Journal articles on the topic 'Local Learning and Employment Networks'

The recovery of a built heritage and specifically of singular buildings is a key aspect of local development. The aim of this study was to understand the influence of these regenerations on their environment by transforming adjacent businesses and initiating parallel processes of gentrification and local development. The renewed attraction of these new businesses to the area can result in increased employment and production. The methodology used was based on self-organizing maps of neural networks with matrix architecture and competitive learning. Through the analysis of neural networks, we were able to identify common relationships and behaviors in commercial properties which are adjacent to singular buildings and that share common patterns and characteristics or attributes. The singular buildings analyzed are located along the Spanish Mediterranean coast in the cities of Almería, Barcelona, and Valencia. The results obtained were based on the following hypotheses: occupancy model and the classification based on total occupancy, total variation in occupancy, and the most common types of usage of a given ground floor commercial property. Among the conclusions, we highlight the existence of commercial premises that display anti-cyclical economic behavior and the presence of commercial premises considered to be “unfortunate” or with low potential.

The first part of this article describes and evaluates a part-time diploma course in occupational therapy. It was instigated by a consortium of health and local authorities, using a contractual process that predated current educational purchasing arrangements. The course achieved a pass rate of 92% and nil voluntary attrition, much to the satisfaction of all the stakeholders. This was due to the students' intrinsic motivation, the partnership between the providers, purchasers and workplaces, an andragogical approach that optimised work-based learning and extensive support networks. The principle of placing the needs of part-time adult learners at the centre of the educational process is relevant for those involved with similar routes. Part 2 will report on the results of a one-year follow-up destination survey.

This article examines the area of intersection of interests of universities and employers, shows the qualifications of graduates of regional universities, their readiness for innovative professional activities, work on the latest path and career growth. The possibility of interaction in the active participation of universities in activities to increase the competitiveness and growth potential of companies, as well as in the joint creation of business incubators is shown. The dynamics of employment of graduates of the Kyzylorda State University named after Korkyt Ata on biological education, employment opportunities for graduates were noted. The most promising areas of business and education development in general are shown. The technologies of distance learning and social networks are shown, new opportunities for online learning are presented; the formation of individual educational trajectories and interdisciplinary integrated learning. It shows the training of specialists in the field of biology on the basis of educational programs, the rights of teachers, if possible, the formation of the main elements of doing business in the process of teaching general education subjects for students of the educational program of biology, promoting the development of the local and national economy in educational programs. training specialists capable of planning and conducting research in this area, including those capable of commercializing the results.

