0000000000132809
AUTHOR
Silvia Rueda
Lessons Learned from the Design and Development of Vehicle Simulators
Vehicle simulators are crucial tools used in a variety of areas, such as aviation, driving, or maritime transportation. International standards require the use of motion-based vehicle simulators in training scenarios. However, the huge variety of applications and requirements makes it difficult for end users to find a motion-based commercial solution that fulfils their needs. On the other hand, commercial solutions are usually expensive as they involve specific hardware and software. Although some ad-hoc solutions have been reported, a generalized design strategy is needed. In this article, the authors emphasize the need for finding a development methodology for these important tools and th…
Towards a method to generate GUI prototypes from BPMN
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) provides organizations with a standard that facilitates further compression of the business process. BPMN focuses on the functional processes, leaving the development of interfaces to one side. Thereby, interface design usually depends on the subjective experience of the analyst. This article aims to propose a new method to generate user interfaces from BPMN models and Class Diagrams. The proposed method is based on the identification of different rules and makes use of stereotypes to extend BPMN notation. The rules have been extracted from seven existing projects on the Bizagi repository. Specifically, the proposal is based on the extraction of ru…
Requirements elicitation methods based on interviews in comparison: A family of experiments
Abstract Context There are several methods to elicit requirements through interviews between an end-user and a team of software developers. The choice of the best method in this context is usually on subjective developers’ preferences instead of objective reasons. There is a lack of empirical evaluations of methods to elicit requirements that help developers to choose the most suitable one. Objective This paper designs and conducts a family of experiments to compare three methods to elicit requirements: Unstructured Interviews, where there is no specific protocol or artifacts; Joint Application Design (JAD), where each member of the development team has a specific role; Paper Prototyping, w…
Terrain data compression using wavelet-tiled pyramids for online 3D terrain visualization
Last years have witnessed the widespread use of online terrain visualization applications. However, the significant improvements achieved in sensing technologies have allowed an increasing size of the terrain databases. These increasing sizes represent a serious drawback when terrain data must be transmitted and rendered at interactive rates. In this paper, we propose a novel wavelet-tiled pyramid for compressing terrain data that replaces the traditional multiresolution pyramid usually used in wavelet compression schemes. The new wavelet-tiled pyramid modifies the wavelet analysis and synthesis processes, allowing an efficient transmission and reconstruction of terrain data in those applic…
A genetic approach for adding QoS to distributed virtual environments
Distributed virtual environment (DVE) systems have been designed last years as a set of distributed servers. These systems allow a large number of remote users to share a single 3D virtual scene. In order to provide quality of service in a DVE system, clients should be properly assigned to servers taking into account system throughput and system latency. The latter one is composed of both network and computational delays. This highly complex problem is known as the quality of service (QoS) problem. In this paper, we study the implementation of a genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the QoS problem in DVE systems. Performance evaluation results show that, due to its ability of both finding goo…
A family of experiments to generate graphical user interfaces from BPMN models with stereotypes
Abstract Context: A significant gap separates Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) models representing processes from the design of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). Objective: This paper reports on a family of experiments to validate a method to automatically generate GUIs from BPMN models using stereotypes complemented with UML class primitives, and transformation rules. Method: We conducted two replications (23 and 31 subjects respectively) in which we compared two methods to generate GUIs from BPMN models; one automatic (using Stereotyped BPMN models) and one manual (using Non-stereotyped BPMN models). The study focuses on comparing effort, accuracy, and satisfaction (in terms of …
Are requirements elicitation sessions influenced by participants' gender? An empirical experiment
[EN] Context: Requirements elicitation is a crucial phase in the software development life cycle. During requirements elicitation sessions, requirements engineers capture software requirements, and motivate stakeholders to express needs and expected software functionalities. In this context, there is a lack of extensive empirical research reporting the extent to which elicitation sessions can be influenced by participants' gender. Objective: This paper presents our research endeavour to investigate requirements engineers' effort and elicited requirements' accuracy based on participants' gender. Method: We conducted an experiment in two rounds with a total of 59 students who played the role …
