2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, 2011
The evaluation of interactive adaptive and personalised systems has long been acknowledged as a d... more The evaluation of interactive adaptive and personalised systems has long been acknowledged as a difficult, complicated and very demanding endeavour due to the complex nature of these systems. This paper describes a web-based framework for the evaluation of end-user experience in adaptive and personalised e-Learning systems. The benefits of the framework include: i) the provision of an interactive reference and recommendation tool to encourage the evaluation of systems that fulfil certain methodological requirements; ii) the collaborative nature of the framework facilitates the sharing of information among researchers from the information technology, adaptive hypermedia, information retrieval and e-Learning communities; iii) the identification of pitfalls in the evaluation planning process as well as in data analysis; and iv) the translation of presented information into users language of choice. This paper also presents a review of User-Centred Evaluation approaches, methodologies and techniques adopted by current systems and frameworks. The results of this review are analysed. From these results, an architectural design for the framework was specified.
Adaptive Hypermedia Systems are capable of delivering personalized learning content to learners a... more Adaptive Hypermedia Systems are capable of delivering personalized learning content to learners across the WWW. Learning Environments provide interfaces and support services to aid tutors in course construction and aid learners in navigating those courses. However, most Learning Environments deliver content sourced from local repositories. This content tends not to offer adaptive features that Adaptive Hypermedia Systems are capable of delivering. Adaptive Hypermedia Systems, which are generally Web-based, could be ...
International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2010
The field of information retrieval still strives to develop models which allow semantic informati... more The field of information retrieval still strives to develop models which allow semantic information to be integrated in the ranking process to improve performance in comparison to standard bag-of-words based models. Cross-lingual information retrieval is an example of where such a model is required, as content or concepts often need to be matched across languages. To overcome this problem, a
The dynamic sourcing of Open Corpus Learning Content is a complex and resource intensive process.... more The dynamic sourcing of Open Corpus Learning Content is a complex and resource intensive process. However, modern technologies and methods can facilitate an efficient content identification and acquisition process. Several bodies of research have begun investigating the application of modern technologies to problems in this area, such as automatic semantic tagging of content, however none have managed to successfully implement
Towards Future Telecommunications Management Architectures Vincent P. Wade Department of Computer... more Towards Future Telecommunications Management Architectures Vincent P. Wade Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland Vincent. Wadiva. es. ted. ie Over the last two decades many communications management architectures for wide area ...
Adaptive Hypermedia is utilised in several domains, such as eLearning and professional training, ... more Adaptive Hypermedia is utilised in several domains, such as eLearning and professional training, where there is a growing movement towards the use of cognitively richer and more 'active' approaches to user engagement. In order to support this move, it is vital that adaptive personalisation systems, in these domains, are capable of integrating adaptively composed activities into adaptively personalised content compositions . Through the integration of the approaches that are used in the automated composition of web services with those found in Adaptive Hypermedia, we believe that it will be possible to support a unified approach to the adaptation of content and services through the leveraging of the characteristics that are common to both adaptive application domains.
Users have become accustomed to a web that is more than an interactive hypermedia but is a comple... more Users have become accustomed to a web that is more than an interactive hypermedia but is a complex mix of rich multimedia services and hypermedia content. Users are now contributors and active participants on the web. However, Pesonalisation technologies, such as Adaptive Hypermedia, have so far focused almost exclusively on adaptive content delivery resulting in their failure to become a high impact technologies. The absence of rich multimedia services in the current generation of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems means that they do not live up to the expectations of users. By providing personalised web experiences that combine both services and content in a seamless environment such systems could not only live up to the expectations of users but could exceed them. This paper presents a system that supports the adaptive selection and sequencing of both content and services in a unified manner. By applying techniques used in content based Adaptive Hypermedia to services with making use of the state of the art in service composition, this system delivers personalised web experiences that combine adaptively selected and sequenced content and services. The integration of appropriate content with services can improve the experience of the user as well as making the activity more efficient.
