Abstract

This presentation reviews the scientific literature of the past 30  years concerned with the individual difference of gender, with  particular emphasis on the use of Information and Communications  Technology. The presentation concentrates on possible gender based  psychological, social and environmental differences and how these  potential differences might influence attitudes and behavioural  performance with regard to new technology. It is argued that these  issues will be of growing importance in the knowledge based society  envisioned by the European Union within a larger and integrated Europe.
 
 Many surveys of gender ratios in technology and engineering education  show fewer females entering these types of courses. As a result of this  gender ratio difference in education, fewer females are employed in  technology based commerce and industry. This paper explores some of the  reasons proposed for this gender ratio difference and suggests actions  that can be taken to try and encourage females into technology based  education and industry.

Bio

Dr. Konrad Morgan is Professor of Human Computer Interaction and leader of the InterMedia research centre on Digital Learning and New Media at the University of Bergen, Norway.His research interests focus on understanding the human and social impact of information and communications technology (ICT). His scientific work includes a number of original contributions: The first empirical evaluations and explanations of why direct manipulation and graphical user interfaces are superior in usability terms; Some of the first explanations of gender differences and attitudes in ICT use; Revealing the role of personality types in computer based behavior and finally, the influence of early parental encouragement in later technology competence and attitudes. During recent research leave from his chair at Bergen he devoted himself to the issues of ICT as aid to least developed countries and attempted to address some of the most extreme gender imbalances in ICT by creating opportunities and role models for females in the Middle East.

• In 2002 he held the chair of computer science and information systems at the University of the South Pacific as part of a Japanese sponsored ICT aid programme to the 12 nations of the South Pacific.

• In 2001 he held the chair of Computing at the prestigious Abu Dhabi Women´s college in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where he helped introduce an accredited ICT education for female UAE nationals in what can be an extremely male dominated society.

He is currently chair of the Ethics and Equity taskforce for the "Kaleidoscope" European Union Network of Excellence devoted to digital learning.
His most recent book “Human Perspectives in the Internet Society: Culture, Psychology, and Gender” by WIT press shows his continuing concern for equity and understanding in the digital environment.

Modelling unreliable and untrustworthy behaviour in norm-governed agent societies By Marek Sergot UK

Abstract

It cannot always be assumed that agents will behave as they are supposed to behave. In such cases it is often useful to think of agent systems (of human or computer agents) as governed by norms. Norms specify agents' obligations, permissions, and rights, their responsibilities in regard to the achievement of specific goals, and their powers to initiate changes, to authorise, and to delegate. Agents may fail to comply with system norms for several reasons. They might do so deliberately, in open agent systems or other competitive settings, or unintentionally, in unreliable environments because of factors beyond their control. In addition to analysing system properties that hold if specifications/norms are followed correctly,  it is also necessary to predict, test, and verify the properties that hold if system norms are violated, and to test the effectiveness of introducing proposed control, enforcement, and recovery mechanisms. (C+)++ is an extended form of the action language C+ of Giunchiglia, Lee, Lifschitz, McCain, and Turner, designed for representing norms of behaviour and institutional aspects of (human or computer) societies. We present the permission component of (C+)++ and then illustrate on a simple example how it can be used in conjunction with standard model checkers for temporal logics to verify system properties in the case where agents cannot be assumed to comply with system norms.

Bio

Marek Sergot is Professor of Computational Logic in the Department of Computing, Imperial College London. He graduated in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and then worked in mathematical modelling before joining Imperial College in 1979. His research is in logic for knowledge representation and the specification of computer systems, with particular interests in legal, temporal and normative reasoning, the logic of action and agency, and the formal theory of organizations. He has also been working on the application of AI techniques in Biologoy. Sergot is the developer, with Peter Hammond, of the logic programming system APES which was used very widely in the 1980s to build a wide variety of expert systems and other applications. With Robert Kowalski, he developed the `event calculus', an approach for reasoning about action and change within a logic programming framework, which is still one of the standard techniques for temporal reasoning in AI. Work on formal-logical models of legal and normative reasoning, and their applications, has been a main topic of research since 1979. In recent years this has included contributions to the logic of norms, to formal theories of complex normative relations such as duties and rights, logics of delegation and authorisation, and applications to organisational modelling, multi-agent systems, the modelling of contracts and business processes, and computer security.  Sergot was a member of the recently concluded EU FET Project ALFEBIITE, developing normative, socio-cognitive and legal frameworks for societies of open (competitive) computational agents. He is currently a member of the EU  Working Group iTrust on Trust Management in Dynamic Open Systems, and of the EU IP project TrustCom concerned with trust and contract management in large-scale distributed virtual organisations. He is a former President of the International Association for AI and Law.

