Nuno Filipe Escudeiro

Polytechnic Institute of Porto | IPP · Department of Computer Engineering

With the increasing number of elderly individuals in the Portuguese population and the consequent rise in cognitive decline associated with normal aging, there is a growing need to invest in mental health. This investment can be realized through the promotion of active aging and cognitive stimulation. Developing interactive tools that provide stimu...

The ATHENA European University is an alliance of nine Higher Education Institutions with the mission of fostering excellence in research and innovation by facilitating international cooperation. The ATHENA acronym stands for Advanced Technologies in Higher Education Alliance. The partner institutions are from France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuan...

In recent times, disabled, incoming, and Erasmus students have encountered challenges in their initial days at the University. These challenges often stem from communication or assistance difficulties, necessitating new solutions to aid them. InDoor Mapping is one such solution; it is an assistive technology that serves as a guide and navigation sy...

Tourism is one important engine of economy worldwide accounting for significant shares of gross product and employment in many countries. The touristic sector faces several challenges such as stimulating off-peak touristic offer, the valorization of people, assuring accessibility and mobility conditions for all, expanding the tourism offer to cover...

Tourist activity has grown to be of extreme importance for a country’s economy, notably in several countries like Portugal, where the tourism sector accounts for over 15% of the national GDP. As of this moment, ensuring that our country has conditions to welcome and assist every tourist interested in our cultural heritage tourism while offering equ...

Understanding the meaning of technical terms is essential when using technical and scientific documentation, whether directed to education, research, or labour. In education settings, there is a need to provide clear definitions of terms, to use a glossary explaining the meaning of each technical term when introducing a new topic, and to align term...

Recycling has grown to be extremely relevant for the maintenance of our planet, but also for our well-being. Sustainability is a key issue in modern societies, relying on intergenerational care and education to promote recycling habits and social responsibility. Raising awareness towards recycling and healthy environmental habits, and motivating pe...

Individuals with hearing impairments face numerous obstacles when engaged in touristic activities or using infrastructure and services in touristic spots. When tourism is considered a social good of first necessity, new concerns arise and pressure for inclusion in the sector stimulates the advance of innovative solutions for inclusive tourism. Ther...

The communication gap between deaf and non-deaf communities arises due to the use of distinct mother languages. A deaf student, who used to communicate in sign language, cannot read fluently materials written in spoken language. This fact causes serious difficulties to deaf students since most didactic materials in higher education are available ex...

Adherence to inhaled controller medications is crucial for patients with chronic respiratory illnesses to achieve favorable clinical outcomes. Selfmanagement measures have been shown to enhance health outcomes, decrease unnecessary interventions, and improve disease control. However, compliance evaluations have difficulties in establishing a high l...

During this critical period the humankind faces, one of the most affected daily activities is the education. Teachers and students of all education levels had to adopt new technological means to overcome the distance and to continue their education. Above and beyond the new prospects that this situation arises, also many problems were raised. For e...

Deaf students, who use sign language as their mother language, continuously experience difficulties to communicate with non-deaf in their daily lives. This is a severe handicap in education settings seriously jeopardizing deaf people chances to progress in their professional career. Deaf people’s comprehension of texts is limited due to grammar dif...

Os surdos encontram constantemente obstáculos na comunicação do dia-a-dia. Estes obstáculos tornam-se ainda mais relevantes em ambiente escolar, o que prejudica seriamente a hipótese de progressão profissional no futuro. Para os surdos, a compreensão de texto escrito é limitada devido às diferenças entre as línguas gestual e oral. É necessário melh...

Over the last years, there has been an increase in hearing-impaired students who use sign language as their main form of communication attending higher education institutions around the world. The knowledge that their comprehension of texts is reduced due to sentence structure differences causes a need for more solutions to improve communication an...

A correcção de respostas a perguntas em texto livre, no decorrer de um processo de avaliação, é uma tarefa demorada e sujeita a flutuações na aplicação dos critérios de avaliação, em particular quando o número de respostas é elevado (na ordem das centenas). Em consequência destas flutuações, inerentes à natureza humana e, em grande medida, determin...

