A Student Workload Estimator Tool: Rethinking Modular Credit

This paper aims to develop a Student Workload Estimator tool for University students. Traditionally, modular credit has been used as a student workload indicator at a purely time-based stage. This needs rethinking keeping in view the changing educational settings. The paper presents a basic student workload model built to assess student workload in a more realistic and detailed manner taking into consideration objective factors as well as subjective factors for personalized model. It presents a mechanism for data collection of course workload as well as of the students’ subjective perceptions for the workload estimator. The outcomes are expected to provide more insights than only estimated weekly working hours indicated by modular credit, thus allowing students to make more informed decisions for a suitable academic path and to help reduce the course dropping rate. Deliverables of the work include a data collection tool and a workload estimator tool.Lai, L.; Wadhwa, B. (2020). A Student Workload Estimator Tool: Rethinking Modular Credit. En 6th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'20). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. (30-05-2020):903-910. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd20.2020.11172OCS90391030-05-202

Report on the 2nd Software Engineering Education Workshop (SEED 2019) co-located with APSEC 2019

SEED 2019, The 2nd International workshop on Software Engineering Education (co-located with Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference – APSEC 2019, 2-4 December, at Putrajaya, Malaysia with a theme 'Engineering Impactful Software for the Society towards IR4.0'), aims to bring together Software Engineering (SE) educators and practitioners into a dialogue to build a shared understanding of Software Engineering curriculum topics and specific issues in teaching and learning of Software Engineering with respect to the emerging topics of Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, and Internet of Things (IoT) and corresponding Industry practices. SEED 2019 invited Position Papers (maximum 6 pages long) in the area of Software Engineering. The workshop accepted 5 papers and consisted of keynote talk as well as group discussion in addition to the position paper presentations

Smart City Technologies: Design and Evaluation of An Intelligent Driving Assistant for Smart Parking

Smart cities technologies are gradually changing our urban landscape thanks to the proliferation of billions of smart devices permanently connected through the internet. Among technologies with highest impact on citizen’s quality of life are intelligent transportation systems and in particular, smart parking applications. In this paper, we present a study evaluation the design of a smart parking assistant developed in our lab. The system is implemented as mobile app with an integrated GUI adapted for Android tablets. The app extends common park guidance information systems (PGI) offering suggestions based on parking fee or proximity to destination. Two novel features – beyond the state of the art of current available systems – are added: the use of natural language and the ability to react in real-time to changes in parking occupancy. If the number of parking lots drops to critical level, the application redirects the driver to another parking place. Furthermore, the app includes GPS and Google maps interfacing modules which enable the application to detect the driver location and calculate the nearest car park distance. A group of five experts with background in interface design and natural language processing evaluated the prototype using Nielsen’s set of heuristics in a think-loud approach. Results and implications for further interaction design are extensively discussed

How to and how much? Teaching ethics in an interaction design course

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eveloping a Suitability Assessment Criteria for Software Developers: Behavioral Assessment Using Psychometric Test

A suitability assessment instrument for software developers was created using a psychometric criteria that identify the impact of behavior on the performance of software engineers. The instrument uses a questionnaire to help both individuals and IT recruiters to identify the psychological factors that affect the working performance of software engineers. Our study identifies the relationship between the behavioral drivers and the programming abilities of the subjects. In order to evaluate the instrument, a total of 100 respondents were compared on the basis of their programming skills and nine behavioral drivers. It was concluded that there is a direct relationship between certain human qualities, such as “Attention to Detail,” and the programming style of the students, while the “Locus of Control” factor was observed to have a negative correlation with performance in programming

Improving quality of use case documents through learning and user interaction

Use cases are widely used to capture user requirements based on interactions between different roles in the system. They are mostly documented in natural language and sometimes aided with graphical illustrations in the form of use case diagrams. Use cases serve as an important means to communicate among stakeholders, requirement engineers and system engineers as they are easy to understand and are produced early in the software development process. Having high quality use cases are beneficial in many ways, e.g., in avoiding inconsistency/incompleteness in requirements, in guiding system design, in generating test cases. In this work, we propose an approach to improve the quality of use cases using techniques including natural language processing and machine learning. The central idea is to discover potential problems in use cases through active learning and human interaction and provide feedbacks in natural language. We conduct user studies with a real-world use case document. The results show that our method is helpful in improving use cases with a reasonable amount of user interaction.No Full Tex

Automatic early defects detection in use case documents

Use cases, as the primary techniques in the user requirement analysis, have been widely adopted in the requirement engineering practice. As developed early, use cases also serve as the basis for function requirement development, system design and testing. Errors in the use cases could potentially lead to problems in the system design or implementation. It is thus highly desirable to detect errors in use cases. Automatically analyzing use case documents is challenging primarily because they are written in natural languages. In this work, we aim to achieve automatic defect detection in use case documents by leveraging on advanced parsing techniques. In our approach, we first parse the use case document using dependency parsing techniques. The parsing results of each use case are further processed to form an activity diagram. Lastly, we perform defect detection on the activity diagrams. To evaluate our approach, we have conducted experiments on 200+ real-world as well as academic use cases. The results show the effectiveness of our method.Full Tex

