https://dl.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/jspui/handle/123456789/4122 2026-04-25T07:35:42Z 2026-04-25T07:35:42Z Wilson, R.S.I. https://dl.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/jspui/handle/123456789/4765 2024-09-25T08:06:31Z 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: An Approach to Produce a Quality Ontology for a Usable Ontology-driven Information System Authors: Wilson, R.S.I. Abstract: Abstract Nowadays, ontologies are increasingly incorporated in information systems owning to the distinct capabilities that they have. Most specifically, ontologies have the significant feature of inferencing knowledge from explicit facts which is not available in other repositories and data models. However, these capabilities would not be beneficial for Ontology-Driven Information Systems (ODIS) unless a good quality ontology is produced. This is due to the fact that ontology quality strongly affects the overall system quality and in turn, user satisfaction. This situation has been realized in several previous works, as well as, through this study. For instance, the studies show that even very few quality issues in an ontology can lead to producing substandard results for user queries. Consequently, this effect creates a negative user attitude toward the system adversely affecting its usability in use. Accordingly, it is clearly evident that a good quality ontology is necessary to make the overall ODIS usable. Thus, a proper quality assessment of ontology content and structure is essential before it is deployed in a system. However, as realized through the literature, the existing works have not thoroughly considered the quality requirements and their evaluation across ontology development. The main cause for this issue is the non-existence of agreed models, methodologies and approaches which support researchers and developers to specify and evaluate the quality characteristics of an ontology. This dissertation alleviated the aforementioned problem by introducing an ontology quality model and approach. Initially, a systematic review was performed to identify the existing contribution to the quality evaluation, i.e., quality characteristics, measures and methods. Consequently, a model was constructed with nineteen characteristics classified into four evaluation scopes namely structural intrinsic, domain intrinsic, domain extrinsic and application extrinsic. Thereafter, an approach was built by adopting well-formed theories and standards in software quality engineering. The overall research study was undertaken by following the Design Science Research methodology. The evaluation of the quality model was performed with the assistance of specialists in ontology quality and the evaluation of the quality approach was carried out using a use case in the agriculture domain. The results show that the proposed model and approach are successful artifacts that support researchers and practitioners to specify and evaluate the quality of an ontology. In the future, it is expected that the developed model and approach will be applied to many case studies in different domains to make them more complete and well-established.

2023-01-01T00:00:00Z Amaraweera, R.J https://dl.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/jspui/handle/123456789/4764 2024-09-25T08:02:11Z 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Improve the Learning Experience through the Synergy between Learning Analytics and Learning Design Authors: Amaraweera, R.J Abstract: Abstract Information and communication technology are widely used in education nowadays. Due to the concept of e-learning, universities conduct teaching, learning, and assessment activities with the aid of Virtual Learning Environments. However, despite modern technology in the advancement of education, university students and lecturers still face various problems such as not receiving real-time feedback, not taking the maximum bene ts from the data collected in Virtual Learning Environments, and cannot identify the students at risk of failure in the initial stages. Learning Analytics and Learning Design are two innovative concepts used to enhance the learning experience. This research aims to enhance the learning experience through the synergy between Learning Analytics and Learning Design by solving university students' and lecturers' problems. This was accomplished by designing and developing two Technology-Enhanced Learning Analytics dashboard systems called TELA-Student and TELA-Lecturer systems. The TELA-Student system aims to improve students' engagement and grades while the TELA-Lecturer system aims to improve lecturers' Learning Designs. The Design Science Research methodology was used as the Research Methodology. We conducted two experiments to evaluate the impact of the TELA-Student system in real-learning environments. According to the t-statistical analysis of the experiments' results, the TELA-Student system can improve the students' engagement and grades. According to the interviews conducted with the treatment group students, the TELA-Student system supported increasing students' motivation for learning, thereby increasing their learning engagement and grades. We evaluated the TELA-Lecturer system in a real-learning environment. According to the results, the TELA-Lecturer system supported lecturers in identifying students at risk of failure, improving the quality of the Learning Designs, and providing a better learning experience to the students. According to the evaluation of the TELA-Student system and TELA-Lecturer system in real learning environments, it can be stated that the synergy between Learning Analytics and Learning Design can enhance the learning experience by solving the problems faced by university students and lecturers.