Abstract

Governments go online, providing electronic services to citizens. Citizens go online, using means such as emails, SMS, and chat rooms to communicate. In this presentation we shall discuss the technological challenges that eGovernments and eCitizens face in attempting to communicate. We shall present the use of Web services, ontologies, and Knowledge Management tools to enable governments rapid, flexible responses to citizen needs on the one hand, and more active participation of citizens in the democratic process, on the other hand. During the presentation, we shall present results from two active European 6th Framework projects in eGovernment, namely TerreGov and QUALEG.

Bio

Dr. Avigdor Gal is a faculty member at the Information Technology Engineering group (Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management) at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He received his D.Sc. degree from the Technion in 1995 in the area of temporal active databases. He has published more than 40 papers in journals (e.g., Journal of the ACM and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering), books (Temporal Databases: Research and Practice) and conferences (e.g., ER and CoopIS) on the topics of information system architectures, active databases, and temporal databases. Avigdor is a member of IFCIS, the International Foundation of Cooperative Information Systems, and the ACM and the IEEE computer society. He was a General co-Chair of CoopIS'2000 and a Program co-Chair of NGITS'2002 and CoopIS'2004. Avigdor has been a PC member of VLDB'2002, SIGMOD'2003 and a Panel Chair of ER'2004. Avigdor has a practical, as well as academic, experience with Internet applications. He worked as a consultant with MyZebra.com, a virtual enterprise specializing in customer service over the Internet and he consults venture capital funds on new and evolving technologies. Also, he has conducted research in the area of data integration of federation of cooperative and non-cooperative databases, with applications to Web-based information services.

Abstract

Ensuring the fubctionality, integrity and availability of information is the key issue in the battle for Information Superiority and thus is a decisive factor in modern warfare. Security policies and security mechanisms govern the access to information and other resources. Their correct specification and enforcement are critical.

I will explore these notions and give a unifying framework that combines functionality, security and temporal requirements. Such a framework is sound and compositional allowing the dynamic change of security policies according to events and time.

Bio

Hussein Zedan is a Professor of Software Engineering at De Montfort University (UK) and Director of the Software Technology Research Laboratory, with over 20 years experience as an academic and practitioner in Computer Science and IT industry.

He is also the Technical Director of the University Technology Centre (UTC) in Software Evolution, which is funded by Software Migration Ltd. This is in addition to being on the executive board of the Centre of Creative Technology (CCT), an interdisciplinary centre involving Computing, Art and Design and Humanities.

Hussein's work on the formal specification, verification, validation and analysis of computing and information systems, in particular those used in (time-, safety, mission-, financial-)critical applications, has gained him an excellent national and international reputation in the field.

He has published 4 books and over 100 technical papers and articles in highly reputable journals and international conferances.

Native XML Databases: A Real-World Perspective By Ronald Bourret USA

Abstract

Although they have been available for nearly six years, native XML databases are just now gaining momentum in the real world. This keynote is based on a broad survey of companies in the field and looks at the problems users are solving with native XML databases, as well as why they were unable to solve these problems with relational or other technology.

Bio

Ronald Bourret is a freelance programmer, technical writer, and researcher. His work includes XML-DBMS, a set of Java packages for transferring data between XML documents and relational databases, an XML schema language (DDML), several widely read papers on XML and databases, and the XML Namespaces FAQ. He has lectured on XML and databases at both commercial and academic conferences and has contributed articles to both XML.com and xmlhack.

Unravelling the relationship between protein sequence, structure and function: an intellectual and computational challenge By Anna Tramontano University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy

Abstract

Proteins are the functioning molecules of living organisms, they play key roles in most physiological processes such as metabolism, transport, immune response, signal transduction, or cell cycle.  These linear polymers of amino acids perform this impressive variety of functions by assuming a well defined three-dimensional structure, which enables them to accomplish highly specific molecular functions. In these complex structures, amino acids that are far apart in the linear sequence can come close together in space and participate in the formation of highly specialized catalyitic sites, ligand binding pockets or interfaces able to recognize, bind and transmit information to other macromolecules.

