Loading...
13 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 13
- Approach and permanent human occupation of mainland Portugal coastal zone (1096–2021)Publication . Bastos, Maria Rosário; Pereira, Olegário Nelson Azevedo; Ferreira, Antero; Salgado, Filipe; Lira, Sérgio; Dias, JoãoThis paper aims to enhance the understanding of the littoralization process in mainland Portugal over a broad chronological framework. Littoralization is defined as the occupation and settlement of human communities along the coast. In this case, the analysis was based on the synchronic analysis of three chronologies: from the formation of Portugal to the settlement of the fountains (1096–1325); at the dawn of modernity, marked by the Portuguese expansion (1500–1524), with the first scientific census (1860); and in the present, with data from the last census (2021). The choice of chronology was dictated by the historical sources available and allowed us to check the trend of population dispersion both in terms of latitude and longitude, the latter being the analysis of the distance of the main population centers (counties) from the coast. In the first chronological segment, there is a “safety distance” from the exposed coastlines, which is gradually blurred over time until there is an impressive coastal demographic concentration in 2021, with around 80% of people settled within 50 km of the sea. So, the management of Portugal’s territory is an unequivocal indicator of the Anthropocene even with the risks of the disappearance of some beaches.
- The HUB: Designing an interactive social space for pre-adolescents’ well-beingPublication . Rodrigues, Pedro; Mitic, Marija; Krammer, Ina; Dias, João; Prada, Rui; Schrank, BeateFriendships are a fundamental source of support during challenging times, especially among pre-adolescents. The current pandemic situation makes it even harder to rely on support from their peers or strengthen friendships. To accompany and support pre-adolescents outside of school at a moment where most interactions happen online, we propose the HUB, a novel online interactive social space. The HUB is a safeguarded and monitored social space which seeks to improve social well-being and positive reinforcement practices between peers by design. This paper's key contributions derived from designing the HUB are threefold: an online social space which follows an iterative user-centered design approach; it is grounded on a theoretical model of friendship development to scaffold interactions of dyadic relationships that occur on the HUB; and it employs a set of gamification strategies, such as quests, achievements and rewards to keep pre-adolescents motivated, and, particularly, an acknowledgement system that encourages peers to work on, and acknowledge, character strengths and social skills in others, which are fundamental for their development as individuals.
- Reward-mediated individual and altruistic behaviorPublication . Gomes, Samuel; Alves, Tomás; Dias, João; Martinho, CarlosRecent research has taken a particular interest in observing the dynamics between individual and altruistic behavior. This is a commonly approached problem when reasoning about social dilemmas, which have a plethora of real-world counterparts in the fields of education, health, and economics. Weighing how incentives influence in-game behavior, our study examines individual and altruistic interactions in the context of a game task, by analyzing the players’ strategies and interaction motives when facing different reward attribution functions. Consequently, a model for interaction motives is proposed, with the premise that the motives for interactions can be defined as a continuous space, ranging from self-oriented (associated with individual behaviors) to others-oriented (associated with altruistic behaviors). To evaluate the promotion of individual and altruistic behavior, we leverage Message Across, an in-loco two-player videogame with adaptable score attribution systems. We conducted a user testing phase (N = 66) to verify to what extent individual and altruistic score functions led players to vary their strategies and interaction motives orientations. Our results indicate that both of these metrics varied significantly and according to our expectations, leading us to believe in the suitability of applying an incentive-based strategy to moderate the emergence of in-game behavior perceivable as individual or altruistic.
- Dual critic conditional wasserstein gAN for height-map generationPublication . Ramos, Nuno; Santos, Pedro; Dias, JoãoTraditionally, video-game maps are either made by hand, requiring many man-hours to produce good results, or made using Procedural Content Generation (PCG) techniques, which rely on a predetermined algorithm to generate every feature of the map. More recent studies have tried an approach using Deep Learning algorithms, which have their own limitations, in particular taking away the creative freedom of the designers. To circumvent this problem we propose a system that transforms low fidelity sketches into realistic height-maps through a Deep Learning model we call the Dual Critic Conditional Wasserstein GAN (DCCWGAN), thus providing high visual quality without removing control from the user. The presented system is capable of producing images that resemble the received input, and a user study with 79 participants showed that observers are not able to distinguish between earth-based height-map images and the images generated by our system.
