Cleo Sgouropoulou

Developing a Metadata Application Profile for Sharing Agricultural Scientific and Scholarly Research Resources

This article describes the development of the VOA3R Metadata Application Profile to facilitate the description, dissemination and reuse of research results in the fields of Agriculture and Aquaculture within a federation of open access repositories. VOA3R is a research project aspiring to deploy an advanced, community-focused integrated platform for the retrieval of relevant open content and data that supports explicit models of the scholarly lifecycle and the practical tasks targeted by applied research. The article details the phased implementation of the core VOA3R application profile relating to the description of scholarly resources. The development process has been based upon the methodology and components of the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles: functional requirements, domain model, description set profile, usage guidelines and data format. Maximum interoperability, reuse of existing mature metadata standards, long-term quality control and extensibility for addressing further community needs, constitute the main benefits of this approach.

Design and Implementation of an E-exam System Based on the Android Platform

Due to the widespread adoption and use of handheld mobile devices, the application of mobile technologies in enhancing learning activities has attracted noteworthy research interest. This paper presents an attempt to exploit mobile technologies to simplify the exam management and performance assessment activities of a learning process. The work focuses on key aspects of mobile device and platform oriented design, light-weight and efficient implementation, interface usability issues related to fast and convenient question navigation, and performance assessment. A prototype system, implemented on Google Android OS, is also illustrated.

Academic Research Policy-Making and Evaluation Using Graph Visualisation

Higher education institutions need to have a social responsibility and attainable objectives regarding their education and research activities. In our approach we use multi-indicator analysis in order to evaluate the research activities of an institution as well the degree of achievement for a specified research policy. Our work is a part of prototype system that supports academic evaluation and decision-making processes concerning research policies, using visual analytics. The presented case study emphasises on the analysis of the research collaborations indicated in published research work. Our main data sources are the Scopus library, Google Scholar and the Quality Assurance Unit Service of a Greek higher education institution. Data are retrieved and enriched by additional analysis and graph metrics. The developed system provides enables user to evaluate aspects of the quality of academic research activities in the context of specific policies and criteria and make informed decisions on the establishment of new strategies.

Developing an Information System for Quality Assurance in Higher Education Using the Balanced Scorecard Technique - The Case Study of TEI-A

Higher education institutions need to have a clear mission and attainable objectives that can be interpreted and analysed by using terms of strategic planning. Our work is part of prototype system that supports academic evaluation and strategy management using the balanced scorecard methodology. This study aims to describe the design of a campus-wide management information system in the Technological Educational Institute of Athens which can be used to evaluate quality and institutional performance in higher education.

PBURC: a patterns-based, unsupervised requirements clustering framework for distributed agile software development

Agile software development methodologies are increasingly adopted by organizations because they focus on the client’s needs, thus safeguarding business value for the final product. At the same time, as the economy and society move toward globalization, more organizations shift to distributed development of software projects. From this perspective, while adopting agile techniques seems beneficial, there are still a number of challenges that need to be addressed; among these notable is the effective cooperation between the stakeholders and the geographically distributed development team. In addition, data collection and validation for requirements engineering demands efficient processing techniques in order to handle the volume of data as well as to manage different inconsistencies, when the data are collected using online tools. In this paper, we present “PBURC,” a patterns-based, unsupervised requirements clustering framework, which makes use of machine-learning methods for requirements validation, being able to overcome data inconsistencies and effectively determine appropriate requirements clusters for optimal definition of software development sprints.

Using Visual Representation for Decision Support in Institutional Research Evaluation

Higher Education Institutes worldwide are facing an increased demand to strengthen their capacities for research and innovation. This study introduces an ontology-based software system architecture that supports research policy evaluation processes and decision-making strategies, using visual analytics. A knowledge modeling technique drawing on multi criteria analysis and data visualisation is proposed. In addition, the paper presents a prototype built on Protege, Pellet reasoner and Java Technologies, which is friendly to the user and capable of interactive synthesis of institutional decision support criteria. In this work we make a transition from knowledge to visual web-based decision support systems with different kinds of visualisations. The developed system enables research managers to evaluate key aspects of academic research activity in the context of specific policies and criteria, correlate strategic goals with research performance and make informed decisions on the establishment of research strategies.

ALU based address generation for RAMs

Memory Built-In Self-Test has become a standard industrial practice. Its quality is mainly determined by its fault detection capability in combination with its required area overhead. Address Generators have a significant contribution to the area overhead. Previously published schemes have proposed the address generator implementations based on counter modules. In this work we present an ALU-based address generator implementation; the proposed scheme present lower hardware overhead compared to the previously proposed one, provided the availability of the ALU or the counter in the circuit.

A Model of Collaborating Agents for Content-Based Electronic Document Filtering

The huge volume of distributed information that is nowadays available in electronic multimedia documents forces a lot of people to consume a significant percentage of their time looking for documents that contain information useful to them. The filtering of electronic documents seems hard to automate, partly because of document heterogeneity, but mainly because it is difficult to train computers to have an understanding of the contents of these documents and make decisions based on user-subjective criteria. In this paper, we suggest a model for the automation of content-based electronic document filtering, supporting multimedia documents in a wide variety of forms. The model is based on multi-agent technology and utilizes an adaptive knowledge base organized as a set of logical rules. Implementations of the model using the client-server architecture should be able to efficiently access documents distributed over an intranet or the Internet.

Symmetric transparent online BIST for arrays of word-organized RAMs

Transparent BIST schemes for RAM modules assure the preservation of the memory contents during periodic testing. Symmetric Transparent Built-in Self Test (BIST) schemes skip the signature prediction phase required in traditional transparent BIST, achieving considerable reduction in test time. Previous works on symmetric transparent BIST schemes require that a separate BIST module is utilized for each RAM under test. This approach, given the large number of memories available in current chips, increases the hardware overhead of the BIST circuitry. In this work we propose a Symmetric transparent BIST scheme that can be utilized to test RAMs of different word widths; hence, more than one RAMs can be tested in a roving manner. The hardware overhead of the proposed scheme is considerably smaller compared to the utilization of previously proposed symmetric transparent schemes, for typical memory configurations.

Applying metadata standards to multilingual learning objects

In this paper, we propose extensions to the IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard to provide the necessary mechanisms for describing and relating alternative language versions of learning resources. The work presented involves the identification of the various stakeholder applications and respective groups, the analysis of issues related to the metadescriptive needs of learning objects and their translations, the definition of an application profile capable of addressing these needs, and the compilation of per-case application guidelines. This proposal will be submitted to the IEEE Learning Technology Standardisation Committee, in order to be considered for the enhancement of a future version of the IEEE LOM standard.