Automated Feedback for 'Fill in the Gap' Programming Exercises

Timely feedback is a vital component in the learning process. It is especially important for beginner students in Information Technology since many have not yet formed an effective internal model of a computer that they can use to construct viable knowledge. Research has shown that learning efficiency is increased if immediate feedback is provided for students. Automatic analysis of student programs has the potential to provide immediate feedback for students and to assist teaching staff in the marking process. This paper describes a “fill in the gap” programming analysis framework which tests students’ solutions and gives feedback on their correctness, detects logic errors and provides hints on how to fix these errors. Currently, the framework is being used with the Environment for Learning to Programming (ELP) system at Queensland University of Technology (QUT); however, the framework can be integrated into any existing online learning environment or programming Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Primary students’ spatial visualization and spatial orientation : an evidence base for instruction

This paper reports on the performance of 58 11 to 12-year-olds on a spatial visualization task and a spatial orientation task. The students completed these tasks and explained their thinking during individual interviews. The qualitative data were analysed to inform pedagogical content knowledge for spatial activities. The study revealed that “matching” or “matching and eliminating” were the typical strategies that students employed on these spatial tasks. However, errors in making associations between parts of the same or different shapes were noted. Students also experienced general difficulties with visual memory and language use to explain their thinking. The students’ specific difficulties in spatial visualization related to obscured items, the perspective used, and the placement and orientation of shapes.

Life cycle modelling and design knowledge development in 3D virtual environments : final report

Experience plays an important role in building management. “How often will this asset need repair?” or “How much time is this repair going to take?” are types of questions that project and facility managers face daily in planning activities. Failure or success in developing good schedules, budgets and other project management tasks depend on the project manager's ability to obtain reliable information to be able to answer these types of questions. Young practitioners tend to rely on information that is based on regional averages and provided by publishing companies. This is in contrast to experienced project managers who tend to rely heavily on personal experience. Another aspect of building management is that many practitioners are seeking to improve available scheduling algorithms, estimating spreadsheets and other project management tools. Such “micro-scale” levels of research are important in providing the required tools for the project manager's tasks. However, even with such tools, low quality input information will produce inaccurate schedules and budgets as output. Thus, it is also important to have a broad approach to research at a more “macro-scale.” Recent trends show that the Architectural, Engineering, Construction (AEC) industry is experiencing explosive growth in its capabilities to generate and collect data. There is a great deal of valuable knowledge that can be obtained from the appropriate use of this data and therefore the need has arisen to analyse this increasing amount of available data. Data Mining can be applied as a powerful tool to extract relevant and useful information from this sea of data. Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) and Data Mining (DM) are tools that allow identification of valid, useful, and previously unknown patterns so large amounts of project data may be analysed. These technologies combine techniques from machine learning, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, statistics, databases, and visualization to automatically extract concepts, interrelationships, and patterns of interest from large databases. The project involves the development of a prototype tool to support facility managers, building owners and designers. This final report presents the AIMMTM prototype system and documents how and what data mining techniques can be applied, the results of their application and the benefits gained from the system. The AIMMTM system is capable of searching for useful patterns of knowledge and correlations within the existing building maintenance data to support decision making about future maintenance operations. The application of the AIMMTM prototype system on building models and their maintenance data (supplied by industry partners) utilises various data mining algorithms and the maintenance data is analysed using interactive visual tools. The application of the AIMMTM prototype system to help in improving maintenance management and building life cycle includes: (i) data preparation and cleaning, (ii) integrating meaningful domain attributes, (iii) performing extensive data mining experiments in which visual analysis (using stacked histograms), classification and clustering techniques, associative rule mining algorithm such as “Apriori” and (iv) filtering and refining data mining results, including the potential implications of these results for improving maintenance management. Maintenance data of a variety of asset types were selected for demonstration with the aim of discovering meaningful patterns to assist facility managers in strategic planning and provide a knowledge base to help shape future requirements and design briefing. Utilising the prototype system developed here, positive and interesting results regarding patterns and structures of data have been obtained.

