Adapted Cloudlet for Mobile Distance Learning: Design, Prototype and Evaluation

The Open and Distance Learning (ODL) currently operated by some institutions in Nigeria has problems of accessibility from remote locations due to bandwidth and latency issues. To address accessibility problem caused by network delays, cloudlet computing is introduced. With cloudlet technology, distant mobile learners are able to connect to the nearby cloudlet and access the learning content. Instead of relying on a distant cloud with latency issues during access, a nearby cloudlet with rich resources could go a long way to address the resource poverty of a mobile device. This paper presents an architectural design and a prototype implementation of an adapted cloudlet for mobile distance learning. The paper proposes a feature in which the learning content in the cloud or cloudlet platform is adapted to a nearby mobile learner depending on the availability of platform with minimum delays in terms of bandwidth and latency

Avant-Garde Poetics of Language in Central and Eastern Europe: Vladimir Mayakovsky’s and Karel Teige’s Responses to the Crisis of Language and Representation

This dissertation is a comparative study of the Russian and Czech avant-gardes and their responses to the crises of representation and artistic language in the first decades of the 20th century. In particular, it examines the theoretical and creative output of two artists who worked at the intersection of the word and image: the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the visual artist Karel Teige. Both artists were central figures in the founding and theoretical articulation of Russian Futurism and Czech Poetism, respectively. The chapters trace these artists’ artistic evolutions, from their earliest conceptions of a crisis in art to the development of solutions for overcoming this crisis. The theoretical and creative output of these figures is examined both within the artists’ individual oeuvres, as well as in light of their respective artistic movements and the broader tendencies of the international avant-garde. Chapter 1 traces Mayakovsky’s response to the crisis from his initial impulse toward abstraction, characteristic of the Russian Cubo-Futurist movement in the verbal and visual arts more broadly, to the introduction of a political agenda into his art. On the basis of Mayakovsky’s participation in collective Futurist publications, his individually authored theoretical essays, and narrative poems, this chapter argues that the poet’s solution to the crisis of language coalesced around the possibility of realizing democratic representation in art. The chapter shows that in poems written between 1914 and 1921, Mayakovsky was concerned with the question of how to accommodate others’ voices in lyric poetry, how to allow them to speak in and through his works. His vision of a more democratic form of representation necessitated the poet’s metaphorical self-sacrifice, which he repeatedly performed in his poems on the level of plot. This sacrifice enabled him to realize his vision of democratic representation in the idea of collective authorship performed in his narrative poem 150,000,000. Chapter 2 highlights Karel Teige’s response to the crisis of artistic language and representation in his theoretical essays and artworks. By contrast to Mayakovsky’s politicized response, Teige prioritized formal innovation. More specifically, this chapter argues that Teige viewed the fusion of the word and image in a multimedia art form as a solution to the parallel crises that afflicted the visual and the verbal arts. This desired fusion remained a constant of Teige’s artistic solutions throughout the 1920s. His first attempts to overcome the crisis are contained in the Poetist conception of “image poetry,” which incorporated words, painted images, photographs, and other materials. The photograph, understood as a direct imprint of reality, introduced the element of the real into image poetry and thereby transfigured the word and image. After image poetry, Teige went on to replay his formal solution to the crisis of representation in another fused form—the typophoto, which was integrated into the experimental multimedia book ABCs (1926). The introduction and conclusion frame these case studies in terms of the broader trends that inform the artistic experiments of these figures. More specifically, the introductory chapter grapples with questions of how the crisis of language and representation at the turn of the 20th century can be conceptualized. Arguing that the artistic experimentation of the 1910s and the 1920s represents a continuity of what Foucault calls the modern episteme, the introduction at the same time seeks to address the fissures and breaks represented by abstraction in art and the proto-structuralist understanding of the sign in linguistics. The conclusion addresses the role of figurative language in the articulation of the crisis and maintains that while the language of crisis was productive for artistic experiment, it confined the avant-garde to perpetual renewal of forms and artistic language

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed

Information Management for Digital Learners : Introduction, Challenges, and Concepts of Personal Information Management for Individual Learners