Modern economy requires engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international setting. However, these competences are not usually addressed in most engineering curricula. In the Multinational Undergraduate Team Work course, MUTW, students develop their capstone project as members of an international team while working at...

With the rise of usage in digital content in education, deaf and blind communities face communication barriers which as a result makes education less inclusive. These barriers do not allow them to integrate within the larger scholarly communities as most tools used for information dissemination remain inaccessible to them. This paper presents BDC-A...

Deaf and blind students face communication barriers that are constantly present in their daily lives. These barriers arise naturally since the deaf community, the blind community and the rest of the students and teachers use different languages and different channels to communicate. These barriers have a significant impact in the academic, personal...

The ageing process is naturally accompanied by changes in people’s cognitive processes. The European population ageing is a challenge for the European social policy and for the mental health professionals. New technologies can play an important role in the neurocognitive stimulation area as they possess characteristics that might reduce the anxiety...

This paper presents the evaluation methods and techniques applied to the serious game developed within the VirtualSign project as well as the results achieved through those methods. VirtualSign is a Portuguese sign language bi-directional translator with three main components. The components are a gesture to text translator, a text to gesture trans...

One of the major challenges for healthcare professionals in the XXI century is the increasing number of elderly in the world population. It is clearly important to find ways to stimulate cognitively this population, helping them to develop strategies and maintaining independency in their daily life activities. Conventional cognitive stimulation is...

This paper presents the game developed within the VirtualSign project. This game aims to make the process of learning sign language easier and enjoyable. In the game the player can control an avatar and interact with several objects and Non-player characters in order to obtain signs. To obtain those signs the player will have to overcome challenges...

The goal of this paper is to present the development of a game aimed at making the process of learning sign language enjoyable and interactive, using the VirtualSign Translator. This game aims to make the process of learning sign language easier and enjoyable. In the game the player can control an avatar and interact with several objects and Non-pl...

This paper discusses the concepts of game design and gamification of content, based on the development of a serious game aimed at making the process of learning sign language enjoyable and interactive. In this game the player controls a character that interacts with various objects and non-player characters, with the aim of collecting several gestu...

This paper discusses the concepts of game design and gamification of content, based on the development of a serious game aimed at making the process of learning sign language enjoyable and interactive. In this game the player controls a character that interacts with various objects and nonplayer characters, with the aim of collecting several gestur...

The work presented in this paper is one of the outcomes of the virtual sign project that aims to assist the communication with deaf students in the classroom. The project is being developed by Portuguese researchers. The main goal of the virtual sign project is the creation of a bidirectional Portuguese sign language translator. This translator sup...

The communication with deaf by means of written text is not as efficient as it might seem. In fact, there is a very deep gap between sign language and spoken/written language. The deployment of tools to assist the daily communication between deaf people and the rest may be a significant contribution to the social inclusion of the deaf community. Th...

This paper presents the development of a game aimed at making the process of learning sign language enjoyable and interactive, using the VirtualSign Translator. In this game the player controls a character that interacts with various objects and non-player characters with the aim of collecting several gestures from the Portuguese Sign Language. Thr...

This paper presents the development of a game aimed at making the process of learning sign language enjoyable and interactive, using the VirtualSign Translator. In this game the player controls a character that interacts with various objects and non-player characters with the aim of collecting several gestures from the Portuguese Sign Language. Thr...

Promoting equity, equal opportunities to all and social inclusion of people with disabilities is a concern of modern societies at large and a key topic in the agenda of European Higher Education. Despite all the progress, we cannot ignore the fact that the conditions provided by the society for the deaf are still far from being perfect. The communi...

The work presented in this paper consists in the development of a game to make the process of learning sign language enjoyable and interactive. In this game the player controls a character that interacts with various objects and non-player characters with the aim of collecting several gestures from the Portuguese Sign Language. This interaction is...

The quantity of educational digital content available for the hearing impaired community is very scarce. However, due to extraordinary progress of the new technologies, remarkable opportunities to bring a better quality of life to the public in general arose. Making these opportunities available to those who endure handicap and disabilities is a co...

The work presented in this paper consists in the development of a game to make the process of learning sign language enjoyable and interactive. In order to do this, a game was created in which the player controls a character and interacts with various objects and non-player characters with the aim of collecting several gestures from the Portuguese...

