Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:25:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2009-09-25Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:33:05Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 rodrigues_rvr_me_prud.pdf: 1982108 bytes, checksum: 5cd99583a59b533223f322970e160062 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Esta pesquisa, referente à linha de pesquisa Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação e Educação, consiste na construção de um Objeto de Aprendizagem (OA) fundamentado sob a perspectiva lógico-histórica e, em decorrência de sua utilização em sala de aula, na análise das potencialidades formadoras do conceito números inteiros. Proporcionar o conhecimento da constituição e extensão de um conceito matemático deve ser um desafio à implementação de qualquer recurso de natureza tecnológica no ensino da Matemática, do contrário esta ferramenta corre o risco de reproduzir técnicas esvaziadas de sentido. Para enfrentar esse desafio, o aporte teórico oferecido por Kopnin (1978), Caraça (1984), Lanner de Moura (et al 2003), Sousa (2004) e Dias (2007) mostrou o movimento histórico e intelectual de criação de conceitos como forma de pensamento e perspectiva didática na produção do conhecimento. O percurso desta investigação, concebido como um estudo de caso qualitativo dividiu-se em duas etapas. A partir dos trabalhos de Lizcano (1993/2006), Schubring (2000/2001), Lima & Moisés (1998), Prado & Moura (2007a/2007b) e Prado (2008), na primeira etapa denominada por caráter bibliográfico/laboratorial, os aspectos substanciais e simbólicos, apreendidos do desenvolvimento lógico-histórico do conceito números inteiros, aliados aos efeitos comunicacionais das novas tecnologias (BELLONI, 2000/2001)... / This research is connected to the research line Information and Communication Technologies and Education. The present paper is about the development of a Learning Object (LO) that is based on logical-historical approach and, due to it is applied to the classroom, on forming potentiality of whole numbers concepts. Providing knowledge about a mathematical concept constitution and extension might be a challenge for implementing any technological resource to Mathematics instruction. On the contrary, this toll may reproduce techniques with no meaning. In order to face such challenge, this paper is based on theoretical approaches offered by Kopnin (1978), Caraça (1984), Lanner de Moura (et al 2003), Sousa (2004) e Dias (2007) who point out the historical and intellectual movement of creating concepts as a way to think and a didactic perspective to produce knowledge. This investigation is a qualitative case study that was divided in two steps. The first one was based on Lizcano (1993/2006), Schubring (2000/2001), Lima & Moisés (1998), Prado & Moura (2007a/2007b) e Prado (2008) works. It had a bibliographical/laboratorial character. At this stage, theoretical and methodological processes of the LO “The Universe and its Opposites” production were outlined by substantial and symbolic aspects, apprehend from logical-historical development of whole numbers concept, joined to communicative effects of new technologies (BELLONI, 2000/2001)... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)

Learning object repositories, a form of digital libraries, are robust systems that provide educators new ways to search for educational resources, collaborate with peers, and provide instruction to students in unique and varied ways. This study examines a learning object repository created by a large suburban school district to increase teaching information and encourage collaboration among teachers. Despite investing nearly $2 million to develop the software and seed the repository with materials, data suggest that teacher use falls below set goals. This document explores five years of site traffic, user engagement, social interaction, asset growth, as well as the authoring of instructional materials as a means to evaluate the repository. The results of the study may inform the policy decisions of educational organizations when considering digital learning environments.

The study emphasizes changing light conditions in architectural spaces as a major factor on human eye adaptation, which represents a potential case for a visual shock. This visual shock is experienced when occupants encounter a sudden field of light whose intensity is above or below the limit of human eye adaptable range. To examine this condition, a new methodology is developed and outlined. It identifies the visual shock within transitional spaces and allows architects to investigate strategies that influence visual comfort. The physiological field of vision analysis is used to first critique, then to adjust, and finally to interpret scenes within transitional spaces. The methodology begins by using a 180° angle fish-eye lens camera to capture 3-D photographs along a selected pedestrian pathway. The photographs are overlaid by a “field of view” diagram to deduct areas obstructed by human facial features (eyebrows, cheeks, and nose). Area weighted percentages of the net view profile is then calculated using an overlay hemispherical radial grid. These percentages represent the cut-off vision (0%), the one-eye vision (12.5%), the peripheral vision (25%), and the central vision (50%). Image metamorphosis is done by the aid of the Adobe Photoshop software to restrict the image to four monochromatic contrasts of shade. Parallel to photographs, actual light intensity readings are collected and calibrated to each assigned contrast on the images. To illustrate the methodology, a case of a person experiencing an extreme discomfort by walking in the direction of a blinding sunlight source has been chosen and investigated. 3-D Computer modeling is then adopted to investigate the different architectural daylight solutions as suggested by the modified design and predicts a visual comfort. This method provides a successful tool for investigating light in transitional spaces as well as contributes to enhancing pedestrian awareness of their surrounding environment and clarity of visual information.

