Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management
Some work scenarios foster the adoption of people-driven, dynamic and geo-located processes. To s... more Some work scenarios foster the adoption of people-driven, dynamic and geo-located processes. To support such scenarios, we suggest two fundamental changes in process structure and control. Regarding structure, we move away from traditional process models towards process contexts, which can be organized around geographical locations. Regarding control, we move away from model-based control-flow towards dynamic activities defined by the participants as processes unfold. This research makes the following unique contributions: 1) It provides the first implementation of people-driven dynamic processes; 2) It provides the first implementation combining people-driven dynamic processes and geographical context; 3) Finally, it provides a unique approach to build process context, which leverages the possibilities brought by microblogging platforms in exchanging semi-structured and unstructured messages.
People who have to insert and adapt themselves to a different culture than the one where they gre... more People who have to insert and adapt themselves to a different culture than the one where they grew up usually experience feelings related to anxiety and uncertainty. This is exactly the situation of the students who decide to go abroad to continue their education or make an internship in a foreign country. The number of these students has been constantly increasing during the last years. In order to better adapt themselves to the new culture they are confronted with the Anxiety/Uncertainty Model, states that they have to manage the levels of anxiety and uncertainty in order to communicate effectively with local students and teachers. According to the literature, an effective communication and intercultural adjustment of the foreign students has a direct impact on their academic performance. Therefore, it is a relevant task to support them in this process. This work introduces a geo-collaborative application called EMHC (for Exploring My Host Country) which run son mobile devices and...
The original article has been corrected. Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with re... more The original article has been corrected. Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Knowledge Management (KM) is a critical activity inside organizations. It has been said to be a d... more Knowledge Management (KM) is a critical activity inside organizations. It has been said to be a differentiating factor and an important source of competitiveness. An important part of the knowledge asset an organization has is tacit knowledge, which is knowledge that is not formalized yet and is difficult to share. KM supporting systems help people inside an organization to convert this tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and to share it. This paper presents the design, implementation, and preliminary tests of a KM system called MCKC, for Mobile Collaborative Knowledge Creation, supporting face-to-face knowledge creation and sharing in mobile scenarios, allowing people to create, make explicit and share their knowledge with their co-workers, using visual metaphors, gestures and sketches to implement the human-computer interface.
In this paper we explore the construction of Situation Awareness using a collection of mobile, co... more In this paper we explore the construction of Situation Awareness using a collection of mobile, collaborative and visual-interactive devices. These devices provide a shared workspace where multiple users may correlate information about the problematic situation at hand and organize the unstructured activities necessary to handle the situation. A PDA prototype of these mobile, collaborative and visual-interactive devices has already been developed with the purpose to evaluate the feasibility of the collaboration model. The paper describes the collaboration model and presents an application scenario in the emergency management area currently being used to evaluate the prototype.
13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence UCAmI 2019, 2019
The pedagogical usability is an important characteristic of applications that support learning as... more The pedagogical usability is an important characteristic of applications that support learning as it relates to the added value students perceive while using it for learning. A good pedagogical usability means that an application has more chances to be accepted and used by the students thus raising the possibilities that students actually will learn with it. However important, this concept tends to be neglected by many authors. In this work we show how this concept can be applied to evaluate an application by presenting a real example of an application that has been re-designed to improve its usability, thus showing how pedagogical usability can be operationalized to be applied in general. The application shown in this work is called RedCoMulApp (Reading Collaborative Multiple-option Application) and its goal is to raise the reading comprehension ability of 12th grade high school students. In order to capture the pedagogical usability, we used 12 metrics to design a questionnaire wi...
Foot traffic, conversion rate, and total sales during a period of time may be considered to be im... more Foot traffic, conversion rate, and total sales during a period of time may be considered to be important indicators of store performance. Forecasting them may allow for business managers plan stores operation in the near future in an efficient way. This work presents a regression method that is able to predict these three indicators based on previous data. The previous data includes values for the indicators in the recent past; therefore, it is a requirement to have gathered them in a suitable manner. The previous data also considers other values that are easily obtained, such as the day of the week and hour of the day of the indicators. The novelty of the approach that is presented here is that it provides a confidence interval for the predicted information and the importance of each parameter for the predicted output values, without additional processing or analysis. Real data gathered by Follow Up, a customer experience company, was used to test the proposed method. The method wa...