In this paper we present the overall study that includes the model developed (VS-Virtual Sign Model) and the experiences performed, with an automatic bidirectional sign language translator, between written and sign language, which is being supervised by the research group GILT (Graphics, interaction and learning technologies) under the frame of a n...

Web search engines are powerful tools used to satisfy specific information needs on the web. Their purpose is to maximize user satisfaction when performing this task. Although there are other sources of evidence, besides text, to characterize document relevance for a specific need, current search engines do not allow users to explore these features...

A global financial crisis, triggered by the the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, has had a detrimental effect on the European economy. In 2009 alone it shrunk by 4.3% (Eurostat). After two years of anaemic growth, it shrunk again in 2012. In the adversity of the crisis governments were called to help companies out. The emergency solutions cam...

PRAXIS is the European Network aiming to setup the European Center for Project/Internship (IP) Excellence, which is developed for needs of project oriented education and between others also support internationalization at home and mobility of students abroad. Project/Internship course units are particularly relevant to engineering degrees. It is th...

The development of software products in general and educational games in particular is a very demanding process involving costly resources for long periods of time. Evaluating its quality throughout the development lifecycle contributes to the early identification of imperfections and to improved efficiency. In this paper we discuss a set of qualit...

In this paper we present the overall study that includes the model developed (VS Model) and the experiences performed, with an automatic bidirectional sign language translator, between written and sign language, which is being supervised by the research group GILT (Graphics, interaction & learning technologies) under the frame of a national project...

In this paper we present a quality model based on the software engineering paradigms, which is applied to evaluate digital learning content, specifically, games for mobile platforms. The model is called Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF), and measures system quality throughout its development life cycle. QEF evaluates the educational software...

In some classification tasks, such as those related to the automatic building and maintenance of text corpora, it is expensive to obtain labeled instances to train a classifier. In such circumstances it is common to have massive corpora where a few instances are labeled (typically a minority) while others are not. Semi-supervised learning technique...

Over the last decade the interest in social virtual worlds as tools to improve the teaching/learning process and to stimulate knowledge, including the development of learning to learn autonomy, has greatly increased as a result of their promising potential. In the current work we introduce a concise definition of a social virtual world and make a c...

Societies are experiencing changes in work organization, in part due to the growing ease with which people can collaborate. People with common interests are interacting within heterogeneous teams composed of members from different cultural groups and with distinct skills and backgrounds. Modern economies require professionals to excel in collaborat...

The use of Mobile Technologies opens new possibilities for the teaching and learning processes, taking us to a new reality, called Mobile Learning or m-Learning. The m-learning in this work is defined" as learning processes that occur, necessarily supported by the use of mobile technologies and that has mobility as a fundamental characteristic of h...

In this paper we present the overall evaluation of the Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF) approach which has been applied in an operational teaching environment for the last year. This environment includes the development of a serious game, supported by a web platform and extended to mobile platforms, which is being supervised by the research...

Soft skills are getting more and more valuable contributing to improve the employability of students. In the modern economy the need to work with people from different countries and cultures arises very frequently. In this scenario, team work and communication skills in an international environment become highly valuable assets. Nevertheless, despi...

Enhancing the performance of education systems and reinforcing the international attractiveness of Europe's higher education is one of the flagship initiatives of the Euro 2020 strategy. Multinational Undergraduate Team Work (MUTW) is a capstone project course unit focused on improving the employability of students, which is one of the main priorit...

This chapter revises some projects and initiatives led by higher education institutions that, being aware of the challenging demands undergraduates have to face during and after their graduation, are willing to endow them with the appropriate tools and skills that will help students grow up to be skillful, responsible, and creative professionals. A...

One of the core aspects of a MUTW-like course unit is the students' project. To begin with, it should be some realistic product with a real interest to some group or community so that students feel they are really contributing with their work to some major goal. Additional care is required to assure that the system can be organized in a set of pack...

This chapter revises some crucial aspects related to report writing and the preparation of oral presentations. These are some of the base competences that are required to succeed in MUTW-like courses.

