Angela Guercio

Kent State University | KSU · Department of Computer Science

People with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulties in social communication and interaction. Their caregivers help them in overcoming these challenges. Social stories are tools largely adopted to improve the interaction and communication capabilities of people with ASD. The creation of a social story is not an easy task. Several guidelines...

This paper proposes a multimodal conversational interface that supports caregivers of people with ASD in the semiautomatic creation of social stories. With the support of the multimodal interface the editor lets caregivers select the appropriate elements and the content representations to be included in the social stories by following specific guid...

Blockchain has recently taken off as a disruptive technology, from its initial use in cryptocurrencies to wider applications in areas such as property registration and insurance due to its characteristic as a distributed ledger which can remove the need for a trusted third party to facilitate transactions. This spread of the technology to new appli...

The number of diagnoses of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) is growing every day. Children suffering from ASD lack of social behaviors, which strongly impacts on the inclusion of the child and his/her own family in the community. Much scientific evidence shows that social storytelling is a valuable tool for developing pro-social behaviors in children...

For this special issue of the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing in honor of Prof. Shi-Kuo Chang we review Prof. Chang's research contributions to the field of education. Always visionary and inspirational, these works reflect Prof. Chang's student-centered approach and his interest in building relationships among international educators in...

Big Data-based methods of learning analytics are increasingly relied on by institutions of higher learning in order to increase student retention by identifying at risk students who are in need of an intervention to allow them to continue on in their educational endeavors. It is well known that e-Learning students are even more at risk of failing o...

In this paper we continue our previous research on the development of the current model of higher education, which pointed out that the labor market is looking for people with competencies and skills reflecting a T-shape model. As a consequence, universities should include a wider mix of disciplines in the curricula of their courses. Hence, to over...

In this paper we review our previous research on the development of the current model of higher education, which pointed out that the labor market is looking for people with competencies and skills reflecting a T-shape model. As a consequence, universities should include a wider mix of disciplines in the curricula of their courses. Hence, to overco...

The paper discusses the smarter university model and some experimental activities as the base model that supports the educational institution while transitioning from the information technology era to the knowledge technology era. Jobs that require news skills and abilities will be in demand and the academy will be transformed from the role of "gen...

Cooperative learning is a paradigm of collaboration aimed to reach a common goal. The trend of using social networks and social media to deliver and exchange knowledge leads us to believe that collaboration skills must be strongly promoted to empower users to learn with and from each other to support the educational challenges of this century. In t...

In this paper we analyze the current situation of education in universities, with particular reference to the European scenario. Specifically, we observe that recent evolutions, such as pervasive networking and other enabling technologies, have been dramatically changing human life, knowledge acquisition, and the way works are performed and people...

Communities of Practice (CoP) are a cornerstone in the design and innovation process of knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of an experimental Open Community of Practice (OCoP), designed to deliver a programming course. The empirical model fosters cooperation between communities which share simi...

Post-secondary students are increasingly receiving instruction by eLearning. Many or these are part-time students or are working while taking classes. In such circumstances, students may find themselves short of time to study. One mechanism that can be exploited to make the best use of available time is ubiquitous eLearning. Ubiquitous e-learning i...

Recently organizations have begun to realize the potential value in the huge amounts of raw, constantly fluctuating data sets that they generate and, with the help of advances in storage and processing technologies, collect. This leads to the phenomenon of big data. This data may be stored in structured format in relational database systems, but ma...

In a cooperative environment technical excellence and high quality students’ artifacts is what teachers strive to achieve while educating computer science students and facing the challenges of this new century. When agile techniques and accelerators and injected in the process in a cooperative environment the consonance and resonance in groups incr...

The ETCplus project tackles the challenges of developing a sequence of learning activities, topics and assessments that improve the learning skills of the modern students. The ETCplus portal connects faculty and students from different institutions to define learning goals and discipline-related skills and collaborate in a distribute environment. T...

Abstract - In a cooperative environment technical excellence and high quality students’ artifacts is what teachers strive to achieve while educating computer science students and facing the challenges of this new century. When agile techniques and accelerators and injected in the process in a cooperative environment the consonance and resonance in...

This paper describes our preliminary work in progress on ubiquitous e-learning. Ubiquitous e-learning is learning which can take place anywhere, anytime. Following this paradigm, ubiquitous e-learners use mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets, and laptops to learn wherever they are. Furthermore, ubiquitous e-learning implies context-sensitiv...

Searching for relevant information on the web is an important aspect of distance learning. This activity is a challenge for visually impaired distance learners. While sighted people have the ability to filter information in a fast and non sequential way, blind persons rely on tools that process the information in a sequential way. Learning is slowe...

