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International service-learning (ISL) is conceptualized as an intersection of three educational components: service-learning, study abroad, and international education. Its potential benefits include increases in students’ intercultural competence and sense of global citizenship. Arguably, through immersion in a cross-cultural context, students can learn to appreciate diverse values and cultures while enhancing their social responsibility and bringing benefit to a community in need. However, most existing empirical studies of the impact of ISL utilize small samples drawn from a single program, which restricts the generalizability of the findings. This study, using a large sample from multiple courses, aims to bridge the gap by examining the relationship between an ISL experience and university students’ global citizenship and intercultural effectiveness. The findings suggest that skills such as intercultural effectiveness and global competencies are more easily enhanced than attitudinal values such as social responsibility and global civic engagement. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

Guided by the expectancy-value theory of motivation in learning, we explored the causal relationship between students’ learning experiences, motivation, and cognitive learning outcome in academic service-learning. Based on a sample of 2,056 college students from a university in Hong Kong, the findings affirm that learning experiences and motivation are key factors determining cognitive learning outcome, affording a better understanding of student learning behavior and the impact in service-learning. This research provides an insight into the impact of motivation and learning experiences on students’ cognitive learning outcome while engaging in academic service-learning. This not only can discover the intermediate factors of the learning process but also provides insights to educators on how to enhance their teaching pedagogy.

The growth of age-friendly community initiatives underscores a paradigmatic shift from the individual to the community, addressing dynamic transactions between people and the environment they are living in. The purpose of the present study is to address the gap in existing research by examining the psycho-social effects of the sense of community in mediating between WHO domains of age-friendliness and the life satisfaction of older adults. Data were obtained from 898 participants in Hong Kong. Path analysis was conducted. Two AFC domains, Social Participation as well as Community Support and Health Services, were found to be associated with life satisfaction. Sense of community was found to mediate between these two domains and life satisfaction. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to developing opportunities in social participation of older adults and enhancing community/health support services in the context of developing sustainability in the community.

Many studies have attested to the efficacy of integrating innovative methods of teaching computing and engineering, especially for introductory students and at the K-12 level. As an example, robots have been successfully used to teach a wide range of subjects, from introductory programming to artificial intelligence. As a discipline, wearable computing is seen to be practical, yet futuristic and exciting, and it captures the attention and interest of people who might not otherwise be drawn to technology. Recent developments in this field have also raised the possibility of moving wearable computing construction within the reach of hobbyists and novices. However, there still exist substantial obstacles toward the adoption of wearable computing into education. This paper presents a framework with the objective of facilitating the integration of wearable computing into outreach and introductory computer science and engineering education. We also present a comprehensive evaluation of our platform, including a comparison with the current practice of sewing-based wearable computing.

Given a set of clusters, we consider an optimization problem which seeks a subset of clusters that maximizes the microaverage F-measure. This optimal value can be used as an evaluation measure of the goodness of clustering. For arbitrarily overlapping clusters, finding the optimal value is NP-hard. We claim that a greedy approximation algorithm yields the global optimal solution for clusters that overlap only by nesting. We present a mathematical proof of this claim by induction. For a family of n clusters containing a total of N objects, this algorithm has an {\rm O}(n;{2}) time complexity and O(N) space complexity.

In this study, a real-time collaborative 3D assembling system (Co-assembler) has been described that allows casual customers to interactively and virtually configure the 3D products over the Internet. It provides a framework for a web-based 3D assembly system that uses a customizable product model to significantly simplify the configuration and the assembly process, and a customer-driven recommendation helper to assist the customers make their design decisions. Two assembly-specific data formats - Assembly ML and Parametric Product ML are developed for archival and data transfer. The system aims to capture the customers’ needs and convert them into technical specifications, indirectly helping to promote e-commerce for manufacturing enterprises.

Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) provides a systematic approach for user communities to model and exchange data on specific types of products and manufacturing technologies. With the increasing popularity of the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) on the Internet, mapping STEP data into XML seems a logical way to make STEP data more accessible through the Internet. On the other hand, Internet-based information systems generally consist of data sources and clients that access the data sources; and mediators have been proposed as a middle layer that provides added value by converting the basic data into information required by the clients. To work effectively, mediators require machine-readable data models and standardized interfaces, which can be developed based on XML. In this paper we discuss the ways of automated conversion from STEP into XML, and the exchange of STEP data through the XML-based mediator architecture.

