TutorJ: un Intelligent Tutoring System di Supporto all'Apprendimento di Java

GAIML: A New Language for Verbal and Graphical Interaction in Chatbots

Natural and intuitive interaction between users and complex systems is a crucial research topic in human-computer interaction. A major direction is the definition and implementation of systems with natural language understanding capabilities. The interaction in natural language is often performed by means of systems called chatbots. A chatbot is a conversational agent with a proper knowledge base able to interact with users. Chatbots appearance can be very sophisticated with 3D avatars and speech processing modules. However the interaction between the system and the user is only performed through textual areas for inputs and replies. An interaction able to add to natural language also graph…

UNA PROCEDURA PER VALUTARE “AUTOMATICAMENTE” IL LIVELLO DI APPRENDIMENTO DEGLI STUDENTI

I-ChatbIT: An intelligent chatbot for the Italian Language

A novel chatbot architecture for the Italian language is presented that is aimed at implementing cognitive under- standing of the query by locating its cor- respondent subgraph in the agent’s KB by means of a graph matching strategy pur- posely devised. The FCG engine is used for producing replies starting from the se- mantic poles extracted from the candidate answers’ subgraphs. The system imple- ments a suitable disambiguation strategy for selecting the correct answer by analyz- ing the commonsense knowledge related to the adverbs in the query that is embed- ded in the lexical constructions of the ad- verbs themselves as a proper set of fea- tures. The whole system is presented, and a com…

MULTIPLE ECHINOCOCCOSIS OF THE LIVER:EXPERIMENTAL STUDY BY COMPUTER THREE-DIMENSIONAL MODELING

A combined semantic-syntactic sentence analysis for students assessment

TutorJ is an Intelligent Tutoring System able to fulfill the requests of a student with a learning path inside didactical materials. To this aim, it must assess the level of training of the learner. In the first version of TutorJ this goal was reached through a conversational agent whose linguistic interaction enriched by a LSA-based text analysis. This approach suffers from the limitations of LSA as a bag-of- words approach. Next, morphosyntactic comparison of sentences' structures was implemented. In this paper we present a new version of the assessment procedure involving both semantic, and morphosyntactic analysis user's sentences.

A Map-Based Visualization Tool To Support Tutors In E-Learning 2.0

Web 2.0 regards essentially the social issues about the new usage of web applications, but participative web and user generated contents induce a new way to think about the design of the web applications themselves. This is particularly true in the field of educational systems that are all web based applications. Many researchers are now devoted to study what is called e-learning 2.0 both as regards the technological issues in the field of computer science, and in relation to the impact of the web 2.0 social and psychological issues on the education process itself. One of the most crucial topics in e-learning 2.0 is the way to provide support to the teacher/tutor to avoid cognitive overload…

Linear density-based clustering with a discrete density model

Density-based clustering techniques are used in a wide range of data mining applications. One of their most attractive features con- sists in not making use of prior knowledge of the number of clusters that a dataset contains along with their shape. In this paper we propose a new algorithm named Linear DBSCAN (Lin-DBSCAN), a simple approach to clustering inspired by the density model introduced with the well known algorithm DBSCAN. Designed to minimize the computational cost of density based clustering on geospatial data, Lin-DBSCAN features a linear time complexity that makes it suitable for real-time applications on low-resource devices. Lin-DBSCAN uses a discrete version of the density m…

Application of an intelligent study and research support system for clinical anatomy in a cooperation scenario

Scientific research and teaching are strongly interrelated. A student should be educated both to the fundamentals of a discipline and to the research tasks as the future development of a discipline is entrusted to the students of today. Computer based tutoring systems already showed useful in pursuing the former target while the Intelligent Study and Research Support System developed at DINFO may be used to fulfill both in an integrated manner. This paper introduces the possible application of the ISRSS to training of Clinical Anatomy in a scenario of international cooperation among academic institutions.

GAIML: A New Language for Verbal and Graphical Interaction in Chatbots

One of the aims of the research in the field of the human-computer interaction is the design of a natural and intuitive interaction modalities. In particular, many efforts have been devoted in the development of systems able to interact with the user in natural language. Chatbots are the classical interfaces for natural language interaction. Such systems can be very sophisticated, including support for 3D avatars and speech analysis and synthesis. However, all of them present only a text area allowing the user to input her sentences. No doubt, an interaction involving also the natural language can increase the comfort of the user with respect to common interfaces using only graphical widget…

Evolving Tree Algorithm Modifications

There are many variants of the original self-organizing neural map algorithm proposed by Kohonen. One of the most recent is the Evolving Tree, a tree-shaped self-organizing network which has many interesting characteristics. This network builds a tree structure splitting the input dataset during learning. This paper presents a speed-up modification of the original training algorithm useful when the Evolving Tree network is used with complex data as images or video. After a measurement of the effectiveness an application of the modified algorithm in image segmentation is presented.

