ABSTRACT In this paper we propose an architecture for the development of Intelligent Virtual Envi... more ABSTRACT In this paper we propose an architecture for the development of Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training, which is based on a col- lection of cooperative software agents. The first level of the architecture is an extension of the classical Intelligent Tutoring System architecture that adds to the expert, student, tutoring and communication modules a new module which is called World Module. Several software agents com- pose each module. Moreover, the proposed architecture includes agents able to simulate the behavior of human students and tutors, as well as agents able to plan the procedures to be taught (given an initial state and a desired final state) prior to the tutoring process.
The objective of this paper is to identify the most visited places through a sentiment analysis o... more The objective of this paper is to identify the most visited places through a sentiment analysis of the tweets posted by people who visited a specific region of a city. The analyzed data were related to preferences and opinions about tourist places. This paper outlines an architectural framework and a methodology to collect and analysis big data from twitter platform.
Introduction. In this article we propose a qualitative analysis tool ?a coding system - that can ... more Introduction. In this article we propose a qualitative analysis tool ?a coding system - that can support the formalisation of the information-seeking process in a specific field: research in computer science. Method. In order to elaborate the coding system, we have conducted a set of qualitative studies, more specifically a focus group and some individual interviews, and have analysed their results. Analysis. We provide a detailed description of how the qualitative studies were performed and how the subsequent analysis, refining and validation phases were carried out until we obtained the proposed coding system. Results. The coding system is presented as a list of hierarchically categorised codes that try to cover the full information-seeking process performed by researchers in computer science. In order to facilitate the understanding and later use of the codes, we also include a detailed description of each, together with real examples of use extracted from the qualitative studies...
Nowadays, visualization of large amounts of data has become a key issue for processing data in ma... more Nowadays, visualization of large amounts of data has become a key issue for processing data in many fields. This paper presents a conceptual model for describing information visualization systems. This conceptual model has been represented using the Unified Modeling Language, therefore it takes advantage of the understandability, unambiguity, flexibility, and adaptability provided by this notation. The proposed model outlines concepts such as visualization workspace, device, visual representation and its features, information visualization task and its effects on visualization, inter-item relationship, etc. The main applications of the proposed model are: (1) to guide the development of a new visualization system by specifying which are the main concepts that have to be considered and how they relate to each other; (2) to characterize or describe an already existing visualization system; and (3) to thoroughly compare existing visualization systems. To illustrate the use and applications of the model, several examples of information visualization systems are provided.
This paper describes an approach towards the interaction with 3D representations of large documen... more This paper describes an approach towards the interaction with 3D representations of large document collections. The goal was to provide the user with a highly dynamic environment in which even the very mapping strategy to position documents in space can be adjusted by the user depending on the specific task at hand, on his preferences, or on the context. A modification to the FDP algorithm is proposed, as well as a new gesture-based interaction paradigm in which the user can explore and search information in the collection just by simple hand movements. An experimental user evaluation was carried on to investigate the impact of the proposed approach on the precision of the mental model built by users through exploration, on the effectiveness in information search tasks, and on the general user satisfaction and perception of utility.
Proceedings of the 18th ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology, 2012
ABSTRACT Despite the powerful tools which are available nowadays to make easy the access to infor... more ABSTRACT Despite the powerful tools which are available nowadays to make easy the access to information contained in huge document collections, like WWW, satisfactory solutions haven’t been found yet which allow not only to easily locate potentially interesting documents but also to help users to build a mental model on a set of documents, and to allow users to explore and interact intuitively with a corpus and to reorganize it according to their interests and preferences. Three-dimensional representations of document collections have shown their usefulness in helping users visualize the thematic structure of the collection. However, a 3D visualization is not enough. New interaction paradigms and techniques need to be investigated.
An objective behavioral test for motivational traits has been developed taking as a reference the... more An objective behavioral test for motivational traits has been developed taking as a reference the structure of the Motivational Trait Questionnaire, which is a validated self-report questionnaire to measure motivational traits in the population. The objective test consists of a computer game, which makes it possible to evaluate a person’s motivational traits and to display them on the same scale as the Motivational Trait Questionnaire. To evaluate the validity of the results obtained in the measurement of motivational traits using the objective behavioral test, a study was carried out with 31 participants whose motivational traits were evaluated using the two methods, and the results obtained were compared to find out whether the two forms of assessment can be considered equivalent. Statistical tests support the high degree of similarity of the results, concluding that the objective behavioral test can be a useful instrument to assess motivational traits as an alternative to the sel...
