1,721,364 research outputs found
Almaworld: Data visualization to support international research collaborations
No full textMonitoring and evaluating research activities and their results can be intended as initiatives devoted to support universities and research institutes policymakers and governments while enhancing international relationships with colleagues from foreign affiliations. In this context, the integration of data coming from multiple and different sources, as well as the adoption of data visualization techniques can play a strategic role, letting the users browse official and reliable data by means of proper and effective user interface and interaction mechanisms. In this paper, we present AlmaWorld, a web application designed and developed to map the international co-authorships of the professors and the researchers of the University of Bologna, by exploiting two dimensions: the spatial and the temporal ones. The paper presents the approaches we have adopted in the design phase and a prototype we have developed
GAP4APE: a client-side system to enhance accessibility in the Web 2.0 era
No full textSocial networking systems have radically changed personal
communication by providing new and interesting
opportunities both in leisure and in business. Despite their
apparent universal appeal, these systems are effectively
leaving out a part of users with disabilities, who have
difficulties in register, join and participate in the main on-line
communities. Facebook represents a critical case: beside
some accessibility improvement provided by this social
network service, its accessibility represents an issue yet. This
paper presents an augmented browsing system, which allows
users with disabilities to specify their needs and preferences
about Web pages presentation, directly by means of the
browser interface. On the basis of the declared settings, the
system automatically transcodes the page content (both static
and dynamic), producing new pages adapted to the user’s
needs. The system, based on the widespread Web browser
extension called GreaseMonkey, works on a wide set of Web
systems, but has been extensively tested on Facebook
On using on-the-fly students' notes in video lecture indexing
No full textThe large number of video lectures within digital archives is making critical the indexing and retrieval process. Indeed, most of the systems base the indexing process on few generic text information (e.g., course title and teacher's name) and this creates problems to students who are looking for very specific topics and hence want to browse video in details. Moreover, additional metadata could provide useful information to those users who access the educational materials by means of assistive technologies. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows students to take on-the-fly notes while watching a video lecture and uses these notes to enrich video lectures with metadata that will be helpful to the indexing and retrieval process. In particular, to allow detailed video browsing, our proposed SOcial Learning (SOLE) system defines a set of eight predefined tagnotes and segments the lecture into a sequence of video chapters. Students can use the textual notes to describe and to retrieve the video material, providing hints about its content to users with special needs. To evaluate our approach, we developed a prototype version of SOLE and we asked for volunteer evaluators. Results showed that users feel comfortable in taking notes while watching a video and liked to browse video lectures using notes. According to the results obtained in the evaluation, both students and video lecture providers might appreciate the proposed approach
User centered design applied to an app for incidental learning of languages and cultures
No full textThis paper focuses upon the piloting of UniOn!, a mobile application for the incidental learning of languages and cultures developed to support mobility students within the ILOCALAPP project (www.ilocalapp.eu). After the methodological phase (dedicated to the methodological framework and to the end-users' consultation), and with the development phase (dedicated to the production of materials and their technological implementation) approaching its end, the project teams are now about to test the prototype of the application. Nevertheless, preliminary tests have been conducted all along the project phases and their results are proving useful to structure the final pilot phase. In this paper we will outline all the issues related to the testing of the application and its crucial impact on the final release
The University Learning Experience: A Dual Approach to Understanding Study Habits and Attendance Patterns
Full text linkEditorial: Smart Objects and Technologies
Full text linkSmart objects are entering everyday life and are heavily modifying it. Healthcare, communication, art, entertainment, safety, environment, education, democracy, and human rights, are just a few examples of scenarios that are radically changing thanks to the use of smart objects and technologies.
