Angelo Gaeta

SERVICES, SEMANTICS, AND STANDARDS: ELEMENTS OF A LEARNING GRID INFRASTRUCTURE

There has been considerable political pressure and much hope invested in the use of communication and information technologies to provide wider access to education, while improving quality and reducing costs. Unfortunately, many of the responses to the challenge of these aspirations have consisted of simple Web technology-driven products, which have failed to progress effective learning. In this paper we outline the characteristics and pedagogical goals of a learning paradigm that is used to drive the technical requirements, rather than being constrained by what is easily achieved in XHTML. We identify and explain the key roles played by services, semantics, and standards in meeting pedagogical goals of novel learning situations, and illustrate with some scenarios that build bridges between traditional learning contexts and future possibilities. Crucially, we explain why we have adopted Grid technologies in the European Learning Grid Infrastructure (ELeGI) research program.

A grid based software architecture for delivery of adaptive and personalised learning experiences

This paper is centred on one of the main results of the ELeGI project, namely its software architecture for the delivery of personalised formal-learning experiences. The architecture has been designed and developed: (1) taking into account a general model for the personalisation of learning experiences, allowing us to obtain a solution that is flexible with respect to the pedagogies, and (2) on top of service oriented grid technologies, allowing us to obtain several advantages in the process of creation and delivery of personalised learning experience like, for instance, ubiquitous and seamless access to heterogeneous learning resources distributed over the network. In order to validate our result, the first prototype of the ELeGI architecture has been deployed on a virtual organisation consisting of three geographically distributed nodes. Each node of the VO provides services and learning resources that have been adopted in the creation and delivery of a personalised learning experience about the Torricelli’s law and based on the virtual scientific experiment model. The case of study has been successfully executed and has given us a proof of our assumptions related to the added value of the service oriented grid mainly in terms of: (1) capabilities to access educational resources distributed over the network, that is relevant in achieving the personalisation of learning experiences, and (2) high level of dynamicity and adaptiveness in the creation and delivery processes of a personalised learning experience.

A new DSS based on situation awareness for smart commerce environments

Real time adaptation of marketing strategies and actions in smart commerce environments, such as shops and malls, is an open challenge with a tremendous impact for the survival of traditional retailers. A main issue of traditional retailers, in comparison with e-commerce shops, is that they usually rely on analysis of point-of-sales data after purchase and/or focus groups and self-reports where customers are asked about what they like or want. This techniques, even if solid grounded to marketing and consumer research, do not allow analysis of data and decision making in real time, i.e., when consumers are inside a shop. In this paper we present our results on the definition and validation of a decision support system for real time decision making on discount and promotion actions. The system makes decision on the basis of recognition and assessment of situations of interest for the consumers, modelled with heuristics related to behavioural economics results. We validated our solution in a virtual shop simulated with V-REP, demonstrating its capabilities to adapt with regards to the changes in the environments, in terms of sensors, people, products, and different situations.

A personality based adaptive approach for information systems

We defined a new adaptive approach to suggest the best interaction to the users.We get the personality of the users by inferring it from the social networks.The adaptive system instantiates for each user the best process and interface.The proposed approach includes two different layers of personalization.The approach suggests the interaction process for collaborative learning. In every context where the objective is matching needs of the users with fitting answers, the high-level performance becomes a requirement able to allow systems being useful and effective. The personalization may affect different moments of computer-humans interaction routing the users to the best answers to their needs. The most part of this complex elaboration is strictly related with the needs themselves and the residual is independent from it. It is what we may face by getting personality traits of the users.In this paper, we describe an approach that is able to get the personality of the users by inferring it from the social activities they do in order to drive them to the interactive processes they should prefer. This may happens in a wide set of situations, when they are deepened in a collaborative learning experience, in an information retrieval problem, in an e-commerce process or in a general searching activity.We defined a complete model to realize an adaptive system that may interoperate with information systems and that is able to instantiate for all the users the processes and the interfaces able to give them the best feeling and to the system the highest possible performance.

