which approaches 1 as m grows. The approximability of the problem for m = O (1) remains a major open question. Even for the case of m = 1 and c = O (1) distinct processing times the problem is open (Sgall in: Algorithms - ESA 2012 - 20th Annual European Symposium, Ljubljana, Slovenia, September 10–12, 2012. Proceedings, pp 2–11, 2012). In this paper we study the case of m = O (1) and show that if there are c distinct processing times, i.e. p j 's come from a set of size c, then there is a randomized (1 - ε) -approximation that runs in time O (n m c 7 ε - 6 log T) , where T is the largest deadline. Therefore, for constant m and constant c this yields a PTAS. Our algorithm is based on proving structural properties for a near optimum solution that allows one to use a dynamic programming with pruning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of finding a maximum size matching in a graph (known as the maximum matching problem) is one of the most classical problems in computer science. Despite a significant body of work dedicated to the study of this problem in the data stream model, the state-of-the-art single-pass semi-streaming algorithm for it is still a simple greedy algorithm that computes a maximal matching, and this way obtains 1 / 2 -approximation. Some previous works described two/three-pass algorithms that improve over this approximation ratio by using their second and third passes to improve the above mentioned maximal matching. One contribution of this paper continues this line of work by presenting new three-pass semi-streaming algorithms that work along these lines and obtain improved approximation ratios of 0.6111 and 0.5694 for triangle-free and general graphs, respectively. Unfortunately, a recent work Konrad and Naidu (Approximation, randomization, and combinatorial optimization. Algorithms and techniques, APPROX/RANDOM 2021, August 16–18, 2021. LIPIcs, vol 207, pp 19:1–19:18, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX/RANDOM.2021.19) shows that the strategy of constructing a maximal matching in the first pass and then improving it in further passes has limitations. Additionally, this technique is unlikely to get us closer to single-pass semi-streaming algorithms obtaining a better than 1 / 2 -approximation. Therefore, it is interesting to come up with algorithms that do something else with their first pass (we term such algorithms non-maximal-matching-first algorithms). No such algorithms were previously known, and the main contribution of this paper is describing such algorithms that obtain approximation ratios of 0.5384 and 0.5555 in two and three passes, respectively, for general graphs. The main significance of our results is not in the numerical improvements, but in demonstrating the potential of non-maximal-matching-first algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present and discuss a promising research avenue, that is the use of graph-based models and software for prosopographical data sets. Our case study will be constituted by Romans 1by1 (http://romans1by1.com/), a digital-born prosopography focusing on people attested in classical era inscriptions; it presently hosts approximately 18,000 open access persons files. The project aimed at employing new techniques and methodologies that come from other fields (i.e. computer science), in order to approach the study of ancient population in an innovative way, to ease the research, and to create an open-access tool, available for the academic community. In the scope of this paper, we use Romans1by1 as an example to explore the perspectives of ingesting the information from a prosopographical relational database into a graph database. Graph based modelling was employed to reveal data and details on the lives of the 'ordinary' people who lived in the Roman Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the evolving landscape of blockchain technology in renewable energy. The study, based on a Scopus database search on 21 February 2024, reveals a growing trend in scholarly output, predominantly in engineering, energy, and computer science. The diverse range of source types and global contributions, led by China, reflects the interdisciplinary nature of this field. This comprehensive review delves into 33 research papers, examining the integration of blockchain in renewable energy systems, encompassing decentralized power dispatching, certificate trading, alternative energy selection, and management in applications like intelligent transportation systems and microgrids. The papers employ theoretical concepts such as decentralized power dispatching models and permissioned blockchains, utilizing methodologies involving advanced algorithms, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts to enhance efficiency, security, and transparency. The findings suggest that blockchain integration can reduce costs, increase renewable source utilization, and optimize energy management. Despite these advantages, challenges including uncertainties, privacy concerns, scalability issues, and energy consumption are identified, alongside legal and regulatory compliance and market acceptance hurdles. Overcoming resistance to change and building trust in blockchain-based systems are crucial for successful adoption, emphasizing the need for collaborative efforts among industry stakeholders, regulators, and technology developers to unlock the full potential of blockchains in renewable energy integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 33rd International Workshop On Combinatorial Algorithms (IWOCA 2022) was held at the University of Trier in Germany. This workshop covers a wide range of topics related to combinatorial algorithms. The special issue of the journal Algorithmica contains extended versions of selected papers from IWOCA 2022, which were nominated by the Program Committee and underwent a rigorous reviewing process. The special issue includes nine papers on various topics such as perfect matchings, algorithmic questions, and winner determination algorithms. One paper was chosen as the Best Paper of IWOCA 2022 and another as the Best Student Paper. The special issue is recommended for readers interested in exploring more papers from IWOCA 2022. [Extracted from the article]

