European E-Learning Important Research Issues and Application Scenarios, ED-Media

European E-Learning: Important Research Issues and Application Scenarios Authors

Martin Wolpers and Wolfgang Nejdl

L3S Research Center and University of Hannover Expo Plaza 1

30539 Hannover, Germany

www.l3s.de and www.prolearn-project.org {nejdl, wolpers}@l3s.de

Abstract (50 words)

While E-Learning is increasingly influencing university and workplace education in Europe, several critical issues still have to be solved in order to achieve the full potential of technology enhanced learning in many of these learning scenarios. The EU/IST FP6 PROLEARN Network of Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning is focussing on these issues, to advance the state of the art in this area, through a large concerted effort of more than 150 research institutions and companies working together in the PROLEARN Consortium and as PROLEARN Associated Partners. An extended version of this paper has been published as an ED-Media 2004 Invited Talk [22].

Keywords

Professional education, technology enhanced learning, personalized learning, interactive media, learning resources

1. Restructuring and Integrating European Research on E-Learning

In the United States, enterprises invest 20 percent of their budget (13 Billion US-$ out of 66 Billion US-$) for professional education in E-Learning activities (Corporate University Exchange 2000, http://www.corpu.com/). A similar trend is now becoming apparent for Europe as well. According to research by the Gartner Group, the European market of corporate E-Learning had a capacity of 829 million $ in 2001, and it will grow to 7.4 billion $ by the year 2004 (Scienter, Bologna 2001). Despite these impressive figures, it has repeatedly been reported that the actual impact of R&D on learning technologies remains limited so far, indicating that too few R&D results are picked up in actual practice. One of the reasons for this is that technology enhanced learning research and researchers are scattered across quite a few distinct communities, with often very limited awareness of the other communities. Different communities focus on media production, digital libraries, the Semantic Web, personalization and adaptation to the individual user, brokerage services, computer-supported collaborative learning, business models, social engineering and other areas. It is the goal of the PROLEARN Network of Excellence to substantially increase the cooperation between these communities and to integrate the various research communities as well as E-Learning providers and companies through joint research, grand challenge workshops, best practice forums and initiatives for enhancing the quality of E-learning in crucial application areas. Summer schools will enable young researchers and professionals to advance their knowledge on the state of the art in technology enhanced learning, and professional networking and joint research in the context of the PROLEARN Academy. It is designed to integrate and co-ordinate long term research amongst the network partners and beyond. As an important component of the academy, training will disseminate technology enhanced learning state of the art and best practice across Europe. Just as the network itself is open for new partnerships, so are the services that are offered by PROLEARN. Activities include regular PROLEARN meetings, publications, symposia, etc. targeted at the global R&D community in this field.

The PROLEARN Virtual Competence Centre focuses on networking research institutes and European industry and on the active participation of corporate users in the actual R&D work. It

will integrate consulting, dissemination and networking initiatives between research and company partners, and tightly couple advanced research and application scenarios for technology enhanced learning in the PROLEARN context. Specific consulting services will be offered to companies, from special training courses (train the trainers) to assistance with the implementation of E-Learning strategies in an organization. Both PROLEARN Academy and PROLEARN VCC are strongly supported by, and interrelated with, dissemination and training.

2. Contributions to standards

Standardization is an important and critical success factor for technology enhanced learning research and application, as it enables technical and semantic interoperability between E-Learning content and infrastructures. Formal standardization is currently taking place in the context of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC), the Centre Européen de Normalisation (CEN)/Information Society Standardization System (ISSS) Learning Technologies WorkShop (LTWS), and the ISO/IEC JTC1 Subcommittee 36 on “Information Technology for Learning, Education, and Training”. These accredited standards organisations receive specifications from consortia, projects, foundations, and all kind of initiatives (ADL/SCORM, AICC, ALIC, ARIADNE, IMS, EUN …).

Figure 1: Ariadne, Isabel and EducaNext all use standards for information interchange In a first phase, this is very much a bottom up process: specifications are developed and experimented with by consortia, who submit their work for further consensus building to the accredited standardization organisations (of which there are exactly three that are relevant to learning). After the upward process, the flow often reverses, as consortia start developing so-called application profiles: these are specifications that are fully compatible with the standard, but adapt it to the needs and requirements of a particular community. In the case of LOM, for example, the ARIADNE foundation has developed such a profile for its multilingual community.

