Gustavo Zurita - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Gustavo Zurita
Sensors
Foot traffic, conversion rate, and total sales during a period of time may be considered to be im... more Foot traffic, conversion rate, and total sales during a period of time may be considered to be important indicators of store performance. Forecasting them may allow for business managers plan stores operation in the near future in an efficient way. This work presents a regression method that is able to predict these three indicators based on previous data. The previous data includes values for the indicators in the recent past; therefore, it is a requirement to have gathered them in a suitable manner. The previous data also considers other values that are easily obtained, such as the day of the week and hour of the day of the indicators. The novelty of the approach that is presented here is that it provides a confidence interval for the predicted information and the importance of each parameter for the predicted output values, without additional processing or analysis. Real data gathered by Follow Up, a customer experience company, was used to test the proposed method. The method wa...
Factoring Ethics in Technology, Policy Making, Regulation and AI, 2021
Nowadays the complexity of knowledge, the specialization of labor and the pervasiveness of ICT in... more Nowadays the complexity of knowledge, the specialization of labor and the pervasiveness of ICT in human activity, lead individuals to frequently make complex decisions with ethical implications. The educational system has a fundamental role in preparing specialized human capital in every discipline, however, it also faces the challenge of educating individuals with ethical discernment capabilities and behavior. In this book chapter, we describe the design, implementation and validation of EthicApp-RP, a social platform aimed at higher education settings, for fostering reflection and moral reasoning around ethical cases through a role-playing activity. We present an application of EthicApp-RP involving a cohort of undergraduate business students (N = 85), based on a case in which students play political and public leadership roles in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. The results indicate that students and teachers acknowledge the learning environment’s capacity to stimulate reflectio...
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2021
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
Springer eBooks, Aug 11, 2014
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2017
ABSTRACT Teaching and learning the principles of wireless communication is a challenging issue ma... more ABSTRACT Teaching and learning the principles of wireless communication is a challenging issue mainly because it is difficult for students to translate the theoretical models that are commonly used in this area into practical knowledge. In order to address this challenge, we explore how to design and implement novel teaching and learning activities that integrate the principles of situated learning supported by mobile, positioning and web technologies. In this paper we present the results of our on-going efforts in this direction describing the rationale of our approach, an application supporting a learning activity designed under this approach and the outcomes of an evaluation we conducted with 28 engineering students. Obtained results show that the proposed approach offers the students new possibilities to combine theoretical and practical knowledge in a variety of collaborative situations in which mobile and web technologies played a central role.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
ABSTRACT Situated learning stresses the importance of the context in which learning takes place. ... more ABSTRACT Situated learning stresses the importance of the context in which learning takes place. It has been therefore frequently associated with informal learning or learning outside the classroom. Mobile technologies can play an important role supporting this type of learning, since it mainly occurs on the field. In this paper we present a learning system and a methodology based on the use of patterns. Students learn about patterns by finding instances of them on the field, or by recognizing new patterns unknown to them so far. The teacher proposes tasks to the students consisting on finding instances of patterns or discovering new ones along a path or inside a pre defined area on a map. This work illustrates the role that geo-referenced data collected on the field can play in supporting situated learning activities.
International Conference on Computers in Education, 2016
The wide availability of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets among students as well as th... more The wide availability of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets among students as well as the included positioning technologies, high definition cameras and other sensors, together with contin ...
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, Dec 1, 2022
UCAmI 2018, 2018
Effective preparedness for reacting in case of a severe emergency requires that many experts with... more Effective preparedness for reacting in case of a severe emergency requires that many experts with various backgrounds evaluate the possible scenarios and come up with a single, unified plan which considers all opinions. This is a typical collaborative decision-making scenario, characterized by a process cycle involving modelling the process, defining the objectives of the decision outcome, gathering data, generating options and evaluating them according to the defined objectives. This is a decision-making scenario which requires the participation of various experts, who must evaluate and compare many scenarios. Each expert will have a partial knowledge about where people may be at the time of the emergency and how they will react. In emergency scenarios the geographical information often plays a significant importance, since plans need to consider the geography of the terrain from which the population should be evacuated, the safe areas where the population should be taken to, the ways connecting evacuations, and how the rescue teams can reach the places where the emergency occurred. This work presents a tool that can help a group of experts with various types of expertise, generate, visualize and compare the outcomes of various hypotheses. The paper also presents a real case simulation in the event of a tsunami following an earthquake at a site in northern Chile and the possibilities of evacuating people to safer zones.
