Angélica de Antonio

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid | UPM · Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Informáticos

The Joint Virtual Reality Conference (JVRC2012) of ICAT, EGVE and EuroVR is an international event which brings together people from industry and research including end-users, developers, suppliers and all those interested in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and 3D user interfaces (3DUI). In 2012 it was held in Spai...

This paper discusses the challenges of the current state of computer vision-based indoor scene understanding assistive solutions for the person with visual impairment (P-VI)/blindness. It focuses on two main issues: the lack of user-centered approach in the development process and the lack of guidelines for the selection of appropriate technologies...

Before interacting with real users, developers must be proficient in human-computer interaction (HCI) so as not to exhaust user patience and availability. For that, substantial training and practice are required, but it is costly to create a variety of high-quality HCI training materials. In this context, ChatGPT and other chatbots based on large l...

Taking into account the challenges of professional training for Industry 4.0 and the new student profile, we conceived an educational alternative adapted from design thinking that uses active learning methodologies and digital technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, etc. This new alternative is called Situação Interativa de Aprendizag...

An objective behavioral test for motivational traits has been developed taking as a reference the structure of the Motivational Trait Questionnaire, which is a validated self-report questionnaire to measure motivational traits in the population. The objective test consists of a computer game, which makes it possible to evaluate a person’s motivatio...

Background: eHealth and telehealth play a crucial role in assisting older adults who visit hospitals frequently or who live in nursing homes and can benefit from staying at home while being cared for. Adapting to new technologies can be difficult for older people. Thus, to better apply these technologies to older adults' lives, many studies have an...

In recent years, research on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN) in deep learning has been actively conducted. In order to provide more personalized and advanced functions in smart home services, studies on deep learning applications are becoming more frequent, and deep learning is acknowledged as an efficient me...

During the past years, the development of assistive technologies for visually impaired (VI)/blind people has helped address various challenges in their lives by providing services such as obstacle detection, indoor/outdoor navigation, scene description, text reading, facial recognition and so on. This systematic mapping review is mainly focused on...

BACKGROUND eHealth and Telehealth play a crucial role in assisting older adults who visit hospitals frequently or who live in nursing homes and can benefit from staying at home while being cared for. Adapting to new technologies can be difficult for older people. Thus, to better apply these technologies to older adults’ lives, many studies have ana...

Background eHealth and telehealth play a crucial role in assisting older adults who visit hospitals frequently or who live in nursing homes and can benefit from staying at home while being cared for. Adapting to new technologies can be difficult for older people. Thus, to better apply these technologies to older adults’ lives, many studies have ana...

Nowadays, visualization of large amounts of data has become a key issue for processing data in many fields. This paper presents a conceptual model for describing information visualization systems. This conceptual model has been represented using the Unified Modeling Language, therefore it takes advantage of the understandability, unambiguity, flexi...

Globally, the percentage of older people in the general population is growing. Smart homes have the potential to help older adults to live independently and healthy, improving their quality of life, and relieving the pressure on the healthcare and social care systems. For that, we need to understand how older adults live and their needs. Thus, this...

Background: Motivation is a key issue in people’s lives. Motivated people are more likely to accomplish the goals they set out to achieve. For this reason, it is essential to motivate people in their lives. At present, the world of information and communications technologies (ICT) is evolving rapidly, and humans are used to interacting with a large...

In recent years, recommender systems have been used as a solution to support tourists with recommendations oriented to maximize the entertainment value of visiting a tourist destination. However, this is not an easy task because many aspects need to be considered to make realistic recommendations: the context of a tourist destination visited, lack...

The high proportion of customers of financial enterprises such as banking or insurance have forced to think in new forms to attend the customers. Chatbots are modern and useful tools with which customers are attended using natural language. In this work, we present a financial chatbot called Ekybot, which uses different channels as Skype and Facebo...

The objective of this paper is to identify the most visited places through a sentiment analysis of the tweets posted by people who visited a specific region of a city. The analyzed data were related to preferences and opinions about tourist places. This paper outlines an architectural framework and a methodology to collect and analysis big data fro...

