Methodology for Training Teachers in Basic and Specific Computer Skills

This article describes methodology for training teachers in Maths, Physics, Astronomy and Professional subjects in basic and specific computer skills.

A Computer-Based Strategy for Practical Skills Teaching

An adaptive learning technology embedded in e-learning environments ensures choice of the structure, content, and activities for each individual learner according to the teaching team’s domain and didactic knowledge and skills. In this paper a computer-based scenario for application of an adaptive navigation technology is proposed and demonstrated on an example course topic.

Improving the Watermarking Process with Usage of Block Error-Correcting Codes

The emergence of digital imaging and of digital networks has made duplication of original artwork easier. Watermarking techniques, also referred to as digital signature, sign images by introducing changes that are imperceptible to the human eye but easily recoverable by a computer program. Usage of error correcting codes is one of the good choices in order to correct possible errors when extracting the signature. In this paper, we present a scheme of error correction based on a combination of Reed-Solomon codes and another optimal linear code as inner code. We have investigated the strength of the noise that this scheme is steady to for a fixed capacity of the image and various lengths of the signature. Finally, we compare our results with other error correcting techniques that are used in watermarking. We have also created a computer program for image watermarking that uses the newly presented scheme for error correction.

A WEB-System for Computer Experiments in the Field of Program Transformations

The paper presents basic notions and scientific achievements in the field of program transformations, describes usage of these achievements both in the professional activity (when developing optimizing and unparallelizing compilers) and in the higher education. It also analyzes main problems in this area. The concept of control of program transformation information is introduced in the form of specialized knowledge bank on computer program transformations to support the scientific research, education and professional activity in the field. The tasks that are solved by the knowledge bank are formulated. The paper is intended for experts in the artificial intelligence, optimizing compilation, postgraduates and senior students of corresponding specialties; it may be also interesting for university lecturers and instructors.

Computer Processing of Medieval Slavic Sources in the Institute of Literature at BAS Repertorium Project (1994–2004)

Mixed-content miscellanies (very frequent in the Byzantine and mediaeval Slavic written heritage) are usually defined as collections of works with non-occupational, non-liturgical application, and texts in them are selected and arranged according to no identifiable principle. It is a “readable” type of miscellanies which were compiled mainly on the basis of the cognitive interests of compilers and readers. Just like the occupational ones, they also appeared to satisfy public needs but were intended for individual usage. My textological comparison had shown that mixed- content miscellanies often showed evidence of a stable content – some of them include the same constituent works in the same order, regardless that the manuscripts had no obvious genetic relationship. These correspondences were sufficiently numerous and distinctive that they could not be merely fortuitous, and the only sensible interpretation was that even when the operative organizational principle was not based on independently identifiable criteria, such as the church calendar, liturgical function, or thematic considerations, mixed-content miscellanies (or, at least, portions of their contents) nonetheless fell into types. In this respect, the apparent free selection and arrangement of texts in mixed-content miscellanies turns out to be illusory. The problem was – as the corpus of manuscripts that I and my colleagues needed to examine grew – our ability to keep track of the structure of each one, and to identify structural correspondences among manuscripts within the corpus, diminished. So, at the end of 1993 I addressed a letter to Prof. David Birnbaum (University of Pittsburgh, PA) with a request to help me to solve the problem. He and my colleague Andrey Boyadzhiev (Sofia University) pointed out to me that computers are well suited to recording, processing, and analyzing large amounts of data, and to identifying patterns within the data, and their proposal was that we try to develop a computer system for description of manuscripts, for their analysis and of course, for searching the data. Our collaboration in this project is now ten years old, and our talk today presents an overview of that collaboration.