O treino de competências sociais, como parte da psicoterapia, para crianças e adolescentes, reque... more O treino de competências sociais, como parte da psicoterapia, para crianças e adolescentes, requer que estes participem em actividades exteriores, nas quais têm que completar tarefas, tais como falar com alguém ou visitar um local especifico. De momento, a incapacidade, por parte dos terapeutas, de monitorizar os seus pacientes, promover esforços colaborativos e fortalecer atitudes positivas, é uma questão importante que afecta tanto o processo da terapia como os seus resultados. Neste artigo detalhamos a avaliação de um protótipo para um sistema colaborativo móvel e georreferenciado que suporta terapia de grupo in-situ. O sistema visa fornecer meios ao terapeutas, para monitorizar os seus pacientes, as suas localizações e os seus feitos, e inclui mecanismos de comunicação que facilitam a cooperação entre pacientes e terapeuta. Descrevemos o conceito por detrás do projecto, os protótipos de baixa fidelidade e os testes que foram levados a cabo para validá-los. São discutidos resulta...
There is consensus among curriculum developers of Business Schools that along with technical know... more There is consensus among curriculum developers of Business Schools that along with technical knowledge students should also be trained to acquire soft skills. Communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and problem solving are mentioned by some authors as the most important skills for professionals of the 21 st century to be successful. Students must perform learning activities applying these skills in order to develop them. In this work we present a learning activity intended for Business students which requires creativity in order to be performed. We developed a collaborative tool to support this activity, called Sketchpad. The students who used the system evaluated the contribution of the designed activity to creativity and the ability of the tool to support it through an open questionnaire based on the Creativity Factor Evaluation (CSI). A second evaluation was done concerning Sketchpad's collaborative support. Both studies showed a positive students' perception of the activity and tool value according to these evaluation dimensions.
2018 IEEE 18th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), 2018
In the era of mobile learning and digital native students, concepts like seamless learning, situa... more In the era of mobile learning and digital native students, concepts like seamless learning, situated learning and rhizomatic learning gain importance as the current technology is able to support them by developing new kinds of applications formobiledevices. Atthesametime, socialnetworkplatforms like Twitter are also being studied as a way to boost communication supporting collaborative knowledge construction since they are available everywhere and students are familiar with their use. This paper highlights an experience in which a mobile application called FeedbackApp was developed and used for these purposes. The main characteristic of this application is that it uses various ways to explore the information generated while searching and sharing information and discussing the learning topics, using concept maps, geographical maps and text lists. A preliminary experience shows that this application might encourage students to be more participative in discussions and exchange of ideas.
This paper reviews some research initiatives to allow situated learning through the use of comput... more This paper reviews some research initiatives to allow situated learning through the use of computer-supported mobile activities. The article also describes the development of a learning activity based on the situated learning theory, which makes use of a mobile application to help students to relate learning activities inside the classroom with activities performed in the field and at home. The application supports learning by discovering patterns, which might be used in various knowledge areas. This research work has been performed within the context of the LACCIR (Latin American & Caribbean Collaborative ICT Research) initiative, which is also briefly described in this article.