Orientador: Klaus Schlünzen Junior / Banca: Maria do Carmo de Sousa / Banca: José Aires de Castro Filho / Resumo: Esta pesquisa, referente à linha de pesquisa Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação e Educação, consiste na construção de um Objeto de Aprendizagem (OA) fundamentado sob a perspectiva lógico-histórica e, em decorrência de sua utilização em sala de aula, na análise das potencialidades formadoras do conceito números inteiros. Proporcionar o conhecimento da constituição e extensão de um conceito matemático deve ser um desafio à implementação de qualquer recurso de natureza tecnológica no ensino da Matemática, do contrário esta ferramenta corre o risco de reproduzir técnicas esvaziadas de sentido. Para enfrentar esse desafio, o aporte teórico oferecido por Kopnin (1978), Caraça (1984), Lanner de Moura (et al 2003), Sousa (2004) e Dias (2007) mostrou o movimento histórico e intelectual de criação de conceitos como forma de pensamento e perspectiva didática na produção do conhecimento. O percurso desta investigação, concebido como um estudo de caso qualitativo dividiu-se em duas etapas. A partir dos trabalhos de Lizcano (1993/2006), Schubring (2000/2001), Lima & Moisés (1998), Prado & Moura (2007a/2007b) e Prado (2008), na primeira etapa denominada por caráter bibliográfico/laboratorial, os aspectos substanciais e simbólicos, apreendidos do desenvolvimento lógico-histórico do conceito números inteiros, aliados aos efeitos comunicacionais das novas tecnologias (BELLONI, 2000/2001)... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: This research is connected to the research line Information and Communication Technologies and Education. The present paper is about the development of a Learning Object (LO) that is based on logical-historical approach and, due to it is applied to the classroom, on forming potentiality of whole numbers concepts. Providing knowledge about a mathematical concept constitution and extension might be a challenge for implementing any technological resource to Mathematics instruction. On the contrary, this toll may reproduce techniques with no meaning. In order to face such challenge, this paper is based on theoretical approaches offered by Kopnin (1978), Caraça (1984), Lanner de Moura (et al 2003), Sousa (2004) e Dias (2007) who point out the historical and intellectual movement of creating concepts as a way to think and a didactic perspective to produce knowledge. This investigation is a qualitative case study that was divided in two steps. The first one was based on Lizcano (1993/2006), Schubring (2000/2001), Lima & Moisés (1998), Prado & Moura (2007a/2007b) e Prado (2008) works. It had a bibliographical/laboratorial character. At this stage, theoretical and methodological processes of the LO "The Universe and its Opposites" production were outlined by substantial and symbolic aspects, apprehend from logical-historical development of whole numbers concept, joined to communicative effects of new technologies (BELLONI, 2000/2001)... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

Ciencias de la Computación / Para lograr coherencia y flexibilidad en unidades de aprendizaje basadas en documentos multimedia, varios autores han recomendado estructurar los componentes de los cursos en grafos. En un grafo de curso, los recursos educacionales son encapsulados como objetos de aprendizaje (LO - Learning Objects) con sus respectivos metadatos (LOM - Learning-Object Metadata) y son interconectados con relaciones de varios tipos retóricos y/o semánticos. Los grafos de recursos son almacenados en repositorios en los cuales los metadatos sirven para facilitar su recuperación y reutilización. Sin embargo, tales sistemas se enfrentan con problemas serios en cuanto al uso de los LOMs: los metadatos son difíciles de instanciar y los autores de cursos generalmente no tienen estímulos para cumplir con esta tediosa tarea ya que ellos mismos no se benefician de los metadatos que generan. La generación automática de metadatos resuelve este problema. Sin embargo, este método se limita a ciertos metadatos excluyendo la mayor parte de los metadatos subjetivos tales como