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In this paper we present a conceptual model and an implementation of a mobile augmented reality (AR) application to support therapeutic sessions for children and adolescents with mental health disorders. In this work, we discuss the importance of having adequate tools so that parents, teachers and therapists may define personalized gamified experiences using AR according to the specific needs of each child. We described the proposed model and an implementation based on Unity AR Foundation and Google Cloud Anchors.

Games are powerful generators of positive emotions in children and are intrinsically satisfying. In this context, our work evaluates the use of mobile augmented reality without markers as the technology to implement a multiplayer game scenario that can be used to improve socialization, communication skills and emotional intelligence in primary school children. The present study addresses the usability of two gameplay styles and their impact on users' communication and motivation: competitive vs collaborative play. The game integrates Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) technology without markers to create a geolocation scenario with unlimited physical space. The results indicate that both game modes are intrinsically satisfactory for children triggering positive emotions such as enthusiasm, enjoyment and curiosity that improve the participants’ mood and help increase the degree of involvement. Moreover, we observed that the collaborative game version has a greater impact on emotional affection, social interaction and interest. In addition, we observed in our study that the quality of the communication in the collaborative mode is good in terms of several factors such as sustaining mutual understanding, dialogue management, information pooling, reaching consensus, time management and reciprocal interaction. Finally, several design implications and suggestions related to game time management, scaffolding, mixed competitive-collaborative modes, dynamic 3D content and active learning, among others, are discussed. The present evaluation contributes to the identification of the most relevant aspects to be considered in the future design of MAR-based gamification strategies in education.

Canonical prefoldin is a protein cochaperone composed of six different subunits (PFDN1 to 6). PFDN1 overexpression promotes epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) and increases the growth of xenograft lung cancer (LC) cell lines. We investigated whether this putative involvement of canonical PFDN in LC translates into the clinic. First, the mRNA expression of 518 non-small cell LC (NSCLC) cases from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database was evaluated. Patients with PFDN1 overexpression had lower overall survival (OS; 45 vs. 86 months; p = 0.034). We then assessed the impact of PFDN expression on outcome in 58 NSCLC patients with available tumor tissue samples. PFDN1, 3, and 5 overexpression were found in 38% (n = 22), 53% (n = 31), and 41% (n = 24) of tumor samples. PFDN1, 3, and 5 overexpression were significantly associated with lower OS, lower disease-free survival (DFS), and lower distant metastasis-free survival (DMFS) for PFDN1 and 3 with a trend for PFDN5. In multivariate analysis, PFDN5 retained significance for OS (hazard ratio (HR) 2.56; p = 0.007) and PFDN1 for DFS (HR 2.53; p = 0.010) and marginally for DMFS (HR 2.32; p = 0.053). Our results indicate that protein response markers, such as PFDN1, 3, and 5, may complement mRNA signatures and be useful for determining the most appropriate therapy for NSCLC patients., This work was co-funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (BFU2017-85420-R to JCR and BFU2016-7772-C3-1-P to SC) and by the Andalusian Government (BIO-271) and the University of Seville (US-1256285 to SC) in cooperation with the European Regional Development Fund.

Resumen del trabajo presentado en el Meeting of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO 2020), celebrado online del 28 de noviembre al 1 de diciembre

The ever-increasing cases of acquired brain injury (ABI), especially among young people, have prompted a rapid progress in research involving neurological disorders. One important path is the concept of relearning, which attempts to help people regain basic motor and cognitive skills lost due to illness or accident. The goals of relearning are twofold. First, there must exist a way to properly assess the necessities of an affected person, leading to a diagnosis, followed by a recommendation regarding the exercises, tests and tasks to perform; and second, there must be a way to confirm the results obtained from these recommendations in order to fine-tune and personalize the relearning process. This presents a challenge, as there is a deeply-rooted duality between the personalized and the generalized approach. In this work we propose a personalization algorithm based on the ant colony optimization (ACO), which is a bio-inspired meta-heuristic. As we show, the stochastic nature of ants has certain similarities to the human learning process. We combine the adaptive and exploratory capabilities of ACO systems to respond to rapidly changing environments and the ubiquitous human factor. Finally, we test the proposed solution extensively in various scenarios, achieving high quality results. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved, This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and by the FEDER funds of the EU under the project SUPEREMOS (TIN2014-60077-R) and insPIre (TIN2012-34003). Kamil Krynicki is supported by the FPI fellowship from Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.

