Towards Industrialized Conception and Production of Serious Games

Serious Games (SGs) have experienced a tremendous outburst these last years. Video game companies have been producing fun, user-friendly SGs, but their educational value has yet to be proven. Meanwhile, cognition research scientist have been developing SGs in such a way as to guarantee an educational gain, but the fun and attractive characteristics featured often would not meet the public's expectations. The ideal SG must combine these two aspects while still being economically viable. In this article, we propose a production chain model to efficiently conceive and produce SGs that are certified for their educational gain and fun qualities. Each step of this chain will be described along with the human actors, the tools and the documents that intervene

Pathways for improving rangeland governance under constraining land tenure systems: Application of a participatory Bayesian Belief approach

This paper analyzes the complex relationships of factors influencing rangeland governance in the arid areas. A Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model was developed in a participatory way to illustrate and assess the weight of a combination of environmental, social and institutional factors enabling the achievement of strengthened rangeland governance at a local level. The Bayesian model was applied in Tataouine situated in south of Tunisia. A complex diagram was built in a participatory way to illustrate the most important interactions between rangeland socioecological system components. Then, a BBN model was applied for a predictive purpose, by inserting evidence conditional probabilities on the most frequent land tenure systems in the region, and thus exploring pathways to improve rangeland governance under each of these systems. Results show that overall improvement of rangeland governance in the study area is highly related to the type of tenure system, performances of farmers organizations, clarification of boundaries between neighboring rangelands, and diversification of the production systems in place by including other agricultural activities in addition to pastoralism. Pastoral areas with tenure systems characterized by combined grazing of private and collective rangelands were revealed to be the most constraining for successful rangeland governance. However, even under such tenure system, the improvement of a set of institutional attributes, especially in relation to the empowerment of farmers organizations can help improving local governance

Healed Lesions of Human Cutaneous Leishmaniasis Caused By Leishmania major Do Not Shelter Persistent Residual Parasites

In human cutaneous leishmaniasis (HCL) caused by Leishmania (L.) major, the cutaneous lesions heal spontaneously and induce a Th1-type immunity that confers solid protection against reinfection. The same holds true for the experimental leishmaniasis induced by L. major in C57BL/6 mice where residual parasites persist after spontaneous clinical cure and induce sustainable memory immune responses and resistance to reinfection. Whether residual parasites also persist in scars of cured HCL caused by L. major is still unknown. Cutaneous scars from 53 volunteers with healed HCL caused by L. major were biopsied and the tissue sample homogenates were analyzed for residual parasites by four methods: i) microscope detection of amastigotes, ii) parasite culture by inoculation on biphasic medium, iii) inoculation of tissue exctracts to the footpad of BALB/c mice, an inbred strain highly susceptible to L. major, and iv) amplification of parasite kDNA by a highly sensitive real-time PCR (RT-PCR). Our results show that the scars of healed lesions of HCL caused by L. major do not contain detectable residual parasites, suggesting that this form likely induces a sterile cure at least within the scars. This feature contrasts with other Leishmania species causing chronic, diffuse, or recidivating forms of leishmaniasis where parasites do persist in healed lesions. The possibility that alternative mechanisms to parasite persistence are needed to boost and maintain long-term immunity to L. major, should be taken into consideration in vaccine development against L. major infection

Towards a Generic Environment for the Design of Serious Games

International audienceIn the aim to find out generic environments that serious game authors can use in order to create any new game within minimum time and minimum cost, we ran a study grounded to several serious games already designed. We identify and capitalize unchanging structures to build a set of generic patterns of interactivities

An efficient reduced complexity PAPR reduction approach for 3GPP LTE system

In wideband communication systems, Multi-Input Multi-Output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) has been proposed as an efficient technique to enhance the link reliability and the spectral efficiency. However, the high Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of the output signals degrades the advantage of the MIMO-OFDM systems. In order to overcome this issue, several methods requiring the explicit transmission of Side Information (SI) bits have been investigated in the literature. Nevertheless, the wrong estimation of the SI leads not only to a damage on the total signal recovery but also to a loss of the entire OFDM sequence which, causes severe degradation in the system performance. Additionally, the transmitted bits must be channel-encoded as they are particularly susceptible to the error performance of the OFDM system, which highly increases the complexity and the end-To-end latency. Therefore, we propose in this paper a blind and reduced complexity technique for MIMO-OFDM systems under high frequency selective channels. At the transmitter side, the proposed method exploits a new form of embedded signaling such as the use of the Zadoff-Chu matrix transform. Regarding the receiver side, the proposed method exploits simultaneously an enhanced Alamouti decoder scheme and an optimized estimation process that is based on calculating the high order statistic of the received signal. Finally, performances evaluation show the usefulness of the proposed methods in Long Term Evolution (LTE) standards. 2016 IEEE.Scopu