Purpose This paper aims to examine a type of interorganizational learning called Industry Peer Networks (IPNs), in which a network of non-competing small businesses cooperates to improve their skills and to stay abreast of the industry trends, so that the firms remain competitive in the local and regional markets. The key characteristic of an IPN is the regular gathering of peers in small groups (typically 20 or fewer carefully selected members) in an atmosphere of significant trust, guided by a facilitator, to participate in a series of formal and informal activities through established guidelines, to share knowledge about management and marketing, exchange information about industry trends beyond their core markets, discuss issues related to company performance and provide constructive criticism about peer companies. Design/methodology/approach The qualitative research on the context included visits to 13 peer meetings, three workshops for peer members, seven semi-structured interviews with members and many communications with the founder, chairman, committee chairpersons and several facilitators of peer meetings that spanned across five years. Data collection and analysis followed grounded theory building techniques. Findings The authors identified both cooperative and competitive learning practices that a small business could carry out to grow from a novice to an expert IPN peer member. The cooperative elements such as peer discussions, disclosure of financial data and exposure to various business models allow member firms to learn vicariously through the successes and/or failure of their peers. At the same time, the competitive elements such as service delivery critiques, business performance benchmarking and firm ranking also prompt the members to focus on execution, to emphasize accountability and to strive for status in the network. The IPN in this research has also built network legitimacy over time, and it has sustained a viable administrative entity that has a recognizable form and structure, whose functions are to strategically manage network activities and network growth to attract like-minded new members. Research limitations/implications First, because this research focused on fleshing out the transformative practices engaged by IPN peers, it necessarily neglected other types of network relationships that affect the small businesses, including local competitors, vendors and customers. Second, the small employment size of these firms and the personal nature of network ties in the IPN may provide an especially fertile ground for network learning that might not exist for larger firms. Third, the technology-intensive and quality-sensitive nature of IT firms may make technological trend sensitization and operating efficiency more competitive advantages in this industry than in others. Finally, although participation in IPN is associated with higher level of perceived learning, the relationship between learning and business performance is not yet articulated empirically. Practical implications The study contributes to the understanding of cooperative/competitive transformative practices in the IPN by highlighting the defining features at each transformation stage, from firms being isolated entities which react to market forces to connected peers which proactively drive the markets. IPNs are most effective for business owners who are at their early growth stage, in which they are positioned to grow further. Nevertheless, the authors also present the paradoxical capacity of IPNs to propel firms along trajectories of empowerment or disengagement. Social implications As 78.5 per cent of the US firms are small businesses having fewer than 10 employees, the knowledge of firm and IPN transformation is important for both researchers and advocates of small businesses to understand the roots of success or failure of firms and the IPNs in which they are embedded. Originality/value Earlier research has not explored the network-level effects as part of a full array of outcomes. Instead, research involving IPNs has focused primarily on the motivation and immediate firm-level outcomes of IPNs. Research to this point has also failed to examine IPNs from a developmental perspective, how the firms and the IPN as a network transform over time.

Purpose In Malaysia, globalization has increased the number of multinational hotel chains and independent five-star hotels employing foreign professionals, interns and labourers. This study aims to explore the benefits and challenges for hotels of the many foreigners working in Malaysia. Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews were conducted with Malaysian hotel managers concerning employment of foreign workers. Findings The results indicate that the employment of foreign workers benefits customers, enlarges the hotel’s network of industry contacts and enhances the knowledge, professionalism and service culture of the hotel workforce. This study identified challenges for the foreign workers such as culture shocks and problems with learning the Malay language. Research limitations/implications This is an exploratory qualitative study conducted prior to the outbreak of COVID-19. The unemployment issue is worsened as COVID-19 spreads globally. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is among the first study to examine the positive and negative impacts of foreign workers employment in hotels in Malaysia. Practical implications The employment of foreign workers reduces the availability of jobs for locals. Recommendations are provided for locals to improve their employability and for hotels to better host international interns. Social implications This study highlights the need for balance between the benefits of foreign workers employment, and its challenges such as local unemployment. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first in the international human resources management literature to provide a first-hand perspective of employment of expatriate managers, foreign labourers and interns in hotels in a Southeast Asian developing country.

Currently, local area network (LAN) is commonplace in the Nigerian tertiary institutions and can be a good platform for distributing and disseminating instructional materials. Thus, this paper proposes to improve the quality of academics through online provision of learning resources based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS); wired and wireless access to contents; and availability of the system 24/7. The system is based on third party software or FOSS called phpBB and Windows 2003 Server Active Directory Services. Both are installed and configured on an intranet. It has a discussion forum which is accessed through Hypertext Transfer Protocol using a web browser; and directory services for files/folders upload and download based on a set of privilege levels in Discretionary Access Control List (DACL) as a way of improving security. The system leads to the development of a virtual campus in Covenant University. Also, it has helpedimprove the quality of teaching by making lecture notes availably on the intranet, lecturer/studentinteraction, accessibility to teaching materials and reduce student’s idle time. The system helps in no small measure to correct the problems plaguing the educational sector such as examination malpractice, decline standards of education and cultism, as students are gainfully engaged in academic and social activities. The creation of a virtual campus would enhance the level of e-participation, and e-readiness of the graduate for the employment market. In particular, it bridges the divide between the developed and the developing nations.

