How human schematization and systematic errors take effect on sketch map formalizations

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

Partial scalar invariance and observed differences across gender in a reasoning test battery

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n

Comportamento, fluência verbal e ritmos circadianos em indivíduos com o Transtorno do Espectro do Autismo (TEA) antes e após o uso de melatonina

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Integrating Visual and Verbal Literacies in the Early Childhood Classroom

Young children have the strong desire to use all of the communicative tools their cultures and families offer them. They want to be able to do all of the things that the powerful people they admire can do, including talking, writing, drawing, using the computer, and otherwise creating and sharing ideas, memories, solutions, even jokes and feelings. Today, we live in a time when the communicative tools are changing rapidly, practically exploding before our eyes in terms of the formats and media available to us in complex combinations not seen before. What do these technological changes mean for how we can support children's development toward literacy? An integrated arts curriculum has long been favored by many educators, but today there are more reasons than ever to implement such a philosophy. From communications theory comes a new understanding of how modern technologies demand that children learn to "read" and "write" messages involving complex combinations and integrations of visual and verbal formats. From psychology come insights about intelligence being multiple not unitary, as well as ecological perception theory offering a well-accepted framework for analyzing the affordances and expressive possibilities of different media. From education come fresh approaches to integrated curriculum, including a philosophy and pedagogy from Reggio Emilia, Italy, that combines well with current thinking by North Americans. Altogether, we have many rationales and exciting strategies at hand for launching young children toward an integrated visual and verbal literacy that involves substance, challenge, and discipline, as well as innovation, creativity, and freedom.

Blinda personers icke-verbala kommunikation : studier om kroppsspråk, icke-verbal samtalsreglering och icke-verbala uttryck

The purpose of this thesis is to deepen the understanding of grown-up blind people’s non-verbal communication, including body expressions and paralinguistic (voice) expressions. More specifically, the thesis includes the following three studies: Blind people’s different forms of body expressions, blind people’s non-verbal conversation regulation and blind people’s experience of their own non-verbal expressions. The focus has been on the blind participants’ competence and on their subjective perspectives. I have also compared congenitally and adventitiously blind in all of the studies. The approach is mainly phenomenological and the qualitative empirical phenomenological psychological method is the primary methodological source of inspiration. Fourteen blind persons (and also some sigthed persons) participated. They have no other obvious disability than the blindness and their ages vary between 18 and 54. Data in the first two studies consisted of video recordings and data in the last study consisted of interviews. The overall results can be summarized in the following three points: 1. There are (almost) only similarities between the congenitally blind and adventitiously blind persons concerning their paralinguistic expressions. 2. There are mainly similarities between the two groups with respect to the occurrences of different body expressive forms. 3. There are also some differences between the groups. For example, the congenitally blind persons seem to have a limited ability to use the body in an abstract and symbolic way and they often mentioned that they have been told that their body expressions deviate from sighted people’s norms. But the persons in both groups also struggle to see themselves as unique persons who express themselves on the basis of their conditions and their previous experiences.

Neural basis of lexical-semantic processing and integration of symbolic gestures with words

Three studies investigated the relation between symbolic gestures and words, aiming at discover the neural basis and behavioural features of the lexical semantic processing and integration of the two communicative signals. The first study aimed at determining whether elaboration of communicative signals (symbolic gestures and words) is always accompanied by integration with each other and, if present, this integration can be considered in support of the existence of a same control mechanism. Experiment 1 aimed at determining whether and how gesture is integrated with word. Participants were administered with a semantic priming paradigm with a lexical decision task and pronounced a target word, which was preceded by a meaningful or meaningless prime gesture. When meaningful, the gesture could be either congruent or incongruent with word meaning. Duration of prime presentation (100, 250, 400 ms) randomly varied. Voice spectra, lip kinematics, and time to response were recorded and analyzed. Formant 1 of voice spectra, and mean velocity in lip kinematics increased when the prime was meaningful and congruent with the word, as compared to meaningless gesture. In other words, parameters of voice and movement were magnified by congruence, but this occurred only when prime duration was 250 ms. Time to response to meaningful gesture was shorter in the condition of congruence compared to incongruence. Experiment 2 aimed at determining whether the mechanism of integration of a prime word with a target word is similar to that of a prime gesture with a target word. Formant 1 of the target word increased when word prime was meaningful and congruent, as compared to meaningless congruent prime. Increase was, however, present for whatever prime word duration. In the second study, experiment 3 aimed at determining whether symbolic prime gesture comprehension makes use of motor simulation. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation was delivered to left primary motor cortex 100, 250, 500 ms after prime gesture presentation. Motor Evoked Potential of First Dorsal Interosseus increased when stimulation occurred 100 ms post-stimulus. Thus, gesture was understood within 100ms and integrated with the target word within 250 ms. Experiment 4 excluded any hand motor simulation in order to comprehend prime word. The effect of the prior presentation of a symbolic gesture on congruent target word processing was investigated in study 3. In experiment 5, symbolic gestures were presented as primes, followed by semantically congruent target word or pseudowords. In this case, lexical-semantic decision was accompanied by a motor simulation at 100ms after the onset of the verbal stimuli. Summing up, the same type of integration with a word was present for both prime gesture and word. It was probably subsequent to understanding of the signal, which used motor simulation for gesture and direct access to semantics for words. However, gesture and words could be understood at the same motor level through simulation if words were preceded by an adequate gestural context. Results are discussed in the prospective of a continuum between transitive actions and emblems, in parallelism with language; the grounded/symbolic content of the different signals evidences relation between sensorimotor and linguistic systems, which could interact at different levels.

