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- Guidelines for Creating Video Podcasts in Mathematics Higher Education.Publication . Costa, Sidonie; Costa e Silva, Eliana; Correia, Aldinab-Mat@plicada is a b-learning Mathematics course for Higher Education students, mainly composed of educational videos available in the institutional Moodle platform. These contents were created by following a set of guidelines, where three components are considered: the quality of students’ learning, the teacher’s time and computer skills, as well as the equipment made available by the institution. With the aim of evaluating the procedure used to make these videos, an experiment was carried out in classroom context, using a video on matrix multiplication which is included in the course syllabus. After its visualization, the 49 students who participated in the experiment completed a questionnaire assessing viewing behaviour, perception, attitudes, satisfaction, and learning performance. The findings demonstrate the importance of using video podcasts in Higher Education as complementary tools and the adequacy of the selected b-Mat@plicada video. Also, the results indicate that, from the students’ perspective, the speech, sound, and image are the most important features in a video podcast.
- A Human-like Upper-limb Motion Planner: Generating naturalistic movements for humanoid robotsPublication . Gulletta, Gianpaolo; Costa e Silva, Eliana; Erlhagen, Wolfram; Meulenbroek, Ruud; Costa, Maria Fernanda Pires; Bicho, EstelaAs robots are starting to become part of our daily lives, they must be able to cooperate in a natural and efficient manner with humans to be socially accepted. Human-like morphology and motion are often considered key features for intuitive human–robot interactions because they allow human peers to easily predict the final intention of a robotic movement. Here, we present a novel motion planning algorithm, the Human-like Upper-limb Motion Planner, for the upper limb of anthropomorphic robots, that generates collision-free trajectories with human-like characteristics. Mainly inspired from established theories of human motor control, the planning process takes into account a task-dependent hierarchy of spatial and postural constraints modelled as cost functions. For experimental validation, we generate arm-hand trajectories in a series of tasks including simple point-to-point reaching movements and sequential object-manipulation paradigms. Being a major contribution to the current literature, specific focus is on the kinematics of naturalistic arm movements during the avoidance of obstacles. To evaluate human-likeness, we observe kinematic regularities and adopt smoothness measures that are applied in human motor control studies to distinguish between well-coordinated and impaired movements. The results of this study show that the proposed algorithm is capable of planning arm-hand movements with human-like kinematic features at a computational cost that allows fluent and efficient human–robot interactions.
- A mixed integer nonlinear multiperiod model for supply chain management of a company in the retail sectorPublication . Teixeira, Ana; Costa e Silva, Eliana; Lopes, Isabel CristinaThe fluctuations in the business environment and seasonal variations characteristic of food supply chains contribute greatly to the increasing complexity of the entire Supply Chain planning. In the present paper, quantitative models are applied to support the decision-making purchasing management department of a retail company. Specifically, a multiperiod mathematical model was developed with the aim of optimizing decision-making of the purchasing managers. The developed model consists of a multiperiod Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming model, with the objective to minimize the ratio between how much is costing the company to move the products along the Supply Chain and the products’ costs. It is discussed how to order the product, what is the most advantageous storage mode and whether it is preferable to order once or twice a week. Real instances, provided by a Portuguese retail company, regarding the demand for one year are tested for two scenarii, which are used currently by the company. The results show that the proposed model can reduce, on both scenarios, the ratio between operational costs and merchandise costs, for almost all products, and therefore it can be an important tool for supporting decision-making of the purchasing manager.