Personalization is desirable, but writing the adaptation behaviour description to go with it is t... more Personalization is desirable, but writing the adaptation behaviour description to go with it is taxing. Even more challenging is the application of multiple adaptation strategies over the same static content. This paper focuses on recent work on strategy modularisation and merger development in the authoring process ofadaptive hypermedia. The reason for the modularisation of strategies is to break a complex adaptation decision into a number of simpler ones, which may be reused more easily and applied in different orders. The rationale for strategy merger is to be able to apply multiple adaptation strategies over the same content - a challenge which is not yet fully addressed in current adaptive hypermedia systems. To demonstrate the proposed method we present an example case study and sample strategies written in the LAG adaptation language. The case study is based on a recently proposed model for Quality of Experience in e-learning. This model exposes the complex interaction betwee...
Nowadays, the rapid rise of the number of vehicles on the roads has led to several challenging pr... more Nowadays, the rapid rise of the number of vehicles on the roads has led to several challenging problems for road authorities, such as traffic congestion, increasing number of accidents and air pollution. According to recent statistics, road traffic jam leads to a huge economic loss due to the increasing delay on the roads and the extra fuel consumption. Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) provides a promising framework to alleviate the congestion on the roads. However, a lot of work needs to be done to improve its efficiency, such as in the area of vehicles re-routing strategies. The main focus of this paper is on designing novel vehicles re-routing strategy to reduce the traffic congestion in urban areas. The proposed strategy is a hybrid approach which takes full advantage of both exact and heuristic algorithms and meets the requirements of dynamic time constraints of real road traffic scenarios. The next step of our work is to evaluate the performance of our strategy and comp...
The large variety of user-adaptive educational hypermedia systems available requires techniques f... more The large variety of user-adaptive educational hypermedia systems available requires techniques for evaluation and comparison with other adaptive systems. In this paper the current evaluation approaches used for assessing intelligent e-learning environments are presented. The paper discusses important issues emerging from research on system evaluation that focuses on both social and practical acceptability of courseware applications. Acceptability of an educational system is analysed in terms of usability evaluation, learner achievement and learning performance evaluation.
2004 IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37577), 2004
This paper presents the framework for a QoS-aware adaptive Web-based system (QoSAS) that adapts W... more This paper presents the framework for a QoS-aware adaptive Web-based system (QoSAS) that adapts Web content based on both user-perceived-QoS and user interests related to the Web content. The architecture of the QoSAS includes a novel perceived performance model (PPM) that models user-perceived performance features via different QoS metrics and suggests content constraints in order to improve the perceived performance.
China-Ireland International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies (CIICT 2008), 2008
Adaptive hypermedia systems are beneficial to e-learners in tailoring content to individual chara... more Adaptive hypermedia systems are beneficial to e-learners in tailoring content to individual characteristics such as prior knowledge, learning preferences, etc. However, unlike popular non-adaptive learning management systems such as Moodle and Blackboard they do not support social connectedness by allowing communication with other learners. This can lead to feelings of isolation amongst learners and ultimately learner demotivation. Enabling communication has been shown to improve cohesion within a learner group and allows a tutor to monitor learner participation and intervene before learners become disengaged. This paper outlines a stand-alone component connect! for the selection of multimedia communication tools in adaptive e-learning systems to support social connectedness. In addition to the already proven benefits of supporting social interaction, attaching such a module to an adaptive hypermedia system allows us to introduce the novel feature of tailoring the communication method to the individual needs of the learner. We draw on research in the area of media ecology to assist us in making our decisions.
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web - WWW '06, 2006
New communication technologies can enable Web users to access personalised information "anytime, ... more New communication technologies can enable Web users to access personalised information "anytime, anywhere". However, the network environments allowing this "anytime, anywhere" access may have widely varying performance characteristics such as bandwidth, level of congestion, mobility support, and cost of transmission. It is unrealistic to expect that the quality of delivery of the same content can be maintained in this variable environment, but rather an effort must be made to fit the content served to the current delivery conditions, thus ensuring high Quality of Experience (QoE) to the users. This paper introduces an end-user QoE-aware adaptive hypermedia framework that extends the adaptation functionality of adaptive hypermedia systems with a fine-grained content-based adaptation mechanism. The proposed mechanism attempts to take into account multiple factors affecting QoE in relation to the delivery of Web content. Various simulation tests investigate the performance improvements provided by this mechanism, in a home-like, low bit rate operational environment, in terms of access time per page, aggregate access time per browsing session and quantity of transmitted information.
