Question: An innovative evolutionary data mining technique and its application in predicting customer churn

This paper introduces a novel evolutionary data mining algorithm and evaluates its effectiveness in the context of churn prediction, a critical problem in customer relationship management. The proposed algorithm integrates elements from both evolutionary computing and data mining techniques to enhance prediction accuracy and model interpretability. Unlike conventional data mining approaches that may struggle with high-dimensional and noisy data, this evolutionary algorithm is designed to robustly handle such complexities. The algorithm is tested on a diverse set of real-world datasets, including those with highly skewed distributions commonly found in churn prediction scenarios. Through extensive empirical analysis, the algorithm demonstrates superior performance in predicting churn compared to traditional methods. Key to its success is the algorithm's ability to dynamically adapt to the underlying data characteristics, making it particularly effective in identifying patterns indicative of customer churn. The results highlight the algorithm's potential to significantly impact business strategies by enabling more accurate predictions and informed decision-making.

The education domain offers a fertile ground for many interesting and challenging data mining applications. These applications can help both educators and students, and improve the quality of education. In this paper, we present a real-life application for the Gifted Education Programme (GEP) of the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore. The application involves many data mining tasks. This paper focuses only on one task, namely, selecting students for remedial classes. Traditionally, a cut-off mark for each subject is used to select the weak students. That is, those students whose scores in a subject fall below the cut-off mark for the subject are advised to take further classes in the subject. In this paper, we show that this traditional method requires too many students to take part in the remedial classes. This not only increases the teaching load of the teachers, but also gives unnecessary burdens to students, which is particularly undesirable in our case because the GEP students are generally taking more subjects than non-GEP students, and the GEP students are encouraged to have more time to explore advanced topics. With the help of data mining, we are able to select the targeted students much more precisely.

This paper proposes a novel anomaly detection system for spacecrafts based on data mining techniques. It constructs a nonlinear probabilistic model w.r.t. behavior of a spacecraft by applying the relevance vector regression and autoregression to massive telemetry data, and then monitors the on-line telemetry data using the model and detects anomalies. A major advantage over conventional anomaly detection methods is that this approach requires little a priori knowledge on the system.

This study focuses on predicting demand based on data collected which spans across many periods. To help our client build a solution to forecast demand effectively, we developed a model using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Networks, a type of Recurrent Neural Network, to estimate demand based on historical patterns. While there may be many available models for dealing with a time series problem, the LSTM model is relatively new and highly sophisticated to its counterpart. By comparing this study which works excellently for sequential learning, to the other existing models and techniques, we are now closer to solving at least one of many complications apparent across industries. The study becomes even more important for supply chain professionals, especially those in the purchase department, as they can now rely on a highly accurate model instead of basing their forecasts purely on intuition and recent customer behavior. Using data from the M3-Competition, which is a competition conducted by the International Institute of Forecasters, we develop a working framework to help our client compare their existing models (feedforward neural network and exponential smoothing model) with our LSTM model.

Data mining technique has attracted attention in the information industry and society as a whole, because of the big amount of data and the imminent need to transform that data into useful information and knowledge. Recently conducted studies with successfully demarcated results using this technique, to estimate several parameters in a variety of domains. However, the effective use of data in some areas is still developing, as is the case of sports, which has shown moderate growth. In this context, the objective of this article is to present a systematic review of the literature about research involving sports data mining. As systematic searches were made out in five databases, resulting in 21 articles that answered a question that grounded this article.

The prediction of survival of Coronary heart disease (CHD) has been a challenging research problem for medical society. The goal of this paper is to develop data mining algorithms for predicting survival of CHD patients based on 1000 cases .We carry out a clinical observation and a 6-month follow up to include 1000 CHD cases. The survival information of each case is obtained via follow up. Based on the data, we employed three popular data mining algorithms to develop the prediction models using the 502 cases. We also used 10-fold cross-validation methods to measure the unbiased estimate of the three prediction models for performance comparison purposes. The results indicated that the SVM is the best predictor with 92.1 % accuracy on the holdout sample artificial neural networks came out to be the second with91.0% accuracy and the decision trees models came out to be the worst of the three with 89.6% accuracy. The comparative study of multiple prediction models for survival of CHD patients along with a 10-fold cross-validation provided us with an insight into the relative prediction ability of different data.

Finding topics from a collection of documents, such as research publications, patents, and technical reports, is helpful for summarizing large scale text collections and the world wide web. It can also help forecast topic trends in the future. This can be beneficial for many applications, such as modeling the evolution of the direction of research and forecasting future trends of the IT industry. In this paper, we propose using association analysis and ensemble forecasting to automatically discover topics from a set of text documents and forecast their evolving trend in a near future. In order to discover meaningful topics, we collect publications from a particular research area, data mining and machine learning, as our data domain. An association analysis process is applied to the collected data to first identify a set of topics, followed by a temporal correlation analysis to help discover correlations between topics, and identify a network of topics and communities. After that, an ensemble forecasting approach is proposed to predict the popularity of research topics in the future. Our experiments and validations on data with 9 years of publication records validate the effectiveness of the proposed design.

The Internet is emerging as a new marketing channel, so understanding the characteristics of online customers’ needs and expectations is considered a prerequisite for activating the consumer-oriented electronic commerce market. In this study, we propose a novel clustering algorithm based on genetic algorithms (GAs) to effectively segment the online shopping market. In general, GAs are believed to be effective on NP-complete global optimization problems, and they can provide good near-optimal solutions in reasonable time. Thus, we believe that a clustering technique with GA can provide a way of finding the relevant clusters more effectively. The research in this paper applied K-means clustering whose initial seeds are optimized by GA, which is called GA K-means, to a real-world online shopping market segmentation case. In this study, we compared the results of GA K-means to those of a simple K-means algorithm and self-organizing maps (SOM). The results showed that GA K-means clustering may improve segmentation performance in comparison to other typical clustering algorithms. In addition, our study validated the usefulness of the proposed model as a preprocessing tool for recommendation systems. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Detecting and identifying e-banking Phishing websites is really a complex and dynamic problem involving many factors and criteria. Because of the subjective considerations and the ambiguities involved in the detection, Fuzzy Data Mining Techniques can be an effective tool in assessing and identifying e-banking phishing websites since it offers a more natural way of dealing with quality factors rather than exact values. In this paper, we present novel approach to overcome the „fuzziness‟ in the e-banking phishing website assessment and propose an intelligent resilient and effective model for detecting e-banking phishing websites. The proposed model is based on Fuzzy logic combined with Data Mining algorithms to characterize the e-banking phishing website factors and to investigate its techniques by classifying there phishing types and defining six e-banking phishing website attack criteria‟s with a layer structure. A Case study was applied to illustrate and simulate the phishing process. Our experimental results showed the significance and importance of the e-banking phishing website criteria (URL & Domain Identity) represented by layer one, and the variety influence of the phishing characteristic layers on the final e-banking phishing website rate. KeywordsPhishing, Fuzzy Logic, Data Mining, Classification, association, apriori, e-banking risk assessment

In recent years the amount of data stored in educational database is growing rapidly. The stored database contains hidden information which if used aids improvement of student's performance and behaviour. In this paper predictive modelling approach is used for extracting this hidden information. Data is collected, a predictive model is formulated, predictions are made, and the model is validated as additional data becomes available. The predictive models will help the instructor to understand how well or how poorly the students in his/her class will perform, and hence the instructor can choose proper pedagogical and instructional interventions to enhance student learning outcomes. The implementation is done in Hadoop framework with MapReduce and Revolutionary R Enterprise RRE.

