Abstract. Isolation is a well-known problem amongst the elderly. This isolation might be ameliorated by engaging the elderly in social media. Unfortunately, the devices most commonly used to access social media (PCs, tablets, and phones) might not be the most appropriate for this demographic. A more appropriate device might be television. Using modern technology, it is possible to aggregate specially tagged social media posts from friends and family and narrow-cast it to other family members. Our research involves creating a television-based social media channel that is appropriate for the elderly. We present our initial work which involves developing a proof-of-concept for the Family Channel and identifying user profiles for the 65+ demographic with respect to technology use.

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General Terms: Management KeywordsSyllabi, similarity matching EXTENDED ABSTRACTStudent mobility is a priority in the European Union since it not only allows academic interchange but also fosters the awareness of being a European citizen amongst students. The Bologna Process 1 aimed at homogenizing the structure of the European Universities to facilitate the recognition of academic titles as foreseen by the Lisbon Recognition Convention 2 and student mobility during their matriculation. Over one and a half million students have already benefited from mobility programs such as the Erasmus programme.Students that participate in a mobility program must consider a destination, a selection of courses to follow abroad and how their home institution will recognize their foreign credits. Selecting the most appropriate courses is not a simple task since a course title doesn't always reflect its content. As a result, manual inspection of syllabi is necessary. This makes the task timeconsuming since it might require manual inspection and comparison of many syllabi from different institutions.It would be nice to be able to at least partially automate the process -i.e. given a set of syllabi from two different universities, to be able to automatically find the best match among courses in the two institutions. We started experimenting with this possibility, and although we do not yet have final results we will present the main idea of our project.Our plan is to try to apply similarity matching algorithms to available documents. Similarity matching is often based on cooccurrence of common words. However, a naïve application of such an algorithm would probably end up generating spurious similarities from the co-occurrence of general terms like "hour, exercise, exam…". Using a stop-word strategy in which these words are catalogued and ignored might seem a viable solution, but generally does not significantly improve the results: words 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_process 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Recognition_Convention that may be considered irrelevant in one context might be important in a different context. The path we are following is to assume the existence of a reference ontology, where all terms have a description, and then try to identify the occurrence of the concepts existing in the ontology within the examined documents. In this way we will be able to state that "syllabus x deals with topic y". The matching between different syllabi would then be calculated by matching the topics that were associated with the syllabi.We decided to focus on the Computer Science domain since the domain has already been classified into areas, units and topics present in CC2001[1] and this ontology has already been mapped into XML structures [2]. We then used a similarity matching algorithm that uses Wikipedia as a reference corpus [3]. Although preliminary results are not yet fully satisfactory, we believe that this might result from working at the word level rather than at a concept level; "software engineering" is n...

The automated assessment of student programming assignments is now considered to be in its third generation. Today, these serverbased systems use web front-ends and employ sophisticated testing techniques. While automated assessment has proven its benefits over the last 40 years, these systems are simply not feasible for many scenarios because of their infrastructure, support or training requirements.Today's extensible email clients are capable of handling many of the functions performed by these modern assessment systems without requiring extra infrastructure.This paper summarizes experiences using graphical email-clients that were extended to support menuactivated automated processing of a student-submitted program sent as an email message or attachment. The email-client automatically captured the results of the automated assessment in an email window for instructor annotation. This client-based system provides many of the same benefits as those provided by web-based systems.