Due to the severe impact of road traffic congestion on both economy and environment, several vehi... more Due to the severe impact of road traffic congestion on both economy and environment, several vehicles routing algorithms have been proposed to optimize travelers itinerary based on real-time traffic feeds or historical data. However, their evaluation methodologies are not as compelling as their key design idea because none of them had been tested under both real transportation map and real traffic data. In this paper, we conduct a deep performance analysis and comparison of four typical vehicles routing algorithms under various scalability levels (i.e. trip length and traffic load) based on realistic transportation simulation. The ultimate goal of this work is to suggest the most suitable routing algorithm to use in different transportation scenarios, so that it can provide a valuable reference for both traffic managers and researchers when they deploy or optimize a large scale centralized Traffic Management System (TMS). The obtained simulation results reveal that dynamic A* is the best routing algorithm if the TMS has sufficient memory or storage capacities, otherwise static A* is also a great alternative.
International Journal of Learning Technology, 2007
This paper proposes QoE-LAOS, a Quality of Experience-oriented adaptive authoring model that enab... more This paper proposes QoE-LAOS, a Quality of Experience-oriented adaptive authoring model that enables performance-aware adaptation. It extends the existing LAOS authoring model in order to consider display and delivery performance issues. QoE-LAOS involves the addition of three new QoE sublayers: QoE Content Features sublayer, QoE Characteristics sublayer and QoE Rules sublayer. These proposed QoE sublayers are deployed at LAOS's Domain, Adaptation and Presentation Models, respectively. This paper formalises and exemplifies QoE-LAOS and discusses authoring-related issues in relation to each new sublayer.
In 1987 the Brundtland report [1] coined the seminal definition for sustainability; it defined th... more In 1987 the Brundtland report [1] coined the seminal definition for sustainability; it defined that development is sustainable,“… if it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Sustainable models of innovation in technology-enhanced learning have to build on this definition. Otherwise they run the risk of adding to the plethora of alternative definitions [2].
Abstract. This paper describes recent work on strategy merger development in the authoring proces... more Abstract. This paper describes recent work on strategy merger development in the authoring process of adaptive hypermedia. The goal of a merging strategy is to break a complex adaptation decision into a number of simpler ones which may be reused more easily and applied in different orders. To demonstrate the proposed method we present an example case study and sample strategies written in the LAG language. The case study is based on a recently proposed model for Quality of Experience in e-learning. This model exposes the ...
17th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2014
As urbanization has been spreading across the world for decades, the traffic congestion problem b... more As urbanization has been spreading across the world for decades, the traffic congestion problem becomes increasingly serious in most of the major cities. Among the root causes of urban traffic congestion, en route events are the main source of the sudden increase of the road traffic load, especially during peak hours. The current solutions, such as on-board navigation systems for individual vehicles, can only provide optimal route using current traffic data gained just before the start of their journeys. Those solutions are thus unable to provide a better alternative route quickly enough if an unexpected congestion occurs. Moreover, using the same alternative routes may lead to new bottlenecks that cannot be avoided. Thus a global traffic load balance cannot be achieved. To deal with these problems, we propose a Multi Agent System (MAS) that can achieve a trade-off between the individual and global benefits by giving the vehicles optimal turn suggestions to bypass a blocked road ahead. The simulation results show that our strategy achieves a substantial gain in average trip time reduction under realistic scenarios. Moreover, the negative impact of selfish rerouting is investigated to show the importance of altruism rerouting applied in our strategy.
International Journal of Learning Technology, 2007
This paper proposes QoE-LAOS, a Quality of Experience-oriented adaptive authoring model that enab... more This paper proposes QoE-LAOS, a Quality of Experience-oriented adaptive authoring model that enables performance-aware adaptation. It extends the existing LAOS authoring model in order to consider display and delivery performance issues. QoE-LAOS involves the addition of three new QoE sublayers: QoE Content Features sublayer, QoE Characteristics sublayer and QoE Rules sublayer. These proposed QoE sublayers are deployed at LAOS's Domain, Adaptation and Presentation Models, respectively. This paper formalises and exemplifies QoE-LAOS and discusses authoring-related issues in relation to each new sublayer. in 2005 for research on end-user quality of experience-aware adaptive hypermedia systems. Her research interests include end-user quality of experience, adaptive hypermedia systems and personalised e-learning over wired and wireless networks using various devices. She has written a book and over 25 peer-reviewed publications on these areas in prestigious international conferences and journals.
