Sylvia Encheva

• Ph. D., Professor (Full)
• Western Norway University of Applied Sciences

Relations between a trilattice and corresponding meet-distributive lattices are discussed. The three meet-distributive lattices illustrate the five information levels, five logical levels and five levels of constructivity respectively. While the trilattice shows connections among the sixteen truth values in general, the three meet-distributive latt...

In this paper we propose a model for automated assessment of learner's skills that are considered to be fundamental in a subject. The model is based on multiple choice tests and meet-distributive lattices.

There is a large number of learning management systems as well as intelligent tutoring systems supporting today's educational process. Some of these systems relay heavily on use and reuse of learning objects. A lot of work has been done on creating, storing, classifying and filtering learning objects with respect to a specific subject. Considerable...

The ESP-NOW protocol on ESP32 MCUs with MicroPython firmware can create a system of smart IoT nodes based on dynamic secure mesh networks. Collaboration between static and mobile nodes is achieved through connectionless communication. A layered IoT architecture helps model, design, and implement the system. The mesh is secured by node authenticatio...

Various aspects of life may require an additional workforce that has not been planned in advance. This is especially demanding when skillful employees are hard to find or nearly impossible to bring to remote places when they are needed. In such cases, one should count on those that are present to handle what a situation demands. One of the importan...

The landscape for potential research funding is diverse, and occasionally, multiple opportunities are available simultaneously. Moreover, considering that the preparation of a well-founded research application is demanding in terms of resource expenditure, the ‘best’ opportunities are continuously evaluated and selected in the hope of maximizing th...

An E2EE is possible to implement on resource constraint microcontrollers using a high-level programming language. A secure protocol based on a well-known key-exchange technique Diffie-Hellman-Merkle and TLS1.3 style session-key negotiation is implemented and tested. Large primes are not needed in the modified DHM key-exchange protocol xb(modP)≡ya(m...

Encheva, SylviaHigh education organizations world while are strongly encouraged to obtain substantial amounts of external support for their research activities. Employees invest an enormous amount of time and effort in proposal writing while granting entities use large amounts of resources, both human and financial, to administrate, evaluate, and f...

Encheva, SylviaIncreasing amount of aging population worldwide is a matter of concern to politicians, healthcare providers, economists, and researchers among many others. A number of studies emphasize the importance of physical fitness for keeping older adults healthy and strong in their retirement life. Among the many open questions here are those...

The aim of this work is to present a novel method for transitioning from competition to collaboration phase in the process of preparing applications for delivering an external support for research projects. Concept similarity is suggested to be employed to facilitate a search for semantic similarities among differently formulated grant applications...

IoT devices are everywhere. Developing embedded system software is a challenge. Embedded systems are inherently event-driven and concurrent multitasks. Coroutine-based concurrency is better suited than multi-threading on microcontrollers with limited computing resources. Using higher interpreted language and a robust cooperative model will help. An...

Reduction of both CO2 emissions and energy consumption is of high importance in Norway. One of the numerous areas where this can be achieved is maritime transport in general and ferry transport in particular. In this work, we present an approach for finding which of the existing solutions is closest to the one a new county would like to implement....

While most well established universities have developed their research structures based on decades of experience and adjustments, others focus on creating research clusters. Both ways however require considerable amount of time and resources. Merging educational organizations are often in need to build their research structures at faculty level wit...

Dynamic media is gaining a lot of popularity among educators working at different study levels. Some of their contributions can be found in a number of repositories offering an impressive collection of free and commercial video clips. This, however, immediately brings up the question of how to assist students and lecturers in the process of selecti...

Timely evaluation of job applications is of high importance for both employers and potential employees. The process however is usually quite laborious and often requires involvement of multi-criteria multi-person decision making. A number of free and commercial stand-alone or Web-based systems supporting ranking of job applications have been develo...

