2435549
Learning Object and Dynamic E-Learning Service Technologies for Simulation-Based Medical Instruction
Simulations are increasingly used for instruction and training purposes in many application areas such as commercial and military aviation, battlefield management, building construction, product manufacturing, medical education and others. However, most simulation systems are monolithic, ad hoc and non-reusable. In this work, we apply learning object and e-learning service technologies to modularize an existing Web-based simulation system called the Virtual Anesthesia Machine (VAM). Instructional materials associated with the components of the simulation system are encapsulated as reusable Atomic Learning Objects, each of which consists of content items, practice items, assessment items, meta-information and constraints. Instructional materials associated with the entire simulation system is modeled as a Composite Learning Object having a structure of activities, which is used by a Learning Process Execution Engine to enact the process of delivering contents, instructing learners to use the simulation system for practice on what they learn, and performing assessment to evaluate the performances of learners in learning the functions and operations of the simulation system and its components. An event-trigger-rule server is used in an event-driven, rule-based execution of a learning process to make the learning process active, adaptive, customizable and flexible.
2650464
Web-service-based, Dynamic and Collaborative E-learning
This paper describes an on-going effort to investigate problems and approaches for achieving Web-service-based, dynamic and collaborative e-learning. In this work, a Learning Content Definition Model is used to model distributed and sharable learning resources as content objects. Distributed and sharable software systems/components for supporting e-learning are modeled as software objects. Both types of objects are uniformly published as Web-services in a constraint-based Web-service registry and made sharable and reusable. An extended Web-service infrastructure provides a standard framework for the modeling, registration, discovery, binding and invocation of these objects. In this work, we also introduce a Learning Process Definition Model and a Learning Process Execution Engine for specifying and executing learning process models, which represent instructional modules in the forms of activity trees. An Event-Trigger-Rule Server is integrated with the Learning Process Execution Engine to make learning process models active, flexible, customizable and adaptable. It is also used to facilitate the interaction and coordination among learners, administrators, authors, and other personnel involved in collaborative elearning.
7164001
Software Component Certification
Although the stringent requirements of some critical applications may require independent certification, the authors see software developer self-certification as a viable alternative in many other cases. They accept that using software certification laboratories (SCLs) may work well for certain software distribution models, but they cannot be applied to all types of software development. The approach has several drawbacks. For example, an SCL may work well for larger software houses that ship mass-marketed software applications to the public, but it is less satisfactory for smaller developers who make reusable components or safety-critical software or for developers who belong to the freeware community.
5662830
Exploiting FPGA Concurrency to Enhance JVM Performance
The Java Programming Language has been praised for its platform independence and portability, but because of its slow execution speed on a software Java Virtual Machine (JVM), some people decide to use faster languages such as C. Building a JVM in hardware is an obvious solution to this problem. Several approaches have been taken to try to achieve the best solution. One approach is by reducing the number of Java instructions a program has to execute along with directly executing instructions in hardware, for example on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), to increase the execution speed. Another approach is the translation of Java Byte Codes into native code by a FPGA and then executing the native code on a conventional CPU. Others have developed a multi-threaded JVM and exploited the parallelism offered by a FPGA and have specifically designed the JVM for real-time systems. This paper compares and contrasts all these approaches and then argues that the parallelism of a FPGA should be exploited in the most general way possible by not restricting the threads of execution to a specific task. It gives a method for building such a JVM and also some results from a JVM that was built using this method. The paper concludes that this approach should be taken to build a system that is capable of running threads of a Java program in parallel.
6951288
A Generalised Spreadsheet Verification Methodology
Although spreadsheets have been around for over thirty years, we are only just realising their importance. Most companies use spreadsheets in their decision-making processes, but rarely employ any form of testing. This paper shows how an "all-uses" test adequacy technique can be integrated into Microsoft's Excel. The modular technique adopted makes the implementation spreadsheet package independent. It also includes a user interface, to assist developers specify test cases and a technique for recording test cases and session information. In particular it presents a systematic technique for constructing test cases. As a key problem with spreadsheet development is the inexperience of developers, this paper describes an easy to use tool that will improve the standard of spreadsheets developed.
35763376
Setting a Framework for Trusted Component Trading
Software engineers constructing systems from third-party components need to be able to assess the quality of those components in order to have any confidence in the final system. We argue that the most effective and economic way to do this is for developers to supply test specifications along with the components that they offer to the market. We describe a simple, portable test specification based on XML documents. When a test specification is packaged with a purchased component, system builders are efficiently able to not only verify a component developer’s claim for quality but also use the test specification to elucidate fine details of a component’s capabilities that may be missing or not manifest in a natural language specification. A system builder selecting a component for integration into a new system needs to consider more than its ability to perform the required functions: the degree of testing can be an important indication of its reliability. Thus we propose an index, describing the degree of testing that a component has undergone, which can be used to rate components and aid selection decisions. Combined with a test specification, a purchaser can efficiently determine whether a component meets claims for its quality.
9555637
Modeling virtual object behavior within virtual environment
Development of virtual reality systems requires iterations of specification, implementation and evaluation. Since correct evaluations of immersive VR systems require the tedious process of wearing many devices, there exist both temporal and spatial gaps between the implementation and evaluation stage, and this usually causes delay and inefficiency in the development process. In order to overcome this gap, there have been several approaches to constructing or modeling the physical aspects of the virtual world (or objects) within the virtual environment. However, modeling their behaviors is still carried out in conventional (2D) programming environments.This paper proposes an interaction model, and interfaces for specifying (and modifying) object behavior, within the virtual environment, based on an underlying virtual object model. The interaction model follows the concept of programming by demonstration, and based on it, we have built a system called the PiP (Programming virtual object behavior in virtual reality Program) "in" which a user can create, modify, test, and save object behaviors. We illustrate examples of interactive virtual worlds constructed using the PiP, and discuss its merits and shortcomings as a content development platform.