Implementing a pedagogical improvement proposal on listening skill through the support of audiovisual material and cooperative learning: watching the film Shrek as as a helping audiovisual tool to teach adjectives and descriptions on 2nd year students of Compulsory Secondary Education

Treball Final de Màster Universitari en Professor/a d'Educació Secundària Obligatòria i Batxillerat, Formació Professional i Ensenyaments d'Idiomes. Codi SAP419. Curs: 2018/2019English, with the increasing globalisation and the development of Internet, has become an indispensable language for communication and for having access to job positions. Spain has adapted to this reality by incorporating structural and legislative changes in its education system. Specifically, the Organic Law 8/2013 for the improvement of the educative quality (LOMCE) proposes the creation of multilingual centres with the aim of fostering the working future of students and their inclusion in a globalised society. These changes are reflected in the classrooms with the use of new technologies as well as with the emeregence of new educational methodologies and audiovisual resources. The current Final Master’s Degree Dissertation evaluates the results of an implementation of a research project on two groups of 2nd year of Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) students with the goal of improving the listening skills of English language through the use of audio-visual material and cooperative work. The sample was composed by 48 students from a Secondary school of Castellón de la Plana. The analysis concludes that the use of audio-visual media enhances the listening skill of English. Likewise, the study stresses that students like to work in the classroom with innovative and collaborative methodologies

Assessing the impact of extramural media contact on the second- language pragmatic competence and awareness of English philology students in Spain

Pragmatic competence is a fundamental aspect of communicative competence and is understood as a capacity to deal with the relationship between utterances and the acts that may be performed through them, as well as the contextual features that promote appropriate language use (Bachman, 1990). Pragmatic awareness consists of conscious, reflective, and explicit knowledge regarding the rules and conventions of appropriate language use in specific communicative situations and according to the social norms of specific speech communities (Alcón/Safont, 2008: 193). Generally, there is a consensus on both the importance of culturally appropriate language use and the difficulty of teaching and learning it across second or foreign language contexts (Washburn, 2001; Alcón, 2005; Alcón/Martínez-Flor, 2008; Alcón/Safont, 2008). Furthermore, a number of researchers have questioned the suitability of textbooks for teaching pragmatics in these contexts (Bardovi- Harlig/Hartford, 1996; Crandell/Basturkmen, 2004; LoCastro, 2003; Vellenga, 2004; Fernández- Guerra, 2008). In many cases, language learners must rely on resources from outside the classroom as a kind of ‘second best’ substitute to real language contact. This is where audio-visual material may play an important role. Although audio-visual media has already featured in several interlanguage pragmatics studies, the focus tends to be on its adequacy as a didactic tool or its use in differing instruction programmes. There is scarce work that focuses on the potential of out-of-school (extramural) contact with audio-visual materials as an incidental learning resource for developing second language pragmatic competence and awareness

English for Engineering: Intercultural formal letter writing

[EN] Writing is a productive skill highly addressed in the ESP classroom. Students learning a foreign language have to learn how to create accurate structured texts with organized ideas to convey relevant meaning. The aim of this study is to analyze and categorize written mistakes produced by 1st cycle foreign students from different nationalities (i.e.: Romanian, Moroccan and Bulgarian) in the English for Engineering module at a Spanish university. The objective is to examine written language accuracy in formal letter writing such as enquiring and complaint letters, to detect any intercultural interference as to mother-tongue influence and other language varieties in the learning of curricular and linguistic knowledge. We believe that studies such as the one presented here allow teachers to provide students with written corrective feedback which may have a positive impact on students’ writing skills (Li, 2000), in this case, foreign students enrolled in an ESP module at a Spanish university.Pla-Ángel, A.; Bellés-Fortuño, B. (2023). English for Engineering: Intercultural formal letter writing. En 9th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'23). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 587-593. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd23.2023.1621058759

A multi-projector CAVE system with commodity hardware and gesture-based interaction

Spatially-immersive systems such as CAVEs provide users with surrounding worlds by projecting 3D models on multiple screens around the viewer. Compared to alternative immersive systems such as HMDs, CAVE systems are a powerful tool for collaborative inspection of virtual environments due to better use of peripheral vision, less sensitivity to tracking errors, and higher communication possibilities among users. Unfortunately, traditional CAVE setups require sophisticated equipment including stereo-ready projectors and tracking systems with high acquisition and maintenance costs. In this paper we present the design and construction of a passive-stereo, four-wall CAVE system based on commodity hardware. Our system works with any mix of a wide range of projector models that can be replaced independently at any time, and achieves high resolution and brightness at a minimum cost. The key ingredients of our CAVE are a self-calibration approach that guarantees continuity across the screen, as well as a gesture-based interaction approach based on a clever combination of skeletal data from multiple Kinect sensors.Preprin