This paper reviews some research initiatives to allow situated learning through the use of comput... more This paper reviews some research initiatives to allow situated learning through the use of computer-supported mobile activities. The article also describes the development of a learning activity based on the situated learning theory, which makes use of a mobile application to help students to relate learning activities inside the classroom with activities performed in the field and at home. The application supports learning by discovering patterns, which might be used in various knowledge areas. This research work has been performed within the context of the LACCIR (Latin American & Caribbean Collaborative ICT Research) initiative, which is also briefly described in this article.
There is consensus among curriculum developers of Business Schools that along with technical know... more There is consensus among curriculum developers of Business Schools that along with technical knowledge students should also be trained to acquire soft skills. Communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and problem solving are mentioned by some authors as the most important skills for professionals of the 21 century to be successful. Students must perform learning activities applying these skills in order to develop them. In this work we present a learning activity intended for Business students which requires creativity in order to be performed. We developed a collaborative tool to support this activity, called Sketchpad. The students who used the system evaluated the contribution of the designed activity to creativity and the ability of the tool to support it through an open questionnaire based on the Creativity Factor Evaluation (CSI). A second evaluation was done concerning Sketchpad’s collaborative support. Both studies showed a positive students’ perception of ...
Several researchers have identified the design of collaborative systems as a particularly challen... more Several researchers have identified the design of collaborative systems as a particularly challenging task, because it has to consider services that are not easily identifiable by software designers. The systems that support the activities of partially virtual communities (PVC) are not an exception. Typically, designers of PVC supporting systems are able to identify services that have a visual representation on the user interface, but they usually overlook those that run in the system back-end. In an attempt to help designers to consider these two types of services, this article proposes a software architecture that can be used for both, designing new PVC supporting systems and evaluating existing ones. The architecture was used in three case studies as a design guideline during the development of PVC supporting platforms, and also as an instrument to evaluate three commercial systems. Although the obtained results are still preliminary, they indicate that the architecture is able t...
Teaching and learning in most current university lectures has remained unchanged for centuries an... more Teaching and learning in most current university lectures has remained unchanged for centuries and nowadays, large lecture classes are a fact at universities. Technologies such as Classroom Response Systems have been designed to ease the adoption of new pedagogical practice in these contexts; however, these pose technological, economic and pedagogical limitations to teachers, students and institutions. In this paper, we present a feasibility study of a system that allows students to take snapshots of paper-based, handwritten solutions to a given task with their devices, and then converts this input to vector graphics that are automatically hosted in a cloud-based storage service, such as Google Drive. The teacher can then discuss students’ solutions and provide elaborate formative feedback in class. We report on the findings of a feasibility study with engineering students in Chile, which validate the practicality of the approach. After this validation we plan to integrate optical character recognition capabilities in the system, in order to support programming and physics education.
2017 IEEE 17th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT)
Learning evaluation in larger online university courses has become a challenge, especially in tho... more Learning evaluation in larger online university courses has become a challenge, especially in those cases when learning focuses on the development of professional skills. The objective of this article is to analyze how "authentic Assessment" applied by students correlate with the judgment of the teaching team, in the framework of a course for business and administration students. The results show that the correlation between pairs and the teaching team increases as the experience is repeated during the course, achieving an average positive correlation at the end of a semester. This opens the possibility of using evaluations with greater professional relevance in online courses, complementing traditional online initiatives.
The Journal of Universal Computer Science is a monthly peer-reviewed open-access scientific journ... more The Journal of Universal Computer Science is a monthly peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal covering all aspects of computer science, launched in 1994, so becoming twenty-five years old in 2019. In order to celebrate its anniversary, this study presents a bibliometric overview of the leading publication and citation trends occurring in the journal. The aim of the work is to identify the most relevant authors, institutions, countries, and analyze their evolution through time. The article uses the Web of Science Core Collection citations and the ACM Computing Classification System in order to search for the bibliographic information. Our study also develops a graphical mapping of the bibliometric material by using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer. With this software, the work analyzes bibliographic coupling, citation and co-citation analysis, co-authorship, and co-occurrence of keywords. The results underline the significant growth of the journal through time and...
