Emerging technologies for learning (volume 1)

Collection of 5 articles on emerging technologies and trend

Model-driven Personalisation of Human-Computer Interaction across Ubiquitous Computing Applications

Personalisation is essential to Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), which focuses on a human-centred paradigm aiming to provide interaction with adaptive content, services, and interfaces towards each one of its users, according to the context of the applications’ scenarios. However, the provision of that appropriated personalised interaction is a true challenge due to different reasons, such as the user interests, heterogeneous environments and devices, dynamic user behaviour and data capture. This dissertation focuses on a model-driven personalisation solution that has the main goal of facili-tating the implementation of a personalised human-computer interaction across different Ubicomp scenarios and applications. The research reported here investigates how a generic and interoperable model for personalisation can be used, shared and processed by different applications, among diverse devices, and across different scenarios, studying how it can enrich human-computer interaction. The research started by the definition of a consistent user model with the integration of context to end in a pervasive model for the definition of personalisations across different applications. Besides the model proposal, the other key contributions within the solution are the modelling frame-work, which encapsulates the model and integrates the user profiling module, and a cloud-based platform to pervasively support developers in the implementation of personalisation across different applications and scenarios. This platform provides tools to put end users in control of their data and to support developers through web services based operations implemented on top of a personalisa-tion API, which can also be used independently of the platform for testing purposes, for instance. Several Ubicomp applications prototypes were designed and used to evaluate, at different phases, both the solution as a whole and each one of its components. Some were specially created with the goal of evaluating specific research questions of this work. Others were being developed with a pur-pose other than for personalisation evaluation, but they ended up as personalised prototypes to better address their initial goals. The process of applying the personalisation model to the design of the latter should also work as a proof of concept on the developer side. On the one hand, developers have been probed with the implementation of personalised applications using the proposed solution, or a part of it, to assess how it works and can help them. The usage of our solution by developers was also important to assess how the model and the platform respond to the developers’ needs. On the other hand, some prototypes that implement our model-driven per-sonalisation solution have been selected for end user evaluation. Usually, user testing was conducted at two different stages of the development, using: (1) a non-personalised version; (2) the final per-sonalised version. This procedure allowed us to assess if personalisation improved the human-com-puter interaction. The first stage was also important to know who were the end users and gather interaction data to come up with personalisation proposals for each prototype. Globally, the results of both developers and end users tests were very positive. Finally, this dissertation proposes further work, which is already ongoing, related to the study of a methodology to the implementation and evaluation of personalised applications, supported by the development of three mobile health applications for rehabilitation

Rule-based Reasoning Mechanism for Context-aware Service Presentation

With universal usability geared towards user focused customisation, a context reasoning engine can derive meaning from the various context elements and facilitate decision-taking for applications and context delivery mechanisms. The heterogeneity of available device capabilities means that the recommendation algorithm must be in a formal, effective and extensible form. Moreover, user preferences, capability context and media metadata must be considered simultaneously to determine appropriate presentation format. Towards this aim, this paper presents a reasoning mechanism that supports service presentation through a rule-based mechanism. The validation of the approach is presented through application use cases

Privacy conscious architecture for personal information transfer from a personal trusted device to an HTTP based service

Modern services request personal information from their customers. The personal information is not needed only for identifying the customer but also for customising the service for each customer. In this paper we first analyse the existing approaches for personal information handling and point out their weaknesses. We desribe an architecture for the delivery of personal information from the customer to the HTTP based service in the Internet. For personal information storing our architecture relies on a mobile device, such as a customer’s mobile phone. The access of the service is conducted with a traditional desktop computer. The information is transmitted to the service on request via a desktop computer that fetches the information from a mobile device over a wireless link. The goal of our approach is to simplify the use of services by helping the customer to provide the required personal information. Furthermore our approach is designed so that existing services require only minor changes. We introduce methods for the customer to control his own privacy by providing notation to define the required security measures for automated data transfer. Finally we discuss the possible security risks of our architecture

A linked data compliant framework for dynamic and web-scale consumption of web services

The While Semantic Web Services (SWS) research aims at automating Web service tasks such as discovery, orchestration and execution, its take-up is very limited so far. This is due to several reasons, such as inherent complexity of existing SWS frameworks and the considerable costs involved in creating correct SWS descriptions. In addition, while semantics are in use to enable tasks such as discovery, interaction between service consumers, providers and brokering environments is still not supported by semantic message descriptions. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has produced a set of established principles for sharing and describing data, such as RDF as representation language and the integral use of dereferencable URIs. In this paper we propose to apply those principles to expose Web services and Web APIs and introduce a framework in which service registries as well as services contribute to the automation of service discovery, and hence, workload is distributed more efficiently. This is achieved by developing a Linked Data compliant Web services framework with that communicate with semi-centralised registries but compute their suitability for a given request themselves. All communications among different framework components are using RDF-based message protocols including service input and output. This framework aims at optimizing load balance and performance by dynamically assembling services at run time in a massively distributed Web environment

Models, Techniques and Applications of e-Learning Personalization

In recent years Web has become mainstream medium for communication and information dissemination. This paper presents approaches and methods for adaptive learning implementation, which are used in some contemporary web-interfaced Learning Management Systems (LMSs). The problem is not how to create electronic learning materials, but how to locate and utilize the available information in personalized way. Different attitudes to personalization are briefly described in section 1. The real personalization requires a user profile containing information about preferences, aims, and educational history to be stored and used by the system. These issues are considered in section 2. A method for development and design of adaptive learning content in terms of learning strategy system support is represented in section 3. Section 4 includes a set of innovative personalization services that are suggested by several very important research projects (SeLeNe project, ELENA project, etc.) dated from the last few years. This section also describes a model for role- and competency-based learning customization that uses Web Services approach. The last part presents how personalization techniques are implemented in Learning Grid-driven applications

Multi-Dimensional-Personalization in mobile contexts

During the dot com era the word "personalisation” was a hot buzzword. With the fall of the dot com companies the topic has lost momentum. As the killer application for UMTS or the mobile internet has yet to be identified, the concept of Multi-Dimensional-Personalisation (MDP) could be a candidate. Using this approach, a recommendation of mobile advertisement or marketing (i.e., recommendations or notifications), online content, as well as offline events, can be offered to the user based on their known interests and current location. Instead of having to request or pull this information, the new service concept would proactively provide the information and services – with the consequence that the right information or service could therefore be offered at the right place, at the right time. The growing availability of "Location-based Services“ for mobile phones is a new target for the use of personalisation. "Location-based Services“ are information, for example, about restaurants, hotels or shopping malls with offers which are in close range / short distance to the user. The lack of acceptance for such services in the past is based on the fact that early implementations required the user to pull the information from the service provider. A more promising approach is to actively push information to the user. This information must be from interest to the user and has to reach the user at the right time and at the right place. This raises new requirements on personalisation which will go far beyond present requirements. It will reach out from personalisation based only on the interest of the user. Besides the interest, the enhanced personalisation has to cover the location and movement patterns, the usage and the past, present and future schedule of the user. This new personalisation paradigm has to protect the user’s privacy so that an approach supporting anonymous recommendations through an extended "Chinese Wall“ will be described

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future