Sandra Baldassarri

University of Zaragoza | UNIZAR · Department of Computing and Systems Engineering

O uso de interfaces tangíveis para fins educacionais é um recurso de tecnologia assistiva que apresenta forte potencial para a educação, podendo proporcionar um incremento no engajamento e motivação dos estudantes. Os principais problemas encontrados para a utilização de mesas tangíveis no ambiente educacional são os altos custos dos produtos comer...

Despite recent efforts by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community to move towards standardised procedures for documenting models, methods, systems or datasets, there is currently no methodology focused on use cases aligned with the risk-based approach of the European AI Act (AI Act). In this paper, we propose a new framework for the documentatio...

The recognition of learners’ emotions, in particular boredom, is a topic of great interest in the context of e-learning, especially with the recent increase in distance education courses. This paper proposes a multimodal framework that integrates an emotion capture system (MsWH), along with commercial hardware and software (Muse2 and Empatica E4),...

Despite recent efforts by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community to move towards standardised procedures for documenting models, methods, systems or datasets, there is currently no methodology focused on use cases aligned with the risk-based approach of the European AI Act (AI Act). In this paper, we propose a new framework for the documentatio...

This paper presents a novel dataset of songs by non-superstar artists in which a set of musical data is collected, identifying for each song its musical structure, and the emotional perception of the artist through a categorical emotional labeling process. The generation of this preliminary dataset is motivated by the existence of biases that have...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Contribution: This article proposes and applies a new systemic 3-D model and a methodology for empathy awareness and development, integrating different partial approaches found in the literature for developing empathy as a transversal competence. Back...

Wearable technology is playing an increasing role in the development of user-centric applications. In the field of sports, this technology is being used to implement solutions that improve athletes’ performance, reduce the risk of injury, or control fatigue, for example. Emotions are involved in most of these solutions, but unfortunately, they are...

Las tecnologías han logrado romper barreras de distancia y tiempo, lo que implica nuevos retos para la educación. Lograr Entornos Virtuales de Enseñanza y Aprendizaje (EVEA) que promuevan la participación, motivación y desempeño de los estudiantes, sin duda, constituye un reto para los docentes de hoy. En este sentido la gamificación de estos entor...

Publishing and using videos in educational activities, both formal and informal contexts, is becoming more frequent. This requires metadata that allows both computer systems and users to manage this particular type of educational resource. In previous research by the authors, a growing interest in the use of emotions to enrich the possibilities of...

O uso de interfaces tangíveis para fins educacionais apresenta consideráveis vantagens e pode proporcionar um incremento no engajamento e motivação dos estudantes, além de ser um recurso de tecnologia assistiva adequado para a educação inclusiva. Este trabalho apresenta uma proposta para uso de mesa tangível na educação inclusiva, juntamente com um...

The creation of applications based on tangible interaction (TI applications), particularly on tabletops, is a developing area that requires the collaboration of professionals with expert knowledge in specific domains. Having an authoring tool that facilitates interdisciplinary intervention in the design and implementation of such applications is a...

Although there have been significant developments in music recommender systems (MRS), artists interested in promoting their artistic career and listeners interested in exploring new musical content do not always feel satisfied with the results obtained. Songs composed by some artists have very little chance of being recommended, and listeners in mo...

Basic emotion classification is one of the main tasks of Sentiment Analysis usually performed by using several machine learning techniques. One of the main issues in Sentiment Analysis is the availability of tagged resources to properly train supervised classification algorithms. This is of particular concern in languages other than English, such a...

O uso de interfaces tangíveis para fins educacionais apresenta consideráveis vantagens e pode proporcionar um incremento no engajamento e motivação dos estudantes, sendo um recurso inovador para todos e um instrumento de tecnologia assistiva adequado para a educação inclusiva. Este trabalho apresenta a criação e análise de uma ferramenta de autoria...

Las tecnologías han logrado romper barreras de distancia y tiempo, lo que implica nuevos retos para la educación. Lograr Entornos Virtuales de Enseñanza y Aprendizaje (EVEA) que promuevan la participación, motivación y desempeño de los estudiantes, sin duda, constituye un reto para los docentes de hoy. En este sentido la gamificación de estos entor...