ObjectivesInterest in linking patients with unmet social needs to area-level resources, such as food pantries and employment centres in one’s ZIP code, is growing. However, whether the presence of these resources is associated with better health outcomes is unclear. We sought to determine if area-level resources, defined as organisations that assist individuals with meeting health-related social needs, are associated with lower levels of cardiometabolic risk factors.DesignCross-sectional.SettingData were collected in a primary care network in eastern Massachusetts in 2015.Participants and primary and secondary outcome measures123 355 participants were included. The primary outcome was body mass index (BMI). The secondary outcomes were systolic blood pressure (SBP), low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and haemoglobin A1c (HbA1c). All participants were included in BMI analyses. Participants with hypertension were included in SBP analyses. Participants with an indication for cholesterol lowering were included in LDL analyses and participants with diabetes mellitus were included in HbA1c analyses. We used a random forest-based machine-learning algorithm to identify types of resources associated with study outcomes. We then tested the association of ZIP-level selected resource types (three for BMI, two each for SBP and HbA1c analyses and one for LDL analyses) with these outcomes, using multilevel models to account for individual-level, clinic-level and other area-level factors.ResultsResources associated with lower BMI included more food resources (−0.08 kg/m2per additional resource, 95% CI −0.13 to −0.03 kg/m2), employment resources (−0.05 kg/m2, 95% CI −0.11 to −0.002 kg/m2) and nutrition resources (−0.07 kg/m2, 95% CI −0.13 to −0.01 kg/m2). No area resources were associated with differences in SBP, LDL or HbA1c.ConclusionsAccess to specific local resources is associated with better BMI. Efforts to link patients to area resources, and to improve the resources landscape within communities, may help reduce BMI and improve population health.

Social network sites are the networked public places for university students. The most famous social network site in Malaysia for university students is Facebook. University students spend a lot of their time navigating collapsed contexts with global and local audience. Thus, Facebook is the most appropriate site to investigate ESL learning acquisition through L2 learners’ interactions and digital footprints. The study investigates the roles of English language and the types of imagined communities of ten L2 learners at a public university. Transcripts of a Facebook group’s online discussion and semi-structured interviews were analysed using qualitative data software Atlas.ti 7. The findings reveal that the key informants are invested to learn English due to its roles in Malaysia. English language has four dominant roles such as the language for their future employment, the language of instruction, the lingua franca and a tool of empowerment. The research also indicates the imagined communities of the key participants are fluent local speakers, fluent non-native speakers and native speakers. The results of the study provide present needs of ESL learners that will enable insights to language instructors, course designers and curriculum designers in facilitating effective language acquisition. instructions give you basic guidelines for preparing camera-ready papers for conference proceedings. Use this document as a template if you are using Microsoft Word 6.0 or later. Otherwise, use this document as an instruction set. The electronic file of your paper will be formatted further. Define all symbols used in the abstract. Do not cite references in the abstract.