There is widespread debate on whether to anonymize author identities in peer review. The key argument for anonymization is to mitigate bias, whereas arguments against anonymization posit various uses of author identities in the review process. The Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) 2023 conference adopted a middle ground by initially anonymizing the author identities from reviewers, revealing them after the reviewer had submitted their initial reviews, and allowing the reviewer to change their review subsequently. We present an analysis of the reviews pertaining to the identification and use of author identities. Our key findings are: (I) A majority of reviewers self-report not knowing and being unable to guess the authors' identities for the papers they were reviewing. (II) After the initial submission of reviews, 7.1% of reviews changed their overall merit score and 3.8% changed their self-reported reviewer expertise. (III) There is a very weak and statistically insignificant correlation of the rank of authors' affiliations with the change in overall merit; there is a weak but statistically significant correlation with respect to change in reviewer expertise. We also conducted an anonymous survey to obtain opinions from reviewers and authors. The main findings from the 200 survey responses are: (i) A vast majority of participants favor anonymizing author identities in some form. (ii) The "middle-ground" initiative of ITCS 2023 was appreciated. (iii) Detecting conflicts of interest is a challenge that needs to be addressed if author identities are anonymized. Overall, these findings support anonymization of author identities in some form (e.g., as was done in ITCS 2023), as long as there is a robust and efficient way to check conflicts of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuous improvement in the clinical performance of neonatal intensive care units (NICU) depends on the use of locally relevant, reliable data. However, neonatal databases with these characteristics are typically unavailable in NICUs using paper-based records, while in those using electronic records, the inaccuracy of data and the inability to customize commercial data systems limit their usability for quality improvement or research purposes. We describe the characteristics and uses of a simple, neonatologist-centered data system that has been successfully maintained for 30 years, with minimal resources and serving multiple purposes, including quality improvement, administrative, research support and educational functions. Structurally, our system comprises customized paper and electronic components, while key functional aspects include the attending-based recording of diagnoses, integration into clinical workflows, multilevel data accuracy and validation checks, and periodic reporting on both data quality and NICU performance results. We provide examples of data validation methods and trends observed over three decades, and discuss essential elements for the successful implementation of this system. This database is reliable and easily maintained; it can be developed from simple paper-based forms or used to supplement the functionality and end-user customizability of existing electronic medical records. This system should be readily adaptable to NICUs in either high- or limited-resource environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial introduces the special issue, Resources for Undergraduate Cryptology. We begin by describing possible roles for cryptology in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum together with a brief overview of the subject. We conclude with a brief preview of each paper included in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The number of citations has been widely used to measure the significance of a paper. However, there is a need in introducing another index to determine superiority or inferiority of papers with the same number of citations. We determine superiority or inferiority of papers by using the ranking based on the number of citations and PageRank. Design/methodology/approach: We show the positive linear correlation between Citation Rank (the ranking of the number of citation) and PageRank. On this basis, we identify high-quality, prestige, emerging, and popular papers. Findings: We found that the high-quality papers belong to the subjects of biochemistry and molecular biology, chemistry, and multidisciplinary sciences. The prestige papers correspond to the subjects of computer science, engineering, and information science. The emerging papers are related to biochemistry and molecular biology, as well as those published in the journal "Cell." The popular papers belong to the subject of multidisciplinary sciences. Research limitations: We analyze the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) from 1981 to 2015 to calculate Citation Rank and PageRank within a citation network consisting of 34,666,719 papers and 591,321,826 citations. Practical implications: Our method is applicable to forecast emerging fields of research subjects in science and helps policymakers to consider science policy. Originality/value: We calculated PageRank for a giant citation network which is extremely larger than the citation networks investigated by previous researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to propose an improved credit allocation method that makes the leading author of the paper more distinguishable and makes the deification more robust under malicious manipulations. We utilize a modified Sigmoid function to handle the fat-tail distributed citation counts. We also remove the target paper in calculating the contribution of co-citations. Following previous studies, we use 30 Nobel Prize-winning papers and their citation networks based on the American Physical Society (APS) and the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) dataset to test the accuracy of our proposed method (NCCAS). In addition, we use 654,148 articles published in the field of computer science from 2000 to 2009 in the MAG dataset to validate the distinguishability and robustness of NCCAS. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, NCCAS gives the most accurate prediction of Nobel laureates. Furthermore, the leading author of the paper identified by NCCAS is more distinguishable compared with other co-authors. The results by NCCAS are also more robust to malicious manipulation. Finally, we perform ablation studies to show the contribution of different components in our methods. Due to limited ground truth on the true leading author of a work, the accuracy of NCCAS and other related methods can only be tested in Nobel Physics Prize-winning papers. NCCAS is successfully applied to a large number of publications, demonstrating its potential in analyzing the relationship between the contribution and the recognition of authors with different by-line orders. Compared with existing methods, NCCAS not only identifies the leading author of a paper more accurately, but also makes the deification more distinguishable and more robust, providing a new tool for related studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the intersection of machine learning and the law, highlighting how machine learning is revolutionizing social life and impacting legal processes. It explores various research topics, such as law as data, predictive policing, and machine learning decision-aids for judicial decision-making. The article also examines the advantages and limitations of using machine learning in legal research, including the reproducibility of results and the potential for bias in algorithms. Overall, the symposium aimed to foster interdisciplinary exchange and explore the ways in which machine learning can contribute to legal scholarship and empirical legal research. [Extracted from the article]

The main purpose of this study is to examine the implementation of active methodologies in the teaching–learning process in computer science. To achieve this objective, a systematic review using the PRISMA method was performed; the search for articles was conducted through the Scopus and Web of Science databases and the scientific search engine Google Scholar. By establishing inclusion and exclusion criteria, 15 research papers were selected addressing the use of various active methodologies which have had a positive impact on students' learning processes. Among the principal active methodologies highlighted are problem-based learning, flipped classrooms, and gamification. The results of the review show how active methodologies promote significant learning, in addition to fostering more outstanding commitment, participation, and motivation on the students' part. It was observed that active methodologies contribute to the development of fundamental cognitive and socio-emotional skills for their professional growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the computational challenges of clique transversal problems in d-degenerate graphs, which are commonly encountered across theoretical computer science and various network applications. We examine d-degenerate graphs to highlight their utility in representing sparse structures and assess several variations of clique transversal problems, including the b-fold and { b } -clique transversal problems, focusing on their computational complexities for different graph categories. Our analysis identifies that certain instances of these problems are polynomial-time solvable in specific graph classes, such as 1-degenerate or 2-degenerate graphs. However, for d-degenerate graphs where d ≥ 2 , these problems generally escalate to NP-completeness. We also explore the parameterized complexity, pinpointing specific conditions that render these problems fixed-parameter tractable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on enhancing security in wireless body area networks (WBANs) through the application of Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based anomaly detection. The main problem addressed is the insufficient attention to security measures in WBANs, particularly in terms of secure connections and mitigation strategies. The proposed solution involves utilizing SVM to categorize security measures for WBAN telehealth solutions based on relevant attributes, ensuring ongoing utilization. The primary results showcase the successful prediction of vital signs with a remarkable accuracy of 98.63% using SVM, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing security in WBANs. This paper explores the application of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to enhance WBAN security updates and intelligence. Specific access management approaches may prove more effective during crisis situations. This study categorizes security measures for WBAN telehealth solutions exclusively using SVM based on relevant security attributes, ensuring their ongoing utilization. Employing SVM, the study predicts a heart rate of 89.087 beats per minute, an RR interval of 673.5 ms, and a QT interval of 271.3 ms, achieving a remarkable accuracy of 98.63 percent