Faraón Llorens, Juan José Bayona, Javier Gómez and Francisco Sanguino
Information and communication technologies have became pervasive in people's lives and in this changing world education cannot remain anchored in old‐fashioned models which ignore…
Abstract
Purpose
Information and communication technologies have became pervasive in people's lives and in this changing world education cannot remain anchored in old‐fashioned models which ignore the evolution through which society is going. This paper seeks to present the gamble made by the University of Alicante (Spain) on the promotion of open knowledge.
Design/methodology/approach
The educational environment cannot continue to be fixed, closed and isolated, where students – assuming a basically passive role – receive standardised teaching. It must consequently experience a fast and decisive transformation which allows it, amongst other things, to respond to the new challenge posed by society: the need for all of us to share the knowledge we generate, so that further progress can be made.
Findings
The Institutional Repository (RUA) and the OpenCourseWare of the University of Alicante (OCW‐UA) were conceived from the very beginning as related projects that could constitute consecutive phases in the open publication of knowledge. In this way the aim of presenting the promotion of open knowledge not as a series of discrete projects but as a global strategic gamble of the institution was achieved. In addition to the most visible educational benefits, this policy has had the virtue of favouring the assumption by the University of its role as an online provider of quality (scientific and teaching) content.
Originality/value
RUA is the storage place of all the teaching materials published by the University of Alicante's teaching staff, which are retrieved from OCW‐UA, while OCW‐UA serves as an organisational model of teaching content self‐archived by the teaching staff in RUA. The connection between the projects has allowed the presentation of the promotion of open knowledge as a global strategic gamble of the University, which has contributed to a greater acceptance by the teaching staff. This work is original in that it shows a successful experience of involvement by one university and its members in the promotion of open knowledge.
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Pilar Arques, Francisco A. Pujol, Faraón Llorens, Mar Pujol and Ramón Rizo
One of the main goals of vision systems is to recognize objects in real world to perform appropriate actions. This implies the ability of handling objects and, moreover, to know…
Abstract
Purpose
One of the main goals of vision systems is to recognize objects in real world to perform appropriate actions. This implies the ability of handling objects and, moreover, to know the relations between these objects and their environment in what we call scenes. Most of the time, navigation in unknown environments is difficult due to a lack of easily identifiable landmarks. Hence, in this work, some geometric features to identify objects are considered. Firstly, a Markov random field segmentation approach is implemented. Then, the key factor for the recognition is the calculation of the so‐called distance histograms, which relate the distances between the border points to the mass center for each object in a scene.
Design/methodology/approach
This work, first discusses the features to be analyzed in order to create a reliable database for a proper recognition of the objects in a scene. Then, a robust classification system is designed and finally some experiments are completed to show that the recognition system can be utilized in a real‐world operation.
Findings
The results of the experiments show that including this distance information improves significantly the final classification process.
Originality/value
This paper describes an object recognition scheme, where a set of histograms is included to the features vector. As is shown, the incorporation of this feature improves the robustness of the system and the recognition rate.
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Keywords
Francisco Gallego, Faraón Llorens, Mar Pujol and Ramón Rizo
The main intention of this paper is to state the benefits of using online videogames as a research environment, where AI algorithms are improved by means of learning from…
Abstract
Purpose
The main intention of this paper is to state the benefits of using online videogames as a research environment, where AI algorithms are improved by means of learning from real‐human‐behaviour examples.
Design/methodology/approach
The manner of taking advantage from the flux of real‐human‐behaviour examples inside an online videogame is stated. Then Mad University, a prototype online videogame specifically conceived and developed for this purpose, is explained.
Findings
Human‐like AI in artificial algorithms can be boosted by means of a specific kind of online videogame called MMORPGs, used as a research environment.
Research limitations/implications
Mad University is a prototype videogame which has been developed to experiment with AI algorithms that aim to learn strategies in a generalized fashion. The next research step will be to improve Mad University and to put it to work with hundreds of players and then research and test the effectiveness of the AI algorithms.
Originality/value
This paper proposes a new way of testing and experimenting with AI algorithms in order to obtain more human‐like results, and claims to have attempted to develop a generalized learning method.
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Francisco J. García-Penalvo Carlos García de Figuerola Jose A. Merlo