Increasingly more companies support their strategies and value propositions offering their client... more Increasingly more companies support their strategies and value propositions offering their clients some services that require physical mobility and teamwork by their staff. This article proposes a type of Location-based Services system called Geomanagement, which supports the fulfilment of business strategy for a real estate broker agency, based on mobility and collaborative work of their employees. Geomanagement application acts as a valuable support to explore real estate and potential client information in each showing appointment, to share information among realtors and to help new and old realtors in developing teamwork skills while they are in movement. Clients also value the great contribution of Geomanagement regarding the collaboration between realtors. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of Geomanagement by generating value in, an uncommon scenario, as is a real state broker agency. We show that the implementation of Geomanagement increases both collaboration among r...
Comput. Informatics, 2015
Several researchers have identified the design of collaborative systems as a particularly challen... more Several researchers have identified the design of collaborative systems as a particularly challenging task, because it has to consider services that are not easily identifiable by software designers. The systems that support the activities of partially virtual communities (PVC) are not an exception. Typically, designers of PVC supporting systems are able to identify services that have a visual representation on the user interface, but they usually overlook those that run in the system back-end. In an attempt to help designers to consider these two types of services, this article proposes a software architecture that can be used for both, designing new PVC supporting systems and evaluating existing ones. The architecture was used in three case studies as a design guideline during the development of PVC supporting platforms, and also as an instrument to evaluate three commercial systems. Although the obtained results are still preliminary, they indicate that the architecture is able t...
JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2021
The Journal of Universal Computer Science is a monthly peer-reviewed open-access scientific journ... more The Journal of Universal Computer Science is a monthly peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal covering all aspects of computer science, launched in 1994, so becoming twenty-five years old in 2019. In order to celebrate its anniversary, this study presents a bibliometric overview of the leading publication and citation trends occurring in the journal. The aim of the work is to identify the most relevant authors, institutions, countries, and analyze their evolution through time. The article uses the Web of Science Core Collection citations and the ACM Computing Classification System in order to search for the bibliographic information. Our study also develops a graphical mapping of the bibliometric material by using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer. With this software, the work analyzes bibliographic coupling, citation and co-citation analysis, co-authorship, and co-occurrence of keywords. The results underline the significant growth of the journal through time and...
Sensors
Foot traffic, conversion rate, and total sales during a period of time may be considered to be im... more Foot traffic, conversion rate, and total sales during a period of time may be considered to be important indicators of store performance. Forecasting them may allow for business managers plan stores operation in the near future in an efficient way. This work presents a regression method that is able to predict these three indicators based on previous data. The previous data includes values for the indicators in the recent past; therefore, it is a requirement to have gathered them in a suitable manner. The previous data also considers other values that are easily obtained, such as the day of the week and hour of the day of the indicators. The novelty of the approach that is presented here is that it provides a confidence interval for the predicted information and the importance of each parameter for the predicted output values, without additional processing or analysis. Real data gathered by Follow Up, a customer experience company, was used to test the proposed method. The method wa...
Factoring Ethics in Technology, Policy Making, Regulation and AI, 2021
Nowadays the complexity of knowledge, the specialization of labor and the pervasiveness of ICT in... more Nowadays the complexity of knowledge, the specialization of labor and the pervasiveness of ICT in human activity, lead individuals to frequently make complex decisions with ethical implications. The educational system has a fundamental role in preparing specialized human capital in every discipline, however, it also faces the challenge of educating individuals with ethical discernment capabilities and behavior. In this book chapter, we describe the design, implementation and validation of EthicApp-RP, a social platform aimed at higher education settings, for fostering reflection and moral reasoning around ethical cases through a role-playing activity. We present an application of EthicApp-RP involving a cohort of undergraduate business students (N = 85), based on a case in which students play political and public leadership roles in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. The results indicate that students and teachers acknowledge the learning environment’s capacity to stimulate reflectio...