los metadatos educacionales. Esta limitación motivó el enfoque de esta tesis sobre una técnica complementaria: un método híbrido basado en la sinergia entre procesos automáticos e intervención humana. La generación híbrida de LOMs puede ser aplicada sobre los atributos que no pueden ser automáticamente generados. Sin embargo, este enfoque está basado en la contribución de usuarios no siempre cooperativos, quienes necesitarían ver beneficios para motivar su participación. Proponemos estudiar los usos de LOM durante la creación de cursos, no sólo desde la perspectiva de la generación híbrida sino también desde la perspectiva de los beneficios que pueden brindar los LOMs. Esta estrategia tiene como objetivo soportar una retroacción positiva en la cual los beneficios puedan motivar la generación de LOMs de buena calidad, y la buena calidad de los LOMs pueda mejorar los beneficios. En particular, esta tesis investiga métodos para (1) integrar sin transición la generación híbrida de LOMs dentro de una herramienta de creación de cursos, (2) procesar un conjunto de LOMs aunque ciertos metadatos quedaran incompletos, incorrectos, o faltantes, (3) mejorar los resultados de los métodos clásicos de recuperación de LOs usando los metadatos de los LOs que componen un curso. Desarrollamos una herramienta de código abierto para validar las propuestas de esta tesis. Experimentos preliminares mostraron que los LOMs pueden mejorar significativamente la recuperación de LOs adicionales durante el proceso de creación de cursos.

Image understanding is the task of interpreting images by effectively solving the individual tasks of object recognition and semantic image segmentation. An image understanding system must have the capacity to distinguish between similar looking image regions while being invariant in its response to regions that have been altered by the appearance-altering transformation. The fundamental challenge for any such system lies within this simultaneous requirement for both invariance and specificity. Many image understanding systems have been proposed that capture geometric properties such as shapes, textures, motion and 3D perspective projections using filtering, non-linear modulus, and pooling operations. Deep learning networks ignore these geometric considerations and compute descriptors having suitable invariance and stability to geometric transformations using (end-to-end) learned multi-layered network filters. These deep learning networks in recent years have come to dominate the previously separate fields of research in machine learning, computer vision, natural language understanding and speech recognition. Despite the success of these deep networks, there remains a fundamental lack of understanding in the design and optimization of these networks which makes it difficult to develop them. Also, training of these networks requires large labeled datasets which in numerous applications may not be available. In this dissertation, we propose the ScatterNet Hybrid Framework for Deep Learning that is inspired by the circuitry of the visual cortex. The framework uses a hand-crafted front-end, an unsupervised learning based middle-section, and a supervised back-end to rapidly learn hierarchical features from unlabelled data. Each layer in the proposed framework is automatically optimized to produce the desired computationally efficient architecture. The term `Hybrid' is coined because the framework uses both unsupervised as well as supervised learning. We propose two hand-crafted front-ends that can extract locally invariant features from the input signals. Next, two ScatterNet Hybrid Deep Learning (SHDL) networks (a generative and a deterministic) were introduced by combining the proposed front-ends with two unsupervised learning modules which learn hierarchical features. These hierarchical features were finally used by a supervised learning module to solve the task of either object recognition or semantic image segmentation. The proposed front-ends have also been shown to improve the performance and learning of current Deep Supervised Learning Networks (VGG, NIN, ResNet) with reduced computing overhead.

