Carmen Morgado

InStory: a system for mobile information access, storytelling and gaming activities in physical spaces

This paper describes the work carried out in the InStory project. InStory has the goal of defining and implementing a platform for mobile storytelling, information access, and gaming activities. The platform has a flexible computational architecture that integrates heterogeneous devices, different media formats and computational support for different narrative modes and gaming activities. The system is driven and validated by a set of story threads and narratives that are centered on the exploration of physical spaces. This exploration is combined with the perspective of sharing information between users and providing historic context. The project also wants to explore the social aspect of shared narratives and activities, with the idea that the technology can provide new innovative approaches to social participation in different types of events.

Group Abstractions for Organizing Dynamic Distributed Systems

We discuss the usefulness of group-based abstractions for the modeling of distributed applications. We suggest that groups can be considered at a higher level of abstraction, and group concepts can be supported as distributed programming constructs in high-level models and languages. We illustrate this approach by discussing GroupLog, an abstract model that uses groups to specify a structured space of interactions, and the collective behavior of cooperating group members.

Implicit groups in web-based interactive applications

The information overload resulting from the growth of the Internet increases the need for efficient mechanisms to identify and manage information relevant for users and groups of users within web-based interactive applications. As users can be grouped according to shared interests, characteristics and interactions, groups form convenient structures to support the required personalization.

A Group-Based Model for Dynamic Communities

Humans tend to interact, to share information and establish relationships and naturally form groups based on interests. This fact motivate research on models, abstractions and mechanisms in order to enable more transparent and flexible interactions between users and group based collaborations. We propose a model that deals with dynamic group membership and combines multiple forms of communication and sharing mechanisms inside each group unit.

Measuring Popularity in Social Network Groups

As the number of users of social network sites increases, the amount of produced information is also increasing at a very fast rate, concerning various types of shared contents like messages, photos, videos and even links, as well as information related to user interactions. Due to this, it becomes necessary to help users to better filter and select the information that will be more useful to them according to their personal interests. Social networking environments typically promote the organization of their users according to groups of individuals who are related through their common characteristics, interests, and interactions. In this paper we present an approach for assisting the user in the evaluation of popularity of the information shared in the context of social networking groups, and we propose a model for measuring the relevance of a user to a group and the group relevance for its members, based on the popularity and freshness of the contents posted by the users. We describe an architecture supporting the model implementation in the Facebook social network, and we describe a Facebook application that collects information concerning the user groups, and the users activities within the groups. The application offers a simple interface where users can have access to some statistic values concerning group-related relevance indicators, for example allowing to observe the users who contribute positively to the group activity, as well as the ones that produce less relevant information or have less activity in a group. We present experimental results of our study, and preliminary conclusions regarding the observation of the behavior of users and groups.

A structured approach to problem solving in CS1

Programming teaching is a complex task, mainly because of the students’ difficulties on building structured solutions and also on problems interpretation. At introductory courses, we need to develop on students, programming skills to help them to apply their knowledge effectively on solving problems. This led us to use an approach that will be followed from the problem presentation until the development of a properly structured program. Its application in CS1/2, which we have taught in recent years, allowed an increase in approval rating and in the quality of the solutions presented, it also has proved to be adapted to the needs of teaching programming with different imperative programming languages. In this work we illustrate the approach with a simple example. We also present an evaluation of the methodology done with a population of 130 students at introductory courses using C and Java languages.

Group-based interactions for multiuser applications

We propose a group-based model for the development of interactive applications where multiple users communicate and collaborate with each other and share information. The model defines the organization of a system in terms of entities and groups, each one with a well-defined interface, that mediates all the interactions. Entities can dynamically enter and leave groups, and distinct forms of communication among the group members are allowed, namely based on messages, events and a shared space. This model provides support for explicit groups and a novel concept of implicit groups, which allows the system to automatically adapt the group membership according to the dynamic changes in user profiles. We discuss applications of the model and illustrate its use to support a tourism scenario in a local community.

Using Octave to introduce programming to technical science students

In this paper we describe a five semester experiment on the introduction of Octave to teach computer programming to technical science students. We discuss the main advantages and disadvantages of this approach relatively to more traditional programming languages. After a qualitative and quantitative analysis of student evaluation results we argue that this kind of programming languages are useful to teach programming to non computer science engineering students.

Energy Savings in the Melting Process of an Electric Arc Furnace

Abstract This document describes a solution to enable electrical energy savings for the steel melting process using an electric arc furnace. The process produces a very high level of noise, which will decay during the melting process. Through the analysis of this noise it is possible to know about the status of the melting process and recommend the earlier stop or extension. The objective of the works presented was to make adequate controllers identifying the process status and enabling energy savings. Two fuzzy controllers were used for that purpose. It was concluded that energy consumption could be decreased up to 1%. In the present paper, their characteristics will be presented.

An Approach for Characterizing Group-Based Interactive Environments

Current developments on Internet and mobile computing platforms have been providing improved functionalities to enable new mechanisms for user interaction and for disseminating information. These web-based environments/applications generate large amounts of information posing the need for efficient mechanisms to identify and extract relevant information both for individual users and for groups of users. It is also known that humans tend to interact with each other in order to share information and cooperate to achieve common goals in professional, social and personal contexts. That is why it seems natural to aggregate users in groups that somehow reflect their similar interests and affinities. As groups typically reflect similarity and proximity relationships among their members, it is expected that their usage help guiding/improving the search for relevant information concerning their common interests and affinities. It can also contribute to improve related group functionalities, such as user and group application personalization, and promote interaction and collaboration among users. In this chapter, we present a brief study of group-related functionalities in social interactive environments. We present an approach for the characterization of groups utility based on a set of indicators that are used for assisting the management of the groups lifecycle, concerning group membership and shared information on the particular case of Facebook.