Nelson Baloian - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Nelson Baloian

This work has been published in print by Logos Verlag, Berlin. Some rights are reserved, especial... more This work has been published in print by Logos Verlag, Berlin. Some rights are reserved, especially the right to distribute printed copies. The material and parts of it may be used in accordance with the creative commons license stated: CC BY-NC-SA. This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from the editors or authors. Violations are liable for prosecution under the German Copyright Law. The Open Access publication of this title under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license was made possible with the support from the Publication Fund of the University of Duisburg-Essen. The editors would like to express their gratitude to the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for funding their activities; to Rubina Danilova, Ashot Harutyanyan, and Gregor Schiele for their ongoing encouragement and support; and to all participants for their presentations and contributions to the workshop and this proceedings volume.

The DiKEViMA project [1] seeks to develop a virtual khachkar museum with the aid of engaged volun... more The DiKEViMA project [1] seeks to develop a virtual khachkar museum with the aid of engaged volunteers. UNESCO [2] describes cross stones as follows: "Khachkars reach [human dimensions of] 1.5 meters in height, and have an ornamentally carved cross in the middle, resting on the symbol of a sun or wheel of eternity, accompanied by vegetative-geometric motifs, carvings of saints and animals. Khachkars are created usually using local stone and carved using chisel, die, sharp pens and hammers." Important resources can be found in the books Armenia sacra [3], l'art des khachkars [4] and the contributions of Patrick Donabédian [5], who helped us work out a historical classification of khachkar styles, periods and locations. Table 1 summarizes the periods and styles in the development of khachkar craftsmanship.

Communications of the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, 2017

In the paper are presented the color-color diagrams (J-H)/(H-K) for all stars with visible values... more In the paper are presented the color-color diagrams (J-H)/(H-K) for all stars with visible values B<11, for which in the known catalogs the values of J, H, K, and also spectral classes and luminosity classes of these stars are given. The diagrams are constructed for luminosity classes Ia, Ib, II, III, IV, V. The similarity of diagrams for classes Ia and Ib (super giants) and II (giants), is obvious from these diagrams. The diagrams obtained by us can be used for discovering of new young stars and also for determining of color excesses of investigating stars. Maximal amounts of stars are registered in the classes V and III. There is a tendency of increasing of J-H and H-K along the sequence of spectral classes O – M, which is correct for all luminosity classes.

This article describes two demonstrations at the NTT Group Communication EXPO held at the Tokyo I... more This article describes two demonstrations at the NTT Group Communication EXPO held at the Tokyo International Forum in December 2005. These showed visitors two of our trials on the feasibility of remotely operating instruments in Chile from Japan: an optical telescope and rock hammers in an underground copper mine. These applications use a relatively high bandwidth of around 100 Mbit/s and require short delay times for smooth interactive operation. To satisfy these requirements we used NTT’s experimental research network GEMnet2 in collaboration with partner R&E (research and education) networks in North and South America. The demonstrations showed that Internet-based networks can handle interactive network applications with sufficient quality between two sites separated by almost the maximum possible distance on the Earth as long as the bandwidth and the route are carefully managed. ‘Global Academy’—Remote Network Applications Connecting Japan and Chile over GEMnet2 and R&E Network...

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management - S-BPM One '18

Some work scenarios foster the adoption of people-driven, dynamic and geo-located processes. To s... more Some work scenarios foster the adoption of people-driven, dynamic and geo-located processes. To support such scenarios, we suggest two fundamental changes in process structure and control. Regarding structure, we move away from traditional process models towards process contexts, which can be organized around geographical locations. Regarding control, we move away from model-based control-flow towards dynamic activities defined by the participants as processes unfold. This research makes the following unique contributions: 1) It provides the first implementation of people-driven dynamic processes; 2) It provides the first implementation combining people-driven dynamic processes and geographical context; 3) Finally, it provides a unique approach to build process context, which leverages the possibilities brought by microblogging platforms in exchanging semi-structured and unstructured messages.

