In today's world, characterized by the massive generation of data, a major problem related to data manipulation occurs when people's privacy is violated. To face this situation different regulations and solutions, to help users... more
In today's world, characterized by the massive generation of data, a major problem related to data manipulation occurs when people's privacy is violated. To face this situation different regulations and solutions, to help users get in control over their data, emerged. However, many of the solutions require a certain level of knowledge in the field of privacy or offer unclear information that does not facilitate a real control of their data by the users. Added to this is the unfriendly user interface design as one of the factors that prevents users from managing their privacy settings effectively. Thus, in this work we explore the effect of the application of Participatory Design (PD) techniques in the implementation of privacy enhancing technologies. In particular, we focus on the use of PD for the design of a privacy dashboard that encourages the immersion of users with privacy issues and gives them greater control with a user interface according to usability criteria. The evaluation of the PD process, which has resulted in a high-fidelity prototype of the dashboard, shows encouraging results and greater user immersion in privacy management.
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Depression is a prevalent disorder and leading cause of disability in Latin America, where the mental health treatment gap is still above 50%. We sought to synthesise and assess the quality of the evidence on the feasibility of... more
Depression is a prevalent disorder and leading cause of disability in Latin America, where the mental health treatment gap is still above 50%. We sought to synthesise and assess the quality of the evidence on the feasibility of mHealth-based interventions for depression in Latin America. We conducted a literature search of studies published in 2007 and after using four electronic databases. We included peer-reviewed articles, in English, Spanish or Portuguese, that evaluated interventions for depressive symptoms. Two authors independently extracted data using forms developed a priori. We assessed appropriateness of reporting utilising the CONSORT checklist for feasibility trials. Eight manuscripts were included for full data extraction. Appropriate reporting varied greatly. Most (n = 6, 75%) of studies were conducted in primary care settings and sought to deliver psychoeducation or behaviour change interventions for depressive symptoms. We found great heterogeneity in the assessment of feasibility. Two studies used comparator conditions. mHealth research for depression in Latin America is scarce. Included studies showed some feasibility despite methodological inconsistencies. Given the dire need for evidence-based mental health interventions in this region, governments and stakeholders must continue promoting and funding research tailored to cultural and population characteristics with subsequent pragmatic clinical trials.
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This study presents the Architecture Specific Model (ASM) defined by the MoWebA approach to improve the development of web applications for different architectures. MoWebA is a model-driven approach to web applications development. The... more
This study presents the Architecture Specific Model (ASM) defined by the MoWebA approach to improve the development of web applications for different architectures. MoWebA is a model-driven approach to web applications development. The article presents a general overview of MoWebA, including the methodological aspects related to its modeling and transformation processes, the process of defining the ASM, and an example of an ASM model. We finally present a preliminary validation experience and its main results. The experience was structured according to the proposal of Runeson et al. for case studies.
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Emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, require systematic strategies to assist in the discovery of effective treatments. Drug repositioning, the process of finding new therapeutic indications for... more
Emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, require systematic strategies to assist in the discovery of effective treatments. Drug repositioning, the process of finding new therapeutic indications for commercialized drugs, is a promising alternative to the development of new drugs, with lower costs and shorter development times. In this paper, we propose a recommendation system called geometric confidence non-negative matrix factorization (GcNMF) to assist in the repositioning of 126 broad spectrum antiviral drugs for 80 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. GcNMF models the non-Euclidean structure of the space using graphs, and produces a ranked list of drugs for each virus. Our experiments reveal that GcNMF significanlty outperforms other matrix decomposition methods at predicting missing drug-virus associations. Our analysis suggests that GcNMF could assist pharmacological experts in the search for effective drugs against viral diseases.
