Educational Technology and Related Education Conferences for June to December 2011

This potpourri of educational technology conferences includes gems such as “Saving Your Organisation from Boring eLearning” and “Lessons and Insights from Ten eLearning Masters”. And, if you wish, you can “Be an Open Learning Hero”. You will also find that the number of mobile learning conferences (and conferences that have a mobile learning component) have increased significantly. Countries such as China, Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand have shown a keen interest in mobile learning. It would be impossible for you to be present at all the conferences that you would like to attend. But, you could go to the conference website/url during and after the conference. Many conference organizers post abstracts, full papers, and/or videos of conference presentations. Thus, you can visit the conference virtually and may encounter information and contacts that would be useful in your work. The list below covers selected events focused primarily on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until December 2011 are complete as dates, locations, or URLs are not available for a number of events held after December 2011. But, take a look at the conference organizers who planned ahead in 2012. A Word 2003 format is used to enable people who do not have access to Word 2007 or higher version and those with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference proceedings. (If you are seeking a more interactive listing, refer to online conference sites.) Consider using the “Find” tool under Microsoft Word’s “Edit” tab or similar tab in OpenOffice to locate the name of a particular conference, association, city, or country. If you enter the country “Australia” or “Singapore” in the “Find” tool, all conferences that occur in Australia or Singapore will be highlighted. Or, enter the word “research”. Then, “cut and paste” a list of suitable events for yourself and your colleagues. Please note that events, dates, titles, and locations may change; thus, CHECK the specific conference website. Note also that some events will be cancelled at a later date. All Internet addresses were verified at the time of publication. No liability is assumed for any errors that may have been introduced inadvertently during the assembly of this conference list. If possible, do not remove the contact information when you re-distribute the list as that is how I receive updates and corrections. If you mount the list on the web, please note its source

A mechanism for organizing last-mile service using non-dedicated fleet

Abstract—Unprecedented pace of urbanization and rising income levels have fueled the growth of car ownership in almost all newly formed megacities. Such growth has congested the limited road space and significantly affected the quality of life in these megacities. Convincing residents to give up their cars and use public transport is the most effective way in reducing congestion; however, even with sufficient public transport capacity, the lack of last-mile (from the transport hub to the destination) travel services is the major deterrent for the adoption of public transport. Due to the dynamic nature of such travel demands, fixed-size fleets will not be a cost-effective approach in addressing last-mile demands. Instead, we propose a dynamic, incentive-based mechanism that enables taxi ridesharing for satisfying last-mile travel demands. On the demand side, travelers would register their last-mile travel demands in real-time, and they are expected to receive ride arrangements before they reach the hub; on the supply side, depending on the real-time demands, proper incentives will be computed and provided to taxi drivers willing to commit to the lastmile service. Multiple travelers will be clustered into groups according to their destinations, and travelers belonging to the same group will be assigned to a taxi, while each of them paying fares considering their destinations and also their orders in reaching destinations. In this paper, we provide mathematical formulations for demand clustering and fare distribution. If the model returns a solution, it is guaranteed to be implementable. For cases where it is not possible to satisfy all demands despite having enough capacity, we propose a two-phase approach that identifies the maximal subset of riders that can be feasibly served. Finally, we use a series of numerical examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Keywords-urban transportation, ride sharing mechanism I

HCI Model with Learning Mechanism for Cooperative Design in Pervasive Computing Environment

This paper presents a human-computer interaction model with a three layers learning mechanism in a pervasive environment. We begin with a discussion around a number of important issues related to human-computer interaction followed by a description of the architecture for a multi-agent cooperative design system for pervasive computing environment. We present our proposed three- layer HCI model and introduce the group formation algorithm, which is predicated on a dynamic sharing niche technology. Finally, we explore the cooperative reinforcement learning and fusion algorithms; the paper closes with concluding observations and a summary of the principal work and contributions of this paper

