Given current changes and trends in foreign language (FL) education (National Standards, waning interest in FL study), educators need to develop intellectually stimulating tasks to encourage personal, inter-/intrapersonal and cultural growth. Although many researchers postulate that fictional texts are a superior means to accomplish this goal (Swaffar, 1992; Shanahan, 1997; Einbeck, 2002), only few have experimented with using them as a basis for culture learning (Scott and Huntington, 2002) or measured their overall efficacy for FL learning. This study investigated the effectiveness of fictional media in the German intermediate FL classroom using a multi-faceted research design incorporating different data sets (questionnaires, student journals, and CMC chats), which underwent quantitative and/or qualitative analyses.The pre-posttest format for of three questionnaires assessed changes in learners' responses to FL attitude and motivation for study, course interest, the National Standards, perceptions about the intellectual content of fictional media, motivation, and enjoyment. Results showed that literature provides educational value beyond the level of language acquisition and encourages a multitude of learning dimensions.Students' CMC journals written about fictional media were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001) to ascertain changes of word usage in certain categories over the duration of the semester. A qualitative analysis using Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Glaser 1992 & 1998) showed emergent changes and themes relevant for culture and language learning. In addition to the journals, learners' CMC chats were also analyzed qualitatively to investigate the social nature of L2 language use and its pedagogical implications (Vygotsky, 1986). Shifts in categories and the emergence of themes were attributed to the effect of Text content/Genre rather than Time, and learners' chat did not evidence co-constructivist/dialogic learning as first postulated.

We present fpga-ToPSS (Toronto Publish/ Subscribe System), an efficient FPGA-based middleware platform geared towards high-frequency and low-latency event processing. fpga-ToPSS is built over reconfigurable hardware---FPGAs---to achieve line-rate processing by exploiting unprecedented degrees of parallelism and potential for pipelining,only available through custom-built, application-specific and low-level logic design. Furthermore, our middleware solution hosts an event processing engine that is built on a hardware-based packet processor and Boolean expression matcher. Our middleware vision extends to a wide range of applications including real-time data analytics, intrusion detection, algorithmic trading, targeted advertisement, and (complex) event processing.

We present fpga-ToPSS (Toronto Publish/ Subscribe System), an efficient FPGA-based middleware platform geared towards high-frequency and low-latency event processing. fpga-ToPSS is built over reconfigurable hardware---FPGAs---to achieve line-rate processing by exploiting unprecedented degrees of parallelism and potential for pipelining,only available through custom-built, application-specific and low-level logic design. Furthermore, our middleware solution hosts an event processing engine that is built on a hardware-based packet processor and Boolean expression matcher. Our middleware vision extends to a wide range of applications including real-time data analytics, intrusion detection, algorithmic trading, targeted advertisement, and (complex) event processing.

Although the identification of humans by fingerprints is a well–known technique in practice, the identification of an audio sample by means of a technique called audio fingerprinting is still under development. Audio fingerprinting can be used to identify different types of audio samples of which music and advertisements are the two most frequently encountered. Different audio fingerprinting techniques to identify audio samples appear seldom in the literature and direct comparisons of the techniques are not always available In this dissertation, the two audio fingerprinting techniques of Avery Wang and Haitsma and Kalker are compared in terms of accuracy, speed, versatility and scalability, with the goal of modifying the algorithms for optimal advertisement identification applications. To start the background of audio fingerprinting is summarised and different algorithms for audio fingerprinting are reviewed. Problems, issues to be addressed and research methodology are discussed. The research question is formulated as follows : “Can audio fingerprinting be applied successfully to advertisement monitoring, and if so, which existing audio fingerprinting algorithm is most suitable as a basis for a generic algorithm and how should the original algorithm be changed for this purpose?” The research question is followed by literature regarding the background of audio fingerprinting and different audio fingerprinting algorithms. Next, the importance of audio fingerprinting in the engineering field is motivated by the technical aspects related to audio fingerprinting. The technical aspects are not always necessary or part of the algorithm, but in most cases, the algorithms are pre–processed, filtered and downsampled. Other aspects include identifying unique features and storing them, on which each algorithm’s techniques differ. More detail on Haitsma and Kalker’s, Avery Wang’s and Microsoft’s RARE algorithms are then presented. Next, the desired interface for advertisement identification Graphical User Interface (GUI) is presented. Different solution architectures for advertisement identification are discussed. A design is presented and implemented which focuses on advertisement identification and helps with the validation process of the algorithm. The implementation is followed by the experimental setup and tests. Finally, the dissertation ends with results and comparisons, which verified and validated the algorithm and thus affirmed the first part of the research question. A short summary of the contribution made in the dissertation is given, followed by conclusions and recommendations for future work. / Thesis (M.Ing. (Computer and Electronical Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

