Victor M. Gonzalez

Sperientia [studio+lab] · Research Labs

In this work, we present the results of a stud} where we monitored the physiological response of a se of fifty high-school students during their participation in an online course. For each of the subjects, we recollected time-series obtained from sensors o physiological signals such as electrical cerebral activity heart rate, galvanic skin response...

RESUMEN Se han utilizado aplicaciones móviles para promover el uso del condón que carecen de fundamento teórico y no consideran la opinión de los usuarios en su desarrollo por lo que han sido evaluadas negativamente. El objetivo fue desarrollar y evaluar una aplicación móvil para promover el uso correcto y consistente del condón en jóvenes mexicano...

Drawing on psychological theory, we created a new approach to classify negative sentiment tweets and presented a subset of unclassified tweets to humans for categorization. With these results, a tweet classification distribution was built to visualize how the tweets can fit in different categories. The approach developed through visualization and c...

How will pedestrians from different regions interact with an approaching autonomous vehicle? Understanding differences in pedestrian culture and responses can help inform autonomous cars how to behave appropriately in different regional contexts. We conducted a field study comparing the behavioral response of pedestrians between metropolitan Mexico...

This paper¹ presents a case study to identify the characteristics of an information visualization tool that facilitates its learning and adoption process in the context of professional practice. We identified the principal categories that explain the most important aspects on the usefulness of the info vis tool that emerged during the practical use...

This study proposes an improvement to the Insight Centre for Data Analytics algorithm, which identifies the most relevant topics in a corpus of tweets, and allows the construction of search rules for that topic or topics, in order to build a corpus of tweets for analysis. The improvement shows above 14% improvement in Purity and other metrics, and...

Our research aims to aid children with autism improve social interactions through discrete messages received in a waist smart band. In this paper, we describe the design and development of an interactive system in a Microsoft Band 2 and present results of an evaluation with three students that gives us positive evidence that using this form of supp...

Information workers and software developers are exposed to work fragmentation, an interleaving of activities and interruptions during their normal work day. Small-scale observational studies have shown that this can be detrimental to their work. In this paper, we perform a large-scale study of this phenomenon for the particular case of software dev...

The exponential growth of data generated by society and the emergence of ubiquitous data collection systems have led to an opportunity to transform data into insights for unparalleled decision-making giving rise to the age of Big Data. It is within this context that the Mexico City Satellite Session of the IEEE Big Data CONGRESS was held on May 8,...

Public streams of geo-located social media information have provided researchers with a rich source of information from which to draw patterns of urban-scale human-mobility. However, most of the literature relies on assumptions over the spatial distribution of this data (e.g., by considering only a uniform grid division of space). In this work the...

Technology can assist older adults to maintain an active lifestyle. To better understand the effect that technology has on aging perception, we conducted two studies. In the first study, through supraliminal priming, we analyzed the effects of aging- and technology-related stimuli on age estimation. In the second study, we conducted a technological...

New technologies are opening novel ways to help people in their decision-making while shopping. From crowd-generated customer reviews to geo-based recommendations, the information to make the decision could come from different social circles with varied degrees of expertise and knowledge. Such differences affect how much influence the information h...

The cerebral palsy (CP) is an irreversible disorder that affects the human brain and causes problems with mobility and communication. This paper presents the results of designing, implementing and evaluating an easy-to-use and low-cost equipment that seeks to increase the motivation and effort of the children with cerebral palsy while they do their...

Stress is becoming a major problem in our society and most people do not know how to cope with it. We propose a novel approach to quantify the stress level using psychophysiological measures. Using an automatic stress detector that can be implemented in a mobile application, we managed to create an alternative to automatically detect stress using s...

The potential for ubiquitous ambient technology to assist older adults to sustain an active life, raises questions about whether this can bring transformational effects for users including those related to modifying ageing perception. We aim to investigate the effects that technology related priming has in the perception of ageing via age estimatio...

