Automata Tutor v3

Computer science class enrollments have rapidly risen in the past decade. With current class sizes, standard approaches to grading and providing personalized feedback are no longer possible and new techniques become both feasible and necessary. In this paper, we present the third version of Automata Tutor, a tool for helping teachers and students in large courses on automata and formal languages. The second version of Automata Tutor supported automatic grading and feedback for finite-automata constructions and has already been used by thousands of users in dozens of countries. This new version of Automata Tutor supports automated grading and feedback generation for a greatly extended variety of new problems, including problems that ask students to create regular expressions, context-free grammars, pushdown automata and Turing machines corresponding to a given description, and problems about converting between equivalent models - e.g., from regular expressions to nondeterministic finite automata. Moreover, for several problems, this new version also enables teachers and students to automatically generate new problem instances. We also present the results of a survey run on a class of 950 students, which shows very positive results about the usability and usefulness of the tool

Business Process Visualization - Use Cases, Challenges, Solutions

The proper visualization and monitoring of their (ongoing) business processes is crucial for any enterprise. Thus a broad spectrum of processes has to be visualized ranging from simple, short–running processes to complex long–running ones (consisting of up to hundreds of activities). In any case, users shall be able to quickly understand the logic behind a process and to get a quick overview of related tasks. One practical problem arises when different fragments of a business process are scattered over several systems where they are often modeled using different process meta models (e.g., High–Level Petri Nets). The challenge is to find an integrated and user–friendly visualization for these business processes. In this paper we discover use cases relevant in this context. Since existing graph layout approaches have focused on general graph drawing so far we further develop a specific approach for layouting business process graphs. The work presented in this paper is embedded within a larger project (Proviado) on the visualization of automotive processes

Simplifying the spectral analysis of the volume operator

The volume operator plays a central role in both the kinematics and dynamics of canonical approaches to quantum gravity which are based on algebras of generalized Wilson loops. We introduce a method for simplifying its spectral analysis, for quantum states that can be realized on a cubic three-dimensional lattice. This involves a decomposition of Hilbert space into sectors transforming according to the irreducible representations of a subgroup of the cubic group. As an application, we determine the complete spectrum for a class of states with six-valent intersections.Comment: 19 pages, TeX, to be published in Nucl. Phys.