Siekiant paspartinti informacinių technologijų (IT) sklaidą visuomenėje, per pastarąjį penkmetį Lietuvoje buvo itin aktyviai plėtojamas viešos interneto prieigos (VIP) tinklas. Nors sudėtinga tiksliai įvardyti VIP diegimo investicijas, jos siekia daugiau nei 100 mln. litų. Beveik 90 % VIP veikia viešosiose bibliotekose (VB) – įvairiomis iniciatyvomis jose buvo sukurtas vienas tankiausių VIP tinklų Europoje. Kita vertus, beveik neturime informacijos apie šių prieigų naudojimą ir juo labiau vartotojams ir visuomenei daromą įtaką. Skaidrūs ir reprezentatyvūs duomenys apie VB teikiamos VIP socialinę ir ekonominę naudą ir jos mastą sprendimų priėmėjams neabejotinai padėtų spręsti šios paslaugos tęstinumo klausimus. Straipsnio tikslas – remiantis atlikto reprezentatyvaus kompleksinio poveikio vertinimo tyrimo duomenimis, atskleisti Lietuvos VB įtaką IT sklaidai visuomenėje. Daroma išvada, jog VB didelei visuomenės daliai yra labai svarbios kaip prieigos prie IT teikėjos, o jų sudaroma galimybė naudotis kompiuteriais ir internetu vartotojams teikia akivaizdžią socialinę ir ekonominę naudą.Impact of Public Libraries of Lithuania on Diffusion of Information Technolgies in SocietyUgnė Rutkauskienė Summary To foster a diffusion of ICT’s in society Lithuania has been intensively developing the network of public internet access points. Almost 90 percent of them were established at public libraries. The sustainability of this initiative will require a lot of public resources and funding so it becomes vital to prove the benefi ts users gain from the interaction the public access computing in libraries. The purpose of the paper is to share the methodology and practice of impact focused and outcomes based research into public access computing in Lithuania. The paper presents a methodology of measuring the outcomes of public access computing as well as acquaints with main results of study conducted within the project “Libraries for Innovation”, supported by Global Libraries program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The study is exploring both positive and negative downstream impacts in the areas of employment and income generation; educational levels; civic life and engagement; government transparency and democracy; cultural preservation and improved health. Findings show the benefi ts that users can gain from using PAC in public libraries including access to ICT, technology training and assistance, expanded employment opportunities, conducting commercial transactions, access to and assistance with local, state and federal government electronic services, support to learning, communication and personal identity.

Using confidential establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database, this paper documents how local shocks propagate across US regions through firms’ internal networks of establishments. Consistent with a model of optimal within-firm resource allocation, we find that establishment-level employment is sensitive to shocks in distant regions in which the establishment’s parent firm is operating, and that the elasticity with respect to such shocks increases with the firm’s financial constraint. At the aggregate regional level, we find that aggregate county-level employment is sensitive to shocks in distant counties linked through firms’ internal networks. (JEL D22, G32, L14, L22, R23, R32)

Main issue of the article are local cooperation networks between institutions, which work on reintegration people, who are at risk of social marginalization. The author is interested in answer for efficient idea to create local, socialprofessional reintegration networks and can subjects of social employment (Centers and Clubs of Social Integration) play the role of local institutional leaders, around which these support networks are creating. Basically conclusion is that Centers and Clubs of Social Integration can play the role of leaders, who creates networks, but process of their establishment and working depends on many characteristic elements for local communities – favor of local power, subject’s social employment potential and relationship with other subjects of local social policy.

Introduction. Educational robotics is a new learning technology and an effective tool for training engineering staff. Networking of educational organizations and enterprises expands their potential in the system of level engineering training. The main idea of the article is to create and test a local model of an effective networked educational system in the context of federal and regional concepts and programs that would meet the development trends of modern society and at the same time would allow the preparation of schoolchildren for real participation in practical activities. Materials and Methods. We conducted a theoretical analysis of foreign and domestic literature. The method of scientific modeling, namely, the creation of a graphic hierarchical model was applied to develop an integrated system of engineering education for schoolchildren. When organizing the practical use of the model, pedagogical design, comparative analysis of verification works, sociological tools and criterial formative evaluation are used. Results. Authors made an attempt of systematization of subjects and forms of lifelong engineering education at the stages from preschool to higher, based on research conducted over six years. It is defined that the subject of inter-agency coordination network between participants of educational organizations. A tool to ensure continuity in the transition to a new level of education, and the implementation of interdisciplinary component pre-engineering education are interdisciplinary programs, in particular, robotics. Implementation of programs on robotics is carried out through curricular and extracurricular activities, additional education program, vacation employment and other forms of work, provided resources as the base of the organization and network partners. The author’s summer program of the camp “Technosphere” was developed and approved with the day-time stay of children during the vacation period. The model of the Integrated System of Level Engineering Engineering for Schoolchildren was developed and introduced into the city’s education system. Discussion and Conclusions.The system of level engineering training, which combines the levels of education, additional educational programs and the potential of network interaction, allows to optimize all directions and forms of organization of the educational process. As a result of the study, a model of an integrated system of level engineering training at the stage of pre-school and primary general education was developed.

