Enabling Practical IPsec authentication for the Internet

On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2006: OTM 2006 Workshops (First International Workshop on Information Security (IS'06), OTM Federated Conferences and workshops). Montpellier, Oct,/Nov. 2006There is a strong consensus about the need for IPsec, although its use is not widespread for end-to-end communications. One of the main reasons for this is the difficulty for authenticating two end-hosts that do not share a secret or do not rely on a common Certification Authority. In this paper we propose a modification to IKE to use reverse DNS and DNSSEC (named DNSSEC-to-IKE) to provide end-to-end authentication to Internet hosts that do not share any secret, without requiring the deployment of a new infrastructure. We perform a comparative analysis in terms of requirements, provided security and performance with state-of-the-art IKE authentication methods and with a recent proposal for IPv6 based on CGA. We conclude that DNSSEC-to-IKE enables the use of IPsec in a broad range of scenarios in which it was not applicable, at the price of offering slightly less security and incurring in higher performance costs.Universidad de Montpellier IIPublicad

Enhancement of Student Learning Through the Use of a Hinting Computer e-Learning System and Comparison with Human Teachers

This paper reports the results of an experiment in a Computer Architecture Laboratory course classroom session, in which students were divided into two groups for interaction both with a hinting e-learning system and with human teachers generating hints. The results show that there were high learning gains for both groups, demonstrating the effectiveness of the human teachers as well as of the computer-based hinting e-learning system even without the use of adaptive and personalization capabilities. In addition, in the worst case, the difference in favor of human teachers (with a low student-to-teacher ratio of 13.5 students per teacher) would not be significant with respect to the e-learning system, so the computer-based system can replace teachers without a significant loss of effectiveness.This work was supported in part by the Learn3 project TIN2008-05163/TSI within the Spanish “Plan Nacional de I+D+I,” and by the Madrid regional community project eMadrid S2009/TIC-1650.Publicad

Using bluetooth to implement a pervasive indoor positioning system with minimal requirements at the application level

Proyecto CCG10-UC3M/TIC-4992 de la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid y la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPublicad

Deciding on different hinting techniques in assessments for intelligent tutoring systems

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) must take advantage of their high computing capabilities and capacity for information retrieval in order to provide the most effective methodologies for improving students' learning. One type of ITS provides assessments to students and some help as a hint, when they do not know how to solve a problem. Our thesis is that the type of hinting techniques used without changing the contents can influence the learning gains and aptitudes of students. We have implemented some hinting techniques as an extension to the XTutor ITS. We found that some hinting techniques can produce a signi cant increase in students' knowledge with respect to others, but the improvement and direction of the comparison depended on some other factors such as the topics to which it was applied. We conclude that proper adaptation of hinting techniques based on different information of the systems will imply better student learning gains. In addition, the results of a student survey, which includes the students' ratings of the different hinting features they interacted with, leads to high variances, which reinforce the idea of the importance of adaptation of hinting techniques in these types of systems.This work was supported in part by the MEC-CICYT Learn3 project TIN2008-05163/TSI (Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, Programa Nacional de Tecnologías de la Información y de las Comunicaciones), and the e-Madrid project S2009/TIC-1650 (Madrid Regional Community).Publicad

Sending learning pills to mobile devices in class to enhance student performance and motivation in network services configuration courses

Teaching electrical and computer software engineers how to configure network services normally requires the detailed presentation of many configuration commands and their numerous parameters. Students tend to find it difficult to maintain acceptable levels of motivation. In many cases, this results in their not attending classes and not dedicating enough time to acquire the required competencies. This paper describes a successful experiment that was able to improve student class attendance, performance, and motivational patterns by using mobile devices in class to provide students with contextualized learning pills. A learning pill is a simple exercise that summarizes some of the key concepts explained in class and promotes reflection and self-study. Each student attending a particular lecture or laboratory session automatically receives a learning pill on his or her mobile phone just after the related concept has been presented. This paper details the scenario used in the experiment and analyzes the performance and motivational patterns of 170 students at the Higher Polytechnic School, Carlos III University of Madrid, Leganes, SpainThis work was supported by the ARTEMISA project TIN2009- 14378-C02-02 within the Spanish “Plan Nacional de I+D+I” and the Madrid regional community projects S2009/TIC-1650 and CCG10-UC3M/TIC-4992.Publicad

Evaluating the Effectiveness and Motivational Impact of Replacing a Human Instructor by Mobile Devices for Teaching Network Services Configuration to Telecommunication Engineering Students

