Automatic detection of learner-style for adaptive eLearning

The advent of modern wireless technologies has seen a shift in focus towards the design and development of educational systems for deployment through mobile devices. The use of mobile phones, tablets and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) is steadily growing across the educational sector as a whole. Mobile learning (mLearning) systems developed for deployment on such devices hold great significance for the future of education. However, mLearning systems must be built around the particular learner’s needs based on both their motivation to learn and subsequent learning outcomes. This thesis investigates how biometric technologies, in particular accelerometer and eye-tracking technologies, could effectively be employed within the development of mobile learning systems to facilitate the needs of individual learners. The creation of personalised learning environments must enable the achievement of improved learning outcomes for users, particularly at an individual level. Therefore consideration is given to individual learning-style differences within the electronic learning (eLearning) space. The overall area of eLearning is considered and areas such as biometric technology and educational psychology are explored for the development of personalised educational systems. This thesis explains the basis of the author’s hypotheses and presents the results of several studies carried out throughout the PhD research period. These results show that both accelerometer and eye-tracking technologies can be employed as an Human Computer Interaction (HCI) method in the detection of student learning-styles to facilitate the provision of automatically adapted eLearning spaces. Finally the author provides recommendations for developers in the creation of adaptive mobile learning systems through the employment of biometric technology as a user interaction tool within mLearning applications. Further research paths are identified and a roadmap for future of research in this area is defined

Business Administration Students As Surrogates For IT Professionals Summary Of A Study

The purpose of this paper is to report a summary of the results of a study which examined the appropriateness of using business school students as surrogates for IT professionals by comparing cognitive styles, physiological characteristics, and basic demographic data among the two groups. Cognitive style refers to the way individuals think, perceive and remember information. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Kolb's Learning Style Inventory (LSI), and Human Information Processing Survey (HIPS) tests were used to examine cognitive style. Physiological characteristics examined include dichotic (different ear) listening and visual perception speed, both with laterality (right/leftness). This study identifies important differences between the students and IT professionals. The results have implications for both researchers and designers of future information systems

Affective Computing for Emotion Detection using Vision and Wearable Sensors

The research explores the opportunities, challenges, limitations, and presents advancements in computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions (Picard, 1997). The field is referred to as Affective Computing (AC) and is expected to play a major role in the engineering and development of computationally and cognitively intelligent systems, processors and applications in the future. Today the field of AC is bolstered by the emergence of multiple sources of affective data and is fuelled on by developments under various Internet of Things (IoTs) projects and the fusion potential of multiple sensory affective data streams. The core focus of this thesis involves investigation into whether the sensitivity and specificity (predictive performance) of AC, based on the fusion of multi-sensor data streams, is fit for purpose? Can such AC powered technologies and techniques truly deliver increasingly accurate emotion predictions of subjects in the real world? The thesis begins by presenting a number of research justifications and AC research questions that are used to formulate the original thesis hypothesis and thesis objectives. As part of the research conducted, a detailed state of the art investigations explored many aspects of AC from both a scientific and technological perspective. The complexity of AC as a multi-sensor, multi-modality, data fusion problem unfolded during the state of the art research and this ultimately led to novel thinking and origination in the form of the creation of an AC conceptualised architecture that will act as a practical and theoretical foundation for the engineering of future AC platforms and solutions. The AC conceptual architecture developed as a result of this research, was applied to the engineering of a series of software artifacts that were combined to create a prototypical AC multi-sensor platform known as the Emotion Fusion Server (EFS) to be used in the thesis hypothesis AC experimentation phases of the research. The thesis research used the EFS platform to conduct a detailed series of AC experiments to investigate if the fusion of multiple sensory sources of affective data from sensory devices can significantly increase the accuracy of emotion prediction by computationally intelligent means. The research involved conducting numerous controlled experiments along with the statistical analysis of the performance of sensors for the purposes of AC, the findings of which serve to assess the feasibility of AC in various domains and points to future directions for the AC field. The AC experiments data investigations conducted in relation to the thesis hypothesis used applied statistical methods and techniques, and the results, analytics and evaluations are presented throughout the two thesis research volumes. The thesis concludes by providing a detailed set of formal findings, conclusions and decisions in relation to the overarching research hypothesis on the sensitivity and specificity of the fusion of vision and wearables sensor modalities and offers foresights and guidance into the many problems, challenges and projections for the AC field into the future