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As mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and Zika continue to develop, traditional approaches have not curbed the epidemics, and evidence suggests that community-based programs are an effective alternative. In Paraguay, more than 8,300... more
As mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and Zika continue to develop, traditional approaches have not curbed the epidemics, and evidence suggests that community-based programs are an effective alternative. In Paraguay, more than 8,300 cases of dengue were reported in 2019. Recent entomological surveys found that the percentage of houses with Aedes aegypti larvae is as high as 20% in the capital. In this context and based on the experiences of Camino Verde and DengueChat in Nicaragua, we started the TopaDengue project, a community-based intervention, supported by ICTs (information and communication technologies), in one of the most vulnerable territories of the Paraguayan capital, the Bañado Sur of Asunción. To inform our design of the socio-technical ICT platform, our fieldwork in this community explored the dynamic of interaction among researchers, facilitators, volunteers, the extended community, and technologies. Combining both paper and digital technologies with a continuous feed...
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Mood inference with mobile sensing data has been studied in ubicomp literature over the last decade. This inference enables context-aware and personalized user experiences in general mobile apps and valuable feedback and interventions in... more
Mood inference with mobile sensing data has been studied in ubicomp literature over the last decade. This inference enables context-aware and personalized user experiences in general mobile apps and valuable feedback and interventions in mobile health apps. However, even though model generalization issues have been highlighted in many studies, the focus has always been on improving the accuracies of models using different sensing modalities and machine learning techniques, with datasets collected in homogeneous populations. In contrast, less attention has been given to studying the performance of mood inference models to assess whether models generalize to new countries. In this study, we collected a mobile sensing dataset with 329K self-reports from 678 participants in eight countries (China, Denmark, India, Italy, Mexico, Mongolia, Paraguay, UK) to assess the effect of geographical diversity on mood inference models. We define and evaluate country-specific (trained and tested with...
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In recent years, social media has become increasingly relevant in democratic decision-making processes, such as referendums or elections. Recent investigations have raised the concern of social media misuse in attempts to manipulate the... more
In recent years, social media has become increasingly relevant in democratic decision-making processes, such as referendums or elections. Recent investigations have raised the concern of social media misuse in attempts to manipulate the public opinion and influence results, undermining the foundations of democracy. By analyzing the use of Twitter during the 2017/2018 presidential elections in Paraguay, this study provides empirical evidence and analysis about the role of social media on political campaigns. In a departure from other countries in the region, dominance in this network did not correlate with elections results. The results we highlight in this article, therefore, challenge the impact of social media on elections, offering an interesting view of their role in Latin America countries, like Paraguay.
The Gaia methodology (Wooldridge et al., 2000) has been the rst com-plete methodology for the analysis and design of multiagent systems. However, the original version of Gaia suered from the limitations of be-ing suitable for the analysis... more
The Gaia methodology (Wooldridge et al., 2000) has been the rst com-plete methodology for the analysis and design of multiagent systems. However, the original version of Gaia suered from the limitations of be-ing suitable for the analysis and design of closed multiagent systems and of adopting non-standard notation techniques. For these reasons, several extensions to the basic Gaia methodology has been recently proposed. In this chapter, we summarize the key characteristics of the original Gaia methodology and present three extensions that have been proposed to Gaia to overcome its limitations and to make it more suitable for the development of open multiagent systems in complex environments.
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Factors such as instructions, payment schemes, platform demographics, along with strategies for mapping studies into crowdsourcing environments, play an important role in the reproducibility of results. However, inferring these details... more
Factors such as instructions, payment schemes, platform demographics, along with strategies for mapping studies into crowdsourcing environments, play an important role in the reproducibility of results. However, inferring these details from scientific articles is often a challenging endeavor, calling for the development of proper reporting guidelines. This paper makes the first steps towards this goal, by describing an initial taxonomy of relevant attributes for crowdsourcing experiments, and providing a glimpse into the state of reporting by analyzing a sample of CSCW papers.
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Crowdsourced civic engagement is a novel form of democratic participation that allows citizens to share their ideas and deliberate in a multitude of diverse participatory processes that are emerging all over the world, influencing, often... more
Crowdsourced civic engagement is a novel form of democratic participation that allows citizens to share their ideas and deliberate in a multitude of diverse participatory processes that are emerging all over the world, influencing, often with binding power, urban plans, city budgets, and even legislation, among many other forms of public policy decisions. As a result, hundreds of thousands of civic contributions are produced as ideas, comments, and proposals circulate among citizens and between them and government officials, generating an avalanche of mostly unstructured data, which decision-makers have difficulty to manage. Sentiment analysis techniques have the potential to process and classify these contributions in ways that can make it easier to make sense of them. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a rule based sentiment analyzer that integrates a lexicon, optimized for the Spanish language and the application domain of civic contributions. We present the results of our first evaluation and discuss the aspects of the proposal that have room for improvement in future work.
