Panagiotis Germanakos

An Experimental Assessment of the Use of Cognitive and Affective Factors in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia

In order to assess the positive effect and validity of personalization on the basis of users cognitive and emotional characteristics, this study presents three subsequent experiments. The first experiment explores the relationship of cognitive style and users eye gaze behavior as to validate this specific psychological construct in the context of educational hypermedia. The second and third experiments present the effect of a set of human factors (cognitive style, visual working memory span, control/speed of processing, and anxiety) in an adaptive educational system. The eye tracking experiment demonstrated that eye gaze patterns are robustly related to cognitive style (n = 21), while matching the instructional style to users characteristics was revealed to be statistically significant in optimizing users performance ( n = 219), with the exception of control/speed of processing. Based on this empirical assessment, this paper argues that individual differences at this intrinsic level are important and adaptation on these parameters through personalization technologies may have a positive effect on learning performance.

Do cognitive styles of users affect preference and performance related to CAPTCHA challenges

A Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is nowadays a widely used security mechanism for constructing a high-confidence proof that the entity interacting with a remote service is actually a human being. Aiming to investigate the relation among users cognitive styles, and CAPTCHA challenges in terms of preference and performance, a study is in progress which entails a psychometric-based survey for extracting users cognitive styles, combined with a real usage scenario with two variations of CAPTCHA mechanisms. A total of 131 participants of age between 19 and 25 participated in the reported study providing interesting insights with respect to users cognitive styles and CAPTCHA preference and performance issues.

Implementing Affect Parameters in Personalized Web-Based Design

Researchers used to believe that emotional processes are beyond the scope of a scientific study. Recent advances in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, however, suggest that there is nothing mystical about emotional processes. Affective neuroscience and psychology have reported that human affect and emotional experience play a significant, and useful, role in human learning and decision making. Emotions are considered to play a central role in guiding and regulating learning, performance, behaviour and decision making, by modulating numerous cognitive and physiological activities. Our purpose is to improve learning performance and, most importantly, to personalize web-content to users needs and preferences, eradicating known difficulties that occur in traditional approaches. Affect parameters are implemented, by constructing a theory that addresses emotion and is feasible in Web-learning environments.

Working Memory Differences in E-Learning Environments: Optimization of Learners' Performance through Personalization

Working memory (WM) is a psychological construct that has a major effect on information processing, thus signifying its importance when considering individual differences and adaptive educational hypermedia. Previous work of the authors in the field has demonstrated that personalization on human factors, including the WM sub-component of visuospatial sketchpad, may assist learners in optimizing their performance. To that end, a deeper approach in WM has been carried out, both in terms of more accurate measurements and more elaborated adaptation techniques. This paper presents results from a sample of 80 university students, underpinning the importance of WM in the context of an e-learning application in a statistically robust way. In short, learners that have low WM span expectedly perform worse than learners with higher levels of WM span; however, through proper personalization techniques this difference is completely alleviated, leveling the performance of low and normal WM span learners.

An Intelligent Web-Based Healthcare System: The Case of DYMOS

Today’s information age is accelerating at quantum speed. Advances, such as the Internet and high-speed networks, have propelled the never-ending quest for information. In this regard, eHealth services is a continuously growing sector, driving the need for advances in the dynamic working environment of different medical actors promoting the effective collaboration within the given contextual and technological constraints. Henceforth, this chapter defines and classifies the various virtual communities in the eHealth sector, analyses existing related approaches and identifies current problems, stressing emphasis on the notion of workflow management within the multi/cross-organizational environment. It further proposes an eHealth system, DYMOS, which has been based on a suggested extended collaboration model, with features that tend to tackle the identified weaknesses. Finally, it presents a positive evaluation of the system’s efficiency and effectiveness with the implementation of an experimentation phase which has used trials in a real hospital environment.

