Progressor: social navigation support through open social student modeling

The increased volumes of online learning content have produced two problems: how to help students to find the most appropriate resources and how to engage them in using these resources. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential ways to address these problems. Our work presented in this paper combines the ideas of personalized and social learning in the context of educational hypermedia. We introduce Progressor, an innovative Web-based tool based on the concepts of social navigation and open student modeling that helps students to find the most relevant resources in a large collection of parameterized self-assessment questions on Java programming. We have evaluated Progressor in a semester-long classroom study, the results of which are presented in this paper. The study confirmed the impact of personalized social navigation support provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more topics attempting more questions and achieving higher success rates in answering them. A deeper analysis of the social navigation support mechanism revealed that the top students successfully led the way to discovering most relevant resources by creating clear pathways for weaker students.     

The Model Repository of the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study

The model repository (MREP) is a relational database management system (RDBMS) developed under the auspices of models of infectious disease agent study (MIDAS). The purpose of the MREP is to organize and catalog the models, results, and suggestions for using the MIDAS and to store them in a way to allow users to run models from an access-controlled disease MREP. The MREP contains source and object code of disease models developed by infectious disease modelers and tested in a production environment. Different versions of models used to describe various aspects of the same disease are housed in the repository. Models are linked to their developers and different versions of the codes are tied to Subversion, a version control tool. An additional element of the MREP will be to house, manage, and control access to a disease model results warehouse, which consists of output generated by the models contained in the MREP. The result tables and files are linked to the version of the model and the input parameters that collectively generated the results. The result tables are warehoused in a relational database that permits them to be easily identified, categorized, and downloaded.     

Removal of uncontrollable phase distortions in synthetic apertureradar signals

This paper presents a new method for removing distortions in the phase spectrum of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images by using the properties of multidimensional finite signals. The quality of the restored images and the time of reconstruction are examined. Results of the reconstruction process are demonstrated on a digital model of a radar image     

Automating Mashups for Next-Generation Enterprise Portals

The increasing number of resources available through portals establish a need to tailor information to individual needs and situations. Mashups are tools for dynamically integrating independent applications. For portals, what is needed are means to automatically create personalized mashups that optimally fit a user's information needs in a given situation. At the core of our approach are different ontology-based models that describe the user, the domain, possible information needs in this domain, and personalization rules determining which information to present to which user in which situation.     

Choice of pulse-fluidization conditions for mixing granulated materials

A method is given for determining the best pulse-fluidization conditions for accelerating the mixing of components in a granular material.Translated from Inzhenerno-Fizicheskii Zhurnal, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 23–28, January, 1980.     

Editing and versioning for high performance network models in a multiuser environment

Network data models are frequently used as a mechanism to describe the connectivity between spatial features in GIS applications. Real-life network models are dynamic in nature since spatial features can be periodically modified to reflect changes in the real world objects that they model. Such updates may change the connectivity relations with the other features in the model. In order to perform analysis the connectivity must be reestablished. Existing editing frameworks are not suitable for a dynamic environment, since they require network connectivity to be reconstructed from scratch. Another requirement for GIS network models is to provide support for a multiuser environment, where users are simultaneously creating and updating large amounts of geographic information. The system must support edit sessions that typically span a number of days or weeks, the facility to undo or redo changes made to the data, and the ability to develop models and alternative application designs without affecting the published database. The row-locking mechanisms adopted by many DBMSs is prohibitively restrictive for many common workflows. To deal with long-lasting transactions, a solution based on versioning is thus preferrable. In this paper we provide a unified solution to the problems of dynamic editing and versioning of network models. We first propose an efficient algorithm that incrementally maintains connectivity within a dynamic network. Our solution is based on the notion of dirty areas and dirty objects (i.e., regions or elements containing edits that have not been reflected in the network connectivity index). The dirty areas and objects are identified and marked during the editing of the network feature data; they are then subsequently cleaned and connectivity is re-built. Furthermore, for improving performance, we propose a ‘hyperedge’ extension to the basic network model. A hyperedge drastically decreases the number of edge elements accessed during solve time on large networks; this in turn leads to faster solve operations. We show how our connectivity maintenance algorithms can support the hyperedge enhanced model. We then propose a new network model versioning scheme that utilizes the dirty areas/objects of the connectivity rebuild algorithm. Our scheme uses flexible reconciling rules that allow the definition of a resolving mechanism between conflicting edits according to user needs. Moreover, the utilization of dirty areas/objects minimizes the overhead of tracking the editing history. The unified editing and versioning solution has been implemented and tested within ESRI’s ArcGIS system.