Showing papers by "Shyan-Ming Yuan published in 2002"

Developing science activities through a networked peer assessment system

Abstract: This paper described the use of a networked peer assessment system to facilitate the development of inquiry-oriented activities for secondary science education. Twenty-four preservice teachers in Taiwan participated in this study and experienced a three-round peer assessment for developing science activities. The findings suggested that teachers tended to develop more creative, theoretically relevant, and practical science activities as a result of the networked peer assessment. However, the peers' evaluations were not highly consistent with experts' (e.g., university professors) grades. This study also revealed that students who offered detailed and constructive comments on reviewing and criticizing other peers' work might help them improve their own work, especially in the beginning stage of revising their original work.

The experience of using Java-based message-oriented middleware to build a distributed training simulator

Abstract: This paper presents a prototype of a distributed training simulator for a surface-to-air missile system. Since the system requirement enforces us to choose an open standard platform, and we think that Java has matured enough to offer acceptable performance and reliability, we decide to implement it by Java. Basically, this training simulator is a distributed interactive application, and lots of messages are exchanged within it. For the performance reason, we use an IP-multicast-based Java message service (JMS) implementation as the communication infrastructure for delivering time-critical events. In this paper, we present how to exploit the capability of the JMS publish/subscribe paradigm to implement this training simulator. Besides, we also perform a set of experiments to test and verify whether the training simulator can meet the system requirement. We think the experience of this paper is a good case study of using Java and message-oriented middleware to build message-intensive distributed systems.

To propose a reviewer dispatching algorithm for networked peer assessment system

Abstract: Despite their increasing availability on the Internet, networked peer assessment systems lack feasible automatic dispatching algorithm of student's assignments and ultimately inhibit the effectiveness of peer assessment. Therefore, this study presents a reviewer dispatching algorithm capable of supporting networked peer assessment system in order to automatically dispatch student's assignments to their peer reviewers.

A pilot study of students' attitudes toward and desired system requirements of networked peer assessment system

Abstract: This study applied NetPeas (networked peer assessment system) in peer assessment activities of graduate level of thesis writing course. Authors wish to discover the students' attitudes toward and desired system requirements of NetPeas in writing course. This study involved 100 electrical engineering graduates from two research-oriented universities at northern Taiwan. Those students were required to attend a weekly thesis writing course and submit eight assignments through four rounds of networked peer assessment, and then authors survey their attitudes and opinions toward NetPeas. In the last, quantitative and qualitative surveys indicated that significantly more students willing to join the networked peer assessment activities via NetPeas in the near future and stand for using NetPeas. Authors also have dug several desirable requirements for NetPeas.

Experience in Building a Real-Time Extension Library for Java

Abstract: For building real-time control programs on PC controllers, we designed and implemented a real-time extension library to enhance the Java virtual machine that was already available in the real-time operating system we used. Our extension library has the following advantages: First, the underlying Java virtual machine needs no modification to accommodate it. Second, this extension library is easily ported to any other priority-based real-time operating system. Third, the core of this extension library is basically derived from a subset of the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) standard, and thus our real-time control program can be moved to a forthcoming RTSJ-compliant Java virtual machine without much difficulty. In brief, our work may help suggest ways of implementing RTSJ, or the notion of (degrees of) ”minimal” compliance support of RTSJ based on non-RTSJ Java virtual machines. In this paper, we will show the requirement, application programming interface, and implementation of this extension library, and discuss its influence on timing.

A Component-Based, Reconfigurable Mobile Agent System for Context-Aware Computing

Abstract: In the near future, people can use various kinds of portable terminal devices, such as PDAs or smart phones, to access the information on Internet at any time, in any place, for supporting their daily life. Personal mobile agents can help those people to search, to filter, to analyze, or to translate the large amount of Internet information. Since the context of a user may vary frequently, the way a personal mobile agent process the Internet information must adapt to the context change. However, we think that the current mainstream mobile agent platforms, such as the IBM Aglet and the IKV++ Grasshopper, are not good enough for developing context-aware applications. Hence, we propose a Component-based, Reconfigurable Mobile Agent (CRMA) system, which is designed for context-aware computing. It offers downloadable user-interface modules on terminal devices for application to adapt the characteristics of various terminal devices. In addition, on agent side, CRMA provides a reconfigurable agent-programming framework, which uses component-based pipelines to perform context-aware data-processing operations. This not only simplifies the programming task for dynamically reconfiguring an agent's behavior to adapt the context change, but also improves the reusability of agent software. In the end of this paper, we will propose a context-aware meta-search service to demonstrate how to use CRMA to develop a context-aware application.