Cloud computing has achieved great success in modern IT industry as an excellent computing paradigm due to its flexible management and elastic resource sharing. To date, cloud computing takes an irrepalceable position in our socioeconomic system and influences almost every aspect of our daily life. However, it is still in its infancy, many problems still exist.Besides the hotly-debated security...

Neurophysiological changes in the brain associated with early dementia can disrupt articulatory timing and precision in speech production. Motivated by this observation, we address the hypothesis that speaking rate and articulatory coordination, as manifested through formant frequency tracks, can predict performance on an animal fluency task administerd to the elderly. Specifically, using phone...

We address the problem of speaker age estimation using ivectors. We first compare different i-vector extraction setups and then focus on (shallow) artificial neural net (ANN) backends. We explore ANN architecture, training algorithm and ANN ensembles. The results on NIST 2008 and 2010 SRE data indicate that, after extensive parameter optimization, ANN back-end in combination with i-vectors reac...

In this paper, we discuss the role that ontologies, a key element in the Semantic Web vision, can have within eLearning and how they can help improve the learning process. We take the LT4eL project as test case, since in this project ontologies play a crucial role in enhancing the management, distribution and retrieval of the learning material within a Learning Management System (LMS). We also ...

Higher education is exceedingly being delivered online through learning-management-systems. Students must continuously use these systems to perform their academic tasks. Therefore, it is important that LMS designers and institutions clearly understand what factors influence students’ behavior towards the continued use of LMS. This research-in-progress aims to improve understanding on students’ ...

1 Motivation Looking at today's technologies that are used to build a learning environment reveals a large variety of different software systems and components depending on the learning processes that organisations aim to support. Learning Management Systems (LMS) have established as the core systems in a modern learning environment (Kuechler et al. 2009; Grohmann et al. 2007. They integrate di...

Surface incident solar radiation (Rs) is a key parameter in many climatic and ecological processes. The data from satellites and reanalysis have been widely used. However, for reanalysis, Rs data has been shown to have substantial spatial bias, and the time span of reliable satellite Rs is too short for climatic and ecological studies. Combining reanalysis and satellite data would be an effecti...

Given that the amount of news being published is only increasing, an effective search tool is invaluable to many Web-based companies. With word-based approaches ignoring much of the information in texts, we propose Destiny, a linguistic approach that leverages the syntactic information in sentences by representing sentences as graphs with disambiguated words as nodes and grammatical relations a...

Learning Management Systems such as Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai and Claroline focus on supporting the learning process at a fairly global level of courses and tests. Recent additions focus on interaction (discussion forums, chat rooms and wikis). GRAPPLE tackles an important omission: integrating the adaptive delivery of course material into the supported learning process. GRAPPLE is an EU funded...

Adaptive LMS have not yet reached the eLearning marketplace due to methodological, technological and management open issues. At aDeNu group, we have been working on two key challenges for the last five years in related research projects. Firstly, develop the general framework and a running architecture to support the adaptive life cycle (i.e., design, publication, use and monitoring), which foc...