Binary proposal for assessing quality of Open Access Institutional Repositories : the case of Spanish repositories

The reason for this study is to propose a new quantitative approach on how to assess the quality of Open Access University Institutional Repositories. The results of this new approach are tested in the Spanish University Repositories. The assessment method is based in a binary codification of a proposal of features that objectively describes the repositories. The purposes of this method are assessing the quality and an almost automatically system for updating the data of the characteristics. First of all a database was created with the 38 Spanish institutional repositories. The variables of analysis are presented and explained either if they are coming from bibliography or are a set of new variables. Among the characteristics analyzed are the features of the software, the services of the repository, the features of the information system, the Internet visibility and the licenses of use. Results from Spanish universities ARE provided as a practical example of the assessment and for having a picture of the state of the development of the open access movement in Spain.

Classification of sags according to their origin based on the waveform similarity

A statistical method for classification of sags their origin downstream or upstream from the recording point is proposed in this work. The goal is to obtain a statistical model using the sag waveforms useful to characterise one type of sags and to discriminate them from the other type. This model is built on the basis of multi-way principal component analysis an later used to project the available registers in a new space with lower dimension. Thus, a case base of diagnosed sags is built in the projection space. Finally classification is done by comparing new sags against the existing in the case base. Similarity is defined in the projection space using a combination of distances to recover the nearest neighbours to the new sag. Finally the method assigns the origin of the new sag according to the origin of their neighbours

Sumak Kawsay, or the concept of living well, and perceptions about natural, urban and rural areas: the case of Cuenca (Ecuador)

This research explores critical environmental concepts from the standpoint of political ecology. It contrasts the Ecuadorian Kichua indigenous concept of Sumak Kawsay (i.e., living well), with discourses about natural, urban and rural areas. Sumak Kawsay was included in Ecuador’s 2008 constitution as an alternative to the neoclassical idea of development. This work reveals interesting insights from a variety of social and political viewpoints from both rural and urban areas. The research is based on the medium sized city of Cuenca, which is located in the southern Ecuadorian Andes. We used an adaptation of the Q Method to investigate stakeholders’ perceptions. Four remarkably well-defined viewpoints were revealed. Although these views contrast strongly with Sumak Kawsay, it is possible to transform this paradigm in the foundation of Cuenca’s public policies and institutional structure.

A Negotiation Style Recommender Based on Computational Ecology in Open Negotiation Environments

The system described herein represents the first example of a recommender system in digital ecosystems where agents negotiate services on behalf of small companies. The small companies compete not only with price or quality, but with a wider service-by-service composition by subcontracting with other companies. The final result of these offerings depends on negotiations at the scale of millions of small companies. This scale requires new platforms for supporting digital business ecosystems, as well as related services like open-id, trust management, monitors and recommenders. This is done in the Open Negotiation Environment (ONE), which is an open-source platform that allows agents, on behalf of small companies, to negotiate and use the ecosystem services, and enables the development of new agent technologies. The methods and tools of cyber engineering are necessary to build up Open Negotiation Environments that are stable, a basic condition for predictable business and reliable business environments. Aiming to build stable digital business ecosystems by means of improved collective intelligence, we introduce a model of negotiation style dynamics from the point of view of computational ecology. This model inspires an ecosystem monitor as well as a novel negotiation style recommender. The ecosystem monitor provides hints to the negotiation style recommender to achieve greater stability of an open negotiation environment in a digital business ecosystem. The greater stability provides the small companies with higher predictability, and therefore better business results. The negotiation style recommender is implemented with a simulated annealing algorithm at a constant temperature, and its impact is shown by applying it to a real case of an open negotiation environment populated by Italian companies

Geometry-based demosaicking

Demosaicking is a particular case of interpolation problems where, from a scalar image in which each pixel has either the red, the green or the blue component, we want to interpolate the full-color image. State-of-the-art demosaicking algorithms perform interpolation along edges, but these edges are estimated locally. We propose a level-set-based geometric method to estimate image edges, inspired by the image in-painting literature. This method has a time complexity of O(S) , where S is the number of pixels in the image, and compares favorably with the state-of-the-art algorithms both visually and in most relevant image quality measures.

Discovering the campus together: a mobile and computer-based learning experience

One of the most relevant difficulties faced by first-year undergraduate students is to settle into the educational environment of universities. This paper presents a case study that proposes a computer-assisted collaborative experience designed to help students in their transition from high school to university. This is done by facilitating their first contact with the campus and its services, the university community, methodologies and activities. The experience combines individual and collaborative activities, conducted in and out of the classroom, structured following the Jigsaw Collaborative Learning Flow Pattern. A specific environment including portable technologies with network and computer applications has been developed to support and facilitate the orchestration of a flow of learning activities into a single integrated learning setting. The result is a Computer-Supported Collaborative Blended Learning scenario, which has been evaluated with first-year university students of the degrees of Software and Audiovisual Engineering within the subject Introduction to Information and Communications Technologies. The findings reveal that the scenario improves significantly students’ interest in their studies and their understanding about the campus and services provided. The environment is also an innovative approach to successfully support the heterogeneous activities conducted by both teachers and students during the scenario. This paper introduces the goals and context of the case study, describes how the technology was employed to conduct the learning scenario, the evaluation methods and the main results of the experience.

Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamics: a case study

In recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices has led to a massiveincrease in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there.The analysis of these spatio-temporal data can supply high-level human behaviorinformation valuable to urban planners, local authorities, and designer of location-basedservices. In this paper, we describe our approach to collect and analyze the history ofphysical presence of tourists from the digital footprints they publicly disclose on the web.Our work takes place in the Province of Florence in Italy, where the insights on thevisitors’ flows and on the nationalities of the tourists who do not sleep in town has beenlimited to information from survey-based hotel and museums frequentation. In fact, mostlocal authorities in the world must face this dearth of data on tourist dynamics. In thiscase study, we used a corpus of geographically referenced photos taken in the provinceby 4280 photographers over a period of 2 years. Based on the disclosure of the locationof the photos, we design geovisualizations to reveal the tourist concentration and spatiotemporalflows. Our initial results provide insights on the density of tourists, the points ofinterests they visit as well as the most common trajectories they follow.

A multicase study for the evaluation of a pattern-based visual design process for collaborative learning

Collage is a pattern-based visual design authoring tool for the creation of collaborative learning scripts computationally modelled with IMS Learning Design (LD). The pattern-based visual approach aims to provide teachers with design ideas that are based on broadly accepted practices. Besides, it seeks hiding the LD notation so that teachers can easily create their own designs. The use of visual representations supports both the understanding of the design ideas and the usability of the authoring tool. This paper presents a multicase study comprising three different cases that evaluate the approach from different perspectives. The first case includes workshops where teachers use Collage. A second case implies the design of a scenario proposed by a third-party using related approaches. The third case analyzes a situation where students follow a design created with Collage. The cross-case analysis provides a global understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the pattern-based visual design approach.