Luiz Faria

Constructivist Approach for an Educational Adaptive Hypermedia Tool

The aim of this paper is to present an Constructivism approach for an educational adaptive hypermedia tool. The learning platform has a constructivist approach, assessing the user knowledge and presenting contents and activities adapted to the characteristics and learning style of the student. The platform allows the students and teachers to autonomously create and consolidate knowledge, with permanent automatic feedback and support, through instructional methodologies and educational activities explored in a constructivist manner.

Better KBS for real-time applications in power system control centers: the experience of SPARSE project

Modern Power System Control Centers must operate and control medium and large electrical networks that usually cover a large geographic area. The accomplishment of these tasks has been made possible due to important developments in computer and communication technologies. Nowadays, complex Power Systems require a very accurate and efficient control that makes Control Centers especially important. These centers are equipped with SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems allowing to acquire information about the Power System and its transmission to Control Centers in real-time. Due to the symbolic nature of the reasoning involved in some control tasks, Artificial Intelligence techniques appeared as a promising solution. Some years ago, some of the most important electrical utilities around the world began to develop knowledge-based applications to incorporate in their Control Centers. These applications deal with the information available in the Control Center and help operators in decision making. On the other hand, the duration of this kind of project is still rather long and the total number of deployed systems all over the world is still very low. This paper deals with what we consider the most important points for the success of Artificial Intelligence applications in Control Centers.

PCMAT – Mathematics Collaborative Learning Platform

The aim of this paper is to present an Educational Adaptive Hypermedia Tool, PCMAT, Based on Progressive Assessment and adapted to the student model and learning style. The adaptation of the application is based on progressive selfassessment (exercises, tasks, etc.). The learning platform was already implemented, tested and evaluated in learning processes in Basic Schools. Also, the paper defines and evaluates the characteristic of the User Model to be used in the Student Modeling.

Cyber-Physical intelligence in the context of power systems

Cyber-Physical Intelligence is a new concept integrating Cyber-Physical Systems and Intelligent Systems. The paradigm is centered in incorporating intelligent behavior in cyber-physical systems, until now too oriented to the operational technological aspects. In this paper we will describe the use of Cyber-Physical Intelligence in the context of Power Systems, namely in the use of Intelligent SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems at different levels of the Power System, from the Power Generation, Transmission, and Distribution Control Centers till the customers houses.

PCMAT Metadata Authoring Tool

This paper introduces the PCMAT platform project and, in particular, one of its components, the PCMAT Metadata Authoring Tool. This is an educational web application that allows the project metadata creators to write the metadata associated to each learning object without any concern for the metadata schema semantics. Furthermore it permits the project managers to add or delete elements to the schema, without having to rewrite or compile any code.

Intelligent behavior in a Cyber-Ambient training system for control center operators

This paper deals with the application of an intelligent tutoring approach to delivery training in diagnosis procedures of a Power System. In particular, the mechanisms implemented by the training tool to support the trainees are detailed. This tool is part of an architecture conceived to integrate Power Systems tools in a Power System Control Centre, based on an Ambient Intelligent paradigm. The present work is integrated in the CITOPSY project which main goal is to achieve a better integration between operators and control room applications, considering the needs of people, customizing requirements and forecasting behaviors.

Cyber-Ambient Intelligent Training of Operators in Power Systems Control Centres

Cyber-Physical Systems and Ambient Intelligence are two of the most important and emerging paradigms of our days. The introduction of renewable sources gave origin to a completely different dimension of the distribution generation problem. On the other hand, Electricity Markets introduced a different dimension in the complexity, the economic dimension. Our goal is to study how to proceed with the Intelligent Training of Operators in Power Systems Control Centres, considering the new reality of Renewable Sources, Distributed Generation, and Electricity Markets, under the emerging paradigms of Cyber-Physical Systems and Ambient Intelligence. We propose Intelligent Tutoring Systems as the approach to deal with the intelligent training of operators in these new circumstances.

User modelling concerning control centre operators training

Typically, the user models used in intelligent tutors tend to be tightly controlled by the system, due to the constraints imposed by the specific nature of the tutoring process. Therefore, no control by the user himself is usually allowed over his/her models contents. In order to make the evaluation of the tutoring process a cooperative task, adequate techniques should, be devised. This paper describes early attempts to build a user model module for an intelligent tutor to be used in the training of electrical network control centre operators. It attempts to address the different requirements of the distinct phases of this tutoring environment. An example of how this user model data can drive the tutoring process is presented.

PCMAT - Mathematics Collaborative Educational System

PCMAT (Mathematics Collaborative Learning Platform) is a collaborative adaptive learning tool based on progressive assessment for Mathematics in Basic Schools. The learning platform is based on a constructivist approach, assessing the user knowledge and presenting contents and activities adapted to the characteristics and learning style of the student. The intelligent behavior of such platform depends on the existence of a tentative description of the student – the student model (SM). The contents of this model and the student most prominent learning style are used by a domain and interaction model to select the most appropriate response to student actions. The SM is used to select the more appropriate learning object according to the student learning stage. However, this selection demands for the access to metadata describing the contents of the learning object. This need leaded to the application of a standard to describe the learning objects (LO). The authoring of LO corresponds to one major maintenance costs present in these applications. PCMAT is able to generate several instances of the same learning object through the parameterization of some features of the learning object. The platform is also able to process student responses in natural language. This project shows how techniques from Adaptive Hypermedia System (AHS) field can improve e-learning based systems in a basic school environment.

Intelligent training in control centres based on an ambient intelligence paradigm

This article describes a new approach in the Intelligent Training of Operators in Power Systems Control Centres, considering the new reality of Renewable Sources, Distributed Generation, and Electricity Markets, under the emerging paradigms of Cyber-Physical Systems and Ambient Intelligence. We propose Intelligent Tutoring Systems as the approach to deal with the intelligent training of operators in these new circumstances.