Parallel thinking is a mindset that enables computer scientists to think about and implement systems that allow activities to happen concurrently. This mindset is needed in designing and implementing a wide range of computer systems involving coordinated components (e.g., parallel, distributed, and multi-user systems). No matter what the coordinated component is, whether human or computer, the underlying issue is to imagine coordination between these components and manage the distribution and reintegration of coordinated work. The rapid development of multi-core technologies has attracted people's attention back to parallelism. Ubiquitous and pervasive computing further brings parallelism into the everyday experiences of non-computer scientists. Designing and developing for ubiquitous parallelism become an essential and heavy responsibility for every software designer and developer. This situation creates a new standard for every one working in the computing field; simply understanding the techniques and algorithm in parallel-distributed computing to support parallel computing resources is not enough; the ability to create support for parallel human activities is also needed. Therefore, the need to train CS students to have a "parallel thinking" mindset is more urgent than ever. This doctoral work approaches the pedagogy of parallel thinking by teaching CS students to model coordination for parallel human activities explicitly. Although most participants started with an undeveloped imagination for human coordination, they were able to improve by focusing on coordination issues in the context of a class. The research method was to study a semester-long experimental class in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech through a qualitative design-based research approach. Multiple types of data were collected using methodological triangulation to maximize validity. The data analysis process was guided by Grounded Theory (GT) through a systematic set of procedures. The outcomes provide a rich, thick, and detailed description about how CS students conceptualize and approach parallel thinking. The research contributes to CS education, programmer cognition literature, and computer supported collaborative system design and development by elaborating and analyzing various challenges in coordinated system creation, and making suggestions about pedagogical solutions, and software infrastructure and tools design. / Ph. D.

Freehand gestures have long been considered to potentially deliver natural, intuitive, terse but powerful human-computer interaction techniques. Over years, researchers have been attempting to employ freehand gestures as an alternative input modality to the conventional devices (e.g. keyboard and mouse) in a wide array of application domains, and a huge number of gesture recognition systems and gesture-based interaction techniques have been created in lab. However, a fundamental question remains: is it possible to establish an interaction framework so that we may approach freehand gestural interaction from a systematic perspective, and design coherent and consistent freehand gesture-based human-computer interaction experience? Existing research tends to focus on the technologies that enable the gestural interaction, or on the novel design of gestural interaction techniques for specific tasks and applications. Such "point designs" are claimed to be insufficient, and an existing application-specific design lends very limited insights and guidance to design problems in another application. An interaction framework allows us to move from individual designs to a more holistic approach. The goal of this research is to construct a framework to support a systematic approach for designing freehand gesture-based interactions. Toward this goal our research began with a review and examination of the gesture interaction literature, followed by an analysis of the essential components of an interaction framework. We then proposed and justified the scope of research and the approach we took to construct the interaction framework. We have designed and evaluated (analytically and empirically) gestural interaction techniques for two broad categories of freehand gestures we specified — spatial gestures, and surface gestures. In the design activity, we have discovered and proposed the core design principles and guidelines, and validated them via user studies. Finally, we assessed the ability of the freehand gesture interaction framework we have constructed to help designers create new applications and designs, by putting together a few proof-of-concept examples of a coherent and consistent freehand gesture user interface. / Ph. D.

Children of the 21st century are digital learners and have various technologies at their fingertips. As a result, classrooms have evolved and school systems are equipping students and teachers with the technological tools that are believed to meet the needs of 21st century learners. However, researchers say there is still a need to examine students\ and teachers' perceptions of, and attitudes about, technology and its use in the classroom (Maninger & Holden, 2009). There has also been a growing interest in knowing if the investment of the technology is having any positive effects in the classroom, what effect technology has on academic progress, and understanding what teachers and students think about the implementation and integration of technology in the classroom as an instructional tool. The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of middle school teachers and students, in a select rural Virginia middle school, on the effect that one-to-one computing had on the frequency and type of instruction that is taking place in the core areas of English, math, science, and social studies.  The study also looked at the teachers' and students' perceived effect on the educational performance of individual subgroups. A quantitative analysis was done using an electronic survey, which provided information on the perceived frequency and type of educational activities using one-to-one computers and the perceived effect one-to-one computing had on the educational performance of different subgroups. Questions on the survey were developed by correlating the theoretical ideas of Bloom's taxonomy / Bloom's web 2.0 technology pyramids and then categorizing the questions so the complexity of the questions could be looked at on the range of use chart. The research found, of the students surveyed, 90% of English students, 78% of math students, 75% of science students, and 77% of social studies students found the computers to have a positive effect on their academic performance. Therefore, one major finding of this study was that students' perceptions of the overall effect of one-to-one computers were positive. / Ed. D.

