Eva Millan Presenting at SIS.Pitt

Today Eva Millan, professof from Malaga visiting SIS presented her work on:
Intelligent web-based tools to support e-learning

Abstract
In this talk I intend to present some of the work being developed by the (ia)2 group at Malaga University, Spain. To this end, I will present two of the systems I have been working on lately. One of them is TAPLI, which is an adaptive web-based learning environment for Linear Programming, composed of a set of adaptive tools: a) an adaptive hypermedia component, that is responsible of presenting contents; b) a testing component, and c) a drill-and-practice component, which automatically generates problems and coaches students while solving them. The other tool is a log analyzer that has been developed and integrated into Moodle by means of web-services. This log analyzer allows to infer the the behavior of a learning community. The inference is supported by a Bayesian Network Model. The indicators are automatically computed from the logs, and used as evidence for the Bayesian Network, which computes the posterior probabilities and uses them to generate a natural language representation for the teacher to learn whether the students divided work, coordinated, cooperated or collaborated during the course.

Rosta Farzan and Jill Freyne, ASSIST: Adaptive Social Support for Information Space Traversal

Jill and Rosta presented their effort to integrate multiple social technologies, called ASSIST. The social technologies included in this approach is like social search and social navigation which are to support ultimately social information access.

The ASSIST engine works in two domains, ACM scholarly articles and YouTube videos. The engine interact with the users and builds matrices for storing interaction information with users for searching and browsing modes and make recommendations based on them. The process is achieved solely social based, not content based.

Evaluations are planned with 20 graduate students in real settings for 2 months in order to test two hypotheses, 1) Interaction will be affected by social recommendations 2) Social searching and browsing will add values to the system.

Michael Yudelson, Brainstorming: A "Perfect" Academic Paper System

The group talked briefly about the polling for the new features to be added to CoPE system. Suggested features from the members so far are arranged in http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~paws/perfect_paper_sharing.html. We will think more about it and do the preliminary polling next week.

Jae-Wook Ahn, "Open User Profiles for Adaptive News Systems: Help or Harm?"

System YourNews, RSS feed aggregator, aggregates 60 feeds. Traces user model. 6 news categories. UI lists news items and open user model (keywords). Open UM is editable, users can enter their own keywords.
Personalization - filtering, tf-idf, importance of the keyword weighting.
Focus of the study - open user model. Viewing and manipulation of the keywords of interest. Does editable user model help or harms users.
Study design: task oriented, 10 subjects, 2 news topics, 2 usage sessions, find news relevant to topics. User activity has been logged. Results of news search were compared to results collected by experts.
User feedback. System performance depends on news topic. Experimental system was better received. Keyword adding dropped from session 1 to session 2.
Conclusions. Open user models could harm. Experimental system showed higher trust.