Finding relevant missing references in learning courses.

Reference sites play an increasingly important role in learning processes. Teachers use these sites in order to identify topics that should be covered by a course or a lecture. Learners visit online encyclopedias and dictionaries to find alternative explanations of concepts, to learn more about a topic, or to better understand the context of a concept. Ideally, a course or lecture should cover all key concepts of the topic that it encompasses, but often time constraints prevent complete coverage. In this paper, we propose an approach to identify missing references and key concepts in a corpus of educational lectures. For this purpose, we link concepts in educational material to the organizational and linking structure of Wikipedia. Identifying missing resources enables learners to improve their understanding of a topic, and allows teachers to investigate whether their learning material covers all necessary concepts.

Authors:  Patrick Siehndel, Ricardo Kawase, Asmelash Teka Hadgu and Eelco Herder.

PDF: siehndel-www13-lile13

OpenScout: harvesting business and management learning objects from the web of data

Ricardo Kawase presenting @LILE2013 @WWW2013

Already existing open educational resources in the field of Business and Management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, it is difficult to act on OERs as some data is hidden. In the meanwhile, numerous repositories provide Linked Open Data on this field. Though, users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In this paper, we present the strategies to gather heterogeneous learning objects from the Web of Data, and we provide an overview of the benefits of the OpenScout platform. Despite the fact that not all data repositories strictly follow Linked Data principles, OpenScout addressed individual variations in order to harvest, align, and provide a single end-point. In the end, OpenScout provides a full-fledged environment that leverages on the Linked Open Data available on the Web and additionally exposes it in an homogeneous format.

Authors:  Ricardo Kawase, Marco Fisichella, Katja Niemann, Vassilis Pitsilis, Aristides Vidalis, Philipp Holtkamp and Bernardo Pereira Nunes

PDF: kawase-www13-lile13

Exploiting Twitter as a Social Channel for Human Computation

To fully leverage the innate problem solving capabilities of humans necessitates paradigm shifts towards decentralization of human computation
systems, making the existence of central authorities super uous and even impossible. In this position paper, we propose a novel decentralized
architecture that exploits the Twitter social network as a communication channel for harnessing human computation. Our framework provides
individuals and organizations the necessary infrastructure for human computation, facilitating human task submission, assignment and
aggregation. We presented a proof of concept and explore the feasibility of our approach in the light of several use cases.

Venue: WWW2012, CrowdSearch2012

Authors: Ernesto Diaz-Aviles, Ricardo Kawase, Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: diaz-www12-CrowdSearch12