A solution to care services crisis by using current technology in which an incentive-based system is proposed. A method for trading care services using cryptocredit is suggested to facilitate a citizen to citizen collaboration. Based on blockchain technology, citizens can trade care services among each other.

Todays project management requires a number of abilities which involve finding quick solutions to shortage of staff members with possession of specific qualities. When persons with team responsibilities are under pressure or due to various circumstances are unable to perform exhaustive search in databases, an interactive visualization tool can come...

Developing short tests for knowledge and skills evaluation is definitely easier and faster than developing larger ones. Larger tests however provide much more information than the short ones. In the era of global digitalization the question of effective test construction arises quite naturally. Reuse of short tests for constructing larger ones is o...

Over the last few years mergers in higher education are taking place all over the world. A number of institutions, that are currently negotiating or have already completed a merger, report about certain difficulties they have experienced. Different cultures, geographical distances, and uncertainty about future developments are just a few examples o...

Delivering of automated personalized assistance to students is becoming an integral part of nearly all recently developed learning systems. While the goal is the same most of the time, i.e. facilitating the cognitive process of acquiring skill and knowledge, the reasoning methods supporting choices of appropriate study materials vary considerably....

Students enrolled in higher education usually possess a wide range of skills developed through their studies. More often than not they experience skills assessment conducted by focusing only on a single skill at a time. What seems to receive less attention in such assessments is related to finding a systematic way of detecting and consecutively ove...

Vague Functional Dependencies are often employed while searching for new attribute dependencies. When it is established that one set of attributes implies another set of attributes it can occur that it is easier or faster to obtain values for the first set rather than for the second. This can be very useful in case the attributes in the second set...

Merging organizations face a number of challenges related to creation of a new establishment. Short deadlines put serious pressure on those, responsible for planning and implementing all possible types of changes. The main issue we direct attention on in this work is concerned with placing employees in new units according to their competencies in a...

Merger in higher education has been of scholarly interest to researchers in various fields. This work is devoted to challenges related to partner selection for an feasible merger. A systematic approach is proposed based on describing educational organizations via several predefined key numbers from the one hand and their expectations from the other...

Suppliers’ selection is important for any enterprise. Most available approaches for facilitating processes of choosing suppliers from a number of alternatives focus on which criteria are to be used according to a particular business. This implies that the role of a decision maker is to confirm or modify the outcome of an already chosen method. In t...

Students' knowledge assessment has occupied the attention of many researches pertaining to different disciplines. Recent areas of interest in this regard include availability of preliminary skills and status of latest obtained knowledge, self- assessment, grading methods, tests, hints, help functions, etc. Involvement of smart technology in assessm...

Today's project leaders face situations where workforce optimizations have to be considered not only under a project planning period but also a number of times through the entire project period. Such occurrences require efficient ways of selecting minimum number of employees with skills that are called for. A lot of efforts and manual labor can be...

Knowledge and skills students gather for a period of time is difficult to estimate. Learning is effected by a number of factors and prior knowledge is among the very important ones. Despite existence of a substantial amount of tests for assessing newly obtained knowledge and skills, there is still a need to provide tailored responses to answers stu...

Students often experience significant difficulties while studying mathematical subjects. In this work we focus on a course in calculus given to third year bachelor engineering students. The course is optional with respect to completing a bachelor degree and compulsory for taking a master degree in engineering. Our intention is to find out whether e...

Waste management plans usually address all types of ship-generated waste and cargo residues originating from ships calling at ports. Well developed waste management plan is a serious step towards reduction of the environmental impact of ship-generated waste. Such important and at the same time complex considerations can be supported by application...

Learning spaces are broadly defined as spaces with a noteworthy bearing on learning. They can be physical or virtual, as well as formal and informal. The formal ones are customary understood to be traditional classrooms or technologically en-hanced active learning classrooms while the informal learning spaces can be libraries, lounges, caf´es, etc....

