Ricardo Imbert

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid | UPM · Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos e Ingeniería de Software

Motivation is fundamental for user engagement in applications. In particular, in educational software systems, gamification is widely used to try to increase student performance and well-being, as it comprises motivational benefits. However, the effectiveness of gamification has sometimes been under question, since a variety of research experiments...

The agent's capability to acquire, infer, and store the knowledge of other agents is known as agent modeling. Agent modeling addresses the problem of reasoning about an opponent, which is a critical task in competitive situations, or reasoning about a partner, which is important in situations of cooperation, communication, and to enhance social con...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Context : Games are a well-established scenario to test AI and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) proposals due to their popularity and defiance. However, there is no big picture of the application of this technology to games, the evolution of the kind of probl...

Explicit motive dispositions are the psychological needs that drive the behavior and play a predictive role in the selection of the achievement goal. In the presence of situational incentive cues, the variables of explicit motive dispositions may arouse/suppress. Similar to these incentive cues, gamification elements (such as leaderboards, points,...

Context: At present, sensor-based systems are widely used to solve distributed problems in changing environments where sensors are controlled by intelligent agents. On Multi-Agent Systems, agents perceive their environment through such sensors, acting upon that environment through actuators in a continuous cycle. These problems have not always been...

Team formation (TF) faces the problem of defining teams of agents able to accomplish a set of tasks. Resilience on TF problems aims to provide robustness and adaptability to unforeseen events involving agent deletion. However, agents are unaware of the inherent social welfare in these teams. This article tackles the problem of how teams can minimis...

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...

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...

Multi-touch tablet devices, like the iPad, are increasingly used for sales and mar-keting activities. In the higher education sector, these devices can contribute to university promotion and student re-cruitment. With this purpose, we have created an iPad app to be used by univer-sity informants in orientation fairs ad-dressed to secondary school s...

We present a cognitive agent architecture to allow its agents to exhibit social behaviors influenced both by rational and cognitive motivators. Currently, our focus is on cooperation and our objective is the observation or emergence of non-scripted behavior in social cooperative environments. We present the results of applying our architecture in t...

Nowadays, software development methodologies, such as Rational Unified Process or agile methodologies, recommend developing software by increments instead of following a waterfall lifecycle model. Although Function Points is one of the most known techniques to estimate effort and cost in software projects, there is little work that indicates how to...

The Use Case Precedence Diagram (UCPD) is a technique that addresses the problem of determining the construction sequence or prioritization of a software product from the developer’s perspective. This paper presents a replicated controlled experiment with undergraduate students. The results obtained from this experiment confirm the results obtained...

Use Cases are the most utilized technique to specify software requirements. Currently, there are several proposals based on this technique to address the problem of determining the scope and construction sequence of a software, but most of them lack ease of use from the developer’s perspective. In this paper, we present an approach to determine sof...

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...

The majority of software development projects utilize the use cases technique to define software requirements, which are necessary to determine not only the scope of the software itself, but also the sequence in which this software will be constructed. Currently, there are several proposals to define the construction sequence of software requiremen...

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...

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...

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...

In the last decades, cognitive and neuroscience findings about emotion have motivated the design of emotional-based architectures to model individuals’ behavior. Currently, we are working with a cognitive, multi-layered architecture for Agents, which provides them with emotion-influenced behavior and has been extended to model social interactions....

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...

In the teamwork research area there is an increasing interest about the principles behind team effectiveness and effective team training; for Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) Team Training is an excellent application area; nevertheless, the few reported works about IVAs in team training, illustrate both the use for the individualized teaching (Ped...

The joint use of virtual reality (VR) and intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) benefits them qualitatively, since their application scope and interaction possibilities are increased. The educational improvement implies the adaptation of the tutoring processes to the new environment, including exploiting many different and, sometimes, novel informati...

The integration of virtual reality (VR) and intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) in training processes has proved to be an effective option. In these systems, it is very important for ITSs to show adaptive and flexible tutoring capabilities. It must not force the student to follow strict action sequences, but to adapt itself to the unexpected -not n...

