Markus KetterlStudied Computer Science at the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück, Germany. He currently is a PhD candidate in Computer Sciences at the University of Osnabrück where his research interests are adaptive multimedia systems, social navigation, multimedia analysis, applications for mobile devices and alternative distribution possibilities for media content. He has been working at the Department of Computer Science, University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück and at the Center for Information Management and Virtual Teaching (virtUOS) at the University of Osnabrück. In the beginning of 2008, Markus Ketterl worked as a visiting scholar at the Personalized Adaptive Web Systems Lab (PAWS) at the University of Pittsburgh. Since September 2011 he is working as Research Engineer at Fraunhofer IAIS. He also is a founding member of UC Berkeley’s Opencast project where he is one of the leading developers and part of the Executive Advisory Board.

Lars Knipping Professor and Managing Director of MuLF (Center for Multimedia in Education and Research) at Technische Universität Berlin. He is part of the board of editors of/ITSE/and is a member of the DIN-NI 36 committee that cooperates with ISO SC-36 in creating e-learning standards. Before joining Technische Universität he spent time as scientific consultant in a research project for a state-founded TV broadcaster, the “Sender Freies Berlin”, followed by positions as researcher and instructor at the multimedia group at the Computer Science Department of Freie Universität Berlin and as lecturer in International Media and Computing at the FHTW Berlin. Lars Knipping received his PhD degree for his work on the eChalk system and holds MSc degrees in both Mathematics and Computer Science. For his eChalk system he received several prizes including the JAX Innovation Award 2006 (2nd place), the European Academic Software Award 2002, and the Multimedia Business Idea Award (“Gründerpreis Multimedia”) 2000 by the German Federal Ministry of Economy.

Nadine LudwigGraduated from Technische Universität Ilmenau with a degree in Computer Science in 2005. In her diploma thesis she described the integration of remote laboratories in Learning Content Management Systems via SCORM. From June 2006 until April 2010 Nadine Ludwig was part of the MuLF Center at Berlin Institute of Technology as a research assistant where she conducted research on cooperative knowledge spaces and the integration of semantic web technologies to improve the navigation through room-based e-learning platforms. In May 2010 she joined the research group on Semantic Technologies at the Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering in Potsdam and is currently working on the issue of Semantic Entity Mapping of Linked Data.

Robert MertensStudied cognitive science at the University of Osnabrück. During his studies, he has spent several months at the DaimlerChrysler RTC in Palo Alto, CA. After finishing his Bachelor’s degree in 2002, Robert had started working at the University of Osnabrück’s virtual teaching support center (virtUOS). There, he had developed the first version of virtPresenter. In 2006 he had been a visiting research scholar on a DAAD grant at the University of Pittsburgh for a couple of months. In 2007 he finished his PhD in computer science and started working as project manager and consultant at Fraunhofer IAIS in Sankt Augustin where he was working on projects for a large telecommunications company. He was also involved in the German Digital Library Project. Since May 2011 he is a post doc researcher at ICSI in Berkeley where he is working on multimedia event detection.

Acknowledgements

The Theme Editors wish to thank the reviewers of this special section for their detailed and thoughtful work:

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Oliver Brdiczka, Palo Alto Research Center.
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Helmar Burkhart, University of Basel, Switzerland.
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Christopher Brooks, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.
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Paul Dickson, University of Massachusetts, USA.
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Wolfgang Hürst, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
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Ulrich Kortenkamp, University of Education Karlsruhe, Germany.
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Fleming Lampi, Kavisio, Germany.
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Ying Li, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA.
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Thomas Richter, University of Stuttgart, Germany.
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Jochen Schwenniger, Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany.
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Jürgen Steimle, Darmstadt Institute of Technology, Germany.
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Georg Turban, Darmstadt Institute of Technology, Germany.
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Dominique Vaufreydaz, Université Pierre-Mendès, France.
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Heinz-Dietrich Wuttke, Ilmenau Institute of Technology, Germany.
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Peter Ziewer, Munich Institute of Technology, Germany.

