A principled approach for formative Web learning assessment and adaptive tutoring
Web based distance learning is a trend of instruction delivery. One of the most difficult challenges of such a learning mechanism is the assessment of students' learning criteria. It is hard to judge the behavior of a student since the instructor is separated spatially and temporally from the students. However, it is possible to rely on some Web based tools to keep track of a student's course attendance, as well as the navigation behavior of that student. In addition, the navigation behavior of an individual can be compared to those of others. Analysis can be conducted, and an interactive tutorial can be generated to assist the student with a poor score. The paper proposes such a mechanism, as well as its supporting system run on Windows browsers.

title: Macro University
abstract: This paper discusses the technical issues related to the Macro University framework. First we present the characteristics of the Macro University, from which the design principles are derived. Then we describe Macro University's software architecture and networking infrastructure. Since the Macro University is a federation of virtual universities, the format and protocol for open information exchange will be very important. Another often neglected issue is the technical tools to facilitate evaluation and assessment. A third issue is a universal interface for distance learning.

title: A general purpose virtual collaboration room
abstract: The general purpose virtual collaboration room (VCR) is an Internet based desktop groupware system that enables a group of remote individuals to flexibly and naturally conduct their collaborative teaching/learning/working without constraints on collaboration types, working styles, group scales, and system platforms. To cope with the complexity, a room metaphor, i.e., emulating a physical room and objects in it, is used as a framework of the system. System implementation becomes no more complex than the case of using one object by identifying associated objects in communication messages between a room server and clients. The VCR provides rich and effective support of awareness of the user, object, space, and their mutual relations. With the use of Java applets for system implementations, users can enter and use a VCR from any standard Java enabled Web browser.

title: Implementation of a Pure P2p Collaboration Multiplatform and its Applications
abstract: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing offers many attractive features, such as collaboration, self-organization, load balancing, availability, fault tolerance and anonymity. However, it also faces many seri...

title: A Multiplatform P2P System: its implementation and applications
abstract: Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing offers many attractive features, such as collaboration, self-organization, load balancing, availability, fault tolerance and anonymity. However, it also faces many serious challenges. In our previous work, we implemented a synchronous P2P collaboration platform called TOMSCOP. Based on the elementary peer group services offered by the JXTA general framework, TOMSCOP provides the extra four types of services: synchronous message transportation, peer room administration, peer communication support and application space management. By using the four services, different kinds of shared applications for various specific purposes can be relatively easily developed and associated collaborative cyber spaces or communities can be quickly built across the JXTA virtual network overlaid on top of the existing physical networks. However, the TOMSCOP was implemented only in Windows XP OS. In this paper, we extend our previous work and present the implementation of a Multi-Platform P2P System (MPPS). The proposed system operates very smoothly in UNIX Solaris 9 OS, LINUX Suse 9.1 OS, Mac OSX, and Windows XP. In the future study, we would like to evaluate the implemented P2P platform and compare its performance with other P2P systems.

title: The specification and implementation of a virtual university software system
abstract: Distance learning is one of the interesting research topics of distributed computing. This paper discusses a joint research project between the University of Aizu in Japan and Tamkang University in Taiwan. A software system supporting virtual university operations is proposed. The software architecture is designed based on three criteria of virtual university operations: administration, awareness and assessment. Specifications of each tools in the system are proposed, with some implementation details and solutions being discussed. We also point out some interesting research directions in the realization of a virtual university.

title: Simulation Study of AODV Performance over IEEE 802.15.4 MAC in WSN with Mobile Sinks
abstract: Mobility has been incorporated into wireless sensor networks in recent years in order to improve energy efficiency and network coverage. In particular, at the cost of increased message delivery delay, the energy conservation can be achieved by limiting the hop count between the communicating sensor-sink pair. In this paper we allow multihop routing between one sensor and mobile sinks, and consider the delay*energy metric, which is a compound metric to evaluate the performance of diverse data collection schemes. Through extensive simulation experiments of AODV performance over IEEE 802.15.4 MAC with clustered wireless sensor network setting, we investigate the fundamental problems of AODV without information of 802.15.4 MAC, and analyze the influence of incorporating multiple sinks.

title: Smart hyperspaces and project Ubikids
abstract: A smart space is an electronics-enhanced physical environment that can sense the existence of users and other entities, and provide them the right services, in the right way, at the right time. Such senses and services are based on collaborative work of many interconnected devices and computers, which may be small enough to be embedded to everyday objects in the space. So far, many creative researches have been conducted to develop and experiment a variety of smart spaces. The next research issue to emerge, we believe, is to interconnect and integrate these isolated smart spaces together into a higher level space known as a hyperspace. In this paper, after briefly reviewing the smart space concepts and related research, we describe what a smart hyperspace is all about and what related challenging issues exist. We then explain our vision and motivations towards building a specific smart hyperspace, called Ubikids, to assist parents and provide services to make them more convenient, prompt, reliable, precise, and can remotely take care of their kids. Finally, we show the fundamental approaches, conceptual designs, crucial problems and so on, regarding the project Ubikids.

title: Fast interval-valued statistical modeling of interconnect and effective capacitance
abstract: Correlated interval representations of range uncertainty offer an attractive solution to approximating computations on statistical quantities. The key idea is to use finite intervals to approximate the essential mass of a probability density function (pdf) as it moves through numerical operators; the resulting compact interval-valued solution can be easily interpreted as a statistical distribution and efficiently sampled. This paper first describes improved interval-valued algorithms for asymptotic wave evaluation (AWE)/passive reduced-order interconnect macromodeling algorithm (PRIMA) model order reduction for tree-structured interconnect circuits with correlated resistance, inductance, and capacitance (RLC) parameter variations. By moving to a much faster interval-valued linear solver based on path-tracing ideas, and making more optimal tradeoffs between interval- and scalar-valued computations, the delay statistics roughly 10/spl times/ faster than classical Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, with accuracy to within 5% can be extracted. This improved interval analysis strategy is further applied in order to build statistical effective capacitance (C/sub eff/) models for variational interconnect, and show how to extract statistics of C/sub eff/ over 100/spl times/ faster than classical MC simulation, with errors less than 4%.

title: Learning to cluster web search results
abstract: Organizing Web search results into clusters facilitates users' quick browsing through search results. Traditional clustering techniques are inadequate since they don't generate clusters with highly readable names. In this paper, we reformalize the clustering problem as a salient phrase ranking problem. Given a query and the ranked list of documents (typically a list of titles and snippets) returned by a certain Web search engine, our method first extracts and ranks salient phrases as candidate cluster names, based on a regression model learned from human labeled training data. The documents are assigned to relevant salient phrases to form candidate clusters, and the final clusters are generated by merging these candidate clusters. Experimental results verify our method's feasibility and effectiveness.

title: A Gradient BYY Harmony Learning Algorithm on Mixture of Experts for Curve Detection
abstract: Curve detection is a basic problem in image processing and has been extensively studied in the literature. However, it remains a difficult problem. In this paper, we study this problem from the Bayesian Ying-Yang (BYY) learning theory via the harmony learning principle on a BYY system with the mixture of experts (ME). A gradient BYY harmony learning algorithm is proposed to detect curves (straight lines or circles) from a binary image. It is demonstrated by the simulation and image experiments that this gradient algorithm can not only detect curves against noise, but also automatically determine the number of straight lines or circles during parameter learning.