http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/juanaugusto/CookAJ2009.pdf

Review: Ambient intelligence: Technologies, applications, and opportunities

THIS is a book of great length (444 pages of text), great learning (168 pages of notes), but not of commensurate understanding. It is a pity, because its defects may conceal its undoubted merits. When Dr. Popper is not caricaturing writers whose views he dislikes-and he dislikes a great many-he has a useful contribution to make to political thought, and his general moral theory (mainly to be found in the notes) is eminently sane and sensible. But for his passion for tilting at windmills he would have written a better and shorter book. The Open Society and its Enemies By K. R. Popper. Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato. Pp. vii + 268. Vol. 2: The High Tide of Prophecy—Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. Pp. v + 352. (London: George Koutledge and Sons, Ltd., 1945.) 2 vols., 42s. net.

The Open Society and its Enemies

There has been a great deal of theoretical and experimental work in computer science on inductive inference systems, that is, systems that try to infer general rules from examples. However, a complete and applicable theory of such systems is still a distant goal. This survey highlights and explains the main ideas that have been developed in the study of inductive inference, with special emphasis on the relations between the general theory and the specific algorithms and implementations. 154 references.

Inductive Inference: Theory and Methods

Teaching is a demanding and complex task. This guide looks at teaching and what it involves. Implicit in the widely accepted and far-reaching changes in medical education is a changing role for the medical teacher. Twelve roles have been identified and these can be grouped in six areas in the model presented: (1) the information provider in the lecture, and in the clinical context; (2) the role model on-the-job, and in more formal teaching settings; (3) the facilitator as a mentor and learning facilitator; (4) the student assessor and curriculum evaluator; (5) the curriculum and course planner; and (6) the resource material creator, and study guide producer. As presented in the model, some roles require more medical expertise and others more educational expertise. Some roles have more direct face-to-face contact with students and others less. The roles are presented in a 'competing values' framework-they may convey conflicting messages, e.g. providing information or encouraging independent learning, helpi...

AMEE Guide No 20: The good teacher is more than a lecturer - the twelve roles of the teacher

We consider inductive inference of formal languages, as defined by Gold (1967) , in the case of positive data, i.e., when the examples of a given formal language are successive elements of some arbitrary enumeration of the elements of the language. We prove a theorem characterizing when an indexed family of nonempty recursive formal languages is inferrable from positive data. From this theorem we obtain other useful conditions for inference from positive data, and give several examples of their application. We give counterexamples to two variants of the characterizing condition, and investigate conditions for inference from positive data that avoids “overgeneralization.”

Inductive inference of formal languages from positive data

Like the learning abilities of their students, the teaching abilities of college professors seem to develop in stages. In this paper I want to offer an account of how this development sometimes, and perhaps often, proceeds. Typically, when they begin their teaching careers, professors focus their concern primarily on their own role in the classroom (stage I: self). When they have mastered this role, at least to their own satisfaction, the focus of their concern shifts, first to their understanding of the subject matter they teach (stage 2: subject) and then to their students" ability to absorb what they have been taught (stage 3: student). With this last shift comes a more general shift of focus from teaching to learning, that begins, in stage 3, with a focus on helping their students become more absorbent (stage 3: student as receptive). Concern then typically shifts to helping students learn to use what they have been taught (stage 4: student as active) and then to helping them to learn on their own (stage 5: student as independent). My account of this development is based on the informal observation of a few cases and it suggests a framework for thinking about the development of professors as teachers. With further work, it might lead to theories that will describe what does happen and predict what will happen.

/pdf/how-professors-develop-as-teachers-5hdztx6bix.pdf

How professors develop as teachers

Thinking may be more than computing

Induction is the process by which we reason from the particular to the general. In this paper we use ideas from the theory of abstract machines and recursion theory to study this process. We focus on pure induction in which the conclusions “go beyond the information given” in the premises from which they are derived and on simple induction, which is rather a stark kind of induction that deals with computable predicates on the integers in rather straightforward ways. Our basic question is “What are the relationships between the kinds of abstract machinery we bring to bear on the job of doing induction and our ability to do that job well?” Our conclusions are as follows: (1) If we use only the abstract machinery of the digital computer in a computing center (which we assume to be capable of only evaluating totally computable functionals or functionals in Σ0 of the Arithmetic Hierarchy) then a single inductive procedure can only develop finitely many sound theories. (2) If we use only the abstract machinery of the mathematician (which we assume to be the machinery required to evaluate a functional in Σ2 of the Arithmetic Hierarchy) then we can develop inductive procedures that generate infinitely many sound theories but no procedure that is analytic in the sense that the theories it puts forth as sound will be sound in “all possible worlds”. (3) If we use the machinery of the trial and error machine (or the machinery required to evaluate functionals in Σ2 of the Arithmetic Hierarchy) then we can develop consistent procedures for induction but none that are complete in the sense that they generate all useful theories in a fairly natural sense of “useful”. (4) Finally, if we use the machinery of the hyper-trial-anderror machine (or the machinery required to evaluate functionals in Σ3 of the Arithmetic Hierarchy) then we can develop procedures that are both consistent and complete.

Induction, pure and simple

The indicativity of a type of catalog information (or catalog field) is intended as a measure of how well the information in the field conveys the contents of the document it represents. In the experiments reported here, indicativity is measured for several catalog fields by comparing users' evaluations of the relevance of documents on the basis of the information in a given field with their judgments on the basis of full text. A small but statistically significant increase in indicativity is found as the length of a catalog field (as measured by the number of different content-word stems) is increased. The title field is found to have an indicativity of 0.64; matching subjects, 0.67; subjects, 0.70; abstract, 0.73. Despite the relatively small gain in indicativity for the longer fields, users value the longer fields highly for determining relevance if one judges by the amount of time they spend on them. Support for the hypothesis that the indicativity measure does not fully reflect the value of the fields is developed. Thus, the question of the cost effectiveness of the longer fields is unresolved. Other aspects of catalog field utility studied under the Project Intrex equipments are also reported.

Catalog information and text as indicators of relevance

http://www.cs.bc.edu/%7Ekugel/Publications/Toward%20a%20theory%20of%20intelligence.pdf

Peter Kugel

Papers

How professors develop as teachers

Thinking may be more than computing

Induction, pure and simple

Catalog information and text as indicators of relevance

Toward a theory of intelligence