Monitoring E-commerce Adoption from Online Data

[EN] The purpose of this paper is to propose an intelligent system to automatically monitor the firms¿ engagement in e-commerce by analyzing online data retrieved from their corporate websites. The design of the proposed system combines web content mining and scraping techniques with learning methods for Big Data. Corporate websites are scraped to extract more than 150 features related to the e-commerce adoption, such as the presence of some keywords or a private area. Then, these features are taken as input by a classification model that includes dimensionality reduction techniques. The system is evaluated with a data set consisting of 426 corporate websites of firms based in France and Spain. The system successfully classified most of the firms into those that adopted e-commerce and those that did not, reaching a classification accuracy of 90.6%. This demonstrates the feasibility of monitoring e-commerce adoption from online data. Moreover, the proposed system represents a cost-effective alternative to surveys as method for collecting e-commerce information from companies, and is capable of providing more frequent information than surveys and avoids the non-response errors. This is the first research work to design and evaluate an intelligent system to automatically detect e-commerce engagement from online data. This proposal opens up the opportunity to monitor e-commerce adoption at a large scale, with highly granular information that otherwise would require every firm to complete a survey. In addition, it makes it possible to track the evolution of this activity in real time, so that governments and institutions could make informed decisions earlier.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness with Grant TIN2013-43913-R, and by the Spanish Ministry of Education with Grant FPU14/02386.Blazquez, D.; Domenech, J.; Gil, JA.; Pont Sanjuan, A. (2018). 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Continuous Space Estimation: Increasing WiFi-Based Indoor Localization Resolution without Increasing the Site-Survey Effort

Abstract Although much research has taken place in WiFi indoor localization systems, their accuracy can still be improved. When designing this kind of system, fingerprint-based methods are a common choice. The problem with fingerprint-based methods comes with the need of site surveying the environment, which is effort consuming. In this work, we propose an approach, based on support vector regression, to estimate the received signal strength at non-site-surveyed positions of the environment. Experiments, performed in a real environment, show that the proposed method could be used to improve the resolution of fingerprint-based indoor WiFi localization systems without increasing the site survey effortThis work has been funded by TIN2014-56633-C3-3-R (ABS4SOWproject) from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and the University of Alcalá Postdoctoral Research program (30400M000.541A.640.17)S

A Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis on Social Network Anonymization: Current Approaches and Future Directions

In recent decades, social network anonymization has become a crucial research field due to its pivotal role in preserving users' privacy. However, the high diversity of approaches introduced in relevant studies poses a challenge to gaining a profound understanding of the field. In response to this, the current study presents an exhaustive and well-structured bibliometric analysis of the social network anonymization field. To begin our research, related studies from the period of 2007-2022 were collected from the Scopus Database then pre-processed. Following this, the VOSviewer was used to visualize the network of authors' keywords. Subsequently, extensive statistical and network analyses were performed to identify the most prominent keywords and trending topics. Additionally, the application of co-word analysis through SciMAT and the Alluvial diagram allowed us to explore the themes of social network anonymization and scrutinize their evolution over time. These analyses culminated in an innovative taxonomy of the existing approaches and anticipation of potential trends in this domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first bibliometric analysis in the social network anonymization field, which offers a deeper understanding of the current state and an insightful roadmap for future research in this domain.Comment: 73 pages, 28 figure

Spatial and temporal-based query disambiguation for improving web search

Queries submitted to search engines are ambiguous in nature due to users’ irrelevant input which poses real challenges to web search engines both towards understanding a query and giving results. A lot of irrelevant and ambiguous information creates disappointment among users. Thus, this research proposes an ambiguity evolvement process followed by an integrated use of spatial and temporal features to alleviate the search results imprecision. To enhance the effectiveness of web information retrieval the study develops an enhanced Adaptive Disambiguation Approach for web search queries to overcome the problems caused by ambiguous queries. A query classification method was used to filter search results to overcome the imprecision. An algorithm was utilized for finding the similarity of the search results based on spatial and temporal features. Users’ selection based on web results facilitated recording of implicit feedback which was then utilized for web search improvement. Performance evaluation was conducted on data sets GISQC_DS, AMBIENT and MORESQUE comprising of ambiguous queries to certify the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison to a well-known temporal evaluation and two-box search methods. The implemented prototype is focused on ambiguous queries to be classified by spatial or temporal features. Spatial queries focus on targeting the location information whereas temporal queries target time in years. In conclusion, the study used search results in the context of Spatial Information Retrieval (S-IR) along with temporal information. Experiments results show that the use of spatial and temporal features in combination can significantly improve the performance in terms of precision (92%), accuracy (93%), recall (95%), and f-measure (93%). Moreover, the use of implicit feedback has a significant impact on the search results which has been demonstrated through experimental evaluation.SHAHID KAMA

What is a Fair Value of Your Recommendation List?

