Emerging and scripted roles in computer-supported collaborative learning

Emerging and scripted roles pose an intriguing approach to analysing and facilitating CSCL. The concept of emerging roles provides a perspective on how learners structure and self-regulate their CSCL processes. Emerging roles appear to be dynamic over longer periods of time in relation to learners’ advancing knowledge, but are often unequally distributed in ad hoc CSCL settings, e.g. a learner being the ‘typist’ and another being the ‘thinker’. Empirical findings show that learners benefit from structuring or scripting CSCL. Scripts can specify roles and facilitate role rotation for learners to equally engage in relevant learning roles and activities. Scripted roles can, however, collide with emerging roles and therefore need to be carefully attuned to the advancing capabilities of the learners

Big Data in HEP: A comprehensive use case study

Experimental Particle Physics has been at the forefront of analyzing the worlds largest datasets for decades. The HEP community was the first to develop suitable software and computing tools for this task. In recent times, new toolkits and systems collectively called Big Data technologies have emerged to support the analysis of Petabyte and Exabyte datasets in industry. While the principles of data analysis in HEP have not changed (filtering and transforming experiment-specific data formats), these new technologies use different approaches and promise a fresh look at analysis of very large datasets and could potentially reduce the time-to-physics with increased interactivity. In this talk, we present an active LHC Run 2 analysis, searching for dark matter with the CMS detector, as a testbed for Big Data technologies. We directly compare the traditional NTuple-based analysis with an equivalent analysis using Apache Spark on the Hadoop ecosystem and beyond. In both cases, we start the analysis with the official experiment data formats and produce publication physics plots. We will discuss advantages and disadvantages of each approach and give an outlook on further studies needed.Comment: Proceedings for 22nd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2016

Supporting a Closely Coupled Task between a Distributed Team: Using Immersive Virtual Reality Technology

Collaboration and teamwork is important in many areas of our lives. People come together to share and discuss ideas, split and distribute work or help and support each other. The sharing of information and artefacts is a central part of collaboration. This often involves the manipulation of shared objects, both sequentially as well as concurrently. For coordinating an efficient collaboration, communication between the team members is necessary. This can happen verbally in form of speech or text and non-verbally through gesturing, pointing, gaze or facial expressions and the referencing and manipulation of shared objects. Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) allow remote users to come together and interact with each other and virtual objects within a computer simulated environment. Immersive display interfaces, such as a walk-in display (e.g. CAVE), that place a human physically into the synthetic environment, lend themselves well to support a natural manipulation of objects as well a set of natural non-verbal human communication, as they can both capture and display human movement. Communication of tracking data, however, can saturate the network and result in delay or loss of messages vital to the manipulation of shared objects. This paper investigates the reality of shared object manipulation between remote users collaborating through linked walk-in displays and extends our research in [27]. Various forms of shared interaction are examined through a set of structured sub tasks within a representative construction task. We report on extensive user-trials between three walk-in displays in the UK and Austria linked over the Internet using a CVE, and demonstrate such effects on a naive implementation of a benchmark application, the Gazebo building task. We then present and evaluate application-level workarounds and conclude by suggesting solutions that may be implemented within next-generation CVE infrastructures

A Behavior Authoring Framework for Multi-Actor Simulations

There has been growing academic and industry interest in the behavioral animation of autonomous actors in virtual worlds. However, it remains a considerable challenge to author complicated interactions between multiple actors in a way that balances automation and control flexibility. In this paper, we propose a behavior authoring framework which provides the user with complete control over the domain of the system: the state space, action space and cost of executing actions. Actors are specialized using effect and cost modifiers, which modify existing action definitions, and constraints, which prune action choices in a state-dependent manner. Behaviors are used to define goals and objective functions for an actor. Actors having common or conflicting goals are grouped together to form a composite domain, and a multi-agent planner is used to generate complicated interactions between multiple actors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by authoring and generating a city simulation involving multiple pedestrians and vehicles that interact with one another to produce complex multi-actor behaviors