This study presents an approach to predict the performance of sales agents of a call center dedicated exclusively to sales and telemarketing activities. This approach is based on a naive Bayesian classifier. The objective is to know what levels of the attributes are indicative of individuals who perform well. A sample of 1037 sales agents was taken during the period between March and September of 2009 on campaigns related to insurance sales and service pre-paid phone services, to build the naive Bayes network. It has been shown that, socio-demographic attributes are not suitable for predicting performance. Alternatively, operational records were used to predict production of sales agents, achieving satisfactory results. In this case, the classifier training and testing is done through a stratified tenfold cross-validation. It classified the instances correctly 80.60% of times, with the proportion of false positives of 18.1% for class no (does not achieve minimum) and 20.8% for the class yes (achieves equal or above minimum acceptable). These results suggest that socio-demographic attributes has no predictive power on performance, while the operational information of the activities of the sale agent can predict the future performance of the


Question: A new evolutionary data mining technique and its application to predicting customer churn

This volume delves into the realm of machine learning and statistical classification, focusing on the development of classifiers from sample data through various techniques such as neural networks, radial basis functions, and decision trees. These methods have gained significant interest due to their versatility and broad applicability across disciplines like Statistics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Mining, and Pattern Recognition. Researchers in these fields are continuously innovating or rediscovering induction methods, often accompanied by the release of implementation code. This scenario naturally leads practitioners and prospective users to ponder, "Which classification technique is the most effective?" or more specifically, "Which set of methods is likely to perform well for a specific type of dataset?". The book offers a comprehensive analysis that provides answers to these questions, serving as a valuable resource for understanding the comparative efficacy of classification techniques on diverse datasets.

In recent years, uncertain data has become ubiquitous because of new technologies for collecting data which can only measure and collect the data in an imprecise way. Furthermore, many technologies such as privacy-preserving data mining create data which is inherently uncertain in nature. As a result there is a need for tools and techniques for mining and managing uncertain data. This chapter discusses the broad outline of the book and the methods used for various uncertain data applications.

A new paradigm of the evolving computational intelligence systems (ECIS) is introduced in a generic framework of the knowledge and data integration (KDI). This generalization of the recent advances in the development of evolving fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy models and the more analytical angle of consideration through the prism of knowledge evolution as opposed to the usually used datacentred approach marks the novelty of the present paper. ECIS constitutes a suitable paradigm for adaptive modeling of continuous dynamic processes and tracing the evolution of knowledge. The elements of evolution, such as inheritance and structure development are related to the knowledge and data pattern dynamics and are considered in the context of an individual system/model. Another novelty of this paper consists of the comparison at a conceptual level between the concept of models and knowledge captured by these models evolution and the well known paradigm of evolutionary computation. Although ECIS differs from the concept of evolutionary (genetic) computing, both paradigms heavily borrow from the same source – nature and human evolution. As the origin of knowledge, humans are the best model of an evolving intelligent system. Instead of considering the evolution of population of spices or genes as the evolutionary computation algorithms does the ECIS concentrate on the evolution of a single intelligent system. The aim is to develop the intelligence/knowledge of this system through an evolution using inheritance and modification, upgrade and reduction. This approach is also suitable for the integration of new data and existing models into new models that can be incrementally adapted to future incoming data. This powerful new concept has been recently introduced by the authors in a series of parallel works and is still under intensive development. It forms the conceptual basis for the development of the truly intelligent systems. Another specific of this paper includes bringing together the two working examples of ECIS, namely ECOS and EFS. The ideas are supported by illustrative examples (a synthetic non-linear function for the ECOS case and a benchmark problem of house price modelling from UCI repository for the case of EFS).

Association rule mining is one of the most important and well researched techniques of data mining for descriptive task, initially used for market basket analysis. It finds all the rules existing in the transactional database that satisfy some minimum support and minimum confidence constraints. Classification using Association rule mining is another major Predictive analysis technique that aims to discover a small set of rule in the database that forms an accurate classifier. In this paper, we introduce the combined approach that integrates association rule mining and classification rule mining called Associative Classification (AC). This is new classification approach. The integration is done by focusing on mining a special subset of association rules called classification association rule (CAR). And then classification is being performed using these CAR. Using association rule mining for constructing classification systems is a promising approach. Given the readability of the associative classifiers, they are especially fit to applications were the model may assist domain experts in their decisions. Medical field is a good example was such applications may appear. Consider an example were

With advances in data collection and generation technologies, organizations and researchers are faced with the ever growing problem of how to manage and analyze large dynamic datasets. Environments that produce streaming sources of data are becoming common place. Examples include stock market, sensor, web click stream, and network data. In many instances, these environments are also equipped with multiple distributed computing nodes that are often located near the data sources. Analyzing and monitoring data in such environments requires data mining technology that is cognizant of the mining task, the distributed nature of the data, and the data influx rate. In this chapter, we survey the current state of the field and identify potential directions of future research.

Event data are collected in logistics, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, customer relationship management, e-learning, e-government, and many other domains. The events found in these domains typically refer to activities executed by resources at particular times and for a particular case (i.e., process instances). Process mining techniques are able to exploit such data. In this article, we focus on process discovery. However, process mining also includes conformance checking, performance analysis, decision mining, organizational mining, predictions, recommendations, etc. These techniques help to diagnose problems and improve processes. All process mining techniques involve both event data and process models. Therefore, a typical first step is to automatically learn a control-flow model from the event data. This is very challenging, but in recent years many powerful discovery techniques have been developed. It is not easy to compare these techniques since they use different representations and make different assumptions. Users often need to resort to trying different algorithms in an ad-hoc manner. Developers of new techniques are often trying to solve specific instances of a more general problem. Therefore, we aim to unify existing approaches by focusing on log and model abstractions. These abstractions link observed and modeled behavior: Concrete behaviors recorded in event logs are related to possible behaviors represented by process models. Hence, such behavioral abstractions provide an “interface” between both. We discuss four discovery approaches involving three abstractions and different types of process models (Petri nets, block-structured models, and declarative models). The goal is to provide a comprehensive understanding of process discovery and show how to develop new techniques. Examples illustrate the different approaches and pointers to software are given. The discussion on abstractions and process representations is also used to reflect on the gap between process mining literature and commercial process mining tools. This facilitates users to select an appropriate process discovery technique. Moreover, structuring the role of internal abstractions and representations helps to broaden the view and facilitates the creation of new discovery approaches. ∗Process and Data Science (PADS), RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

Previous studies propose that associative classification has high classification accuracy and strong flexibility at handling unstructured data. However, it still suffers from the huge set of mined rules and sometimes biased classification or overfitting since the classification is based on only single high-confidence rule. In this study, we propose a new associative classification method, CMAR, i.e., Classification based on Multiple Association Rules. The method extends an efficient frequent pattern mining method, FP-growth, constructs a class distribution-associated FP-tree, and mines large database efficiently. Moreover, it applies a CR-tree structure to store and retrieve mined association rules efficiently, and prunes rules effectively based on confidence, correlation and database coverage. The classification is performed based on a weighted analysis using multiple strong association rules. Our extensive experiments on databases from UCI machine learning database repository show that CMAR is consistent, highly effective at classification of various kinds of databases and has better average classification accuracy in comparison with CBA and C4.5. Moreover, our performance study shows that the method is highly efficient and scalable in comparison with other reported associative classification methods.

Although data mining has been successfully implemented in the business world for some time now, its use in higher education is still relatively new, i.e. its use is intended for identification and extraction of new and potentially valuable knowledge from the data. Using data mining the aim was to develop a model which can derive the conclusion on students' academic success. Different methods and techniques of data mining were compared during the prediction of students' success, applying the data collected from the surveys conducted during the summer semester at the University of Tuzla, the Faculty of Economics, academic year 2010-2011, among first year students and the data taken during the enrollment. The success was evaluated with the passing grade at the exam. The impact of students' socio-demographic variables, achieved results from high school and from the entrance exam, and attitudes towards studying which can have an affect on success, were all investigated. In future investigations, with identifying and evaulating variables associated with process of studying, and with the sample increase, it would be possible to produce a model which would stand as a foundation for the development of decision support system in higher education.