Applying virtual reality (VR) in combination with intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) is a promising approach to computer based learning and training. However, the classical structure of ITSs has not been conceived to deal with the new sources of information and interaction provided by VR environments. The resulting structures combining both techno...

It is no accident that VR has become one of the most employed technologies in the training and education area. It offers many interesting features that both traditional human-based learning and classical computer-based instruction are unable to provide. However, the spectacular nature of VR has, in many occasions, eclipsed the pedagogical importan...

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...

The Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is a paradigm that can be viewed as an evolution of individual learning done in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) and Learning Environments (LE) to a group learning environments. In this paper a Team Training Strategy (TTS) is decribed, which involves the use of an Intelligent Collaborative Virt...

From the last decade, intelligent virtual environments (IVEs) have become a quite popular tool for applying computer science to education. The intelligence of the systems generated using IVEs usually falls on the denominated pedagogical virtual agent. Pedagogical virtual agents have characteristics that allow to increase the computer's ability to e...

This paper uses the Activity Theory as a framework to define activities and related tasks to be executed as part of a plan proposed in a team training strategy designed by the authors. The Collaborative Virtual Environment for Training proposed by this strategy uses the same framework to define a group and a student model. The strategy is briefly d...

This paper presents the mechanisms proposed by a generic cognitive architecture for virtual characters with emotional influenced behaviors, called cognitiva, to maintain behavior control at will without giving up the richness provided by emotions. This architecture, together with a progressive specification process for its application, have been us...

In this work, we have used the activity theory perspective as a framework to study CVETs and proposed an activities and actions classification for these environments. The pedagogical agent (PA) acting like a trainer in the CVET use the structures derived from the activities classification as well as both the Student Knowledge Model (SKM) and the st...

The traditional consideration that intelligent behaviors can only be produced from pure reasoning fails when trying to explain most of human behaviors, in which the emotional component has a decisive weight. However, although many different efforts have been made to consider emotions in the rational process, emotion is still perceived by many resea...

In this paper we propose an architecture for the development of Intelligent Virtual Environments for Training, which is based on a col- lection of cooperative software agents. The first level of the architecture is an extension of the classical Intelligent Tutoring System architecture that adds to the expert, student, tutoring and communication mod...

Intelligent behaviours have been traditionally considered exclusively as products of pure rationality processes. Considering other influential factors, such as emotions, has been accused of being "non scientific". However, pure rational processes fail when trying to explain most of human behaviours, in which emotion plays a key role. Nevertheless,...

Assign the students the appropriate task associated with this own capabilities and knowledge, and form rights groups among team members are two main problems that a Pedagogical Agent –acting like a trainer-must solve into a Collaborative Virtual Environment for trainin g. We use reusable learning objects design by contract to formulate a Student Kn...

This paper describes the software architecture that has been designed as a model for the application of Intelligent Virtual Environments to training activities. CORBA has been used as the middleware to integrate a graphical and interactive environment developed in OpenGL and Visual C++, with a cooperative multi-agent system developed on top of the...

Tradicionalmente, aspectos tales como la simulación de comportamientos o la toma de decisión han sido relacionados con la modelización de procesos puramente racionales. En la última década, la tecnología favorita para obtener dicho propósito ha sido la de los agentes: su capacidad para reaccionar ante acontecimientos de su entorno, al tiempo que ap...

The traditional consideration that intelligent behaviors can only be produced from pure reasoning fails when trying to explain most of human behaviors, in which the emotional component has a decisive weight. However, the inclusion of this kind of emotional factors char-ges agent architectures with an extra complexity, making them less efficient or...

The traditional view of intelligent behaviours as products of pure rational processes fails when trying to explain most of human behaviours, in which emotion plays a key role. However, emotional factors add an ex- tra complexity to agent architectures, making them, hitherto, either few efficient or few reusable. This paper presents a context indepe...

Este artículo describe la arquitectura software que ha sido diseñada como modelo para la aplicación de Entornos Virtuales Inteligentes a actividades de entrenamiento. A través de CORBA, como middleware, se ha integrado un entorno gráfico interactivo, desarrollado en OpenGL y Visual C++, con un sistema multiagente cooperativo desarrollado sobre la p...

