Collaborative Educational Systems in the Virtual Environment

The work leads to an original approach to the construction of collaborative systems metrics. The approach is based both on research already conducted by the author, on the experimental results obtained, and the foundation taken from the specific literature. The collaborative systems in knowledgebased economy are formalized and their characteristics are identified. The virtual campus structure is described and a comparison with the classical university is achieved. The architecture of virtual is designed and the categories of agents in virtual campus are analyzed.

Mobile Data Science: Towards Understanding Data-Driven Intelligent Mobile Applications

Due to the popularity of smart mobile phones and context-aware technology, various contextual data relevant to users' diverse activities with mobile phones is available around us. This enables the study on mobile phone data and context-awareness in computing, for the purpose of building data-driven intelligent mobile applications, not only on a single device but also in a distributed environment for the benefit of end users. Based on the availability of mobile phone data, and the usefulness of data-driven applications, in this paper, we discuss about mobile data science that involves in collecting the mobile phone data from various sources and building data-driven models using machine learning techniques, in order to make dynamic decisions intelligently in various day-to-day situations of the users. For this, we first discuss the fundamental concepts and the potentiality of mobile data science to build intelligent applications. We also highlight the key elements and explain various key modules involving in the process of mobile data science. This article is the first in the field to draw a big picture, and thinking about mobile data science, and it's potentiality in developing various data-driven intelligent mobile applications. We believe this study will help both the researchers and application developers for building smart data-driven mobile applications, to assist the end mobile phone users in their daily activities.Comment: Journal, 11 pages, Double Colum

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing

Position paper on realizing smart products: challenges for Semantic Web technologies

In the rapidly developing space of novel technologies that combine sensing and semantic technologies, research on smart products has the potential of establishing a research field in itself. In this paper, we synthesize existing work in this area in order to define and characterize smart products. We then reflect on a set of challenges that semantic technologies are likely to face in this domain. Finally, in order to initiate discussion in the workshop, we sketch an initial comparison of smart products and semantic sensor networks from the perspective of knowledge technologies

Context-Aware and Adaptable eLearning Systems

The full text file attached to this record contains a copy of the thesis without the authors publications attached. The list of publications that are attached to the complete thesis can be found on pages 6-7 in the thesis.This thesis proposed solutions to some shortcomings to current eLearning architectures. The proposed DeLC architecture supports context-aware and adaptable provision of eLearning services and electronic content. The architecture is fully distributed and integrates service-oriented development with agent technology. Central to this architecture is that a node is our unit of computation (known as eLearning node) which can have purely service-oriented architecture, agent-oriented architecture or mixed architecture. Three eLeaerning Nodes have been implemented in order to demonstrate the vitality of the DeLC concept. The Mobile eLearning Node uses a three-level communication network, called InfoStations network, supporting mobile service provision. The services, displayed on this node, are to be aware of its context, gather required learning material and adapted to the learner request. This is supported trough a multi-layered hybrid (service- and agent-oriented) architecture whose kernel is implemented as middleware. For testing of the middleware a simulation environment has been developed. In addition, the DeLC development approach is proposed. The second eLearning node has been implemented as Education Portal. The architecture of this node is poorly service-oriented and it adopts a client-server architecture. In the education portal, there are incorporated education services and system services, called engines. The electronic content is kept in Digital Libraries. Furthermore, in order to facilitate content creators in DeLC, the environment Selbo2 was developed. The environment allows for creating new content, editing available content, as well as generating educational units out of preexisting standardized elements. In the last two years, the portal is used in actual education at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Plovdiv. The third eLearning node, known as Agent Village, exhibits a purely agent-oriented architecture. The purpose of this node is to provide intelligent assistance to the services deployed on the Education Pportal. Currently, two kinds of assistants are implemented in the node - eTesting Assistants and Refactoring eLearning Environment (ReLE). A more complex architecture, known as Education Cluster, is presented in this thesis as well. The Education Cluster incorporates two eLearning nodes, namely the Education Portal and the Agent Village. eLearning services and intelligent agents interact in the cluster