In this process, some data elements in the overall LOM scheme have been made mandatory, some value spaces have been restricted and some interrelationships have been imposed. This enables the ARIADNE Foundation to develop more powerful tools for its community.

European research is increasingly influence the standardization process in technology enhanced learning. Building on and improving already existing standards like LOM, SCORM, LIP, IMS Learning Design and other relevant standards will further extend their applicability and outreach and speed up the process of their adoption. PROLEARNs work package on “Learning Objects, Metadata and Standards” reflects these issues in research manifestos and Grand Challenge workshops for these areas.

3. Research Issues for E-Learning

Joint European research activities in PROLEARN currently focus on seven key areas identified as crucial for technology enhanced professional learning. In order to make E-Learning successful and applicable in a variety of application scenarios, we have to integrate extensive interactive experiences, including the usage of interactive media and videoconferences, simulations and hands-on experiences in the context of online and virtual laboratories. Great potential for advanced E-Learning environments have techniques to personalize learner experiences based on user and group profiles, taking the actual needs of specific learners into account. Brokerage systems can significantly help to share and exchange learning materials, in the form of advanced learning objects, including (new) pedagogical models as they emerge. Using standardized descriptions of learning objects and interfaces, learning management systems are able to connect and to facilitate simplified access to learning resources in a distributed environment. At the same time these environments can support and integrate knowledge work and learning, supporting human resource management and company profile development. Special business models and processes are needed to integrate life-long learning into the work process and to build a viable infrastructure of E-Learning technology, service and content providers in Europe.

4. Research Issues in Detail

The following sections will exemplify the key areas “Personalized Adaptive Learning” and “Interactive Media” and the research issues involved in greater detail, including appropriate references, objectives and key research issues. The remaining key areas, shown in figure 2, on online experimentation, metadata and standards, brokerage systems and learning management, business processes, models and markets and knowledge work management are described in more detail in [46].

Figure 2: PROLEARN Work Packages

4.1 Personalized Adaptive Learning

Personalized learning focuses on improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of learning, for individuals and organizations, independent of time, place and pace, through the development of open systems and services in support of ubiquitous, experiential and contextualized learning and virtual collaborative learning communities. An important issue to realize the potential of personalized and adaptive learning is to integrate the variety of perspectives on personalized and adaptive learning: Psychological Backgrounds, Diagnostics, Models of Competence, Personality, Knowledge, Social Psychology; Cognitive Science, Models of Cognition, Linguistic Approaches,

Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science Approaches, User Modelling, User Tracking, Profiling, Machine Learning Methods, Business Applications of Personalization Tools, Human Resource Management, Employee Self Services, Business Processes underlying Personalization. This integration can build on a sound body of work in these areas, including [1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 16, 20, 25, 26, 27, 28]. In 2004, PROLEARN sponsored the 3rd International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems that took place in Eindhoven in August 2004, which has been a major forum for these efforts.

Key Research Issues

Pedagogical models and learning theories for corporate learning: The focus here is on the development of new pedagogical models for e-Learning, mobile learning, learning on demand and for life long professional learning in general. Learning scenarios for different work processes and for learning/working situations will be considered in the PROLEARN Network, taking into account different roles that learners may perform. Communities building amongst the learners, collaborative learning as well as blended learning have proven to be adequate. Further research on learning theories and refinement of the constructivist learning model for the corporate learning environment will go on. The impact of e-Learning, mobile learning and learning on demand on society will be analysed and considered according to different target groups with specific needs. Beside technological ones also social and pedagogical approaches will be emphasized. Based on evaluation of work place performance needs pedagogical models and learning theories can then be proposed that are based on competence management, individual gap analysis and goal oriented learning to shorten acquisition of new skills.

Standardized learning solutions and personalization: Especially for reusability and technical integration aspects the interoperability of learning content is essential. The standardisation of learning content and content engineering processes today is the basis for personalized services of tomorrow. Standardized descriptions and the possibility to search learning object repositories therefore need to be extended and closely interrelated with methods for personalized learning support. PROLEARN partners will contribute to the development of standards by analysing user requirements and feeding them into the appropriate standards body as well as by contributing

specifications to the standards organizations, as base documents for the development of consensus for finalized standards.