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Personalised Multilingual Hypertext Retrieval - PMHR '11, 2011
The explosive growth of the Internet has seen it exceed over two billion users in 2010. However a... more The explosive growth of the Internet has seen it exceed over two billion users in 2010. However an analysis of the demography of this user base indicates an ever growing diversity. Currently only 38.8% of internet users originate from the countries such as Europe, America and Australia whereas 61.2% internet users come from the Africa, Asia and Middle East. Moreover, these figures are changing even farther in favour of Africa, Asia and Middle East countries since their current internet penetration levels are relatively low e.g. the penetration of the internet in China/Asia is only at 21%, and Africa is only 10%. It is clear that the diversity of the user base of the web is growing rapidly. Moreover research is showing that each individual uses the WWW in different ways that suit their own personal needs, preferences. However, it is also clear that these differences extends far beyond just the appropriateness of content selection, and encompasses many dimensions e.g. tasks & activities, cultural preferences, language and social interaction etc. From a language diversity perspective, this growing diversity of internet users is increasingly apparent with English only accounting for 27% of all languages on the Internet in 2010. Other evidence of user diversity is demonstrated in social networking sites such as Facebook where in 2007 it supported 50M users in only one language (English) whilst by 2010 it had grown to 600M users and supported 77 different languages. By 2010 55% (approximately 13.75 Billion) tweets on Twitter were non-English. The expansion of the internet is not just in user number but has also resulted in vast quantities and great diversity of WWW accessible content where user generated content has for some time exceeded traditional web hosted content. In 2011, mobile access to the Internet and WWW has exceeded that accessed from desktop computers. Increasingly digital content on the internet is reaching users, not just through traditional web queries but via collaborative social networks and mediated personalisation filters, which check for affinity, freshness and other complex selection factors. Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web research is examining the personalised delivery and exploration of adaptive content. However, content personalisation has traditionally been focused on closed-corpus content, with less research being conducted on open corpus content. From a commercial perspective, information portals and recommender systems have been more focused on adaptive content identification/retrieval rather than adaptive content composition. It is well recognised that a key influencer on the WWW's evolution will be the end-users themselves and not just the major commercial internet players and technical communities. In fact social networking/social media is the fastest growing sector of the WWW and is facilitating the rapid formation of communities of extremely diverse users. The evolving WWW must be able to break the barriers of language, it must empower users to easily assimilate and reuse content, and it must connect users with real, shared interests in an even more meaningful way.
Policy-based management systems use declarative rules to govern their operation whilst satisfying... more Policy-based management systems use declarative rules to govern their operation whilst satisfying the goals of the system. One of the fundamental issues in policy engineering remains the inability to automatically refine high-level goals to low level achievable goals, many of which will be interdependent and conflicting. This paper introduces the automated decomposition and refinement of management policies through the optimisation of balancing constraints by the innovative integration metaheuristic algorithms.
Integrated Network Management VI. Distributed Management for the Networked Millennium. Proceedings of the Sixth IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management. (Cat. No.99EX302), 1999
Service providers are under increasing competitive pressure to reduce costs, increase customer se... more Service providers are under increasing competitive pressure to reduce costs, increase customer service and introduce new services. Speed of deployment, ease of reuse of existing components and cooperation across organizational boundaries are vital for management systems to succeed in such an environment. This requires a significant change in the way management systems are modeled and developed. This paper presents a design process which is customized to support the analysis and development of inter and intra domain management systems as well as assisting in the development and deployment of reusable components. The design process was trialed and validated by its application in the development of software in a multi-domain management research project.
Personalised elearning is being heralded as one of the grand challenges of next generation learni... more Personalised elearning is being heralded as one of the grand challenges of next generation learning systems, in particular, its ability to support greater effectiveness, efficiency and student empowerment. However, a key problem with such systems is their reliance on bespoke content developed for, and only used by, these systems. The challenge for adaptive systems in scalably supporting personalised elearning is its ability to source, harvest and deliver open corpus content to adaptive content services and personalised elearning systems. This paper examines the issues involved in implementing such an adaptive content service. The paper seeks to explore the accurate extraction of content requirements from the adaptive system, the sourcing and identification of suitable learning content, the harvesting and customisation of the content for delivery to adaptive elearning systems.
