Olga De Troyer

Olga De Troyer
Vrije Universiteit Brussel | VUB · Department of Computer Science

PhD Computer Science

About

193
Publications
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3,279
Citations

Publications

Publications (193)
Article
The European Union’s ban on animal testing for cosmetic products and their ingredients, combined with the lack of validated animal-free methods, poses challenges in evaluating their potential repeated-dose organ toxicity. To address this, innovative strategies like Next-Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA) are being explored, integrating historical an...
Chapter
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The chapter presents the knowledge management system, developed in the context of an interdisciplinary project called TOXIN, for the toxicity testing domain to facilitate the safety assessment of new cosmetic ingredients. Tools have been developed to capture existing knowledge captured in Safety Evaluation Opinions documents issued by the Scientifi...
Chapter
Full-text available
COVID-19 showed the need for community support networks to help vulnerable individuals that were forced to stay in their homes during extended periods. While the pandemic is slowly passing, there is still a need for this type of help, especially for elderly who nowadays want to live longer in their own home. Several social engagement platforms are...
Chapter
Blockchain technology allows to store data in a secure and decentralized manner and can provide true ownership to the owners of the data. Therefore, it could be a good solution for applications where this is required. Resource-exchange systems are such a type of application. To allow to easily set up such systems using blockchain technology, we hav...
Chapter
Blockchain technology allows to store data in a secure and decentralized manner. The combination of blockchains with smart contracts allows for a novel range of applications. However, the creation of such applications requires IT skills, which introduces a burden for businesspeople that would like to incorporate blockchains combined with smart cont...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
COVID-19 showed the need for community support networks to help vulnerable individuals that were forced to stay in their homes during extended periods. While the pandemic is slowly passing, there is still a need for this type of help, especially for elderly who nowadays want to live longer in their own home. Several social engagement platforms are...
Chapter
Blockchain technology has been rapidly emerging in the past years. The notion of decentralization, enabling ecosystems that provide true ownership of resources without requiring a trusted third party, is gaining interest and is applied in use cases daily. Such use cases vary from simple currency-exchange applications to complex smart contract appli...
Article
Knowledge bases store information on certain topics. Applying a well-structured and machine-readable format for a knowledge base is a prerequisite for any AI-based processing or reasoning. Semantic technologies (e.g. RDF) offer such a format and have the advantages that they make it possible to define the semantics of the information and support ad...
Chapter
Empirical research that draws a framework on how the theory of MI could be incorporated in (learning) games is non-existent. Furthermore, the theory of MI fits well into the concept of individualization, as it distinguishes between individuals in terms of their abilities. In light of this, the chapter reports on the first evidence-based set of mapp...
Article
Full-text available
It has been extensively argued that individualizing a serious game to the characteristics of its players is a major contributing factor to its effectiveness. To realize this individualization, the identification of player aspects that can be used as input is essential. Despite its importance, research works that review and highlight the most widely...
Chapter
Knowledge bases are used to store and centralize information on certain topics in a domain. Using a well-structured and machine-readable format is a prerequisite for any AI-based processing or reasoning. The use of semantic technologies (e.g., RDF, OWL) has the advantage that it allows to define the semantics of the information and supports advance...
Article
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Social Networks, like Facebook, have become an important part of life for millions of people, with many people using them on a daily basis. While there are games that simulate life-to-life interactions, there are not as many that simulate social network interactions, and even fewer where social network interactions are an important part of the game...
Article
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A focal point in the safety evaluation of cosmetic ingredients includes oral repeated dose toxicity testing, which is intended to address the most complex human endpoints. Seven years after the full implementation of the animal testing ban for cosmetic ingredients in the EU, there are still no alternative methods available capable of fully replacin...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The number of available educational games has enormously grown and it is difficult for users to identify which games are pedagogically effective among the multitude of options in app marketplaces. Recent studies on math games have highlighted the importance of (1) linking learning attributes and gameplay and (2) game design that supports students'...
Article
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Most people are using their smartphones daily and carry them all the time. Therefore, mobile learning applications can be integrated in daily routines to make learning a part of daily life. While numerous mobile learning applications exist, each with their own goal, our aim was to explore the possibility of creating an engaging mobile environment t...
Chapter
Empirical research that draws a framework on how the theory of MI could be incorporated in (learning) games is non-existent. Furthermore, the theory of MI fits well into the concept of individualization, as it distinguishes between individuals in terms of their abilities. In light of this, the chapter reports on the first evidence-based set of mapp...