In recent years, uncertain data management applications have grown in importance because of the large number of hardware applications which measure data approximately. For example, sensors are typically expected to have considerable noise in their readings because of inaccuracies in data retrieval, transmission, and power failures. In many cases, the estimated error of the underlying data stream is available. This information is very useful for the mining process, since it can be used in order to improve the quality of the underlying results. In this paper we will propose a method for clustering uncertain data streams. We use a very general model of the uncertainty in which we assume that only a few statistical measures of the uncertainty are available. We will show that the use of even modest uncertainty information during the mining process is sufficient to greatly improve the quality of the underlying results. We show that our approach is more effective than a purely deterministic method such as the CluStream approach. We will test the approach on a variety of real and synthetic data sets and illustrate the advantages of the method in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

Data mining techniques have been extensively applied in bioinformatics to analyze biomedical data. In this paper, we choose the Rapid-I¿s RapidMiner as our tool to analyze a Pima Indians Diabetes Data Set, which collects the information of patients with and without developing diabetes. The discussion follows the data mining process. The focus will be on the data preprocessing, including attribute identification and selection, outlier removal, data normalization and numerical discretization, visual data analysis, hidden relationships discovery, and a diabetes prediction model construction.

In recent years we have seen the emergence of a variety of scholarly datasets. Typically these capture ‘standard’ scholarly entities and their connections, such as authors, affiliations, venues, publications, citations, and others. However, as the repositories grow and the technology improves, researchers are adding new entities to these repositories to develop a richer model of the scholarly domain. In this paper, we introduce TechMiner, a new approach, which combines NLP, machine learning and semantic technologies, for mining technologies from research publications and generating an OWL ontology describing their relationships with other research entities. The resulting knowledge base can support a number of tasks, such as: richer semantic search, which can exploit the technology dimension to support better retrieval of publications; richer expert search; monitoring the emergence and impact of new technologies, both within and across scientific fields; studying the scholarly dynamics associated with the emergence of new technologies; and others. TechMiner was evaluated on a manually annotated gold standard and the results indicate that it significantly outperforms alternative NLP approaches and that its semantic features improve performance significantly with respect to both recall and precision.


Question: An overview of online judge systems and their various applications.

This paper offers an extensive review of contemporary multi-objective optimization (MOO) techniques and their applications in engineering contexts. It aims to unify and elucidate the often-disparate terminologies and methodologies employed in the field. The MOO methods are categorized into three primary groups: those that require preferences to be specified a priori, those that allow preferences to be articulated a posteriori, and those that do not necessitate any preference articulation. Additionally, the paper provides an overview of genetic algorithms within this framework. Insights are offered from three perspectives: the strengths and limitations of individual methods, the distinctions between the various classes of methods, and the broader implications for the MOO field. The paper highlights the key attributes of prominent methods, drawing conclusions that often go overlooked and discussing their relevance to engineering challenges. It is concluded that no single method can claim universal superiority; rather, the choice of a particular method should be guided by the specifics of the problem at hand, the user's preferences, the desired solution characteristics, and the accessibility of relevant software. This comprehensive survey not only serves as a guide for practitioners but also underscores the multifaceted nature of MOO in engineering problem-solving.

This paper describes the initial development of an HRM system that aims to decrease the gap between higher vocational education and the labour market for a specific job in the ICT sector. This paper focuses specifically on the delineation of a process model and the selection of a suitable job role (information system analyst) that is valid across organisational and cultural boundaries. The process model implies various applied uses of this ontology-based system, including mapping qualifications in vocational education to current and valid job roles, testing and evaluating the student applicant on the basis of labour market driven competencies, and providing ad-hoc support to educational institutions by elucidating the weaknesses of particular VET curricula.

Under the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) in Scotland, newer approaches such as games-based learning and games-based construction are being adopted to motivate and engage students. Construction of computer games is seen by some to be a highly motivational and practical approach at engaging children at Primary Education (PE) level in computer programming concepts. Gamesbased learning (GBL) and games-based construction both suffer from a dearth of empirical evidence supporting their validity as teaching and learning approaches. To address this issue, this paper will present the findings of observational research at PE level using Scratch as a tool to develop computer games using rudimentary programming concepts. A list of criteria will be compiled for reviewing the implementation of each participant to gauge the level of programming proficiency demonstrated. The study will review 29 games from Primary 4 to Primary 7 level and will present the overall results and results for each individual year. This study will contribute to the empirical evidence in games-based construction by providing the results of observational research across different levels of PE and will provide pedagogical guidelines for assessing programming ability using a games-based construction approach.

The perceptual computer (Per-C) is an architecture that makes subjective judgments by computing with words (CWWs). This paper applies the Per-C to hierarchical decision making, which means decision making based on comparing the performance of competing alternatives, where each alternative is first evaluated based on hierarchical criteria and subcriteria, and then, these alternatives are compared to arrive at either a single winner or a subset of winners. What can make this challenging is that the inputs to the subcriteria and criteria can be numbers, intervals, type-1 fuzzy sets, or even words modeled by interval type-2 fuzzy sets. Novel weighted averages are proposed in this paper as a CWW engine in the Per-C to aggregate these diverse inputs. A missile-evaluation problem is used to illustrate it. The main advantages of our approaches are that diverse inputs can be aggregated, and uncertainties associated with these inputs can be preserved and are propagated into the final evaluation.

The SHOP2 planning system received one of the awards for distinguished performance in the 2002 International Planning Competition. This paper describes the features of SHOP2 which enabled it to excel in the competition, especially those aspects of SHOP2 that deal with temporal and metric planning domains.

This paper presents GISMO, a graphical interactive student monitoring and tracking system tool that extracts tracking data from an on-line course maintained with a Course Management System, and generates graphical representations that can be explored by course instructors to examine various aspects of distance students. GISMO uses techniques from Information Visualisation to render into an appropriate graphical manner the complex multidimensional student tracking data provided by the Course Management System. GISMO aims to help instructors to become aware of what is happening in their classes and provide a better support to their learners.

Active learning requires that students receive a continuous feedback about their understanding. Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQ) tests have been frequently used to provide students the required feedback and to measure the effectiveness of this learning model. To construct a test is a challenging task, which is time consuming and requires experience. For these reasons, research efforts have been focused on the automatic generation of well-constructed tests. The semantic technologies have played a relevant role in the implementation of these testgeneration systems. Nevertheless, the existing proposals present a set of drawbacks that restrict their applicability to different learning domains and the type of test to be composed. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented and semantic-based system that solves these drawbacks. The system consists of a dynamic strategy of generating candidate distractors (alternatives to the correct answer), a set of heuristics for scoring the distractors' suitability, and a selection of distractors that considers the difficulty level of tests. Besides, the final version of tests is created using the Google Form service, a de-facto standard for elaborating online questionnaires.

E-learning is the synthesis of multimedia and social media platforms powered by Internet and mobile technologies. Great popularity of e-learning is encouraging governments and educational institutions to adopt and develop e-learning cultures in societies in general and universities in particular. In traditional e-learning systems, all components (agents and services) are tightly coupled into a single system. In this study, we propose a new architecture for e-learning with two subsystems, namely, e-learning and e-testing. The motivation of the research is to improve the effectiveness of the learning process by extracting relevant features for elastic learning and testing process. We employ a multi-agent system because it contains five-layer architecture, including agents at various levels. We also propose a novel method for updating content through question and answer between e-learners and intelligent agents. To achieve optimization, we design a system that applies various technologies, which M. Arif (B)· A. Karim · K. A. Alam · S. Farid · S. Iqbal Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: arifmuhammad36@siswa.um.edu.my M. Arif · M. Illahi Departmnet of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan S. Shamshirband Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Department of Computer System and Technology, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: shamshirband1396@gmail.com S. Shamshirband Department of Computer Science, Chalous Branch, Islamic Azad University (IAU), Chalous, 46615-397 Mazandaran, Iran Z. Buang Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Hang Tuah Jaya, 76100 Durian Tunggal, Melaka, Malaysia V. E. Balas Department of Automation and Applied Informatics, University of Arad, 310130 Arad, Romania