Genomic projects are providing us with the linear amino acid sequence of hundreds of thousands of proteins. If only we could learn how each and every of them folds in three-dimensions we would have the complete part list of an organism and could face the challenge of  understanding how these parts assemble in a cell.

This is not only an intellectual challenge, it has enormous practical implications. Malfunctioning of proteins is the most common cause of endogenous diseases while the action of pathogens is generally mediated by their proteins.

There are experimental methods that can provide us with the knowledge of the precise arrangement of every atom of a protein and with details about their functional properties, but they are time consuming techniques and we cannot hope to use them to understand the structure and function of all  the proteins of the universe. What stands in our way, notwithstanding all these efforts, is the complexity of the problem. However, we have at our disposal the experimentally solved structures of a reasonable number of proteins, a few thousands as of today. They represent solved instances of our problem and we can hope to extract heuristic rules from their analysis.

I will describes what we can learn from the analysis of known protein structures and how this knowledge can be used to attempt the prediction of the structure and function of the remaining proteins.

Bio

Anna Tramontano was trained as a physicist but she soon became fascinated by the complexity of biology and by the promises of computational biology. She did her post-doc at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics of UCSF where she collaborated in the development of the very popular molecular graphics software Insight. Later she was a staff scientist in the Biocomputing Programme of the EMBL, where she studied the sequence structure relationship in immunoglobulin molecules. In 1990 she moved back to Italy in the Merck Research Laboratories near Rome, where she was involved in protein structure modeling and design, and in drug and vaccine discovery and development. She recently returned to the academic world and is now Chair Professor of Biochemistry in "La Sapienza" University in Rome where she continues to pursue her scientific interests on protein structure prediction and analysis.

She is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and a member of the board of Directors and past vice president of the International Society of Computational Biology.

She is Associate Editor of Proteins, Bioinformatics and FEBS Journal, member of the steering Committee of the EU funded BioSapiens Network of Excellence, of the FEBS publication Committee, of the organizing Committee of the Critical Assesment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) initiative, of the Scientific Council of Institute Pasteur - Fondazione Cenci Bolognetti.

In 2001, she received a prize from the Italian National Academy of Science and in 2002 she was awarded the special prize for Natural Sciences of the Italian Government.

Abstract

The address will cover current thoughts of ethical issues pertaining to the use of computers in Medicine and especially the internet. The paper will cover areas on
clinical consulting on the net, and the accreditation of health sites.
The value of the net in acquiring knowledge on evidence based medicine will be covered. Opposing views on alternative medicine, medical tests on the net and the sale of pharmaceutical agents via the net will all be discussed.

Bio

Bernie Brenner is in active clinical practice as a gynaecologist in Auckland NZ. He has had an interest in ethics that spans 3 decades. His educational background includes medical degree from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg and he completed his specialist studies in Auckland. He has a BA with Philosophy major from University of South Africa. He has a post graduate Diploma in Professional Ethics from Auckland University. His Doctoral Thesis from Southern Cross University
included the design and use of computer expert systems and Ethical Decision Making.
He has presented topics relating to Ethics at both National and International Conferences. He has published several articles on Ethics in peer reviewed journals.
He has run many successful workshops on Ethics and audiences have included government departments, business managers, students, and health care workers. He has been a regular guest lecturer for Massey University covering areas of International Business Ethics and Applied Ethics topics.

He has design a totally separate stand alone module on Ethics for part of the University of Otago Health Informatics diploma. He is a senior lecturer in this university as part of its distance learning program. He is actively involved in the South Pacific Islands teaching program of the University.