Article
Full-text available
Learning Chemistry course is considered as a difficult task for many learners especially for elementary school students. This is related to understanding different concepts chemical reactions atoms structures, physical representations of molecules, etc. One way to facilitate the learning process of chemistry course is to use Mobile Learning (m-lear...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract Since years, the logic course in the first year of our Bachelor program in Computer Science, dealing with propositional and predicate logic, suffers from poor pass rates. The students perceive the formal and abstract mechanisms of logic as difficult and awkward to deal with. Many students do not study the course material on a regular basis...
Chapter
The chemical reaction between different molecules is an important learning subject in a chemistry course. Especially for elementary school students, this can be an abstract concept and therefore difficult to understand. One way to facilitate this learning process is to use Augmented Reality (AR) technology, which is considered as an added value com...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Urban and landscape planning are critical to ensure there is a right balance between three crucial dimensions: human development, societal welfare, and nature protection and conservation. These instruments play an important role during the Environmental Sciences studies and, when facing them, it is crucial for students to learn the importance of co...
Article
The chemical reaction between different molecules is an important learning subject in a chemistry course. Especially for elementary school students, this can be an abstract concept and therefore difficult to understand. One way to facilitate this learning process is to use Augmented Reality (AR) technology, which is considered as an added value com...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Urban and landscape planning are critical to ensure there is a right balance between three crucial dimensions: human development, societal welfare, and nature protection and conservation. These instruments play an important role during the Environmental Sciences studies and, when facing them, it is crucial for students to learn the importance of co...
Article
Full-text available
The validation of any new methodological proposal demands several real-life implementations. However, organizations are reluctant to invest without the firm guarantee that they will be returned the entire expended amount of money. For this purpose, expert judgment techniques are very useful to provide a less-costly initial validation that, when pos...
Article
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This paper describes the items, scale validity and scale reliability of a self-report questionnaire that measures bystander behavior in cyberbullying incidents among adolescents, and its behavioral determinants. Determinants included behavioral intention, behavioral attitudes, moral disengagement attitudes, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, subj...
Article
The European epidemiological study EURALOC aimed to establish a dose response relationship for low dose radiation induced eye lens opacities using interventional cardiologists as the study group. Within the EURALOC project, two dosimetry methodologies were developed serving as the basis for cumulative eye lens dose assessment. Besides being the cor...
Article
Full-text available
Narrative-based serious games present pedagogical content and interventions through an interactive narrative. To ensure effective learning in such kind of serious games, designers are not only faced with the challenge of creating a compelling narrative, but also with the additional challenge of incorporating suitable pedagogical strategies. Therefo...
Article
Cyberbullying is a social phenomenon which can bring severe harm to victims. Bystanders can show positive bystander behavior (e.g. defending) and decrease cyberbullying and its harm, or negative behavior (e.g. passive bystanding, joining) and sustain cyberbullying and its negative effects. Few interventions have currently targeted bystanders and ev...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The use of 3D Virtual Environments is gaining interest in the context of academic discussions on e-learning technologies, as it provides several advantages over classical learning material. However, the use of multimedia resources such as videos and audio inside 3D Virtual Learning Environments (3D VLE) also has drawbacks, especially usability and...
Conference Paper
Agile and Web Engineering show important synergies, making Agile a common approach for Web development. Besides, several initiatives emerged to support CMMI-DEV within Agile, where CMMI-DEV aims to improve organizations’ software development process. An approach integrating Agile, Web and CMMI-DEV might be of great value, since they might allow Web...
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Conference Paper
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Las organizaciones que trabajan en el desarrollo de Sistemas de Infor-mación son reacias muchas veces a implantar nuevas metodologías de trabajo sin disponer previamente de ciertas garantías de éxito. Esta reacción es comprensi-ble, ya que el éxito o el fracaso de ciertos proyectos puede suponer graves pérdi-das económicas o reputacionales para las...
Chapter
Full-text available
Creating serious games calls for a multidisciplinary design team, including game developers, subject-matter experts, pedagogical experts, and narrative designers. However, such multidisciplinary teams often experience communication and collaboration problems due to differences in terminology, background and the concerns of the people involved. As o...
Conference Paper
Introduction. Cyberbullying is a social phenomenon which can bring severe harm to victims. Bystanders can show positive bystander behavior (e.g. defending) and decrease cyberbullying and its harm, or negative behavior (e.g. passive bystanding, joining) and sustain cyberbullying and its negative effects. Few interventions have currently targeted bys...