Agents in a network want to learn the true state of the world from their own signals and their neighbors' reports. Agents know only their local networks, consisting of their neighbors and the links among them. Every agent is Bayesian with the (possibly misspecified) prior belief that her local network is the entire network. We present a tractable learning rule to implement such locally Bayesian learning: each agent extracts new information using the full history of observed reports in her local network. Despite their limited network knowledge, agents learn correctly when the network is a social quilt, a tree‐like union of cliques. But they fail to learn when a network contains interlinked circles (echo chambers), despite an arbitrarily large number of correct signals.

In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of local feedback multilayered networks, a particular class of recurrent networks, in which feedback connections are only allowed from neurons to themselves. In this class, learning can be accomplished by an algorithm that is local in both space and time. We describe the limits and properties of these networks and give some insights on their use for solving practical problems.

Very rarely are training data evenly distributed in the input space. Local learning algorithms attempt to locally adjust the capacity of the training system to the properties of the training set in each area of the input space. The family of local learning algorithms contains known methods, like the k-nearest neighbors method (kNN) or the radial basis function networks (RBF), as well as new algorithms. A single analysis models some aspects of these algorithms. In particular, it suggests that neither kNN or RBF, nor nonlocal classifiers, achieve the best compromise between locality and capacity. A careful control of these parameters in a simple local learning algorithm has provided a performance breakthrough for an optical character recognition problem. Both the error rate and the rejection performance have been significantly improved.

Much effort has been directed at developing algorithms for learning optimal Bayesian network structures from data. When given limited or noisy data, however, the optimal Bayesian network often fails to capture the true underlying network structure. One can potentially address the problem by finding multiple most likely Bayesian networks (K-Best) in the hope that one of them recovers the true model. However, it is often the case that some of the best models come from the same peak(s) and are very similar to each other; so they tend to fail together. Moreover, many of these models are not even optimal respective to any causal ordering, thus unlikely to be useful. This paper proposes a novel method for finding a set of diverse top Bayesian networks, called modes, such that each network is guaranteed to be optimal in a local neighborhood. Such mode networks are expected to provide a much better coverage of the true model. Based on a globallocal theorem showing that a mode Bayesian network must be optimal in all local scopes, we introduce an A* search algorithm to efficiently find top M Bayesian networks which are highly probable and naturally diverse. Empirical evaluations show that our top mode models have much better diversity as well as accuracy in discovering true underlying models than those found by K-Best.

Recently, a large number of neural mechanisms and models have been proposed for sequence learning, of which selfattention, as exemplified by the Transformer model, and graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted much attention. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines and draws on the complementary strengths of these two methods. Specifically, we propose contextualized non-local neural networks (CN3), which can both dynamically construct a task-specific structure of a sentence and leverage rich local dependencies within a particular neighbourhood.Experimental results on ten NLP tasks in text classification, semantic matching, and sequence labelling show that our proposed model outperforms competitive baselines and discovers task-specific dependency structures, thus providing better interpretability to users.