Mobile, digital technologies are thought to augment and transcend the limits of our places, yet they raise the issue of what our places are. PlaceMark is a simple, distributed collaborative authoring environment constructed in conjunction with a site-specific writing activity. This system is examined as a cultural probe, investigating how new media students engage in collaborative writing and how they construct place. Findings include that students engage in the activity as if in parallel play (influencing one another implicitly rather than explicitly), that approaching the notion of place through writing may require development (working through issues brought to the place and the exercise), and that students' relationship to place, at least when asked to write about places that may be considered natural, is not characterized by certainty in behavioral framing. / Master of Science

Submitted by Silvana Teresinha Dornelles Studzinski (sstudzinski) on 2016-06-14T14:03:16Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Carlos Felipe Rocha Carneiro_.pdf: 2544491 bytes, checksum: fd21e5fffaf06a468e94644cb0dcfff0 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-14T14:03:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Carlos Felipe Rocha Carneiro_.pdf: 2544491 bytes, checksum: fd21e5fffaf06a468e94644cb0dcfff0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-30 / IFRR - Instituto Federal de Educação Ciência e Tecnologia de Roraima / Nota-se, atualmente, que o avanço da tecnologia e a crescente quantidade de dispositivos móveis vêm estimulando o uso deste tipo de tecnologia. Porém, esses dispositivos não estão prontos para atender pessoas com determinados tipos de deficiência, especificamente o deficiente auditivo. O presente trabalho tem por objetivo propor um modelo de suporte ao deficiente auditivo chamado Hermes. O Hermes em relação aos trabalhos relacionados é o único a apresentar sensibilidade ao contexto, pois nenhum dos modelos avaliados apresenta essa característica. Além disso, Hermes suporta o reconhecimento de som, a localização de recurso e por fim, suporte a trilhas. A avaliação do modelo foi baseada em cenários, partindo de um recurso selecionado pelo usuário, mostrando que o aplicativo possui suporte à acessibilidade. O Hermes foi avaliado por 10 usuários, um deles deficiente auditivo. Os avaliadores aprovaram com 88% o aplicativo no quesito que buscou avaliar a facilidade percebida de uso, e com 90% o quesito de utilidade percebida. / It is perceivable that the technology advance and the growing on the amount of mobile devices have stimulated the use of this type of technology. Nevertheless, these devices are not completely available to people who have some types of disability, especially the hearing disability. This paper aims to propose a support model for the hearing impaired, an application called Hermes. Hermes in relation to the related works is the one to be sensitive to the context, because none of the evaluated models has this feature. Moreover, Hermes is able to recognize sounds, localize a resource and tracking supports. The evaluation of the sample was based on scenarios, where the starting point was a resource chosen by the user, showing that the application supports accessibility. Hermes application was evaluated by 10 users, one of them is deaf. The evaluators approved the requirement of ease to use in 88%, and the requirement of usefulness in 90%.

University, Diss.--Bamberg, 2007.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-22T17:26:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sergio.pdf: 4483896 bytes, checksum: fd6e9fa437d692c1d9468eadde90af71 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-03-05 / The ubiquitous medicine has the premisse to provide access to health services at any time, without restriction of location enhancing the mobility of doctors, nurses and other health professionals. These professionals need tools for information access, both at the site where the patient, either in other locations. The aim of this paper is to propose an infrastructure that integrates sensors and computing devices (mobile and fixed), considering the ubiquitous environment provided by a middleware and software architecture with context elements awareness, and also with the capacity acting on them. This architecture is called uMED, and their target applications will include monitoring vital signs of patients considering a typical work environment of staff working in medical emergencies. It is also being made to allow health professionals to remotely control (actuation) medical equipments. From the monitoring and/or actuation features, the intention is to enable an improvement in work routines of health professionals, helping to reduce the high percentage of nomadism and fragmentation of its activities. The uMED architecture is being designed with the perspective of being integrated with middleware EXEHDA. In order to evaluate the software architecture proposed for uMED, was developed a case study aimed at clinical follow-up of patients / A medicina ub´ıqua tem como premissa disponibilizar acesso aos servic¸os de sa´ude a qualquer hora, sem restric¸ oes de localizac¸ ao potencializando a mobilidade de m´edicos, enfermeiros e outros profissionais de sa´ude. Estes profissionais necessitam de ferramentas de acesso `as informac¸ oes, tanto no local onde se encontra o paciente, como n ao. O objetivo central deste trabalho ´e propor uma infraestrutura que integre sensores e dispositivos computacionais (m´oveis e fixos), valendo-se para isto do ambiente ub´ıquo provido por um middleware, e de uma arquitetura de software com sensibilidade para elementos de contexto, e tamb´em com capacidade de atuac¸ ao sobre os mesmos. Esta arquitetura ´e denominada uMED, e suas respectivas aplicac¸ oes alvo ir ao contemplar o monitoramento de sinais vitais de pacientes considerando um ambiente t´ıpico de trabalho das equipes que atuam em urg encias m´edicas. Tamb´em est´a sendo prevista a possibilidade dos profissionais de sa´ude controlarem remotamente (atuac¸ ao) equipamentos m´edicos. A partir das funcionalidades de monitoramento e/ou atuac¸ ao pretende-se possibilitar uma melhora nas rotinas de trabalho dos profissionais de sa´ude, contribuindo para reduzir o elevado percentual de nomadismo e fragmentac¸ ao de suas atividades. A arquitetura do uMED est´a sendo concebida com a perspectiva de ser integrada ao middleware EXEHDA. No sentido de avaliar a arquitetura de software proposta para o uMED, foi desenvolvido um estudo de caso direcionado ao acompanhamento cl´ınico de pacientes

