Despite promising outcomes in higher education, the widespread adoption of learning analytics remains elusive in various educational settings, with primary and secondary schools displaying considerable reluctance to embrace these tools. This hesitancy poses a significant obstacle, particularly given the prevalence of educational technology and the abundance of data generated in these environments. In contrast to higher education institutions that readily integrate learning analytics tools into their educational governance, high schools often harbor skepticism regarding the tools’ impact and returns. To overcome these challenges, this work aims to harness learning analytics to address critical areas, such as school dropout rates, the need to foster student collaboration, improving argumentation and writing skills, and the need to enhance computational thinking across all age groups. The goal is to empower teachers and decision makers with learning analytics tools that will equip them to identify learners in vulnerable or exceptional situations, enabling educational authorities to take suitable actions that are aligned with students’ needs; this could potentially involve adapting learning processes and organizational structures to meet the needs of students. This work also seeks to evaluate the impact of such analytics tools on education within a multi-dimensional and scalable domain, ranging from individual learners to teachers and principals, and extending to broader governing bodies. The primary objective is articulated through the development of a user-friendly AI-based dashboard for learning. This prototype aims to provide robust support for teachers and principals who are dedicated to enhancing the education they provide within the intricate and multifaceted social domain of the school.

Time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) is an enhanced access mechanism for IEEE 802.15.4 that improves many aspects of the original protocol, like determinism and power consumption. Besides preventing collisions, time slotting allows motes to stay asleep for most of the time. In addition, channel hopping achieves more stable communication, in terms of packet losses and transmission latency, in spite of wireless spectrum variations. In this article, the specific effects of the latter mechanism are investigated from both qualitative and quantitative points of view. In particular, a thorough experimental campaign was carried out on real devices, deployed in a real environment and performing realistic data exchanges, when they are exposed to different interference conditions, to assess the benefits it brings over the case when transmissions are performed on a fixed-channel (FC). Experimental results confirm that, when the transmission frequency is kept repeatedly changing, communication quality is sensibly less affected by colocated Wi-Fi infrastructures, which makes the network behavior more predictable, and hence, intrinsically more dependable.

Appears in: EDULEARN22 Proceedings Publication year: 2022Pages: 5334-5344ISBN: 978-84-09-42484-9ISSN: 2340-1117doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2022.1263Conference name: 14th International Conference on Education and New Learning TechnologiesDates: 4-6 July, 2022Location: Palma, Spain

Schools, universities, and other educational entities are increasingly aware of the untapped potential of digital transformation, an essential process for increasing efficiency and collaboration, and reducing costs and errors in the management of at-scale training systems. In this context, the “Riconnessioni” project was promoted by the Compagnia di San Paolo in agreement with the Ministry of Education but planned, started and developed by the Foundation for the School. The digital transformation started with a defined strategy that leveraged opportunities presented by new technology while meeting the objectives of system stakeholders. Through several steps, that strategy was developed for education connecting everything to support tomorrow's digital world and creating strong strategic partnerships able to build an ecosystem connecting people, processes, and things into a powerful, secure, and smart communications network. This paper reports on the three-year Riconnessioni project, which is combining the energies of teachers, managers, administrative staff, students, among others, and experimenting with new learning models, taking advantage of opportunities that emerged from perceptions stemming from concerns and systemic issues. To date, more than 150 schools in Italy have been included in the project, together with 550 teachers selected to scale up the instructional process. Using a methodology called “cascade training”, the 550 selected teachers were able to spread the knowledge to more than 2,600 colleagues. The monitoring and evaluation activity performed in Riconnessioni aims at processing information on implementation and results, following three lines. First, it regularly evaluates project activities from a reporting standpoint. Second, it verifies the plan consistency against implementation achievements. Third, it identifies changes produced and focuses on teachers' and students' skills to evaluate the effects of the project. The assessment framework is also discussed in this work, reporting on results regarding feedback, follow-up, and effects gathered from the field. The evaluation highlighted that labs were indeed able to improve teachers' competence and underlined the added value of cascade training which spread digital domain knowledge and awareness into the group of involved schools.