Figure 3: ELENA Personalized Learning Space

Adaptive learning and assessment in open environments: Open and distributed environments provide us with many learning resources that can be potentially shared and reused in different contexts, different learning situations, and by learners with different background. The learning resources should have appropriate interface for connecting them to different services. The learning services can be customized for particular learners by selecting appropriate resources and packaging them into final services. To enable such adaptive services we need models of static structure of learning services taking reusability into account, models of service behaviour taking learner model into account, mechanisms for adapting the learning services and resources to multi-modal interfaces, mechanisms for interpreting service behaviour by particular service provider or a learner peer, techniques and methods for adaptive configuration and packaging of learning resources within learning services. Semantic web technologies together with competence ontologies can help to design and implement adaptive and cooperative learning in a portable and platform independent way. Social recommendation techniques can help in exploiting similarities

between learners to suggest potentially relevant learning objects that might not be found by explicit search.

One of the key issues in a learning system is the assessment of the acquired knowledge. One of the activities will focus on the theoretical foundation of assessment, and the development of new assessment tools that can be used in open environments to construct exercise repositories. Assessment can be greatly improved by using personalization techniques to guarantee that the exercises posed are suited to the student. On the other hand, the development of open and reusable assessment tools will contribute to increase the modularity of the learning system, allow the comparison of the results obtained with different tutorial strategies, and contribute to the standardization of results obtained.

Learner modelling: To provide personalized, adaptive learning, learner modelling tools must track learner’s activity and interactions with the learning material, analyse the feedback, identify the needs or interests, and evaluate the psychological profile as well as the learning style. Modern context-adaptive systems employ generic and mobile user models to provide human centred and ubiquitous services. Learners can be modelled by various peers and learning service providers in a distributed network. The key research issues in this area are: interoperable learner model artefacts, techniques for describing such artefacts, methods for extracting relevant learner model parts for particular learning situations or services, techniques for exchanging and communicating such artefacts. Personalisation procedures benefit from learner models which enclose observations from different sources, for example observations of user interaction, learner self-reflection, or peer reflections. Diagnosis procedure methods for externalizing learner model artefacts, techniques for accessing, manipulating and processing learner model parts from different perspectives are important issues in this regard. Learner models will also need to include situated learning in the context of work where learning is an integrated part of working (learning on demand). User competence profile will be taken into account, group modelling and pattern recognition in the user behaviour will be analysed.

User interface: The delivery of e-Learning content on different target devices and into different learning contexts is a highly challenging task. Corporate e-Learning scenarios give a rich and realistic chance to learn about the real added value of mobile services and situated learning tools. Based on pedagogical models of situated learning and cognition a wide application field can be

defined to adapt the selection of learning tools and the customization of learning content to individuals. To allow the learner to take control of the personalization process in a responsible, flexible and empowering way we want to investigate the use of information visualization. Expert and expertise locators should support personalised discovery. Another promising technique to achieve adaptive behaviour human-machine interaction are didactic plans based on story boards. These story boards usually consist of scenes and scenes may be recursively divided into sub scenes. In this way, a space of paths is determined – the so-called story space. Another important aspect related to distributed and ubiquitous cooperative environments is the ability to deal with multi-device and multi-modal interfaces. In general, we envision the user to use a variety of devices to access an e-Learning infrastructure. Users have to be able to work and learn in sessions in which they seamlessly transit from one kind of device to another in different situations while interacting with the community.

Privacy and data protection: Important topics in this context are privacy threats of personalisation and technology enhanced learning in general, such as linkability of data, observability of data, identity disclosure, or data disclosure. PROLEARN partners will identify and evaluate privacy enhancing technologies, e.g. identity protectors, that should be integrated in learning solutions or that are missing in technology enhanced learning, and explore identity management in this area. Conflicts with personalization activities, such as activity tracking, also have to be dealt with. This includes dealing with the questions of how to protect users' data and which security technologies are the best choice to achieve data confidentiality and integrity, also from a user acceptance point of view.

Evaluation of personalization and adaptation methods: Evaluation and return on investment analysis are an important factor for the introduction of e-Learning solutions at the workplace. This includes the identification of enterprises requirements and of the main success factors for E-Learning in corporate environments. Other questions are to determine the real impact of technology-enhanced learning on individual and organizational levels, how to measure this impact, and how organizational issues and community culture influence the success of E-Learning in different environments.

