Samuel O. Azevedo

RoboEduc: A pedagogical tool to support educational robotics

In this paper, we reflect upon the employment of educational robotics as a tool to help the learning process inside elementary school. The primary objective is to introduce an environment for educational robotics, creating a basis for adoption of new educational methods. Based on such technological tools, we came out with a motivating and innovative instrument in the process of teaching and learning that can be used as a tool against digital exclusion. We show experiments and results of a digital inclusion project running at the periphery of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The main objective is to lead children to learn about and accept the new technological resources, in this case computers and robots. We report the learning process of digitally excluded children as well as the benefits of educational robotics in the intellectual formation of marginalized children in Brazilian society. We verify, in practice, that robots and computer can be combined as a very nice tool to enrich and stimulate the teaching work, optimizing the pedagogical practice. This is a social initiative that certainly benefits present and future generations.

Interperception on Shared Virtual Environments

In this work we introduces the concept of interdimensional virtual environments and proposes to it creation an architecture based on the client-server model. Our architecture allows the users with different resources sharing the same environment in a transparent way, same that users are connected by a different graphical interfaces. This interdimensionality provides by the system is possible thanks to the use of a component in the serving side that if put in charge to carry through, when necessary, the transformation of the messages of a dimension for another one, removing or adding indispensable information to the different customers of the system

Fuzzy Logic on a Polygenic Multi-Agent System for Steganalysis of Digital Images

Digital cryptography has being a solution for protecting transmission of data in applications such as electronic commerce (Luciano 2003), electronic vote (Kofler 2003), and digital Television (Macq 1995). However, an interceptor monitoring network flow could easily break purely encoded data and clear the contents of cryptographed messages. Steganography techniques came up in order to help improving this protection. The goal of steganography is to hide data into a covering message (envelop) in such a way that an interceptor has no way to notice the presence of a hidden message in its covering envelop. Note that one can combine both cryptography and steganography in order to achieve better security. For example an image can be enriched with visually imperceptible extra information that, when eventually noticed, could be understood as an eventual noise. This damaged image could serve thus as a camouflaging body that brings protected data to the other side of the communication process. Any media object can be used as the covering message, such as text, audio, video, network packages, and file systems. Digital images are known to be the most used media objects for this purpose due to its inherent artistic appeal.

GTMV: Virtual museum authoring systems

In this work we propose a system that has joined the multi-user system paradigm and the easy-to-use authoring tools for the development of virtual museums through the Web. Our system provides an interface for authoring and another interface for navigation. The authoring interface is used by the curator and has tools for building and editing museums. The navigator interface is used by visitors to interact with the museum including its objects and other users.

Indirect group interaction in interpeceptives virtual environments

This paper proposes a component that can capture a variety of user movements and use that to create information and interaction with computational applications, like electronic games and Interactive Digital TV Programs in a pervasive approach. Some techniques and systems get information from the user, like thoughts and actions, to provide extra functionality but that is done for one user at each time. The component proposed here bases itself on observing the user, thus it is able to detect his thoughts and feelings based on his actions, providing ways for users to interact seamlessly and for the system to change its outputs and states based on whatever the users are doing. Besides that, systems might be created to support multiple inputs from groups of users providing a whole new range of outputs. The events generated through these users observation are referred here as Indirect Group Interaction.

CardBot - Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired in Educational Robotics: Experiments and Results

We proposes an educational assistive methodology aiming to provide the access to educational robotics activities to students with visual impairments or low vision. As an approach to soften the main issues related to this challenging problem, we introduce a low cost, assistive technology, called CardBot 2.0. Basically, this model for teaching-learning is composed by a programming environment, a mobile application, and several geometric cards, each of them representing a specific action that is recognized by the application with a tag. So, the student can program the robot by selecting and organizing geometric cards on the surface of a board or on a table. Also a contribution of this work being part of the solution, the professor can create new cards and register the respective actions and tags. This allows the professor to add new actions for the robot or even to create a new language. We validated our approach by performing experimental classes for students with different visual impairments and ages, and for students without impairment, with an analysis of the results, qualitative.

MultiArt — An API specification to support production and distribuction of telematic art

This paper describes the specification of an API called MultiArt, and its role is to support the production and presentation of telematic art in its many forms of expressions. This API abstracts specific arts applications that can be used together. We present an initial architecture and a case study demonstrating the use of MultiArt. Our case study makes use of a predefined functions that allow us to program robots choreography in an easy way, manage video streams captured during the art presentations and provide communication and interactivity to viewers through a 3D virtual environment.

