Christos Rodosthenous

Open University of Cyprus · Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences

In this paper, we present our efforts and plans for creating environmental awareness towards plants and greenery, while educating children and their teachers in ecological learning spaces. Our approach aims to stimulate knowledge and appreciation of plants and the effects of plants in classrooms, offices, homes and open learning spaces, which have...

This paper presents the theoretical framework, design, and evaluation of an online training program on immersive technologies for education, which was based on the participatory design and STEAM education approaches and targeted in-service teachers and university students from various STEAM fields. Findings based on a survey that was administered a...

In this work, we present the Republic of Cyprus Open Data Portal for promoting the publishing and reuse of government data. In particular, we present the design and implementation options for the portal and how this is used to enable access and reuse of government data. A brief overview of the state-of-affairs of open data in Cyprus is presented an...

In this paper, we present an experiment performed with the aim of evaluating if linguistic knowledge of expert quality about Romanian synonyms could be crowdsourced from L1 language learners , learning Romanian as their mother tongue, by collecting and aggregating their answers to two types of questions that are automatically generated from a datas...

This paper investigates a general framework for synchronous educational language games that simultaneously allows researchers to crowdsource learner answers in a controlled environment. Our prototype Substituto allows teachers and students to interact in real-time while undergoing language learning exercises; ensuring that the learner's progress is...

The paper presents a cross-European survey on teachers and crowdsourcing. The survey examines how familiar language teachers are with the concept of crowdsourcing and addresses their attitude towards including crowdsourcing into language teaching activities. The survey was administrated via an online questionnaire and collected volunteers' data on:...

This volume contains revised versions of the papers selected for the first volume of the Online Handbook of Argumentation for AI (OHAAI). Previously, formal theories of argument and argument interaction have been proposed and studied, and this has led to the more recent study of computational models of argument. Argumentation, as a field within art...

In this work, we report on a crowdsourcing experiment conducted using the V-TREL vocabulary trainer which is accessed via a Telegram chatbot interface to gather knowledge on word relations suitable for expanding ConceptNet. V-TREL is built on top of a generic architecture implementing the implicit crowdsourding paradigm in order to offer vocabulary...

We introduce in this paper a generic approach to combine implicit crowdsourcing and language learning in order to mass-produce language resources (LRs) for any language for which a crowd of language learners can be involved. We present the approach by explaining its core paradigm that consists in pairing specific types of LRs with specific exercise...

editor: Federico Castagna and Francesca Mosca and Jack Mumford and Stefan Sarkadi and Andreas Xydis

In this paper, we present our work on developing a vocabulary trainer that uses exercises generated from language resources such as ConceptNet and crowdsources the responses of the learners to enrich the language resource. We performed an empirical evaluation of our approach with 60 non-native speakers over two days, which shows that new entries to...

We present an architecture for crowdsourcing language resources from language learners and a prototype implementation of it as a vocabulary trainer. The vocabulary trainer relies on lexical resources from the ConceptNet semantic network to generate exercises while using the learners' answers to improve the resources used for the exercise generation...

In this article, we present our work on developing and using a crowdsourcing platform for acquiring commonsense knowledge aiming to create machines that are able to understand stories. More specifically, we present a platform that has been used in the development of a crowdsourcing application and two Games With A Purpose. The platform's specificat...

We present Web-STAR, an online platform for story understanding built on top of the STAR reasoning engine for STory comprehension through ARgumentation. The platform includes a web-based integrated development environment, integration with the STAR system, and a web service infrastructure to support integration with other systems that rely on story...

Certain documents are naturally associated with a country as their geographic focus. Some past work has sought to develop systems that identify this focus, under the assumption that the target country is explicitly mentioned in the document. When this assumption is not met, the task becomes one of inferring the focus based on the available context...

We present Web-STAR, an online platform for story understanding built on top of the STAR reasoning engine for STory comprehension through ARgumentation. The platform includes a web-based IDE, integration with the STAR system, and a web service infrastructure to support integration with other systems that rely on story understanding functionality to...

We consider the problem of identifying the geographic focus of a document. Unlike some previous work on this problem, we do not expect the document to explicitly mention the target region, making our problem one of inference or prediction, rather than one of identification. Further, we seek to tackle the problem without appealing to specialized geo...

In this work, we present Web-STAR, an online platform for story understanding built on top of the STAR (STory comprehension through ARgumentation) reasoning engine. This platform includes a web-based IDE, integration with the STAR system and a web service infrastructure to support integration with other systems that rely on story understanding func...

Libraries are well-positioned in order to work in cross-disciplinary teams in teaching and learning as well as in research landscape. The new trends and significant challenges in education and the important developments in technology are drivers for developing and changing libraries. For instance, among others, the economic and political pressures,...

Arising from work on a Vision and Strategy Appraisal of the UKOU Library Services, and with facilitation from EADTU, a comparative study was done of four distance teaching university library services functions in terms of support to students and teaching staff: FernUniversität; Open Universiteit Nederland (library services supplied by Maastricht Un...

Universities worldwide offer distance education courses through a number of channels. There is a plethora of courses offered either as part of official Programs of Study that lead to a degree or even as Vocational Training Programs or as MOOCS. The Open University of Cyprus (OUC) is the only higher education organization in Cyprus dedicated to dist...

This work presents a knowledge acquisition platform and a certain game developed on that platform for endowing machines with common sense, by following a hybrid approach that combines crowdsourcing techniques, knowledge engineering, and automated reasoning. Short narratives are presented to players, who are asked to combine fragments of text into r...

The introduction of eLearning led to a number of advancements in student assessment and evaluation. Conventional methods of assignment submission, evaluation and feedback were substituted by online workflows and were enhanced with plagiarism detection tools to assist tutors in evaluating large numbers of assignments. The increasing number of eLearn...

The evolution of technology during the last decades gave a new impetus to education. Distance Education started to grow to something noticeable, but it was the Internet in the mid-1990s that broadened Distance Education’s horizons. Academic institutions transformed their programs to match the demands of the new global economy of lifelong learning f...

The eClass eLearning Platform (eClass) is the main educational tool of the Open University of Cyprus (OUC), used for facilitating online teaching and learning. Selecting and deploying the best alternative among different candidate services is a major challenge that requires in depth knowledge of the educational process, educators and students needs...

We adopt the use of Games with A Purpose (GWAPs) for the crowdsourcing of knowledge acquisition as a way of motivating people to participate. ”Knowledge Coder” game was developed. Reason by integrating story information with background knowledge Gather background knowledge and represent it formally High-level version of the Event Calculus [2]. Φ im...

Successfully comprehending stories involves integration of the story information with the reader's own background knowledge. A prerequisite, then, of building automated story understanding systems is the availability of such background knowledge. We take the approach that knowledge appropriate for story understanding can be gathered by sourcing the...

Modern ICT has evolved through the years and is now in position of delivering educational content to specific target groups in remote locations. Advanced e-learning techniques are now used not only for delivering content to high school and university students, but can be used in lifelong training programs. Due to the target group most of these prog...

This paper presents Diplek, a Learning Management System (LMS) that addresses the needs of novice users, educators and students. The development of Diplek is based on a service oriented architecture. Among the many services offered by the platform, one can distinguish the innovative Video recording service and the Course creation service that enabl...