2022-01-01T00:00:00Z Kulasekara, D.M.R https://dl.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/jspui/handle/123456789/4763 2024-09-25T07:55:41Z 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Fully Automatic Projector Calibration on Planar Surface with a Sensor Based Approach Authors: Kulasekara, D.M.R Abstract: Abstract Portable projectors are used to create large scale displays in occasions such as classroom events, entertainment events, and in mobile augmented reality applications. Usually, the default settings of such projectors are suitable to project on orthogonal planes where, the projector’s optical axis is perpendicular to both the horizontal and the vertical sides of the displaying surface. However, due to its portability, projectors are being increasingly used for non-orthogonal projections as well. In such situations, due to the absence of fully automatic calibration procedures, the users have to go through a tedious manual calibration process to correct its quadrilateral shape projections and obtain distortion-free rectified visualizations. Being dependent on the visual inputs to identify the distortions of the displayed image is a common limitation of the existing calibration techniques. A projector is a dual of a camera. Therefore, the visual input-based calibration systems use a few orientation camera-inputs and camera-projector pair calibrations to compute the distortion on the display. Different orientations of the cameras cover the entire display and compute the specific calibration parameters of the relative arrangement between the projector and the camera. Scale-Invariant Feature Transform or Speeded Up Robust Features algorithm is used for the pre-calibration phase and the continuous re-calibration with loop-feed mechanisms. In the correction mechanism, fiducial and screen marking boards affect the user’s immersive feeling and the scenery. The outcome of the research presented in this thesis is a projector display distortion correction method based on a projector arrangement relative to the projector’s display using a non-linear distortion correction algorithm. A novel hardware platform based on a small-scale hardware apparatus called Beam Adjustment Technology (BAT) is used in this solution, to do calibrations. It is a relatively small apparatus and thus, does not hinder the portability of the projector. The BAT uses, an efficient software framework for continuous automatic projector calibration based on inputs from Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) instead of visual inputs. The proposed equations for estimating distortion corrections are based on perspective transformations using IMU and the distance sensor outputs. Furthermore, the system can estimate the arrangements of the projector and its light beam propagation in 3D world relative to the planar display to generate a distortion-free display.The solution has been tested with 30 different sizes of images and more than 1000 poses of the projector. Its projective display deviations have been tested with standard horizontal and vertical coordinates. The mean value of this deviation is 2° and 3° with respect to the horizontal and vertical coordinates, respectively. Information on the users’ experience was also collected to evaluate the system qualitatively. According to the user response, the system outputs (projected displays) were rectified and were free from distortions. The area occupied by the corrected display is decreased with the deviation of the projector from its orthogonal position. However, continuous distortion correction is important to preserve user’s immersive feelings and convey the real interpretations about the images.

