Nicola Capuano

Università degli Studi di Salerno | UNISA · Department of Information Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics (DIEM)

Student Performance Prediction (SPP) models and tools are useful for quickly identifying at-risk students in online courses and enable the provision of personalized learning plans and assistance. Additionally, they give educators and course managers the information they need to recognize the programs that require improvement. High accuracy is essen...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a teaching method that uses Virtual Learning Environments to reach a vast number of students, thus, facilitating access to education by making costs more appealing because of scale economics. Consequently, Tutors’ and teachers’ interaction is crucial for the successful development of a MOOC. However, due to t...

Discussion forums are popular tools in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), used by students to express feelings, exchange ideas, and ask for help. Unfortunately, the huge number of enrolled students hinders educational scaffolding activities, including the active participation of instructors in discussion forums. Therefore, students seeking to cla...

In the biomedical field, there is an ever-increasing number of large, fragmented, and isolated data sources stored in databases and ontologies that use heterogeneous formats and poorly integrated schemes. Researchers and healthcare professionals find it extremely difficult to master this huge amount of data and extract relevant information. In this...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) make up a teaching modality that aims to reach a large number of students using Virtual Learning Environments. In these courses, the intervention of tutors and teachers is essential to support students in the teaching-learning process, answer questions about their content, and provide engagement for students. How...

Understanding the role played by genetic variations in diseases, exploring genomic variants and discovering disease-associated loci are among the most pressing challenges of genomic medicine. A huge and ever-increasing amount of information is available to researchers to address these challenges. Unfortunately, it is stored in fragmented ontologies...

Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely applied in every area of human being’s daily life. Despite the AI benefits, its application suffer from the opacity of complex internal mechanisms and doesn’t satisfy by design the principles of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). The lack of transparency further exacerbates the problem in the...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) allow students and instructors to discuss through messages posted on a forum. However, the instructors should limit their interaction to the most critical tasks during MOOC delivery so, teacher-led scaffolding activities, such as forum-based support, can be very limited, even impossible in such environments. In a...

In recent years there has been a significant rethinking of corporate management, which is increasingly based on customer orientation principles. As a matter of fact, customer relationship management processes and systems are ever more popular and crucial to facing today’s business challenges. However, the large number of available customer communic...

This research presents a comprehensive methodological approach to detect and analyze student engagement within the context of online education. It is supported by e-learning systems, and is based on a combination of semantic analysis, applied to the students’ posts and comments, with a machine learning-based classification, performed upon a range o...

Discussion forums are popular tools in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), used by students to express feelings, exchange ideas, and ask for help. Due to the large number of enrolled students, several approaches to automated forum post analysis are emerging for helping instructors to moderate and plan their interventions. Such approaches have the...

Massive Open Online Courses are gaining popularity with millions of students enrolled, thousands of courses available and hundreds of learning institutions involved. Due to the high number of students and the relatively small number of tutors, student assessment, especially for complex tasks, is a typical issue of such courses. Thus, peer assessmen...

Adaptive learning refers to technologies that dynamically adjust to the level or type of course content based on an individual’s abilities or skill attainment, in ways that accelerate a learner’s performance with both automated and instructor interventions. This column explores adaptive learning, its close relationship to artificial intelligence, a...

Discussion forums are among the most common interaction tools offered by MOOCs. Nevertheless, due to the high number of students enrolled and the relatively small number of tutors, it is virtually impossible for instructors to effectively monitor and moderate them. For this reason, teacher-guided instructional scaffolding activities may be very lim...

Due to the high number of students enrolled and the relatively small number of available tutors, the assessment of complex assignments is deemed as one of the most critical tasks in Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs). Peer assessment is becoming an increasingly popular tool to face this problem and many approaches have been proposed so far to mak...

Group Recommender Systems are special kinds of Recommender Systems aimed at suggesting items to groups rather than individuals taking into account, at the same time, the preferences of all (or the majority of) members. Most existing models build recommendations for a group by aggregating the preferences for their members without taking into account...

