Andrés Neyem

DESIGNING EMOTIONAL AWARENESS DEVICES: WHAT ONE SEES IS WHAT ONE FEELS

La comunicacion interpersonal requiere mas que solamente palabras, involucra emociones. En terminos generales las emociones pueden ser vistas como estados internos complejamente organizados. El Awareness de estos estados permitiria a los seres humanos evaluar la informacion social y desarrollar inteligencia social estrategica y, por lo tanto, las acciones cotidianas estarian tenidas de significado social y emocional. Este articulo reporta una experiencia que busca permitir un dialogo basado en emociones expresadas, capturadas y transmitidas entre diversos participantes usando interfaces tangibles. Ademas, se explota el significado social de objetos fisicos y cotidianos como un portarretratos, con el fin de crear interfaces afectivas entre usuarios dispersos geograficamente. En este articulo se describe un dispositivo que permite un tipo de Awareness emocional apoyando la interaccion interpersonal y afectiva entre personas distantes geograficamente.

A Strategy to Share Documents in MANETs using Mobile Devices

Since long time ago, information sharing has been the base to support collaboration in several scenarios. Advances in mobile technology have extended such collaboration scenarios including one-hop and multi-hop wireless networks. Traditional strategies to share information in wired networks are not suitable for mobile scenarios because they do not consider the disturbing networking aspects such as high disconnection rate, dynamic topology and the low bandwidth. The use of hand-held devices to share documents. This paper presents a strategy based on XML to share information in MANETs (mobile adhoc networks) using hand-held devices, considering disconnections and instability of the network bandwidth. This strategy is currently implemented in PASIR (service platform for ad hoc sharing information resources) and it can be considered by other middleware products when design the data sharing support. In addition, many group ware applications could be designed using this strategy, i.e.: distributed technical presentations, casual interactions, brainstorming, meetings for decision making and software technical reviews

Improving software engineering education through an empirical approach: lessons learned from capstone teaching experiences

Software Engineering is an important area within industry and academia. Empirical software engineering has grown in importance in the software engineering research and education community. This means that it has become very relevant to include empirical studies or practices into computer science and software engineering curricula. This paper shows the results of applying an empirical approach to teaching software engineering through real-life projects. The computer science capstone experience is designed to bridge the gap from university expectations to those of industry.

MOCET: a mobile collaborative examination tool

This paper presents a mobile collaborative application to support the Collaborative Examination Technique (CET). This software tool, named MOCET, keeps the metaphor of the students paper notebook used to support CET processes. In addition, it provides solutions to overcome the two main limitations identified on CET: (a) the inefficiency to support the building and sharing knowledge processes carried out by students during the pre and posttest activities, and (b) the high cost in time spent by instructors to carry out the examination process. Although MOCET is able to run on several computing devices, it has been specially designed to be used on Tablet PCs and PDAs and interact with the users using a pen device. This tool replaces the students paper notebook during exams and supports students and instructors in every phase of the examination process. MOCET has been tested in two computer science courses and interesting results were obtained.

An Architectural Pattern for Mobile Groupware Platforms

Architectural patterns have been proposed in many domains to capture recurring design problems that arise in specific design situations. This article presents an architectural pattern to help modeling the coordination and communication services required by mobile groupware platforms. This pattern serves as educational media for developers, students or researchers on how to design coordination and communication services for mobile groupware systems. The pattern also fosters the reuse of proven solutions.

MobiCOP: A Scalable and Reliable Mobile Code Offloading Solution

Code offloading is a popular technique for extending the natural capabilities of mobile devices by migrating processor-intensive tasks to resource-rich surrogates. Despite multiple platforms for offloading being available in academia, these frameworks have yet to permeate the industry. One of the primary reasons for this is limited experimentation in practical settings and lack of reliability, scalability, and options for distribution. This paper introduces MobiCOP, a new code offloading framework designed from the ground up with these requirements in mind. It features a novel design fully self-contained in a library and offers compatibility with most stock Android devices available today. Compared to local task executions, MobiCOP offers performance improvements of up to 17x and increased battery efficiency of up to 25x, shows minimum performance degradation in environments with unstable networks, and features an autoscaling module that allows its server counterpart to scale to an arbitrary number of offloading requests. It is compatible with the most relevant Android technologies optimized for heavy computation (NDK and Renderscript) and has so far been well received by fellow mobile developers. We hope MobiCOP will help bring mobile code offloading closer to the industry realm.

