Gabriel Huecas

An Empirical Case of a Context-Aware Mobile Recommender System in a Banking Environment

Traditional E-Commerce applications have evolved in the last years due to the growth of the mobile environment, creating a new research area known as U-Commerce. The application of these techniques in the banking environment has been a direct outcome in order to enhance the services offered to end users. In this paper, we present a context-aware mobile recommender system based on real banking data provided by a well known Spanish bank. The data were composed by customer profiles, credit card transactions and information about places where bank clients have previously spent their money. The system model and its architecture are described taking into account social, mobility and ubiquitous requisites to generate personalized recommendations. The mobile prototype deployed in the bank was evaluated in a survey among 100 users with good results regarding trust, usefulness and effectiveness.

ISABEL: A CSCW Application for the Distribution of Events

Introduction Many activities which in the past have required physical presence and direct interaction among participants can be performed in a distributed fashion with the help of advanced information technologies such as, CSCW [1,2] (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), interactive multimedia services and broadband communications. Technologies aiming at supporting the collaboration among individuals or groups are identified under the term groupware technologies. Asynchronous interactions which do not require physical presence of interacting persons have matured during the last years. Very successful examples of asynchronous groupware exist. LOTUS Notes [3] is considered probably the most successful commercial product in this area. The Internet and many of its application can be considered as groupware technologies to some extend. Technology can support today also synchronous interaction where real time contact among individuals is required. We mean by synchronous interaction the exchange of verbal, visual, ... messages or information, like the exchanges of information carried out typicaly in meetings, conversations or other activities where several participants collaborate in physical presence. Remote synchronous interaction is not new, the plain old telephone is a very good example of an old technology supporting a simple but very effective form of synchronous interaction. POTS is today by far the most demanded synchronous service. This service has evolved into N to N audioconference or videoconference facilities. Computers in general and the Internet have also had primitive types of character oriented synchronous interactive services for a long time, like TALK, IRC, ... Today low quality voice and video over the Internet is also common practice with applications like, CU-SeeMe, IVS, VAT, ... Audiovisual broadcasting is also a highly demanded type of remote synchronous interaction which has been done since many years. Although broadcasting has really no interaction because the flow of information is unidirectional, it is nevertheless being addressed in the experiments performed for creating new synchronous services. One of the most popular services on the multicast backbone of the Internet, also known as the MBONE, is the conference broadcasting for which a Session Directory (SD) exists where the list of broadcast conferences is displayed in real time. Sophisticated forms of remote synchronous interaction requiring good quality telepresence demand more bandwidth and more reliable communications to achieve a proper interaction. Therefore for setting up large sacle experiments like the RACE/ACTS Summer Schools [2,5,6,9] a complex collaboration among a large number of organizations has been needed. In addition, the availability of large …

Isabel: an application for real time collaboration with a flexible floor control

Isabel is a P2P like multipoint group collaboration tool for the Internet, which implements an innovative service concept for synchronous collaborations based on a flexible and programmable floor control. This approach leads to a more natural and effective management of collaboration sessions. The flexible and programmable floor control incorporates the experience gained in many years of service trials with real users in distributed conferences, classrooms or meetings. The main conclusion after all those trials is that services should use more or less the same media components (audio, video or application sharing), but differ in the floor control model used. The flexible floor control is especially well suited for multipoint audience interconnection in distributed classrooms, conferences, meetings, etc. The development of Isabel started in 1993 for the distribution of the RACE Summer Schools on Advanced Broadband Communication (ABC93-6) where the early versions of this service concept were developed and tuned. The effectiveness of the Isabel service concept has been proven and enhanced since then in many other distributed events, such as Global360x, IDC9x, Global IPv6 Summitts, Telecom I+D, etc. The adaptation of Isabel to the broadband Internet (including VPNs, IPv4/IPv6 transition scenarios, mixtures of unicast and multicast) has reached maturity recently

Educanext: a framework for sharing live educational resources with isabel

EducaNext is an educational mediator created within the UNIVERSAL IST Project which supports both, the exchange of reusable educational materials based on open standards, as well as the collaboration of educators over the network in the realization of educational activities. The Isabel CSCW application is a group collaboration tool for the Internet supporting audience interconnection over the network, such as distributed classrooms, conferences or meetings. This paper describes the conclusions and feedback obtained from the integration of Isabel into EducaNext, its use for the realization of collaborative educational activities involving distributed classrooms, lectures or workshops, as well as the general conclusions obtained about the integration of synchronous collaboration applications into educational mediators.

