Attentional Graph Convolutional Networks for Knowledge Concept Recommendation in MOOCs in a Heterogeneous View

Massive open online courses are becoming a modish way for education, which provides a large-scale and open-access learning opportunity for students to grasp the knowledge. To attract students' interest, the recommendation system is applied by MOOCs providers to recommend courses to students. However, as a course usually consists of a number of video lectures, with each one covering some specific knowledge concepts, directly recommending courses overlook students'interest to some specific knowledge concepts. To fill this gap, in this paper, we study the problem of knowledge concept recommendation. We propose an end-to-end graph neural network-based approach calledAttentionalHeterogeneous Graph Convolutional Deep Knowledge Recommender(ACKRec) for knowledge concept recommendation in MOOCs. Like other recommendation problems, it suffers from sparsity issues. To address this issue, we leverage both content information and context information to learn the representation of entities via graph convolution network. In addition to students and knowledge concepts, we consider other types of entities (e.g., courses, videos, teachers) and construct a heterogeneous information network to capture the corresponding fruitful semantic relationships among different types of entities and incorporate them into the representation learning process. Specifically, we use meta-path on the HIN to guide the propagation of students' preferences. With the help of these meta-paths, the students' preference distribution with respect to a candidate knowledge concept can be captured. Furthermore, we propose an attention mechanism to adaptively fuse the context information from different meta-paths, in order to capture the different interests of different students. The promising experiment results show that the proposedACKRecis able to effectively recommend knowledge concepts to students pursuing online learning in MOOCs.

Cognitive Internet of Things: A New Paradigm beyond Connection

Current research on Internet of Things (IoT) mainly focuses on how to enable general objects to see, hear, and smell the physical world for themselves, and make them connected to share the observations. In this paper, we argue that only connected is not enough, beyond that, general objects should have the capability to learn, think, and understand both physical and social worlds by themselves. This practical need impels us to develop a new paradigm, named Cognitive Internet of Things (CIoT), to empower the current IoT with a `brain' for high-level intelligence. Specifically, we first present a comprehensive definition for CIoT, primarily inspired by the effectiveness of human cognition. Then, we propose an operational framework of CIoT, which mainly characterizes the interactions among five fundamental cognitive tasks: perception-action cycle, massive data analytics, semantic derivation and knowledge discovery, intelligent decision-making, and on-demand service provisioning. Furthermore, we provide a systematic tutorial on key enabling techniques involved in the cognitive tasks. In addition, we also discuss the design of proper performance metrics on evaluating the enabling techniques. Last but not least, we present the research challenges and open issues ahead. Building on the present work and potentially fruitful future studies, CIoT has the capability to bridge the physical world (with objects, resources, etc.) and the social world (with human demand, social behavior, etc.), and enhance smart resource allocation, automatic network operation, and intelligent service provisioning.