Ant Colony Optimization is a bio-inspired computational technique for establishing optimal paths in graphs. It has been successfully adapted to solve many classical computational problems, with considerable results. Nevertheless, the attempts to apply ACO to the question of multidimensional problems and multi-class resource querying have been somewhat limited. They suffer from either severely decreased efficiency or low scalability, and are usually static, custom-made solutions with only one particular use. In this paper we employ Angry Ant Framework, a multipheromone variant of Ant Colony System that surpasses its predecessor in terms of convergence quality, to the question of multi-class resource queries. To the best of the authors knowledge it is the only algorithm capable of dynamically creating and pruning pheromone levels, which we refer to as dynamic pheromone stratification. In a series of experiments we verify that, due to this pheromone level flexibility, Angry Ant Framework, as well as our improvement of it called Entropic Angry Ant Framework, have significantly more potential for handling multi-class resource queries than their single pheromone counterpart. Most notably, the tight coupling between pheromone and resource classes enables convergence that is both better in quality and more stable, while maintaining a sublinear cost. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved., Kamil Krynicki is a FPI fellow of Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, number 3117. This work received support from Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) with the project SUPEREMOS TIN2014-60077-R and the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan.

[EN] Play is an essential activity for both humans and animals as it provides stimulation and favors cognitive, physical and social development. This paper proposes a novel pervasive playful environment that allows hospitalized children to participate in remote interspecies play with dogs in a dog daycare facility, while it also allows the dogs to play by themselves with the pervasive system. The aim of this playful interactive space is to help improving both children¿s and animal¿s wellbeing and their relationships by means of technologically mediated play, while creating a solid knowledge base to define the future of pervasive interactive environments for animals., This work is supported by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER), Spain and Spanish MINECO (TIN2014-60077-R). The work of Patricia Pons is supported by the Spanish MECD (FPU13/03831). Special thanks to the dogs and children who participated in our study, the dogs' owners and the children's families. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the teachers of the Unidad Pedagogica Hospitalaria La Fe and Oncologia Pediatrica La Fe and also Olga and Astrid from Buma's Doggy Daycare facility, for their invaluable support, collaboration and dedication.

As technologies diversify and become embedded in everyday lives, the technologies we expose to animals, and the new technologies being developed for animals within the field of Animal Computer Interaction (ACI) are increasing. As we approach seven years since the ACI manifesto, which grounded the field within Human Computer Interaction and Computer Science, this thematic literature review looks at the technologies developed for (non-human) animals. Technologies that are analysed include tangible and physical, haptic and wearable, olfactory, screen technology and tracking systems. The conversation explores what exactly ACI is whilst questioning what it means to be animal by considering the impact and loop between machine and animal interactivity. The findings of this review are expected to form the first grounding foundation of ACI technologies informing future research in animal computing as well as suggesting future areas for exploration.

