Vol.10 No.3&4 November 10, 2014

Social Networks and the Construction of Identity in Digital Environments (194-205)
        Mónica Aresta, Luis Pedro, Carlos Santos and António Moreira
The recognition of the creative, participatory and social dimensions of the Web brought profound changes to the way individuals approach education, identity, practice and knowledge. In a scenario characterized by connectivity and ease of access to people and content, the network provides a space where people can interact, learn, share experiences and build a reputation and identity available and accessible to the entire community. When it is almost impossible to stay out of the digital world and, therefore, of the production of an online identity, this paper addresses issues related with digital literacy, social networks and online identity. Presenting the main results of a case study developed at the University of Aveiro – Portugal, this paper describes how a group of students from a Master Degree Course adopted social networks to build a presence over the web and how they created, manifested and managed their online identity. When the characteristics of the digital world change the ways of building identity, and in a scenario where the contextualization of data and information is becoming increasingly important, this paper reflects upon the importance and relevance of building an identity in open social online environments.

Learning from Gaming: Teachers’ and Students’ Perceptions (206-217)
        Margarida Lucas
Research into the use of games in education is relatively new, but growing rapidly. Several authors suggest that these will gain widespread use in two to three years, but practical implementation is still rare and integration into the curriculum still seems unlikely. Games in education are described as inherently valuable, leading to a development of a range of skills and competences, such as collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication that may transfer to other social and work-related spheres. This article presents an experiment that used online video games to foster interaction among students and teachers from different educational levels and different national schools. Results suggest that both students and teachers perceived gaming as a means to harness curriculum interdisciplinarity, develop skills and acquire new knowledge.

Social Media Utilization in B2B Networks' Organizational Learning -- Review and Research Agenda Proposal (218-233)
        Elina Pettersson, Heli Aramo-Immonen, and Jari J. Jussila
Knowledge management (KM) in a business-to-business (B2B) network is a different task than intra-organizational KM. Therefore this conceptual paper searches for an answer to the question of what we should re-search in this more demanding KM environment. We suggest that the social media provides a variety of vehicles for performing organizational learning via KM in B2B networks. Since this is relatively novel research area, we have done a literature review and propose a research agenda in this article.

Mobile Devices for Teaching English as a Second Language in Higher Education, the Case of DUOC in Chile (234-243)
        Eileen Sepúlveda Valenzuela, Maria G. Badilla Quaintana, and
        Marcelo Careaga Butter
Mobile devices are efficient tools of language learning since they enable students to learn and practice anywhere and anytime with personalized content and progress. The article analyzes the incorporation of the use of mobile devices for teaching English as a second language in higher education. This research was developed on a positivist paradigm, with a descriptive and quantitative methodology. The sample was formed by 32 students of Basic English courses belong to DUOC UC Institute, in Chile who practice their writing skills through systematic activities developed during 2013 in the Virtual Platform Blackboard. The results of this study suggest that students reacted positively to the use of technology, but expressed concern about the technological difficulties. Main findings confirm that the use of technology enables student’s practice of English, transforming and improving the learning environment inside of the classroom and students feel comfortable and secure because they have a teacher and technology’s support.

Query Types and Energy Consumption in Mobile Applications: an Experimental Study (244-251)
        Na Wang, Puyuan Yang, Peiquan Jin, and Lihua Yue
Mobile devices and applications have been very popular in people’s daily life. However, the energy issue in mobile platform, or in other words, the quick use-out of battery, has been rather a bottle-neck for the further development of mobile applications, as modern mobile applications usually cost a lot of power in mobile devices. Thus, it has been an urgent need to develop energy-friendly techniques for mobile applications. The most important thing is to identify the major factors that cause the rapid decreasing of power in mobile applications. In this paper, we make a preliminary study on this issue, and conduct experiments on mobile platform to analyse the connection between query types and energy consumption. On this basis, we can identify the most energy-consuming queries in mobile applications. In detail, we choose the TPC_H benchmark as the basic workload and select different types of queries to see the relationship between query type and energy consumption in mobile applications. The results show that the energy consumption in mobile applications is sensitive to high-cost queries. This indicates that there should be query-dependant methods to improve the energy efficiency in mobile applications.

Using Game Theory in Computer Engineering Education through Case Study Methodology: Kodak vs Polaroid in the Market for Instant Cameras (252-262)
        Andres Faina, Jesus Lopez-Rodriguez, and Laura Varela-Candamio
Our teaching proposal lies in explaining some of the core concepts of non-cooperative game theory by means of real cases of strategic decision within the computer engineering education. The innovative features of our methodology are based on the use of PC simulations to analyze the strategic decisions faced by Kodak and Polaroid under several circumstances. The discussion of the Kodak vs Polaroid case fits very well to introduce the students the economic perspectives within the more technical discipline of engineering. With this new e-learning method, one the one hand, the students of computer engineering get a more realistic and complete vision in their learning and on the other reduce the degree of abstraction of the theory itself and thereby a greater motivation and interest in social sciences is achieved.

