A Personalized Knowledge Recommender System For Workspace Learning

Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) is emerging as a popular learning approach utilized by both educational institutions and business organizations. Learning Recommender Systems (RSs) can help e-learners to cope with the data overload difficulty and suggest useful items that users may wish to use. This research aims to examine the design and implementation of personalized RS that supports individual learning in the workplace. First, a hybrid knowledge recommendation technique is proposed by combing content-based method with feedback learning method to adapt to the dynamic preference of users. Second, the design and implementation of a personalized knowledge recommender system using proposed technique in a case company is presented. Quantitative and qualitative data are collected to validate the system and evaluate its performance and impact. The preliminary results show that involving enterprise experts and target users in the system design phase can improve the system transparency and users’ trust in the system. It is also found that users’ learning attitude can be positively influenced by the system experience. This research provides important implications on employing intelligent recommender system to support workplace learning

Sistema de recomendação para alívio de stress

Stress is considered to be a normal part of our lives, especially when taken into account that people are constantly trying to push their limits and the limits of others around them. Whether at home or at their jobs, the idea that to be successful one must work harder is deeply rooted within society because such behavior has shown positive results in the past. Stressful events can work as a reactor for people to feel the necessary motivation to move on with their tasks. However, if uncontrolled, may lead to health-related consequences, such as cardiovascular diseases, sleep deprivation, and anxiety. Therefore, it is important to not only recognize that stress has serious negative impacts in the lives of people but also to find mechanisms to cope with it. This document presents a solution in the form of a web application capable of providing stresseasing and health improving recommendations that adapt to the users of the application by considering their ratings from past recommendation, as well as their profiles. Through an engaging and interactive graphical user interface, users can receive personalized recommendations via system notifications. These notifications are composed of a demonstrative card and a description, as well as a collection of documents with insightful information regarding the recommendations being provided. This web application is supported by three major components, designed to operate both synchronously and asynchronously in a microservices-oriented architecture, promoting the flexibility and scalability of the solution. Furthermore, for the solution to provide recommendations, it was necessary to implement a filtering technique. Among the most common ones, the content-based filtering is the most advantageous, meaning that a content-based recommender system was developed as part of the solution. Lastly, it was concluded that the web application satisfactorily meets the established requirements. However, due to lack of user-generated data, the randomly generated data used to demonstrate how a proper evaluation would be conducted cannot be subject for interpretation.O stress é considerado parte integrante nas nossas vidas, especialmente quando consideramos que as pessoas estão constantemente a tentar superar os seus limites, muitas vezes delegando essas mesmas expectativas àqueles que as rodeiam. Tanto em casa, com os seus parceiros e familiares, como no seu local de trabalho, a ideia de que para se obter sucesso tem de se trabalhar mais está enraizada na sociedade, sendo que comportamentos semelhantes no passado comprovaram resultados positivos nesse sentido. Os eventos de stress podem funcionar como um sentimento de motivação para que as pessoas consigam desempenhar as suas funções diariamente. Contudo, caso não sejam controlados, poderão trazer consequências graves relacionadas com a saúde, tais como doenças cardiovasculares, privação do sono, e problemas de ansiedade. Assim, é importante não apenas reconhecer que o stress tem diversos impactos sérios na vida das pessoas, mas também encontrar formas de o gerir apropriadamente. Este documento apresenta uma solução na forma de uma aplicação web capaz de fornecer recomendações para redução do stress e melhoria de saúde, que se adaptam aos utilizadores da aplicação considerando as suas avaliações a recomendações no passado. Através de uma interface gráfica envolvente e interativa, os utilizadores podem receber recomendações personalizadas por meio de notificações do sistema. Essas notificações são compostas por um cartão demonstrativo e uma descrição, assim como de um conjunto de documentos com informações detalhadas acerca das recomendações fornecidas. Esta aplicação é composta por três componentes principais, desenhados para interagirem entre si tanto de forma síncrona como assíncrona numa arquitetura orientada a microserviços, promovendo a flexibilidade e escalabilidade da solução. Para além disso, para que a solução seja capaz de fornecer recomendações, foi preciso implementar uma técnica de filtragem. Entre as mais comuns, a filtragem baseada em conteúdo demonstrou ser a mais vantajosa, significando que foi desenvolvido um sistema de recomendação baseado em conteúdo como parte da solução. Finalmente, concluiu-se que a aplicação web vai satisfatoriamente de encontro aos requisitos estabelecidos. Contudo, devido à falta de dados gerados pelos utilizadores da aplicação, os dados gerados aleatoriamente para demonstrar de que forma uma avaliação adequada seria realizada, não estão sujeitos a interpretação

Supporting the development of mobile adaptive learning environments: A case study

