Javier Gonzalez-Sanchez

California Polytechnic State University | Cal Poly · Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering

Affect is inextricably related to human cognitive processes and ex- presses a great deal about human necessities (Picard, 1997); affect signals what matters to us and what we care about. Furthermore, affect impacts our rational decision-making and action selection (Picard, 2010). Provid- ing computers with the capability to recognize, understand, a...

Affect signals what humans care about and is involved in rational decision-making and action selection. Many technologies may be improved by the capability to recognize human affect and to respond adaptively by appropriately modifying their operation. This capability, named affect-driven self-adaptation , benefits systems as diverse as learning env...

One expected characteristic in modern systems is self-adaptation, the capability of monitoring and reacting to changes into the environment. A particular case of self- adaptation is affective-driven self-adaptation. Affective-driven self-adaptation is about having consciousness of user’s affects (emotions) and drive self-adaptation reacting to chan...

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) constitute an alternative to expert human tutors, providing direct customized instruction and feedback to students. ITSs could positively impact education if adopted on a large scale, but doing that requires tools to enable their mass production. This circumstance is the key motivation for this work. We present a...

The computer's ability to recognize human emotional states given physiological signals is gaining in popularity to create empathetic systems such as learning environments, health care systems and videogames. Despite that, there are few frameworks, libraries, architectures, or software tools, which allow systems developers to easily integrate emotio...

This work addresses the challenge of understanding and respond- ing to variations in human cognitive and emotional states during Human-Robot Interaction in manufacturing settings. We investi- gate the use of consumer-grade EEG devices to gather the opera- tor’s brain signals and infer their emotional and cognitive states. These states are then comm...

In recent years, the focus on gait therapy research has intensified, driven by a desire to enhance session efficiency. Accelerating rehabilitation timelines is imperative to accommodate a larger patient population annually. For instance, the Centro de Rehabilitacion Infantil Teleton, a prominent rehabilitation center in Mexico, operates at total ca...

Over seven million people suffer from an impairment in Mexico; 64.1% are gait-related, and 36.2% are children aged 0 to 14 years. Furthermore, many suffer from neurological disorders, which limits their verbal skills to provide accurate feedback. Robot-assisted gait therapy has shown significant benefits, but the users must make an active effort to...

With Computer Science (CS) class sizes that are often large, it is challenging to provide effective personalized feedback to students. Intelligent Tutoring Companions can provide such feedback and improve CS students’ experience. This work describes the construction of a Tutoring Companion, Annete, designed to support students in a university Java...

With large class sizes and instructors who may not be equipped to assist struggling students, many students abandon the field, deeming it to be too difficult and not for them. Consistent, constructive, supportive feedback through a Tutoring Companion can scaffold the learning process for students. This poster describes a reasoning model, using neur...

Programmers use Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) to write and test software, and students use them while learning programming. We explore the approach of embedding a tutoring companion inside Eclipse, a popular IDE. The embedded tutoring companion aims to be comparable to having an actual teaching assistant present all the time with each...

Data sensing refers to the acquisition of information about an object, subject, or phenomenon using sensor technologies. Today, sensor technologies are able to measure almost any physical quality—including electromagnetic radiation; emitted or reflected light (e.g., infrared light in eye-tracker systems); temperature, acoustic, electric current, or...

Mobile learning (mLearning) is a rapidly expanding area of educational research. Theorists, researchers, and instructional designers are excited about the potential contributions of mobile technology to the field of education. Mobile tools such as Apple's iPad or Galaxy Tab have sparked this interest based on their ability to provide high-powered c...

Building affect-driven adaptive environments is a task geared toward creating environments able to change based on the affective state of a target user. In our project, the environment is the well-known game, Pac- Man. To provide affect-driven adaptive capabilities, diverse sensors were utilized to gather a user's physiological data and an emotion...

The Affective Meta-Tutoring system is comprised of (1) a tutor that teaches system dynamics modeling, (2) a meta-tutor that teaches good strategies for learning how to model from the tutor, and (3) an affective learning companion that encourages students to use the learning strategy that the meta-tutor teaches. The affective learning companion’s me...

Modelling is an important skill to acquire, but it is not an easy one for students to learn. Existing instructional technology has had limited success in teaching modelling. We have applied a recently developed technology, meta-tutoring, to address the important problem of teaching model construction. More specifically, we have developed and evalua...

One important way for systems to adapt to their individual users is related to their ability to show empathy. Being empathetic implies that the computer is able to recognize a user's affective states and understand the implication of those states. Detection of affective states is a step forward to provide machines with the necessary intelligence to...