The Affordances of Mobile Computing Devices in Collaborative Learning (263-272)
        Ilias Hotzoglou
Tablet PCs, tablets, and PDAs are currently used in traditional classrooms to improve the learning process, allowing collaboration to take place among the instructor and students. Can these technologies promote student engagement, enhance the delivery of electronic course materials, and provide an effective way to connect the instructor and student together in an integrated learning environment? A literature review is conducted to determine the efficiency of these technologies contributing to collaborative learning. Tablet PCs have been successfully used in multiple United States institutions with many positive outcomes. Poor findings were found for the new tablets and smartphone devices which require more research to be conducted in the future.

The GRP Methodology: an Approach to Build Routes Based on Points of Interest (273-293)
        A.M.Magdalena Saldaña, Miguel Torres, Oleksiy Pogrebnyak, Marco oMoreno, and
        Giovanni Guzman
Many research areas are developing applications that use the Global Positioning System (GPS) in order to improve human’s life. In routing systems most of the studies are focused on time improvements. Despite they notify users the instructions that they should follow in their travels, they do not include support features that could be useful as landmarks or points of interest (POIs). In this paper, the Routing with Points of Interest (GRP) methodology is proposed. It is based on an application ontology that is used to describe POIs as shops, hospitals and schools, among others, located on the roadways of a case study. The GRP gives the users instructions to go from one place to another, combining semantic geospatial analysis tools, web and mobile technologies. The routes begin in the mobile position and after applying a geospatial process; the user obtains a map with the route, POIs located on the route, and instructions to change the direction with visual references to help him on his trip. The GRP methodology provides a filter to let user select the kind of business that he wants to visualize, besides the route elements. The cartography used on this work allows the map visualization without an Internet connection.

Fusion of Visible Images and Thermal Image Sequences for Automated Facial Emotion Estimation (294-308)
        Hung Nguyen, Fan Chen, Kazunori Kotani, and Bac Le
The visible image-based approach has long been considered the most powerful approach to facial emotion estimation. However it is illumination dependency. Under uncontrolled operating conditions, estimation accuracy degrades significantly. In this paper, we focus on integrating visible images with thermal image sequences for facial emotion estimation. First, to address limitations of thermal infrared (IR) images, such as being opaque to eyeglasses, we apply thermal Regions of Interest (t-ROIs) to sequences of thermal images. Then, wavelet transform is applied to visible images. Second, features are selected and fused from visible features and thermal features. Third, fusion decision using conventional methods, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Eigen-space Method based on class-features (EMC), and our proposed methods, thermal Principal Component Analysis (t-PCA) and norm Eigen-space Method based on class-features (n-EMC), is applied. Applying our suggested methods, experiments on the Kotani Thermal Facial Emotion (KTFE) database show significant improvement, proving its effectiveness.

Full Body Adjustment Using Iterative Inverse Kinematic and Body Parts Correlation (309-326)
        Ahlem Bentrah, Abdelhamid Djeffal, Mc Babahenini, Christophe Gillet, Philippe Pudlo, and
        Abdelmalik Taleb-Ahmed
In this paper, we present an iterative inverse kinematic method that adjust 3D human full body pose in real time to achieve new constraints. The input data for the adjustments are the starting posture and the desired end effectors positions -constraints-. The principal idea of our method is to divide the full-body into groups and apply inverse kinematic based on conformal algebra to each group in specific order, our proposed method involve correlation of body parts. In the first part of the paper we explain the used inverse kinematic when handle with one and multiple constraints simultaneously and in the case of the collision induced by the joints with the objects of the environment. The second part focuses on the adjustment algorithm of the full body using the inverse kinematic described above. Comparison is made between the used inverse kinematic(IK) and another inverse kinematic that have the same principle. In the case of multiple tasks simultaneously, our inverse kinematic gives results without conflict. With presence of obstacles, our IK allows to avoid collisions too. Preliminary results of the adjustment method show that it generates new realistic poses that respect quickly new constraints. The tests made on our adjustment method show that it resolves the motion retargeting problem.

Sleep Detection Using De-identified Depth Data (327-342)
        Bjorn Kruger, Anna Vogele, Marouane Lassiri, Lukas Herwartz, Thomas Terkatz,
        Andreas Weber, Carmen Garcia, Ingo Fietze, and Thomas Penzel
The work at hand presents a method to assess the quality of human sleep within a non-laboratory environment. The monitoring of patients is performed by means of a Kinect device. This results in a non-invasive method which is independent of immediate physical contact to subjects. The results of a study which was carried out as proof of concept are discussed and compared with the polysomnography-based gold standard of sleep analysis. When medical data are concerned, confidentiality is always an issue. This is no less important when monitoring people in their own homes, especially when they are in a situation as vulnerable as sleep. To meet the upcoming challenge of protecting people's privacy while still offering analyses of their data we introduce a blurring method to the acquired data and evaluate the use of our sleep detection test on such de-identified data sets.

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