Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning

Learning and teaching resource are available on the Web - both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors). They can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate Social information retrieval (SIR) methods, techniques and systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance in potentially overwhelming variety of choices. The aim of the SIRTEL’09 workshop is to look onward beyond recent achievements to discuss specific topics, emerging research issues, new trends and endeavors in SIR for TEL. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to present, and more importantly, to discuss the current status of research in SIR and TEL and its implications for science and teaching

Designing Embodied Interactive Software Agents for E-Learning: Principles, Components, and Roles

Embodied interactive software agents are complex autonomous, adaptive, and social software systems with a digital embodiment that enables them to act on and react to other entities (users, objects, and other agents) in their environment through bodily actions, which include the use of verbal and non-verbal communicative behaviors in face-to-face interactions with the user. These agents have been developed for various roles in different application domains, in which they perform tasks that have been assigned to them by their developers or delegated to them by their users or by other agents. In computer-assisted learning, embodied interactive pedagogical software agents have the general task to promote human learning by working with students (and other agents) in computer-based learning environments, among them e-learning platforms based on Internet technologies, such as the Virtual Linguistics Campus (www.linguistics-online.com). In these environments, pedagogical agents provide contextualized, qualified, personalized, and timely assistance, cooperation, instruction, motivation, and services for both individual learners and groups of learners. This thesis develops a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and user-oriented view of the design of embodied interactive pedagogical software agents, which integrates theoretical and practical insights from various academic and other fields. The research intends to contribute to the scientific understanding of issues, methods, theories, and technologies that are involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of embodied interactive software agents for different roles in e-learning and other areas. For developers, the thesis provides sixteen basic principles (Added Value, Perceptible Qualities, Balanced Design, Coherence, Consistency, Completeness, Comprehensibility, Individuality, Variability, Communicative Ability, Modularity, Teamwork, Participatory Design, Role Awareness, Cultural Awareness, and Relationship Building) plus a large number of specific guidelines for the design of embodied interactive software agents and their components. Furthermore, it offers critical reviews of theories, concepts, approaches, and technologies from different areas and disciplines that are relevant to agent design. Finally, it discusses three pedagogical agent roles (virtual native speaker, coach, and peer) in the scenario of the linguistic fieldwork classes on the Virtual Linguistics Campus and presents detailed considerations for the design of an agent for one of these roles (the virtual native speaker)

Learning Transferable Features From Different Domains

Les progrès récents en matière d'apprentissage automatique supposent généralement que les données d'apprentissage et de test proviennent de la même distribution de données. Cependant, dans la pratique, les données peuvent être collectées séparément comme des ensembles de données différents. Apprendre à partir de données provenant de plusieurs domaines sources et les généraliser à un autre domaine est un problème crucial de l'apprentissage automatique. Nous abordons ce type de problème dans le contexte de l'apprentissage par transfert (TL), notamment l'adaptation de domaine (DA), la généralisation de domaine (DG) et l'apprentissage multi-tâches (MTL), et ce dans le but de transférer les caractéristiques invariantes communes à de nouveaux domaines. Nous avons étudié ce type d'apprentissage par transfert sous différents aspects, y compris les problèmes liés au décalage conditionnel dans l'adaptation de domaine, les problèmes de désalignement sémantique et de décalage d'étiquettes dans la généralisation de domaine et l'apprentissage multi-tâches en parvenant à plusieurs résultats. Concrètement, nous explorons d'abord les problèmes de décalage conditionnel (DA) avec une stratégie d'apprentissage actif pour interroger les instances les plus informatives dans le domaine cible afin de faire migrer le terme de désaccord entre les fonctions d'étiquetage des domaines source et cible. Nous explorons ensuite les similitudes de catégories dans les problèmes liés à la généralisation de domaine (DG) via l'entraînement adversarial basé sur le transport optimal avec un objectif d'apprentissage de similarité métrique afin d'améliorer la correspondance au niveau du domaine et de la classe pour les problèmes DG. Nous étudions ensuite, plus en détail les relations entre les étiquettes et la sémantique dans le MTL, où nous fournissons une compréhension théorique de la manière de contrôler les divergences entre les étiquettes et la distribution sémantique. Enfin, nous étendons l'analyse théorique sur la façon d'exploiter les étiquettes et l'information sémantique dans la généralisation de domaine (DG), en fournissant une première analyse pour comprendre les propriétés de généralisation dans le contrôle des divergences de distribution des étiquettes et de la sémantique. Pour chaque travail reflété dans cette thèse, nous menons des expériences approfondies afin de démontrer l'efficacité et les objectifs d'apprentissage. Les résultats expérimentaux confirment que nos méthodes parviennent aux performances souhaitées et indiquées par les principes d'analyse et d'apprentissage, ce qui valide les contributions de cette thèse.Recent machine learning progresses usually assume the data for training and testing are from the same data distribution. However, in practice, the data might be gathered separately as different datasets. To learn data from several source domains and generalize to another domain, is a crucial problem in machine learning. We tackle this kind of problem in the context of Transfer Learning (TL), including Domain Adaptation (DA), Domain Generalization (DG) and Multi-task Learning (MTL), with the sake of transferring the common invariant features to new domains. We have investigated this kind of transfer learning method in several different aspects, including the conditional shift problems in domain adaptation, semantic misalignment and label shift problems in domain generalization and multi-task learning problems with several accomplishments. Concretely, we first explore the conditional shift problems DA with an active learning strategy to query the most informative instances in the target domain to migrate the disagreement term between the source and target domain labelling functions. We then explore the category similarities in the DG problems via the optimal transport-based adversarial training with a metric similarity learning objective to enhance both the domain-level and class-level matching for DG problems. After that, we further investigate the label and semantic relations in MTL, where we provide the first theoretical understanding of how to control the label and semantic distribution divergences. Lastly, we extend the theoretical analysis on how to leverage the label and semantic information in DG, providing the first analysis to understand the generalization properties on controlling the label and semantic distribution divergences. For each work reflected in this thesis, we also conduct intensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and learning objectives. The experimental results confirm that our methods achieve the desired performance indicated by the analysis and learning principles, which confirms the contributions of this thesis