International student mobility has been increasingly subject to turbulences in politics, culture, economics, natural disasters, and public health. The new decade has witnessed an unprecedented disruption to international student flows and welfare as a consequence of the COVID-19 outbreak. COVID-19 has laid bare how fragile the current transactional higher education model is, in Australia and in other major destination countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. This health crisis hitting international education presents a range of challenges for host universities. In such a fallout, the connection between university communities and international students is more critical than ever. This connection is vital not only to university’s operations and recovery but more importantly, to international students’ learning and wellbeing. This in turn will have longer term impacts on host countries’ and universities’ sustainable international recruitment and reputation as a study destination. Therefore, it is timely to reflect on how we view and conceptualize the way we engage and work with international students. This article presents a new frame for conceptualizing the teaching, learning, and engagement for international students, which emphasizes people-to-people empathy and people-to-people connections. Conceptualize Student Connection Through Formal and Informal Curriculum Dis/connection has been argued to play “an important role in shaping international students’ wellbeing, performance and life trajectories” (Tran & Gomes, 2017, p. 1). Therefore, it is important to frame international student connectedness not only within the context of formal teaching and learning on campus, but also in a broader setting, taking into account the dynamic, diverse, and fluid features of transnational mobility. Some of the primary dimensions of international student connection vital to their academic and social experience and wellbeing have been identified as: • Connection with the content and process of teaching and learning• Bonding between host teachers and international students• Engagement with the university communities• Interaction between domestic and international students and among international peers• Integration into relevant social and professional networks, the host community, and the host society• Connection with family and home communities• Online and digital connection Based on interviews with around 400 international students, teachers, and international student support staff across different research projects, I identified four main principles underpinning effective engagement and support for international students. Most participants stressed the importance of understanding international students’ study purposes, needs, expectations, and characteristics in the first place in order to meaningfully and productively engage with and cater for this cohort (Tran, 2013). Second, effective teaching of and engagement with international students is based on understanding not only their academic needs but also other aspects that are interlinked with their academic performance, including pastoral care needs, mental health, employment, accommodation, finance, life plans, and aspirations. Third, a sense of belonging to the content of teaching and learning and the pedagogy used by teachers is essential to international students’ engagement with the classroom community. In this regard, connection is intimately linked to international students being included and valued intellectually and culturally in teaching and learning, and in being treated as partners (Green, 2019; Tran, 2013) rather than ‘others’ in the curriculum. Fourth, to position international students as truly an integral component of campus communities, it is essential to develop explicit approaches to engage them not only academically and interculturally, but also mentally and emotionally, especially during hard-hitting crises in international education such as the 2019–2020 COVID-19 outbreak, the 2003 SARS epidemic, and the 2001 September 11 attacks. Productive Connectedness The lack of engagement between international and domestic students is often identified as a primary area for improvement for universities that host international students, especially in Anglophone countries (Leask, 2009). While international education is supposed to strengthen people-to-people connections and enrich human interactions, ironically it is this lack of connection with the local community, including local students, that international students feel most dissatisfied about in their international education experience. To support and optimize the learning and wellbeing of international students, productive connectedness is essential. Productive connectedness is not simply providing the mere conditions for interaction between domestic and international peers (Tran & Pham, 2016). These conditions alone cannot ensure meaningful and real connectedness but can just lead to artificial or surface engagement between international students and the host communities. Productive connectedness is centered around creating real opportunities for international and local students to not only increase their mutual understandings, but importantly also to reciprocally learn from the encounter of differences and share, negotiate, and contribute to building knowledge, cultural experiences, and skills on a more equal basis. In this regard, productive connectedness is integral to optimizing teaching and learning for international students. Teaching and Learning for International Students Over the past 15 years, I and my colleagues have undertaken various research on conceptualizing