Nuno Escudeiro | Instituto Politecnico do Porto (original) (raw)

Papers by Nuno Escudeiro

A internacionalização não pode ser implementada na ausência do entendimento sobre as mudanças per... more A internacionalização não pode ser implementada na ausência do entendimento sobre as mudanças permanentes a que o mundo global está hoje sujeito e o seu propósito deve ser a melhoria da qualidade e dar um contributo significativo para a sociedade. Mesmo na presença de um número considerável de estratégias internacionais, nacionais, regionais e locais que dinamizam a internacionalização através da mobilidade, o número de estudantes em mobilidade internacional na área da OCDE em 2015 representa cerca de 5,6% das matrículas a nível mundial, valor que demonstra que a maioria dos estudantes são-no no seu país de origem. O padrão de mobilidade concentra-se num pequeno conjunto de países, moldado por fatores de proximidade, e os maiores países anfitriões são as economias avançadas de língua inglesa. Proporcionar excelentes oportunidades de mobilidade é fundamental, mas além de oferecer oportunidades para a pequena proporção de estudantes que pode estudar fora, a instituição deve esforçar-s...

Intelligent Tutoring Systems

During this critical period the humankind faces, one of the most affected daily activities is the... more During this critical period the humankind faces, one of the most affected daily activities is the education. Teachers and students of all education levels had to adopt new technological means to overcome the distance and to continue their education. Above and beyond the new prospects that this situation arises, also many problems were raised. For example, the special care education e.g., deaf or hard hearing students, face more difficulties than in ordinary situations. These students either read the lips or have to see their interlocutor’s whole body, in order to understand what he/she is saying but this nowadays is almost inevitable. In the unlikely scenario that their school is open, all classroom participants including teacher must wear a face mask, while in distance learning they can see only a small window of their teacher and most likely only his/her face. This paper presents the ways of communication of deaf and hard hearing people and proposes a novel educational tool that with the proper use should help them overcome this difficult situation.

2018 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)

Deaf and blind students face communication barrierst that are constantly present in their daily l... more Deaf and blind students face communication barrierst that are constantly present in their daily lives. These barriers arise naturally since the deaf community, the blind community and the rest of the students and teachers use different languages and different channels to communicate. These barriers have a significant impact in the academic, personal and professional development of deaf and blind students. Using automatic tools to assist the fluid communication between people using different languages and different channels of communication might significantly promote the social inclusion of disabled students. In this paper we describe the ACE architecture which incorporates VirtualSign, a translator for sign language and other components to allow for the real time translation between sign and oral languages. This architecture supports any sign language. We expect ACE will provide ways for the fluid communication among deaf people, blind people and those not constrained by these disabilities.

The Journal of Community Informatics

This article discusses the artistic activity titled ‘Conversations with the edge’ that was execut... more This article discusses the artistic activity titled ‘Conversations with the edge’ that was executed by communities in Australia, Russia and Finland, and curated for an exhibition at the Helinä Rautavaara Museum in Espoo, Finland in 2017. This activity was created in the context of Margin to Margin: Women living on the edges of the world, a larger arts-based research project that took place between four geographical margins: outback South Australia, Finnish Lapland, Russian Kola Peninsula and Namibia. Margin to Margin was a collaboration between artist communities with the aim to explore the relationship between art-making and empowerment of makers living and working ‘on the edges’. The aim of the project was to understand the realities marginalised communities face whilst giving voice to these communities by exhibiting their art in various formats, stimulating digital participation and utilising technology for digital inclusion. The purpose of the article is to develop a model that ...

This paper discusses the concepts of game design and gamification of content, based on the develo... more This paper discusses the concepts of game design and gamification of content, based on the development of a serious game aimed at making the process of learning sign language enjoyable and interactive. In this game the player controls a character that interacts with various objects and nonplayer characters, with the aim of collecting several gestures from the Portuguese Sign Language corpus. The learning model used pushes forward the concept of gamification as a learning process valued by students and teachers alike, and illustrates how it may be used as a personalized device for amplifying learning. Our goal is to provide a new methodology to involve students and general public in learning specific subjects using a ludic, participatory and interactive approach supported by ICTbased tools. Thus, in this paper we argue that perhaps some education processes could be improved by adding the gaming factor through technologies that are able to involve students in a way that is more physic...

Our society is experiencing sudden changes in work organization in part due to the growing ease w... more Our society is experiencing sudden changes in work organization in part due to the growing ease with which people can collaborate. Many successful cases of peer-to-peer models of organization arise and assume leading positions in world economy replacing, in many cases, the traditional hierarchical organization. People are evolving and interacting within heterogeneous teams composed by members from many different cultural groups and with distinct skills and backgrounds. Modern economy requires engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international setting. However, these competences are not usually addressed in most engineering curricula. We believe that in such a demanding and culturally diverse environment as the labour market is today, it is essential to promote team work and communication skills at an international and intercultural level. In the Multinational Undergraduate Team Work course, MUTW, students develop their capstone project as members of an ...