Visualization plays a relevant role for discovering patterns in big sets of data. In fact, the most common way to help a human with a pattern interpretation is through a graphic. In 2D/3D virtual environments for procedural training the student interaction is more varied and complex than in traditional e-learning environments. Therefore, the visual...

In this paper we review how human interaction models are designed for its use in synthetic environments, being these any kind of computer-generated environment, as in virtual reality, augmented reality or others. We present how human interaction techniques are modelled in synthetic environments relating to the self-representation of the user's body...

When giving directions to the location of an object, people typically use other attractive objects as reference, that is, reference objects. With the aim to select proper reference objects, useful for locating a target object within a virtual environment (VE), a computational model to identify perceptual saliency is presented. Based on the object’s...

In the current information society, it is essential that the Information and Communication Technologies are accessible for all users, including persons with disabilities. Thus, professionals need to receive training in accessibility and adaptation. The Universidad Politecnica of Madrid in Spain has pioneered since 1995 the introduction of such cont...

In order to assist users in the process of locating objects in Virtual Environments (VE), we automatize the process of giving directions through a computational model. This model generates directions in natural language by using spatial and perceptual aspects. It involves three main processes: (1) a computational model of perceptual saliency for 3D...

The shape of an object is one of the features that attracts viewers’ attention, making it salient from other objects in a scenario. However, the shape of an object might be linked to the viewer’s personal experiences. In order to verify if the shape of an object is a feature not linked to the meaning that the object has for the viewer, in this pape...

This article presents an investigation on the educational value of virtual worlds intended for the acquisition of procedural knowledge. This investigation takes as a case of study a virtual laboratory on biotechnology. A remarkable feature in this virtual laboratory is an automatic tutor that supervises student’s actions and provides tutoring feedb...

One of the basic characteristics of an object is its shape. Several research areas in mathematics and computer science have taken an interest in object representation in both 2D images and 3D models, where shape descriptors are a powerful mechanism enabling the processes of classification, retrieval and comparison for object matching. In this paper...

The information-seeking process carried out by researchers is complex and full of different variables. We have represented this complexity for computer science researchers in the form of a conceptual model. The model is presented in a visual form using the UML modeling language, since it allows conveying all the complexity present in such a process...

The shape of an object is a basic characteristic that when attracts the viewers’ attention represents a salient feature. In this paper we propose a computational measure of saliency of the shape of 3D objects in virtual reality, based on the proportion of empty and full space within its bounding box. This measure of saliency is part of a computatio...

Spatial language is the syntax used for object or place locations. Because an object location is inherently relative, it implies a frame of reference, which in turn may be aided by a reference object, other than the one to be located. This reference object is commonly selected based on its perceptual salience, that is, its more prominent fea- tures...

The automatic generation of direction in natural language for the location of objects is an ongoing research area heavily supported by the use of virtual environments (VE). Important components of spatial language such as the selected reference object, along with specific features related to the situation of the scenario and the user, have to be pr...

Introduction. In this article we propose a qualitative analysis tool –a coding system - that can support the formalisation of the information-seeking process in a specific field: research in computer science. Method. In order to elaborate the coding system, we have conducted a set of qualitative studies, more specifically a focus group and some ind...

Adaptive Augmented Reality (A2R) is an emerging technology that can support users in their daily life with useful information for their activities which is really adapted to the user's characteristics, to the environment where the activity is taking place, and to the current context. However, one of the problems identified is the lack of a formal d...

Adaptive Augmented Reality is an emerging technology that can support users in their daily life with useful information in real time activities. However, one of the problems identified is the lack of a formal definition of the models required for the development of a A 2 R system. Therefore our aim is to propose a detailed definition of the models...

Background. During the last fifty years, improved information retrieval techniques have become necessary because of the huge amount of information people have available, which continues to increase rapidly due to the use of new technologies and the Internet. Stemming is one of the processes that can improve information retrieval in terms of accurac...

