Pervasive and ubiquitous computing has come a long way in recent years, and our technologies and experimental prototypes are slowly moving out of the lab and into people’s everyday lives. In this talk I will provide an overview of such research conducted by my team over the past years, and outline the main challenges that we face in the future, particularly in terms of making our technology acc...

COLLECT-UML is an intelligent tutoring system that teaches Object-Oriented design using Unified Modelling Language (UML). UML is one of the most popular techniques used in the design and development of Object-Oriented systems nowadays. The Constraint-Based Modelling (CBM) has been used successfully in several systems and they have proved to be extremely effective in evaluations performed in rea...

This paper introduces the LetsRead Corpus of European Portuguese read speech from 6 to 10 years old children. The motivation for the creation of this corpus stems from the inexistence of databases with recordings of reading tasks of Portuguese children with different performance levels and including all the common reading aloud disfluencies. It is also essential to develop techniques to fulfill...

Systems driven out of equilibrium can often exhibit behaviour not seen in systems in thermal equilibriumfor example phase transitions in one-dimensional systems. In this talk I will review several ‘condensation’ transitions that occur when a conserved quantity is driven through the system. Although the condensation is spatial, i.e. a finite fraction of the conserved quantity condenses into a sm...

Policy problems like “What should we do about global warming?” are ill-defined in large part because we do not agree on a system to represent them the way we agree Algebra problems should be represented by equations. As a first step toward building a policy deliberation tutor, we investigated: (a) whether causal diagrams help students learn to evaluate policy options, (b) whether constructing d...

This paper offers a detailed text analysis of the written feedback given by two teachers to ESL students over a complete proficiency course. We consider this feedback in terms of its functions as praise, criticism, and suggestions. Praise was the most frequently employed function in the feedback of these two teachers, but this was often used to soften criticisms and suggestions rather than simp...

Constructive interaction provides natural thinking-aloud as test subjects collaborate to solve tasks. Since children may face difficulties in following instructions for a standard think-aloud test, constructive interaction has been suggested as evaluation method when conducting usability testing with children. However, the relationship between thinkaloud and constructive interaction is still po...

Participants were observed while searching and browsing the internet for campaign information in a mock-voting situation in three online note-taking conditions: No Notes, Private Notes, and Shared Notes. Note taking significantly influenced the manner in which participants browsed for information about candidates. Note taking competed for time and cognitive resources and resulted in less thorou...

Learning material in multimedia learning environments is frequently made up of text and pictures. Many students, however, have difficulties learning from such material successfully. In order to support students’ learning, we conceptualized a deep level strategy and a surface level strategy for learning from text and pictures. In an experimental study we investigated whether students who exercis...