Life Cycle Modelling and Design Knowledge Development in 3D Virtual Environments

Experience plays an important role in building management. “How often will this asset need repair?” or “How much time is this repair going to take?” are types of questions that project and facility managers face daily in planning activities. Failure or success in developing good schedules, budgets and other project management tasks depend on the project manager's ability to obtain reliable information to be able to answer these types of questions. Young practitioners tend to rely on information that is based on regional averages and provided by publishing companies. This is in contrast to experienced project managers who tend to rely heavily on personal experience. Another aspect of building management is that many practitioners are seeking to improve available scheduling algorithms, estimating spreadsheets and other project management tools. Such “micro-scale” levels of research are important in providing the required tools for the project manager's tasks. However, even with such tools, low quality input information will produce inaccurate schedules and budgets as output. Thus, it is also important to have a broad approach to research at a more “macro-scale.” Recent trends show that the Architectural, Engineering, Construction (AEC) industry is experiencing explosive growth in its capabilities to generate and collect data. There is a great deal of valuable knowledge that can be obtained from the appropriate use of this data and therefore the need has arisen to analyse this increasing amount of available data. Data Mining can be applied as a powerful tool to extract relevant and useful information from this sea of data. Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) and Data Mining (DM) are tools that allow identification of valid, useful, and previously unknown patterns so large amounts of project data may be analysed. These technologies combine techniques from machine learning, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, statistics, databases, and visualization to automatically extract concepts, interrelationships, and patterns of interest from large databases. The project involves the development of a prototype tool to support facility managers, building owners and designers. This Industry focused report presents the AIMMTM prototype system and documents how and what data mining techniques can be applied, the results of their application and the benefits gained from the system. The AIMMTM system is capable of searching for useful patterns of knowledge and correlations within the existing building maintenance data to support decision making about future maintenance operations. The application of the AIMMTM prototype system on building models and their maintenance data (supplied by industry partners) utilises various data mining algorithms and the maintenance data is analysed using interactive visual tools. The application of the AIMMTM prototype system to help in improving maintenance management and building life cycle includes: (i) data preparation and cleaning, (ii) integrating meaningful domain attributes, (iii) performing extensive data mining experiments in which visual analysis (using stacked histograms), classification and clustering techniques, associative rule mining algorithm such as “Apriori” and (iv) filtering and refining data mining results, including the potential implications of these results for improving maintenance management. Maintenance data of a variety of asset types were selected for demonstration with the aim of discovering meaningful patterns to assist facility managers in strategic planning and provide a knowledge base to help shape future requirements and design briefing. Utilising the prototype system developed here, positive and interesting results regarding patterns and structures of data have been obtained.

Automated code checking

Most buildings constructed in Australia must comply with the Building Code of Australia (BCA). Checking for compliance against the BCA is a major task for both designers and building surveyors. This project carries out a prototype research using the EDM Model Checker and the SMC Model Checker for automated design checking against the Building Codes of Australia for use in professional practice. In this project, we develop a means of encoding design requirements and domain specific knowledge for building codes and investigate the flexibility of building models to contain design information. After assessing two implementations of EDM and SMC that check compliance against deemed-to-satisfy provision of building codes relevant to access by people with disabilities, an approach to automated code checking using a shared object-oriented database is established. This project can be applied in other potential areas – including checking a building design for non-compliance of many types of design requirements. Recommendations for future development and use in other potential areas in construction industries are discussed

Automated code checking

Most buildings constructed in Australia must comply with the Building Code of Australia (BCA). Checking for compliance against the BCA is a major task for both designers and building surveyors. This project carries out a prototype research using the EDM Model Checker and the SMC Model Checker for automated design checking against the Building Codes of Australia for use in professional practice. In this project, we develop a means of encoding design requirements and domain specific knowledge for building codes and investigate the flexibility of building models to contain design information. After assessing two implementations of EDM and SMC that check compliance against deemed-to-satisfy provision of building codes relevant to access by people with disabilities, an approach to automated code checking using a shared object-oriented database is established. This project can be applied in other potential areas – including checking a building design for non-compliance of many types of design requirements. Recommendations for future development and use in other potential areas in construction industries are discussed.