We present a student modeling approach that has been designed to be part of an Intelligent Virtual Environment for Training and/or Instruction (IVET). In order to provide the proper tutoring to a student, an IVET needs to keep and update dynamically a student model taking into account the student's behaviour in the Virtual Environment. For that pur...

This work presents an alternative approach (Genetic Algorithms approach) to traditional treatment of Recommender Systems (RSs). The work examines genetic algorithms possibilities to offer adaptive characteristics to these systems trough learning. The main goal, in addition to give a general view about RSs capabilities and possibilities, it is to pr...

This paper describes an approach towards the interaction with 3D representations of large document collections. The goal was to provide the user with a highly dynamic environment in which even the very mapping strategy to position documents in space can be adjusted by the user depending on the specific task at hand, on his preferences, or on the co...

An infrastructure is presented for semantic virtual environments (SVEs) that is based on an extensible ontology, together with a set of software components that facilitate the creation and exploitation of SVEs.

This paper describes an approach towards the interaction with 3D representations of large document collections. The goal was to provide the user with a highly dynamic environment in which even the very mapping strategy to position documents in space can be adjusted by the user depending on the specific task at hand, on his preferences, or on the co...

Despite the powerful tools which are available nowadays to make easy the access to information contained in huge document collections, like WWW, satisfactory solutions haven’t been found yet which allow not only to easily locate potentially interesting documents but also to help users to build a mental model on a set of documents, and to allow user...

The main goal of this project is to develop an architecture for interactive systems that combines a dialogue engine, a natural language generator, and a semantic representation based on ontologies covering both the real (or virtual) physical space and the user located within it. © 2012 Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural.

An attractive question which still remains on Intelligent Systems reseach field is how can we build autonomous agents whose internal cognition process can be self-configured over time? Our paper proposes a self-organized model for decision making, which is a robust evolutionary extension of typical Behaviors Network model. Given an initial set of m...

This paper describes the preliminary results of an educational innovation project in which virtual world technologies have been used to build up a set of virtual laboratories oriented to engineering studies. Focusing on the architecture of a biotechnology laboratory created in this project, we describe how this architecture will also be adopted in...

The advances in the educational field and the high complexity of student modeling have provoked it to be one of the aspects more investigated in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). The Student Models (SMs) should not only represent the student’s knowledge, but rather they should reflect, as faithfully as possible, the student’s reasoning process....

Similar to real life, in a Collaborative Virtual Environment the users' interaction is accomplished not only by the verbal channel. The response to a request can be an action; also the users' avatars body movements such as pointing or their gazes' direction are helpful to send messages that may complement or even substitute verbal communication. In...

When a group of students, placed around a shared workspace and working on a predefined task, is observed, the teacher can intuitively, to a certain extent, understand the collaboration that is taking place within the group without listening to the students' discourse. Following this analogy, we propose that some Non-Verbal Communication (NVC) cues,...

In the classrooms at school, when a group of students is working in a predetermined task, the teacher or the tutor identifies some problems related to collaboration by observing the students’ behavior. While interacting, people interchange messages composed of speech, actions and gestures, as the wordless messages emphasize, support or even substit...

When a group of students, placed around a shared workspace and working on an anticipated task is observed, the teacher or the facilitator intuitively can, to a certain extent, understand how collaboration is taking place within the group, without listening to the students' discourse. Following this analogy, we propose that some specific nonverbal c...

Playability occupies a central role in videogame design. Heuristics may help for establishing the game concept, but some testing is essential for ensuring a wide acceptance in the target user population. The experience of designing and testing a set of web-based sport videogames is described, focusing on the heuristics employed and the testing appr...

Integrating different kinds of micro-theories of cognition in intelligent systems when a huge amount of variables are changing continuously, with increasing complexity, is a very exhaustive and complicated task. Our approach proposes a hybrid cognitive architecture that relies on the integration of emergent and cognitivist approaches using evolutio...

