TOWARDS BUILDING INTELLIGENT COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING SYSTEMS

Historically, Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) systems were more focused on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) issues, such as providing good experience of communication among the participants. Whereas, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) focus both on HCI issues as well as leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in their intelligent agents. This dissertation seeks to minimize the gap between CPS systems and ITS by adopting the methods used in ITS researches. To move towards this goal, we focus on analyzing interactions with textual inputs in online learning systems such as DeepTutor and Virtual Internships (VI) to understand their semantics and underlying intents. In order to address the problem of assessing the student generated short text, this research explores firstly data driven machine learning models coupled with expert generated as well as general text analysis features. Secondly it explores method to utilize knowledge graph embedding for assessing student answer in ITS. Finally, it also explores a method using only standard reference examples generated by human teacher. Such method is useful when a new system has been deployed and no student data were available.To handle negation in tutorial dialogue, this research explored a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) based method. The advantage of this method is that it requires no human engineered features and performs comparably well with other models using human engineered features.Another important analysis done in this research is to find speech acts in conversation utterances of multiple players in VI. Among various models, a noise label trained neural network model performed better in categorizing the speech acts of the utterances.The learners\u27 professional skill development in VI is characterized by the distribution of SKIVE elements, the components of epistemic frames. Inferring the population distribution of these elements could help to assess the learners\u27 skill development. This research sought a Markov method to infer the population distribution of SKIVE elements, namely the stationary distribution of the elements.While studying various aspects of interactions in our targeted learning systems, we motivate our research to replace the human mentor or tutor with intelligent agent. Introducing intelligent agent in place of human helps to reduce the cost as well as scale up the system

A Bandwidth-Conserving Architecture for Crawling Virtual Worlds

A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit via avatars. Content in virtual worlds such as Second Life or OpenSimulator is increasingly presented using three-dimensional (3D) dynamic presentation technologies that challenge traditional search technologies. As 3D environments become both more prevalent and more fragmented, the need for a data crawler and distributed search service will continue to grow. By increasing the visibility of content across virtual world servers in order to better collect and integrate the 3D data we can also improve the crawling and searching efficiency and accuracy by avoiding crawling unchanged regions or downloading unmodified objects that already exist in our collection. This will help to save bandwidth resources and Internet traffic during the content collection and indexing and, for a fixed amount of bandwidth, maximize the freshness of the collection. This work presents a new services paradigm for virtual world crawler interaction that is co-operative and exploits information about 3D objects in the virtual world. Our approach supports analyzing redundant information crawled from virtual worlds in order to decrease the amount of data collected by crawlers, keep search engine collections up to date, and provide an efficient mechanism for collecting and searching information from multiple virtual worlds. Experimental results with data crawled from Second Life servers demonstrate that our approach provides the ability to save crawling bandwidth consumption, to explore more hidden objects and new regions to be crawled that facilitate the search service in virtual worlds

Banks, non-bank companies and stock exchange: do we know the relationship?

This paper investigates the role played by the banking sector in founding, sustaining and developing stock exchange markets. The paper has constructed data on market capitalisation separately for banks and non-bank companies. We apply cointegration techniques developed by Engle and Granger [1987] and Johansen [1988] and we bootstrap the variables to examine the nature of relationship between the banks and stock markets. We found that banks have played an important role in the development of stock exchanges. Further, the empirical analysis made amongst ten developed and developing exchanges suggests a listing of non-bank companies important for development of stock markets. These findings have also been verified by analysing the data of an exchange not included in the test

Improving inventory management systems

Inventory management is an important part of operations management of any organisation. Maintaining a balanced condition in the inventory operations, maintaining the efficiency of all systems as well as minimizing all losses, is a difficult process. The organisation involved in this research deals in retail convenience of dairy products and it is unable to produce detailed reports regarding economic conditions of the market due to its outdated accounting systems. The aim of the research is to study the issues of improper and outdated inventory record systems, accounting systems and inventory tracking systems in order to develop solutions to upgrade them. The research will also help to upgrade the weak cost saving system of the company along with solving the problem of time delays due to the location of its warehouses. Theory of just-in-time inventory theory, economic order theory, and economic production theory have been applied in this study. The major objective for application of these theories is to stabilise inventory management system along with the systems regarding cost analysis. Participants were specifically chosen for data collection method and the process was carried out ethically. The results exclusively pointed out the requirement of new technologies to digitalize the system and upgrade the current cost analysis system. Therefore, the research concluded that with incorporation of skilled staff and high-tech systems to manage organisational resources, the organisation can achieve a better inventory management system and minimise excessive expense

Assessing Student-Generated Design Justifications in Engineering Virtual Internships

ABSTRACT Engineering virtual internships are simulations where students role play as interns at fictional companies, working to create engineering designs. To improve the scalability of these virtual internships, a reliable automated assessment system for tasks submitted by students is necessary. Therefore, we propose a machine learning approach to automatically assess student generated textual design justifications in two engineering virtual internships, Nephrotex and RescuShell. To this end, we compared two major categories of models: domain expert-driven vs. general text analysis models. The models were coupled with machine learning algorithms and evaluated using 10-fold cross validation. We found no quantitative differences among the two major categories of models, domain expert-driven vs. general text analysis, although there are major qualitative differences as discussed in the paper

From Moscow with love

One of the less researched aspects of postcolonial India’s “progressive” culture is its Soviet connection. Starting in the 1950s and consolidating in the 1960s, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics invested in building up “committed” networks amongst writers, directors, actors, and other theater- and film-practitioners across India. Thus, an entire generation of cultural professionals was initiated into the anticolonial solidarity of emerging Afro-Asian nations that were seen, and portrayed, by the Soviets as being victims of “Western” imperialism. The aspirational figure of the New Soviet Man was celebrated through the rise of a new form of “transactional sociality” (Westlund 2003). This paper looks at selected cases of cultural diplomacy—through the lens of cultural history—between the USSR and India for two decades after India’s Independence, exploring the possibility of theorizing it from the perspective of an anticolonial cultural solidarity that allowed agency to Indian interlocutors

Production of Video Using Photography Techniques

The main goal of this thesis project is to utilize different photography techniques to produce a video with higher production value. The final product of this project is a video file produced by numbers of still photographs, assembled together. This project demonstrates the possibility of using still photography to produce higher dimension video with a camera that is capable of recording only standard video dimension. The four photography techniques used in this project are time-lapse, hyper-lapse, stop-motion and bullet-time. These photography techniques are renowned for their ability to transcend time and space, creating a surreal visual experience to the viewers. Using the techniques, a real-time can be frozen, fast-forwarded or compressed. This project combines all the photography techniques to create unrealistically real video. Everything in this project is made from still photographs, assembled together and there is no trace of any video file in the production process.Showreel made from the photography techniques such as time-lapse, hyper-lapse, stop-motion and bullet-time.2 mi