the teaching and learning process for international students, an evolving and dynamic field of scholarship (Tran, 2011; Tran, 2013a, 2013b; Tran & Nguyen, 2015; Tran & Gomes, 2017; Tran & Pham, 2016). Figure 1 summarizes the six interrelated dimensions of teaching and learning for international students emerging from our research: connecting, accommodating, reciprocating, integrating, “relationalizing,” and empathy. Connecting It is critical in effective teaching and learning for international students that conditions are provided to engage them intellectually, culturally, socially, and affectively. Curriculum, pedagogies, and assessment activities should aim at supporting international students to make transnational knowledge, skills, experience, and culture, as well as people-to-people connections (Tran, 2013). Accommodating Effective teaching and learning for international students cannot be achieved without an effort to understand their purposes to undertake international education, their cultural and educational backgrounds, their characteristics, their identities, and their aspirations. Good teaching and learning practices in international education are often built on educators’ capacities to tailor their curriculum and pedagogies to cater to international students based on an understanding of their study purposes, backgrounds, and identities. Reciprocating Reciprocal learning and teaching is integral to international education (Tran, 2011). It is centered around positioning international students as co-constructors of knowledge and educators as reciprocal co-learners (Tran, 2013b). It refers to extending beyond mutual understanding and respect for diversity, to validate and reciprocally learn from diverse resources, experiences, and encounters of differences that international classrooms can offer. This is vital to making international students feel included and valued as an integral part of the curriculum and the university community. Integrating Integrating refers to the purposeful incorporation of international examples, case studies, materials, and perspectives into the curriculum. Strategies to diversify the teaching and learning content and pedagogies are closely connected with de- Westernizing the curriculum and moving away from Euro-centric content (Tran, 2013a). Integrating contributes to enriching students’ global awareness, world mindfulness, and intercultural competence, which are central to internationalizing student experience and outcomes. “Relationalizing” “Relationalizing” is crucial in assisting domestic and international students to develop open-minded and ethno-relative perspectives. Engaging students in a comparing–contrasting and reflexive process about professional practices, prior experiences, and cultural norms in different countries represents a critical step in assisting them to develop multiple frames of reference and build capacities to relationally learn from richly varied perspectives and experiences that an international classroom can offer. Empathy International students’ sense of belonging to the classroom and university community significantly depends on the empathy local teachers and students display toward them. Teachers can develop activities that enable students to develop an understanding and empathy toward what it feels like to be an international student in an unfamiliar academic and social environment, studying in a language that is not their mother tongue. One of the teacher-participants in our research shared an activity she used to help all students develop empathy:I asked for volunteers, I’d speak to them in English and they had to answer in their language. The group had to try and figure out from their body language and tone of voice what they were actually saying to me...But what I try and make them understand that part of the reason we’re doing that, not in English, is because it’s like excluding the local students and it’s making them look like foreigners and to understand the challenge. Conclusion Effective practices in engaging, teaching, and learning for international students enrich the international classroom community and optimize learning for all, including international and domestic students and teachers themselves (Carroll & Ryan, 2007; Tran, 2013b; Tran & Le, 2018). Good pedagogical practices in teaching and learning for international students depend on teachers’ commitment to step outside of their comfort zone and take on a new learning curve (Tran, 2013). It is, however, vital that internationalizing teaching and learning and building intercultural interactions among students from diverse backgrounds and—in particular between international and domestic students—should be prioritized at both program and course development levels, making them explicit in course objectives and assessments (Tran & Pham, 2016). It is crucial to have a coherent whole-institution approach toward a purposeful, transformative, and empathetic internationalization of teaching and learning content, pedagogies, and assessment, one that is supported by the broader institution’s core goals about internationalizing the student experience and graduate outcomes. An internationalized program of learning for international and domestic students alike should prioritize enhancing their abilities to learn from global encounters, abilities to connect and empathize, skills to navigate intercultural relationships, and skills to capitalize on opportunities and also to deal with pressures and challenges. Importantly, the teaching and learning for international students needs to be built on an approach emphasizing people-to-people empathy and people-to-people connections.