ABSTRACT Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been widely set up for last-mile network connectivity... more ABSTRACT Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been widely set up for last-mile network connectivity due to their flexibility, ease of use, and low-cost deployment. When used in conjunction with peer-to-peer data transfer solutions, many innovative applications and services, such as distributed storage, distributed resource sharing, and live TV broadcasting, can be deployed with no centralized administration. However, to achieve good quality of service in wireless environments, it is important that the associated peer-to-peer overlay is not only aware of the availability but of the location of its peers and services as well. This paper proposes a wireless location-aware Chord-based overlay mechanism for WMNs (WILCO) based on a novel geographical multilevel identification (ID) mapping and an improved finger table. The proposed scheme exploits the location information of mesh routers (MRs) to decrease the number of hops that the overlay messages traverse in the physical topology. In comparison with the original Chord, the WILCO mechanism has significant benefits: It reduces the number of lookup messages, has symmetric lookup on keys in both the forward and backward directions of a Chord ring, and achieves a stretch factor of $O(hbox{1})$. Simulation results show how the proposed scheme outperforms the original Chord and the state-of-the-art MeshChord in terms of lookup efficiency and how it significantly reduces the overlay message overhead.
In the recent years, there has been an increasing demand for high quality multimedia services ove... more In the recent years, there has been an increasing demand for high quality multimedia services over wireless networks. Triple play services (voice, data and video) require data-rates of the order of several megabits per second (Mbps). However, the large transmission ...
Abstract. This paper presents a novel authoring framework for Quality of Ex-perience (QoE) aware ... more Abstract. This paper presents a novel authoring framework for Quality of Ex-perience (QoE) aware Adaptive Hypermedia Systems. It extends the LAOS au-thoring model in order to consider delivery performance issues. The paper formalises and exemplifies the newly proposed QoE ...
Personalization is desirable, but writing the adaptation behaviour description to go with it is t... more Personalization is desirable, but writing the adaptation behaviour description to go with it is taxing. Even more challenging is the application of multiple adaptation strategies over the same static content. This paper focuses on recent work on strategy modularisation and merger development in the authoring process ofadaptive hypermedia. The reason for the modularisation of strategies is to break a complex adaptation decision into a number of simpler ones, which may be reused more easily and applied in different orders. The rationale for strategy merger is to be able to apply multiple adaptation strategies over the same content - a challenge which is not yet fully addressed in current adaptive hypermedia systems. To demonstrate the proposed method we present an example case study and sample strategies written in the LAG adaptation language. The case study is based on a recently proposed model for Quality of Experience in e-learning. This model exposes the complex interaction betwee...
Nowadays, the rapid rise of the number of vehicles on the roads has led to several challenging pr... more Nowadays, the rapid rise of the number of vehicles on the roads has led to several challenging problems for road authorities, such as traffic congestion, increasing number of accidents and air pollution. According to recent statistics, road traffic jam leads to a huge economic loss due to the increasing delay on the roads and the extra fuel consumption. Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) provides a promising framework to alleviate the congestion on the roads. However, a lot of work needs to be done to improve its efficiency, such as in the area of vehicles re-routing strategies. The main focus of this paper is on designing novel vehicles re-routing strategy to reduce the traffic congestion in urban areas. The proposed strategy is a hybrid approach which takes full advantage of both exact and heuristic algorithms and meets the requirements of dynamic time constraints of real road traffic scenarios. The next step of our work is to evaluate the performance of our strategy and comp...
The large variety of user-adaptive educational hypermedia systems available requires techniques f... more The large variety of user-adaptive educational hypermedia systems available requires techniques for evaluation and comparison with other adaptive systems. In this paper the current evaluation approaches used for assessing intelligent e-learning environments are presented. The paper discusses important issues emerging from research on system evaluation that focuses on both social and practical acceptability of courseware applications. Acceptability of an educational system is analysed in terms of usability evaluation, learner achievement and learning performance evaluation.
