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The number of game experiences based on the player’s location has increased recently due to proliferation of and innovation in related technologies. In the educational context, the goal of these games has been to increase the player’s skills with respect to a particular topic. When pervasive or narrative components are added; however, complexity of construction and support increases, requiring a tool to manage the information both appropriately and dynamically. Space and pervasiveness of social interaction work together to achieve objectives through the exchange of information between several pervasive games to provide a better game experience. This paper presents a platform enabled to create game experiences based on the player’s location to improve students’ skills by applying the pervasive narrative. It then validates a game experience designed and built in a higher education environment.

At present, sexual robots have become a new paradigm of social robots. In this paper, we developed a systematic literature review about sexual robots (sexbots). To do this, we used the Scopus and WoS databases to answer different research questions regarding the design, interaction, and gender and ethical approaches from 1980 until 2020. In our review, we found a male bias in this discipline, and in recent years, articles have shown that user opinion has become more relevant. Some insights and recommendations on gender and ethics in designing sexual robots were also made.

Game-inspired applications use fun to motivate user participation in activities designed to achieve specific objectives. In this sense, there is a spatial, temporal, social framework, and a set of rules that guide user participation and interaction. Recently, pervasive computing has become a key element to explore new interaction schemes in game inspired applications. By making the concept of space and time ambiguous and confusing, it allows building new mechanics that engage the participant with innovative elements and consequently produce a different, in some cases, more interesting and entertaining experience. This research describes the social expansion as a strategy to enhance game experiences supported by pervasive computing, thus exposing a conceptual model that shows its components, how they relate, and what is the flow of interaction that a user experiences when he or she gets involved; among the most important aspects to consider is the incorporation of a new role to the traditional game mechanics, the spectator. The incorporation of the spectator offers us the opportunity to promote communication schemes with the players, strengthen the affinity ties between spectator-player and expose a series of premises to build pervasive game mechanics.

This paper proposes a workflow ontology-based methodological approach to build a tutorial function groupware and a directed acyclic graph to generate a student' critical route. Accordingly, the development of a groupware to manage and control the monitoring of an educational path by a tutor, is necessary. This is possible as, on the one hand, the workflow ontology allows specifying and modelling this development in a natural, formal manner, which allows the tutor to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with their students in order to guide and orient the latter, throughout their formation, while, on the other hand, a directed acyclic graph algorithm determines the critical route, a student must follow in the course of their academic formation. A case study to show the feasibility of both proposals is presented.

This paper deals with the problem of the small number of women who enroll in technical studies or work in technological enterprises. Although we have focused on initiatives that have been launched in Spain, we have also included several studies from around the world, which try to encourage women into engineering. Once we have reviewed these proposals and confirmed that they have not resulted in a growth of women in technologies, we suggest other proposals and actions such as empathic co-creation from primary education, which could improve this situation and thus provide the benefits of reducing this gender gap.

This paper presents a novel multimodal interaction system that provides three modalities of human interaction to manage the supervision and control of a home automation system for people with limited physical mobility. The first one is based on a brain-control interface (BCI, Brain Computer Interface) by means of surface electroencephalographic electrodes (EEG) using a noninvasive Neurosky wearable. In this case, the control of the BCI is managed by the blinking of human eyes. The second one is based on a voice recognition system using spoken commands on a dialogue system. Finally, the third one is based on a configurable touch screen of a mobile device. All three-interaction modalities can be interchangeable according to user needs. The multimodal interaction system allows the control of home devices and appliances through a home gateway implemented on a resource-limited embedded system, which it is responsible to apply the user commands detected by the multimodal interface to the corresponding home devices. The set of commands can be configurable and extensible adapted to the needs and abilities of different users. For this research, a prototype of the system was developed to verify the interaction modalities. The system provided an adequate and comprehensible operation for users with different user profiles. Our initial tests show that multimodal control is valid for users who have limited physical mobility.

This paper presents a software architecture-based methodological approach to develop collaborative applications. Today, the use of collaborative applications has spread to various domains, as they facilitate communication, collaboration, and coordination between several users. These applications require mechanisms to support and model communication activities and processing of information, vital in the dynamic nature to the group. In this paper, the use of a software architecture is recommended to develop collaborative applications. This architecture for specifying the structure and behavior through the application, providing a shared meeting space to simplify and agile the group work. Thus, it is possible to support dynamic group structure. In addition, specification tables are proposed to simplify the development of this kind of applications; since the developers to complete the table are analyzing the necessary elements required to build an application, so performing requirements analysis, design, and displayed as would the final application. A case study to validate the software architecture is proposed.

In CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), managing the group’s organizational structure allows to control how the group members communicate, collaborate, and coordinate, to achieve a common goal, in order to benefit an organization or a community. Consequently, establishing an appropriate model of this structure’s management is very important, as it can be used as a guide for implementing these kinds of systems. This modeling must be flexible enough, so that it can conform itself to changes within the group and to adjust to the different working styles of several groups, as well as to formally support a base of knowledge; helping to eradicate any ambiguity or redundancy. Therefore, this modeling must formally provide a knowledge representation in order to specify the elements and to control the set of orderly steps on an organizational structure. Thus, a workflow ontology to control such a structure is proposed in this paper. Since, the workflow manages and controls the process, via a set of steps ordered and executed by different organization entities, whereas the ontology specifies the domain of knowledge through concepts, relations, axioms, and instances in a formal, explicit, way. A case of study, to demonstrate the knowledge management of the group’s organizational structure, through workflow ontology is shown.

Ponencia de la conferencia "2018 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference - Emerging Trends and Challenges of Engineering Education, EDUCON 2018; Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands; Spain; 17 April 2018 through 20 April 2018" Transparency and ethics are the key issues to improve in the future generations of bots and robots. Communication between users and bots or robots must be clear and transparent to be audited. Empathy will be a valuable asset in a symbiotic domain (user/bot, bot/bot, bot/robot, robot/robot, user/robot). We expose some guidelines to UX designers to cope to new paradigms in HCI communication challenges.

This paper proposes an MVC Design Pattern for developing groupware. This MVC is customized to take into account both individuals and group aspects, as well as, its evolution to offer users the suitable flexibility and responsiveness at all times. This is achieved through the set of items that configure it, which result from the analysis of various models, methodologies, and tools used in the groupware domain. These items are allocated on templates that serve as guidelines to analyze, design, and implement groupware. Furthermore, this MVC is supported by an ontology that models the group organizational structure, allowing the evolution, reuse and adaptation of groupware, since, the ontology can be adjusted by adding instances, concepts, and/or relations, and a workflow that specifies the task precedence, considering its order and execution through stages. Finally, a case study is presented to attest the viability of the proposal.

Conferencia de "17th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Interaccion 2016; Salamanca; Spain; 13 September 2016 through 16 September 2016" Current computation paradigms allow us to interact with the technology through several devices at the same time. Virtual tools and interfaces belong to the real world. This is the reason why the number of pervasive and geolocated games has been increased. This kind of games mixes activities in the real world with technology typical from video games. These characteristics offer new challenges when designing interactive experiences and they give new ways of teaching through technology. Stories help to motivate participants. However, designing stories for video games is a hard task, due to the interactive characteristic of this media. Players can change the story flow with their own actions. Thus, writers and designers of the game must find the balance between the freedom of the player and the control of the quality of the story. In the present work, we propose a set of technics to design and evaluate a story aimed to lead a geolocated educational experience.

Learning through play is currently an effective and attractive educational strategy. However, are all educational video games (EVG) successful and do they always keep the player motivated? Here, the authors emphasize that the success of an EVG will be more achievable if the game quality is measured, and suggest the use of playability property as a suitable and effective tool to do this. To this end, they present a set of guidelines that are based on Educational Playability (Playability in EVG), which were compiled by analyzing the existing game guidelines to achieve a good EVG design, to form a basis for evaluating the EVG quality, acting as useful tools for developers to enhance videogame playability. The authors propose that through the use of guidelines an acceptable level of playability can be achieved and this ensures the players’ motivation, which is a complicated process requiring the consideration of many aspects (playful, educational, etc.).

An important feature in collaborative environment is coordination, defined as the act of managing interdependencies between activities performed to achieve a goal. These interdependencies can be the result of loosely integrated collaborative activities (the use of coordination processes within the collaboration activities is not required) or tightly integrated collaborative activities (sophisticated coordination mechanisms are necessary). The existence of both activities along with the dynamic nature of these environments adds a greater complexity to the coordination that has not been taken into account in traditional collaborative systems. In this work, the authors present a partially Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) that defines and maintains dynamic coordination polities in collaborative systems based on coordination models.

Current society demands the construction of systems that provide support for cooperative work (CSCW). However, the inherent complexity of this kind of systems hinders the specification of the real requirements, as well as the quick and cheap development. To analyze, design and develop systematically these systems, our research group has created a methodology called AMENITIES. We found similar scenarios in the conceptual modeling of a system that are repeatedly modeled. This paper shows the application of software patterns which capture these common situations, improving and facilitating the conceptual modeling (conceptual patterns) of cooperative systems with AMENITIES. For that purpose, we define a UML profile that facilitates the representation of these patterns. Using a uniform template, we describe and model two examples of patterns which can be used in different stages of the methodology.

Video Games can make people to feel a wide range of emotions like if they actually were in the virtual world they are playing. Emotional Intelligence more and more is taught in schools to children. The aim of this work is giving an introduction to be able to find the way of linking an educational program for teaching emotions to preschool children with game mechanics. To achieve this goal, we have started by learning about emotional intelligence and we have studied some programs and tools used to teach it. We have analyzed also how different media produce emotions. As a result, we propose a set of requirements based in previous study in order to be able to fix a base for game design to fun children while adults can evaluate how these young people are learning to identify emotions and deal feelings they produce.