Developing adaptive, rich-media, eLearning courses tends to be a complex, highly-expensive and ti... more Developing adaptive, rich-media, eLearning courses tends to be a complex, highly-expensive and time-consuming task. A typical adaptive eLearning course will involve a multi-skilled development team of technologists, instructional developers, subject matter experts and integrators. Even where the adaptive course attempts to reuse existing digital resources, considerable effort is still required in the integration of the adaptive techniques and curriculum. This paper tackles the fundamental challenges of extending adaptivity across not only content (based on prior knowledge, goals, learning styles, connectivity etc.) but also across adaptive pedagogic approaches, communication tools and a range of e-activity types which are required for effective, deeper learning. This paper identifies key activities and requirements for adaptive course construction and presents the design of a tool to allow the rapid construction of such courses. The paper outlines the usage of this tool in the form of a case study and presents its research findings.
2007 10th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, 2007
Page 1. Service Management in a Dynamic E-Business Environment Marcus O'Connell * Nexala Tec... more Page 1. Service Management in a Dynamic E-Business Environment Marcus O'Connell * Nexala Technologies Dublin, Ireland marcus.oconnellgnexala.com Abstract-Internet technologies are facilitating the development of an ...
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Personalised Multilingual Hypertext Retrieval - PMHR '11, 2011
A key advantage of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) is their ability to re-sequence and reintegr... more A key advantage of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) is their ability to re-sequence and reintegrate content to satisfy a particular user's need, context or requirements. However, this requires large volumes of content, with appropriate granularities and suitable meta-data descriptions, representing a major impediment to the mainstream adoption of Adaptive Hypermedia. Opencorpus content is now widely available on the web, however, traditional information retrieval (IR) approaches are an inadequate means of incorporating these external content resources within AHS. This is due to the "one size fits all" content delivery paradigm offered by traditional IR. Slicing technology addresses these limitations by providing adaptive retrieval of open corpus resources, tailored to suit AHS specific content requirements. This is achieved through the on demand provision of tailored content called slices. This paper introduces slicing systems and details the objectives and challenges involved in the evaluation of such systems. A framework for the evaluation of slicing systems is presented along with a proposed experimental implementation.
2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, 2011
The evaluation of interactive adaptive and personalised systems has long been acknowledged as a d... more The evaluation of interactive adaptive and personalised systems has long been acknowledged as a difficult, complicated and very demanding endeavour due to the complex nature of these systems. This paper describes a web-based framework for the evaluation of end-user experience in adaptive and personalised e-Learning systems. The benefits of the framework include: i) the provision of an interactive reference and recommendation tool to encourage the evaluation of systems that fulfil certain methodological requirements; ii) the collaborative nature of the framework facilitates the sharing of information among researchers from the information technology, adaptive hypermedia, information retrieval and e-Learning communities; iii) the identification of pitfalls in the evaluation planning process as well as in data analysis; and iv) the translation of presented information into users language of choice. This paper also presents a review of User-Centred Evaluation approaches, methodologies and techniques adopted by current systems and frameworks. The results of this review are analysed. From these results, an architectural design for the framework was specified.
Adaptive Hypermedia Systems are capable of delivering personalized learning content to learners a... more Adaptive Hypermedia Systems are capable of delivering personalized learning content to learners across the WWW. Learning Environments provide interfaces and support services to aid tutors in course construction and aid learners in navigating those courses. However, most Learning Environments deliver content sourced from local repositories. This content tends not to offer adaptive features that Adaptive Hypermedia Systems are capable of delivering. Adaptive Hypermedia Systems, which are generally Web-based, could be ...
International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2010
The field of information retrieval still strives to develop models which allow semantic informati... more The field of information retrieval still strives to develop models which allow semantic information to be integrated in the ranking process to improve performance in comparison to standard bag-of-words based models. Cross-lingual information retrieval is an example of where such a model is required, as content or concepts often need to be matched across languages. To overcome this problem, a
The dynamic sourcing of Open Corpus Learning Content is a complex and resource intensive process.... more The dynamic sourcing of Open Corpus Learning Content is a complex and resource intensive process. However, modern technologies and methods can facilitate an efficient content identification and acquisition process. Several bodies of research have begun investigating the application of modern technologies to problems in this area, such as automatic semantic tagging of content, however none have managed to successfully implement
Towards Future Telecommunications Management Architectures Vincent P. Wade Department of Computer... more Towards Future Telecommunications Management Architectures Vincent P. Wade Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland Vincent. Wadiva. es. ted. ie Over the last two decades many communications management architectures for wide area ...
