Improving chatbots in higher education. Intent recognition evaluation

Intelligent assistants provide a lot of potential in the development of scalable mentoring solutions for higher education. Chatbots became popular also in this field, but they may cause users’ frustration if they do not understand the user correctly. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate their performance in recognizing user messages, in order to know their weak points and improve them accordingly. In their experiments, the autors took one chatbot used by students of educational sciences and evaluated it from various perspectives. The results indicate that this kind of validation can help to improve the usability of chatbots in the learning domain. (DIPF/Orig.

Unproceedings of the Fourth .Astronomy Conference (.Astronomy 4), Heidelberg, Germany, July 9-11 2012

The goal of the .Astronomy conference series is to bring together astronomers, educators, developers and others interested in using the Internet as a medium for astronomy. Attendance at the event is limited to approximately 50 participants, and days are split into mornings of scheduled talks, followed by 'unconference' afternoons, where sessions are defined by participants during the course of the event. Participants in unconference sessions are discouraged from formal presentations, with discussion, workshop-style formats or informal practical tutorials encouraged. The conference also designates one day as a 'hack day', in which attendees collaborate in groups on day-long projects for presentation the following morning. These hacks are often a way of concentrating effort, learning new skills, and exploring ideas in a practical fashion. The emphasis on informal, focused interaction makes recording proceedings more difficult than for a normal meeting. While the first .Astronomy conference is preserved formally in a book, more recent iterations are not documented. We therefore, in the spirit of .Astronomy, report 'unproceedings' from .Astronomy 4, which was held in Heidelberg in July 2012.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, .Astronomy 4, #dotastr

Supporting small and medium-sized enterprises in the educational technology sector to become more research-minded: Introduction to a small collection

The EDUCAtional Technology Exchange programme (EDUCATE) at UCL Institute of Education provides the context for this paper, which describes the programme’s vision, objectives and key activities, and sets the context for the collection of articles that follow. This university-led programme was underpinned by Luckin’s (2016) golden triangle of evidence-informed educational technology (edtech) as it sought to support 252 small and medium-sized enterprises to become more research-informed through a six-month research training and mentoring programme. The evaluation of the programme’s design-based research cycles revealed the importance of the careful choice and evolution of its boundary objects. These boundary objects, namely each enterprise’s ‘logic model’ and research proposal, facilitated meaningful conversations between the programme’s research mentors and the enterprises. These boundary objects involved several iterations, during which the language of the two communities became more aligned, helping to bridge the academic knowledge and practices with those of the enterprises

Start up ecosystem: Features, processes, and actors.

Successful start-ups can positively contribute to the well-being of countries' economies by creating jobs and new investment opportunities. The success of start-ups strongly depends on the ecosystem in which they are inserted. In this regard, it is important to understand the concept of the start-up ecosystem, in particular from the point of view of researchers and professionals. The desire to deepen the dimensions and components of the ecosystem and to observe more closely the best start-up-friendly ecosystems, then propose a comparison with the Italian context, is derived from evidence indicating that the most successful start-ups are concentrated mainly in certain areas of the world, and this concentration is by no means accidental. In fact, the presence of cities and districts recognized worldwide as real technological hubs appears to be directly connected to the presence of a series of conditions that are extremely favorable to their development. From this reasoning, the concept of "ecosystem," which we defined in the course of the work as a "set of conditions, actors and infrastructures capable of supporting the birth and development of innovative business projects; an absolutely heterogeneous system of elements, which embraces culture, regulatory and fiscal measures, public administration, financiers, businesses, universities and research centers." To better describe the phenomenon of start-up ecosystems and analyze the main components that characterize the latter, especially in relation to the geographical contexts in which they develop, we have chosen to start from a model that presents five essential components of start-up ecosystems: entrepreneurship with a particular focus on the diffusion of start-up companies; business incubators and accelerators; institutions (and in particular universities); and the possibility of accessing technologies as a lever for achieving the main objectives of start-ups. The work presents a qualitative research methodology on different levels of analysis. The process research is aimed at multiple case studies in which we first present a comparison between the start-up ecosystems of Rome and Naples and then conciliate with a first benchmarking with a context considered to be of excellence (despite the limitations it presents in recent times), i.e., that of Silicon Valley. The case studies were enriched by the results of narrative interviews of the main actors of the start-up ecosystem: start-uppers, directors of incubators and start-up accelerators and university professors engaged in the issues of new entrepreneurship

Cloud Metering and Monitoring

For Service Oriented Infrastructures (SOI) and Cloud services, monitoring and metering are crucial tasks. For the proper execution of cloud applications & the monitoring of SLA compliance, the data gathered through monitoring is required. The motivations for and challenges in monitoring and metering cloud systems are discussed. The methods for monitoring the network and execution environment on virtualized infrastructures will be discussed together with the monitoring tools that are now available on various commercial and research platforms. Every distributed computing system has a basic feature that includes monitoring chores. Every service should be watched over in order to evaluate its effectiveness and enable remedial measures in the event of failure. A functional snapshot of the system's behaviour along the time axis is what monitoring data reflects. Such information is essential for pinpointing the source of issues or for fine-tuning various system components. For example, failure detection and recovery procedures require a monitoring component to determine whether to restart a specific server or subsystem based on the data gathered by the monitoring system.Published By: Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP) © Copyright: All rights reserved