Virtual world process perspective visualization

Product Lifecycle Management has been developed as an approach to providing timely engineering information. However, the number of domain specializations within manufacturing makes such information communication disjointed, inefficient and error-prone. In this paper we propose an immersive 3D visualization of linked domain- specific information views for improving and accelerating communication processes in Product Lifecycle Management. With a common and yet understandable visualization of several domain views, interconnections and dependencies become obvious. The conceptual framework presented here links domain-specific information extracts from Product Lifecycle Management systems with each other and displays them via an integrated 3D representation scheme. We expect that this visualization framework should support holistic tactical decision making processes between domain-experts in operational and tactical manufacturing scenarios.

An analytical tool that quantifies cellular morphology changes from three-dimensional fluorescence images

The most common software analysis tools available for measuring fluorescence images are for two-dimensional (2D) data that rely on manual settings for inclusion and exclusion of data points, and computer-aided pattern recognition to support the interpretation and findings of the analysis. It has become increasingly important to be able to measure fluorescence images constructed from three-dimensional (3D) datasets in order to be able to capture the complexity of cellular dynamics and understand the basis of cellular plasticity within biological systems. Sophisticated microscopy instruments have permitted the visualization of 3D fluorescence images through the acquisition of multispectral fluorescence images and powerful analytical software that reconstructs the images from confocal stacks that then provide a 3D representation of the collected 2D images. Advanced design-based stereology methods have progressed from the approximation and assumptions of the original model-based stereology(1) even in complex tissue sections(2). Despite these scientific advances in microscopy, a need remains for an automated analytic method that fully exploits the intrinsic 3D data to allow for the analysis and quantification of the complex changes in cell morphology, protein localization and receptor trafficking. Current techniques available to quantify fluorescence images include Meta-Morph (Molecular Devices, Sunnyvale, CA) and Image J (NIH) which provide manual analysis. Imaris (Andor Technology, Belfast, Northern Ireland) software provides the feature MeasurementPro, which allows the manual creation of measurement points that can be placed in a volume image or drawn on a series of 2D slices to create a 3D object. This method is useful for single-click point measurements to measure a line distance between two objects or to create a polygon that encloses a region of interest, but it is difficult to apply to complex cellular network structures. Filament Tracer (Andor) allows automatic detection of the 3D neuronal filament-like however, this module has been developed to measure defined structures such as neurons, which are comprised of dendrites, axons and spines (tree-like structure). This module has been ingeniously utilized to make morphological measurements to non-neuronal cells(3), however, the output data provide information of an extended cellular network by using a software that depends on a defined cell shape rather than being an amorphous-shaped cellular model. To overcome the issue of analyzing amorphous-shaped cells and making the software more suitable to a biological application, Imaris developed Imaris Cell. This was a scientific project with the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, which has been developed to calculate the relationship between cells and organelles. While the software enables the detection of biological constraints, by forcing one nucleus per cell and using cell membranes to segment cells, it cannot be utilized to analyze fluorescence data that are not continuous because ideally it builds cell surface without void spaces. To our knowledge, at present no user-modifiable automated approach that provides morphometric information from 3D fluorescence images has been developed that achieves cellular spatial information of an undefined shape (Figure 1). We have developed an analytical platform using the Imaris core software module and Imaris XT interfaced to MATLAB (Mat Works, Inc.). These tools allow the 3D measurement of cells without a pre-defined shape and with inconsistent fluorescence network components. Furthermore, this method will allow researchers who have extended expertise in biological systems, but not familiarity to computer applications, to perform quantification of morphological changes in cell dynamics.

The ECOS green buildings project : data dramatization, visualization and manipulation

Buildings are key mediators between human activity and the environment around them, but details of energy usage and activity in buildings is often poorly communicated and understood. ECOS is an Eco-Visualization project that aims to contextualize the energy generation and consumption of a green building in a variety of different climates. The ECOS project is being developed for a large public interactive space installed in the new Science and Engineering Centre of the Queensland University of Technology that is dedicated to delivering interactive science education content to the public. This paper focuses on how design can develop ICT solutions from large data sets to create meaningful engagement with environmental data.

The ECOS green buildings project : data dramatization, visualization and manipulation

Buildings are key mediators between human activity and the environment around them, but details of energy usage and activity in buildings is often poorly communicated and understood. ECOS is an Eco-Visualization project that aims to contextualize the energy generation and consumption of a green building in a variety of different climates. The ECOS project is being developed for a large public interactive space installed in the new Science and Engineering Centre of the Queensland University of Technology that is dedicated to delivering interactive science education content to the public. This paper focuses on how design can develop ICT solutions from large data sets to create meaningful engagement with environmental data.