Introduction to Development Engineering

This open access textbook introduces the emerging field of Development Engineering and its constituent theories, methods, and applications. It is both a teaching text for students and a resource for researchers and practitioners engaged in the design and scaling of technologies for low-resource communities. The scope is broad, ranging from the development of mobile applications for low-literacy users to hardware and software solutions for providing electricity and water in remote settings. It is also highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and theory from the social sciences as well as engineering and the natural sciences. The opening section reviews the history of “technology-for-development” research, and presents a framework that formalizes this body of work and begins its transformation into an academic discipline. It identifies common challenges in development and explains the book’s iterative approach of “innovation, implementation, evaluation, adaptation.” Each of the next six thematic sections focuses on a different sector: energy and environment; market performance; education and labor; water, sanitation and health; digital governance; and connectivity. These thematic sections contain case studies from landmark research that directly integrates engineering innovation with technically rigorous methods from the social sciences. Each case study describes the design, evaluation, and/or scaling of a technology in the field and follows a single form, with common elements and discussion questions, to create continuity and pedagogical consistency. Together, they highlight successful solutions to development challenges, while also analyzing the rarely discussed failures. The book concludes by reiterating the core principles of development engineering illustrated in the case studies, highlighting common challenges that engineers and scientists will face in designing technology interventions that sustainably accelerate economic development. Development Engineering provides, for the first time, a coherent intellectual framework for attacking the challenges of poverty and global climate change through the design of better technologies. It offers the rigorous discipline needed to channel the energy of a new generation of scientists and engineers toward advancing social justice and improved living conditions in low-resource communities around the world

Introduction to Development Engineering

This open access textbook introduces the emerging field of Development Engineering and its constituent theories, methods, and applications. It is both a teaching text for students and a resource for researchers and practitioners engaged in the design and scaling of technologies for low-resource communities. The scope is broad, ranging from the development of mobile applications for low-literacy users to hardware and software solutions for providing electricity and water in remote settings. It is also highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and theory from the social sciences as well as engineering and the natural sciences. The opening section reviews the history of “technology-for-development” research, and presents a framework that formalizes this body of work and begins its transformation into an academic discipline. It identifies common challenges in development and explains the book’s iterative approach of “innovation, implementation, evaluation, adaptation.” Each of the next six thematic sections focuses on a different sector: energy and environment; market performance; education and labor; water, sanitation and health; digital governance; and connectivity. These thematic sections contain case studies from landmark research that directly integrates engineering innovation with technically rigorous methods from the social sciences. Each case study describes the design, evaluation, and/or scaling of a technology in the field and follows a single form, with common elements and discussion questions, to create continuity and pedagogical consistency. Together, they highlight successful solutions to development challenges, while also analyzing the rarely discussed failures. The book concludes by reiterating the core principles of development engineering illustrated in the case studies, highlighting common challenges that engineers and scientists will face in designing technology interventions that sustainably accelerate economic development. Development Engineering provides, for the first time, a coherent intellectual framework for attacking the challenges of poverty and global climate change through the design of better technologies. It offers the rigorous discipline needed to channel the energy of a new generation of scientists and engineers toward advancing social justice and improved living conditions in low-resource communities around the world