Recently, PROLEARN members worked on the development of new pedagogical models and learning theories for corporate e-Learning, taking into consideration the different roles that learners may perform and the different work processes for learning / working situations in user requirements. These roles were discussed in great detail at a workshop at the ED-Media Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, June 2004 and are included in a PROLEARN Report available at https://agws.dit.upm.es/projects/PROLEARN

We furthermore provide a specification of a taxonomy for adaptive learning, which was discussed and agreed on by a large number of PROLEARN partners. By analysing user requirements and feeding them into general agreed specifications, we contributed to the development of appropriate standard bodies. In order to support new user interfaces for data (metadata) and relationship visualization, we also working on a specification of user interface requirements that will be followed by PROLEARN partners.

4.2 Interactive Media

E-Learning can provide a much more interactive experience for the professional learner than the traditional book or training lecture. Academics understand that learning is an active and constructive process and typically aim to design learning experiences that leverage the learner’s interactions [9, 15, 19, 21]. Typical corporate “training” can be less interactive! Even an idealized face-to-face learning experience can be judged by how the student interacts with the teacher, other learners and the content [8]. However, it is still the case that both professional and academic learning requires much more effective E-Learning media production, management and sharing. For instance, complex learning assets like video are still difficult to manage and transport effectively to learners [13]. Even the simplest of interactive media productions systems [4, 10, 17, 18, 23] can be expensive to use and difficult to maintain and develop [4, 24]. PROLEARN will thus specifically focus on expanding the professional learners’ engagement with the best of European Interactive Media research to help create a more effective learning experience through technology enhanced learning. Key Research Issues

Corporate training still needs effective competence mapping and performance evaluation tools to support business learners. Indeed, corporate clients actually need the same access as all learners to an ideal portal learning system: ie. that will offer them a tracked experience with a set of “10 Euro” learning modules, complete with credits and real interaction with peers, tutors and content; anywhere, anytime. Interactive Multimedia is improving as development environments mature. The best educationalists are now able to design media experiences for learners to achieve that “click-you-back”. One critical feature which distinguishes quality media designs, from blended learning providers, is their commitment to materials that fully engage the learner in the learning process. Overall, there are three threads of research questions for both synchronous and asynchronous interactive media:

Understanding the online learning context: Which blends of the existing and innovative technologies are appropriate for different professional learners? At which level should they be integrated? How do we provide support for knowledge management and decision making in an appropriate context? How can E-Learning tools help us to produce and represent knowledge differently? How can E-Learning and traditional (existing) learning can be blended, integrated, mutually leveraged in a given context?

Understanding the social and shared learning environment: Which are the strategies to overcome the separation between technology and pedagogy, to achieve a truly interweaving between both? How cooperation between all actors in an e-learning environment can be efficiently and effectively augmented? How do we structure the underlying discussions? How do we collect and disseminate data, information and knowledge produced by diverse sources? How do we integrate knowledge management, decision making, argumentation and simulation issues in the e-learning context? How do we model interactive media for the above purposes?

Understanding the learning process: Which are the foundations of interactive media production and how do they contribute to the learning process? Which media semantics and ontologies we need to define? How can we best associate / integrate knowledge with the learning process? Which are the appropriate learning methods that take advantage of the unique features of E-Learning tools? Which are the appropriate methods to extract exchange and share individual experience via E-Learning?

Eight top themes arise from the research issues noted above: streaming Interactive Video content creation and management; purposing interactive media for mobile learners; remote presence and shared cooperative learning; a semantic workspace for interactive media content and management; intelligent agency for knowledgable media; empowering learners to capture and share their own content; interacting with 3D and time based content; effective live telepresence for learning systems. For three of these issues we will give a more detailed insight below. Excellence in Streaming Interactive Video: Based on already existing and upcoming technology, e.g. the Stadium project of the Knowledge Media Institute, OU UK (eg. see the AMC system in Greece, PROLEARN-tv, or http://kmi.open.ac.uk/stadium/), it is necessary to explore and advance its utilisation in the professional workspace. Also, allowing learners to skim content and to annotate it (e.g., virtual \"sticky notes\") is an important further research issue. Therefore the integration with existing and upcoming support systems (eg. the work of the Freiburg Multimedia Research group research – see e.g. http://ad.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/aof) will advance the usability of these systems. Also, by combination of streaming technology with interactive course generation like the MEDIT (Multimedia Environment for Distributed Interactive Teaching) project of the EPFL group in Switzerland which provides a generic platform for the generation of interactive courses on the Web, the issue of advanced streaming content will further advance. Emphasis is placed on the experimentation of innovative pedagogic concepts based on the use and, reuse of information through hypermedia dynamic documents.