[EN] Gamification has been identified as an interesting technique to foster collaboration in educational contexts. However, there are not many approaches that tackle this in primary school learning environments. The most popular technologies in the classroom are still traditional video consoles and desktop computers, which complicate the design of collaborative activities since they are essentially mono-user. The recent popularization of handheld devices such as tablets and smartphones has made it possible to build affordable, scalable, and improvised collaborative gamifled activities by creating a multi-tablet environment. In this paper we present Quizbot, a collaborative gamifled quiz application to practice different subjects, which can be defined by educators beforehand. Two versions of the system are implemented: a tactile for tablets laid on a table, in which all the elements are digital; and a tangible in which the tablets are scattered on the floor and the components are both digital and physical objects. Both versions of Quizbot are evaluated and compared in a study with eighty primary-schooled children in terms of user experience and quality of collaboration supported. Results indicate that both versions of Quizbot are essentially equally fun and easy to use, and can effectively support collaboration, with the tangible version outperforming the other one with respect to make the children reach consensus after a discussion, split and parallelize work, and treat each other with more respect, but also presenting a poorer time management., We would like to thank Universitat Politecnica de Valencia's Summer School for their collaboration during the development of this study, as well as Colegio Internacional Ausias March for their support in the development of educational content., This work is supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) with Project TIN2014-60077-R. It is also supported by fellowship ACIF/2014/214 within the VALi+d program from Conselleria d’Educació, Cultura i Esport (Generalitat Valenciana), and by fellowship FPU14/00136 within the FPU program from Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport

[EN] Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is an essential soft skill that should be fostered from a young age. Research shows that a good way of teaching such skills is through video games; however, the success and viability of this method may be affected by the technological platform used. In this work we propose a gameful approach to train CPS skills in the form of the CPSbot framework and describe a study involving 80 primary school children on user experience and acceptance of a game, Quizbot, using three different technological platforms: two purely digital (tabletop and handheld tablets) and another based on tangible interfaces and physical spaces. The results show that physical spaces proved to be more effective than the screen-based platforms in several ways, as well as being considered more fun and easier to use by the children. Finally, we propose a set of design considerations for future gameful CPS systems based on the observations made during this study., Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund (project TIN2014-60077-R); Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (with fellowship FPU14/00136) and Conselleria d'Educacio, Cultura i Esport (Generalitat Valenciana, Spain) (grant ACIF/2014/214).

[EN] The use of multi-touch devices for all types of users (from children to the elderly) has grown considerably in the recent years. However, despite the huge interest in this technology there is a lack of research addressing usability studies on children with Down's Syndrome. This article evaluates the abilities of these children (aged from 5 to 10 years) when performing a basic set of multi-touch gestures (tap, double tap, long press, drag, scale up and down, rotation) in tablet devices. The results show that regardless of their more limited motor skills, DS children are able to perform most of the evaluated multi-touch gestures with success rates close to 100% and that this technology could be fully exploited for developing applications targeted specifically at this type of user., Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) with the project TIN2014-60077-R (SUPEREMOS). This work was also supported by a pre-doctoral fellowship within the Formacion de Profesorado Universitario (FPU) program from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports to V. Nacher (FPU14/00136) and by a pre-doctoral scholarship given by the SENESCYT (Secretaria Nacional de Educacion Superior, Ciencia y Tecnologia e Innovacion) of the government of Ecuador (No. 381-2012) to Doris Caliz.

User-centered design applied to non-human animals is showing to be a promising research line known as Animal Computer Interaction (ACI), aimed at improving animals' wellbeing using technology. Within this research line, intelligent systems for animal entertainment could have remarkable benefits for their mental and physical wellbeing, while providing new ways of communication and amusement between humans and animals. In order to create user-centered interactive intelligent systems for animals, we first need to understand how they spontaneously interact with technology, and develop suitable mechanisms to adapt to the animals' observed interactions and preferences. Therefore, this paper describes a pioneer study on cats' preferences and behaviors with different technological devices. It also presents the design and evaluation of a promising depth-based tracking system for the detection of cats' body parts and postures. The contributions of this work lay foundations towards providing a framework for the development of future intelligent systems for animal entertainment.