Computing devices have become a primary working tool for many professional roles, among them software programmers. In order to enable a more productive interaction between computers and humans for programming purposes it is important to acquire an awareness of human attention/concentration levels. In this work we report on a controlled experiment t...

Sociological studies on transnational migration are often based on surveys or interviews, an expensive and time consuming approach. On the other hand, the pervasiveness of mobile phones and location aware social networks has introduced new ways to understand human mobility patterns at a national or global scale. In this work, we leverage geo locate...

Different approaches used to define how a website shows informa- tion have an impact on how users evaluate its usability. As shown in the present study, how people accomplish a search of visual content in a newspaper website is an important factor to review while designing it. In this study, 47 participants were randomly assigned to evaluate one of...

In this paper, we improve the named-entity recognition (NER) capabilities for an already existing text-based dialog system (TDS) in Spanish. Our solution is twofold: first, we developed a hidden Markov model part-of-speech (POS) tagger trained with the frequencies from over 120-million words; second, we obtained 2, 283 real-world conversations from...

Information workers and software developers are exposed to work fragmentation, an interleaving of activities and interruptions during their normal work day. Small-scale observational studies have shown that this can be detrimental to their work. In this paper, we perform a large-scale study of this phenomenon for the particular case of software dev...

Objective: To determine whether the use of online sexual material influences sexual risk behavior for HIV / AIDS in young university students. Concepts of Social Cognitive Theory were used. Methods: A descriptive correlational design, involving 200 university students selected by systematic random sampling (k = 11). Results: Young people who used s...

Objetivo: Determinar si el uso de material sexual en línea influye en la conducta sexual de riesgo para VIH/SIDA en los jóvenes universitarios. Se utilizaron conceptos de la Teoría Cognitiva Social. Método: Diseño descriptivo correlacional, participaron 200 jóvenes universitarios, seleccionados por muestreo aleatorio sistemático (k = 11). Resultado...

This paper studies work environments where groups of people interact synchronously and remotely (distributed) with the purpose of creating and developing software within the institutional framework of an organization, in what is known as distributed software development (DSD). In this type of collaborative schemes, developers are required to work i...

In this paper, we examine how collective notions of belonging and imagination become a fertile terrain upon which transnational Web sites can sustain certain social practices across national boundaries that would be difficult otherwise. Drawing on field work carried out in the U.S. and Mexico, and using transnational imagination as our analytical l...

This paper presents a study of the usage of Twitter within the context of urban activity. We retrieved a set of tweets submitted by users located in Mexico City. Tweets were labeled as either positive or negative mood using a sentiment analyzer implementation. By calculating the average mood, we were able to run a Mann-Withney's U test to evaluate...

We propose a statistical study of sentiment produced in an urban environment by collecting tweets submitted in a certain timeframe. Each tweet was processed using our own sentiment classifier and assigned either a positive or a negative label. By calculating the average mood, we were able to run a Mann-Withney’s U test to evaluate differences in th...

This work presents the study of a complex interactive system (Twitter) and the analysis of the relation between people's mental models, performance and usability perceptions. Participants were asked to perform a number of activities with Twitter and to draw graphical representations of their mental model about it. We identified three typical Mental...

This paper describes the design and implementation of an alternative communication device implemented as a mobile application for tablets. The application was developed applying user-centered design techniques and allows children between 3 and 12 years old with severe language impairments improve their communication skills with others. Several prot...

The aim of this investigation is to identify and understand the relations between the people’s mental models and their performance and usability perception about a complex interactive system (Twitter). Our study includes the participation of thirty college students where each of them was asked to perform a number of activities with Twitter, and to...

Participating in regular physical activity (PA) can help people maintain a healthy weight, and it reduces their risks of developing cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. Unfortunately, PA declines during early adolescence, particularly in minority populations. This paper explores design requirements for mobile PA-based games to motivate Hispanic te...

Advances in computer technology have made it increasingly easy for users to navigate through a virtual world. We are interested in assessing what kind of immersive virtual experience is being delivered to the users through projects that aim to share virtualized aspects of the physical world. In order to achieve this we will assess whether people's...

