Repositorio TEC

Poster. V Conferencia Internacional BIREDIAL-ISTEC 2015.El poster hace un recorrido de la historia del RepositorioTEC, repositorio institucional del Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica. Cómo se ha desarrollado desde 2002 hasta 2015

Phonological Proximity in Costa Rican Sign Language

The study of phonological proximity makes it possible to establish a basis for future decision-making in the treatment of sign languages. Knowing how close a set of signs are allows the interested party to decide more easily its study by clustering, as well as the teaching of the language to third parties based on similarities. In addition, it lays the foundation for strengthening disambiguation modules in automatic recognition systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind for Costa Rican Sign Language (LESCO, for its Spanish acronym), and forms the basis for one of the modules of the already operational system of sign and speech editing called the International Platform for Sign Language Edition (PIELS). A database of 2665 signs, grouped into eight contexts, is used, and a comparison of similarity measures is made, using standard statistical formulas to measure their degree of correlation. This corpus will be especially useful in machine learning approaches. In this work, we have proposed an analysis of different similarity measures between signs in order to find out the phonological proximity between them. After analyzing the results obtained, we can conclude that LESCO is a sign language with high levels of phonological proximity, particularly in the orientation and location components, but they are noticeably lower in the form component. We have also concluded as an outstanding contribution of our research that automatic recognition systems can take as a basis for their first prototypes the contexts or sign domains that map to clusters with lower levels of similarity. As mentioned, the results obtained have multiple applications such as in the teaching area or the Natural Language Processing area for automatic recognition tasks.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the Project ECLIPSE-UA under Grant RTI2018-094283-B-C32, the Project INTEGER under Grant RTI2018-094649-B-I00, and partly by the Conselleria de Educación, Investigación, Cultura y Deporte of the Community of Valencia, Spain, within the Project PROMETEO/2018/089

Architecture design of a reinforcement environment for learning sign languages

Different fields such as linguistics, teaching, and computing have demonstrated special interest in the study of sign languages (SL). However, the processes of teaching and learning these languages turn complex since it is unusual to find people teaching these languages that are fluent in both SL and the native language of the students. The teachings from deaf individuals become unique. Nonetheless, it is important for the student to lean on supportive mechanisms while being in the process of learning an SL. Bidirectional communication between deaf and hearing people through SL is a hot topic to achieve a higher level of inclusion. However, all the processes that convey teaching and learning SL turn difficult and complex since it is unusual to find SL teachers that are fluent also in the native language of the students, making it harder to provide computer teaching tools for different SL. Moreover, the main aspects that a second language learner of an SL finds difficult are phonology, non-manual components, and the use of space (the latter two are specific to SL, not to spoken languages). This proposal appears to be the first of the kind to favor the Costa Rican Sign Language (LESCO, for its Spanish acronym), as well as any other SL. Our research focus stands on reinforcing the learning process of final-user hearing people through a modular architectural design of a learning environment, relying on the concept of phonological proximity within a graphical tool with a high degree of usability. The aim of incorporating phonological proximity is to assist individuals in learning signs with similar handshapes. This architecture separates the logic and processing aspects from those associated with the access and generation of data, which makes it portable to other SL in the future. The methodology used consisted of defining 26 phonological parameters (13 for each hand), thus characterizing each sign appropriately. Then, a similarity formula was applied to compare each pair of signs. With these pre-calculations, the tool displays each sign and its top ten most similar signs. A SUS usability test and an open qualitative question were applied, as well as a numerical evaluation to a group of learners, to validate the proposal. In order to reach our research aims, we have analyzed previous work on proposals for teaching tools meant for the student to practice SL, as well as previous work on the importance of phonological proximity in this teaching process. This previous work justifies the necessity of our proposal, whose benefits have been proved through the experimentation conducted by different users on the usability and usefulness of the tool. To meet these needs, homonymous words (signs with the same starting handshape) and paronyms (signs with highly similar handshape), have been included to explore their impact on learning. It allows the possibility to apply the same perspective of our existing line of research to other SL in the future.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the Project ECLIPSE-UA under Grant RTI2018-094283-B-C32, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Project AETHER-UA under Grant PID2020-112540RB-C43, the Project INTEGER under Grant RTI2018-094649-B-I00, and by the Conselleria de Educación, Investigación, Cultura y Deporte of the Community of Valencia, Spain, within the Project PROMETEO/2018/089, the School of Computing and the Computer Research Center at Costa Rica Institute of Technology and CONICIT (Consejo Nacional para Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas), Costa Rica, under grant 290-2006

