Accessibility evaluation of chats and forums in e-learning environments

Proceedings of: 2013 International Conference on Frontiers in Education: Computer Science & Computer Engineering (FECS'13): WORLDCOMP'13, July 22-25, 2013, Las Vegas, Nevada (USA)Collaborative learning is useful for students in their learning process. Nowadays, most e-learning systems include Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) tools like chats and forums; however, are they accessible for everybody? This paper presents a heuristic evaluation of accessibility of two CSCL tools (chat and forum) in four web-based, open-source Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS): Moodle, ATutor, dotLRN and Claroline. The evaluation results show that the CSCL tools evaluated present accessibility barriers which are a handicap for many students who want to use the LCMSs Moreover, some recommendations are offered in order to improve the accessibility of the evaluated tools. Considering these recommendations in the development of the evaluated tools, all students could participate actively in the collaborative tasks proposed by teachersThis research work has been supported by the Regional Government of Madrid under the Research Network MA2VICMR (S2009/TIC-1542) and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy under the project MULTIMEDICA (TIN2010-20644-C03-01)Publicad

Dinamička distribucija sigurnosnih ključeva i koalicijski protokol IP adresa za mobilne ad hoc mreže

In mobile adhoc networks (MANETs) a tree-based dynamic address auto-configuration protocol (T-DAAP) is one of the best protocols designed for address assignment as far as the network throughput and packet delays are concerned. Moreover, MANET security is an important factor for many applications given that any node can listen to the channel and overhear the packets being transmitted. In this paper, we merge the address assignment with the security key delivery into one protocol, such that a node in the MANET is configured with IP address and security key simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, no single protocol provides concurrent assignment of IP addresses and security keys for MANET nodes. The proposed method, which is based on T-DAAP, shows significant enhancements in the required control packets needed for assigning network nodes IP addresses and security keys, MAC layer packets, total end-to-end delay, and channel throughput over those obtained when using separate protocols. Additionally, it provides not only efficient security keys to the nodes from the first moment they join the network, but also secure delivery of the address and security key to all participating nodes. It is noteworthy to mention that providing a complete security model for MANET to detect and countermeasure network security threats and attacks is beyond the scope of our proposed protocol.Kod mobilnih ad hoc mreža (MANET) dinamički protokol za autokonfiguraciju adresa baziran na stablu (T-DAAP) je jedan od najboljih protokola dizajniranih za dodjelu adresa iz perspektive propusnosti mreže i i kašnjenja paketa. štoviše, sigurnost MANET-a je važan faktor za mnoge aplikacije s obzirom da bilo koji čvor može osluškivati kanal i slučajno čuti pakete koji se šalju. U ovom radu, dodjela adresa i dostava sigurnosnih ključeva spojeni su u jedan protokol tako da je čvor u MANET-u konfiguriran simultano s IP adresom i sigurnosnim ključem. Prema saznanjima autora, niti jedan postojeći protokol ne pruža istovremeno dodjeljivanje IP adrese i sigurnosnog ključa za MANET čvorove. Predložena metoda, koja se bazira na T-DAAP-u, pokazuje značajna poboljšanja u odnosu na metode koje koriste odvojene porotokole, kod traženih kontrolnih paketa koji su potrebni za dodjeljivanje IP adresa i sigurnosnih ključeva čvorovima mreže, MAC paketa, ukupnog end-to-end kašnjenja i propusnosti kanala. Dodatno pruža ne samo efikasne sigurnosne ključeve čvorovima od trenutka kad se priključe mreži, nego i sigurno dostavljanje adrese i sigurnosnog ključa svim čvorovima koji sudjeluju u mreži. Važno je spomenuti da je pružanje cjelokupnog sigurnosnog modela za MANET koji detektira dodatno i protumjere prijetnjama i napadima na sigurnost mreže izvan dosega predloženog protokola

Guiding the Creation of Choreographed Processes with Multiple Instances Based on Data Models

Choreography in business processes is used as a mechanism to communicate various organizations, by providing a method to isolate the behaviour of each part and keeping the privacy of their data. Nev ertheless, choreography diagrams can also be necessary inside an orga nization when a single instance of a process needs to interact and be synchronized with multiple instances of another process simultaneously. The description, by business experts, and the implementation, by devel opers, of these choreographed models are highly complex, especially when the activities involved in the processes exchange various data objects and with different cardinalities. We propose the automatic detection of the synchronization points, when a choreographed process model is needed. The choreography will be derived from the analysis of the process model, data objects consumed and generated through the process, and the data conceptual model that relates the data objects. A graphical tool has been developed to support where the synchronization points must be included, helping to decide about the patterns that describe how a single model can be transformed into a choreographed model.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2015-63502-C3-2-

Deriving information from spatial sampling floor-based personnel detection system

