Tarmo Robal

Tallinn University of Technology | TTU · Department of Computer Systems

Teamwork skills are critical to obtain for every engineering student. Numerous research has outlined this necessity and studied teamwork from various aspects. Yet, from the point of grading, teamwork is one of the task forms that is difficult to evaluate, especially in comparison to individual evaluation. Several criteria may affect the evaluation,...

The use of mobile technology has become an ubiquitous part of our daily lives and enables us to perform tasks on-the-go and anytime that once were possible only on stationary devices. This shift has also affected the way we learn. The use of mobile devices for learning on-the-go requires users to multitask and divide attention between several activ...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become an attractive opportunity for people around the world to gain knowledge and skills. Despite the initial enthusiasm of the first wave of MOOCs and the subsequent research efforts, MOOCs today suffer from retention issues: many MOOC learners start but do not finish. A main culprit is the lack of oversig...

The rapid development of the Internet and associated technologies for content delivery has led to a situation where the Web can be accessed on a multitude of different platforms - from desktop computers, laptops and tablets to smart-phones, which have become a crucial part of our lives, raising the question of usability on this plethora of devices....

The Internet consists of thousands of web sites with different kinds of structures. However, users are browsing the web according to their informational expectations towards the web site searched, having an implicit conceptual model of the domain in their minds. Nevertheless, people tend to repeat themselves and have partially shared conceptual vie...

The ageing global population puts heavy pressure on healthcare systems everywhere. Addressing ageing-related chronic conditions requires employment of novel innovative solutions. Telehealth technologies, including telepresence robots (TPRs), are being rapidly developed to provide healthcare services efficiently wherever needed. This article explore...

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is driving significant changes across both industry and academia, fostering increased autonomy in various processes. This influence extends to all key stakeholders in the education sector, including students, teachers, and institutions. Previous research suggests that students often...

We are on a challenging path for digital transformation. Yet, this process proposes a challenge for availability of skilled experts as the success of digitalisation depends heavily on such workforce. Currently, we are in a shortage of skilled ICT specialists, which holds back the development of digital economy and society. To meet the rapidly chang...

Models allow us to simplify reality and give advantages to both decomposition and abstraction. Models can have various forms from textual, tabular, mathematical, and graphical to a combination of these formats. Formal models can be processed, or even executed, by machines. An engineering model must satisfy such characteristics as abstraction, under...

ICL 2023 conference presentation

Modern elevators became into wide use some 150 years ago. With the advancement of technology, the main task of elevators has remained the same – transport people and goods in between floors – yet elevators have become more sophisticated with a trend towards smart elevators. Have you ever wondered why some people always stand in the same place, or w...

Content-based semantics-driven recommender systems are often used in the small-scale news recommendation domain, founded on the TF-IDF measure but also taking into account domain semantics through semantic lexicons or ontologies. This work explores the application of content-based semantics-driven recommender systems to large-scale recommendations...

For ages, machines have been used to lift materials and goods. With the appearance of elevators on the 19th century, vertical transportation of people became efficiently available. The general concept of modern elevators, which became widely exploitable some 150 years ago, has regardless of many technological advancements remained mostly the same....

This work proposes the Bing-CSF-IDF+ recommender – a content-based recommender that makes use of semantic relationships, and combines the best features of our earlier introduced Bing-SF-IDF+ and CF-IDF+ systems. First, we make use of concepts and concept relationships from a domain ontology. Next, Bing-CSF-IDF+ employs the synsets and synset relati...

Elevators have been used for centuries to convey material and people, with a history going back to 19th century. Modern elevators as we use them today became widely used some 150 years ago, and regardless of many improvements and technological advancements, the general concept has remained the same. The typical elevator still needs traveller’s inpu...

Since 2015 in Norther Europe comprising North Sea and Baltic Sea, Emission Control Areas (ECA) were established that require additional compliance costs from maritime industry. Shipping companies have different options to cope with the environmental regulations but all abatement investments are related with high risks due to high investment sums an...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems, DB&IS 2020, held in Tallinn, Estonia, in June 2020.* The 22 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. The papers are centered around topics like architectures and quality of inform...

Eye tracking is one of the solutions applied in human-computer interaction research to study how users interact with user interfaces – where do they focus, what interests them and how do they browse through the content on the page. Eye tracking has also been used to detect user attention and even mind-wandering. Eye tracking is usually carried out...

With the ever growing amount of news on the Web, the need for automatically finding the relevant content increases. Semantics-driven news recommender systems suggest unread items to users by matching user profiles, which are based on information found in previously read articles, with emerging news. This paper proposes an extension to the state-of-...

