Influential user detection is critical in supporting the human facilitator-based facilitation in the online forum. Traditional approaches to detect influential users in the online forum focus on the statistical activity information such as the number of posts. However, statistical activity information cannot fully reflect the influence that users bring to the online forum. In this paper, we propose to detect the influencers from the influence propagation perspective and focus on the influential maximization (IM) problem which aims at choosing a set of users that maximize the influence propagation from the entire social network. An online forum influence propagation network (OFIPN) is proposed to model the influence from an individual user perspective and influence propagation between users, and a heuristic algorithm that is proposed to find influential users in OFIPN. Experiments are conducted by simulations with a real-world social network. Our empirical results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

In academic presentation, the structure design of presentation is critical for making the presentation logical and understandable. However, it is difficult for novice researchers to construct required academic presentation structure due to the flexibility in structure creation. To help novice researchers revise and improve their presentation structure, we propose an academic presentation structure modification support system based on structural elements of the presentation slides. In the proposed system, we build a presentation structural elements model (PSEM) that represents the essential structural elements and their relations to clarify the ideal structure of academic presentation. Based on the PSEM, we also designed two evaluation indices to evaluate the academic presentation structure. To evaluate the proposed system with real-world data, we construct a web application that generates evaluation and feedback to academic presentation slides. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

This paper aims to support the cultivation of proper cognitive skills for academic English listening. First of all, this paper identified several listening strategies proved to be effective for cultivating listening skills through past research and builds up the respective strategy models, based on which we designed and developed various functional units as strategy objects, and the mashup environment where these function units can be assembled to serve as a personal learning environment. We also attached listening strategies and tactics to each object, in order to make learners aware of the related strategies and tactics applied during learning. Both short-term and mid-term case studies were carried out, and the data collected showed several positive results and some interesting indications.