This research proposes an enhanced approach of decoupling assessment and serious games to support fire evacuation training in smart education. The proposed assessment approach employs an evidence-based dynamic assessment and feedback to guide players through school’s building evacuation. Experimentation results show the applicability of the propose...

This work presents a Smart Learning system based on Knowledge Discovery and Cognitive Computing techniques aimed at citizens, legal students and experts alike, providing them with the possibility of submitting legal cases expressed in natural language and obtaining legal insight and advice in return. Advanced features implemented within the system...

Although fuzzy preference relations (FPRs) are among the most commonly used preference models in group decision making (GDM), they are not free from drawbacks. First of all, especially when dealing with many alternatives, the definition of FPRs becomes complex and time consuming. Moreover, they allow to focus on only two options at a time. This fac...

Peer assessment has been used for many years as a tool to improve learning outcomes but, only recently, it is becoming an increasingly used support also in students evaluation. Many approaches have been proposed so far to make peer assessment as reliable as possible even in case of incorrect or inaccurate evaluations proposed by students. Among the...

A promising research area in the field of Group Decision Making (GDM) is the study of interpersonal influence and its impact on the evolution of experts' opinions. In conventional GDM models, a group of experts express their individual preferences on a finite set of alternatives, then preferences are aggregated and the best alternative, satisfying...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are becoming an increasingly popular choice for education but, to reach their full extent, they require the resolution of new issues like assessing students at scale. A feasible approach to tackle this problem is peer assessment, in which students also play the role of assessor for assignments submitted by others...

The paper presents innovative trustworthy services to support secure e-assessment in web-based collaborative learning grids. Although e-Learning has been widely adopted, there exist still drawbacks which limit their potential. Among these limitations, we investigate information security requirements in on-line assessment learning activities, (e-ass...

Peer grading is a process whereby students are required to grade some of their peers' assignments as part of their own assignment. Peer grading is capable of improving students' learning outcomes, metacognition and critical thinking and, at the same time, it can support formative assessment, saving teacher's time and providing fast feedback, especi...

In this paper, we present our results related to the definition of a methodology that combines augmented reality (AR) with semantic techniques for the creation of digital stories associated with museum exhibitions. In contrast to traditional AR approaches, we augment real-world elements by supplementing contents of a museum exhibition with addition...

Peer grading is an approach increasingly adopted for assessing students in massive on-line courses, especially for complex assignments where automatic assessment is impossible and the ability of tutors to evaluate and provide feedback at scale is limited. Unfortunately, as students may have different expertise, peer grading often does not deliver a...

The increase in popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) requires the resolution of new issues related to the huge number of participants to such courses. Among the main challenges is the difficulty in students' assessment, especially for complex assignments, such as essays or open-ended exercises , which is limited by the ability of teach...

Emergency preparedness is a promising application field for digital serious games enabling the simulation of real emergency scenarios and allowing a high learning transfer thanks to engagement and focus on specific tasks. Games can also play a role in the assessment that may happen without interrupting the learner, observing and evaluating what she...

The preparation of evacuation plans for public buildings and the related training is mandated by law in many countries. The traditional approaches for providing people with the correct emergency information tend to be based on long, written instructions, posted on doors and walls that are not necessarily read by occupants and on evacuation drills t...

The need of a common environment where to share information and knowledge is of particular interest in the field of special education not only to support the access to a large amount of available information (along with the ability to derive value from this information) but also to foster synergistic actions involving different special education op...

The use of the emotional language of stories and the amplification of the empathic driver thanks to the identification with story characters, makes the storytelling a valuable educational approach, especially for children. In accordance with embodied and situated cognition theories, manipulative storytelling proposes interactive environments where...

This paper presents a methodology for helping citizens obtain guidance and training when submitting a natural language description of a legal case they are interested in. This is done via an automatic mechanism, which firstly extracts relevant legal concepts from the given textual description, by relying upon an underlying legal ontology built for...

Abstract In every context where the objective is matching needs of the users with fitting answers, the high-level performance becomes a requirement able to allow systems being useful and effective. The personalization may affect different moments of computer–humans interaction routing the users to the best answers to their needs. The most part of t...