He is co-author of a textbook on "The Ethics of Health Informatics". Bernie has an active and continuing interest in teaching and running workshops all aspects of Ethics in National and International Business, in Informatics, the Computer industry and in all branches of Health Care Delivery

Leurré.com: a worldwide distributed honeynet to build early warning systems By Marc Dacier Institut Eurecom, France

Abstract

For several months we have deployed the very same platform at the premises of the networks of several partners located all over the world. As of today, around 30 platforms in 20 countries covering the 5 continents have accepted, on a voluntary basis, to participate to this experiment. By hosting one of our honeypots, they are granted access to the whole data set we have accumulated so far. In this presentation, we will present the platform itself as well as some of the results we have obtained thanks to detailed analysis carried out by our team. The idea of this set up is not to capture so called zero day attacks but, instead, to build long term statistical data to model the threats occurring on the Internet. We will highlight the differences that exist between platforms and give examples of the level of sophistication found in some of these attack processes. More detailed information is available in the papers published in various other conferences in the recent past, the references of which are available on the following web page: www.eurecom.fr/~pouget/papers.htm. This work is partially funded in the context of the French National ACI Security project entitled CADHO (http://acisi.loria.fr).

Bio

Marc Dacier received the degree of Ingénieur Civil en Informatique from the University of Louvain, Belgium in 1989 and the Ph.D., European Label, from the Institut National Polytechnique in Toulouse, France in 1994. From 1989 until 1991, he worked at the University of Louvain. From 1992 until 1994, he was a member of the dependability group, at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, working in the "Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance" group on quantitative evaluation of operational computer security. In 1995, he worked in Paris as a security consultant. In 1996 he joined the IBM Zurich Research laboratory. In 1997, he became the manager of the Global Security Analysis Lab. The GSAL team pursued several projects in the intrusion detection domain which led to the creation of the new Tivoli Intrusion detection product, namely Tivoli Risk Manager. Since 1997, he has ben giving, as an invited researcher, an intrusion detection seminar at the University of Louvain (UCL), Namur (FUNDP) and Liège (ULG) and also at the ENSEEIHT in Toulouse. In 2002, he has received the title of invited professor at UCL and associate professor at ULG. In 1998, he co-founded with Kathleen Jackson from the Los Alamos National Lab, the symposium on "Recent Advances on Intrusion Detection" (RAID). He is now chairing its steering committee. He also was the co-director, with Brian Randell from the University of Newcsastle, of the MAFTIA European Project. He serves on the program committees of major security and dependability conferences and is a member of the steering committee of the "European Symposium on Research for Computer Security" (ESORICS). He is a member of the editorial board of the journal IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. He has joined the Corporate Communications Department at Eurecom in July 2002 as a professor.  His research and teaching interests include computer and network security, intrusion detection, network and system management, dependability in the presence of malicious faults. He is the author of numerous international publications and several patents.

Abstract

With the improvement in technology and increasing bandwidth of Internet access, synchronous solutions for instruction are becoming popular. They do not only provide savings in terms of time and cost, but also outperform asynchronous online instruction and even traditional face-to-face education in many circumstances. But the lack of a pedagogical framework for synchronous instruction has till now affected the effective use of this medium. In this keynote, I will introduce an online synchronous learning model that aims to provide guidelines for teachers and students to conduct synchronous instruction. The model provides a broad range of scenarios to suit individual requirements and covers both synchronous lecturing and 'office-hours' modes.

Bio

Dr. Chen is a Professor with the Department of Information Management, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. and an Adjunct Professor with the Griffith Institue for Higher Education, Griffith University, Australia. He is also served as the Director of Taiwan Computer Emergency Response Team/Coordination Center (TWCERT/CC).

Dr. Chen received his Master Degree in Industrial Engineering in 1986 and his Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science in 1990 from National Tsing-Hua University.

Professor Chen is very keen to promote information technology for education; he has devoted himself to designing a very popular LMS (Learning Management System) since 1995. He also made many efforts to enable colleges and K12 schools to adopt E-learning for teaching and learning. Some of his efforts have been well recognized, such as NSYSU Cyber University http://cu.nsysu.edu.tw, AJET(Advanced Joint English Telecommunication) http://ajet.nsysu.edu.tw and bK12 digital school http://ds.k12.edu.tw. Professor Chen has been strongly involved in the development of the Taiwan Academic Network (TANet) for more than 14 years.

His publications include 35 journal papers, 87 articles in academic Conferences, three books and 86 other publications. His current research interests include assessing e-Learning course performance; online synchronous live instruction; e-Learning standards; mobile learning; IP-based video-conferencing; knowledge management and information system development methodology.

