NPSNET - Large-Scale Virtual Environment Technology Testbed (presentation to the International Conference on Artificial Reality & Tele-existence (ICAT))

at the International Conference on Artificial Reality & Tele-existence (ICAT) 97, Tokyo, Japan

Communication and Security Issues in Online Education: Student Self-Disclosure in Course Introductions

In designing online and hybrid courses, instructors should consider structure, student motivation, and interaction (per Moore’s 1993 Theory of Transactional Distance). To motivate students to interact and to build course community, instructors may assign student introductions. However, after examining students’ introductions in a hybrid content-design course and an online design course, we noted that students self-disclosed private information in their introductions, whether to classmates or instructors. To investigate further, we analyzed the content of discussion-board and email-to-instructor introductions in a community college (first data set). Then, we analyzed discussion-board and memo-to-instructor introductions at a four-year university (second data set). We identified categories in the information that students disclosed, noting that they shared demographic, professional, academic, and personal information, some of which were identifiers that could compromise the students’ privacy. Our findings are relevant to professional communication, instruction design, pedagogy, and writing research as the study sheds light on issues that we address as investigators, instructors, and student advocates in a variety of contexts, specifically online spaces

Some requirements for autonomic routing in self-organizing networks

International audienceThis paper addresses some requirements of self-organizing networks as well as interoperability problems due to merges and splits phenomena. In a mobile environment, merges and splits characterize the spatial overlap between two self-organized networks. While merge refers to the time when two disjoint networks meet and overlap, split refers to the time of partition. In a dynamic environment, AutoComm (AC) principles bring a new support for interoperability since current protocol heterogeneity is observed at all stack layers from the radio interface to applications. In this paper, we reconsider the formalization of a community and its requirements. We then characterize the split and merge phenomena and their implications. We give some requirements that must fulfill solutions to merging (high context-awareness) in order for AC groups to self-scale. Finally, we propose a merging solution for overlapping wireless self-organized networks using heterogeneous routing protocols

The WWW as a Resource for Lexicography

International audienceUntil the appearance of the Brown Corpus with its 1 million words in the 1960s and then, on a larger scale, the British National Corpus (the BNC) with its 100 million words, the lexicographer had to rely pretty much on his or her intuition (and amassed scraps of papers) to describe how words were used. Since the task of a lexicographer was to summarize the senses and usages of a word, that person was called upon to be very well read, with a good memory, and a great sensitivity to nuance. These qualities are still and always will be needed when one must condense the description of a great variety of phenomena into a fixed amount of space. But what if this last constraint, a fixed amount of space, disappears? One can then imagine fuller descriptions of how words are used. Taking this imaginative step, the FrameNet project has begun collecting new, fuller descriptions into a new type of lexicographical resource in which '[e] ach entry will in principle provide an exhaustive account of the semantic and syntactic combinatorial properties of one "lexical unit" (i.e., one word in one of its uses).' (Fillmore & Atkins 1998) This ambition to provide an exhaustive accounting of these properties implies access to a large number of examples of words in use. Though the Brown Corpus and the British National Corpus can provide a certain number of these, the World Wide Web (WWW) presents a vastly larger collection of examples of language use. The WWW is a new resource for lexicographers in their task of describing word patterns and their meanings. In this chapter, we look at the WWW as a corpus, and see how this will change how lexicographers model word meaning

Using Internet Videoconferencing to Connect Fashion Students With Apparel Industry Professionals

The purpose of this study was to explore the efficacy, benefits and student perceptions of using Internet videoconferencing and a web camera to connect college and university fashion students with apparel industry professionals. A total of 70 college and university fashion students, three instructors, and three apparel industry professionals participated in this introductory study. Data was collected through pre and post surveys from all three groups. Industry professionals were invited as guest speakers into the classroom via Internet videoconferencing using Skype and a web camera. The findings in the study indicated that students, instructors, and apparel industry professionals overwhelmingly benefited from this type of interaction. Although technical difficulties occurred, the effectiveness, cost, and overall benefits to the instructor, students, and industry professionals indicate a need to have this type of interaction regularly in the classroo

Self-management for large-scale distributed systems

Autonomic computing aims at making computing systems self-managing by using autonomic managers in order to reduce obstacles caused by management complexity. This thesis presents results of research on self-management for large-scale distributed systems. This research was motivated by the increasing complexity of computing systems and their management. In the first part, we present our platform, called Niche, for programming self-managing component-based distributed applications. In our work on Niche, we have faced and addressed the following four challenges in achieving self-management in a dynamic environment characterized by volatile resources and high churn: resource discovery, robust and efficient sensing and actuation, management bottleneck, and scale. We present results of our research on addressing the above challenges. Niche implements the autonomic computing architecture, proposed by IBM, in a fully decentralized way. Niche supports a network-transparent view of the system architecture simplifying the design of distributed self-management. Niche provides a concise and expressive API for self-management. The implementation of the platform relies on the scalability and robustness of structured overlay networks. We proceed by presenting a methodology for designing the management part of a distributed self-managing application. We define design steps that include partitioning of management functions and orchestration of multiple autonomic managers. In the second part, we discuss robustness of management and data consistency, which are necessary in a distributed system. Dealing with the effect of churn on management increases the complexity of the management logic and thus makes its development time consuming and error prone. We propose the abstraction of Robust Management Elements, which are able to heal themselves under continuous churn. Our approach is based on replicating a management element using finite state machine replication with a reconfigurable replica set. Our algorithm automates the reconfiguration (migration) of the replica set in order to tolerate continuous churn. For data consistency, we propose a majority-based distributed key-value store supporting multiple consistency levels that is based on a peer-to-peer network. The store enables the tradeoff between high availability and data consistency. Using majority allows avoiding potential drawbacks of a master-based consistency control, namely, a single-point of failure and a potential performance bottleneck. In the third part, we investigate self-management for Cloud-based storage systems with the focus on elasticity control using elements of control theory and machine learning. We have conducted research on a number of different designs of an elasticity controller, including a State-Space feedback controller and a controller that combines feedback and feedforward control. We describe our experience in designing an elasticity controller for a Cloud-based key-value store using state-space model that enables to trade-off performance for cost. We describe the steps in designing an elasticity controller. We continue by presenting the design and evaluation of ElastMan, an elasticity controller for Cloud-based elastic key-value stores that combines feedforward and feedback control