Luis Anido Rifón

Knowledge-based platform for eGovernment agents: A Web-based solution using semantic technologies

Currently eGovernment is clearly gaining momentum in our society. Many solutions and projects are being developed and, among the large amount of used tools, semantics is called to play a paramount role. In order to overcome issues related to cooperation, interoperability and accessibility of services in the domain, semantics can be used to improve in-use solutions and to develop new mechanisms able to support the development of expert and intelligent systems in eGovernment. This paper addresses a semantic based philosophy to tackle a holistic platform for the domain taking into account the knowledge of the administrations. By means of intelligent documents and Life Events, as they are presented in the paper, it is possible to build up a intelligent platform to host eGovernment services, as proved by the successful study case Tecut portal.

Is My Student at the Other Side? Applying Biometric Web Authentication to E-Learning Environments

Despite of the advances in the e-learning domain during the last decades, there is a lack of suitable mechanism to carry out assessment with the appropriate measures to avoid cheating. Current LMSs do not provide the needed features to check that the intended student is taking the online exam by himself, or even to know if he has spent the whole session time in front of the computer. This paper presents a web-based application that offers biometric authentication based on face-recognition. This application, which can be easily integrated in currently available LMSs, is able to use face-recognition during access control, tracking and assessment. Thus it is possible to improve security during critical phases in the learning process (e.g. assessment).

Towards a Benchmark for the Evaluation of LD Expressiveness and Suitability

Commentary on: Chapter2: The Learning Design Specification (Olivier and Tattersall, 2005) Abstract: IMS Learning Design (LD) has been presented as the EML standard. We propose a methodology to achieve an evaluation benchmark for LD and EMLs based on the identification of perspectives and patterns. We consider a perspective as a feature of an EML with a specific purpose which can be analyzed independently. For each identified perspective, we study the involved patterns. A pattern is an abstraction that is frequently repeated in a design domain, it can be considered as a typical solution to a common problem. Perspectives and patterns provide the criteria that will made up the evaluation benchmark. The evaluation benchmark is proposed to carry out two kinds of evaluation: expressiveness and suitability. The final purpose is to contribute to the development of LD in order to enhance the reusability and interoperability of units of learning. Editors: Colin Tattersall and Rob Koper.

A proposal for a semantic-driven egovernment service architecture

Governments from all over the world are currently developing solutions and initiatives for the provision of solutions in the field of eGovernment. This leads to a heterogeneity problem that makes it necessary to provide interoperability mechanisms. This paper proposes an overall approach to overcome the current drawbacks of electronic communication among different PAs. In addition, new services are included to improve the eventual performance of this kind of systems. Web semantic technologies are used and some domain-specific profiles are proposed.

Multimodal Biometrics-Based Student Attendance Measurement in Learning Management Systems

In this paper we present a solution to obtain useful and reliable user logs in a Learning Management System (LMS).Current LMS logs are combined with biometric-based logs that show the student behaviour. Our system models the student behaviour, allowing to know exactly how much time the student spends in front of the computer examining the con-tents of the LMS. Besides, user verification and face tracking are also integrated, what guarantees that the student is the person actually interacting with the system. The presented multimodal solution for user tracking and user ver-ification combines face tracking, face verification, speakerverification and fingerprint verification. Face tracking and face verification are performed in a non-collaborative fashion. Fingerprint or speaker verification is performed on demand, with the aim of avoiding a negative in¿uence of adverse environmental or behavioural human factors in the reliability of the user logs generated by the system. These circumstances can thwart the non collaborative face veri-fication performance involved in the tracking process. The presented solution solves the problem of user tracking and authentication even in adverse environments for face verifi-cation.In this paper we present a solution to obtain useful and reliable user logs in a Learning Management System (LMS). Current LMS logs are combined with biometric-based logs that show the student behaviour. Our system models the student behaviour, allowing to know exactly how much time the student spends in front of the computer examining the contents of the LMS. Besides, user verification and face tracking are also integrated, what guarantees that the student is the person actually interacting with the system. The presented multimodal solution for user tracking and user verification combines face tracking, face verification, speaker verification and fingerprint verification. Face tracking and face verification are performed in a non-collaborative fashion. Fingerprint or speaker verification is performed on demmand, with the aim of avoiding a negative influence of adverse environmental or behavioural human factors in the reliability of the user logs generated by the system. These circumstances can thwart the non collaborative face verification performance involved in the tracking process. The presented solution solves the problem of user tracking and authentication even in adverse environments for face verification.

Information Extraction in Semantic, Highly-Structured, and Semi-Structured Web Sources

The evolution of the Web from the original proposal made in 1989 can be considered one of the most revolutionary technological changes in centuries. During the past 25 years the Web has evolved from a static version to a fully dynamic and interoperable intelligent ecosystem. The amount of data produced during these few decades is enormous. New applications, developed by individual developers or small companies, can take advantage of both services and data already present on the Web. Data, produced by humans and machines, may be available in different formats and through different access interfaces. This paper analyses three different types of data available on the Web and presents mechanisms for accessing and extracting this information. The authors show several applications that leverage extracted information in two areas of research: recommendations of educational resources beyond content and interactive digital TV applications.

