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The Quad-camera Wavefront-sensing Six-channel Speckle Interferometer (QWSSI) is a new speckle imaging instrument available on the 4.3-m Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT). QWSSI is built to efficiently make use of collected photons and available detector area. The instrument images on a single Electron Multiplying CCD (EMCCD) at four wavelengths in the optical (577, 658, 808, and 880nm) with 40nm bandpasses. Longward of 1μm, two imaging wavelengths in the NIR are collected at 1150 and 1570nm on two InGaAs cameras with 50nm bandpasses. All remaining non-imaging visible light is then sent into a wavefront EMCCD. All cameras are operated synchronously via concurrent triggering from a timing module. With the simultaneous wavefront sensing, QWSSI characterizes atmospheric aberrations in the wavefront for each speckle frame. This results in additional data that can be utilized during post-processing, enabling advanced techniques such as Multi-Frame Blind Deconvolution. The design philosophy was optimized for an inexpensive, rapid build; virtually all parts were commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), and custom parts were fabricated or 3D printed on-site. QWSSI's unique build and capabilities represent a new frontier in civilian high-resolution speckle imaging. © COPYRIGHT SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Biologists and bioinformaticians heavily rely on data portals and repositories accessible through web application. While they mostly agree that the data is valuable, they find the interfaces hard to use and non-intuitive. In this paper we present a user-centered design of a database for classification and annotation for major and minor introns in various species. Our design is based on surveying and interviewing minor intron researchers and comparing the features of existing databases. In addition to its ease of use, the proposed database, Major and Minor Intron Annotation Database (MMIAD) offers high flexibility in querying and downloading subsets of information that interest the user in multiple commonly used file formats. © Proceedings of the 14th IADIS International Conference Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction 2020, IHCI 2020 and Proceedings of the 13th IADIS International Conference Game and Entertainment Technologies 2020, GET 2020 - Part of the 14th Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, MCCSIS 2020. All rights reserved.

Drawing from analyses of teaching and learning, we posit a theoretical framework of axes, practical to epistemic and explicit to implicit, which frame four quadrants of support needed to know how and why to use the crosscutting concepts in sensemaking. This work has implications for the design of learning environments that use the crosscutting concepts in scientific sensemaking. © ISLS.

This paper examines the impact of higher education on youth unemployment. Following the 2008 financial crisis, youth unemployment returned to the fore as a serious concern among policy makers in Europe. A crucial difference from previous recessions is that this time around supply of higher education opportunities was much higher than in the 1980s, and indeed higher education participation rates grew rapidly in many regions during this period. Drawing on previous work on youth unemployment and the economic impacts of education we identify a variety of channels through which higher education is likely to influence youth unemployment. We examine this issue using a macro-panel of European regions for the period 2002-2012. This decade was characterized by variation in economic activity and higher education rates. Our results suggest that expansion of higher education during this period had a mitigating effect on youth unemployment and not recognizing this external benefit of education risks underestimating the effects of macroeconomic shocks on young people. © 2020, University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Adult content on the Internet may be accessed by children with only a few keystrokes. While separate child-safe accounts may be established, a better approach could be incorporating automatic age estimation capability into the browser. We envision a safer browsing experience by implementing child-safe browsers combined with Internet content rating similar to the film industry. Before such a browser is created it was necessary to test the age estimation module to see whether acceptable error rates are possible. We created an Android application for collecting biometric touch data, specifically tapping data. We arranged with an elementary school, a middle school, a high school, and a university and collected samples from 262 user sessions (ages 5 to 61). From the tapping data, feature vectors were constructed, which were used to train and test 14 regressors and classifiers. Results for regression show the best mean absolute errors of 3.451 and 3.027 years, respectively, for phones and tablets. Results for classification show the best accuracies of 73.63% and 82.28%, respectively, for phones and tablets. These results demonstrate that age estimation, and hence, a child-safe browser, is feasible, and is a worthwhile objective. © 2020 IEEE.

Traditional keyboards remain the input device of choice for typing-heavy environments. When attached to sensitive data, security is a major concern. To continuously authenticate users in these environments, use of keystroke dynamics can be a preferred choice. An integral part of user enrollment in a keystroke based continuous authentication system is the writing instruction (prompt) given to the users, to use as a basis for their improvised writing. There are many prompts possible, and they directly impact the performance of authentication systems. Hence, prompts should be designed carefully, and with purpose. In this paper, we bridge the gap between cognitive psychology and computer science and attempt to influence the mental state of the users to acquire a better authentication performance. We compare two kinds of writing prompts, creative and factual, for generating reference samples. In addition, we perform two robustness tests: robustness to dissimilar writing style (e.g., creative reference and factual test) and robustness to surface (e.g., hard surface reference and soft surface test). We collect data from thirty participants in four weekly sessions. We experiment with three features: key interval, key press, and key hold latencies. We use Relative (R) measure to generate the match score between the reference and test samples. Results show that creative writing consistently performs better than the factual one. Both writing prompts perform well with dissimilar style in testing, i.e., continuous authentication is found robust to writing style. Also, we find that the surface (hard or soft) used in testing need not match that used for the reference, thus continuous authentication is also surface robust. © 2020 IEEE.