Effective preparedness for reacting in case of a severe emergency requires that many experts with... more Effective preparedness for reacting in case of a severe emergency requires that many experts with various backgrounds evaluate the possible scenarios and come up with a single, unified plan which considers all opinions. This is a typical collaborative decision-making scenario, characterized by a process cycle involving modelling the process, defining the objectives of the decision outcome, gathering data, generating options and evaluating them according to the defined objectives. This is a decision-making scenario which requires the participation of various experts, who must evaluate and compare many scenarios. Each expert will have a partial knowledge about where people may be at the time of the emergency and how they will react. In emergency scenarios the geographical information often plays a significant importance, since plans need to consider the geography of the terrain from which the population should be evacuated, the safe areas where the population should be taken to, the ways connecting evacuations, and how the rescue teams can reach the places where the emergency occurred. This work presents a tool that can help a group of experts with various types of expertise, generate, visualize and compare the outcomes of various hypotheses. The paper also presents a real case simulation in the event of a tsunami following an earthquake at a site in northern Chile and the possibilities of evacuating people to safer zones.
Preparing a plan for reaction to a grave emergency is a significant first stage in disaster manag... more Preparing a plan for reaction to a grave emergency is a significant first stage in disaster management. A group of experts can do such preparation. Best results are obtained with group members having diverse backgrounds and access to different relevant data. The output of this stage should be a plan as comprehensive as possible, taking into account various perspectives. The group can organize itself as a collaborative decision-making team with a process cycle involving modeling the process, defining the objectives of the decision outcome, gathering data, generating options and evaluating them according to the defined objectives. The meeting participants may have their own evidences concerning people’s location at the beginning of the emergency and assumptions about people’s reactions once it occurs. Geographical information is typically crucial for the plan, because the plan must be based on the location of the safe areas, the distances to move people, the connecting roads or other ...
Size and evolution of current cities present a great challenge to their inhabitants to make them ... more Size and evolution of current cities present a great challenge to their inhabitants to make them develop in a harmonious and sustainable way. People living in large cities find many obstacles to participate in the urban development decisions affecting them directly. A tool which supports citizens in gathering, combining and visualizing the information, as well as proposing, discussing and selecting the best ideas for urban improvement would certainly help them to accomplish this task, thus contributing to the development of a more participatory society and a smarter city with better reaction capabilities to changes in the environment. In this work we present a smart city application, intended for citizens living in an urban community enabling them to present and share their opinions, comments and interests. The application also should support citizens to make decisions. Those decisions should influence local authorities concerning community improvements. The application may be used with any subject relevant to an urban community and thus, it could be useful in many scenarios of citizens’ participation and decision making. It includes multiple views: time-based, spatial and relational.
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management
Some work scenarios foster the adoption of people-driven, dynamic and geo-located processes. To s... more Some work scenarios foster the adoption of people-driven, dynamic and geo-located processes. To support such scenarios, we suggest two fundamental changes in process structure and control. Regarding structure, we move away from traditional process models towards process contexts, which can be organized around geographical locations. Regarding control, we move away from model-based control-flow towards dynamic activities defined by the participants as processes unfold. This research makes the following unique contributions: 1) It provides the first implementation of people-driven dynamic processes; 2) It provides the first implementation combining people-driven dynamic processes and geographical context; 3) Finally, it provides a unique approach to build process context, which leverages the possibilities brought by microblogging platforms in exchanging semi-structured and unstructured messages.
People who have to insert and adapt themselves to a different culture than the one where they gre... more People who have to insert and adapt themselves to a different culture than the one where they grew up usually experience feelings related to anxiety and uncertainty. This is exactly the situation of the students who decide to go abroad to continue their education or make an internship in a foreign country. The number of these students has been constantly increasing during the last years. In order to better adapt themselves to the new culture they are confronted with the Anxiety/Uncertainty Model, states that they have to manage the levels of anxiety and uncertainty in order to communicate effectively with local students and teachers. According to the literature, an effective communication and intercultural adjustment of the foreign students has a direct impact on their academic performance. Therefore, it is a relevant task to support them in this process. This work introduces a geo-collaborative application called EMHC (for Exploring My Host Country) which run son mobile devices and...
The original article has been corrected. Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with re... more The original article has been corrected. Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Knowledge Management (KM) is a critical activity inside organizations. It has been said to be a d... more Knowledge Management (KM) is a critical activity inside organizations. It has been said to be a differentiating factor and an important source of competitiveness. An important part of the knowledge asset an organization has is tacit knowledge, which is knowledge that is not formalized yet and is difficult to share. KM supporting systems help people inside an organization to convert this tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and to share it. This paper presents the design, implementation, and preliminary tests of a KM system called MCKC, for Mobile Collaborative Knowledge Creation, supporting face-to-face knowledge creation and sharing in mobile scenarios, allowing people to create, make explicit and share their knowledge with their co-workers, using visual metaphors, gestures and sketches to implement the human-computer interface.
