In China, a growing awareness that many areas have been left behind during an era characterized by market reform has raised concerns about the impact of community disadvantage on schooling. In this paper, I investigate whether villages exert distinct influences on student achievement. Building on these results, I explore the relationship between student achievement and resources present in the ...

Rapid prototyping is an area in which cognitive modeling is not frequently used. We examine some of the reasons behind this and argue that cognitive modeling could play an important role. Specifically we argue that usability testing could be improved by testing simulated users. We review the benefits that this methodology could offer and discuss one approach to building a simulated user using A...

In Quantum Hall effect the ground state wave function at ν = 1 is the building block of all other states at different filling factors. It is developed by the entanglement of two spinors forming a singlet state. The inherent frustration visualized by the non-abelian matrix Berry phase is responsible for the quantum pumped charge to flow in the Hall surface. The Physics behind the Quantum Hall st...

This paper deals with the problem of classifying signals. The new method for building so called local classifiers and local features is presented. The method is a combination of the lifting scheme and the support vector machines. Its main aim is to produce effective and yet comprehensible classifiers that would help in understanding processes hidden behind classified signals. To illustrate the ...

Vision and sensor systems and an efficient motion system are fundamental components in the process of designing and building autonomous robots. This paper describes the technologies behind a “chess robot”, built to collect pawns, queens and kings and to separate them into on specified squares. The robot, designed to participate to the International competition of robotics “Eurobot 2011”, is abl...

Sigma-Delta modulation techniques have been applied to narrow-band passband signals [Jantzi93]. Recent technology improvement has allowed conversion of GSM channels [Ong97] and DECT channels[Bazarjiani97]. In this report, the main concept behind BandPass Sigma-Delta conversion is briefly explained together with its advantages and applications. The architecture choices for this design are then d...

In games research, Go is considered the classical board game that is most resistant to current AI techniques. Large-scale knowledge engineering has been considered indispensable for building state of the art programs, even for subproblems such as Life and Death, or tsume-Go. This paper describes the technologies behind TSUMEGO EXPLORER, a high-performance tsume-Go search engine for enclosed pro...

Fundamental assumptions behind qualitative modeling are critically considered, and some inherent problems in that modeling approach are outlined. The problems outlined are due to the assumption that a suu-cient set of symbols representing the fundamental features of the physical world exists. That assumption causes serious problems when modeling continuous systems. An alternative for intelligen...

We present work in the spatio-temporal-thematic analysis of citizen-sensor observations pertaining to real-world events. Using Twitter as a platform for obtaining crowd-sourced observations, we explore the interplay between these 3 dimensions in extracting insightful summaries of social perceptions behind events. We present our experiences in building a web mashup application, Twitris[1] that e...