The Influence of Space Layout, Technology and Teaching Approach on Student Learning: An Architectural Technology Perspective

Some would argue that there is a need for the traditional lecture format to be rethought in favour of a more active approach. However, this must form part of a bipartite strategy, considered in conjunction with the layout of any new space to facilitate alternative learning and teaching methods. With this in mind, this paper begins to examine the impact of the learning environment on the student learning experience, specifically focusing on students studying on the Architectural Technology and Management programme at Ulster University. The aim of this study is two-fold: to increase understanding of the impact of learning space layout, by taking a student centered approach; and to gain an appreciation of how technology can impact upon the learning space. The study forms part of a wider project being undertaken at Ulster University known as the Learning Landscape Transition Project, exploring the relationship between learning, teaching and space layout. Data collection was both qualitative and quantitative, with use of a case study supported by a questionnaire based on attitudinal scaling. A focus group was also used to further analyse the key trends resulting from the questionnaire. The initial results suggest that the learning environment, and the technology within it, can not only play an important part in the overall learning experience of the student, but also assist with preparation for the working environment to be experienced in professional life.

Modelado de estrategias de personalización en OO-H

The consideration of personalization politics in the context of any web application modelling method obliges to the revision of its different modelling activities, which must be adapted to take into account the information regarding the user (usually gathered in a user model) to define aspects such as navigation or presentation. Additionally, they must provide a set of techniques to populate such user model. Finally, and because of the rapid pace at which personalization politics usually change, the modelling process should provide support not only for static personalization rules (known at design time) but also for the definition or change of these rules once the application has been deployed. This article presents, in the context of the Object Oriented Hypermedia Method (OO-H), a personalization framework that fulfils these requirements, and is organized around four main concepts: (1) a set of design activities that capture the personalization requirements known at design time, (2) a mechanism for the specification of personalization rules, defined by means of an XML template, that decouples the definition of the personalization model from the remaining models, (3) an execution architecture that supports the change at execution time of these rules and (4) an extensible repository that includes a set of register mechanisms for the user activity in the system. The possibility of extension of this repository facilitates its adaptation to the particular characteristics of any particular application.

Towards a reverse engineering approach for guiding user in applying data mining

Comunicación presentada en las XVI Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos, JISBD 2011, A Coruña, 5-7 septiembre 2011.

Footwear bio-modelling: An industrial approach

There is a growing need within the footwear sector to customise the design of the last from which a specific footwear style is to be produced. This customisation is necessary for user comfort and health reasons, as the user needs to wear a suitable shoe. For this purpose, a relationship must be established between the user foot and the last with which the style will be made; up until now, no model has existed that integrates both elements. On the one hand, traditional customised footwear manufacturing techniques are based on purely artisanal procedures which make the process arduous and complex; on the other hand, geometric models proposed by different authors present the impossibility of implementing them in an industrial environment with limited resources for the acquisition of morphometric and structural data for the foot, apart from the fact that they do not prove to be sufficiently accurate given the non-similarity of the foot and last. In this paper, two interrelated geometric models are defined, the first, a bio-deformable foot model and the second, a deformable last model. The experiments completed show the goodness of the model, with it obtaining satisfactory results in terms of comfort, efficiency and precision, which make it viable for use in the sector.

A novel concept-level approach for ultra-concise opinion summarization

The Web 2.0 has resulted in a shift as to how users consume and interact with the information, and has introduced a wide range of new textual genres, such as reviews or microblogs, through which users communicate, exchange, and share opinions. The exploitation of all this user-generated content is of great value both for users and companies, in order to assist them in their decision-making processes. Given this context, the analysis and development of automatic methods that can help manage online information in a quicker manner are needed. Therefore, this article proposes and evaluates a novel concept-level approach for ultra-concise opinion abstractive summarization. Our approach is characterized by the integration of syntactic sentence simplification, sentence regeneration and internal concept representation into the summarization process, thus being able to generate abstractive summaries, which is one the most challenging issues for this task. In order to be able to analyze different settings for our approach, the use of the sentence regeneration module was made optional, leading to two different versions of the system (one with sentence regeneration and one without). For testing them, a corpus of 400 English texts, gathered from reviews and tweets belonging to two different domains, was used. Although both versions were shown to be reliable methods for generating this type of summaries, the results obtained indicate that the version without sentence regeneration yielded to better results, improving the results of a number of state-of-the-art systems by 9%, whereas the version with sentence regeneration proved to be more robust to noisy data.