Recursos

Nowadays, assessing and improving customer experience has become a priority, and has emerged as a key differentiator for business and organizations worldwide. A customer journey (CJ) is a strategic tool, a map of the steps customers follow when engaging with a company or organization to obtain a product or service. The increase of the need to obtain knowledge about customers’ perceptions and feelings when interacting with participants, touchpoints, and channels through different stages of the customer life cycle. This study aims to describe the application of process mining techniques in healthcare as a tool to asses customer journeys. The appropriateness of the approach presented is illustrated through a case study of a key healthcare process. Results depict how a healthcare process can be mapped through the CJ components, and its analysis can serve to understand and improve the patient’s experience.

One of the main causes of chronic pain in older people is spine deformity, an abnormal curvature of the spine. The purpose of this study is to improve understanding of the experience of chronic pain produced by spinal deformity in older people and understand how cultural factors may affect this experience. A qualitative study was performed with 10 older people. Participants were encouraged to describe a typical day in their life, including the factors that affect their pain and how their quality of life had been affected since experiencing chronic pain. The semistructured interviews were transcribed and analyzed using open coding. Pain caused by spine deformity produces disability, affecting how older people perform their daily activities, causing them to adapt their households and physical positions to perform these tasks, albeit slowly or incompletely. Chronic pain also affects emotional states and social relationships because older people become unable to undertake physical activities that they performed in the past. The close relationship with adult children and friends, typical in Latin cultures, is a source of comfort and support. At a community level, adaptation of public services (such as public transportation) must be improved.

Dynamic resource allocation is considered a key aspect with in business process management. Selecting the most suitable resources is a challenge for those in charge of making the allocation, because the efficiency with which this task is executed, can contribute to the quality of the results, and improve the process performance. Different mechanisms have been proposed to improve resource allocation. However, there is a need for more flexible allocation methods that integrate a set of conditions and requirements defined at run-time, and also, allow the combination of different criteria to evaluate resources. In this paper, we present ResRec, a novel Multi-factor Criteria tool that can be used to recommend and allocate resources dynamically. The tool provides the feature of solving individual requests (On-demand), or requests made in blocks (Batch) through a recommender system developed in ProM.

This article has the purpose of presenting the results of a gender-driven investigation about the perception that students, enrolled in the Bachelor of enterprise computing/Corporate IT offered at the University of Costa Rica (Western Campus), have when choosing a career to enroll in and what their work life expectations are. This essay presents therefore; the factors that encourage women, in the largest regional campus (San Ramon and Grecia), to enroll in this program and it points out what their expectations are for when they will walk out in the working market. This essay also includes an analysis on the similarities and differences found when compared to the opinions of men in this same regional campus.

Nowadays, studying in detail the gender situation in careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) has been fully encouraged. Despite the relevance of STEM disciplines around the world, women continue to be underrepresented in STEM programs as well as the lack of academic engagement for STEM education in primary and secondary schools and universities. Whereby, there is a growing in- terest in analyzing the gender gap and motivating both boys and girls in primary education to participate equally in STEM careers. The aim of this article is to collaborate and encourage strengthening the teaching of STEM programs at earlier levels and to reduce the aforementioned gap. To accomplish our goal, we present the design of an initiative called Playful STEM-promotion to define a series of STEM-oriented activities in primary schools focused on the gender variable. Preliminary results show that we have proposed a methodology that will serve as a guide to de- velop our initiative. A set of valuable learned lessons had been identified as part of the experience of conducting a STEM-oriented inter-university research.

Diary studies are used to gather user information in their natural context. Despite the advantages of digital diaries, older users are not able to fully benefit from them, e.g. due to decreased motor and cognitive abilities, and low digital skills. This work presents InMyDay, a digital diary application specifically designed and implemented for older users. The goal of this work is twofold: first, we research whether older users are able to record activities and reflect on their emotions using a digital diary. Then, using the results of this first phase, we implemented three input styles for the second version of the digital diary: voice, stylus, and keyboard. Overall, 23 older users participated in evaluations aimed at improving the design of the diary and understanding their input style preferences. We found that the older adults used the diary to reflect on their emotions, registering positive as well as negative emotions. We also found that the variety of choices in input styles helped the participants select the option most suited to their particular needs and preferences. Future work will focus on evaluating the digital diary over a longer period of time, to analyze variables such as long-term adoption and motivation, as well as trends in the selection of input styles.

Nowadays organizations generate large amount of data. Only a few make a good use to optimize the performance of the business. Process mining appears as a branch of the data science that tries to understand the actual operational processes in the organizations through different algorithms, allowing the discovery of process models to give insight of the processes and understand how they can be improved.

In this work different process mining techniques are applied to a company dedicated to the advertisement market, specifically the process of dealing with contract issues with customers. The Process Mining Project Methodology was followed to execute a case study. Additional to the basic methodology, elements from the others areas of studies were added to generate better results and have a better understanding of the problem. The case study includes three scenarios with three different hypotheses that were validated through our method.

Distributed and parallel computing conform a mature area of computer sciences. However, design, relization and testing of such systems is still a burden. Simmulation is a useful technique for getting feedback about models before they get into real life. SEND is a distributed histories simmulator that can attach several types of logical clocks to events in different processes, in order to study the causal relationships among them. This paper is aimed to present some results about SEND and possible perspectives about it. (XIII Encuentro Chileno de Computación. Jornadas Chilenas de Computación. Valdivia, Chile)