NEXT LEVEL: A COURSE RECOMMENDER SYSTEM BASED ON CAREER INTERESTS

Skills-based hiring is a talent management approach that empowers employers to align recruitment around business results, rather than around credentials and title. It starts with employers identifying the particular skills required for a role, and then screening and evaluating candidates’ competencies against those requirements. With the recent rise in employers adopting skills-based hiring practices, it has become integral for students to take courses that improve their marketability and support their long-term career success. A 2017 survey of over 32,000 students at 43 randomly selected institutions found that only 34% of students believe they will graduate with the skills and knowledge required to be successful in the job market. Furthermore, the study found that while 96% of chief academic officers believe that their institutions are very or somewhat effective at preparing students for the workforce, only 11% of business leaders strongly agree [11]. An implication of the misalignment is that college graduates lack the skills that companies need and value. Fortunately, the rise of skills-based hiring provides an opportunity for universities and students to establish and follow clearer classroom-to-career pathways. To this end, this paper presents a course recommender system that aims to improve students’ career readiness by suggesting relevant skills and courses based on their unique career interests

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Together we stand, Together we fall, Together we win: Dynamic Team Formation in Massive Open Online Courses

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer a new scalable paradigm for e-learning by providing students with global exposure and opportunities for connecting and interacting with millions of people all around the world. Very often, students work as teams to effectively accomplish course related tasks. However, due to lack of face to face interaction, it becomes difficult for MOOC students to collaborate. Additionally, the instructor also faces challenges in manually organizing students into teams because students flock to these MOOCs in huge numbers. Thus, the proposed research is aimed at developing a robust methodology for dynamic team formation in MOOCs, the theoretical framework for which is grounded at the confluence of organizational team theory, social network analysis and machine learning. A prerequisite for such an undertaking is that we understand the fact that, each and every informal tie established among students offers the opportunities to influence and be influenced. Therefore, we aim to extract value from the inherent connectedness of students in the MOOC. These connections carry with them radical implications for the way students understand each other in the networked learning community. Our approach will enable course instructors to automatically group students in teams that have fairly balanced social connections with their peers, well defined in terms of appropriately selected qualitative and quantitative network metrics.Comment: In Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Conference on Application of Digital Information & Web Technologies (ICADIWT), India, February 2014 (6 pages, 3 figures

Knowledge discovery for moderating collaborative projects

In today's global market environment, enterprises are increasingly turning towards collaboration in projects to leverage their resources, skills and expertise, and simultaneously address the challenges posed in diverse and competitive markets. Moderators, which are knowledge based systems have successfully been used to support collaborative teams by raising awareness of problems or conflicts. However, the functioning of a moderator is limited to the knowledge it has about the team members. Knowledge acquisition, learning and updating of knowledge are the major challenges for a Moderator's implementation. To address these challenges a Knowledge discOvery And daTa minINg inteGrated (KOATING) framework is presented for Moderators to enable them to continuously learn from the operational databases of the company and semi-automatically update the corresponding expert module. The architecture for the Universal Knowledge Moderator (UKM) shows how the existing moderators can be extended to support global manufacturing. A method for designing and developing the knowledge acquisition module of the Moderator for manual and semi-automatic update of knowledge is documented using the Unified Modelling Language (UML). UML has been used to explore the static structure and dynamic behaviour, and describe the system analysis, system design and system development aspects of the proposed KOATING framework. The proof of design has been presented using a case study for a collaborative project in the form of construction project supply chain. It has been shown that Moderators can "learn" by extracting various kinds of knowledge from Post Project Reports (PPRs) using different types of text mining techniques. Furthermore, it also proposed that the knowledge discovery integrated moderators can be used to support and enhance collaboration by identifying appropriate business opportunities and identifying corresponding partners for creation of a virtual organization. A case study is presented in the context of a UK based SME. Finally, this thesis concludes by summarizing the thesis, outlining its novelties and contributions, and recommending future research

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research