Incorporating different kinds of micro-theories of cognition and modulating several mechanisms to unify all the recommended actions and outputs of an intelligent system when a huge amount of environmental variables are changing continuously with increasing complexity, may become a very comprehensive task. The presented framework proposes an hybrid...

The advances in the educational field and the high complexity of student modelling have provoked it to be one of the aspects more investigated in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). The Student Models (SMs) should not only represent the student's knowledge, but rather they should reflect, as faithfully as possible, the student's reasoning process....

The integration of interaction and simulation in e-learning systems represents a milestone in educational research and supports the student's learning process in innumerable ways. Nevertheless, current standards do not provide appropriate mechanisms to treat simulations as learning objects, which makes their integration into e-learning systems a ha...

The goal of this article is to propose a new approach to student's modeling, based on Ontological Engineering, and resulting into a more granular and complete knowledge representation. A new student's modeling taxonomy has been built after a rigorous analysis of all the types of knowledge that can be represented about the student. This representati...

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 th...

The use of agents is spreading as a means to develop different kinds of software systems, among which we can find Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training. The agent community has already started to pay attention to software engineering issues to develop agent-oriented systems, but they are mainly focused on methodologies and, to some extent,...

This article presents a research on the control of automated cameras in dynamic 3D virtual environments, which analyses the different branches that are currently being developed and improved in relation to the placement and movement of the virtual cameras. The aim of this research is to choose a method to design a management system for automatic ca...

Managing and arbitrating behaviours, processes and components in multilayered cognitive architectures when a huge amount of environmental variables are changing continuously with increasing complexity, ensue in a very comprehensive task. The presented framework proposes an hybrid cognitive architecture that relies on subsumption theory and includes...

Attention is defined as a mechanism that organizes and structures the operation of the person’s basic cognitive processes; it has been studied from different paradigms; among them, attentional capability is related to: the quantity of stimulus a person can attend at the same time; the intensity (concentration) of his attention to them; and, the tim...

Because the conversational capabilities of pedagogical agents (embodiments of trainers) allow social interactions with learner(s), their application in 3D virtual environments for training, besides improving the interaction and giving more realism to virtual training, permits changes in tutoring strategies bringing closer the virtual experience to...

Las capacidades conversacionales de un agente pedagógico (la personificación del entrenador) permiten una interacción social con los aprendices; luego, su aplicación en entornos virtuales 3D para el entrenamiento permite mejorar esta interacción y da mayor realismo al entrenamiento virtual, permitiendo cambios en las estrategias de tutorías que ace...

During the last years, intelligent virtual environments for training have become a quite popular application of computer science to education. However, little attention is being paid to software engineering issues, and most systems are developed in an ad-hoc way that does not allow the reuse of their components or an easy modification of the applic...

In this paper we present a generic model for human interaction in virtual environ-ments and the design of a software component that has been built according to this model for its use in the Maevif platform for Intelligent Virtual Environments for Education and Training. We present the motivations and the main objectives and we detail the key design...

In this paper we analyse the psychological facets that a virtual pedagogical agent needs to incorporate in the context of a 3D virtual environment to maximise the effectiveness in the learner instruction. Interesting psychological facets are personality traits, emotions, motivation and attention. The attitudes towards the learner (confidence level,...

The integration of interaction and simulation in e- learning systems represents a milestone in educational research and supports the student's learning process in innumerable ways. Nevertheless, current standards do not provide appropriate mechanisms to obtain a significant assessment about the student's performance while interacting with a simulat...

In this work, a hybrid, self-configurable, multilayered and evolutionary architecture for cognitive agents is developed. Each layer of the subsumption architecture is modeled by one different Machine Learning System MLS based on bio-inspired techniques. In this research an evolutionary mechanism supported on Gene Expression Programming to self-conf...

The concept of Agent is being used with different meanings and purposes in two separate fields of software engineering, namely Requirements Engineering and Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. After an introduction to Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) and its evolution into Agent-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE), this chapter pr...

Intelligent virtual agents have characteristics that allow increasing the computer's 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...