Recognizing complex faces and gaits via novel probabilistic models

In the field of computer vision, developing automated systems to recognize people under unconstrained scenarios is a partially solved problem. In unconstrained sce- narios a number of common variations and complexities such as occlusion, illumi- nation, cluttered background and so on impose vast uncertainty to the recognition process. Among the various biometrics that have been emerging recently, this dissertation focus on two of them namely face and gait recognition. Firstly we address the problem of recognizing faces with major occlusions amidst other variations such as pose, scale, expression and illumination using a novel PRObabilistic Component based Interpretation Model (PROCIM) inspired by key psychophysical principles that are closely related to reasoning under uncertainty. The model basically employs Bayesian Networks to establish, learn, interpret and exploit intrinsic similarity mappings from the face domain. Then, by incorporating e cient inference strategies, robust decisions are made for successfully recognizing faces under uncertainty. PROCIM reports improved recognition rates over recent approaches. Secondly we address the newly upcoming gait recognition problem and show that PROCIM can be easily adapted to the gait domain as well. We scienti cally de ne and formulate sub-gaits and propose a novel modular training scheme to e ciently learn subtle sub-gait characteristics from the gait domain. Our results show that the proposed model is robust to several uncertainties and yields sig- ni cant recognition performance. Apart from PROCIM, nally we show how a simple component based gait reasoning can be coherently modeled using the re- cently prominent Markov Logic Networks (MLNs) by intuitively fusing imaging, logic and graphs. We have discovered that face and gait domains exhibit interesting similarity map- pings between object entities and their components. We have proposed intuitive probabilistic methods to model these mappings to perform recognition under vari- ous uncertainty elements. Extensive experimental validations justi es the robust- ness of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-art techniques.

Context-sensitive memory augmentation using recorded everyday life data

The recent rise of life-logging technologies and wearable computing gadgets allows the recording of data from our daily lives. Experiences make people what they are. The omnipresent tracking devices and their sensors experience the same things as their owners, thus creating e-memories and surrogate brains. Such life-logs or e-memories contain everything we can sense or our environment senses, like images, heart rates or locations. With this increase of digital personal data we explore challenges and solutions how to use this vast amount of data with the goal to support human memory. To do this, we used a user-centered approach. In the first step we conducted a series of focus groups and an online survey with the goal of understanding the requirements of life-logging tools. The results of the requirement analysis led to the development of a holistic concept of a digital life assistant. Our initial prototype leverages life-log data in form of a smart alarm clock, which provides an automatic morning briefing about the past and the upcoming day via audio and bedside projection. The prototype was finally evaluated in the field in a small-scale pilot study with the focus on the different presentation modes.Die aktuelle Entwicklung von Life-Logging-Technologien und tragbaren Computern ermöglicht die Aufzeichnung von Daten aus dem täglichen Leben. Erfahrungen machen Menschen zu dem was sie sind. Die allgegenwärtigen Aufnahmegeräte erleben dasselbe, wie ihre Besitzer und schaffen damit elektronische Erinnerungen und einen stellvertretenden Verstand. Diese Life-Logs oder elektronischen Erinnerungen beinhalten alles was deren Besitzer oder deren Umgebungen wahrnehmen, wie z. B. Bilder, Herzfrequenzen oder Standorte. Mit diesem Anstieg von digitalen persönlichen Daten erforschen wir Herausforderungen und Lösungen, wie diese gewaltige Datenmenge nutzbar gemacht und das menschliche Gedächtnis unterstützt werden kann. Daher haben wir einen nutzerorientierten Ansatz gewählt. Im ersten Schritt haben wir eine Serie von Fokusgruppen und eine Online-Umfrage durchgeführt, um die Anforderungen von Life-Logging Werkzeugen zu verstehen. Das Ergebnis der Anforderungsanalyse führte zu der Entwicklung eines ganzheitlichen Konzepts eines digitalen persönlichen Assistentens. Unser initialer Prototyp macht sich Life-Logging-Daten in Form eines intelligenten Weckers zu Nutze. Der Assistent bereitet automatisiert ein morgendliches Briefing über die Vergangenheit und den bevorstehenden Tag vor und präsentiert dieses mittels Sprache und einer bettseitigen Projektion. Schließlich wurde der Prototyp im praktischen Einsatz in einer kleinen Pilotstudie mit dem Fokus auf die verschiedenen Präsentationsmodi untersucht

