Planning and implementing a new assessment strategy using an e-learning platform

One of the most difficult issues of e-Learning is the students’ assessment. Being this an outstanding task regarding theoretical topics, it becomes even more challenging when the topics under evaluation are practical. ISCAP’s Information Systems Department is composed of about twenty teachers who have been for several years using an e-learning environment (at the moment Moodle 2.3) combined with traditional assessment. They are now planning and implementing a new e-learning assessment strategy. This effort was undertaken in order to evaluate a practical topic (the use of spreadsheets to solve management problems) common to shared courses of several undergraduate degree programs. The same team group is already experienced in the assessment of theoretical information systems topics using the b-learning platform. Therefore, this project works as an extension to previous experiences being the team aware of the additional difficulties due to the practical nature of the topics. This paper describes this project and presents two cycles of the action research methodology, used to conduct the research. The first cycle goal was to produce a database of questions. When it was implemented in order to be used with a pilot group of students, several problems were identified. Subsequently, the second cycle consisted in solving the identified problems preparing the database and all the players to a broader scope implementation. For each cycle, all the phases, its drawbacks and achievements are described. This paper suits all those who are or are planning to be in the process of shifting their assessment strategy from a traditional to one supported by an e-learning platform.

Estratégias de implementação de plataformas de e-maintenance na indústria: desenvolvimento de uma aplicação para um sistema logístico de viaturas

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrotécnica – Sistemas Eléctricos de Energia

Sistema pericial para suporte à decisão na alocação de recursos de emergência

O panorama atual da emergência e socorro de primeira linha em Portugal, carateriza-se por uma grande aposta ao longo dos últimos anos num incremento contínuo da qualidade e da eficiência que estes serviços prestam às populações locais. Com vista à prossecução do objetivo de melhoria contínua dos serviços, foram realizados ao longo dos últimos anos investimentos avultados ao nível dos recursos técnicos e ao nível da contratação e formação de recursos humanos altamente qualificados. Atualmente as instituições que prestam socorro e emergência de primeira linha estão bem dotadas ao nível físico e ao nível humano dos recursos necessários para fazerem face aos mais diversos tipos de ocorrências. Contudo, ao nível dos sistemas de informação de apoio à emergência e socorro de primeira linha, verifica-se uma inadequação (e por vezes inexistência) de sistemas informáticos capazes de suportar convenientemente o atual contexto de exigência e complexidade da emergência e socorro. Foi feita ao longo dos últimos anos, uma forte aposta na melhoria dos recursos físicos e dos recursos humanos encarregues da resposta àsemergência de primeira linha, mas descurou-se a área da gestão e análise da informação sobre as ocorrências, assim como, o delinear de possíveis estratégias de prevenção que uma análise sistematizada da informação sobre as ocorrências possibilita. Nas instituições de emergência e socorro de primeira linha em Portugal (bombeiros, proteção civil municipal, PSP, GNR, polícia municipal), prevalecem ainda hoje os sistemas informáticos apenas para o registo das ocorrências à posteriori e a total inexistência de sistemas de registo de informação e de apoio à decisão na alocação de recursos que operem em tempo real. A generalidade dos sistemas informáticos atualmente existentes nas instituições são unicamente de sistemas de backoffice, que não aproveitam a todas as potencialidades da informação operacional neles armazenada. Verificou-se também, que a geo-localização por via informática dos recursos físicos e de pontos de interesse relevantes em situações críticas é inexistente a este nível. Neste contexto, consideramos ser possível e importante alinhar o nível dos sistemas informáticos das instituições encarregues da emergência e socorro de primeira linha, com o nível dos recursos físicos e humanos que já dispõem atualmente. Dado que a emergência e socorro de primeira linha é um domínio claramente elegível para a aplicação de tecnologias provenientes dos domínios da inteligência artificial (nomeadamente sistemas periciais para apoio à decisão) e da geo-localização, decidimos no âmbito desta tese desenvolver um sistema informático capaz de colmatar muitas das lacunas por nós identificadas ao nível dos sistemas informáticos destas instituições. Pretendemos colocar as suas plataformas informáticas num nível similar ao dos seus recursos físicos e humanos. Assim, foram por nós identificadas duas áreas chave onde a implementação de sistemas informáticos adequados às reais necessidades das instituições podem ter um impacto muito proporcionar uma melhor gestão e otimização dos recursos físicos e humanos. As duas áreas chave por nós identificadas são o suporte à decisão na alocação dos recursos físicos e a geolocalização dos recursos físicos, das ocorrências e dos pontos de interesse. Procurando fornecer uma resposta válida e adequada a estas duas necessidades prementes, foi desenvolvido no âmbito desta tese o sistema CRITICAL DECISIONS. O sistema CRITICAL DECISIONS incorpora um conjunto de funcionalidades típicas de um sistema pericial, para o apoio na decisão de alocação de recursos físicos às ocorrências. A inferência automática dos recursos físicos, assenta num conjunto de regra de inferência armazenadas numa base de conhecimento, em constante crescimento e atualização, com base nas respostas bem sucedidas a ocorrências passadas. Para suprimir as carências aos nível da geo-localização dos recursos físicos, das ocorrências e dos pontos de interesse, o sistema CRITICAL DECISIONS incorpora também um conjunto de funcionalidades de geo-localização. Estas permitem a geo-localização de todos os recursos físicos da instituição, a geo-localização dos locais e as áreas das várias ocorrências, assim como, dos vários tipos de pontos de interesse. O sistema CRITICAL DECISIONS visa ainda suprimir um conjunto de outras carências por nós identificadas, ao nível da gestão documental (planos de emergência, plantas dos edifícios) , da comunicação, da partilha de informação entre as instituições de socorro e emergência locais, da contabilização dos tempos de serviço, entre outros. O sistema CRITICAL DECISIONS é o culminar de um esforço colaborativo e contínuo com várias instituições, responsáveis pela emergência e socorro de primeira linha a nível local. Esperamos com o sistema CRITICAL DECISIONS, dotar estas instituições de uma plataforma informática atual, inovadora, evolutiva, com baixos custos de implementação e de operação, capaz de proporcionar melhorias contínuas e significativas ao nível da qualidade da resposta às ocorrências, das capacidades de prevenção e de uma melhor otimização de todos os tipos de recursos que têm ao dispor.

