Abstract

Living Book is an application developed within the In2Math project at the University of Koblenz-Landau. Living Book focuses on personalized and user oriented educational material with interactive components. Its main goal is to support the active, explorative and self-determined learning in lectures, tutorials and self-study.
This talk focuses on two main aspects of Living Book: interactive components in an introductory logic course, and assembly of personalized documents from a repository of textbooks.
Interactive components: Currently, the material for a previously developed course on ``Logic for Computer Science'' is extended by various tools to analyzelogical formulas. The formulas entered by the user, as well asthe results of thetool applications, are integrated into the document.
The talk will include a system demonstration centered around an exercise from the diagnosis domain, and a sketch of the architecture of the system.
Personalized documents: The statical sequential structure of classical textbooks can be altered in Living Book by dynamically selecting those subjects a student user is interested in or needs to know, say, to prepare for an exam. To this end, the teaching material is organized as a collection of small units, or slices, representing elementary units of knowlegde. Furthermore, meta data describe the dependencies between different slices. Additionally, a user model contains information about known or unknown topics. This information, together with the user's selection of subjects is used to generate a personalized book that fits the user's needs.
The talk will include a demonstration of this part of the system as well. The focus, however, will be on the techniques used for the generation of the document tasks, which are based on logic programming and automated deduction principles.

Dr. Peter Baumgartner studied computer science at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, from 1982 to 1988. After a year at Siemens, Germany, he took a research assistant position at the University of Munich, Germany. Since 1990 he is a research assistant at the AI Research Group at the University of Koblenz, Germany. In 1996 he received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Koblenz, with a dissertation on automated deduction. In 2002 he finished his habilitation thesis, which was defended by a talk on the "Semantic Web".
His main research interests revolve around the design of automated deduction systems, and their use as knowledge representation and reasoning systems in practical applications.