128 research outputs found
Exploring Player Engagement in Social and Pervasive Learning Games
No full textPervasive gaming is a genre of gaming that integrates with the physical and social aspects of the real world and blends into the player’s everyday life. The context of this thesis is the use of long-lasting pervasive games to facilitate learning. However, for students to achieve the intended learning outcome from pervasive learning games, they need to participate. Hence, player motivation and engagement are critical success factors and the strategies and mechanisms that can be implemented for this purpose is the focus for this thesis.
Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and player enjoyment is the theoretical foundation for the research presented here. Different methods and techniques to increase player engagement have been explored and evaluated, including features to support “in-game” awareness.
The research presented is conducted on three primary artifacts. One artifact was a commercial web-based smokers’ cessation program designed as a 50-day real-time pervasive learning game. The two other artifacts were Pervasive Learning Games designed and developed as a part of this research project. Both these games were 100% designed, developed and game mastered by the author of this thesis. The game “Nuclear Mayhem” was in addition programmed by the author while the programming of the second game “HiNTHunt” was outsourced and done by a third party. A Design Science research method was applied to investigate how storytelling, real-life locations, real-life events, awareness enhancing, social game play, as well as other types of game play and game design, can be implemented in long lasting learning games to motivate and improve player participation.
Results from this research project have been presented to the research community in six scientific papers, all published in renowned international conferences and journals according to the Norsk Publiseringsindikator (NPI) listing published by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data.
Main contribution presented in these six papers are strategies and solutions demonstrated in the artifacts designed, developed, and instantiated as a part of this research project and expanded knowledge about how to increase player engagement in long-lasting pervasive learning.
We learned that using pervasive learning games could expand the area for learning into the student’s everyday life and enable learning to be anytime and anywhere. Furthermore, we discovered that a dynamic game story that incorporates real life events that unfolds in the duration of the game as a part of the game story, created more awareness about the game and proved to be a valuable technique to create increased player engagement. This resulted in the development of the Dynamic Pervasive Storytelling model.
Different iterations of the artifact HiNT Hunt provided information about the importance of a game story to engage players as early as possible and increase overall player engagement. Iterations of artifact HiNT Hunt also provided learning that led to the development of The-Last-Shall-Be-The-First Dynamic Bonus System, a method to activate passive players to get them more engaged in the game.
Case study of the commercial web-based freeFromNicotine course, which provides a game-based approach to smoking cessation led to the principle of core assignments and individual assignments, a successful method to ensure that all users could participate in the overall competition on equal terms while still have a unique tailored personal course program to follow.
The work presented in this thesis provides unique insight into strategies and methods for player engagement in pervasive games. This is relevant knowledge when designing and developing pervasive games to increase player engagement and the solutions that have been develop can be reused, as well as provide a good foundation for further research on the topic
Robust multi-objective production optimization with CO2 emissions reduction
No full textIn this paper, we describe an efficient methodology for simultaneously maximizing the expected profitability of oil field production and minimizing the expected emission of greenhouse gasses associated with the production through optimizing controls of the reservoir injection and production wells. Instead of simply minimizing water production and injection as is often done as a surrogate for energy consumption, we use an emissions calculator to account for the energy efficiency of the injection and compression system. Because our approach to minimization is efficient, we are able to account for uncertainty in geology during the minimization and to use the operational simulation model for the field. The most common approach to solving for Pareto optimal solutions is through some type of scalarization of the optimization problem. In this study, we apply the weighted-sum method, which despite its limitations when applied to problems with feasible regions for objective outcomes that are not convex provides Pareto optimal solutions at a relatively low cost. Finally, we apply the methodology to the problem of well controls for a three-well field in the Norwegian Sea with platform facilities shared by another field. The reservoir model has 330,000 active cells