A software system to support the description and the explanation of medical images based on medical diagnosis criteria

An Emotional Talking Head for a Humoristic Chatbot

The interest about enhancing the interface usability of applications and entertainment platforms has increased in last years. The research in human-computer interaction on conversational agents, named also chatbots, and natural language dialogue systems equipped with audio-video interfaces has grown as well. One of the most pursued goals is to enhance the realness of interaction of such systems. For this reason they are provided with catchy interfaces using humanlike avatars capable to adapt their behavior according to the conversation content. This kind of agents can vocally interact with users by using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text To Speech (TTS) systems; besides they can c…

A framework for data-driven adaptive GUI generation based on DICOM

Computer applications for diagnostic medical imaging provide generally a wide range of tools to support physicians in their daily diagnosis activities. Unfortunately, some functionalities are specialized for specific diseases or imaging modalities, while other ones are useless for the images under investigation. Nevertheless, the corresponding Graphical User Interface (GUI) widgets are still present on the screen reducing the image visualization area. As a consequence, the physician may be affected by cognitive overload and visual stress causing a degradation of performances, mainly due to unuseful widgets. In clinical environments, a GUI must represent a sequence of steps for image investi…

Three-dimensional computer models in a case of Azygos lobe discovered during adenocarcinoma surgery

GUI Usability in Medical Imaging

The diffusion of computer technologies in everyday life has involved the birth of standard methodologies to control their development. Indeed, the purpose of standardization procedures consists of providing rules aimed to control technologies leaving no space for empirical improvisations. In general, medical software manufacturers provide their applications with Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) that are not compliant with any clear and standard usability criterion. The only guideline is the creation of GUIs inherited from the ones adopted on medical consoles because physicians use them routinely. This paper addresses this issue: medical software interfaces should be designed trying to overcome…

A meta-cognitive architecture for planning in uncertain environments

Abstract The behavior of an artificial agent performing in a natural environment is influenced by many different pressures and needs coming from both external world and internal factors, which sometimes drive the agent to reach conflicting goals. At the same time, the interaction between an artificial agent and the environment is deeply affected by uncertainty due to the imprecision in the description of the world, and the unpredictability of the effects of the agent’s actions. Such an agent needs meta-cognition in terms of both self-awareness and control. Self-awareness is related to the internal conditions that may possibly influence the completion of the task, while control is oriented t…

Automatic Generation of User Interfaces using the Set Description Language

We present a paradigm to generate automatically graphical user interfaces from a formal description of the data model following the well-known model-view-control paradigm. This paradigm provide complete separation between data model and interface description, setting the programmer free from the low-level aspects of programming interfaces, letting him take care of higher level aspects. The interface along with the data model is described by means of a formal language, the Set Description Language. We also describe the infrastructure based on this paradigm we implemented to generate graphical user interfaces for generic applications. Moreover, it can adapt the user interface of a program to …

Improving Assessment of Students through Semantic Space Construction

Assessment is one of the hardest tasks an Intelligent Tutoring System has to perform. It involves different and sometimes uncorrelated sub-tasks: building a student model to define her needs, defining tools and procedures to perform tests, understanding students' replies to system prompts, defining suitable procedures to evaluate the correctness of students' replies, and strategies to improve students' abilities after the assessment session.In this work we  present an improvement of our system, TutorJ, with particular attention to the assessment phase. Many tutoring systems offer only a limited set of assessment options like multiple-choice questions,fill-in-the-blanks tests or other types …

Towards MKDA: A Knowledge Discovery Assistant for Researches in Medicine

Nowadays doctors are generating a huge amount of raw data. These data, analyzed with data mining techniques, could be sources of new knowledge. Unluckily such tasks need skilled data analysts, and not so much researchers in Medicine are also data mining experts. In this paper we present a web based system for knowledge discovery assistance in Medicine able to advice a medical researcher in this kind of tasks. The user must define only the experiment specifications in a formal language we have defined. The system GUI helps users in their composition. Then the system plans a Knowledge Discovery Process (KDP) on the basis of rules in a knowledge base. Finally the system executes the KDP and pr…