Thanks to its ability to effectively counteract disturbance and interference, including the traffic generated by co-located Wi-Fi networks, Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is currently gaining momentum in many application fields characterized by demanding reliability and determinism requirements. In particular, the ability of TSCH to change transmission frequency on every attempt sensibly mitigates packet losses and latencies, improving the overall behavior in a tangible way. In this paper, the communication quality achieved by TSCH in a setup that includes real motes exposed to a realistic interfering traffic is evaluated experimentally. A theoretical model is also developed, based on quite simple assumptions about the effectiveness of time and frequency diversity, which satisfactorily matches the real behavior. The model permits to determine how much network parameters like, e.g., the retry limit, actually affect communication, and can be exploited to find proper settings for them. Finally, the ability of channel hopping to prevent narrowband interference from disrupting communication is assessed. As results show, this mechanism makes motes suffer from an equivalent interference that roughly corresponds to the mean interference evaluated over all physical channels. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Reliability, power consumption, and latency are the three main performance indicators of wireless sensor networks. Time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) is a promising technique introduced in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard that performs some steps ahead in the direction of the final dream to meet all the previous requirements at the same time. In this article, a simple and effective mathematical model is presented for TSCH that, starting from measurements performed on a real testbed, permits to characterize both the network and the surrounding environment. To better characterize power consumption, an experimental measurement campaign was purposely performed on OpenMote B devices. The model, which was checked against a real 6TiSCH implementation, can be employed to predict network behaviour when configuration parameters are varied, in such a way to satisfy different application contexts. Results show that, when one of the three above indices is privileged, unavoidably there is a worsening of the others.

Recent years have seen the continuous evolution of technology, which has led to the definition of frameworks such as the internet of things (IoT) and Industry 4.0. These paradigms are producing enormous quantities of data every single day. These data are subject to data analysis, shared publicly or kept secret. Traditionally, this task was carried out using databases. With the advent of Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), instead, these data have a new way of being stored and shared (or kept private). The last actor role in this play is acted by quantum computers, since sufficiently large quantum computers are expected to seriously threaten the security and integrity of DLTs thanks to their totally different way of representing information. This paper aims to investigate the real threats for blockchain due to quantum computing and review post-quantum DLT solutions for traceability applications.

The undergoing fourth industrial revolution is constantly putting an accent on the integration of all entities within a single computational system, by moving from a centralized cloud architecture to edge computation. The decentralization of computational power needs a fog architecture, since it's becoming essential to reduce the latency required to take decisions in the industrial environment, in a way that does not violate timing constraints. This work describes the development and the deployment of an industrial fog architecture based on open source tools for Industry 4.0, called IFog4.0. The proposed architecture is able to exchange data using industrial networks and communication protocols, such as Profinet and Modbus TCP, and it is mainly intended to be deployed to Small and Medium Enterprise (SME). Automation is provided by the proposed programming Integrated Development Environment (IDE), while platform management is implemented by the Fog-Management tool. Furthermore, IFog4.0 embeds other open source tools such as Docker and Grafana, to perform data visualization and transmission. Verification is carried out by deploying the platform to an emulated industrial environment. A gas regulation station has been selected as the main usecase.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely accessible materials for teaching, learning, and research that have been made available such that they can be freely used, modified, and shared. Prompted by the potential positive impact that OERs can have, a growing community of OER enthusiasts has been advocating for their adoption in higher education, and elsewhere. The growing demand for computer science education and training (especially in areas related to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data) has led to speculation as to how OERs may be best leveraged to support such teaching and learning. The recent occasion of an international OER workshop at the 2019 IEEE Conference on Computers, Software and Applications (COMPSAC) allowed for six OER enthusiasts, all with extensive OER experience, to reflect on the status of OER adoption and understanding. These reflections, addressing misconceptions and challenges, form the basis for this paper.

