The automatic assessment of the level of independence of a person, based on the recognition of a set of Activities of Daily Living, is among the most challenging research fields in Ambient Intelligence. The article proposes a framework for the recognition of motion primitives, relying on Gaussian Mixture Modeling and Gaussian Mixture Regression for the creation of activity models. A recognition procedure based on Dynamic Time Warping and Mahalanobis distance is found to: (i) ensure good classification results; (ii) exploit the properties of GMM and GMR modeling to allow for an easy run-time recognition; (iii) enhance the consistency of the recognition via the use of a classifier allowing unknown as an answer.

With the increasing importance of Computational Thinking (CT) at all levels of education, it is essential to have valid and reliable assessments. Currently, there is a lack of such assessments in upper primary school. That is why we present the development and validation of the competent CT test (cCTt), an unplugged CT test targeting 7–9 year-old students. In the first phase, 37 experts evaluated the validity of the cCTt through a survey and focus group. In the second phase, the test was administered to 1519 students. We employed Classical Test Theory, Item Response Theory, and Confirmatory Factor Analysis to assess the instruments’ psychometric properties. The expert evaluation indicates that the cCTt shows good face, construct, and content validity. Furthermore, the psychometric analysis of the student data demonstrates adequate reliability, difficulty, and discriminability for the target age groups. Finally, shortened variants of the test are established through Confirmatory Factor Analysis. To conclude, the proposed cCTt is a valid and reliable instrument, for use by researchers and educators alike, which expands the portfolio of validated CT assessments across compulsory education. Future assessments looking at capturing CT in a more exhaustive manner might consider combining the cCTt with other forms of assessments.

Cultural competence is a well known requirement for an effective healthcare, widely investigated in the nursing literature. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, aware of general cultural characteristics and of the different forms they take in different individuals, and sensitive to cultural differences while perceiving, reasoning, and acting. Drawing inspiration from existing guidelines for culturally competent healthcare and the state-of-the-art in culturally competent robotics, we identify the key robot capabilities which enable culturally competent behaviours and discuss methodologies for their development and evaluation.

Understanding the way learners engage with learning technologies, and its relation with their learning, is crucial for motivating design of effective learning interventions. Assessing the learners’ state of engagement, however, is non-trivial. Research suggests that performance is not always a good indicator of learning, especially with open-ended constructivist activities. In this paper, we describe a combined multi-modal learning analytics and interaction analysis method that uses video, audio and log data to identify multi-modal collaborative learning behavioral profiles of 32 dyads as they work on an open-ended task around interactive tabletops with a robot mediator. These profiles, which we name Expressive Explorers, Calm Tinkerers, and Silent Wanderers, confirm previous collaborative learning findings. In particular, the amount of speech interaction and the overlap of speech between a pair of learners are behavior patterns that strongly distinguish between learning and non-learning pairs. Delving deeper, findings suggest that overlapping speech between learners can indicate engagement that is conducive to learning. When we more broadly consider learner affect and actions during the task, we are better able to characterize the range of behavioral profiles exhibited among those who learn. Specifically, we discover two behavioral dimensions along which those who learn vary, namely, problem solving strategy (actions) and emotional expressivity (affect). This finding suggests a relation between problem solving strategy and emotional behavior; one strategy leads to more frustration compared to another. These findings have implications for the design of real-time learning interventions that support productive collaborative learning in open-ended tasks.