Figure 4: PROLEARN TV and PROLEARN Mobile

Further examples of projects in the area of streaming content are the ISABEL project at UPM in Spain, the Classroom 2000, a Swiss national project sponsored by the Swiss National Foundation and coordinated by the FPIT (Formation Postgrade en Informatique et Telecommunication) through which they run a wide range of courses dedicated to continuing education in industry. Similarly, the CASE centre run by the DEI, Polimi, which is involved in a very similar project funded by the European Social Fund –Teleacademy. As a collaborative initiative developed in synergy with the local industry partners, Teleacademy aims at establishing a system of E-Learning addressed and accessible to different users: (non-)working and senior students and employees of the local corporate using streaming media.

Interactive Media for Mobile learning: Many professional eLearners are enthusiastic about the possibility of accessing learning materials on demand via mobile devices such as phones and PDAs. One critical virtue of the technology is that it helps a learner to prepare for synchronous learning such as lectures and to work asynchronously when they rehearse or extend upon the lecture at available time-pockets during the day. Here, experience of designing and repurposing content for alternative media platforms, such as phones and PDAs needs to be refocused on the critical requirements for the professional elearner. Examples of ongoing projects in this area are the mLearning project of KTH, Sweden who have experimental systems for interactive media on mobile devices and the work on user interfaces by the team at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität. Presence and Shared Cooperative Learning: It has always been difficult to bring learners together in collaborative systems that are sufficiently lightweight to run on the networks and machines typically available to SMEs and non-technically focused European Corporations. Integrating knowledge about the location, state and presence of remote learners is a very significant new light on the E-Learning horizon. Two of the fastest-growing areas of Internet and mobile device usage are 'Presence' (knowing about the existence, availability, activity status, and location of others) and 'Instant Messaging' (point-to-point just-in-time text or voice communication). Thus rapid lightweight collaboration media can foster group learning interactions and productive learning behaviours. Of particular interest is the role of graphical metaphors for presence, including maps, logical layouts such as building schematics, and abstract artistic layouts such as graffiti walls. Recent experiences show that open discussion forums or instant messengers that are isolated from the content modules are rarely used. Thus, if a learner has a question about some part of a audio-visual learning object they must be able to jump

directly from that context to an interaction. Our shared belief is that the synchronous presence of colleagues, both near and far, enhances not only the emotional well-being of isolated workers, but also enhances problem solving performance and learning outcomes.

PROLEARN already has produced a significant web presence in interactive multimedia on the PROLEARN.TV website (http://www.PROLEARN.tv/) which will host our key deliverables and show the current state of each of our tasks. We have introduced an interactive video content creation and management system which has become branded as PROLEARN.TV. The hosting is provided via the Stadium architecture (http://stadium.open.ac.uk/PROLEARN/).

Our mobile showcase has started with a presence on the PROLEARN.tv website. Initial work has begun on showcase systems and prospective integration with partners on other mobile projects (eg. Raft and Mobilearn) is being negotiated. Showcase examples with Hewlett Packard have already begun, we presented initial trials of mobile technologies under the Mobile Bristol architecture at the 2AD conference.

We also have released the prototype for a PROLEARN collaborative environment which is available to PROLEARN partners as (http://cnm.open.ac.uk/projects/hexagon/PROLEARN/). This activity is in its preparation stage but has already been trialled by a dozen partners, including corporate clients. We have also released two partner meeting tools to the Network community which has been in use in this WP and has been trialled by various partners: Isabel and Flashmeeting. These tools are freely available for the PROLEARN community. They significantly support active and lively participation by fostering easy-to-use yet powerful collaboration tools.

5. PROLEARN Events

As the network aims to significantly impact research by readjusting and focusing on open issues, it has the continuous objective of reaching well beyond its current borders. PROLEARN organized and sponsored events are an important part of that process. PROLEARN public workshops organized by the PROLEARN work package partners facilitate the communication among all interested partners either in virtual or face-to-face meetings. For each of these

workshops, specific discussion topics are focussed upon, based on the work package agenda as well as the research and application projects conducted by partners.