Although the identification of humans by fingerprints is a well–known technique in practice, the identification of an audio sample by means of a technique called audio fingerprinting is still under development. Audio fingerprinting can be used to identify different types of audio samples of which music and advertisements are the two most frequently encountered. Different audio fingerprinting techniques to identify audio samples appear seldom in the literature and direct comparisons of the techniques are not always available In this dissertation, the two audio fingerprinting techniques of Avery Wang and Haitsma and Kalker are compared in terms of accuracy, speed, versatility and scalability, with the goal of modifying the algorithms for optimal advertisement identification applications. To start the background of audio fingerprinting is summarised and different algorithms for audio fingerprinting are reviewed. Problems, issues to be addressed and research methodology are discussed. The research question is formulated as follows : “Can audio fingerprinting be applied successfully to advertisement monitoring, and if so, which existing audio fingerprinting algorithm is most suitable as a basis for a generic algorithm and how should the original algorithm be changed for this purpose?” The research question is followed by literature regarding the background of audio fingerprinting and different audio fingerprinting algorithms. Next, the importance of audio fingerprinting in the engineering field is motivated by the technical aspects related to audio fingerprinting. The technical aspects are not always necessary or part of the algorithm, but in most cases, the algorithms are pre–processed, filtered and downsampled. Other aspects include identifying unique features and storing them, on which each algorithm’s techniques differ. More detail on Haitsma and Kalker’s, Avery Wang’s and Microsoft’s RARE algorithms are then presented. Next, the desired interface for advertisement identification Graphical User Interface (GUI) is presented. Different solution architectures for advertisement identification are discussed. A design is presented and implemented which focuses on advertisement identification and helps with the validation process of the algorithm. The implementation is followed by the experimental setup and tests. Finally, the dissertation ends with results and comparisons, which verified and validated the algorithm and thus affirmed the first part of the research question. A short summary of the contribution made in the dissertation is given, followed by conclusions and recommendations for future work. / Thesis (M.Ing. (Computer and Electronical Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

A flexible, scalable, and asynchronous middleware abstract is needed for business process management, which involves thousands of tasks and a large number of running instances of large business processes. The content-based publish/subscribe system is an ideal candidate to serve as enterprise service bus for these applications. In the publish/subscribe paradigm, information providers called publishers disseminate publications to all subscribers who have expressed interests by registering subscriptions through a loosely coupled interface. However, the traditional publish/subscribe paradigm only supports stateless subscriptions, that is, event correlation is ignored. Moreover, subscribers can only receive publications issued after their subscriptions. There are many application contexts, however, where access to publications from the past is necessary,such as for replaying a business process execution to debug it. Even more interesting uses arise when data from the past can be correlated with those in the future. Therefore, new languages and new functionalities are needed in the standard publish/subscribe model in order to support business process management. A new subscription language PADRES SQL(PSQL) which can express event patterns and unify both historic and future views for subscribers. PADRES allows a subscriber to access data published both in the past and in the future. Furthermore, complex event detection happens in the broker network. The main difficulties of distributed event detection are routing a composite subscription, including where and how to decompose the composite subscription, and routing the individual parts of the subscription. Our composite subscription routing decisions are based on a cost model which minimizes the routing and detection delay. An adaptive subscription routing protocol is proposed to determine efficient location with dynamic changing workloads. PADRES also provides robust message delivery by exploring alternative paths in a cyclic overlay. Routing optimizations and efficient matching algorithms are studied to improve the performance of the extended publish/subscribe model. With the above features, we propose the Ninos system, the distributed business process execution architecture as a case study,which uses light-weight activity agents to carry out business process execution in a distributed environment. Ninos proves that decentralized business process execution is the trend for next generation products, and the publish/subscribe model is ideal to serve as an enterpriser service bus (ESB) for distributed applications.

