In the past years, a continuous innovation process characterized the field of Technology-Enhanced... more In the past years, a continuous innovation process characterized the field of Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL), to the aim of implementing any newly emerged technology inside the different facets of teaching and learning tasks. Currently, something different is happening, mainly related to the so- called exponential learning, due to the exponential growth of training demand. In fact, new knowledge and skills must be delivered at a speed never seen before, pushed by, e.g., Industry 4.0 and other European Community programs, as well as by the new wave of cognitive computing technology (i.e., cognitive managers, cognitive architecture engineers, cognitive system programming, etc.). The authors believe that this paradigm must be extended, causing the shift from classrooms to communities where we can speak of men and machines, rather than men or machines, thus enhancing humans\u2019 faculties and assisting them in the transformation of skills. Such a revolutionary approach requires that the next generation of TEL platforms include a variety of novel cognitive services to enable storing and using big data. To achieve such results, we will be forced to respect two fundamental constraints: time and content, with contents that will have to be ready within the time learners will need them. Besides, the services will be profiled for different users\u2019 levels, such as learning professional and learning business consumer. Also interfaces will be completely different from those we are used today, because we will be able to talk with machines, whose answers will result from a very quick and effective natural language processing and decision-making methods. We are on a turning point of training processes, a very challenging and important moment in which the cognitive approach will lead to a transformation, and e-learning and platforms are not excluded. The paper presents the general vision of authors about this new scenario and some preliminary applications to a virtual community platform where a big data-enabled architecture and some prototypes of cognitive services are under experimentation
2021 IEEE 6th International Forum on Research and Technology for Society and Industry (RTSI), Sep 6, 2021
This paper presents the results achieved in four years of activity within the NERD? project, whic... more This paper presents the results achieved in four years of activity within the NERD? project, which was created by IBM Italy and La Sapienza University of Rome and is carried on in collaboration with several universities and schools, in Italy. The long-term objective of the project is bridging the gender gap in the so-called STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) starting from the secondary education. Specifically, we refer to the experience conducted in the field of informatics and computer engineering by the Federico II University of Naples, which empowered the original educational model of the NERD? project, introducing collaboration issues within a smart learning community. This involved people from industry, university and secondary schools, including both teachers and students at all the levels.
This paper deals with the use of videos in education and describes an approach to improve the lea... more This paper deals with the use of videos in education and describes an approach to improve the learners’ experience in the first-watch and rewatch learning contexts. Actually, learning through videos raises challenging issues like non-linear navigation and poor structure of the video content. Hence, a novel application is presented, designed to address such issues. To this aim, the proposed Edurell environment enriches standard video lessons with new services based on the contents’ structure of the video, resulting in a new hypervideo educational application. The system extracts the concepts explained in a given video lesson, their prerequisite relations, and the segments of the video where they occur, together with other pieces of knowledge. The resulting knowledge graph allows creating augmented video lessons and enables learners to perform non-linear navigation and in-depth exploration of their learning contents. This idea was implemented in a custom web-based video player with in...
The paper presents the definition of the characteristics of a new manipulator based on the elepha... more The paper presents the definition of the characteristics of a new manipulator based on the elephant trunk principle but with a special kind of large bandwidth actuators working with oil at low pressure, controlled by the sliding modes technique and with a new simplex-based approach for tracking trajectories. This work represents a point of convergence of two complementary activities. The
Cognitive computing is the new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), relying on traditional techn... more Cognitive computing is the new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), relying on traditional techniques based on expert systems and also exploiting statistics and mathematical models. In particular, cognitive computing systems can be regarded as a " more human " artificial intelligence. In fact, they mimic human reasoning methodologies, showing special capabilities in dealing with uncertainties and in solving problems that typically entail computation consuming processes. Moreover, they can evolve, exploiting the accumulated experience to learn from the past, both from errors and from successful findings. From a theoretical point of view, cognitive computing could replace existing calculators in many fields of application but hardware requirements are still high, even if the cloud infrastructure, which is expected to uphold its rapid growth in the very next future, can support their diffusion and ease the penetration of such a novel variety of systems, fostering new services as well as changes in many settled paradigms. In this paper, we focus on
Applied Degree Education and the Future of Work, 2020
Both technology and society are living a continuous evolution process, driving innovation and the... more Both technology and society are living a continuous evolution process, driving innovation and the development of novel solutions in almost any field of application. Making reference to the specific scenario of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), we observe significant steps ahead in techniques and methodology and, consequently, technological solutions undergo a continuous upgrade to cope with these, to the aim of improving the quality of services, the usability, the overall performances, the effectiveness of education, and to provide a more pervasive experience for learners. Accordingly, e-learning environments and the related tools have been growing in complexity.
Cognitive computing is the new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), relying on traditional techn... more Cognitive computing is the new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), relying on traditional techniques based on expert systems and also exploiting statistics and mathematical model. In particular, cognitive computing systems can be regarded as a "more human" artificial intelligence. In fact, they mimic human reasoning methodologies, showing special capabilities in dealing with uncertainties and in solving problems that typically entail computation consuming processes. Moreover, they can evolve, exploiting the accumulated experience to learn from the past, both from errors and from successful findings. From a theoretical point of view, cognitive computing could replace existing calculators in many fields of application but hardware requirements are still high, even if the cloud infrastructure, which is expected to uphold its rapid growth in the very next future, can support their diffusion and ease the penetration of such a novel variety of systems, fostering new services a...
