Search

Online learning tools have allowed professors to carry out their classes in an interactive way, synchronic as well as asynchronic, giving them the opportunity to explore from different points of view specific themes or concepts, achieving greater dynamism in their classes through the active participation of students. This article presents the results of the implementation of an software tool for massive use designed with the objective of allowing Engineering students to strengthen their basic mathematical knowledge as well as to improve their results in courses such as Calculus I and Mathematics I. These courses are part of the first semesters of the syllabus for all undergraduate programs of the School of Engineering, and are basic courses in the formation of an engineer at Universidad EAFIT (Medellin, Colombia). This software tool for massive use allows students to self-diagnose, to solve exercises with different levels of complexity and difficulty, to visualize academic contents such as video classes and virtual resources, and to know their evolution in the understanding of basic concepts in calculus. On one hand, this facilitates the beginning of their studies at the university. On the other, it gives the professor an initial diagnose of the level students have to start the course so that continuous analytics can be performed based on the learning process of the student. Furthermore, this article shows the results of a comparative analysis done to two groups of students, a Control group and an Experimental group, that took Calculus I as part of their undergraduate studies. The experiment lasted two months with testing done at the beginning and at the end of the course. The objective was to register the level of knowledge acquired by the students and compare the differences between the two groups, control and experimental. The testing also allowed the progress of the student between tests to be measured, taking into account that the experimental group had the opp

The IEEE Educational Society has sponsored the development of IEEE-SA P1876™ standard for Networked Smart Learning Objects for Online Laboratories. This paper proposes two different architectures that integrate components to support educational online laboratories, through the use of xAPI statements to communicate between Remote Laboratory Management Systems, Virtual Learning Environments and Learning Analytics Generators. Proof of concept implementations of three scalable, ad hoc, low-cost, mobile, online laboratories that utilize the proposed distributed and centralized architectures are described, one fully integrated to an Actionable Data Book. The next steps would be to implement Mobile Massive Open Online Laboratories (M-MOOLs) within the context of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), using the P1876™ standard under development. © 2018 IEEE.

Digital Libraries will be one of the main ways to access structured information through the Internet. Information related to resources or objects is known as metadata. Several metadata models have been proposed; however, the model proposed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) [1] has demonstrated great utility in digital libraries. The simplicity and generality of DCMI has facilitated the deployment of digital libraries and their interoperability. This paper proposes DCMI as metadata model in our own Digital Library Architecture (Biblioteca Digital de Nueva Generación -BDNG). We have extended DCMI and used some elements of DC-Library application profile (DC-Lib) [2] in addition to new elements not previously considered. This paper presents the metadata models for the following applications: digital library of EAFIT University (BDEeafit), integration of digital or referential libraries (BDMetaLib) and digital library for E-Learning systems (BDEI). This paper also describes the general architecture of BDNG.

This paper presents the mantisGRID project, an interinstitutional initiative from Colombian medical and academic centers aiming to provide medical grid services for Colombia and Latin America. The mantisGRID is a GRID platform, based on open source grid infrastructure that provides the necessary services to access and exchange medical images and associated information following digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) and health level 7 standards. The paper focuses first on the data abstraction architecture, which is achieved via Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) services and supported by the Globus Toolkit. The grid currently uses a 30-Mb bandwidth of the Colombian High Technology Academic Network, RENATA, connected to Internet 2. It also includes a discussion on the relational database created to handle the DICOM objects that were represented using Extensible Markup Language Schema documents, as well as other features implemented such as data security, user authentication, and patient confidentiality. Grid performance was tested using the three current operative nodes and the results demonstrated comparable query times between the mantisGRID (OGSA-DAI) and Distributed mySQL databases, especially for a large number of records.

The end result of this research is an application created using freely available tools applied to a case scenario to perform review meetings by different specialists in real time.

In the software industry, product Lines has emerged as an attractive approach to perform planned reuse. Nevertheless, a product line solution is not appropriate for all the cases and requires some conditions to be implemented successfully. The literature offers several contributions regarding the adoption of product lines. However, only a few of these support decision-makers for taking well-informed decisions in favor or against following this approach. This paper presents APPLIES, a framework to (i) detect signals that could motivate an organization to adopt a product line approach (ii) assess to what extent a company is prepared for supporting the practices necessary to adopt a product line. APPLIES is grounded in a thematic analysis of the literature and was preliminarily evaluated with two experts through a survey and an interview. The results of the evaluation provide us insights to create an improved version of the proposal following a design-science method. © 2018 IEEE.