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. E. Martín and R. M. Carro, "Supporting the development of mobile adaptive learning environments: A case study" IEEE Transactions on learning technologies, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 23-36, january-march 2009In this paper, we describe a system to support the generation of adaptive mobile learning environments. In these environments, students and teachers can accomplish different types of individual and collaborative activities in different contexts. Activities are dynamically recommended to users depending on different criteria (user features, context, etc.), and workspaces to support the corresponding activity accomplishment are dynamically generated. In this paper, we present the main characteristics of the mechanism that suggests the most suitable activities at each situation, the system in which this mechanism has been implemented, the authoring tool to facilitate the specification of context-based adaptive m-learning environments, and two environments generated following this approach will be presented. The outcomes of two case studies carried out with students of the first and second courses of “Computer Engineering” at the “Universidad Auto´noma de Madrid” are also presented.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, project number TIN2007-64718

The 3A Interaction Model and Relation-Based Recommender System:Adopting Social Media Paradigms in Designing Personal Learning Environments

We live in a rapidly changing digital world marked by technological advances, and fraught with online information constantly growing thanks to the Internet revolution and the online social applications in particular. Formal learning acquired in traditional academic and professional environments is not by itself sufficient to keep up with our information-based society. Instead, more and more focus is granted to lifelong, self-directed, and self-paced learning, acquired intentionally or spontaneously, in environments that are not purposely dedicated for learning. The concept of online Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) refers to the development of platforms that are able to sustain lifelong learning. PLEs require new design paradigms giving learners the opportunity to conduct autonomous activities depending on their interests, and allowing them to appropriate, repurpose and contribute to online content rather than merely consume pre-packaged learning resources. This thesis presents the 3A interaction model, a flexible design model targeting online personal and collaborative environments in general, and PLEs in particular. The model adopts bottom-up social media paradigms in combining social networking with flexible content and activity management features. The proposed model targets both formal and informal interactions where learning in not necessarily an explicit aim but may be a byproduct. It identifies 3 main constructs, namely actors, activities, and assets that can represent interaction and learning contexts in a flexible way. The applicability of the 3A interaction model to design actual PLEs and to deploy them in different learning modalities is demonstrated through usability studies and use-case scenarios. This thesis also addresses the challenge of dealing with information overload and helping end-users find relatively interesting information in open environments such as PLEs where content is not predefined, but is rather constantly added at run time, and differ in subject matter, quality, as well as intended audience. For that purpose, the 3A personalized, contextual, and relation-based recommender system is proposed, and evaluated on two real datasets

Interactive Intent Modeling for Exploratory Search

Exploratory search requires the system to assist the user in comprehending the information space and expressing evolving search intents for iterative exploration and retrieval of information. We introduce interactive intent modeling, a technique that models a user’s evolving search intents and visualizes them as keywords for interaction. The user can provide feedback on the keywords, from which the system learns and visualizes an improved intent estimate and retrieves information. We report experiments comparing variants of a system implementing interactive intent modeling to a control system. Data comprising search logs, interaction logs, essay answers, and questionnaires indicate significant improvements in task performance, information retrieval performance over the session, information comprehension performance, and user experience. The improvements in retrieval effectiveness can be attributed to the intent modeling and the effect on users’ task performance, breadth of information comprehension, and user experience are shown to be dependent on a richer visualization. Our results demonstrate the utility of combining interactive modeling of search intentions with interactive visualization of the models that can benefit both directing the exploratory search process and making sense of the information space. Our findings can help design personalized systems that support exploratory information seeking and discovery of novel information.Peer reviewe

Design an expert system for students graduation projects in Iraq universities: Basrah University

A graduation project is a form or work that the study authority requests from the student to measure what he made during the study. Designed an expert system for students’ graduation projects at the University of Basrah for students who are obligated to submit a project that qualifies them to graduate from the university. The system works according to a set of requirements, the most important is first: The student's possession of a high rate that qualifies him for the project. Second: he must possess half of the skills required for the project provided that it includes at least one programming language example (c ++, java, PHP, c #, etc ...). The system has many features that help the Supervisors and Students Committee to manage students' projects efficiently. System is built as a web-based system, with access limited only to the university's local network