Dr. Chen is a member of IEEE and a member of IEEE Technical Committee on Learning Technology (http://lttf.ieee.org/contacts.htm).

Social Presence and e-Learning By Karen Swan Kent State University, USA

Abstract

“Social presence” can be defined as the ability of participants in online discussions to both perceive other participants as “real people” and to project themselves socially and affectively into the discussion. This presentation will explore the concept of social presence and its relationship to learning online, through a review of research studies to date investigating these topics, with a particular emphasis on the presenter’s research.

Bio

Karen Swan is the Research Professor in the Research Center for Educational Technology (RCET) at Kent State University.  Dr. Swan’s research has been in the general area of media and learning. Her current research focuses on teaching and learning in ubiquitous computing environments, mobile technologies, and asynchronous learning networks. Her research on online learning has particularly centered on interactivity, social presence, and interface issues. Dr. Swan pioneered the development of an online degree in Instructional Technology at the University at Albany and taught several online courses for the program.  She is the Learning Effectiveness Editor for the Sloan Consortium on Asynchronous Learning Networks, the Special Issues Editor for the Journal of Educational Computing Research, and Editor of RCET’s own multimedia online journal, the Journal of the Research Center for Educational Technology.

Bio

Hesham Soliman is a member of the Advanced Networking group at Flarion Technologies. He made numerous contributions to the Mobile IPv6 protocol and related optimisations, as well as, IPv6 and its applicability to cellular networks. He is a member of several scientific committees for wireless and mobility related conferences. Prior to his current role, he was a senior specialist at Ericsson Research where he led several research activities related to IPv6, mobility management, and cellular networks. Hesham is also the author of Mobile IPv6: Mobility in a wireless Internet, Addison-Wesley.

Developing Ubiquitous Medical Imaging Information System Standard By Sabah Mohammed Advanced Technology and Academic Centre, Lakehead University, Canada

Abstract

Under pressure to improve the quality of patient care, reduce errors, and reduce costs, the medical industry faces an immediate need to change the way healthcare is delivered. This means providing healthcare workers with tools and technologies that deliver critical information at the point of care while streamlining their workloads with secure and automated functionality.
Armed with handheld ubiquitous devices, healthcare workers can now use every minute of the day more productively to streamline processes and get real-time data at the point of care. This article presents a solution framework for designing ubiquitous medical imaging information system based on JXTA peer-to-peer technology along with representing the medical data that includes multimedia or images as SVG. The security issue of having the data as SVG where it represents an open source XML files, is addressed. XML Encryption along with lightweight encipherment techniques are introduced as solutions for the security problem. The article also addresses SVG metadata and annotation issues for better data retrieval and interactivity based on RDF standard.

Bio

Dr. Mohammed received his B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics ( Baghdad University 1977), and his graduate degrees in Computer Science from Glasgow University (MSc 1981), and Brunel University (PhD 1986).

Since late 2001, Dr. Mohammed is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Lakehead University. Formerly, from 1986-1995, Dr. Mohammed was an Assistant/Associate Professor of Computer Science at Baghdad University holding the position of the Graduate Organizer in Computer Science. During 1996-2001, he served as the Chair of Computer Science at four different universities: Amman University (1995-1996), Philadelphia University (1996-1997), Applied Science University (1997-2000), and Higher College of Technology(2000-2001).

Dr. Mohammed has co-authored four text books in Compilers, Artificial Intelligence, Java Programming and Applied Image Processing, published over 70 refereed publications, was the MSc advisor for 17 students and 1 PhD student, and has received research support from a variety of governmental and industrial organizations. Dr. Mohammed provided consultations for a variety of organizations. Dr. Mohammed organized two international conferences on Computers and their Applications during 1997 (at Philadelphia University) and 1998 (at Applied Science University) as well as a Regional Symposium on eEducation during 2001 (at Higher College of Technology).