Adaptive Hypermedia is utilised in several domains, such as eLearning and professional training, ... more Adaptive Hypermedia is utilised in several domains, such as eLearning and professional training, where there is a growing movement towards the use of cognitively richer and more 'active' approaches to user engagement. In order to support this move, it is vital that adaptive personalisation systems, in these domains, are capable of integrating adaptively composed activities into adaptively personalised content compositions . Through the integration of the approaches that are used in the automated composition of web services with those found in Adaptive Hypermedia, we believe that it will be possible to support a unified approach to the adaptation of content and services through the leveraging of the characteristics that are common to both adaptive application domains.
Users have become accustomed to a web that is more than an interactive hypermedia but is a comple... more Users have become accustomed to a web that is more than an interactive hypermedia but is a complex mix of rich multimedia services and hypermedia content. Users are now contributors and active participants on the web. However, Pesonalisation technologies, such as Adaptive Hypermedia, have so far focused almost exclusively on adaptive content delivery resulting in their failure to become a high impact technologies. The absence of rich multimedia services in the current generation of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems means that they do not live up to the expectations of users. By providing personalised web experiences that combine both services and content in a seamless environment such systems could not only live up to the expectations of users but could exceed them. This paper presents a system that supports the adaptive selection and sequencing of both content and services in a unified manner. By applying techniques used in content based Adaptive Hypermedia to services with making use of the state of the art in service composition, this system delivers personalised web experiences that combine adaptively selected and sequenced content and services. The integration of appropriate content with services can improve the experience of the user as well as making the activity more efficient.
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Personalised Multilingual Hypertext Retrieval - PMHR '11, 2011
The explosive growth of the Internet has seen it exceed over two billion users in 2010. However a... more The explosive growth of the Internet has seen it exceed over two billion users in 2010. However an analysis of the demography of this user base indicates an ever growing diversity. Currently only 38.8% of internet users originate from the countries such as Europe, America and Australia whereas 61.2% internet users come from the Africa, Asia and Middle East. Moreover, these figures are changing even farther in favour of Africa, Asia and Middle East countries since their current internet penetration levels are relatively low e.g. the penetration of the internet in China/Asia is only at 21%, and Africa is only 10%. It is clear that the diversity of the user base of the web is growing rapidly. Moreover research is showing that each individual uses the WWW in different ways that suit their own personal needs, preferences. However, it is also clear that these differences extends far beyond just the appropriateness of content selection, and encompasses many dimensions e.g. tasks & activities, cultural preferences, language and social interaction etc. From a language diversity perspective, this growing diversity of internet users is increasingly apparent with English only accounting for 27% of all languages on the Internet in 2010. Other evidence of user diversity is demonstrated in social networking sites such as Facebook where in 2007 it supported 50M users in only one language (English) whilst by 2010 it had grown to 600M users and supported 77 different languages. By 2010 55% (approximately 13.75 Billion) tweets on Twitter were non-English. The expansion of the internet is not just in user number but has also resulted in vast quantities and great diversity of WWW accessible content where user generated content has for some time exceeded traditional web hosted content. In 2011, mobile access to the Internet and WWW has exceeded that accessed from desktop computers. Increasingly digital content on the internet is reaching users, not just through traditional web queries but via collaborative social networks and mediated personalisation filters, which check for affinity, freshness and other complex selection factors. Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web research is examining the personalised delivery and exploration of adaptive content. However, content personalisation has traditionally been focused on closed-corpus content, with less research being conducted on open corpus content. From a commercial perspective, information portals and recommender systems have been more focused on adaptive content identification/retrieval rather than adaptive content composition. It is well recognised that a key influencer on the WWW's evolution will be the end-users themselves and not just the major commercial internet players and technical communities. In fact social networking/social media is the fastest growing sector of the WWW and is facilitating the rapid formation of communities of extremely diverse users. The evolving WWW must be able to break the barriers of language, it must empower users to easily assimilate and reuse content, and it must connect users with real, shared interests in an even more meaningful way.
