Use Of Contextual Information Research Articles

From the Editors

Dear Colleagues, The transition of the International Reading Association to the International Literacy Association has been the result of an evolution of ideas and understandings about how we define the field. For some, the adoption of literacy in the association's name was merely the formalization of a de facto identity already held by many. Reading has not been replaced, but rather subsumed by a broader and more comprehensive descriptor, one that better captures the nature of the research happening in the field in the 21st century. With reverence to the past, we have ventured into our next era, meshing old with new and borrowing from knowledge generated from a variety of disciplines. The five peer-reviewed articles featured in this issue of Reading Research Quarterly could be viewed similarly, presenting cutting-edge research that builds on the past, examines new approaches, and has implications for practice and additional research that might transfer across populations. McGee and her colleagues bridge old and new in their investigation of young children's actions and strategic use of sources of information at a point of difficulty in reading. In the study, students’ actions at point of difficulty for Reading Recovery students reading at grade level at the end of the year are compared with those of Reading Recovery students who were not yet on grade level. The researchers found that all readers increased their use of graphic information, using it both alone and in conjunction with contextual information, and decreased their use of contextual information alone. More importantly, the researchers identified two new categories of error episodes: single action and action chain. Students who were at grade level in reading at the end of the year increased their use of action chains, whereas students below grade level did not. Tighe and Schatschneider make a new and considerable contribution to the research on morphological awareness and the interplay between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Their investigation is particularly compelling because it ventures into new territory on several fronts. Never before has the factor structure of morphological awareness in Adult Basic Education (ABE) students been explored, nor have ABE students ever been the subjects of research differentiating morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Results from the study, generated through confirmatory factor analyses, support a multidimensional view of morphological awareness and provide the basis for a preliminary framework for understanding the construct and its interaction with vocabulary knowledge. Do emergent bilingual children borrow syntactic skills from their native language to understand a new one? In a fascinating study of Chinese–English learners in grades 1–3, Siu and Ho consider the import and impact of syntactic skills in three applications. A rigorous research design and analysis of the data yielded significant findings related to syntactical knowledge, many of which have cross-cultural implications for literacy instruction. In one particularly interesting component of the study, Siu and Ho examine cross-language transfer to determine whether syntactic knowledge in one language supports comprehension in another—putting to the test Cummins's hypothesis asserting that underlying abilities in literacy transfer across languages. Academic vocabulary has long been an area of interest for literacy researchers. Ucceli and her colleagues move the research in a new direction, beyond this single content-specific concept, to consider the impact of the more comprehensive construct of academic language. Conceptualized as CALS (core academic-language skills), this new expanded construct encompasses a battery of connected skills thought to support reading comprehension across content areas. Children in grades 4–6 were given the CALS-I, a robust and innovative instrument. Researchers looked for variability in students’ CALS-I scores by grade, socioeconomic status, and English proficiency. Scores on assessments of academic vocabulary and word-reading fluency, along with social and demographic factors, served as covariates. This research yielded significant results relevant to the field and future studies, including the finding that CALS are independent predictors of reading comprehension even when controlling for academic vocabulary, fluency, and sociodemographic factors. “So, you can write me a beautiful two-page paper, but I'm only grading the first 26 lines,” said a teacher attempting to teach her students to adhere to the 26-line maximum that they would encounter in their state's new mandated assessment. Comments such as these are considered in Davis and Willson's insightful and thought-provoking case study examining test-centric literacy practices during a testing transition in the State of Texas. Davis and Willson provide observations and commentary from the teachers, who have been “conscripted into participation in a complex data economy.” Scrupulous coding procedures and practices led the authors to suggest that transfer avoidance, managerial partitioning, and overreaching inferences are largely responsible for the persistence of test-centric practices. Smith, A.B., & Jones, X.Y. (2015). Article title. Journal Name. Advance online publication. doi:123456789 Linda B. Gambrell Susan B. Neuman

Stress, Coping, and Work Engagement within the Specific Job Context: Comment on Kaiseler, et al. (2014)

This work discusses the use of tools that make use of context information. Comments are based on a previous study that looked into the relationship between stressors, coping, and work engagement (Kaiseler, Queirós, Passos & Sousa, 2014). A set of propositions are provided for research that will allow the design of contextualized stress interventions in specific job settings.

