A survey on e-learning content standardization

eLearning has been evolved in a gradual and consistent way. Along with this evolution several specialized and disparate systems appeared to fulfill the needs of teachers and students such as repositories of learning objects, intelligent tutors, or automatic evaluators. This heterogeneity poses issues that are necessary to address in order to promote interoperability among systems. Based on this fact, the standardization of content takes a leading role in the eLearning realm. This article presents a survey on current eLearning content standards. It gathers information on the most emergent standards and categorizes them according three distinct facets: metadata, content packaging and educational design

Personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries

Widespread use of the Internet has resulted in digital libraries that are increasingly used by diverse communities of users for diverse purposes and in which sharing and collaboration have become important social elements. As such libraries become commonplace, as their contents and services become more varied, and as their patrons become more experienced with computer technology, users will expect more sophisticated services from these libraries. A simple search function, normally an integral part of any digital library, increasingly leads to user frustration as user needs become more complex and as the volume of managed information increases. Proactive digital libraries, where the library evolves from being passive and untailored, are seen as offering great potential for addressing and overcoming these issues and include techniques such as personalisation and recommender systems. In this paper, following on from the DELOS/NSF Working Group on Personalisation and Recommender Systems for Digital Libraries, which met and reported during 2003, we present some background material on the scope of personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries. We then outline the working group’s vision for the evolution of digital libraries and the role that personalisation and recommender systems will play, and we present a series of research challenges and specific recommendations and research priorities for the field

Robots for Humanity: Using Assistive Robots to Empower People with Disabilities

Assistive mobile manipulators have the potential to one day serve as surrogates and helpers for people with disabilities, giving them the freedom to perform tasks such as scratching an itch, picking up a cup, or socializing with their families. This article introduces a collaborative project with the goal of putting assistive mobile manipulators into real homes to work with people with disabilities. Through a participatory design process in which users have been actively involved from day one, we are identifying and developing assistive capabilities for the PR2 robot. Our approach is to develop a diverse suite of open source software tools that blend the capabilities of the user and the robot. Within this article, we introduce the project, describe our progress, and discuss lessons we have learned.This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by IEEE-Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=100. ©2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Keywords: Medical robotics, Biomedical equipment, Robots, Control systems, Handicapped aids, Software development, Exoskeletons, Sensory aids, Human factors, Prosthetic

Finite element simulation of reactive flow in the active area of an SOFC stack

A 3D-Finite Element Analysis of the electrochemically active area of a SOFC Stack is presented. The model is focused on the fluid dynamics coupled with thermal balances and electrochemical reactions over a three dimensional homogenized geometrical structure. Based on the equations of fluid flow through porous media a generalized formulation of the mass and momentum transport processes was implemented. It allows a flexible simulation of more complex flowfield designs as for instance the fuel gas flow through a foam layer. The computations rely on a C++ source code program developed within the commercial finite element code library DiffPack. The mathematical solution could be stabilized and optimized as the programming environment of DiffPack permits the implementation of numerical schemes differing from standard Finite Element (FE) methods. The transport equations are treated by a non-standard Least-Squares FE approach. An example for the application of the simulation for different stack designs is presented. The effect of inhomogeneous fuel distribution within the active stack area with respect to stack power and stability of the stack operation is studied for several design variants. It could be demonstrated that the effect of the inhomogeneous gas distribution on the global stack characteristic remains negligible in the range of low to intermediate fuel consumption but sets a limit to safe stack operation in the case of high fuel utilization. A different anode flowfield design, allowing an exchange between the differently exhausted gas regions, results in a more homogeneous field distribution and extends the range of stable stack operation to higher fuel utilizations. The model conclusions have been confirmed by comparison with experimental results

New method to determine diffusion coefficients and surface rate constants in mixed ionic electronic conductors

A new math. method to est. diffusion coeffs. (D) and surface rate consts. (k) in mixed ionic electronic conductors has been developed. The so-called intersection line method neglects the dependency of D and k pairs on initial values like classical optimization programs do. The important advantages of the new developed method against classical optimization procedures in terms of independence of initial values and precision by finding the phys. meaningful soln. have been shown

The {PhotoSpread} Query Language

This document defines the data model as well as the syntax and semantics of the formula language employed by PhotoSpread. It is inspired by Excel with specialized and enriched functionality for managing and tagging large photo collections in a spreadsheet. PhotoSpread allows for capturing, storing, arranging, manipulating, and querying arbitrary tagged photo objects with an intuitive and easy-to-learn, yet expressive formula language