Image search: an investigation of factors affecting search behaviour of users

Searching for images can be challenging. How users search for images is governed by their information need. Nevertheless, in fulfilling their information need, users are often affected by subjective factors. These factors include topic familiarity, task difficulty, relevance criteria and satisfaction. This thesis focuses on three research questions exploring how image information needs together with these factors affect online web users' searching behaviour. The questions are: 1. How does image information need affect the criteria users apply when selecting relevant images? 2. How do different factors in image retrieval affect users' image searching behaviour? 3. Can we identify image information needs solely from user queries? In addressing these challenges, we conducted both user studies and proxy log analysis to complement each other. User studies are conducted in a laboratory setting and the needs are artificial, while proxy log captures users' actual needs and behaviour in the wild. The main user study involved 48 students of various disciplines from RMIT University. In the study, we represent image information needs as types of tasks. Data were collected from questionnaires and screen capture recordings. The questionnaire was used to collect data on criteria users find important when judging image relevance and perception on the effects of subjective factors to their searching. Screen capture recordings of their search activities were observed and time stamped to identify and measure search and retrieval behaviour. These measures were used to evaluate the effects of subjective factors on users' image search behaviour. The results showed in judging image relevance, users may apply similar criteria, however, the importance of these criteria depend on the types of image. Similarly, ratings of users' perception on aspects of performing image search show they were task dependent and that effect of different aspects were related. Users were more affected by familiarity and satisfaction when performing difficult image search tasks. Results of correlation suggest that users' perception of aspects of performing image search did not always correspond with their actual search behaviour. However, for some subjective aspects of user search behaviour, we have identified particular objective measures that correlate well with that aspect. The examination of users' queries in proxy logs, shows that users search for unambiguous images more frequently compared to conceptual images. Their sessions are short with two to three terms per query. When analysing queries from logs, we are actually making a guess of what users were searching for. However, by examining the way users modify/reformulate their queries may give an indication of their information need. Results show, that users frequently submit new queries or replace terms from their previous query rather than revising the query into more depth or breadth. Similar findings were found when compared with the user study data, whereby users in both settings exhibit similarity in the number of queries, terms and reformulation type. This thesis concludes that given similar image information needs, ordinary users make relevance judgements similar to specialised users (such as journalists, art historians and medical doctors) despite giving attention to different criteria of relevance. Moreover, only certain measures of search behaviour used in text retrieval are applicable to image retrieval due to the difference in judging the relevance of textual information and image. In addition, visual information needs can be better inferred when analysing series of queries and their reformulation within a search session

Multi-Agent Systems

This Special Issue ""Multi-Agent Systems"" gathers original research articles reporting results on the steadily growing area of agent-oriented computing and multi-agent systems technologies. After more than 20 years of academic research on multi-agent systems (MASs), in fact, agent-oriented models and technologies have been promoted as the most suitable candidates for the design and development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and dynamic environments. With respect to both their quality and range, the papers in this Special Issue already represent a meaningful sample of the most recent advancements in the field of agent-oriented models and technologies. In particular, the 17 contributions cover agent-based modeling and simulation, situated multi-agent systems, socio-technical multi-agent systems, and semantic technologies applied to multi-agent systems. In fact, it is surprising to witness how such a limited portion of MAS research already highlights the most relevant usage of agent-based models and technologies, as well as their most appreciated characteristics. We are thus confident that the readers of Applied Sciences will be able to appreciate the growing role that MASs will play in the design and development of the next generation of complex intelligent systems. This Special Issue has been converted into a yearly series, for which a new call for papers is already available at the Applied Sciences journal’s website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/special_issues/Multi-Agent_Systems_2019