The proven ability of music to transmit emotions provokes the increasing interest in the development of new algorithms for music emotion recognition (MER). In this work, we present an automatic system of emotional classification of music by implementing a neural network. This work is based on a previous implementation of a dimensional emotional pre...

The framework for our study is the transition between university and the workplace. It has two main purposes: firstly, to assess the Cooperation and Networking skill amongst students about to graduate from university, and secondly, to find out whether they are aware of its importance. For this analysis, a 360° skills assessment process was carried...

Older people represent a growing proportion of the world population, and in our occidental societies, these people often suffer from social and emotional isolation, and from ageism. The developed project is a disruptive vision of the intergenerational relations in the actual society, by using digital entertainment as a tool for motivating and for r...

Desde hace ya muchos años, EDUCAUSE Horizon Report® emite informes anuales en los que perfila las tendencias clave y las tecnologías emergentes que permiten vislumbrar el estado actual y futuro de la educación superior, analizando diferentes escenarios y sus posibles implicaciones. Aquí comentaremos el informe más reciente: 2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Re...

Tagged language resources are an essential requirement for developing machine-learning text-based classifiers. However, manual tagging is extremely time consuming and the resulting datasets are rather small, containing only a few thousand samples. Basic emotion datasets are particularly difficult to classify manually because categorization is prone...

The music emotions can help to improve the personalization of services and contents offered by music streaming providers. Many research works based on the use of machine learning techniques have addressed the problem of recognising the music emotions during the last years. Nevertheless, the results obtained are only applied on small-size music repo...

In this work, a research was carried out with the aim of investigating the possibilities of active objects (with the ability to act and feedback when interacting with digital information) in educational activities based on Tangible Interaction (IT). During the course of the research, a background analysis was made that evidenced the scarce developm...

El uso pedagógico de la tecnología es una realidad y está impulsando un cambio importante en la atención educativa a los niños con necesidades educativas especiales. Sin embargo, pocos son los estudios centrados en cómo verificar el impacto de estas herramientas en las diversas intervenciones que se realizan. En este sentido y con el objeto de eval...

Technology and videogames have been proven as motivating tools for working attention and complex communication skills, especially in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this work, we present two experiences that used interactive games for promoting communication and attention. The first game considers emotions in order to measure child...

This correspondence introduces a correction on the survey entitled “A Survey on Empathetic Dialogue Systems”, recently published in the Information Fusion journal. The authors of this correspondence first presented in 2010 a methodology for the scalable fusion of affective channels in a 2D continuous emotional space, including a novel “emotional ki...

Tangible tabletops can be used for educational purposes with considerable advantages, especially when it involves children with intellectual disabilities or autism. The main problems for its use in the educational environment are the lack of equipment and software and the difficulty of creating tangible resources, mainly by teachers who do not mast...

The online music streaming providers offer powerful personalization tools for recommending songs to their registered users. These tools are usually based on users’ listening histories and tastes, but ignore other contextual variables that affect users while listening to music, for example, the user’s mood. In this paper, a Web-based system for gene...

Este artículo presenta una revisión de librerías de alto nivel que permiten reconocer ciertas emociones en la música (MER). El principal objetivo del trabajo consiste en estudiar y comparar diferentes analizadores de contenido, mostrando sus principales funcionalidades, enfocadas a la extracción de características de la música y su posterior clasif...

Music can produce a positive effect in runners’ motivation and performance. Nevertheless, these effects vary depending on the user’s location, the emotions that she/he feels at each moment or the type of training session. In this paper, a context and emotion-aware system for the recommendation and playing of Spotify songs is presented. It consists...

Contribution: Significant gender differences are observed on primary school students' perception of self-efficacy and test anxiety in mathematics. Girls perceive themselves to be significantly worse than boys in mathematics and report higher test anxiety toward mathematics exams. Gender differences in self-efficacy become more pronounced as student...

Purpose This work presents KitVision, a software toolkit based on the End-User Development paradigm to create and to customize tangible tabletop interactive activities for clients with cognitive impairments. The KitVision toolkit has been developed with therapists in mind to engage them in the creation of therapeutic activities, which is the final...