The diversity of smartphones and tablet computers has become an integral part of modern life. An essential requirement for web application development is following web usability guidelines, while designing web user interface (UI). Even a minor change in UI could lead to usability problems. Empirical evaluation methods like interviews and questionna...

Mobile devices enable users to access information ubiquitously, including in the online learning scenario. This though requires users to multitask and divide their attention between several tasks at once whilst "on-the-go" (e.g. watching a video, walking down the street and keeping track of the traffic at the same time). In order to accommodate lea...

With the increasing popularity of portable devices, web applications correspondence to usability guidelines becomes one of the key factors in user satisfaction and application success. Manual usability evaluation is time and resource consuming. Automated usability evaluation is a solution to overcome aforementioned problems. Existing solutions addr...

A main weakness of the open online learning movement is retention: a small minority of learners (on average 5-10%, in extreme cases

The diversity of smartphones and tablet computers has become intrinsic part of modern life. Following usability guidelines while designing web user interface (UI) is an essential requirement for each web application. Even a minor change in UI could lead to usability problems, e.g. changing background or foreground colour of buttons could cause usab...

The developing of Estonian eGovernment components started approximately at the beginning of the century. In this article, we discuss our experience of how the main components of Estonian eGovernment are managed in this period. The administration system RIHA is developed for realizing this management. The objective of the RIHA is to guarantee the tr...

The rapid development of information and communication technologies has made the Internet to become the main source of information, not to say a platform to share knowledge and information on a daily basis, consumed on various devices and platforms. This information consumption on the other hand produces data that can be used to measure user engage...

More and more web applications are being migrated from desktop platforms to mobile platforms. User experience is extremely different on desktop and portable devices. Changes in user interfaces (UI) could lead to severe violations of usability rules, e.g. changing the text color could lead to decrease of accessibility for users with low vision or co...

Current paper attempts to identify and categorise the most prominent software development concepts at present time. To achieve that, we employed the method of text mining on weblogs written by software development practitioners. Large volume of text extracted from the most popular professional blogs provided basis for frequency analysis of relevant...

With the increasing popularity of portable devices and the variety of platforms for such devices web applications correspondence to critical user requirements becomes one of the key factors in user satisfaction and application success. More and more applications are being migrated from desktop to mobile platforms. Due to the different screen resolu...

Software engineering has undergone a remarkable progress in more than 40 years. New technologies and methodologies are established ever faster, making the management of the latter a challenging task. This has also set high expectations on domain conception both on developers' and also on customers ordering software. Several factors play a crucial r...

The developing of Estonian eGovernment components started approximately 15 years ago. In this article, we discuss our experience how the main components of Estonian eGovernment like public key infrastructure, data exchange layer and governmental portal have developed and changed within this period. Estonian ID-card is the best representative of our...

Over the past years information and communication technology has evolved with an increasing speed - new technologies, systems, applications are released faster than ever. However, to be successful in their lifecycle, systems need to be carefully modelled beforehand to mitigate several risks a new product or application launch might hinder, biggest...

Systems engineering is defined as a discipline that guides the engineering of complex systems. It is essential to have a special course covering the issues and aspects of systems engineering in engineering curricula in order to provide the students with multidisciplinary knowledge and experience, and to ensure quality of learning outcomes. Students...

Poorly working client-vendor relationship has been shown to be among the most common reasons for software project failures. One way to improve it is to set a common ground for communication: above all, by making sure that clients without software development background are knowledgeable of certain concepts and principles. By having surveyed 45 soft...

User behaviour prediction and analysis have become one of the most important approaches in the research of adaptive user interfaces (UI). Web personalisation, automatic UI adoption, recommender engines, flexible and responsive frameworks to user actions and user behaviour prediction provide alternative automatic solutions to enhance sophisticated u...

This paper deals with new paradigms rising in contemporary teaching, where classical “teacher-to-student” approach is shifting to more flexible and diverse ways of teaching and learning. We describe our experience at the Department of Computer Engineering of Tallinn University of Technology in involving engineering students into the process of crea...

Today, information and communication technology (ICT) plays a crucial role in our lives. Devices taking advantage of the rapid development of ICT are increasingly used to ease and provide comfort to our daily activities. This has also affected the way young engineers prefer to learn and how they are taught. Traditional methods, proven to work, may...

The Europe 2020 project, “Digital Agenda for Europe”, sets the goal of covering all of Europe with high-speed Internet. All homes, companies and institutions in the EU must have the possibility of connecting to at least a 30 Mbit/s Internet connection and at least half must have access to 100Mbit/s and faster connection. Estonia also has set the go...