In this paper we explore the construction of Situation Awareness using a collection of mobile, co... more In this paper we explore the construction of Situation Awareness using a collection of mobile, collaborative and visual-interactive devices. These devices provide a shared workspace where multiple users may correlate information about the problematic situation at hand and organize the unstructured activities necessary to handle the situation. A PDA prototype of these mobile, collaborative and visual-interactive devices has already been developed with the purpose to evaluate the feasibility of the collaboration model. The paper describes the collaboration model and presents an application scenario in the emergency management area currently being used to evaluate the prototype.
13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence UCAmI 2019, 2019
The pedagogical usability is an important characteristic of applications that support learning as... more The pedagogical usability is an important characteristic of applications that support learning as it relates to the added value students perceive while using it for learning. A good pedagogical usability means that an application has more chances to be accepted and used by the students thus raising the possibilities that students actually will learn with it. However important, this concept tends to be neglected by many authors. In this work we show how this concept can be applied to evaluate an application by presenting a real example of an application that has been re-designed to improve its usability, thus showing how pedagogical usability can be operationalized to be applied in general. The application shown in this work is called RedCoMulApp (Reading Collaborative Multiple-option Application) and its goal is to raise the reading comprehension ability of 12th grade high school students. In order to capture the pedagogical usability, we used 12 metrics to design a questionnaire wi...
Foot traffic, conversion rate, and total sales during a period of time may be considered to be im... more Foot traffic, conversion rate, and total sales during a period of time may be considered to be important indicators of store performance. Forecasting them may allow for business managers plan stores operation in the near future in an efficient way. This work presents a regression method that is able to predict these three indicators based on previous data. The previous data includes values for the indicators in the recent past; therefore, it is a requirement to have gathered them in a suitable manner. The previous data also considers other values that are easily obtained, such as the day of the week and hour of the day of the indicators. The novelty of the approach that is presented here is that it provides a confidence interval for the predicted information and the importance of each parameter for the predicted output values, without additional processing or analysis. Real data gathered by Follow Up, a customer experience company, was used to test the proposed method. The method wa...
This paper reviews some research initiatives to allow situated learning through the use of comput... more This paper reviews some research initiatives to allow situated learning through the use of computer-supported mobile activities. The article also describes the development of a learning activity based on the situated learning theory, which makes use of a mobile application to help students to relate learning activities inside the classroom with activities performed in the field and at home. The application supports learning by discovering patterns, which might be used in various knowledge areas. This research work has been performed within the context of the LACCIR (Latin American & Caribbean Collaborative ICT Research) initiative, which is also briefly described in this article.
There is consensus among curriculum developers of Business Schools that along with technical know... more There is consensus among curriculum developers of Business Schools that along with technical knowledge students should also be trained to acquire soft skills. Communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and problem solving are mentioned by some authors as the most important skills for professionals of the 21 century to be successful. Students must perform learning activities applying these skills in order to develop them. In this work we present a learning activity intended for Business students which requires creativity in order to be performed. We developed a collaborative tool to support this activity, called Sketchpad. The students who used the system evaluated the contribution of the designed activity to creativity and the ability of the tool to support it through an open questionnaire based on the Creativity Factor Evaluation (CSI). A second evaluation was done concerning Sketchpad’s collaborative support. Both studies showed a positive students’ perception of ...
Several researchers have identified the design of collaborative systems as a particularly challen... more Several researchers have identified the design of collaborative systems as a particularly challenging task, because it has to consider services that are not easily identifiable by software designers. The systems that support the activities of partially virtual communities (PVC) are not an exception. Typically, designers of PVC supporting systems are able to identify services that have a visual representation on the user interface, but they usually overlook those that run in the system back-end. In an attempt to help designers to consider these two types of services, this article proposes a software architecture that can be used for both, designing new PVC supporting systems and evaluating existing ones. The architecture was used in three case studies as a design guideline during the development of PVC supporting platforms, and also as an instrument to evaluate three commercial systems. Although the obtained results are still preliminary, they indicate that the architecture is able t...
Teaching and learning in most current university lectures has remained unchanged for centuries an... more Teaching and learning in most current university lectures has remained unchanged for centuries and nowadays, large lecture classes are a fact at universities. Technologies such as Classroom Response Systems have been designed to ease the adoption of new pedagogical practice in these contexts; however, these pose technological, economic and pedagogical limitations to teachers, students and institutions. In this paper, we present a feasibility study of a system that allows students to take snapshots of paper-based, handwritten solutions to a given task with their devices, and then converts this input to vector graphics that are automatically hosted in a cloud-based storage service, such as Google Drive. The teacher can then discuss students’ solutions and provide elaborate formative feedback in class. We report on the findings of a feasibility study with engineering students in Chile, which validate the practicality of the approach. After this validation we plan to integrate optical character recognition capabilities in the system, in order to support programming and physics education.
