Exploring the uses of ICT in education: A national survey study

Scientific Conference (2016, November 23)

This study aims at documenting current educational technology practices in Luxembourgish public schools and to better understand them in terms of various internal/proximal and external/distal enabling ... [more ▼]

This study aims at documenting current educational technology practices in Luxembourgish public schools and to better understand them in terms of various internal/proximal and external/distal enabling factors and barriers. It is supposed to serve as a guide for current digital education policies, strategies and actions and to assess their effects in the near and mid-term future. Therefore, an online survey was designed and deployed to all primary and secondary school teachers asking (mostly multiple choice) questions about a variety of proximal and distal influence factors and about ICT-supported pedagogical practices of teachers. Results show that teachers are willing to integrate ICT in education, that they are aware of its importance, that they feel comfortable to use ICT in everyday, but not prepared to use them for educational purposes. ICT-supported teaching remains rather teacher-centered. This has important implications for teacher training and on digital education strategies to be implemented. [less ▲]

Contemporary Russia: Der KGB und der feine englische Humor

Article for general public (2016)

Vor genau zehn Jahren wurde in London Alexander Litwinenko (1962-2006), der frühere KGB-Offizier, der durch seine Kritik an der Spitze des Geheimdienstes prominent wurde, mit einer tödlichen Dosis des ... [more ▼]

Vor genau zehn Jahren wurde in London Alexander Litwinenko (1962-2006), der frühere KGB-Offizier, der durch seine Kritik an der Spitze des Geheimdienstes prominent wurde, mit einer tödlichen Dosis des radioaktiven Elements Polonium 210 vergiftet. [less ▲]

To Share or not to Share: Access Control and Information Inference in Social Networks

Doctoral thesis (2016)

Online social networks (OSNs) have been the most successful online applications during the past decade. Leading players in the business, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, attract a huge number of ... [more ▼]

Online social networks (OSNs) have been the most successful online applications during the past decade. Leading players in the business, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, attract a huge number of users. Nowadays, OSNs have become a primary way for people to connect, communicate and share life moments. Although OSNs have brought a lot of convenience to our life, users' privacy, on the other hand, has become a major concern due to the large amount of personal data shared online. In this thesis, we study users' privacy in social networks from two aspects, namely access control and information inference. Access control is a mechanism, provided by OSNs, for users themselves to regulate who can view their resources. Access control schemes in OSNs are relationship-based, i.e., a user can define access control policies to allow others who are in a certain relationship with him to access his resources. Current OSNs have deployed multiple access control schemes, however most of these schemes do not satisfy users' expectations, due to expressiveness and usability. There are mainly two types of information that users share in OSNs, namely their activities and social relations. The information has provided an unprecedented chance for academia to understand human society and for industry to build appealing applications, such as personalized recommendation. However, the large quantity of data can also be used to infer a user's personal information, even though not shared by the user in OSNs. This thesis concentrates on users' privacy in online social networks from two aspects, i.e., access control and information inference, it is organized into two parts. The first part of this thesis addresses access control in social networks from three perspectives. First, we propose a formal framework based on a hybrid logic to model users' access control policies. This framework incorporates the notion of public information and provides users with a fine-grained way to control who can view their resources. Second, we design cryptographic protocols to enforce access control policies in OSNs. Under these protocols, a user can allow others to view his resources without leaking private information. Third, major OSN companies have deployed blacklist for users to enforce extra access control besides the normal access control policies. We formally model blacklist with the help of a hybrid logic and propose efficient algorithms to implement it in OSNs. The second part of this thesis concentrates on the inference of users' information in OSNs, using machine learning techniques. The targets of our inference are users' activities, represented by mobility, and social relations. First, we propose a method which uses a user's social relations to predict his locations. This method adopts a user's social community information to construct the location predictor, and perform the inference with machine learning techniques. Second, we focus on inferring the friendship between two users based on the common locations they have been to. We propose a notion namely location sociality that characterizes to which extent a location is suitable for conducting social activities, and use this notion for friendship prediction. Experiments on real life social network datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our two inferences. [less ▲]

Le Freeport Luxembourg. Logistique, pure valeur et volatilisation de l’œuvre d’art

in Esprit (2016)

In the last decade, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, artwork has become a successful financial asset. Improved logistical techniques and specific legal provisions (as the evergrowing spread of ... [more ▼]

In the last decade, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, artwork has become a successful financial asset. Improved logistical techniques and specific legal provisions (as the evergrowing spread of Free Economic Zones) have fostered this evolution. Created in 2014, Le Freeport Luxembourg is the first free zone in Luxembourg. It follows the exemple of the Geneva and Singapore freeports. Its creation coincides with the attempt to diversify the country’s national economy, and to develop a niche where finance, art, and logistics meet. The empirical analysis comprehends a document analysis, fieldwork (incl. photographs) and three semi-structured interviews with experts working at the Freeport Luxembourg. The contribution investigates how Le Freeport territorializes immaterial flows, thus imposing practices and contributing to establishing Luxembourg as a prominent node of the international art market. The paper demonstrates how this territorialization results into the enclaving of the building and into the dematerialization of artwork and valuables. While other similar freeports are in project around the world (Dubai, Shangai), this case study investigates an emerging trend which exemplifies, and takes to extremes, the functioning of the current logistical organization. [less ▲]

L’utilisation de l’environnement numérique MathemaTIC pour développer les compétences dans le domaine de la résolution de problèmes arithmétiques

Scientific Conference (2016, November 21)