In this context, the popularity of portable computing devices, such as smartphones, tablets, or smart watches combined with the emergence of many other small smart objects with computational, sensing and communication capabilities coupled with the popularity of social networks and new human-technology interaction paradigms is creating unprecedented opportunities for each of us to do something useful, ranging from a single person to the whole world. Furthermore, Internet of Things, Smart-cities, distributed sensing and Fog computing are representative examples of modern ICT paradigms that aim to describe a dynamic and globally cooperative infrastructure built upon objects intelligence and self-configuring capabilities. These connected objects are finding their way into our pockets, vehicles, urban areas and infrastructure, thus becoming the very texture of our society and providing us the possibility, but also the responsibility, to shape it
On personalizing Web content through reinforcement learning
No full textNowadays, a large use of personalization techniques is used to adapt Web content to users’ habits, mainly with the aim of offering appropriate products and services. This paper presents a system that uses personalization and adaptation techniques, in order to transcode or modify contents (e.g., adapt text fonts) so as to meet preferences and needs of elderly users and users with disabilities. Such an adaptation can have a positive effect, in particular for users with some reading-related disabilities (i.e., people with dyslexia, users with low vision, users with color blindness, elderly people.). To avoid issues arising from applying transformations to the whole content, the proposed system uses Web intelligence to perform automatic adaptations on single elements composing a Web page. The transformation is applied on the basis of a reinforcement learning algorithm which manages a user profile. The system is evaluated through simulations and a real assessment, where elderly users where asked to use the system prototype for a time period and to perform some specific tasks. Results of the qualitative evaluation confirm the feasibility of the proposal, showing its validity and the users’ appreciation
An alternative approach to dimension reduction for pareto distributed data: a case study
Full text linkDeep learning models are tools for data analysis suitable for approximating (non-linear) relationships among variables for the best prediction of an outcome. While these models can be used to answer many important questions, their utility is still harshly criticized, being extremely challenging to identify which data descriptors are the most adequate to represent a given specific phenomenon of interest. With a recent experience in the development of a deep learning model designed to detect failures in mechanical water meter devices, we have learnt that a sensible deterioration of the prediction accuracy can occur if one tries to train a deep learning model by adding specific device descriptors, based on categorical data. This can happen because of an excessive increase in the dimensions of the data, with a correspondent loss of statistical significance. After several unsuccessful experiments conducted with alternative methodologies that either permit to reduce the data space dimensionality or employ more traditional machine learning algorithms, we changed the training strategy, reconsidering that categorical data, in the light of a Pareto analysis. In essence, we used those categorical descriptors, not as an input on which to train our deep learning model, but as a tool to give a new shape to the dataset, based on the Pareto rule. With this data adjustment, we trained a more performative deep learning model able to detect defective water meter devices with a prediction accuracy in the range 87-90%, even in the presence of categorical descriptors
On personalizing Web content through reinforcement learning
No full textNowadays, a large use of personalization techniques is used to adapt Web content to users’ habits, mainly with the aim of offering appropriate products and services. This paper presents a system that uses personalization and adaptation techniques, in order to transcode or modify contents (e.g., adapt text fonts) so as to meet preferences and needs of elderly users and users with disabilities. Such an adaptation can have a positive effect, in particular for users with some reading-related disabilities (i.e., people with dyslexia, users with low vision, users with color blindness, elderly people.). To avoid issues arising from applying transformations to the whole content, the proposed system uses Web intelligence to perform automatic adaptations on single elements composing a Web page. The transformation is applied on the basis of a reinforcement learning algorithm which manages a user profile. The system is evaluated through simulations and a real assessment, where elderly users where asked to use the system prototype for a time period and to perform some specific tasks. Results of the qualitative evaluation confirm the feasibility of the proposal, showing its validity and the users’ appreciation
Discovering the city: Crowdsourcing and Personalized Urban Paths across Cultural Heritage
No full textTravel planners and mobile applications related to cultural
heritage can play an interesting role in the development of smart cities,
when they are integrated each other, engaging the user in touristic
and entertainment activities, letting him/her be a source of cultural
resources. This paper focuses on a microservices-based architecture, defined
with the aim of providing support in computing personalized urban
paths across cultural heritage places and in sharing multimedia resources
about points of interest. A prototype of mobile application has been implemented
on the basis of such architecture, showing the feasibility of
the proposed approach thanks to personas and related scenarios
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