Knowing me, knowing you: perspectives on awareness in autism

Purpose: This paper raises important questions from the different perspectives on autism research that arose from a seminar on autism and technology, held as part of an ESRC-funded series on innovative technologies for autism. Design/methodology/approach: The paper focuses on the roles of technology in understanding questions about different perspectives on autism: how do people on the spectrum see neurotypicals (people without autism) and vice versa?; how do we use eye-gaze differently from each other?; how might technology influence what is looked at and how we measure this?; what differences might there be in how people use imitation of others?; and finally, how should we study and treat any differences? Findings: We synthesise common themes from invited talks and responses. The audience discussions highlighted the ways in which we take account of human variation, how we can understand the perspective of another, particularly across third-person and second-person approaches in research, and how researchers and stakeholders engage with each other. Originality/value: We argue that the question of perspectives is important for considering how people with autism and neurotypical people interact in everyday contexts, and how researchers frame their research questions and methods. We propose that stakeholders and researchers can fruitfully engage directly in discussions of research, in ways that benefit both research and practice

The Utilization of Virtual Reality for Commercial Purpose: Taking Television Broadcast Advertising as an Example

In general, current research suggests that virtual environments, compared to classical advertising media, provide users with a higher level of presence, more perceptual and psychological immersion. This paper reviews how virtual reality enables private companies and public organizations to support business advertising by creating new business opportunities and to promote more proactive service management by using television broadcast advertising as a medium. This, in turn, will have the effect of making him I her less aware of embedded persuasive message, which will thus have a moderating effect on various advertising-related outcomes, less advertising recall, but more positive brand attitude, and favorable purchase intention This paper that due to their specific character, integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersive and narrative virtual environment could be a more effective persuasion charmel than classical advertising media. This is a momentum to see how far virtual reality is able to rival video in television advertising. Virtual reality has grown very well nowadays but the usage in society and in the business community is minimal. Therefore, by introducing virtual reality in new environment; advertising will create a new era, which provides technical foundation for the computer software and hardware that drives to the advertising environment. This project will be of interest to practitioners involved in virtual environment development in the television broadcast advertising. The scope of studies for this project covered the advertising, education, entertainment and human senses. All scopes are inter-related in this research. Rapid Application Development (RAD) has been chosen as a methodology of the project. This will be a useful finding for product in virtual reality advertising.

From audiences to publics : convergence culture and the Harry Potter phenomenon

In the mid-nineties, changing business and communication models influenced the way in which cultural industries operated. The spheres of public and private, production and distribution, ownership and access had to be reconsidered and were characterised by convergence culture, a commercial and creative environment based on active participation that offers support for creating and sharing interpretations and original works. Convergence culture has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic participation and fosters a sense of community growing around people’s common interests and ideologies. It is also a product of the relationship between communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow around them, and the activities they support.peer-reviewe

A game engine to make games as multi-agent systems

Video games are applications that present design patterns that resemble multi-agent systems. Game objects or actors are like autonomous agents that interact with each other to describe complex systems. The purpose of this work is to develop a game engine to build games as multi-agent systems. The actors or game engine agents have a set of properties and behaviour rules with the end to interact with the environment of the game. The behaviour definition is established through a formal semantic based on predicate logic. The proposed engine tries to fulfil the basic requirements of the multi-agent systems, by adjusting the characteristics of the system, without affecting its potential. Finally, a set of games are introduced to validate the operation and possibilities of the engine

A gentle transition from Java programming to Web Services using XML-RPC

Exposing students to leading edge vocational areas of relevance such as Web Services can be difficult. We show a lightweight approach by embedding a key component of Web Services within a Level 3 BSc module in Distributed Computing. We present a ready to use collection of lecture slides and student activities based on XML-RPC. In addition we show that this material addresses the central topics in the context of web services as identified by Draganova (2003)