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An open-source management system of Web-based teaching interventions is presented that can be used in general for science curriculum courses and especially for computer science courses. The proposed solution is called System of Teaching Intelligent Interventions (STII) and facilitates the authoring, deployment, and evaluation of Web-based metaphors. This paper discusses the use of metaphors for assisting students to comprehend the substance of cognitive concepts and their basic background. STII has been applied in a particular educational scenario during the learning process of 228 students attending the course 'computer applications.' The presentation of results from a pilot evaluation of two metaphors demonstrates the usefulness of the system. The evaluation focuses on the impact of the two metaphors on student learning, and on detecting potential correlations between metaphors and students' groups. STII evaluation conclusions strongly support that multimedia metaphors can be used as an alternative instructional tool to assist students in confronting their cognitive constraints and developing functional understanding of curriculum courses. Index Terms--Internet technologies, multimedia metaphors, open learning system, teaching intervention.

The broad acceptance of mobile technology has undoubtedly created new opportunities in communication. The proposed environment attempts to enhance the information flow among the members of a department and, furthermore, to provide a test-bed mobile Web application for students undertaking Internet technologies courses. The key ideas are to support the educational process to provide auxiliary access to educational information sources, such as announcements, course schedules, grades, and user directory details. As a second system integration step, additional mobile Web services were introduced, such as application forms of the department's administration office, project assignment, and discussion groups. Technological evaluation and students' feedback indicate that the proposed solution is both efficient in communication perspective and effective for student involvement in the mobile Web initiative. Future steps include multimedia messages (MMS) integration and third-generation (3G)-based information delivery. Index Terms--Internet technologies, mobile communication, mobile education, mobile Web services, Web development.

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2005.06.002 Byline: Christos Makris, Yannis Panagis, Evangelos Sakkopoulos, Athanasios Tsakalidis Keywords: Dynamic discovery; Adaptive Web Services; UDDI Abstract: Attempts have been made concerning the search and finding of a Web Service based on keywords and descriptions. However, no work has been done concerning the efficient selection of the appropriate Web Service instance in terms of quality and performance factors at the moment of the Web Service consumption attempt. Such factors may include execution time and response time. The proposed approach adaptively selects the most efficient WS among possible different alternatives with real-time, optimized and countable factors-parameters. Implementation issues and case study experiments are presented along with the corresponding results. Additionally, an optimal selection algorithm for series of Web Services requests is proposed. Finally, conclusions and future steps are discussed. Author Affiliation: Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, School of Engineering, University of Patras Rio, 26500 Patras, Greece Research Academic Computer Technology Institute, Internet and Multimedia Technologies Research Unit 5, 61 Riga Feraiou Str. 26110 Patras, Greece Article History: Received 16 April 2005; Revised 1 June 2005; Accepted 2 June 2005 Article Note: (footnote) [star] This work is partially supported by the Karatheodory Research Program of the University of Patras, Greece.

Byline: Evangelos Sakkopoulos, Dimitris Kanellopoulos, Athanasios Tsakalidis The proposed techniques facilitate semantic discovery and interoperability of web services that manage and deliver web media content. As a test-bed, a web management system is discussed that provides vocational monographs for occupational guidance. The key idea of the proposed web service based architecture is that the WS of participating members share their vocational monographs and related resources, resulting in the overall system capacity increase. Mechanisms and techniques are presented concerning: an 'information desk', which provides an adaptive search user interface; discovery functions based on semantic representation of the WS' monographs; mining into monographs based on their semantic representation; a metric-based evaluation model for the web monographs; dynamic ranking of retrieved content list; consumption mechanisms for the career counsellors' local WS; e-payment; universal usability access. This analysis can be exploited in the practice of a new Occupational Guidance Policy.

Touristic destinations all around the world are struggling to digitally transform the touristic experience and the touristic products they offer and to capitalize a good experience with new tourists and returning ones. There is a lot of research on digital solutions assisting tourism, but it does not provide a follow-up digital product, therefore depending only on physical gifts, postcards and mementos. In this work, we propose a novel platform that can provide a personalized digital memento or digital gift for every route or tourist destination that can become the digital point of reference of visitors' experience giving new dimensions for commercialization to the existing physical mementos at the gift shops. The purpose of this study is to analyze what comprises a memorable touristic experience and to design and, finally, present a total solution that builds and offers a personal e-souvenir of a touristic experience to the tourist for him to hold, sport and share just using his mobile phone. We propose a digital memento-building platform that includes the personalized experience in visits taking place while in vacations. The visitors are usually taking pictures along routes they follow that later need further organization and processing and that in no way substitutes the physical mementos. In our approach, we propose a solution that generates a unique and personalized e-souvenir through a collage of the selfies and photos creating the digital equivalent of the touristic postcards but in our case personalized with the visitor photos with minimum amount of effort and produced real-time. Our approach is also providing a platform to the photographers and designers of touristic destinations to build and graphically generated memento artifacts—templates specific for one or more destinations or routes. In this way, the approach serves the tourism industry vertically, covering all aspects, i.e., the tourist-visitor, the tourism professional players such as photographers, designers of physical mementos and, of course, the touristic destination providing a digital footprint to server marketing of the destination through sharing on social media and word-of-mouth, of course. To support our approach, we have built and run a fully working prototype in the touristic center of Athens, Greece, with real users and designers for several weeks during summer vacations. The results have been greatly encouraging from end-users and professionals. The study shows that it is possible for various lines of business to come together and work along one another for an improve touristic experience using mobile technologies in a personalized, targeted approach. The touristic destination, graphic designers, photographers, tourist agent specialists, software developers and visitors can all now have a digital personalized memorable gift from the visit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) allow to achieve user's transactions unlinkability across different online Service Providers. However, current PETs fail to guarantee unlinkability against the Identity Provider (IdP), which becomes a single point of failure in terms of privacy and security, and therefore, might impersonate its users. To address this issue, OLYMPUS EU project establishes an interoperable framework of technologies for a distributed privacy-preserving identity management based on cryptographic techniques that can be applied both to online and offline scenarios. Namely, distributed cryptographic techniques based on threshold cryptography are used to split up the role of the Identity Provider (IdP) into several authorities so that a single entity is not able to impersonate or track its users. The architecture leverages PET technologies, such as distributed threshold-based signatures and privacy attribute-based credentials (p-ABC), so that the signed tokens and the ABC credentials are managed in a distributed way by several IdPs. This paper describes the Olympus architecture, including its associated requirements, the main building blocks and processes, as well as the associated use cases. In addition, the paper shows how the Olympus oblivious architecture can be used to achieve privacy-preserving M2M offline transactions between IoT devices.