with an active aquifer. The emissions calculator uses pump characteristics to account for fuel usage attributed to water injection. Gas compression, water treatment, and base energy costs are estimated by calibration of allocated energy usage to historical production data. The expectation of the objective functions is approximated by the sample average of the objective functions over the ensemble of 50 history-matched model realizations. Control variables are the injector and producer rates over one-month intervals. The Stochastic Simplex Approximate Gradient (StoSAG) method was used to estimate the gradient of the scalarized objective function and a quasi-Newton method (BFGS) was used for minimization. Results showed that moderately large reductions in CO2 emissions from a reference case optimized purely for profitability could be obtained at the cost of modest reductions in NPV. Larger reductions in CO emissions were costlier. Additionally, the optimized reservoir production strategies were not intuitively obvious, indicating that a formal multi-objective optimization approach was beneficial.Robust multi-objective production optimization with CO2 emissions reductionpublishedVersio
Coner: A Collaborative Approach for Long-Tail Named Entity Recognition in Scientific Publications
No full textNamed Entity Recognition (NER) for rare long-tail entities as e.g., often found in domain-specific scientific publications is a challenging task, as typically the extensive training data and test data for fine-tuning NER algorithms is lacking. Recent approaches presented promising solutions relying on training NER algorithms in an iterative weakly-supervised fashion, thus limiting human interaction to only providing a small set of seed terms. Such approaches heavily rely on heuristics in order to cope with the limited training data size. As these heuristics are prone to failure, the overall achievable performance is limited. In this paper, we therefore introduce a collaborative approach which incrementally incorporates human feedback on the relevance of extracted entities into the training cycle of such iterative NER algorithms. This approach, called Coner, allows to still train new domain specific rare long-tail NER extractors with low costs, but with ever increasing performance while the algorithm is actively used in an application.Web Information System
A Domain Meta-wrapper Using Seeds for Intelligent Author List Extraction in the Domain of Scholarly Articles
No full textIn this paper we investigate about automated extraction of author lists in the domain of scientific digital libraries. It is given a list of known “seed” authors and we aim to extract complete lists of co-authors from Web pages in arbitrary format. We adopt a methodology embedding domain knowledge in a unique “meta-wrapper”, not requiring training, with negligible maintenance costs and based on the combination of several extraction techniques. Such methods are applied at the structural level, at the character level and at the annotation level. We describe the methodology, illustrate our tool, compare with known approaches and measure the accuracy of our techniques with proper experiments
Archives and Technological Selection
No full textThe archive is not a place for the undifferentiated storage of the past: the political role of the archive is to select what to include as the past and what to discard, in order to regulate the future. These selections are prescribed by laws and regulations, but they are also determined by the archival techniques available for inscription, storage, indexing and access. The author analyses the technological selections of two ages of the archive. The first age is that of the intermedial archive emerging after the end of the text archive monopoly, with the gramophone, photograph and, in particular, film. The gaps and contradictions resulting from this configuration of media are investigated through a discussion of the media set-up of Albert Kahn’s Les archives de la planète (1908-1931). The second age is that of the digital archives, and the digitization of analogue material, again with Les archives de la planète as an example. Instead of understanding these ages of archival technologies as autonomous and separate, the author argues that they should be approached as “superimposed” archival regimes in order to tease out the current interrelations between analogue and digital archives.Une archive n’est pas un endroit où l’on stocke indifféremment les traces du passé. Le rôle politique de l’archive est de sélectionner ce qui doit participer du passé et ce qui doit être mis de côté, de manière à réguler le futur. Ce processus de sélection repose sur des lois et des régulations, mais il est également prescrit par les techniques d’archivage disponibles, tant pour l’inscription, l’entreposage, l’indexation et l’accès. L’auteur de cet article analyse les sélections technologiques à deux époques distinctes de l’archive. La première est celle de l’archive intermédiale, qui émerge après le monopole de l’archive textuelle, avec l’arrivée du gramophone, de la photographie et, surtout, du cinéma. Les lacunes et les contradictions qui résultent de cette nouvelle configuration médiatique sont investiguées à la lumière des propos d’Albert Kahn dans Les archives de la planète (1908-1931). Les archives numériques et la numérisation du matériel analogique constituent la seconde époque analysée, de nouveau avec Les archives de la planète comme exemple. Plutôt que d’essayer de comprendre ces différentes technologies archivistiques comme appartenant à des périodes autonomes et séparées, l’auteur propose de les appréhender comme des régimes archivistiques « superposés », dans le but d’éclairer les relations entre les archives analogiques et numériques
