A number of technical and policy issues need to be addressed and solved before multimedia applications can take advantage of the Internet. We currently have the resources to enable, in a very limited way, multimedia. communication and collaboration among groups, and to manage these interactions. Scaling these groups to hundreds of students will necessitate management tools for handling the vari...

The development of modern technology and the Internet has enabled the explosive growth of distance learning. distance learning is a process that is increasingly present in the world. This is the field of education focused on educating students who are not physically present in the traditional classrooms or student's campus. described as a process where the source of information is separated fro...

This thesis explores the use of Bayesian distance metric learning (Bayes-dml) for the task of speaker verification using the i-vector feature representation. We propose a framework that explores the distance constraints between i-vector pairs from the same speaker and different speakers. With an approximation of the distance metric as a weighted covariance matrix of the top eigenvectors from th...

Two questions regarding the non-local nature of long-distance agreement in consonantal harmony patterns (Hansson 2001, Rose and Walker 2004) are addressed: (1) How can such patterns be learned from surface forms alone? (2) How can we understand a a major feature of the typology—the absence of blocking effects? It is shown that a learner which generalizes only by making distinctions with respect...

It is a pleasure to be with you. I begin by congratulating the Open University of Hong Kong in general, and CRIDALA in particular, for the tremendous contribution they are making to the practice of open and distance learning around the world. I have been privileged to serve on the Council of OUHK on two occasions. The first was in the late 1980s. It was then called the Hong Kong Open Learning I...

  Background : Studies have shown a gradual decline in empathy of medical trainees with increasing years of education. Methods to augment empathy show some promise, but the most effective methods are both expensive and time consuming.To assess effectiveness of communication skills training program as a distant learning method in improving empathy.   Method s: Fourteen first year residents of ps...

Can distance learning transform higher education, saving money and improving student learning? Modern technologies allow instructors to design distance learning environments with all the features of traditional courses and more. What findings from research on instruction can help course designers make effective choices? I argue that students who take an autonomous stance towards instruction ten...