1,507 research outputs found

    Breaking Virtual Barriers : Investigating Virtual Reality for Enhanced Educational Engagement

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    Virtual reality (VR) is an innovative technology that has regained popularity in recent years. In the field of education, VR has been introduced as a tool to enhance learning experiences. This thesis presents an exploration of how VR is used from the context of educators and learners. The research employed a mixed-methods approach, including surveying and interviewing educators, and conducting empirical studies to examine engagement, usability, and user behaviour within VR. The results revealed educators are interested in using VR for a wide range of scenarios, including thought exercises, virtual field trips, and simulations. However, they face several barriers to incorporating VR into their practice, such as cost, lack of training, and technical challenges. A subsequent study found that virtual reality can no longer be assumed to be more engaging than desktop equivalents. This empirical study showed that engagement levels were similar in both VR and non-VR environments, suggesting that the novelty effect of VR may be less pronounced than previously assumed. A study against a VR mind mapping artifact, VERITAS, demonstrated that complex interactions are possible on low-cost VR devices, making VR accessible to educators and students. The analysis of user behaviour within this VR artifact showed that quantifiable strategies emerge, contributing to the understanding of how to design for collaborative VR experiences. This thesis provides insights into how the end-users in the education space perceive and use VR. The findings suggest that while educators are interested in using VR, they face barriers to adoption. The research highlights the need to design VR experiences, with understanding of existing pedagogy, that are engaging with careful thought applied to complex interactions, particularly for collaborative experiences. This research contributes to the understanding of the potential of VR in education and provides recommendations for educators and designers to enhance learning experiences using VR

    Mining Architectural Responsibilities and Components from Textual Specifications Written in Natural Language

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    Given the enormous growth and complexity of modern software systems, architectural design has become an essential concern for almost every software development project. One of the most challenging steps for designing the best architecture for a certain piece of software is the analysis of requirements, usually written in natural language by engineers not familiar with specific design formalisms. The Use Case Map (UCM) notation can be used to map requirements into proper design concerns, usually known as responsibilities. In this paper, we introduce an approach for mining candidate architectural responsibilities and components from textual descriptions of requirements using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, in order to relieve software designers of this complex and time-consuming task. High accuracy and precision rates achieved by applying part-of-speech (POS) tagging with domain rules and semantic clustering to textual requirement documents, suggest a great potential for providing assistance to software designers during early stages of development.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

    Technical Training to Nonprofit Managers Influences Using Big Data Technology in Business Operations

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    This nonexperimental, survey-based online quantitative study on nonprofit managers’ technical training measures the extent of the influence on big data technology use. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology is a theoretical framework to determine whether business managers are trained to have know-how in using big data technology. This study followed a quantitative methodology to help narrow the gap in research between what is not known in relation to the nonprofit manager’s technical training on the use of big data technology. Today’s data is the most critical asset, but progress toward big data technology-oriented usage needs to be accessed by the nonprofit. Nonprofits need to use big data technology to gain insights into identifying the program activities and monitor them to make better decisions that maximize societal impact. Big data technology allows nonprofit managers to be effective by getting insights into the problem-solving of the social programs where they operate to reduce unemployment, poverty, social exclusion, and low education levels. This study seeks to answer how nonprofit managers differ in technical training (facilitating conditions) using big data technology compared to managers who have not used big data technology to manage business operations. The study may contribute to bridging existing research gaps in managers’ technical training and using big data technology

    SurfaceCast: Ubiquitous, Cross-Device Surface Sharing

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    Real-time online interaction is the norm today. Tabletops and other dedicated interactive surface devices with direct input and tangible interaction can enhance remote collaboration, and open up new interaction scenarios based on mixed physical/virtual components. However, they are only available to a small subset of users, as they usually require identical bespoke hardware for every participant, are complex to setup, and need custom scenario-specific applications. We present SurfaceCast, a software toolkit designed to merge multiple distributed, heterogeneous end-user devices into a single, shared mixed-reality surface. Supported devices include regular desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and mixed-reality headsets, as well as projector-camera setups and dedicated interactive tabletop systems. This device-agnostic approach provides a fundamental building block for exploration of a far wider range of usage scenarios than previously feasible, including future clients using our provided API. In this paper, we discuss the software architecture of SurfaceCast, present a formative user study and a quantitative performance analysis of our framework, and introduce five example application scenarios which we enhance through the multi-user and multi-device features of the framework. Our results show that the hardware- and content-agnostic architecture of SurfaceCast can run on a wide variety of devices with sufficient performance and fidelity for real-time interaction

    Machine Learning Algorithm for the Scansion of Old Saxon Poetry

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    Several scholars designed tools to perform the automatic scansion of poetry in many languages, but none of these tools deal with Old Saxon or Old English. This project aims to be a first attempt to create a tool for these languages. We implemented a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model to perform the automatic scansion of Old Saxon and Old English poems. Since this model uses supervised learning, we manually annotated the Heliand manuscript, and we used the resulting corpus as labeled dataset to train the model. The evaluation of the performance of the algorithm reached a 97% for the accuracy and a 99% of weighted average for precision, recall and F1 Score. In addition, we tested the model with some verses from the Old Saxon Genesis and some from The Battle of Brunanburh, and we observed that the model predicted almost all Old Saxon metrical patterns correctly misclassified the majority of the Old English input verses

