Ease of use and usefulness are believed to be fundamental in determining the acceptance and use of various, corporate ITs. These beliefs, however, may not explain the user’s behavior toward newly emerging ITs, such as the World-Wide-Web (WWW). In this study, we introduce playfulness as a new factor that reflects the user’s intrinsic belief in WWW acceptance. Using it as an intrinsic motivation factor, we extend and empirically validate the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) for the WWW context. # 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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Beyond the Usefulness and Ease of Use : Extending the TAM for a World - Wide - Web Context

In view of the important bearing of BEER and ARBER'S conclusions upon various cytological and physiological problems, it is to be hoped that future investigations may throw some light upon the following questions: i. Are BEER and ARBER'S phragmospheres actually hollow spheres of kinoplasm or ring-shaped phragmoplasts such as occur in other tissues of the higher plants ? 2. If they are ring-shaped phragmoplasts, as seems probable, do they form cell plates ? 3. Are the nuclei of the \"binucleate cells\" separated by a thin membrane, or does the cell plate disappear without forming a membrane ? 4. Do the nuclei of multinucleate cells arise by the same type of nuclear division as the nuclei of binucleate cells ?-I. WY. BAILEY.

Ripening of Tomatoes

The data generated in modern agricultural operations are provided by diverse elements, which allow a better understanding of the dynamic conditions of the crop, soil and climate, which indicates that these processes will be increasingly data-driven. Big Data and Machine Learning (ML) have emerged as high-performance computing technologies to create new opportunities to unravel, quantify and understand agricultural processes through data. However, there are many challenges to achieve the integration of these technologies. It implies making some adaptations to ML for using it with Big Data. These adaptations must consider the increasing volume of data, its variety and the transmission speed issues. This paper provides information on the use of Big Data and ML for agriculture, identifying challenges, adaptations and the design of architectures for these systems. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), which allowed us to analyze 34 real cases applied in agriculture. This review may be of interest to computer or data scientists and electronic or software engineers. The results show that manipulating large volumes of data is no longer a challenge due to Cloud technologies. There are still challenges regarding (1) processing speed due to little control of the data in its different stages, raw, semi-processed and processed data (value data); (2) information visualization systems, which support technical data little understood by farmers.

Use and Adaptations of Machine Learning in Big Data—Applications in Real Cases in Agriculture

The author conducted two experiments to assess effectiveness of interactive e-learning. Students in a fully interactive multimedia-based e-learning environment achieved better performance and higher levels of satisfaction than those in a traditional classroom and those in a less interactive e-learning environment.

Interactive multimedia-based e-learning: A study of effectiveness.

International Technology Transfer.

When combined, education and technology can build dynamic teaching and learning experiences that are tailored to developing and transforming the educators and learners needed to power the digital economy. For some reasons, however, there is still a big chunk of people especially students who aren’t ready yet to embrace the technological change in the field of education. This study aims to determine the factors affecting students’ e-learning technology acceptance particularly on Learning Management Systems (LMS) in the Filipino context. A conceptual model was proposed based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) which was extended through the inclusion of Internet Connectivity Experience (ICE), Social Media Influence (SMI), Integrated Multimedia Instruction (IMI), System Interactivity (SI) and Perceived Quality Work of Life (PQWL) as additional predictor values. The constructs were determined according to the three-tier use model (3TUM) which was characterized to explore users’ attitudes towards IT at three levels. The target population in this research was Filipino students from colleges that are considered as promoters of elearning integration in the educational sphere in the Philippines. The collected data from 629 Filipino college students were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) technique based on AMOS methods. Finally, a path model was created to examine the relationships between the factors to explain students’ adoption of e-learning technology from the information systems acceptance point of view. As a result, it provided practical and technical implications applicable for local and global school environments that could help educational leaders, educational technologists, educators and learners in their development, implementation, and acceptance of e-learning technology like LMS.

https://manuelgarcia.info/media/full_paper/elearning-philippines.pdf

E-Learning Technology Adoption in the Philippines: An Investigation of Factors Affecting Filipino College Students' Acceptance of Learning Management Systems

Computer programming education is often delivered using individual learning strategies leaving group learning techniques as an under-researched pedagogy. This pose a research gap since novice programmers tend to form their own group discussions after lecture meetings and laboratory activities, and often rely on peers when a topic or activity is difficult. Thus, this study intends to evaluate the impact of cooperative learning using jigsaw technique when teaching computer programming to novice programmers. A quasi-experimental research using a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design was adopted to examine the impact of jigsaw teaching strategy. After a 14-week programming course, pre- and post-test results revealed a significant increase in terms of attitude and self-efficacy, and the experimental group demonstrated significantly higher scores than in the control group. Therefore, it was concluded that cooperative learning using Jigsaw technique is a valid and effective teaching strategy when handling novice programmers in an introductory programming course.