Este póster ha sido presentado en el Workshop de Investigadores de Ciencias de la Computación 2020, con algunas de la líneas de I+D que estamos desarrollando y los resultados alcanzados, principalmente en 2019

The recognition of emotions for annotating large-size music datasets is still an open challenge. The problem lies in that most of the solutions require the audio of the songs and user/expert intervention during certain phases of the recognition process. In this paper, we propose an automatic solution for overcoming these drawbacks. It consists of a...

This article focuses on the process of designing a prediction system for automatic recognition of emotions in music. One of the main goals of this work is to analyze a prediction solution and some possible variations in its design that allow maximizing the success rate of predictions through a machine learning technique. For the training process a...

One of the key aspects of the texts coming from social media is that they tend to be very noisy. This is mainly because of the usage of informal language and non-standard grammatical structures. Therefore, in order to use these contents as input for a text analysis process, it is highly recommended to previously clean and reduce the noise of the da...

In this paper, some use cases of active objects in educational activities with tangible interaction (TI) are reviewed. As part of this review, several criteria are defined to characterize and compare the experiences being analyzed. These criteria are focused on the possibilities for active objects within the educational experience with TI. Criteria...

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is one of the most frequent neurodevelopmental disorders among children. In spite of this, there is a lack of HCI research specifically devoted to these children. This paper describes efforts to transfer previous experience with other neurodiverse children in the field of tangible tabletops to ADHD children....

In this work, we have studied the potentialities of tangible tabletops when applied to the therapy of children with developmental problems. The research question was if tangible tabletop activities would be useful for children with developmental delay. We present the development and evaluation of several activities for our tangible tabletop NIKVisi...

This article presents a review of high-level libraries that enable to recognize emotions in digital files of music. The main objective of the work is to study and compare different high-level content-analyzer libraries, showing their main functionalities, focused on the extraction of low and high level relevant features to classify musical pieces t...

In this article, a multidisciplinary experience with designers and developers to create pervasive games prototypes for an Interactive Space is presented. The Interactive Space, in which the experience took place, and the toolkit that the developers used in order to implement the games are explained. The different sessions with designers and develop...

People that practice running use to listen to music during their training sessions. Music can have a positive influence on runners’ motivation and performance, but it requires selecting the most suitable song at each moment. Most of the music recommendation systems combine users’ preferences and context-aware factors to predict the next song. In th...

As tecnologias podem ter um papel mediador e potencializador da aprendizagem dos alunos com deficiência. Neste artigo se discute a compensação social nos processos mediados com tecnologias apresentando um estudo de caso no que se utiliza interação tangível com 6 crianças com autismo e 7 com problemas específicos de comunicação num processo de inter...

This paper presents innovations to stimulate the autonomy of engineering students by using different active methodologies. The strategies designed to address this problem are based on analyzing students’ learning styles and incorporating specific tools into teaching practice, such as "M-eRoDes", which supports the automatic evaluation and feedback...

Music can have a positive influence on long-distance runners’ motivation and performance. It requires selecting the most suitable music by considering the runner’s physiological data, the type of training session and the geographical and environmental conditions under which the activity is done. In this context, we are interested in studying the ru...

Technology and videogames have been proven as motivating tools for working attention and complex communication skills, especially in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In this work, we present two experiences that used interactive games for promoting communication and attention. The first game considers emotions in order to measure child...

This paper presents a novel initiative carried out in the Spanish region of Aragon in the last three years to promote engineering vocations among primary school children, especially among girls. Another objective is to make visible the role of women in the engineering field and to put into value their contributions. To do so, women working in this...

La inspección de usabilidad es un método de evaluación llevada a cabo por uno o más expertos en HCI, sujetos con bases teóricas y prácticas sólidas para la observación formal y objetiva de un producto. Uno de los métodos más utilizados es la evaluación heurística, término acuñado por Jakob Nielsen en 1989, que consiste en utilizar un set de heuríst...

In this article, we present an assessment process on a tangible interaction application oriented to individuals with complex communication needs, called ACoTI, and details about the main results obtained thus far. The process is based on a set of decisions that have been surveyed as key elements for assessing this type of experiences, based on a ba...