Virtual worlds enable users' interactions through avatars. Avatars embody individual characteristics from their owners and exhibit those characteristics outward to the community. Motivated by the role of avatars in interpersonal communication, we integrated a generic real-time multimodal affect recognition hub as an input within an online virtual w...

The ability of a learning system to infer a student’s affects has become highly relevant to be able to adjust its pedagogical strategies. Several methods have been used to infer affects. One of the most recognized for its reliability is face- based affect recognition. Another emerging one involves the use of brain-computer interfaces. In this paper...

Research in affective computing and educational technology has shown the potential of affective interventions to increase student’s self-concept and motivation while learning. Our project aims to investigate whether the use of affective interventions in a meta-cognitive tutor can help students achieve deeper modeling of dynamic systems by being per...

User modeling in AIED has been extended in the past decades to include affective and motivational aspects of learner's interaction in intelligent tutoring systems. An issue in such systems is researchers' ability to understand and detect students' cognitive and meta-cognitive processes while they learn. In order to study those factors, various dete...

Introductory programming course have two very specific difficulties for novice students. First is the lack of real world examples in the sessions. It is very difficult to find areas of application where all the students are familiar enough and that offers challenging and engaging examples. Second it is the lack of palpable results of the job done....

Having environments that are able to adjust accordingly with the user has been sought in the last years particularly in the area of Human Computer Interfaces. Environments able to recognize the user emotions and react in consequence have been of interest on the area of Affective Computing. This work presents a project -- an adaptable 3D video game,...

Having environments that are able to adjust accordingly with the user has been sought in the last years particularly in the area of Human Computer Interfaces. Environments able to recognize the user emotions and react in consequence have been of interest on the area of Affective Computing. This work presents a project -- an adaptable 3D video game,...

The assembly process is often very complex and involved, collecting and managing a significant number of parts in an intricate manner. Because the quality of a product is in large part impacted by the assembly process, intuitive and carefully scaffolded guidelines can make a difference in how fast and how accurate an assembler can complete the asse...

This paper presents the design of a computer system for visualizing in three dimensions the movement of the Earth's crust by means of the information gathered and processed from the Global Positioning System (GPS). Several existing products, display information corresponding to the movement of each GPS component (latitude, longitude and altitude) u...

Mobile learning (mLearning) is a rapidly expanding area of educational research. Theorists, researchers, and instructional designers are excited about the potential contributions of mobile technology to the field of education. Mobile tools such as Apple's iPad or Galaxy Tab have sparked this interest based on their ability to provide high-powered c...

Intelligent Tutoring Systems are software applications capable of complementing and enhancing the learning process by providing direct customized instruction and feedback to students in various disciplines. Although Intelligent Tutoring Systems could differ widely in their attached knowledge bases and user interfaces (including interaction mechanis...

The human-element is crucial for designing and implementing interactive intelligent systems, and therefore on instructional design. This tutorial provides a description and hands-on demonstration for detection of affective states and a description of devices, methodologies and tools necessary for automatic detection of affective states. Automatic d...

There is a growing interest in how to leverage information about user's emotions as a mean of personalizing the response of computer systems. This is particularly useful for computer-aided learning, health, and entertainment systems. However, there are few architectures, frameworks, libraries, or software tools that allow developers to easily integ...

Meta-tutoring applies the basic policies of interactive tutoring to get students to adopt effective meta-cognitive strategies. Unfortunately, when the meta-tutor is removed, students often revert to using ineffective strategies. This paper is an early report on the progress of the Affective Meta-Tutoring (AMT) project, which will use an affective l...

The level up procedure is a method for evaluating the learning gains of educational software, and tutoring systems in particular, that includes some form of embedded assessment. The instruction is arranged in levels that take only a few minutes to master, and students level up when the software indicates they have achieved mastery. This paper repor...

iPhone platform involves several and amazing technologies that makes programming it a cool activity for experienced programmers willing to know the goodness of a mobile device, and a great option for students or novices to learn programming. Both of them will find the power of the iPhone libraries and development tools amazing to quickly start buil...

El cambio excesivo en los requerimientos de un proyecto de software en un problema importante, para manejarlo es necesario asegurar que todos los requerimientos del proyecto han sido recolectados y es indispensable que los requerimientos sean consistentes. Para asegurar esta consistencia se propone una técnica de manejo de requerimientos que permit...

La programación es una tarea compleja. Los lenguajes de programación visual buscan facilitar la programación mediante un cambio en la notación. En el enfoque visual un programa es construido utilizando elementos gráficos y textuales para crear expresiones multidimensionales; este enfoque hace el proceso de programación más fácil, rápido y confiable...