The aim of this paper is to study the implementation of online games to encourage public participation in urban planning. Its theoretical foundations are based on previous work in public participatory geographical information systems (PP GISs), play and games, with a special focus on serious games. Serious games aim to support learning processes in a new, more playful way. We developed the concept of playful public participation in urban planning, including playful elements such as storytelling, walking and moving, sketching, drawing, and games. A group of students designed an online serious public participatory game entitled NextCampus. The case study used in NextCampus was taken from the real-world question of a possible move of a university campus to a new location in the city of Hamburg, Germany. The development of the serious public participatory game NextCampus resulted in a physical prototype, user interface design, and a computational model of the game. The NextCampus game was tested with the help of two groups of urban planning students and presented to three external experts who provided valuable recommendations for further development. The critical comments questioned the level of complexity involved in such games. The positive comments included recognition of the potential for joy and the play-fulness a game like NextCampus could evoke. Public participatory online applications aim to attract citizens to discuss current issues related to their environment and to improve the process of public participation in general. An integration of geographic information systems (GISs) with public participatory tools represents one of the latest innovations in this area. ways of integrating the new applications into participatory processes and considers which new functionalities and technical characteristics could offer the most benefit to users. In the past, these technologies and other map-based applications were frequently criticized as being too complex for the majority of potential users (Steinmann, Krek, & Blaschke, 2004). New forms of collaboration and technical solutions emerged during the Web 2.0 era. For example , Google Maps and Google Earth can be used by lay users and non-experts without intense training. Recent research on collabo-rative mapping also known as ''geography without geographers'' prior work in PP GIS to include much wider, distributed participation (Hardy, 2008). Despite these new forms of collaboration and innovative technologies , Moody (2007) demonstrates that the use of GIS technology to involve citizens in participatory urban planning does not seem to empower citizens. An important factor in such findings …

With the rapid development of Web 2.0 and Online To Offline (O2O) marketing model, various <italic>online <underline> e</underline>vent-<underline>b</underline>ased <underline>s</underline>ocial <underline>n</underline>etwork<underline>s </underline></italic> (EBSNs) are getting popular. An important task of EBSNs is to facilitate the most satisfactory event-participant arrangement for both sides, i.e., events enroll more participants and participants are arranged with personally interesting events. Existing approaches usually focus on the arrangement of each single event to a set of potential users, or ignore the conflicts between different events, which leads to infeasible or redundant arrangements. In this paper, to address the shortcomings of existing approaches, we first identify a more general and useful event-participant arrangement problem, called <italic><underline>G</underline>lobal <underline>E</underline> vent-participant <underline>A</underline>rrangement with <underline>C</underline>onflict and <underline>C</underline> apacity</italic> (<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$GEACC$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="chen-ieq1-2565468.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>) problem, focusing on the conflicts of different events and making event-participant arrangements in a global view. We find that the GEACC problem is NP-hard due to the conflicts among events. Thus, we design two approximation algorithms with provable approximation ratios and an exact algorithm with pruning technique to address this problem. In addition, we propose an online setting of GEACC, called OnlineGEACC, which is also practical in real-world scenarios. We further design an online algorithm with provable performance guarantee. Finally, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods through extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets.

Peer reviewing is a standard process for assessing the quality of submissions at academic conferences and journals. A very important task in this process is the assignment of reviewers to papers. However, achieving an appropriate assignment is not easy, because all reviewers should have similar load and the subjects of the assigned papers should be consistent with the reviewers' expertise. In this paper, we propose a generalized framework for fair reviewer assignment. We first extract the domain knowledge from the reviewers' published papers and model this knowledge as a set of topics. Then, we perform a group assignment of reviewers to papers, which is a generalization of the classic Reviewer Assignment Problem (RAP), considering the relevance of the papers to topics as weights. We study a special case of the problem, where reviewers are to be found for just one paper (Journal Assignment Problem) and propose an exact algorithm which is fast in practice, as opposed to brute-force solutions. For the general case of having to assign multiple papers, which is too hard to be solved exactly, we propose a greedy algorithm that achieves a 1/2-approximation ratio compared to the exact solution. This is a great improvement compared to the 1/3-approximation solution proposed in previous work for the simpler coverage-based reviewer assignment problem, where there are no weights on topics. We theoretically prove the approximation bound of our solution and experimentally show that it is superior to the current state-of-the-art.


Question: An overview of online judge systems and their various applications.

This paper establishes a conceptual framework to investigate the interplay between effective optimization algorithms and the problems they address, culminating in several No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems. These theorems reveal that any optimization algorithm's superior performance on a particular set of problems is invariably offset by inferior performance on another set of problems. The theorems lead to a geometric understanding of how an algorithm's suitability to an optimization problem is determined. The paper also delves into the implications of these NFL theorems on information-theoretic facets of optimization and on benchmarking performance measures. Additional topics covered include the dynamics of time-varying optimization problems and a priori minimax distinctions between optimization algorithms, demonstrating that despite the NFL theorems' enforcement of a uniformity across algorithms, certain head-to-head distinctions can still be made. This exploration into the relationship between algorithms and problems offers valuable insights into the nature of optimization and the limitations of algorithms in different contexts.

In this paper we propose the architecture of an Intelligent Tutoring System that considers the student's learning style and the competency-based education. We also describe the processes that have been implemented so far. Our architecture presents innovations in the representation of the tutor module and in the knowledge module; the tutor module incorporates a selector agent, which will choose the content to show, considering the teaching strategies that support the student's learning style.

In this paper, the use of systems development as a methodology in information systems (is) research is described and defended. A framework to explain the nature of systems development as a research methodology in is research is proposed. Use of this methodology in the engineering field in general is compared with its use specifically in computer science and computer engineering. An integrated program for conducting IS research that incorporates theory building, systems development, experimentation, and observation is proposed. Progress in several application domains is reviewed to provide a basis upon which to argue that systems development is a valid research methodology. A systems development research process is presented from a methodological perspective. Software engineering, which is the basic method of applying the systems development research methodology, is then discussed. It is the authors' belief that systems development and other research methodologies are complementary and that an integrated multi-dimensional and multimethodological approach will generate fruitful is research results. The premise is that research contributions can result from systems development, experimentation, observation, and performance testing of the systems under development and that all of these research approaches are needed to investigate different aspects of the research question. An earlier version of Ihis paper was originally published in the Proceedings of ihe Twenty-Third Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (IEEE Computer Society Press, 1990). Journal of Management Information Systems I Winter 1990-91, Vol. 7, No, 3, pp. 89-106. Copyright © M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1991. 90 NUNAMAKER, CHEN. AND PURDIN

E-learning is the synthesis of multimedia and social media platforms powered by Internet and mobile technologies. Great popularity of e-learning is encouraging governments and educational institutions to adopt and develop e-learning cultures in societies in general and universities in particular. In traditional e-learning systems, all components (agents and services) are tightly coupled into a single system. In this study, we propose a new architecture for e-learning with two subsystems, namely, e-learning and e-testing. The motivation of the research is to improve the effectiveness of the learning process by extracting relevant features for elastic learning and testing process. We employ a multi-agent system because it contains five-layer architecture, including agents at various levels. We also propose a novel method for updating content through question and answer between e-learners and intelligent agents. To achieve optimization, we design a system that applies various technologies, which M. Arif (B)· A. Karim · K. A. Alam · S. Farid · S. Iqbal Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: arifmuhammad36@siswa.um.edu.my M. Arif · M. Illahi Departmnet of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan S. Shamshirband Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Department of Computer System and Technology, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: shamshirband1396@gmail.com S. Shamshirband Department of Computer Science, Chalous Branch, Islamic Azad University (IAU), Chalous, 46615-397 Mazandaran, Iran Z. Buang Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Hang Tuah Jaya, 76100 Durian Tunggal, Melaka, Malaysia V. E. Balas Department of Automation and Applied Informatics, University of Arad, 310130 Arad, Romania

New systems are designed with improved quality or features. However, not every new system lives to its pre-development expectations when tested with end-users. The evaluation of the first version of our LOCO-Analyst tool for providing teachers with feedback on students learning activities and performance led to the enhancing the visualization features of the tool. The second evaluation of the improved tool allowed us to see how the improvements affect the user perceptions of the tool. Here, we present the qualitative results of our two evaluations. The results show that educators find the kinds of feedback implemented in the tool informative and they value the mix of textual and graphical representations of different kinds of feedback provided by the tool.