?rea de concentra??o: Ensino, ?tica e pol?tica p?blica de sa?de. / Disponibiliza??o do trabalho em conte?do parcial, conforme Termo de Autoriza??o. / Submitted by Jos? Henrique Henrique (jose.neves@ufvjm.edu.br) on 2017-03-20T20:34:27Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) karine_alencar_froes_parcial.pdf: 390320 bytes, checksum: e1ff6d61571979f05b06c9248961dfbf (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Rodrigo Martins Cruz (rodrigo.cruz@ufvjm.edu.br) on 2017-04-20T14:53:47Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) karine_alencar_froes_parcial.pdf: 390320 bytes, checksum: e1ff6d61571979f05b06c9248961dfbf (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-04-20T14:53:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) karine_alencar_froes_parcial.pdf: 390320 bytes, checksum: e1ff6d61571979f05b06c9248961dfbf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016 / A cont?nua e acelerada evolu??o dos conhecimentos na atualidade tem gerado a necessidade de atualiza??o e aprendizado cont?nuo do homem, al?m da exig?ncia do mercado por profissionais com mais qualifica??o, novas compet?ncias e habilidades. Diante desse cen?rio, na educa??o, tem se constru?do novas concep??es pedag?gicas a partir do uso dos novos recursos tecnol?gicos. A Enfermagem acompanha o contexto apresentado. Percebeu-se o aumento na produ??o de tecnologias pela Enfermagem, nas ?reas educacionais, assistenciais e gerenciais. Recursos tecnol?gicos, como os objetos de aprendizagem (OA), tornam-se importantes estrat?gias ? medida que possibilitam superar as barreiras para a realiza??o das experi?ncias pr?ticas, permitindo ao estudante uma aproxima??o com a realidade. A Escola de Enfermagem da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) apresenta experi?ncia na elabora??o de OA para o ensino de enfermagem. Sendo assim, o presente estudo tem como objetivo compreender o processo de elabora??o de objetos de aprendizagem no ensino de enfermagem na Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul durante o per?odo de 2010 a 2014. Para a realiza??o do estudo optou-se pela pesquisa b?sica, explorat?ria, descritiva, cujos procedimentos t?cnicos incluem a pesquisa bibliogr?fica, documental, a abordagem qualitativa e o estudo de caso. A amostra foi constitu?da por um total de cinco docentes de enfermagem da UFRGS. Para a realiza??o da coleta dos dados optou-se, como instrumento, a entrevista estruturada. A an?lise documental da pesquisa foi constitu?da por projetos de desenvolvimento de OA, al?m de documentos referentes ? implanta??o do n?cleo de inform?tica na referida escola. Os dados foram analisados atrav?s da t?cnica de an?lise de conte?do. Ficou evidente que o desenvolvimento de um OA ? complexo e est? relacionado com diversos fatores, como paradigmas educacionais, ferramentas tecnol?gicas, equipe multidisciplinar, metodologias de elabora??o e teorias e m?todos de ensino/aprendizagem. Evidenciou-se, tamb?m, que fatores como or?amento, infraestrutura, a falta de conhecimento t?cnico e te?rico sobre OA e o ac?mulo de atividades por parte dos docentes de enfermagem interferem na implementa??o de projetos de desenvolvimento de OA. No estudo, ficou percept?vel a necessidade de uma op??o consciente e reflexiva por parte dos docentes de enfermagem em rela??o aos aspectos que envolvem o desenvolvimento de um OA, como a concep??o e caracter?sticas dos objetos, enfoques pedag?gicos e metodologia de desenvolvimento. Foi poss?vel observar concord?ncia e discord?ncias relacionadas a enfoques pedag?gicos, al?m da determina??o de ?etapas? de metodologia de produ??o, mesmo que de forma intuitiva. A partir da an?lise dos discursos dos entrevistados e das diferentes metodologias abordadas, o presente estudo prop?e um novo ?Processo de Desenvolvimento de Objeto de Aprendizagem?, com o intuito de reunir em um ?nico m?todo os principais elementos destacados pelos diferentes autores citados na pesquisa que prop?em metodologias de constru??o de objetos. / Disserta??o (Mestrado) ? Programa de P?s-gradua??o em Ensino em Sa?de, Universidade Federal dos Vales do Jequitinhonha e Mucuri, 2016. / The continuous and rapid development of knowledge nowadays has generated the need for updating and continuous learning of mankind, besides the market demand for professionals with more qualifications, new skills and abilities. In this scenario, in education, new pedagogical conceptions have been created from the use of new technological resources. Nursing follows this present context. It was noticed a rise in the production of technologies by Nursing in educational, care and management areas. Technological resources, such as learning objects (LO), become important strategies as they enable to overcome the barriers to the accomplishment of practical experiences, allowing students to be close to reality. The Nursing School of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) has experience in the development of LO for nursing education. Thus, this study aims to understand the Learning Objects development process in Nursing Education at UFRGS during the period 2010 to 2014. According to the chosen methods, this research is considered to be basic, exploratory, and descriptive. Its technical