Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information for assisting its management and decision process. The principal aims of this study are: a) to complement the existing literature surveys in the BI area by identifying publications for the period 2007 to 2020, b) to classify these publications according to nine research strategies, c) to classify them according to various well-defined research topic categories, and d) apply machine learning techniques to assess their relevance with the BI field. We have collect 332 papers using ‘Google Scholar’ and a set of related keywords to the field of BI. The results show that most of the papers appeared during the years 2015 and 2017 [1]. The classifications of the literature based on research strategies and research topic indicate that most papers address formal theory and/or reviews and belong to the “benefits” research topic category. Finally, we attempt to increase the accuracy of the classification of aggregated information by utilizing machine learning techniques and estimating the “relevance” with respect to BI discipline. It appears that the overall best individual classifier is the SVM polynomial with ROSE sampling on 80% of the original data using the ‘TDM’ feature space, following by the Neural Networks with ROSE sampling on 80% of the original data using the ‘Topic’ feature space. We furthermore apply various ensemble methods, and we estimate and analyze their performance

This paper attempts to provide a data analysis of cryptocurrency markets. Such markets have been developed rapidly and their volatility poses significant research challenges and justifies intensive behavior analysis. For this, we develop statistical and machine learning techniques and apply them to analyze their price variations and to generate inferences. In particular, we utilize deep learning algorithms to predict the closing price of the Ethereum cryptocurrency in a short period. The price data is accumulated from Poloniex exchange and analyzed through a Convolutional Neural Network and four types of Recurrent Neural Network including the Long Short Term Memory network, the Stacked Long Short Term Memory network, the Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory network, and the Gated Recurrent Unit network. These deep learning models are benchmarked and compared under various metrics. Our experimental data suggest that certain of the above models can be utilized to predict the Ethereum closing price in real time with promising accuracy and experimentally proven profitability.

The engineering sector today faces a shortage of technical personnel as a result of fast evolving technologies in innovation related sectors expected to drive economic growth. Engineering higher education is in need of modernization in order to link student skills to labour market needs. Skills necessary for supporting economic growth include both a sound theoretical background as well as transversal competencies such as problem-solving capacity, creativity, and analytical thinking. This work presents a problem-based learning framework that aims to more effectively develop students for transitioning into the world of work. This is pursued through active educational approaches supported by digital learning services that promote collaboration, innovative mindsets, autonomous, and self-relying work. The proposed platform facilitates learning experiences that integrate simulations and serious games linked to real world challenges in the context of wider, blended learning practices. The framework is being developed by a network of European and South Asian universities with the objective of integrating needs from diverse cultural, economic, and educational environments resulting into an educational platform with international relevance.

This document provides the initial design specifications of the problem solving environment (PSE) GasTurbnLab. The long term objective of Ga.<;'I\lrbnLab is to evolve into a complete and versatile simulator for gas turbines to study their performance and operability. The shorter term objective of GasTurbnLab is to simulate the comprcssor-combustor-turbine coupling to study the mechanisms of stall, surge and turbine blade fatigue. Simultaneously, GasTurbnLab will explore new PSE methodologies such as agent bru;ed simulation, interface relaxation and geometry objects.

Digital skills are emerging as one of the basic, transversal competencies that allow learners and professionals to excel in wide areas academically and professionally, along with analytical and critical thinking, entrepreneurial mindsets, the capacity to collaborate across cultures, learning-to learn, and more. The PISA review now includes digital skills among the competencies the achievement levels of which is measures for learners in high school. The importance of digital skills is underscored by the Digital Agenda for Europe and the New Skills for New jobs initiatives, both of which highlight the fact that wide professional activities in broad sectors now require familiarity with digital services. The same initiatives point to the lack of 900K professionals with digital skills in the coming years in Europe. At the same time, youth unemployment in Europe is around 24%. These contradicting observations point to the need of building digital skills among young learners with the objective of easing their transition into the job market and boosting their employability prospects as a result of skill sets that are aligned with industry needs. Digital skills are broad and may cover a range of abilities and competencies. Examples include the capacity to use popular software and services that can support professional activities, such as text processors, image processors, spreadsheets, and more. Digital skills may further include the capacity to perform basic financial and economic activities on-line, such as accessing bank services, paying bills, using social media for building a professional network, and more. Other related abilities include a good understanding of an individual's digital footprint, respect for the personal data of others, and respect of intellectual property rights. Project EMPLOY aims at building digital skills among lower secondary education learners for use in professional contexts. The project promotes active, experiential learning design in the context of serious games that immerse learners into scenarios inspired by the world of work, the implementation of which requires the deployment of digital skills. Game-play is problem-based facilitating the development of critical and innovative thinking among learners that allow them to use digital skills creatively for addressing real-life professional challenges. Recognizing the importance of supporting educational process, EMPLOY further develops instructor support content for promoting the smooth integration of the EMPLOY active learning methodology and serious game into wider blended learning design. This content is comprised of end-to-end learning activities and how-to videos that involve the EMPLOY serious game. The content reaches beyond the application by suggesting good practices for class collaboration and social learning. The EMPLOY serious game is deployed in Greece, Turkey, Estonia, Italy, and France. The project is funded with the support of the ERASMUS+ Program.

