2012 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all people which have made this work possible. I express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Militon Frent¸iu, for his help during these years. I also thank Professor Horia F. Pop for research opportunities offered and valuable ideas. The passion for research, encouragements and many ideas came from my coleague Andreea Vescan to whom I am ...

An economic model of the online advertising market is presented, focusing on the effect of ad fraud. In the model, the market is comprised of three classes of players: publishers, advertising networks, and advertisers. The central question is whether ad networks have an incentive to aggressively combat fraud. The main outcome of the model is to answer this question in the affirmative.

Metacognitive awareness has been shown to be a critical skill for academic success. However, students often struggle to regulate this ability during learning tasks. The current study investigates how features designed to promote metacognitive awareness can be built into the game-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS) iSTART-2. College students (n=28) interacted with iSTART-2 for one hour, comp...

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Phenomena in the performance behaviour of high-performance computing (HPC) applications can stem from the HPC system itself, from the application’s code, but also from the simulation domain. In order to analyse the latter phenomena, we propose a system that visualizes profile-based performance data in its spatial context, i.e., on the geometry, in the simulation domain. It thus helps HPC expert...

A learner who can solve a problem cannot always understand the problem adequately. In order to deeply understand a problem, it is necessary that he/she poses various problems which can be solved by the “solution method” of the problem. Moreover, after he/she poses problems, it is necessary that he/she considers and indicates differences between the problems posed by him/her, too. So, we develop...

Spanning 30 years and 40 individual videogames across a range of platforms, Pac-Man is one of the most recognizable of all videogame characters and a pop–culture icon. In spite of its widespread popularity, the game receives little sustained academic engagement or analysis. In an attempt to address this, the paper argues that in its classic iterations PacMan generates complex notions of space a...

Paralinguistics organizers such as parenthesis, footnotes, and pop-up fields on screen, should play an important role signalling the writer’s “minimization” intention when secondary points are concerned. This experiment investigated the role of pop-up fields compared to brackets in an information retrieval task. The results showed that, in this kind of task, putting secondary pieces of informat...