Context-based service for intelligent public transportation systems

Nowadays, cities become ever more populated, starting to represent an enormous source of pollution, congestion and overcrowding. Technology is evolving at a very fast speed; most of the people have a smartphone and are using it on a daily basis. In this paper, we describe a service designed to assist citizens take informed decisions regarding the means of transportation, to make them more aware of public transportation alternatives. We propose techniques to deal with mobility of people (monitor individual and group travelling conditions), and propose alternative means of transportation considering the active use of context information. The idea is to use the mobile apps capable of understanding the user's environment and reacting accordingly.

Using contextual co-presence to strengthen Zero-Interaction Authentication: Design, integration and usability

Zero-Interaction Authentication (ZIA) refers to approaches that authenticate a user to a verifier (terminal) without any user interaction. Currently deployed ZIA solutions are predominantly based on the terminal detecting the proximity of the user’s personal device, or a security token, by running an authentication protocol over a short-range wireless communication channel. Unfortunately, this simple approach is highly vulnerable to low-cost and practical relay attacks which completely offset the usability benefits of ZIA. The use of contextual information, gathered via on-board sensors, to detect the co-presence of the user and the verifier is a recently proposed mechanism to resist relay attacks.In this paper, we systematically investigate the performance of different sensor modalities for co-presence detection with respect to a standard Dolev–Yao adversary. First, using a common data collection framework run in realistic everyday settings, we compare the performance of four commonly available sensor modalities (WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and audio) in resisting ZIA relay attacks, and find that WiFi is better than the rest. Second, we show that, compared to any single modality, fusing multiple modalities improves resilience against ZIA relay attacks while retaining a high level of usability. Third, we motivate the need for a stronger adversarial model to characterize an attacker who can compromise the integrity of context sensing itself. We show that in the presence of such a powerful attacker, each individual sensor modality offers very low security. Positively, the use of multiple sensor modalities improves security against such an attacker if the attacker cannot compromise multiple modalities simultaneously.Finally, based on our analysis, we integrate our contextual co-presence detection system with a real-world ZIA application, BlueProximity [1], so as to enhance its security against relay attacks. We describe the design of the BlueProximity++ application and present results from a small-scale user study that evaluated its effectiveness.

The effect of paranoia on the judging of harmful events

Objective. Social psychological research has indicated that intentional harm may be perceived as causing greater damage than unintentional harm. It has been proposed that this harm magnification is a consequence of a need to blame, condemn and punish (“blame motivation”). The objective of the current study was to replicate these findings and to test whether such judgements about harmful events are associated with the level of an individual's paranoia.Method. Three hundred adults read a scenario in which a head of a company causes a reduction in employees' pay. Participants were randomly allocated to versions in which the outcome of the executive's action was intended or unintended. Ratings were made of intent, harm caused and blame motivation. Participants also completed assessments of paranoia and anxiety.Results. Intentional harm was judged as causing worse outcomes than unintentional harm, explaining a small amount of variance in harm scores. Paranoia moderated judgements of intent and blame motivation but not the degree of harm caused; high paranoia, relative to low paranoia, was associated with the unintentional scenario generating higher attributions of intent and blame and the intentional scenario generating lower attributions of intent and blame. Anxiety levels did not affect judgements.Conclusions. The study supports the theory that there is a reasoning bias that magnifies the consequences of intentional harm relative to unintentional harm. In the initial judgement about intent, people with paranoia are less accurate in their use of contextual information.

A Semantic-Based Approach for Context-Aware Service Discovery

The increasingly growing number of services available on the web, along with advances in information and communication technologies, has given rise to the development of new approaches for service discovery, devoted to retrieve services advertised by a service provider and satisfying users requests. Traditional service discovery attempts are devoted to enable a matching between advertised service names and the keywords of the user request. Some of these methods use also semantic approaches, however an improvement in terms of precision has been obtained with the adoption of a semantic-based approach, together with the use of contextual information. This research aims at facing the problem of discovering context-aware services by proposing a semantic similarity model for enabling the matching between advertisements and requests personalized according to the context information (such as user position, user preferences, available resources). The method proposed has been validated by performing a set of experiments for evaluating the recall and precision of the method.