Use of sexual material online (USMO) by young people has been connected with at-risk sexual behavior for HIV/AIDS. Media Richness and Social Cognitive theories propose that rich media offer more information with interactive and audible visual content, which could have a significant impact on people's thinking and behavior. The objective was to dete...

Within the CHI community there has been sustained interest in interruptions and multitasking behaviour. Research in the area falls into two broad categories: the micro world of perception and cognition; and the macro world of organisations, systems and long-term planning. Although both kinds of research have generated insights into behaviour, the d...

Media-sharing Web sites are facilitating modern versions of storytelling activities. This study investigates the use of photo-based narratives to support young parents who are geographically separated from their aging parents to share stories about their young children. The case analyses Malaysian young mothers living in the UK, communicating regul...

When somebody dies, her or his presence might still be hanging around others' lives on Social Networking Sites (SNS). Several factors might influence the way we perceive this digital presence after the death including personal and religious beliefs. In this work, we present results from a study aimed at examining the differences between the way we...

The software industry is facing a recent trend called distributed software development (DSD), in which distributed teams require continuous support in their communication and coordination. However, there is a lack of communication tools that actually support the coordination of DSD activities. Current communication mechanisms appear to favour the i...

A framework for analyzing computer-mediated communication is presented, based on Clark's theory of common ground. Four technologies are reviewed: Facebook, Wikipedia, Blacksburg Electronic Village, and World of Warcraft, to assess their “social affordances,” that is, how communication is supported and how the technologies provide facilities to prom...

We are living in an age of global work. The development of communication and collaborative technologies has enabled businesses to form multidisciplinary working teams independent of where the members are geographically located. Through distributed work, companies can better integrate and efficiently use their human

The goal of this project is get a better understanding about the strategies and mechanisms that people use to manage and coordinate information from multiple spheres of work. We aim to define a comprehensive model from which new information technologies can be designed and developed. This model and the findings of our research can also be used by I...

In this paper, we report the results obtained of comparing how people make kense of health information when receiving it via two different media: application for a mobile device and a printed pamphlet. The study was motivated by the 2009 outbreak of the AHN1 influenza and the need to educate the general public using all possible media to disseminat...

Self-interruptions account for a significant portion of task switching in information-centric work contexts. However, most of the research to date has focused on understanding, analyzing and designing for external interruptions. The causes of self-interruptions are not well understood. In this paper we present an analysis of 889 hours of observed t...

Distributed software development is a new working philosophy that the software industry is currently facing. Organisations may benefit from the situations that this shift has created, although they must also confront new challenges related to them. In this study, the authors focused on the lack of timely adequate opportunities for informal interact...

Different aspects defining the nature of software engineering work have been analyzed by empirical studies conducted in the last 30 years. However, in recent years, many changes have occurred in the context of software development that impact the way people collaborate, communicate with each other, manage the development process and search for info...

The software industry is facing a paradigm shift towards distributed software development (DSD). This change creates situations from which organizations may benefit, and challenges to which they must adapt to (e.g. the absence of opportunities for informal interaction). In this paper we present the results of an analysis of the knowledge flow probl...

Within a frame of possible ubiquitous urban applications this research explores ways to support the mobility of senior citizens in vehicles by finding efficient routes to reach their destination and managing their time. Our solution is called SAMM and operates following a context-aware and crowdsourcing model where data used by the system to optimi...

This purpose of this paper is to investigate the role played by different CMC for supporting young parents' reporting of everyday experiences about their baby's development with geographically separated families. “Reporting” in this study refers to narrative exercises using text, photo and video. Thus, the researcher wanted to see the differences o...

Many modern working environments are characterized by the need to manage multiple activities simultaneously. This is the case of hospital work, which also demands a high degree of mobility and collaboration among specialists. These working conditions have motivated us to design and implement mobileSJ, a mobile information management tool based on t...