Dr. Mohammed's research interests include Medical Image Processing, Multimedia Learning Objects, P2P Programming, Image Lightweight Security, Artificial Intelligence and Fuzzy Logic. Dr. Mohammed is also on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Computing and Information Sciences, Regional Editor of Journal of Information and Technology, Regional Editor of the American Journal of Applied Science, Member of the Editorial board of the International Arab Journal of Information Technology and the Asian Journal of Information Technology. Dr. Mohammed is a member of the British Computer Society, member of the Canadian Image Processing & Pattern recognition Society, Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

Selected Publications:

1. S. MOHAMMED, and J. FIAIDHI, Image Segmentation Based on Light Intensity Growth and its Implementation in Java, International Journal of Applied Science and Computation (USA), Vol.11, No.1, April 2004, pp 10-17.

2. S. MOHAMMED, J. FIAIDHI, and L. YANG, Developing Multitier Lightweight Techniques for Protecting Medical Images within Ubiquitous Environments, IEEE 2nd Communications, Networks and Service Research Conference (CNSR04), Fredericton, N.B., Canada, May 19-21, 2004.

3. S. MOHAMMED, L. YANG, and J. FIAIDHI, A Dynamic Fuzzy Classifier for Detecting Abnormalities in Mammograms, IEEE 1st Canadian Conference of Computer and Robot Vision (CRV04), University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, May 17-19, 2004.

4. S. MOHAMMED, L. YANG, J. FIAIDHI and P. MAHANTI, Developing a Mammography P2P Consultation System, The 2004 International Conference on Imaging, Science and Systems (CISST04), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, June 21-24, 2004
5. S. MOHAMMED, and J. FIAIDHI, A Blackboard Model of Natural Language Comprehension Using Data Mining, International Conference of the IASTED on Computer Systems & Applications (IASTED98), Irbid, HKJ, March 30- April 2, 1998.
6. S. MOHAMMED, R. NAOUM, and N. KASTO, An NP-Complete Approach for Solving
Textile Allocation Problem, The IEEE International Conference on
Information, Systems and Control (ICECS'95), Amman, HKJ, 17-21 Dec, 1995.

Abstract

Identification of orthologous gene pairs in related species is an essential objective of comparative genomics, as it contributes to our understanding of the evolution of genes and their functions. Most of the current approaches to computational orthology identification rely greatly on sequence similarity. These approaches typically require an exhaustive “all-against-all” sequence alignment as an initial step of the identification procedure.

We have developed a simple method that does not require sequence alignment for gene orthology identification. In this method we first identify all “uni-marker pairs”: 16-mer sequences that occur exactly once in both genomes of the compared species. Each pair of genes that contain identical uni-markers is assigned an orthology score, encapsulating the number of uni-markers contained, as well as their coverage extent and orientation within the two genes. An empirical p-value is provided as a measure of confidence in the orthology score. Gene pairs with mutual best scores are reported as orthologous pairs.  We hypothesize that extensive “uni-marker linkage” between a pair of genes provides a significant evidence that the two genes have descended from a common ancestral gene.

We have utilized this method to identify human - mouse gene orthology. The resulting human-mouse orthologous gene pairs were in good agreement with those included in the Mouse Genome Database (MGD) at the Jackson Laboratory, and in NCBI’s HomoloGene database. In addition, our method provides alternative orthologous assignments, as well as new orthologous pairs that have not been reported by MGD or Homologene databases, many of those with low p-values.

Bio

I received a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA) in 1989. I then worked for Biosym Technologies Inc. (San Diego, CA) for five years. At Biosym, I helped lead a team funded by a consortium of pharmaceutical and chemical companies to develop a suite of new-generation molecular energy functions for the simulation and modeling of biological and chemical molecules. Since 1994 I have been a Principal Investigator for the Laboratory for Bioinformatics and Biomolecule Modeling at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the Academia Sinica. My laboratory has produced a number of bioinformatics databases and software tools (http://gln.ibms.sinica.edu.tw/software.php).

 Selected Publication

1. Chen, L.Y.Y., Lu, S.-H., Shih, E.S.C., Hwang, M.-J. (2002)  “Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Mapping Using Genome-wide Unique Sequences,” Genome Research 12:1106-1111.

2. Yang, J.M.,* Tsai, C.H., Hwang, M.-J.,* Tsai, H.K., Hwang J.K., Kao, C.Y. (2002) “GEM: a Guassian Evolutionary Method for Predicting Protein Side-chain Conformations,” Protein Sci. 11:1897-1907. (co-corresponding authors)

3. Shih, E. S.C., Hwang, M.-J. (2003) "Protein Structure Comparison by Probability-Based Matching of Secondary Structure Elements," Bioinformatics 19:735-741.