Managing Semantic Models for Representing Intangible Enterprise Assets: The ARISTOTELE Project Software Architecture

The wealth of modern enterprises has progressively shifted from tangible assets (capital, resources,) into intangible ones (knowledge, reputation, skills management, innovation processes,). Intangibles are closely related to the natural interactions normally occurring among work practices. This is where ideas, innovation, learning, knowledge, social cohesion, and other diverse intangibles synergistically contribute to performance, competition differentiators and value creation. In order to make these intangibles productive for the organization, we have to define suitable models for their correct representation in real contexts, as well as tools for their proper management in the workplace environment in a transparent way. All these aspects are the foundation of the ARISTOTELE research project. In this paper, we address two issues: i) the use of semantic technologies for modeling and cross relating relevant organizational assets, namely knowledge, competency, worker and learning, ii) how to design a software architecture for managing these models through the integration of ad-hoc developed tools and commercial off-the-shelf platforms.

Design patterns for secure virtual organization management architecture

The work presented in this paper describes an architecture for a secure Virtual Organization Management framework. This work is taking place in the BEinGRID EU project, which aims to advance the take up of Grid technologies in the business domain by conducting a number of business experiments and in parallel producing a number of components.

Enabling technologies for future learning scenarios: the semantic grid for human learning

In this paper, starting from the limitations and constrains of traditional human learning approaches, we outline new suitable approaches to education and training in future knowledge based society. In our vision, learning and teaching are no longer standalone activities but complex, conversational and experiential-based processes implying collaboration, direct experience, mutual trust and shared interests. We identify characteristics of the environments suitable for these processes, and we compare different enabling technology infrastructures in order to justify why the semantic grid for human learning, that is a particular enhanced instance of the traditional semantic grid, is the most appropriate infrastructure to build our vision on. Finally, we present a realistic learning scenario as a case study, proving the effectiveness of our innovative learning approaches for future education and training.

Exploiting Semantic Models and Techniques to Evaluate Relevance of Human Resources in Knowledge Intensive Organizations

This paper reports the results of the ARISTOTELE methodology for decision support on Human Resource Management and, in particular, of one of the most important tool of the methodology, i.e. the Relevance Analysis. The Relevance Analysis is devoted at providing a systemic way to map human resources on the basis of their relevance in an organization, and take informed decisions. We have defined a model and a methodology to quantify relevance of the human resources with respect to key processes of an organization. Relevance is a combination of two factors: i) Criticality, an attribute to establish the attention degree that the organization must pay to assess the importance of human resource, ii) Influence, an attribute to establish the degree of influence the human resource can exert in placing limits, indicating rules and regulations in the organization and with other human resources. We will show how exploiting the ARISTOTELE results on the semantic models and semantic Social Network Analysis is possible to quantify the Criticality and Influence of human resources in a knowledge intensive organization.

Enhancing augmented reality with cognitive and knowledge perspectives: a case study in museum exhibitions

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present our results related to the definition of a methodology that combines augmented reality (AR) with semantic techniques for the creation of digital stories associated with museum exhibitions. In contrast to traditional AR approaches, we augment real-world elements by supplementing contents of a museum exhibition with additional inputs that provide new and different meanings. In this way we augment a cultural resource with respect to both its presentation and meaning. The methodology is framed in the cultural re-mediation theory and is grounded on a set of ontologies aimed at modelling a cultural resource and correlating it with external multimedia objects and resources. To provide an easy tool for the creation of museum narratives, the methodology makes use of a set of recognised practices widely adopted by museum curators that have been formalised through inference rules. The defined methodology has been experimented in a scenario related to Flemish paintings to validate the augmentation of cultural objects with two different approaches, the first basing on similarities and the second on dissimilarities.

Evaluation of the human resources relevance in organisations via knowledge technologies and semantic social network analysis

This paper reports the results of the ARISTOTELE methodology for decision support on human resource management (HRM) implemented in the Relevance Analysis tool. The Relevance Analysis is devoted to provide a systemic way to map human resources on the basis of their relevance in an organisation, and for taking informed decisions. Relevance is a combination of two factors: i) Criticality, an attribute to establish the attention degree that the organisation must pay to assess the importance of the human resource; ii) Influence, an attribute to establish the degree of influence the human resource can exert in placing limits, indicating rules and regulations in the organisation and with other human resources. We show how exploiting the ARISTOTELEs semantic models and semantic social network analysis (SNA) capabilities it is possible to quantify the Criticality and Influence of human resources in a knowledge intensive organisation. We present the software solution and experimental results.