Big data, which is maturing over time, has a high impact in analyzing scenarios and coming up with decision making strategies pertaining to any sector. Consequently the number of applications are also increasing where in the past, they were limited to the confines of company sales departments. In lieu, this paper is primarily focused on applying Data Sciences within the education sector. We will be discussing the overall application to address higher-education issues. We will also present a framework for capturing, analyzing it and concluding on data in order to benefit decision-makers, thus ultimately manifesting in informing design and finalizing policy.

Peer reviewing is a standard process for assessing the quality of submissions at academic conferences and journals. A very important task in this process is the assignment of reviewers to papers. However, achieving an appropriate assignment is not easy, because all reviewers should have similar load and the subjects of the assigned papers should be consistent with the reviewers' expertise. In this paper, we propose a generalized framework for fair reviewer assignment. We first extract the domain knowledge from the reviewers' published papers and model this knowledge as a set of topics. Then, we perform a group assignment of reviewers to papers, which is a generalization of the classic Reviewer Assignment Problem (RAP), considering the relevance of the papers to topics as weights. We study a special case of the problem, where reviewers are to be found for just one paper (Journal Assignment Problem) and propose an exact algorithm which is fast in practice, as opposed to brute-force solutions. For the general case of having to assign multiple papers, which is too hard to be solved exactly, we propose a greedy algorithm that achieves a 1/2-approximation ratio compared to the exact solution. This is a great improvement compared to the 1/3-approximation solution proposed in previous work for the simpler coverage-based reviewer assignment problem, where there are no weights on topics. We theoretically prove the approximation bound of our solution and experimentally show that it is superior to the current state-of-the-art.

Computational Thinking (CT) has been recognized as one of the fundamental skills that all graduates should acquire. For this reason, motivational concerns need to be addressed at an early age of a child, and reaching students who do not consider themselves candidates for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines is important as well if the broadest audience possible is to be engaged. This article describes a framework for teaching and assessing CT in the context of K-12 education. The framework is based on Agile software engineering methods, which rely on a set of principles and practices that can be mapped to the activities of CT. The article presents as well the results of an experiment applying this framework in two sixth-grade classes, with 42 participants in total. The results show that Agile software engineering methods are effective at teaching CT in middle schools, after the addition of some tasks to allow students to explore, project, and experience the potential product before using the software tools at hand. Moreover, according to the teachers’ feedback, the students reached all the educational objectives of the topics involved in the multidisciplinary activities. This result can be taken as an indicator that it is possible to use computing as a medium for teaching other subjects, besides computer science.

This article describes the design and implementation of the course Introduction to Computational Thinking (PC-01) for primary and secondary education. The course introduces the “concepts” and core “processes” of Computational Thinking using a visual programming environment. The design of the course PC-01 includes a set of multimedia content, learning tools and technologies that help teachers and students in the teaching-learning process. These tools allow the teacher the successful delivery of the course content as well as the individual/collective monitoring of students' progress in the course. Students have access to their progress throughout the course and participate in creative and collaborative tasks. This course also serves to introduce transversely educational technologies to many students of primary and secondary education. The technological environment integrates the online teaching resources and the methodological tools of the course. The course uses Scratch 2.0 as the programming environment and Moodle as the learning platform. At present the course is being implemented in public schools in the Dominican Republic.

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) which were introduced in 2008 has since drawn attention around the world for both its advantages as well as criticism on its drawbacks. One of the issues in MOOCs which is the lack of interactivity with the instructor has brought conversational bot into the picture to fill in this gap. In this study, a prototype of MOOCs conversational bot, MOOC-bot is being developed and integrated into MOOCs website to respond to the learner’s enquiries using text or speech input. MOOC-bot is using the popular Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to develop its knowledge base, leverage from AIML’s capability to deliver appropriate responses and can be quickly adapted to new knowledge domains. The system architecture of MOOC-bot consists of knowledge base along with AIML interpreter, chat interface, MOOCs website and Web Speech API to provide speech recognition and speech synthesis capability. The initial MOOC-bot prototype has the general knowledge from the past Loebner Prize winner ALICE, course’s frequent asked questions, and a course’s content offered by Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM). The evaluation of MOOC-bot based on the past competition questions from Chatterbox Challenge (CBC) and Loebner Prize has shown that it was able to provide correct answers most of the time during the test and demonstrated the capability to prolong the conversation. The advantages of MOOCbot such as able to provide 24-hour service that can serve different time zones, able to have knowledge in multiple domains, and can be shared by multiple sites simultaneously have outweighed its existing limitations.

For a learning platform to be adapti ve, it needs to monitor the user in r ealtime. At the ScienceCampus Tübingen, we conduct empirical research on learning strategies, in particular with regard to system adaptivity. Our experimental Webbased adaptiv e multimedia learning environment is able to communicate with an eyetracking system in real-time, and l inks gaze data to browser-based learning content. By processing simple evaluation scripts in the browser, we can control the learning process by adapting the learning content in response to predefined conditions and user inputs. The experimental system serves as a basis for a series of psyc hologi al studies in the learning context. We have already conducted some studies with our experimental learning platform, but its devel opment is still ongoing. In particular, we are adding new feature s required for future studies. In this paper, we desc ribe the actual state of our experimental learning environment, lessons learned from its a pplication in the studies, and our plans for future devel opment.


Question: An overview of online judge systems and their various applications.

This paper offers an overview of the methodologies employed in automatic programming assessment and the generation of test data, with a focus on their integration and application in the evaluation of student programming assignments. Automatic programming assessment has gained prominence as a tool for educators in programming courses, enabling the automated evaluation and grading of student submissions, along with providing constructive feedback. A critical component of this process is the generation of test data, which is essential for conducting dynamic testing on student programs. While there are numerous automated techniques for test data generation in the software testing domain, their adoption in the realm of automatic programming assessment has been limited. Recent studies have explored the integration of these methods to enhance the quality of program testing and offer more comprehensive coverage. This paper compiles an analysis of the various approaches utilized in automatic programming assessment, test data generation, and their convergence. The aim is to consolidate diverse techniques that have been implemented, guiding readers interested in exploring the current trends and advancements in this field. Furthermore, the review highlights the primary gaps in the existing research, which align with our core research interest.

In view of the recent developments in many countries, for example, in the USA and in the UK, it appears that computer science education (CSE) in primary or secondary schools (K-12) has reached a significant turning point, shifting its focus from ICT-oriented to rigorous computer science concepts. The goal of this special issue is to offer a publication platform for soundly based in-depth experiences that have been made around the world with concepts, approaches, or initiatives that aim at supporting this shift. For this purpose, the article format was kept as large as possible, enabling the authors to explain many facets of their concepts and experiences in detail. Regarding the structure of the articles, we had encouraged the authors to lean on the Darmstadt Model, a category system that was developed to support the development, improvement, and investigation of K-12 CSE across regional or national boundaries. This model could serve as a unifying framework that might provide a proper structure for a well-founded critical discussion about the future of K-12 CSE. Curriculum designers or policy stakeholders, who have to decide, which approach an upcoming national initiative should follow, could benefit from this discussion as well as researchers who are investigating K12 CSE in any regard. With this goal in mind, we have selected six extensive and two short case studies from the UK, New Zealand, USA/Israel, France, Sweden, Georgia (USA), Russia, and Italy that provide an in-depth analysis of K-12 CSE in their respective country or state.