In the past years, a continuous innovation process characterized the field of Technology-Enhanced... more In the past years, a continuous innovation process characterized the field of Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL), to the aim of implementing any newly emerged technology inside the different facets of teaching and learning tasks. Currently, something different is happening, mainly related to the so- called exponential learning, due to the exponential growth of training demand. In fact, new knowledge and skills must be delivered at a speed never seen before, pushed by, e.g., Industry 4.0 and other European Community programs, as well as by the new wave of cognitive computing technology (i.e., cognitive managers, cognitive architecture engineers, cognitive system programming, etc.). The authors believe that this paradigm must be extended, causing the shift from classrooms to communities where we can speak of men and machines, rather than men or machines, thus enhancing humans\u2019 faculties and assisting them in the transformation of skills. Such a revolutionary approach requires that the next generation of TEL platforms include a variety of novel cognitive services to enable storing and using big data. To achieve such results, we will be forced to respect two fundamental constraints: time and content, with contents that will have to be ready within the time learners will need them. Besides, the services will be profiled for different users\u2019 levels, such as learning professional and learning business consumer. Also interfaces will be completely different from those we are used today, because we will be able to talk with machines, whose answers will result from a very quick and effective natural language processing and decision-making methods. We are on a turning point of training processes, a very challenging and important moment in which the cognitive approach will lead to a transformation, and e-learning and platforms are not excluded. The paper presents the general vision of authors about this new scenario and some preliminary applications to a virtual community platform where a big data-enabled architecture and some prototypes of cognitive services are under experimentation
2021 IEEE 6th International Forum on Research and Technology for Society and Industry (RTSI), Sep 6, 2021
This paper presents the results achieved in four years of activity within the NERD? project, whic... more This paper presents the results achieved in four years of activity within the NERD? project, which was created by IBM Italy and La Sapienza University of Rome and is carried on in collaboration with several universities and schools, in Italy. The long-term objective of the project is bridging the gender gap in the so-called STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) starting from the secondary education. Specifically, we refer to the experience conducted in the field of informatics and computer engineering by the Federico II University of Naples, which empowered the original educational model of the NERD? project, introducing collaboration issues within a smart learning community. This involved people from industry, university and secondary schools, including both teachers and students at all the levels.
This paper deals with the use of videos in education and describes an approach to improve the lea... more This paper deals with the use of videos in education and describes an approach to improve the learners’ experience in the first-watch and rewatch learning contexts. Actually, learning through videos raises challenging issues like non-linear navigation and poor structure of the video content. Hence, a novel application is presented, designed to address such issues. To this aim, the proposed Edurell environment enriches standard video lessons with new services based on the contents’ structure of the video, resulting in a new hypervideo educational application. The system extracts the concepts explained in a given video lesson, their prerequisite relations, and the segments of the video where they occur, together with other pieces of knowledge. The resulting knowledge graph allows creating augmented video lessons and enables learners to perform non-linear navigation and in-depth exploration of their learning contents. This idea was implemented in a custom web-based video player with in...
The paper presents the definition of the characteristics of a new manipulator based on the elepha... more The paper presents the definition of the characteristics of a new manipulator based on the elephant trunk principle but with a special kind of large bandwidth actuators working with oil at low pressure, controlled by the sliding modes technique and with a new simplex-based approach for tracking trajectories. This work represents a point of convergence of two complementary activities. The
Cognitive computing is the new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), relying on traditional techn... more Cognitive computing is the new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), relying on traditional techniques based on expert systems and also exploiting statistics and mathematical models. In particular, cognitive computing systems can be regarded as a " more human " artificial intelligence. In fact, they mimic human reasoning methodologies, showing special capabilities in dealing with uncertainties and in solving problems that typically entail computation consuming processes. Moreover, they can evolve, exploiting the accumulated experience to learn from the past, both from errors and from successful findings. From a theoretical point of view, cognitive computing could replace existing calculators in many fields of application but hardware requirements are still high, even if the cloud infrastructure, which is expected to uphold its rapid growth in the very next future, can support their diffusion and ease the penetration of such a novel variety of systems, fostering new services as well as changes in many settled paradigms. In this paper, we focus on
Applied Degree Education and the Future of Work, 2020
Both technology and society are living a continuous evolution process, driving innovation and the... more Both technology and society are living a continuous evolution process, driving innovation and the development of novel solutions in almost any field of application. Making reference to the specific scenario of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), we observe significant steps ahead in techniques and methodology and, consequently, technological solutions undergo a continuous upgrade to cope with these, to the aim of improving the quality of services, the usability, the overall performances, the effectiveness of education, and to provide a more pervasive experience for learners. Accordingly, e-learning environments and the related tools have been growing in complexity.
Cognitive computing is the new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), relying on traditional techn... more Cognitive computing is the new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), relying on traditional techniques based on expert systems and also exploiting statistics and mathematical model. In particular, cognitive computing systems can be regarded as a "more human" artificial intelligence. In fact, they mimic human reasoning methodologies, showing special capabilities in dealing with uncertainties and in solving problems that typically entail computation consuming processes. Moreover, they can evolve, exploiting the accumulated experience to learn from the past, both from errors and from successful findings. From a theoretical point of view, cognitive computing could replace existing calculators in many fields of application but hardware requirements are still high, even if the cloud infrastructure, which is expected to uphold its rapid growth in the very next future, can support their diffusion and ease the penetration of such a novel variety of systems, fostering new services a...
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