Bilateral Personalized Dialogue Generation with Contrastive Learning

Generating personalized responses is one of the major challenges in natural human-robot interaction. Current researches in this field mainly focus on generating responses consistent with the robot’s pre-assigned persona, while ignoring the user’s persona. Such responses may be inappropriate or even offensive, which may lead to the bad user experience. Therefore, we propose a Bilateral Personalized Dialogue Generation (BPDG) method for dyadic conversation, which integrates user and robot personas into dialogue generation via designing a dynamic persona-aware fusion method. To bridge the gap between the learning objective function and evaluation metrics, the Conditional Mutual Information Maximum (CMIM) criterion is adopted with contrastive learning to select the proper response from the generated candidates. Moreover, a bilateral persona accuracy metric is designed to measure the degree of bilateral personalization. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with several state-of-the-art methods, the final results of the proposed method are more personalized and consistent with bilateral personas in terms of both automatic and manual evaluations.

ACMEORIENTED DEVELOPMENT OF TEACHERS IN THE INTEGRATED EDUCATIONAL SPACE

In this article, the problems of the teacher's professional development, as well as the pedagogical conditions of the acmeoriented mentoring within educational institutions are being examined. The characteristics of mentoring, the features of the integrated educational space of pedagogical education in the training of teachers also had been presented here. Nowadays, the need for mentoring is quite urgent to an extent that a modern teacher must be able to instantly 'react' to the ongoing changes within the educational system. A proper 'response' to such metamorphoses in the institutional environment is required such that it's encompassing alterations of the educational program's content, the introduction of brand-new teaching methods and technologies. Mentoring is organically combining acmeorinted professional development, its personalization, and guarantees a holistic approach to each teacher. It's believed by us that mentoring allows us to expand applied professional skills and competencies. The following paper represents a general experience of the educational mentoring process, in particular, considering the use of mentoring in the advancement of acting teachers' qualifications. An important role plays an innovative project of advanced training courses, "Pro-teaching", established collectively with Karaganda Buketov University and aimed at developing new training programs.

Expressive language development in ASD context- Case Study

This paper aims to highlight a way of approach for a child with ASD in the field of speech therapy alone, despite the unfavorable forecast (prognosis). The structure of the paper consists of two main parts: a theoretical one regarding the diagnosis and its involvement in the field of language development, and in the second part will be presented a case study carried out over a period of 6 months and with possible future opportunities progress. It is well known that most children with ADS have major language deficiencies coupled with their lack of social skills which worsens (accentuates) the course of further development and, therefore, early intervention can substantially reduce their disabilities. But, in this case study, it is presented a thirteen-year-old boy with ADS and its total absence (lack) of expressive language although the receptive language is at a pretty good level. The main goal of the program was to develop, somehow, (at first hand) first of all, a phonological basis in order to establish a pragmatic (functional) verbal communication. It is known that children with ADS are quite difficult to engage in activities that require focused attention and proper response to multiple requests and what was really remarkable and quite unusual, in the same time, is his full cooperation that led to significant results that will help him in the future.

The approach of Islamic economists to the prohibition of interest in the context of Böhm-Bawerk’s time preference theory of interest

Purpose Böhm-Bawerk’s time preference approach had significant importance among many other theories of interest. His assertion based on inherent human nature and the distinction he made between the positive and normative aspects of interest were remarkably authentic. As it is assumed that any efficient evaluation, judgment or regulation on the legitimacy of interest has to consider the theory of time preference, especially Böhm-Bawerk’s approach, the paper aimed to examine the Islamic economists’ response to the time preference theory of interest. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents Böhm-Bawerk’s time preference theory of interest. Then, it evaluates the Islamic economists’ views on the concepts of the time value of money and time preference qualitatively by scrutinizing the relevant literature. Findings It is observed that there is not any proper response of Islamic economists to the assertions of the causes of time preference. Responding to such challenges requires an approach that is mostly developed in the positive domain. Originality/value Although it is evident that interest is regarded as destructive in Islamic economics, the consideration is primarily normative. However, a convincing assertion also requires to be justified in the positive domain. Empirical works are exhibiting the problems with interest-based transactions. Besides, this paper raises the need for theoretical expositions of Islamic economists in response to the interest theories, which claim that the existence of interest is inevitable.

From the past to the future: what we learn from China’s 2020 Census

The population of China has entered an era of low fertility and aging, with a slower growth rate in the last decade. This commentary briefly reviews demographic changes in China in the last seven decades with some important years of change in mortality, fertility and urbanization, and discusses future trends according to the information provided by the 2020 Census. China has experienced “compressed” population change, and population aging will continue to advance, meanwhile the size of the population is expected to reach its peak in the near future. To prepare proper response to the challenges proactively, institutional change which adapts to population changes is necessary.

Staying neutral or intervening?