Video games benefit from the power of narrative to make the user feel immersed in the virtual world that they offer. The different context switches within the range of game mechanics can be justified by these stories. This keeps the motivation through immersion and favors, therefore, teaching through games. The required link for taking the receiver of the story involved with the characters is achieved thanks to the emotions that are transmitted in the story. The design of video games stories is complex due to its interactive nature. In this paper, we expose the basis of our proposal to design and evaluate these interactive stories and include them in a game, paying particular attention to the evaluation of emotions contained therein.

In this paper we present part of our current work: a proposal on a Software System evolutionary framework. This proposal is based mainly on previous work carried out by the GEDES (Group of Specification, Development and Evolution of Software) Research Group. Within this framework, we try to model the way a Software System can evolve, and especially, the evolution of Agent-based systems. We present the way systems evolve based on the application of operators and the understanding of definition of focusing on which should be these operators, and invariants in Agent-based systems, as well as introducing examples of actions and restrictions applied.

This paper presents an architectural model to construct cooperative and evolutionary agent-based software systems. Here, a software system is defined as one consisting of a set of agents which interact by executing actions and by determining system functionality. Because the agents need intercommunication and coordination, we propose a model that allows this communication between agents and preserves system activity. This coordination model uses a blackboard as the means of communication between the system agents. The system architecture presented is dynamic in the sense that the modelled system can evolve and be adapted to its new functions. To do this, we distinguish two levels in the architecture: the system and the metasystem levels. The system level describes the system's structure and its functionality, while the meta-system level allows us to effect changes in the system in such a way as to preserve the system's integrity and restrictions. Modifications at the system level are carried out when the developer interacts at the meta-system level. System users interact only at the system level.

In order for educational video games to continue aiding in the teaching / learning processes it is necessary to continue advancing, first, in their educational effectiveness and, secondly, in their ease of use for the teacher. This ease of use is multifaceted; one aspect is the assessment of learning achieved by students. In an educational environment where continuous assessment is a requirement and the acquisition of skills becomes element analysis, teachers have had to greatly increase the amount of work related to the assessment of students. And this problem grows when the number of students is very high, since the time available to meet the needs of the learning process decreases with the increasing time spent taking notes and analysing data in order to give a rating. Therefore, in this paper we address the aspect of assessing competencies through continuing evaluation, presenting a proposal that includes such assessment as part of the game itself. This proposal is in line with the latest laws of Spanish education, and refers to what to assess at each point of the game, how to do it and where to perform the evaluation itself, showing that these three issues need not coincide in time.

An important feature in collaborative environment is coordination, defined as the act of managing interdependencies between activities performed to achieve a goal. These interdependencies can be the result of loosely integrated collaborative activities (the use of coordination processes within the collaboration activities is not required) or tightly integrated collaborative activities (sophisticated coordination mechanisms are necessary). The existence of both activities along with the dynamic nature of these environments adds a greater complexity to the coordination that has not been taken into account in traditional collaborative systems. In this work, the authors present a partially Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) that defines and maintains dynamic coordination polities in collaborative systems based on coordination models.

Groupware applications support group work and groups may perform geographically distributed with different roles and using different organizational structures. It is important that these applications do not provide only the needed infrastructure to support group work, but also grant some ways to change the group behaviour during a session. Therefore, this paper presents a conceptual model of the session management policies by means of an ontology, i.e. we model the form in which group work is organized. This ontology describes the concepts, the relations among them and the axioms that allow to specify and control the role changes that a user can play in a session and the changes in the rights/obligations of each role. In this model we have separated the mechanisms that consent to establishing a session (i.e. mechanisms to create the shared workspace) from the session management policies. Moreover, we can create templates of policies that can be employed to facilitate their reuse in runtime. In this way, we can affirm that this model smooths the dynamic group work.

Many organizations have to carry out their work by groups of people who are geographically distributed. The groups can experiment changes, which demand the development of applications supporting groupwork and allowing the adaptation to different groupwork organization styles and to both individual and collective needs. This paper proposes a SOA-based architecture that provides the suitable structure for the development of collaborative applications that are both adaptive and adaptable. We also present an adaptation process that allows the applications based on the architecture to be adapted to the changes in the groupwork organization and to the necessity of new functionalities.

This paper presents a study of the main current collaborative applications and shows how their architectural models focus on the interactive aspects of the systems for very specific applications. It also analyses state-of-the art web service-based collaborative applications and shows how they only solve specific problems and do not provide an extensible and flexible architecture. From this study, we conclude that there is currently no standard architecture (and even less a web service-based one) which can be taken as a model for collaborative application development. We therefore propose a web service-based architectural model for the development of this type of application. This model provides flexible collaborative sessions in order to facilitate collaborative work in a consistent way and with group awareness mechanisms. The proposed architecture enables applications, components or tools to be added and can be extended with new web services when required without the need to modify existing services. The resulting collaborative applications are therefore flexible and extensible.