«Biometrics and Behavior Understanding Technologies for e-Learning Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities»

Aythami Morales & Ruth Cobos

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

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Abstract

Although e-learning presents many advantages, it also hands over certain challenges compared to the traditional face-to-face education. One of the most important aspects is the absence of direct contact between teachers and students. This results in significantly higher dropout rates compared to face-to-face education and learning obstacles difficult to resolve remotely. As a result, recent e-learning platforms are incorporating measures to monitor the student identity, activity, attention, engagement, and other very useful data to adapt the platforms accordingly for better learning and session monitoring. Some of these very valuable measures are based on biometric analyses and behavior understanding technologies, which allow us to estimate factors such as the attention level, the stress level through the heart rate, the emotional state, and the gaze and head pose. This talk will overview the main challenges associated with the use of biometric and behavior understanding technologies in e-learning platforms. During the talk, we will also highlight the research opportunities in these technologies including important aspects such as performance, privacy, and fairness. Finally, we will present ongoing work to include these technologies into real MOOC courses.

Bio

Aythami Morales Moreno (https://aythami.me/) received his M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2006 from Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. He received his Ph.D degree in Artificial Intelligence from La Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 2011. He performs his research works in the BiDA Lab – Biometric and Data Pattern Analytics Laboratory at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he is currently an Associate Professor (CAM Lectuter Excellence Program). He is member of the ELLIS Society (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems). He has performed research stays at the Biometric Research Laboratory at Michigan State University, the Biometric Research Center at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Biometric System Laboratory at University of Bologna and Schepens Eye Research Institute (Harvard Medical School). His research interests include pattern recognition, computer vision, machine learning, discrimination-aware learning, trustworthy AI, and biometrics signal processing. He is author of more than 100 scientific articles published in international journals and conferences, and 2 patents. He has participated in several National and European projects in collaboration with other universities and private entities.

Dr. Ruth  Cobos is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). She received her M.Sc. and  Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from UAM. She has been member of the research group “GHIA: Grupo de Herramientas Interactivas Avanzadas” (https://vghia.ii.uam.es/) at UAM since 1999 and member of the research group “Grupo de Excelencia Cognición y Contexto: el aprendizaje colaborativo mediado por ordenador” at University of Lleida (UdL) since 2005.

She is the Principal Investigator from UAM of the eMadrid Research Network (http://www.emadridnet.org/) and of the Spanish Network of Learning Analytics – SNOLA (https://snola.es/). She has participated in more than twelve R&D projects. During 2008 and 2009 she was de Principal Investigator of a project funded by the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID), which involves researchers from UAM, from UdL and from two universities at Colombia.

As Rector’s Delegate for Educational Technologies (2014-2016) she directed the technical office at UAM for the generation and creation of UAM MOOCs at edX (https://www.edx.org/es/school/uamx). UAM has been member of edX consortium since 2014. Nowadays, she is the coordinator of the MOOC instructor team of the course entitled “Introducción al desarrollo de aplicaciones web”.

Currently, her main areas of research include Learning Analytics, MOOCs, e-Learning, Blended Learning, CSCL and Educational Technologies.

More information: https://vghia.ii.uam.es/member?filepath=cobos_ruth.txt

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