This paper presents the development of a new tangible tabletop specially designed for interactive audiovisual and musical control. It explores a new interactive space based on 3D active tangible interaction and user's gestures that allows the user to extend the control of the musical events beyond the tabletop surface. It includes a vertical see-th...

Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) provides a large amount of educational programs useful for supporting students’ learning and teaching processes. Nevertheless, despite the continuous growth of the number of available contents, it is hard to find those which can be useful for a specific educational purpose. In order to provide a solution to thi...

In this article, we present an assessment process on a tangible interaction application oriented to individuals with complex communication needs, called ACoTI, and details about the main results obtained thus far. The process is based on a set of decisions that have been surveyed as key elements for assessing this type of experiences, based on a ba...

Tabletop devices offer an attractive environment for the creation of hybrid board-games that seamlessly integrate physical and digital interaction. However, the prototyping of Tangible User Interfaces involves the integration of physical and virtual aspects, challenging both designers and developers, and hindering the rapid exploration of richer ph...

Although during the last years the Interactive Collaborative Environments (ICEs) are offering new possibilities and opportunities to integrate new physical interactions modalities, they also bring new challenges for designers and developers. For that reason, the development of tools that facilitate the creation of applications for ICEs is needed. I...

This work presents the design and implementation of activities for the tangible tabletop NIKVision, specially focused for children with developmental disorders. The evaluation carried out with final users was very satisfactory, and allowed to modify and improve, not only the activities but also the software used.

This paper presents ImmertableApp, an innovative multimodal interface based in tangible interaction in which audio edition is managed through physical controllers. The system is composed by two different main components: a tangible tabletop interface in which the sound parameters can be changed by the manipulation of physical controllers; and a gra...

This paper presents a set of activities specially designed for children with developmental delay to be run on vision-based tangible tabletops. This way, the benefits that the combination of tabletop devices and Tangible Interaction offers to the treatment of cognitive problems can reach the children, which is the final aim of the work presented her...

In this paper, the description of the most relevant metadata schemas of multimedia content annotation for digital television are presented. The analysed schemas are: MPEG-7, TV-Anytime, P-META, EBUCore, PBCore, and SMPTE. For each of them, their most basic features are explained, and their extensions and application profiles for audio, video or aud...

This paper presents an analysis of the most relevant metadata schemas for marking up educational content found on the Web: LOM, MLR, LRMI, DC-Ed AP and EdNA. The results of this analysis are summarized in a plot that relates the different schemes and in a table in which the main characteristic are compared. LOM is the standard of metadata with the...

This paper presents the design of an authoring tool for creating educational activities based on tangible interaction. First, background information is presented in relation to tangible interaction and its possibilities for the educational context. Also, the concept of authoring tool is reviewed, and a number of desirable features for authoring too...

The tangible interaction approach has, in recent years, become a promising alternative to tactile interaction for very young children. Children playing with Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) are motivated by the novel and digital environment and benefit from the same values as conventional physical playing. Young children build their mental image of t...

This paper presents a state of the art concerning the studies related to different services that can be found at educational television and the need to annotate their contents. The bibliographic review carried out allowed to detect the lack of a set of metadata for identifying educational multimedia content in IPTV environments, andtaking into acco...

In this paper, an Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) tool called AraBoard, developed for facilitating the functional communication to persons with complex communication needs, is presented. In order to guarantee the tool's quality, an assessment process with experts has been carried out. The experts used as instrument a checklist prev...

The increasing amount of computational capacity of mobile devices allowed the development of real time multimodal applications. This kind of systems use to employ virtual agents for improving the communication between services and users. In this work, we present an agent-based application that allows multimodal and emotional interaction with the us...

During recent years, our group has been combining tabletop devices and Tangible Interaction in several experiments in nurseries, schools and special education schools. The development of tangible tabletop games for children involves the integration of physical, virtual and social aspects, thus introducing new challenges to their design, implementat...

Se presentan una de las líneas de investigación y desarrollo y los resultados logrados del área de Tecnología informática aplicada en educación del III LIDI - Facultad de Informática - UNLP

This chapter discusses a novel methodology to deal with multimodal fusion of emotional channels. Affective computing is an emerging field aimed at developing intelligent systems able to provide a computer with the ability of recognizing, interpreting and processing human emotions. The chapter explains the step from the discrete perspective of emoti...