Over the recent years peer-to-peer (p2p) systems have become increasingly popular. As of today most ofthe internet IP traffic is already transmitted in this format and still it is said to double in volume till 2014.Most p2p systems, however, are not pure serverless solutions, nor is the searching in those networkshighly efficient, usually achieved by simple flooding. In order to confront with the growing traffic wemust consider more elaborate search mechanisms and far less centralized environments. An effectiveproposal to this problem is to solve it in the domain of ant colony optimization metaheuristics. In thispaper we present an overview of ACO algorithms that offer the best potential in this field, under the strictrequirements and limitations of a pure p2p network. We design several experiments to serve as an evalu-ation platform for the mentioned algorithms to conclude the features of a high quality approach. Finally,we consider two hybrid extensions to the classical algorithms, in order to examine their contribution tothe overall quality robustness.© 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved., This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and Innovation under the National Strategic Program of Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation (I+D+i) project TIN2010-20488. Kamil Krynicki is supported by a FPI fellowship from Universidad Politecnica de Valencia.

[EN] The ever increasing elderly population requires a revision of technology to make it usable and meaningful for them. Most applications take into account their reduced physical and cognitive abilities in order to provide assistive services, but this paper focuses on building technology to improve these capacities through cognitive games. We present Tangibot, a tangible-mediated robot aimed at enabling more intuitive and appealing interactions. A usability study conducted on subjects at three different levels of cognitive impairment (none, mild, and severe) reveals that it is usable and engaging for users with no or mild cognitive impairment, and even though it is less usable for persons with severe impairment, it triggers positive emotional reactions among them, which makes it promising for their use in therapeutic activities., This work is supported by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) with Project TIN2014-60077-R. It is also supported by fellowship ACIF/2014/214 within the VALi+d program from Conselleria d'Educacio, Cultura i Esport (Generalitat Valenciana), and by fellowship FPU14/00136 within the FPU program from Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport.

[EN] There is growing interest in the automatic detection of animals' behaviors and body postures within the field of Animal Computer Interaction, and the benefits this could bring to animal welfare, enabling remote communication, welfare assessment, detection of behavioral patterns, interactive and adaptive systems, etc. Most of the works on animals' behavior recognition rely on wearable sensors to gather information about the animals' postures and movements, which are then processed using machine learning techniques. However, non-wearable mechanisms such as depth-based tracking could also make use of machine learning techniques and classifiers for the automatic detection of animals' behavior. These systems also offer the advantage of working in set-ups in which wearable devices would be difficult to use. This paper presents a depth-based tracking system for the automatic detection of animals' postures and body parts, as well as an exhaustive evaluation on the performance of several classification algorithms based on both a supervised and a knowledge-based approach. The evaluation of the depth -based tracking system and the different classifiers shows that the system proposed is promising for advancing the research on animals' behavior recognition within and outside the field of Animal Computer Interaction. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved., This work is funded by the European Development Regional Fund (EDRF-FEDER) and supported by Spanish MINECO with Project TIN2014-60077-R. It also received support from a postdoctoral fellowship within the VALi+d Program of the Conselleria d'Educacio, Cultura I Esport (Generalitat Valenciana) awarded to Alejandro Catala (APOSTD/2013/013). The work of Patricia Pons is supported by a national grant from the Spanish MECD (FPU13/03831). Special thanks to our cat participants and their owners, and many thanks to our feline caretakers and therapists, Olga, Asier and Julia, for their valuable collaboration and their dedication to animal wellbeing.

Several studies have shown the suitability of the direct manipulation style and the multi-touch technology for kindergarteners and, as a result, direct dragging has been established as the standard way of interaction when supporting drag manipulations for them. However, there are scenarios in which direct dragging is not appropriate. For example, when the object to be dragged has to move at a fixed speed or performing an animation independent of the actual direct movement speed or trajectory of the user's hand. However, nobody has yet explored the suitability of indirect dragging interaction mechanisms that allow designers to effectively implement these scenarios. This paper evaluates different mechanisms of indirect dragging manipulations (Tap-based, Accelerometer-based and Buttons-based) in order to identify those that could be used by kindergarteners in scenarios where the direct dragging is not suitable. The results show that even though kindergarten children are able to effectively use different types of indirect dragging techniques, some considerations in terms of completion time and precision must be taken into account.