Orchestration of e-learning services for automatic evaluation of programming exercises

Managing programming exercises require several heterogeneous systems such as evaluation engines, learning objects repositories and exercise resolution environments. The coordination of networks of such disparate systems is rather complex. These tools would be too specific to incorporate in an e-Learning platform. Even if they could be provided as pluggable components, the burden of maintaining them would be prohibitive to institutions with few courses in those domains. This work presents a standard based approach for the coordination of a network of e-Learning systems participating on the automatic evaluation of programming exercises. The proposed approach uses a pivot component to orchestrate the interaction among all the systems using communication standards. This approach was validated through its effective use on classroom and we present some preliminary results.

On the hardware and software architecture of the robuter mobile platform: a hands-on approach

The Robuter is a robotic mobile platform that is located in the “Hands-On” Laboratory of the IPP-Hurray! Research Group, at the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto. Recently, the Robuter was subject of an upgrading process addressing two essential areas: the Hardware Architecture and the Software Architecture. This upgrade in process was triggered due to technical problems on-board of the robot and also to the fact that the hardware/software architecture has become obsolete. This Technical Report overviews the most important aspects of the new Hardware and Software Architectures of the Robuter. This document also presents a first approach on the first steps towards the use of the Robuter platform, and provides some hints on future work that may be carried out using this mobile platform.

QoS-based surrogates selection and service proposal formulation in offloading environments

Resource constraints are becoming a problem as many of the wireless mobile devices have increased generality. Our work tries to address this growing demand on resources and performance, by proposing the dynamic selection of neighbor nodes for cooperative service execution. This selection is in uenced by user's quality of service requirements expressed in his request, tailoring provided service to user's speci c needs. In this paper we improve our proposal's formulation algorithm with the ability to trade o time for the quality of the solution. At any given time, a complete solution for service execution exists, and the quality of that solution is expected to improve overtime.

