22,412 research outputs found
Learning support for mature, part-time, evening students: providing feedback via frequent, computer-based assessments
A new module in our first year Biology curriculum was used as a vehicle to test
strategies for improving learning support. To this end, we have administered frequent CBA, incorporating extensive feedback, both to pace the studentsâ study efforts and to pinpoint areas in which additional help from lecturers may be required.
Three of the 7 CBA provided through the 15-week course were initially given as
open-book summative tests, thus contributing to the overall mark for the module. Other CBA were formative: these included repeats of the summative CBA made available for revision purposes, as well as other CBA which focused mainly on aspects of the course that were summatively assessed by other means. A closedbook final exam, also computer-based, was given in the final week as a comprehensive assessment. We have evaluated the utility and effectiveness of our approach by surveying student opinion via questionnaires, examining patterns and extent of student use of formative assessments, and by analysing grades for the summative CBA. We have found the studentsâ perceptions of the approach to be largely positive and that the formative CBA were well-used, especially as revision aids for the final exam. Our analysis further indicates that the style of the assessments may have been especially helpful to students whose first language is not English
Extending OWL-S for the Composition of Web Services Generated With a Legacy Application Wrapper
Despite numerous efforts by various developers, web service composition is
still a difficult problem to tackle. Lot of progressive research has been made
on the development of suitable standards. These researches help to alleviate
and overcome some of the web services composition issues. However, the legacy
application wrappers generate nonstandard WSDL which hinder the progress.
Indeed, in addition to their lack of semantics, WSDLs have sometimes different
shapes because they are adapted to circumvent some technical implementation
aspect. In this paper, we propose a method for the semi automatic composition
of web services in the context of the NeuroLOG project. In this project the
reuse of processing tools relies on a legacy application wrapper called jGASW.
The paper describes the extensions to OWL-S in order to introduce and enable
the composition of web services generated using the jGASW wrapper and also to
implement consistency checks regarding these services.Comment: ICIW 2012, The Seventh International Conference on Internet and Web
Applications and Services, Stuttgart : Germany (2012
Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes
Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work
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