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In this study, an acidophilic GH5 β-mannanase (TaMan5) from Trichoderma asperellum ND-1 was efficiently expressed in Pichia pastoris (a 2.0-fold increase, 67.5 ± 1.95 U/mL). TaMan5 displayed the highest specificity toward locust bean gum (Km = 1.34 mg/mL, Vmax = 749.14 μmol/min/mg) at pH 4.0 and 65°C. Furthermore, TaMan5 displayed remarkable tolerance to acidic environments, retaining over 80% of its original activity at pH 3.0-5.0. The activity of TaMan5 was remarkably decreased by Cu2+, Mn2+, and SDS, while Fe2+/Fe3+ improved the enzyme activity. A thin-layer chromatography (TLC) analysis of the action model showed that TaMan5 could rapidly degrade mannan/MOS into mannobiose without mannose via hydrolysis action as well as transglycosylation. Site-directed mutagenesis results suggested that Glu205, Glu313, and Asp357 of TaMan5 are crucial catalytic residues, with Asp152 playing an auxiliary function. Additionally, TaMan5 and commercial α-galactosidase displayed a remarkable synergistic effect on the degradation of galactomannans. This study provided a novel β-mannanase with ideal characteristics and can be considered a potential candidate for the production of bioactive polysaccharide mannobiose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several major theories have been established in research on motivation in education to describe, explain, and predict the direction, initiation, intensity, and persistence of learning behaviors. The most commonly cited theories of academic motivation include expectancy-value theory, social cognitive theory, self-determination theory, interest theory, achievement goal theory, and attribution theory. To gain a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences among these prominent theories, we present an integrative framework based on an action model (Heckhausen & Heckhausen, 2018). The basic model is deliberately parsimonious, consisting of six stages of action: the situation, the self, the goal, the action, the outcome, and the consequences. Motivational constructs from each major theory are related to these determinants in the course of action, mainly revealing differences and to a lesser extent commonalities. In the integrative model, learning outcomes represent a typical indicator of goal-directed behavior. Associated recent meta-analyses demonstrate the empirical relationship between the motivational constructs of the six central theories and academic achievement. They provide evidence for the explanatory value of each theory for students’ learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

國立臺中教育大學的「教師專業碩士學位學程」可說是臺灣近年來一項重大的師資培育改革方案，其在教育部倡議專業標準本位的脈絡下形成。為瞭解此一變革之成效，以及影響成效的中介機制，本研究以「行動模式／改變模式圖式」作為評鑑取徑。在前置作業中，採取文獻分析、文件分析與訪談方法，建立「教師專業碩士學位學程」之「行動模式／改變模式圖式」，本研究進而採問卷調查與訪談，檢視圖式中「改變模式」三個要素（課程實施、實踐反思、專業表現）之落實情形，以及該學程的課程實施成效（專業表現）受到實踐反思 的中介情形。研究結果顯示，學程之課程實施、師資生之實踐反思與專業表現，均達中高標程度。另課程實施對於實踐反思與專業表現均有直接效果，惟實踐反思中的創新教學，不論對於整體的專業表現或專業表現的構面（專業實踐與專業責任）均產生顯著的部分中介作用；而實踐反思中的觀察反省，則對專業知能產生部分的中介作用。此意謂要造就一位專業表現良好的師資生，除了要有統整的課程設計外，尚須致力於提升師資生創新教學與觀察反省能力，方有助於專業表現效果的強化。上述的研究結果點出創新教學、觀察反省是師培方案要產生預期成果所需的中介機制，而此提供了師資培育改進之重要參考方向。 The Teacher Professional Master Degree Program launched by the National Taichung University of Education has drastically reformed Taiwanese teacher education in recent years. The Ministry of Education promoted this program in a standard-based policy context. To evaluate its effects, this study used the evaluation approach of action model/change model schema. In the preliminary stage, the program’s action model/change model schema was constructed through literature analysis, document analysis, and interviews. Furthermore, the survey and interview data were collected to evaluate the schema’s change model. Specifically, the implementation of the program and how students’ practical reflection mediated the relationship between curriculum implementation and students’ professional performance were explored. The findings revealed that the scores of curriculum implementation, students’ practical reflection, and professional performance were all at a moderately high level. Additionally, it was found that curriculum implementation exerted main effects on students’ practical reflection and professional performance. However, innovative teaching, as a dimension of practical reflection, partially mediated the effects of curriculum implementation either on professional performance or on its two dimensions (professional practice and professional responsibility). Observation and reflection, another dimension of practical reflection, also had mediated effect but only on professional knowledge. The study suggested that integrated curriculum design is crucial for cultivating students’ professional competence and that skills of innovative teaching, and observation and reflection strengthen the program’s effect on student performance. Those two skills are significant intervening mechanisms that enable teacher education programs to achieve anticipated outcomes, in turn providing a direction for improving teacher education.

