In this demo we present a first prototype of an assistant for the improvement of writing skills in Catalan. The system is more than a grammatical checker as it proposes links to grammatical explanations and exercises, allowing the user to practice specific aspects. The program also works as a level evaluator and allows to track the user’s improvements.

I analyze how careerist judges formulate their decisions using information they uncover during deliberations as well as relevant information from previous decisions. I assume that judges have reputation concerns and try to signal to an evaluator that they can interpret the law correctly. If an appeal is brought, the appellate court’s decision reveals whether the judge interpreted the law proper...

We discuss the impact of cultural differences on usability evaluations that are based on the thinking-aloud method (TA). The term ‘cultural differences’ helps distinguish differences in the perception and thinking of Westerners (people from Western Europe and US citizens with European origins) and Easterners (people from China and the countries heavily influenced by its culture). We illustrate ...

We present the progress on the benchmarking project for high school timetabling that was introduced at PATAT 2008. In particular, we announce the High School Timetabling Archive XHSTT-2011 with 21 instances from 8 countries and an evaluator capable of checking the syntax of instances and evaluating the solutions.

We discuss the impact of cultural differences on usability evaluations that are based on the thinking-aloud method (TA). The term ‘cultural differences’ helps distinguish differences in the perception and thinking of Westerners (people from Western Europe and US citizens with European origins) and Easterners (people from China and the countries heavily influenced by its culture). We illustrate ...

The objective of this paper is to identify those factors, which are critical to the success of a maintenance operation in general and to apply them to a particular maintenance project. The project in question is the maintenance and evolution of a very large and complex banking application system for securities processing which has been in progress since several years. Eight factors are defined ...

This article introduces a genetic algorithm based system intended for automated generating of a realistic rhythmic (drum set) accompaniment. Present systems do not insist on the natural music criteria and realistic (human-like) result. They generate a rhythmic accompaniment regardless to the other instruments used. The fitness operators are mostly based on manual evaluation by user. The system ...

Evaluation of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) is an important area of research in current educational practices. There are many evaluation methods available but the literature does not suggest any clear guidelines for an evaluator – normally an educator – which methods to use in particular contexts. This paper proposes a classification of evaluation methods to simplify the selection task. Th...

The paper investigates the performance of novice evaluators in usability evaluations by presenting the results of a comparative usability evaluation that was conducted by nine novice evaluator teams. The evaluation teams performed considerably well in terms of the validity of their results, which counts for their participation in usability evaluation projects. The thoroughness of the results ob...

We demonstrate sparqlgx: our implementation of a distributed sparql evaluator. We show that sparqlgx makes it possible to evaluate sparql queries on billions of triples distributed across multiple nodes, while providing attractive performance figures.