2004 IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37577), 2004
This paper presents the framework for a QoS-aware adaptive Web-based system (QoSAS) that adapts W... more This paper presents the framework for a QoS-aware adaptive Web-based system (QoSAS) that adapts Web content based on both user-perceived-QoS and user interests related to the Web content. The architecture of the QoSAS includes a novel perceived performance model (PPM) that models user-perceived performance features via different QoS metrics and suggests content constraints in order to improve the perceived performance.
China-Ireland International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies (CIICT 2008), 2008
Adaptive hypermedia systems are beneficial to e-learners in tailoring content to individual chara... more Adaptive hypermedia systems are beneficial to e-learners in tailoring content to individual characteristics such as prior knowledge, learning preferences, etc. However, unlike popular non-adaptive learning management systems such as Moodle and Blackboard they do not support social connectedness by allowing communication with other learners. This can lead to feelings of isolation amongst learners and ultimately learner demotivation. Enabling communication has been shown to improve cohesion within a learner group and allows a tutor to monitor learner participation and intervene before learners become disengaged. This paper outlines a stand-alone component connect! for the selection of multimedia communication tools in adaptive e-learning systems to support social connectedness. In addition to the already proven benefits of supporting social interaction, attaching such a module to an adaptive hypermedia system allows us to introduce the novel feature of tailoring the communication method to the individual needs of the learner. We draw on research in the area of media ecology to assist us in making our decisions.
Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web - WWW '06, 2006
New communication technologies can enable Web users to access personalised information "anytime, ... more New communication technologies can enable Web users to access personalised information "anytime, anywhere". However, the network environments allowing this "anytime, anywhere" access may have widely varying performance characteristics such as bandwidth, level of congestion, mobility support, and cost of transmission. It is unrealistic to expect that the quality of delivery of the same content can be maintained in this variable environment, but rather an effort must be made to fit the content served to the current delivery conditions, thus ensuring high Quality of Experience (QoE) to the users. This paper introduces an end-user QoE-aware adaptive hypermedia framework that extends the adaptation functionality of adaptive hypermedia systems with a fine-grained content-based adaptation mechanism. The proposed mechanism attempts to take into account multiple factors affecting QoE in relation to the delivery of Web content. Various simulation tests investigate the performance improvements provided by this mechanism, in a home-like, low bit rate operational environment, in terms of access time per page, aggregate access time per browsing session and quantity of transmitted information.
Due to the severe impact of road traffic congestion on both economy and environment, several vehi... more Due to the severe impact of road traffic congestion on both economy and environment, several vehicles routing algorithms have been proposed to optimize travelers itinerary based on real-time traffic feeds or historical data. However, their evaluation methodologies are not as compelling as their key design idea because none of them had been tested under both real transportation map and real traffic data. In this paper, we conduct a deep performance analysis and comparison of four typical vehicles routing algorithms under various scalability levels (i.e. trip length and traffic load) based on realistic transportation simulation. The ultimate goal of this work is to suggest the most suitable routing algorithm to use in different transportation scenarios, so that it can provide a valuable reference for both traffic managers and researchers when they deploy or optimize a large scale centralized Traffic Management System (TMS). The obtained simulation results reveal that dynamic A* is the best routing algorithm if the TMS has sufficient memory or storage capacities, otherwise static A* is also a great alternative.
International Journal of Learning Technology, 2007
This paper proposes QoE-LAOS, a Quality of Experience-oriented adaptive authoring model that enab... more This paper proposes QoE-LAOS, a Quality of Experience-oriented adaptive authoring model that enables performance-aware adaptation. It extends the existing LAOS authoring model in order to consider display and delivery performance issues. QoE-LAOS involves the addition of three new QoE sublayers: QoE Content Features sublayer, QoE Characteristics sublayer and QoE Rules sublayer. These proposed QoE sublayers are deployed at LAOS's Domain, Adaptation and Presentation Models, respectively. This paper formalises and exemplifies QoE-LAOS and discusses authoring-related issues in relation to each new sublayer.
In 1987 the Brundtland report [1] coined the seminal definition for sustainability; it defined th... more In 1987 the Brundtland report [1] coined the seminal definition for sustainability; it defined that development is sustainable,“… if it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Sustainable models of innovation in technology-enhanced learning have to build on this definition. Otherwise they run the risk of adding to the plethora of alternative definitions [2].
