This work proposes an innovative visual tool for real-time continuous learners analytics. The purpose of the work is to improve the design, functionality, and usability of learning management systems to monitor user activity to allow educators to make informed decisions on e-learning design, usually limited to dashboards graphs, tables, and low-usability user logs. The standard visualisation is currently scarce, and often inadequate to inform educators about the design quality and students engagement on their learning objects. The same low usability can be found in learning analytics tools, which mostly focus on post-course analysis, demanding specific skills to be effectively used, e.g., for statistical analysis and database queries. We propose a tool for student analytics embedded in a Learning Management System, based on the innovative visual metaphor of interface morphing. Artificial intelligence provides in remote learning immediate feedback, crucial in a face-to-face setting, highlighting the students’ engagement in each single learning object. A visual metaphor is the representation of a person, group, learning object, or concept through a visual image that suggests a particular association or point of similarity. The basic idea is that elements of the application interface, e.g., learning objects’ icons and student avatars, can be modified in colour and dimension to reflect key performance indicators of learner’s activities. The goal is to provide high-affordance information on the student engagement and usage of learning objects, where aggregation functions on subsets of users allow a dynamic evaluation of cohorts with different granularity. The proposed visual metaphors (i.e., thermometer bar, dimensional morphing, and tag cloud morphing) have been implemented and experimented within academic-level courses. Experimental results have been evaluated with a comparative analysis of user logs and a subjective usability survey, which show that the tool obtains quantitative, measurable effectiveness and the qualitative appreciation of educators. Among metaphors, the highest success is obtained by Dimensional morphing and Tag cloud transformation.

Individualized treatment is crucial for epileptic patients with different types of seizures. The differences among patients impact the drug choice as well as the surgery procedure. With the advance in machine learning, automatic seizure detection can ease the manual time-consuming and labor-intensive procedure for diagnose seizure in the clinical setting. In this paper, we present an electroencephalography (EEG) frequency bands (sub-bands) and montages selection (sub-zones) method for classifier training that exploits Natural Language Processing from individual patients’ clinical report. The proposed approach is targeting for individualized treatment. We integrated the prior knowledge from patient’s reports into the classifier-building process, mimicking the authentic thinking process of experienced neurologist’s when diagnosing seizure using EEG. The keywords from clinical documents are mapped to the EEG data in terms of frequency bands and scalp EEG electrodes. The data of experiments are from the Temple University Hospital EEG seizure corpus, and the dataset is divided based on each group of patients with same seizure type and same recording electrode references. The classifier includes Random Forest, Support Vector Machine and Multi-Layer Perceptron. The classification performance indicates that competitive results can be achieve with a small portion of EEG the data. Using the sub-zones selection for Generalized Seizures (GNSZ) on all three electrodes, data are reduced by nearly 50% while the performance metrics remain at the same level with the whole frequency and zones. Moreover, when selecting by sub-zones and sub-bands together for GNSZ with Linked Ears reference, the data range reduced to 0.3% of whole range, and the performance deviates less than 3% from the results with whole range of data. Results show that using proposed approach may lead to more efficient implementations of the seizure classifier to be executed on power-efficient devices for long lasting real-time seizures detection.

Each term in a short text can potentially convey emotional meaning. Facebook comments and shared posts often convey human biases, which play a pivotal role in information spreading and content consumption. Such bias is at the basis of human-generated content, and capable of conveying contexts which shape the opinion of users through the social media flow of information. Starting from the observation that a separation in topic clusters, i.e. sub-contexts, spontaneously occur if evaluated by human common sense, this work introduces a process for automated extraction of sub-context in Facebook. Basing on emotional abstraction and valence, the automated extraction is exploited through a class of path-based semantic similarity measures and sentiment analysis. Experimental results are obtained using validated clustering techniques on such features, on the domain of information security, over a sample of over 9 million page users. An additional expert evaluation of clusters in tag clouds confirms that the proposed automated algorithm for emotional abstraction clusters Facebook comments compatibly with human common sense. The baseline methods rely on the robust notion of collective concept similarity

Relating, connecting and navigating between concepts represent a major challenge for machine intelligence. On the other hand, collaborative repositories provide a large base of knowledge already filtered, structured, linked and meaningful from a human semantic point of view. Although these repositories are machine accessible, they have no formal explicit semantic tagging to help for automatic navigation in them. In this paper we present a randomized approach, based on Heuristic Semantic Walk (HSW) for searching a collaborative network in order to extract meaningful semantic chains between concepts. The method is based on the use of heuristics defined on semantic proximity measures, which can be easily computed from general search engines statistics. Information from multiple random chains can be used to compute semantic distances between the concepts, as well as to determine the underlying semantic context. The proposed method solves major issues posed by collaborative networks, such as large dimensions, high connectivity degree and dynamical evolution of online networks, which make classical search methods inefficient and unfeasible. In this study the HSW model has been experimented on Wikipedia. Tests held with the well known Word Sym353 benchmark for human evaluation show that the proposed model is comparable to best state-of-the-art results, while being the only web-based approach. Other potential applications range from query expansion, argumentation mining, and simulation of user navigation.