- ISPO: a serious game to train the interview skills of police officersPublication . Guimarães, Manuel; Prada, Rui; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Soeiro, Cristina; Guerra, Raquel; Steiner-Stanitznig, Christina; Molinari, AndreaThe training of Police Interview competencies relies on the hiring of actors to play the role of victims, witnesses and suspects. While role-play can be a particularly effective training technique, it requires a significant amount of resources. The Interview Sim-ulation for Police Officers (ISPO) is a serious game developed as a collaboration of Gameware Europe with the Portuguese School of Police Officers. The objective of the game is to train police officers in communication competencies related to the interview of victims, witnesses, and suspects. Through ISPO, players can take the role of a police interviewer and practice the techniques and methodologies learned in theoretical classes. The serious game offers a safe, lightweight and easily repeatable experience. In order to evaluate the training effectiveness of the serious game, a study was con-ducted with 194 participants where general subjective learning effectiveness was mea-sured. Overall, the ISPO game improved the self-perceived competence of its players. Additionally, participants changed their opinion regarding the most valuable attitudes necessary to conduct a successful interview. Finally, the interaction with the game had a stronger effect on inexperienced users. These results lead us to believe that ISPO can be an added value to police officer schools.
- Heroine’s learning journey: motivating women in stem online courses through the power of a narrativePublication . Costa, Luis Felipe Coimbra; Gomes, Samuel; Santos, Ana Moura; Xexéo, Geraldo Bonorino; De Lima, Yuri Oliveira; Prada, Rui; Martinho, Carlos; Dias, JoãoAlthough Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are essential for the development of society, men hugely outnumber women in the majority of STEM fields in higher education, a factor that hinders inclusion and restricts the possibility of having different points-of-view. Previous studies indicate multiple causes of low female motivation in STEM degrees and careers, which inspired several initiatives to increase female interest in STEM. A proven way to captivate an audience to change its attitude is the heroic narrative model, a style of narrative in which a character goes through a sequence of difficulty-increasing and attitude-shaping quests. This paper proposes a heroic narrative model named Heroine's Learning Journey (HLJ) targeted at counteracting low female participation in STEM courses. In particular, the HLJ model is developed especially for enhancing STEM online courses, by using a narrative that can encourage female students to engage and prevail in them. The HLJ model is divided into three acts, each composed of several stages symbolizing steps tailored to a female student's development. The model was applied to set up the structure of a preexisting Machine Learning online course with hundreds of enrolled students. Although a first version of the course already presented a higher-than-expected female enrollment per se (approximate to 37.3%), with HLJ, we verified an even higher female enrollment (approximate to 59.2% ), slightly surpassing male enrollments. The feedback provided in learners' responses to a final, voluntary and anonymous questionnaire, allowed to obtain the degree of satisfaction of participants at the end of the course with the HLJ. The responses indicated that, at the end of the second edition of the online course, students were able to acknowledge the existence of a STEM gender imbalance, and appreciated the motivating nature of the HLJ model. From several student's feedback and comments submitted in the questionnaire, one can conclude that the attitude-shaping character of the HLJ was greatly appreciated, in addition to the technical content of the course. All these preliminary results are indicative of the usability of HLJ to foster gender balance in STEM online courses. Thus, the present study contributes to STEM Education by leveraging the motivation of young women to enter and prevail in these areas of study.
- EEG Mode: emotional episode generation for social sharing of emotionsPublication . Antunes, Ana; Campos, Joana; Dias, João; Santos, Pedro A.; Prada, RuiSocial sharing of emotions (SSE) occurs when one communicates their feelings and reactions to a certain event in the course of a social interaction. The phenomenon is part of our social fabric and plays an important role in creating empathetic responses and establishing rapport. Intelligent social agents capable of SSE will have a mechanism to create and build long-term interaction with humans. In this paper, we present the Emotional Episode Generation (EEG) model, a fine-tuned GPT-2 model capable of generating emotional social talk regarding multiple event tuples in a human-like manner. Human evaluation results show that the model successfully translates one or more event-tuples into emotional episodes, reaching quality levels close to human performance. Furthermore, the model clearly expresses one emotion in each episode as well as humans. To train this model we used a public dataset and built upon it using event extraction techniques(1).
