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Applying the correct set of Boolean operations is a fundamental task in constructive solid geometry (CSG), which is a staple in automated manufacturing systems. Although textual buttons and icons are the most common interfaces to apply such operations, these require an unnecessary cognitive load that hampers the solid modeling process. This study presents VennPad, a novel CSG widget that gathers all Boolean operations under the same user interface control element and is represented as a two-set Venn diagram. Contrary to conventional CSG widgets, VennPad supports a graphical interface that gives simultaneous access to several types of Boolean operations (intersection, union, difference, symmetric difference and split). A usability study was conducted to ascertain whether VennPad is a more natural interface compared to textual buttons and icon-based widgets for different solid modeling tasks. VennPad proved to be an effective interface to perform Boolean operations. Qualitative feedback places VennPad as the preferred interface, but efficiency results are operation dependent, thus, opening the way to new design iterations.

RESUMEN: La utilización de protocolos y estándares han facilitado el control de las redes informáticas desde sus inicios. Siendo hoy éstas cada vez más heterogéneas, proporcionando mayor número de servicios, su gestión ha sido una ardua tarea por implementar para poder adaptarse a su evolución continua. Los técnicos o administradores de las redes han tenido que buscar métodos alternativos para cubrir las necesidades de gestión de las organizaciones, ya que se espera que todas y cada una de sus áreas principales funcionen de manera óptima y garanticen las operaciones de los usuarios con la red de datos. A través de estos, debe ser posible medir, mantener y mejorar los procesos informáticos. Gracias a la utilización de la plataforma de gestión LibreNMS, será posible lograr una mejor calidad de servicio, dado que su sistema permite administrar una base de datos con todas las configuraciones de los equipos, pudiendo monitorizarlos gráficamente, detectar incidencias mediante el aviso de alertas que se obtiene de los mensajes SNMP, como prevenir futuros fallos de red y actuar con la mayor brevedad posible. ABSTRACT: The use of protocols and standards have provided the control of computer networks since its their very beginning. These days, the networks are increasingly heterogeneous, providing a greater number of services, their management has been an arduous task to implement in order to adapt to their continuous evolution. Technicians or network administrators have had to look for alternative methods to meet the management requirements of organizations, since each and every one of their main areas is expected to work optimally and guarantee the operations of users with the data network. Through these, it must be possible to measure, maintain and improve IT processes. Thanks to the use of the LibreNMS management platform, it will be possible to achieve a better quality of service, since its system allows to manage a database with all the configurations of the equipment, being able to monitor them graphically, detect problems through the warning of alerts that is obtained from the SNMP messages, as well as preventing future network failures and act as soon as possible. Grado en Ingeniería de Tecnologías de Telecomunicación

Este proyecto presenta el diseño e implementación de un widget para una aplicación de smarthome ya existente. El sistema diseñado permite llevar a cabo funciones de la aplicación de forma más rápida y directa, ahorrando de esta forma recursos. Con el trabajo realizado se pretende dotar de valor añadido a la aplicación enControl de la empresa Sensing & Control S.L. para la cual trabajo. Aquest projecte presenta el disseny i implementació d'un giny per a una aplicació de smarthome ja existent. El sistema dissenyat permet dur a terme funcions de l'aplicació de forma més ràpida i directa, estalviant d'aquesta forma recursos. Amb el treball realitzat es pretén dotar de valor afegit a l'aplicació enControl de l'empresa Sensing & Control S.L. para la qual treball. This project presents the design and implementation of a widget for an existing smarthome application. The designed system allows to carry out application functions faster, directly and saving resources. With this final work is intended to provide added value to the enControl application of the company Sensing & Control S.L. for which I work.

The paper presents a novel approach to conduct laboratory experiments in relation with the Control class taught at EPFL. The existing laboratory interface built as a Java applet, which allows students to access experimentation devices locally or remotely, is split into a set of light-weight Web applications or widgets. While achieving the same basic functionalities, these widgets provide user customization and extension. They are more flexible and add off-the-shelf interaction with other widgets and with the surrounding Web environment. The paper shows how remote experimentation devices are integrated within the Graasp platform, which provides knowledge management and enables collaboration among students. The educational scenario illustrates the technical challenges, and the solutions to tackle them are proposed and explained.