This paper evaluates MarkAirs, an interaction technique that uses fiducial markers to perform mid-air interactions. MarkAirs offers several advantages: the proposed technique does not require any tracking external hardware other than the front camera of a mobile device; it is robust even when the markers are partially occluded; and it enables precise 2D manipulations (translation, rotation and scaling). An evaluation study points to the feasibility and precision of the proposed technique and the perceived usability and subjective workload impressions of the participants.

Modern technology has brought many changes to our everyday lives. Our need to be in constant touch with others has been met with the cellphone, which has become our companion and the convergence point of many technological advances. The combination of capabilities such as browsing the Internet and GPS reception has multiplied the services and applications based on the current location of the user. However, providing the user with these services has certain drawbacks. Although map navigation systems are the most meaningful way of displaying this information, the user still has to manually set up the filter in order to obtain a non-bloated visualization of the map and the available services. To tackle this problem, we present here a semantic multicriteria ant colony algorithm capable of learning the user's routes, including associated context information, and then predicting the most likely route a user is following, given his current location and context data. This knowledge could then be used as the basis for offering services related to his current (or most likely future) context data close to the path he is following. Our experimental results show that our algorithm is capable of obtaining consistent solutions sets even when multiple objective ontological terms are included in the process., This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) under the funding project CENIT-MIO! CENIT-2008 1019.

Pathfinding is one of the tasks, apart from graphics rendering, requiring most CPU resources. Although there are many approaches to effectively solve pathfinding problems, they are becoming less suitable as more and more games have larger game worlds that dynamically change during the game play. These new games have more visually realistic graphics that increase the game characters realism but all these efforts may be useless if game characters perform dumb movements or follow inappropriate paths such as repeatedly walking close to an enemy or a predator while moving from one location to another. To tackle this problem we present in this paper an ant colony algorithm for path finding that takes into account the emotions of the game characters and we show how our approach is used in an augmented-reality educational game. The proposed algorithm is implemented on a GPU processor to demonstrate its scalability with large problem sizes when compared to its corresponding CPU version.

[EN] Digital games for animals within Animal Computer Interaction are usually single-device oriented, however richer interactions could be delivered by considering multimodal environments and expanding the number of technological elements involved. In these playful ecosystems, animals could be either alone or accompanied by human beings, but in both cases the system should react properly to the interactions of all the players, creating more engaging and natural games. Technologically-mediated playful scenarios for animals will therefore require contextual information about the game participants, such as their location or body posture, in order to suitably adapt the system reactions. This paper presents a depth-based tracking system for cats capable of detecting their location, body posture and field of view. The proposed system could also be extended to locate and detect human gestures and track small robots, becoming a promising component in the creation of intelligent interspecies playful environments., Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and funded by the EDRF-FEDER (TIN2014-60077-R). The work of Patricia Pons has been supported by a national grant from the Spanish MECD (FPU13/03831). Alejandro Catalá also received support from a VALi+d fellowship from the GVA (APOSTD/2013/013). Special thanks to our cat participants, their owners, and our feline caretakers and therapists

Ant Colony Optimization has proven to be an important optimization technique. It has provided a solid base for solving classical computational problems, networks routing problems and many others. Nonetheless, algorithms within the Ant Colony metaheuristic have been shown to struggle to reach the global optimum of the search space, with only a few select ones guaranteed to reach it at all. On the other hand, Ant Colony based hybrid solutions that address this issue suffer from either severely decreased efficiency or low scalability and are usually static and custom-made, with only one particular use. In this paper we present a generic and robust solution to this problem, restricted rigorously to the Ant Colony Optimization paradigm, named Angry Ant Framework. It adds a new dimension -- a dynamic, biologically-inspired pheromone stratification, which we hope can become the objective of further state-of-the-art research. We present a series of experiments to enable a discussion on the benefits provided by this new framework. In particular, we show that Angry Ant Framework increases the efficiency, while at the same time improving the flexibility, the adaptability and the scalability with a very low computational investment.

