Peer assessment is widely used in higher education, yet the cognitive demands placed on student assessors, particularly under conditions of overload and repetition, remain poorly understood.We examine how two cognitive factors, information overload and what we term assessment fatigue, influence evaluation behavior and user experience.Assessment fatigue is defined as cognitive strain resulting from repeated evaluative tasks.The study draws on data from a universitylevel deployment of a structured peer evaluation system.We applied Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze how behavioral data and self-reported perceptions of overload and fatigue relate to overall system satisfaction.Results reveal a significant indirect pathway from information overload to system satisfaction, mediated by fatigue.Based on these findings, we propose design recommendations for cognitively-aware assessment systems that adapt to students' cognitive constraints, contributing to the development of AI-supported educational tools that are more robust and human-centered.

Abstract Students’ decisions on whether to take a class are strongly affected by whether their friends plan to take the class with them. A student may prefer to be assigned to a course they like less, just to be with their friends, rather than taking a more preferred class alone. It has been shown that taking classes with friends positively affects academic performance. Thus, academic institutes should prioritize friendship relations when assigning course seats. The introduction of friendship relations results in several non-trivial changes to current course allocation methods. This paper explores how course allocation mechanisms can account for friendships between students and provide a unique, distributed solution. Specifically, we approach the problem by framing it as an asymmetric distributed constraint optimization problem and develop a new dedicated algorithm. Our extensive evaluation includes both simulated data and a study involving 177 students, focusing on their preferences regarding both courses and friendships. The findings indicate that our algorithm achieves significant utility for the students, maintaining fairness in the solution and adhering to the limitations on course seat capacities.

Electronic voting systems have significant advantages in comparison with physical voting systems. One of the main challenges in e-voting systems is to secure the voting process: namely, to certify that the computed results are consistent with the cast ballots and that the voters’ privacy is preserved. We propose herein a secure voting protocol for elections that are governed by order-based voting rules. Our protocol, in which the tallying task is distributed among several independent talliers, offers perfect ballot secrecy in the sense that it issues only the required output while no other information on the cast ballots is revealed. Such perfect secrecy, achieved by employing secure multiparty computation tools, may increase the voters’ confidence and, consequently, encourage them to vote according to their true preferences. We implemented a demo of a voting system that is based on our protocol and we describe herein the system’s components and its operation. Our implementation demonstrates that our secure order-based voting protocol can be readily implemented in real-life large-scale electronic elections.

Electronic voting systems have significant advantages in comparison with physical voting systems. One of the main challenges in e-voting systems is to secure the voting process: namely, to certify that the computed results are consistent with the cast ballots and that the voters’ privacy is preserved. We propose herein a secure voting protocol for elections that are governed by order-based voting rules. Our protocol offers perfect ballot secrecy in the sense that it issues only the required output while no other information on the cast ballots is revealed. Such perfect secrecy, achieved by employing secure multiparty computation tools, may increase the voters’ confidence and, consequently, encourage them to vote according to their true preferences. Evaluation of the protocol’s computational costs establishes that it is lightweight and can be readily implemented in real-life electronic elections.

Iterative peer grading activities may keep students engaged during in-class project presentations. Effective methods for collecting and aggregating peer assessment data are essential. Students tend to grade projects favorably. So, while asking students for numeric grades is a common approach, it often leads to inflated grades across all projects, resulting in numerous ties for the top grades. Additionally, students may strategically assign lower grades to others’ projects so that their projects will shine. Alternatively, requesting students to rank all projects from best to worst presents challenges due to limitations in human cognitive capacity. To address these issues, we propose a novel peer grading model consisting of (a) an algorithm designed to elicit student evaluations and (b) a median-based voting protocol for aggregating grades to a single ranked order that reduces ties. An application based on our model was deployed and tested in a university course, demonstrating fewer ties between alternatives and a significant decrease in students’ cognitive and communication burdens.

In higher education courses, peer grading can keep students engaged during class presentations. Defining how students grade the work of their peers requires careful consideration. Two commonly used approaches exist. The first involves asking students to order the projects from best to worst. However, this approach imposes a high cognitive load on students, as ordering numerous projects is challenging. The second and most prevalent approach involves soliciting qualitative or numerical scores from students. However, a common challenge arises as students tend to be generous in the scores they assign their peers. Consequently, this leads to a situation where all projects receive similar, high grades. To address this challenge, we have developed a novel, interactive model. This model requires students to provide grades and to respond to a few pairwise comparison questions when necessary. The model was implemented as a mobile web application and tested in a university course, confirming its validity and efficiency.

Dery et al. recently proposed a secure voting protocol for score-based elections, where independent talliers perform the tallying procedure. The protocol offers perfect ballot secrecy: it outputs the identity of the winner(s), but keeps all other information secret, even from the talliers. This high level of privacy, which may encourage voters to vote truthfully, and the protocol's extremely lightweight nature, make it a most adequate and powerful tool for democracies of any size. We have implemented that system and in this work we describe the system's components - election administrators, voters and talliers - and its operation. Our implementation is in Python and is open source. We view this demo as an essential step towards convincing decision makers in communities that practice score-based elections to adopt it as their election platform.

Voting is a common way to reach a group decision. When possible, voters will attempt to vote strategically, in order to optimize their satisfaction from the outcome. Previous research has modelled how rational voter agents (bots) vote to maximize their personal utility in an iterative voting process that has a deadline (a timeout). However, it remains an open question whether human beings behave rationally when faced with the same settings. The focus of this paper is therefore to examine how the deadline factor affects manipulative behavior in real-world scenarios were humans are required to reach a decision before a deadline. An On-line platform was built to enable voting games by all types of users: agents (bots), humans, and mixed games with both humans and agents. We compare the results of human behavior and bot behavior and conclude that it might be wise to allow bots to make (certain) decisions on our behalf.

A group may appreciate recommendations on items that fit their joint preferences. When the members' actual preferences are unknown, a recommendation can be made with the aid of collaborative filtering methods. We offer to narrow down the recommended list of items by eliciting the users' actual preferences. Our final goal is to output top-k preferred items to the group out of the top-N recommendations provided by the recommender system (k

Group Recommendation Systems (GRS) aim at recommending items that are relevant for the joint interest of a group of users. Voting mechanisms assume that users rate all items in order to identify an item that suits the preferences of all group members. This assumption is not feasible in sparse rating scenarios which are common in the recommender systems domain. In this paper we examine an application of voting theory to GRS. We propose a method to accurately determine the winning item while using a minimal set of the group members ratings, assuming that the recommender system has probabilistic knowledge about the distribution of users' ratings of items in the system. Since computing the optimal minimal set of ratings is computationally intractable, we propose two heuristic algorithms that proceed iteratively that aiming atto minimizing the number of required ratings, until identifying a "winning item". Experiments with the Netflix data show that the proposed algorithms reduce the required number of ratings for identifying the "winning item" by more than 50%.

The MediaScout system is envisioned to function as personalized media (audio, video, print) service within mobile phones, online media portals, sling boxes, etc. The MediaScout recommender engine uses a novel stereotype-based recommendation engine. Upon the registration of new users the system must decide how to classify the new users to existing stereotypes. In this paper we present a method to achieve this classification through an anytime, interactive questionnaire, created automatically upon the generation of new stereotypes. A comparative study performed on the IMDB database illustrates the advantages of the new system