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Chagas disease is a parasitic disease, endemic in South America. As of today, there is no effective treatment in its chronic stage. We have recently identified 134 FDA approved drugs with potential antitrypanosomal activity. In this... more
Chagas disease is a parasitic disease, endemic in South America. As of today, there is no effective treatment in its chronic stage. We have recently identified 134 FDA approved drugs with potential antitrypanosomal activity. In this paper, we propose a novel method for selecting combinations of drugs (drug cocktails), to provide a more effective treatment against Chagas disease. We define three measures to evaluate the predicted performance of a cocktail, establishing in this way a mathematical foundation for its analysis. This allows us to model the drug cocktail selection as a multi-objective optimisation problem, that we show can be solved efficiently with state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms. Our analysis retrieves 57 drug cocktails containing between 2 and 6 drugs. We discuss the improvement of the cocktail selection given by our method, and the application of this approach to the identification of cocktails against other parasitic diseases.
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Supplemental Items used in "Machine Learning and Network Medicine approaches for Drug Repositioning for COVID-19" by Suzana de Siqueira Santos, Mateo Torres, Diego Galeano, María del Mar Sánchez, Luca Cernuzzi, and Alberto... more
Supplemental Items used in "Machine Learning and Network Medicine approaches for Drug Repositioning for COVID-19" by Suzana de Siqueira Santos, Mateo Torres, Diego Galeano, María del Mar Sánchez, Luca Cernuzzi, and Alberto Paccanaro. The items include input datasets, and predictions by our matrix decomposition model and network medicine approach. Predictions by our matrix decomposition model are shown in Supplementary File 1. Two out of three interactomes used by our network medicine approach were mapped to SwissProt proteins and shown in Supplementary Files 2 (Luck et al., 2020, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2188-x), and 3 (Cheng et al., 2018, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05116-5). For these two interactomes, we used drug-target associations in Supplementary File 4, and 336 host proteins (UniProt accession numbers) in Supplementary File 5. For the Gysi el al. interactome (Gysi et al., 2021, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2025581118), we used Entrez IDs of the 336 host proteins shown in Supplementary File 6. Supplementary File 7 shows the ATC categories of DrugBank drugs. DrugBank entries with effect against SARS-CoV-2 according to CMAP, in vitro, and clinical trials evidence are shown in Supplementary Files 8, 9, and 10, respectively. Predictions by our network medicine approach are shown in Supplementary File 11. The weights assigned to the host proteins by the kernel-based methods are shown in Supplementary File 12.
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In the context of the project “WeNet: Internet of us” we are studying the role of diversity in relation to Internetmediated social interactions. In this paper, in particular, we analyze a possible relationship between personality aspects... more
In the context of the project “WeNet: Internet of us” we are studying the role of diversity in relation to Internetmediated social interactions. In this paper, in particular, we analyze a possible relationship between personality aspects and social interaction mediated by digital platforms. More specifically, we rely on the five personality traits (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability and Openness to Experience), commonly referred to as “Big-five”, and associate them to automatically extracted behavioral characteristics derived from the experience of using a Chatbot for a closed community of students at the Universidad Católica “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción” (UC). The personality data comes from a self-report made by the users through questionnaires. The main results show very positive appraisals about the use of the Chatbot in terms of user experience and its main functionalities. As for the role of personality in relation to the main use of the Chat...
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Having a sense of purpose is one of the tenets of well-being, at any age. Here, the authors review technologies that could help older adults remain active in society -- in particular, those who can't leave their home regularly or... more
Having a sense of purpose is one of the tenets of well-being, at any age. Here, the authors review technologies that could help older adults remain active in society -- in particular, those who can't leave their home regularly or easily. The authors also discuss areas that current research and practice haven't yet addressed satisfactorily.