Play stands as one of the most natural and inherent behavior among the majority of living species, specifically humans and animals. Human play has evolved significantly over the years, and so have done the artifacts which allow us to play: from children playing tag games without any tools other than their bodies, to modern video games using haptic and wearable devices to augment the playful experience. However, this ludic revolution has not been the same for the humans’ closest companions, our pets. Recently, a new discipline inside the human–computer interaction (HCI) community, called animal–computer interaction (ACI), has focused its attention on improving animals’ welfare using technology. Several works in the ACI field rely on playful interfaces to mediate this digital communication between animals and humans. Until now, the development of these interfaces only comprises a single goal or activity, and its adaptation to the animals’ needs requires the developers’ intervention. This work analyzes the existing approaches, proposing a more generic and autonomous system aimed at addressing several aspects of animal welfare at a time: Intelligent Playful Environments for Animals. The great potential of these systems is discussed, explaining how incorporating intelligent capabilities within playful environments could allow learning from the animals’ behavior and automatically adapt the game to the animals’ needs and preferences. The engaging playful activities created with these systems could serve different purposes and eventually improve animals’ quality of life., This work was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science andInnovation under the National R&D&I Program within the projects Create Worlds (TIN2010-20488) and SUPEREMOS (TIN2014-60077-R), and from Universitat Politècnica de València under Project UPV-FE-2014-24. It also received support from a postdoctoral fellowship within theVALi+d Program of the Conselleria d’Educació, Cultura I Esport (Generalitat Valenciana) awarded to Alejandro Catalá (APOSTD/2013/013). The work of Patricia Pons has been supported by the Universitat Politècnica de València under the “Beca de Excelencia” program and currently by an FPU fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports (FPU13/03831).

International audience; Digital tabletops present numerous benefits in face-to-face collaboration environments. However, their integration in real settings is complicated by cost and fixed location. In this respect, building table-like environments using several handheld devices such as tablets or smartphones provides a promising alternative but is limited to touch interaction only. We propose instead another kind of “around-device” interaction (ADI) technique using the built-in front camera of these devices and fiducial frame markers, which presents advantages including better awareness and less interference. This paper contributes a first step in exploring the potential of this interaction technique by conducting a usability test comparing several ergonomic factors that may have an effect on the very first operation of the interaction: the acquisition of the marker.

Digital media and software have been used in supporting learning. Activities based on games should place the emphasis on the phase of creating artifacts for the game world, not on just playing or consuming contents. This chapter briefly reviews a number of outstanding efforts on providing advanced systems for the creation of digital games or simulations by children or young users, and analyzes their characteristics in terms of technology and the creation degree offered in both authorship and play processes.

Context: A collaborative system is a special kind of software whose users can perform collaboration, communication and collaboration tasks. These systems usually have a high number of non-functional requirements, resulting from the users¿ need of being aware of other users with whom to collaborate, that is, the workspace awareness. Objective: This paper aims at evaluating two Requirements Engineering languages i and CSRML (an extension of i ) in order to determine which is the most suitable one to specify requirements of collaborative systems, taking into account their special characteristics regarding collaboration and awareness. Method: We performed a family of experiments comprising an original experiment and two replicas. They were performed by 30, 45 and 9 Computer Science students, respectively, from Spain and Argentina. These subjects filled in two understandability questionnaires once they analyzed the requirements models of two systems: an e-learning collaborative system and a conference review system with some collaborative aspects support. Both models were specified by using the evaluated languages. Results: The statistical analysis of the family of experiments showed that the understandability was higher for the models specified with CSRML than for those specified with i , especially for collaborative aspects. This result was also confirmed by the meta-analysis conducted. Conclusions: CSRML surpasses i when modeling collaborative systems requirements models due to the specific expressiveness introduced to represent collaboration between users and awareness and the new resorts to manage actors and roles., This work has been partially supported by the grant (PEII09-0054-9581) from the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha and by the grant (DESACO, TIN2008-06596-C02-01) from the Spanish Government. We would like to thank Leandro Antonelli (Software Engineering teacher at UNLP), Francisco Parreno (Statistics teacher at UCLM) and Oscar Dieste (Empirical Software Engineering expert at UPM) for their advices during the course of this study. We would also like to thank Symbia IT Corp. software engineers for their feedback to help us to improve the questionnaires.

