Hugo Paredes

Using Intelligent Personal Assistants to Strengthen the Elderlies’ Social Bonds

Social isolation and loneliness are among the important factors for the degradation of the life quality as the persons’ aging process advances. These factors can have a pronounced effect on the general health and are caused by the decrease in social interaction by the person with the friends, family and ex-co-workers groups. On the other hand, the software and hardware technologies has reached a maturation point were the electronic assistants can acquire information from the user through camera images, as well as to communicate with the user by means of natural voice language. In this context, a model for the adoption of electronic intelligent assistants by the elderlies has been proposed in previous work. In the current work, it is assessed the possibility of using the current consumer assistants to implement the proposed model. Several assistants are analyzed (Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple), assessing their functionalities and how they could be used to assist the elderly in strengthening their social bonds with the family, friends and ex-co-workers groups.

Transforming e-Procurement Platforms for PEPPOL and WCAG 2.0 Compliance

The increase in the complexity inherent to public administrative activities, including public procurement, has led ANO to develop a public e-procurement platform in order for Portuguese public entities to perform their contracts and acquisitions. Given the introduction of European PEPPOL standards and the requirement for all Portuguese e-procurement platforms to be WCAG 2.0 level A compliant, ANO company established a consortium with the UTAD University in order to improve their platform and develop the required features. By using a specially designed stage-based work methodology, the R&D project was carried out with success and all initial goals were achieved.

Crowdsourcing and Massively Collaborative Science: A Systematic Literature Review and Mapping Study

Current times are denoting unprecedented indicators of scientific data production, and the involvement of the wider public (the crowd) on research has attracted increasing attention. Drawing on review of extant literature, this paper outlines some ways in which crowdsourcing and mass collaboration can leverage the design of intelligent systems to keep pace with the rapid transformation of scientific work. A systematic literature review was performed following the guidelines of evidence-based software engineering and a total of 148 papers were identified as primary after querying digital libraries. From our review, a lack of methodological frameworks and algorithms for enhancing interactive intelligent systems by combining machine and crowd intelligence is clearly manifested and we will need more technical support in the future. We lay out a vision for a cyberinfrastructure that comprises crowd behavior, task features, platform facilities, and integration of human inputs into AI systems.

Reframing Taxonomy Development in Collaborative Computing Research: A Review and Synthesis of CSCW Literature 2003–2010

Technological evolution impacts the research and development of new solutions, as well as consumers’ expectations and behaviors. With the advent of the new millennium, collaboration systems and technologies were introduced to support ordinary cooperative work and inter-dependent, socially and culturally mediated practices as integral units of everyday life settings. Nevertheless, existing classification systems are limited in scope to analyze technological developments and capture the intellectual structure of a field, understood as an abstraction of the collective knowledge of its researchers and their socially mediated activities. Ten years after the introduction of Mittleman et al.’s taxonomy, we build upon earlier work and adopt this classification scheme to provide a descriptive, taxonomy-based analysis of four distinct venues focused on collaborative computing research: ACM CSCW, ACM GROUP, ECSCW, and CRIWG. The proposal consists of achieving evidence on technical attributes and impacts towards characterizing the evolution of socio-technical systems via (and for) taxonomic modeling. This study can also constitute an important step towards the emergence of new, potentially more valid and robust evaluation studies combining Grounded Theory with alternative methods and techniques.

SciCrowd: Towards a Hybrid, Crowd-Computing System for Supporting Research Groups in Academic Settings.

The increasing amount of scholarly literature and the diversity of dissemination channels are challenging several fields and research communities. A continuous interplay between researchers and citizen scientists creates a vast set of possibilities to integrate hybrid, crowd-machine interaction features into crowd science projects for improving knowledge acquisition from large volumes of scientific data. This paper presents SciCrowd, an experimental crowd-powered system under development “from the ground up” to support data-driven research. The system combines automatic data indexing and crowd-based processing of data for detecting topic evolution by fostering a knowledge base of concepts, methods, and results categorized according to the particular needs of each field. We describe the prototype and discuss its main implications as a mixed-initiative approach for leveraging the analysis of academic literature.

MyCarMobile: A Travel Assistance Emergency Mobile App for Deaf People

Deaf people face serious communication problems. The use of smartphones has been explored as a solution for breaking communication barriers and enhancing their communication, by providing access to basic services. This paper explores the usage of iconographic interfaces in smartphones as a means for contributing to further autonomy for deaf people. We applied the model for asynchronous and non-verbal communication through iconographic and interactive flows to develop the MyCarMobile application, a travel assistance android mobile application for deaf people. Our research explores a solution which enables travel assistance services without involving audio, using an iconographic interface to report road accidents. A user centered design approach was applied in the development of the prototype and usability tests were performed with eleven deaf users, in order to validate the mobile application. The results revealed a good performance and user satisfaction when interacting with the application.