Dimensão intercultural da linguagem não-verbal em contexto de sala de aula: um estudo com uma turma de espanhol

O presente relatório tem como principal objetivo desenvolver a competência da interculturalidade no âmbito da linguagem não-verbal de alunos portugueses, do 3º ciclo do ensino básico, com frequência à disciplina de Espanhol. A Linguagem não-verbal tem um contributo preponderante na comunicação e, quando há a pretensão de se conhecer outra cultura, é forçoso que se interpretem os diferentes sistemas onde cada indivíduo se integra e interage, porque comunicar eficazmente com o outro implica um conhecimento das estruturas simbólicas e dos códigos culturais intrínsecos, não só à cultura de um outro específico, mas também ao seu próprio contexto sociocultural, histórico-cultural e económico-cultural. Este trabalho faz apologia de um ensino intercultural que promova o diálogo entre culturas, sabendo-se de antemão que há representações que devem ser desconstruídas, bem como uma linguagem não-verbal específica que pode interferir na pragmática da interculturalidade. Trata-se de uma investigação-ação demarcada por dois momentos distintos: um primeiro estudo vocacionado para a consciencialização dos alunos de que a comunicação não-verbal é uma competência que se ensina e se aprende e um segundo estudo dedicado a aspetos culturais diferenciadores, entre Espanha e Portugal, na linguagem não-verbal , com enfoque nos gestos culturais e no tratamento do tempo. Os dados a analisar são: a transcrição de uma aula gravada, onde foram aplicados vários recursos audiovisuais e escritos consentâneos com as unidades programáticas, e as respostas a um questionário dirigido à turma de intervenção e a uma turma de nacionalidade espanhola que com ela colaborou. A implementação destas atividades/estratégias didáticas permitiu concluir que, por um lado, os alunos interpretam os diferentes códigos não -verbais à luz de uma perspetiva universal, por outro, há uma forte influência de estereótipos herdados e filtrados, a partir de diferentes marcos histórico-temporais. Este estudo sobre o não- verbal também se traduziu num alicerce bastante hábil para motivar à aprendizagem em geral e para enriquecer o conhecimento sobre a cultura do outro e a sua própria cultura, através da aquisição de códigos não- verbais comunicativo-funcionais.

On the role of Computational Logic in Data Science: representing, learning, reasoning, and explaining knowledge

In this thesis we discuss in what ways computational logic (CL) and data science (DS) can jointly contribute to the management of knowledge within the scope of modern and future artificial intelligence (AI), and how technically-sound software technologies can be realised along the path. An agent-oriented mindset permeates the whole discussion, by stressing pivotal role of autonomous agents in exploiting both means to reach higher degrees of intelligence. Accordingly, the goals of this thesis are manifold. First, we elicit the analogies and differences among CL and DS, hence looking for possible synergies and complementarities along 4 major knowledge-related dimensions, namely representation, acquisition (a.k.a. learning), inference (a.k.a. reasoning), and explanation. In this regard, we propose a conceptual framework through which bridges these disciplines can be described and designed. We then survey the current state of the art of AI technologies, w.r.t. their capability to support bridging CL and DS in practice. After detecting lacks and opportunities, we propose the notion of logic ecosystem as the new conceptual, architectural, and technological solution supporting the incremental integration of symbolic and sub-symbolic AI. Finally, we discuss how our notion of logic ecosys- tem can be reified into actual software technology and extended towards many DS-related directions.

Bio-QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Interpretable Biomedical Question Answering

