Studies indicate that much of the software created today is not accessible to all users, indicating that developers don't see the need to devote sufficient resources to creating accessible software. Compounding this problem, there is a lack of robust, easily adoptable educational accessibility material available to instructors for inclusion in their curricula. To address these issues, we have created five Accessibility Learning Labs (ALL) using an experiential learning structure. The labs are designed to educate and create awareness of accessibility needs in computing. The labs enable easy classroom integration by providing instructors with complete educational materials including lecture slides, activities, and quizzes. The labs are hosted on our servers and require only a browser to be utilized.To demonstrate the benefit of our material and the potential benefits of our experiential lab format with empathy-creating material, we conducted a study involving 276 students in ten sections of an introductory computing course. Our findings include: (I) The demonstrated potential of the proposed experiential learning format and labs are effective in motivating and educating students about the importance of accessibility (II) The labs are effective in informing students about foundational accessibility topics (III) Empathy-creating material is demonstrated to be a beneficial component in computing accessibility education, supporting students in placing a higher value on the importance of creating accessible software. Created labs and project materials are publicly available on the project website: http://all.rit.edu

Abstract-This paper presents herein experiments and calculations of electromagnetic induction between jointless track circuits (JTCs) and track-circuit readers (TCRs). The paper uses transmission-line theory to simulate JTC currents ahead of shunt points and electromagnetism to calculate voltages induced in the TCR antenna. Based on these calculations, the JTC-to-TCR range is defined. The paper derives expressions for the amplitude and phase of the voltage induced in the TCR antenna by the JTC current and uses them to quantitatively analyze the train control system. Experiments verify the conclusions reached based on the calculations.

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With the fast increase of online services of all kinds, users start to care more about the Quality of Service (QoS) that a service provider can offer besides the functionalities of the services. As a result, QoS-based service selection and recommendation have received significant attention since the mid-2000s. However, existing approaches primarily consider a small number of standard QoS parameters, most of which relate to the response time, fee, availability of services, and so on. As online services start to diversify significantly over different domains, these small set of QoS parameters will not be able to capture the different quality aspects that users truly care about over different domains. Most existing approaches for QoS data collection depend on the information from service providers, which are sensitive to the trustworthiness of the providers. Some service monitoring mechanisms collect QoS data through actual service invocations but may be affected by actual hardware/software configurations. In either case, domain-specific QoS data that capture what users truly care about have not been successfully collected or analyzed by existing works in service computing. To address this demanding issue, we develop a statistical learning approach to extract domain-specific QoS features from user-provided service reviews. In particular, we aim to classify user reviews based on their sentiment orientations into either a positive or negative category. Meanwhile, statistical feature selection is performed to identify statistically nontrivial terms from review text, which can serve as candidate QoS features. We also develop a topic models-based approach that automatically groups relevant terms and returns the term groups to users, where each term group corresponds to one high-level quality aspect of services. We have conducted extensive experiments on three real-world datasets to demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

We focus on using natural language unstructured textual Knowledge Bases (KBs) to answer questions from community-based Question-and-Answer (Q8A) websites. We propose a novel framework that integrates multi-level tag recommendation with external KBs to retrieve the most relevant KB articles to answer user posted questions. Different from many existing efforts that primarily rely on the Q8A sites’ own historical data (e.g., user answers), retrieving answers from authoritative external KBs (e.g., online programming documentation repositories) has the potential to provide rich information to help users better understand the problem, acquire the knowledge, and hence avoid asking similar questions in future. The proposed multi-level tag recommendation best leverages the rich tag information by first categorizing them into different semantic levels based on their usage frequencies. A post-tag co-clustering model, augmented by a two-step tag recommender, is used to predict tags at different levels for a given user posted question. A KB article retrieval component leverages the recommended multi-level tags to select the appropriate KBs and search/rank the matching articles thereof. We conduct extensive experiments using real-world data from a Q8A site and multiple external KBs to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed question-answering framework.