The current cultural transition of our society into a digital society influences all aspects of human life. New technologies like the Internet and mobile devices enable an unobstructed access to knowledge in worldwide networks. These advancements bring with them a great freedom in decisions and actions of individuals but also a growing demand for an appropriate mastering of this freedom of choice and the amount of knowledge that has become available today. Naturally, this observable rise and progress of new technologies—gently but emphatically becoming part of people’s everyday lives—not only changes the way people work, communicate, and shape their leisure but also the way people learn. This thesis is dedicated to an examination of how learners can meet these requirements with the support that modern technology is able to provide to learners. More precisely, this thesis places a particular emphasis that is absent from previous work in the field and thus makes it distinctive: the explicit focus on individual learners. As a result, the main concern of this thesis can be described as the examination, development, and implementation of personal information management in learning. Altogether two different steps towards a solution have been chosen: the development of a theoretical framework and its practical implementation into a comprehensive concept. To establish a theoretical framework for personal information management in learning, the spheres of learning, e-learning, and personalised learning have been combined with theories of organisational and personal knowledge management to form a so far unique holistic view of personal information management in learning. The development of this framework involves the identification of characteristics, needs, and challenges that distinguish individual learners from within the larger crowd of uniform learners. The theoretical framework defined within the first part is transferred to a comprehensive technical concept for personal information management in learning. The realisation and design of this concept as well as its practical implementation are strongly characterised by the utilisation of information retrieval techniques to support individual learners. The characteristic feature of the resulting system is a flexible architecture that enables the unified acquisition, representation, and organisation of information related to an individual’s learning and supports an improved find-ability of personal information across all relevant sources of information. The most important results of this thesis have been validated by a comparison with current projects in related areas and within a user study.Der gegenwärtige Wandel unserer Gesellschaft zu einer digitalen Gesellschaft hat weitreichenden Einfluss auf alle Aspekte des menschlichen Lebens. Neue Technologien wie das Internet und mobile Geräte zur Nutzung dieser Technologien ermöglichen einen nahezu ungehinderten Zugriff auf Wissen in weltweiten Netzwerken. Dieser Fortschritt bringt einerseits einen großen Freiheitsgrad für Entscheidungen und Handlungen des Einzelnen, andererseits aber auch eine immer lauter werdende Forderung nach Strategien für einen adäquaten Umgang mit dieser Freiheit und der verfügbaren Menge an Informationen. Naturgemäß verändern dieser Fortschritt und die zugehörigen Technologien nicht nur unser Arbeitsleben und den privaten Alltag, sondern auch die Art und Weise zu lernen. Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie Lernende diesen neuen Anforderungen gerecht werden und mithilfe von modernen Technologien in einem adäquaten Informationsmanagement unterstützt werden können. Die Besonderheit liegt dabei in einem ausschließlichen Fokus individuell Lernender, genauer gesagt jenen, die sich eigenständig auf individuellen Lernpfaden bewegen. Zusammengefasst untersucht diese Arbeit daher Möglichkeiten des personalisierten Informationsmanagements für Lernende. Die Untersuchung dieser Fragestellung erfolgt auf zwei Ebenen. Die erste Ebene dieser Arbeit umfasst eine theoretische Untersuchung der Thematik. Zu diesem Zweck wird ein übergreifendes Rahmenwerk für das persönliche Informationsmanagement von Lernenden entwickelt, das eine ganzheitliche Betrachtung dieser Fragestellung ermöglicht. Das entwickelte Rahmenwerk zeichnet sich insbesondere durch eine Verschmelzung der Domänen E-Learning und Wissensmanagement aus. Dazu werden im Rahmen dieser theoretischen Untersuchung prägende Facetten des Lernens beschrieben und Theorien des organisatorischen Wissensmanagements zur Bewältigung des persönlichen Informationsmanagements untersucht. Dies führt schließlich zu einer Charakterisierung von individuell Lernenden, der Identifikation grundlegender Herausforderungen für diese Lernenden sowie einem Modell zur Beschreibung des individuellen Informations- und Wissensmanagements. Die zweite Ebene dieser Arbeit umfasst die Umsetzung des entwickelten Rahmenwerks in ein praktisches Konzept zur effizienten Verwaltung von persönlichen Lerninhalten und -informationen einzelner Lernender. Das realisierte System ist dabei durch die Berücksichtigung von Informationsbedürfnissen individuell Lernender sowie besonders durch den gezielten Einsatz von Information Retrieval Techniken zur Unterstützung dieser Lernenden gekennzeichnet. Das konstituierende Merkmal dieses Systems ist daher eine flexible Architektur, die die Erfassung von Lernobjekten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Lernkontexts erlaubt. Detaillierter betrachtet ermöglicht die Erfassung von Basisinformation in Form von Lernobjekten in Kombination mit hierarchischen und nicht-hierarchischen Zusatzinformationen eine individuelle und umfassende Verwaltung von Lerninhalten und -informationen, die auch eine verbesserte Wiederauffindbarkeit dieser Informationen zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt unterstützt. Die wichtigsten Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit werden aktuellen Entwicklungen und Projekten in verwandten Bereichen gegenübergestellt und im Rahmen einer Nutzerstudie grundlegend validiert

