Social Personalized Adaptive E-Learning Environment: Topolor - Implementation and Evaluation

This paper presents a quantitative study on the use of Topolor-a prototype that introduces Web 2.0 tools and Facebook-like appearance into an adaptive educational hypermedia system. We present the system design and its evaluation using system usability scale questionnaire and learning behavior data analysis. The results indicate high level of student satisfaction with the learning experience and the diversity of learning activities. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

FFT-LB modeling of thermal liquid-vapor systems

We further develop a thermal LB model for multiphase flows. In the improved model, we propose to use the FFT scheme to calculate both the convection term and external force term. The usage of FFT scheme is detailed and analyzed. By using the FFT algorithm spatiotemporal discretization errors are decreased dramatically and the conservation of total energy is much better preserved. A direct consequence of the improvement is that the unphysical spurious velocities at the interfacial regions can be damped to neglectable scale. Together with the better conservation of total energy, the more accurate flow velocities lead to the more accurate temperature field which determines the dynamical and final states of the system. With the new model, the phase diagram of the liquid-vapor system obtained from simulation is more consistent with that from theoretical calculation. Very sharp interfaces can be achieved. The accuracy of simulation results are also verified by the Laplace law. The FFT scheme can be easily applied to other models for multiphase flows.Comment: 34 pages, 21 figure

Revealing Higher Order Protein Structure Using Mass Spectrometry

International audienceThe development of rapid, sensitive, and accurate mass spectrometric methods for measuring peptides, proteins, and even intact protein assemblies has made mass spectrometry (MS) an extraordinarily enabling tool for structural biology. Here, we provide a personal perspective of the increasingly useful role that mass spectrometric techniques are exerting during the elucidation of higher order protein structures. Areas covered in this brief perspective include MS as an enabling tool for the high resolution structural biologist, for compositional analysis of endogenous protein complexes, for stoichiometry determination, as well as for integrated approaches for the structural elucidation of protein complexes. We conclude with a vision for the future role of MS-based techniques in the development of a multi-scale molecular microscope

Evaluation of adaptive hypermedia authoring patterns during a Socrates programme class

The authors present a second experiment in combining teaching and research: the testing of MOT and its new adaptive patterns. MOT is an adaptive hypermedia authoring tool based on the LAOS adaptive hypermedia authoring framework. The patterns are implemented via an adaptive language that uses a low-granularity domain model, LAOS, to extract the adaptation alternatives. The tests were performed in a class of over thirty students enrolled in the fourth year of the University "Politehnica" of Bucharest, taking a two-week intensive course in adaptive hypermedia. The focus of this article is on the experiment itself and its parameters: the setting and initial planning, the implementation, and the results. The authors comment on and interpret the results

Flexibility of automatic authoring for the semantic web

The LAOS model, a 5-layer adaptive hypermedia (AH) authoring model, was previously shown to specify a flexible framework for (collaborative) creation of material for the semantic web. However, for adaptive behavior, an author has to design not only basic semantic contents (and its alternatives), but also specify the desired dynamics of the system, which is rather cumbersome. Therefore, automatic authoring techniques are being researched, that aim at decreasing the authoring burden. Here we elaborate on these techniques that can be built based on LAOS, and show specific implementations. They exploit the LAOS structure and consist of automatic transformation (interpretation) rules between different layers of the model (populate some layers based on the contents of others). To evaluate the effectiveness of these transformations, we have to see if and how much flexibility is lost by performing these automatic transformations, as opposed to fully manual creation. We shall see that even with these automatic transformations in LAOS, high flexibility can still be achieved

Innovations in advanced technology for learning : authoring for adaptive educational hypermedia

Invited editor's note. - Why should we look at the authoring process in adaptive educational hypermedia design? How does detecting authoring patterns help the process? Why do we need to consider cognitive styles in adaptive hypermedia? What do these seemingly unrelated topics have in common? These and other questions were posed to the accepted paper presenters of the First International Workshop on Authoring of Adaptive and Adaptable Educational Hypermedia . The workshop lead discussions and even more questions. As a result, selected authors were asked to extend their papers, and hence the Special Issue on Innovations in Advanced Technology for Learning: Authoring for Adaptive Educational Hypermedia was born. This paper will present the issues that we tried to tackle and how these were answered in the selected papers

Automatic and manual annotation using flexible schemas for adaptation on the semantic desktop

Adaptive Hypermedia builds upon the annotation and adaptation of content. As manual annotation has proven to be the main bottleneck, all means for supporting it by reusing automatically generated metadata are helpful. In this paper we discuss two issues. The first is the integration of a generic AH authoring environment MOT into a semantic desktop environment. In this setup, the semantic desktop environment provides a rich source of automatically generated meta-data, whilst MOT provides a convenient way to enhance this meta-data manually, as needed for an adaptive course environment. Secondly, we also consider the issue of source schema heterogeneity, especially during the automatic metadata generation process, as semantic desktop metadata are generated through a lot of different tools and at different times, so that schemas are overlapping and evolving. Explicitly taking into account all versions of these schemas would require a combinatorial explosion of generation rules. This paper investigates a solution to this problem based on malleable schemas, which allow metadata generation rules to flexibly match different versions of schemas, and can thus cope with the heterogeneous and evolving desktop environment

Semport: a personalized semantic portal.

This paper presents an ontology-based semantic portal, SEMPort, which aims to support both content providers and the users of the portal during providing information, browsing and searching. The content is enriched with context-based semantic hyperlinks and personalized views. Distributed content editing/provision is supplied for the maintenance of the contents in real-time. As a case study, SEMPort is tested on the school's Course Modules Web Page (CMWP) and evaluated using this domain