Defining software development methodologies may jointly include traditional and agile frameworks practices. Agile frameworks give teamwork structure and dynamics which are focused on delivering value in an incremental way. Traditional frameworks establish clarity in work products and project phases along all its lifecycle. The combination of frameworks can help to apply best practices of different models, but increasing the complexity in the methodology definition when having to start from contexts of a different nature. You will see in this article a carried out study that confirms the use of agile/traditional mixed methodologies in the industry, the difficulties that emerged and that are still seen in this approach, and the creation, setting and analysis of a guide that helps to uncomplex the definition of mixed methodologies. © Springer International Publishing AG 2018.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) allow for communication between the human brain and computers. They have been used to create systems able to generate control over a software or mechatronic device, becoming an important tool for the rehabilitation of handicapped people, especially for patients with quadriplegia. Due to the importance of BCIs, any attempt to improve their response has a great value. The work described in this paper consists of the evaluation of various stimuli applied to improve the training of a BCI based system. The device is the Emotiv® EPOC which includes a Software Development Kit (SDK) to train the system. During the usual training of the SDK; images, videos, thoughts, movements and gestures were used as stimuli to improve the users' skills for accomplishing specific actions. After the evaluation of these stimuli, they were ranked according to their effectiveness. Finally, a powered wheelchair was controlled using the Emotiv® EPOC by applying the best-ranked stimulus and an assessment protocol was used in order to evaluate the performance of users driving the wheelchair with the BCI, with satisfactory results.

Security requirements are known to be “the most difficult of requirements types” and potentially the ones causing the greatest risk if they are not correct. One approach to requirements elicitation is based on the reuse of explicit knowledge. AMAN-DA is a requirement elicitation method that reuses encapsulated knowledge in security and domain ontologies to produce security requirements specifications. The main research question addressed in this paper is to what extent is AMAN-DA able to generate domain-specific security requirements? Following a well-documented process, a case study related to the maritime domain was undertaken with the goal to demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of AMAN-DA for the elicitation and analysis of domain-specific security requirements. The usefulness of the method was also evaluated with a group of 12 experts. The paper demonstrates the elicitation of domain-specific security requirements by presenting the AMAN-DA method and its application. It describes the evaluation and reports some significant results and their implications for practice and future research, especially for the field of knowledge reuse in requirements engineering. © 2017, Springer-Verlag London Ltd.

This article presents the Interactivity Model 2.0, which aims to support the communicative process of knowledge transfer 2.0 developed in organizations that follow a social business model. This model has its origin in SECI and Ba interaction models and in the Open Communication Interactivity Model. This study defines Interactivity building on two concepts: role and interaction. The study considers role as actors taking part in Knowledge Transfer Process 2.0, and interaction as the process of communication that enables a transfer. The research tests this model through a case study at a Colombian Information Technology Company. The results show the changes of the communicative process in social settings and allow the identification of a message, a role, the direction and control of a message, and the knowledge contributions of the various actors of the Knowledge Transfer Process 2.0. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Science and innovation are not a luxury but a prerequisite for social and economic development (Annan, 2003).

Constant changes in technology pose continuous challenges for higher education institutions that are training the engineers of the future. These changes are making it necessary to adapt the curriculum in order to develop the skills needed by the XXI century engineer. Moreover, instead of thinking in a large curriculum reform at a specific moment, it is necessary to define curriculum management processes that include change as a natural component of the process. In addition to these global trends, each institution has a particular context and thus, the analysis in each institution has unique characteristics, a common methodological approach, and a reference model that can be built as long as it is flexible enough to include that context. This paper describes a model developed for curriculum management inside the School of Engineering at Universidad EAFIT - Colombia. This model includes the institutional context and is based on a process approach defined by the Business Process Management (BPM) methodology. The model uses the Burlton Hexagon as a theoretical framework to identify organizational structure, strategies, policies, infrastructure, technology tools and human capital. It is also a mechanism for specifying curricular macro processes including the global and institutional context. The proposed model is based on three pillars: (a) scientific research in education, which promotes the use of the scientific method as a strategy to ensure an approach to problems based on evidence which allows the construction of educational innovation projects, (b) education engineering focused on engineering education, which transforms the learning by developing basic, professional, and transversal skills as well as those specific for an engineer of the XXI century, and (c) interactive educational communities, both face to face and virtual, as spaces for knowledge management that support collaborative working and experience-sharing, managed by its members working together promotin

