Work-In-Progress Paper: WebXR to support student wellbeing and anxiety

The COVID-19 pandemic social distancing measures had immense evidenced impact on student life in higher education affecting their mental health in many ways. In addition, remote working measures taken by Higher Education organizations to protect students and staff created an additional barrier for students seeking support at a stage they feel the most vulnerable. This paper presents a work-in-progress study that focuses on investigating ways of designing an online system for self-assessment symptoms of anxiety based on which available support is provided in a personalized and emotionally engaging manner. The project builds and compares three prototypes: a conventional web site; a VR immersive environment with a single virtual human playing the role of a student life advisor; and an immersive environment with more than one virtual humans interacting with the user aiming to study which system engages and assists vulnerable students more effectively, contributing to a better user experience. The paper presents that project motivations, its aims and objectives, the proposed research methodology and the expected contributions to knowledge

A methodology for full-system power modeling in heterogeneous data centers

The need for energy-awareness in current data centers has encouraged the use of power modeling to estimate their power consumption. However, existing models present noticeable limitations, which make them application-dependent, platform-dependent, inaccurate, or computationally complex. In this paper, we propose a platform-and application-agnostic methodology for full-system power modeling in heterogeneous data centers that overcomes those limitations. It derives a single model per platform, which works with high accuracy for heterogeneous applications with different patterns of resource usage and energy consumption, by systematically selecting a minimum set of resource usage indicators and extracting complex relations among them that capture the impact on energy consumption of all the resources in the system. We demonstrate our methodology by generating power models for heterogeneous platforms with very different power consumption profiles. Our validation experiments with real Cloud applications show that such models provide high accuracy (around 5% of average estimation error).This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under contract TIN2015-65316-P, by the Gener- alitat de Catalunya under contract 2014-SGR-1051, and by the European Commission under FP7-SMARTCITIES-2013 contract 608679 (RenewIT) and FP7-ICT-2013-10 contracts 610874 (AS- CETiC) and 610456 (EuroServer).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Many-body effects on the capacitance of multilayers made from strongly correlated materials

Recent work by Kopp and Mannhart on novel electronic systems formed at oxide interfaces has shown interesting effects on the capacitances of these devices. We employ inhomogeneous dynamical mean-field theory to calculate the capacitance of multilayered nanostructures. These multilayered nanostructures are composed of semi-infinite metallic leads coupled via a strongly correlated dielectric barrier region. The barrier region can be adjusted from a metallic regime to a Mott insulator through adjusting the interaction strength. We examine the effects of varying the barrier width, temperature, potential difference, screening length, and chemical potential. We find that the interaction strength has a relatively strong effect on the capacitance, while the potential and temperature show weaker dependence.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, REVTe

Localized basis sets for unbound electrons in nanoelectronics

It is shown how unbound electron wave functions can be expanded in a suitably chosen localized basis sets for any desired range of energies. In particular, we focus on the use of gaussian basis sets, commonly used in first-principles codes. The possible usefulness of these basis sets in a first-principles description of field emission or scanning tunneling microscopy at large bias is illustrated by studying a simpler related phenomenon: The lifetime of an electron in a H atom subjected to a strong electric field.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted by J. Chem. Phys. (http://jcp.aip.org/

Immersive Learning Research Network

Computer games have now been around for over three decades and the term serious games has been attributed to the use of computer games that are thought to have educational value. Game-based learning (GBL) has been applied in a number of different fields such as medicine, languages and software engineering. Furthermore, serious games can be a very effective as an instructional tool and can assist learning by providing an alternative way of presenting instructions and content on a supplementary level, and can promote student motivation and interest in subject matter resulting in enhanced learning effectiveness. REVLAW (Real and Virtual Reality Law) is a research project that the departments of Law and Computer Science of Westminster University have proposed as a new framework in which law students can explore a real case scenario using Virtual Reality (VR) technology to discover important pieces of evidence from a real-given scenario and make up their mind over the crime case if this is a murder or not. REVLAW integrates the immersion into VR as the perception of being physically present in a non-physical world. The paper presents the prototype framework and the mechanics used to make students focus on the crime case and make the best use of this immersive learning approach

Work-In-Progress Paper: 360-degree immersive storytelling video to create empathetic response

Open days are organised by Universities to give potential students the opportunity to visit the University premises, talk to staff and student ambassadors and develop a sense of how it feels to study at a University something difficult to be conveyed via a prospectus. However, visiting open days requires investing time, travelling and can be expensive. The resent years there has been an increasing demand for open days to be delivered online. The social distancing measures imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic enforced this mode of delivery of open days as the only option. Many Universities created VR campuses to help students experience their campuses, but those fail to capture the actual vibe of a place and lack of empathetic response. New tools such as 360-degree immersive storytelling video (VR) and 3D interactive media present new opportunities for effectively delivering open days capturing not only a realistic representation of the place, but the actual feel of a place. This paper presents work-in-progress focusing on studying if 360-degree immersive storytelling video can create empathetic response. It achieves this by creating a 360-degree immersive storytelling video that effectively and realistically captures student life. This paper presents the project motivation, discusses the proposed research methodology, presents the research instruments and finishes with expected contributions to knowledge and future work

Dynamical mean field theory for strongly correlated inhomogeneous multilayered nanostructures

Dynamical mean field theory is employed to calculate the properties of multilayered inhomogeneous devices composed of semi-infinite metallic lead layers coupled via barrier planes that are made from a strongly correlated material (and can be tuned through the metal-insulator Mott transition). We find that the Friedel oscillations in the metallic leads are immediately frozen in and don't change as the thickness of the barrier increases from one to eighty planes. We also identify a generalization of the Thouless energy that describes the crossover from tunneling to incoherent Ohmic transport in the insulating barrier. We qualitatively compare the results of these self-consistent many-body calculations with the assumptions of non-self-consistent Landauer-based approaches to shed light on when such approaches are likely to yield good results for the transport.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.