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Friendships and social interactions are renown contributors to wellbeing. As such, keeping a healthy amount of relationships becomes very important as people age and the size of their social network tends to decrease. In this paper, we... more
Friendships and social interactions are renown contributors to wellbeing. As such, keeping a healthy amount of relationships becomes very important as people age and the size of their social network tends to decrease. In this paper, we take a step back and explore reconnection -- find out about or re-contact old friends, an emerging topic due to the increased use of computer-mediated technology by older adults to maintain friendships and form new ones. We report on our findings from semi-structured interviews with 28 individuals from Costa Rica and Poland. The interviews aimed to explore whether there is a wish to reconnect, and the challenges encountered by older adults to reconnect. We contribute with design considerations for tools allow- ing older adults to reconnect, discussing opportunities for technology.
Crowdsourcing is being increasingly adopted as a platform to run studies with human subjects. Running a crowdsourcing experiment involves several choices and strategies to successfully port an experimental design into an otherwise... more
Crowdsourcing is being increasingly adopted as a platform to run studies with human subjects. Running a crowdsourcing experiment involves several choices and strategies to successfully port an experimental design into an otherwise uncontrolled research environment, e.g., sampling crowd workers, mapping experimental conditions to micro-tasks, or ensure quality contributions. While several guidelines inform researchers in these choices, guidance of how and what to report from crowdsourcing experiments has been largely overlooked. If under-reported, implementation choices constitute variability sources that can affect the experiment's reproducibility and prevent a fair assessment of research outcomes. In this paper, we examine the current state of reporting of crowdsourcing experiments and offer guidance to address associated reporting issues. We start by identifying sensible implementation choices, relying on existing literature and interviews with experts, to then extensively ana...
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node node node This thesis introduces SKOs (Scientific Knowledge Object) a specification for capturing the knowledge and artifacts that are produced by the scientific research processes. Aiming to address the current existing limitations... more
node node node This thesis introduces SKOs (Scientific Knowledge Object) a specification for capturing the knowledge and artifacts that are produced by the scientific research processes. Aiming to address the current existing limitations of scientific production this specification is focused on reducing the work overhead of scientific creation, being composable and reusable, allow continuous evolution and facilitate collaboration and discovery among researchers. To do so it introduces four layers that capture different aspects of the scientific knowledge: content, meaning, ordering and visualization. Executive Summary node Scientific papers or Articles were introduced during the 17th century when the first academic journals appeared. Since then these papers, along with the scientific conferences or symposiums, have become the cornerstones of the scientific community and research. Currently, not very unlike
This special issue of the CLEIej consists of extended and revised versions of Selected Papers presented at the XXI Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering (CIbSE 2018), hold in Bogotá, Colombia, in April 2018.
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Abstract The data layer access design is a critical task for mobile applications which need constant access to remote data, making them available offline in case of network connectivity problems. Moreover, the variety of mobile operating... more
Abstract The data layer access design is a critical task for mobile applications which need constant access to remote data, making them available offline in case of network connectivity problems. Moreover, the variety of mobile operating systems and platforms (fragmentation phenomenon) that handles data storage differently affects the portability of mobile applications. This issue suggests the use of Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach that may ease the smartphone application development for different platforms. Therefore, we propose an extension of the Model-Oriented Web Approach (MoWebA) for the development of native mobile applications focusing on the data layer. MoWebA Mobile (as we name the proposal) covers data persistence concepts to achieve offline applications in case of network connectivity problems. It defines meta-models and the Architecture-Specific Model (ASM) for data persistence and data provider to design the data sources of mobile applications. As well, we propose transformation rules for the generation of Android and Windows Phone applications. The MoWebA Mobile process was illustrated by means of modeling, design, and development of a typical mobile application. Despite the learning curve of the approach, the first evaluation suggests that MoWebA Mobile has the potential for supporting the mobile design applications considering the persistence of data.