MyMOOCSpace: A cloud-based mobile system to support effective collaboration in higher education online courses

In recent years, institutions of higher education have been using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as an alternative to enhance and innovate traditional classroom practices. One of the approaches to this type of innovation consists of using the platforms where MOOCs are hosted for the development of courses that are aligned to their on‐campus curricular contents. They are known as Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs), which allow online access to knowledge for groups of students with a well‐defined profile. The platforms where MOOCs (and SPOCs) are hosted have been designed to support large volumes of data and visits. However, these platforms present important limitations regarding the implementation of collaborative learning activities. To address this problem, this article presents MyMOOCSpace, a cloud‐based mobile system aimed at supporting effective collaboration in MOOCs, by combining key aspects of collaboration from the research area of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) with game‐based dynamics. MyMOOCSpace has been tested in three quasi‐experiments that were run in four Latin‐American universities with a total of 68 participants. The objective was to assess its usability and its effect in enhancing collaboration among students in a SPOC. The results obtained on usability show that MyMOOCSpace is easy to use, and that participants felt pleased with while using it. Finally, it was observed that MyMOOCSpace managed to enhance interaction and collaboration among students.

Understanding Student Interactions in Capstone Courses to Improve Learning Experiences

Project-based courses can provide valuable learning experiences for computing majors as well as for faculty and community partners. However, proper coordination between students, stakeholders and the academic team is very difficult to achieve. We present an integral study consisting of a twofold approach. First, we propose a proven capstone course framework implementation in conjunction with an educational software tool to support and ensure proper fulfillment of most academic and engineering needs. Second, we propose an approach for mining process data from the information generated by this tool as a way of understanding these courses and improving software engineering education. Moreover, we propose visualizations, metrics and algorithms using Process Mining to provide an insight into practices and procedures followed during various phases of a software development life cycle. We mine the event logs produced by the educational software tool and derive aspects such as cooperative behaviors in a team, component and student entropy, process compliance and verification. The proposed visualizations and metrics (learning analytics) provide a multi-faceted view to the academic team serving as a tool for feedback on development process and quality by students

Anatomicis Network: Una Plataforma de Software Educativa basada en la Nube para Mejorar la Enseñanza de la Anatomía en la Educación Médica

RESUMEN: En este artículo, se describe una propuesta novedosa de plataforma de software educativa para mejorar la enseñanza de la anatomía en la educación médica. Con el fin de determinar la utilidad y el impacto de esta plataforma, se desarrollo u na experiencia inter institucional entre los años 2016 y 2017, el cual involucró a las Universidades de Antofagasta, Playa Ancha, Austral y Católica de Chile. Los departamentos de anatomía que participaron en esta experiencia utilizaron la plataforma de software educ ativa para acceder a imágenes anatómicas 2D y 3D, videos y evaluaciones teórico prácticas multimodales en línea, pudiendo realizar co n sus estudiantes pruebas de usabilidad. Este proyecto pretende aportar a la enseñanza de la anatomía en los diferentes departamentos anatomía a lo largo del país.

Towards native code offloading platforms for image processing in mobile applications: a case study

In this paper, we present a real-life case study to show the advantages of a new code offloading solution focused on improving both performance and energy consumption for image processing mobile applications. From our experiments, we found that offloading an image processing task would allow up to 5.7x speedup and 85% of reduction in energy consumption for low-end devices, and 1.7x speedup and 64.3% of reduction in energy consumption for high-end devices.