Bell Educational Trust

Ubiquitous wearable and mobile devices provide access to a diverse set of data. However, the mobility demand for our devices naturally imposes constraints on their computational and communication capabilities. A solution is to locally learn knowledge from data captured by ubiquitous devices, rather than to store and transmit the data in its original form. In this paper, we develop a federated learning framework, called Centaur, to incorporate on-device data selection at the edge, which allows partition-based training of a deep neural nets through collaboration between constrained and resourceful devices within the multidevice ecosystem of the same user. We benchmark on five neural net architecture and six datasets that include image data and wearable sensor time series. On average, Centaur achieves ~19% higher classification accuracy and ~58% lower federated training latency, compared to the baseline. We also evaluate Centaur when dealing with imbalanced non-iid data, client participation heterogeneity, and different mobility patterns. To encourage further research in this area, we release our code at github.com/nokia-bell-labs/data-centric-federated-learning.

Our perceptions of public spaces are central for our experience in the city. Understanding which factors shape this perception informs both urban planners, that aim at improving city life, as well as computational models that help us navigate in urban spaces. To understand cities at scale, crowdsourcing games have been employed successfully to evaluate citizens' opinions about cities and urban scenes. By analyzing human perceptions from residents of a mid-sized Brazilian city, this work brings three novel contributions. First, we consider theories from urban design to explore through crowdsourcing which high and low level features in an urban space are linked to perceptions of safety and pleasantness. Secondly, this paper leverages theory from urban sociology and anthropology to show how the sociodemographic profile of the citizens significantly mediate their perception of safeness and pleasantness of places. Finally, we show that features of the urban form proposed by urbanists can be combined with sociodemographics to improve the accuracy of machine learning models that predict which scene a person will find more safe or pleasant. This last result paves the road for more personalized recommendations in cold-start scenarios.

Although an LTO may have dedicated marketing and sales staff, everyone has a part to play in marketing and selling an LTO’s services. Furthermore, in order to manage an LTO successfully, it is important to have an understanding of what marketing involves, and how essential effective marketing is to achieving the goals of the LTO. Some people have a virtually intuitive entrepreneurial flair, which they deploy with great success. Others, however, are less blessed, and less successful, as is demonstrated in Vignettes 4.1 and 4.2 below and on p. 80. This chapter aims to provide a basis in marketing and sales so as to help avoid the ineptness illustrated in these vignettes, and to build on the successful marketing practice exemplified in Vignette 4.3 on p. 80.

A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

In this chapter, academic management will be considered from the viewpoint of two complementary roles: that of CEO or leader and manager of the organization, its people and resources, and that of the leading professional, focusing on the educational and pedagogical core of the LTO’s language teaching service. In fact, academic management faces in two directions: towards students and teachers on the one hand, and, on the other, towards the organizational systems and processes which make effective provision of teaching and learning possible. Such a dual viewpoint means that the academic manager is often called upon to reconcile two sets of interests: those concerned with the commercial success of the LTO, and those prioritizing its responsibilities as an educational provider.

Several ways in which texts are used in ‘communicative’ EFL classrooms are considered, and it is argued that in important ways they fail to offer the student the possibility of personal involvement of the sort that would be normal with a text in the native language. Suggestions are made for using texts in a way which encourages such involvement and is thus more truly communicative. The use of texts is probably one of the defining characteristics of classroom language teaching. In much current ‘communicative’ teaching, however, there seems to us a danger that an over-restricted view is taken both of the types of text that may be used, and of the exploitation activities that may be based on them. Three conventional ‘communicative’ uses of texts will serve to illustrate our concern.

Reviews Get access Episodes intESP John Swales (ed.) Pergamon 1985 217pp. ISBN 0 08 029428 6 £9.95 Andy Hopkins Andy Hopkins Bell Educational TrustCambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ELT Journal, Volume 40, Issue 3, July 1986, Pages 250–252, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/40.3.250 Published: 01 July 1986 Article history Received: 01 November 1985 Published: 01 July 1986