A web-based application for the management and evaluation of tutoring requests in PBL-based massive laboratories

One important steps in a successful project-based-learning methodology (PBL) is the process of providing the students with a convenient feedback that allows them to keep on developing their projects or to improve them. However, this task is more difficult in massive courses, especially when the project deadline is close. Besides, the continuous evaluation methodology makes necessary to find ways to objectively and continuously measure students' performance without increasing excessively instructors' work load. In order to alleviate these problems, we have developed a web service that allows students to request personal tutoring assistance during the laboratory sessions by specifying the kind of problem they have and the person who could help them to solve it. This service provides tools for the staff to manage the laboratory, for performing continuous evaluation for all students and for the student collaborators, and to prioritize tutoring according to the progress of the student's project. Additionally, the application provides objective metrics which can be used at the end of the subject during the evaluation process in order to support some students' final scores. Different usability statistics and the results of a subjective evaluation with more than 330 students confirm the success of the proposed application

New teaching methodology for electronics and its adaptation to the European space for higher education

There is a widespread consensus that aims to the flexibility of the subjects, both in terms of times and places when and where they are taught as one of the main factors that increase or enhance their appeal for students. The deployment of a new remote access platform tailored to the specific needs of students in a course on digital electronic systems based on microprocessors has enabled them to enjoy greater flexibility by offering them the ability to complete remotely, in a different time and place to the university, the proposed practices (PBL) simultaneously with the lectures. This remarkable improvement, endorsed by the results of a survey among the students, has had a particularly positive impact on the impression students have of the subject, and has contributed significantly to improve its assessment and the participation in it

A Bayesian Networks Approach for Dialog Modeling: The Fusion BN

Bayesian networks, BNs, are suitable for mixed-initiative dialog modeling allowing a more flexible and natural spoken interaction. This solution can be applied to identify the intention of the user considering the concepts extracted from the last utterance and the dialog context. Subsequently, in order to make a correct decision regarding how the dialog should continue, unnecessary, missing, wrong, optional and required concepts have to be detected according to the inferred goals. This information is useful to properly drive the dialog prompting for missing concepts, clarifying for wrong concepts, ignoring unnecessary concepts and retrieving those required and optional. This paper presents a novel BNs approach where a single BN is obtained from N goal-specific BNs through a fusion process. The new fusion BN enables a single concept analysis which is more consistent with the whole dialog context

Etología. Introducción a la ciencia del comportamiento

1ª ed., 3ª reimp.El objetivo de este libro es proporcionar una introducción a la Etología. Ésta ciencia responde al interés por profundizar en el conocimiento de las costumbres animales; por comprender la variedad de comportamientos que en diferentes situaciones exhiben los individuos de diferentes especies. Una posible definición de Etología podría ser: el estudio científico del comportamiento de los seres vivos. A lo largo de esta obra se analizan todos los aspectos que tienen que ver con el comportamiento animal, desde las causas y mecanismos de actuación o la adaptación y evolución y el bienestar animal.The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction to Ethology. This science responds to the interest in deepening the knowledge of animal customs; to understand the variety of behaviour that in different situations exhibit individuals of different species. A possible definition of ethology could be: the scientific study of the behavior of living beings. Throughout this book all aspects related to animal behavior, from the causes and mechanisms of action or adaptation and evolution and animal welfare, are analyzed

Application of backend database contents and structure to the design of spoken dialog services

Current development platforms for designing spoken dialog services feature different kinds of strategies to help designers build, test, and deploy their applications. In general, these platforms are made up of several assistants that handle the different design stages (e.g. definition of the dialog flow, prompt and grammar definition, database connection, or to debug and test the running of the application). In spite of all the advances in this area, in general the process of designing spoken-based dialog services is a time consuming task that needs to be accelerated. In this paper we describe a complete development platform that reduces the design time by using different types of acceleration strategies based on using information from the data model structure and database contents, as well as cumulative information obtained throughout the successive steps in the design. Thanks to these accelerations, the interaction with the platform is simplified and the design is reduced, in most cases, to simple confirmations to the “proposals” that the platform automatically provides at each stage. Different kinds of proposals are available to complete the application flow such as the possibility of selecting which information slots should be requested to the user together, predefined templates for common dialogs, the most probable actions that make up each state defined in the flow, different solutions to solve specific speech-modality problems such as the presentation of the lists of retrieved results after querying the backend database. The platform also includes accelerations for creating speech grammars and prompts, and the SQL queries for accessing the database at runtime. Finally, we will describe the setup and results obtained in a simultaneous summative, subjective and objective evaluations with different designers used to test the usability of the proposed accelerations as well as their contribution to reducing the design time and interaction

Speech to sign language translation system for Spanish

This paper describes the development of and the first experiments in a Spanish to sign language translation system in a real domain. The developed system focuses on the sentences spoken by an official when assisting people applying for, or renewing their Identity Card. The system translates official explanations into Spanish Sign Language (LSE: Lengua de Signos Espan¿ola) for Deaf people. The translation system is made up of a speech recognizer (for decoding the spoken utterance into a word sequence), a natural language translator (for converting a word sequence into a sequence of signs belonging to the sign language), and a 3D avatar animation module (for playing back the hand movements). Two proposals for natural language translation have been evaluated: a rule-based translation module (that computes sign confidence measures from the word confidence measures obtained in the speech recognition module) and a statistical translation module (in this case, parallel corpora were used for training the statistical model). The best configuration reported 31.6% SER (Sign Error Rate) and 0.5780 BLEU (BiLingual Evaluation Understudy). The paper also describes the eSIGN 3D avatar animation module (considering the sign confidence), and the limitations found when implementing a strategy for reducing the delay between the spoken utterance and the sign sequence animation