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2021
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
Springer eBooks, Aug 11, 2014
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2017
ABSTRACT Teaching and learning the principles of wireless communication is a challenging issue ma... more ABSTRACT Teaching and learning the principles of wireless communication is a challenging issue mainly because it is difficult for students to translate the theoretical models that are commonly used in this area into practical knowledge. In order to address this challenge, we explore how to design and implement novel teaching and learning activities that integrate the principles of situated learning supported by mobile, positioning and web technologies. In this paper we present the results of our on-going efforts in this direction describing the rationale of our approach, an application supporting a learning activity designed under this approach and the outcomes of an evaluation we conducted with 28 engineering students. Obtained results show that the proposed approach offers the students new possibilities to combine theoretical and practical knowledge in a variety of collaborative situations in which mobile and web technologies played a central role.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
ABSTRACT Situated learning stresses the importance of the context in which learning takes place. ... more ABSTRACT Situated learning stresses the importance of the context in which learning takes place. It has been therefore frequently associated with informal learning or learning outside the classroom. Mobile technologies can play an important role supporting this type of learning, since it mainly occurs on the field. In this paper we present a learning system and a methodology based on the use of patterns. Students learn about patterns by finding instances of them on the field, or by recognizing new patterns unknown to them so far. The teacher proposes tasks to the students consisting on finding instances of patterns or discovering new ones along a path or inside a pre defined area on a map. This work illustrates the role that geo-referenced data collected on the field can play in supporting situated learning activities.
International Conference on Computers in Education, 2016
The wide availability of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets among students as well as th... more The wide availability of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets among students as well as the included positioning technologies, high definition cameras and other sensors, together with contin ...
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, Dec 1, 2022
UCAmI 2018, 2018
Effective preparedness for reacting in case of a severe emergency requires that many experts with... more Effective preparedness for reacting in case of a severe emergency requires that many experts with various backgrounds evaluate the possible scenarios and come up with a single, unified plan which considers all opinions. This is a typical collaborative decision-making scenario, characterized by a process cycle involving modelling the process, defining the objectives of the decision outcome, gathering data, generating options and evaluating them according to the defined objectives. This is a decision-making scenario which requires the participation of various experts, who must evaluate and compare many scenarios. Each expert will have a partial knowledge about where people may be at the time of the emergency and how they will react. In emergency scenarios the geographical information often plays a significant importance, since plans need to consider the geography of the terrain from which the population should be evacuated, the safe areas where the population should be taken to, the ways connecting evacuations, and how the rescue teams can reach the places where the emergency occurred. This work presents a tool that can help a group of experts with various types of expertise, generate, visualize and compare the outcomes of various hypotheses. The paper also presents a real case simulation in the event of a tsunami following an earthquake at a site in northern Chile and the possibilities of evacuating people to safer zones.
O treino de competências sociais, como parte da psicoterapia, para crianças e adolescentes, reque... more O treino de competências sociais, como parte da psicoterapia, para crianças e adolescentes, requer que estes participem em actividades exteriores, nas quais têm que completar tarefas, tais como falar com alguém ou visitar um local especifico. De momento, a incapacidade, por parte dos terapeutas, de monitorizar os seus pacientes, promover esforços colaborativos e fortalecer atitudes positivas, é uma questão importante que afecta tanto o processo da terapia como os seus resultados. Neste artigo detalhamos a avaliação de um protótipo para um sistema colaborativo móvel e georreferenciado que suporta terapia de grupo in-situ. O sistema visa fornecer meios ao terapeutas, para monitorizar os seus pacientes, as suas localizações e os seus feitos, e inclui mecanismos de comunicação que facilitam a cooperação entre pacientes e terapeuta. Descrevemos o conceito por detrás do projecto, os protótipos de baixa fidelidade e os testes que foram levados a cabo para validá-los. São discutidos resulta...