They would like to thank all authors for their quick revision and extension of the papers presented at the workshop and for their valuable contributions. Their commitment made it possible to publish this special section quickly and in high quality.

Education is one of the most important application areas for multimedia technologies. Universities and other educational institutions enhance their educational portfolio by using new technologies. Video and audio capture of lectures has become a common practice to produce e-learning content. Simulations allow to explore experiments which would be too expensive or too dangerous to be conducted physically by students. Multimedia-powered demonstrations are freed from many physical restrictions such as the availability of an object to study or the timescale of an effect to observe. Teaching enriched by vivid presentations and possibilities for interaction for students can also gain from improved learner’s motivation. Concepts may be realized in a demonstration and the observability of important details can be augmented. With the present amounts of produced educational data, there is a high demand in techniques and methods capable of handling multimedia contents adequately. Educational content has to be presented, deployed, stored, navigated, searched, retrieved, edited, combined, and reused in a proper way. Furthermore, quality control and learning processes with feedback loops are considered to be important concepts for more effective and sustainable e-learning solutions. Multimedia technologies facilitate the evaluation, improvement, and assurance of quality in loopback-controlled e-learning processes.

Most of these topics involve techniques from artificial intelligence, computer vision, and multimedia, but also human computer interaction, educational science, and psychology. The Fifth IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for E-learning was held in Taichung, Taiwan in December 2010 and brought experts from these respective fields together. The workshop program consisted of one extended session, in which six papers were presented.

The articles of this special section of Interactive Technology and Smart Education are the revised and significantly extended versions of three outstanding papers presented at the MTEL 2010 workshop.

The article “Speech development of autistic children by interactive computer games” tackles the problem of teaching speaking skills to autistic children. E-learning is especially suited for this task as autistic children have difficulties when working with people, especially when they are not familiar with them. The article first analyzes different speech disorders found in autistic children and then introduces two interactive computer games that can be used to therapy two of the aforementioned disorders. It has to be noted that the games are not intended to be a replacement for traditional therapies but can work in conjunction with these. The first game is intended to help children that utter unintelligible sounds. In this game, a speech recognition engine is used to calculate scores and to thus provide feedback to the children. The second game helps children to construct correct sentences and keeps a human instructor in the loop, who is, however, not in the same room with the child. Both games are evaluated in brief studies that show the effectiveness of the approach.

The article “Enabling user to user interactions in web lectures with history-aware user awareness” presents an intelligent user interface for web lectures for engaging with other users while working with video-based learning content. The information filtering is based on the evaluation of past user interaction data in time-based media. Different approaches for identifying suitable candidates are being analyzed and discussed. Besides this the paper exemplifies different user awareness models and explains how they can be adapted to video content. The presented work is available as a plug-in for the international Opencast Matterhorn platform – a free open-source system to support the management of educational audio and video content.

The article “WhoKnows? Evaluating linked data heuristics with a quiz that cleans up DBpedia” presents WhoKnows? An online quiz system that generates different kinds of questionaries from DBpedia data sets. Linked Open Data (LOD) provide a vast amount of well-structured semantic information. But many inconsistencies may occur, especially if the data are generated with the help of automated methods. Data-cleansing approaches enable to detect inconsistencies and to overhaul affected data sets, but they are difficult to apply automatically. The presented system was developed to evaluate heuristics to rank LOD properties and thus, obtain a semantic relatedness between entities according to the properties they are linked by. It uses the concept of “Games with a purpose” to detect inconsistencies in Linked Data and score properties to rank them for sophisticated semantic search scenarios. The approach is an efficient method to detect popular properties within a limited amount of triples. Ongoing work continues in the development of sound property ranking heuristics for the purpose of detecting the most relevant characteristics of entities.

Markus Ketterl, Lars Knipping, Nadine Ludwig, Robert MertensTheme Editors

Themed Section: MTEL 2010 workshop

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