FORMULATION, SYSTEMATIC OPTIMIZATION, IN VITRO, EX VIVO, AND STABILITY ASSESSMENT OF TRANSETHOSOME BASED GEL OF CURCUMIN

Objectives: The current work presents a formulation of curcumin-loaded transethosome (CRM-TE) in the form of a gel and its characterization.Methods: Thirteen formulations were prepared by varying the concentration of Phospholipon 90G as lipid, ethanol, and ratio of lipid: Span using Box- Behnken Design. The optimized formulation was characterized by vesicle size, entrapment efficiency, drug retention, drug permeation through skin, and morphology. Parameters of CRM-TE were compared to other vesicular systems that include liposomes, ethosomes, and transfersomes. Optimized CRM-TE was incorporated into gels, and comparative evaluation was performed. CRM-TE gel was kept at 5±3°C, 25±3°C, and 40±3°C for 180 days, further evaluated for entrapment efficacy and vesicle size.Results: CRM-TE showed 286.4 nm vesicle size, 61.2% entrapment efficiency, 19.8% drug retention, and 71.3% drug permeation at 24 h in the skin. It was found superior in terms of all the parameters as compared to other vesicular formulations. CRM-TE gel also exhibited best characteristics in terms of entrapment efficiency, drug retention, and drug permeation. CRM-TE gel exhibited better stability at 5±3°C in terms of vesicle size and entrapment efficiency as compared to other storage conditions.Conclusion: CRM-TE gel could offer efficient delivery of curcumin through topical route

INFLUENCE OF FORMULATION PARAMETERS ON DISSOLUTION RATE ENHANCEMENT OF ACYCLOVIR USING LIQUISOLID FORMULATION

Objective: The objective of this research work is to explore the use of liquisolid technique in enhancement of acyclovir dissolution rate. This current study was planned to assess the impact of different formulation variables, such as non-volatile liquid type and concentrations of acyclovir on its dissolution rates profile. Method: Acyclovir liquisolid tablets were prepared with Tween 60 (liquid vehicle), Microcrystalline cellulose PH 102 (acted as a carrier to turn liquid medication into free-flowing powder) and Syloid XDP (coating material). In vitro, drug dissolution rate of liquisolid formulations of acyclovir was performed and compared with pure acyclovir drug using USP dissolution apparatus (Type II) for 60 min at a paddle speed of 50 rpm and filled with 900 mL of distilled water. Results: The dissolution study showed that 94.1% of the drug was released in 60 min of ratio 10 while only 66% of the pure drug acyclovir was released in 60 min. Hence, present work concluded that the acyclovir dissolution rate profile has been improved with the formation of liquisolid formulations. Conclusion: From the present study, it may be ratified that the drug dissolution rate of acyclovir has been improved with the utilization of liquisolid formulations approach.Â

DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE VERIFICATION OF NEWLY DEVELOPED DISPOSABLE STATIC DIFFUSION CELL FOR DRUG DIFFUSION/PERMEABILITY STUDIES

Objectives: The present study describes a disposable static diffusion cell for in vitro diffusion studies to achieve better results as compared to well existing Franz diffusion cell (FDC) in terms of the absence of bubbles, variable receptor compartment, ease of handling, and faster results.Materials and Methods: The cell consists of a cup-shaped donor compartment made of semi permeable that could be either cellophane membrane or, animal skin fitted to a rigid frame, which is supported on a plastic plate that contains a hole for the sample withdrawal. The receptor compartment is a separate unit, and it could be any container up to 500ml volume capacity. The most preferred receptor compartment is glass beaker. In the present study, goatskin was used as semi-permeable membrane and verification of its performance was carried out through diffusion studies using gel formulations of one each of the four-selected biopharmaceutical classification system (BCS) class drugs. Metronidazole, diclofenac sodium, fluconazole, and sulfadiazine were used as model drugs for BCS Class I, II, III, and IV, respectively.Results: The newly developed diffusion cell (NDDC) was found to provide faster and more reproducible results as compared to FDC. At the time interval of 24 h, the cell was found to exhibit a higher diffusion of metronidazole, diclofenac sodium, fluconazole, and sulfadiazine by 0.65, 0.65, 0.32, and 0.81 folds, respectively. The faster release obtained with NDDC was attributed to a larger surface area of skin as compared to that in FDC.Conclusion: It was concluded that better reproducibility of results could be achieved with NDDC