https://manuelgarcia.info/media/full_paper/cooperative-learning-computer-programming.pdf

Cooperative learning in computer programming: A quasi-experimental evaluation of Jigsaw teaching strategy with novice programmers

The main enterprise of the Philippine agriculture sector is crop cultivation where tomato is deliberated as one of the major crops in the country. With the abundance on tomato production, ripeness classification becomes fairly laborious and challenging, not to mention the subjective visual interpretation of human graders grounded from practical experience that is easily influenced by the environment and prone to error. Thus, this study proposes an automatic tomato ripeness identification using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier and CIELab color space via a machine learning approach. Dataset used for modeling and validation experiment in a 5-fold cross-validation strategy was composed of 900 images assembled from a farm and various image search engines. Divided into six classes that represent tomato ripening stages, experimental results showed that the proposed method was successful with 83.39% accuracy in ripeness classification detection. With this machine learning approach and combination of image processing techniques, the agriculture industry could benefit by automating the ripeness estimation which then could save tomatoes from damage.

https://manuelgarcia.info/media/full_paper/tomayto-tomahto.pdf

Tomayto, Tomahto: A Machine Learning Approach for Tomato Ripening Stage Identification Using Pixel-Based Color Image Classification

The combination of multimedia technology and Internet provides an amiss channel for pornographic contents accessible by certain sensitive groups of people. Furthermore, the same channel provides the easiest medium to distribute illicit images and videos without an autonomous content supervision process. In this study, an application was developed grounded from a pixel-based approach and a skin tone detection filter to identify images and videos with a large skin color count and considered as pornographic in nature. With nudity detection algorithm as the foundation of the system, all multimedia files were preprocessed, segmented, and filtered to analyze skin-colored pixels by processing in YCbCr space and then classifying it as skin or non-skin pixels. Afterwards, the percentage of skin pixels relative to the size of the frames is calculated to be part of the mean baseline for nudity and non-nudity materials. Lastly, the application classifies the files as nude or not, and then filter it. The application was evaluated by supplying a dataset of 1,239 multimedia files (Images = 986; Videos = 253) collected from the Web. On the final testing set, the application obtained a precision of 90.33% and accuracy of 80.23% using the supplied dataset.

https://manuelgarcia.info/media/full_paper/pornographic-filtering-application.pdf

A Pornographic Image and Video Filtering Application Using Optimized Nudity Recognition and Detection Algorithm

A life without language – the human system of communication – is a life that couldn’t be lived to the fullest. Aphasia, a multimodal neurophysiologic disorder that is manifested by a substantial communication restriction due to damage to the brain, is one of the many possible causes that can make life languageless. Fortunately, it can be treated by speech therapy to rehabilitate language skills and can even be improved by therapy via an app to supplement communication experiences as proven by recent studies. As a contribution to the gaming rehabilitation industry, this paper aimed to design and develop a speech therapy game application, as an additional neurorehabilitation modality for aphasia patients and assess its applicability as an adjunct to the traditional neuromuscular rehabilitation through a pilot study. Eight sessions of game-based speech therapy were applied to seven aphasic patients, 10–15 minutes per day, once a week, for 8 successive weeks. Aphasia assessment in stroke patients was performed with a multidimensional assessment tool, built-in to the therapeutic game, based from quick aphasia battery (QAB) before and after treatment. The comparison of before and after treatment revealed that there was an improvement in all of the QAB subtests: level of consciousness, connected speech, word comprehension, sentence comprehension, picture naming, repetition, reading aloud, and motor speech. This suggests that the development of this speech therapy game and the preliminary findings from the pilot study may indeed be an effective neurorehabilitation instrument for therapy of aphasia patients. Keywords-Mobile Game Application, Neuororehabilitation, Speech Therapy, Video Game Rehabilitation, Aphasia, Stroke

https://manuelgarcia.info/media/full_paper/speech-therapy-game.pdf

Manuel B. Garcia

Papers

E-Learning Technology Adoption in the Philippines: An Investigation of Factors Affecting Filipino College Students' Acceptance of Learning Management Systems

Cooperative learning in computer programming: A quasi-experimental evaluation of Jigsaw teaching strategy with novice programmers

Tomayto, Tomahto: A Machine Learning Approach for Tomato Ripening Stage Identification Using Pixel-Based Color Image Classification

A Pornographic Image and Video Filtering Application Using Optimized Nudity Recognition and Detection Algorithm

A Speech Therapy Game Application for Aphasia Patient Neurorehabilitation – A Pilot Study of an mHealth App