Feedback Matters! Predicting the Appreciation of Online Articles A Data-Driven Approach

The current era of advanced computational mobile systems, continuous connectivity and multi-variate data has led to the deployment of rich information settings that generate constant and close to real-time feedback. Journalists and authors of articles in the area of Data Journalism have only recently acknowledged the influence that the audience reactions and opinions can bring to effective writing, so to be widely appreciated. Such feedback may be obtained using specific metrics that describe the user behavior during the interaction process like shares, comments, likes, claps, recommendations, or even with the use of specialized mechanisms like mood meters that display certain emotions of readers they experience while reading a story. However, which characteristics can reveal an article’s character or type in relation to the collected data and the audience reflection to the benefit of the author? In this paper, we investigate the relationships between the characteristics of an article like structure, style of speech, sentiment, author’s popularity, and its success (number of claps) by employing natural language processing techniques. We highlight the emotions and polarity communicated by an article liable to increase the prediction regarding its acceptability by the audience.

Enhancing collaboration in ASD-Centric treatment environments: a proposed architecture

There is a growing body of evidence that people diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is increasing each year. ASD is a neurodevelopmental spectrum disorder with overarching characteristics the abnormal social interaction, communication ability, patterns of interests, and patterns of behavior. Individuals with ASD are characterized by unique and divergent needs and requirements which make a generalized treatment approach obsolete. Early diagnosis and interventions in persons with ASD, along with a consistent and continuous monitoring of their situation by the dedicated care team may increase their learning abilities and social inclusion. In this respect, we propose an ASD-centric Computer Supported Collaborative Treatment Architecture which employs the notion of Virtual Care Teams and dynamic workflows. We analyze its various components and outline a set of services that have been adjusted on the qualities and limitations of the ASD sector. Through this architecture a continuous treatment with updated exchange of information, effective communication, prompt error handling, and improved decision making, can be achieved within and between the members of a care team. Finally, we present a real life case scenario which employs the particular architecture, encapsulating the arisen benefits of the proposed approach.

Implementing Psychological Parameters in a Web-Based Appraisal System

For many years people have been trying to measure differences between individuals. Over the course of time, a combination of developments in statistical know-how and the evolution of thought within psychology enabled the refinement of measures, and subsequently the assessment of more specific factors in the field of individual differences like different kinds of ability, affect and personality. This knowledge has been used in many areas within psychology and at the same time the advancement of technology has enabled the development of web-based appraisal systems that measure specific factors relevant to specific situations. This paper presents the theory behind a web-based assessment system and some first experimental results that will lead to the design of the web environment.

Evaluation Metrics for eHealth Services and Applications within Smart Houses Context

eHealth services is a continuously growing sector, driving the need for advances in both the network characteristics and infrastructure, as well as in the available mobile devices used. The same need requires the development of quality software applications to facilitate and service eHealth activities. On these grounds, this paper proposes a novel evaluation methodology that takes into consideration the peculiarities of sensor/actuator related services. It further focuses on aspects of software quality for eHealth services and applications, and identifies a set of quality characteristics and attributes to take into consideration. These quality characteristics are integrated into our proposed evaluation methodology during the analysis and engineering phases, which is a revised version of the spiral software process used in web engineering. The efficacy of the proposed approach in a real scenario is discussed.

The Role of Affect in Personalized Learning

Research on modelling affect and on interfaces adaptation based on affective factors has matured considerably over the past several years. Emotions are considered to play a central role in guiding and regulating learning, performance, behaviour and decision making, by modulating numerous cognitive and physiological activities. The basic objective of this paper is to analyse the way that individuals process their emotions and how they interact with other elements of their information-processing system. It will further underpin their significance taking into consideration the notion of emotion regulation, based on which users expect to receive the most apt personalized provider’s content. Special emphasis will be given in dispositional trait affect that serves as an overall estimation of an individual’s affective state and statistical evidence will be provided which suggest that affect can have both informational and processing effects on cognition.