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We present and evaluate a web-based architecture for monitoring student-system interaction indicators in Exploratory Learning Environments (ELEs), using as our case study a microworld for secondary school algebra. We discuss the challenging role of teachers in exploratory learning settings and motivate the need for visualisation and notification tools that can assist teachers in focusing their attention across the class and inform teachers' interventions. We present an architecture that can support such Teacher Assistance tools and demonstrate its scalability to allow concurrent usage by thousands of users (students and teachers).

Peer reviewed

In this paper, we provide an overview of the sixth annual edition of the CLEF eHealth evaluation lab. CLEF eHealth 2018 continues our evaluation resource building efforts around the easing and support of patients, their next-of-kins, clinical staff, and health scientists in understanding, accessing, and authoring eHealth information in a multilingual setting. This year’s lab offered three tasks: Task 1 on multilingual information extraction to extend from last year’s task on French and English corpora to French, Hungarian, and Italian; Task 2 on technologically assisted reviews in empirical medicine building on last year’s pilot task in English; and Task 3 on Consumer Health Search (CHS) in mono- and multilingual settings that builds on the 2013–17 Information Retrieval tasks. In total 28 teams took part in these tasks (14 in Task 1, 7 in Task 2 and 7 in Task 3). Herein, we describe the resources created for these tasks, outline our evaluation methodology adopted and provide a brief summary of participants of this year’s challenges and results obtained. As in previous years, the organizers have made data and tools associated with the lab tasks available for future research and development.

Poster: The properties of etched large angle tilted gratings (81o) are investigated. The attenuation peaks of the modes are found to shift to shorter wavelengths at a rate of ∼5nm/min in a solution of 10% HF acid. The most sensitive modes are examined for different etching times creating the relationship that longer etching times results in an increase in overall sensitivity. Comparing the sensitivity of the tilted fibre grating, etched for 6 hours, 506.9nm/unri and the most sensitive LPG, period 164μm, 389.2nm/unri in the RI range 1.30-1.40 shows that the produced tilted grating is more sensitive than the LPG and in this range would ideally be suited for the used in Bio-sensing applications.

Some minority ethnic groups in England and Wales have higher rates of admission for mental\ud illness and more adverse pathways to care. Are the resulting accusations of institutional racism\ud within psychiatry justified?

This study presents research on laboratory production and experimental characterisation of an alternative bitumen using municipal waste plastics. Six different waste plastics (A1 - A6) produced by a local waste recycling manufacturers were selected and characterised to investigate their feasibility in modifying the bitumen binders. Thermal characteristics were firstly obtained using Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) device and the chemical functional groups were identified by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR) test to determine the plastic types existing in the recycled plastics. Then the rheological properties of the bitumen modified with two nominated plastic waste (A1 and A2) were examined using the Dynamic Shear Rheometer (DSR) device by conducting frequency sweep tests. Additionally, the engineering performance of waste plastics-derived bitumen was also obtained and compared against the control bitumen, including fatigue, rutting and healing performance using Time Sweep (TS) test, Multiple Stress Creep and Recovery (MSCR) test and Healing test, respectively. Results show that A1and A2 consist of low-density polyethene (LDPE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively. The recycled waste plastic A5 and A6 (both classified under the same category but collected from different plants and batches) are mainly consisting of LDPE. Whereas, other recycled plastics (A3 and A4) consist of a variety of materials and impurities. Thus, A1 and A2 were chosen as bitumen binder extenders. A1-modified bitumen exhibited more elastic and less viscous behaviour than the control bitumen, showed by increased shear modulus and reduced phase angle. Whereas, A2 (consisting of PP) caused a significant drop in the shear modulus. Both recycled LDPE and PP-modified bitumen had a substantially improved resistance to rutting and fatigue cracking compared to the control bitumen. Furthermore, waste LDPE-modified bitumen sustained increased healing potential compared to waste PP-modified bitumen, where the latter did not show noticeable improvement to the healing performance.

Secure Role Based Messaging (SRBM) augments messaging systems with role oriented communication in a secure manner. Role occupants can sign and decrypt messages on behalf of roles. This paper identifies the requirements of SRBM and recognises the need for: distributed key shares, fast membership revocation, mandatory security controls and detection of identity spoofing. A shared RSA scheme is constructed. RSA keys are shared and distributed to role occupants and role gate keepers. Role occupants and role gate keepers must cooperate together to use the key shares to sign and decrypt the messages. Role occupant signatures can be verified by an audit service. A SRBM system architecture is developed to show the security related performance of the proposed scheme, which also demonstrates the implementation of fast membership revocation, mandatory security control and prevention of spoofing. It is shown that the proposed scheme has successfully coupled distributed security with mandatory security controls to realize secure role based messaging.