Interactive Virtual Training: Implementation for Early Career Teachers to Practice Classroom Behavior Management

Teachers that are equipped with the skills to manage and prevent disruptive behaviors increase the potential for their students to achieve academically and socially. Student success increases when prevention strategies and effective classroom behavior management (CBM) are implemented in the classroom. However, teachers with less than 5 years of experience, early career teachers (ECTs), are ill equipped to handle disruptive students. ECTs describe disruptive behaviors as a major factor for stress given their limited training in CBM. As a result, disruptive behaviors are reported by ECTs as one of the main reasons for leaving the field. Virtual training environments (VTEs) combined with advances in virtual social agents can support the training of CBM. Although VTEs for teachers already exist, requirements to guide future research and development of similar training systems have not been defined. We propose a set of six requirements for VTEs for teachers. Our requirements were established from a survey of the literature and from iterative lifecycle activities to build our own VTE for teachers. We present different evaluations of our VTE using methodologies and metrics we developed to assess whether all requirements were met. Our VTE simulates interactions with virtual animated students based on real classroom situations to help ECTs practice their CBM. We enhanced our classroom simulator to further explore two aspects of our requirements: interaction devices and emotional virtual agents. Interactions devices were explored by comparing the effect of immersive technologies on users\u27 experience (UX) such as presence, co-presence, engagement and believability. We adapted our VTE originally built for desktop computer, to be compatible with two immersive VR platforms. Results show that our VTE generates high levels of UX across all VR platforms. Furthermore, we enhanced our virtual students to display emotions using facial expressions as current studies do not address whether emotional virtual agents provide the same level of UX across different VR platforms. We assessed the effects of VR platforms and display of emotions on UX. Our analysis shows that facial expressions have greater impact when using a desktop computer. We propose future work on immersive VTEs using emotional virtual agents

Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

Using a Research Domain Ontology as a driver for Technology Commercialization

O conceito Operator 4.0 desempenha um papel fundamental no tipo de indústria em que nos encontramos hoje, a Indústria 4.0. Durante a revisão da literatura, tornou-se evidente que não existia um modelo de referência para apoiar o desenvolvimento de conceitos inovadores para o Operador 4.0. Por conseguinte, esta investigação centrar-se-á no seu desenvolvimento, em parceria com o Fraunhofer Portugal Research Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions - Fraunhofer AICOS. Como resultado, foi criada uma ontologia, e utilizada a abordagem de Design Science Approach para auxiliar no seu desenvolvimento, seguida de uma primeira validação por especialistas da Fraunhofer Portugal. Posteriormente, foi realizada uma sessão de Focus Group, também com especialistas da Fraunhofer Portugal, que participaram numa segunda e última validação da ontologia, bem como na avaliação das questões de competência. Este estudo contribuiu para uma melhor compreensão de como a organização do conhecimento (Frishammar, Lichtenthaler, & Rundquist, 2012) num determinado domínio tecnológico pode ajudar na tomada de decisões quando é proposto um novo projeto de investigação que pode resultar em propriedade intelectual futura. Esta propriedade intelectual seria licenciada ou explorada de alguma forma no futuro. Após a validação da ontologia, foi realizado um workshop para demonstrar a segunda contribuição desta dissertação, uma proposta sobre como utilizar a ontologia como motor para iniciar o processo tecnológico no contexto da identificação de oportunidades de comercialização futura da tecnologia. No final, este estudo respondeu à pergunta de investigação colocada e às questões de competência relacionadas. Consequentemente, pode-se dizer que com esta investigação, foi eficazmente desenvolvido um modelo de referência para apoiar a construção de soluções Operador 4.0 para a indústria.The Operator 4.0 concept plays a key role in the kind of industry we find ourselves in today, Industry 4.0. In the course of the literature review, it became evident that there was an absence of a reference model to support the development of innovative concepts for Operator 4.0. Therefore, this research will focus on its development, in partnership with Fraunhofer Portugal Research Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions - Fraunhofer AICOS. As a result, an ontology was created, and Design Science Approach used to help its development, followed by a first validation by Fraunhofer Portugal experts. A Focus Group session was held with experts from Fraunhofer Portugal, who participated in the validation of the ontology as well as the evaluation of the competence questions, as a final validation. This study contributed to a better understanding of how knowledge organization (Frishammar, Lichtenthaler, & Rundquist, 2012) in a given technological domain might assist in decision making when a new research project is proposed that may result in future intellectual property. This intellectual property would be licensed or exploited in some way in the future. Following the ontology validation, a workshop was held to demonstrate the second contribution of this dissertation, a proposal on how to use the ontology as a driver to start the technology process in the context of identifying opportunities for future commercialization of the technology. In the end, this study answered the research question and related competence questions. Therefore, it can be said that with this research, a reference model has been effectively developed to support the construction of Operator 4.0 solutions for industry

Human-Computer Interaction

In this book the reader will find a collection of 31 papers presenting different facets of Human Computer Interaction, the result of research projects and experiments as well as new approaches to design user interfaces. The book is organized according to the following main topics in a sequential order: new interaction paradigms, multimodality, usability studies on several interaction mechanisms, human factors, universal design and development methodologies and tools