This paper identifies ways in which conceptual, methodological and technical developments in e-research can contribute to solutions of key questions in learning science research and, in particular, design-based research (DBR). The paper focuses on DBR issues in three major areas: methodology, research process, and dissemination. By mapping DBR issues to the conceptual and technological features...

Many natural language systems either focus on specific domains or sacrifice deep representations for broad coverage. We propose that a combination of a domain independent grammar and semantics along with top-down domain-relevant narrative guidance can achieve both breadth and depth. We investigate one source of top-down guidance in Qualitative Process (QP) theory, a general causal semantics for...

This paper studies the following problem: given (1) a query and (2) a set of sensitive records, find the subset of records “accessed” by the query. The notion of a query accessing a single record is adopted from prior work. There are several scenarios where the number of sensitive records is large (in the millions.) The novel challenge addressed in this work is to develop a general-purpose solu...

Evolutionary algorithms has been recently used for prototype selection showing good results. An important problem that we can find is the scaling up problem that appears evaluating the Evolutionary Prototype Selection algorithms in large size data sets. In this paper, we offer a proposal to solve the drawbacks introduced by the evaluation of large size data sets using evolutionary prototype sel...

The acceleration of sanitation delivery towards meeting the South African Government's target of completely eradicating the existing backlogs by 2010, has led to a surge of activities. As part of its strategy for ensuring that basic sanitation is provided, the policy has recommended that a ventilated improved pit latrine (VIP) is considered as the basic minimum requirement in the form of a sani...

Understanding Development and Applying the Lessons 3 Learning lessons about development and development assistance 5 Goals and approaches to development: The evolution in thinking 7 A strategy for development: Building the investment climate and empowering people 8 How we have applied lessons on development effectiveness 10 Lesson 1: Allocating aid well 10 Lesson 2: Working to improve policies ...

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with parameter uncertainty, under the robust MDP paradigm. Previous studies showed that robust MDPs, based on a minimax approach to handle uncertainty, can be solved using dynamic programming for small to medium sized problems. However, due to the “curse of dimensionality”, MDPs that model real-life problems are typically prohibitively la...

The 3C model was rst developed in [Trac 89] and reviewed at last year's workshop [SMTR 90]. This position paper responds to that review, and in doing so outlines a framework for thinking about 3C aspects of an architecture of components. Such components can be said to be normalized in that they capture one concern of the architecture in their content.

Scale is a concept used to manage information about the real world and to summarize observations about complex phenomena that vary within space, time, or other dimensions. The ordering of phenomena according to scale enables human beings to store, recall, and analyze information about features that would otherwise be impossible to evaluate. The concept is essential to researchers of agricultura...

Machine learning programs need to scale up to very large data sets for several reasons, including increasing accuracy and discovering infrequent special cases. Current inductive learners perform well with hundreds or thousands of training examples, but in some cases, up to a million or more examples may be necessary to learn important special cases with conndence. These tasks are infeasible for...