Domain-specific search engines are growing in popularity because they offer increased accuracy and extra functionality not possible with the general, Web-wide search engines. For example, www.campsearch.com allows complex queries by age-group, size, location and cost over .summer camps. Unfortunately these domain-specific search engines are difficult and timeconsuming to maintain. This paper proposes the use of machine learning techniques to greatly automate the creation and maintenance of domain-specific search engines. We describe new research in reinforcement learning, information extraction and text classification that enables efficient spidering, identifying informative text segments, and populating topic hierarchies. Using these techniques, we have built a demonstration system: a search engine for computer science research papers. It already contaius over 50,000 papers and is publicly available at ~w. cora.justres earch, com.

Educational Data Mining (EDM) is an emerging multidisciplinary research area, in which methods and techniques for exploring data originating from various educational information systems have been developed. EDM is both a learning science, as well as a rich application area for data mining, due to the growing availability of educational data. EDM contributes to the study of how students learn, and the settings in which they learn. It enables data-driven decision making for improving the current educational practice and learning material. We present a brief overview of EDM and introduce four selected EDM papers representing a crosscut of different application areas for data mining in education.

The emerging discipline of algorithm engineering has primarily focussed on transforming pencil-and-paper sequential algorithms into robust, efficient, well tested, and easily used implementations. As parallel computing becomes ubiquitous, we need to extend algorithm engineering techniques to parallel computation. Such an extension adds significant complications. After a short review of algorithm engineering achievements for sequential computing, we review the various complications caused by parallel computing, present some examples of successful efforts, and give a personal view of possible future research.

The author defines real-time computing and states and dispels the most common misconceptions about it. He discusses the fundamental technical issues of real-time computing. He examines specification and verification, scheduling theory, operating systems, programming languages and design methodology, distributed databases, artificial intelligence, fault tolerance, architectures, and communication.<<ETX>>

0747-5632/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.07.020 ⇑ Tel.: +1 757 683 5008; fax: +1 757 683 5639. E-mail address: whe@odu.edu This study analyses the online questions and chat messages automatically recorded by a live video streaming (LVS) system using data mining and text mining techniques. We apply data mining and text mining techniques to analyze two different datasets and then conducted an in-depth correlation analysis for two educational courses with the most online questions and chat messages respectively. The study found the discrepancies as well as similarities in the students’ patterns and themes of participation between online questions (student–instructor interaction) and online chat messages (student–students interaction or peer interaction). The results also identify disciplinary differences in students’ online participation. A correlation is found between the number of online questions students asked and students’ final grades. The data suggests that a combination of using data mining and text mining techniques for a large amount of online learning data can yield considerable insights and reveal valuable patterns in students’ learning behaviors. Limitations with data and text mining were also revealed and discussed in the paper. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In massive open-access online courses (MOOCs), peer grading serves as a critical tool for scaling the grading of complex, open-ended assignments to courses with tens or hundreds of thousands of students. But despite promising initial trials, it does not always deliver accurate results compared to human experts. In this paper, we develop algorithms for estimating and correcting for grader biases and reliabilities, showing significant improvement in peer grading accuracy on real data with 63,199 peer grades from Coursera’s HCI course offerings — the largest peer grading networks analysed to date. We relate grader biases and reliabilities to other student factors such as engagement, performance as well as commenting style. We also show that our model can lead to more intelligent assignment of graders to gradees.

TopicShop is an interface that helps users evaluate and organize collections of web sites. The main interface components are site profiles, which contain information that helps users select high-quality items, and a work area, which offers thumbnail images, annotation, and lightweight grouping techniques to help users organize selected sites. The two components are linked to allow task integration. Previous work [2] demonstrated that subjects who used TopicShop were able to select significantly more highquality sites, in less time and with less effort. We report here on studies that confirm and extend these results. We also show that TopicShop subjects spent just half the time organizing sites, yet still created more groups and more annotations, and agreed more in how they grouped sites. Finally, TopicShop subjects tightly integrated the tasks of evaluating and organizing sites. INTRODUCTION In previous work [2], we motivated an important task for web users – gathering, evaluating, and organizing information resources for a given topic. Current web tools do not support this task well; specifically, they do not make it easy to evaluate collections of web sites to select the best ones or to organize sites for future reuse and sharing. Users have to browse and view sites one after another until they are satisfied they have a good set, or, more likely, they get tired and give up. Browsing a web site is an expensive operation, both in time and cognitive effort. And bookmarks, the most common form of keeping track of web sites, are a fairly primitive organizational technique. We designed and implemented the TopicShop system to provide comprehensive, integrated support for this task. TopicShop aids users in finding a set of relevant sites, in narrowing down the set into a smaller set of high quality sites, and in organizing sites for future use. TopicShop has evolved through a number of design iterations, driven by extensive user testing. We report here on lessons we learned from a pilot study, how these lessons re-shaped our understanding of the task and led to a significant re-design, and the results of a second, larger user study. RELATED WORK Our research program investigates the major information problems faced by users of the World Wide Web: • finding collections of items relevant to their interests; • identifying high-quality items within a collection; • finding items that contain a certain category of information, e.g., episode guides (for a television show) or song lyrics (for a musician); • organizing personalized subsets of items. We have addressed these problems by developing algorithms, implementing them in web crawling and analysis tools, creating interfaces to support users in exploring, comprehending, and organizing collections of web documents, and performing user studies [2, 3, 4, 15]. The work reported here focuses on understanding the user tasks of evaluating and organizing collections of web sites, as ill uminated by the design, evaluation, and re-design of interfaces to support these tasks. Other researchers have investigated these issues. Much recent work has been devoted to algorithms for adding meta-information to collections of web sites to enhance user comprehension, typically by analyzing the structure of links between sites. This approach builds on the intuition that when the author of one site chooses to link to another, this often implies both that the sites have similar content and that the author is endorsing the content of the linked-to site. Pirolli , Pitkow and colleagues [12, 13] experimented with link-based algorithms for clustering and categorizing web pages. Kleinberg’s HITS algorithm [8] defines authoritative and hub pages within a hypertext collection. Authorities and hubs are mutually dependent: a good authority is a page that is linked to by many hubs, and a good hub is one that links to many authorities. After evaluating items and selecting the interesting ones, users must organize the items for future use. Card, Robertson, and Mackinlay [5] introduced the concept of information workspaces to refer to environments in which information items can be stored and manipulated. A departure point for most such systems is the file manager popularized by the Apple Macintosh and then in Microsoft Windows. Such systems typically include a list view, which shows various properties of items, and an icon view, which lets users organize icons representing the items in a 2D space. Mander, Salomon, and Wong [10] enhanced the basic metaphor with the addition of “piles” . Users could create and manipulate piles of items. Interesting interaction techniques for displaying, browsing, and searching piles were designed and tested. Bookmarks are the most popular way to create personal information workspaces of web resources. Bookmarks consist of lists of URLs; typically the title of the web page is used as the label for the URL. Users may organize their bookmarks into a hierarchical category structure. Abrams, Baecker, and Chignell [1] carried out an extensive study of how several hundred web users used bookmarks. They observed a number of strategies for organizing bookmarks, including a flat ordered list, a single level of folders, and hierarchical folders. They also made four design recommendations to help users manage their bookmarks more effectively. First, bookmarks must be easy to organize, e.g., via automatic sorting techniques. Second, visualization techniques are necessary to provide comprehensive overviews of large sets of bookmarks. Third, rich representations of sites are required; many users noted that site titles are not accurate descriptors of site content. Finally, tools for managing bookmarks must be well i ntegrated with web browsers. Many researchers have created experimental information workspace interfaces, often designed expressly for web documents. Card, Robertson, and York [5] describe the WebBook, which uses a book metaphor to group a collection of related web pages for viewing and interaction, and the WebForager, an interface that lets users view and manage multiple WebBooks. Mackinlay, Rao, and Card [9] developed a novel user interface for accessing articles from a citation database. The central UI object is a “Butterfly” , which represents an article, its references, and its citers. The interface makes it easy for users to browse among related articles, group articles, and generate queries to retrieve articles that stand in a particular relationship to the current article. The Data Mountain of Robertson et al [14] represents documents as thumbnail images in a 3D virtual space. Users can move and group the images freely, with various interesting visual and audio cues used to help users arrange the documents. In a study comparing the use of Data Mountain to Internet Explorer Favorites, Data Mountain users retrieved items more quickly, with fewer incorrect or failed retrievals. Our research shares goals with much of the previous work. We focus on designing interfaces that make automatically extracted information about web sites readily accessible to users. We show that this increases users’ abilit y to select high-quality sites. Through ongoing user studies and redesign, we developed easy-to-use annotation and grouping techniques that let users organize items better and more quickly. Finally, we learned how users interleave work on various tasks and re-designed our interface to support such task interleaving. TOPICSHOPEXPLORER, VERSION 1 The TopicShop Explorer is implemented in C++ and runs on Microsoft Windows platforms. Version 1 was based directly on the Macintosh file manager / MS Windows Explorer metaphor (see [3] for detail of TopicShop Version 1 and the pilot study). Accordingly, users could view collections in either a details (Figure 1) or icons (Figure 2) view. The details view showed site profile information (see below) to help users evaluate sites, and the icons view let users organize sites spatially. Figure 1: TopicShop Explorer (version 1), details view. Each web site is represented by a small thumbnail image, the site title, and profile data including the links to/from other sites in the collection, and the number of pages, images, and audio files on the site. Users can sort by a property by clicking on the appropriate column. Figure 2: TopicShop Explorer (version 1), icons view. Each site is represented by a large thumbnail image and the site title. Users can organize sites by arranging them spatially, a technique especially useful in the early stages of exploration. The collections of sites and site profile data used in TopicShop are obtained by running a webcrawler/analyzer. The crawler takes a user-specified set of seed sites as input, and follows links from the seeds to construct a graph of the seed sites, pages contained on these sites, and, optionally, sites determined to be related based on their textual and hyperlink connections to the seeds. Site profiles are built by fetching a large number of pages from each site. Profiles contain content data, including the page title, an estimate of the page count, and a roster of audio files, movie files, and images; they also record links between sites in the collection. In addition, a thumbnail image of each site’s root page is constructed. The first goal of TopicShop is to help users evaluate and identify high quality sites. We sought to achieve this goal by providing site profile data and interface mechanisms for viewing and exploring the data. Making this data visible means that users no longer had to select sites to browse based solely on titles and (sometimes) brief textual annotations. (A chief complaint of subjects in the Abrams et al [1] study was that titles were inadequate descriptors of site content — and that was for sites that users already had browsed and decided to bookmark.) Instead, users may visit only sites that have been endorsed (linked to) by many other sites or sites that are rich in