There is consensus among curriculum developers of Business Schools that along with technical know... more There is consensus among curriculum developers of Business Schools that along with technical knowledge students should also be trained to acquire soft skills. Communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and problem solving are mentioned by some authors as the most important skills for professionals of the 21 st century to be successful. Students must perform learning activities applying these skills in order to develop them. In this work we present a learning activity intended for Business students which requires creativity in order to be performed. We developed a collaborative tool to support this activity, called Sketchpad. The students who used the system evaluated the contribution of the designed activity to creativity and the ability of the tool to support it through an open questionnaire based on the Creativity Factor Evaluation (CSI). A second evaluation was done concerning Sketchpad's collaborative support. Both studies showed a positive students' perception of the activity and tool value according to these evaluation dimensions.
2018 IEEE 18th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), 2018
In the era of mobile learning and digital native students, concepts like seamless learning, situa... more In the era of mobile learning and digital native students, concepts like seamless learning, situated learning and rhizomatic learning gain importance as the current technology is able to support them by developing new kinds of applications formobiledevices. Atthesametime, socialnetworkplatforms like Twitter are also being studied as a way to boost communication supporting collaborative knowledge construction since they are available everywhere and students are familiar with their use. This paper highlights an experience in which a mobile application called FeedbackApp was developed and used for these purposes. The main characteristic of this application is that it uses various ways to explore the information generated while searching and sharing information and discussing the learning topics, using concept maps, geographical maps and text lists. A preliminary experience shows that this application might encourage students to be more participative in discussions and exchange of ideas.
This paper reviews some research initiatives to allow situated learning through the use of comput... more This paper reviews some research initiatives to allow situated learning through the use of computer-supported mobile activities. The article also describes the development of a learning activity based on the situated learning theory, which makes use of a mobile application to help students to relate learning activities inside the classroom with activities performed in the field and at home. The application supports learning by discovering patterns, which might be used in various knowledge areas. This research work has been performed within the context of the LACCIR (Latin American & Caribbean Collaborative ICT Research) initiative, which is also briefly described in this article.
Increasingly more companies support their strategies and value propositions offering their client... more Increasingly more companies support their strategies and value propositions offering their clients some services that require physical mobility and teamwork by their staff. This article proposes a type of Location-based Services system called Geomanagement, which supports the fulfilment of business strategy for a real estate broker agency, based on mobility and collaborative work of their employees. Geomanagement application acts as a valuable support to explore real estate and potential client information in each showing appointment, to share information among realtors and to help new and old realtors in developing teamwork skills while they are in movement. Clients also value the great contribution of Geomanagement regarding the collaboration between realtors. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of Geomanagement by generating value in, an uncommon scenario, as is a real state broker agency. We show that the implementation of Geomanagement increases both collaboration among r...
Comput. Informatics, 2015
Several researchers have identified the design of collaborative systems as a particularly challen... more Several researchers have identified the design of collaborative systems as a particularly challenging task, because it has to consider services that are not easily identifiable by software designers. The systems that support the activities of partially virtual communities (PVC) are not an exception. Typically, designers of PVC supporting systems are able to identify services that have a visual representation on the user interface, but they usually overlook those that run in the system back-end. In an attempt to help designers to consider these two types of services, this article proposes a software architecture that can be used for both, designing new PVC supporting systems and evaluating existing ones. The architecture was used in three case studies as a design guideline during the development of PVC supporting platforms, and also as an instrument to evaluate three commercial systems. Although the obtained results are still preliminary, they indicate that the architecture is able t...
JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2021
The Journal of Universal Computer Science is a monthly peer-reviewed open-access scientific journ... more The Journal of Universal Computer Science is a monthly peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal covering all aspects of computer science, launched in 1994, so becoming twenty-five years old in 2019. In order to celebrate its anniversary, this study presents a bibliometric overview of the leading publication and citation trends occurring in the journal. The aim of the work is to identify the most relevant authors, institutions, countries, and analyze their evolution through time. The article uses the Web of Science Core Collection citations and the ACM Computing Classification System in order to search for the bibliographic information. Our study also develops a graphical mapping of the bibliometric material by using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer. With this software, the work analyzes bibliographic coupling, citation and co-citation analysis, co-authorship, and co-occurrence of keywords. The results underline the significant growth of the journal through time and...