J. Univers. Comput. Sci., 2021

Modern technologies and various domains of human activities increasingly rely on data science to ... more Modern technologies and various domains of human activities increasingly rely on data science to develop smarter and autonomous systems. This trend has already changed the whole landscape of the global economy becoming more AI-driven. Massive production of data by humans and machines, its availability for feasible processing with advent of deep learning infrastructures, combined with advancements in reliable information transfer capacities, open unbounded horizons for societal progress in close future. Quite naturally, this brings also new challenges for science and industry. In that context, Internet of things (IoT) is an enormously huge factory of monitoring and data generation. It enables countless devices to act as sensors which record and manipulate data, while requiring efficient algorithms to derive actionable knowledge. Billions of end-users equipped with smart mobile phones are also producing immensely large volumes of data, being it about user interaction or indirect telem...

JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2021

This paper presents a survey of innovative concepts and technologies involved in virtual museums ... more This paper presents a survey of innovative concepts and technologies involved in virtual museums (ViM) that shows their advantages and disadvantages in comparison with physical museums. We describe important lessons learned during the creation of three major virtual museums between 2010 and 2020 with partners at universities from Armenia, Germany, and Chile. Based on their categories and features, we distinguish between content-, communication- and collaboration-centric museums with a special focus on learning and co-curation. We give an overview of a generative approach to ViMs using the ViMCOX metadata format, the curator software suite ViMEDEAS, and a comprehensive validation and verification management. Theoretical considerations include exhibition design and new room concepts, positioning objects in their context, artwork authenticity, digital instances and rights management, distributed items, private museum and universal access, immersion, and tour and interaction design for ...

J. Univers. Comput. Sci., 2009

Nowadays, we are experiencing a rapid development in mobile computing because of the sinking pric... more Nowadays, we are experiencing a rapid development in mobile computing because of the sinking prices of the mobile devices and the availability of wireless networks that can connect them. The ability of many of these devices to set up ad-hoc networks by proximity allows face-to-face interaction combined with mobility. However, mobile devices are much weaker in computing power compared with desktop or laptop computing. Therefore, a key aspect to ensure success of an application supporting mobile learning is whether mobility is really needed for the activity it supports and if mobile devices do really represent an added value compared with the same application implemented on non-mobile devices. This work presents MCI-Supporter, an application supporting collaborative learning practises in the classroom. MCI-Supported was conceived by first analyzing the best known collaborative learning practices trying to find out which are the real needs for mobility and face-to-face interaction and ...

IEEE Access, 2021

Predicting an individual's risk of getting a stroke has been a research subject for many authors ... more Predicting an individual's risk of getting a stroke has been a research subject for many authors worldwide since it is a frequent illness and there is strong evidence that early awareness of having that risk can be beneficial for prevention and treatment. Many Governments have been collecting medical data about their own population with the purpose of using artificial intelligence methods for making those predictions. The most accurate ones are based on so called black-box methods which give little or no information about why they make a certain prediction. However, in the medical field the explanations are sometimes more important than the accuracy since they allow specialists to gain insight about the factors that influence the risk level. It is also frequent to find medical information records with some missing data. In this work, we present the development of a prediction method which not only outperforms some other existing ones but it also gives information about the most probable causes of a high stroke risk and can deal with incomplete data records. It is based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of plausibility. For the testing we used data provided by the regional hospital in Okayama, Japan, a country in which people are compelled to undergo annual health checkups by law. This article presents experiments comparing the results of the Dempster-Shafer method with the ones obtained using other well-known machine learning methods like Multilayer perceptron, Support Vector Machines and Naive Bayes. Our approach performed the best in these experiments with some missing data. It also presents an analysis of the interpretation of rules produced by the method for doing the classification. The rules were validated by both medical literature and human specialists.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

This paper present s a syste m called CodeBreaker for supporting small and medium size software d... more This paper present s a syste m called CodeBreaker for supporting small and medium size software develop me n t based on an extreme progra m mi ng principle. The system follows a decentralize d model of develop m e n t, which means, it does not requires a central repository. A set of rules for code owners hip maintains the synchroniz a tion of the work among all member s of the developing team which can work on-or offline. It allows fine-grained locking of parts of the code.

