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Studies show that face to face collaborative videogames have a great potential to improve the quality of education in the classroom of the future. Educational games can help pupils increase cognitive skills, increase motivation and reduce the time taken to reach learning objectives. Games used in a group environment can enrich the learning experience further still by helping develop group social skills and exploiting social dynamics toward achieving a common learning objective. Despite these advantages the uptake of collaborative games as learning tools in the classroom is still relatively low. While collaborative working has proven advantages they also suffer from an incompatibility with the ingrained individualism of traditional education. Moreover, collaborative working can disadvantage introverted students, suffer from conflicts within a group or allow less motivated students to avoid making a contribution. The work described in this paper investigates the viability of these disadvantages being managed through the intervention and mediation of an intelligent embodied conversational agent with awareness of group activity acting as a virtual tutor. Here we examine how students perform and collaborate using a variety of games to; learn words in a foreign language, solve mathematical equations, and add missing words to a paragraph of text. These respectively aim to develop the students’ memorization, basic reasoning, and creative vocabulary. Our embodied virtual agent is emulated using a wizard-of-oz set up with a human controlling the embodied agent Samuela using a basic scripted interaction strategy. To qualify our results, they are contrasted with those obtained with an unsupervised group and a group supervised by a human tutor.

This paper presents a novel vertical timeline information-visualization technique developed to support the analysis of human-computer dialogue data. The technique uses combined linked views including distorted views to effectively communicate the timing of dialogue events while presenting text in such a manner that it is easily readable. A prototype has been implemented and tested to demonstrate the technique's effectiveness for supporting exploration and revealing previously unsuspected patterns.

Motivation -- To improve the process of information retrieval (IR), specifically for geospatial data, by accounting for the natural processes of situated cognition where knowledge is a product of both action and context.

Research approach -- To focus on a specific topic (Mexican history), evaluate the limitations of existing approaches and design/implement a new system that overcomes these limitations.

Findings/Design -- As the theory situated cognition stipulates-all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts. It was found that the knowledge produced by information retrieval can be situated in the activity of exploring search results and bound to the context of geographic location (specifically, place names). In the design of our new application this made it important to allow the user to be able to have place-names for towns and cities visible throughout the search process.

Research limitations/Implications -- Tests were only undertaken with Mexicans living in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca with data about Mexican events, hence results may be culturally specific or specific to users from countries with a particular geography.

Originality/Value -- The results of this research should be of interest to designers of interactive maps and those who attempting to apply the theory of situated cognition to application design.

Take away message -- Taking account for the context in which users want to view the results of searches can improve the usability of IR applications. Specifically, this is demonstrated for geographic data where maintaining the visibility of place-names makes results generally more valuable.

The study presented in this paper shows how collaborative learning games can be used to improve primary education for children aged eight to ten in la Mixteca region of Mexico. We developed a series of three collaborative games to develop mathematics, language and reading skills. Each game uses elements of either Mixtec or Mexican national culture to encourage the children to identify with different sides of their identity. The children were tested before and after playing the games, observed during gaming sessions and interviewed to assess the impact of the games on their learning. Results show that educational videogames can be used to promote learning and team working skills as well as directly achieving learning objectives in mathematics.

Cognitonics is a new science which looks at ways to reconcile human socio-spiritual development with increasingly rapid human intellectual development in the new context of technological advances and increased cultural homogeny. This is particularly relevant in areas such as education and informatics where children are found to be increasingly capable to control and adapt to new technological advances yet often suffer from a lack of social development or are unable to engage with aspects of their own cultural heritage. In this study we consider the application of a cognitonics based approach to the problems of the Oaxacan education system, particularly for indigenous children who suffer from a loss of culture and diminished provision of education due to a lack of resources and regular teacher strikes. Specifically, we look at how the introduction of face-to-face collaborative video games can help develop academic, information-technology and social skills together while promoting spiritual well-being and cultural identity.

This paper presents a novel visual analytics technique developed to support exploratory search tasks for event data document collections. The technique supports discovery and exploration by clustering results and overlaying cluster summaries onto coordinated timeline and map views. Users can also explore and interact with search results by selecting clusters to filter and re-cluster the data with animation used to smooth the transition between views. The technique demonstrates a number of advantages over alternative methods for displaying and exploring georeferenced search results and spatio-temporal data. Firstly, cluster summaries can be presented in a manner that makes them easy to read and scan. Listing representative events from each cluster also helps the process of discovery by preserving the diversity of results. Also, clicking on visual representations of geo-temporal clusters provides a quick and intuitive way to navigate across space and time simultaneously. This removes the need to overload users with the display of too many event labels at any one time. The technique was evaluated with a group of nineteen users and compared with an equivalent text based exploratory search engine.

This paper describes state of the art information visualization research undertaken within the Sistemas Interactivos group at the Universidad Technologica de la Mixteca to make large scale complex data-sets more accessible for scientists and the general public. Our central thesis is that by making data more accessible we can improve the efficiency of our scientists and democratize data for the general public toward improving development. This is particularly important in traditionally disadvantaged areas such as the state of Oaxaca where the state of development lags behind that of other parts of Mexico and the efficient use of human and physical resources are essential to improve this situation. We also demonstrate that information visualization is an important tool for collaboration and would like to encourage the use of information visualization in university systems, such as the SUNEO of Oaxaca (Seara Vázquez 2009), where regular face to face collaboration between staff can be difficult due to the large distances between campuses. The examples of information visualization presented in the paper are applied in the fields of bioinformatics, taxonomy, logistics, intelligent agent research, spoken language systems and information retrieval.