Policy-based management systems use declarative rules to govern their operation whilst satisfying... more Policy-based management systems use declarative rules to govern their operation whilst satisfying the goals of the system. One of the fundamental issues in policy engineering remains the inability to automatically refine high-level goals to low level achievable goals, many of which will be interdependent and conflicting. This paper introduces the automated decomposition and refinement of management policies through the optimisation of balancing constraints by the innovative integration metaheuristic algorithms.
Integrated Network Management VI. Distributed Management for the Networked Millennium. Proceedings of the Sixth IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management. (Cat. No.99EX302), 1999
Service providers are under increasing competitive pressure to reduce costs, increase customer se... more Service providers are under increasing competitive pressure to reduce costs, increase customer service and introduce new services. Speed of deployment, ease of reuse of existing components and cooperation across organizational boundaries are vital for management systems to succeed in such an environment. This requires a significant change in the way management systems are modeled and developed. This paper presents a design process which is customized to support the analysis and development of inter and intra domain management systems as well as assisting in the development and deployment of reusable components. The design process was trialed and validated by its application in the development of software in a multi-domain management research project.
Personalised elearning is being heralded as one of the grand challenges of next generation learni... more Personalised elearning is being heralded as one of the grand challenges of next generation learning systems, in particular, its ability to support greater effectiveness, efficiency and student empowerment. However, a key problem with such systems is their reliance on bespoke content developed for, and only used by, these systems. The challenge for adaptive systems in scalably supporting personalised elearning is its ability to source, harvest and deliver open corpus content to adaptive content services and personalised elearning systems. This paper examines the issues involved in implementing such an adaptive content service. The paper seeks to explore the accurate extraction of content requirements from the adaptive system, the sourcing and identification of suitable learning content, the harvesting and customisation of the content for delivery to adaptive elearning systems.
Developing adaptive, rich-media, eLearning courses tends to be a complex, highly-expensive and ti... more Developing adaptive, rich-media, eLearning courses tends to be a complex, highly-expensive and time-consuming task. A typical adaptive eLearning course will involve a multi-skilled development team of technologists, instructional developers, subject matter experts and integrators. Even where the adaptive course attempts to reuse existing digital resources, considerable effort is still required in the integration of the adaptive techniques and curriculum. This paper tackles the fundamental challenges of extending adaptivity across not only content (based on prior knowledge, goals, learning styles, connectivity etc.) but also across adaptive pedagogic approaches, communication tools and a range of e-activity types which are required for effective, deeper learning. This paper identifies key activities and requirements for adaptive course construction and presents the design of a tool to allow the rapid construction of such courses. The paper outlines the usage of this tool in the form of a case study and presents its research findings.
2007 10th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, 2007
Page 1. Service Management in a Dynamic E-Business Environment Marcus O'Connell * Nexala Tec... more Page 1. Service Management in a Dynamic E-Business Environment Marcus O'Connell * Nexala Technologies Dublin, Ireland marcus.oconnellgnexala.com Abstract-Internet technologies are facilitating the development of an ...
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Personalised Multilingual Hypertext Retrieval - PMHR '11, 2011
A key advantage of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) is their ability to re-sequence and reintegr... more A key advantage of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) is their ability to re-sequence and reintegrate content to satisfy a particular user's need, context or requirements. However, this requires large volumes of content, with appropriate granularities and suitable meta-data descriptions, representing a major impediment to the mainstream adoption of Adaptive Hypermedia. Opencorpus content is now widely available on the web, however, traditional information retrieval (IR) approaches are an inadequate means of incorporating these external content resources within AHS. This is due to the "one size fits all" content delivery paradigm offered by traditional IR. Slicing technology addresses these limitations by providing adaptive retrieval of open corpus resources, tailored to suit AHS specific content requirements. This is achieved through the on demand provision of tailored content called slices. This paper introduces slicing systems and details the objectives and challenges involved in the evaluation of such systems. A framework for the evaluation of slicing systems is presented along with a proposed experimental implementation.
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Papers by Vincent Wade