Al hablar de evaluación de aprendizaje, es necesario considerar que ningún documento que se refiera a ella puede ser asumido en términos absolutos. Cualquier propuesta frente a este tema no refleja principios universalesAl hablar de evaluación de aprend

The exponential growth of medical data has generated the need to implement new techniques of information analysis that support decision making. The objective of this article is to identify the aggregated value that data mining models have in decision making in the information given by exploratory analysis. It was used a case study methodology for two data sets, that look to determine the malignity of detected masses, in the breasts of patients, through the interpretation of attributes registered from the mases. The results show a complementary behavior of both techniques. © 2018.

Over the past thirty years, since the advent of the Web, the potential use of virtual environments for teaching-learning processes has undergone an exponential increase, leading us quickly from the use of web pages to social networks, and fro

Clustering is a research challenge focused on discovering knowledge from data samples whose goal is to build good quality partitions. In this paper is proposed an approach based on LAMDA (Learning Algorithm for Multivariable Data Analysis), whose most important features are: a) it is a non-iterative fuzzy algorithm that can work with online data streams, b) it does not require the number of clusters, c) it can generate new partitions with objects that do not have enough similarity with the preexisting clusters (incremental-learning). However, in some applications, the number of created partitions does not correspond with the number of desired clusters, which can be excessive or impractical for the expert. Therefore, our contribution is the formalization of an automatic merge technique to update the cluster partition performed by LAMDA to improve the quality of the clusters, and a new methodology to compute the Marginal Adequacy Degree that enhances the individual-cluster assignment. The proposal, called LAMDA-RD, is applied to several benchmarks, comparing the results against the original LAMDA and other clustering algorithms, to evaluate the performance based on different metrics. Finally, LAMDA-RD is validated in a real case study related to the identification of production states in a gas-lift well, with data stream. The results have shown that LAMDA-RD achieves a competitive performance with respect to the other well-known algorithms, especially in unbalanced benchmarks and benchmarks with an overlapping of around 9%. In these cases, our algorithm is the best, reaching a Rand Index (RI) >98%. Besides, it is consistently among the best for all metrics considered (Silhouette coefficient, modification of the Silhouette coefficient, WB-index, Performance Coefficient, among others) in all case studies analyzed in this paper. Finally, in the real case study, it is better in all the metrics.

Currently in the process of engineering, but increasingly implemented simulation methods since they are an economical and feasible to predict the behavior of some variable you wish to benefit. The problem of fluid simulation is a broad field of study, traditionally in this area are implemented domain discretization methods, volumes, differences or finite elements (Computational Fluid Dynamics), in this work, a different approach where the discretization is made on the physical properties of fluid and the fluid for reconstruction from its microscopic properties, simulating these, propagating Boltzmann distribution functions for the grid of nodes, this set is comprised of a fluid group of nodes, nodes fluid the border and nodes structure, docked the method to the boundary conditions necessary to simulate Glycerol in a pipe. © (2014) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.

Distance interaction among educational communities is becoming increasingly important. Courses and talks are shared among institutions and individuals who are located in different places. The Telepresence tool, developed by Eafit and Universidad del Quindío, permits course sharing among the institutions. Instructors from one institution can teach students of the other one, thereby sharing the positive features of each course. In this paper, we present the recent improvements of the Telepresence tool. We also report on the use of the tool in a Multi-Variable Calculus course, designed in accordance to the Teaching for Understanding (TFU) pedagogical framework. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

We can program a Real-Time (RT) music improvisation system in C++ without a formal semantic or we can model it with process calculi such as the Non-deterministic Timed Concurrent Constraint (ntcc) calculus. “A Concurrent Constraints Factor Oracle (FO) model for Music Improvisation” (Ccfomi) is an improvisation model specified on ntcc. Since Ccfomi improvises non-deterministically, there is no control on choices and therefore little control over the sequence variation during the improvisation. To avoid this, we extended Ccfomi using the Probabilistic Non-deterministic Timed Concurrent Constraint calculus. Our extension to Ccfomi does not change the time and space complexity of building the FO, thus making our extension compatible with RT. However, there was not a ntcc interpreter capable of RT to execute Ccfomi. We developed Ntccrt -a RT capable interpreter for ntcc- and we executed Ccfomi on Ntccrt. In the future, we plan to extend Ntccrt to execute our extension to Ccfomi. © IBERAMIA and the authors.

