Top university gets IT help from Esbjerg against academic dishonesty · 3. October 2011
Four IT students and their supervisor at Aalborg University Esbjerg can take part of the credit for catching students at the internationally recognized University of Alberta in Canada who try to cheat on their assignments.
The Esbjerg group has provided an important part of the software that the Canadian university’s Department of Biological Sciences has implemented to prevent students from handing in lab reports and other material they have plagiarized.
The anti-cheating solution is integrated in the website that bio-science students use when they have to turn in assignments. A message on the screen makes it clear that the material submitted will be cross-checked with other students' assignments and that the purpose is to detect cases of plagiarism.
The department gratefully acknowledges the five-member team in Esbjerg by name for providing the source code and the inspiration for the algorithm that detects when two assignments are too similar.
According to the students’ supervisor, Akbar Hussain, Associate Professor, Department of Energy Technology, Esbjerg, it was the Canadian researchers themselves who initiated the collaboration with him and the four students Daniele Anzelmi, Domenico Carlone, Fabio Rizzello and Robert Thomsen in the master's program in software construction.
- We wrote a scientific article on detecting plagiarism using a particular algorithm and it was published in connection with an international conference for engineers and computer scientists in Hong Kong earlier this year. After publication, I was contacted by people from the University of Alberta in Canada who said they had read about our work and that they would like to collaborate because they were developing a program to detect plagiarism, says Akbar Hussain.
In that article underpinning the collaboration, he and his colleagues pointed out that plagiarism is increasingly a problem in the scientific world because of the Internet's easy access to large amounts of data. Plagiarism consisting of verbatim reproductions is easy to detect. The problem becomes more complex when it also includes paraphrases, partial duplications and missing references and citations. Akbar Hussain is therefore delighted that the collaboration with the Canadian university has resulted in a usable and reliable solution:
- It is a fine achievement that demonstrates that our university can produce projects and research of high quality.
Further information and contact:
- More information on the Esbjerg group’s scientific article.
- The four students are specializing in information search in the master’s program in software construction at Aalborg University Esbjerg.
- University of Alberta’s Department of Biological Sciences.
- Akbar Hussain, Associate Professor, Dept. of Energy Technology, AAU Esbjerg, tel. +45 9940 7729, mail akh@et.aau.dk.
- Anders Schmidt Kristensen, Head of Campus, AAU Esbjerg, mobile +45 4218 0842.
- Carsten Nielsen, Science Journalist, AAU, mobile +45 2340 6554.