Algoritmo Híbrido de Recomendação

Nesta era tecnológica em que nos encontramos há cada vez mais informação disponível na internet, mas grande parte dessa informação não é relevante. Isto leva à necessidade de criar maneiras de filtrar informação, de forma a reduzir o tempo de recolha de informação útil. Esta necessidade torna o uso de sistemas de recomendação muito apelativo, visto estes personalizarem as pesquisas de forma a ajudar os seus utilizadores a fazer escolhas mais informadas. Os sistemas de recomendação procuram recomendar os itens mais relevantes aos seus utilizadores, no entanto necessitam de informação sobre os utilizadores e os itens, de forma a melhor os poder organizar e categorizar. Há vários tipos de sistemas de recomendação, cada um com as suas forças e fraquezas. De modo a superar as limitações destes sistemas surgiram os sistemas de recomendação híbridos, que procuram combinar características dos diferentes tipos de sistemas de recomendação de modo a reduzir, ou eliminar, as suas fraquezas. Uma das limitações dos sistemas de recomendação acontece quando o próprio sistema não tem informação suficiente para fazer recomendações. Esta limitação tem o nome de Cold Start e pode focar-se numa de duas áreas: quando a falta de informação vem do utilizador, conhecida como User Cold Start; e quando a falta de informação vem de um item, conhecida como Item Cold Start. O foco desta dissertação é no User Cold Start, nomeadamente na criação de um sistema de recomendação híbrido capaz de lidar com esta situação. A abordagem apresentada nesta dissertação procura combinar a segmentação de clientes com regras de associação. O objetivo passa por descobrir os utilizadores mais similares aos utilizadores numa situação de Cold Start e, através dos itens avaliados pelos utilizadores mais similares, recomendar os itens considerados mais relevantes, obtidos através de regras de associação. O algoritmo híbrido apresentado nesta dissertação procura e classifica todos os tipos de utilizadores. Quando um utilizador numa situação de Cold Start está à procura de recomendações, o sistema encontra itens para recomendar através da aplicação de regras de associação a itens avaliados por utilizadores no mesmo grupo que o utilizador na situação de Cold Start, cruzando essas regras com os itens avaliados por este último e apresentando as recomendações com base no resultado.Recommender systems, or recommenders, are a way to filter the useful information from the data, in this age where there is a lot of available data. A recommender system’s purpose is to recommend relevant items to users, and to do that, it requires information on both, data from users and from items, to better organise and categorise both of them. There are several types of recommenders, each best suited for a specific purpose, and with specific weaknesses. Then there are hybrid recommenders, made by combining one or more types of recommenders in a way that each type supresses, or at least limits, the weaknesses of the other types. A very important weakness of recommender systems occurs when the system doesn’t have enough information about something and so, it cannot make a recommendation. This problem known as a Cold Start problem is addressed in this thesis. There are two types of Cold Start problems: those where the lack of information comes from a user (User Cold Start) and those where it comes from an item (Item Cold Start). This thesis’ main focus is on User Cold Start problems. A novel approach is introduced in this thesis which combines clients’ segmentation with association rules. The goal is first, finding the most similar users to cold start users and then, with the items rated by these similar users, recommend those that are most suitable, which are gotten through association rules. The hybrid algorithm presented in this thesis finds and classifies all users’ types. When a user in a Cold Start situation is looking for recommendations, the system finds the items to recommend to him by applying association rules to the items evaluated by users in the same user group as the Cold Start user, crossing them with the few items evaluated by the Cold Start user and finally making its recommendations based on that

User-Generated Data Network Effects and Market Competition Dynamics

This Article defines User-Generated Data (“UGD”) network effects, distinguishes them from the more familiar concept of traditional network effects, and explores their implications for market competition dynamics. It explains that UGD network effects produce various efficiencies for digital service providers (“data platforms”) by empowering their services’ optimization, personalization, and continuous diversification. In light of these efficiencies, competition dynamics in UGD-driven markets tend to be unstable and lead to the formation of dominant multi-industry conglomerates. These processes will enhance social welfare because they are natural and efficient. Conversely, countervailing UGD network effects also empower data platforms to detect and neutralize competitive threats, price discriminate among users, and manipulate users’ behaviors. The realization of these effects will result in inefficiencies, which will undermine social welfare. After a comprehensive analysis of conflicting economic forces, this Article sets the ground for informed policymaking. It suggests that emerging calls to aggravate antitrust enforcement and to “break up” Big Tech are ill-advised. Instead, this Article calls for policymakers to draw inspiration from traditional network industries’ public utility and open-access regulations

Social and Semantic Contexts in Tourist Mobile Applications

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web along with the increase possibility of access information through a variety of devices in mobility, has defi nitely changed the way users acquire, create, and personalize information, pushing innovative strategies for annotating and organizing it. In this scenario, Social Annotation Systems have quickly gained a huge popularity, introducing millions of metadata on di fferent Web resources following a bottom-up approach, generating free and democratic mechanisms of classi cation, namely folksonomies. Moving away from hierarchical classi cation schemas, folksonomies represent also a meaningful mean for identifying similarities among users, resources and tags. At any rate, they suff er from several limitations, such as the lack of specialized tools devoted to manage, modify, customize and visualize them as well as the lack of an explicit semantic, making di fficult for users to bene fit from them eff ectively. Despite appealing promises of Semantic Web technologies, which were intended to explicitly formalize the knowledge within a particular domain in a top-down manner, in order to perform intelligent integration and reasoning on it, they are still far from reach their objectives, due to di fficulties in knowledge acquisition and annotation bottleneck. The main contribution of this dissertation consists in modeling a novel conceptual framework that exploits both social and semantic contextual dimensions, focusing on the domain of tourism and cultural heritage. The primary aim of our assessment is to evaluate the overall user satisfaction and the perceived quality in use thanks to two concrete case studies. Firstly, we concentrate our attention on contextual information and navigation, and on authoring tool; secondly, we provide a semantic mapping of tags of the system folksonomy, contrasted and compared to the expert users' classi cation, allowing a bridge between social and semantic knowledge according to its constantly mutual growth. The performed user evaluations analyses results are promising, reporting a high level of agreement on the perceived quality in use of both the applications and of the speci c analyzed features, demonstrating that a social-semantic contextual model improves the general users' satisfactio