Field of study: Electrical & computer engineering.Dr. Harry W. Tyrer, Thesis Supervisor.Includes vita."May 2017."Research has shown and identified a clear link between human gait characteristics and different medical conditions. Therefore, a change in certain gait parameters may be predictive of future falls and adverse events in older adults such as physical functional decline and fall risks. We describe a system that is unobtrusive and continuously monitors the gait during daily activities of elderly people. The early assessment of gait decline will benefit the senior by providing an indication of the risk of falls. We developed a low cost floor-based personnel detection system; we call a smart carpet, which consists of a sensor pad placed under a carpet; the electronics reads walking activity. The smart carpet systems is used as a component of an automated health monitoring system, which helps enable independent living for elderly people and provide a practical environment that improves quality of life, reduces healthcare costs and promotes independence. In this dissertation, we extended the functionalities of the smart carpet to improve its ability to detect falls, estimate gait parameters and compared it to GAITRite system. We counted number of people walking on the carpet in order to distinguish the plurality of people from fall event. Additionally we studied the characteristics and the behavior of the sensor's scavenged signal. Results showed that our system detects falls, using computational intelligence techniques, with 96.2% accuracy and 81% sensitivity and 97.8% specificity. The system reliably estimates the gait parameters; walking speed, stride length and stride time with percentage errors of 1.43%, -4.32%, and -5.73% respectively. Our system can count the number of people on the carpet with high accuracy, and we ran tests with up to four people. We were able to use computational features of the generated waveform, by extracting the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), and using formal computation intelligence to distinguish different people with an average accuracy of 82%, given that the experiments were performed within the same day.Includes bibliographical references

Skip Trie Matching for Real-Time OCR Output Error Corrrection on Smartphones

Many Visually Impaired individuals are managing their daily activities with the help of smartphones. While there are many vision-based mobile applications to identify products, there is a relative dearth of applications for extracting useful nutrition information. In this report, we study the performance of existing OCR systems available for the Android platform, and choose the best to extract the nutrition facts information from U.S grocery store packages. We then provide approaches to improve the results of text strings produced by the Tesseract OCR engine on image segments of nutrition tables automatically extracted by an Android 2.3.6 smartphone application using real-time video streams of grocery products. We also present an algorithm, called Skip Trie Matching (STM), for real-time OCR output error correction on smartphones. The algorithm’s performance is compared with Apache Lucene’s spell checker. Our evaluation indicates that the average run time of the STM algorithm is lower than Lucene’s. (68 pages

A HADOOP-ENABLED SENSOR-ORIENTED INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY ABOUT TARGET-OF-INTEREST

To obtain a real-time situational awareness about the specific behavior of targets-of-interest using large-scale sensory data-set, this paper presents a generic sensor-oriented information system based on Hadoop Ecosystem, which is denoted as SOIS-Hadoop for simplicity.  Robotic heterogeneous sensor nodes bound by wireless sensor network are used to track things-of-interest. Hadoop Ecosystem enables highly scalable and fault-tolerant acquisition, fusion and storage, retrieval, and processing of sensory data. In addition, SOIS-Hadoop employs temporally and spatially dependent mathematical model to formulate the expected behavior of targets-of-interest, based on which the observed behavior of targets can be analyzed and evaluated.  Using two real-world sensor-oriented information processing and analysis problems as examples, the mechanism of SOIS-Hadoop is also presented and validated in detail

La dimensión social de los videojuegos 'online': de las comunidades de jugadores a los 'e-sports'

The experienced advances by ICT have provoked changes in the way to understand and to consume media. Video games are not alien to these changes. To the exponential growth of their use and relevance, new social structures are joined, marked by the network. The active communities of players connected through the Internet, change the conception of the user of video games lonely and the way to consume this product of electronic entertainment. An example of such evolution of the consumption of video games is those which support electronic sports (e-sports). Such a phenomenon suggests a transition of the games understood as an entertainment to its conception as a social event, spectacle and, ultimately, professional competition. This work offers an approach to the changes that the consumption habits of video games have experienced since the popularization of Internet and the web 2.0, focusing on the influence that they have on player communities. The analysis of existing thematic literature allows you to set the steps of this evolution and to advance future lines of research. Finally, it is confirmed the existing relationship between the social dimension of video games and the participatory culture, focusing on e-sports future.Los avances experimentados por las TIC han provocado cambios en la forma de entender y consumir los medios de comunicación. Los videojuegos no han sido ajenos a estos cambios. Al crecimiento exponencial de su uso y de su relevancia, se unen nuevas estructuras sociales marcadas por la red. Las comunidades activas de jugadores conectados a través de Internet modifican la concepción del usuario de videojuegos en solitario y la forma de consumir este producto de ocio electrónico. Un ejemplo de esa evolución del consumo de videojuegos es el que suponen los deportes electrónicos o e-sports. Dicho fenómeno propone una transición de los videojuegos entendidos como entretenimiento a su concepción como evento social, espectáculo y, en última instancia, competición profesional. Este trabajo ofrece un acercamiento a los cambios que han experimentado los hábitos de consumo de videojuegos desde la popularización de Internet y la web 2.0, centrándose en la influencia que estos ejercen sobre las comunidades de jugadores. El análisis de la bibliografía temática existente permite establecer las pautas de esa evolución y avanzar futuras líneas de investigación. Finalmente, se constata la relación existente entre la dimensión social de los videojuegos y la cultura participativa, fijando la mirada de futuras líneas de investigación construidas alrededor del fenómeno de los deportes electrónicos.

