Recursos

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)

The Information and Communications Technologies' market has been growing, and organizations around the world have been joining the great concern about the women's under-representation in programs related with science, technology, engineering and mathematics areas. This situation has led to the proposal of initiatives in distinct institutions to promote an increase in the participation of women. This article describes the experience of carrying out the I Workshop Women in Tech Occidente-Costa Rica (WITO 2019), which was attended by the fourth-year undergraduate female students of the bachelor's degree program in Informática Empresarial from the Sede de Occidente of the Universidad de Costa Rica. This workshop was focused on identifying: student fears, skills, interests and how the program and university services could be improved. Main results showed that: (i) students do not feel completely prepared for the office environment, (ii) the university must improve the support provided to students in topics such as sexual harassment, ergonomics labs and complementary services, and (iii) participants consider that stereotypes should disappear, and gender equality can generate better results for organizations. Finally, this kind of activity encourages the empowerment of female students and it also inspires them to be role models. 

Monitoring the posture of older persons using portable sensors while they carry out daily activities can facilitate the process of generating indicators with which to evaluate their health and quality of life. The majority of current research into such sensors focuses primarily on their functionality and accuracy, and minimal effort is dedicated to understanding the experience of older persons who interact with the devices. This study proposes a wearable device to identify the bodily postures of older persons, while also looking into the perceptions of the users. For the purposes of this study, thirty independent and semi-independent older persons undertook eight different types of physical activity, including: walking, raising arms, lowering arms, leaning forward, sitting, sitting upright, transitioning from standing to sitting, and transitioning from sitting to standing. The data was classified offline, achieving an accuracy of 93.5%, while overall device user perception was positive. Participants rated the usability of the device, in addition to their overall user experience, highly.

The use of information systems in organizations has increased over time, causing that most of the data related to the execution of business processes is recorded in corporate databases. Despite the rise in the generation of information, there is a need to further analyze what happens to the business processes in the organizations. There is a research field called process mining by which it is possible to extract knowledge from the data stored in event logs of the information systems. We propose a series of steps that can serve as a useful guide for those responsible for managing business processes in any organization. Recommended steps were developed through a case study applied in a process of booking tour packages using a synthetic event log.

Nowadays, the information systems are an indispensable resource for the organizations. The processes that are managed through these systems most of the time are hard to understand, maintain and improve. The data associated to the process becomes the main source and input to do all types of analysis. Process Mining allows the extraction of useful knowledge from the generated information of the corporate systems.

This work suggests a methodology based on process mining to execute process support analysis of a corporate intranet implemented in SharePoint Server. With the extracted information it is possible to do analysis from several perspectives. The obtained results allow administrators of this type of technology platforms to evaluate the techniques used and generate benefits. The methodology was applied in a case study for a Retail client, besides doing an exploratory analysis of the data for two additional clients in the Industrial Safety industry in Chile.

Este artículo desarrolla una descripción del proceso de desarrollo y creación de la primera carrera propia de todas las sedes regionales de la Universidad de Costa Rica, la carrera de Bachillerato en Informática Empresarial. Adicionalmente se describen los retos enfrentados por la carrera, especialmente los relacionados a la ejecución de proyec­tos de actualización y a responder a los requisitos para obtener una acreditación.