One of the most important issues in Adaptive and Intelligent Educational Systems (AIES) is to define effective pedagogical policies for tutoring students according to their needs. This paper proposes to use Reinforcement Learning (RL) in the pedagogical module of an educational system so that the system learns automatically which is the best pedagogical policy for teaching students. One of the main characteristics of this approach is its ability to improve the pedagogical policy based only on acquired experience with other students with similar learning characteristics. In this paper we study the learning performance of the educational system through three important issues. Firstly, the learning convergence towards accurate pedagogical policies. Secondly, the role of exploration/exploitation strategies in the application of RL to AIES. Finally, a method for reducing the training phase of the AIES.

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Comprehensive Geria.tcic Assessment ( CGA) is an integrated clinical process to evaluate the frailty of elderly persons in order to create therapy plans that improve their quality of life. For robotizing these tests, we are designing and developing CLA RC, a mobile robot able to help the physician to capture and manage data during the CGA procedures, mainly by autonomously conducting a set of predefined evaluation tests. Built around a shared internal representation of the outer world, the architecture is composed of softwa,r e modules able to plan and generate a stream of actions, t.o execute actions emanated from the representation or to update this by including/removing items at different abstraction levels. Percepts, actions and intentfons ooming from all software modules are grounded within th.is unique representation. This allows the robot to react to unexpected events and to modify the course of action accord ing to the dynamics of a scenario built around the interaction with the patient. The paper describes the architecture of the system as well as the preliminary user studies and evaluation to gather new user requirements.

Abstract:In recent decades, the use of the Internet has spread rapidly into diverse social spheres including that of education. Currently, most educational centers make use of e-learning environments created through authoring tool applications like learning content management systems (LCMSs).However, most of these applications currently present accessibility barriers that make the creation of accessible e-learning environments difficult for teachers and administrators. In this paper, the accessibility of the Moodle authoring tool, one of the most frequently-used LCMSs worldwide, is evaluated. More specifically, the evaluation is carried out from the perspective of two visually-impaired users accessing content through screen readers, as well as a heuristic evaluation considering the World Wide Web Consortium's Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. The evaluation results demonstrate that Moodle presents barriers for screen reader users, limiting their ability to access the tool. One example of accessibility problems for visually-impaired users is the frequent inability to publish learning contents without assistance. In light of these results, the paper offers recommendations that can be followed to reduce or eliminate these accessibility barriers.