with a training dataset comprising 80 percent of the data and a testing dataset encompassing the remaining 20 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the tremendous increase in human population the demand of milk and meat is also increasing. This necessitates the centralization of animal husbandry sector both in developed and developing countries. More production has to be taken from fewer animals which seem to be possible only with the usage of advanced technologies. Earlier this seems to be impractical due to non-availability of such technologies to the farmers. Nowadays, computational power is very cheap and easily available. Artificial intelligence is one such field of computer science devoted to creating computing machines and systems that perform operations analogous to human learning and decision-making. Artificial intelligence includes the machine learning, deep learning and predictive analytics. With the implementation of various software and algorithms, the production has been increased from the farm animals along with better management and welfare. This paper illustrates the application domains and maneuvering of artificial intelligence in the animal husbandry sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electricity theft comes with various disadvantages for power utilities, governments, businesses, and the general public. This continues despite the various solutions employed to detect and prevent it. Some of the disadvantages of electricity theft include revenue loss and load shedding, leading to a disruption in business operations. This study aimed to conduct a systematic literature review to identify what technology solutions have been offered to solve electricity theft and the effectiveness of those solutions by considering peer-reviewed empirical studies. The systematic literature review was undertaken following the guidelines for conducting a literature review in computer science to assess potential bias. A total of 11 journal articles published from 2012 to 2022 in SCOPUS, Science Direct, and Web of Science were analysed to reveal solutions, the type of theft addressed, and the success and limitations of the solutions. The findings show that the focus in research is channelled towards solving electricity theft in Smart Grids (SGs) and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI); moreover, there is a neglect in the recent literature on finding solutions that can prevent electricity theft in countries that do not have SG and AMI installed. Although the results reported in this study are confined to the analysed research papers, the leading limitation in the selected studies, lack of real-life data for dishonest users. This study's contribution is to show what technology solutions are prevalent in solving electricity theft in recent years and the effectiveness of such solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Searching over a sorted list is a classical problem in computer science. Binary Search takes at most log 2 ⁡ n + 1 tries to find an item in a sorted list of size n. Interpolation Search achieves an average time complexity of O (log ⁡ log ⁡ n ) for uniformly distributed data. Hybrids of Binary Search and Interpolation Search are also available to handle data with unknown distributions. This paper analyzes the computation cost of these methods and shows that interpolation can significantly affect their performance—accordingly, a new method, Interpolation Once Binary Search (IOBS), is proposed. The experimental results show that IOBS outperforms the hybrids of Binary Search and Interpolation Search for nonuniformly distributed data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graphs are used to solve many problems in mathematics and computer sciences. Many structures can be displayed with the help of graphs. For example, a directed graph can be used to show how websites are related to each other. Vague graph (VG) is one of the most important graphs in the fuzzy graph (FG)-theory, which can play a significant role in finding the most suitable places in construction and also finding the shortest path in computer networks. Connectivity indices are one of the most widely used topics in graph theory, which are used in other sciences, including computer science and chemistry. One of the most famous indices in the graph is the Wiener index, which belongs to the description of the molecular structure, which is used to design molecules with desirable properties. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce important topological indices such as Wiener index, Wiener absolute index, Randic index, Zegreb index, Harmonic index, and Average Wiener index on VGs and investigate their properties with several examples. Finally, an application of the Wiener index is given to find the most suitable place to build an university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the implementation of a STEM scholarship program which utilized a holistic approach to providing a multi-dimensional student support system. The program has been successful in encouraging and supporting women in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science by offering a diverse suite of extracurricular opportunities, actively engaging them in organized events, research projects, and participation in STEM communities, and helping them achieve higher GPAs and shorter times to graduation. The supported women also benefitted from close mentoring relationships with the faculty mentors. The program emphasized the development of empowering settings for women's engagement and achievement, which act to sustain and expand interest in mathematics and computing, and thereby help them to see themselves as future professionals in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]