Recursos

Research on physical representations of data has often used personal data as its focus. Core aim of making personal data physical is to provoke self-reflections through a felt experience. In this paper, we present a preliminary study which employs the idea of gift-giving as a means to explore one's online data. Our main findings report strategies of relating to the data of strangers as well as a conflict between what one thought of their online self and what others were able to find. We discuss how the gifts became platforms for self-reflection, similar to physical data models. Then, we connect that to the engagement of a third person (gift-giver) in the process, highlighting the potential of such involvement. In the future, we focus on how to link people's meaningful artifacts with their personal data.

The aim of this article is to expose how the topic of usability in the course Multimedia, which is part of the Business program imparted by Universidad de Costa Rica in Western Campus at Grecia location. The study took place on I semester 2011 and it used the teaching strategy called case study, where students had to design an Internet shopping cart graphical user interface for a specific user type. Before making the design, students characterized the selected users and then they had to assess the usability of the final design. The results of the evaluation of the design of the interface by the selected users reflected that people improved with respect to the usability of the application, since 81.25% of the designs received a positive assessment from users. To determine if students assimilated usability issues, a survey based on the technique of Learning Curve was applied. The results indicated that students scored 9.07% on the question of expertise with the topic of usability, after making the case study.

Publicado en revista Panorama Académico

Team recommendation is a key and little-explored aspect within the area of business process management. The efficiency with which the team is conformed may influence the success of the process execution. The formation of work teams is often done manually, without a comparative analysis based on multiple criteria between the individual performance of the resources and their collective performance in different teams. In this article, we present a multi-criteria framework to allocate work teams dynamically. The framework considers four elements: (i) a resource request characterization, (ii) historical information on the pro- cess execution and expertise information, (iii) different metrics which calculate the suitability of the work teams taking into account both individual performance as well as collective performance of the resources, and (iv) a recommender system based on the Best Position Algorithm (BPA2) to obtain a ranking for the recommended work teams. A software development process was used to test the usefulness of our approach.

A lack of female students has been perceived in the enrollment process in the Bachelor of Business Informatics offered at the University of Costa Rica (Western Campus, Tacares precinct). This gender imbalance has been also documented in the national environment and worldwide. This essay presents the academic preferences and motivational factor to choose a career, and the perception towards information technologies program based on gender, according to a poll applied to students from high schools located near the Tacares precinct. The results from this research present significant evidence of differences between genders in the process of selecting careers related to Business Informatics, as well as the criteria used to make the decision. Additionally, some actions to bring more female students to the career are mentioned.

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.