David Bueno

METIORE: A Personalized Information Retrieval System

The idea of personalizing the interactions of a system is not new. With stereotypes the users are grouped into classes where all the users in a class have similar characteristics. Personalization was therefore not on individual basis but on a group of users. Personalized systems are also used in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) and in information filtering. In ITS, the pedagogical activities of a learner is personalized and in information filtering, the long-term stable information need of the user is used to filter incoming new information. We propose an explicit individual user model for representing the users activities during information retrieval. One of the new ideas here is that personalization is really individualized and linked with the users objective, that is his information need. Our proposals are implemented in the prototype METIORE for providing access to the publications in our laboratory. This prototype was experimented and we present in this paper the first results of our observation.

METIOREW: An Objective Oriented Content Based and Collaborative Recommending System

The size of Internet has been growing very fast and many documents appear every day in the Net. Users find many problems in obtaining the information that they really need. In order to help users in this task of finding relevant information, recommending systems were proposed. They give advice using two methods: the content-based method that extracts information from the already evaluated documents by the user in order to obtain new related documents; the collaborative method that recommends documents to the user based on the evaluation by users with similar information needs. In this paper we analyze some existing Web recommending systems and identify some problems which we try to solve in our system METIOREW.

What Can I Watch on TV Tonight

This paper presents the methods used in a TV Recommender System that helps users in the difficult task of finding an interesting TV program from among the hundreds of channels that we can find nowadays on TV. Our aim is to cover not only user preferences but also user restrictions while watching TV. The recommendations use a hybrid method, combining content based and folksonomy (collaborative and social recommendations). We also present interesting initial results of some experiments that try to show the accuracy of the users recommendations.

METIORE: A Publications Reference for the Adaptive Hypermedia Community

The Web is one of the most powerful sources of information on any topic. However looking for scientific literature is a difficult task. Prior knowledge of link sites is necessary and if you are lucky they point to conferences proceedings available on-line. In fact the case the user is not able to make queries about the available documents and must check them one by one using general purpose search engines. In this paper we propose our system METIORE as a source of information for the Adaptive Hypermedia community. The idea is to put together all the publications on this research area and provide an adaptive tool to find papers or people working in the field. METIORE is a Personalized Information Retrieval system that keeps a user model based on objectives.

Learning to Teach Sports to Handicapped People Using Games

Nowadays most universities use different distance learning environments. However in the educational process besides forums, chats and other collaborative possibilities the content of the subject matter to be taught is normally done using static file formats. Specific Learning games can improve the student experience by enhancing motivation and interest in the subject. In this paper we present a learning game aimed at adapting the teaching of sports to handicapped people. The experiments show how the learning experience of the students can be improved using our simulator tool.

From MITO to SAMO: Evolution of an Educational Game for Spanish Orthography

An educational game is a recreational activity designed to teach people (typically children) about a certain subject, or to help them learn a skill as they play. These games are usually successful in capturing pupils’ interest but sometimes fail to trigger learning. This paper briefly explains MITO, an educational game to teach Spanish orthography. The game is evaluated and authors look at the implications of the results of this evaluation in the design of SAMO, a second version of the same game which tries to overcome the main deficiencies identified in the evaluation process.

A New Approach for a Lightweight Multidimensional TV Content Taxonomy: TV Content Fingerprinting

In order to support the demands of fast and precise TV categorization for a personalized Electronic Programming Guide (EPG), the authors propose a new multidimensional taxonomy for the TV content. In addition to being much more lightweight in nature than the approach proposed by TV Anytime, with this method, a much more streamlined format is generated, which attempts to balance sensitive and detailed categorization criteria with computer efficiency in order to fulfill the demands of the recommender system. Furthermore, the authors propose a mechanism to obtain a quick and efficient real-time comparison of specific TV content with an alternative system called TV content fingerprinting

Network Performance Engineering

This tutorial provides a general view on the research field of ad hoc networks. After a definition of the concept, the discussion concentrates on enabling technologies, including physical and medium access control layers, networking and transport issues. We find discussions on the adequacy of enabling technologies for wireless multihop communication, specifically in the case of the pervasive Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11. Then, a variety of dynamic routing protocols are presented and specific issues that are relevant in this context are highlighted. After a short discussion on TCP issues in this context, we look at power awareness, which is a very important issue in this scenario. Finally, we discuss proposals that aim at maintaining Service Level Agreements in isolated ad hoc networks and ad hoc networks connected to fixed networks.

Adapting an Educational Game for Spanish Orthography to make it Adaptive and Accessible

This paper explains SAMO, an educational game for Spanish orthography. The game is an evolution of MITO, which was evaluated with real students. Using information obtained from this evaluation, which highlighted some shortcomings from the pedagogical and access point of view, a new game has been developed, using a new architecture, with a new teaching methodology and accessibility features.