Proceedings of: 10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2010). Sousse, Tunisia, 5-7 July 2010.The introduction of mobile technologies in class provide instructors with tools for contextualized, active, situated, any-time any-where learning. In fact, the role of the instructor can be partially delegated to the student by the use of a mobile device. This paper assesses if this delegation can be brought to the limit of eliminating the need of the physical presence of the instructor in the particular context of a situated learning environment consisting of a server room where third year Telecommunication Engineering students learn how to configure network services such as DNS, SMTP and HTTP. The paper presents the results of two experiments inside the "advanced telematic applications" course at the Carlos III University of Madrid. Two groups of students participated in the experiments, one following traditional instructor based classes and the other using NFC enabled mobile phones. The paper analyzes both learning increments and motivational aspects.The work presented in this paper has been partially funded by the project Learn3 TIN2008-05163/TSI within the Spanish “Plan Nacional de I+D+I”, the SOLITE CYTED Program 508AC0341 and the e-Madrid project S2009/TIC-1650 funded by the Madrid regional Government. Thanks to INNOVISION for providing the NFC tags for this experiment. Gustavo Ramirez-Gonzalez is funded by the EU Programme Alban, scholarship number E06D101768CO and by the Universidad del Cauca.Publicad

An adaptive and innovative question-driven competition-based intelligent tutoring system for learning

Teaching electrical and computer software engineers how to configure network services normally requires the detailed presentation of many configuration commands and their numerous parameters. Students tend to find it difficult to maintain acceptable levels of motivation. In many cases, this results in their not attending classes and not dedicating enough time to acquire the required competencies. This paper describes a successful experiment that was able to improve student class attendance, performance, and motivational patterns by using mobile devices in class to provide students with contextualized learning pills. A learning pill is a simple exercise that summarizes some of the key concepts explained in class and promotes reflection and self-study. Each student attending a particular lecture or laboratory session automatically receives a learning pill on his or her mobile phone just after the related concept has been presented. This paper details the scenario used in the experiment and analyzes the performance and motivational patterns of 170 students at the Higher Polytechnic School, Carlos III University of Madrid, Leganes, Spain.Work partially funded by the Learn3 project TIN2008-05163/TSI and the EEE project TIN 2011-28308-CO3-1 within the Spanish ‘‘Plan Nacional de I+D+I’’, and the Madrid regional community project eMadrid S2009/TIC-1650

Magiclearning: a serious game for learning based in a magic world

This paper presents a new software educational system called MagicLearning that we have designed and implemented. Magic Learning enables each student to be in a multimedia virtual world in which he/she is a magician. The magician has to find several educational challenges (such as questions, crosswords, or reading contents) that are in the magic world and, depending on his/her performance, can then obtain various magic powers (such as invisibility, different types of attacks, or robbing colleagues' notes). The student can apply these powers against monsters, other players or himself/herself. As a result, students will experience more enjoyment while they are learning, so we can expect student learning and motivation to improve. The MagicLearning system also generates adaptive notes for each student related to the specific student interactions, meaning that the better notes a student produces, the better their performance in the game will be.Work partially funded by the Learn3 project TIN2008-05163/TSI and the EEE project TIN2011-28308-C03-1 within the Spanish \Plan Nacional de I+D+I", and the Madrid regional community project eMadrid S2009/TIC-1650.Publicad

An Approach for the Personalization of Exercises Based on Contextualized Attention Metadata and Semantic Web technologies

Proocedings of: 10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2010). Sousse, Tunisia, 5-7 July 2010.The generation of Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM) allows to retrieve information about the different actions that users execute over different resources in a specific context. This paper presents how CAM is used within a learning system to personalize help provided to students while working on online exercises. We outline our approach and present two application examples within this framework for the personalization of exercises with hints.Work partially funded by the Learn3 project TIN2008-05163/TSI within the Spanish “Plan Nacional de I+D+I”, and the Madrid regional community project eMadrid S2009/TIC-1650. This research was partially supported by the European Commission within the Role IP (Grant agreement no.:231396).Publicad

Provision of awareness of learners' emotions through visualizations in a computer interaction-based environment

One of the challenges of intelligent systems for education is to use low-level data collected in computer environments in the form of events or interactions to infer information with high-level significance using artificial intelligence techniques, and present it through visualizations in a meaningful and effective way. Among this information, emotional data is gaining track in by instructors in their educational activities. Many benefits can be obtained if an intelligent systems can bring teachers with knowledge about their learner's emotions, learning causes, and learning relationships with emotions. In this paper, we propose and justify a set of visualizations for an intelligent system to provide awareness about the emotions of the learners to the instructor based on the learners' interactions in their computers. We apply these learner's affective visualizations in a programming course at University level with more than 300 students, and analyze and interpret the student's emotional results in connection with the learning process.Work partially funded by the EEE project, ‘‘Plan Nacional de I+D+I TIN2011-28308-C03-01’’ and the ‘‘Emadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid’’ project (S2009/TIC-1650)’’