The Southern Connecticut Stellar Interferometer (SCSI) is an intensity interferometer that is designed to use correlated photon arrival times to determine the geometry of stars. Originally a low-cost, two-telescope instrument that used a 1-pixel single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detector at the focal plane of each telescope to record photon events, it is now being upgraded to include a third telescope. This will allow for the simultaneous detection of the photon correlation at three baselines, and thus the ability to map out the two-dimensional geometry of the source much more efficiently than with the two-telescope arrangement. Recent papers in the literature suggest that it may be possible to derive phase information in the Fourier domain from such triple correlations for the brightest stars, potentially giving SCSI an imaging capability. Prior to investigating this possibility, steps must be taken to maximize the observing efficiency of the SCSI. We present here our latest efforts in achieving better pointing, tracking, and collimation with our telescopes, and we discuss our first modeling results of the three-telescope situation in order to understand under what conditions the upgraded SCSI could retrieve imaging information. © COPYRIGHT SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Based on a pragmatist inspired conception of the social self, the concept of reparations for the harms of genocide is reexamined. Both Raphael Lemkin, the person who invented the term “genocide,” and Claudia Card, a philosopher who examined the evil of genocide, hold similarly expansive notions of the harms inflicted by genocidal violence. Both argued that biological death is not necessarily central to genocide. For Lemkin cultural destruction of the targeted group is just as essential as the actual killing itself. Genocide is a group crime that aims to destroy the group and all the social aspects of group identity. Card similarly sees the target of genocidal violence as the social vitality of the self. This vitality is sustained by group relations. Reparations thus need to be reconceptualize in terms of the restoration of social life of the victim group and not solely on the basis of economic losses. Examples are given for the reparation of the social vitality of communities that have suffered genocide. © 2020 Central European Pragmatist Forum. All rights reserved.

The cyber-behavioral biometric modalities such as keystroke dynamics, mouse dynamics, and touch screen dynamics have come under attacks of different forms in recent days. To address these attacks and other security issues, we present a novel concept of using smartwatch sensor data to continuously verify users in cyberspace and show its potential to be a new standalone cyber-behavioral biometric modality. For our experiments, smartwatch gyroscope and accelerometer data collected from 49 subjects while typing in desktop computer have been considered. We implemented six pattern matching classifiers to compare each verification attempt against the user profile. Experimental results comprising of 282, 240 classification attempts show significantly high True Positive (TP) rates and extremely low False Positive (FP) rates with the highest achieved TP rate of 87.2% and lowest FP rate of 0.2%. With this level of accuracy and natural resiliency to attacks comes with physical biometric property as such in hand movement, we opine that smartwatch movement dynamics, besides being a new biometric trait, can be a solution to the security loopholes in existing cyber-behavioral biometric modalities for continuous verification. © 2020 IEEE.

In this paper, we provide a consistent, inexpensive, and easy to use graphical user interface (GUI) smart phone application named Sleep Apnea Screener (SAS) that can diagnosis Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) based on demographic data such as: gender, age, height, BMI, neck circumference, waist, etc., allowing a tentative diagnosis of OSA without the need for overnight tests. The developed smart phone application can diagnosis sleep apnea using a model trained with 620 samples collected from a sleep center in Corpus Christi, TX. Two machine learning classifiers (i.e., Logistic Regression (LR) and Support Vector Machine (SVM)) were used to diagnosis OSA. Our preliminary results show that at-home OSA screening is indeed possible, and that our application is effective method for covering large numbers of undiagnosed cases.

Objective: Increasing BMI, overweight, and obesity are urgent and grave problems in the US. The goal of this study is to begin to understand trends in overweight and obesity among undergraduate students in the U.S. to assist in informing public health education and health promotion practices. Methods: Data on self-reported weight and height were collected in 2012, 2014, and 2016 from randomly selected college students who were enrolled in a public university in Northeast US. Spearman's Rank Order Test was used to evaluate trends within specific demographic categories. Results: BMI increased for almost all studentsfrom 2012-2016. Groups with significant increases in BMI included: males, females, sophomores, and seniors. Conclusions: Results suggest the need for interventions to reduce increases in overweight and obesity that are experienced during college years. College is a critical transitional time when students adopt health behaviors that they continue into adulthood. Increasing BMI in college students indicates a need for additional research to understand the factors that contribute to the increasing trend of overweight and obesity in this population. College is an optimal setting for implementation of effective interventions that can help prevent BMI increases in this population and establish healthy behaviors for the future. Keywords: Overweight, Obesity, College Students, BMI, Spearman’s Rank, Interventions

Purpose This paper aims to explore the effect of employees’ state mindfulness, a short period of mindful presence, on the quality of the service they provide in a service encounter. Design/methodology/approach Three studies are conducted. A pilot study explores the relationship between state mindfulness and service encounter quality. Experiment 1 examines whether a 15-min mindfulness exercise results in an increase in service employees’ state mindfulness. Experiment 2 tests whether induced state mindfulness produces higher service quality and whether a reminding technique can prolong state mindfulness between service encounters. Findings The results demonstrate the following. First, that more mindful employees provide better service quality. Second, that a short, easily implemented, mindfulness exercise can reliably increase employees’ state mindfulness. Third, induced mindfulness has an impact on subsequent service quality in terms of reliability, assurance, empathy and responsiveness. These effects persist regardless of the service encounter structure (high vs low structure) or the degree of emotional labor involved (high vs low emotionally charged). Finally, the reminding technique developed as part of this research suggests that state mindfulness can be maintained between service encounters. Research limitations/implications As simulated (programmed) customers are used, independent evaluators to assess service quality are used. Service providers in this study are college students; future field studies should consider a wider range of service providers. The research focuses on state mindfulness; exploration of trait mindfulness offers future research opportunities. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to empirically examine the link between mindfulness and service quality. It shows that mindfulness can be induced, and through a reminding technique be maintained, and improve service quality across service interactions. This is a powerful finding for marketing managers, for it offers a new method to enhance service provision. Moreover, this research implies that the increase in service quality is likely to be accompanied by reduced job burnout: a double win for employees, employers and customers.