ABSTRACT This paper seeks to give an affirmative answer to the question could problems in softwar... more ABSTRACT This paper seeks to give an affirmative answer to the question could problems in software development be mitigated through a more practical education? Although it is true that many of the problems affecting software development are the product of the complexity of the products developed, it is no less true that other problems are due to the immaturity of the software engineering profession. Higher education has a fundamental role to play in training future engineers. Even though software development is a new, difficult and complicated field, these characteristics should not be used as an excuse by educators for not taking up the challenge of supplying realistic training that is akin to professional practice. This type of training should encourage the development of skills such that students know how to react in the face of the project development problems in industry. We hold that this type of education will benefit industry, leading to a long-term improvement in some, though by no means all, of the problems faced by real-world software development. This paper discusses a case study-based approach, also describing the experience gained at the School of Computer Science of the Polytechnic University of Madrid after applying this approach for several academic years.
... Tel: (+34) 91 336 69 25 angelica@fi.upm.es ... 5. REFERENCES [1] Steve Benford, Wolfgang Prin... more ... Tel: (+34) 91 336 69 25 angelica@fi.upm.es ... 5. REFERENCES [1] Steve Benford, Wolfgang Prinz, John Mariani, Tom Rodden, Leandro Navarro, Elsa Bignoli, Charles Grant Brown and TorbjØrn Naslund, MOCCA - A Distributed Environment For Collaboration, Available from the ...
BACKGROUND eHealth and telehealth play a crucial role in assisting older adults who visit hospita... more BACKGROUND eHealth and telehealth play a crucial role in assisting older adults who visit hospitals frequently or who live in nursing homes and can benefit from staying at home while being cared for. Adapting to new technologies can be difficult for older people. Thus, to better apply these technologies to older adults’ lives, many studies have analyzed the acceptance factors for this particular population. However, there is not yet a consensual framework that can be used in further development and to search for solutions. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to present an integrated acceptance framework (IAF) for older users’ acceptance of eHealth based on 43 studies selected through a systematic review. METHODS We conducted a 4-step study. First, through a systematic review in the field of eHealth from 2010 to 2020, the acceptance factors and basic data for analysis were extracted. Second, we conducted a thematic analysis to group the factors into themes to propose an integrated framework fo...
Abstract:- The use of Virtual Environments (VEs) is increasing rapidly and people are demanding e... more Abstract:- The use of Virtual Environments (VEs) is increasing rapidly and people are demanding easier and more credible ways to interact with these new sites. We define a VE as a special kind of 3D virtual environment, inhabited by avatars which represent humans in the VE, or even autonomous agents. This kind of software was selected because of its increasing importance as the new future trend in interactive software applications. From a software engineering point of view, VEs can be seen as a special kind of information system, so they must be analyzed, designed, implemented, etc. Our aim is to improve software engineering's traditional software processes to achieve quality VEs. In this paper, we present the guidelines to perform properly the analysis of a VE.
... or hearing-impaired children, designed to assist them in acquiring and developing totalcommun... more ... or hearing-impaired children, designed to assist them in acquiring and developing totalcommunication ... first is responsible for the educational part in the strict sense, setting activities for ... changes depending on the child's best interests, to make progress with communication skills. ...
this paper, the most relevant results of both approaches are presented and, despite they have evo... more this paper, the most relevant results of both approaches are presented and, despite they have evolved independently, the relation between them is highlighted. Software process modelling tries to capture the main characteristics of the set of activities performed to obtain a software product, and a variety of models have been created for this purpose. A process model can be used either to represent the existing process in an organisation, or to define a recommended software process. Software process evaluation assesses the quality of the software process used in a software development organisation, being the SCE and ISO/IEC 15504 the two most commonly used evaluation methods. Software process evaluation can be the starting point of a software process improvement effort. This effort aims to direct the organisation's current practices to a state where the software process is continuously evaluated and improved
In the field of agents, there are a wide variety of them, such as learning agents, planning agent... more In the field of agents, there are a wide variety of them, such as learning agents, planning agents or communicative agents. One of the youngest members in the family are mobile agents, which provide us with the interesting feature of mobility in order to perform their tasks in different machines. In this paper, we will see some of the current uses of mobile agents and we will suggest how we could use these agents along with Virtual Environments in order to enhance them and open a new world of possibilities for the users of these applications.
During the last years, Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training have become a quite popular ... more During the last years, Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training have become a quite popular application of com-puter science to education, and are often used to allow stu-dents to experience situations that would be difficult, costly, or impossible in the real world. These systems involve very different technologies, ranging from computer graphics to artificial intelligence. However, little attention has been paid to software engi-neering issues, and most of these systems are developed in an ad-hoc way that does not allow the reuse of their com-ponents or even an easy modification of the application. We describe an agent-based software architecture for the tutoring side of the application, which is intended to be easily extended and modified. In addition, we show how this architecture has been integrated with a Virtual Envi-ronment to support realistic training. To encourage the use of this infrastructure, an authoring tool has been develop to aid human tutors to create new tra...