Dans le cadre du « Digital Lëtzebuerg » et suite à l’appel Horizon 2020 par la commission européenne, le gouvernement du Luxembourg a lancé des initiatives pour l'implémentation du numérique dans ses ... [more ▼]

Dans le cadre du « Digital Lëtzebuerg » et suite à l’appel Horizon 2020 par la commission européenne, le gouvernement du Luxembourg a lancé des initiatives pour l'implémentation du numérique dans ses différents ministères. Dans ce contexte, l’éducation nationale a initié le développement d’un environnement numérique pour l'apprentissage des mathématiques à l’écolefondamentale pour les élèves de cycle 4,Université du c'est-à-dire âgés de 10 à 12 ans. Suite au constat de faibles performances en mathématiques aux épreuves standardisées de début de cycle 3 (élèves de 8 à 10 ans), la question d'élargir l'implémentation de cet environnement numérique à ce cycle s'avère opportune. En effet, les résultats à ces épreuves indiquent que d’une part un quart de ces élèves n’arrive pas à atteindre le niveau socle et que d’autre part les résultats ne se sont que peu améliorés entre 2011 et2013. En d'autres termes, il y aurait donc un quart de la population scolaire de cycle 3 qui n’ aurait pas les compétences nécessaires pour suivre les apprentissages prévues en mathématiques. Les élèves concernés sont majoritairement d'un milieu socio-économique faible et issus de la migration.Ainsi, une étude est envisagée pour voir dans quelle mesure l’usage de l’environnement MathemaTIC favoriserait le développement des compétences en mathématiques, notamment dans le domaine de la résolution de problèmes arithmétiques. Cette étude se réalisera entre 2016 et 2018 avec un échantillon de 20 classes (400 élèves). Les items seront construits en partant des niveaux testés dans les Ep.Stan 3.1 et en se basant sur le plan d’études du cycle 3. Pour ce faire, l'approche adoptée est celle dite " centrée utilisateur ", issue du domaine des Interactions Hommes-Machines (IHM). Les compétences au début et à la fin de l’utilisation-même de l'environnement MathemaTIC par les élèves de cycle 3 seront mesurées par les épreuves standardisées Ep. Stan, sous le couvert du Lucet. [less ▲]

Metadiscourse in lectures: the case of importance marking

Scientific Conference (2016, November 19)

This paper surveys how relative importance is marked lexicogrammatically in lectures (cf. Deroey and Taverniers, 2012; Deroey, 2014; Deroey, 2015). Markers of (lesser) importance (e.g. the point is ... [more ▼]

This paper surveys how relative importance is marked lexicogrammatically in lectures (cf. Deroey and Taverniers, 2012; Deroey, 2014; Deroey, 2015). Markers of (lesser) importance (e.g. the point is, remember, anyway, briefly) are metadiscursive devices combining discourse organization with evaluation along a ‘parameter of importance or relevance’ (Thompson and Hunston, 2000: 24). Such marking can benefit lecture comprehension, note-taking and retention. Using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods, 40 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus were first manually examined to identify candidate markers. Further instances of these and related markers were then retrieved from the whole corpus of 160 lectures using Corpus Query Language in Sketch Engine. A wide variety of markers were thus attested, the predominant ones of which are not the ones we would intuitively think of. Markers of important information were classified into lexicogrammatical patterns depending on the word class of their main lexeme. The multifunctional, semi-fixed expressions ‘the point is’ and ‘remember’ predominate over more stereotypical, explicit markers such as ‘the important point is’. Markers of lesser importance were classified according to how they achieved their effect. Most denote partial relevance (e.g. detail, in passing, briefly) rather than irrelevance (e.g. not pertinent, not matter, trash) and some markers appear pragmaticalized in certain contexts. As many markers required significant interpretation to achieve their importance marking effect, an understanding of the lecture genre as well as co-textual, visual, non-verbal and prosodic clues seem particularly important in identifying their precise status. This poses a challenge to quantification. Indeed, Hunston’s observation that ‘much evaluative meaning is not obviously identifiable, as it appears to depend on immediate context and on reader assumptions about value’ (2004: 157) is particularly pertinent here. Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). ‘Ignore that'cause it's totally irrelevant’: marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(14), 2085-2099. Deroey, K. L. B. (2014). ‘Anyway, the point I'm making is’: Lexicogrammatical relevance marking in lectures. In L. Vandelanotte, D. Kristin, G. Caroline, & K. Ditte (Eds.), Recent advances in corpus linguistics: developing and exploiting corpora (pp. 265-291). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Deroey, K. L. B. (2015). Marking importance in lectures: interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 51-72. Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford: OUP. [less ▲]

Exchanging Postcards Across the Iron Curtain: Foreign Tourists and Transnational Networks in Socialist Romania of the 1960s-1980

Presentation (2016, November 18)

NIMBY

Article for general public (2016)

The seven golden rules to introduce citizens' consultation at the EU level: Reforming "Your Voice in Europe"

Presentation (2016, November 17)

In this paper, I would like to draw some lessons from the failed attempts of democratization of the EU by proposing some rules that should be followed in order to envision a realistic deliberative and ... [more ▼]

In this paper, I would like to draw some lessons from the failed attempts of democratization of the EU by proposing some rules that should be followed in order to envision a realistic deliberative and inclusive transformation of the EU-decision making process. By following their spirits, I will propose an ambitious renovation of Your Voice in Europe, the only EU public institutionalized system of consultation that however most of the citizens are not aware of. [less ▲]

Magnetic neutron scattering studies on Nd-Fe-B magnets

Scientific Conference (2016, November 17)