The general idea behind Agile is that a project needs to be flexible, evolving, and adaptive. Agile design supports the idea that design must stay close to often evolving user needs. It is mostly applied in situations where the user requirements may not be fully understood at the beginning of a project, or where the requirements change. It facilitates the management of specific tasks, since it allows flexibility and continuing development. Agile is an up-and-coming methodology that is embraced with innovation and is used in industrial processes.On the other hand, a significant chasm exists between the knowledge obtained through university courses by learning the theoretical background and the practicality of this knowledge and how exactly it can be applied to real-world professional scenarios. This chasm can only be eliminated in case scholars are supplied with the appropriate up-to-date knowledge and obtain a wide range of experience that exposes them to real-world needs.Technology, and more specifically serious games, can support knowledge development and retention among students by simulating real-word practices in a virtual and safe environment. Through serious games students have the opportunity to address their lack of practical experience, acquire self-confidence, and succeed. Agile learning processes may further allow students to influence the learning process in relation to their interests and needs taking into account industry requirements for employment, thus promoting the competitiveness and employability of learners as future professionals.This paper presents project LEAP, which aims at exposing higher education students to agile practices applied in industry in preparation for a smooth transition into the job market. The project develops a serious game through which students are exposed to agile practices deployed in professional settings. The LEAP serious game is based on an active and problem-based methodological learning framework. The LEAP serious game will be validated in learning experiments that engage higher education students and their instructors in Greece, Estonia, Spain, the U.K., and Portugal.

Agile design refers to flexible processes in which design and implementation of a product are not separate process, but rather they are interleaved. Design is revised throughout product development aiming at a final product that best meets the needs of targeted users. Agile design is useful when product user requirements are not fully understood or when they emerge gradually throughout the implementation process. While agile design is typically applied in software engineering, its principles of ensuring a product that best addresses customer expectations through iterative development of disposable prototypes has applicability in wider engineering sectors. Project LEAP [2] promotes the linking of engineering higher education learning to industry practices, and specifically, agile design, with the objective of facilitating a smoother transition of students from the academic environment to the world of work. The project designs and develops serious games that encourage learners to adopt industry roles related to agile design processes, to think critically for addressing community and societal needs through agile engineering solutions, and to practice on the application of industrial process management in the context of wide learning activities. Recognizing the importance of supporting educators on integrating the proposed innovative learning methods and tools into their teaching practices LEAP further develops good practice guidelines and instructor support content. The outcomes will be validated in real-life contexts in classrooms in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Estonia, and the UK.

Although several researchers have investigated engineering design process (EDP) as an effective pedagogy for technology education in K-12, its potential for technical and vocational education has not obtained much attention. In an ever-changing scientific, technological and social environment, technical and vocational education has not only to provide practical occupational skills, but also to ensure that students will acquire higher order critical thinking, competencies with regard to adaptation, decision-making, creativity and innovation, technological literacy and collaboration skills. This article discusses engineering design process, as an appropriate constructivist approach for contextualized learning and effective connection between theory and practice that fosters the intended learning outcomes for technical and vocational education in the twenty-first century. It is based on an ongoing research project, where we examine, theoretically and practically, how problem solving environments (PSEs) supporting EDP could be developed to underpin effectively engineering design as a constructivist learning activity in the heterogeneous technological classroom, employing activity theory as a conceptual framework.

Irrigation is, for certain geographical regions, a vital activity which often happens to be an expensive one. For those regions, irrigation commonly accounts to significant energy consumption. In this paper, we propose to investigate the possibility of reducing the cost of irrigation by utilizing techniques, methods and practices that are common in the next generation energy systems, known also as smart energy systems. Specifically, we design, implement and evaluate a software platform that couples the smartness of the irrigation systems with the smartness of the energy systems. The resulting simulation engine allows large scale and very detailed experimentation which allow irrigation experts to specify energy effective configurations that lead to the reduction of the irrigation cost through smart utilization of Renewable Energy Sources.

