Holistic analysis of the effectiveness of a software engineering teaching approach

To provide the best training in software engineering, several approaches and strategies are carried out. Some of them are more theoretical, learned through books and manuals, while others have a practical focus and often done in collaboration with companies. In this paper, we share an approach based on a balanced mix to foster the assimilation of knowledge, the approximation with what is done in software companies and student motivation. Two questionnaires were also carried out, one involving students, who had successfully completed the subject in past academic years (some had already graduated, and others are still students), and other questionnaire involving companies, in the field of software development, which employ students from our school. The analysis of the perspectives of the different stakeholders allows an overall and holistic) view, and a general understanding, of the effectiveness of the software engineering teaching approach. We analyse the results of the questionnaires and share some of the experiences and lessons learned.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Proactive scheduling for situated displays

We present an approach to improve the usefulness of situated displays systems. Our approach is based on expected utility obtained by presenting each job. We use MAUT to specify job utility and a context-aware scheduler to select the most relevant job. In our future work we will proceed with simulations in order to refine utility functions and typical weight vectors. We also intend to deploy the system with users and create a feedback panel that can function as an actionable for any type of job, and thus provide essential data for evaluating scheduling policies

Timely and keyword-based dynamic content selection for public displays

In public display systems determine what to present and when is a central feature. Although several adaptive scheduling alternatives have been explored, which introduce sensibility of the display to some type of external variable, they are still very dependent on the user in their behavior, content specific in their nature and very rigid in their adaptation to their social environment, not providing visitors of the place with appropriate, rich and personalized information according to their interests and expectations. There is a need for solutions that successfully integrate the wealth of dynamic web sources as providers for situated and updated content with social and contextual environment around the display so as to present the most appropriate content at every moment, and thus improving the utility of the system. In this paper, we present a recommender system for public situated displays that is able to autonomously select relevant content from Internet sources using a keyword-based place model as input. Based on external relevance criteria the system finds and pre-selects only those sources that are more relevant, and an adaptive scheduling algorithm continuously select content that are relevant, timely, in accordance with the place model, sensitive to immediate indications of interest and balanced to serve the broad range of interests of the target population. To evaluate this system we have carried out two partial experiments. The results showed that keyword-based shared place models jointly with content specific relevance models are a simple and valid approach to user-generated content for public displays.The first author was supported by a Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology scholarship (SFRH/BD/31292/2006)

Interacting and making personalized recommendations of places of interest to tourists

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 353Nowadays, applications that are developed to support tourists should go much further than simply providing information about places or recommending places or routes based on the user location. They should be able to provide users with simple mechanisms to interact with places of interest and provide them with relevant information and recommendations about new relevant places of interest or tours according to their preferences and the preferences of other tourists with similar interests. In this work we describe a system that explores information about tourists’ interactions with places of interest and their opinions about each place, to recommend new places of interest, pedestrian tours and to promote products and services which are in accordance with their expectations. First experiments show that the system can help the tourists to interact with places of interest, helping them in their visits and also to promote shops and services

Place-aware content selection from dynamic web sources for public displays

Public digital displays could greatly benefit from the ability to dynamically select from the Internet content items that would be strongly related with the place where each display is installed. Generically, this is similar to the type of problem addressed by recommender systems. However, the usage context of a public display raises specific challenges that may limit the applicability of existing recommender systems. In this paper, we explore the creation of a recommender system for public situated displays that is able to autonomously select relevant content from Internet sources using keywords as input. This type of recommender system should enable public displays to become devices for Internet information delivery in public spaces, while also making them more situated in the social settings in which they are installed. We have created a recommender system based on these principles and we have conducted two studies to evaluate the perceived performance of the system. The results have shown that keywords can be very effective in driving user-generated content, but they often need to be complemented with contextual information that disambiguates their semanticsFundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - SFRH/BD/31292/200

Classified advertisements platform for academic environment

Nowadays web based applications represent an important role in business success, fast global advertisement of products, easy management and internal organization and fast information access are values that have shown decisive for a correct and supported organizations development. This essay describes a project work carried out in the academic environment, with open source tools, in order to develop a classified advertisement platform using web technologies, namely JSP, XML and JavaBeans. The application aims at supplying a set of functionalities related to students and products management, businesses management and the presentation of products between the students themselves. Thus this article presents the methodology followed since the modeling of the application process and the development of a data model that corresponds to the identified needs during the modeling phase of the processes, until the system implementation

Information system for pedagogical assessment

This poster presents an information system that is being used in Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Castelo Branco to perform the pedagogical assessment of their teachers. The process, almost fully automated, begins by sending an access code by email to each student, which allows him to fill an Internet based questionnaire for each discipline he is registered. Each questionnaire data is then stored in a database for further automated analysis. The statistical results for each teacher, which are confidential, are automatically sent to him by email. Global results are both sent to responsible entities and published in the Intranet

