Enfoque UTE

pp. 1 - 15

Authors: Marco Yamba-Yugsi, Sergio Luján-Mora

We are experiencing constant technological change, which implies that learning and training requirements have been increased, they are increasingly high. One of these changes are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). As this is a new technology in our environment, the amount of desertion is high, it is essential to the analysis, to know the reasons of the high amounts of desertion and reduce the dropout of users in MOOC courses. For that, it is proposed to meet the different factors of the problem, for example, previous experience of users in making the MOOC courses, the level of satisfaction in the interaction with platforms that have courses MOOC and satisfaction by the end of a course. Additionally, knowing the user’s profile will make it easier for future courses suit them, although entails increasing the team and tailor a course to users, for the purpose of that they feel supported, intending to follow course and that they possess a new learning experience.

pp. 31 - 45

Authors: Estevan Gómez Torres, Nelson Herrera Herrera, Magí Paúl Díaz

The use of mobile devices has gradually increased. Every day, the number of organizations adopting systems which include some type of mobile payments is becoming bigger. Because of this reason, it is mandatory to have agile and quick systems to guarantee security and reliability, not only for the user but also for the operator. In that way, users will get a high-quality service based on mobile technologies. An analysis of NFC Technology has been made in this paper taking into consideration a proposal of a system development including mobile payments, which could be used in the transportation system of Metro of Quito. To assure the response time and transactional security, the use of cloud computing is recommended.

pp. 62 - 76

Authors: Vicente Merchán, Rocío Rodríguez

Nowadays, leadership and the style of governing have become one of the quality criteria that challenges the Government of Technologies and Information Systems (GoTIS) value-based on public domain. In this aspect, the excellence models and GoTIS standards play a vital role in the success of the organizations due to their usefulness as systems that help the improvement towards the organizational excellence. Two of them are the Ibero-american Model of Excellence in Public Administration and the GoTIS standard ISO/IEC 38500. This paper takes them into account to create a new assessment model of GoTSI, the same one that is validated through the opinion of leaders of technologies and information systems of high-level. The work provides two sub-criteria, eleven dimensions and five components of assessment. This model will allow GoTIS assess itself as a principle of quality and, from there, make an improvement and an organizational change of the processes and GoTIS team decisions. Similarly, it will also help to open the way to the development of new quality criteria from a specific and comprehensive view.

pp. 92 - 106

Authors: Aníbal Rubén Mantilla Guerra

In order to contribute to the treatment of diabetes, which is one of the main causes of death in Ecuador and in the world, a research project is being developed to create equipment that allows the effective control and treatment of this disease. The electronic equipment created for nutrition control, allows the diabetic patient to have information about the amount of calories they should ingest in consideration of their activities and their medical treatment. The mechatronic equipment for the physical exercise of people with diabetic foot, allows the application of therapies according to the severity of the affection. Considering that this is a delicate and complex treatment, the equipment helps the patients to alleviate its discomfort, to decrease the time of recovery and in some cases even to avoid amputation. The construction of the biomedical equipment for the control of nutrition is completed. While the equipment for the treatment of diabetic foot is in a stage of development of prototypes and tests. Both equipment has been conceived and developed with rigorous engineering methods and under quality standards, making an important contribution to research, development of science, technology, and innovation.

pp. 122 - 134

Authors: Juan Pablo Rojas, Julio César Bustos, Diego Ordóñez Camacho

QBus is a system that locates the bus routes circulating in the city of Quito. It consists of a mobile application which uses either Bluetooth Low Energy technology or Quick Response codes to identify the stops. It is based on the location of the user to show the nearest stops and search the available bus routes. The application shows relevant information of each route and, using a digital map, draws its path and the stops it performs. In addition to this, it offers the "How do I get there" functionality that allows the user to search the available bus routes to move from one point to another within the city. In order to comply with this process, QBus performs a search of the bus routes that have stops near the points of origin and destination; this functionality indicates to the user the stop in which he must take the bus and in which it must get off. On the other hand the system consists of a web portal which allows to manage all the information of the application, ie cooperatives, stops and bus routes in a graphical way through the use of the Google Maps V3 API.