4. Shih, E. S.C., Hwang, M.-J. (2004) "Alternative Alignments from Comparison of Protein Structures," Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics 56:519-527.

5. Liao, B.-Y., Chang, Y.-J., Ho, J.-M., Hwang, M.-J. (2004) “The UniMarker (UM) method for synteny mapping of large genomes,” Bioinformatics 20:3156-3165.

Abstract

The  fast development in digital technologies during the digital era confront individuals with situations that require the utilization of an ever-growing assortment of  cognitive skills that are utilized in executing tasks in digital environments, such as surfing the web, deciphering user interfaces, working with databases, participating in Internet forums, and chatting in chat rooms. In the digital era, these skills have become real "survival skills that help users to work intuitively in executing complex digital tasks. Eshet (2004) published a conceptual cognitive, holistic model for the term digital literacy, a model that complements existing, but incomplete models (e.g. Burnett & McKinley, 1998; Zins, 2000; Hargittai, 2002),  that  are usually local, focusing on a limited variety of digital skills, mainly information-seeking skills. Eshet has argued that his model covers most of the cognitive skills that users and scholars employ in digital environments and, therefore, provides researchers and designers of digital environments with powerful framework and design guidelines.  The six digital literacy cognitive skills of Eshet are:

Photo-visual skills: The ability of users to “use vision to think”, and to communicate effectively with digital environments through visual representations of information (Tuft, 1990). These skills are utilized mainly in designing and working with graphic user interfaces.

Reproduction skills: The ability to use digital technologies in order to create new meanings or new interpretations by combining preexisting, independent shreds of information (Benjamin, 1994) in any form of media (text, graphic, or sound). These skills are employed in writing digital texts and in designing graphical displays with digital editing tools.

Branching skills: The ability of users of digital environments to seek information and construct knowledge in non-linear digital environments. These skills are crucial for effective surfing and knowledge creation from databases and the Internet .

Information skills:  The ability of digital information consumers to analyze, evaluate and assess information (e.g. Burnett & McKinley, 1998; Zins, 2000). Information skills act as a filter: They identify false, irrelevant, or biased information, and avoid their penetration into the learner’s cognition. Information skills are utilized in almost any work with digital environments that involve information, as news resources, databases and the Internet. In the digital era, with the unlimited exposure to information, these skills have become "survival skills" for modern users.

Socio-emotional skills: The ability of users to employ sociological and emotional skills in order to perform effectively in digital communication environments, as knowledge-sharing groups, discussion groups, knowledge communities, chat rooms, and any other form of  collaborative learning (Amichai-Hamburger, 2002).

Synchronic skills: The ability of users to process simultaneously large volumes of information that are provided by digital environments. These skills are utilized mainly in computer games and multimedia learning environments, which provide simultaneous audio-visual stimuli, and challenge the user with the need to synchronize them in order to work effectively.

The present paper reports on a pioneering research that was designated to examine the performance of users of different age groups with tasks that require the utilization of the different types of cognitive skills described above. The research’s basic assumption is that the level of digital literacy is affected mainly by the cognitive developmental stage and experience of users and, hence, the hypothesis is that differences in digital skills would be found for different age and gender groups (Hargittai, 2002) of similar background and experience. Until today, very little empirical information is available on digital literacy skills of different ages and genders, and the present research's results may shed light on this relatively new assortment of cognitive skills that learners cope with in the digital era. Results will improve our understanding of users' needs under different digital situations and provide educators and designers of digital environments with powerful guidelines in designing better user-oriented digital environments.

 References cited

·        Amichai-Hamburger, Y. (2002). Internet and personality. Computers in Human Behavior, 18: 1-10.

·        Benjamin W. (1994). The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction  (Hebrew translation from German). Tel Aviv: Teamin Publishers.

·        Burnett, K., & McKinley, E.G. (1998). Modeling information seeking. Interacting With Computers, 10:  285-302.

·        Eshet, Y. (2004).  Digital literacy: A conceptual framework for survival skills in the digital era. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 13(1): 93-106 .

·        Hargittai, E. (2002). Beyond logs and surveys: In-depth measures of people's Web use skills. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53 (14): 1239-1244.