ITV-telearch an architecture for enabling device telecontrol and sensor data access over IDTV systems

Our work provides the specification and implementation of a communication mechanism between broadcast content viewers and interaction devices or sensors placed on the scenario of a live video show. This solution was designed using middleware based architecture and interconnects the devices and sensors of a broadcast program environment in a device network. By using the proposed architecture, the viewers will be able to see the real world interaction devices and control them through interactive applications using specific APIs to each broadcast system. So this approach is able to manage the devices in the network despite of the physical layer used to communicate, allowing them to communicate to each other and to be controlled by external applications. Afterwards, by using the architecture, we can allow viewers to control or access data from entities which compound the network through distributed communication processes and control applications. In order to validate our work we present a test scenario where a mobile robot with a set of sensors is added to our architecture and controlled by the viewers.

Ambiente de Simulação para Robótica Educacional

Este artigo discute a colaboracao entre estudantes na internet e a troca de conhecimento por meio desse canal de comunicacao. Propoe uma metodologia que visa potencializar as relacoes entre os usuarios de uma rede educacional situada num contexto especifico. Tal metodo tem como fundamento as teorias do contexto e a analise de redes sociais (ARS), para promover um mapeamento das redes estudadas.Refletir sobre curriculo escolar formal e comunidades de aprendizagem como metafora das TIC dinamizam os caminhos empiricos, construcoes criticas e aprofundamento da difusao do conhecimento como parte do processo de humanizacao/ tecnologizacao do homem. Oriundos de processos e movimentos contemporâneos, a consolidacao de ambientes computacionais nas escolas potencializa a construcao do conhecimento e a socializacao de praticas pedagogicas inovadoras. Esta investigacao assume as situacoes especificas curriculares, procura descobrir o que existe de mais essencial e caracteristico, partindo do conhecimento de curriculo e suas bases teoricas tradicionais, para a construcao da discussao sobre um curriculo em rede associada a instrumentalizacao das comunidades de aprendizagem.O sistema Moodle constitui-se atualmente numa das mais importantes ferramentas de apoio a cursos na Web. Apesar disto, seu modelo apresenta algumas deficiencias para uma estruturacao hierarquica e compartilhamento de materiais digitais entre disciplinas e turmas do seu ambiente virtual. Este artigo apresenta um estudo sobre a arquitetura central do Moodle, propondo a definicao de um novo nucleo, visando o aprimoramento destas caracteristicas.Estudo descritivo, qualitativo, com estudantes da 3a serie de Graduacao em Enfermagem de uma Universidade Publica de Sao Paulo, SP. Os participantes construiram Mapas Conceituais, por meio do software Cmap Tools®. Os dados foram coletados em um Grupo Focal e todos os sujeitos indicaram que o uso do software facilita e garante a organizacao, visualizacao e correlacao dos dados, porem houve dificuldades iniciais relacionadas ao manejo das ferramentas. Conclui-se, que o software Cmap Tools® favoreceu a construcao dos MC por seus recursos de formatacao, porem estrategias de orientacao deveriam ser implantadas. Como resultado, desenvolveu-se um manual para o uso do software Cmap Tool® em video Podcasting.Ha poucas iniciativas com respeito aos ambientes de virtuais para a divulgacao de materiais curriculares sobre modelagem matematica. Esses ambientes oferecem acesso as praticas pedagogicas em modelagem. Este trabalho apresenta um sistema Web para hospedar atividades de modelagem e materiais multimidia para descrever o desenvolvimento do ambiente de modelagem em sala de aula e apoiar outros professores na implementacao em suas praticas pedagogicas.A composicao e sequenciamento de Objetos de Aprendizagem sao discutidas neste trabalho a partir da representacao da estrutura conceitual de um dominio em termos das suas relacoes de dependencia. A composicao de Objetos de Aprendizagem e modelada a partir da estrutura narrativa de um discurso considerando-se os aspetos formais dos planos do conteudo e de expressao. O aspecto formal do conteudo da composicao e dado pelas pelos conceitos e seus relacionamentos e forma da expressao corresponde aos tipos de signos definidos pelo LOM. A estrutura da composicao obtida independe do tipo de midia utilizado e o modelo adequa-se as propostas de composicao adaptativas tanto do ponto de vista do meio como das disponibilidades de conexao.

Virtual multiverse: Interperception in multiple virtual universes

In this paper we propose a design and implementation of a collaborative virtual environment that supports virtual multiverse. With this, we are creating an infra-structure that allows the insertion of all possible and imaginable virtual worlds, allowing the coexistence of these different virtual worlds in a same application. On this system, the users can visit many different words using a same avatar.