Enhanced recommendations for e-Learning authoring tools based on a proactive context-aware recommender

Authoring tools are powerful systems in the area of e-Learning that make easier for teachers to create new learning objects by reusing or editing existing educational resources coming from learning repositories or content providers. However, due to the overwhelming number of resources these tools can access, sometimes it is difficult for teachers to find the most suitable resources taking into account their needs in terms of content (e.g. topic) or pedagogical aspects (e.g. target level associated to their students). Recommender systems can take an important role trying to mitigate this problem. In this paper we propose a new model to generate proactive context-aware recommendations on resources during the creation process of a new learning object that a teacher carries out by using an authoring tool. The common use cases covered by the model for having recommendations in online authoring tools and details about the recommender model itself are presented.

A model for generating proactive context-aware recommendations in e-Learning systems

A proactive recommender system pushes recommendations to the user when the current situation seems appropriate, without explicit user request. This is suitable in e-Learning scenarios in which a great amount of learning objects are available but it is difficult to find them according to the users needs. In this paper, we present a model for generating proactive context-aware recommendations in the Virtual Science Hub (ViSH), a educational platform related to the GLOBAL excursion European project. The model relies on domain-dependent context modeling in several categories to generate personalized recommendations to teachers and scientists that will produce the learning resources the students will consume. The recommendation process is divided into three phases. First, the generation of the social context information related to the users in the platform. Then, the current situation considering the social, location and user context is analyzed. Finally, the suitability of particular learning objects to be recommended is examined. Therefore, details about the recommendation model proposed and advantages related to applying the model in ViSH can be found in the paper, in addition to some conclusion remarks and outlook on future work.

Isabel distribution of the Madrid global IPv6 summit 2002 over an IPv6 transition network

This paper describes the main issues arising during the port of the Isabel CSCW application to IPv6. Isabel has been ported to IPv6 in the European IST-1999-20393 LONG project. The port was validated in the distribution of the Madrid Global IPv6 Summit in March 2002. The distribution of the Global IPv6 Summit was a large trial where access to the conference was given with ISABEL running over a network which includes native IPv6 parts, IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels as well as only IPv4 parts. The conclusions obtained are analyzed.

Sharing live educational resources in universal with Isabel

This document describes the design, architecture and implementation of the Isabel live delivery platform integrated in the Universal Brokerage Platform. Isabel enables live delivery of Educational Learning Activities, such as courses, lectures, talks or interactive collaborations over the Internet. We will discuss both the design decisions and the actual implementation, which makes use of the new Semantic Web technologies at the UBP side and of the Internet.multimedia architecture at the Isabel side.

A Quality of Service Assessment Technique for Large-Scale Management of Multimedia Flows

This paper presents the concept and preliminary experiments of a system for assessing on the Quality of Service of multimedia flows. The goal is to devise a mechanism that allows a service provider to take action whenever poor quality of service is detected in the delivery of multimedia flows. Such procedure is fully automatic since it is based on a goodness-of-fit test between source and destination packet interarrival histograms. If the null hypothesis of the test is accepted the flow is marked as in good standing, otherwise it is marked as anomalous and the network management system should take action in response. The proposed technique is analyzed in terms of hardware complexity and bandwidth consumption. The results show this technique is feasible and easily deployable at a minimum hardware and bandwidth expense.

A Collaborative Environment Integration Layer for Activity Orientation

This paper proposes the creation of an architectural layer for integration of all the resources and members participating in a given collaborative activity into a unified framework which is referred as the collaborative environment integration layer (CEIL). This layer is considered a necessary step for integrating with open standards all the collaborative resources or components into a tightly coupled collaborative environment which implements activity orientation. The proposal considers two architectural elements. The first element is the collaborative environment description language (CEDL), which is the formal language for describing all the elements and associated parameters relevant for modeling and managing a collaborative environment. The second one is the collaborative environment management interface (CEMI), which is the unified interface which provides uniform management and configuration of the collaborative components of an environment. This layer includes accurate descriptions of the virtual organizations associated to collaborative activity, including participants, roles, rights, hierarchies, etc being able to model the variety of existing virtual organization models