The papers from the EC-TEL 09 A3H workshop are available for download from here. Our paper (J. Scotton, S. Moebs, J. McManis and A. Cristea) was runner up in the best paper award. You can download the paper here.

To download the slides from my talk “A Case Study on Merging Strategies for Authoring QoE-based Adaptive Hypermedia” in the A3H workshop at the EC-TEL 2009 conference today, click here.

Here are the slides from the talk I gave today at the WPCCS’09 event. I used LaTex (Beamer) to create the presentation so the .tex file is available as well:

Slides

Source

There’s a lot of people out there posting their SpeedTest.Net results so here’s mine, courtesy of the Warwick University Campus Network!

The power’s just come on after a 4th power cut in the Computer Science building in as many days. There were two on Friday while I was in the building and one just after I left. We’re not sure what the cause is or how many happened over the weekend but my suspicion is that the department is trying to get us geeks to take breaks from sitting in front of our computers 24/7!

This one lasted about 10 minutes and Jonny got stuck in the lift for the duration!

The picture is of my first shot from the 13th hole at Brailsford on the 23rd. Unfortunately my birdie putt stopped short so I could only manage par, however as that’s a rare occurrance at the moment I’m pretty happy with it!

I submitted an abstract for our annual departmental Postgraduate Colloquium event titled “Viewing and Delivering Adaptive Educational Hypermedia” last week. It’s about the program I’m currently writing at Warwick and is currently going through the review process. Providing the abstract is accepted the talk would be given on 3rd July.

Here’s the abstract in full:
Adaptive Educational Hypermedia offers a more intelligent and customised approach to the field of e-learning then the traditional linear methods. In an Adaptive Educational Hypermedia course a student’s learning experiences can be personalised using a user model which could include such information as the student’s knowledge level or learning style.
Adaptive strategies are sets of adaptive rules and once the learning material to be used in a course has been created, adaptive strategies can be applied to allow the personalisation of the course to students. This talk will describe the initial development of a software platform which imports learning content and adaptive strategies and then can display the resulting Adaptive Educational Hypermedia course to students. The software platform, called an adaptation engine, will be able to implement different types of adaptive strategies and test their suitability.

Spent this afternoon looking into parsing the LAG file format quickly in Java, the idea is to formally specify LAG grammar using ANTLR. I’ve got part of the grammar finished and it’s starting to output AST graphs like the one in this post so it’s looking hopeful and will save a lot of coding work later.

My application to upgrade my BCS membership from Student to Professional Member was accepted today so I am now a full member of the “leading body for those working in IT”…

On another note, I’m still working on the CAF+LAG player program. For those of you who haven’t fallen asleep after the double-barrelled  use of acronyms… …a CAF describes the data for a lesson and a LAG tells the computer how to display it… sort of. At the moment I’m working on turning a basic .lag file (like this one) into an XML representation (like this) for easy manipulation in the rest of the program.

I’m currently working through the examples on this page to make sure that I’m covering the syntax and grammer properly.

I’ve been exceptionally busy over the past month finishing off a lot of things before I start at Warwick University including training my replacement at my job in Leicester, finishing off most of the work on the Alpha Sales and Stock Database System for the 6 clients which are currently using the software, and other odds and ends as they came up.

As a result I haven’t been able been able to work as much on the volunteer based projects I’ve involved in such as BlenderArt, the Blender Challenges (www.blenderchallenge.com), the Entertainer Media Center etc. I’m hoping that once I’ve settled into a routine at Warwick I’ll be able to fit those back into my schedule.

My first day at Warwick was yesterday and it went well. I sorted out Computer Logins, got my Eee on the network, joined the gym and the climbing club (the indoor climbing area is impressive!), worked out where the important buildings are and continued the work I’ve been doing on a CAF + LAG player.

I still have some things todo, such as getting an annual pass for the car park, which I have to do today. I’ve got some more music recorded as well which I’ll be uploading to this blog and last.fm sometime soon.

I got my final degree results this week from the Open University.

They were good enough for Warwick University, so I’ll be starting a research PhD in Computer Science next year.