PVEX: An expert system for producibility/value engineering

PVEX is described as an expert system that solves the problem of selection of the material and process in missile manufacturing. The producibility and the value problem has been deeply studied in the past years, and was written in dBase III and PROLOG before. A new approach is presented in that the solution is achieved by introducing hypothetical reasoning, heuristic criteria integrated with a simple hypertext system and shell programming. PVEX combines KMS with Unix scripts which graphically depicts decision trees. The decision trees convey high level qualitative problem solving knowledge to users, and a stand-alone help facility and technical documentation is available through KMS. The system developed is considerably less development costly than any other comparable expert system

A scrutable adaptive hypertext

Fuelled by the popularity and uptake of the World Wide Web since the 1990s, many researchers and commercial vendors have focussed on Adaptive Hypermedia Systems as an effective mechanism for disseminating personalised information and services. Such systems store information about the user, such as their goals, interests and background, and use this to provide a personalised response to the user. This technology has been applied to a number of contexts such as education systems, e-commerce applications, information search and retrieval systems. As an increasing number of systems collect and store personal information about their users to provide a personalised service, legislation around the world increasingly requires that users have access to view and modify their personal data. The spirit of such legislation is that the user should be able to understand how personal information about them is used. There literature has reported benefits of allowing users to access and understand data collected about them, particularly in the context of supporting learning through reflection. Although researchers have experimented with open user models, typically the personalisation is inscrutable: the user has little or no visibility in to the adaptation process. When the adaptation produces unexpected results, the user may be left confused with no mechanism for understanding why the system did what it did or how to correct it. This thesis is the next step, giving users the ability to see what has been personalised and why. In the context of personalised hypermedia, this thesis describes the first research to go beyond open, or even scrutable user models; it makes the adaptivity and associated processes open to the user and controllable. The novelty of this work is that a user of an adaptive hypertext system might ask How was this page personalised to me? and is able to see just how their user model affected what they saw in the hypertext document. With an understanding of the personalisation process and the ability to control it, the user is able to steer the personalisation to suit their changing needs, and help improve the accuracy of the user model. Developing an interface to support the scrutinisation of an adaptive hypertext is difficult. Users may not scrutinise often as it is a distraction from their main task. But when users need to scrutinise, perhaps to correct a system misconception, they need to easily find and access the scrutinisation tools. Ideally, the tools should not require any training and users should be able to use them effectively without prior experience or if have not used them for a long time, since this is how users are likely to scrutinise in practice. The contributions of thesis are: (1) SASY/ATML, a domain independent, reusable framework for creation and delivery of scrutable adaptive hypertext; (2)a toolkit of graphical tools that allow the user to scrutinise, or inspect and understand what personalisation occurred and control it; (3) evaluation of the scrutinisation tools and (4) a set of guidelines for providing support for the scrutinisation of an adaptive hypertext through the exploration of several forms of scrutinisation tools

Principles of protein structure: An established Internet‐based course in structural biology

The Department of Crystallography at Birkbeck College, London, UK, has been running a one‐year, part‐time accredited graduate course, ‘Principles of Protein Structure’, entirely over the Internet since 1996. Students on this course learn the basic principles of the increasingly important subject of structural biology using software programs such as Rasmol and Chime to visualize and manipulate molecular structures in three dimensions. They interact with their tutors, based at Birkbeck, using email and text‐based teleconferencing, and can test their knowledge with multiple choice quizzes on the Web. Over 200 students from thirty countries registered for this course in the last four years. Forty, from central and eastern Europe, were supported by bursaries from the Open Society Institute. The course has been well received by students and its success led us to introduce a similar course in protein crystallography