To graver med hest og hesteutstyr fra Tu : maktpolitiske forhold på Sørvestlandet i yngre jernalder
No full textThis article discusses political changes in Southwest Norway in the 8th and 9th centuries. It is suggested that two male graves
from this period, found at Tu in Klepp, Rogaland, and containing horse and horse equipment, are related to political changes. The
author suggests that graves with horses and horse equipment belong to persons and families with significant roles in the political
development of the time
Low Short Circuit Ratio Connection of Wind Power Plants
No full textPrimary factor for the site selection during the planning process of the large modern wind farms is the wind climate, which is usually favorable at remote and offshore locations where the public grid is not particularly strong. Among the consequences of this solution is the necessity to connect wind farms to weak points of the grid and the necessity to reach this point by the means of long connection lines. All the mentioned factors result in a low short circuit ratio connection of wind farms becoming a frequent condition to deal with. Wind turbine manufacturers and wind farm operators have already faced various engineering problems concerning the wind farms, operating in weak grids. One of them is inability to transfer the desired amount of the active power along the needed distance due to the lack of transmission capability. Besides that the system has to operate at the tip of its PV curve, which makes it vulnerable to voltage instability in case of sudden changes in a system, for instance a load connection or a short circuit. Furthermore, all the modern wind farms are using power electronic converter based drivetrain system, which has numerous advantages in terms of controllability but also demonstrates much lower short circuit current capabilities, compared to the previously used synchronous generator technology. That minimizes the modern wind turbines contribution to fault recovery, which in cases of severe faults might cause a wind power plant to violate the grid codes requirements, resulting in unfavorable consequences for the wind farm operator. Among the consequent instabilities, reported by the wind turbine manufacturers are the slow voltage recovery after system faults and oscillatory voltage instability in response to small disturbances. A peculiarity of the previously held studies is that they are constrained by a range of case-dependent parameters, due to the fact that vast majority of the offered solutions propose the refinement of the turbine voltage controllers gains. The proposed solutions have demonstrated limited positive effect, however they are not universal, due to the fact that the voltage controllers are tuned on a case to case basis. Therefore this thesis carries out a systematic analysis of the nature of the occurring phenomenas instead of a case study solving. The investigated system is modeled, using the per-unitized conventional power system elements, with an emphasis on their mutual relations and not bound by the magnitudes. Therefore system behavior is not conditioned by any specific case peculiarities. On the contrary, the integral dependences are being tracked and the solutions are supplemented by the mathematical derivations, based on the fundamental power system laws. Due to this approach the reason of the occurring instabilities has been detected, explained and resolved. Lack of transmission capabilities, shown by the simulations lays in the insufficient accuracy of the simplified power system modeling with the shunt capacitances neglected. The system, modeled with the shunt capacitances included does not possess the above-mentioned problems. Power system oscillations have been eliminated by means of controller tuning and insufficient voltage recovery has been overcome by means of partial reactive power compensation. The recommendations on modeling and control refinement are given, based on the derived dependences and tracked properties of the high impedance grid with high wind power penetration.Electrical Power SystemsElectrical Power EngineeringElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
Getting Connected: How Sociologists Can Access The High Tech Élite