Students experience various types of difficulties when it comes to examinations, where some of them are subject related while others are more of a psychological character. A number of factors influencing academic success or failure of undergraduate students are identified in various research studies. One of the many important questions related to t...

While learning has been in the main focus of a number of educators and researches, instructors’ teaching styles have received considerably less attention. When it comes to dependencies between learning styles and teaching styles the available knowledge is even less. There is a definite need for a systematic approach while looking for such dependenc...

Students face a number of difficulties studying mathematics on all educational levels. Data mining techniques applied on educational data can allow better understanding of the large amount of challenges students meet taking mathematical courses. Many researches focus on investigating various factors causing exam failure or even drop out. They often...

Current technologies for collecting and storing data allow users to gather it without been too much concern about devices' capacities. At the same time a very serious question on how to extract significant knowledge from available datasets remains quite open. One non trivial attempt to provide an adequate answer involves residuated lattices.

Evaluation processes in higher education have been addressed by both educators and computer scientists. While the first group is occupied mainly with the learning side of the problem the latter one is concentrating on approaches that can extract the most useful information from previously collected data applying statistical methods. Results obtaine...

Salmon lice causes reduced fish welfare as well as great economical losses along with a significantly increased amount of work for fish farmers. Resistance among salmon lice to well established treatments has resulted in repeated treatments and reduced immune systems among the fish. The main focus of this work is to investigate correlations between...

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to propose a methodology that allows researchers and practitioners to structure a small amount of data in a way which aids understandings and allows predictions to be made. Design/methodology/approach – The paper explores how formal concept analysis can be combined with fuzzy reasoning to make predictions based on...

This paper is applying methods from soft sets theory for timely identification of students who are in danger to fail their exam in a particular subject. The work exploits the advantages of soft sets compare to fuzzy logics and statistical methods. While most statistical methods require large data sets and perform well in stochastically stable envir...

A substantial part of the literature on decision making is often devoted to issues relating qualities and styles of a leader as an individual. Current technological and economic developments require both knowledge and skills within different fields and as a result a large number of decisions have to be made by incorporating opinions of several expe...

Recommender systems are often used for extracting appropriate items that are to be suggested to a user. A user’s preferences are compared with preferences of previous users. Afterwards the user is assigned to a group with similar preferences, provided such a group exists. New suggestions to that user are made following the recommendations of the gr...

Collaborative filtering techniques are often used to predict the unknown preferences of a new user by applying rules derived from the known preferences of a group of users. In the literature users having high correlation with a large number of other users are referred to as ’white sheeps’, while those that express preferences which do not fall into...

Rapid development of new technologies minimizes the significance of distances but increases complexity levels of previously known Hamiltonian paths problems by introducing additional variables. We are employing application of lattices and weight functions for decreasing the amount of choices to be evaluated in the process of looking for an optimal...

Cooperative decision making is a well discussed research topic and has been often practised in a form of majority voting. Nowadays complicated life situations which involve a large number of conditional attributes and several alternative solutions require new, efficient and non the less systematic ways of handling cooperative decision making. In th...

Well formulated project proposals are usually the ones being granted. At the same time the society is using are substantial amount of time and efforts to rank submitted proposals and thereafter decide on which one is to be granted. Projects team members along with their formal qualifications play a very important role considering a successful outco...

A lot of data mining techniques are develop to handle large data sets. When applied on small data sets however they perform poorly. More often than not conclusions have to be drawn from relatively small data sets due to various reasons. Rough sets approximations can be applied in such situations since they do not need a critical amount of data in o...

Just in time learning is a very important issue in any rapidly changing society. Initially well defined projects are often forced to introduce changes requiring current team members to learn new skills or alternatively find new people ready to step in. Such decisions have to be seriously considered before taking a risk that current team members mig...

The ranging analysis of transport logistics problems and decision-making methods were held in the paper. The problems, which are represented as subsystems of DSS (Decision Support System) module type, were considered. One of which, in particular, evaluation of the quality of transport services to select cargo shipping company, was considered in det...

