Initiatives Towards an Education for Creativity

AbstractWe have tried to approach the problem of fostering creativity in education from two distinct directions: First, in the project “iLab2 - Innovation Laboratories for the quality assurance of vocational education and training”, we acted on the learning environment. Then, in the project “Tecrino – teaching creativity in engineering”, we are working to create specially designed educational content for both teachers and students. This paper presents the philosophy and the preliminary results of these projects and suggests that a reformed school seems to be the only efficient social instrument for promoting creativity on a large scale

Engineering Human Stigmergy

Discovered in the context of a research about insects, stigmergy – the indirect coordination mechanism that allows ant colonies to achieve intelligent behavior – has been extensively studied with the aim to create artificial, ant-like agents. Although stigmergic behavior has been also identified in human collectivities, there are relatively few reports about technological solutions that facilitate the emergence of such interactions between people.This paper proposes the concept of virtual pheromones, defined as engrams created by the agents not  in the environment, but in a representation thereof – a map, and outlines several use cases, wherein pheromones embedded in maps are the key element for inducing stigmergic behavior in human multi-agent systems.Without proposing a theoretic generalization, this paper aims to emphasize the broad range of possible technological applications of human stigmergy, and, maybe, to mark a new starting point for a more in-depth study of this topic

A Fuzzy Logic Software Instrument and a New Scale for the Assessment of Creativity

It is difficult to measure something we cannot clearly define. No wonder hat, for the over 100 definitions of the creativity proposed in the literature, there re almost as many scales and assessment tools. Most of these instruments have been esigned for research purposes, and are difficult to apply and score, especially in the ducational environment. Not to mention that they are expensive. he research described in this paper is aimed to develop a free, fast, and easy to se software tool for the assessment of creativity in the educational context. To this urpose, we have designed a new scale with 20 items, based on a novel approach ocusing on detecting the factors known to block the creativity, like stereotypical hinking, and social conformity. The user input is collected through a web based nterface, and the actual interpretation of the results is automated by means of a uzzy logic algorithm. The proposed solution is interesting because it can be easily ntegrated in almost any e-learning platform, or used as a stand-alone tool for tracing he evolution of the students involved in courses for the development of creative hinking skills, and also for possible other applications

Unobtrusive Monitoring the Daily Activity Routine of Elderly People Living Alone, with Low-Cost Binary Sensors

Most expert projections indicate that in 2030, there will be over one billion people aged 60 or over. The vast majority of them prefer to spend their last years at home, and almost a third of them live alone. This creates a growing need for technology-based solutions capable of helping older people to live independently in their places. Despite the wealth of solutions proposed for this general problem, there are very few support systems that can be reproduced on a larger scale. In this study, we propose a method to monitor the activity of the elderly living alone and detect deviations from the previous activity patterns based on the idea that the residential living environment can be modeled as a collection of behaviorally significant places located arbitrarily in a generic space. Then we use virtual pheromones—a concept defined in our previous work—to create images of the pheromone distribution maps, which describe the spatiotemporal evolution of the interactions between the user and the environment. We propose a method to detect deviations from the activity routines based on a simple statistical analysis of the resulting images. By applying this method on two public activity recognition datasets, we found that the system is capable of detecting both singular deviations and slow-deviating trends from the previous activity routine of the monitored persons

Research and Science Today No. 1(7)/2014

RESEARCH AND SCIENCE TODAY is a biannual science journal established in 2011. The journal is an informational platform that publishes assessment articles and the results of various scientific research carried out by academics. We provide the authors with the opportunity to create and/or perfect their science writing skills. Thus, each issue of the journal (two per year and at least two supplements) will contain professional articles from any academic field, authored by domestic and international academics. The goal of this journal is to pass on relevant information to undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students as well as to fellow academics and researchers; the topics covered are unlimited, considering its multi-disciplinary profile. Regarding the national and international visibility of Research and Science Today, it is indexed in over 30 international databases (IDB) and is present in over 200 online libraries and catalogues; therefore, anybody can easily consult the articles featured in each issue by accessing the databases or simply the website