Diseño de un sistema recomendador híbrido de objetos de aprendizaje

El proceso de planeación o diseño de un curso se basa en gran medida en la selección de las actividades que están sujetas al criterio o conocimiento del docente; del mismo modo que dada la cantidad de recursos disponibles para un tema específico es muy grande y solo puede restringirse por el criterio del experto en la materia.El Sistema Recomendador Híbrido de Objetos de Aprendizaje busca sugerir recursos de aprendizaje disponibles en distintos repositorios en la nube para un profesor a partir de los contenidos del Diseño Instruccional (DI) de su curso. Para esto, el sistema selecciona los descriptores textuales de los contenidos e intenta extraer las palabras clave que describen a cada actividad del DI de forma automática. Seguidamente, realiza búsquedas parciales con estos descriptores en una serie de repositorios y prioriza los metadatos de los Objetos de Aprendizaje (OA) recuperados de acuerdo con la afinidad que presenten con respecto a la descripción de las actividades de un curso.De este modo, se le presentan al profesor solo aquellos ítems que cuenten con mayor afinidad en cuanto a los contenidos que describen una actividad mediante una interfaz gráfica unificada. Así, se aprovechan los OA creados por otros profesionales en la materia y se reduce la cantidad de recursos que debe revisar un profesor para elegir entre aquellos que le podrían interesar para utilizarlos en su lección

Design of a hybrid recommender system of learning objects

El proceso de planeación o diseño de un curso se basa en gran medida en la selección de las actividades que están sujetas al criterio o conocimiento del docente; del mismo modo que dada la cantidad de recursos disponibles para un tema específico es muy grande y solo puede restringirse por el criterio del experto en la materia. El Sistema Recomendador Híbrido de Objetos de Aprendizaje busca sugerir recursos de aprendizaje disponibles en distintos repositorios en la nube para un profesor a partir de los contenidos del Diseño Instruccional (DI) de su curso. Para esto, el sistema selecciona los descriptores textuales de los contenidos e intenta extraer las palabras clave que describen a cada actividad del DI de forma automática. Seguidamente, realiza búsquedas parciales con estos descriptores en una serie de repositorios y prioriza los metadatos de los Objetos de Aprendizaje (OA) recuperados de acuerdo con la afinidad que presenten con respecto a la descripción de las actividades de un curso. De este modo, se le presentan al profesor solo aquellos ítems que cuenten con mayor afinidad en cuanto a los contenidos que describen una actividad mediante una interfaz gráfica unificada. Así, se aprovechan los OA creados por otros profesionales en la materia y se reduce la cantidad de recursos que debe revisar un profesor para elegir entre aquellos que le podrían interesar para utilizarlos en su lección.The process of planning or designing a course is based largely on the selection of activities that are subject to the judgment or knowledge of the teacher; just as given the amount of resources available to a specific topic is very large and can only be restricted by the discretion of the skilled. The Hybrid Recommender System of Learning Objects seeks to suggest learning resources available in different cloud repositories for a teacher from the contents of the Instructional Design (ID) of his course. For this, the system selects the textual descriptors of the contents and tries to extract the keywords that describe each ID activity in a automatic. Next, perform partial searches with these descriptors in a series of repositories and prioritizes the metadata of the Objects of Learning (OA) recovered according to the affinity they present with regarding the description of the activities of a course. In this way, the teacher is presented with only those items that have the greatest affinity in terms of the contents that describe an activity through an interface unified graph. Thus, the LOs created by other professionals in the subject matter and reduces the number of resources a teacher must review to choose among those that might interest you for use in her lesson

Teacher training model - towards a Collaborative Rubric Bank

© © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Beyond providing alternatives to build rubrics, a group of researchers in Tecnológico de Costa Rica found the need to implement best practices in the definition and validation of evaluation rubrics, to encourage the creation of a Higher Education bank of assessment instruments. To achieve this goal, in the Tecnológico de Costa Rica, a teacher training process was established, which includes cooperative-collaborative work, scaffolding for the construction of knowledge and assessment tests carried out in the institutional LMS. The ultimate purpose is to build skills in teachers to design more robust rubrics and thus to form an institutional bank of evaluation instruments to share among colleagues. The first results meet the expectations established for the training model, as well as those of the teachers who participate in the training and use the rubrics for evaluation in their courses, as shown in the paper