Digital skills are part of the basic competences with high demand in the work place. They are not only necessary for professionals in the ICT sector; diverse jobs in wide economic sectors require the capacity of a professional to deploy digital tools and services. For example, a store manager must manage inventory through a database, a professional in tourism must register customers into an on- line system and check availability of services, an educator needs to deploy digital tools in classroom contexts, an architect must design through a digital application, and more.At the policy level, the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs [1] estimates that in the coming years there will be a shortage of up to 900K professionals in Europe in the ICT sector and ICT- using sectors. The New Skills for New Jobs Agenda [2] and ET2020 [3] both identify digital skills as core, basic competences that are desirable for students independently of area of study.At the same time the EU-28 unemployment rate was 9.6% in January 2017 while the youth unemployment rate was 19.7% in 2015 according to Eurostat. These statistics demonstrate that there is a skills mismatch in the job market: one the one hand there is a shortage of professionals with digital skills while on the other youth unemployment rates are high.Digital competences for employment are a broad set of skills that are related to how a professional in various field may use digital services and tools in job contexts for completing specific tasks or for becoming more effective in her job. Wide definitions of digital competences exist. Some related skills include: using software for text authoring, using software for image or video editing, surfing the Internet, using email, using social media, being safe on the Internet, performing economic transactions through digital services, being aware of one's digital footprint on the Internet, understanding the principles of copyright of information reached through the internet, and a lot more.The EMPLOY project aims to help bridge the skills mismatch in the job market by building digital competences for employment among secondary education students. The project aims to achieve this objective through active, experiential learning approaches that expose learners to the way digital skills may be applied in work contexts. EMPLOY develops a serious game, namely a digital game designed for learning, through which learners build broad digital skills useful in work contexts. The game is designed for classroom deployment and is aimed as a complementary learning tool that an instructor may deploy towards enriching digital skill building educational practices. The game includes specific learning scenarios through which learners develop a contained set from the wide list of digital competences. The game simulates work in an office, challenging learners to complete tasks in the context of a typical a work day. The game is being evaluated in schools in Italy, Greece, France, Estonia, and Turkey.

Secondary education students often struggle with Mathematics and Science, preventing them to follow a successful career in Engineering. At a higher education level, problems still exist, including in their motivation levels. A Problem-Based Learning approach can offer an interesting solution to help circumvent this issue by creating an environment in which the learners themselves seek out information and create strategies to solve the training situation. This present work, named project eCity, aims at creating a Virtual Learning Environment platform in the form of a city building simulator, in which students, often digital native, will feel at ease and encouraged to solve the practical engineering scenarios they will face. The eCity platform targets at the same time students from the secondary education and students from higher education, allowing them to work together in a close relation to solve the presented problems together.

The EMPLOY project addresses the development of digital skills among young learners with the objective of enhancing their future employment opportunities in innovation-related sectors that are expected by policy makers to drive economic growth. Digital skills are considered among the basic and transversal competencies that are necessary in wide economic sectors and as such must be developed among individuals with diverse professional and career aspirations, independently of area. It also promotes the strategic deployment of ICT in education as a learning tool, and the development of ICT applications for learning and the integration of digital tools as complementary educational content within wider, blended learning and teaching processes. The integration of proposed technology and pedagogies offer broad learning benefits to both students and teachers by enhancing motivation, promoting long-term engagement with the learning process, providing timely and constructive feedback, and promoting critical and entrepreneurial thinking mind sets.

Early school leaving is a complex phenomenon that may adversely affect on a learner's future development. ESL is the result of a combination of factors, such as insufficient school curricula understanding, low value placed on education by families, unavailability or low capacity of parents to support learners in schooling, insufficient parent-teacher-learner communication, and more. Many factors are socio-economic and are related to the extended social environment of learners. This work aims at strengthening the ties of school networks aiming at preventing ESL risk factors to set root in a learner's life through early interventions that start in primary school. This is pursued through a gamified school community and supporting gamified complementary to school curricula learning activities that aim at fostering engagement of parents, teachers, and learners. The community promotes a sense of affiliation, opens-up communication channels, and promotes a positive school environment for the benefit of learners and their parents.

