ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed the importance of efficient and accommodating online educational experiences. In this contribution, we present a novel system for the facilitation of small group online discussions using an avatar during video conferencing. The avatar was programmed with group facilitation best practices, whereas the content for the activities was prepared by the classes' teachers. Groups of tenth grade students interacted with the system, where we compared activities facilitated by the avatar with activities without facilitation. Our results show that students reported the activity with the avatar to be significantly more efficient, more understandable and inducing more participation compared to activities without avatar facilitation. Students also spoke significantly more with avatar facilitation. This system shows promise in future online educational activities as a facilitator of discussions with K-12 students. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Contact tracking plays an important role in the epidemiological investigation of COVID-19, which can effectively reduce the spread of the epidemic. As an excellent alternative method for contact tracking, mobile phone location-based methods are widely used for locating and tracking contacts. However, current inaccurate positioning algorithms that are widely used in contact tracking lead to the inaccurate follow-up of contacts. Aiming to achieve accurate contact tracking for the COVID-19 contact group, we extend the analysis of the GPS data to combine GPS data with video surveillance data and address a novel task named group activity trajectory recovery. Meanwhile, a new dataset called GATR-GPS is constructed to simulate a realistic scenario of COVID-19 contact tracking, and a coordinated optimization algorithm with a spatio-temporal constraint table is further proposed to realize efficient trajectory recovery of pedestrian trajectories. Extensive experiments on the novel collected dataset and commonly used two existing person re-identification datasets are performed, and the results evidently demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed the importance of efficient and accommodating online educational experiences. In this contribution, we present work-in-progress on the development of a novel system for facilitation of small group online discussions using an avatar during video conferencing. Four groups of eighth and ninth grades' students interacted with the system, with and without avatar guidance. Our pilot study results show that students reported the avatar-guided learning to be more efficient, easier to follow, and inducing more engagement and active participation. Students also showed better understanding of the learned subject with the avatar guidance, as shown by the post-session questionnaires. This system shows promise in future online educational activities as a facilitator of discussions with K-12 students. © 2021 Virtual Simulation Innovation Workshop, SIW 2021. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic initiated a worldwide race toward the development of treatments and vaccines. Small animal models included the Syrian golden hamster and the K18-hACE2 mice infected with SARS-CoV-2 to display a disease state with some aspects of human COVID-19. A group activity of animals in their home cage continuously monitored by the HCMS100 (Home cage Monitoring System 100) was used as a sensitive marker of disease, successfully detecting morbidity symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection in hamsters and in K18-hACE2 mice. COVID-19 convalescent hamsters rechallenged with SARS-CoV-2 exhibited minor reduction in group activity compared to naive hamsters. To evaluate the rVSV-ΔG-spike vaccination efficacy against SARS-CoV-2, we used the HCMS100 to monitor the group activity of hamsters in their home cage. A single-dose rVSV-ΔG-spike vaccination of the immunized group showed a faster recovery than the nonimmunized infected hamsters, substantiating the efficacy of rVSV-ΔG-spike vaccine. HCMS100 offers nonintrusive, hands-free monitoring of a number of home cages of hamsters or mice modeling COVID-19.