This article introduces a set of conceptual guidelines for the construction of the model "TAG", in Spanish: Tecnología, Aprendizaje y Gestión (Technology, Learning and Management). The model seeks to determine the levels of ubiquity in higher education institucions. This proposal arises from the review of experiences in the development of strategies for the construction of environments intervened by technologies and the elaborated conceptualization about the term Ubiquitous Learning.

Public Transportation Strategic Systems are a digital transformation for the urban transportation service in the Colombian medium-size cities, from 200,000 to 600,000 inhabitants. The implementation of the urban public transportation services has not started in many cities; as a result, this cities in Colombia have an increase of illegal motorcycle taxis, which cause a high number of road accidents. The main method for controlling illegal motorcycle taxis is by giving the drivers transit fines. In order to give such transit fines, transit police have several control points in medium-size cities. In this article, we developed a mobile application to detect three types of transit infractions usually committed by motorcycle taxi drivers. The purpose of this application is to be a tool for the transit police agents to disincentivize the use of motorcycle taxis. The mobile application detects a possible transit infraction, saves the photo, motorcycle plate number, date, and time. Afterwards, the application generates a support for the transit infractions that will be issued by the transit police officer. We performed an experiment using this mobile application in the city of Valledupar, Colombia. The mobile application captured 40 possible transit infractions. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be used in order to motivate students to establish links between the classroom material and real life situations by modeling those situations through the course equations. This article describes the results of an experience involving a group of Multivariable Calculus at Eafit University. 3DUniversal is the program developed for the experience, which runs on Pocket PC. It allows students to interact and communicate inside the classroom. At each stage of the experience, students were asked to establish links between the classroom-covered material and real objects in their environment. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008.

In this work we explain the implementation of event-driven real-time interpreters for the Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) and Non-deterministic Timed Concurrent Constraint (NTCC) for- malisms. The CCP interpreter was tested with a program...

Multicast plays an important role in supporting a new generation of applications. At present and for different reasons, technical and non-technical, multicast IP hasn't yet been totally adopted for Internet. During recent years, an active area of research is that of implementing this kind of traffic in the application layer where the multicast functionality isnt a responsibility of the routers but that of the hosts, which we know as Multicast Overlay Networks (MON). In this article, routing in an MON is put forward as a multiobjective optimization problem (MOP) where two functions are optimized: 1) the total end to end delay of the multicast tree and 2) the maximum link utilization. The simultaneous optimization of these two functions is an NP-Complete problem and to solve this we suggest using Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEA), specifically NSGA-II.

This article presents the specification of a Managing Agent of emergent serious games for a smart classroom. The Managing Agent of Emergent Serious Games is a manager of emergent serious games, which seeks to adapt emergent serious games to the subject that is developed in the smart classroom, with the aim of motivating the acquisition of knowledge and skills in students during their learning processes. The introduction of emergent serious games in a smart classroom allows incorporating a new type of teaching resource in the learning dynamic, which allows enriching with new strategies the learning process. © 2003-2012 IEEE.

Cybersecurity is becoming vital as industries are gradually moving from automating physical processes to a higher level automation using cyber physical systems (CPS) and internet of things (IoT). In this context, security is becoming a continuous process that runs in parallel to other processes during the complete life cycle of a system. Traditional threat analysis methods use design models alongside threat models as an input for security analysis, hence missing the life-cycle-based dynamicity required by the security concern. In this paper, we argue for an attacker-aware systems modeling language that exposes the systems attack surfaces. For this purpose, we have designed Pimca, a domain specific modeling language geared towards capturing the attacker point of view of the system. This study introduces the formalism along with the Pimca workbench, a framework designed to ease the development and manipulation of the Pimca models. Finally, we present two relevant use cases, serving as a preliminary validation of our approach. © Copyright 2020 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

In this paper we report results of the use of a telepresence application in a simulated distance education setting. The application combines video-conference with a networked virtual environment in which the instructor and the students can experiment with virtual object in a collaborative manner. The teaching for Understanding (TFU) framework is used as the pedagogical approach. Current preliminary results show that the combination of the telepresence application with TFU, can compensate for the lack of physical presence of the instructor in the classroom.

