Vania Dimitrova

University of Leeds · School of Computing

Free text comments (FTC) in patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) data are typically analysed using manual methods, such as content analysis, which is labour-intensive and time-consuming. Machine learning analysis methods are largely unsupervised, necessitating post-analysis interpretation. Weakly supervised text classification (WSTC) can be a...

Sustainable urban infrastructure planning and maintenance require an integrated approach that considers various infrastructure assets (e.g., the ground, roads, and buried pipes) and their inter-linkages as a holistic system. To facilitate the usage of this integrated approach, we propose a model of city infrastructure assets and their interdependen...

The utilization of semantic web technologies has led to the development of knowledge graphs represented as triples that allow for the exploration of specific and cross-domains. Despite the advantages of semantic links between entities in facilitating user exploration, they can also lead to an overwhelming number of exploration choices that can caus...

The predominance of using videos for learning has become a phenomenon for generations to come. This leads to a prevalence of videos generating and using open learning platforms. However, learners may not be able to detect the main points in the video and relate them to the domain for their study. This can hinder the effectiveness of using videos fo...

Whitby is the server-side of an Intelligent Tutoring System application for learning System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a methodology used to ensure the safety of anything that can be represented with a systems model. The underlying logic driving the reasoning behind Whitby is Situation Calculus, which is a many-sorted logic with situation,...

The paper presents a multi-faceted data-driven computational approach to analyse workplace-based assessment (WBA) of clinical skills in medical education. Unlike formal university-based part of the degree, the setting of WBA can be informal and only loosely regulated, as students are encouraged to take every opportunity to learn from the clinical s...

Video-based learning is widely used today in both formal education and informal learning in a variety of contexts. Videos are especially powerful for transferable skills learning (e.g. communicating, negotiating, collaborating), where contextualization in personal experience and ability to see different perspectives are crucial. With the ubiquity o...

Whitby is the server-side of an Intelligent Tutoring System application for learning System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a methodology used to ensure the safety of anything that can be represented with a systems model. The underlying logic driving the reasoning behind Whitby is Situation Calculus, which is a many-sorted logic with situation,...

This two-volume set LNAI 12748 and 12749 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2021, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in June 2021.* The 40 full papers presented together with 76 short papers, 2 panels papers, 4 industry papers, 4 doctoral consortium, and 6 workshop...

This two-volume set LNAI 12748 and 12749 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2021, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in June 2021.* The 40 full papers presented together with 76 short papers, 2 panels papers, 4 industry papers, 4 doctoral consortium, and 6 workshop...

Lifelong learning is a key requirement for anyone working in healthcare, but many healthcare professionals find it challenging to undertake learning activities during their daily tasks. Digital solutions such as e-learning have been proposed to encourage and support the self-management of learning activities. In order to enhance the effectiveness o...

System safety analysis is a creative process that can often be undertaken by people who are not experts in the system under analysis whilst also learning the analysis methodology. With the increase of system complexity, the high demand for analyses conducted at a scale and the potentially catastrophic consequences of inadequate analysis, there is a...

Tunnel maintenance requires complex decision making, which involves pathology diagnosis and risk assessment, to ensure full safety while optimising maintenance and repair costs. A Decision Support System (DSS) can play a key role in this process by supporting the decision makers in identifying pathologies based on disorders present in various tunne...

Urban infrastructure assets (e.g. roads, water pipes) perform critical functions to the health and well-being of society. Although it has been widely recognised that different infrastructure assets are highly interconnected, infrastructure management in practice such as planning, installation and maintenance are often undertaken by different stakeh...

Video is frequently used as a learning medium in a variety of educational settings, including large online courses as well as informal learning scenarios. To foster learner engagement around instructional videos, our learning scenario facilitates interactive note taking and commenting similar to popular social video-sharing platforms. This approach...

In order for videos to be a powerful medium for learning, it is crucial that learners engage in constructive learning. Historic interactions of previous learners can provide a rich resource to enhance interaction and promote engagement fostering constructive learning. This paper proposes such a novel approach of adding nudges to AVW-Space, a platfo...