Cross-Lingual knowledge discovery : Chinese-to-English article linking in Wikipedia

In this paper we examine automated Chinese to English link discovery in Wikipedia and the effects of Chinese segmentation and Chinese to English translation on the hyperlink recommendation. Our experimental results show that the implemented link discovery framework can effectively recommend Chinese-to-English cross-lingual links. The techniques described here can assist bi-lingual users where a particular topic is not covered in Chinese, is not equally covered in both languages, or is biased in one language; as well as for language learning.

Visualization of thermal characteristics around the absorber tube of a standard parabolic trough thermal collector by 3D simulation

Three dimensional conjugate heat transfer simulation of a standard parabolic trough thermal collector receiver is performed numerically in order to visualize and analyze the surface thermal characteristics. The computational model is developed in Ansys Fluent environment based on some simplified assumptions. Three test conditions are selected from the existing literature to verify the numerical model directly, and reasonably good agreement between the model and the test results confirms the reliability of the simulation. Solar radiation flux profile around the tube is also approximated from the literature. An in house macro is written to read the input solar flux as a heat flux wall boundary condition for the tube wall. The numerical results show that there is an abrupt variation in the resultant heat flux along the circumference of the receiver. Consequently, the temperature varies throughout the tube surface. The lower half of the horizontal receiver enjoys the maximum solar flux, and therefore, experiences the maximum temperature rise compared to the upper part with almost leveled temperature. Reasonable attributions and suggestions are made on this particular type of conjugate thermal system. The knowledge that gained so far from this study will be used to further the analysis and to design an efficient concentrator photovoltaic collector in near future.

Visualization of predictive distributions for discrete spatial-temporal log Cox processes approximated with MCMC

An important aspect of decision support systems involves applying sophisticated and flexible statistical models to real datasets and communicating these results to decision makers in interpretable ways. An important class of problem is the modelling of incidence such as fire, disease etc. Models of incidence known as point processes or Cox processes are particularly challenging as they are ‘doubly stochastic’ i.e. obtaining the probability mass function of incidents requires two integrals to be evaluated. Existing approaches to the problem either use simple models that obtain predictions using plug-in point estimates and do not distinguish between Cox processes and density estimation but do use sophisticated 3D visualization for interpretation. Alternatively other work employs sophisticated non-parametric Bayesian Cox process models, but do not use visualization to render interpretable complex spatial temporal forecasts. The contribution here is to fill this gap by inferring predictive distributions of Gaussian-log Cox processes and rendering them using state of the art 3D visualization techniques. This requires performing inference on an approximation of the model on a discretized grid of large scale and adapting an existing spatial-diurnal kernel to the log Gaussian Cox process context.

Developing Co-operating Legal Knowledge Based Systems

In attempting to build intelligent litigation support tools, we have moved beyond first generation, production rule legal expert systems. Our work supplements rule-based reasoning with case based reasoning and intelligent information retrieval. This research, specifies an approach to the case based retrieval problem which relies heavily on an extended object-oriented / rule-based system architecture that is supplemented with causal background information. Machine learning techniques and a distributed agent architecture are used to help simulate the reasoning process of lawyers. In this paper, we outline our implementation of the hybrid IKBALS II Rule Based Reasoning / Case Based Reasoning system. It makes extensive use of an automated case representation editor and background information.

Decision strategies for automated visual collision avoidance

This paper provides a preliminary analysis of an autonomous uncooperative collision avoidance strategy for unmanned aircraft using image-based visual control. Assuming target detection, the approach consists of three parts. First, a novel decision strategy is used to determine appropriate reference image features to track for safe avoidance. This is achieved by considering the current rules of the air (regulations), the properties of spiral motion and the expected visual tracking errors. Second, a spherical visual predictive control (VPC) scheme is used to guide the aircraft along a safe spiral-like trajectory about the object. Lastly, a stopping decision based on thresholding a cost function is used to determine when to stop the avoidance behaviour. The approach does not require estimation of range or time to collision, and instead relies on tuning two mutually exclusive decision thresholds to ensure satisfactory performance.