Ensuring the performance and scalability of peer-to-peer distributed virtual environments
Large scale distributed virtual environments (DVEs) have become a major trend in distributed applications. Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures have been proposed as an efficient and truly scalable solution for these kinds of systems. However, in order to design efficient P2P DVEs these systems must be characterized, measuring the impact of different client behavior on system performance. This paper presents the experimental characterization of P2P DVEs. The results show that the saturation of a given client has an exclusive effect on the surrounding clients in the virtual world, having no noticeable effect at all on the rest of clients. Nevertheless, the interactions among clients that can tak…
The Future We Want: a Learning Experience to Promote SDGs in Higher Education from the United Nations and University of Valencia
This article shares the strategy for mainstreaming the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the University of Valencia (UV), which, although limited in its scale, may compel other Higher Education Institutions to think in technological and social progress aligned with the 2030 Agenda. It explicates a process driven by the UV, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the United Nations (UN), and in collaboration with the Service for Geospatial, Information, and Telecommunications Technologies from the UN Support Base in Valencia (Spain) to prepare the online event: “The United Nations We Want”. It was the culmination of a collaborative project between students and faculties from differe…
Generation of User Interfaces from Business Process Model Notation (BPMN)
Business Process Model Notation focuses on functional processes; so, the design of the interface generally depends on the subjective experience of the analyst. This thesis proposes a new method to generate interfaces from BPMN models. The idea is to identify rules from BPMN to interfaces in existing real projects. We have analyzed 7 Bizagi projects to generalize a list of rules. It has been done considering five BPMN patterns. Apart from BPMN primitives, there are rules that depend on elements of Class Diagrams to know how to generate the interfaces. When the rules have several alternatives to generate the interfaces, we need an unambiguous semantics to specify which alternative we are goin…
Gender Diversity in STEM Disciplines: A Multiple Factor Problem.
La falta de diversidad, y específicamente de diversidad de género, es uno de los problemas clave que se están encontrando tanto las empresas del sector tecnológico como las instituciones del ámbito académico en la educación superior. Según la UNESCO, las mujeres representan el 35% de todos los matriculados en las ramas de Ciencia, Tecnología, Ingeniería y Matemáticas (STEM, en sus siglas en inglés), encontrándose el mínimo, un 3%, en el área de las Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (TIC). Al mismo tiempo, el número de mujeres profesionales que abandonan trabajos de perfil tecnológico es inaceptablemente alto. Como miembros de una institución de educación superior centrada e…
Simulación de Plataformas Robóticas de Movimiento para Aplicaciones de Realidad Virtual Mediante Filtros Digitales
[ES] El uso de plataformas robóticas de movimiento en simuladores de vehículos y aplicaciones de Realidad Virtual es relativamente habitual. Sin embargo, el ajuste de los algoritmos que controlan su funcionamiento, denominados algoritmos de washout, no es sencillo y requiere de numerosas pruebas hasta obtener una apropiada fidelidad de movimiento. Disponer de herramientas que permitan simular plataformas de movimiento puede permitir simplificar esta tarea. Es por ello que este trabajo presenta un método para la caracterización y simulación de manipuladores robóticos mediante filtros digitales de segundo orden, sencillo de implementar y ajustar a partir de una caracterización previa. El simu…
Girls4STEM: Gender Diversity in STEM for a Sustainable Future
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are key disciplines towards tackling the challenges related to the Sustainable Development Goals. However, evidence shows that women are enrolling in these disciplines in a smaller percentage than men, especially in Engineering related fields. As stated by the United Nations Women section, increasing the number of women studying and working in STEM fields is fundamental towards achieving better solutions to the global challenges, since the potential for innovation is larger. In this paper, we present the Girls4STEM project, which started in 2019 at the Escola Tè
Towards breaking the Gender Gap in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
The gender gap in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) has drawn the attention of research and academic communities due to its impact in the Digital Society, targeting the fourth and fifth 2030 sustainable development goals of achieving quality education and gender equality. Recent studies show that women are enrolling STEM studies in smaller proportion than men and that they have a larger probability to renounce to their jobs or to take leaves. In this scenario, the involvement of educational institutions is seminal to change this trend. The School of Engineering of the University of Valencia (ETSE-UV), Spain, launched in 2011 a pilot program to promote STEM careers, foc…