Raúl A. Aguilar

Searching Pancho's Soul: An Intelligent Virtual Agent for Human Teams

Intelligent virtual agents have characteristics that allow increasing the computers ability to engage and motivate students along their learning or training process. We are considered incorporate the particular behaviors of team roles defined by Belbin into the simulated agent Ltcalled PanchoGt that will join the human group with the intention of improving the team performance. It this paper we identify relations between the team roles defined by Belbin and the personality traits based into OCEAN model, as well as relations between each one of class of tasks proposed by McGrath and the first. Finally, we describe the cognitive architecture for emotional agents that will use for Panchos architecture.

Pedagogical Virtual Agents to Support Training of Human Groups

From the last decade, intelligent virtual environments (IVEs) have become a quite popular tool for applying computer science to education. The intelligence of the systems generated using IVEs usually falls on the denominated pedagogical virtual agent. Pedagogical virtual agents have characteristics that allow to increase the computers ability to engage and motivate students along their learning process. In this paper, a human groups (teams) training strategy is presented, supporting one of its stages by the use of a pedagogical virtual agent playing the role of team leader

An Intelligent Collaborative Virtual Environment for Team Training -- A Preliminary Report

The computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is a paradigm that can be viewed as an evolution of individual learning done in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) and learning environments (LE) to a group learning environments. In this paper a team training strategy (TTS) is described, which involves the use of an intelligent collaborative virtual environment (ICVE) that incorporates a pedagogical virtual agent (PVA) to assist the group during the execution stage. We are developing an ICVE to support the requirements of each phase of the TTS; in this report we describe the advances and the ongoing work of the ICVE

Enhancing Teams with PANCHO to Improve the Training Experience

Here we present an automated mechanism used by a human coach in the decision making process to enhance teams replacing a human member with an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA). The IVA called PANCHO (Pedagogical AgeNt to support Collaborative Human grOups) will join the human group with the aim of improving the performance of the team --inspired by the Team Roles Theory-- and providing scaffolding to the trainees during the task execution. PANCHOs architecture --an emotional architecture-- is also described briefly.

Exploring the Influence of Belbin’s Roles in Software Measurement: A Controlled Experiment with Students

The article presents a controlled experiment in which the convenience of using the Belbin Role Theory for the integration of work teams with the task of measuring the software is explored. The study is developed in an academic environment with students of the Software Engineering degree and analyzes the differences between the metrics obtained with the Function Point Technique, by teams integrated with the Belbin Theory, and those obtained by teams integrated with students selected randomly. The results obtained provide evidence regarding the significant differences in terms of the time spent for the task; it was observed that teams integrated with the Belbin theory take more time. Regarding the five metrics obtained to measure the functionality of the software, differences were found only in the functionality linked to the external outputs.

An Empirical Study on the Impact of an IDE Tool Support in the Pair and Solo Programming

The adoption of Agile software development approaches has been widespread. One well-known Agile approach is extreme programming, which encompasses twelve practices of which pair programming is one of them. Although various aspects of pair programming have been studied, we have not found, under a traditional setting of pair programming, studies that examine the impact of using a tool support, such as an integrated development environment (IDE) or a simple text editor. In an attempt to obtain a better understanding of the impact of using an IDE in this field, we present the results of a controlled experiment that expose the influence on quality, measured as the number of defects injected per hour, and cost, measured as the time necessary to complete a programming assignment, of pair and solo programming with and without the use of an IDE. For quality, our findings suggest that the use of an IDE results in significantly higher defect injection rates (for both pairs and solos) when the programming assignment is not very complicated. Nevertheless, defect injection rates seem to decrease when pairs work on more complicated programming assignments irrespective of the tool support that they use. For cost, the programming assignment significantly affects the time needed to complete the assignment. In relation to the programming type, pairs and solos performed in a similar way with regards to quality and cost.