Apache Wookie (incubating) has generated considerable interest within the context of Technology Enhanced Learning where it was developed, as well as in mobile applications. The origins of the system in providing services for IMS Learning Design are described, together with an introduction to the system's design and functionality. However, the areas where it has had success are distinct from the application area for which it was designed and developed. The implications of this for understanding user needs is analysed by using ideas drawn from sociology. The complexity of the relationship between the context of use and user needs, and the feedback loops between them is discussed, and the role of technological interventions as an element in a discourse is considered. It is proposed that this understanding of users needs, together with the experience of the development and use of Wookie, argues in favour of an interoperability strategy which focuses on relatively small sets of functional requirements, and avoidance where possible of specifications developed for particular application domains: an approach which may be characterised as piecemeal rather than Utopian.

In order to provide interoperable services to a range of applications, platforms and devices a number of open source applications have been developed, many of them within the Apache Software Foundation. We analyse the way that these relate to research and development in education, which has also informed the functionality which they offer, providing a case study of the relationship between generic open source infrastructure development, and the discourse around pedagogy. The functionality foreseen for Personal Learning Environments and for the learning design approach to face-to-face learning is identified. The capabilities of Apache Wookie (incubating) W3C Widget Server are compared with this desired functionality, and the unfulfilled functionality identified with a particular focus on the need to support teachers control over their technological environment in response to emerging conditions in the classroom. The application store ('app store') is identified as a key software paradigm for meeting the unfulfilled functionality, and the ways in which it can support teaching practice are explored. A number of current software projects, and collaborations between them, are described which are contributing to providing a coherent infrastructure for building app stores. Finally some areas of functionality which remain pending future research and development are identified.

The influence of digital technologies as well as the World Wide Web on education rises dramatically. In former years Learning Management Systems (LMS) were introduced on educational institutes to address the needs both their institutions and their lecturers. Nowadays a shift from an institution-centered approach to a learner-centered one becomes necessary to allow individuality through the learning process and to think about learning strategies in general. In this paper a first approach of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is described. The technological concept is pointed out as well as a study about the graphical user-interface done at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). It can be concluded that PLEs are the next generation environments, which help to improve the learning and teaching behavior

International audience; Social interaction leverages collective intelligence through user-generated content, social networking, and social annotation. Users are enabled to enrich knowledge representation by rating, commenting, and tagging. The existing systems for service discovery make use of semantic relation among social tags, but ignore the relation between a user information need for services and tags. This paper first provides an overview of how social tagging is applied to discover contents/services. An enhanced web widget discovery model that aims to discover services mostly relevant to users is then proposed. The model includes an algorithm that quantifies the accurate relation between user intent for a service and the tags of a widget, as well as three different widget discovery schemes. Using the online service of Widgetbox.com, we experimentally demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our system.

A recent trend in web development is to build platforms which are carefully designed to host a plurality of software components (sometimes called widgets or plugins) which can be organized or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience to create personalized environments. The same holds true for the web development of educational applications. The degree of personalization can depend on the role of users such as in traditional virtual learning environment, where the components are chosen by a teacher in the context of a course. Or, it can be more opened as in a so-called personalized learning environment (PLE). It now exists a wide array of available web platforms exhibiting different functionalities but all built on the same concept of aggregating components together to support different tasks and scenarios. There is now an overlap between the development of PLE and the more generic developments in web 2.0 applications such as social network sites. This article shows that 6 more or less independent dimensions allow to map the functionalities of these platforms: the screen dimensionmaps the visual integration, the data dimension maps the portability of data, the temporal dimension maps the coupling between participants, the social dimension maps the grouping of users, the activity dimension maps the structuring of end users–interactions with the environment, and the runtime dimensionmaps the flexibility in accessing the system from different end points. Finally these dimensions are used to compare 6 familiar Web platforms which could potentially be used in the construction of a PLE.

As two recent trends in Web development, Widgets and mashups, are converging, we claim that there is a growing need to define a Widget Space configuration language to allow building flexible personal learning environments that could be independent of a runtime environment. By integrating the do-it-yourself dimension of a Web portal or Web mashup and the social dimension of the Web, we describe the scenarios that could emerge and we describe the new Web components that would be required to support it.

This paper proposes a novel approach to build and deploy learning analytics dashboards in multiple learning environments. Existing learning dashboards are barely portable: once deployed on a learning platform, it requires considerable effort to deploy the dashboard elsewhere. We suggest constructing dashboards from lightweight web applications, namely widgets. Our approach allows to port dashboards with no additional cost between learning environments that implement open specifications (Open Social and Activity Streams) for data access and use widget APIs. We propose to facilitate reuse by sharing the dashboards and widgets via a centralized analytics repository.