A Recommendation Cascade for e-learning

This paper is concerned with the presentation of a collaborative recommendation system that implementsa cascade of strategies in order to support the learning process. Similarities between learners are determined by taking advantage of the underlying implicit or explicit personalisation and of the non-personalised modes of interaction. In the personalised approach implicit profiles are based on the patterns of behaviour of learners, while explicit profiles are generated from the results of a questionnaire on learning style. The non-personalisation approach relies on the cumulative intervention of a community of learners implied by the recorded frequency of the usage of objects by learners, and by the expert rating of objects by teachers. Content-based and collaborative approaches are combined into a hybrid model that widens the range of objects to which a learner may be exposed. The quality of service of the recommendation system is evaluated by considering the accuracy of its predictive capability on a publicly available data set

Hybrid P2P Architecture for Transaction Management

In contrast with many centralised schemes P2P systems are flexible, scalable and highly dynamic. They offer an attractive distributed platform despite concerns over security. This work is motivated by the need to address explicitly the main issues that arise in the deployment of P2P systems in a business environment. A systematic approach is proposed in the development of a secure and trusted system to support authentication, non-repudiation and trust in business transactions. This involves two stages. Firstly, the identification of the functional components designed to facilitate security through authentication and nonrepudiation, and those aimed at insuring trust; secondly, their implementation and integration into a hybrid P2P architecture, where the entry point server plays a central role. This integration is facilitated by the layering of functional components. Secure and trusted file transactions are further enhanced by a community management layer

Robust e-Voting Composition

This paper is concerned with the presentation of a perspective on robustness in e-voting systems. It is argued that the effective design of an e-voting system and its viability can be enhanced by a two-pronged approach to robustness. First, it requires a clear distinction between two forms of robustness: robustness at protocol level and robustness at system level. Second, selected technologies should be integrated into an appropriate architecture in order to address robustness simultaneously at the two levels. The proposed approach is illustrated by the design and implementation of an e-voting system based on the FOO92 protocol. A service-oriented architecture supported by onion routing forms the basis of the system. It facilitates the distribution of tasks and state, the dynamic path configuration and the just-in-time (JIT) composition of the election system. The system conforms to most e-voting requirements

An E-Learning Investigation into Learning Style Adaptivity

Abstrac

A new agents-based model for dynamic job allocation in manufacturing shopfloors

Market-based mechanisms such as the contract net protocol (CNP) are very popular for dynamic job allocation in distributed manufacturing control and scheduling. The CNP can be deployed with different configurations of the system elements. Every configuration corresponds to a basic or a hybrid topology. The subject of topology is generally discussed in the field of “distributed systems.” Inspired from the notion of topology in the distributed systems, this paper proposes a ring-like model as a competitor for the web-like CNP-based job allocation within the concept of holonic manufacturing systems. Details of the algorithm for scheduling and assignment of jobs to resources in the ring structure is presented and its performance is compared with both CNP-based distributed model, and the centralized conventional scheduling of a real manufacturing case study involving a major turbine production plant. Comparison of performance indicators such as time and cost of operations shows that the distributed models clearly outperform the conventional practice with meaningful impact on the production economy. As a possible implementation strategy, a hybrid switching model, composed of both competing models, is proposed

Hybrid Profiling in Information Retrieval

Abstract-One of the main challenges in search engine quality of service is how to satisfy the needs and the interests of individual users. This raises the fundamental issue of how to identify and select the information that is relevant to a specific user. This concern over generic provision and the lack of search precision have provided the impetus for the research into Web Search personalisation. In this paper a hybrid user profiling system is proposed -a combination of explicit and implicit user profiles for improving the web search effectiveness in terms of precision and recall. The proposed system is content-based and implements the Vector Space Model. Experimental results, supported by significance tests, indicate that the system offers better precision and recall in comparison to traditional search engines

The Impact of Modes of Mediation on the Web Retrieval Process

This paper is concerned with the investigation of mediation between users and Web search engines and the impact of different modes of mediation on the Web search effectiveness. This involves the integration of explicit, implicit and hybrid modes of mediation within a content-based framework, facilitated by the adoption of the Vector Space Model. The work is supported by an experimental evaluation of the impact of different mediation modes on documents retrieval process in terms of recall and precision. The results of the experiments indicate that the mediation framework improves the quality of the retrieval process, and that the difference in the quality of the results is statistically significant