Moving code (Servlet strategy) vs. inviting code (applet strategy)

In this position paper, we aim at describing two strategies that could enhance the functioning of software agents. Servlet and applet denote respectively these strategies. In the servlet strategy, the flow takes place from the client to the server. The applet strategy performs differently; the flow takes place from the server to the client. Applying both strategies to workflows, as a potential application domain, is also discussed

Approaching Growth in E-Sports

The E-Sports community is comprised of competitive online gamers, a growing community of fans and spectators, as well as a large and growing industry covering video games, computer hardware, and tournament hosting. The current community is typically difficult to enter due to a number of different aspects. These aspects include an unavailability of consolidated tournament information, varying live stream availability and cost, and sometimes game complexity or difficulty. Our project targeted the tournament information aspect by exploring and developing and initial stage of a tournament tracking application. This application was designed to be more navigable and graphically based than other options to enable new community members to better find, access, and track tournament information

E-government and Planning: Key Citizen Participation Issues and Applications

Citizen participation is a common goal of local governments. Local governments face the challenge of giving information to and getting input from citizens. The use of the Internet for citizen participation is growing among local government planning departments. This book explores the issues related to on-line citizen participation for local government planning departments. In designing for e-government planning departments need to consider accessibility, trust, and the types of participation tools that are most appropriate to meet citizen needs.The John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Polic

A basic web-based distance education model

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Computer Engineering, Izmir, 2005Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 147)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishxv, 201 leavesDuring the recent years, the rapid growth of the Web and multimedia technologies urged a shift of Computer-Based Educational Technology towards the Web. In the leading universities of the developed countries, studies on Web-Based Education have started and in an increasing manner are going strong. In the last few years, the leading universities of Turkey are also greatly interested in Web-Based Education and have started their re-structuring accordingly.The goal of this study is to design a basic model to be utilized by a university aiming to offer web-based distance education. In achieving this; by the use of system approach, a model comprising of three subsystems, namely system analysis, system design and evaluation&control, working in coordination with each other, has been tried to be proposed. There may be only one missing point of this study, that is; since preparing a lesson or program according to this model was not foreseen in this thesis, the effectiveness evaluations suggested in the evaluation&control subsystem could not be realized. It is recommended to realize such an evaluation in a further study to make it possible to reveal the effectiveness of web-based education by preparing a lesson or program according to this model.On the other hand, a survey has been conducted in Turkey in some of the universities either offering web-based education or are interested in studies in this field.The aim of this survey is to analyze from system design point of view the studies carried out in our universities on this matter and to get a picture of the existing situation.The directed questions aiming this were prepared by taking into consideration of the three stages of system design subsystem, i.e. administrative design, educational design, and technological design. It is intended for the result of this survey to shed light to the new-coming institutions in this field. As a matter of fact, each stage of this subsystem is a survey item itself and should be researched one by one in other studies.Furthermore, for individuals interested in distance education and web-based distance education and for people newly involved in this matter, this thesis is intended to be a reference material and to serve this purpose the sections are prepared containing the basic information accordingly. Nevertheless, since most of the information regarding system design are prepared without taking into consideration the disabled people, the relevant information are not complete. In another study, the offering of the web-based education to the disabled people, especially for deaf, hard of hearing or speech impaired, and blind students, has to be investigated.Finally, in this thesis the proposed model for the Web-Based Distance Education, as being a basic and conceptual model, has a flexible structure; i.e., suitable for all the institutions and establishments intending to offer the web-based education.What is important here, is to exploit the potential sources within the institution that will display the required systematic approach

Decision Support Systems

Decision support systems (DSS) have evolved over the past four decades from theoretical concepts into real world computerized applications. DSS architecture contains three key components: knowledge base, computerized model, and user interface. DSS simulate cognitive decision-making functions of humans based on artificial intelligence methodologies (including expert systems, data mining, machine learning, connectionism, logistical reasoning, etc.) in order to perform decision support functions. The applications of DSS cover many domains, ranging from aviation monitoring, transportation safety, clinical diagnosis, weather forecast, business management to internet search strategy. By combining knowledge bases with inference rules, DSS are able to provide suggestions to end users to improve decisions and outcomes. This book is written as a textbook so that it can be used in formal courses examining decision support systems. It may be used by both undergraduate and graduate students from diverse computer-related fields. It will also be of value to established professionals as a text for self-study or for reference

Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

Change in science teacher practice towards IBSE

This study reports on the introduction of inquiry-based science education (IBSE) to the classroom through teacher professional development. The study occurs in three phases. Teachers initially participated in a professional learning community (PLC) in Phase 1 of the study. They then participated in a community of practice (CoP) in Phase 2. In Phase 1 teachers (as a PLC) were introduced to the concept of teaching by inquiry and delivered Topic 1 to students in the junior cycle of secondary school. Teachers and students encountered challenges. This did not deter most of the teachers who continued to the next phase. The teachers in Phase 2 became part of a CoP that developed resources for two more inquiry based topics to be taught by them in the classroom. Professional development of science teachers using CoP appeared to be effective as a vehicle for teachers to grow in understanding of IBSE in this study. Teachers continued to implement inquiry learning in other classes outside of the study with different resources and so introduced inquiry at a school department level. CoP may be used as a model for teacher professional development to introduce IBL into the classroom

Advanced techniques for personalized, interactive question answering

Using a computer to answer questions has been a human dream since the beginning of the digital era. A first step towards the achievement of such an ambitious goal is to deal with naturallangilage to enable the computer to understand what its user asks. The discipline that studies the conD:ection between natural language and the represen~ tation of its meaning via computational models is computational linguistics. According to such discipline, Question Answering can be defined as the task that, given a question formulated in natural language, aims at finding one or more concise answers in the form of sentences or phrases. Question Answering can be interpreted as a sub-discipline of information retrieval with the added challenge of applying sophisticated techniques to identify the complex syntactic and semantic relationships present in text. Although it is widely accepted that Question Answering represents a step beyond standard infomiation retrieval, allowing a more sophisticated and satisfactory response to the user's information needs, it still shares a series of unsolved issues with the latter. First, in most state-of-the-art Question Answering systems, the results are created independently of the questioner's characteristics, goals and needs. This is a serious limitation in several cases: for instance, a primary school child and a History student may need different answers to the questlon: When did, the Middle Ages begin? Moreover, users often issue queries not as standalone but in the context of a wider information need, for instance when researching a specific topic. Although it has recently been proposed that providing Question Answering systems with dialogue interfaces would encourage and accommodate the submission of multiple related questions and handle the user's requests for clarification, interactive Question Answering is still at its early stages: Furthermore, an i~sue which still remains open in current Question Answering is that of efficiently answering complex questions, such as those invoking definitions and descriptions (e.g. What is a metaphor?). Indeed, it is difficult to design criteria to assess the correctness of answers to such complex questions. .. These are the central research problems addressed by this thesis, and are solved as follows. An in-depth study on complex Question Answering led to the development of classifiers for complex answers. These exploit a variety of lexical, syntactic and shallow semantic features to perform textual classification using tree-~ernel functions for Support Vector Machines. The issue of personalization is solved by the integration of a User Modelling corn': ponent within the the Question Answering model. The User Model is able to filter and fe-rank results based on the user's reading level and interests. The issue ofinteractivity is approached by the development of a dialogue model and a dialogue manager suitable for open-domain interactive Question Answering. The utility of such model is corroborated by the integration of an interactive interface to allow reference resolution and follow-up conversation into the core Question Answerin,g system and by its evaluation. Finally, the models of personalized and interactive Question Answering are integrated in a comprehensive framework forming a unified model for future Question Answering research