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T14:01:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 27 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A evolução constante da tecnologia computacional e das redes sem fio tem tornado os dispositivos móveis cada vez menores e mais poderosos, provendo serviços em qualquer lugar e a qualquer momento. Neste contexto, áreas de pesquisa como as de educação, medicina, jogos e entretenimentos, automobilístico e atualmente o comércio têm experimentado forte crescimento com a adoção destas novas tecnologias. Esta dissertação propõe um modelo de comércio ubíquo chamado MUCS, que utiliza computação ubíqua para a geração de oportunidades de negócio aos usuários nos papeis de clientes e/ou fornecedores. Também são descritos nesta dissertação diversos cenários do cotidiano onde o modelo MUCS pode ser aplicado, e o protótipo que foi implementado para validá-los. Por fim, são apresentados os resultados obtidos em experimentos práticos, com a participação de usuários, cujos principais objetivos foram o de validar os cenários apresentados, e avaliar a aceitação do modelo proposto. / The constant evolution of computing technology and wireless networks have made the wireless devices smaller and more powerful, providing services anywhere at any time. In this context, research areas such as education, medicine, games and entertainment, automakers and businesses have been experiencing high growth with the adoption of new technologies. This essay proposes a ubiquitous commercial model called MUCS, which utilizes ubiquitous computing to generate business opportunities to users, being them customers and/or providers. It also describes several everyday scenarios where the MUCS model can be applied, and the prototype which has been implemented to validate them. Finally, the results obtained are presented through a practical experiment, with the participation of users whose main objectives were to validate the presented scenarios, and evaluate the acceptance of the proposed model.

Submitted by Mariana Dornelles Vargas (marianadv) on 2015-05-13T18:00:17Z No. of bitstreams: 1 hefestos.pdf: 4234333 bytes, checksum: ee8934fcf3cb7b70d89bfda934f923d0 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-13T18:00:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 hefestos.pdf: 4234333 bytes, checksum: ee8934fcf3cb7b70d89bfda934f923d0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-12-19 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / FAPERGS - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul / Atualmente, com a ampla diversidade de dispositivos móveis disponíveis, de diversos tipos, capacidades e tecnologias, associando-se à profusão das redes de comunicação sem fio, possibilita-se a oferta de serviços em qualquer lugar e a qualquer momento. Embora, algumas áreas de pesquisa como as de educação, comércio, medicina, jogos e entretenimento tenham se desenvolvido com a adoção dessas tecnologias, a da acessibilidade ainda carece de estudos semelhantes. Por isso, esta dissertação propõe um modelo para suporte à acessibilidade chamado Hefestos que utiliza computação ubíqua para o gerenciamento de recursos para acessibilidade de Pessoas com Deficiência (PCDs) e idosos. Também são descritos nesta dissertação diversos cenários do cotidiano, onde o modelo Hefestos pode ser aplicado, e o protótipo de cadeira de rodas inteligente, chamado Hefestos Wheelchair, que foi implementado para avaliar um cenário voltado para PCDs cadeirantes. Por fim, são apresentados os resultados obtidos em experimentos práticos, com a participação de cadeirantes com diversos graus de deficiência, cujos principais objetivos foram o de avaliar a usabilidade e funcionalidade do protótipo e aceitação do modelo proposto. / Nowadays, the wide range of available mobile devices, from various types, capabilities and technologies, associated with the profusion of wireless communication networks, allows the services offer anywhere and anytime. Although some research areas such as education, business, medicine, games and entertainment have been developed with the adoption of these technologies, the accessibility area still lacks of similar studies. Therefore, this dissertation proposes a model for accessibility support called Hefestos which uses ubiquitous computing to manage resources for elderly and People with Disabilities? (PWDs) accessibility. Various scenarios of everyday life are also described in this dissertation, where the Hefestos model can be applied, and the prototype of the smart wheelchair, called Hefestos Wheelchair, which was implemented to evaluate a scenario related to wheelchair users. Ultimately, the results obtained in the practical experiment are presented, with the participation of wheelchair users with a range of disability degrees, whose main goals were to evaluate the usability and functionality of the prototype and the acceptance to the proposed model.

