Towards a Lightweight Approach for Modding Serious Educational Games: Assisting Novice Designers

Serious educational games (SEGs) are a growing segment of the education community’s pedagogical toolbox. Effectively creating such games remains challenging, as teachers and industry trainers are content experts; typically they are not game designers with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to create a quality SEG. Here, a lightweight approach to interactively explore and modify existing SEGs is introduced, a toll that can be broadly adopted by educators for pedagogically sound SEGs. Novice game designers can rapidly explore the educational and traditional elements of a game, with a stress on tracking the SEG learning objectives, as well as allowing for reviewing and altering a variety of graphic and audio game elements

Interactive context-aware user-driven metadata correction in digital libraries

Personal name variants are a common problem in digital libraries, reducing the precision of searches and complicating browsing-based interaction. The book-centric approach of name authority control has not scaled to match the growth and diversity of digital repositories. In this paper, we present a novel system for user-driven integration of name variants when interacting with web-based information-in particular digital library-systems. We approach these issues via a client-side JavaScript browser extension that can reorganize web content and also integrate remote data sources. Designed to be agnostic towards the web sites it is applied to, we illustrate the developed proof-of-concept system through worked examples using three different digital libraries. We discuss the extensibility of the approach in the context of other user-driven information systems and the growth of the Semantic Web

DESIGN OF A HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM USING ARDUINO WITH WIRELESS CONTROL

The rapid growth of technology has drastically changed the living standards of modern society. Seeing the increasing number of electronic devices being made in a household, an automated home control system has become an increasing useful feature. Current systems, however, have problems with complexity, high costs, non-open sources and multiple incompatible standards; resulting in the limited venture of the home automation into the homes of the rich or hobbyists. This project intends to design an open source, affordable and easy to use home automation system, which will be done by interfacing the open source Arduino microcontroller with web browser; creating a simple, easy-to-use system to control home appliances. The project was carried out in several stages. The Arduino is first setup for Wi-Fi connection and web browser interfacing. Next, the system is made to work with appliances in a home model. Last of all, a simple user interface is created using HTML to make the system user friendly, completing the home automation system design. The home automation system design was successfully implemented. Using web browser on laptop and smartphone, connection was made to Arduino through wireless network, allowing for control of the appliances in the home model

The Hierarchic treatment of marine ecological information from spatial networks of benthic platforms

Measuring biodiversity simultaneously in different locations, at different temporal scales, and over wide spatial scales is of strategic importance for the improvement of our understanding of the functioning of marine ecosystems and for the conservation of their biodiversity. Monitoring networks of cabled observatories, along with other docked autonomous systems (e.g., Remotely Operated Vehicles [ROVs], Autonomous Underwater Vehicles [AUVs], and crawlers), are being conceived and established at a spatial scale capable of tracking energy fluxes across benthic and pelagic compartments, as well as across geographic ecotones. At the same time, optoacoustic imaging is sustaining an unprecedented expansion in marine ecological monitoring, enabling the acquisition of new biological and environmental data at an appropriate spatiotemporal scale. At this stage, one of the main problems for an effective application of these technologies is the processing, storage, and treatment of the acquired complex ecological information. Here, we provide a conceptual overview on the technological developments in the multiparametric generation, storage, and automated hierarchic treatment of biological and environmental information required to capture the spatiotemporal complexity of a marine ecosystem. In doing so, we present a pipeline of ecological data acquisition and processing in different steps and prone to automation. We also give an example of population biomass, community richness and biodiversity data computation (as indicators for ecosystem functionality) with an Internet Operated Vehicle (a mobile crawler). Finally, we discuss the software requirements for that automated data processing at the level of cyber-infrastructures with sensor calibration and control, data banking, and ingestion into large data portals.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Serverification of Molecular Modeling Applications: the Rosetta Online Server that Includes Everyone (ROSIE)

The Rosetta molecular modeling software package provides experimentally tested and rapidly evolving tools for the 3D structure prediction and high-resolution design of proteins, nucleic acids, and a growing number of non-natural polymers. Despite its free availability to academic users and improving documentation, use of Rosetta has largely remained confined to developers and their immediate collaborators due to the code's difficulty of use, the requirement for large computational resources, and the unavailability of servers for most of the Rosetta applications. Here, we present a unified web framework for Rosetta applications called ROSIE (Rosetta Online Server that Includes Everyone). ROSIE provides (a) a common user interface for Rosetta protocols, (b) a stable application programming interface for developers to add additional protocols, (c) a flexible back-end to allow leveraging of computer cluster resources shared by RosettaCommons member institutions, and (d) centralized administration by the RosettaCommons to ensure continuous maintenance. This paper describes the ROSIE server infrastructure, a step-by-step 'serverification' protocol for use by Rosetta developers, and the deployment of the first nine ROSIE applications by six separate developer teams: Docking, RNA de novo, ERRASER, Antibody, Sequence Tolerance, Supercharge, Beta peptide design, NCBB design, and VIP redesign. As illustrated by the number and diversity of these applications, ROSIE offers a general and speedy paradigm for serverification of Rosetta applications that incurs negligible cost to developers and lowers barriers to Rosetta use for the broader biological community. ROSIE is available at http://rosie.rosettacommons.org