SpaceSemantics: an architecture for modeling environments

The notion of modeling location is fundamental to location awareness in ubiquitous computing environments. The investigation of models and the integration with the myriad of location sensing technologies makes for a challenging discipline. Despite notable development of location models, we believe that many challenges remain unresolved. Complexity and scalability, diverse environments coupled with various sensors and managing the privacy and security of sensitive information are open issues. In this paper we discuss our previous experience combining location sensing with mobile agents and how the lessons learnt have lead to the conception of SpaceSemantics, an open architecture for modeling environments

HandyBroker - An intelligent product-brokering agent for M-commerce applications with user preference tracking

One of the potential applications for agent-based systems is m-commerce. A lot of research has been done on making such systems intelligent to personalize their services for users. In most systems, user-supplied keywords are generally used to help generate profiles for users. In this paper, an evolutionary ontology-based product-brokering agent has been designed for m-commerce applications. It uses an evaluation function to represent a user’s preference instead of the usual keyword-based profile. By using genetic algorithms, the agent tracks the user’s preferences for a particular product by tuning some parameters inside its evaluation function. A prototype called “Handy Broker” has been implemented in Java and the results obtained from our experiments looks promising for m-commerce use

Managing evolution and change in web-based teaching and learning environments

The state of the art in information technology and educational technologies is evolving constantly. Courses taught are subject to constant change from organisational and subject-specific reasons. Evolution and change affect educators and developers of computer-based teaching and learning environments alike – both often being unprepared to respond effectively. A large number of educational systems are designed and developed without change and evolution in mind. We will present our approach to the design and maintenance of these systems in rapidly evolving environments and illustrate the consequences of evolution and change for these systems and for the educators and developers responsible for their implementation and deployment. We discuss various factors of change, illustrated by a Web-based virtual course, with the objective of raising an awareness of this issue of evolution and change in computer-supported teaching and learning environments. This discussion leads towards the establishment of a development and management framework for teaching and learning systems