Escalonamento autónomo e sensível ao contexto para ecrãs públicos

Tese de doutoramento em Tecnologias e Sistemas de InformaçãoO advento da computação ubíqua e a proliferação das tecnologias de ecrãs e sensores fez surgir novas oportunidades para o desenvolvimento de ecrãs interactivos e sensíveis ao contexto. Estes ecrãs, integrados com vários tipos de sensores, podem ser utilizados para apresentação de aplicações ubíquas cujos conteúdos estão relacionados com o espaço onde se encontram situados. Nestes casos os ecrãs podem actuar como portais entre o mundo virtual e o mundo físico desses espaços, reflectindo a informação e as interacções associadas ao seu ambiente envolvente e às pessoas que o frequentam. Para que isto seja possível, os ecrãs públicos e situados devem ir muito além daquilo que, actualmente, é a sua utilização, que consiste essencialmente na apresentação de conteúdos pré‐definidos, através de algoritmos de escalonamento não adaptativos, ou simples reacções a interacções dos utilizadores. Os ecrãs devem ser capazes de autonomamente descobrir de forma dinâmica as fontes de conteúdos mais relevantes e mais apropriadas para cada situação em particular e seleccionar, a cada momento, o conteúdo mais útil para o contexto social envolvente do ecrã. Nesta tese é proposta uma nova abordagem de escalonamento autónomo e sensível ao contexto para ecrãs públicos. Nesta abordagem, as intencionalidades partilhadas do gestor do ecrã e dos múltiplos visitantes do espaço, obtidas através de interacções situadas na forma de palavras‐chave, semanticamente contextualizadas através de informação de contexto, permitem a construção de um perfil de espaço partilhado de alto nível o qual representa o ambiente social envolvente do ecrã. Esta informação, juntamente com modelos de relevância adaptados ao tipo de conteúdo, representam a base do modelo de escalonamento adaptativo que procura as fontes de conteúdo mais relevantes e selecciona, a cada momento, o conteúdo mais apropriado para o ambiente social envolvente do ecrã. Os resultados das avaliações sugerem que os utilizadores reconhecem a sensibilidade do ecrã às suas interacções e que esta é uma abordagem viável para a recomendação adaptativa de conteúdo em ecrãs públicos seleccionando conteúdo relevante e adequado à sua envolvente social. Sugerem também que a abordagem proposta pode representar um passo importante para a emergência de um perfil dinâmico de espaço que representa as expectativas sociais e as práticas da sua envolvente social valorizando esses espaços e criando janelas de interacção com os sistemas de informação e com as actividades associadas a esses espaços.The advent of ubiquitous computing and recent advances in screen and sensor technology, have resulted in new opportunities for developing context‐aware and interactive displays. These displays, integrated with different types of sensors, can be used for the presentation of ubiquitous applications with content related to the environment where they are situated. In these cases displays can act as portals between the virtual world and the physical world, reflecting the information and the interactions associated with that environment and the people on it. To achieve this, public and situated displays should go beyond what is their actual usage nowadays, that is the presentation of pre‐defined and pre‐built content through nonadaptive scheduling processes or simply reacting to users’ interactions. They should be able to discover autonomously the content sources that are more relevant and appropriate for each particular situation and select, at each moment, the content that is more useful to the social environment around the display. This thesis proposes a novel approach to autonomous and context‐aware scheduling for public displays. In this approach, the shared intentionality of both the display manager and the multiple visitors to the space, obtained through situated interactions with simple keywords, semantically contextualized by context keywords, allows building a high‐level shared place profile that characterizes the social environment around the display. This information, together with relevance models adapted to the particularities of each content type, represent the knowledge base of the adaptive scheduling model that searches the most relevant content sources and schedules at each moment the most appropriate content for the social environment around the display. Evaluation results show that, users recognize the display’s sensitivity to their interactions and this is a viable approach for content adaptive recommendation in public displays, allowing the presentation of adequate and relevant content for each situation. Evaluation also suggests that this approach represents an important step towards the emergence of a dynamic place profile that represents the social expectations and the social environment practices, valuing these spaces and opening windows of interaction with information systems and activities associated to these spaces.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT

Web-CAN interface for access control and monitoring

This paper describes a web-based system which allows the user to manage and to do real time monitoring the access to the educational building spaces, using two data nets. The first one is based on the CAN bus for data acquisition and actuation tasks to which are connected control devices like, magnetic cards readers, door locks and sensors. The second one is an Internet/Intranet infrastructure and uses standard web technologies like PHP and Java to provide an effective control and real time monitoring. This system is implemented on the Linux operating system using the Apache HTTP server and make use of standard technologies in use on the Web, to make an effective campus-wide security system. To close the gap between these two nets we used a CAN/Intranet gateway. In this paper the system layout and its main components are described

Water supply remote monitoring system: a case study

In recent years, there has been enormous research interest in natural resources monitoring. So, there is a need to develop easily accessible, cheap and reliable information systems for monitoring and early warning, which could be used in most natural resources. This paper presents an ongoing information system development that aims the monitoring and supervising of some parameters on water supply, such as quality and quantity. To implement our system we use several technologies in order to monitoring about 100 water tanks in an area of ±1000 Km2. In these technologies is included GSM communication, web infrastructure and sensing equipment that allows the access of information from any place of the world. In paper sections the main blocks of the system architecture are described in detail