Erik Duval (11 September 1965 – 12 March 2016) was a Belgian computer scientist. Duval chaired the informatics section of the computer science department of the
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
KU Leuven (or Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a Catholic research university in the city of Leuven, Belgium. It conducts teaching, research, and services in computer science, engineering, natural sciences, theology, humanities, medicine, l ...
, where he also chaired the research unit on human-computer interaction. His research was situated in the long-standing quest to
augment the human intellect.
Life and career
Duval served on the executive committee of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR), as a fellow of the AACE, as a member of
ACM
ACM or A.C.M. may refer to:
Aviation
* AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile
* Air chief marshal
* Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting
* Air cycle machine
* Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia
Computing
* ...
, and the IEEE computer society, on the Editorial Review Board and the Executive Advisory Board of the International Journal on E-Learning, as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (TLT), on the board of editors of the Journal of Universal Computer Science, and as a member of the informatics section of the Academia Europaea.
Duval co-founded and contributed to Aristo Music Technology (2000) and Atmire (2006).
In the last stages of his research career, Duval and his team were focused on:
* Capturing user actions for analysis of the user experience (with sensors like brainwave, ECG, eyetracking, … but also software sensors that track what people do)
* Personal information visualisation, where we try to help users with awareness, reflection, sensemaking, and behaviour change.
Typical application areas for this research included
* technology enhanced learning and
learning analytics,
*
science2.0 and
digital humanities,
* personal health,
*
data journalism.
Selected academic works
Duval has published over 100 papers. A selection of the highly cited ones:
* 2002, Metadata Principles and Practicalities
* 2002,
IEEE Standard for learning object metadata
* 2002, Reusable learning objects: a survey of LOM-based repositories
* 2001, The Ariadne knowledge pool system
* 2003, A LOM Research Agenda
* 2007, Social Software for Lifelong learning
* 2005, Automating metadata generation: the simple indexing interface
* 2007, Tracking actual usage: the attention metadata approach
* 2011, Attention please!: learning analytics for visualization and recommendation
Death
In March 2014, Duval was diagnosed with
Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. After chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, a
PET scan mid-January 2015 did not show any more traces of the disease. In the summer of 2015, a new diagnose revealed
T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma. Duval died on March 12, 2016.
Legacy
To honor the memory of Erik Duval, the
Society for Learning Analytics Research
A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societi ...
created Erik Duval Student Scholarships to provide support for students attending Learning Analytics Summer Institute.
The main auditorium in the Computer Science building of the
KU Leuven was named after him, a few months after his death.
References
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:Duval, Erik
1965 births
2016 deaths
Academic staff of KU Leuven
Belgian computer scientists