Chemical Surface Modifications development of Silicon Based Label Free Integrated Optical (IO) Biosensors: A Review

[EN] Increasing interest has been paid to label-free biosensors in recent years. 11 Among them, refractive index (RI) optical biosensors enable high density and the chip-12 scale integration of optical components. This makes them more appealing to help 13 develop lab-on-a-chip devices. Today, many RI integrated optical (IO) devices are made 14 using silicon-based materials. A key issue in their development is the 15 biofunctionalization of sensing surfaces because they provide a specific, sensitive 16 response to the analyte of interest. This review critically discusses the 17 biofunctionalization procedures, assay formats and characterization techniques 18 employed in setting up IO biosensors. In addition, it provides the most relevant results 19 obtained from using these devices for real sample biosensing. Finally, an overview of 20 the most promising future developments in the fields of chemical surface modification 21 and capture agent attachment for IO biosensors follows.This research has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through project CTQ2010-15943/BQU and by the Regional Valencian Government, through GVA/PROMETEO 2010/08. The authors thank Dr. Miguel Holgado, from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, for his helpful discussion about the classification of RI optical sensors.Bañuls Polo, MJ.; Puchades Pla, R.; Maquieira Catala, Á. (2013). Chemical Surface Modifications development of Silicon Based Label Free Integrated Optical (IO) Biosensors: A Review. Analytica Chimica Acta. 777:1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aca.2013.01.025S11677

Primer design for SNP genotyping based on allele-specific amplification Application to organ transplantation pharmacogenomics

[EN] Diagnostic methods based on single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) biomarkers are essential for the real adoption of personalized medicine. Allele specific amplification in a homogeneous format or combined to microarray hybridization are powerful approaches for SNP genotyping. However, primers must be properly selected to minimize cross-reactivity, dimer formation and nonspecific hybridization. This study presents a design workflow diagram for the selection of required oligonucleotides for multiplex assays. Based on thermodynamic restrictions, the oligonucleotide sets are chosen for a specific amplification of wild- and mutant-type templates. Design constraints include the structural stability of primer-template duplexes, template-probe duplexes and self-annealing complexes or hairpins for each targeted gene. The performance of the design algorithm was evaluated for the simultaneous genotyping of three SNPs related to immunosuppressive drugs administered after solid organ transplantation. The assayed polymorphisms were rs1045642 (ABCS] gene), rs1801133 (MTHFR gene) and rs776746 (CYP3A5 gene). Candidates were confirmed by discriminating homozygote and heterozygote populations using a fluorescence solution method and two colorimetric microarray methods on polycarbonate chips. The analysis of patient samples provided excellent genotyping results compared to those obtained by a reference method. The study demonstrates that the development of the allele-specific methods as pharmacogenetic tools can be simplified. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Tortajada-Genaro, LA.; Puchades Pla, R.; Maquieira Catala, Á. (2017). Primer design for SNP genotyping based on allele-specific amplification Application to organ transplantation pharmacogenomics. Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis. 136:14-21. doi:10.1016/j.jpba.2016.12.030S142113

Transformer based contextualization of pre-trained word embeddings for irony detection in Twitter