Comprehensive Uncertainty Management in MDPs

Multistage decision-making in robots involved in real-world tasks is a process affected by uncertainty. The effects of the agent’s actions in a physical en- vironment cannot be always predicted deterministically and in a precise manner. Moreover, observing the environment can be a too onerous for a robot, hence not continuos. Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a well-known solution inspired to the classic probabilistic approach for managing uncertainty. On the other hand, including fuzzy logics and possibility theory has widened uncertainty representa- tion. Probability, possibility, fuzzy logics, and epistemic belief allow treating dif- ferent and not always superimposable facets of unce…

Acquisition of New Knowledge to Manage Conversation in TutorJ

This paper presents new conversation modules developed for TutorJ to support the use of meta-cognitive strategies in the learners. TutorJ is an Intelligent Tutoring System able to interact with users to assess their skills, and improve their knowledge in a specific domain. New models are devoted to plan the conversation and to acquire new knowledge from semi-structured data sources. Conversation planning is based on probabilistic techniques. Knowledge acquisition is based on retrieval, transformation and alignment of data from wikis to enrich the replies to students questions.

Fostering Teacher-Student Interaction and Learner Autonomy by the I-TUTOR Maps

The paper analyses the use of an automatically generated map as a mediator; that map visually represents the study domain of a university course and fosters the co-activity between teachers and stu- dents. In our approach the role of the teacher is meant as a media- tor between the student and knowledge. The mediation (and not the transmission) highlights a process in which theres no deterministic rela- tion between teaching and learning. Learning is affected by the students previous experiences, their own modalities of acquisition and by the in- puts coming from the environment. The learning path develops when the teachers and the students visions approach and, partly, overlap. In this cas…

XML-based Knowledge Discovery for Linguistic Atlas of Sicily (ALS) Project

The identification of new useful patterns in data is a core process for intelligent systems. Information overflow is directly related to this problem. In this work we propose a knowledge discovery methodology to retrieve useful and novel information from raw data stored in a DBMS. We used ALSDB, a database that has been built suitably to access structured information obtained from the questionnaires produced in the Linguistic Atlas of Sicily (ALS) project. The ALS project is a decennal joint effort led by researchers at the Dipartimento di Scienze Filologiche e Linguistiche of the University of Palermo that has the purpose to track and study the geo-linguistic and lexicographic processes ab…

Three-dimensional geometrical models using TC images in the study of the surgical approach to hydatid cists of the liver.

A Cognitive Dialogue Manager for Education Purposes

A conversational agent is a software system that is able to interact with users in a natural way, and often uses natural language capabilities. In this chapter, an evolution of a conversational agent is presented according to the definition of dialogue management techniques for the conversational agents. The presented conversational agent is intended to act as a part of an educational system. The chapter outlines the state-of-the-art systems and techniques for dialogue management in cognitive educational systems, and the underlying psychological and social aspects. We present our framework for a dialogue manager aimed to reduce the uncertainty in users’ sentences during the assessment of hi…

Towards MKDA: A Knowledge Discovery Assistant For Researches in Medicine

Nowadays doctors are generating a huge amount of raw data. These data, analyzed with data mining techniques, could be sources of new knowledge. Unluckily such tasks need skilled data analysts, and not so much researchers in Medicine are also data mining experts. In this paper we present a web based system for knowledge discovery assistance in Medicine able to advice a medical researcher in this kind of tasks. The user must define only the experiment specifications in a formal language we have defined. The system GUI helps users in their composition. Then the system plans a Knowledge Discovery Process (KDP) on the basis of rules in a knowledge base. Finally the system executes the KDP and pr…

WikiArt: An Ontology-Based Information Retrieval System for Arts

The paper presents WikiArt, a new system integrating three distinct types of contents about the art: data, information, and knowledge, to generate automatically thematic paths to consult all its contents. WikiArt is a wiki, allowing to manage cooperatively documents about artists, artworks, artistic movements or techniques, and so on. It is also an expert system, provided with an ontology about arts, with which it is able to plan possible different ways of consulting and browsing its contents. This ability is made possible by a second part of the ontology of the system, describing a collection of criteria regarding how to plan thematic paths, and by a set of rules followed by the expert sys…

A Proposal for a System able to analyse forum discussions and to build personalized learning paths