We propose a new quality metric for recommender systems. The main feature of our approach is the fact, that we take into account the set of requirements, which are important for business application of a recommender. Thus, we construct a general criterion, named “audience satisfaction”, which thoroughly describe the result of interaction between users and recommendation service. During the criterion construction we had to deal with a number of common recommenders’ problems: a) Most of users rate only a random part of the objects they consume and a part of the objects that were recommended to them; b) Attention of users is distributed very unevenly over the list of recommendations and it requires a special behavioral model; c) The value of the user’s rate measures the level of his/her satisfaction, hence these values should be naturally incorporated in the criterion intrinsically; d) Different elements may often dramatically differ from each other by popularity (long tail – short head problem) and this effect prevents accurate measuring of user’s satisfaction. The final metric takes into account all these issues, leaving opportunity to adjust the metric performance based on proper behavioral models and parameters of short head problem treatment

What is a Fair Value of Your Recommendation List?

We propose a new quality metric for recommender systems. The main feature of our approach is the fact, that we take into account the set of requirements, which are important for business application of a recommender. Thus, we construct a general criterion, named “audience satisfaction”, which thoroughly describe the result of interaction between users and recommendation service. During the criterion construction we had to deal with a number of common recommenders’ problems: a) Most of users rate only a random part of the objects they consume and a part of the objects that were recommended to them; b) Attention of users is distributed very unevenly over the list of recommendations and it requires a special behavioral model; c) The value of the user’s rate measures the level of his/her satisfaction, hence these values should be naturally incorporated in the criterion intrinsically; d) Different elements may often dramatically differ from each other by popularity (long tail – short head problem) and this effect prevents accurate measuring of user’s satisfaction. The final metric takes into account all these issues, leaving opportunity to adjust the metric performance based on proper behavioral models and parameters of short head problem treatment

Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet

[DE] World Wide Web is the greatest boon towards the technological advancement of modern era. Using the benefits of Internet globally, anywhere and anytime, users can avail the benefits of accessing live and on demand video services. The streaming media systems such as YouTube, Netflix, and Apple Music are reining the multimedia world with frequent popularity among users. A key concern of quality perceived for video streaming applications over Internet is the Quality of Experience (QoE) that users go through. Due to changing network conditions, bit rate and initial delay and the multimedia file freezes or provide poor video quality to the end users, researchers across industry and academia are explored HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS), which split the video content into multiple segments and offer the clients at varying qualities. The video player at the client side plays a vital role in buffer management and choosing the appropriate bit rate for each such segment of video to be transmitted. A higher bit rate transmitted video pauses in between whereas, a lower bit rate video lacks in quality, requiring a tradeoff between them. The need of the hour was to adaptively varying the bit rate and video quality to match the transmission media conditions. Further, The main aim of this paper is to give an overview on the state of the art HAS techniques across multimedia and networking domains. A detailed survey was conducted to analyze challenges and solutions in adaptive streaming algorithms, QoE, network protocols, buffering and etc. It also focuses on various challenges on QoE influence factors in a fluctuating network condition, which are often ignored in present HAS methodologies. Furthermore, this survey will enable network and multimedia researchers a fair amount of understanding about the latest happenings of adaptive streaming and the necessary improvements that can be incorporated in future developments.Abdullah, MTA.; Lloret, J.; Canovas Solbes, A.; García-García, L. (2017). Survey of Transportation of Adaptive Multimedia Streaming service in Internet. Network Protocols and Algorithms. 9(1-2):85-125. doi:10.5296/npa.v9i1-2.12412S8512591-