Desarrollo de un Robot-Guía con Integración de un Sistema de Diálogo y Expresión de Emociones: Proyecto ROBINT

Este artículo presenta la incorporación de un sistema de diálogo hablado a un robot autónomo, concebido como elemento interactivo en un museo de ciencias capaz de realizar visitas guiadas y establecer diálogos sencillos con los visitantes del mismo. Para hacer más atractivo su funcionamiento, se ha dotado al robot de rasgos (como expresividad gestual o síntesis de voz con emociones) que humanizan sus intervenciones. El reconocedor de voz es un subsistema independiente del locutor (permite reconocer el habla de cualquier persona), que incorpora medidas de confianza para mejorar las prestaciones del reconocimiento, puesto que se logra un filtrado muy importante de habla parásita. En cuanto al sistema de comprensión, hace uso de un sistema de aprendizaje basado en reglas, lo que le permite inferir información explícita de un conjunto de ejemplos, sin que sea necesario generar previamente una gramática o un conjunto de reglas que guíen al módulo de comprensión. Estos subsistemas se han evaluado previamente en una tarea de control por voz de un equipo HIFI, empleando nuestro robot como elemento de interfaz, obteniendo valores de 95,9% de palabras correctamente reconocidas y 92,8% de conceptos reconocidos. En cuanto al sistema de conversión de texto a voz, se ha implementado un conjunto de modificaciones segmentales y prosódicas sobre una voz neutra, que conducen a la generación de emociones en la voz sintetizada por el robot, tales como alegría, enfado, tristeza o sorpresa. La fiabilidad de estas emociones se ha medido con varios experimentos perceptuales que arrojan resultados de identificación superiores al 70% para la mayoría de las emociones, (87% en tristeza, 79,1% en sorpresa)

Spanish Expressive Voices: corpus for emotion research in Spanish

A new emotional multimedia database has been recorded and aligned. The database comprises speech and video recordings of one actor and one actress simulating a neutral state and the Big Six emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust. Due to a careful design and its size (more than 100 minutes per emotion), the recorded database allows comprehensive studies on emotional speech synthesis, prosodic modelling, speech conversion, far-field speech recognition and speech and video-based emotion identification. The database has been automatically labelled for prosodic purposes (5% was manually revised). The whole database has been validated thorough objective and perceptual tests, achieving a validation score as high as 89%

Automatic Understanding of ATC Speech: Study of Prospectives and Field Experiments for Several Controller Positions

Although there has been a lot of interest in recognizing and understanding air traffic control (ATC) speech, none of the published works have obtained detailed field data results. We have developed a system able to identify the language spoken and recognize and understand sentences in both Spanish and English. We also present field results for several in-tower controller positions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that field ATC speech (not simulated) is captured, processed, and analyzed. The use of stochastic grammars allows variations in the standard phraseology that appear in field data. The robust understanding algorithm developed has 95% concept accuracy from ATC text input. It also allows changes in the presentation order of the concepts and the correction of errors created by the speech recognition engine improving it by 17% and 25%, respectively, absolute in the percentage of fully correctly understood sentences for English and Spanish in relation to the percentages of fully correctly recognized sentences. The analysis of errors due to the spontaneity of the speech and its comparison to read speech is also carried out. A 96% word accuracy for read speech is reduced to 86% word accuracy for field ATC data for Spanish for the "clearances" task confirming that field data is needed to estimate the performance of a system. A literature review and a critical discussion on the possibilities of speech recognition and understanding technology applied to ATC speech are also given

Evolution of the maintainability of HPC facilities at CIEMAT headquarters

Desde su creación en 1951, el CIEMAT ha estado impulsando continuamente el uso de la computación como un método de investigación, desplegando plataformas de cómputo innovadoras. De esta manera, arquitecturas vectoriales, MPP, NUMA y otras completamente distribuidas han sido gestionadas en el CIEMAT, acumulando un extenso conocimiento sobre su sostenibilidad y sobre las necesidades de las comunidades científicas relacionadas con proyectos internacionales. Actualmente, la evolución del hardware y el software para HPC es cada vez más rápida e implica un desafío constante para aumentar su disponibilidad debido al número de iniciativas que el centro apoya. Para abordar esta tarea, el equipo TIC ha estado cambiando su gestión hacia un modelo flexible, con una mirada puesta en las adquisiciones futuras.Since its establishment in 1951, CIEMAT has been continuously boosting the use of computation as a research method, deploying innovative computing facilities. Hence, Vectorial, MPP, NUMA, and distributed architectures have been managed at CIEMAT, resulting in an extensive expertise on HPC maintainability as well as on the computational needs of the community related to international projects. Nowadays, the evolution of HPC hardware and software is progressively faster and implies a continuous challenge to increase their availability for the greater number of different initiatives supported. To address this task, the ICT team has been changing towards a flexible management model, with a look toward future acquisitions