A Systematic Mapping of Translation-Enabling Technologies for Sign Languages

Sign languages (SL) are the first language for most deaf people. Consequently, bidirectional communication among deaf and non-deaf people has always been a challenging issue. Sign language usage has increased due to inclusion policies and general public agreement, which must then become evident in information technologies, in the many facets that comprise sign language understanding and its computational treatment. In this study, we conduct a thorough systematic mapping of translation-enabling technologies for sign languages. This mapping has considered the most recommended guidelines for systematic reviews, i.e., those pertaining software engineering, since there is a need to account for interdisciplinary areas of accessibility, human computer interaction, natural language processing, and education, all of them part of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) computing classification system directly related to software engineering. An ongoing development of a software tool called SYMPLE (SYstematic Mapping and Parallel Loading Engine) facilitated the querying and construction of a base set of candidate studies. A great diversity of topics has been studied over the last 25 years or so, but this systematic mapping allows for comfortable visualization of predominant areas, venues, top authors, and different measures of concentration and dispersion. The systematic review clearly shows a large number of classifications and subclassifications interspersed over time. This is an area of study in which there is much interest, with a basically steady level of scientific publications over the last decade, concentrated mainly in the European continent. The publications by country, nevertheless, usually favor their local sign language.The authors thank the School of Computing and the Computer Research Center of the Technological Institute of Costa Rica for the financial support, as well as CONICIT (Consejo Nacional para Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas), Costa Rica, under grant 290-2006. This work was partly supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities through the Project ECLIPSE-UA under Grant RTI2018-094283-B-C32 and the Project INTEGER under Grant RTI2018-094649-B-I00, and partly by the Conselleria de Educación, Investigación, Cultura y Deporte of the Community of Valencia, Spain, within the Project PROMETEO/2018/089

Integrating academic analytics for supporting accreditation and international cooperation: TEC and UABCS experience

© © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Information is the most important asset of organizations, currently, the fast, effective and accurate access is vital for strategic decision making and the organizations competitiveness. The education area is not the exception, so this article aims to share the experiences of collaboration between two Universities about learning analitycs and academic analytics tools, to motivate other universities to generate collaboration links. In this article, we refer the differences between learning analytics and academic analytics, the description of some tools developed at the Instituto Tecnologico de Costa Rica and ´ the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California Sur, focused ´ on these topics and the experiences of collaboration between both universities in two ways: sharing the current tools and how to develop new tools, capable of integrating with the infrastructure of each university in particular

Variaciones de los parámetros hematológicos, utilizando anticoagulantes EDTA K3 y EDTA K2

Objetivos: Determinar variaciones de parámetros hematológicos, utilizando anticoagulantes K3 y K2 del EDTA. Diseño: Observacional de corte transversal. Institución: EAP de Tecnología Médica, Facultad de Medicina, UNMSM. Participantes: 28 alumnos del último de año de la EAP de Economía de la Facultad de Ciencias Contables. Intervenciones: Se tomó 56 muestras de sangre venosa, utilizando tubos al vacío con EDTA K3 y K2: Se hizo recuento de hematíes, leucocitos, plaquetas, hemoglobina, hematocrito y formula leucocitaria. El muestreo fue por conveniencia y se procesó en el Servicio de Hematología del Hospital Centro Médico Naval en dos tiempos diferentes: a las 2 y 24 horas de obtenida la muestra, conservadas a temperatura ambiente. Principales medidas de resultados: Se utilizó la t de student y coeficiente de correlación de Pearson para muestras apareadas y el grado de asociación, respectivamente. Resultados: A las dos primeras horas no se encontró diferencia estadísticamente significativa (p>0,025), a excepción de los basófilos. A las 24 horas, tampoco se observó variaciones significativas, con excepción de las plaquetas, observándose una diferencia en el tubo con EDTA k3, con p<0,025 y r=0,48. Conclusiones: Ambas presentaciones pudieran ser usadas en el recuento hematológico; sin embargo, recomendamos el uso del EDTA k2, ya que presenta menores interferencias

Preface to the April 2018 Issue including selected works from CIbSE 2017 and LACLO 2016

This issue of the CLEIej consists of three main parts: i) a review paper on the state of the art of how contextual information extracted from a user task can help to improve searches for contents relevant to this task; ii) extended and revised versions of Selected Papers (which correspond to the second and third best paper from each track) presented at the XX Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering (CIbSE 2017), which took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in May 2017; and, iii) extended and revised versions of selected papers from LACLO 2016, the XI Latin American Conference on Learning Objects and Technology, which took place in San Joseé, Costa Rica, in October 2016