This paper examines the effects of substituting a computer simulation for real laboratory equipment in the second semester of a large-scale introductory physics course. The direct current circuit laboratory was modified to compare the effects of using computer simulations with the effects of using real light bulbs, meters, and wires. Two groups of students, those who used real equipment and those who used a computer simulation that explicitly modeled electron flow, were compared in terms of their mastery of physics concepts and skills with real equipment. Students who used the simulated equipment outperformed their counterparts both on a conceptual survey of the domain and in the coordinated tasks of assembling a real circuit and describing how it worked.

The SHOP2 planning system received one of the awards for distinguished performance in the 2002 International Planning Competition. This paper describes the features of SHOP2 which enabled it to excel in the competition, especially those aspects of SHOP2 that deal with temporal and metric planning domains.


Question: An overview of online judge systems and their various applications.

An Exploration of Genetic Algorithms: Techniques, Tools, and Applications in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning

This comprehensive guide presents, in an engaging and accessible manner, the computational strategies, mathematical frameworks, and research findings that empower students and professionals to harness genetic algorithms for tackling complex problems. The book integrates a range of computer techniques, mathematical tools, and empirical evidence to provide a holistic understanding of genetic algorithms and their practical applications in search, optimization, and machine learning domains. Through a blend of theoretical insights and practical examples, readers are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to apply genetic algorithms effectively to a variety of computational challenges.

This paper advocates a new ML-based programming framework, called Programming by Feedback (PF), which involves a sequence of interactions between the active computer and the user. The latter only provides preference judgments on pairs of solutions supplied by the active computer. The active computer involves two components: the learning component estimates the user’s utility function and accounts for the user’s (possibly limited) competence; the optimization component explores the search space and returns the most appropriate candidate solution. A proof of principle of the approach is proposed, showing that PF requires a handful of interactions in order to solve some discrete and continuous benchmark problems.

In this work we present a novel approach for evaluating job applicants in online recruitment systems, using machine learning algorithms to solve the candidate ranking problem and performing semantic matching techniques. An application of our approach is implemented in the form of a prototype system, whose functionality is showcased and evaluated in a real-world recruitment scenario. The proposed system extracts a set of objective criteria from the applicants’ LinkedIn profile, and compares them semantically to the job’s prerequisites. It also infers their personality characteristics using linguistic analysis on their blog posts. Our system was found to perform consistently compared to human recruiters, thus it can be trusted for the automation of applicant ranking and personality mining.

This paper describes Pyro, a robotics programming environment designed to allow inexperienced undergraduates to explore topics in advanced robotics. Pyro, which stands for Python Robotics, runs on a number of advanced robotics platforms. In addition, programs in Pyro can abstract away low-level details such that individual programs can work unchanged across very different robotics hardware. Results of using Pyro in an undergraduate course are discussed.

8 1094-7167/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS to elucidate the planet’s past climate, water activity, and habitability. Science is MER’s primary driver, so making best use of the scientific instruments, within the available resources, is a crucial aspect of the mission. To address this criticality, the MER project team selected MAPGEN (Mixed Initiative Activity Plan Generator) as an activity-planning tool. MAPGEN combines two existing systems, each with a strong heritage: the APGEN activity-planning tool1 from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Europa planning and scheduling system2 from NASA Ames Research Center. This article discusses the issues arising from combining these tools in this mission’s context.

In view of the recent developments in many countries, for example, in the USA and in the UK, it appears that computer science education (CSE) in primary or secondary schools (K-12) has reached a significant turning point, shifting its focus from ICT-oriented to rigorous computer science concepts. The goal of this special issue is to offer a publication platform for soundly based in-depth experiences that have been made around the world with concepts, approaches, or initiatives that aim at supporting this shift. For this purpose, the article format was kept as large as possible, enabling the authors to explain many facets of their concepts and experiences in detail. Regarding the structure of the articles, we had encouraged the authors to lean on the Darmstadt Model, a category system that was developed to support the development, improvement, and investigation of K-12 CSE across regional or national boundaries. This model could serve as a unifying framework that might provide a proper structure for a well-founded critical discussion about the future of K-12 CSE. Curriculum designers or policy stakeholders, who have to decide, which approach an upcoming national initiative should follow, could benefit from this discussion as well as researchers who are investigating K12 CSE in any regard. With this goal in mind, we have selected six extensive and two short case studies from the UK, New Zealand, USA/Israel, France, Sweden, Georgia (USA), Russia, and Italy that provide an in-depth analysis of K-12 CSE in their respective country or state.

Students in online courses generate large amounts of data that can be used to personalize the learning process and improve quality of education. In this paper, we present the Latent Skill Embedding (LSE), a probabilistic model of students and educational content that can be used to recommend personalized sequences of lessons with the goal of helping students prepare for specific assessments. Akin to collaborative filtering for recommender systems, the algorithm does not require students or content to be described by features, but it learns a representation using access traces. We formulate this problem as a regularized maximum-likelihood embedding of students, lessons, and assessments from historical student-content interactions. An empirical evaluation on large-scale data from Knewton, an adaptive learning technology company, shows that this approach predicts assessment results competitively with benchmark models and is able to discriminate between lesson sequences that lead to mastery and failure.

