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Enrique Yeguas-Bolívar

Publications and source records attributed to Enrique Yeguas-Bolívar.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

Customized Tourist Navigation in Urban Contexts Following General Trends and Individual Preferences

Navigating an unfamiliar city poses significant challenges, and tourists are among the groups more likely to experience them, particularly when attempting to locate a point of interest (POI). Various factors, such as language barriers or a lack of precise information, further complicate this issue by making it difficult for visitors to explore efficiently. To address these issues, we introduce the tool "Personalized Assistant for Tourist Hints" (PATH), which is based on a methodology for estimating personalized tourist routes. PATH computes optimal paths to specified locations guided by two tailored heuristics: tourist frequency and POI preference. This integration enables efficient and personalized navigation, guiding users toward attractions that best match their preferences. We evaluated our methodology through a case study in Viterbo, Italy, using a dataset comprising over 1000 routes from 265 tourists who visited the city during different periods. To validate our approach, we tested it with 238 new tourists and collected expert assessments from 86 local specialists. User satisfaction was measured through a structured questionnaire, which revealed highly positive feedback regarding the relevance and quality of the recommended routes, also when compared with existing routing applications and approaches proposed in the literature. These results demonstrate PATH's potential to enhance urban exploration by providing an adaptable and user-centric solution for tourist navigation.

cs.HC↗

Leveraging Machine Learning Techniques to Investigate Media and Information Literacy Competence in Tackling Disinformation

This study develops machine learning models to assess Media and Information Literacy (MIL) skills specifically in the context of disinformation among students, particularly future educators and communicators. While the digital revolution has expanded access to information, it has also amplified the spread of false and misleading content, making MIL essential for fostering critical thinking and responsible media engagement. Despite its relevance, predictive modeling of MIL in relation to disinformation remains underexplored. To address this gap, a quantitative study was conducted with 723 students in education and communication programs using a validated survey. Classification and regression algorithms were applied to predict MIL competencies and identify key influencing factors. Results show that complex models outperform simpler approaches, with variables such as academic year and prior training significantly improving prediction accuracy. These findings can inform the design of targeted educational interventions and personalized strategies to enhance students' ability to critically navigate and respond to disinformation in digital environments.

cs.CY↗

Behavioral Engagement in VR-Based Sign Language Learning: Visual Attention as a Predictor of Performance and Temporal Dynamics

This study analyzes behavioral engagement in SONAR, a virtual reality application designed for sign language training and validation. We focus on three automatically derived engagement indicators (Visual Attention (VA), Video Replay Frequency (VRF), and Post-Playback Viewing Time (PPVT)) and examine their relationship with learning performance. Participants completed a self-paced Training phase, followed by a Validation quiz assessing retention. We employed Pearson correlation analysis to examine the relationships between engagement indicators and quiz performance, followed by binomial Generalized Linear Model (GLM) regression to assess their joint predictive contributions. Additionally, we conducted temporal analysis by aggregating moment-to-moment VA traces across all learners to characterize engagement dynamics during the learning session. Results show that VA exhibits a strong positive correlation with quiz performance,followed by PPVT, whereas VRF shows no meaningful association. A binomial GLM confirms that VA and PPVT are significant predictors of learning success, jointly explaining a substantial proportion of performance variance. Going beyond outcome-oriented analysis, we characterize temporal engagement patterns by aggregating moment-to-moment VA traces across all learners. The temporal profile reveals distinct attention peaks aligned with informationally dense segments of both training and validation videos, as well as phase-specific engagement dynamics, including initial acclimatization, oscillatory attention cycles during learning, and pronounced attentional peaks during assessment. Together, these findings highlight the central role of sustained and strategically allocated visual attention in VR-based sign language learning and demonstrate the value of behavioral trace data for understanding and predicting learner engagement in immersive environments.

cs.HC↗

Fostering Inclusion: A Virtual Reality Experience to Raise Awareness of Dyslexia-Related Barriers in University Settings

This work introduces the design, implementation, and validation of a virtual reality (VR) experience aimed at promoting the inclusion of individuals with dyslexia in university settings. Unlike traditional awareness methods, this immersive approach offers a novel way to foster empathy by allowing participants to experience firsthand the challenges faced by students with dyslexia. Specifically, the experience raises awareness by exposing non-dyslexic individuals to the difficulties commonly encountered by dyslexic students. In the virtual environment, participants explore a virtual campus with multiple buildings, navigating between them while completing tasks and simultaneously encountering barriers that simulate some of the challenges faced by individuals with dyslexia. These barriers include reading signs with shifting letters, following directional arrows that may point incorrectly, and dealing with a lack of assistance. The campus is a comprehensive model featuring both indoor and outdoor spaces and supporting various modes of locomotion. To validate the experience, more than 30 non-dyslexic participants from the university environment, mainly professors and students, evaluated it through ad hoc satisfaction surveys. The results indicated heightened awareness of the barriers encountered by students with dyslexia, with participants deeming the experience a valuable tool for increasing visibility and fostering understanding of dyslexic students.