Assessment of software defect detection efficiency and cost through an intelligent collaborative virtual environment

The use of collaborative virtual environments facilitates communication, coordination and cooperation within a group of people. In the field of information and communications technology (ICT), collaborative virtual environments have been developed to support the learning of programming. In this work, we report an empirical study (controlled experiment) which assess the efficiency and cost of detecting defects in instrumented programs with and without the support of an intelligent collaborative virtual environment (ICVE). The ICVE was used as part of a programming course at undergraduate level. The results suggest an equivalent efficiency in defect detection for both types of participants, those who used the ICVE (3.76 observed defects per hour) and those who worked in a traditional manner (4.07 observed defects per hour). With regard to cost, it was observed that participants who used the ICVE completed the activities within a slightly shorter time frame (49.25 minutes) than those who worked without the environment (52.90 minutes); however, the difference was not significant. It was observed that with regard to efficiency and cost, for this type of task (the detection of defects), working virtually through an ICVE versus working ad hoc (in a tradition manner, at the same time and in the same place) yields equivalent results. When collaborative work cannot be done in a traditional way, the use an ICVE is an alternative approach equally effective.

Paradigma Experimental en la Ingeniería de Software – Caso Programación en Pareja

Resumen—Contexto: La Ingenieria de Software (IS) es una disciplina compleja donde a dia de hoy el resultado de la aplicacion de alguna tecnologia para apoyar el desarrollo de software es impredecible. De manera similar a otras disciplinas ingenieriles, la IS requiere de construccion de modelos, experimentacion y aprendizaje. La experimentacion es un recurso valioso que permite evaluar de manera objetiva las distintas tecnologias disponibles para desarrollar software. Objetivo: Con la finalidad de promover el paradigma experimental en la IS, en este articulo se aplica el paradigma experimental para estudiar algunos efectos de la programacion en pareja. Metodo: A traves de un diseno experimental cuadrado latino con dos factores de bloqueo, se emplearon 21 estudiantes del programa de licenciatura en IS de la Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan (UADY) para examinar la duracion y esfuerzo que conlleva la programacion en pareja. Los estudiantes se agruparon en 7 parejas y 7 individuos donde codificaron durante dos sesiones dos programas pequenos. Resultados: Los resultados del experimento sugieren una diferencia significativa (en un nivel α=0.1) en favor de la programacion en pareja con respecto a la duracion de codificacion de los ejercicios asignados (28% decremento en tiempo). Por el contrario, los resultados sugieren una diferencia significativa (en un nivel α=0.1) en favor de la programacion individual con respecto al esfuerzo (30% decremento en esfuerzo). Conclusiones: En este articulo se presenta el paradigma experimental aplicado a la IS. A traves del paradigma experimental es posible obtener observaciones de manera objetiva para acumular un cuerpo de conocimientos que pueda ser usado de manera confiable por profesionales en IS.

Emotional Agents with Team Roles to Support Human Group Training

In the teamwork research area there is an increasing interest about the principles behind team effectiveness and effective team training; for Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) Team Training is an excellent application area; nevertheless, the few reported works about IVAs in team training, illustrate both the use for the individualized teaching (Pedagogical Agents) of procedural tasks and the substitution of missing team members (Teammate Agents) to promote the practice of team tasks in relation to functional roles (Taskwork) [1]. Our interest on Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training (IVETs) has led us to propose a Team Training Strategy (TTS) whose purpose is to promote social skills as well as knowledge and skills related to tasks of socio technical nature. The alternatives that we are evaluated to improve the performance of human groups and to promote effective teams deal with: the use of scaffolding as the best tutoring approach, the promotion of social skills before technical skills, and especially, the selection of the best nonfunctional roles (team roles) balance according to the task. In addition, our aim is to incorporate into an IVA called Pancho (Pedagogical AgeNt to support Colaborative Human grOups) the particular behaviors of Team Roles defined by Belbin [2]; Pancho, with a selected team role --according to a team model-- will join the human group with the intention of improving the performance of the team (Teamwork) and providing scaffolding to the trainees (Taskwork). The Belbins categorization is the earliest and still the most popular. He states that the team role can be defined as a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with each others at work in a certain distinctive ways; he also states that in teamwork, a good mix of team roles in the group is necessary for groups to use their technical skills optimally. The team roles defined by Belbin have very particular behaviors; we have selected a generic cognitive architecture for agents with emotionally influenced behaviors --called COGNITIVA-- to realize those roles [3]. The constructs provided by this architecture (Personal traits, Concerns, Moods, Attitudes and Physical states) are being properly instantiated to generate the desired behaviors.