Industry 4.0 – the new industrial revolution – is a new paradigm of the industry based on increas... more Industry 4.0 – the new industrial revolution – is a new paradigm of the industry based on increased automation. However, the development of professional automated industrial systems nowadays is still a “proprietary technology” at high costs, which in a way impede its development. The implementation of free and accessible systems will make it possible to open the range of possibilities and work in their development when it comes to implementing such systems. The Openin project develops innovative ways to teach Arduino programming as a way to democratize the use of open source microcontrollers. The results from several pilot courses ran in Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy show that the developed materials and the innovative teaching approaches are valuable and facilitate the process of learning microcontrollers programming.

The web is a vast repository of human knowledge that is much ex- plored as an information source;... more The web is a vast repository of human knowledge that is much ex- plored as an information source; however, web characteristics, such as volume, dynamics and heterogeneity require significant amounts of effort to satisfy pri- vate or institutional information needs. Topic focused portals try to reduce the effort that is required to end-users at the expense of extra time and effort that is required to an editor, who manages the portal on behalf of all its end-users. This editorial effort can be reduced by semi-automating some of editor's tasks. The higher aim of this work is to contribute to the development of a computational framework able to assist web site editors to retrieve and manage web content. We expect to reduce the cost of maintaining web sites and also to improve end-user satisfaction.

2017 12th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI)

Identifying hand configuration is a critical feature of sign language translation. In this paper,... more Identifying hand configuration is a critical feature of sign language translation. In this paper, we describe our approach to recognize hand configurations in real time with the purpose of providing accurate predictions to be used in automatic sign language translation. To capture the hand configuration we rely on data gloves with 14 sensors that measure finger joints bending. These inputs are sampled at a frequency of 100Hz and fed to a classifier that predicts the current hand configuration. The classification model is created from an annotated sample of hand configurations previously acquired. We expect this approach to be accurate and robust in the sense that the performance of the classification model should not vary significantly when the classifier is being used by one or another user. The results from our experimental evaluation show that there is a very high accuracy, meaning that data gloves are a good approach to capture the descriptive features of hand configurations. However, the robustness of such an approach is not as good as desirable since the accuracy of the classifier depends on the user, i.e., the accuracy is high when the classifier is used by a user who trained it but decreases in other cases.

ATHENA is a federation of seven mid-size Higher Education Institutions leveraging their combined ... more ATHENA is a federation of seven mid-size Higher Education Institutions leveraging their combined strengths to deliver high-quality education and research with significant impact on youth employability and social advancement at the local, national and European level. ATHENA aims to the development of an all-inclusive, sustainable and safe digital economy accompanying and shaping the digital transformation of societies. At this talk we will guide you through the ATHENA Education model and discuss its main features related to sustainable education.

Tese de mestrado. Analise de Dados e Sistemas de Apoio a Decisao. Faculdade de Economia. Universi... more Tese de mestrado. Analise de Dados e Sistemas de Apoio a Decisao. Faculdade de Economia. Universidade do Porto. 2004

In some classification tasks, such as those related to the automatic building and maintenance of ... more In some classification tasks, such as those related to the automatic building and maintenance of text corpora, it is expensive to obtain labeled examples to train a classifier. In such circumstances it is common to have massive corpora where a few examples are labeled (typically a minority) while others are not. Semi-supervised learning techniques try to leverage the intrinsic information in unlabeled examples to improve classification models. However, these techniques assume that the labeled examples cover all the classes to learn which might not stand. In the presence of an imbalanced class distribution getting labeled examples from minority classes might be very costly if queries are randomly selected. Active learning allows asking an oracle to label new examples, that are criteriously selected, and does not assume a previous knowledge of all classes. D-Confidence is an active learning approach that is effective when in presence of imbalanced training sets. In this paper we discu...

Blended learning and blended mobility are becoming more and more popular approach in education. B... more Blended learning and blended mobility are becoming more and more popular approach in education. Both are enabled by the technology that support teachers and students’ activities during the pedagogical process as well as mobility. Especially the mobility gained a lot with technological support, while students and teacher got the possibility to be mobile in all those cases, where, for various reasons such as economic, family or time constraints, they would otherwise not be able to participate. With blending different approaches and technologies, also the teaching and learning changed a lot. In this, we have to deal with the new challenges of understanding learning and teaching, among which the intercultural challenges are also included. On the base of this awareness as well as experiences in two projects - one oriented on blended and virtual learning and another on blended mobility we will present our proposals how to deal with intercultural challenges.

Wireless sensors are an irreplaceable link in the chain of global networking today. There is almo... more Wireless sensors are an irreplaceable link in the chain of global networking today. There is almost no area of human activity where they are still not used, and they will be used in the near future almost everywhere. Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of sensor nodes that are arranged (usually randomly) in an area. The main problem is the limited power supply. Sensors are usually powered by the battery which is not possible to replace. The lifetime of the network depends on the duration of battery power of sensor nodes. The largest part of the consumed energy goes for communication with the rest of the network. Therefore, the selection of good routing protocol is essential for the long life-span of the network. There are a large number of proposed protocols and they can be divided into several groups, depending on the approach to the problem. In this paper we present a family of hierarchical protocols, their common features and specifi c implementation, we will prese...

