Alan Pedro da Silva

A survey of security in multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are a relatively new software paradigm that is being widely accepted in several application domains to address large and complex tasks. However, with the use of MAS in open, distributed and heterogeneous applications, the security issues may endanger the success of the application. The goal of this research is to identify the security issues faced by MAS and to survey the current state of the art of this field of knowledge. In order to do it, this paper examines the basic concepts of security in computing, and some characteristics of agents and multi-agent systems that introduce new threats and ways to attack. After this, some models and architectures proposed in the literature are presented and analyzed.

Does peer assessment in on-line learning environments work? A systematic review of the literature

There is an increase use of Peer Assessment (PA) approaches in On-line Learning Environments to support students and teachers on educational process. However, the community still lacks a comprehensive understanding of how Peer Assessment behaves within these educational environments, since there are no studies that make an analysis of the researches which has been conducted in this context, analysing the benefits and disadvantages of the use of Peer Assessment. Thus, the main goal of this work is to investigate and better understand how PA contributes in student learning as well as can bring benefits to the teachers involved. In order to meet our goal, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR). In summary, the main findings are: (1) there are empirical evidences of the benefits of using PA in both industry and academy, and in several educational levels; (2) PA is most addressed to the correction of written activities on on-line courses; (3) About 60% of the articles showed PA improvement in student performance; (4) About 1/3 of the studies showed PA brings some benefits to teachers; (5) In some studies the use of the PA had difficulties, especially issues related to student motivation, which impairs the peer review process. We conducted a SLR to identify the use of Peer Assessment(PA)in On-line Learning.The results show there are empirical evidences of the benefits of using PA approaches.About 60%of the studies indicates that PA improvement in student performance.About 1/3 of the studies showed that Peer Assessment brings benefits to teachers.

A Systematic Approach for Providing Personalized Pedagogical Recommendations Based on Educational Data Mining

This work presents an approach to assist teachers, tutors and students from online learning environments. It is a four-steps process called Pedagogical Recommendation Process that uses the coordinated efforts of human actors (pedagogical and technological specialists) and artificial actors (computational artifacts). The process’ objective is to find relevant information in educational data to help creating personalized recommendations. Using the process it was possible to detect issues within a learning environment (UFAL Linguas), and discovered why some students were facing difficulties, and what other students were doing in order to succeed in the course. This information was used to personalize pedagogical recommendations.

Ontology-based software product line for building semantic web applications

The Software Product Lines (SPL) has proved very effective in building large-scale software. However, few works seek to adjust the approach of software product line to applications in the context of semantic web. This is because applications in this context assume the use of semantic services and intelligent agents. As a result, it is necessary that there are assets that provide adequate interoperability both semantic services and intelligent agents. In this sense, it is proposed in this paper the use of ontologies for the specification of entire a project of a SPL. With this, it can be a sufficiently formal specification that can be interpreted by both software engineers and computational algorithms.

Uma Ferramenta para Recomendação Pedagógica Baseada em Mineração de Dados Educacionais

Este artigo apresenta um modelo para aplicacao de tecnicas de mineracao em dados coletados a partir de avaliacoes da aprendizagem. A partir da proposta, torna-se possivel identificar quais conteudos e em que niveis cognitivos eles foram assimilados pelos aprendizes, permitindo, assim, que estrategicas pedagogicas sejam adequadamente planejadas para grupos de estudantes que apresentem as dificuldades identificadas. Para validar o estudo, sao apresentados tambem os resultados do experimento realizado numa disciplina de Programacao do curso de Licenciatura em Computacao da Universidade de Pernambuco.

An Ontology-Based Model for Driving the Building of Software Product Lines in an ITS Context

The Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have been used daily to support education in various domains. For this reason, fast and easy construction of ITSs are fundamental requirements. In this sense, a Software Product Line has been used accordingly for building Intelligent Tutoring System families. However, the construction of such family systems is still a hard and complex task which involves the representation and manipulation of different knowledge sources with distinct artifacts. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes an ontology-based model for driving the building of software product lines in an ITS Context. It also provides a case study describing the construction of an ITS in the programming domain. In addition, an evaluation is presented aiming to show the feasibility of the proposed model. The main conclusion is that this model reduces the effort and the complexity in the construction of such systems.

Amplifying Teachers Intelligence in the Design of Gamified Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Researchers are increasingly interested in using gamification along with Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) to motivate action, promote learning, facilitate problem-solving, and to drive desired learning behaviors. In fact, although the desire of teachers to be active users of gamified ITS, these systems are not personalized according to teachers’ preferences. Several research problems might arise when trying to empower teachers in the design of gamified ITS, for instance, the high complexity and variability of features to manage, the need to consider theories and design practices, and the need of providing simple and usable solutions for them. In this work, we propose a gamified ITS authoring tool that supports authoring (fully or partially) of the domain, gamification and pedagogical models of gamified ITS by teachers. We investigate how different versions of the tool are perceived by users assuming the role of teachers. Our results indicate a positive attitude towards the use of the authoring tool, in which participants agreed that they are easy to use, usable, simple, aesthetically appealing, have a well-perceived system support and high credibility.

An approach for planning and deploying gamification concepts with social networks within educational contexts

Abstract Gamification planning has been a topic of discussion in the last years since it can be used to increase performance, engagement, and motivation of end users. When properly applied in educational settings, gamification can lead to better learning. Furthermore, it can be boosted when tied to social networks. However, according to the literature, there are three main concerns regarding this topic: (a) instructors and teachers does not have the resources to plan and develop gamification strategies into their classes; (b) gamification needs a systematic approach to achieve the desired positive results; and (c) inexistence of systematic approaches that connect and help in the design of gamification and social network tasks within these contexts. Thus, this work proposes a solution to help instructors and teachers to plan and deploy gamification concepts with social network features in learning environments. In this paper, we detailed our approach depicting the set of items to analyze and compare it with other solutions that are focused on education. Then, it was conducted a case study over a programming course (N = 40) to analyze the planning and deployment phases. Our results demonstrated that our approach is the first to consider the stakeholders (i.e. instructors and teachers) as part of the process. Moreover, even though there are still some obstacles to overcome, the gamified strategies that were created achieved positive acceptance among the students and professor.

An ontology-driven software product line architecture for developing gamified intelligent tutoring systems

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) are effective to provide instruction for students in several situations. Many works have been using gamification by adding game elements to learning contexts aiming to engage students and to drive desired learning behaviours. However, the design of gamified ITS should deal with a huge variability. Software product lines (SPLs) promise to offer rapid product development and more affordable development costs to build software from the same family. A key factor to successfully implement a product-line approach is to structure commonalities and variabilities into a product line architecture (PLA). In this paper, we propose a PLA for developing gamified ITSs that uses an ontology-driven feature modelling strategy. We illustrate how our architecture could be applied to instantiate a product on the basic math domain. We also discuss a set of implications of using it as well as how it could support the evolution/changing of gamified ITSs.