Submitted by Nara Lays Domingues Viana Oliveira (naradv) on 2015-06-15T13:39:55Z No. of bitstreams: 1 0000061A.pdf: 7791263 bytes, checksum: a599d040f1f3a02351f70b58600f4bc8 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-06-15T13:39:55Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 0000061A.pdf: 7791263 bytes, checksum: a599d040f1f3a02351f70b58600f4bc8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-03 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / UNISINOS - Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos / O uso de dispositivos móveis para auxilio em tarefas de trabalho e lazer tem crescido vertiginosamente ao longo dos anos. Na área de turismo, os benefícios que estes dispositivos podem trazer são significativos, tendo em vista a mobilidade associada ao acesso instantâneo e atualizado de informações turísticas. Uma das aplicações mais relevantes para a esta área são os guias de turismo eletrônico, podendo fornecer informações essenciais ao turista para que ele possa aproveitar melhor a sua viagem. Estes guias, em geral, oferecem informações como onde dormir, comer e passear. Entretanto, estas informações, muitas vezes, são fornecidas apenas com base na localização do turista, não considerando recursos como sugestões de visita a determinados pontos turísticos, de acordo com inferências realizadas com base em informações personalizadas obtidas das preferências do turista e das características do ambiente onde ele se encontra. Tendo em vista os benefícios que isto pode trazer ao turista, o objetivo deste trabalho é propor um modelo de arquitetura de software, para dispositivos móveis, que utilize os conceitos de turismo ubíquo para incrementar a qualidade da experiência de turismo. A proposta considera as características individuais, como necessidades e restrições de cada turista, em conjunto com as características de contexto do ambiente turístico. A arquitetura proposta, que é chamada de UbiTour, emprega diversos conceitos da computação ubíqua, como sensibilidade ao contexto, transparência ao usuário, serviços baseados em localização, perfis, restrições, para que o turista possa, entre outras atividades, consultar quais são os pontos de interesse turísticos mais indicados para o seu perfil em um determinado contexto. Além disso, é proposta a definição de uma ontologia para o turismo ubíquo com base nesta arquitetura e foram feitas avaliações da arquitetura para assegurar a eficiência do modelo. Essas avaliações foram realizadas através do desenvolvimento de um protótipo para iOS (iPhones e iPads) focado no itinerário turístico Caminhos de Pedra, localizado em Bento Gonçalves no Rio Grande do Sul. Foram aplicadas três avaliações nesse protótipo: baseada em cenários, da ontologia e de usabilidade. Como resultados, verificou-se que o modelo de turismo ubíquo auxilia as pessoas a terem uma melhor experiência de turismo. / The use of mobile devices to use in work and leisure has grown dramatically over the years. In the tourism area, the benefits that these devices can bring are significant, considering the mobility associated with instant access and updated tourist information. One of the most relevant applications in this area are the Electronic Tour Guides (ETGs). They can provide essential information to tourists to make better use of their trip. These guides usually provide information such as where to sleep, eat and sightseeing. However, this information often are provided based on the location of the tourist, not considering resource suggestions as visiting certain attractions, according to inferences made based on information obtained from the custom preferences of the tourist and the characteristics of the environment where they are. Given the benefits that this knowledge can bring to the tourist, the aim of this work is to propose a model of software architecture, for mobile devices, that uses the concepts of ubiquitous tourism to enhance the quality of tourism experience. The proposal suggests the individual characteristics, such requirements and constraints of each tourist, together with the characteristics of the touristic environmental context. The proposed architecture, which is called UbiTour, employs several concepts of ubiquitous computing, such as context awareness, transparency to the user, location-based services, profiles, restrictions, so that the tourist can, among other activities, see what Points of Interest (POIs) are best suited to their profile in a given context. Furthermore, we proposed an ontology for ubiquitous tourism based on the proposed architecture. Besides, we conducted evaluations of UbiTour to assess the efficiency of the proposed model. We performed these evaluations using a prototype developed for iOS (iPhones and iPads). This application focused on the Caminhos de Pedra tourist itinerary, located in Bento Gonçalves, Rio Grande do Sul state, in Brazil. We applied three evaluations to this prototype: based on scenarios, focusing on the ontology, and a usability assessment. As a result, it was found that the proposed model for ubiquitous tourism helps people to have a better tourism experience.