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 4th International Workshop on Human Aspects in Adaptive and Personalized Interactive Environments (HAAPIE 2019). HAAPIE 2019 (http://haapie.cs.ucy.ac.cy) is a full-day workshop held on 09 June 2019 in conjunction with the 27th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2019),...

Welcome to this special issue of the Semantic Web (SWJ) journal. The special issue compiles three technical contributions that significantly advance the state-of-the-art in exploration of semantic data using semantic web techniques and technologies.

Empirical research has produced inconclusive, and occasionally contradictory, evidence relating to the extent to which improvements in medical communication skills taught through simulation can be measured. This is further limited by the wide range of designs and outcome collection methods that studies employ and does not allow for data comparabili...

Learning from visual and social media makes a complex area of study and a vital part of understanding the development of 21st century skills. The Active Video Watching (AVW) platform was developed in order to scaffold students’ active learning of soft skills from videos, by encouraging users to engage with the content (e.g. marking important aspect...

Urban infrastructure assets perform critical functions to the health and well-being of the society. In this paper, we present a prototype decision support system for sustainable subsurface inter-asset management. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first on assessing the underground space by considering the inter-asset dependenc...

Modelling diversity is especially valuable in soft skills learning, where contextual awareness and understanding of different perspectives are crucial. This paper presents an application of a diversity analytics pipeline to generate domain diversity profiles for learners as captured in their comments while watching videos for learning a soft skill....

One of the most effective ways to develop self-regulated learning skills in higher education is to include work placements. Workplace-based assessment (WBA) provides opportunities for students to gain feedback on their practical skills, reflect on their performance, and set goals and actions for further development. This requires identifying tempor...

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 3rd International Workshop on Human Aspects in Adaptive and Personalized Interactive Environments (HAAPIE 2018). HAAPIE 2018 (http://haapie.cs.ucy.ac.cy) is a full-day workshop held on 08 July 2018 in conjunction with the 26th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2018),...

Diversity has been the subject of study in various disciplines from biology to social science and computing. Respecting and utilising the diversity of the population is increasingly important to broadening knowledge. This paper describes a pipeline for diversity profiling of a pool of text in order to understand its coverage of an underpinning doma...

Video is becoming more and more popular as a learning medium in a variety of educational settings, ranging from flipped classrooms to MOOCs to informal learning. The prevailing educational usage of videos is based on watching prepared videos, which calls for accompanying video usage with activities to promote constructive learning. In the Active Vi...

Learning through video watching has been popular through the education community and is considered as a common choice especially for self-directed informal learning. However, the learner in this situation acts only as a passive consumer and does not receives any feedback for improving his/her performance, an element important in any educational con...

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2nd International workshop on Human Aspects in Adaptive and Personalized Interactive Environments (HAAPIE 2017). HAAPIE 2017 (http://haapie.cs.ucy.ac.cy) is a full-day workshop held on 09 July 2017 in conjunction with the 25th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2017),...

Although videos are a highly popular digital medium for learning, video watching can be a passive activity and results in limited learning. This calls for interactive means to support engagement and active video watching. However, there is limited insight into what engagement challenges have to be overcome and what intelligent features are needed....

The growing number of available data graphs in the form of RDF Linked Data enables the development of semantic exploration applications in many domains. Often, the users are not domain experts and are therefore unaware of the complex knowledge structures represented in the data graphs they interact with. This hinders users’ experience and effective...

A large proportion of audiences read news online, often accessing news articles through social media like Facebook or Twitter. A distinguishing characteristic of news on social media is that the most prominent (and often the only visible) part of the news article is the headline. We investigate the impact of headline characteristics, including jour...

Social media like Facebook or Twitter have become an entry point to news for many readers. In that scenario, the headline is the most prominent — and often the only visible — part of the news article. We propose a novel task of using only headlines to predict the popularity of news articles. The prediction model is evaluated on headlines from two m...

Adaptive intelligent learning environments (AILE) seek to optimize the learning process for every individual learner. To this end, they create and maintain models of domain knowledge, instructional activities and the learners themselves. AILE is an active area of research that can be traced back to the 1970s. Over these years, a multitude of techno...