ABSTRACT In this paper we propose an architecture for the development of Intelligent Virtual Envi... more ABSTRACT In this paper we propose an architecture for the development of Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training, which is based on a col- lection of cooperative software agents. The first level of the architecture is an extension of the classical Intelligent Tutoring System architecture that adds to the expert, student, tutoring and communication modules a new module which is called World Module. Several software agents com- pose each module. Moreover, the proposed architecture includes agents able to simulate the behavior of human students and tutors, as well as agents able to plan the procedures to be taught (given an initial state and a desired final state) prior to the tutoring process.
The objective of this paper is to identify the most visited places through a sentiment analysis o... more The objective of this paper is to identify the most visited places through a sentiment analysis of the tweets posted by people who visited a specific region of a city. The analyzed data were related to preferences and opinions about tourist places. This paper outlines an architectural framework and a methodology to collect and analysis big data from twitter platform.
Introduction. In this article we propose a qualitative analysis tool ?a coding system - that can ... more Introduction. In this article we propose a qualitative analysis tool ?a coding system - that can support the formalisation of the information-seeking process in a specific field: research in computer science. Method. In order to elaborate the coding system, we have conducted a set of qualitative studies, more specifically a focus group and some individual interviews, and have analysed their results. Analysis. We provide a detailed description of how the qualitative studies were performed and how the subsequent analysis, refining and validation phases were carried out until we obtained the proposed coding system. Results. The coding system is presented as a list of hierarchically categorised codes that try to cover the full information-seeking process performed by researchers in computer science. In order to facilitate the understanding and later use of the codes, we also include a detailed description of each, together with real examples of use extracted from the qualitative studies...
Nowadays, visualization of large amounts of data has become a key issue for processing data in ma... more Nowadays, visualization of large amounts of data has become a key issue for processing data in many fields. This paper presents a conceptual model for describing information visualization systems. This conceptual model has been represented using the Unified Modeling Language, therefore it takes advantage of the understandability, unambiguity, flexibility, and adaptability provided by this notation. The proposed model outlines concepts such as visualization workspace, device, visual representation and its features, information visualization task and its effects on visualization, inter-item relationship, etc. The main applications of the proposed model are: (1) to guide the development of a new visualization system by specifying which are the main concepts that have to be considered and how they relate to each other; (2) to characterize or describe an already existing visualization system; and (3) to thoroughly compare existing visualization systems. To illustrate the use and applications of the model, several examples of information visualization systems are provided.
This paper describes an approach towards the interaction with 3D representations of large documen... more This paper describes an approach towards the interaction with 3D representations of large document collections. The goal was to provide the user with a highly dynamic environment in which even the very mapping strategy to position documents in space can be adjusted by the user depending on the specific task at hand, on his preferences, or on the context. A modification to the FDP algorithm is proposed, as well as a new gesture-based interaction paradigm in which the user can explore and search information in the collection just by simple hand movements. An experimental user evaluation was carried on to investigate the impact of the proposed approach on the precision of the mental model built by users through exploration, on the effectiveness in information search tasks, and on the general user satisfaction and perception of utility.
Proceedings of the 18th ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology, 2012
ABSTRACT Despite the powerful tools which are available nowadays to make easy the access to infor... more ABSTRACT Despite the powerful tools which are available nowadays to make easy the access to information contained in huge document collections, like WWW, satisfactory solutions haven’t been found yet which allow not only to easily locate potentially interesting documents but also to help users to build a mental model on a set of documents, and to allow users to explore and interact intuitively with a corpus and to reorganize it according to their interests and preferences. Three-dimensional representations of document collections have shown their usefulness in helping users visualize the thematic structure of the collection. However, a 3D visualization is not enough. New interaction paradigms and techniques need to be investigated.
An objective behavioral test for motivational traits has been developed taking as a reference the... more An objective behavioral test for motivational traits has been developed taking as a reference the structure of the Motivational Trait Questionnaire, which is a validated self-report questionnaire to measure motivational traits in the population. The objective test consists of a computer game, which makes it possible to evaluate a person’s motivational traits and to display them on the same scale as the Motivational Trait Questionnaire. To evaluate the validity of the results obtained in the measurement of motivational traits using the objective behavioral test, a study was carried out with 31 participants whose motivational traits were evaluated using the two methods, and the results obtained were compared to find out whether the two forms of assessment can be considered equivalent. Statistical tests support the high degree of similarity of the results, concluding that the objective behavioral test can be a useful instrument to assess motivational traits as an alternative to the sel...
