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A 3D virtual world such as SecondLife, cannot in fact be considered a teaching platform, although it provides a good foundation for one. To do so, it must include some elements such as a training program, with a sequence of activities for students to acquire knowledge, as well as a methodology to evaluate previously defined learning results. “When all those elements exist, we can say that we have gone from an abstract 3D world to a learning platform”, explained the Full Professor in Telematics Engineering, Carlos Delgado Kloos, who heads this UC3M line of research.

The advantages of using this type of application for teaching have been investigated by these researchers who have carried out an experiment regarding learning Spanish as a second language. The researchers have started with the assumption that the best way to learn a language is to live in a country where it is spoken. “The 3D learning environments are not only appropriate for transmission of knowledge, but also for teaching competencies, and if they also include Augmented Reality elements for the manipulation of a three-dimensional world with real physical elements, even better results are obtained, as the barrier of a fictional world immersion is reduced”, Professor Delgado Kloos added.

A richer academic experience

The researchers’ target is to successfully develop a teaching product which offers a total educative experience, improving on the classic textbook format. If this is complemented by multimedia elements, it is even better however, if it goes one step further, and provides 3D environments which can be explored by the student, then you have more pedagogical resources. Along these same lines, student pilots have long been using flight simulators where a real environment is reproduced to learn how to handle a plane. A 3D world is an environment which is more similar to the real world than one created by a textbook. As a result, it can transmit many more elements other than purely cognitive ones, so that skills and competencies can be acquired which a textbook alone cannot offer, according to the researchers; in a nutshell, a much richer educational experience.

We still have a bit of a way to go until we are able to employ virtual 3D worlds as learning platforms. “This is a relatively virgin area which has to demonstrate its relevance, and which will grow as IT hardware capacity grows, and as new software interfaces are defined and new person-machine interface devices become more generalized”, Delgado Kloos, pointed out. Professor Delgado Kloos also heads the UC3M Telematics Applications and Services Group (GAST) which carries out work in the areas of e-learning, ubiquitous computing, intelligent environments, distributed real- time systems and web technologies.

According to the researchers, there is a need to define standards and good practices for the implementation of teaching environments in 3D virtual platforms. The eMadrid network project is working in these as well as in many other areas. This is a project which is funded by the Community of Madrid, and headed by UC3M, and in which experts from other public universities in the region participate, such as the Autónoma, Complutense, Politécnica, Rey Juan Carlos and UNED (The National Distance Education University of Spain). This network’s objective is to achieve the rationalization of e-learning research efforts, incorporating into the group education and training experts and technicians through the TIC, whose participation allows the technology capacity of the different teams to be topped off and important synergies to be achieved. It also strives to be a showcase for the most important elearning developments with the aim of energizing this field. Lastly, special mention must be made of technology transfer to companies and the synergy between researchers and the needs of the very core of production.

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Internet ads are currently only available in three or four specific sizes, meaning websites must be designed around the ads. The size restrictions greatly limit ad placement options and affect the way ads look on devices such as the iPhone and iPad.

But a new technology, developed by UofT Electrical and Computer Engineering associate professor Parham Aarabi, enables ads to be resized automatically to conform to any web space. Aarabi will present the concept at the World Wide Web 2010 Conference in late April in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“Currently, a significant portion of usable website spaces are not used for advertising because the standard size ads don’t fit,” says Aarabi, Canada Research Chair in Internet Video, Audio, and Image Search. “Our technology is the first ever to conform ads to any available website space in an automated and practical way. Essentially, advertisers provide a single ad at a preset size, and our technology can, automatically and dynamically, regenerate the ad at any size, resolution, or aspect ratio by taking into account the contents of the ad, relevant text, and other information.”

He adds that the technology will translate into profit because formerly wasted web space can be used for advertising.

“Given an online advertising market worth billions of dollars, this technology could significantly increase revenues for publishers, and create new opportunities for advertisers,” Aarabi says.

“What we’ve done represents a significant advance in security for cloud computing and other virtualization applications,” says Dr. Xuxian Jiang, an assistant professor of computer science and co-author of the study. “Anyone interested in the virtualization sector will be very interested in our work.”

Virtualization allows the pooling of the computational power and storage of multiple computers, which can then be shared by multiple users. For example, under the cloud computing paradigm, businesses can lease computer resources from a data center to operate Web sites and interact with customers – without having to pay for the overhead of buying and maintaining their own IT infrastructures. The virtualization manager, commonly referred to as a “hypervisor,” is a type of software that creates “virtual machines” that operate in isolation from one another on a common computer. In other words, the hypervisor allows different operating systems to run in isolation from one another – even though each of these systems is using computing power and storage capability on the same computer. This is the technique that enables concepts like cloud computing to function.

One of the major threats to virtualization – and cloud computing – is malicious software that enables computer viruses or other malware that have compromised one customer’s system to spread to the underlying hypervisor and, ultimately, to the systems of other customers. In short, a key concern is that one cloud computing customer could download a virus – such as one that steals user data – and then spread that virus to the systems of all the other customers.

“If this sort of attack is feasible, it undermines consumer confidence in cloud computing,” Jiang says, “since consumers couldn’t trust that their information would remain confidential.”

But Jiang and his Ph.D. student Zhi Wang have now developed software, called HyperSafe, that leverages existing hardware features to secure hypervisors against such attacks. “We can guarantee the integrity of the underlying hypervisor by protecting it from being compromised by any malware downloaded by an individual user,” Jiang says. “By doing so, we can ensure the hypervisor’s isolation.”

For malware to affect a hypervisor, it typically needs to run its own code in the hypervisor. HyperSafe utilizes two components to prevent that from happening. First, the HyperSafe program “has a technique called non-bypassable memory lockdown, which explicitly and reliably bars the introduction of new code by anyone other than the hypervisor administrator,” Jiang says. “This also prevents attempts to modify existing hypervisor code by external users.”

Second, HyperSafe uses a technique called restricted pointer indexing. This technique “initially characterizes a hypervisor’s normal behavior, and then prevents any deviation from that profile,” Jiang says. “Only the hypervisor administrators themselves can introduce changes to the hypervisor code.”

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