[EN] Human communication using natural language, specially in social media, is influenced by the use of figurative language like irony. Recently, several workshops are intended to explore the task of irony detection in Twitter by using computational approaches. This paper describes a model for irony detection based on the contextualization of pre-trained Twitter word embeddings by means of the Transformer architecture. This approach is based on the same powerful architecture as BERT but, differently to it, our approach allows us to use in-domain embeddings. We performed an extensive evaluation on two corpora, one for the English language and another for the Spanish language. Our system was the first ranked system in the Spanish corpus and, to our knowledge, it has achieved the second-best result on the English corpus. These results support the correctness and adequacy of our proposal. We also studied and interpreted how the multi-head self-attention mechanisms are specialized on detecting irony by means of considering the polarity and relevance of individual words and even the relationships among words. This analysis is a first step towards understanding how the multi-head self-attention mechanisms of the Transformer architecture address the irony detection problem.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades and FEDER founds under project AMIC (TIN2017-85854-C4-2-R) and the GiSPRO project (PROMETEU/2018/176). Work of Jose-Angel Gonzalez is financed by Universitat Politecnica de Valencia under grant PAID-01-17.González-Barba, JÁ.; Hurtado Oliver, LF.; Pla Santamaría, F. (2020). Transformer based contextualization of pre-trained word embeddings for irony detection in Twitter. Information Processing & Management. 57(4):1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2020.102262S115574Farías, D. I. H., Patti, V., & Rosso, P. (2016). Irony Detection in Twitter. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 16(3), 1-24. doi:10.1145/2930663Greene, R., Cushman, S., Cavanagh, C., Ramazani, J., & Rouzer, P. (Eds.). (2012). The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. doi:10.1515/9781400841424Van Hee, C., Lefever, E., & Hoste, V. (2018). We Usually Don’t Like Going to the Dentist: Using Common Sense to Detect Irony on Twitter. Computational Linguistics, 44(4), 793-832. doi:10.1162/coli_a_00337Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997). Long Short-Term Memory. Neural Computation, 9(8), 1735-1780. doi:10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735Joshi, A., Bhattacharyya, P., & Carman, M. J. (2017). Automatic Sarcasm Detection. ACM Computing Surveys, 50(5), 1-22. doi:10.1145/3124420Lan, Z., Chen, M., Goodman, S., Gimpel, K., Sharma, P., & Soricut, R. (2019). Albert: A lite bert for self-supervised learning of language representations.Mohammad, S. M., & Turney, P. D. (2012). CROWDSOURCING A WORD-EMOTION ASSOCIATION LEXICON. Computational Intelligence, 29(3), 436-465. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8640.2012.00460.xMuecke, D. C. (1978). Irony markers. Poetics, 7(4), 363-375. doi:10.1016/0304-422x(78)90011-6Potamias, R. A., Siolas, G., & Stafylopatis, A. (2019). A transformer-based approach to irony and sarcasm detection. arXiv:1911.10401.Rosso, P., Rangel, F., Farías, I. H., Cagnina, L., Zaghouani, W., & Charfi, A. (2018). A survey on author profiling, deception, and irony detection for the Arabic language. Language and Linguistics Compass, 12(4), e12275. doi:10.1111/lnc3.12275Sulis, E., Irazú Hernández Farías, D., Rosso, P., Patti, V., & Ruffo, G. (2016). Figurative messages and affect in Twitter: Differences between #irony, #sarcasm and #not. Knowledge-Based Systems, 108, 132-143. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2016.05.035Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1992). On verbal irony. Lingua, 87(1-2), 53-76. doi:10.1016/0024-3841(92)90025-eYus, F. (2016). Propositional attitude, affective attitude and irony comprehension. Pragmatics & Cognition, 23(1), 92-116. doi:10.1075/pc.23.1.05yusZhang, S., Zhang, X., Chan, J., & Rosso, P. (2019). Irony detection via sentiment-based transfer learning. Information Processing & Management, 56(5), 1633-1644. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2019.04.00

Intelligent Municipal Heritage Management Service in a Smart City: Telecommunication Traffic Characterizationand Quality of Service

[EN] The monitoring of cultural heritage is becoming common in cities to provide heritage preservation and prevent vandalism. Using sensors and video cameras for this task implies the need to transmit information. In this paper, the teletraffic that cameras and sensors generate is characterized and the transmissions¿ influence on the municipal communications network is evaluated. Then, we propose models for telecommunication traffic sources in an intelligent municipal heritage management service inside a smart sustainable city. The sources were simulated in a smart city scenario to find the proper quality of service (QoS) parameters for the communication network, using Valencia City as background. Specific sensors for intelligent municipal heritage management were selected and four telecommunication traffic sources were modelled according to real-life requirements and sensors datasheet. Different simulations were performed to find the proper CIR (Committed Information Rate) and PIR (Peak Information Rate) values and to study the effects of limited bandwidth networks. Packet loss, throughput, delay, and jitter were used to evaluate the network¿s performance. Consequently, the result was the selection of the minimum values for PIR and CIR that ensured QoS and thus optimized the traffic telecommunication costs associated with an intelligent municipal heritage management service.This work was partially supported by Spanish Government Projects TIN2013-47272-C2-1-R and TEC2015-71932-REDTRodríguez-Hernández, MA.; Jiang, Z.; Gomez-Sacristan, Á.; Pla, V. (2019). Intelligent Municipal Heritage Management Service in a Smart City: Telecommunication Traffic Characterizationand Quality of Service. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (Online). 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/8412542S11