Nestor Garay-Vitoria

Text prediction systems: a survey

Text prediction is one of the most widely used techniques to enhance the communication rate in augmentative and alternative communication. Prediction systems are traditionally used by people with disabilities (e.g. people with motor and speech impairments). However, new applications, such as writing short text messages via mobile phones, have recently appeared. A vast amount of heterogeneous text prediction methods and techniques can be found in literature. Their heterogeneity makes it difficult to understand and compare them, in order to select the most convenient technique for a specific design. This paper presents a survey on text prediction techniques with the intention to provide a systematic view of this field. Prediction applications and related features, such as block size, dictionary structure, prediction method, user interface, etc., are examined. In addition, prediction measurement parameters and published results are compared. A large number of factors that may influence prediction results, including the acceptance of the system by the users, are reviewed, and their influence on the performance and usability of the system is discussed.

Automatically generating tailored accessible user interfaces for ubiquitous services

Ambient Assisted Living environments provide support to people with disabilities and elderly people, usually at home. This concept can be extended to public spaces, where ubiquitous accessible services allow people with disabilities to access intelligent machines such as information kiosks. One of the key issues in achieving full accessibility is the instantaneous generation of an adapted accessible interface suited to the specific user that requests the service. In this paper we present the method used by the EGOKI interface generator to select the most suitable interaction resources and modalities for each user in the automatic creation of the interface. The validation of the interfaces generated for four different types of users is presented and discussed.

A Comparison of Prediction Techniques to Enhance the Communication Rate

Prediction is one of the most extended techniques to enhance the rate of communication for people with motor and speech impairments who use Augmentative and Alternative Communication systems. There is an enormous diversity of prediction methods and techniques mentioned in the literature. Therefore, the designer finds tremendous difficulties in understanding and comparing them in order to decide the most convenient technique for a specific design. This paper presents a survey on prediction techniques applied to communicators with the intention of helping them to understand this field. Prediction applications and related features, such as block size, dictionary structure, prediction method, interface, special features, measurement and results, are detailed. Systems found in the literature are studied and described. Finally, a discussion is carried out on the possible comparison among the different methods.

Mobile Interface for a Smart Wheelchair

Smart wheelchairs are designed for severely motor impaired people that have difficulties to drive standard-manual or electric powered-wheelchairs. Their goal is to automate driving tasks as much as possible in order to minimize user intervention. Nevertheless, human involvement is still necessary to maintain high level task control. Therefore in the interface design it is necessary to take into account the restrictions imposed by the system (mobile and small), by the type of users (people with severe motor restrictions) and by the task (to select a destination among a number of choices in a structured environment). This paper describes the structure of an adaptive mobile interface for smart wheelchairs that is driven by the context.

Game-Console-Based Projects for Learning the Computer Input/Output Subsystem

The input/output (I/O) subsystem is an important topic within computer architecture (CA) because it determines how the computer interacts with its environment. For this reason, computer scientists and engineers must understand how the computer manages this interaction, which is usually taught in introductory CA courses. Of course, there are many different styles of teaching, ranging from purely theoretical to completely practical. The CA course considered in this paper has already applied a practical approach for some time. For the I/O subsystem, students must be able to describe what polling and interrupts are and handle them through low-level programming. However, programming at this level in operating system (OS)-driven computers is not possible without being familiar with the kernel and drivers, which is not usually the case for students in an introductory course. Fortunately, there are many bare and specialized embedded systems around that are not OS-driven. In this proposal, the Nintendo DS (NDS) console was used in a classroom setting. It proved to be an appropriate infrastructure for developing attractive and engaging projects and was useful in providing a better understanding of the mechanisms related to the I/O subsystem. At the same time, the teaching methods were altered to make the transition from classical, passive, lecture-based classes to an active project-based learning (PBL) approach. It has been a very rewarding experience to see students learning to control the NDS devices on their own. In addition to describing the implementation of the proposed changes in two subsequent school years, this paper also presents some data and conclusions.

A comparison between lecturers' and students' concept maps related to the input/output topic in computer architecture

The Input/Output topic is mandatory in the Computer Architecture branch of the computing curricula. However. in our experience it is a rather complex topic for students to understand. This paper presents the process followed to produce some concept maps that represent the theory we, as lecturers, would like students to learn, and shows the differences found between these concept maps and the concept maps produced by several representative students selected among the students attending the course during the school year 2011-2012. There is also a comparison made between the scores obtained by these representative students in the exam and the results of the concept maps. Finally, a discussion is proposed. This type of study is new to the researchers and the objective of the discussion is to gather knowledge on how well the research has been developed so far, and how to continue.

An Intelligent Tutoring System Oriented to the Integration of People with Intellectual Disabilities

The development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) based on mobile platforms offers new perspectives for a better integration of people with intellectual disabilities. The LAGUNTXO System aims to achieve the performance of human tutors. Due to the wide diversity related to a person with disabilities, an intelligent structure that may achieve a convenient tutoring system configuration for each case has been incorporated. With an appropriate design of the structure and architecture of this task handler, it is very easy to operate by stakeholders. An automaton-based mechanism has been performed to technologically adapt the large amount of possibilities related to the interaction between people with disabilities, the task that is going to be made autonomously by users, and the mobile system elements. In this paper, LAGUNTXO architecture, operational ways, heuristic evaluation and a pilot study with final users are presented.

Evaluation of Prediction Methods Applied to an Inflected Language

Prediction is one of the techniques that has been applied to Augmentative and Alternative Communication to help people enhance the quality and quantity of the composed text in a time unit. Most of the literature has focused on word prediction methods that may easily be applied to non-inflected languages. However, for inflected languages, other approaches that mainly distinguish roots and suffixes may enhance the results (in terms of keystroke savings and hit ratio) of predictive systems. In this paper, we present the approaches we have applied to the Basque language (highly inflected) and the results they achieve with a particular text (that was not used while creating the initial lexicons the systems use for prediction). Starting from this evaluation, one of the presented approaches is suggested as being the best.

Extending In-Home User and Context Models to Provide Ubiquitous Adaptive Support Outside the Home

Ubiquitous Computing has proved to be an excellent way of providing technological support for the daily life of people within its range. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), which is largely based on Ubiquitous Computing, aims at tutoring and supervising elderly people and users with physical, sensory or cognitive disabilities in the performance of routine household activities. AAL’s main aim is to increase the autonomy of dependent people in their daily life by providing them with supportive instructions for everyday routines and warnings about home safety issues. This concept can be extended to public spaces, where ubiquitous accessible services allow people with disabilities to access location-dependent web services (providing maps, addresses, transport schedules, etc.) and local intelligent machines (such as information kiosks or ATMs). This approach allows existing knowledge about the users, their common activities, and their environment to be used to extend the in-home AAL concept to the support of common routines performed outside the home. This chapter surveys the modelling techniques used inside the home and discusses the methodologies required for their extension for out-of-home use, including interoperation and sharing of models.

The Learning Outcomes of the Exam Question in the Input/Output Topic in Computer Architecture

The Input/Output (I/O) topic as a branch of the Computer Architecture field has been considered a key topic in both the Computer Science and the Computer Engineering curricula. Years of teaching have demonstrated this topic to be difficult for students to understand. Having made some changes to the methodology used to teach the topic and to the infrastructure used for practice, we have analysed the results and concluded that the research should be more expert-centric than novice-centric. In this turnaround some exam questions have been analysed in order to determine the real learning outcomes achieved.