Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The capture, the structuring and the exploitation of the expertise or the capabilities of an “object” (like a business partner, an employee, a software component, a Web site, etc.) are crucial problems in various applications, like cooperative and distributed applications or e-business and e-commerce applications. The work we describe in this paper concerns the advertising of the capabilities or the know-how of an object. The capabilities are structured and organized in order to be used when searching for objects that satisfy a given objective or that meet a given need. One of the originality of our proposal is in the nature of the answers the intended system can return. Indeed, the answers are not Yes/No answers but they may be cooperative answers in that sense that when no single object meets the search criteria, the system attempts to find out what a set of “complementary” objects do satisfy the whole search criteria, every object in the resulting set satisfying part of the criteria. In this approach, Description Logics (DL) is used as a knowledge representation formalism and classification techniques are used as search mechanisms. The determination of the “complementary objects” is founded on the DL complement concept.

In this paper, we present an innovating on-line monitoring system that has been developed by applying new advances in biosensors, mobile devices and wireless technologies. The aim of the system is to monitor people that suffer from heart arrhythmias without having to be hospitalized; and therefore, living a normal life while feeling safe at the same time. On the one hand, the architecture of the system is presented; and, on the other hand, some performance results and implementation details are explained showing how the previous solution can be effectively implemented and deployed into a system that makes use of PDAs, and wireless communications: Bluetooth and GPRS. Moreover, special attention is paid to two aspects: cost of the wireless communications and notification latency for the detected serious heart anomalies.

In order to support the residual communication capabilities of verbal impaired peoples softwares allowing Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) have been developed. AAC communication software aids provide verbal disables with an electronic table of AAC languages (i.e. Bliss, PCS, PIC, etc.) symbols in order to compose messages, exchange them via email, or vocally synthetize them, and so on. A current open issue, in thins kind of software, regards human-computer interaction in verbal impaired people suffering motor disorders. They can adopt only ad-hoc input device, such as buttons or switches, which require an intelligent automatic scansion of the AAC symbols table in order to compose messages. In such perspective we have developed an innovative composition assistant exploiting an user linguistic behavior model adopting a semantic/probabilistic approach for predictive Bliss symbols scansion. is based on an original discrete implementation of auto-regressive hidden Markov model called DAR-HMM and it is able to predict a list of symbols as the most probable ones according to both the previous selected symbol and the semantic categories associated to the symbols. We have implemented the composition assistant as a component of 2003 an AAC communication software centered on Bliss language and experimentally validated it with both synthetic and real data.

This paper puts forward a new design method based upon Alexandrian patterns for interface design for particular user groups. The author has created a set of interface design patterns for speech systems for older adults with the aim of supporting the dynamic diversity in this group. The patterns themselves reflect a significant body of research work with this user group uncovering important information about how they interact with speech systems. The design knowledge embedded in these patterns is therefore closely linked to knowledge about the user and enables interface designers to clarify which users are excluded from their software.

Within corporate intranet or on the WWW, a global search engine is the main service used to discover and sort information. Nevertheless, even the most “intelligent” ones have great difficulties to select those targeted to each user specific needs and preferences. We have built a mediated social media named SoMeONe, which helps people to control their information exchanges through trusted relationships. A key component of this system is a contact recommender, which helps people to open their relationship networks by exchanging targeted information with qualified new users. Instead of using only matching between interests of users, this “socially aware” recommender system also takes into account existing relationships in the social network of the system. In this paper, we describe the computations of those recommendations based on a social network analysis.

Man-Machine Interaction (MMI) systems that utilize multimodal information about users’ current emotional state are presently at the forefront of interest of the computer vision and artificial intelligence communities. Interfaces with human faces expressing emotions may help users feel at home when interacting with a computer because they are accepted as the most expressive means for communicating and recognizing emotions. Thus, emotion synthesis can enhance the atmosphere of a virtual environment and communicate messages far more vividly than any textual or speech information. In this paper, we present an abstract means of description of facial expressions, by utilizing concepts included in the MPEG-4 standard to synthesize expressions using a reduced representation, suitable for networked and lightweight applications.

Internet accessibility for the visually impaired community is still an open issue. Guidelines have been issued by the W3C consortium to help web designers to improve web site accessibility. However several studies show that a significant percentage of web page creators are still ignoring the proposed guidelines. Several tools are now available, general purpose, or web specific, to help visually impaired readers. But is reading a web page enough? Regular sighted users are able to scan a web page for a particular piece of information at high speeds. Shouldn’t visually impaired readers have the same chance? This paper discusses some features already implemented to improve accessibility and presents a user feedback report regarding the AudioBrowser, a talking browser. Based on the user feedback the paper also suggests some avenues for future work in order to make talking browsers and screen readers compatible.

The success of the Information Society, with the overabundance of online multimedia information, has become an obstacle for users to discover pertinent resources. For those users, the key is the refinement of resource discovery as the choice and complexity of available online content continues to grow. The work presented in this paper will address this issue by representing complex extensible user and information provider profiles and content metadata using XML and the provision of a middle canonical language to aid in learner-to-content matching, independent of the underlying metadata format. This approach can provide a federated search solution leading to personalise resource discovery based on user requirements and preferences, seamlessly searching over multiple repository types. The novelty of the work includes the complex extensible user profiles, information provider profiles, the canonical language and the federated search strategy. Although, the work presented is focused on E-Learning, the general ideas could be applied to any resource discovery or information retrieval system.