Article
Full-text available
A large body of research work demonstrates the importance and effectiveness of adapting a learning game to its players. This process is driven by understanding the differences between individuals in terms of abilities and preferences. One of the rather interesting but least explored approaches for understanding individual differences among learners...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents a digital educational game, TrueBiters, developed in order to help students practice the use of the truth tables to compute the truth-value of logical expressions in proposition logic. Next to improving the pass rate of our logic course, we also use the game to investigate whether there is a difference in learning outcome and ga...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
It is argued that reflecting on the in-game performance in a serious game is important for facilitating learning transfer. A way to facilitate such a reflection is by means of a so-called debriefing phase. However, a human facilitated debriefing is expensive, time consuming and not always possible. Therefore, an automatic self-debriefing facility f...
Conference Paper
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This paper presents the results of a research on investigating whether tailoring the game mechanics and interaction modality of a game has an impact on the game experience of the player in the case of players with a high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (with respect to the theory of Multiple Intelligences). For this purpose, we designed and develop...
Conference Paper
In the context of games for learning, it is argued that taking individual differences among players into consideration during game design can be beneficial for the game and/or learning experience. Researchers have studied a variety of factors that can be used for taking individual differences among players into consideration. Although research work...
Conference Paper
This paper describes the Localized Website Design Advisor “LWDA” tool. It is a web-based tool that uses a localization ontology and knowledge about cultural markers to provide website localization guidelines. LWDA captures expertise on how to design websites for different cultures and at different levels of localization. LWDA generates dynamically...
Chapter
The use of 3D and Virtual Reality is gaining interest in the context of academic discussions on E-learning technologies. However, the use of 3D for learning environments also has drawbacks. One way to overcome these drawbacks is by having an adaptive learning environment, i.e., an environment that dynamically adapts to the learner and the activitie...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Creating serious games calls for a multidisciplinary design team, including game developers, subject-matter experts, pedagogical experts, and narrative designers. However, such multidisciplinary teams often experience communication and collaboration problems due to the different terminologies, backgrounds and concerns of the people involved. To ove...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Creating serious games calls for a multidisciplinary design team, including game developers, subject-matter experts, pedagogical experts, and narrative designers. However, such multidisciplinary teams often experience communication and collaboration problems due to the different terminologies, backgrounds and concerns of the people involved. To ove...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Successful serious games include a compelling narrative context and empirically validated pedagogical intervention methods. In order to create such games, design teams must consist of a multidisciplinary group of technical and pedagogical experts. In this paper, the authors show how the domain specific modeling language ATTAC-L facilitates communic...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Realistic social interactions are an important aspect for games since it helps to create immersion and engagement. Some games like Façade or Prom Week have an impressive AI engine for this, but it is not an approach that fits all games. In this paper we present iATTAC, a system for realistic autonomous agents and their social interactions. To reali...
Chapter
Full-text available
Smart Study is an educational platform allowing learners to continue using pen and paper for exercise solving, accomplished by using a digital pen and Anoto paper. Handwritten solutions are digitalized, automatically corrected, and animated feedback is provided by means of a tablet device. By using pen and paper, read-write learners can still use t...
Article
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In this paper we present Maze Commander, a two-player game using two different types of interaction. One player uses the Oculus Rift and the other uses the Sifteo Cubes. The game requires effective and efficient communication to win. We also conducted an evaluation. The results show a positive evaluation for the game experience and collaboration, b...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we presented an approach for domain-specific requirement elicitation. Building domain-specific software requires the expertise of people with very different background and with different levels of experience in software development. This complicates the process of requirement elicitation. The purpose of the approach is twofold. On th...
Conference Paper
This paper introduces a cultural conceptual model that was created to provide a conceptual representation of the Cultural Markers Pyramid introduced for the purpose of designing a localized website. The proposed conceptual model is an abstract specification of a set of five groups of cultural markers and guidelines for culture-centered website desi...
Article
In this paper, we argue that before defining the scenario of a serious game, a thorough preparation, i.e., requirement analysis phase is needed. Before an attractive scenario can be defined, one should decide and clarify a lot of different issues that could influence the setup of the serious game, as well as the scenario(s). This can be done in ple...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Adaptive three-dimensional (3D) Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) offer many advantages for learning, but developing them is still far from easy and is usually only done by specialized people. However, involving teachers in the development of learning material is essential. One way to support teachers in authoring adaptive 3D VLEs is the use of...
Article
Full-text available
The use of 3D and Virtual Reality is gaining interest in the context of academic discussions on E-learning technologies. However, the use of 3D for learning environments also has drawbacks. One way to overcome these drawbacks is by having an adaptive learning environment, i.e. an environment that dynamically adapts to the learner and the activities...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Dynamically adapting educational games seem to be useful for sustaining the engagement of the player to the game. Although there exist several examples of adaptive educational games, they mostly only base the adaptation on the performance of the player, and only adapt the difficulty level or the learning content of the game. In this paper, we propo...