2021-01-01T00:00:00Z Jayasinghe, K.P.U. https://dl.ucsc.cmb.ac.lk/jspui/handle/123456789/4762 2024-09-25T07:51:54Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Application of Edutainment Concepts and Tracking Emotions Based on Transient Emotion Peak in Online Education Systems Authors: Jayasinghe, K.P.U. Abstract: Abstract The current teaching practice in most of the educational institutes is to follow the conventional approach where the role of the teachers is to communicate everything outlined in the syllabus to the students rather than encouraging them to learn and explore themselves. As a result, the intellectual creativity and the thinking ability of the students are limited to a frame. It is found that learning by experience is more efficient and effective than learning in a teacher centered learning environment. From a few decades ago, introduction of computer games for educational purposes was drawn attention of the educationists since a variety of opportunities are available to apply the knowledge within a virtual world facilitating the learning process through the concept of “Edutainment”. The two main approaches that are considered as “Edutainment” concepts are GBL and gamification. This research is an attempt of investigating the feasibility of implementing a virtual learning environment by using “Edutainment” concepts to teach Computer Science subjects to undergraduate students, to find the most the effective way out of GBL and gamification approaches in teaching Computer Science subjects to undergraduates and to facilitate an online test environment to the students to have frequent formative assessments to self-evaluate themselves so that they can go for a higher grade at the end of the summative assessment. Even though, there were many games available for undergraduates, those games were not challenging games, they were role-play games or quests-based games. Hence, the first attempt of this research was to introduce a challenging game as a GBL approach to Computer Science undergraduates. A car game was developed to teach ‘Peterson’s algorithm’ which comes under Operating Systems course module in Computer Science undergraduate syllabus. The game was given to students prior and after they attend the lecture based on this algorithm and gathered their feedback on the game through a questionnaire. The questionnaire was designed to analyse the students’ opinions on the game. As there were no proper analysis had been carried out by researchers to compare Computer Science undergraduate students’ perspectives towards gamification vs Game based learning (GBL) learning approaches, the next target was to compare the higher education students’ perspective towards these two approaches. Taking into account the feedback that the students had provided at the previous study, it was decided to compare a game based learning instance with a gamification instance. A quantitative analysis was done to compare the effectiveness of the two approaches by letting the students to answer a quiz after letting the students to study through the game and the gamification module. The test marks and time taken to answer each question were analysed to compare which method was effective with this cohort of the students. Moreover, a qualitative analysis was conducted by getting the students feedback on each approach. The other goal was to facilitate the students to have frequent formative assessments and to let the students to self-evaluate their performance. Under this section, it was found that synthesizing a feedback should consider not only the correctness of the answer but also another two factors i.e. the effort that a student has put when engaging in learning and an evaluation based on their performance like analysing the time-spent in answering a question. It is easier to mark an answer as correct or iii wrong and to get the time spent to answer a question. It is a proven thing that students’ emotions can be analysed to find the effort that a student has put in answering a question. Considering all these factors, emotional level of the student, correctness of the answer and time taken to answer a question had been identified as the key factors of generating an effective feedback. It was found that, usage of hardware equipment in analysing the emotional changes in online education systems, impedes the effort of gathering the true emotional changes of the students. Hence, it was decided to use a webcam to track the facial expressions to interpret the emotions of the students. There were research work carried out to track emotions by using the webcams, however those research were used to analyse the changes in emotional/concentration level for a longer period of time for example to measure the concentration level during a lecture. But here, the intention was to analyse the emotional changes while a student is answering to set of questions. Therefore, this study proposes a systematic way to track the emotional changes based on the transient emotion peak. Further, it was noted that, the emotional changes elaborate through facial expressions can be intensified through body cues. There were no research work conducted to investigate the effect of body cues in analysing the emotions through facial expressions in online education systems, but there were research work that were carried out to check the effect body cues of in analysing emotions in fields like sports. Finally, this research can be concluded with three main findings. When it comes to adult learning, it was discovered that adult students mostly tend to grab the core concepts rather than playing fancy games, but they can be motivated with basic gaming concepts. The first observation and the conclusion that was able to derive from this study was that the concept called “gamification” is a better solution than GBL for Computer Science undergraduates. The second conclusion that was able to derive was that the proposed systematic algorithm works at a 71.52% accuracy level in identifying the emotional changes in an online test environment. However, it can be said that, it would be better to use this proposed time interval to track the concentration level of the students by tracking the eye-ball movements. The other conclusion was, that there is no significance effect in body cues in analysing the emotional changes through facial expressions in online education systems. Finally, this research was able to design a set of lessons and tests as formative assessments components to Computer Science undergraduates along with three feedback components which have to be taken into account when forming an effective feedback.

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z