We believe that a set of tools and curricular activities involving students from different countries, collaborating to complete projects that generate relevant outputs to the community, might improve both students' enthusiasm and their team work and communication skills. That is the mission of the Multinational Undergraduate Team Work project (MUTW...

Our society is experiencing sudden changes in work organization in part due to the growing ease with which people can collaborate. Many successful cases of peer-to-peer models of organization arise and assume leading positions in world economy replacing, in many cases, the traditional hierarchical organization. People are evolving and interacting w...

Our society is experiencing sudden changes in work organization in part due to the growing ease with which people can collaborate. Many successful cases of peer-to-peer models of organization arise and assume leading positions in world economy replacing, in many cases, the traditional hierarchical organization. People are evolving and interacting w...

The correct grading of free text answers to exam questions during an assessment process is time consuming and subject to fluctuations in the application of evaluation criteria, particularly when the number of answers is high (in the hundreds). In consequence of these fluctuations, inherent to human nature, and largely determined by emotional factor...

The web is a comprehensive and dynamic repository of information regarding most of the areas of human knowledge. However, retrieving information from the web is not an easy task. Web's characteristics place many difficulties to users willing to explore it as an information source. Information retrieved from the web is usually very extensive, compos...

Over the last decade the interest in social virtual worlds as tools to improve the teaching/learning process and to stimulate knowledge, including the development of learning to learn autonomy, has greatly increased as a result of their promising potential. In the current work we introduce a concise definition of a social virtual world and make a c...

In some classification tasks, such as those related to the automatic building and maintenance of text corpora, it is expensive to obtain labeled examples to train a classifier. In such circumstances it is common to have massive corpora where a few examples are labeled (typically a minority) while others are not. Semi-supervised learning techniques...

Web search engines are powerful tools used to satisfy specific information needs on the web. Their purpose is to maximize user satisfaction when performing this task. Although there are other sources of evidence, besides text, to characterize document relevance for a specific need, especially for HTML documents, current search engines do not allow...

Collecting and annotating exemplary cases is a costly and critical task that is required in early stages of any classification process. Reducing labeling cost without degrading accuracy calls for a compromise solution which may be achieved with active learning. Common active learning approaches focus on accuracy and assume the availability of a pre...

Modern economy is highly dependent on technology requiring engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international setting. However these competences are not addressed in the generality of engineering curricula. We believe that a set of tools and curricular activities involving students from different countries, collaborati...

Information overload is a major concern that retrieval systems face. Information is ubiquitous and information resources are frequently used as educational resources, available from many distinct sources. The main issue is to get just the right piece of information that might satisfy our specific needs. Many of these sources organize their resource...

This paper presents the overall evaluation of the Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF) approach which has been applied in an operational teaching environment for the last six years. During this period we have evaluated the difference between educational software systems that were developed using the Techno-Didactical Extension for Instruction/Le...

Human kind felt, since early ages, the need to keep records of its achievements that could persist through time and that could be easily retrieved for later reference. Our own evolution depends largely on this iterative process, where each iteration is based on these records. The advent of the web and its attractiveness highly increased the availab...

In this paper we propose a methodology for automatically retrieving document collections from the web on specific topics and for organizing them and keeping them up-to-date over time, according to user specific persistent information needs. The documents collected are organized according to user specifications and are classified partly by the user...

The web is a vast repository of human knowledge that is much ex-plored as an information source; however, web characteristics, such as volume, dynamics and heterogeneity require significant amounts of effort to satisfy pri-vate or institutional information needs. Topic focused portals try to reduce the effort that is required to end-users at the ex...

In some classification tasks, such as those related to the automatic building and maintenance of text corpora, it is expensive to obtain labeled exam-ples to train a classifier. In such circumstances it is common to have massive cor-pora where a few examples are labeled (typically a minority) while others are not. Semi-supervised learning technique...

Análise de Dados e Sistemas de Apoio à Decisão Master in Data Analysis and Decision Support Systems Nesta dissertação propomos uma metodologia que automatize a recolha de recursos na Web e facilite a sua exploração. Um recurso é uma colecção de documentos referentes a um tópico específico definido pelo utilizador. A intervenção do utilizador é expl...