Interaction between virtual entities and human beings should be similar to the normal interaction between human beings. Verbal interaction is the usual way of interaction among humans, but the interfaces that allow verbal communication between a human being and an agent (virtual human) have a limited vocabulary, need a lot of training and are expensive. In this paper we propose an Augmented Reality System with an unidirectional interface between an agent and a person. By using gestures, animations and adequate texts the agent can show a user how to perform a simple task. We hope that the tests to be conducted will show how useful this unidirectional interface is.

This article presents the development and validation of a wheelchair mobility solution. The solution is based on a Tongue Machine Interface (TMI) involving the use of Force Sensing Resistors (FSRs). The semantics and functionality of the development are compared with two other interfaces: a Joystick and a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) implemented on the same wheelchair. Each development is described from the electric, mechanic and informatic domains. Surveys and user's tests were performed in order to explore which technology had a more positive impact on the mobility of quadriplegic persons in terms of effectiveness, better ergonomics, lower costs and better functionality. The quantitative and qualitative results are described and analyzed.

Data Analytic (DA) is currently a very important approach to obtain the best possible benefit of the data, but its degree of difficulty compared to other computational processes limits its implementation in organizations. In addition, it remains a term highly confused with respect to other areas of data science, such as data mining, and Big Data. There are few methodologies for its implementation, in addition, its complexity makes it non-participatory, with a certain degree of resistance on the part of the users. The knowledge and skills of users must be exploited when analyzing and producing the business intelligence necessary for the Data Analytic execution. In this position paper, we explore the possibilities of contribution through a Methodology for Data Analytic, which is extended with the incorporation of features extracted from a user-centered design (UCD) approach inspired by the ISEA methodology. This existing DA methodology, called MIDANO, will be extended using gamification techniques, to facilitate the applicability and understanding, in order to guarantee a participation of organizational actors, resulting in a Participatory Data Analytic Methodology. © 2020 IEEE.

In actual applications of virtual environments, one of the problems that has received attention is the way to assign computational resources to those who participate in the system. In most cases, static resource allocation is used. Static allocation is simple but has several limitations, among them, the missutilization of resources. In this paper we present a proof-of-concept of a new system and report the results of experiments with a system that accomplishes dynamic resource allocation by using Quadtrees for space partitioning, in a Shared Virtual Environment.

The AES block cipher cryptographic algorithm is widely used and it is resource intensive. An existing sequential open source implementation of the algorithm was parallelized on multi-core microprocessors and GPUs. Performance results are presented. © 2011 IEEE.

Most interactive scenarios are based on informal specifications, so that it is not possible to formally verify properties of such systems. We advocate the need for a general and formal model aiming at ensuring safe executions of interactive multimedia sce

Given the growing evolution of technology, machinery and manufacturing techniques, conventional methodologies for training the workforce are not enough for the current needs. Therefore methodologies capable to accelerate the training process and able to train the trainee in a wide range of scenarios are claimed for the industrial sector. Virtual reality offers an alternative that has been successfully implemented in other industries, and virtual reality based training systems have numerous advantages over the conventional methodologies, making it a very good option. Based on that premise, this paper explores the implementation of an immersive training system for mechanical assembly based on virtual reality for improving the training process. This system was proved to be as effective as the conventional methodology.

Writing music interaction systems is not easy because their concurrent processes usually access shared resources in a non-deterministic order, often leading to unpredictable behavior. Using Pure Data (Pure Data) and Max/MSP, it is possible to program concurrency; however, it is difficult to synchronize processes based on multiple criteria. Process calculi such as the Non-deterministic Timed Concurrent Constraint (ntcc) calculus, overcome that problem by representing, declaratively, the synchronization of multiple criteria as constraints. In this article, we propose the framework Ntccrt, as a new alternative to manage concurrency in Pure Data and Max/MSP. Ntccrt is a real-time capable interpreter for ntcc. Using Ntccrt binary plugins in Pure Data, we executed models for machine improvisation and signal processing. We also analyzed two case studies: one of a machine improvisation system and one of a signal processing system. We found out that performance of both case studies is compatible with soft real-time music interaction; it means, a musician can interact with Ntccrt without noticeable delays during the interaction. © 2005 - 2015 JATIT & LLS. All rights reserved.