Alexa,Siri, Cortana,and More: An Introduction to Voice Assistants

Voice assistants are software agents that can interpret human speech and respond via synthesized voices. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Assistant are the most popular voice assistants and are embedded in smartphones or dedicated home speakers. Users can ask their assistants questions, control home automation devices and media playback via voice, and manage other basic tasks such as email, to-do lists, and calendars with verbal commands. This column will explore the basic workings and common features of today’s voice assistants. It will also discuss some of the privacy and security issues inherent to voice assistants and some potential future uses for these devices. As voice assistants become more widely used, librarians will want to be familiar with their operation and perhaps consider them as a means to deliver library services and materials.     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.     

Scaling up Content Analysis

ABSTRACT

Employing a number of different standalone programs is a prevalent approach among communication scholars who use computational methods to analyze media content. For instance, a researcher might use a specific program or a paid service to scrape some content from the Web, then use another program to process the resulting data, and finally conduct statistical analysis or produce some visualizations in yet another program. This makes it hard to build reproducible workflows, and even harder to build on the work of earlier studies. To improve this situation, we propose and discuss four criteria that a framework for automated content analysis should fulfill: scalability, free and open source, adaptability, and accessibility via multiple interfaces. We also describe how to put these considerations into practice, discuss their feasibility, and point toward future developments.     

Critical communication pedagogy and service learning in a mixed-method communication research course

ABSTRACT

Course: Mixed-Method Communication Research Methods

Objective: The purpose of this semester-long activity is to provide students with opportunities to cultivate mixed-method communication research skills through a social justice-informed service-learning format. Completing this course, students will be able to: recognize the unique strengths of quantitative and qualitative research methods; locate, evaluate, and utilize scholarly literature for a literature review; conduct an original research project using quantitative and qualitative research methods to gather and analyze data; and raise self and community awareness about a social issue through collaboration with a community organization.     

Along the Write Lines: a case study exploring activities to enable creative writing in a secondary English classroom.

This article arises from a four week study of a class of 14‐15 year old students. The study explored students’ perception of themselves as writers and the effects of a variety of teaching and learning strategies on their creative writing responses. The aim of the project was to enhance the students’ creative writing, whilst ascertaining whether there were particular activities or types of writing that would lead to students perceiving more satisfactory outcomes in their writing. It answers the research question: What do I observe, and what do my students say, about the experience of different classroom based creative writing tasks?     

Rapid mask prototyping for microfluidics

With the rise of microfluidics for the past decade, there has come an ever more pressing need for a low-cost and rapid prototyping technology, especially for research and education purposes. In this article, we report a rapid prototyping process of chromed masks for various microfluidic applications. The process takes place out of a clean room, uses a commercially available video-projector, and can be completed in less than half an hour. We quantify the ranges of fields of view and of resolutions accessible through this video-projection system and report the fabrication of critical microfluidic components (junctions, straight channels, and curved channels). To exemplify the process, three common devices are produced using this method: a droplet generation device, a gradient generation device, and a neuro-engineering oriented device. The neuro-engineering oriented device is a compartmentalized microfluidic chip, and therefore, required the production and the precise alignment of two different masks.