2017 IEEE 17th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT)
Learning evaluation in larger online university courses has become a challenge, especially in tho... more Learning evaluation in larger online university courses has become a challenge, especially in those cases when learning focuses on the development of professional skills. The objective of this article is to analyze how "authentic Assessment" applied by students correlate with the judgment of the teaching team, in the framework of a course for business and administration students. The results show that the correlation between pairs and the teaching team increases as the experience is repeated during the course, achieving an average positive correlation at the end of a semester. This opens the possibility of using evaluations with greater professional relevance in online courses, complementing traditional online initiatives.
The Journal of Universal Computer Science is a monthly peer-reviewed open-access scientific journ... more The Journal of Universal Computer Science is a monthly peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal covering all aspects of computer science, launched in 1994, so becoming twenty-five years old in 2019. In order to celebrate its anniversary, this study presents a bibliometric overview of the leading publication and citation trends occurring in the journal. The aim of the work is to identify the most relevant authors, institutions, countries, and analyze their evolution through time. The article uses the Web of Science Core Collection citations and the ACM Computing Classification System in order to search for the bibliographic information. Our study also develops a graphical mapping of the bibliometric material by using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer. With this software, the work analyzes bibliographic coupling, citation and co-citation analysis, co-authorship, and co-occurrence of keywords. The results underline the significant growth of the journal through time and...
Effective preparedness for reacting in case of a severe emergency requires that many experts with... more Effective preparedness for reacting in case of a severe emergency requires that many experts with various backgrounds evaluate the possible scenarios and come up with a single, unified plan which considers all opinions. This is a typical collaborative decision-making scenario, characterized by a process cycle involving modelling the process, defining the objectives of the decision outcome, gathering data, generating options and evaluating them according to the defined objectives. This is a decision-making scenario which requires the participation of various experts, who must evaluate and compare many scenarios. Each expert will have a partial knowledge about where people may be at the time of the emergency and how they will react. In emergency scenarios the geographical information often plays a significant importance, since plans need to consider the geography of the terrain from which the population should be evacuated, the safe areas where the population should be taken to, the ways connecting evacuations, and how the rescue teams can reach the places where the emergency occurred. This work presents a tool that can help a group of experts with various types of expertise, generate, visualize and compare the outcomes of various hypotheses. The paper also presents a real case simulation in the event of a tsunami following an earthquake at a site in northern Chile and the possibilities of evacuating people to safer zones.
Preparing a plan for reaction to a grave emergency is a significant first stage in disaster manag... more Preparing a plan for reaction to a grave emergency is a significant first stage in disaster management. A group of experts can do such preparation. Best results are obtained with group members having diverse backgrounds and access to different relevant data. The output of this stage should be a plan as comprehensive as possible, taking into account various perspectives. The group can organize itself as a collaborative decision-making team with a process cycle involving modeling the process, defining the objectives of the decision outcome, gathering data, generating options and evaluating them according to the defined objectives. The meeting participants may have their own evidences concerning people’s location at the beginning of the emergency and assumptions about people’s reactions once it occurs. Geographical information is typically crucial for the plan, because the plan must be based on the location of the safe areas, the distances to move people, the connecting roads or other ...
Size and evolution of current cities present a great challenge to their inhabitants to make them ... more Size and evolution of current cities present a great challenge to their inhabitants to make them develop in a harmonious and sustainable way. People living in large cities find many obstacles to participate in the urban development decisions affecting them directly. A tool which supports citizens in gathering, combining and visualizing the information, as well as proposing, discussing and selecting the best ideas for urban improvement would certainly help them to accomplish this task, thus contributing to the development of a more participatory society and a smarter city with better reaction capabilities to changes in the environment. In this work we present a smart city application, intended for citizens living in an urban community enabling them to present and share their opinions, comments and interests. The application also should support citizens to make decisions. Those decisions should influence local authorities concerning community improvements. The application may be used with any subject relevant to an urban community and thus, it could be useful in many scenarios of citizens’ participation and decision making. It includes multiple views: time-based, spatial and relational.
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Papers by Gustavo Zurita