This study investigates the effectiveness of mobile video games for learning English language vocabulary among Chinese students in comparison with more standard electronic dictionary learning. This involved an ethnographic study of students in their natural learning environment which was followed by classroom testing of vocabulary proficiency. Results show that educational video games can both improve the student learning experience and student results when combined with traditional methods.

  Existing Human Computer Interaction (HCI) strategies are seriously limited by current technologies. These are neither sensitive nor accurate enough to respond to users’ emotional states, the fundamental basis for effective communication in real time. This offered the challenge of investigating factors that would impact on the designing of effective and more emotionally intelligent interaction strategies for Companions. These were applied to a conceptual tool, the Affective Channel (AC), to endow Companions with emotional capabilities. This was implemented in the Wizard of Oz (WoZ) platform to evaluate Companions in real time. The WoZ is an experimental setup where existing immature technologies and a human operator combine to simulate Companion interaction with end users. In these aspects of my work is my original contribution to the HCI knowledge base.Experiments, focus groups and face to face interviews were carried out to ascertain users’ perception and expectations of virtual agents. ‘Descriptors’ thus identified formed the bases for the designing of user friendly Companions. Verbal and facial expressions data and other affective elements of effective human-companion interactionwere collected for use in the AC and the WoZ as stated above.Companion evaluations yielded the subsidiary contribution that Companions are perceived as empathetic, useful and trustworthy entities. Further, that they arouse positive emotions in children and also that they promote their learning improvement.These findings were the result of two experiments, one within subjects and one between subjects, conducted with thirty grade four pupils in a rural school in the poor Oaxaca region of Mexico.

Companions represent a new form of human-computer interaction. They are the next generation of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) with a robust dialogue capability. ECAs alter the interaction to a more natural setting: face-to-face communication and because of the anthropomorphic communication this creates, Companions are also expected to be affective interfaces. Empathy is an essential component of the interaction between users and Companions. The vision of Companions is that they are changing interactions between humans and systems into relationships. Companions represent a particular challenge for the design research because of the emergent technologies that they are endowed with and because of the fact that users' response to Companions is unknown. The key elements of these Companions which impact the user experience need to be identified, particularly the global users’ perception towards these Companions as interfaces. The methodology of the design process of Companions is inspired by the concept of ‘Kansei’ and the methods of ‘Kansei Engineering’, which translate consumer perceptions into design attributes. Analyzing results provide an interesting insight into the societal impact and the new relationships people want to develop with Companions as a new interface involving emergent technology. Firstly, results reveal that users need time to speak about these emergent technologies, secondly, they yearn a relationship with their own Companions which is somewhere between the human relationship and object relationship. The semantic of these artefacts seem to be emerging; as a result users need to make use of metaphors to qualify these Companions. Moreover, people drew a singular approach to how the ‘Companion’s hierarchy’ could work illustrating their expectations of the ‘technology promises’.

This chapter presents Companions interacting with children in real time, in a Collaborative Collocated Learning Game environment as a means of gaining a clearer understanding of the dynamics of interaction between the parties.

Companions are the evolution of Embodied Conversational Agents endowed with emotional abilities for establishing relationships, to care for and provide companionship for them.

The Learning Game environment is an ideal setting for observing how children construct social relationships with each other, and for our purposes, how they perceive Companions as their team-members, how these entities' embodiment impacted on them and the kind of social relationship these factors promoted.

The fact that Companions elicit positive emotions in children and influence their activities in a productive way is a core finding that may be viewed as a gateway to designing, implementing promising applications in diverse fields, from education to care, to companionship. We will show how the Wizard of Oz protocol can be used to develop a Conversational, Empathetic, and Domain Specific Interaction Strategy for Companions.

The material presented in this chapter will be of interest to application designers, developers working with interfaces that use agents as Companions or have Companion-like behavior, and/or to other specialists whose work would benefit from knowing more about developing enjoyable and productive interactive relationships between Companions and children.

This paper describes a child’s mental model of an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) acting as a learning Companion. Embodied Conversational Agents are characters that interact with humans through the medium of conversation. Acting as a learning Companion, an ECA can support children or offer guidance toward improving the learning process. When a child uses an ECA they necessarily form some sort of mental model of the ECA and this will affect the manner in which they learn and ultimately determine the effectiveness of their learning. This paper considers what a child’s natural mental model of an ECA is, and how we can best develop an ECA interaction strategy to fit that mental model.

This chapter explores the role of empathy in our relationship with technology. Empathy is defined as the human ability to put oneself in the place of another in order to better understand what that other person feels or thinks. In other words, it is the understanding and feeling of another person’s emotional and cognitive experience. This is a very human condition and not generally something we would associate with technology. However, as technology continues to evolve, particularly with the advent of more human technologies such as virtual agents who adopt a more involved relationship with their users, empathy has become more important. Empathy is a crucial aspect of human communication and as technology becomes more communicative, and more human, empathy will become an increasingly important part of our relationship with that technology.