Looking for an optimal solution in a constantly changing environment is both time consuming and costly. Decision making problems are becoming more complicated when a number of alternatives have to be evaluated with respect to several criteria. In this paper we are discussing an approach to minimize some of the preliminary work by using closure syst...

In this work we propose ranking of projects proposals applying both classical and non-classical cluster analysis techniques. The evaluation is based on six criteria and is employing four linguistic values. In addition we combine concept lattices and vector weights in an attempt to find possible clusters over the dataset used for cluster analysis. T...

The concept category score has been introduced few years ago with the intention of emphasizing customers' preferences in Kansei engineering. Its definition implies equal sizes of all groups of participants stating their preferences. In order to use the concept in a more general way, i.e. when the involved groups of participants expressing preferenc...

User preferences are very important in planning organization’s future activities. Involvement of a decision support system can considerably shorten the time used for planing and for cost calculations by presenting what is the current status and what can be expected in relation to new users’ preferences. The latter can be further combined with exist...

This work focuses on investigating the importance of evaluating the likelihood that a particular collaboration option is going to be profitable for a firm. Some collaboration options for a firm are first evaluated by experts on previously agreed upon criteria. Methods from rough set theory are afterwords employed for ordering of the agreed upon cri...

Intensive research on reusable learning objects has been going on for more than three decades. Both content providers and information technology experts work for developing and implementing models that can facilitate the process of developing, storing, classifying and delivering of learning objects to students. Considering the amount of resources r...

A large number of approaches for evaluating students' knowledge are made available by the research community. Much less is known when it comes to discussing qualities of assessment materials. In this work we propose use of graphical representations of individual paths in self-evaluation processes for unveiling dependences between tests' content, al...

Cooperative decision making is broadly understood as a consensus process aiming to find the best possible solution for both a particular group as a whole and for its members. While some of the researchers concentrate on the human aspect of the process others work on providing technical solutions facilitating both human and computer based decision m...

Firms of all sizes are forced to consider new collaboration partners in order to prosper. The process of partner selection requires both serious considerations and efficient decision making. Evaluating of firm’s collaboration options as well as a discussion of methods for ordering criteria applied for ranking selected options are the subject of thi...

The paper presents software for simulation and optimization elaborated by a Norwegian firm. This tool is applied by an international corporation which consists of ship designers, suppliers of equipment, and R&D suppliers during their collaborating projects with shipowners. This tool allows a better coordination between participants of the design pr...

While standard economic theory suggests that unemployment should be evenly distributed across space, casual observation of unemployment rates shows that this is not the case. This has led to the development of a substantial literature on the topic. Due to the complexity of the problem, it is not always clear what the root cause is. This is particul...

In this paper we illustrate application of many valued context for extracting dependences from complex data sets. While the classical binary approach clearly indicates relationships among objects and attributes it still does not provide any information on the degrees to which an object possesses an attribute. Many valued contexts allow inclusion of...

Ranking of help functions with respect to their usefulness is in the main focus of this work. A help function is regarded as useful to a student if the student has succeeded to solve a problem after using it. Methods from the theory of partial orderings are further applied facilitating an automated process of suggesting individualised advises on ho...

A numerous amount of models supporting automated provision of personalized recommendations to students have been developed lately. Students usually receive recommendations based on outcomes of tests they have already taken. In this paper we explore methods from formal concept analysis for predicting students' preferences with respect to learning ob...

In this article we apply a method for presenting numeric predicates as a closed set of 'closed sets' associated with the objects instead of a closed set of attributes associated with a set of objects. In order to derive additional knowledge from a dataset we introduce a new measure called 'distance' that emphasises changes in attribute values.

Authentication is a process by which you provide proofs that you are who you claim to be. Authorization is granting you valid permissions. Everyone is familiar with authentication i.e. login process but not so with authorization. Web-based applications introduced the needs for more understanding of these two processes to both users and implementors...