Socio-Sonic: An ethnographic methodology for electroacoustic composition

This paper outlines a way forward for an anthropologically inclined electroacoustic music. Considering the similarities in methodological approaches between the fields of ethnography and soundscape composition, this paper proposes to further the use of contextual information when making compositional decisions with sound materials derived from field recordings: a socio-sonic methodology. To begin the discussion, theoretical readings of sound in context are presented. Parallels are highlighted between the practices of ethnographic study and soundscape composition, illustrated with the work of Steve Feld and the World Soundscape Project. A brief consideration of the soundscape–acousmatic continuum with reference to works by Luc Ferrari, Denis Smalley and Hildegard Westerkamp is followed by a combined summation of ethnographic, soundscape and acousmatic approaches to outline a socio-sonic methodology for composition. Examples of work by Peter Cusack, Justin Bennett and Bob Ostertag are discussed alongside my own workManifest– a fixed-media composition based on field recordings and interviews made at political protests in Barcelona. The potential is for a music considered equally for its sonic and socio-political properties.

Using Semantic Web for Mobile Services Personalization

Personalization is a desired functionality for applications within mobile environments. One approach to personalization of mobile services is by the use of contextual information. In this paper we describe an architecture for this purpose where we utilize semantic web technologies representing person-profiles. The developed ontology that covers personal information and food information is based on personas and scenarios from the food shopping domain. The profile covers three levels of information; personal information, long term information and temporary interests. The proposed concept of personalization is illustrated in two scenarios. The personalization concept illustrated in the form of videos showing the scenarios at work is evaluated by using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to identify variables for investigations of mechanisms important for understanding interest in and acceptance of this type of solution.

Contextual Mobile Apps: Avoiding the "Big Brother" Fallout

As smartphones and tablets become more integrated into our lives, mobile applications provide an unprecedented opportunity to engage users. One of the more dramatic shifts with mobile apps is the use of contextual information to make them more relevant to the user. This use of contextual information creates unique opportunities as well as risks for government agencies, with the main question being how much user information the government can gather without being perceived as George Orwell's "Big Brother".

Quality of Context: models and applications for context-aware systems in pervasive environments

AbstractLimitations of sensors and the situation of a specific measurement can affect the quality of context information that is implicitly collected in pervasive environments. The lack of information about Quality of Context (QoC) can result in degraded performance of context-aware systems in pervasive environments, without knowing the actual problem. Context-aware systems can take advantage of QoC if context producers also provide QoC metrics along with context information. In this paper, we analyze QoC and present our model for processing QoC metrics. We evaluate QoC metrics considering the capabilities of sensors, circumstances of specific measurement, requirements of context consumer, and the situation of the use of context information. We also illustrate how QoC metrics can facilitate in enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of different tasks performed by a system to provide context information in pervasive environments.

A spontaneous social network based on mobile devices

Social networks provide a growing mean of communication that still preserves our human social interaction. Due to the widespread use of mobile devices, and the vast development of applications targeting these platforms, people tend to use their smartphone or tablet as the main way to make that interaction. Furthermore, applications developed to these devices are fostering the use of contextual information, such as the location of the user. In this way, this article describes a model for a spontaneous social network targeted at mobile devices. In our proposal, named Mingle, the social network is spontaneous, i.e., involves only people who are physically present in a specific location. Besides presenting the model, we show a developed prototype using Android-based devices. We evaluated Mingle employing two strategies. The first evaluation consisted of a performance evaluation of the server. The second assessment focused on usability, regarding effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of users in using Mingle. The results were encouraging and show the potential of deploying Mingle in real situations.

Detecting DDoS Attacks Using Conditional Random Fields

In recent years, the detection technology based on machine learning algorithms for distributed denialof-service (DDoS) attacks has made great progress. However, previous methods fail to make full use of contextual information and rely heavily on the probability distribution of the input data. To avoid those pitfalls, the Conditional Random Fields (CRF) model is introduced in this paper for DDoS attacks detection. Firstly, the CRF is trained to build the classification model for DDoS attacks based on three groups of statistical features including conditional entropy, flag ratios and protocol ratios. Then, the trained CRF models are used to identify the attacks with model inference. Experimental results demonstrate that, the proposed approach can accurately distinguish between attacks and normal network traffic, and is more robust to resist disturbance of background traffic than its counterparts.

