Plan-based delivery composition in intelligent tutoring systems for introductory computer programming

In a shell system for the generation of intelligent tutoring systems, the instructional model that one applies should be variable independent of the content of instruction. In this article, a taxonomy of content elements is presented in order to define a relatively content-independent instructional planner for introductory programming ITS's; the taxonomy is based on the concepts of programming goals and programming plans. Deliveries may be composed by the instantiation of delivery templates with the content elements. Examples from two different instructional models illustrate the flexibility of this approach. All content in the examples is taken from a course in COMAL-80 turtle graphics

Towards automatic generation of multimodal answers to medical questions: a cognitive engineering approach

This paper describes a production experiment carried out to determine which modalities people choose to answer different types of questions. In this experiment participants had to create (multimodal) presentations of answers to general medical questions. The collected answer presentations were coded on types of manipulations (typographic, spatial, graphical), presence of visual media (i.e., photos, graphics, and animations), functions and position of these visual media. The results of a first analysis indicated that participants presented the information in a multimodal way. Moreover, significant differences were found in the information presentation of different answer and question types

What are NDC Pension Systems? What Do They Bring to Reform Strategies?

This paper has two parts. Part 1 presents the basic ideas underlying notional defined contribution (NDC) systems and discusses their main advantages and disadvantages. We argue that a NDC system is mainly a political device. It makes parametric reform, badly needed to stabilize the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pillars all over the World, easier because it exposes the trade-offs and clarifies concepts. It may also change the microeconomics of labor supply and savings. It does not, however, change the macroeconomics of PAYG systems and thus does not substitute for the introduction of pre-funded second and third pillars. NDC systems can be installed as individual account systems, as done most prominently in Sweden. However, they can also be mimicked by a set of rules in a conventional defined benefits PAYG system, showing that NDC systems are more a political than economic devices. Part 2 describes how the German pension reform proposals made in late summer 2003 effectively introduce a NDC system without explicit NDC-type accounting.

Human computer interaction with a PIM application: Merging activity, location and social setting into context

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Springer VerlagPersonal Information Managers exploit the ubiquitous paradigm in mobile computing technology to integrate services and programs for business and leisure. Recognizing that every situation is constituted by information and events, this context will vary depending on the situation users are in, and the tasks they are about to commit. The value of context as a source of information is highly recognized and for individual dimensions context has been both conceptually described and prototypes implemented. The novelty in this paper is a new implementation of context by integrating three dimensions of context: social information, activity information and geographical position. Based on an application developed for Microsoft Window Mobile these three dimensions of context are explored and implemented in an application for mobile telephone users. Experiment conducted show the viability of tailoring contextual information in three dimensions to provide user with timely and relevant information

Dissection of a Bug Dataset: Anatomy of 395 Patches from Defects4J

Well-designed and publicly available datasets of bugs are an invaluable asset to advance research fields such as fault localization and program repair as they allow directly and fairly comparison between competing techniques and also the replication of experiments. These datasets need to be deeply understood by researchers: the answer for questions like "which bugs can my technique handle?" and "for which bugs is my technique effective?" depends on the comprehension of properties related to bugs and their patches. However, such properties are usually not included in the datasets, and there is still no widely adopted methodology for characterizing bugs and patches. In this work, we deeply study 395 patches of the Defects4J dataset. Quantitative properties (patch size and spreading) were automatically extracted, whereas qualitative ones (repair actions and patterns) were manually extracted using a thematic analysis-based approach. We found that 1) the median size of Defects4J patches is four lines, and almost 30% of the patches contain only addition of lines; 2) 92% of the patches change only one file, and 38% has no spreading at all; 3) the top-3 most applied repair actions are addition of method calls, conditionals, and assignments, occurring in 77% of the patches; and 4) nine repair patterns were found for 95% of the patches, where the most prevalent, appearing in 43% of the patches, is on conditional blocks. These results are useful for researchers to perform advanced analysis on their techniques' results based on Defects4J. Moreover, our set of properties can be used to characterize and compare different bug datasets.Comment: Accepted for SANER'18 (25th edition of IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering), Campobasso, Ital