The paper reports the results related to the application of the FIBAC cultural re-mediation model for the development of an interactive educational experience. The FIBAC model remediates a cultural resource not only with regard to media and the ICT but mainly with regard to its meaning and associated knowledge generating, thus, knowledge paths able...

The paper describes a research aimed at defining theoretical and technological components enabling a citizen to obtain guidance and training on legal concepts starting from a textual description of a case. The defined system is able to detect relevant legal concepts from the textual description also relying on a ontology and on the enrichment of th...

The purpose of this paper is to describe a learning model based on Storytelling and its application in the context of legal education helping build challenging training resources that explain, to common citizens with little or no background about legal topics, concepts related to Legal Mediation in general and in specific areas like e-commerce and...

We describe a methodology for the automatic classification of legal cases expressed in natural language, which relies on existing legal ontologies and a commonsense knowledge base. This methodology is founded on a process consisting of three phases: an enrichment of a given legal ontology by associating its terms with topics retrieved from the Wiki...

Context-aware e-learning is an educational mod el that foresees the selection of learning resources to make the e-learning content more relevant and suitable for the learner in his/her situation. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that an ontological approach can be used to define leaning contexts and to allow contextualizing learning expe...

Over the past years the concept of role in distance education has become a promising construct for analysing and facilitating collaborative processes and outcomes. Designing effective collaborative learning processes is a complex task that can be supported by existing good practices formulated as pedagogical patterns or scripts. Over the past years...

Getting citizens prepared to emergencies, and especially children, is an essential issue which requires special attention in the educational process. Many evidences show that misconceptions about natural disaster and incorrect beliefs are often the basis for misguided actions that can lead to inefficient behaviours in case of dangerous events. Then...

If on the one hand the individualised teaching approaches try to find the best sequence of learning resources capable of satisfying individual goals, preferences and contexts, the intuitive guided learning approaches, on the other hand, envisages a non-linear learning experience where each learner can chose a personal path across the material accor...

In March 2011 the Italian Government introduced mandatory pre-trial mediation of civil and commercial cases. The Italian mediation model is capable of sensibly speed-up the settlement of disputes but, on the other end, citizens need to be sensitized to the benefits of mediation and must be trained on how mediation works and how to access it. The pu...

We describe a system for computer-assisted writing of legal documents via a question-based mechanism. This system relies upon an underlying ontological structure meant to represent the data flow from the user’s input, and a corresponding resolution algorithm, implemented within a local engine based on a Last-State Next-State model, for navigating t...

La ricerca nella mole sconfinata di informazioni e risorse disponibili in rete rappresenta sicuramente un problema che oggi viene riconosciuto come sovraccarico informativo. Una possibile soluzione arriva dalle tecnologie di knowledge e dalla semantica. Nell'ambito del presente contributo verrà descritta la metodologia per lo sviluppo dello user mo...

Learning to behave in case of natural disaster is one of the most urgent challenges in our modern society. The school plays a major role in the development of educational plans for disaster reduction, designing appropriate resources and selecting didactic methods able to guarantee the retention and progression of the learning process. The challenge...

Over the last decade, the interest in disaster education has grown rapidly. Several studies demonstrate that effective results can be obtained in this field only with instructional methods able to motivate the learner and to support them in practicing skills by means of narrative situations. The narrative is a privileged method that can help develo...

The aim of a recommender system is to estimate the utility of a set of objects belonging to a given domain, starting from the information available about users and objects. Adaptive e-learning systems are able to automatically generate personalized learning experiences starting from a learner profile and a set of target learning goals. Starting for...

The Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is a research domain whose methodological instances are vaguely recognized and even more rarely modeled. The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach for the construction of dynamic collaborative learning experiences and their devolution inside an Intelligent Tutoring System. The presen...

In the knowledge society the ultimate goal of education is not only to make learners learn but mostly to grow a correct learning behaviour that creates the best conditions for them to reach learning goals in a controlled and directed way. In many cases, a lack of self-regulatory skills is the main obstacle to adequate regulation and a new class of...

