Juan-Miguel López-Gil

Method for Improving EEG Based Emotion Recognition by Combining It with Synchronized Biometric and Eye Tracking Technologies in a Non-invasive and Low Cost Way

Technical advances, particularly the integration of wearable and embedded sensors, facilitate tracking of physiological responses in a less intrusive way. Currently, there are many devices that allow gathering biometric measurements from human beings, such as EEG Headsets or Health Bracelets. The massive data sets generated by tracking of EEG and physiology may be used, among other things, to infer knowledge about human moods and emotions. Apart from direct biometric signal measurement, eye tracking systems are nowadays capable of determining the point of gaze of the users when interacting in ICT environments, which provides an added value research on many different areas, such as psychology or marketing. We present a process in which devices for eye tracking, biometric, and EEG signal measurements are synchronously used for studying both basic and complex emotions. We selected the least intrusive devices for different signal data collection given the study requirements and cost constraints, so users would behave in the most natural way possible. On the one hand, we have been able to determine basic emotions participants were experiencing by means of valence and arousal. On the other hand, a complex emotion such as empathy has also been detected. To validate the usefulness of this approach, a study involving forty-four people has been carried out, where they were exposed to a series of affective stimuli while their EEG activity, biometric signals, and eye position were synchronously recorded to detect self-regulation. The hypothesis of the work was that people who self-regulated would show significantly different results when analyzing their EEG data. Participants were divided into two groups depending on whether Electro Dermal Activity (EDA) data indicated they self-regulated or not. The comparison of the results obtained using different machine learning algorithms for emotion recognition shows that using EEG activity alone as a predictor for self-regulation does not allow properly determining whether a person in self-regulation its emotions while watching affective stimuli. However, adequately combining different data sources in a synchronous way to detect emotions makes it possible to overcome the limitations of single detection methods.

Incorporating educational robots and visual programming environments in introductory programming courses

Introductory programming courses are very challenging both for students and teachers. Several authors propose incorporating either educational robots or visual programming environments as a means to ease learning of programming. This paper presents three experiences that use these kinds of tools with the aim of applying Kolbs experiential learning cycle. The experiences have been carried out in the first year courses of programming in the Bachelor in Computer Management and Information Systems Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of Vitoria-Gasteiz in the UPV/EHU.

Visualizing Students’ Performance in the Classroom: Towards Effective F2F Interaction Modelling

Students are supposed to work and learn when they are in the classroom, but how are they learning? Answering this question is not so easy, but perhaps knowing the learning activities of the student and following his or her learning progress can be good supporting mechanisms. The PresenceClick environment is intended to let teachers and students nimbly capture what happens in class to provide them, in return, with information about students’ behavior during class. The system involves two platforms −a web system and a mobile application− that working together allow recording of students’ interactions and provide updated graphical visualizations about their behavior.

Web Ontologies to Categorialy Structure Reality: Representations of Human Emotional, Cognitive, and Motivational Processes

This work presents a Web ontology for modeling and representation of the emotional, cognitive and motivational state of online learners, interacting with university systems for distance or blended education. The ontology is understood as a way to provide the required mechanisms to model reality and associate it to emotional responses, but without committing to a particular way of organizing these emotional responses. Knowledge representation for the contributed ontology is performed by using Web Ontology Language (OWL), a semantic web language designed to represent rich and complex knowledge about things, groups of things, and relations between things. OWL is a computational logic-based language such that computer programs can exploit knowledge expressed in OWL and also facilitates sharing and reusing knowledge using the global infrastructure of the Web. The proposed ontology has been tested in the field of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to check if it is capable of representing emotions and motivation of the students in this context of use.