The Web has become a crucial part of our everyday lives, being a source for information and news, a platform to connect with other users through various social web applications, a medium for citizens to communicate with state via of e-government services, and doing business online, regardless whether it is online banking or shopping. It has also be...

Through years more and more software is produced. The quality of software architecture however has an important role in systems exploitation, as it determines the maintainability and extensibility of an application. Recently more emphasis is put on quality of the design, so that new features can be added with ease. To preserve code readability and...

The Internet has grown into a sophisticated set of resources providing an ever-increasing amount of information leaving users to face information overload coupled with problems of successful information retrieval. Search engines can alleviate the problem to some extent; however they are unsuitable for web sites optimization and cannot tackle the pr...

In this paper we propose an intelligent learning object as a tool for teaching the basics of digital logic in which students learn by exploring and investigating the elements. The novelty of the tool relies in the use of specially designed ontology to capture domain knowledge of microelectronics. traditional materials is declining, creating a need...

Participation in the knowledge-based society presumes access to the internet and ICT-based services. As a result of the early liberalization of the telecommunications market and intense competition, Estonia has a well-developed communications network: all central and local government agencies, public libraries as well as educational and health inst...

Internet has always played a significant role in Estonia's development. Over the years, the state has contributed to ensuring its availability in central and local governments, schools, public libraries and other public sector institutions. Two years ago the government of the republic approved the Estonian information society strategy for 2007-2013...

This paper introduces a framework for using Web services as the platform for creating Web-based learning objects, delivering features such as modularity, interoperability and extensibility for interactive tools in the field of digital microelectronics.

This paper proposes a framework for using Web services for developing interactive learning objects such as simulators and hands-on tools for Web-based training, taking advantage of features such as interoperability, modularity, and extensibility delivered by the Web services paradigm. Using various approaches two prototype web services were develop...

The expansion of the Internet has enabled to move studies to e-environments, where time and distance are not obstacles anymore. In this paper we present an overview of a personalized Web service for course information broadcast based on RSS-feeds. The service is provided using an already existing Web-based learning environment e-EDU, developed and...

In this chapter we propose a model for predicting users' next page requests. The model is based on the recognition and mining of navigational paths and patterns users typically follow. A special access log system is employed and techniques of web mining are used. Experimental results with developed prediction model are presented.

The development of the Internet has enabled sophisticated Web-based systems in education providing. Over the years a wide variety of educational and learning support systems has been developed; some of them have been successful, and some have failed. In general, these environments are meant to help learners and teachers in the learning-teaching pro...

Websites employ different structures to provide information to visitors. Nevertheless, users are browsing the web according to their informational needs and comprehensions of the sites, based on the conceptual model in their mind. This delivers a good basis for evaluating web-based systems. Herein we propose a framework for web systems evaluation o...

When searching the web, users have an implicit conceptual model of the domain in their mind. This model is based on their knowledge of the domain and as a rule does not entirely match to the given web site topology. In this paper, we provide a solution to this mismatching problem by making web users’ domain models explicit by using ontologies creat...

eGovernment services in Estonia are based on secure data transport backbone X-Road. Portals, elements of public key infrastructure (PKI) and a special service administration system RIHA supports developing and managing of the services. RIHA is the environment, which was initially developed for managing only the X-road data exchange services . Today...

The development of the Internet has made it possible to move studies to e-environments, where time and distance are not obstacles any more. The paper presents an overview of an e-learning system and discusses some Web-based tools for teaching the basics of digital logic in such a system.

The Internet consists of web sites that employ different kinds of structures as the backbone of their build-up. However, users are browsing the web according to its content, regardless of the structure. In this paper we discuss the possibilities of applying ontologies in exploring the web sites' structures and usage for producing viewing recommenda...

The general purpose of any website is to attract visitors by its information. Information, which needs to be up to date, is only one of the components that make visitors to come back to the site again. Besides information presented, a site has to have a reliable architecture, irresistible user interface with clear and logical navigation through the...

The rapid expansion of the Internet with the development of web-based technologies and services has had its impact on today's educational possibilities, enabling to move studies to e-environments. E-learning offers new possibilities to attain knowledge where time and distance are not the issue anymore, taking an advantage of the technologies and to...

These are additional instructions and a checklist for the preparation of the camera-ready manuscript to be included in the post-conference proceedings of selected papers of the Eighth International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems published by IOS Press in the series "Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. This...