procedures include literature review, documentary research, qualitative approach, and case study. The sample consisted of a total of five nursing faculty members of the UFRGS, and a structured interview was used for data collection. The documentary analysis of the research consisted of projects for the development of LO as well as documents related to the implementation of the computing center at the nursing school. Data were analyzed by using content analysis technique. It has become evident that LO development is complex, and it is related to many factors such as educational paradigms, technological tools, multidisciplinary team, development methodologies, and theories and methods for teaching/learning. It evidenced that factors such as budget, infrastructure, lack of technical and theoretical knowledge about LO as well as the accumulation of activities by the nursing faculty members interfere with the implementation of LO development projects. In the study, it became noticeable the need for a conscious and reflective option by the nursing faculty members in regard to aspects involving the development of a LO, such as the design and characteristics of the objects, pedagogical approaches, and development methodology. It was possible to observe agreement and disagreements related to pedagogical approaches, in addition to the determination of "steps" of production methodology, though intuitively. From the analysis of the interviewees? discourses and from the different methodologies approached, this study proposes a new "Process for the Development of Learning Object" in order to bring together in a single method the major elements highlighted by different authors mentioned in this work who propose methods for the creation of objects.

A tecnologia apóia o processo de ensino de diversas maneiras ao mesmo tempo em que traz desafios para sua utilização. A produção e disponibilização de materiais instrucionais é um dos pilares dos sistemas de ensino, sendo o repositório de objetos de aprendizagem uma forma possível para realização. Essa solução possui poucos anos de existência se comparada a outras, o que impõe desafios para o seu planejamento. Em parte significativa das organizações de ensino observa-se lacuna de conhecimentos nas áreas que envolvem a planificação desse empreendimento. O interesse do estudo e do pesquisador é a integração dos campos de conhecimento envolvidos, nesse caso o técnico, o gerencial, o legal e o pedagógico, para o aumento da capacidade desse processo, na qual se possa identificar as atividades, boas práticas e resultados necessários, em formato flexível, para que se estruture em bases sustentáveis para implantação. O objetivo geral foi o desenvolvimento de um modelo de planejamento para repositório de objetos de aprendizagem. A hipótese da pesquisa é que a formalização, a mobilização de recursos, a aceitação, a integração, a descentralização, o controle, a avaliação ambiental e a interação entre os planejadores estão contemplados no modelo e possibilitam o aumento da capacidade de planejamento do repositório de objetos de aprendizagem em organizações de ensino. De forma a alcançar o resultado requerido foi realizado estudo de múltiplos casos, que decorreram ao longo do ano de 2009 até meados do ano de 2010. A unidade de análise foi o planejamento de repositório de objetos de aprendizagem em organizações com fins educacionais. Realizou-se pesquisa das referências, que envolviam documentos científicos e organizacionais, da área de gestão de projetos e repositório, para que se chegasse a primeira versão da proposta. De forma integrante utilizou-se entrevistas, análise de documentos, observação e instrumento de pesquisa, para a realização de melhorias e o alcance dos resultados e análises quanto a funcionalidade do modelo, com o intuito de melhorar a capacidade do planejamento. O instrumento foi desenvolvido com a utilização de protocolo de modo a ser testado e validado. A hipótese de pesquisa foi confirmada, porém a dimensão mobilização teve concordância interavaliadores baixa, o que demanda atenção especial, de modo que não faltem recursos e pessoas para a realização do trabalho. A pesquisa contribuiu ao proporcionar aos gestores, fases, processos, atividades, boas práticas e questões que possibilitam o aumento da capacidade do planejamento desse tipo de empreendimento. / Technology has supported the teaching process in several ways whereas it poses challenges to its use. The production and availability of instructional materials is one of the pillars of education, and the learning object repository is a possible way to achieve this task. This solution has few years of existence, which poses challenges for planning, In a considerable number of educational organizations there is a knowledge gap in the areas surrounding the planning of learning object repository. The interest of this study and of the researcher is integrating the fields of knowledge involved, which, in this case, are the technical, managerial, legal and pedagogical. The purpose is to increase the capacity of this process, where one can identify the activities, best practices and necessary results, in a flexible format, so that it is structured on a sustainable basis for deployment. The overall