pp. 148-159

Authors: Rodrigo Arturo Proaño Escalante, Ciro Napoleón Saguay Chafla, Segundo Bolívar Jácome Canchig, Fanny Sandoval Zambrano

One of the problems that the IT auditor has when expressing an opinion about a finding is the subjectivity that can be due to many aspects, among the main ones: emotional, technical skills or abilities with which this opinion can be right or wrong. This is a major problem because the audit report issued may have distortions of the facts. On the other hand, the development of the expert systems involves capturing the knowledge of the human and transferring it to a computer program in which all the characteristics of this knowledge are emulated and considering a group of rules, the system can make decisions as a human does. Advances in artificial intelligence over the last few years have led to the development of these knowledge-based systems increasing and the results obtained are more real. The use of these systems presents a promising future in the field of computer audit. The objective of this article is to give a general idea of the characterization and use of knowledge based systems, the way they are implemented and their application to the audit of information systems as a tool to help the opinion issue at the moment of realization of an audit.

pp. 172-185

Authors: Alex Cazañas, Andre de San Miguel, Esther Parra

One strategy used to assure that an interface meets user requirements is to conduct usability testing. When conducting such testing one of the unknowns is sample size. Since extensive testing is costly, minimizing the number of participants can contribute greatly to successful resource management of a project. Even though a significant number of models have been proposed to estimate sample size in usability testing, there is still not consensus on the optimal size. Several studies claim that 3 to 5 users suffice to uncover 80% of problems in a software interface. However, many other studies challenge this assertion. This study analyzed data collected from the user testing of a web application to verify the rule of thumb, commonly known as the “magic number 5”. The outcomes of the analysis showed that the 5-user rule significantly underestimates the required sample size to achieve reasonable levels of problem detection.

pp. 201-216

Authors: Germán Oswaldo Cárdenas, Jairo Aponte

Many researchers have highlighted the scarcity of empirical studies that systematically examine the advantages and disadvantages of the use of visualization techniques for software understanding activities. Such studies are crucial for gathering and analyzing objective and quantifiable evidence about the usefulness of proposed visualization techniques and tools, and ultimately, for guiding the research in software visualization. This paper presents a controlled experiment aimed at assessing the impact of a graph-based visualization technique on comprehension tasks. Six common comprehension tasks were performed by 20 undergraduate software engineering students. The completion time and the accuracy of the participants’ responses were measured. The results indicate that on one hand the use of the graph-based visualization increases the correctness (by 21.45% in average) but on the other hand it does not reduce the completion time in program comprehension tasks.

pp. 232-243

Authors: D. Viveros-Melo, M. Ortega-Adarme, X. Blanco Valencia, A. E. Castro-Ospina, S. Murillo Rendón, D. H. Peluffo-Ordóñez

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a process used for computer processing that tries to mimic the behavior of a human expert in making decisions regarding a subject and learn from the experience of past cases. CBR has demonstrated to be appropriate for working with unstructured domains data or difficult knowledge acquisition situations, such as medical diagnosis, where it is possible to identify diseases such as: cancer diagnosis, epilepsy prediction and appendicitis diagnosis. Some of the trends that may be developed for CBR in the health science are oriented to reduce the number of features in highly dimensional data. An important contribution may be the estimation of probabilities of belonging to each class for new cases. In this paper, in order to adequately represent the database and to avoid the inconveniences caused by the high dimensionality, noise and redundancy, a number of algorithms are used in the preprocessing stage for performing both variable selection and dimension reduction procedures. Also, a comparison of the performance of some representative multi-class classifiers is carried out to identify the most effective one to include within a CBR scheme. Particularly, four classification techniques and two reduction techniques are employed to make a comparative study of multiclass classifiers on CBR.

pp. 257 - 272

Authors: Mónica Moreno-Revelo, Sandra Patascoy-Botina, Andrés Pantoja-Buchelli, Javier Revelo Fuelagán, José Rodríguez-Sotelo, Santiago Murillo-Rendón, Diego Peluffo-Ordoñez

