Zeng-Wei Hong

Impact of Using an Educational Robot-Based Learning System on Students’ Motivation in Elementary Education

Educational robotics has been regarded as an effective instructional tool over the past decade. Many studies have tested the role of robots in supporting educational classroom activities. However, reliable empirical evidence confirming the effectiveness of educational robots remains limited. Therefore, this study developed an educational robot-based learning system that provides an attractive teaching application that combines multimedia objects with an educational robot. This study examined the impact of the proposed learning system on student learning performance and motivation. The four-stage experimental procedure involved a pre-test, post-test, learning activities, and questionnaire survey. The participants comprised one homeroom teacher and 52 second-grade students from two classes at an elementary school in Taiwan. All of the students were assigned to use either the proposed learning system or a PowerPoint-based learning system. The pre-test and post-test results show that the proposed learning system improved student performance more than the PowerPoint-based learning system did. A questionnaire based on the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS) was employed to measure four motivational factors (attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction). The IMMS survey results show that satisfaction and relevance were the highest rated motivational factors among students who used the proposed learning system. The experimental results indicate that the students were motivated to use the educational robot-based learning system. Thus, using educational robot-based learning systems in classrooms demonstrates a significant advantage for students, by improving overall learning interest and motivation.

A knowledge-based system for extracting text-lines from mixed and overlapping text/graphics compound document images

This paper presents a new knowledge-based system for extracting and identifying text-lines from various real-life mixed text/graphics compound document images. The proposed system first decomposes the document image into distinct object planes to separate homogeneous objects, including textual regions of interest, non-text objects such as graphics and pictures, and background textures. A knowledge-based text extraction and identification method obtains the text-lines with different characteristics in each plane. The proposed system offers high flexibility and expandability by merely updating new rules to cope with various types of real-life complex document images. Experimental and comparative results prove the effectiveness of the proposed knowledge-based system and its advantages in extracting text-lines with a large variety of illumination levels, sizes, and font styles from various types of mixed and overlapping text/graphics complex compound document images.

A courseware to script animated pedagogical agents in instructional material for elementary students in English education

Animated agents are virtual characters who demonstrate facial expressions, gestures, movements, and speech to facilitate students’ engagement in the learning environment. Our research developed a courseware that supports a XML-based markup language and an authoring tool for teachers to script animated pedagogical agents in teaching materials. The design of the markup language refers to Mayers segmenting principle that is efficient for assisting a teacher to edit teaching contents into a set of segments and further organize the segments in a given lesson in class. This paper details a case study of applying the proposed courseware for elementary students in English education, and further investigates how the instructional materials scripted using the courseware affect the learning achievement of students. Two groups of participants from an elementary school in Taiwan enrolled in this experiment. The experimental group used animated agent-based instructional materials in their English classroom, whereas the control group participated in a traditional curriculum. Post-test results revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group. Our experiment demonstrated that the developed courseware provides an opportunity for scripting animated pedagogical agents as appropriate instructional tools in a computer-assisted language learning environment to foster elementary students’ English learning.

An Efficient Component-Based Framework for Intelligent Home-Care System Design with Video and Physiological Monitoring Machineries

This study proposes a customized and reusable component-based design framework based on the UML modeling process for intelligent home healthcare systems. All the proposed functional components are reusable, replaceable, and extensible for the system developers to implement customized home healthcare systems for different demands of patients and caregivers on healthcare monitoring aspects. The prototype design of the intelligent healthcare system based on these proposed components can provide the following features: 1). the system can monitor and record the videos of rehabilitation situations and actions of the patient by multiple CCD cameras, and the monitoring videos at different times can be accordingly stored in the archive. 2). the system can record the patient¡¦s physiological data records and the corresponding treatment plan, and these records can be stored in a XML archiving database for caregivers¡¦ review. 3). during the times for the patient to take medicine or other healing activities listed on the given treatment plan, the system can automatically alarm the patient and record the patient¡¦s treatment situations. 4). The patient¡¦s caregivers and family members can ubiquitously monitor the videos and physiological records of the patient¡¦s rehabilitation situations via the handheld mobile devices via the internet or wireless communication networks. 5). The caregivers and patients can setup the alarm machinery for the patients¡¦ physiological warning states, and once the patients¡¦ physiological states suddenly deteriorate, the module will immediately alarm the caregivers by sending notification messages to their remote mobile devices or web browsers.