Virtual environments (VEs) have a set of characteristics that make them hard to be designed and implemented: distributed nature, high-level graphical design, technology novelty, and so forth. Because of the criticism or the repetitiveness of some roles played in them, some of the characters of the VEs usually must be automated. The risk is to pay a...

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...

This paper presents some of the results obtained in the VRIMOR project (virtual reality for inspection, maintenance, operation and repair of nuclear power plants). The general aim was to integrate environmental scanning technologies with human modelling and radiological dose estimation tools, and to deliver an intuitive and cost-effective system fo...

Virtual environments (VEs) have a set of characteristics that make them hard to be designed and implemented: distributed nature, high-level graphical design, technology novelty, and so forth. Because of the criticism or the repetitiveness of some roles played in them, some of the characters of the VEs usually must be automated. The risk is to pay a...

Training is a promising application area of three dimensional virtual environments. These environments allow the students to navigate through and interact with a virtual representation of a real environment in which they have to learn to carry out a certain task. They are especially useful in situations where the real environment is not available f...

As the Internet has become a global medium for communication, virtual environments are consolidating as the arena where users can interact with each others in a synchronous, three- dimensional way. However, the poor behaviour usually shown by the avatars that inhabit these worlds, makes it dicult to achieve an acceptable level of immersion of their...

User-to-User Communication within Internet-based 3D Virtual Environments is usually difficult mainly due to the trade -off between the capability and the complexity of the interface. In this pa per we make a proposal for interface management based on the delegation of some communication tasks on Intelligent and Emotional Agents.

The use of Inhabited Virtual Environments (IVEs), is growing very quickly and people demand easier and more believable ways to interact in these new sites [3] [4], [5], [10], [13]. We understand by IVE a special kind of 3D virtual environments inhabited by avatars, which are the representation either of real humans users of the IVE or autonomous ag...

User-to-User Communication within Internet-based 3D Virtual Environments is usually difficult mainly due to the trade-off between the capability and the complexity of the interface. In this paper we make a proposal for interface management based on the delegation of some communication tasks on Intelligent and Emotional Agents.

Collective virtual places are growing very quick. These places have appeared as a result of the people living in the nets, who demand more easy and believable ways for interacting within these new sites. We think it is necessary to study which is the order that rules Virtual Societies, which emerge as a result of the arrival and interaction of the...

Since the introduction of object-oriented (OO) development in industrial practice, many Function Point (FP) technique adaptations have been introduced to improve software size estimation in these kinds of projects. Current research work only deal with OO modifications to the previous version of the FP Counting Practices Manual (4.1). In this paper,...

The lack of believability of nowadays virtual characters may lead the users of Distributed Virtual Environments to stop using them, once the initial attraction of the innovation has declined. The successful use in the future of Distributed Virtual Environments for complex tasks, beyond simple chatting systems, might depend on our ability to provide...

Nobody has doubts about the Virtual Environments as a tool with a future: their possible applications are huge and they are very attractive for users. However, the lack of believability of virtual characters leads the users to get bored of these Virtual Environments or, at least, to lose the impression of being interacting with other real users, in...

One of the most widely methods used to size estimation is Function Point Analysis. Since the introduction of object-oriented development in industrial practice, many OO and Function Point -like approaches have been presented. This paper proposes the use of the composition relationship among analysis classes to improve the rules included in many of...

Collective virtual places are growing very quick. These places have appeared as a result of the people living in the ne ts, who de mand more ea sy and believable ways for interacting within these ne w sites. We think it is necessary to study which is the order that rules Virtual Societies, which emerge as a result of the arrival and interaction of...

El alumno percibe una gran diferencia entre la educación secundaria y la educación universitaria al comenzar sus estudios de grado. Los programas de orientación que ayudan a afianzar la integración social y académica de los alumnos de nuevo ingreso contribuyen a evitar el abandono de los estudios iniciados en un centro universitario. La Facultad de...