Keeping a Distance-Education Course Current Through eLearning and Contextual Assessment

Distance education is most economical when delivered to large groups of students over several years. The Open University course T396: Artificial Intelligence for Technology makes use of electronic delivery and a carefully designed assessment strategy to address the challenge of keeping the course up-to-date while remaining economically viable. Three aspects of currency are considered: academic content, organizational context, and breaking news. An electronic study guide permits new forms of interactivity and presentational styles, while allowing the course team the flexibility to maintain the academic content of the course. The organizational context of the course is maintained through integrated Web pages. An electronic conference provides news, such as course announcements, correction of errata, data files for assignments, and lists of frequently asked questions. It also enables students to participate in an extended learning community. Continuous assessment and the final project are designed to assess the students, to allow practice and experimentation, and to provide a vehicle for constructive feedback. The assessment strategy aims to maintain currency by introducing the latest contexts in which artificial intelligence is used. Detailed marking guides ensure consistent marking and demonstrable achievement of the intended learning outcomes. In a survey at the end of the course, a clear majority of students favored the use of the electronic study guide, particularly for teaching genetic algorithms, where the interactivity enabled difficult concepts to be demonstrated in a way that would not be possible on the printed page. The same survey also gave an overwhelming endorsement to the assessment strategy and the online electronic conference     

Single channel nonstationary stochastic signal separation using linear time-varying filters

Separability of signal mixtures given only one mixture observation is defined as the identification of the accuracy to which the signals can be separated. The paper shows that when signals are separated using the generalized Wiener filter, the degree of separability can be deduced from the signal structure. To identify this structure, the processes are represented on an general spectral domain, and a sufficient solution to the Wiener filter is obtained. The filter is composed of a term independent of the signal values, corresponding to regions in the spectral domain where the desired signal components are not distorted by interfering noise components, and a term dependent on the signal correlations, corresponding to the region where components overlap. An example of determining perfect separability of modulated random signals is given with application in radar and speech processing.     

Artificial intelligence: hype or reality?

Artificial intelligence is not just hype, as many working applications use AI techniques. However, we have yet to develop a system that spans the full spectrum of intelligent behavior. For example, building a system that an make sensible decisions about unfamiliar situations in everyday, nonspecialist domains remains difficult. Nevertheless, it seems likely that applications like distributed blackboards will continue apace in specialist domains. This quiet revolution can make a significant contribution to our lives. Meanwhile, we can also expect progress toward the popular idea of AI manifested in human-like robots as we progress in simulating vision, language, common sense, and adaptability behaviors.     

Web 2D Graphics File Formats

The earliest Web browsers focussed on the display of textual information. When graphics were added, essentially only image graphics and image file formats were supported. For a significant range of applications, image graphics has severe limitations, for example in terms of file size, download time and inability to interact with and modify the graphics client-side. Vector graphics may be more appropriate in these cases, and this has become possible through the introduction of the WebCGM and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) formats, both of which are open standards, the former from ISO/IEC and W3C and the latter from W3C. This paper reviews the background to Web graphics, presents the WebCGM file format, and gives a more detailed exposition of the most recent format, SVG. The paper concludes with reflections on the current state of this area and future prospects.     

PERQ and Advanced Raster Graphics Workstations

A National Network of Inexpensive, High-Powered, Single-User Computers with Good Interactive Capabilities Is Being Launched in the UK.