We applied TETRAD II, a causal discovery program developed in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Philosophy, to a database containing information on 204 U.S. colleges, collected by the US News and World Report magazine for the purpose of college ranking. Our analysis focuses on possible causes of low freshmen retention in U.S. colleges. TETRAD II finds a set of causal structures that ar...

A method for evaluating and ranking energy alternatives based on impact upon the natural environment and cultural heritage was developed as part of the first phase of an Icelandic framework plan for the use of hydropower and geothermal energy. The three step procedure involved assessing i) site values and ii) development impacts within a multi-criteria analysis, and iii) ranking the alternative...

ranking fuzzy numbers plays a very important role in linguistic decision making and other fuzzy application systems. in spite of many ranking methods, no one can rank fuzzy numbers with human intuition consistently in all cases. shortcoming are found in some of the convenient methods for ranking triangular fuzzy numbers such as the coefficient of variation (cv index), distance between fuzzy set...

Background: in order to evaluate educational courses, usually different criteria of student and academic staff are being used. These criteria for students include their number, fields, the ratio of post-garaduate students to all students, and for staff, they are composed of their number, their rank in the academic pyramid, as well as the ratio of students to academic staff classified based on t...

In Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), struggling learners often seek help by posting questions in discussion forums. Unfortunately, given the large volume of discussion in MOOCs, instructors may overlook these learners’ posts, detrimentally impacting the learning process and exacerbating attrition. In this paper, we present YouEDU, an instructional aid that automatically detects and addresses...

The need for sustainable architecture and urban design and planning has long been acknowledged, along with the necessity for adequate, early-phase guiding instruments. This paper aims at exploring the effectiveness and usability of a novel decision-support workflow for neighbourhood-scale projects, developed to provide practitioners with early-stage design alternatives in an interactive and ite...

In the ongoing debate about front-of-package (FOP) nutrition labels, little data exist regarding nutritionally at-risk populations, although they are critical targets of prevention programs. This study aimed to compare the impact of FOP labels on the ability to rank products according to their nutritional quality among French adults potentially at risk of poor dietary quality (N = 14,230). Four...

In e-learning settings, the evaluation of different alternatives regarding learning paths’ proposals is nowadays crucial, due to the great attention devoted to the construction of learning objects (LO) available through Learning Management Systems (LMS). In this paper, we present a model aiming to support this evaluation process, in presence of multiple attributes and of a panel of experts invo...

We investigate a novel approach to e-Learning using Semantic Web technologies and aiming to optimise the learners’ experience incorporating pedagogical strategies into the learning process. The increasing availability of Semantic Web based educational resources and the establishment of open metadata standards like IEEE LOM pave the way for enhanced e-Learning systems that support personalised l...