The goal state of the robot motion involved in an action is determined by the action model based on the effect of the action and the scene state. This study focuses on serving food as a robot action; the action model of serving food is obtained based on demonstrations. The arrangement position is determined by considering the spatial relations between the object being served and the multiple selected reference objects. Therefore, it is necessary to learn the importance of the relations for the reference and the spatial relations between objects based on demonstrations. In this paper, bottom-up action modeling is proposed as an action modeling approach based on the demonstration. In this method, the spatial relations between labeled objects and the importance of the relations are learned through spatial factorization of the scene into partial relations. This approach enables the robot to determine the arrangement position intended by the demonstrator, even in unknown scenes. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated by simulation, which the action of serving food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerning a software tool of legal reasoning, it is important to describe the prediction about the result of a criminal action, because a crime is often caused by the unpredictability of the result of the defendant. In the court, the judge needs to investigate the predictability and the intention of the agent. Previously, we have formalized the reasoning process of judgment by action model in dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) and have attempted to describe the precedents. However, the prediction in legal cases depends not only on the states of knowledge but also on the limited degree of attention by agents. In this paper, we employ DEL with awareness for multi-agent to represent the predictability and model the typical criminal precedents. We propose a revised semantics of action model with awareness which can define each basic action model to reproduce the agent’s considering process. To describe the legal reasoning we introduce an extension of modeling program DEMO to include the awareness (we call it DEMO+𝒜) and present a GUI in this extended program to calculate the updated epistemic model easily and to classify precedents according to the degree of prediction. In the end, we calculate the epistemic models of typical criminal precedents by this newly developed tool and estimate them.

The security of cryptographic protocols has always been an important issue. Although there are various verification schemes of protocols in the literature, efficiently and accurately verifying cryptographic protocols is still a challenging research task. In this work, we develop a formal method based on dynamic epistemic logic to analyze and describe cryptographic protocols. In particular, we adopt the action model to depict the execution process of the protocol. To verify the security, the intruder's actions are analyzed. We model exactly the protocol applying our formal language and give the verification models according to the security requirements of this cryptographic protocol. With analysis and proof on a selected example, we show the usefulness of our method. The result indicates that the selected protocol meets the security requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel acidophilic GH5 β-1,4-endoglucanase (TaCel12) from Trichoderma asperellum ND-1 was efficiently expressed in Pichia pastoris (a 1.5-fold increase). Deglycosylated TaCel12 migrated as a single band (26.5 kDa) in SDS-PAGE. TaCel12 was acidophilic with a pH optimum of 4.0 and displayed great pH stability (>80 % activity over pH 3.0–5.0). TaCel12 exhibited considerable activity towards sodium carboxymethyl cellulose and sodium alginate with V max values of 197.97 μmol/min/mg and 119.06 μmol/min/mg, respectively. Moreover, TaCel12 maintained >80 % activity in the presence of 20 % ethanol and 4.28 M NaCl. Additionally, Mn2+, Pb2+ and Cu2+ negatively affected TaCel12 activity, while the presence of 5 mM Co2+ significantly increased the enzyme activity. Analysis of action mode revealed that TaCel12 required at least four glucose (cellotetraose) residues for hydrolysis to yield cellobiose and cellotriose. Site-directed mutagenesis results suggested that Glu133 and Glu217 of TaCel12 are crucial catalytic residues, with Asp116 displaying an auxiliary function. Production of soluble sugars from lignocellulose is a crucial step in bioethanol development, and it is noteworthy that TaCel12 could synergistically yield fermentable sugars from corn stover and bagasse, respectively. Thus TaCel12 with excellent properties will be considered a potential biocatalyst for applications in various industries, especially for lignocellulosic biomass conversion. • A novel endoglucanase gene from T. asperellum is cloned for the first time. • TaCel12 is extreme acidophilic, ethanol-tolerant and halophilic. • TaCel12 hydrolyzes glucan into cello-oligosaccharide with DP ≥ 3. • Glu133 and Glu217 of TaCel12 are crucial catalytic residues, with Asp116 displaying an auxiliary role. • TaCel12 possesses good potential applications in bioresources, food and feed industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthesizing plans for a deformable object to transit from initial observations to goal observations, both of which are represented by high-dimensional data (namely “raw” data), is challenging due to the difficulty of learning abstract state representations of raw data and transition models of continuous states and continuous actions. Even though there have been some approaches making remarkable progress regarding the planning problem, they often neglect actions between observations and are unable to generate action sequences from initial observations to goal observations. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm framework, namely AGN. We first learn a state-abstractor model to abstract states from raw observations, a state-generator model to generate raw observations from states, a heuristic model to predict actions to be executed in current states, and a transition model to transform current states to next states after executing specific actions. After that, we directly generate plans for a deformable object by performing the four models. We evaluate our approach in continuous domains and show that our approach is effective with comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms.