Virtual Reality (VR) has increasingly attracted the attention of the computer animation community in search of more intuitive and effective alternatives to the current sophisticated user interfaces. Previous works in the literature already demonstrated the higher affordances offered by VR interaction, as well as the enhanced spatial understanding that arises thanks to the strong sense of immersion guaranteed by virtual environments. These factors have the potential to improve the animators' job, which is tremendously skill-intensive and time-consuming. The present paper explores the opportunities provided by VR-based interfaces for the generation of 3D animations via armature deformation. To the best of the authors' knowledge, for the first time a tool is presented which allows users to manage a complete pipeline supporting the above animation method, by letting them execute key tasks such as rigging, skinning and posing within a well-known animation suite using a customizable interface. Moreover, it is the first work to validate, in both objective and subjective terms, character animation performance in the above tasks and under realistic work conditions involving different user categories. In our experiments, task completion time was reduced by 26%, on average, while maintaining almost the same levels of accuracy and precision for both novice and experienced users.

A high number of research initiatives investigated the advantages of blockchain technology in different sectors. The objective of this work is to present an overview of blockchainbased applications in the consumer electronics field. In particular this work reports around fifty blockchain initiatives in the contexts of healthcare, smart homes, smart cities, automotive and smart devices, and discusses advantages/limitations of this technology.

Blockchain recently received an increasing attention from the industrial and research fields as well as a wide coverage from the media, as it enables the creation of a shared (worldwide) ledger maintained on a peer-to-peer basis, where autonomous programs (the smart contracts) can be executed. From the technological point of view, the blockchain is still far from a mainstream adoption, mainly due to scalability issues and because the interaction with it is still complex and requires technical skills. Given blockchain’s (and smart contracts’) advantages and technical limitations, it is difficult, for a company, to decide whether to invest in this technology or not, and to identify potential successful use cases. The objective of this chapter is to provide the reader with practical information to perform this choice. In particular, the chapter first provides a glossary of blockchain-related terms and then shows existing and under development use cases belonging to different sectors. Presented use cases are then discussed, to identify which sectors could benefit the most from blockchain and smart contracts, highlighting the most promising use cases in which this technology could be disrupting, and underlying the ones where advantages of relying on it are only marginal.

Industrial Communication Systems have become an increasingly essential part of factory automation, motion control, networked control systems. New and real-time capable solutions are required to support the always more present Industry 4.0 paradigm: for both local and wide area networks. At the same time, standardization has also started moving in this direction: in particular, for future open and dynamic system architectures, promising activities based on OPC-UA are serious attempt to satisfy stricter requirements for interoperability and information modeling with hard real-time needs. For these reasons, in this paper the development of an OPC-UA based architecture is described: the main target is to build a “collector” able to collect data from the shop-floor and convert them in the OPC-UA standard for an agile and effective vertical integration. The subsequent analysis carried out on the testbed mainly focuses on the performance evaluation of the method. To achieve high-performance data transmission in a fair environment, a parallel communication mechanism has been proposed.

Blockchains and sensors installed on a vehicle could be combined to semiautomatically activate/deactivate car insurance coverage in an envisaged on-demand insurance scenario. We present a prototype that includes a mobile application (app) and a portable electronic device to be installed onboard. The mobile app lets the driver dynamically change the status of specific insurance coverage (in some ca...

In recent years, online shopping is increasing the flows that transit into the urban areas. An increase in demand corresponds to an increase in operational complexity for logistics operators and environmental issues.

Impact of Delayed Packet Forwarding Sparse-Modeling Based Approach for Betweenness Centrality Abstract – Formative assessment is a practice aimed to enhance teaching and learning and to develop self-regulation. Among the strategies for activating formative assessment, the provision of feedback is one of the most studied: good feedback helps close the gap between actual and desired performance and it promotes self- regulation. Automatic Assessment Systems can improve the practice of formative assessment, especially for the immediacy of feedback and the flexible solutions for questioning. In this context, the Department of Mathematics of the University of Turin has developed a model for automatic formative assessment using an automatic assessment system suitable for STEM disciplines. The key features of the model, grounded on the models from the literature, are: availability, algorithmic questions, open answers, immediate feedback, interactive feedback, and contextualization. These are detailed and discussed through evidence gained from three experimentations, involving the total number of 553 students. In particular, it emerges that the use of interactive feedback ensures that students process the information from the feedback and use it to improve their performance, thus solving the major problem raised in the literature that feedback are not useful when students do not read them.