ETCplus found its life from the best practices identified in the ETC 1 (Enforcing Team Cooperation) project. After being applied in about 50 different projects involving Italian universities, ETC has been extended to produce an experiment of cooperation between two diverse communities of practice cooperating around two selected academic courses: on...

Abstract—This paper describes preliminary work in progress on using social networks to form learning communities for e-learning. Today’s learners are increasingly likely to engage in learning activities via some form of e-learning. In order to meet the needs of these learners, a personalized approach to web-based e-learning is very helpful. An adap...

Abstract Achieving technical excellence and good design of the students’ deliverables is what a Computer Science teacher must achieve in a successful course. We believe that when agile techniques are used in a teaching environment the learning speed and the quality of the material produced by students improves. Agile processes promote sustainable d...

This paper describes our preliminary work in progress on using social networks to form learning communities for e-learning. Today's learners are increasingly likely to engage in learning activities via some form of e-learning. In order to meet the needs of these learners, a personalized approach to web-based e-learning is very helpful. An adaptive...

Searching for relevant information on the web is an important aspect of distance learning. This activity is a challenge for visually impaired distance learners. While sighted people have the ability to filter information in a fast and non sequential way, blind persons rely on tools that process the information in a sequential way. Learning is slowe...

Browsers and search engines are essential tools for retrieving information in distance learning but this technology is still a challenge for blind and visually impaired persons. Deciding to read or not read a page often requires the listening to an abundance of undesired information. While sighted people have the ability to filter information in a...

This paper describes our work in progress on ubiquitous eLearning. Today's learners are increasingly likely to engage in learning activities "on the fly" (while commuting, between other activities, on work breaks, etc.) than to use long, concentrated work sessions to learn course material. In order to meet the needs of these learners, a ubiquitous...

In an Internet-based multimedia application that plays an orchestra of remote source sounds, the synchronization of audio media streams is essential for optimal performance of the piece. The application that enables this virtual synchronized orchestra benefits from the use of a language containing constructs that help express the specifications and...

This paper describes our work in progress on ubiquitous eLearning. Today's learners are increasingly likely to engage in learning activities "on the fly" (while commuting, between other activities, on work breaks, etc.) than to use long, concentrated work sessions to learn course material. In order to meet the needs of these learners, a ubiquitous...

With the growth of the Internet there is a clear need to develop distributed multimedia languages that integrate asynchronous interaction, event based triggers, reactivity, communication, computation and visualization for transparent modeling, monitoring and human-computer interaction. In our previous research, we described an XML based distributed...

Multimedia Software Engineering (MSE) is a new frontier for both Software Engineering (SE) and Visual Languages (VL). In fact multimedia software engineering can be considered as the discipline for systematic specification, design, substitution and verification of visual patterns. In this paper we concentrate on the first of these possibilities, di...

Multimedia communication over the Internet has gained popularity in recent years. An efficient means of communication is vital for multimedia movies to reach consumers who can use voice commands to interactively modify XML based animations and movies depending on their subjective need. However, the initial modeling of an XML based multimedia movie...

Current Internet based multimedia modeling systems and languages lack visualization based upon integration of asynchronous events and deterministic synchronization and triggering based upon such integration. Modeling interactive and real world systems needs such integration. The paper introduces a modeling technique for reactive distributed multime...

Internet is being used more pervasively for multimedia retrieval, multimedia transmission and rendering. However, little work has gone on the Internet based multimedia modeling integrating user interaction, asynchronous and non-deterministic multimedia events, multiple multimedia streams, and their synchronization. In this paper, we describe a new...

Multimedia Software Engineering (MSE) is a new frontier for both Software Engineering (SE) and Visual Languages (VL). In fact multimedia software engineering can be considered as the discipline for systematic specification, design, substitution and verification of visual patterns. Visual Languages contribute to MSE such concepts as: Visual notation...

Multimedia applications are becoming increasingly important in areas such as education (digital libraries, training, presentation, distance learning), health care (telemedicine, health information management, medical image systems), entertainment (video-on-demand, music databases, interactive TV), information dissemination (news-on-demand, advertis...

Multimedia Software Engineering (MSE) is a new frontier for both Software Engineering (SE) and Visual Languages (VL). In fact multimedia software engineering can be considered as the discipline for systematic specification, design, substitution and verification of patterns that are often visual. Visual Languages give such contributions to MSE as: V...

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1.................................................................................................................................................. 3 TAO-BASED MULTIMEDIA APPLICATION DEVELOP...