Abstract. This paper describes recent work on strategy merger development in the authoring proces... more Abstract. This paper describes recent work on strategy merger development in the authoring process of adaptive hypermedia. The goal of a merging strategy is to break a complex adaptation decision into a number of simpler ones which may be reused more easily and applied in different orders. To demonstrate the proposed method we present an example case study and sample strategies written in the LAG language. The case study is based on a recently proposed model for Quality of Experience in e-learning. This model exposes the ...
17th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2014
As urbanization has been spreading across the world for decades, the traffic congestion problem b... more As urbanization has been spreading across the world for decades, the traffic congestion problem becomes increasingly serious in most of the major cities. Among the root causes of urban traffic congestion, en route events are the main source of the sudden increase of the road traffic load, especially during peak hours. The current solutions, such as on-board navigation systems for individual vehicles, can only provide optimal route using current traffic data gained just before the start of their journeys. Those solutions are thus unable to provide a better alternative route quickly enough if an unexpected congestion occurs. Moreover, using the same alternative routes may lead to new bottlenecks that cannot be avoided. Thus a global traffic load balance cannot be achieved. To deal with these problems, we propose a Multi Agent System (MAS) that can achieve a trade-off between the individual and global benefits by giving the vehicles optimal turn suggestions to bypass a blocked road ahead. The simulation results show that our strategy achieves a substantial gain in average trip time reduction under realistic scenarios. Moreover, the negative impact of selfish rerouting is investigated to show the importance of altruism rerouting applied in our strategy.
International Journal of Learning Technology, 2007
This paper proposes QoE-LAOS, a Quality of Experience-oriented adaptive authoring model that enab... more This paper proposes QoE-LAOS, a Quality of Experience-oriented adaptive authoring model that enables performance-aware adaptation. It extends the existing LAOS authoring model in order to consider display and delivery performance issues. QoE-LAOS involves the addition of three new QoE sublayers: QoE Content Features sublayer, QoE Characteristics sublayer and QoE Rules sublayer. These proposed QoE sublayers are deployed at LAOS's Domain, Adaptation and Presentation Models, respectively. This paper formalises and exemplifies QoE-LAOS and discusses authoring-related issues in relation to each new sublayer. in 2005 for research on end-user quality of experience-aware adaptive hypermedia systems. Her research interests include end-user quality of experience, adaptive hypermedia systems and personalised e-learning over wired and wireless networks using various devices. She has written a book and over 25 peer-reviewed publications on these areas in prestigious international conferences and journals.
ABSTRACT Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been widely set up for last-mile network connectivity... more ABSTRACT Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been widely set up for last-mile network connectivity due to their flexibility, ease of use, and low-cost deployment. When used in conjunction with peer-to-peer data transfer solutions, many innovative applications and services, such as distributed storage, distributed resource sharing, and live TV broadcasting, can be deployed with no centralized administration. However, to achieve good quality of service in wireless environments, it is important that the associated peer-to-peer overlay is not only aware of the availability but of the location of its peers and services as well. This paper proposes a wireless location-aware Chord-based overlay mechanism for WMNs (WILCO) based on a novel geographical multilevel identification (ID) mapping and an improved finger table. The proposed scheme exploits the location information of mesh routers (MRs) to decrease the number of hops that the overlay messages traverse in the physical topology. In comparison with the original Chord, the WILCO mechanism has significant benefits: It reduces the number of lookup messages, has symmetric lookup on keys in both the forward and backward directions of a Chord ring, and achieves a stretch factor of $O(hbox{1})$. Simulation results show how the proposed scheme outperforms the original Chord and the state-of-the-art MeshChord in terms of lookup efficiency and how it significantly reduces the overlay message overhead.
In the recent years, there has been an increasing demand for high quality multimedia services ove... more In the recent years, there has been an increasing demand for high quality multimedia services over wireless networks. Triple play services (voice, data and video) require data-rates of the order of several megabits per second (Mbps). However, the large transmission ...
Abstract. This paper presents a novel authoring framework for Quality of Ex-perience (QoE) aware ... more Abstract. This paper presents a novel authoring framework for Quality of Ex-perience (QoE) aware Adaptive Hypermedia Systems. It extends the LAOS au-thoring model in order to consider delivery performance issues. The paper formalises and exemplifies the newly proposed QoE ...
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Papers by J. McManis