Riadi Laboratory

This paper focuses on socio-cultural user modeling in a social and intercultural collaborative context. we first, study and discuss several examples of user models in many research domains, we mainly focus on how these models are defined and represented. After that, we describe our generic and multidimensional socio-cultural profile, so, we define and justify its dimensions, its characteristics and its properties. We also describe the way the data to fill the model will be collected and updated. Finally, we discuss what we have presented and we give a brief plan of our future work to better address these important issues.

Within collaborative learning environments, learners from different socio-cultural background may interact together. These learners evolve within various cultures and social contexts and acquire different socio-cultural values and behaviors. They develop different needs, points of view and learning styles. Thus, they should be supported while communicating and collaborating together. In fact, the communication and collaboration tools provided to each learner should be appropriate according to her/his personal context and socio-cultural profile allowing her/him to learn actively and effectively in a group. Besides, the presentation of information, information structure and the interaction should be possible in different forms and with various media (text, image, audio, visual, audiovisual, symbols for facial expression transmission, pictures and videos). In the last few years and over the last decades, there was a growing interest in the development of Computer Supported Collaborative learning (CSCL) environments. However, the existing systems ignore the variety of learners and their socio-cultural differences especially in the case of distant learning. In fact, the socio-cultural impacts were demonstrated both on learner characteristics (behaviors, cognition, emotion, personality and learning), and on collaborative learning environment variables (communication, collaboration style, on learning style and behavior, motivation and participation). The main goal of this thesis work is to propose an approach to integrate and operationalize social and cultural differences between learners when developing CSCL environments. Therefore, our problem statement is as follows: First, identify, define and model the socio-cultural user background, then propose a socio-cultural adaptation approach of computer supported collaborative learning environments (from the early conceptualization phase to the operationalization phase and the final use of the system).To address this problem statement, the main contributions of this thesis are: the proposition of an ontological framework to model the socio-cultural knowledge and their influences on CSCL environments and the definition of an adaptation approach based on and guided by this framework. The latter is formed by two complementary ontologies: 1) SOCUDO : a generic ontology (domain independent) which models the socio-cultural user characteristics as well as knowledge about the influences of culture on personality, preferences and cognition 2) SCACLO: a generic domain ontology that models the CSCL domain variables that are socio-culturally sensitive. Literature reviews and studies were done within humanities and social sciences and within educational sciences to extract the socio cultural specificities of CSCL learners. Based on the finding of these studies, adaptation rules were built. In order to validate these rules, a trilingual online survey (Arabic, French and English) was widely circulated online targeting three cultures (Tunisian, French and American). The results of this survey were used to refine these rules. The proposed adaptation process based on these rules is a dynamic process that supports both adaptability (by generating automatically adapted recommendations to the user) and adaptivity (by involving the user in the adaptation process and allowing him/her whether to accept recommendations proposed by the system or to decline them and choose others. Long term adaptation rule Refinement and extraction of new knowledge about the user is ensured by the observation and machine learning of the user interaction behavior with the system and with others. To operationalize the ontological framework and the socio-cultural adaptation approach, we implement a collaborative editing CSCL environment that offers adapted functionalities according to the socio-cultural learner profile. The proposed system is able to solve the intercultural communication problems by notifications and intelligent intermediation in order to promote group awareness.

Companies model their business processes either for documentation, analysis, re-engineering or automation purposes; usually using normalized business process modeling languages such as EPC or BPMN. Although these models explain how the processes should be performed and by whom, they abstract away their business rationale (i.e. what is offered and why). Business modeling aims to answer the latter and different frameworks have been proposed to express the process in terms of value-chains. Ensuring alignment between both of these views manually is error prone and labor intensive. In this paper, we present a novel approach to derive a value-chain-expressed in REA-from a business process model expressed in BPMN. At the heart of our approach and our main contribution lies a set of nine general business patterns we have defined and classified as structural and behavioral patterns.

Research related to context-aware u-learning system has proliferated during last decades. Systems identified in literature are developed in ad-hoc manner to resolve a specific problem in a given context; however, u-learning systems developers need to have a clear and a general view of how their intended systems make use of the ubiquitous context. The paper details a general descriptive view of context usage within learning systems through three different view-points inspired from Dowson's work . Each view is capturing a particular aspect of context handling. Then a set of facets is associated to each given aspect in order to study, understand and appropriately describe it. This work would be useful for context-aware u-learning system developers in order to have a clear understanding of the context usage in such systems and to underline the requirements of the u-learning environment to respond. This research is also aimed to establish a structured baseline to help in comparing and evaluating context-aware u-learning systems according to the descriptive system views.

Research in ubiquitous learning (U-learning) has gained attention of a large number of researchers and a number of ubiquitous learning systems are now available in the literature. Majority of these systems have been developed to resolve a specific problem in a given context; their development approaches do not dictate ubiquitous context usage requirements to fill in. U-learning systems developers need to have a clear and a general view of how their intended systems make use of the ubiquitous context. This paper introduces a comprehensive view of context usage through three different view-points inspired from Dowson’s work (Dowson, 1993) each one capturing a particular aspect of context handling. Then a set of facets is associated to each given aspect in order to study, understand and appropriately describe it. The findings of this research are aimed to provide context-aware u-learning system developers a clear understanding of the context usage in such systems and help in underlinin...