Study of the accessibility of a sample of scientific electronic journal publishing platforms: Changes from 2011 to 2016

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse the degree of accessibility of a set of electronic journals that are hosted on widely used online scientific journal publishing platforms and whose content quality has already been certified. Two studies were performed, in which the accessibility of the selected platforms was studied in 2011 and 2016. Design/methodology/approach The research was performed on publishing platforms than hosted more than 20 journals about human behaviour and factors that may influence it. The evaluation was carried out following the methodology described by the Web Accessibility Initiative in their Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology. Findings The results show that, in spite of an improvement in accessibility, all the analysed electronic consultation platforms contain errors that could hinder their users’ access to their content. The incidence of errors found varies considerably among platforms. As the user interface of each platform analysed is common to all the online scientific electronic journals it hosts, the results obtained are valid for all other journals hosted on a given platform. Research limitations/implications Obtained results were valid in the date and time the websites were analysed. Changes made on the websites since then make that the results of an accessibility analysis would be different. Practical implications Analysed platforms would require taking steps to ensure their accessibility. Social implications Users with disabilities cannot use these platforms appropriately due to the accessibility problems found. The lack of web accessibility also has implications regarding visibility of published articles and common users. Originality/value This work offers a systematic analysis that includes manual accessibility evaluation, which has not been performed in scientific article publishing platforms to the extent presented in this paper. Articles found in the literature perform automatic analyses, which lack the depth of a manual one. Besides, when manual accessibility analysis is performed, usually the home page of a platform or journal alone is considered.

Visual Programming Environments for Object-Oriented Programming: Acceptance and Effects on Student Motivation

This paper presents an experiment in which visual programming environments have been used in programming courses aiming at helping students to acquire the competencies of a course on object-oriented programming. This paper is centered on the analysis of the acceptance by the students of this type of environment, as well as its effect on the motivation of the students. The results obtained show differences in their answers according to the two possible characteristics of the students analyzed: their gender and the fact of being or not a newcomer.

Scientific Production on Web Usability

Scientific literature on Web usability is presented by the bibliometric analysis of published Science and Scopus database articles available on the Web. We analyzed the productivity, temporal distribution and scientific production by authors, institutions, countries and journals. There has been a growing trend in the number of articles published, confirming the consolidation and progress in web usability research.

Integrating Field Studies in Agile Development to Evaluate Usability on Context Dependant Mobile Applications

Agile development is a current trend in Software Engineering which is encouraged by the special needs of interactive systems that require incorporating usability engineering in their development processes. In this regard, how usability assessment of mobile interactive applications should be conducted in the frame of agile methodologies is an open question. On the one hand, usability evaluation consumes time and resources, which can make agile methodologies lose their agile essence. On the other hand, there is a considerable debate about whether user interactions with mobile systems should be investigated in the field or in more traditional laboratory environments. This paper presents the results of a field study conducted in an interactive context-dependant mobile application. This study allowed detecting different interaction patterns and contextual factors that are difficult or impossible to simulate in laboratory. The way and timing in which evaluations were performed were carefully considered to optimize the cost in time and resources. The integration of field evaluations in agile processes, as the one here presented, is consistent with the objective of improving product quality through incremental assessments.

Validation of a Framework for Enriching Human–Computer–Human Interaction with Awareness in a Seamless Way

Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) environments enable users to interact with each other by using computers to conveniently share relevant data across the user interface. Awareness is an essential requirement in CSCW to convey precise information about the context in which the work in group is taking place, contributing thus to collaboration between users. In this kind of environments, we need to go beyond traditional human computer interaction to embrace human computer human interaction (HCHI). It is necessary to devise flexible mechanisms to support HCHI in dealing with the diversity of contexts and group concerns. Furthermore, these mechanisms should endeavor to provide a seamless integration with current development techniques. This work presents a multi-purpose framework to include group awareness in HCHI systems in a seamless way. Proposed framework is based on the Dichotomic View of Plasticity approach. An experiment was conducted with two different versions of a specific groupware platform: the original platform and a new version of it, extended by means of the proposed framework. The goal was twofol: (i) to verify the benefits of applying this framework and (ii) to validate, in terms of user satisfaction, the improvement regarding groupware features introduced in the extended version. The results of the experiment backed up our hypothesis by showing that proposed framework is able to add awareness support to existing human computer Human (HCH) interfaces in a seamless way. It is also showed that added awareness components effectively contributed to achieve a higher level of collaboration among users.

Scientific electronic book: information architecture and reference points

This paper examines the influence of the loss of reference points for the digital readout in user interaction. This has been done using 5 eBooks from different disciplines, accessed through various consultation platforms. We have examined different aspects of the information architecture of these sites to find out if users are aware of their location in the text during reading and maintaining control to scroll through it. The results indicate the need to design more robust information architectures to overcome the problems of loss of location and convert the digital reading experience into a viable alternative