An upcoming major event is the First Thematic PROLEARN Workshop (1st PROLEARN TWS) on Technology Enhanced Learning for Learning Organizations. It will present the latest research results and developments in this area, focusing on the use of technology enhanced learning (TEL) from the perspective of both the user and the provider. Additionally, the workshop will examine the various ways of integrating eLearning in company-wide education programmes. Presentations from TEL projects in FP 5 and FP 6 will summarize and discuss achievements and results of national and international co-operations. Further exploitation of results will be one of the focus topics of the workshop, providing a forum for new collaboration among research and industry. Furthermore, the agenda includes presentations on the various regional, national and European cooperation and funding schemes. Target groups are SMEs, large companies and research institutes from all over Europe. Further information is available at http://www.l3s.de/prolearn_tws2004.

Continuing the series of PROLEARN Thematic Workshops, the second workshop focuses on the area of standards for learning and learning management and the interoperability among systems. It will take place in Leuven, Belgium, in early spring 2005. For more information check the PROLEARN homepage regularly (http://www.prolearn-project.org) or become an associated partner of PROLEARN.

In summer 2005 PROLEARN will organize the first PROLEARN summer school at ISIK University in Turkey near Istanbul. The main objective of the workshop is to support the integration of all PROLEARN related communities, utilizing the vast potential of young researchers and PhD students at participating universities. An important goal is to contribute to the creation of an institutional culture in technology enhanced learning, bonding distributed researchers across Europe into one community. The summer school will provide a framework for structuring a number of ongoing research, training, and scientific leadership activities by focusing on the areas of personalized adaptive learning, interactive media and online experiments as well as business models, processes and markets and knowledge work management.

6. Conclusion

European E-Learning Research and Development has strongly influenced the advance of state of the art in E-Learning environments and innovative E-Learning scenarios in the last years, and, through joint initiatives of European research and industry, will continue and increase E-Learning potentials and benefits in the years to come. The PROLEARN Network of Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning, funded by the European Union in the context of the new 6th IST Framework Programme is focussing on a set of key issues, in a large concerted effort of more than 150 research institutions and companies working together in the PROLEARN Consortium and as PROLEARN Associated Partners. Interactivity in E-Learning environments will strongly be supported by interactive media and hands-on experiences. E-Learning will turn into a personalized and an adaptive learning experience, brokerage and learning management systems provide learning objects and resources utilizing standard interfaces and metadata. Knowledge work management aims to support human resource development in companies and integrate learning into workplace scenarios, and innovative E-learning business models and networks help identify and create new markets for European industry.

7. Acknowledgements

This paper as well as the PROLEARN Network of Excellence would not have been possible without the active contribution and help from all PROLEARN partners. It is impossible to mention all who contributed to these efforts and hence to this paper, but we would especially like to thank the following colleagues, partners and friends for their invaluable help in the last year, at the same time apologizing to all those whom we could not list here because of length constraints: Bernardo Wagner, Stefan Fischer, Klaus Jobmann and Rudi Studer from L3S, Guido Grohmann and August-Wilhelm Scheer from IWI/DFKI, Peter Scott and Enrico Motta from KMi / Open University, Erik Duval from the K.U.Leuven and the Ariadne consortium, Ralf Klamma, Marcus Specht and Matthias Jarke from RWTH Aachen and Fraunhofer FIT, Alexander Karapidis and Till Becker from Fraunhofer IAO, Bernd Simon and Gustav Neuman from WU Vienna, Barbara Kieslinger from CSI/BOKU Vienna, Stefano Ceri from Politecnico Milano, Borka Jermain Blazic from Institute Joszef Stefan in Slovenia, Ambjörn Naeve from the KTH Stockholm, Jacques Dang from HEC Paris, Katherine Maillet from INT, Evry, France, Paul DeBra from the TU Eindhoven, Tapio Koskinnen from the University of Technology in Helsinki, Constantin

Makropoulos from NCSR Demokritos in Greece, Juan Quemada from UPM Madrid, Bernhard Plattner from ETH Zürich and Denis Gillet EPFL Lausanne.

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