Software development organizations are facing a paradigm shift towards Distributed Software Development. This shift introduces situations from which organizations may benefit (e.g. highly skilled human resources, development groups closer to client location, etc.); but also introduces challenges to which organizations have to adapt (e.g. coordina-t...

The difficulties associated with the evaluation of ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp) technologies increase in application domains such as hospitals, where human life can be at risk, privacy of personal records is paramount, and labor is costly and highly distributed across space and time. For the last 6 years numerous Ubicomp technologies in support o...

The evaluation of ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp) applications presents a number of challenges ranging from the optimal recreation of the contextual conditions where technologies will be implemented, to the definition of tasks which often go well beyond the model of human-computer interaction that people are used to interact with. Many contexts, suc...

Many modern working environments are characterized by the need to manage multiple activities simultaneously. This is the case of hospital work, which also demands a high degree of mobility and collaboration among specialists. These working conditions have motivated us to design and implement mobileSJ, a mobile information management tool based on t...

The user generated content (UGC) phenomenon has gained popularity over the last few years as a result of new types of Web sites providing flexible functionality to people for sharing their profiles, pictures, videos and even their expertise and skills. This paper presents results of a study analyzing Web sites whose main purpose is to host and shar...

Purpose An ensemble is an intermediate unit of work between action and activity in the hierarchical framework proposed by classical activity theory. Ensembles are the mid‐level of activity, offering more flexibility than objects, but more purposeful structure than actions. The paper aims to introduce the notion of ensembles to understand the way ob...

As in many Latin–American countries, in Mexico many older adults live alone as a result of the migration of one or more of their relatives, mostly to the USA. Thus, not only do they live alone, but they might seldom see these relatives for long periods, even though they often depend on them financially. With the goal of designing appropriate commun...

For the last 30 years, several empirical studies have been conducted to understand how software engineers work. However, during this period, many changes occurred in the context of software development: new communication technologies like instant messaging appeared as well as new quality models to evaluate the work being conducted. Despite this new...

One important tendency in software development has been the globalization of its industry. Software developers are frequently required to work in groups which are distributed throughout multiple geographic locations. People and processes (e.g. software design) are consequently distributed. Providing the support that will allow distributed software...

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) become particularly relevant in contexts where place-based communities get dispersed and migrants look for ways to keep strong connections to the homeland. This paper presents the case of a website currently being used by migrants and non-migrants of a dispersed community to keep in touch with each o...

Developing a system to provide support for distributed software developers (DSD) to get into collaboration is very complicated. On the first hand, it is necessary to know the characteristics of their daily work activities. On the other hand, technical aspects must be considered, such as obtaining information on the context and on the data flow of t...

People use media-sharing web sites to document their lives and those of their children for maintaining and strengthening social ties with people living away. It is clear then that people can and like to create narratives as a form of expression. This study presents an analysis of the characteristics and type of baby stories written by young mothers...

Social Mediating Technologies (SMTs) range from e-mail to social networking sites and community websites. The popularity of these technologies is increasing rapidly, yet we have little understanding about how and why people find these technologies so appealing. The research challenge is to try to understand the causal drivers for usage of social te...

Understanding and characterizing the nature of indoor mobility is an essential requirement for developing proper mobile technologies. Yet, a detailed study of indoor mobility in real scenarios represents a challenge as it requires intensive labor from researchers and a level of intrusion which is not always welcome by participants. Previous researc...

Ambient computing refers to the development of physical environments enhanced through information and communication technology to better serve the needs of users. In contrast with traditional computer applications, ambient computing offers a vision in which computer support migrates from the desktop to the physical environment, thus demanding natur...

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be instrumental to the sense of community connectedness of migrants: being aware of the daily occurrences in their home communities. Whereas formerly, migrant workers were using the postal service and telephone as the preferred channels of communication, nowadays the penetration of the Internet...

This work presents preliminary results of a case study of intergenerational communication through video blogging, following a 79-year old blogger and the responses from his younger readers. An open, non-patronizing and direct form of intergenerational communication was observed, which fits into the stereotype activation model of communication frame...

Many older adults in Mexico are likely to experience isolation and emotional discomfort because of the migration of one or more family members to the USA. Despite the increasing number of communication tools provided by the Internet, their current design and characteristics, limit their use by older adults. Our work aims at offering a board-based m...

Hospitals are characterized by a high degree of collaborative work, mobility, and information access from many devices or artifacts. Healthcare environments are becoming ideal test-beds for pervasive and mobile communication technologies. In this paper we present the development of an agent-based mobile collaborative system to support the intensive...

ABSTRACT Information and,Communication,Technologies,can,be instrumental,for those,who,have moved,away,permanently,from,their places,of origin. This paper,presents,a condensed analysis of interviews conducted,with twenty,six (26) Mexican,migrants,and,family members living in Mexico. The interviews addressed,several topics ranging,from family communi...

Many modern working environments are characterized by the need to manage multiple activities simultaneously. This is the case of hospital work, which also demands a high degree of mobility and collaboration among specialist. These working conditions have motivated us to design and implement mobileSJ, a mobile information management tool based on th...

This study investigates the motivations of using rich-media forms of computer-mediated-communication (CMC) tools among young mothers living abroad to maintain ties with their geographically-separated families and friends. Our research involves sixteen Malaysian young mothers living in the United Kingdom, most of them dealing with the challenges of...

Many recent studies provide evidence of the challenges experienced by knowledge workers while multi-tasking among several projects and initiatives. Work is often interrupted, and this results in people leaving activities pending until they have the time, information, resources or energy to reassume them. Among the different types of knowledge worke...

The practical use of information technology devices in domestic and residential contexts often results in radical changes from their envisioned raison d'être. This study focuses on the context of household safety and security, and presents results from the analysis of the usage of video cameras in the public areas of an urban neighbourhood in Tecám...

Privacy is a complex social process that will persist in one form or another as a fundamental feature of the substrate into which ubicomp is threaded. To better understand the privacy issues related to the use of ubicomp we place our efforts in understanding the contextual information relevant to privacy and how their interplay shapes the perceptio...

This paper presents a discussion of design considerations for community web portals as social networking systems. We analyse and compare the social interaction approach, design considerations and socio-technical requirements with regards to community portal technology employed in two master-planned urban developments in Australia and Mexico. We foc...

Following worldwide tendencies, the patterns of usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Mexico are being influenced by increasing affordability. In this work we present the results of a study on the use and adoption of ICTs to support daily life in residential communities conducted in Tecamac, Mexico. There, neighbors were prov...

Migration has gained considerable attention in the past few years all over the world. The migratory phenomenon has already affected many countries and is likely to deeply reshape forever their societies and regulations. Of particular interest is the migratory flow from Mexico to the USA, which is identified as one of the most important labor relate...

Many studies have shown how knowledge workers face challenges while multi-tasking among several projects and initiatives at the workplace. Researchers and consultants of personal productivity have identified practical strategies and processes that people use to face, plan and manage their activities. Our work is based on the analysis of those proce...

The use of personal computers and Internet at home is becoming more and more common in some developing countries such as Mexico, where affordable prices and credit plans have contributed to this trend. Undoubtedly, the presence of information technology in the households has effects in the life of families and their communities; however how benefi...

Even with the introduction of computer technology, paper-based artifacts remain ubiquitous in hospital settings. The need to manually transfer and update information from the physical to the digital realm is a common practice among hospital staff, which, although usually well managed, at times becomes a source for errors and inconsistencies. This p...

Hospitals are convenient settings for the deployment of context-aware applications. The information needs of hospital workers are highly dependent on contextual variables, such as location, role and activity. While some of these parameters can be easily determined, others, such as activity are much more complex to estimate. This paper describes an...

This Works in Progress department discusses five projects covering various research topics. The first two projects are sensor network oriented: a Java MIDP-based sensor network platform and a platform for monitoring distributed power generation systems. The third is a wearable computing application for optimizing the circuit-training process for a...