The domain of cultural variations in interpersonal communication is becoming increasingly important in various areas, including human-human interaction (e.g. business settings) and human-computer interaction (e.g. during simulations, or with social robots). User generated content (UGC) in social media can provide an invaluable source of culturally...

This paper presents a computational model for measuring diversity in terms of variety, balance and disparity. This model is informed by the Stirling’s framework for understanding diversity from social science and underpinned by semantic techniques from computer science. A case study in learning is used to illustrate the application of the model. It...

Learning by watching videos has become the dominant way of learning for millennials. However, watching videos is a passive form of learning which usually results in a low level of engagement. As the result, video-based learning often results in poor learning outcomes. One of the proven strategies to increase engagement is to integrate interactive a...

The recent growth of the Web of Data has brought to the fore the need to develop intelligent means to support user exploration through big data graphs. To be effective, approaches for data graph exploration should take into account the utility from a user's point of view. We have been investigating knowledge utility -- how useful the trajectories i...

STyLE-OLM (Dimitrova 2003 International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 13, 35–78) presented a framework for interactive open learner modelling which entails the development of the means by which learners can inspect, discuss and alter the learner model that has been jointly constructed by themselves and the system. This paper outl...

We investigate how to provide personalized nudges to aid a user's exploration of linked data in a way leading to expanding her domain knowledge. This requires a model of the user's familiarity with domain concepts. The paper examines an approach to detect user domain familiarity by exploiting anchoring concepts which provide a backbone for probing...

A Decision Support System (DSS) in tunnelling domain deals with identifying pathologies based on disorders present in various tunnel portions and contextual factors affecting a tunnel. Another key area in diagnosing pathologies is to identify regions of interest (ROI). In practice, tunnel experts intuitively abstract regions of interest by selectin...

This paper investigates how a user could be aided to explore linked data in a way leading to expanding her domain knowledge. Earlier work has confirmed that users can gain knowledge while exploring information spaces generated from semantic databases. In such exploration, semantic links can play a key role. However, the learning effect of explorati...

In the culture domain, questionnaires are often used to obtain profiles of users for adaptation. Creating questionnaires requires subject matter experts and diverse content, and often does not scale to a variety of cultures and situations. This paper presents a novel approach that is inspired by crowdwisdom and takes advantage of freely available s...

In the culture domain, questionnaires are often used to obtain profiles of users for adaptation. Creating questionnaires requires subject matter experts and diverse content, and often does not scale to a variety of cultures and situations. This paper presents a novel approach that is inspired by crowdwisdom and takes advantage of freely available s...

This paper presents a trial study to gain insight into collaborative sensemaking behaviour. We use a generic argumentation tool to capture interaction data, which is then analyzed by exploiting collaboration-specific semantic types. A Community Behaviour Analytics Tool, CommBAT, was developed. Further studies were conducted to visualize the differe...

This chapter reviews the state-of-the-art on collaboration and decision making support in contemporary settings. Related issues concerning integration technologies are also discussed. The methodologies, tools and approaches discussed in the chapter are considered with respect to the information overload and cognitive complexity dimensions. The chap...

There are growing arguments that Linked Data technologies can be utilised to enable user-oriented exploratory search systems for the future Internet. Recently, search over Linked Data has been studied in different domains and contexts. However, there is still limited insight into how conventional semantic browsers over Linked Data can be extended t...

This chapter reports on practical lessons learned during the development of innovative collaboration and decision making support services in the context of the Dicode project. These lessons concern: (i) the methodology followed and process carried out for the development of the abovementioned Dicode services (ii) the facilitation and enhancement of...

Intercultural competence is an essential 21st Century skill. A key issue for developers of cross-cultural training simulators is the need to provide relevant learning experience adapted to the learnerfis abilities. This paper presents a dialogic approach for a quick assessment of the depth of a learner's current intercultural awareness as part of t...

Social web content such as blogs, videos, and other user-generated content present a vast source of rich “digital-traces” of individuals' experiences. The use of digital traces to provide insight into human behavior remains underdeveloped. Recently, ontological approaches have been exploited for tagging and linking digital traces, with progress mad...