In this paper we address the problem of music playlist generation based on the user-personalized specification of context information. We propose a generic semantic multicriteria ant colony algorithm capable of dealing with domain-specific problems by the use of ontologies. It also employs any associated metadata defined in the search space to feed its solution-building process and considers any restrictions the user may have specified. An example is given of the use of the algorithm for the problem of automatic generation of music playlists, some experimental results are presented and the behavior of the approach is explained in different situations. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved., This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under the funding project CENIT-MIOI CENIT-2008 1019 and by the Microsoft Research Labs (Cambridge) under the "Create, Play and Learn" program.

In this paper we present our research to extend a recommender system based on a semantic multicriteria ant colony algorithm to allow the use of Allen temporal operators. The system utilizes user’s learnt routes, including their associated context information, in order to predict the most likely route a user is following, given his current location and context data. The addition of temporal operators will increase the level of expressiveness of the queries the system can answer what will allow, in turn, more fine-tuned predictions. This more refined knowledge could then be used as the basis for offering services related to his current (or most likely future) context in the vicinity of the path the user is following, This work has been supported by the Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) under the funding project CENIT-MIO! CENIT-2008 1019.

[EN] Mobile devices are undergoing great advances in recent years allowing users to access an increasing number of services or personalized applications that can help them select the best restaurant, locate certain shops, choose the best way home or rent the best film. However this great quantity of services does not require the user to find and select those services needed for each specific situation. The classical approaches link some preferences to certain services, include the recommendations given by other users or even include certain fixed rules in order to choose the most appropriate services. However, since these methods assume that user needs can be modelled by fixed rules or preferences, they fail when modelling different users or makes them difficult to train. In this paper we propose a new algorithm that learns from the user's actions in different contextual situations, which allows to properly infer the most appropriate recommendations for a user in a specific contextual situation. This model, by using of a double knowledge diffusion approach, has been specifically designed to face the inherent lack of learning evidences, computational cost and continuous training requirements and, therefore, overcomes the performance and convergence rates offered by other learning methodologies. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved., This work is partially underwritten by the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade of the Government of Spain under the research project CENIT-2008-1019

Departing from creative learning foundations, this paper discusses on the suitability of interactive tables as a grounding technology to support creative learning for several reasons: support for social learning, because the subjects share a physical space as in traditional non-digital technologies; communication during the creative, experimental and reflexive process is direct and not computer-mediated; and subjects can carry out the task in parallel on the same surface. Considering reflection, discussion and creation processes in a loop, an experiment with teenagers has been conducted comparing a digital-based against a pure tangible tabletop in a task of creating entities consisting of blocks and joint elements. This preliminary study, designed to obtain initial insights about whether the grounding technology may become a promising tool to support creative learning, explores some aspects such as productivity, complexity of designs and concurrent comanipulation. The results showed that subjects were more productive in terms of the number of solutions obtained using the non computer-mediated approach. However using the digital tabletop approach subjects design, on average, more complex or elaborate solutions in terms of the number of involved bodies and joints. Finally, an important finding was that teams established more frequently concurrent cooperation schemes in the digital tabletop condition by sharing more effectively the creation space., This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and Innovation under the National Strategic Program of Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation (I+D+i) and project TSI2010-20488. Our thanks to the Alaquas city council and the clubhouse’s managers. Thanks also to the team Polimedia of the office “Área de Información y Comunicaciones” (ASIC) for the support in computer hardware. A. Catalá is supported by a FPU fellowship from the Ministry of Education and Science of Spain with reference AP2006-00181.

In this paper we present an overview of the system designed to provide the 32nd America’s Cup teams with the most accurate and up-to-date meteorological data available of the race course, paying special attention to how the information is gathered in a Grid of meteorological sensors, massively managed and robustly delivered to participating teams.

In this paper we present eCoology, an AR edutainment application for children in which emotional and social aspects are taking into consideration to improve flow or optimal experience. Particularly, we investigate the introduction of emotional agents that react and move within the AR environment according to their emotional state. We propose a model for emotional agents and a path finding mechanism with backtracking that allows exploration of different movement alternatives. In this way, virtual entities may exhibit a complex number of emotional movement behaviors within the augmented space.

Grid applications need for coordination infrastructures that are secure and scalable with both the vast number of potential users and the enormous volume of information that may be exchanged. However, building middleware for these purposes that scales to accommodate the Grid requirements remains a complex problem. In this paper we present a middleware infrastructure that supports the creation of secure shared spaces scaling virtually to any number of users by defining security policies with regular expressions over distinguished names. We propose an XML representation for tuples in the shared space, an infrastructure of XSQL pages for accessing them, and a security model that supports authentication, privacy, integrity and authorization. Our approach leverages on existing standard technologies like XML, XSL, and HTTP favouring coordination between existing applications and future Web Services.

Virtual Organizations (VO) consisting of heterogeneous institutions and individuals that share resources dynamically and in a coordinated way to support collaborative problem-solving are emerging in many fields. Consequently, new types of distributed infrastructures known as Grids have been proposed to cope with these new sharing requirements. Grids offer sets of collective services to support collaborative tasks which are distributed in nature and need asynchronous communication. Existing approaches to this problem lack of flexibility, adaptability and are tightly bound to the collective service that is provided. We present here a generic event model to build collective services that requires no programming, is extensible and can accommodate different event vocabularies. An implementation is also described using standard Web technologies like Java Servlets, XML, XSLT, and XSQL.

The development of software systems must be done using platforms that allow the description of quality, complex, distributed, dynamic and reusable architectural models. We present in this paper PRISMA, an architectural modelling approach based on aspects and components that uses a component definition language (components, connectors and systems) to define architectural types at a high abstraction level and a configuration language to design the architecture of software systems. The component definition language increases reuse allowing importation of COTS and reduces complexity by integrating two modern software development approaches: component-based software development and aspect-oriented software development. The configuration language designs the architecture of software systems by creating and interconnecting instances of the defined types including possible imported COTS. PRISMA has a metalevel with reflexive properties for these two languages. For this reason, the types of PRISMA may evolve and the topologies of PRISMA may be reconfigured dynamically.

The applicability of peer-to-peer (p2p) in the domain of grid computing has been an important subject over the past years. Nevertheless, the sole merger between p2p and the concept of grid is not sufficient to guarantee non-trivial efficiency. Some claim that ant colony optimisation (ACO) algorithms might provide a definite answer to this question. However, the use of ACO in grid networks causes several problems. The first and foremost stems out of the fact that ACO algorithms usually perform well under the conditions of static networks, solving predetermined problems in a known and bound space. The question that remains to be answered is whether the evolutive component of these algorithms is able to cope with changing conditions; and by those we mean changes both in the positive sense, such as the appearance of new resources, but also in the negative sense, such as the disappearance or failure of fragments of the network. In this paper we study these considerations in depth, bearing in mind the specificity of the peer-to-peer nature., This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and Innovation under the National Strategic Programme of Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation (I+D+i) and project TIN 2010-20488. Kamil Krynicki is supported by the FPI Fellowship from Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.

Present-day museums are not mere passive institutions for the preservation of a society's cultural heritage. They have become instead learning environments, research centres and even tourist attractions. The paper introduces the notion of a hybrid museum (HM) in which wireless personal digital devices (PDAs) are used to tailor digital contents to the visitor to enrich both the learning and entertainment experience. The paper describes a fully functional hybrid museum infrastructure (MoMo) implemented with the.NET compact framework running on the PocketPC platform. Several research challenges that had to be faced during the implementation of the system such as the exploration of large sets of information on PDAs are also presented; and the customisation and personalisation of the displayed contents using a modified partial prediction matching algorithm are also discussed.