ABSTRACT This paper seeks to give an affirmative answer to the question could problems in softwar... more ABSTRACT This paper seeks to give an affirmative answer to the question could problems in software development be mitigated through a more practical education? Although it is true that many of the problems affecting software development are the product of the complexity of the products developed, it is no less true that other problems are due to the immaturity of the software engineering profession. Higher education has a fundamental role to play in training future engineers. Even though software development is a new, difficult and complicated field, these characteristics should not be used as an excuse by educators for not taking up the challenge of supplying realistic training that is akin to professional practice. This type of training should encourage the development of skills such that students know how to react in the face of the project development problems in industry. We hold that this type of education will benefit industry, leading to a long-term improvement in some, though by no means all, of the problems faced by real-world software development. This paper discusses a case study-based approach, also describing the experience gained at the School of Computer Science of the Polytechnic University of Madrid after applying this approach for several academic years.
... Tel: (+34) 91 336 69 25 angelica@fi.upm.es ... 5. REFERENCES [1] Steve Benford, Wolfgang Prin... more ... Tel: (+34) 91 336 69 25 angelica@fi.upm.es ... 5. REFERENCES [1] Steve Benford, Wolfgang Prinz, John Mariani, Tom Rodden, Leandro Navarro, Elsa Bignoli, Charles Grant Brown and TorbjØrn Naslund, MOCCA - A Distributed Environment For Collaboration, Available from the ...
BACKGROUND eHealth and telehealth play a crucial role in assisting older adults who visit hospita... more BACKGROUND eHealth and telehealth play a crucial role in assisting older adults who visit hospitals frequently or who live in nursing homes and can benefit from staying at home while being cared for. Adapting to new technologies can be difficult for older people. Thus, to better apply these technologies to older adults’ lives, many studies have analyzed the acceptance factors for this particular population. However, there is not yet a consensual framework that can be used in further development and to search for solutions. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to present an integrated acceptance framework (IAF) for older users’ acceptance of eHealth based on 43 studies selected through a systematic review. METHODS We conducted a 4-step study. First, through a systematic review in the field of eHealth from 2010 to 2020, the acceptance factors and basic data for analysis were extracted. Second, we conducted a thematic analysis to group the factors into themes to propose an integrated framework fo...
Abstract:- The use of Virtual Environments (VEs) is increasing rapidly and people are demanding e... more Abstract:- The use of Virtual Environments (VEs) is increasing rapidly and people are demanding easier and more credible ways to interact with these new sites. We define a VE as a special kind of 3D virtual environment, inhabited by avatars which represent humans in the VE, or even autonomous agents. This kind of software was selected because of its increasing importance as the new future trend in interactive software applications. From a software engineering point of view, VEs can be seen as a special kind of information system, so they must be analyzed, designed, implemented, etc. Our aim is to improve software engineering's traditional software processes to achieve quality VEs. In this paper, we present the guidelines to perform properly the analysis of a VE.
... or hearing-impaired children, designed to assist them in acquiring and developing totalcommun... more ... or hearing-impaired children, designed to assist them in acquiring and developing totalcommunication ... first is responsible for the educational part in the strict sense, setting activities for ... changes depending on the child's best interests, to make progress with communication skills. ...
this paper, the most relevant results of both approaches are presented and, despite they have evo... more this paper, the most relevant results of both approaches are presented and, despite they have evolved independently, the relation between them is highlighted. Software process modelling tries to capture the main characteristics of the set of activities performed to obtain a software product, and a variety of models have been created for this purpose. A process model can be used either to represent the existing process in an organisation, or to define a recommended software process. Software process evaluation assesses the quality of the software process used in a software development organisation, being the SCE and ISO/IEC 15504 the two most commonly used evaluation methods. Software process evaluation can be the starting point of a software process improvement effort. This effort aims to direct the organisation's current practices to a state where the software process is continuously evaluated and improved
In the field of agents, there are a wide variety of them, such as learning agents, planning agent... more In the field of agents, there are a wide variety of them, such as learning agents, planning agents or communicative agents. One of the youngest members in the family are mobile agents, which provide us with the interesting feature of mobility in order to perform their tasks in different machines. In this paper, we will see some of the current uses of mobile agents and we will suggest how we could use these agents along with Virtual Environments in order to enhance them and open a new world of possibilities for the users of these applications.
During the last years, Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training have become a quite popular ... more During the last years, Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training have become a quite popular application of com-puter science to education, and are often used to allow stu-dents to experience situations that would be difficult, costly, or impossible in the real world. These systems involve very different technologies, ranging from computer graphics to artificial intelligence. However, little attention has been paid to software engi-neering issues, and most of these systems are developed in an ad-hoc way that does not allow the reuse of their com-ponents or even an easy modification of the application. We describe an agent-based software architecture for the tutoring side of the application, which is intended to be easily extended and modified. In addition, we show how this architecture has been integrated with a Virtual Envi-ronment to support realistic training. To encourage the use of this infrastructure, an authoring tool has been develop to aid human tutors to create new tra...
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Papers by Angélica de Antonio