Modern economy requires engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an intern... more Modern economy requires engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international setting. However, these competences are not usually addressed in engineering curricula. In the Blended Academic International Mobility course, Blended-AIM, students develop their capstone project as members of an international and multidisciplinary team while working at their home institutions. Team members are geographically spread to assure heterogeneous teams and to promote international cooperation. This paradigm, although very suited for engineering degrees, can be adapted and applied in any project/internship course unit. The results from the first 10 editions of the course that ran between 2009/10 and 2018/19 support our initial hypothesis that Blended-AIM significantly promotes students’ soft skills without requiring costly and time consuming changes to prior degree curricula. It has the additional benefit of tearing down most of the barriers to international mobility in ...

Eighth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality

Sustainable education has many facets involving not only the conservation of our natural ecosyste... more Sustainable education has many facets involving not only the conservation of our natural ecosystem and the development of a sustainable society but also promoting equity and ensuring lifelong learning opportunities for all regardless of any handicaps or circumstances. UNESCO, through its Sustainable Development Goals, and the European Commission through several programmes, push the society and the universities to promote Quality Education as a core asset of modern societies in the digital era. ATHENA is a European University, a federation of seven higher education institutions, aimed to nurture the development of all-inclusive digitalization of societies. The educational model of ATHENA is based on several initiatives and novel pedagogies to advance green education and inclusion at the European Higher Education Area. At this paper we describe the general architecture of ATHENA focusing on concrete activities directly linked to sustainable education such as blended mobility, competence clusters, remote labs and assistive technology. ATHENA will set all these in place during the coming three years starting in October 2020. By 2023 ATHENA will be a renowned brand in higher education, a unified, yet distributed, campus offering sustainable equitable education and research to its stakeholders.

2019 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)

Over the last years, there has been an increase in hearing-impaired students who use sign languag... more Over the last years, there has been an increase in hearing-impaired students who use sign language as their main form of communication attending higher education institutions around the world. The knowledge that their comprehension of texts is reduced due to sentence structure differences causes a need for more solutions to improve communication and support students in environments where they are unable to be accompanied by sign interpreters. This article details the improvements and current structure of the VirtualSign platform, a bidirectional sign language to text translation tool that has been in development since 2015. The platform is divided into two main parts, sign to text and text to sign, and both components are described and explained. The solution has received positive feedback on several tests and a pilot experiment, and is being developed with partnerships with sign interpreters from six different European countries. Some planned improvements and future functionalities for the tool are also mentioned and detailed.

2021 30th Annual Conference of the European Association for Education in Electrical and Information Engineering (EAEEIE)

Nowadays where Covid-19 threatens human lives, it is essential to adapt to this situation and try... more Nowadays where Covid-19 threatens human lives, it is essential to adapt to this situation and try to continue our lives even though some activities are almost inevitable. Education system is one of the most affected daily activities. New technological means had to be adopted to overcome the distance and to continue education process. Although these new adopted means brought new perspectives, also many problems were arised. Deaf or hard hearing students, faced more difficulties than in ordinary situations. Deaf students in order to communicate are either using lip reading and must see their interlocutor’s whole body. In the not likely scenario that the schools are open, teachers and students must wear a face mask, while in distance learning only a small window of the participants is visible and most probably only their faces. Thus, communication at the era of Covid-19 for deaf and hard hearing students is almost inevitable. This paper makes a presentation of the special education system of deaf people in Greece, addresses the difficulties these students face and presents a novel educational tool that with the proper use should help them overcome this difficult situation.

IEEE Revista Iberoamericana de Tecnologias del Aprendizaje

Deaf students, who use sign language as their mother language, continuously experience difficulti... more Deaf students, who use sign language as their mother language, continuously experience difficulties to communicate with non-deaf in their daily lives. This is a severe handicap in education settings seriously jeopardizing deaf people chances to progress in their professional career. Deaf people’s comprehension of texts is limited due to grammar differences between sign and oral languages. There is a need to improve the communication between deaf and non-deaf and to support deaf students in environments where they are unable to be accompanied by sign interpreters. This article details the improvements and current structure of the VirtualSign platform, a bidirectional sign language to text translation tool in development since 2015. The platform has two main components, sign to text and text to sign, that are both described. Translation from text to sign relies on a 3D avatar. Translation from sign to text relies on a set of data gloves and Kinect. In this paper we discuss the relevance of different types of data gloves. VirtualSign is being developed in cooperation with the deaf communities from six different European countries and Brazil. This solution to support deaf students in educational settings has received positive feedback on several tests and pilot experiments. Some planned improvements and future functionalities for the tool are also mentioned and detailed.