Nowadays the idea of injecting world or domain-specific structured knowledge into pre-trained language models (PLMs) is becoming an increasingly popular approach for solving problems such as biases, hallucinations, huge architectural sizes, and explainability lack—critical for real-world natural language processing applications in sensitive fields like bioinformatics. One recent work that has garnered much attention in Neuro-symbolic AI is QA-GNN, an end-to-end model for multiple-choice open-domain question answering (MCOQA) tasks via interpretable text-graph reasoning. Unlike previous publications, QA-GNN mutually informs PLMs and graph neural networks (GNNs) on top of relevant facts retrieved from knowledge graphs (KGs). However, taking a more holistic view, existing PLM+KG contributions mainly consider commonsense benchmarks and ignore or shallowly analyze performances on biomedical datasets. This thesis start from a propose of a deep investigation of QA-GNN for biomedicine, comparing existing or brand-new PLMs, KGs, edge-aware GNNs, preprocessing techniques, and initialization strategies. By combining the insights emerged in DISI's research, we introduce Bio-QA-GNN that include a KG. Working with this part has led to an improvement in state-of-the-art of MCOQA model on biomedical/clinical text, largely outperforming the original one (+3.63\% accuracy on MedQA). Our findings also contribute to a better understanding of the explanation degree allowed by joint text-graph reasoning architectures and their effectiveness on different medical subjects and reasoning types. Codes, models, datasets, and demos to reproduce the results are freely available at: \url{https://github.com/disi-unibo-nlp/bio-qagnn}.

O corpo e seus textos : o estetico, o politico e o pedagogico na dança

Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Faculdade de Educação Física

Dança em cadeira de rodas : os sentidos da dança como linguagem não-verbal

Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Faculdade de Educação Física

Inteligência artificial aplicada à Zootecnia

Os sistemas biológicos são surpreendentemente flexíveis pra processar informação proveniente do mundo real. Alguns organismos biológicos possuem uma unidade central de processamento denominada de cérebro. O cérebro humano consiste de 10(11) neurônios e realiza processamento inteligente de forma exata e subjetiva. A Inteligência Artificial (IA) tenta trazer para o mundo da computação digital a heurística dos sistemas biológicos de várias maneiras, mas, ainda resta muito para que isso seja concretizado. No entanto, algumas técnicas como Redes neurais artificiais e lógica fuzzy tem mostrado efetivas para resolver problemas complexos usando a heurística dos sistemas biológicos. Recentemente o numero de aplicação dos métodos da IA em sistemas zootécnicos tem aumentado significativamente. O objetivo deste artigo é explicar os princípios básicos da resolução de problemas usando heurística e demonstrar como a IA pode ser aplicada para construir um sistema especialista para resolver problemas na área de zootecnia.

Estudo longitudinal da compreensão verbal de crianças usuárias de implante coclear

OBJETIVO: analisar a compreensão verbal de crianças surdas usuárias de implante coclear (IC) por meio de um estudo longitudinal. MÉTODOS: os participantes foram nove crianças surdas usuárias de IC. A idade cronológica das crianças variou entre quatro e oito anos e o tempo de uso do IC foi, em média, 1 ano e 6 meses na 1ª avaliação, 3 anos e 7 meses na 2ª avaliação e 4 anos e 9 meses na 3ª avaliação. As crianças foram avaliadas longitudinalmente por meio da Escala de Compreensão Verbal da RDLS. Os materiais usados foram brinquedos, objetos e figuras. Os dados foram analisados qualitativa e quantitativamente. RESULTADOS: os resultados mostraram que as crianças implantadas obtiveram uma evolução estatisticamente significante em relação às habilidades de linguagem receptiva. CONCLUSÃO: o estudo comprova a efetividade do IC para o desenvolvimento da compreensão verbal.

Efeitos da exposição a estímulos aversivos e apetitivos incontroláveis sobre o comportamento verbal em contingências de reforço positivo

Foram analisados efeitos de diferentes histórias de incontrolabilidade por perda ou ganho de pontos sobre o desempenho posterior de participantes humanos na construção de frases. Inicialmente, os participantes podiam ganhar ou perder pontos independentemente de qualquer característica da frase construída. Posteriormente, recebiam pontos por construir frases iniciadas apenas pelo pronome "ele". Os resultados mostram que a exposição à incontrolabilidade pode dificultar condições posteriores de novas aprendizagens sob reforçamento positivo. Interessantemente, essas dificuldades foram menos acentuadas e, em certos casos, até mesmo superadas, no caso de uma história de exposição a ganhos incontroláveis de pontos. Em contrapartida, no caso de uma história de perdas incontroláveis de pontos, aprendizagens subsequentes sob reforço positivo tenderam a ser prejudicadas. Esses resultados contribuem para os estudos de incontrolabilidade e desamparo aprendido, em particular por apresentar alternativas metodológicas passíveis de aplicação a respostas verbais em humanos.

Improving Critical Thinking and Clinical Reasoning With a Continuing Education Course

Background: Continuing education courses related to critical thinking and clinical reasoning are needed to improve the accuracy of diagnosis. Method: This study evaluated a 4-day, 16-hour continuing education course conducted in Brazil. Thirty-nine nurses completed a pretest and a posttest consisting of two written case studies designed to measure the accuracy of nurses` diagnoses. Results: There were significant differences in accuracy from pretest to posttest for case 1 (p = .008) and case 2 (p = .042) and overall (p = .001). Conclusion: Continuing education courses should be implemented to improve the accuracy of nurses` diagnoses. J Contin Educ Nurs 2009;40(3):121-127.