Óscar Sapena

Oscar Sapena, Eva Onaindia

The way of understanding online higher education has greatly changed due to the worldwide pandemic situation. Teaching is undertaken remotely, and the faculty incorporate lecture audio recordings as part of the teaching material. This new online teaching-learning setting has largely impacted university classes. While online teaching technology that enriches virtual classrooms has been abundant over the past two years, the same has not occurred in supporting students during online learning. {To overcome this limitation, our aim is to work toward enabling students to easily access the piece of the lesson recording in which the teacher explains a theoretical concept, solves an exercise, or comments on organizational issues of the course. To that end, we present a multimodal classification algorithm that identifies the type of activity that is being carried out at any time of the lesson by using a transformer-based language model that exploits features from the audio file and from the automated lecture transcription. The experimental results will show that some academic activities are more easily identifiable with the audio signal while resorting to the text transcription is needed to identify others. All in all, our contribution aims to recognize the academic activities of a teacher during a lesson.

Alejandro Torreño, Eva Onaindia, Óscar Sapena

Multi-agent planning (MAP) approaches are typically oriented at solving loosely-coupled problems, being ineffective to deal with more complex, strongly-related problems. In most cases, agents work under complete information, building complete knowledge bases. The present article introduces a general-purpose MAP framework designed to tackle problems of any coupling levels under incomplete information. Agents in our MAP model are partially unaware of the information managed by the rest of agents and share only the critical information that affects other agents, thus maintaining a distributed vision of the task.

Alejandro Torreño, Eva Onaindia, Óscar Sapena

Multi-agent planning (MAP) approaches have been typically conceived for independent or loosely-coupled problems to enhance the benefits of distributed planning between autonomous agents as solving this type of problems require less coordination between the agents' sub-plans. However, when it comes to tightly-coupled agents' tasks, MAP has been relegated in favour of centralized approaches and little work has been done in this direction. In this paper, we present a general-purpose MAP capable to efficiently handle planning problems with any level of coupling between agents. We propose a cooperative refinement planning approach, built upon the partial-order planning paradigm, that allows agents to work with incomplete information and to have incomplete views of the world, i.e. being ignorant of other agents' information, as well as maintaining their own private information. We show various experiments to compare the performance of our system with a distributed CSP-based MAP approach over a suite of problems.