A Survey of Artificial Intelligence Techniques Employed for Adaptive Educational Systems within E-Learning Platforms

Abstract The adaptive educational systems within e-learning platforms are built in response to the fact that the learning process is different for each and every learner. In order to provide adaptive e-learning services and study materials that are tailor-made for adaptive learning, this type of educational approach seeks to combine the ability to comprehend and detect a person’s specific needs in the context of learning with the expertise required to use appropriate learning pedagogy and enhance the learning process. Thus, it is critical to create accurate student profiles and models based upon analysis of their affective states, knowledge level, and their individual personality traits and skills. The acquired data can then be efficiently used and exploited to develop an adaptive learning environment. Once acquired, these learner models can be used in two ways. The first is to inform the pedagogy proposed by the experts and designers of the adaptive educational system. The second is to give the system dynamic self-learning capabilities from the behaviors exhibited by the teachers and students to create the appropriate pedagogy and automatically adjust the e-learning environments to suit the pedagogies. In this respect, artificial intelligence techniques may be useful for several reasons, including their ability to develop and imitate human reasoning and decision-making processes (learning-teaching model) and minimize the sources of uncertainty to achieve an effective learning-teaching context. These learning capabilities ensure both learner and system improvement over the lifelong learning mechanism. In this paper, we present a survey of raised and related topics to the field of artificial intelligence techniques employed for adaptive educational systems within e-learning, their advantages and disadvantages, and a discussion of the importance of using those techniques to achieve more intelligent and adaptive e-learning environments.</jats:p

The foundation of capability modelling: A study of the impact and utilisation of human resources

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This research aims at finding a foundation for assessment of capabilities and applying the concept in a human resource selection. The research identifies a common ground for assessing individuals’ applied capability in a given job based on literature review of various disciplines in engineering, human sciences and economics. A set of criteria is found to be common and appropriate to be used as the basis of this assessment. Applied Capability is then described in this research as the impact of the person in fulfilling job requirements and also their level of usage from their resources with regards to the identified criteria. In other words how their available resources (abilities, skills, value sets, personal attributes and previous performance records) can be used in completing a job. Translation of the person’s resources and task requirements using the proposed criteria is done through a novel algorithm and two prevalent statistical inference techniques (OLS regression and Fuzzy) are used to estimate quantitative levels of impact and utilisation. A survey on post graduate students is conducted to estimate their applied capabilities in a given job. Moreover, expert academics are surveyed on their views on key applied capability assessment criteria, and how different levels of match between job requirement and person’s resources in those criteria might affect the impact levels. The results from both surveys were mathematically modelled and the predictive ability of the conceptual and mathematical developments were compared and further contrasted with the observed data. The models were tested for robustness using experimental data and the results for both estimation methods in both surveys are close to one another with the regression models being closer to observations. It is believed that this research has provided sound conceptual and mathematical platforms which can satisfactorily predict individuals’ applied capability in a given job. This research has contributed to the current knowledge and practice by a) providing a comparison of capability definitions and uses in different disciplines, b) defining criteria for applied capability assessment, c) developing an algorithm to capture applied capabilities, d) quantification of an existing parallel model and finally e) estimating impact and utilisation indices using mathematical methods

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Improving the matching of registered unemployed to job offers through machine learning algorithms

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceDue to the existence of a double-sided asymmetric information problem on the labour market characterized by a mutual lack of trust by employers and unemployed people, not enough job matches are facilitated by public employment services (PES), which seem to be caught in a low-end equilibrium. In order to act as a reliable third party, PES need to build a good and solid reputation among their main clients by offering better and less time consuming pre-selection services. The use of machine-learning, data-driven relevancy algorithms that calculate the viability of a specific candidate for a particular job opening is becoming increasingly popular in this field. Based on the Portuguese PES databases (CVs, vacancies, pre-selection and matching results), complemented by relevant external data published by Statistics Portugal and the European Classification of Skills/Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO), the current thesis evaluates the potential application of models such as Random Forests, Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Machines, Neural Networks Ensembles and other tree-based ensembles to the job matching activities that are carried out by the Portuguese PES, in order to understand the extent to which the latter can be improved through the adoption of automated processes. The obtained results seem promising and point to the possible use of robust algorithms such as Random Forests within the pre-selection of suitable candidates, due to their advantages at various levels, namely in terms of accuracy, capacity to handle large datasets with thousands of variables, including badly unbalanced ones, as well as extensive missing values and many-valued categorical variables

Gene expression programming for Efficient Time-series Financial Forecasting

Stock market prediction is of immense interest to trading companies and buyers due to high profit margins. The majority of successful buying or selling activities occur close to stock price turning trends. This makes the prediction of stock indices and analysis a crucial factor in the determination that whether the stocks will increase or decrease the next day. Additionally, precise prediction of the measure of increase or decrease of stock prices also plays an important role in buying/selling activities. This research presents two core aspects of stock-market prediction. Firstly, it presents a Networkbased Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) methodology to integrate the capabilities of neural networks with that of fuzzy logic. A specialised extension to this technique is known as the genetic programming (GP) and gene expression programming (GEP) to explore and investigate the outcome of the GEP criteria on the stock market price prediction. The research presented in this thesis aims at the modelling and prediction of short-tomedium term stock value fluctuations in the market via genetically tuned stock market parameters. The technique uses hierarchically defined GP and gene-expressionprogramming (GEP) techniques to tune algebraic functions representing the fittest equation for stock market activities. The technology achieves novelty by proposing a fractional adaptive mutation rate Elitism (GEP-FAMR) technique to initiate a balance between varied mutation rates between varied-fitness chromosomes thereby improving prediction accuracy and fitness improvement rate. The methodology is evaluated against five stock market companies with each having its own trading circumstances during the past 20+ years. The proposed GEP/GP methodologies were evaluated based on variable window/population sizes, selection methods, and Elitism, Rank and Roulette selection methods. The Elitism-based approach showed promising results with a low error-rate in the resultant pattern matching with an overall accuracy of 95.96% for short-term 5-day and 95.35% for medium-term 56-day trading periods. The contribution of this research to theory is that it presented a novel evolutionary methodology with modified selection operators for the prediction of stock exchange data via Gene expression programming. The methodology dynamically adapts the mutation rate of different fitness groups in each generation to ensure a diversification II balance between high and low fitness solutions. The GEP-FAMR approach was preferred to Neural and Fuzzy approaches because it can address well-reported problems of over-fitting, algorithmic black-boxing, and data-snooping issues via GP and GEP algorithmsSaudi Cultural Burea