Future Generation Computer Systems, 2011

User interfaces are redesigned for various purposes, like adapting interfaces or meeting new requ... more User interfaces are redesigned for various purposes, like adapting interfaces or meeting new requirements during software creation processes. In the context of learning systems, the aim of interface redesign is to let the student creates his or her own interface corresponding to the abstract concept to be learned, which is reflected in the interface designed. In this article we present an approach to interface redesign in a cooperative learning scenario for cryptographic protocols. We describe an iterative workflow using two different pieces of software for the creation and redesign of interfaces and distributed simulation and evaluate this approach.

Expert Systems with Applications, 2020

Two approaches have traditionally been identified for developing artificial intelligence systems ... more Two approaches have traditionally been identified for developing artificial intelligence systems supporting decision-making: Machine Learning, which applies general techniques based on statistical analysis and optimization methods to extract information from a large amount of data looking for possible relations among them, and Expert Systems, which codify experts knowledge in rules, which are then applied to a specific situation. One of the main advantages of the first approach is its greater accuracy and wider generality for the application of the methods developed which can be used in various scenarios. By contrast, expert systems are usually more restricted and often applicable only to the domain for which they were originally developed. However, the machine learning approach requires the availability of large chunks of data, and it is much more complicated to interpret the results of the statistical methods to obtain some explanation of why the system decides, classifies, or evaluates a situation in a certain way. This issue may become very important in areas such as medicine, where it is relevant to know why the system recommends a certain treatment or diagnoses a certain illness. Likewise, in the financial sector, it might be legally required to explain that a decision to reject the granting of a mortgage loan to a person is not due to discriminatory causes such as gender or race. In order to be able to have interpretability and extract knowledge of available data we developed a classification method based on Dempster-Shafer's Plausibility Theory. Mass assignment functions (MAF) must be established to apply this theory and they assign a weight or probability to all subsets of the possible outcomes, given the presence of a certain fact on a decision scenario. Thus MAF assignments encode expert knowledge. The method learns optimal values for the weights of each MAF using the Gradient Descent method. The presented method allows combination of MAF which have been generated by the method itself or defined by an expert with those that are derived from a set of available data. The developed method was first applied to controlled scenarios and traditional data sets to ensure that classifications and explanations are correct. Results show that the model can classify with an accuracy which is comparable to other statistical classification methods, being also able to extract the most important decision rules from the data.

Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 2021

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...

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

In this paper we explore the construction of Situation Awareness using a collection of mobile, co... more In this paper we explore the construction of Situation Awareness using a collection of mobile, collaborative and visual-interactive devices. These devices provide a shared workspace where multiple users may correlate information about the problematic situation at hand and organize the unstructured activities necessary to handle the situation. A PDA prototype of these mobile, collaborative and visual-interactive devices has already been developed with the purpose to evaluate the feasibility of the collaboration model. The paper describes the collaboration model and presents an application scenario in the emergency management area currently being used to evaluate the prototype.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002

This paper reports on a work in-progress scenario of a computerintegrated classroom (CiC) with a ... more This paper reports on a work in-progress scenario of a computerintegrated classroom (CiC) with a focus on document management and document sharing. Following a brief introduction on the topic of distributed (distance) and non-distributed (face-to-face) learning, the system´s functionalities and architecture are being described, as well as the file structure to be found in the document archive. The system uses a unique type of XML document that can be created and edited by the FreeStyler application. The paper then concludes with a short description about the future work on the project.