Temporal and visual source memory deficits among ecstasy/polydrug users

We wished to investigate whether source memory judgements are adversely affected by recreational illicit drug use. Sixty-two ecstasy/polydrug users and 75 non ecstasy users completed a source memory task, in which they tried to determine whether or not a word had been previously presented and if so, attempted to recall the format, location and temporal position in which the word had occurred. While not differing in terms of the number of hits and false positive responses, ecstasy/polydrug users adopted a more liberal decision criterion when judging if a word had been presented previously. With regard to source memory, users were less able to determine the format in which words had been presented (upper versus lower case). Female users did worse than female nonusers in determining which list (first or second) a word was from. Unexpectedly, the current frequency of cocaine use was negative associated with list and case source memory performance. Given the role that source memory plays in everyday cognition, those who use cocaine more frequently might have more difficulty in everyday tasks such as recalling the sources of crucial information or making use of contextual information as an aid to learning.

ViCoMo: visual context modeling for scene understanding in video surveillance

The use of contextual information can significantly aid scene understanding of surveillance video. Just detecting people and tracking them does not provide sufficient information to detect situations that require operator attention. We propose a proof-of-concept system that uses several sources of contextual information to improve scene understanding in surveillance video. The focus is on two scenarios that represent common video surveillance situations, parking lot surveillance and crowd monitoring. In the first scenario, a pan–tilt–zoom (PTZ) camera tracking system is developed for parking lot surveillance. Context is provided by the traffic sign recognition system to localize regular and handicapped parking spot signs as well as license plates. The PTZ algorithm has the ability to selectively detect and track persons based on scene context. In the second scenario, a group analysis algorithm is introduced to detect groups of people. Contextual information is provided by traffic sign recognition and region labeling algorithms and exploited for behavior understanding. In both scenarios, decision engines are used to interpret and classify the output of the subsystems and if necessary raise operator alerts. We show that using context information enables the automated analysis of complicated scenarios that were previously not possible using conventional moving object classification techniques.

Getting to Grips with Idioms: Greek Learners vis-à-vis English Idioms

The present paper aims at examining Greek learners’ comprehension and production errors in L2 idiom learning. To this end, four exercises – two focusing on receptive skills and two on productive ones – were distributed to 50 Greek native speakers of advanced English Proficiency in order to assess which idiom-type(s) and exercises cause the biggest problem to Greek learners. It was shown that L2 learners made more errors in idiom-production exercises than in comprehension-based ones and that the biggest error percentage was found in idioms with both structural and semantic dissimilarity to L1 idioms. These findings suggest that Greek learners of English tend to understand the meaning of L2 idiomatic expressions through the use of contextual information and conceptual knowledge but are unable to use them in their own language production, thus making structural, grammatical and contextual mistakes.

An experimental investigation on the effects of context on source code identifiers splitting and expansion

Recent and past studies indicate that source code lexicon plays an important role in program comprehension. Developers often compose source code identifiers with abbreviated words and acronyms, and do not always use consistent mechanisms and explicit separators when creating identifiers. Such choices and inconsistencies impede the work of developers that must understand identifiers by decomposing them into their component terms, and mapping them onto dictionary, application or domain words. When software documentation is scarce, outdated or simply not available, developers must therefore use the available contextual information to understand the source code. This paper aims at investigating how developers split and expand source code identifiers, and, specifically, the extent to which different kinds of contextual information could support such a task. In particular, we consider (i) an internal context consisting of the content of functions and source code files in which the identifiers are located, and (ii) an external context involving external documentation. We conducted a family of two experiments with 63 participants, including bachelor, master, Ph.D. students, and post-docs. We randomly sampled a set of 50 identifiers from a corpus of open source C programs and we asked participants to split and expand them with the availability (or not) of internal and external contexts. We report evidence on the usefulness of contextual information for identifier splitting and acronym/abbreviation expansion. We observe that the source code files are more helpful than just looking at function source code, and that the application-level contextual information does not help any further. The availability of external sources of information only helps in some circumstances. Also, in some cases, we observe that participants better expanded acronyms than abbreviations, although in most cases both exhibit the same level of accuracy. Finally, results indicated that the knowledge of English plays a significant effect in identifier splitting/expansion. The obtained results confirm the conjecture that contextual information is useful in program comprehension, including when developers split and expand identifiers to understand them. We hypothesize that the integration of identifier splitting and expansion tools with IDE could help to improve developers' productivity.