In this paper, a framework for shape-based similarity search of 3D molecular structures is presented. The proposed framework exploits simultaneously the discriminative capabilities of a global, a local, and a hybrid local-global shape feature to produce a geometric descriptor that achieves higher retrieval accuracy than each feature does separately. Global and hybrid features are extracted using pairwise computations of diffusion distances between the points of the molecular surface, while the local feature is based on accumulating pairwise relations among oriented surface points into local histograms. The local features are integrated into a global descriptor vector using the bag-of-features approach. Due to the intrinsic property of its constituting shape features to be invariant to articulations of the 3D objects, the framework is appropriate for similarity search of flexible 3D molecules, while at the same time it is also accurate in retrieving rigid 3D molecules. The proposed framework is evaluated in flexible and rigid shape matching of 3D protein structures as well as in shape-based virtual screening of large ligand databases with quite promising results.

In today’s open business environment peer communication across borders is the norm. It is commonplace in face-to-face interaction as well as on-line communities that facilitate work related collaboration of cross-border teams. To effectively work in these international surroundings, individuals resort to commonly understood, vehicular languages. In work-related contexts, impeccable use of a language is less important than effective communication towards addressing common goals. This work departs from typical professional language learning approaches by introducing a serious game for building language and cultural communication skills in a lingua franca. The game exposes professionals to typical deployment of a lingua franca by native and non-native speakers. Learners build communication competence through situated learning approaches that draw inspiration from the real world, which is both multilingual and multicultural. At the same time they become aware of the cultural wealth that is manifested in the individualized uses of vehicular languages by individuals with diverse backgrounds.

We present a methodology for evaluating the performance of application programs on distributed computing sysLems. An application A is represented by an annotated graph G (A) giving its requirements for processing, memory and communication. plus the precedence between computation modules. Machines are represented by a similar graph G(M) and the methodology is to map G(A) into G(M). The mapping problem is subdivided into three steps (51) a reduction of the parallelism of G(A) to that of G (M), (82) scheduling the computational modules to (nearly) minimize communication costs, and (83) actual layout of resulting graph into G(M). The two technical problems addressed here are (1) using communication delay models to simplify G(M) and the step (s3), (2) scheduling the modules (step (s2)). Our communlcation models apply well to uniform architectures, we explicitly consider the following four: single bus and common memory. single bus and dislributed memory. multiple bus and dislributed common memory, Banyan interconnection and distributed common memory. • This research was supported by NSF granl DMC-85080684At. •• This research was supported by ARO grant DAAG29-B3-K-0026 and AFOSR grant 84-0385.

Collocation methods based on quintic splines are fonnulated and analyzed for the secondorder two-point boundary value problems with mixed boundary conditions. These methods determine quintic spline approximation to the solution of the boundary value problem. by forcing lhe approximating solution to satisfy the given operator equation, or a perturbed one at the nodes, the boundary conditions and auxiliary end conditions. The methods that are based on the initial operator equation produce not optimal approximation. as compared to lhe corresponding interpolation procedures. This paper derives appropriate perturbations of lhe initial differential equation, such. that the application of the collocation procedure leads 10 optimal approximating schemes. The theoretical behavior of the method has been verified numerically on a variety of benchmark problems found in !.he literature. L INTRODUCTION In !.his paper we consider a collocation of the solul..ion u of the second order two-point boWldary problem Lu == 02U(S) + pes) Du(s) + q(s) u(s) '" [(s) , aSs S b • subject to boWldary conditions '. . Bu == L (Oij DJu(a) + bij OJu(b» = g;, i == O. I i"' (Ua)

This paper introduces siLang, a serious gaming approach for situated learning of vehicular languages. Otherwise referred to as lingua franca, these languages are commonly understood and used across communities. They facilitate effective communication by individuals not sharing a mother tongue. In the context of ever increasing international collaboration, this work takes a new approach in language learning building on the added-value introduced by vehicular languages as cross-cultural communication tools. siLang takes into account cultural aspects by exposing learners to the use of vehicular languages by native as well as non-native speakers. The project integrates into a serious game culturally-influenced communication norms and language transfer effects including diverse pronunciations, expressions, and idioms through scenarios that draw inspiration from real-life. The learning game is supported by good practice recommendations targeting language instructors facilitating the effective integration of proposed situated, game-based learning into language education with applications in wider learning settings. The development of the serious game is work in progress. Validation activities will take place in Greece, Norway, Italy, Portugal, and Estonia involving undergraduate students, professionals, and vocational workers.