Individualized teaching approaches try to find the best sequence of learning resources capable of satisfying individual goals and preferences. On the other side, intuitive guided learning approaches see the learning experience as "non-linear": each learner can chose a personal path across the material according to his/her interests and preferences....

Il problema principale che caratterizza il contesto delle comunità di inte-resse che operano nel campo della dell'Educazione Speciale è l'accesso alla grande quantità di informazioni (intese come dati strutturati, ossia forniti di significato), unitamente alla possibilità di trarre valore (sempre più spesso associata all'innovazione) da tali inform...

In questo contributo verrà descritta la metodologia sviluppata e utiliz-zata per la catalogazione di informazioni e conoscenze sull'homebound education (esperienze, progetti, comunità e bibliografie) e per lo sviluppo dello user-modelling finalizzato a descrivere il profilo e il contesto degli utenti nell'utilizzo del sistema WISE. Sia la catalogaz...

Context-aware e-learning is an educational model that foresees the selection of learning resources to make the e-learning content more relevant and suitable for the learner in his/her situation. The research reported in this paper was purposed to improve an existing system for personalized e-learning with contextualisation features. This has been d...

Lo scritto, partendo dalla crisi vissuta dal diritto d'autore nel confronto con i nuovi strumenti tecnologici, affronta la tematica dell'applicabilità all'e-learning di alcune eccezioni o limitazioni ai diritti di riproduzione e di comunicazione al pubblico di opere dell'ingegno allorché l'utilizzo abbia esclusivamente finalità illustrativa per uso...

Nowadays, the importance of knowledge manage- ment is well understood by managers in the organizations and, at the same time, the great significance of trust, in enabling effective knowledge sharing, is emerging. Presence or lack of trust can have serious implications for organizations with respect to the quality and of their business processes. Se...

Designing effective CSCL processes is a complex task that can be supported by existing good practices formulated as pedagogical patterns or script. Over the past years the TEE research has shown that CSCL script acts as Mediating Artifacts (MA) designing educational scenarios and structuring and prescribing roles and activities. This work proposes...

Designing effective CSCL processes is a complex task that can be supported by existing good practices formulated as pedagogical patterns or script. Over the past years the TEE research has shown that CSCL script acts as Mediating Artifacts (MA) designing educational scenarios and structuring and prescribing roles and activities. This work proposes...

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and Computer Supported Cooperative Work are research domains whose methodological instances are vaguely recognized and even more rarely modeled. The goal of this paper is to present a new approach for the construction of dynamic collaborative learning experiences and their devolution inside an Intelligent T...

This study presents new approaches for the detection and treatment of the attention of a student by an e-learning system through the use of the information given by the implicit interaction of the student with the system and the data com-ing from non-invasive devices such as webcams. Furthermore, the paper proposes two models for the treatment of t...

Il Web Semantico appare offrire interessanti opportunità nell’ambito dei sistemi educativi per soddisfare il principio dell’ “apprendimento per tutti, in qualunque momento e in ogni luogo”. In linea con questo principio, in questo lavoro vengono discussi due progetti di ricerca: CADDIE (Content Automated Design & Development Integrated Editor), svi...

The Semantic Web seems to offer great opportunities for educational systems aiming to accomplish the AAAL: Anytime, Anywhere, Anybody Learning. In this scenario, two different research projects are here introduced: CADDIE (Content Automated Design & Development Integrated Editor), developed at the DIST of the University of Genoa, and IWT (Intellige...

The term Enterprise 2.0 applies to the use of Web 2.0 technologies as a support for business activities within the organizations. These technologies are exploited to foster inter-persons collaboration, information exchange and knowledge sharing, also outside the organization, to establish relationships based on conversational modalities rather than...

This paper describes a work performed in the framework of the HealthOnNet project purposed to define and implement an Internet-based repository of diagnostic exams and medical reports connecting several Italian hospitals. The repository, which will be used as an historical and legal archive of clinical data, offers second opinion teleconsulting fea...