There is an accelerating demand to access and work over the visual content of documents. Because of the insufficiency of text-based techniques for storing this data, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems have become a promising field. Due this fact, in this study a CBIR system is implemented that is Mpeg-7 compliant and ORDBMS based. The database contains images and their content summaries that are parsed from XML files. The summaries describe their dominant colors, color histograms, color spaces and labels, in order to be compliant with Mpeg-7. The query process requires only the summary not the image itself. Software implementation of the system is based on JSP and servlet technologies using Oracle database and Tomcat web server. It is shown that the usage of these tools in the proposed architecture brings security, portability, and speed.

This study examines the implementation of the theme-based curriculum in the 2003-2004 academic year to meet the goals and objectives of DBE students at METU. The research design of the study includes questionnaires and focus group interviews with former DBE students and DBE teachers. At the first stage, 231 students and 60 teachers took the questionnaire. Then, 19 students (in groups) and teachers (individually) were interviewed. The results indicated that there was a big difference between the perceptions of teachers and students and teachers were more negative about the program. Especially, pre-intermediate group teachers were quite dissatisfied with the program. Implementation and quality of the materials and lack of communication between teachers and administrators were considered as probable reasons. In terms of materials, reading was the skill most successfully developed. Moreover, students found handouts much more useful than the books. Writing seemed to be the most problematic area in the program. Finally, as a result of time limitation, teachers were perceived to be more active in class and pair/group work were considered as ineffective.

Searching relevant information based on content features in video databases is an interesting and challenging research topic that has drawn lots of attention recently. Video similarity search has many practical applications such as TV broadcast monitoring, copyright compliance enforcement and search result clustering, etc. However, existing studies are limited to provide fast and accurate solutions due to the diverse variations among the videos in large collections. In this thesis, we introduce the database support for effective and efficient video similarity search from various sources, even if there exists some transformation distortion, partial content re-ordering, insertion, deletion or replacement. Specifically, we focus on processing two different types of content-based queries: video clip retrieval in a large collection of segmented short videos, and video subsequence identification from a long unsegmented stream. The first part of the thesis investigates the problem of how to process a number of individual kNN searches on the same database simultaneously to reduce the computational overhead of current content-based video search systems. We propose a Dynamic Query Ordering (DQO) algorithm for efficiently processing Batch Nearest Neighbor (BNN) search in high-dimensional space, with advanced optimizations of both I/O cost and CPU cost. The second part of the thesis challenges an unstudied problem of temporal localization of similar content from a long unsegmented video sequence, with extension to identify the occurrence of potentially different ordering or length with respect to query due to video content editing. A graph transformation and matching approach supported by the above BNN search is proposed, as a filter-and-refine query processing strategy to effectively but still efficiently identify the most similar subsequence. The third part of the thesis extends the method of Bounded Coordinate System (BCS) we introduced earlier for video clip retrieval. A novel collective perspective of exploiting the distributional discrepancy of samples for assessing the similarity between two video clips is presented. Several ideas of non-parametric hypothesis tests in statistics are utilized to check the hypothesis whether two ensembles of points are from a same distribution. The proposed similarity measures can provide a more comprehensive analysis that captures the essence of invariant distribution information for retrieving video clips. For each part, we demonstrate comprehensive experimental evaluations, which show improved performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. In the end, some scheduled extensions of this work are highlighted as future research objectives.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 82-87).