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This paper presents an algorithm and a tool for discovering scientific communities. Several approaches have been proposed to discover community structure applying clustering methods over different networks, such as co-authorship and... more
This paper presents an algorithm and a tool for discovering scientific communities. Several approaches have been proposed to discover community structure applying clustering methods over different networks, such as co-authorship and citation networks. However, most existing approaches do not allow for overlapping of communities, which is instead natural when we consider communities of scientists. The approach presented in this paper combines different clustering algorithms for detecting overlapping scientific communities, based on conference publication data. The Community Engine Tool implements the algorithm and was evaluated using the DBLP dataset, which contains information on more than 12 thousand conferences. The results show that using our approach it is possible to automatically produce community structure close to human-defined classification of conferences. The approach is part of a larger research effort aimed at studying how scientific communities are born, evolve, remain...
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i* is one of the more promising goal-oriented modeling framework to capture and model multi agent systems (MAS) requirements. Moreover, i* has been incorporated as the foundation for one of the more important AOSE methodologies, that is,... more
i* is one of the more promising goal-oriented modeling framework to capture and model multi agent systems (MAS) requirements. Moreover, i* has been incorporated as the foundation for one of the more important AOSE methodologies, that is, Tropos. Our research interests related with i* cover two mainly directions. The first, is to compare i* with other methods, techniques and notations for capturing and modeling MAS abstractions. The second is related to the computational organization theory to model the organizational perspective of the MAS. Specifically, we are analyzing the critical issue of coping with adaptive changes of MAS organizations whenever circumstances claim for changes in the very MAS structure. Then, we are surveying different relevant AOSE methodologies, Tropos (and therefore i*) among others, to discuss their suitability in dealing with adaptation in MAS organizations.
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Crowdsourcing is being increasingly adopted as a platform to run studies with human subjects. Running a crowdsourcing experiment involves several choices and strategies to successfully port an experimental design into an otherwise... more
Crowdsourcing is being increasingly adopted as a platform to run studies with human subjects. Running a crowdsourcing experiment involves several choices and strategies to successfully port an experimental design into an otherwise uncontrolled research environment, e.g., sampling crowd workers, mapping experimental conditions to micro-tasks, or ensure quality contributions. While several guidelines inform researchers in these choices, guidance of how and what to report from crowdsourcing experiments has been largely overlooked. If under-reported, implementation choices constitute variability sources that can affect the experiment's reproducibility and prevent a fair assessment of research outcomes. In this paper, we examine the current state of reporting of crowdsourcing experiments and offer guidance to address associated reporting issues. We start by identifying sensible implementation choices, relying on existing literature and interviews with experts, to then extensively ana...
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Agent design is a complex human activity involving active and proactive modules of software that may present knowledge representation and learning aspects. In this study we review some Agent-Oriented Methodologies including extensions of... more
Agent design is a complex human activity involving active and proactive modules of software that may present knowledge representation and learning aspects. In this study we review some Agent-Oriented Methodologies including extensions of object oriented and knowledge engineering methodologies. Moreover, we present a case study of a multi-agent system for requirement engineering formal specification that was designed using “the Agent Modelling Technique for Systems of BDI agent” [12]. Finally, a discussion about the use of the methodology is presented.
Scientific papers are the current de-facto unit for scientific knowledge dissemination. Nevertheless, with the advent of the Web and is related technologies, the popularity of new types of dissemination methods (e.g. blogs, web pages and... more
Scientific papers are the current de-facto unit for scientific knowledge dissemination. Nevertheless, with the advent of the Web and is related technologies, the popularity of new types of dissemination methods (e.g. blogs, web pages and social networks) has also become difficult to ignore. In fact, several discussions are currently based on the advantages and limitations of both; the traditional paper model and these so called Science 2.0 new webbased opportunities. There is no discussion, however, on the fact that both of these types of documents are in fact used to disseminate and advance scientific knowledge. This paper presents a metadata-enabled model based on Scientific Knowledge Objects that aims to represent and capture the knowledge from both the traditional and the new types of these scientific artifacts. The inspiration for this model is mainly drawn from the comparison between the scientific artifacts and software, as several of the properties and processes currently us...