An arrhythmia is a pathology that consists on altering the heartbeat. Although, the 12-lead electrocardiogram allows evaluation of the electrical behavior from heart to determine certain pathologies, there are some arrhythmias that are difficult to detect with this type of electrocardiography. In this sense, it is necessary the use of the Holter monitor because it facilitates the records of the heart electrical activity for long periods of time, it is usually 24 up to 48 hours. Due to the extension of the records provided by the monitor, it is common to use computational systems to evaluate diagnostic and morphological features of the beats in order to determine if there is any type of abnormality. These computational systems can be based on supervised or unsupervised pattern recognition techniques, however considering that the first option requires a visual inspection about the large number of beats present in a Holter record, it is an arduous task, as well as it involves monetary costs. Consequently, throughout this paper we present the design of a complete system for the identification of arrhythmias in Holter records using unsupervised pattern recognition techniques. The proposed system involves stages of preprocessing of the signal, segmentation and characterization of beats, as well as feature selection and clustering. In this case, the technique k-means is used. These steps are applied within the framework of a segment-based methodology that improves the detection of minority classes. Additionally, initialization criteria are considered, which allow to enhance quality measures, especially sensitivity. As a result, it is determined that using k-means with the max-min initialization and a number of groups equal to 12, it is possible to obtain the best results, with values of: 99.36%, 91.31% and 99.16% for accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, respectively.

pp. 287 - 299

Authors: Marcelo V. García, Edurne Irisarri, Federico Pérez

Nowadays, factory automation systems need to cope with very different challenges, such as big data, IIoT, etc. These challenges lead to a new generation of automation systems based on the so-called Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) globally connected to form a flexible System of Cyber-Physical Production Systems (SoCPPS). CPPSs require acquisition of production system data and smart data processing to extract information to improve the overall system performance. To achieve that it is needed to bridge the gap between the control systems and higher layers. This paper discusses an approach to use the IEC 61499 function block concept to exchange data between plant floor and higher layers using an industrial standard like OPC UA. The OPC UA server offers subscription mechanisms, making possible the integration of several resources residing at plant floor. As it runs on embedded devices, the proposal makes possible to acquire plant information at low cost, enabling at the same time, a component-based design for enterprise plant floor control with independence of the hardware platform used.

pp. 315 - 328

Authors: Oswaldo Moscoso-Zea, Sergio Lujan-Mora

Knowledge Management (KM) is a practice that allows the creation, use, distribution and transfer of knowledge in organizations. Different KM frameworks exist that include business intelligence or enterprise architecture (EA) components for the implementation of KM in organizations. EA tools are used to digitize, relate and visualize the following dimensions of knowledge: organizational structure, business processes, applications and technology. The objective of this paper is to assess the role of EA as a key component in KM and to suggest software evaluation methodologies that can be adapted for the field of EA. For this, an investigation was realized to identify the existing software evaluation methodologies in the market and to filter those that can be adapted for the field of EA. The methodology used for the research was qualitative and exploratory using a case study performed in an international logistic service provider. The case study describes the process done for the selection of the evaluation methodology. Furthermore, it describes the steps for knowledge digitization.

pp. 344 - 357

Authors: Alex Cazañas, Esther Parra

This paper presents a literature review on the topic of web design, specifically with regard to mobile web design. The aim of the review is to identify and analyze major strategies and approaches to design for small-screen-size devices. Three strategies consistently appeared across the reviewed literature, namely, responsive web design, adaptive web design, and separate site. The analysis of these strategies intends to provide a clear understanding of their advantages and disadvantages, in terms of cost and user experience.

pp. 374 - 383

Authors: Xavier Sotomayor, Diego Ordóñez Camacho

The Websockets Shared Virtual Whiteboard, is a system for cooperative work, that allows its users to collaborate remotely, online and in real time. The system provides with a virtual whiteboard acting as a shared workspace where any user´s interactions synchronize automatically and immediately with all the other users. Server side, the system is implemented with the Java Enterprise Edition, mainly using WebSockets technology. Client side, no installing process is necessary, given that any recent browser supporting WebSockets through Javascript, whether on desktop or mobile systems, is able to integrate itself into a working session. The chosen configuration allows the users to hand-draw, and use geometric figures and text boxes; it is possible to save any stage of the working environment to file and reload it for a different session; moreover, a chat tool has been incorporated, which provides with a complementary workspace for adding contextual explanations to the session, everything in a collaborative environment.