2021
Autores
Paiva, JC; Queirós, R; Leal, JP;
Publicação
SLATE
Abstract
Practice is pivotal in learning programming. As many other automated assessment tools for programming assignments, Mooshak has been adopted by numerous educational practitioners to support them in delivering timely and accurate feedback to students during exercise solving. These tools specialize in the delivery and assessment of blank-sheet coding questions. However, the different phases of a student's learning path may demand distinct types of exercises (e.g., bug fix and block sorting) to foster new competencies such as debugging programs and understanding unknown source code or, otherwise, to break the routine and keep engagement. Recently, a format for describing programming exercises - YAPExIL -, supporting different types of activities, has been introduced. Unfortunately, no automated assessment tool yet supports this novel format. This paper describes a JavaScript library to transform YAPExIL packages into Mooshak problem packages (i.e., MEF format), keeping support for all exercise types. Moreover, its integration in an exercise authoring tool is described.
2021
Autores
dos Santos, AF; Leal, JP;
Publicação
SLATE
Abstract
Consuming Semantic Web data presents several challenges, from the number of datasets it is composed of, to the (very) large size of some of those datasets and the uncertain availability of querying endpoints. According to its core principles, accessing linked data can be done simply by dereferencing the IRIs of RDF resources. This is a light alternative both for clients and servers when compared to dataset dumps or SPARQL endpoints. The linked data interface does not support complex querying, but using it recursively may suffice to gather information about RDF resources, or to extract the relevant sub-graph which can then be processed and queried using other methods. We present Derzis1, an open source semantic web crawler capable of traversing the linked data cloud starting from a set of seed resources. Derzis maintains information about the paths followed while crawling, which allows to define property path-based restrictions to the crawling frontier.
2021
Autores
Swacha, J; Naprawski, T; Queirós, R; Paiva, JC; Leal, JP; de Vita, CG; Mellone, G; Montella, R; Ljubenkov, D; Kosta, S;
Publicação
Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference, ISECON
Abstract
Computer programming courses are considered difficult. They can be made more engaging for students by incorporating game elements in a process known as gamification. In order to make it easier to facilitate this process in practice, several European universities collaborated in a joint project aimed at developing a framework for application of gamification to programming education. The framework includes the specification of the gamification scheme and the exercise definition format, an open source toolkit for preparing the gamified exercises and an interactive learning environment to present them to the students, and, last but not least, an open source collection of gamified programming exercises. In this paper, we present a work-in-progress on the last element, describing the current contents of the collection and planned directions for its extension.
2021
Autores
Brown, PS; Dimitrova, V; Hart, G; Cohn, AG; Moura, P;
Publicação
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LOGIC PROGRAMMING
Abstract
Whitby is the server-side of an Intelligent Tutoring System application for learning SystemTheoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a methodology used to ensure the safety of anything that can be represented with a systems model. The underlying logic driving the reasoning behind Whitby is Situation Calculus, which is a many-sorted logic with situation, action, and object sorts. The Situation Calculus is applied to Ontology Authoring and Contingent Scaffolding: the primary activities within Whitby. Thus many fluents and actions are aggregated in Whitby from these two sub-applications and from Whitby itself, but all are available through a common situation query interface that does not depend upon any of the fluents or actions. Each STPA project in Whitby is a single situation term, which is queried for fluents that include the ontology, and to determine what pedagogical interventions to offer. Initially Whitby was written in Prolog using a module system. In the interest of a cleaner architecture and implementation with improved code reuse and extensibility, the initial application was refactored into Logtalk. This refactoring includes decoupling the Situation Calculus reasoner, Ontology Authoring framework, and Contingent Scaffolding framework into third-party libraries that can be reused in other applications. This extraction was achieved by inverting dependencies via Logtalk protocols and categories, which are reusable interfaces and components that provide functionally cohesive sets of predicate declarations and predicate definitions. In this paper the architectures of two iterations of Whitby are evaluated with respect to the motivations behind the refactor: clean architecture enabling code reuse and extensibility.
2021
Autores
Areias, M; Rocha, R;
Publicação
JOURNAL OF PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING
Abstract
Hash tries are a trie-based data structure with nearly ideal characteristics for the implementation of hash maps. In this paper, we present a novel, simple and scalable hash trie map design that fully supports the concurrent search, insert and remove operations on hash maps. To the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first that puts together the following characteristics: (i) be lock free; (ii) use fixed size data structures; and (iii) maintain the access to all internal data structures as persistent memory references. Our design is modular enough to allow different types of configurations aimed for different performances in memory usage and execution time and can be easily implemented in any type of language, library or within other complex data structures. We discuss in detail the key algorithms required to easily reproduce our implementation by others and we present a proof of correctness showing that our proposal is linearizable and lock-free for the search, insert and remove operations. Experimental results show that our proposal is quite competitive when compared against other state-of-the-art proposals implemented in Java.
2021
Autores
Moreno, P; Areias, M; Rocha, R;
Publicação
JOURNAL OF PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING
Abstract
Hash tries are a trie-based data structure with nearly ideal characteristics for the implementation of hash maps. Starting from a particular lock-free hash map data structure, named Lock-Free Hash Tries, we focus on solving the problem of memory reclamation without losing the lock-freedom property. To the best of our knowledge, outside garbage collected environments, there is no current implementation of hash maps that is able to reclaim memory in a lock-free manner. To achieve this goal, we propose an approach for memory reclamation specific to Lock-Free Hash Tries that explores the characteristics of its structure in order to achieve efficient memory reclamation with low and well-defined memory bounds. We present and discuss in detail the key algorithms required to easily reproduce our implementation by others. Experimental results show that our approach obtains better results when compared with other state-of-the-art memory reclamation methods and provides a competitive and scalable hash map implementation, if compared to lock-based implementations.
The access to the final selection minute is only available to applicants.
Please check the confirmation e-mail of your application to obtain the access code.