Proceedings. International Online Symposium of Young Optometrists (SIYO 2022)

The VI International Symposium of Young Optometrists (SIYO 2022) took place from November 14-28 2022 in its usual online format. This conference aims to create a space where young optometry students and optometry practitioners are the protagonists. This book of proceedings contains the abstracts of the different contributions to the conference. Its contents are organizing in two sections: invited and sponsored oral communication and workshops, and free communication. This last section is divided in oral communications and poster communications, comprising the conference’s different thematic areas. The Organizing Committee thanks all the young and senior researchers that have contributed their work to the conference, the members of the Scientific Commettee for their careful reviews of the works and the different enterprises and accademic or offical entities that have sponsored this event.El Simposio Internacional de Jóvenes Optometristas pretende crear un espacio donde participen conjuntamente jóvenes estudiantes y profesionales de la optometría para facilitar la divulgación de sus investigaciones, así como el contacto y la colaboración. Este libro recopila los resúmenes de las diferentes contribuciones que se presentaron en su cuarta edición, que se celebró del 14 al 28 de noviembre de 2022 en su habitual formato en línea. Se organiza en dos secciones que comprenden las diferentes áreas temáticas de las conferencias, con el objetivo de mejorar la atención en el ámbito de la óptica y la optometría mediante la integración de la investigación en la práctica sanitaria.(AORG- 2022) Expediente CIAORG/2021/11

Forging a Stable Relationship?: Bridging the Law and Forensic Science Divide in the Academy

The marriage of law and science has most often been represented as discordant. While the law/science divide meme is hardly novel, concerns over the potentially deleterious coupling within the criminal justice system may have reached fever pitch. There is a growing chorus of disapproval addressed to ‘forensic science’, accompanied by the denigration of legal professionals for being unable or unwilling to forge a symbiotic relationship with forensic scientists. The 2009 National Academy of Sciences Report on forensic science heralds the latest call for greater collaboration between ‘law’ and ‘science’, particularly in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) yet little reaction has been apparent amid law and science faculties. To investigate the potential for interdisciplinary cooperation, the authors received funding for a project: ‘Lowering the Drawbridges: Forensic and Legal Education in the 21st Century’, hoping to stimulate both law and forensic science educators to seek mutually beneficial solutions to common educational problems and build vital connections in the academy. A workshop held in the UK, attended by academics and practitioners from scientific, policing, and legal backgrounds marked the commencement of the project. This paper outlines some of the workshop conclusions to elucidate areas of dissent and consensus, and where further dialogue is required, but aims to strike a note of optimism that the ‘cultural divide’ should not be taken to be so wide as to be beyond the legal and forensic science academy to bridge. The authors seek to demonstrate that legal and forensic science educators can work cooperatively to respond to critics and forge new paths in learning and teaching, creating an opportunity to take stock and enrich our discipline as well as answer critics. As Latham (2010:34) exhorts, we are not interested in turning lawyers into scientists and vice versa, but building a foundation upon which they can build during their professional lives: “Instead of melding the two cultures, we need to establish conditions of cooperation, mutual respect, and mutual reliance between them.” Law and forensic science educators should, and can assist with the building of a mutual understanding between forensic scientists and legal professionals, a significant step on the road to answering calls for the professions to minimise some of the risks associated with the use of forensic science in the criminal process. REFERENCES Latham, S.R. 2010, ‘Law between the cultures: C.P.Snow’s The Two Cultures and the problem of scientific illiteracy in law’ 32 Technology in Society, 31-34. KEYWORDS forensic science education legal education law/science divid