A Humanoid Robot as a Teaching Assistant for Primary Education

In this paper, we propose an IDML tools which can provide teachers a humanoid robot to help them for engaging teaching activities in a classroom. Teachers can use this humanoid robot as a teaching assistant for providing an interactive learning experience to students. In order to evaluate the teaching efficacy of humanoid robot, we conducted a trial experiment in the primary education. Formative evaluations of the experiments not only proved that the humanoid robot can promote students¡¦ learning interest, but also found that humanoid robots have potential benefits for primary education and the possibility of robot-aided education in the classroom.

A resource management model for ubiquitous computing environments

We will propose a centralized model to manage all the resources in ubiquitous computing environments, including device accessing time and heterogeneous network utilization. We will define a resource management model in terms of characteristics of smart devices and wireless networks. The proposed model consists of two parts: 3R and a scheduling model. 3R is for information collection and then a scheduling model can be constructed based on 3R. We also reduce a classical job-shop scheduling problem to the scheduling model and show that the scheduling problem is a NP-hard problem. Finally, a scenario is used to illustrate the details of the proposed method and demonstrate its feasibility.

A Reliable Non-volatile Memory System: Exploiting File-System Characteristics

Flash memory has become a popular non-volatile memory technology and is widely used in mobile electronics devices and consumer applications. A flash-memory device is different from typical hard-disk devices and requires sophisticated management to improve the lifetime and the performance. As a result, when a file system is executed on these flash-memory devices, the endurance problem will be an important issue. This is because flash memory could suffer from access errors due to unevenly erase operations on specific locations. In this paper, we will propose a reliable non-volatile memory system by exploiting file-system characteristics. The proposed method can help quick identification of hot and cold files and evenly distribute erase operations over flash-memory devices.When compared to other methods, the proposed method can provide reliable endurance and a more practical solution according to the experimental results.

A CUSTOMIZED AND PORTABLE COMPONENT-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR INTELLIGENT HOMECARE SYSTEM DESIGN WITH VIDEO AND PHYSIOLOGICAL MONITORING MACHINERIES

This study proposes a customized and reusable component-based design framework based on the UML modeling process for intelligent home healthcare systems. All the proposed functional components are reusable, replaceable, and extensible for the system developers to implement customized home healthcare systems addressing different demands of patients and caregivers from healthcare monitoring aspects. The prototype design of the intelligent healthcare system based on these proposed components can provide the following features: (1) monitoring and recording videos of rehabilitation situations and patient behavior using multiple CCD cameras, which can be stored accordingly in an archive; (2) recording the patients physiological data and corresponding treatment plan, which can be stored in an XML archiving database for caregivers review; (3) automatically alerting patients to remind them of medication schedules or treatment plans, while recording the patients treatment situations; (4) caregivers monitoring videos and physiological records of the patients rehabilitation using handheld mobile devices via the Internet or wireless communication networks; and (5) caregivers and patients establishing alert mechanisms for the patients physiological warning states. If the patients physiological state suddenly deteriorates, the module would immediately alert caregivers by sending notification messages to their remote mobile devices or web browsers.

An agent-based Internet advertising system by using PULL mechanism

This study is aimed to investigate how to apply PULL mechanism in an agent-based Internet advertising system. In this pull mechanism, consumers are able to actively announce requirements. Therefore, advertisers are easier to find and analyze potential consumers for designing appropriate ads. This study also proposes an agent-based Internet advertising system which consists of multiple software agents to accomplish this pull mechanism. There are personal agents for consumers to release requirements and request promotion of advertisers actively. To attract consumers, this system supports advertisers to script animated conversational agents for expressively interacting with consumers. In order to demonstrate this study, an experimental system, e-novel advisor system, is also described in this paper.