Programming atomic multicasts in CAN

In Distributed Computer-Controlled Systems (DCCS), a special emphasis must be given to the communication infrastructure, which must provide timely and reliable communication services. CAN networks are usually suitable to support small-scale DCCS. However, they are known to present some reliability problems, which can lead to an unreliable behaviour of the supported applications. In this paper, an atomic multicast protocol for CAN networks is proposed. This protocol explores the CAN synchronous properties, providing a timely and reliable service to the supported applications. The implementation of such protocol in Ada, on top of the Ada version of Real-Time Linux is presented, which is used to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of the platform to support reliable communications in DCCS.

Negotiation platform for personalised advertising

This paper describes a multi-agent brokerage platform for near real time advertising personalisation organised in three layers: user interface, agency and marketplace. The personalisation is based on the classification of viewer profiles and advertisements (ads). The goal is to provide viewers with a personalised advertising alignment during programme intervals. The enterprise interface agents upload new ads and negotiation profiles to producer agents and new user and negotiation profiles to distributor agents. The agency layer is composed of agents that represent ad producer and media distributor enterprises as well as the market regulator. The enterprise agents offer data upload and download operations as Web Services and register the specification of these interfaces at an UDDI registry for future discovery. The market agent supports the registration and deregistration of enterprise delegate agents at the marketplace. This paper addresses the marketplace layer, an agent-based negotiation platform per se, where delegates of the relevant advertising agencies and programme distributors negotiate to create the advertising alignment that best fits a viewer profile and the advertising campaigns available. The whole brokerage platform is being developed in JADE, a multi-agent development platform. The delegate agents download the negotiation profile and upload the negotiation results from / to the corresponding enterprise agent. In the meanwhile, they negotiate using the Iterated Contract Net protocol. All tools and technologies used are open source.

A proposal for media component brokerage

This paper describes how MPEG-4 object based video (obv) can be used to allow selected objects to be inserted into the play-out stream to a specific user based on a profile derived for that user. The application scenario described here is for personalized product placement, and considers the value of this application in the current and evolving commercial media distribution market given the huge emphasis media distributors are currently placing on targeted advertising. This level of application of video content requires a sophisticated content description and metadata system (e.g., MPEG-7). The scenario considers the requirement for global libraries to provide the objects to be inserted into the streams. The paper then considers the commercial trading of objects between the libraries, video service providers, advertising agencies and other parties involved in the service. Consequently a brokerage of video objects is proposed based on negotiation and trading using intelligent agents representing the various parties. The proposed Media Brokerage Platform is a multi-agent system structured in two layers. In the top layer, there is a collection of coarse grain agents representing the real world players – the providers and deliverers of media contents and the market regulator profiler – and, in the bottom layer, there is a set of finer grain agents constituting the marketplace – the delegate agents and the market agent. For knowledge representation (domain, strategic and negotiation protocols) we propose a Semantic Web approach based on ontologies. The media components contents should be represented in MPEG-7 and the metadata describing the objects to be traded should follow a specific ontology. The top layer content providers and deliverers are modelled by intelligent autonomous agents that express their will to transact – buy or sell – media components by registering at a service registry. The market regulator profiler creates, according to the selected profile, a market agent, which, in turn, checks the service registry for potential trading partners for a given component and invites them for the marketplace. The subsequent negotiation and actual transaction is performed by delegate agents in accordance with their profiles and the predefined rules of the market.

B2B platform for media content personalisation

This paper proposes a novel business model to support media content personalisation: an agent-based business-to-business (B2B) brokerage platform for media content producer and distributor businesses. Distributors aim to provide viewers with a personalised content experience and producers wish to en-sure that their media objects are watched by as many targeted viewers as possible. In this scenario viewers and media objects (main programmes and candidate objects for insertion) have profiles and, in the case of main programme objects, are annotated with placeholders representing personalisation opportunities, i.e., locations for insertion of personalised media objects. The MultiMedia Brokerage (MMB) platform is a multiagent multilayered brokerage composed by agents that act as sellers and buyers of viewer stream timeslots and/or media objects on behalf of the registered businesses. These agents engage in negotiations to select the media objects that best match the current programme and viewer profiles.