The Semantic Web seems to be a challenge for educational system aiming to accomplish the AAAL: Anytime, Anywhere, Anybody Learning. In this scenario an innovative e-learning solution named IWT, Intelligent Web Teacher, coming from Italian and European research projects, actually employed in many Italian high schools, enterprises and university depa...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand it aims at presenting the "pedagogical template" methodology for the definition of didactic activities, through the aggregation of atomic learning entities on the basis of pre-defined schemas. On the other hand it proposes a Web-based authoring tool to build learning resources applying the defin...

In the Virtual Organization (VO) Management area the main challenge has been to develop policies and models for governance and lifecycle management of a business-to-business (B2B) collaboration. This work included research and development in the areas of federated identity management and semantics in addition to VO, business registries and B2B coll...

Nowadays, every public or private company has to provide the access to their services through Internet. Unfortunately, the access channels and devices increase both in numbers and heterogeneity. We started few years ago with a PC, wired connected to Internet, moved to wireless access through mobile phone and looking, in the next future, at wearable...

Nowadays, the use of domain ontologies in e-Learning applications is rapidly increasing due to the important role they play in knowledge representation, sharing of didactical material and content personalization. However, the ontology building processes is still extremely difficult to achieve. In this paper we present a semi-automatic process based...

In questo articolo si delinea un approccio originale all'interazione con i sistemi di e-learning che integra i più recenti risultati della human-computer interaction. In particolare si mostra l'applicabilità delle multimodal, attentive, affective e perceptual user interface per monitorare i comportamenti dello studente durante l'interazione con un...

This paper outlines an original approach to e-learning systems which integrates the most recent results in the feld of human-computer interaction. Notably it will show the applicability of multimodal, attentive, affective and perceptual user interfaces to monitor the students’ behavior during their interaction with an e-learning system, in order t...

Intelligent e-learning systems have revolutionized online education by providing individualized and personalized instruction for each learner. Nevertheless, till now very few systems were able to leave academic labs and be integrated in real commercial products. One of these few exceptions is the Learning Intelligent Advisor (LIA) described in this...

Nowadays, the Semantic Web technologies are exploited also in the e-learning domain in order to provide personalized and adaptive learning experiences, semantic annotation of learning contents and learner profiling. The approaches of the Web 2.0, instead, are used to implement and deploy knowledge exchange services based on the concept of social co...

The ontologies are used to state the meaning of the terms used in data produced, shared and consumed within the context of Semantic Web applications. The folksonomies instead are an emergent phenomenon of the Social Web and represent the result of free tagging of information and objects in a social environment. Both ontologies and folksonomies are...

The paper presents the main findings of the ELeGI project, namely its learning model and software architecture to support the creation and execution of complex learning processes.The learning model defined in ELeGI promotes and supports a learning paradigm centred on knowledge construction using experiential based and collaborative learning approac...

In the context of the European Commission Project BEinGRID (FP6), the authors have defined a set of design patterns to develop software components based on service-oriented grid technologies. Some of these patterns have been used to improve the software components of a service-oriented grid middleware named GRid-based Application Service Provision...

The purpose of this chapter is to propose an overview of the Knowledge Virtual Enterprise model, where the Virtual Enterprise vision is extended with Knowledge-based assets in order to provide an agreement model to support the interoperability among organizations. Every enterprise or organization, by itself, is a source of original knowledge that,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose an innovative approach for providing an answer to the emerging trends on how to integrate e-learning efficiently in the business value chain in medium and large enterprises. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed approach defines methodologies and technologies for integrating technology-enhanced...

This paper presents a Service Oriented Architecture to manage the lifecycle of a federation in a secure Business to Business (B2B) environment. The main contribution of the authors to Grid and SOA communities is related to the definition and development of a set of design patterns and software components to support the creation, management and diss...

Grid technologies are rising as the next generation of Internet by defining a powerful computing paradigm by analogy with the electric Power Grid. A Grid user is able to use his private workplace to invoke any application from a remote system, use the system best suited for executing that application, access data securely and consistently from remo...