objective was the development of a model for planning learning object repository. The hypothesis is that, formalization, resource mobilization, acceptance, integration, decentralization, control, environmental assessment and interaction between planners are included in the model allowing to increase the capacity to plan the learning object repository in educational organizations. ln order to achieve the required result multiple case study was realized, during the year of 2009 until mid-2010. The unit of analysis was the planning of learning object repository in organizations with educational purposes. We performed a review of the literature, involving scientific and organizational documents, in the area of project management and learning object repository, to reach the first version of the proposal. We used interviews, document analysis, observation and research tool for the realization of improvement and achievement of results and analysis regarding the functionality of the model, in order to improve the capacity of planning. The instrument was tested and validated by means of a protocol. The research hypothesis was confirmed, but the dimension resource mobilization had low interrater agreement, which requires special attention, so that there is no lack of resources and people to do the work. The research contributed by providing managers with, phases, processes, activities, best practices and issues that make it possible to increase the capacity of planning this type of project.

This thesis tackles the problem of large-scale visual search for categories within large collections of images. Given a textual description of a visual category, such as 'car' or 'person', the objective is to retrieve images containing that category from the corpus quickly and accurately, and without the need for auxiliary meta-data or, crucially and in contrast to previous approaches, expensive pre-training. The general approach to identifying different visual categories within a dataset is to train classifiers over features extracted from a set of training images. The performance of such classifiers relies heavily on sufficiently discriminative image representations, and many methods have been proposed which involve the aggregating of local appearance features into rich bag-of-words encodings. We begin by conducting a comprehensive evaluation of the latest such encodings, identifying best-of-breed practices for training powerful visual models using these representations. We also contrast these methods with the latest breed of Convolutional Network (ConvNet) based features, thus developing a state-of-the-art architecture for large-scale image classification. Following this, we explore how a standard classification pipeline can be adapted for use in a real-time setting. One of the major issues, particularly with bag-of-words based methods, is the high dimensionality of the encodings, which causes ranking over large datasets to be prohibitively expensive. We therefore assess different methods for compressing such features, and further propose a novel cascade approach to ranking which both reduces ranking time and improves retrieval performance. Finally, we explore the problem of training visual models on-the-fly, making use of visual data dynamically collected from the web to train classifiers on demand. On this basis, we develop a novel GPU architecture for on-the-fly visual category search which is capable of retrieving previously unknown categories over unannonated datasets of millions of images in just a few seconds.

This work focuses on building frameworks to strengthen the relation between human and machine learning. This is achieved by proposing a new category of algorithms and a new theory to formalize the perception and categorizationof objects. For what concerns the algorithmic part, we developed a series of procedures to perform Interactive Continuous Open World learning from the point of view of a single user. As for humans, the input of the algorithms are continuous streams of visual information (sequences of frames), that enable the extraction of richer representations by exploiting the persistence of the same object in the input data. Our approaches are able to incrementally learn and recognize collections of objects, starting from emph{zero} knowledge, and organizing them in a hierarchy that follows the will of the user. We then present a novel Knowledge Representation theory that formalizes the property of our setting and enables the learning over it. The theory is based on the notion of separating the visual representation of objects from the semantic meaning associated with them. This distinction enables to treat both instances and classes of objects as being elements of the same kind, as well as allowing for dynamically rearranging objects according to the needs of the user. The whole framework is gradually introduced through the entire thesis and is coupled with an extensive series of experiments to demonstrate its working principles. The experiments focus also on demonstrating the role of a developmental learning policy, in which new objects are regularly introduced, enabling both an increase in recognition performance while reducing the amount of supervision provided by the user.