The moderating role of coping mechanisms and being an e-sport player between psychiatric symptoms and gaming disorder: online survey

Background: The emerging popularity of playing video games (gaming) as a hobby and as a professional sport raises awareness about both the benefits and possible downsides of the activity. Although a healthy and passionate hobby for most, a minority of gamers experience addiction-like symptoms and are considered to have gaming disorder (GD). GD has previously been found to be related to aversive conditions, such as depression or anxiety, as well as putatively maladaptive coping strategies. Objective: The aim of this study is twofold: to explore the moderating effect of different coping strategies and type of video game usage (professional [e-sport] or recreational) on the relationship between psychiatric symptoms and GD. Methods: A sample of 3476 gamers (n=3133, 90.13% males; mean age 23.20, SD 6.48 years) was recruited via the website and social networking site of the most popular gaming magazine in Hungary (GameStar). Results: The main effect of psychiatric symptoms was moderate to large in all models, whereas the moderation effects were significant (P<.001) for 4 out of 8 coping strategies (ie, self-blame/self-distraction, denial, emotional/social support, and active coping). However, the explained variance of the models only increased negligibly (from 0.3% to 0.5%) owing to the moderation effect. The direction of the moderations was as expected (ie, putatively maladaptive strategies were associated with more GD symptoms when the level of psychiatric symptoms was high, while putatively adaptive strategies were associated with less). Furthermore, no considerable moderation effect of the player type (recreational vs professional players) was found on the association between psychiatric symptoms and GD (β=.04; P=.02; 0.1% change in the explained variance). Conclusions: Future studies should be designed to better understand coping-related mechanisms in the context of video gaming and GD

Esports y ciencia: sintonizando con el fenómeno de los deportes electrónicos

The cultural changes suffered in the last decades have originated different emergent phenomena that have burst into our time. Electronic sports (esports) have been consolidated as one of them, giving rise to their study from multiple areas, especially from the sciences of physical-sports activity (leisure, performance, professionalization ...). Therefore, this work illustrates how the scientific-academic world is currently addressing this phenomenon, using the PRISMA-P protocol for systematic reviews and the databases Scopus and Web of Science as main sources of information. The results provide a total of 106 works on the subject, which have been categorized into four thematic axes: physical activity and health; concept of sport; esports as a social phenomenon; and marketing and legal framework. As a main result, there is a scarce corpus of scientific-academic knowledge about esports, in comparison with its social impact. The dispersion in the topics from which it is approached is due, fundamentally, to the almost non-existent legal regulatory framework, besides the abstract of the phenomenon to explain it from the traditional concept of sportLos cambios culturales sufridos en las últimas déca-das han originado diferentes fenómenos emergentes que han irrumpido en nuestro tiempo. Los deportes electrónicos (esports) se han consolidado como uno de ellos, dando lugar a su estudio desde múltiples áreas, especialmente desde las ciencias de la actividad físico-deportiva (ocio, rendimiento, profesionalización...). Por todo ello, el presente trabajo ilustra cómo el mundo científico-académico está abordando este fenómeno en la actualidad, sirviéndose del protocolo PRISMA-P para revisiones sistemáticas y de las bases de datos Scopus y Web of Science como fuentes principales de informa-ción. Los resultados aportan un total de 106 trabajos en torno a la temática, que se han categorizado en cuatro ejes: actividad física y salud; concepto de deporte; los esports como fenómeno social; y marketing y marco legal. Como resultado principal, se aprecia que hay un escaso corpus de conocimiento científico-académico so-bre esports, en comparación con el impacto social del mismo. La dispersión en las temáticas desde las que se aborda se debe, fundamentalmente, al casi inexistente marco regulatorio legal, además de lo abstracto del fe-nómeno para explicarlo desde el concepto tradicional de deporteActividad Física y Deport

Os “E’s” dos e-sports: uma análise polissêmica do esporte eletrônico

O esporte é um fenômeno que se desenvolve junto da sociedade. O esporte moderno, que tem suas origens no século XIX, desenvolve-se para um esporte contemporâneo e, com isso, novas práticas surgem e os praticantes se multiplicam. Dentro dessas novas práticas podemos citar os esportes eletrônicos, chamados de e-Sports, que se desenvolvem a partir dos anos 1970, com o fomento de competições e a profissionalização do jogo e dos jogadores. Desta forma, eles passam a adquirir características de esporte, fazendo com que a questão sobre os e-Sports estarem ou não dentro da definição de esporte começa a ser fomentada. Esta é uma questão polêmica, visto que ainda se tenta definir o esporte e os próprios e-Sports. Buscando fazer uma aproximação do esporte eletrônico com o fenômeno esportivo, este trabalho objetiva analisar os e-Sports através da lente esportiva, por meio do modelo analítico de Marchi Jr., intitulado “Teoria dos 5 E’s”