Biomedical literature classification using encyclopedic knowledge: a Wikipedia-based bag-of-concepts approach

Automatic classification of text documents into a set of categories has a lot of applications. Among those applications, the automatic classification of biomedical literature stands out as an important application for automatic document classification strategies. Biomedical staff and researchers have to deal with a lot of literature in their daily activities, so it would be useful a system that allows for accessing to documents of interest in a simple and effective way; thus, it is necessary that these documents are sorted based on some criteria—that is to say, they have to be classified. Documents to classify are usually represented following the bag-of-words (BoW) paradigm. Features are words in the text—thus suffering from synonymy and polysemy—and their weights are just based on their frequency of occurrence. This paper presents an empirical study of the efficiency of a classifier that leverages encyclopedic background knowledge—concretely Wikipedia—in order to create bag-of-concepts (BoC) representations of documents, understanding concept as “unit of meaning”, and thus tackling synonymy and polysemy. Besides, the weighting of concepts is based on their semantic relevance in the text. For the evaluation of the proposal, empirical experiments have been conducted with one of the commonly used corpora for evaluating classification and retrieval of biomedical information, OHSUMED, and also with a purpose-built corpus of MEDLINE biomedical abstracts, UVigoMED. Results obtained show that the Wikipedia-based bag-of-concepts representation outperforms the classical bag-of-words representation up to 157% in the single-label classification problem and up to 100% in the multi-label problem for OHSUMED corpus, and up to 122% in the single-label classification problem and up to 155% in the multi-label problem for UVigoMED corpus.

Semantic interoperability: use of vocabularies with learning object metadata

In order to enable teachers to share and reuse learning objects, these objects should be described using standard metadata such as the IEEEs learning object metadata. Learning object metadata elements must be described using appropriate vocabularies in order to ensure semantic interoperability and facilitate resource description discovery and reuse. LOM elements can be described using simple vocabularies and value lists, LOM vocabularies, taxonomies, classifications and thesauri and natural language. CEN/ISSS has funded the development of a registry of taxonomies and vocabularies relevant for a European learning society. It is recommended that metadata implementers publish their vocabularies in the registry to reduce duplication of effort and facilitate semantic interoperability.

An approach to multiple fault diagnosis using fuzzy logic

The development of systems capable of diagnosing new and multiple faults in industrial systems is an active research topic. In this paper a model-based diagnostic system capable of diagnosing new and multiple faults using fuzzy logic as a fundamental tool is proposed. Also, the wavelet transform is used for isolating noise present in measurements. The proposed model was applied to the Continuously-Stirred Tank Heater model benchmark. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model, improving the robustness in the diagnostic, without loss of sensitivity to incipient or small magnitude faults.

The acceptability of TV-based game platforms as an instrument to support the cognitive evaluation of senior adults at home

Introduction The computing capabilities of state-of-the-art television sets and media centres may facilitate the introduction of computer-assisted evaluation at home. This approach would help to overcome the drawbacks of traditional pen-and-paper evaluations administered in clinical facilities, as they could be performed in a more comfortable environment, the subject’s home, and they would be more flexible for designing complex environments for the evaluation of neuropsychological constructs that are difficult to assess through traditional testing. The objective of this work was to obtain some initial evidence about the technical acceptance by senior adults of serious games played at home on the TV set and therefore about the convenience of further investigating such an approach to cognitive assesment. Materials and Methods We developed a collection of games to be deployed on a TV environment. These games were tried by a group of senior adults at their homes. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was used to validate this approach. Surveys were performed to study the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of such technical setting as an instrument for their cognitive evaluation; that is, its technical acceptance. Subjective information collected from participants was correlated with actual interaction data captured. An additional survey was performed 36 months after pilot testing to have an indication about the long-term perceptions about usefulness and ease of use. Results More than 90% of participating subjects perceived cognitive games on TV as useful or very useful. The majority of participants selected the TV set as their preferred option to interact with serious games at home, when compared to other devices such as smartphones, tablets or PCs. This result correlates with the number of participants perceiving them as easily usable or very easy to use, and also with automatically captured interaction data. Three out of four seniors expressed their interest in keeping the system at home after the pilot. Besides, these perceptions are fairly stable in time as shown by the survey performed 36 months after pilot testing. Limitations Although participating users are a representative sample of the Galician population, which in turn is comparable to the population of most rural areas in Europe, a larger and more diverse user sample would be needed to obtain significant results for a wider population profile. Conclusion The study confirmed the technical acceptance, that is, the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, of the TV-based home technical setting introduced as a means of cognitive evaluation. This study provides initial evidence on the viability of a TV-based serious games approach for cognitive longitudinal screening at home with little intervention of clinical professionals, thus contributing to the early detection of cognitive impairments in the senior population.