Cloud computing becomes more popular day by day. The “dream” of users to “to get rid” of administrators, huge investments on expensive hardware and human resources becomes true. The goal of this paper is to present a general overview of the new coming service offered by Google company Google App Engine. “What is it for?”, “What can I do with the system?” and “How does it work?” are some of the questions on which this paper will try to give an answer. In addition, brief overview and description of “cloud computing” and comparison of Google App Engine with other similar products will be provided to the reader as well.

This paper presents GISMO, a graphical interactive student monitoring and tracking system tool that extracts tracking data from an on-line course maintained with a Course Management System, and generates graphical representations that can be explored by course instructors to examine various aspects of distance students. GISMO uses techniques from Information Visualisation to render into an appropriate graphical manner the complex multidimensional student tracking data provided by the Course Management System. GISMO aims to help instructors to become aware of what is happening in their classes and provide a better support to their learners.

Trust and reputation systems represent a significant trend in decision support for Internet mediated service provision. The basic idea is to let parties rate each other, for example after the completion of a transaction, and use the aggregated ratings about a given party to derive a trust or reputation score, which can assist other parties in deciding whether or not to transact with that party in the future. A natural side effect is that it also provides an incentive for good behaviour, and therefore tends to have a positive effect on market quality. Reputation systems can be called collaborative sanctioning systems to reflect their collaborative nature, and are related to collaborative filtering systems. Reputation systems are already being used in successful commercial online applications. There is also a rapidly growing literature around trust and reputation systems, but unfortunately this activity is not very coherent. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of existing and proposed systems that can be used to derive measures of trust and reputation for Internet transactions, to analyze the current trends and developments in this area, and to propose a research agenda for trust and reputation systems. Josang, A., R. Ismal, and C. Boyd (2007). A Survey of Trust and Reputation Systems for Online Service Provision, Journal of Decision Support Systems, 43(2):618-644 Citation: Outline of Presentation • Section 1: Introduction • Section 2: Define trust and reputation • Section 3: Trust and Reputation relationship as security mechanisms • Section 4: Collaborative filtering and reputation • Section 5: Trust Classes • Section 6: Four categories of reputation and trust semantics • Section 7: Centralized and distributed architectures for reputation Outline of Presentation Continued • Section 8: Reputation computation methods (Day 1 Goal) • Section 9: Reputation systems used in commercial applications • Section 10: Description of main problems in reputation systems • Section 11: Ending discussion Section 1: Introduction • Online transactions differ from those of in person transactions because of the inherent asymmetry in the transaction, the seller has all the power so to say. • The nature of online transactions obscure the traditional metrics used to establish if a brick and mortar store is trustworthy. Example: a brick and mortar store takes time to establish a web site takes very little time to set up. – These reasons make it hard to determine rather or not a particular online venue is trustworthy or not and is why this trust issue is receiving so much attention from an academic point of view. • The authors of this paper wrote it in part because of the rapidly growing interest in this topic and because they felt that the prior overviews used inconsistent terminology. Section 2: Define trust and reputation • Two kinds of trust: reliability and decision trust • Reliability Trust: Trust is the subjective probability by which an individual, A, expects that another individual, B, performs a given action on which its welfare depends. • Decision Trust: Trust is the extent to which one party is willing to depend on something or somebody in a given situation with a feeling of relative security, even though negative consequences are possible. • The authors mention that the prior mentioned definitions are not as simple as they seem. – For example: Trust in an individual is not necessarily enough to enter into a state of dependence with a person. In other words, that danger might seem to the agent an intolerable risk. • The authors mentions that only a few papers deal with trust and that in economic circles there are some who reject trust as a computational model. • Someone by the name of Williamson argues that the notion of trust should be avoided when modeling economic interactions, because it adds nothing new, and that well known notions such as reliability, utility and risk are adequate ad sufficient for that purpose. • Williamson argues however that personal trust is still important for modeling, and that non-computation models for trust can be meaningful for studying certain relationships. • Concerning reputation, the authors mention two aspects: trust because of good reputation and trust despite of bad reputation. • These two statements shed light on the fact that trust is often made with outside information, knowledge about the relationship that is not general know, instincts and feelings, etc. • Reputation can also be considered as a collective measure of trustworthiness based on referrals from the community. • Research in Trust and Reputation Systems should have two foci: – Finding adequate online substitutes for traditional cues in the physical world and identifying new elements specific to the online applications which are suitable for measurements. – Taking advantage of IT and Internet to create efficient systems for collecting information and deriving measurements of trust and reputation in order to aid decision making and improve online markets. • These simple principles invite rigorous research in order to answer some fundamental questions: What information elements are most suitable for deriving measures of trust and reputation in a given application? How can these information elements be captured and collected? What are the best principles for designing such systems from a theoretic and from a usability point of view? Can they be made resistant to attacks of manipulation by strategic agents? How should users include the information provided by such systems into their decision process? What role can these systems play in the business model of commercial companies? Do these systems truly improve the quality of online trade and interactions? These are important questions that need good answers in order to determine the potential for trust and reputation systems in online environments. • According to a cited reference in the paper, Resnick, a reputation system must have the following: 1. Entities must be long lived, so that with every interaction there is always an expectation of future interactions. 2. Ratings about current interactions are captured and distributed. 3. Ratings about past interactions must guide decisions about current interactions. Example of how trust is derived. (Fig. 1 from paper) Section 3: Trust and Reputation relationship as security mechanisms • In a general sense, the purpose of security mechanisms is to provide protection against malicious parties. • In many situations we have to protect ourselves from those who offer resources so that the problem in fact is reversed. Information providers can for example act deceitfully by providing false or misleading information, and traditional security mechanisms are unable to protect against this type of threat. Trust and reputation systems on the other hand can provide protection against such threats. • To summaries this section the author basically says that a computer system that appears to have robust security appears more trust worthy to the user. Listing known security vulnerabilities and using encryption techniques make the system appear to me more trust worthy. Section 4: Collaborative filtering and reputation • Collaborative filtering systems are a mechanism that shares traits with a reputation system but they are different at the same time. • Collaborative filtering systems (henceforth CF) are a mechanism that attempts to take into consideration that different people have different tastes. • If two separate people rate two items similarly then they are called neighbours in CF terminology. • This new fact can be used to recommend to one something that the other liked, a technique called a recommender system. • This takes the opposite assumption of reputation systems which assume that all people will judge the same performance or transaction consistently. • The example provided by the article is that in CF systems users might rate a video or music file differently based on tastes but one containing a virus would be universally rated poorly. • Another caveat about CF vs reputation systems is that CF systems assume an optimistic world view and reputation systems assume a pessimistic world view. • In specifics, CF systems assume all participants are trustworthy and sincere, meaning that all participants report their genuine opinion. • Conversely, reputation system assume that participants will try to misrepresent the quality of services in order to make more profit and will lie to achieve said goals. • This duel opposing nature of these type systems can make it very advantageous to combine them as will be explored in the study of Amazon in section 9 which does this to some extent. Section 5: Trust Classes • Types of Trust classes: – Provision – Access – Delegation – Identity – Context • Paper mentions them in order to get specific about trust semantics. • Paper focuses on provision trust so it is emphasized. • Provision trust describes the relying party’s trust in a service or resource provider. It is relevant when the relying party is a user seeking protection from malicious or unreliable service providers. I extrapolated from the paper that this is the type of trust that would be studied in business through subjects like contract law. • Access trust describes trust in principals for the purpose of accessing resources owned by or under the responsibility of the relying party. This relates to the access control paradigm which is a central element in computer security. • Delegation trust describes trust in an agent (the delegate) that acts and makes decision on behalf of the relying party. • Identity trust describes the belief that an agent identity is as claimed. Identity trust systems have been discussed mostly in the information security community. An example mentioned in the paper is PGP encryption technology. • Context trust describes the extent to which the relying party believes that the necessary systems and institutions ar

The field of artificial intelligence in education (AIED) uses techniques from AI and cognitive science to better understand the nature of learning and teaching and to build systems to help learners gain new skills or understand new concepts. This article studies metareviews and meta-analyses to make the case for blended learning, wherein the teacher can offload some work to AIED systems.