The definition and maintenance of workflow processes have become important tasks for enterprises as workflow management systems (WFMS) are systematically applied to critical business processes. In order to simplify the management and usage of workflow processes and to integrate with other applications, a good modeling method is essential. The WFCP-net (workflow-net based on colored Petri net) is an extension of the workflow-net (WF-net) which can be used to model family of workflow processes with similar process routes and logic rules. An expanding suite of tools, which currently includes, can support its application: a process structure graph editor, a WF script (workflow script language for writing business rules) editor and translator (translate WF script into Java classes) and a dynamically loadable workflow engine.

The Internet and the World-Wide Web created a new infrastructure and new possibilities for concurrent engineering. In order to support real-time (synchronous) collaborative solid shape design, however, some major issues still have to be resolved. These involved deployment of solid modeling software on the Web, shared access to common solid models, communication and control of the design actions among designers, and efficient representation of the many different but related design versions of the product. This paper discusses the development of a real-time collaborative solid modeling system that addresses these issues. The prototype system has been implemented in a client-server environment in Java, using the Java Remote Method Invocation package for networking support.

The concept of mediation has been successfully applied to the development of distributed information systems, where mediators form the middle tier between client applications and data resources, providing valuable abstraction and integration functions. Extensible MarkUp Language (XML) has been used to develop self-describing data models and common interfaces for mediators to be deployed in Web-based information systems. This makes such systems easier to develop, to maintain, and to evolve. This paper discusses the design of such an architecture and its application in retail inventory control in electronic commerce (e-commerce). The prototype system is implemented with Java Servlets and CORBA.

This paper discusses the synchronous viewing and editing of object-oriented models based on the Unified Modeling Lan guage (UML) by multiple users on the internet. Each user works on a copy of the model, which is continuously synchronized with the master copy on a central server. A group of users can work together in the common single writer-multiple reader mode, controlled by a token that can be passed from user to user. Alternatively, different users can lock different parts of the model for exclusive editing while the changes are visible to all other users. One can improve on basic granular locking by considering the semantics of the graphical nota tion. A semantics-based locking mechanism has been designed and implemented for UML class diagrams in order to allow users to col laborate more effectively: A prototype collaborative UML (CUML) editing system has been implemented in Java to validate the design.

In this paper, we present our design of a GIS (Geographic Information System) to provide tourist information to visitors via the WWW. The system can help a tourist, even when he is not in Hong Kong, to find information about routes, buildings, underground railways and train stations. Further, the GIS also allows a tourist to interact with the displayed map by zooming, scrolling, panning, finding out a walking path between two locations with a time estimate, and linking to other WWW locations of tourist hotspots in Hong Kong.

A library of functions for the creation, manipulation, and viewing of solid models was created for deployment on the World Wide Web. The core data structure was based on the halfedge boundary-representation data structure proposed by M. Mantyla but much functionality had been added. It provided an alternate, constructive-solid-geometry interface to the core data structure. It was initially implemented in C and subsequently re-implemented in Java. An interface to the STEP standard and various applications such as a simple solid modeling applet, a conic illustrator applet, and a virtual furniture showroom applet had been built. It is being extended to support multiple simultaneous users as part of a prototype WWW-based tele-processing manufacturing system.

Data modelling plays a pivotal role in Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) as a vehicle for integration among the various component systems and users. Standardization in the representation of product information is receiving growing attention in recent years. In data modelling, the concepts of generalization, aggregation and classification are well known. They form the foundation of many, if not most, semantic and object-oriented models. Class hierarchy and the attendant inheritance semantics provide powerful modelling mechanisms whereby a more effective schema can be constructed in which common structural and behavioural specifications are shared. Aggregation has mainly been treated as an information structuring concept in most models, with focus on how complex-valued properties can be accommodated. In the application of computers in such areas as CAD/CAM and Geographic Information Systems where the structure of objects is of primary importance, the current aggregation semantics are inadequate. In this paper, we examine the aggregation concept from a number of perspectives. We discuss a proposed model of attribute semantics which can more effectively support the definition of constraints and derived data in an aggregation hierarchy. In the model, object attributes are categorized according to their meronymic type. The attribute categories serve as expansion scope for generating attribute references on a composite object. In the latter part of the paper we illustrate how part-of semantics can be incorporated into the current international standard for manufacturing data exchange of STEP/EXPRESS.