Practical Applications of Intelligent Systems: An E-Learning Platforms Recommender Victoria Lopez, Matilde Santos Dept. Computer Architecture and Automatics Complutense University Madrid, Spain vlopez@fdi.ucm.es Pablo Esteve, David Roldán, Juan C. deMendoza Informatics Faculty Complutense University Madrid, Spain Abstract—This paper shows the advantage of using Intelligent Systems while developing engineering projects. The paper is based on three examples and it is focus into one of them: The E- learning Migration application, developed as a teaching aid tool in different organizations where various platforms coexist; this is the case of some Spanish universities. This tool solves three basic problems, which are shown in three independent modules. The first of these ones, concerns the recording and migration of the data; the second one, refers to the storing and organization of the images. The last one is an E-learning platform recommender based on an ID3 tree-decision. We are going to focus our article in this concrete module. Keywords-E-Learning; ID3, recommender systems, intelligent systems. I. INTRODUCTION There are a lot of applications developed as engineering projects in which meet natural language and quantitative data. In theses cases, Intelligent Systems offers a set of suitable techniques and very easy to apply. The following three examples were developed at Complutense University of Madrid during this academic course. • SB Data Analysis [11]: A study about Store Brands (SB) and market consumers is developed in this project. Fuzzy logic and Multicriteria Decision Making techniques are used to decide the behavior of the market. The software tool SB Data Analysis allows make several store brand surveys analysis and make a comparison of store brands’ consume by age group and waves using Soft-Computing techniques. These studies will serve to understand better the evolution, trends and tastes of consumers with respect to store brands. • EMSI [10]: Measuring computer performance and reliability. This project develops some tools and techniques in computer-system performance and reliability analysis. Statistical methods combined with fuzzy logic techniques are used to interpret the measured data in a meaningful way. Also in this project the user can find an algorithm (following a pseudo greedy scheme) to improve reliability and performance of a set of devices or components into a computer-system. In particular, a fuzzy multicriteria decision making (MCDM) approach is considered at each step of the algorithm to select a new candidate, so the greedy scheme improves each isolated component. At the final stage, a new system is obtained and its global reliability and performance can be then evaluated by means of appropriate fuzzy specifications. • E-Learning Management Tool [8]: This project has got three modules, one of them allows to migrate contents that a teacher has in a platform to another one, the second one allows to store in a database images allowing the teacher to annotate them with Topics or descriptions that he chooses, as well as to assign to the images subjects, so that then they could select images for a concrete subject or description. In addition the export is allowed in a compressed file of the images that the user chooses. The third tool is a system recommender for learning platforms. This recommender are based on artificial intelligent technique, the ID3 algorithm that it is shown into next sections. II. E-LEARNING MANAGEMENT TOOL The increasing popularity of open source and freeware platforms added with the traditional use of commercial platforms, point to the benefit of migrating data between them with the most transparency and reliability for the user. During the last years, there has been a steady increase in online educational systems, also known as E-learning systems. Nowadays is not very frequent to find educational centers, or even companies who are not in the possession of a ‘Learning Management System’ (LMS). At the beginning, these systems were for commercial reasons like WebCT (Blackboard as the new version) [1] however, freeware systems such as Moodle [6] are currently playing a major role. With regard to this topic there are a number of articles that can be consulted [5]. As the use of such virtual learning systems keeps increasing, the E-learning Migration tool arises to simplify the user’s work. On the one hand, our application seeks to make ___________________________________ 978-1-4244-6793-8/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE