Engaging Science: Innovative Teaching for Responsible Citizenship

This book “ENGAGING SCIENCE: Innovative teaching for responsible citizenship” provides a detailed overview of key pedagogical tools for Science Educators in Europe. This open licensed content translated in various languages and localised to address various national curricula has been implemented through MOOC in various countries in Europe. The ENGAGE “CPD on/for RRI” framework demonstrates its relevance to RRI teaching/learning content and structure by helping secondary science teachers address contemporary science issues, develop beliefs and knowledge for RRI and enrich their practices through teaching strategies based on inquiry pedagogies

Towards Method Component Contextualization

International audienceMethod Engineering (ME) is a discipline which aims to bring effective solutions to the construction, improvement and modification of the methods used to develop Information Systems (IS). Situational Method Engineering (SME) promotes the idea of retrieving, adapting and tailoring components, rather than complete methodologies, to the specific context. Existing SME approaches use the notion of context for characterizing situations of IS development projects and for guiding the method components selection from a repository. However, in the reviewed literature, there is no proposed approach to specify the specific context of method components. This paper provides a detailed vision of context and a process for contextualizing methods in the IS domain. This proposal is illustrated with three case studies: scenario conceptualization, project portfolio management, and decision-making

Numerical and Evolutionary Optimization 2020

This book was established after the 8th International Workshop on Numerical and Evolutionary Optimization (NEO), representing a collection of papers on the intersection of the two research areas covered at this workshop: numerical optimization and evolutionary search techniques. While focusing on the design of fast and reliable methods lying across these two paradigms, the resulting techniques are strongly applicable to a broad class of real-world problems, such as pattern recognition, routing, energy, lines of production, prediction, and modeling, among others. This volume is intended to serve as a useful reference for mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists to explore current issues and solutions emerging from these mathematical and computational methods and their applications

Technology assessment between risk, uncertainty and ignorance

The use of most if not all technologies is accompanied by negative side effects, While we may profit from today’s technologies, it is most often future generations who bear most risks. Risk analysis therefore becomes a delicate issue, because future risks often cannot be assigned a meaningful occurance probability. This paper argues that technology assessement most often deal with uncertainty and ignorance rather than risk when we include future generations into our ethical, political or juridal thinking. This has serious implications as probabilistic decision approaches are not applicable anymore. I contend that a virtue ethical approach in which dianoetic virtues play a central role may supplement a welfare based ethics in order to overcome the difficulties in dealing with uncertainty and ignorance in technology assessement

E-portfolio in education. Practices and reflections

The main activities of the digiFolio Project include: Building a common knowledge base supported by research work on the theory of portfolio usage; Paper and online publication of the results of the research work; Establishment of the pedagogical model for the training course; Analysis of the existing technological infrastructures for digital portfolio usage; Adjustment of the best tools and training course setup; Piloting and evidencing of the training course; Monitoring of the trainees' work by using a specific online teachers' support structure; International seminar. Website: http://digifolioseminar.org/?The present publication addresses the use of digital portfolios in educational context and it is one of the latest dissemination activities of the Digifolio project – Digital Portfolio as a strategy for teachers’ professional development, a COMENIUS 2.1 project which was carried out between 2005 and 2008. It involved several universities and teacher training institutions from five different European countries. The project, which main focus was the reflection on the potentialities of portfolios and digital technologies in the perspective of teachers’ professional development, came to its end with an international seminar which aimed at disseminating the work produced in the frame of a previous teachers training course, as well as allowing and welcoming the contribution of other education professionals with their practices and reflections on the above-mentioned thematic.Europeen Comissio

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

A new methodology for advanced engineering design: Lessons from experimenting C-K Theory driven tools

International audienceThis research shows that C-K Design Theory provides fruitful connections between New Product Development and Knowledge Management issues. Our purpose is to go a step further on the benefits of C-K Theory-based design tools for managing the upstream phases of innovative design processes. Based on 14 industrial case studies conducted between 2009 and 2011, we find that C-K Theory-based design tools enable practitioners to generate and explore various design paths while converging on the most competitive one

Designing Normative Theories for Ethical and Legal Reasoning: LogiKEy Framework, Methodology, and Tool Support

A framework and methodology---termed LogiKEy---for the design and engineering of ethical reasoners, normative theories and deontic logics is presented. The overall motivation is the development of suitable means for the control and governance of intelligent autonomous systems. LogiKEy's unifying formal framework is based on semantical embeddings of deontic logics, logic combinations and ethico-legal domain theories in expressive classic higher-order logic (HOL). This meta-logical approach enables the provision of powerful tool support in LogiKEy: off-the-shelf theorem provers and model finders for HOL are assisting the LogiKEy designer of ethical intelligent agents to flexibly experiment with underlying logics and their combinations, with ethico-legal domain theories, and with concrete examples---all at the same time. Continuous improvements of these off-the-shelf provers, without further ado, leverage the reasoning performance in LogiKEy. Case studies, in which the LogiKEy framework and methodology has been applied and tested, give evidence that HOL's undecidability often does not hinder efficient experimentation.Comment: 50 pages; 10 figure

Identification of levels of sustainable consciousness of teachers in training through an e-portfolio

The contents of Education for Sustainable Development should be included in teachers’ initial and advanced training programs. A sustainable consciousness is one of the main foundations for determining the key competences for sustainability. However, there are not many empirical studies that deal with consciousness from education. In this context, the e-portfolio appears as a tool that promotes reflection and critical thinking, which are key competences for consciousness development. This work intends to propose a categorization system to extract types of consciousness and identify the levels of consciousness of teachers in training. For this research work, which is of an eminently qualitative nature, we have selected 25 e-portfolios of students (teachers in pre-service training) in the last year of the School of Education at the University of Macerata (Italy). The qualitative methodological procedure that was followed enabled deducing three bases that shape the consciousness of teachers in training: thinking, representation of reality, and type of consciousness. We concluded that the attainment of a sustainable consciousness in teachers requires activating and developing higher levels of thinking, as well as a projective and macrostructural representation of reality

Intelligent computational argumentation for evaluating performance scores in multi-criteria decision making

Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a discipline aimed at assisting multiple stakeholders in contemplating a decision paradigm in an uncertain environment. The decision analysis to be performed involves numerous alternative positions assessed under varied criterion. A performance score is assigned for each alternative in terms of every criterion and it represents satisfaction of the criteria by that alternative. In a collaborative decision making environment, performance scores are either obtained when a consensus can be reached among stakeholders on a particular score or in some cases or controversial when stakeholders do not agree with each other about them. In the previous research an intelligent argumentation system for collaborative decision making was developed. In this thesis; its use is being extended for evaluating performance scores in MCDM. A framework is laid out for using the Intelligent Argumentation approach for resolving controversial performance scores. An application case study of Selection of a Mine Detection Simulation tool is used to illustrate the method. To validate it empirically, a case study to determine division of effort between software quality assurance and software testing, which has a group of 24 stakeholders, is conducted in a hypothetical setup. Its empirical data is collected and analyzed. The analysis serves two basic purposes: 1) to validate capability of the argumentation process in determining the controversial performance scores in MCDM using our intelligent computational argumentation system and to show its effectiveness in capturing rationales of stakeholders and assisting rapid collaborative decision making --Abstract, page iii