Article
Full-text available
As games keep evolving and improving in areas such as graphics, audio and physics, game players also expect the games to have believable agents. Many games have been criticised by players because of repeated dialogues; or because of the developers’ lack of knowledge of the game world; or because the player is unable to avoid obstacles in the game;...
Conference Paper
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This paper investigates the possibility of using information from brain signals, obtained through a light and inexpensive Brain Computer Interface (BCI), in order to dynamically adjust the difficulty of an educational video game and adapt the level of challenge to players’ abilities. In this experiment, attention levels of Tetris players – measured...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Adaptive three-dimensional (3D) Virtual Leaning Environments are interesting for the e-learning domain as they have great potential resulting from the capabilities offered by 3D Virtual Environments in combination with the opportunities offered by adaptive systems. However, their breakthrough is hindered by the difficulty of their development. This...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Cyber bullying (bullying via electronic communication tools) is a relatively recent phenomenon that especially occurs among early adolescents. As cyber bullying may have a serious impact on the mental (and physical) well-being of victims, it is important to develop effective evidence-based interventions against cyber bullying. The “Friendly ATTAC”-...
Article
Full-text available
Using 3D virtual environment for educational purposes is becoming attractive, powered by the advantage of high Internet connection and broadband technologies, as well as new Web technologies, which make it feasible to deliver a virtual world using a regular browser. Furthermore, being able to dynamically adapt the 3D virtual environment to the pers...
Conference Paper
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Feature models have been commonly used to model the variability and commonality in software product lines. We have defined the Feature Assembly Modelling, a feature modelling technique that allows to model variability in software adopting a multi perspective approach. Furthermore, the approach allows modelling software by combining both variability...
Article
Mobile devices are increasingly multifunctional and personal, providing mobile applications with the necessary user information to achieve personalization. At the same time, detection technologies let such devices find nearby physical entities and thus map the user's environment. By exploiting existing online Semantic Web sources about these detect...
Article
Full-text available
Recent technological developments in the area of mobile devices in combination with the ubiquity of mobile connectivity have turned handheld devices into rich mobile web clients. On the other hand, we witness an increased number of web resources that are no longer only available in HTML but also in RDF format. In order to access relevant informatio...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents an evaluation of feature modeling tools. The purpose of the evaluation was to gain insight in the aspects that influence the quality and more in the particular usability. The evaluation focused on the quality criteria: usability, safety, and the support for functional usability requirements. The study involved 9 feature-modeling...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Due to advancements in mobile technology and connectivity, mobile devices have become fully-fledged web clients. At the same time, more and more Semantic Web data is becoming available, to a point where it becomes usable for various mobile application scenarios. However, most applications are limited to using pre-defined query endpoints in order to...
Conference Paper
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More and more, mobile devices act as personal information managers and are able to obtain rich contextual information on the user's environment. Mobile, context-aware web applications can exploit this information to better address the needs of mobile users. Currently, such websites are either developed separately from their associated desktop-orien...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recent advancements in mobile devices and the omnipresence of wireless connectivity have turned handheld devices into powerful mobile web clients. This evolution has made the wealth of online Semantic Web data accessible to mobile devices. To support this new opportunity, we present a semantic technology-based client-side solution to efficiently qu...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Feature models have been commonly used to model the variability in software product lines. In this paper we present the Feature Assembly framework which is a new approach for creating feature models through feature composition and feature assembly. Furthermore, it promotes feature reusability by storing features in a so-called feature pool, which a...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper, we provide an approach for modeling data variability as part of the overall software product line modeling approach. Modeling data variability in software product lines allows tailoring the data to the variability of a product. For this purpose, we have extended our Feature Assembly Modeling technique with the concept of persistency...
Book
This book contains the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB) held in Brussels, Belgium, in June 2011. This year's conference theme "Managing Software Innovation for Tomorrow's Business" reflects the specific challenges in the research domain of software business. The 14 papers accepted for ICSOB we...
Conference Paper
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In a mobile setting, the user often browses the Web to consult information related to his current context and environment: e.g., reviews of nearby restaurants, or tourist information on visited monuments. On the other hand, the limitations of mobile devices (e.g., limited screen) and the peculiarities of mobile Web usage (e.g., walking around, driv...
Conference Paper
Web mashups are become increasingly popular. A mashup is a Web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated form. Several mashup creation tools, so-called mashup makers, exist and many of them are advertised as easy to use tools for casual users. These tools target Web users without programming background and pr...
Conference Paper
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Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining in popularity and its added value for learning is being recognized. However, its richness in representation and manipulation possibilities may also become one of its weaknesses, as some learners may be overwhelmed and be easily lost in a virtual environment. Others may spend all their time on exploring features not r...