Software visualization has been almost exclusively tackled from the visual point of view; this me... more Software visualization has been almost exclusively tackled from the visual point of view; this means visualization occurs exclusively through the visual channel. This approach has its limitations. Considering previous work for blind people we propose that complementing usual approaches with those techniques used to develop interfaces for non-sighted people can enhance user awareness of logical structures or data types using different perception chan-nels. To achieve better comprehension, we deal with new or augmented inter-faces built on top of standard systems for data visualization and algorithm ani-mation. The notion of specific concept keyboards is introduced. As a conse-quence, modern information and learning systems can be designed in such a way that not only sighted but also blind users can navigate within these sys-tems. 1 Value and Problems of Software Visualization Software visualization deals with the animation of algorithms, including numerical, geometric, graphic, and g...

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 ...

2017 IEEE 21st International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD), 2017

Science fiction had anticipated the prediction of future occurrence of crimes. In fact, that pred... more Science fiction had anticipated the prediction of future occurrence of crimes. In fact, that prediction is actually possible. It can be done with some imprecision and by computer algorithms using available data from various sources. The prediction involves approximate time and risk maps of occurrence of certain type of felonies such as home burglaries, armed robberies and violent thefts. The police can then use this information for increasing their patrolling accordingly and thereby reducing the crime occurrence rate. We present a crime prediction solution developed for Chilean large cities. Its novel approach includes three independent software modules which make predictions based on different algorithms. The final prediction is the cooperative integration of the individual ones. The developed system has been tested on historical data and its performance has been considered acceptable for police field use. An interesting result is that the performance of each individual module is i...

Collaboration Technologies and Social Computing

In many engineering schools around the world, ethics is a compulsory subject. However, teaching e... more In many engineering schools around the world, ethics is a compulsory subject. However, teaching ethics in engineering is not a simple duty, as engineering students usually attribute less value to learning ethics than to other subjects. Hereby, we report on our initial efforts towards developing a CSCL script for fostering meaningful ethical discussions among engineering students in the classroom. The script comprises successive phases in which the students conduct ethical judgments individually, in a small group and in a teacher-mediated class group discussion. The process seeks that students cast their judgments without inhibitions, so it maintains students’ anonymity in all phases. A trial with 35 engineering students confirmed that the tool offers a good usability, averaging a 79.9 score in the System Usability Scale (SUS). Furthermore, the trial cohort highlighted the convenience of anonymity when discussing ethical cases. Analysis of student behavior revealed that ethical judgments tend to be stable across the activity. However, judgments changed mostly in groups where more discussion was generated. In the future, we will study whether group composition that maximizes the heterogeneity of the students in the groups according to their individual ethical appraisals increases the likelihood of students varying their ethical judgments, as a result of argumentative and reflexive processes in discussions.

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

Implicit HCI is about computers understanding the intentions and needs of the user and proactivel... more Implicit HCI is about computers understanding the intentions and needs of the user and proactively triggering functions or adapting the interface to help users achieve their goals. In ubiquitous learning environments, this could mean that the software and hardware settings make relevant learning material available to students; activate proper learning environments, like collaborative authoring tools and/or chatting spaces; find most suitable peers for collaborative learning; etc., at the right time or place. In this research, we report on an experience in which we added implicit HCI to an existing application that supports ethics education called EthicApp. Successful methodologies supporting ethics education include students discussing real-life or simulated cases where ethical dilemmas are presented. It is important that students actively participate in the discussion in order to develop their key abilities for ethical discernment. EthicApp implements a methodology in which students read about a case that presents an ethical dilemma, report on their personal stance about it, and then discuss their opinions anonymously in a small group, and then with the whole class. We included an automatic mechanism of group formation in order to maximize discussion and active participation among the students. For this, we first compared two strategies of forming groups: one random and another maximizing the differences of individual students’ judgments about the presented case within each group. We found that the second strategy was the most appropriate to encourage participation. As a result, EthicApp was modified in order to implicitly generate groups with diverging ethical judgments.