Energy-conscious tasks partitioning onto a heterogeneous multi-core platform

Modern multicore processors for the embedded market are often heterogeneous in nature. One feature often available are multiple sleep states with varying transition cost for entering and leaving said sleep states. This research effort explores the energy efficient task-mapping on such a heterogeneous multicore platform to reduce overall energy consumption of the system. This is performed in the context of a partitioned scheduling approach and a very realistic power model, which improves over some of the simplifying assumptions often made in the state-of-the-art. The developed heuristic consists of two phases, in the first phase, tasks are allocated to minimise their active energy consumption, while the second phase trades off a higher active energy consumption for an increased ability to exploit savings through more efficient sleep states. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.

Service offloading in adaptive real-time systems

Smartphones and other internet enabled devices are now common on our everyday life, thus unsurprisingly a current trend is to adapt desktop PC applications to execute on them. However, since most of these applications have quality of service (QoS) requirements, their execution on resource-constrained mobile devices presents several challenges. One solution to support more stringent applications is to offload some of the applications’ services to surrogate devices nearby. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an adaptable offloading mechanism which takes into account the QoS requirements of the application being executed (particularly its real-time requirements), whilst allowing offloading services to several surrogate nodes. We also present how the proposed computing model can be implemented in an Android environment

Provably good scheduling of sporadic tasks with resource sharing on a two-type heterogeneous multiprocessor platform

Consider the problem of scheduling a set of implicit-deadline sporadic tasks to meet all deadlines on a two-type heterogeneous multiprocessor platform where a task may request at most one of |R| shared resources. There are m1 processors of type-1 and m2 processors of type-2. Tasks may migrate only when requesting or releasing resources. We present a new algorithm, FF-3C-vpr, which offers a guarantee that if a task set is schedulable to meet deadlines by an optimal task assignment scheme that only allows tasks to migrate when requesting or releasing a resource, then FF-3Cvpr also meets deadlines if given processors 4+6*ceil(|R|/min(m1,m2)) times as fast. As far as we know, it is the first result for resource sharing on heterogeneous platforms with provable performance.

Experiences on the implementation of a cooperative embedded system framework

As the complexity of embedded systems increases, multiple services have to compete for the limited resources of a single device. This situation is particularly critical for small embedded devices used in consumer electronics, telecommunication, industrial automation, or automotive systems. In fact, in order to satisfy a set of constraints related to weight, space, and energy consumption, these systems are typically built using microprocessors with lower processing power and limited resources. The CooperatES framework has recently been proposed to tackle these challenges, allowing resource constrained devices to collectively execute services with their neighbours in order to fulfil the complex Quality of Service (QoS) constraints imposed by users and applications. In order to demonstrate the framework's concepts, a prototype is being implemented in the Android platform. This paper discusses key challenges that must be addressed and possible directions to incorporate the desired real-time behaviour in Android.

Improving quality-of-service in wireless sensor networks by mitigating “Hidden-Node Collisions”

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) emerge as underlying infrastructures for new classes of large-scale networked embedded systems. However, WSNs system designers must fulfill the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements imposed by the applications (and users). Very harsh and dynamic physical environments and extremely limited energy/computing/memory/communication node resources are major obstacles for satisfying QoS metrics such as reliability, timeliness, and system lifetime. The limited communication range of WSN nodes, link asymmetry, and the characteristics of the physical environment lead to a major source of QoS degradation in WSNs-the ldquohidden node problem.rdquo In wireless contention-based medium access control (MAC) protocols, when two nodes that are not visible to each other transmit to a third node that is visible to the former, there will be a collision-called hidden-node or blind collision. This problem greatly impacts network throughput, energy-efficiency and message transfer delays, and the problem dramatically increases with the number of nodes. This paper proposes H-NAMe, a very simple yet extremely efficient hidden-node avoidance mechanism for WSNs. H-NAMe relies on a grouping strategy that splits each cluster of a WSN into disjoint groups of non-hidden nodes that scales to multiple clusters via a cluster grouping strategy that guarantees no interference between overlapping clusters. Importantly, H-NAMe is instantiated in IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee, which currently are the most widespread communication technologies for WSNs, with only minor add-ons and ensuring backward compatibility with their protocols standards. H-NAMe was implemented and exhaustively tested using an experimental test-bed based on ldquooff-the-shelfrdquo technology, showing that it increases network throughput and transmission success probability up to twice the values obtained without H-NAMe. H-NAMe effectiveness was also demonstrated in a target tracking application with mobile robots - over a WSN deployment.