·        Tuft, E.R., (1990). Envisioning Information. Graphic Press, Cheshire, CT.

·        Zins, C. (2000). Success, a structured search strategy rationale, principles and implications. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51: 1232-1247

Bio

My academic education is variegated: Archeology & geography (B.A.-1977) and geology & Environmental Sciences (M.Sc.-1982 & Ph.D-1987.).

My professional experience is also variegated, lying between geology research and educational technology research and development.  For the last 15 years I devoted my career to researching and developing technology-based instructional materials in computer companies and in the academia. At the same time, I was a part-time senior researcher at the geological survey of Israel.  Today I'm an Assoc. Prof. and a faculty member at the Open University of Israel (Dep. Of Pssychology & Education). I'm the Head of the Chais Research Center of Educational Technologies and the Head of the Instructional Technologies Dep.  In the Tel Hai Academic College.

Andes intelligent physics tutoring system: Lessons learned  By Kurt VanLehn University of Pittsburgh, USA

Abstract

It is difficult to fit innovative educational technology into the ordinary practices of instructors, unless the instructors themselves developed the technology.   On the other hand, almost all instructors are eager to delegate grading of homework exercises, as long as they can continue to assign the exercises that they prefer.  Thus, web-based homework grading services are a rapidly growing type of educational technology.  The Andes intelligent tutoring system (www.andes.pitt.edu) takes this success one step further.  It is a homework helper, and not just a grader.  Instead of solving physics homework problems on paper and entering the answer into a homework grading service, students do all their work on the Andes user interface.  The user interface is intended to be as unconstraining as a piece of paper.  However, unlike paper, it provides immediate feedback on every user action, thus preventing mistakes from proliferating and wasting students' time.  Students may also ask for help, and frequently do so when they do not see immediatly how to fix an error.  Andes then gives them a sequence of increasingly specific hints until they can correct their error and continue solving the problem. Andes has been evaluated in five semester-long evaluations at the United States Naval Academy.  Students who did their homework on Andes scored significantly higher on exams than students who do the same homework problems on paper.  This talk describes Andes, the evaluations, and what was learned about the process of developing a successful homework helper.

Bio

Dr. VanLehn is as a Professor of Computer Science, a Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, and Director of CIRCLE , an NSF Center. He received a BS from Stanford (Mathematics, 1974) and a PhD from MIT (Computer Science, 1983). He was a Research Associate at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center until 1985, when he joined Carnegie-Mellon University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. He moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 1990.

Dr. VanLehn's research interests focus on applications of artificial intelligence to education and cognitive modeling. At this writing, he is engaged in 3 research projects. Circle is an NSF-supported research center that is finding out why human tutoring is so effective and building computer tutors that will equal or even exceed their effectiveness. Circle is a collaborative effort involving 9 professors from CMU and Pitt. The Andes project is developing an intelligent tutoring system that helps college students learn physics. It features 3 novel help systems and a student modeling component based on Bayesian networks. The Why2000 project is developing a natural-language based tutoring system for help student learn how to explain "why" physical systems work the way they do.

Consolidating Memory Status through Sleep Stages By Piet Kommers  University of Twente, The Netherlands

Abstract

The transition from retained information into active knowledge for further problem solving has not been understood well. Once learning new skills and knowledge ocurred in a conscious way, certain sleep stages help to make the learned more durable and more flexible.
The conscious element has been recognized as meta-knowledge: the awareness of what you know. However the effects of non-rem sleep for the persistence of declarative knowledge heas been underestimated until recently.

Bio

Dr. Piet Kommers is associate professor in media technology in the University of Twente in the Netherlands and Lector at Fontys Academy in Eindhoven. His research interest is the further specification of media design methodologies for learning and training situations. His leadership of the 1992 NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Cognitive Learning Tools raised the global attention for constructivist elements in complex learning. He was initiator of a large number of international projects on media scenarios for the further development of training and educational institutes. His current
research into WWW-based Learning Communities and the role of Virtual Reality in the sharing of experiences in complex situations like medical and technological interventions has earned a wide recognition so far. Dr. Kommers is associate editor of the International Journal for Continuous Engineering Education and Life-long Learning and he is executive editor of the International Journal for WWW-based Communities.

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