The use of learning management systems (LMS) has grown considerably in universities around the world. The University of Minho (UM) has pioneered in this area in Portugal, adopting Blackboard as its official LMS. Moodle is also used in UM in scattered initiatives, allowing for interesting comparisons. Previous studies comparing Blackboard and Moodle have been confined to limited samples and focu...

We introduce a multiagent blackboard system for poetry generation with a special focus on emotional modelling. The emotional content is extracted from text, particularly blog posts, and is used as inspiration for generating poems. Our main objective is to create a system with an empathic emotional personality that would change its mood according to the affective content of the text, and express...

Approximate processing is an approach to real-time AI problem solving in domains in which compromise is possible between the resources required to generate a solution and the quality of that solution. It is a satisficing approach in which the goal is to produce acceptable solutions within the available time and computational resource constraints. Previous work has shown how to integrate approxi...

Distributed blackboard is one of the popular agent communication architectures. However, in current agent systems, the distributed blackboard architecture is kept fixed after its initial setting, which may influence the system performance when network topology or agent cooperation relations are changed during operation. To solve the problem, this paper presents a novel mechanism for adjusting a...

Adopting the blackboard architecture from the area of Arti cial Intelligence, a novel kind of optimizer enabling two desirable ideas will be proposed. Firstly, using such a well-structured approach backpropagation of the optimized queries allows an evolutionary improvement of (crucial) parts of the optimizer. Secondly, the A search strategy can be applied to harmonize two contrary properties: A...

A b s t r a c t In this paper we discuss Poligon, a skeletal system fo r the development of concurrent blackboard based applications, its architecture and the motivation fo r its design. A number of experiments have been performed in order to evaluate the performance of Poligon. Some of these are detailed and the results are shown. Lessons learned in the development of Poligon are given and con...

The present study investigates the central concerns of the use of visuals within the four EFL textbooks taught at Iranian high schools which have been prescribed by the Ministry of Education. To do this, the four EFL textbooks were evaluated and analyzed. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze data quantitatively. The analysis indicated that over the four textbooks, 95.71 percent of all vi...