- The influence of reward on the social valence of interactionsPublication . Alves, Tomas; Gomes, Samuel; Dias, João; Martinho, CarlosThroughout the years, social norms have been promoted as an informal enforcement mechanism for achieving beneficial collective outcomes. Among the most used methods to foster interactions, framing the context of a situation or setting in-game rules have shown strong results as mediators on how an individual interacts with their peers. Nevertheless, we found that there is a lack of research regarding the use of incentives such as scores to promote social interactions differing in valence. Weighing how incentives influence in-game behavior, we propose the use of rewards to promote interactions varying in valence, i.e. positive or negative, in a two-player scenario. To do so, we defined social valence as a continuous scale with two poles represented by Complicate and Help. Then, we performed user tests where participants where asked to play a game with two reward-based systems to test on whether the scoring system influenced the social interaction valence. The results indicate that the developed reward-based systems were able to foster interactions diverging in social valence scores, providing insights on how factors such as incentives overlap individual's established social norms. These findings empower game developers and designers with a low-cost and effective policy tool that is able to promote in-game behavior changes.
- MHeVA - mental health virtual assistant for high education studentsPublication . Antunes, André; Guimarães, Manuel; Santos, Pedro A.; Dias, João; Boura, Carla; Campos, JoanaCurrent Higher Education Institutions' mental health support systems lack the capabilities to cope with the growing need and demand for mental health support from students. We introduce MHeVA - Mental Health Virtual Assistant - which was designed with the goal of creating an intelligent virtual agent that could serve as a first-line diagnostic-aid tool for mental health services across universities and faculties. Students interact with the agent which attempts to establish rapport and promotes disclosure through mental health state evaluation questions. In addition to this, MHeVA has the ability to assess self-reported anxiety levels, provide health improvement tips and flag the most severe cases. In order to evaluate the agent's effectiveness, a user study was conducted that measured self-disclosure, rapport building, anxiety levels and stigma mitigation. Our findings suggest that MHeVA was able to elicit self-disclosure in higher education students and achieved high levels of acceptance and engagement. The work presented further supports the potential benefits of using IVAs to encourage self-disclosure and to be integrated into existing mental health care systems.
- Modeling students’ behavioral engagement through different in-class behavior stylesPublication . Gomes, Samuel; Costa, Luis; Martinho, Carlos; Dias, João; Xexéo, Geraldo; Moura Santos, AnaBackground The growing necessity of providing better education, notably through the development of Adaptive Learning Systems (ALSs), leveraged the study of several psychological constructs to accurately characterize learners. A concept extensively studied in education is engagement, a multidimensional construct encompassing behavioral expression and motivational backgrounds. This metric can be used to not only guide certain pedagogic methodologies, but also to endow systems with the right tutoring techniques. As such, this article aims to inspire improved teaching styles and automatic learning systems, by experimentally verifying the influence of in-class behaviors in students’ engagement. Results Over 16 math lessons, the occurrence of students’ and instructors’ behaviors, alongside students’ engagement estimates, were recorded using the COPUS observation protocol. After behavior-profiling the classes deploying such lessons, significant linear models were computed to relate the frequency of the students’ or instructors’ behaviors with the students’ engagement at different in-class periods. The models revealed a positive relation of students’ initial individual thinking and later group activity participation with their collective engagement, as well as a positive engagement relation with the later application of instructor’s strategies such as giving feedback and moving through class, guiding on-going work. Conclusions The results suggest the benefit of applying a workshop-like learning process, providing more individual explanations and feedback at the beginning of an interaction, leaving collective feedback and students’ guidance of on-going work for later on. Based on the relations suggested by our models, several guidelines for developing ALSs are proposed, and a practical illustrative example is formulated.