Les mots étrangers de Vladimir Nabokov

Cette thèse démontre le caractère fondamental du multilinguisme de Nabokov dans son écriture en anglais : après avoir été un auteur prolifique en russe, l écrivain a opéré une transition linguistique et n a plus composé ses romans qu en langue anglaise. Cette dernière ne peut nullement être réduite à une langue seconde puisque Nabokov a su l écrire avant le russe et la parlait depuis l enfance. Il a par ailleurs bénéficié d une éducation polyglotte puisqu il maîtrisait parfaitement le français. Cette thèse étudie le style de Nabokov en soulignant sa créativité linguistique et en examinant le rôle fondateur que la traduction a joué dans le positionnement de ses différentes langues les unes par rapport aux autres. L identité bilingue de Nabokov a pour conséquence que son écriture est déviante, mais aussi défiante : elle est marquée d étrangeté (le caractère de ce qui est étrange) et d étrangéité (ce qui est étranger). Dans ses romans, la langue anglaise voit surgir en son sein des mots étrangers qui, typographiquement et sémantiquement, déstabilisent la lecture : le phénomène de l alternance codique (ou code-switching) est au cœur de cette thèse et interroge le rapport entre l auteur tyrannique (Couturier) et son lecteur. La langue anglaise elle-même perd de sa familiarité et devient étrangère : le bilinguisme de Nabokov lui confère un statut d étranger dans la langue, ce qui lui permet de voir la violence du langage (Lecercle) et de la faire apparaître, notamment grâce à des calembours et des néologismes. Nabokov est ce que Deleuze appelle un grand écrivain à l aide d une formule proustienne : ses livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère .This thesis shows how central Nabokov s multilingualism was to his prose in English: after authoring several works in Russian, the writer changed languages and then only wrote his novels in English. It was not merely a second language for him because Nabokov could write English before Russian and he had spoken it since childhood. Besides, he enjoyed a polyglot education and was fluent in French. This thesis studies Nabokov s style in English by focusing on his linguistic creativity and by examining the founding role that translation played in how his several tongues were going to position themselves in relation to one another. Nabokov s bilingual identity means that his writing both challenges and deviates from the norm: it is dappled with strangeness and foreignness. In his novels, foreign words irrupt in the midst of the English prose and, typographically and semantically, they destabilize the reading experience: code-switching is at the heart of this thesis and questions the relation between the narrator s tyranny (Couturier) and his reader. English itself loses its familiarity and becomes a foreign language: Nabokov s bilingualism means he is like a foreigner in this tongue; therefore he reveals the violence of language (Lecercle) and puts it into play through puns and neologisms. Nabokov is what Deleuze calls, thanks to a Proustian expression, a great writer: his books are written in a kind of foreign language .NANTERRE-PARIS10-Bib. élec. (920509901) / SudocSudocFranceF

XX Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación - WICC 2018 : Libro de actas

Actas del XX Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación (WICC 2018), realizado en Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales y Agrimensura de la Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, los dìas 26 y 27 de abril de 2018.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

XX Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación - WICC 2018 : Libro de actas

Actas del XX Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación (WICC 2018), realizado en Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales y Agrimensura de la Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, los dìas 26 y 27 de abril de 2018.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

XXIII Edición del Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación : Libro de actas

Compilación de las ponencias presentadas en el XXIII Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación (WICC), llevado a cabo en Chilecito (La Rioja) en abril de 2021.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic