A Model to Develop Chatbots for Assisting the Teaching and Learning Process.

Recently, in the commercial and entertainment sectors, we have seen increasing interest in incorporating chatbots into websites and apps, in order to assist customers and clients. In the academic area, chatbots are useful to provide some guidance and information about courses, admission processes and procedures, study programs, and scholarly services. However, these virtual assistants have limited mechanisms to suitably help the teaching and learning process, considering that these mechanisms should be advantageous for all the people involved. In this article, we design a model for developing a chatbot that serves as an extra-school tool to carry out academic and administrative tasks and facilitate communication between middle-school students and academic staff (e.g., teachers, social workers, psychologists, and pedagogues). Our approach is designed to help less tech-savvy people by offering them a familiar environment, using a conversational agent to ease and guide their interactions. The proposed model has been validated by implementing a multi-platform chatbot that provides both textual-based and voice-based communications and uses state-of-the-art technology. The chatbot has been tested with the help of students and teachers from a Mexican middle school, and the evaluation results show that our prototype obtained positive usability and user experience endorsements from such end-users.

An Architecture for Collaborative Terrain Sketching with Mobile Devices.

3D terrains used in digital animations and videogames are typically created by several collaborators with a single-user application, which constrains them to update the shared terrain from their PCs, using a turn-taking strategy. Moreover, collaborators have to visualize the terrain through 2D views, confusing novice users when conceiving its shape in 3D. In this article, we describe an architecture for collaborative applications, which allow co-located users to sketch a terrain using their mobile devices concurrently. Two interaction modes are supplied: the standard one and an augmented reality-based mode, which helps collaborators understand the 3D terrain shape. Using the painting with brushesparadigm, users can modify the terrain while visualizing its shape evolution through the camera of their devices. Work coordination is promoted by enriching the 3D space with each collaborator's avatar, which provides awareness information about identity, location, and current action. We implemented a collaborative application from this architecture that was tested by groups of users, who assessed its hedonic and pragmatic qualities in both interaction modes and compared them with the qualities of a similar Web terrain editor. The results showed that the augmented reality mode of our prototype was considered more attractive and usable by the participants.

FunBlocks. A modular framework for AmI system development.

The last decade has seen explosive growth in the technologies required to implement Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems. Technologies such as facial and speech recognition, home networks, household cleaning robots, to name a few, have become commonplace. However, due to the multidisciplinary nature of AmI systems and the distinct requirements of different user groups, integrating these developments into full-scale systems is not an easy task. In this paper we propose FunBlocks, a minimalist modular framework for the development of AmI systems based on the function module abstraction used in the IEC 61499 standard for distributed control systems. FunBlocks provides a framework for the development of AmI systems through the integration of modules loosely joined by means of an event-driven middleware and a module and sensor/actuator catalog. The modular design of the FunBlocks framework allows the development of AmI systems which can be customized to a wide variety of usage scenarios.