cs.HC↗

A VR Serious Game to Increase Empathy towards Students with Phonological Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is estimated to affect about 5-10% of the population. In particular, phonological dyslexia causes problems in connecting the sounds of words with their written forms. This results in difficulties such as slow reading speed, inaccurate reading, and difficulty decoding unfamiliar words. Moreover, dyslexia can also be a challenging and frustrating experience for students as they may feel misunderstood or stigmatized by their peers or educators. For these reasons, the use of compensatory tools and strategies is of crucial importance for dyslexic students to have the same opportunities as non-dyslexic ones. However, generally, people underestimate the problem and are not aware of the importance of support methodologies. In the light of this, the main purpose of this paper is to propose a virtual reality (VR) serious game through which teachers, students and, in general, non-dyslexic people could understand which are some of the issues of student with dyslexia and the fundamental utility of offering support to them. In the game, players must create a potion by following a recipe written in an alphabet that is specifically designed to replicate the reading difficulties experienced by individuals with dyslexia. The task must be solved first without any help and then by receiving supporting tools and strategies with the idea that the player can put himself in the place of the dyslexic person and understand the real need for support methodologies.

cs.HC↗

Determining the Difficulties of Students With Dyslexia via Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence: An Exploratory Analysis

Learning disorders are neurological conditions that affect the brain's ability to interconnect communication areas. Dyslexic students experience problems with reading, memorizing, and exposing concepts; however the magnitude of these can be mitigated through both therapies and the creation of compensatory mechanisms. Several efforts have been made to mitigate these issues, leading to the creation of digital resources for students with specific learning disorders attending primary and secondary education levels. Conversely, a standard approach is still missed in higher education. The VRAIlexia project has been created to tackle this issue by proposing two different tools: a mobile application integrating virtual reality (VR) to collect data quickly and easily, and an artificial intelligencebased software (AI) to analyze the collected data for customizing the supporting methodology for each student. The first one has been created and is being distributed among dyslexic students in Higher Education Institutions, for the conduction of specific psychological and psychometric tests. The second tool applies specific artificial intelligence algorithms to the data gathered via the application and other surveys. These AI techniques have allowed us to identify the most relevant difficulties faced by the students' cohort. Our different models have obtained around 90\% mean accuracy for predicting the support tools and learning strategies.

cs.CY↗

Analysing the Needs of Homeless People Using Feature Selection and Mining Association Rules

Homelessness is a social and health problem with great repercussions in Europe. Many non-governmental organisations help homeless people by collecting and analysing large amounts of information about them. However, these tasks are not always easy to perform, and hinder other of the organisations duties. The SINTECH project was created to tackle this issue proposing two different tools: a mobile application to quickly and easily collect data; and a software based on artificial intelligence which obtains interesting information from the collected data. The first one has been distributed to some Spanish organisations which are using it to conduct surveys of homeless people. The second tool implements different feature selection and association rules mining methods. These artificial intelligence techniques have allowed us to identify the most relevant features and some interesting association rules from previously collected homeless data.

cs.AI↗

Jewelry Recognition via Encoder-Decoder Models

Jewelry recognition is a complex task due to the different styles and designs of accessories. Precise descriptions of the various accessories is something that today can only be achieved by experts in the field of jewelry. In this work, we propose an approach for jewelry recognition using computer vision techniques and image captioning, trying to simulate this expert human behavior of analyzing accessories. The proposed methodology consist on using different image captioning models to detect the jewels from an image and generate a natural language description of the accessory. Then, this description is also utilized to classify the accessories at different levels of detail. The generated caption includes details such as the type of jewel, color, material, and design. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in accurately recognizing different types of jewels, a dataset consisting of images of accessories belonging to jewelry stores in Córdoba (Spain) has been created. After testing the different image captioning architectures designed, the final model achieves a captioning accuracy of 95\%. The proposed methodology has the potential to be used in various applications such as jewelry e-commerce, inventory management or automatic jewels recognition to analyze people's tastes and social status.

cs.CV↗

Training program on sign language: social inclusion through Virtual Reality in ISENSE project

Structured hand gestures that incorporate visual motions and signs are used in sign language. Sign language is a valuable means of daily communication for individuals who are deaf or have speech impairments, but it is still rare among hearing people, and fewer are capable of understand it. Within the academic context, parents and teachers play a crucial role in supporting deaf students from childhood by facilitating their learning of sign language. In the last years, among all the teaching tools useful for learning sign language, the use of Virtual Reality (VR) has increased, as it has been demonstrated to improve retention, memory and attention during the learning process. The ISENSE project has been created to assist students with deafness during their academic life by proposing different technological tools for teaching sign language to the hearing community in the academic context. As part of the ISENSE project, this work aims to develop an application for Spanish and Italian sign language recognition that exploits the VR environment to quickly and easily create a comprehensive database of signs and an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based software to accurately classify and recognize static and dynamic signs: from letters to sentences.

cs.HC↗