The rapidly growing learning simulations market calls urgently for innovative ways to facilitate the simulation design process [1],[2]. Social spaces can provide an extensive source of reports on individuals’ experiences and their real-world contexts that may be exploited for the purpose of identifying relevant content and evaluating the quality of...

Social user-generated content (e.g. comments, blogs) will play a key role in learning environments providing a rich source for capturing diverse viewpoints; and is particularly beneficial in ill-defined domains that encompass diverse interpretations. This paper presents ViewS - a framework for capturing viewpoints from user-generated textual conten...

There are growing arguments that linked data technologies can be utilised to enable user-oriented exploratory search systems for the future Internet. Recently, search over linked data has been studied in different domains and contexts. However, there is still limited insight into how conventional semantic browsers over linked data can be extended t...

Social web provides rich content for gaining an understanding about the users which can empower adaptation. There is a current trend to extract user profiles from social media content using semantic augmentation and linking to domain ontologies. The paper shows a further step in this research strand, exploiting semantics to get a deeper understandi...

Service-orientation is effective at managing complexity and dynamicity at a programmatic level, but there is still much work to be done in understanding and improving the trust that users place in a system's outputs, and the extent to which they understand the associated risks of decisions recommended by a system. This is crucial if we are to impro...

The maturation of semantic technologies and the growing popularity of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud make it possible to expose linked semantic data sets to end users in order to empower a range of analytical tasks taking advantage of knowledge integration and semantic linking. Linked semantic data appears to offer a great potential for explorato...

As modern information systems become increasingly business- and safety-critical, it is extremely important to improve both the trust that a user places in a system and their understanding of the risks associated with making a decision. This paper presents the STRAPP framework, a generic framework that supports both of these goals through the use of...

This paper argues that there is a need for integrating cultural considerations into AIED systems in order to enhance interactions between systems and learners. The development of a conceptual model of intercultural communication, the challenges encountered and the major achievements are described.

Semantic Web technologies are increasingly being adopted for aggregating Web data. Tools such as Semantic Data Browsers have been proposed to assist users to access and make sense of the vast semantic space. However, further investigations are needed to understand how users make use of the additional semantic features provided by these new breed of...

This paper describes a suite of tools developed at the University of Leeds which aim to make it easier for domain experts to be involved in the creation and use of ontologies. The paper summarises the main features of the tools and gives a short summary of our evaluations and experiences using the tools with domain experts.

This paper presents a model-driven evaluation approach to elicit requirements. This approach has been applied to evaluate a technology-driven prototype designed to help analysts make sense of Internet forums. Due to the complexity of sensemaking and the immature nature of the prototype, we believe a user evaluation informed by a sensemaking model i...

This paper presents a knowledge representation approach to modelling and manipulating spatio-temporal data and to grounding a spatio-temporal geographic ontology upon the data. This approach has been developed in the form of a definition-based ontological framework, upon which GIS applications can be developed to perform analysis of geographic phen...

This demonstration will present a system, called I-CAW, which aggregates content from social spaces into a semantic-enriched data browser to promote informal learning. The work pioneers a new way to interact with social content using nudges (in the form of signposts and prompts) that exploit ontologies and semantically augmented content. The result...

Modern learning models require linking experiences in training environments with experiences in the real-world. However, data about real-world experiences is notoriously hard to collect. Social spaces bring new opportunities to tackle this challenge, supplying digital traces where people talk about their real-world experiences. These traces can bec...

Simulated environments for learning are becoming increasingly popular to support experiential learning in complex domains. A key challenge when designing simulated learning environments is how to align the experience in the simulated world with real world experiences. Social media resources provide user-generated content that is rich in digital tra...

Large-scale data processing systems frequently require users to make timely and high-value business decisions based upon information that is received from a variety of heterogeneous sources. Such heterogeneity is especially true of service-oriented systems, which are often dynamic in nature and composed of multiple interacting services. However, in...

Social web-groups where people with common interests and goals communicate, share resources, and construct knowledge, are becoming a major part of today’s organisational practice. Research has shown that appropriate support for effective knowledge sharing tailored to the needs of the community is paramount. This brings a new challenge to user model...