Multimedia systems incorporating hyperlinks and user interaction can be prototyped using TAOML, an extension of HTML. TAOML is used to define a Teleaction Object (TAO) which is a multimedia object with associated hypergraph structure and knowledge structure. The user can create and modify the private knowledge of a TAO so that the TAO will react au...

The storage and retrieval of multimedia data is a crucial problem in multimedia information systems due to the huge storage requirements. It is necessary to provide an efficient methodology for the indexing of multimedia data for rapid retrieval. The aim of this paper is to introduce a methodology to represent, simplify, store, retrieve and reconst...

Multimode database systems are becoming increasingly important as organizations accumulate more multimedia data. There are few solutions that allow the information to be stored and managed efficiently. Relational systems provide features that organization rely on for their alphanumeric data. Unfortunately, these system lack facilities necessary for...

A visual software engineering environment referred to as the Multimedia IC Development Environment (MICE) is described. MICE is to be used as the basis for the study of the visual design process applied to the development of TAO-based multimedia applications. The unifying model used in this approach is barred on Teleaction Objects (TAOs). TAOs are...

A teleaction object (TAO) is a multimedia object with associated hypergraph structure and knowledge structure. The user can create and modify the private knowledge of a TAO so that the TAO will react automatically to certain events. The hypergraph structure supports the effective presentation and efficient communication of multimedia information. T...

The technique of symbolic projection has been widely studied in the area of image database systems as a first step towards content-based indexing and retrieval of images. In this paper we have extended the idea of symbolic projections to video and audio data as well as to multimedia documents containing combinations of these data types. Formal defi...

A prototype object-oriented multimedia database management system currently being developed is described. The system supports the storage and retrieval of images, video, audio and documents composed of these types. The major features of the system include: (1) content-based indexes for each of the data types, (2) an intuitive user-oriented query la...

A prototype object-oriented multimedia database management system currently being developed is described. The system supports the storage and retrieval of images, video, audio and documents composed of these types. The major features of the system include: (1) content-based indexes for each of the data types, (2) an intuitive user-oriented query la...

Data flow diagrams are an important design aid in system development. CASE tools allow data flow diagram construction and modification to be automated. Decomposition is the top-down development of a data flow diagram starting with the system inputs and the system outputs. Decomposition may also be automated, resulting in an interactive process for...

The concepts of virtual agents (VAs) and virtual communities (VCs) are proposed for interagent communication and cooperation based on `scientific community' metaphor. VAs are `images' of autonomous agents (expert decision support systems and human decision makers) dynamically created in a local agent's `mind' (or knowledge base) and linked to the r...

Relation grammars are introduced as a powerful formalism for specifying the syntax of visual languages and, more generally, of multi-dimensional languages. Textual languages use only the implicit relation of sequential concatenation of symbols. The proposed extension relax this limitation and allows the introduction of any number of relations. By a...

A grammatical inference technique tailored for the definition of the syntax of visual languages is presented. The technique employs a functional similarity measure between icons, the primitives of visual languages. An algorithm based on this technique has been implemented and utilized for the development of the inference module of a system for the...

Relation grammars (RGs) are introduced as a possible general framework for specifying the syntax of visual languages and, more generally, of multi-dimensional languages. A formal definition of relation grammars is given. Two examples of applications on graphs are shown. RG formalism is compared to conventional context-free grammars. RGs are used to...

A system to generate and interpret customized visual languages in given application areas is presented. The generation is highly automated. The user presents a set of sample visual sentences to the generator. The generator uses inference grammar techniques to produce a grammar that generalizes the initial set of sample sentences, and exploits gener...

Using the SIL-Icon compiler, whereby a general-purpose iconic system is specialized by expert provision of domain-specific grammar and semantics to define the individual visual language, a learning interface module (LIM) has been designed allowing the nonexpert user to utilize the system and define his or her own visual language providing only samp...

A tree learning algorithm that uses tree systems inference techniques is presented. The algorithm observes similarity between subtrees and embedding tree structures and affects grammatical expansions that enlarge the input sample set. An application to a set of icons from the SIL-ICON Compiler v.3 is described. The algorithm adds learning capabilit...

In this paper, we give purity-preserving conditions for iconic operators, and present a formal definition of degree of icon purity by extending an icon system to a fuzzy icon system, based upon the theory of fuzzy sets. We also show an icon system can be modeled by means of an attribute grammar.

Within a robotic environment where both a mechanical manipulator and an artificial eye must cooperate in order to perform a well specified task (perhaps a changing one in time) the software environment and programming language play a crucial role in the design and implementation of the control strategies. For this reason both from the area of PR an...