No full textÉlite studies have been relatively neglected in the qualitative methods literature (Coleman, 1996, p. 336; Hertz & Imber, 1995) . As a consequence, the interview methods literature in the social sciences does not adequately address the issue of access to élite interviews. Nor does it address the élite interview process itself (Breakwell, Hammond, & Fife-Schaw, 1995; Brenner, Brown, & Canter, 1985; Crabtree & Miller, 1992; Fog, 1994; Fowler & Mangione, 1990; McCracken , 1988; Stewart & Cash, 1997; Sudman & Bradburn, 1982; Weiss, 1994) . Despite its élite sample (scientists, engineers, policy- makers) the science and technology studies (STS) community (Undheim, 2002) suffers from the same lack of attention to access, with Traweek (1995) as a notable exception. The author discusses the small literature on qualitative élite studies ( Hertz & Imber, 1995; Walford, 1994) as well as contributions on élite interviewing (Burgess, 1988; Cassell, 1988; Dexter, 1970; Moyser, 1988; Spector, 1980; Thomas, 1995) . Practical consultation for interview practice is also given. Seeing access as an ongoing, precarious process, the author recommends improvisation by ways of a threefold journalistic, therapeutic, and investigative modus operandi. The author draws on a study of the situated nature of high tech practices and is based on interview experience with knowledge workers, experts, and high tech CEOs in the United States, Italy, and Norway. As well, he brings experiences from a previous study of regional innovation in Norway and Great Britain (Thorvik & Undheim, 1998)
Joint Maintenance Interval and Spare Parts Optimization using a Discrete-Event Simulation Model
No full textThe goal of this report is to use discrete-event simulation (DES) as a method for optimizing maintenance strategies, such as spare parts levels and maintenance intervals. Firstly, the au- thor argues for spare parts optimization with a DES in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The models and assumptions that are needed for developing such a model are explained. Further- more, this report elaborates on how a DES can be coded in VBA. Lastly, several methods for optimizing both speed and decision variables of a DES are introduced.
The report shows how a DES can be coded and which models and assumptions can be used in developing such a simulation. A specific focus is on the design of the pending-event set (PES), which is the core of the DES. Several different designs are tested in different situations in order to determine their performance. The results show that the performance of these methods vary in each situation, and therefore the designer of a DES should determine the characteristics of the DES, before an appropriate PES method can be chosen. This thesis shows that a simplified genetic algorithm can be used in order to find good results in a faster and more structured way than a trial-and-error method. It furthermore shows that this genetic algorithm can be used for joint optimization of preventive maintenance interval, the overhaul interval, spare order thresh- old and stock levels.
The author concludes the report with recommendations for further work. On the practical side, the impact of different PM strategies on stock levels should be researched. Furthermore, the research to including condition-based maintenance (CBM) in a model like this should be taken a step further with a more complex model for CBM. On the theoretical side, the PES methods should be more thoroughly studied. More functions to manipulate the PES and the required memory space should be included in further research. Lastly, the author believes that the simplified genetic algorithm can be further improved, which can be a focus topic in further research
Joint Maintenance Interval and Spare Parts Optimization using a Discrete-Event Simulation Model
No full textThe goal of this report is to use discrete-event simulation (DES) as a method for optimizing maintenance strategies, such as spare parts levels and maintenance intervals. Firstly, the au- thor argues for spare parts optimization with a DES in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The models and assumptions that are needed for developing such a model are explained. Further- more, this report elaborates on how a DES can be coded in VBA. Lastly, several methods for optimizing both speed and decision variables of a DES are introduced.
The report shows how a DES can be coded and which models and assumptions can be used in developing such a simulation. A specific focus is on the design of the pending-event set (PES), which is the core of the DES. Several different designs are tested in different situations in order to determine their performance. The results show that the performance of these methods vary in each situation, and therefore the designer of a DES should determine the characteristics of the DES, before an appropriate PES method can be chosen. This thesis shows that a simplified genetic algorithm can be used in order to find good results in a faster and more structured way than a trial-and-error method. It furthermore shows that this genetic algorithm can be used for joint optimization of preventive maintenance interval, the overhaul interval, spare order thresh- old and stock levels.
The author concludes the report with recommendations for further work. On the practical side, the impact of different PM strategies on stock levels should be researched. Furthermore, the research to including condition-based maintenance (CBM) in a model like this should be taken a step further with a more complex model for CBM. On the theoretical side, the PES methods should be more thoroughly studied. More functions to manipulate the PES and the required memory space should be included in further research. Lastly, the author believes that the simplified genetic algorithm can be further improved, which can be a focus topic in further research
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