A robust locally adaptive learning algorithm is developed via two enhancements of the Resilient Propagation (RPROP) method. Remaining drawbacks of the gradient-based approach are addressed by hybridization with gradient-independent Local Search. Finally, a global optimization method based on recursion of the hybrid is constructed, making use of tabu neighborhoods to accelerate the search for minima through diver-sification. Enhanced RPROP is shown to be faster and more accurate than the standard RPROP in solving classification tasks based on natural data sets taken from the UCI repository of machine learning databases. Furthermore, the use of Local Search is shown to improve Enhanced RPROP by solving the same classification tasks as part of the global optimization method.

AbstractThis paper presents a local modification of the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (LM). First, the mathematical basics of the classic LM method are shown. The classic LM algorithm is very efficient for learning small neural networks. For bigger neural networks, whose computational complexity grows significantly, it makes this method practically inefficient. In order to overcome this limitation, local modification of the LM is introduced in this paper. The main goal of this paper is to develop a more complexity efficient modification of the LM method by using a local computation. The introduced modification has been tested on the following benchmarks: the function approximation and classification problems. The obtained results have been compared to the classic LM method performance. The paper shows that the local modification of the LM method significantly improves the algorithm’s performance for bigger networks. Several possible proposals for future works are suggested.

In this paper, we explore the concept of sequential learning and the efficacy of global and local neural network learning algorithms on a sequential learning task. Pseudorehearsal, a method developed by Robins19) to solve the catastrophic forgetting problem which arises from the excessive plasticity of neural networks, is significantly more effective than other local learning algorithms for the sequential task. We further consider the concept of local learning and suggest that pseudorehearsal is so effective because it works directly at the level of the learned function, and not indirectly on the representation of the function within the network. We also briefly explore the effect of local learning on generalization within the task.

Bayesian Networks structure learning (BNSL) is a troublesome problem that aims to search for an optimal structure. An exact search tends to sacrifice a significant amount of time and memory to promote accuracy, while the local search can tackle complex networks with thousands of variables but commonly gets stuck in a local optimum. In this paper, two novel and practical operators and a derived operator are proposed to perturb structures and maintain the acyclicity. Then, we design a framework, incorporating an influential perturbation factor integrated by three proposed operators, to escape current local optimal and improve the dilemma that outcomes trap in local optimal. The experimental results illustrate that our algorithm can output competitive results compared with the state-of-the-art constraint-based method in most cases. Meanwhile, our algorithm reaches an equivalent or better solution found by the state-of-the-art exact search and hybrid methods.

Abstract This paper uses data from rural India to study the relationship between local labor market opportunities and child education outcomes. We construct a Bartik index as a measure of exogenous changes in district-level labor demand and find that an increase in predicted overall employment growth is associated with higher years of education and better test scores for both boys and girls of primary school age. The effects on test scores of older boys are smaller and less statistically significant. Older girls, however, do benefit from better labor market opportunities. We do not find evidence for changes in school quality or district-level investment. Instead, we find support for increases in household education spending, possibly because of overall higher wages, or re-allocation of resources.

A method of supervised learning for multilayer artificial neural networks to escape local minima is proposed. The learning model has two phases: a backpropagation phase and a gradient ascent phase. The backpropagation phase performs steepest descent on a surface in weight space whose height at any point in weight space is equal to an error measure, and it finds a set of weights minimizing this error measure. When the backpropagation gets stuck in local minima, the gradient ascent phase attempts to fill up the valley by modifying gain parameters in a gradient ascent direction of the error measure. The two phases are repeated until the network gets out of local minima. The algorithm has been tested on benchmark problems, such as exclusive-or (XOR), parity, alphabetic characters learning, Arabic numerals with a noise recognition problem, and a realistic real-world problem: classification of radar returns from the ionosphere. For all of these problems, the systems are shown to be capable of escaping from the backpropagation local minima and converge faster when using the new proposed method than using the simulated annealing techniques.

Pruning methods for feature selection in neural networks start out from the idea that the representation of the data must evolve from a distributed representation of the information to a more localised representation which will represent the skeleton of the network, needing long training times imposed by the back propagation algorithm. Even the quasi-Newton algorithm spent a long computation time. We propose a three-layer network based on local representation with a step-threshold function and an algorithm called Direct Method for Structural Learning, both allow a very fast pruning of superfluous attributes.