Multi-Agent Plan Recognition (MAPR) aims to recognize team structures (which are composed of team plans) from the observed team traces (action sequences) of a set of intelligent agents. In this article, we introduce the problem formulation of MAPR based on partially observed team traces, and present a weighted MAX-SAT-based framework to recognize multi-agent plans from partially observed team traces with the help of two types of auxiliary knowledge to help recognize multi-agent plans, i.e., a library of incomplete team plans and a set of incomplete action models. Our framework functions with two phases. We first build a set of hard constraints that encode the correctness property of the team plans, and a set of soft constraints that encode the optimal utility property of team plans based on the input team trace, incomplete team plans, and incomplete action models. After that, we solve all of the constraints using a weighted MAX-SAT solver and convert the solution to a set of team plans that best explain the structure of the observed team trace. We empirically exhibit both effectiveness and efficiency of our framework in benchmark domains from International Planning Competition (IPC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The security of cryptographic protocols has always been an important issue. Although there are various verification schemes of protocols in the literature, efficiently and accurately verifying cryptographic protocols is still a challenging research task. In this work, we develop a formal method based on dynamic epistemic logic to analyze and describe cryptographic protocols. In particular, we adopt the action model to depict the execution process of the protocol. To verify the security, the intruder’s actions are analyzed. We model exactly the protocol applying our formal language and give the verification models according to the security requirements of this cryptographic protocol. With analysis and proof on a selected example, we show the usefulness of our method. The result indicates that the selected protocol meets the security requirements.

The study of narratives, as the greatest gift of structuralism is considered as one of the most important aspects of the modern literary theory. Following Prop, structuralists attempted to present an overall model in creating different narrative in the 20th century. In this field, A. J. Greimas—the most popular narrative theorist—went beyond the limited studies of Prop, and presented his action model and his narrative chains. By doing so, he attempted to reach to the general principles of the narratives language and to analyze each narrative based on a specific narrative structure. He created his action model in a way that it can be adaptable which other narratives. Therefore, the aim of the present research is to study the narrative structure of Bahram and Gol-andam story, as a sample of the amatory and lyrical poems based on Greimas theory so we can analyze the structure of the original Plot using changes in statuses according to two-fold reciprocities, the narrative chains, and the action model of narratives.after analyzing the context, we concluded that Greimas's action model in analyzing the narrative of lyric poems of Bahram and Gol-andam is approximately useful and plot of the story has a particular structure and narrative cohesion and is investigate from two viewpoints (two-fold reciprocities and syntactic rules) and from the action viewpoint, it includes two distinct action models with distinct actives which is rarely seen in other narratives.

The problem statement related to modification of structural design model, when stiffness parameters of the structural members undergo changes, was considered. Some data was outlined from the design practice concerning design cases that occur during erection and maintenance of buildings and structures, when stiffness parameters of some structural members undergo changes. A physical mechanism that controls changing of these parameters was described for some of the design cases. Likewise, attention was paid to the design cases when changing of stiffness parameters has no relation to changing of actual stress-and-strain state and when such change occurs. Appropriate analysis methods were described.