Elsa Marcelino-Jesus

A framework for technological research results assessment

Nowadays, research has had a fundamental role for the economic development and growth of economies at a worldwide level. Research has contributed with new ideas, studies, implementations and innovations, which requires an effective validation to be launched for production or exploitation. Thereby, it is important for entrepreneurs to have new technical and business tools, such as frameworks to help them in the evaluation and validation of such new technologies development. In this article, a methodology to analyse the economic viability of the involvement of companies in research projects is presented. However, the focus of this work is about to propose a framework for its technological research results assessment for one of its phases. This phase intends to ensure an efficient validation approach, which supported by an effective change management of the research results appliance, would result in a favourable condition for their successful exploration. Authors proposed a framework that was tested in the evaluation of a research project pilot through an execution in the textile domain.

Enhanced Affective Factors Management for HEI Students Dropout Prevention

Among the problems affecting Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Latin America and the Caribbean there is the dropout, which relates to a more general issue consisting in dealing with the diversity of students. Here provided solutions are to detect and deal with student’s particular capacities and needs. To cope with this situation the ACACIA project has defined a framework that develops both CADEP centers and technological infrastructure. The former consists of an organizational unit focus on Empowering, Innovating, Educating, Supporting, Monitoring and leveraging institutions in dealing with such diversity. The latter is based on building the required infrastructure to tackle those issues and covering both face-to-face and eLearning educational settings. This comprises non-intrusive affect detection methods along with ambient intelligent solutions, which provide context-aware affective feedback to each student. Preliminary experimentation results open interesting avenues to be further progressed thus taking advantage of current developments on affect computing technologies.

Student’s Attention Improvement Supported by Physiological Measurements Analysis

The focus of the most recent theories of emotional state analysis is the Autonomic Nervous System. Those theories propose that sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems interact antagonistically accordingly to each emotional state implying variations of interbeat intervals of consecutive heart beats. Emotional arousal and attention can be inferred based on the electrocardiogram (ECG) specifically through Heart Rate Variability (HRV) analysis, including the Low Frequency (LF), High Frequency (HF), and ratio LF/HF. The aim of this study is to analyze the impact of classic background music, in students’ emotional arousal and attention, and performance in the context of e-Learning training courses. As a result, it is foreseen the development of a system integrating wearables to smoothly gather the mentioned biosignals, which will be able to sense user’s emotions to further automatically propose recommendations for better learning approaches and contents, aiming student’s attention improvement.

The Use of Serious Games in Requirements Engineering

Today we live in a society where time is money. In research and technology development projects, it isn’t different, every minute of delay would cause expenses, possible harms or project failures. In this context an efficient requirements engineering would avoid this kind of problems facilitating the accomplishment of the projects accordingly to the plan and technologically reaching the foreseen goals. The objective of this paper is to propose the use of serious games in the support of requirements engineering acquisition and validation. To demonstrate such approach two serious games are presented, which were used in the requirements engineering process of the “OSMOSE” project in two use case scenarios of the automotive and aeronautic industry respectively.

Aquaculture Production Processes and Training Validation through Serious Games

Nowadays, and due to the shortage of wild fish in our seas, rivers and lakes has led to the growth of the aquaculture industry and consequently to the increase of existing aquaculture fish in the markets for domestic consumption to a global scale. In this sense, aquaculture plays a central role to feed the world population in a healthy way and simultaneously for the preservation of the aquatic ecosystems. Thus, the aquaculture production process can be determined by several factors namely biological, technological, economic, and environmental. The authors intend to address and validate such factors related to production processes in the AquaSmart project using serious games. The Serious Games strategy proposes to demonstrate the technological results of the project, namely data analytics tools able to generate new knowledge to improve aquaculture production processes. Additionally, it also intends to work as supporting training and marketing material, validating both the tools and the training programme.

Semantic Alignment for Interoperable Manufacturing Networks Establishment

Nowadays, SMEs aim to establish business’s networks to be competitive with multinationals, which requires the sharing of knowledge, strategies and resources to boost the sector’s and the cooperation’s consolidation. Even if all the enterprises of a business network alliance come from the same business area, each one has its own view or perspective of its domain knowledge. Thus different conceptual, semantic and lexical knowledge representations may occur and therefore it is expected to happen non-transparent and interoperability inconsistencies of the shared information. This paper proposes a web user interface component that could enable to identify and classify the resulting possible semantic heterogeneities in a flexible way. This software component will then support the semantic mapping establishments that answer the mentioned requirements.Copyright

The Role of Ethical Issues in Collaborative Manufacturing Research

In the last years an increase in the importance of the role of ethical issues in the world has been observed. Research is a process of collecting and analyzing information to increase the understanding of a phenomenon under study. Due to the complexity of such phenomena, nowadays mostly of the times such research work is performed in a group or community, under public grants accomplishing a collaborative research consortium. Consequently to the nature of such collaborations, ethical conduct is vital to the maintenance of such research communities. This paper provides some information about ethical issues clarifying its importance and challenges in collaborative manufacturing research development and exploitation.Copyright

MSIRP: Methodology for the Economic Viability of Semantic Interoperability Resolution Projects

Due to the current economy difficulties, companies need to dynamically establish business partnerships having at the same time a careful approach in doing investments. One of the main problems found in the establishment of such partnerships is related to the lack of semantic interoperability between the partners’ information systems. The integration and sharing of the knowledge representation elements of companies, has proportionated the appearance of semantic resolution projects. The paper presents a methodology to analyze the economic viability of companies in the application or development of such projects.Copyright

An evaluation approach for research project pilot technological applications

In a world increasingly more competitive and in a constantly development and growth its important that companies have economic tools, like frameworks to help them to evaluate and validate the technology development to better fits in each company particular needs. The paper presents an evaluation approach for research project pilot applications to stimulate its implementation and deployment, increasing its adequacy and acceptance to their stakeholders and consequently providing new business profit and opportunities. Authors used the DECIDE evaluation framework as a major guide to this approach, which was tested in the iSURF project to support the implementation of an interoperability service utility for collaborative supply chain planning across multiple domains supported by RFID devices.

Methodology for the Economic Viability of Companies in the Semantic Adaptation of Information Systems

In the current globalized and competitive business world it has become increasingly more important that companies adapt their knowledge bases, in order to establish more dynamic business partnerships. However, one of the main problems found in the establishment of such partnerships has to do with the lack of interoperability between technologic systems, especially those related to the semantic of shared knowledge. The integration and sharing of the knowledge representation elements of companies, performs a key role in the research challenges in the business interoperability area.The paper presents a methodology to analyse the economic viability of companies in the needed effort to the conception of a common knowledge base in their operational domain area, in order to stimulate interoperability in the business cooperation. These studies also have as objective to support the development of the thesis that argues that in the future, the capability to adapt the semantics of business information systems will promote collaboration between companies, providing them new business opportunities.Copyright