    Perpetuum mobile: conocimiento, investigación e innovación en la sociedad actual

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    La Educación se ha erigido como uno de los ejes fundamentales para la vertebración de la Cultura, tanto en Oriente como en Occidente. Disciplinas clásicas como la antropología y, más concretamente, la filosofía, la música, las matemáticas, el ejercicio físico y mental, la nutrición, la geografía, la historia o la tecnología, entre otras materias impregnadas por el Humanismo, se nos presentan como campos de investigación, de formación pedagógica y, en definitiva, de difusión del conocimiento. A este respecto, las aportaciones, aproximaciones, propuestas, análisis e investigaciones que conforman la presente edición crítica comparten la voluntad humanística de experimentar, conocer y compartir las diferentes disciplinas. Les invitamos, así pues, a leer, disfrutar y descubrir en los 13 capítulos que conforman este volumen el provecho de estas reminiscencias humanísticas en la Educación

    Seven Years of Design Research at Politecnico di Milano

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    Which are the main research funds currently accessed by the Department of Design? What are the topics explored through them and which are the interconnections with the Department core research activities? Also, what are the research products delivered, the reached outcomes, and the expected impacts BY these research projects? The book synthesises the results of a qualitative analysis conducted over 32 research (out of 96) projects coordinated or participated in by the researchers of the Department in the timeframe 2014-mid 2021. The results of the analysis confirm the high-level attractiveness of the Department research profile on core topics such as design methodology, service design, and health. However, more interestingly, the analysis shows a significant variety of new topics and themes that emerge as new research questions for the Department, such as the role of design in public sector innovation, ethics, or policy design. The publication provides a snapshot of the topics addressed through the competitive research projects, the dimension of such strands of investigations, the typology and features of results achieved, as well as their relationship to the Department's basic research lines. The relationship and interplay among the outputs, outcomes, and impacts of the funded research is then elaborated in impact pathways, opening up reflections about the upcoming and future of Design research. The findings of the analysis aim to capture the present to understand future directions in terms of scientific, societal, technological and economic aspects. The volume addresses an academic audience from long terms researchers the field of design and other closely related scientific disciplinary fields at the national and international levels, to young researchers approaching the world of design research

    Exploring how workspace awareness cues affect distributed meeting outcome

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    Nowadays, using the online whiteboard to share knowledge in distributed meetings has become a common practice. Existing studies and practices have attempted to visualize attendees’ interactive activities in whiteboard tools to support the virtual team’s workspace awareness (WA). However, the impact of such visual cues on meeting success remains unclear. For this purpose, we primarily explore whether and to what extent WA cues are conducive to meeting outcome. This study applies activity theory to guide our prototype design and research analysis. A customized web-based whiteboard interface is implemented under two conditions. We conduct a study with 42 subjects in a distributed meeting scenario via a controlled experiment. Also, we analyze the system affordance via user experience. The results demonstrate that the benefits of WA cues to meeting outcome are especially embodied in goal attainment and quality of contributions, but not effectively supported in productivity and user satisfaction. Moreover, subjects report that they do not feel distracted by the system’s visual cues because they do not notice those cues most of the time and use them only when needed. Drawing upon findings from our trial work, we provide several implications for designing a collaborative knowledge-sharing environment to assist the visual support of WA in distributed meetings

    Periscope: A Robotic Camera System to Support Remote Physical Collaboration

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    We investigate how robotic camera systems can offer new capabilities to computer-supported cooperative work through the design, development, and evaluation of a prototype system called Periscope. With Periscope, a local worker completes manipulation tasks with guidance from a remote helper who observes the workspace through a camera mounted on a semi-autonomous robotic arm that is co-located with the worker. Our key insight is that the helper, the worker, and the robot should all share responsibility of the camera view--an approach we call shared camera control. Using this approach, we present a set of modes that distribute the control of the camera between the human collaborators and the autonomous robot depending on task needs. We demonstrate the system's utility and the promise of shared camera control through a preliminary study where 12 dyads collaboratively worked on assembly tasks. Finally, we discuss design and research implications of our work for future robotic camera systems that facilitate remote collaboration.Comment: This is a pre-print of the article accepted for publication in PACM HCI and will be presented at CSCW 202

    Modelo de realidad aumentada que considere características cognitivas para aprendizaje de niños en edad escolar

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    Desarrolla el modelo de Realidad Aumentada denominado “Model for Augmented Reality Applications with Gestural Interface for Children (MARAGIC)”. El modelo considera las características cognitivas de niños en edad escolar, su validación y aplicación en el diseño y desarrollo de dos Recursos Educativos Digitales (RED) que se emplean como herramientas de apoyo en dos casos de estudio donde participan estudiantes que asisten al 3° grado de Educación General Básica (EGB) en la ciudad de Riobamba de Ecuador. El trabajo pretende ser un aporte que oriente el adecuado diseño y desarrollo de este tipo de herramientas tecnológicas educativas. Como método de estudio, se utiliza un enfoque de investigación cualitativa en el que la recolección de datos se realiza mediante la aplicación de una encuesta con elementos de referencia a la percepción tanto a los niños participantes del estudio como a un grupo de docentes de nivel medio y superior frente a la utilización de los recursos basados en MARAGIC. Se realiza además un análisis cuantitativo que permite comparar el rendimiento académico de los estudiantes antes y después de usar dichos recursos para los dos casos de estudio ejecutados. Los resultados señalan que los docentes encuestados perciben al modelo desarrollado como una oportunidad para mejorar los procesos de aprendizaje y que, la utilización de los recursos educativos desarrollados siguiendo las orientaciones del modelo MARAGIC mejora significativamente el rendimiento académico de los estudiantes participantes del estudio en sus clases de matemática. La aplicación de este tipo de recurso facilita los procesos de aprendizaje de los niños, mismos que se muestran motivados y participan activamente en las actividades propuestas en los recursos educativos diseñados a partir del modelo
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