Disconnecting Neural Networks May Improve Psychopathology

Cognitive control, the use of contextual information to guide behavior in a flexible and goal-directed manner, depends on suppression of the default

Closing the Gate in the Limbic Striatum: Prefrontal Suppression of Hippocampal and Thalamic Inputs

Many brain circuits control behavior by integrating information arising from separate inputs onto a common target neuron. Neurons in the ventral striatum (VS) receive converging excitatory afferents from the prefrontal cortex (PFC), hippocampus (HP), and thalamus, among other structures, and the integration of these inputs is critical for goal-directed behaviors. Although HP inputs have been described as gating PFC throughput in the VS, recent data reveal that the VS desynchronizes from the HP during epochs of burst-like PFC activity related to decision making. It is therefore possible that PFC inputs locally attenuate responses to other glutamatergic inputs to the VS. Here, we found that delivering trains of stimuli to the PFC suppresses HP- and thalamus-evoked synaptic responses in the VS, in part through activation of inhibitory processes. This interaction may enable the PFC to exert influence on basal ganglia loops during decision-making instances with minimal disturbance from ongoing contextual inputs.

Immunohistochemical analysis of breast tissue microarray images using contextual classifiers

Background: Tissue microarrays (TMAs) are an important tool in translational research for examining multiple cancers for molecular and protein markers. Automatic immunohistochemical (IHC) scoring of breast TMA images remains a challenging problem. Methods: A two-stage approach that involves localization of regions of invasive and in-situ carcinoma followed by ordinal IHC scoring of nuclei in these regions is proposed. The localization stage classifies locations on a grid as tumor or non-tumor based on local image features. These classifications are then refined using an auto-context algorithm called spin-context. Spin-context uses a series of classifiers to integrate image feature information with spatial context information in the form of estimated class probabilities. This is achieved in a rotationally-invariant manner. The second stage estimates ordinal IHC scores in terms of the strength of staining and the proportion of nuclei stained. These estimates take the form of posterior probabilities, enabling images with uncertain scores to be referred for pathologist review. Results: The method was validated against manual pathologist scoring on two nuclear markers, progesterone receptor (PR) and estrogen receptor (ER). Errors for PR data were consistently lower than those achieved with ER data. Scoring was in terms of estimated proportion of cells that were positively stained (scored on an ordinal scale of 0-6) and perceived strength of staining (scored on an ordinal scale of 0-3). Average absolute differences between predicted scores and pathologist-assigned scores were 0.74 for proportion of cells and 0.35 for strength of staining (PR). Conclusions: The use of context information via spin-context improved the precision and recall of tumor localization. The combination of the spin-context localization method with the automated scoring method resulted in reduced IHC scoring errors.

The role of medial prefrontal cortex in extinction and reinstatement of alcohol‐seeking in rats

The prelimbic (PL) and infralimbic (IL) medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are thought to play opposing roles in drug-seeking behaviour. Specifically, the PL promotes drug-seeking whereas the IL is necessary for the inhibition of drug-seeking during extinction. We studied the roles of the PL, IL and dorsal peduncular PFC (DP) in the expression of context-induced reinstatement, reacquisition and extinction of alcoholic beer-seeking. In context-induced reinstatement (renewal), animals were trained to nosepoke for alcoholic beer (context A), extinguished (context B) and then tested in context A and B. In reacquisition, animals received the same instrumental training and extinction without any contextual manipulation. On test, alcoholic beer was again available and responding was compared with naive controls. Just prior to the test, rats received bilateral infusion of baclofen/muscimol into the PL, IL or DP. Reversible inactivation of the PL attenuated ABA renewal but augmented reacquisition. Reversible inactivation of IL had no effect on the reinstatement or reacquisition of alcoholic beer-seeking and had no effect on extinction expression (ABB and AAA). IL inactivation did, however, increase the latencies with which animals responded on test but only when animals were tested in the extinction context. DP inactivation had no effect on reinstatement or reacquisition. These studies are inconsistent with the view that PL and IL exert opposing effects on drug-seeking. Rather, they support the view that PL is important for retrieval of drug-seeking contingency information and that the use of contextual information is enhanced with IL manipulation.