Ethics teachers are regularly confronted with disturbing cases brought in by medical students in class. These classes are considered confidential, so that everyone can speak freely about their experiences. But what should ethics teachers do when they hear about a situation they consider to be outright alarming, for example where patients/students’ safety is at stake or where systematic power abuse seems to be at hand? Should they remain neutral or should they step in and intervene? In the Netherlands, as in many other countries, there are no clear guidelines for ethics teachers on how to respond. To get more insight into what teachers themselves think a proper response would be, we interviewed 18 Dutch medical ethics teachers. We found that Dutch ethics teachers will address the issue in class, but that they are overall reluctant to intervene; take action outside the scope of class. This reluctance is partly rooted in the conviction that ethicists should stay neutral and facilitate reflection, instead of telling students or physicians what to do. At the same time, this neutral position seems a difficult place to leave for those teachers who would want to or feel they need to. This has to do with various organizational and institutional constraints tied up with their position. The study invites medical ethics teachers to reflect on these constraints together and think about how to proceed from there. This study seeks to contribute to research on cultural change in medicine and medical students’ experiences of moral distress.

Faith as a Proper Answer in Crisis

This article addresses the problem of preserving the faith in God while discouraging circumstances, based on the first part of Habakkuk’s prophecy. The message of the book teaches us how to benefit from our faith by presenting the process through which the prophet overcomes the confusion around him, even in God’s acting for his people. In the introduction, it is argued that faith is a basic principle of life, which can be questioned because of difficult circumstances. The first part of the article discusses why Habakkuk’s prophecy can be understood as a “burden,” and the second part presents the historical context of the book of Habakkuk. The third section discusses the internal and external crisis in Judah and the fourth section analyses the prophet’s reaction against the Babylonian crisis. The fifth section described the faith as a proper response to the crisis (2:1-4) while the final section discusses implications of Habakkuk 2:4 for the teaching of the New Testament. In general, we can see that in the first part of Habakkuk (1:1-2:4) the prophet questions the validity of his faith in God, because of the apparent long divine silence about injustice in Judah (1:2-4). Then, he was unhappy with God’s answer, who decided to send a new crisis to solve the first crisis (1:5-6). After the prophet’s complaint (1:7-2:1), God advises him and his people to trust His solution in overcoming the crisis (2:2-4). The insights from the message of Habakkuk analyzed in this article, may help the reader to preserve authentic faith in a time of crisis. Also, that pattern of living by faith from this Old Testament book is taken over by the New Testament authors so that Habakkuk’s expression “the righteous live by their faith” (2:4), is quoted as a key statement for the Gospel message of salvation (Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38). But not only that, this statement defines the proper behavior of people in expecting the divine solution of salvation in the time of crisis.

Anticorruption Constraints as a Manifestation of the "Coherent Force" of Human Rights in the Activities of Public Administration Actors

The search for an optimal model for relationships between individuals and entities of public administration should go hand in hand with the statutorization of the guarantees of individual rights, freedoms and legal interests, including the principle of protection of legitimate expectations of individuals in their relations with public administration entities. The research provides grounds for believing that anti-corruption restrictions for entities of public administration are the components of the above-mentioned principle since they act as a manifestation of the binding force for the latter, emphasizing anthropocentric nature of their activity. It is the standardization of models for resource utilization in regard to the activities of public administration entities with the use of anti-corruption restrictions that makes the trust of an individual to public entities possible. It also makes the actions and decisions of the latter predictable, let alone enables unification of interpretation and application of national and international legislation. Using the resource of anti-corruption restrictions, which is aimed to make it impossible for public administration entities to get distracted from their main task of protecting and realizing individuals’ legitimate expectations, a sound doctrinal analysis of the phenomena is advisable for establishing the new and consistent with the latest advances in the legal science basis for rule-making and legal enforcement in the sphere of relations between individuals and entities of public administration. Owing to the statutorization of the use of relevant anti-corruption restrictions as well as compliance with technicalities and proper response to modern challenges, the conclusion is made about a great potential for quality assurance of the anti-corruption law with its availability, intelligibility for all legal entities in the sphere of public administration, unification of its use and interpretation and hence the predictability of the decisions and actions of public administration entities, guarantee of realization and protection of the legitimate expectations of individuals in their relations with the latter.

RT-qPCR assay for detection of British (B.1.1.7) and South Africa (B.1.351) variants of SARS-CoV-2

Less than a year following the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, variants of concern have emerged in the form of the British variant B.1.1.7 and the South Africa variant B.1.351. Due to their high infectivity and morbidity, it is crucial to quickly and effectively detect them. Current methods of detection are either time-consuming, expensive or indirect. Here, we report the development of a rapid, cost-effective and direct RT-qPCR method for detection of the two variants of concern. We developed and validate a detection system for the detection of the B.1.1.7 variant and another single detection set for the B.1.351 variant. The developed approach was characterized and tested on wastewater samples and illustrated that all primers and probes were sensitive and specific. The novel system presented here will allow proper response and pandemic containment with regard to these variants. In addition, it may provide a basis for developing tools for the detection of additional variants of concern.

For a Right to Health Beyond Biopolitics: The Politics of Pandemic and the ‘Politics of Life’

We argue, drawing on the work of Didier Fassin, that the right to health can be understood as an essential part of a radical politics of life. Since the right to health implies fostering the well-being of individuals in a way that is structural, progressive and non-discriminatory, the right not only problematises the ‘governmentality’ approach to power but allows push-back against statist and market discourses through a specific phenomenology of right. The discourse of rights – like the pandemic itself – oscillates between general and particular in a way that makes normative responses unstable. Nonetheless it is this dialectic that is characteristic of human rights discourse and allows a right to health to be the proper response to pandemic without it being subsumed within neoliberal logic. A politics of life is a multi-focussed analysis of life, health and society potentially resisting the appropriation of biological life by neoliberalism.