Santi Caballe – författare

This book presents original research on analytics and context awareness with regard to providing sophisticated learning services for all stakeholders in the eLearning context. It offers essential information on the definition, modeling, development and deployment of services for these stakeholders.

Data analysis has long-since been a cornerstone of eLearning, supplying learners, teachers, researchers, managers and policymakers with valuable information on learning activities and design. With the rapid development of Internet technologies and sophisticated online learning environments, increasing volumes and varieties of data are being generated, and data analysis has moved on to more complex analysis techniques, such as educational data mining and learning analytics. Now powered by cloud technologies, online learning environments are capable of gathering and storing massive amounts of data in various formats, of tracking user-system and user-user interactions, and of delivering rich contextual information.

This book presents the latest, innovative research findings on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud, and Internet Computing. It gathers the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing, held on November 8–10, 2017 in Barcelona, Spain. These computing technologies have rapidly established themselves as breakthrough paradigms for solving complex problems by enabling the aggregation and sharing of an increasing variety of distributed computational resources at large scale.

Grid Computing originated as a paradigm for high-performance computing, offering an alternative to expensive supercomputers through different forms of large-scale distributed computing, while P2P Computing emerged as a new paradigm after client-server and web-based computing and has shown to be useful in the development of social networking, B2B (Business to Business), B2C (Business to Consumer), B2G (Business to Government), B2E (Business to Employee), and so on. Cloud Computing has been defined as a “computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing are determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits”. Cloud computing has quickly been adopted in a broad range of application domains and provides utility computing at large scale. Lastly, Internet Computing is the basis of any large-scale distributed computing paradigm; it has very rapidly developed into a flourishing field with an enormous impact on today’s information societies, serving as a universal platform comprising a large variety of computing forms such as Grid, P2P, Cloud and Mobile computing.

The aim of the book “Advances on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing” is to provide the latest findings, methods and development techniques from both theoretical and practical perspectives, and to reveal synergies between these large-scale computing paradigms.

Intelligent Collaborative e-Learning Systems and Applications is a major research theme in CSCL and CSCW research community. It comprises a variety of research topics that focus on developing systems that are more powerful and flexible and also more adaptable to the learning process and thus provide better answers to the paradigmatic principles of on-line collaborative learning and work. The chapters collected in this book provide new insights, findings and approaches both on the analysis and the development of more powerful e-collaboration settings. Researchers will find in this book the latest trends in these research topics. On the other hand, academics will find practical insights on how to use conceptual and experimental approaches in their daily tasks. Finally, developers from CSCL community can be inspired and put in practice the proposed models and evaluate them for the specific purposes of their own work and context.

E-Learning has become one of the most wide spread ways of distance teaching and learning. Technologies such as Web, Grid, and Mobile and Wireless networks are pushing teaching and learning communities to find new and intelligent ways of using these technologies to enhance teaching and learning activities. Indeed, these new technologies can play an important role in increasing the support to teachers and learners, to shorten the time to learning and teaching; yet, it is necessary to use intelligent techniques to take advantage of these new technologies to achieve the desired support to teachers and learners and enhance learners’ performance in distributed learning environments.

The chapters of this volume bring advances in using intelligent techniques for technology enhanced learning as well as development of e-Learning applications based on such techniques and supported by technology. Such intelligent techniques include clustering and classification for personalization of learning, intelligent context-aware techniques, adaptive learning, data mining techniques and ontologies in e-Learning systems, among others.

Academics, scientists, software developers, teachers and tutors and students interested in e-Learning will find this book useful for their academic, research and practice activity.

Current companies and communities of practice are involved in intensive networking and collaborative systems by a great variety of electronic relations and collaborative interactions. This has resulted in entangled systems that need to be managed efficiently and in an autonomous way, thus facing many issues and challenges.

The extensive research produced in this book will help virtual organizations to exploit latest and powerful technologies based on Grid and Wireless infrastructures as well as Cloud computing in order to alleviate complex issues and challenges arisen in networking and collaborative systems, in terms of collaborative applications, resource management, mobility, and security and system resilience. 

The ultimate aim of the book is to stimulate research that leads to the creation of responsive environments for networking and, at longer-term, the development of adaptive, secure, mobile, and intuitive intelligent systems for collaborative work and learning. Academic researchers, professionals and practitioners in the field will be inspired and put in practice the ideas and experiences proposed in the book in order to evaluate them for their specific research and work.

Technology-Enhanced Systems and Tools for Collaborative Learning Scaffolding is a major research theme in CSCL and CSCW research community. This book presents up-to-date research approaches for developing technology-enhanced systems and tools to support functional online collaborative learning and work settings. It comprises a variety of research topics that span from the study of frameworks and infrastructures that foster collaborative learning and work through the application of different methods (distributed e-learning repositories, content creation and customization, social networks, collaborative ontologies building, and educational games) to the use of personalization and adaptation techniques to support the development of more powerful e-collaboration settings, including methodologies and tools for analyzing students'' interactions with the aim to increase students'' collaborative behaviors, performance and group organization. Researchers will find in this book the latest trends in these research topics, which gives them the opportunity to deepen further on the above issues and to extend their knowledge to other areas. Academics will find practical insights on how to use conceptual and experimental approaches in their daily tasks. Developers from CSCL community can be inspired and put in practice the proposed models and evaluate them for the specific purposes of their own work and context.