3.3NEMar 20, 2024
Evo* 2023 -- Late-Breaking Abstracts VolumeA. M. Mora, A. I. Esparcia-Alcázar
Volume with the Late-Breaking Abstracts submitted to the Evo* 2023 Conference, held in Brno (Czech Republic), from 12 to 14 of April. These papers present ongoing research and preliminary results investigating on the application of different approaches of Bioinspired Methods (mainly Evolutionary Computation) to different problems, most of them real world ones.
Chatbots and messaging platforms in the classroom: an analysis from the teacher's perspectiveJ. J. Merelo, P. A. Castillo, Antonio M. Mora et al.
Introducing new technologies such as messaging platforms, and the chatbots attached to them, in higher education, is rapidly growing. This introduction entails a careful consideration of the potential opportunities and/or challenges of adopting these tools. Hence, a thorough examination of the teachers' experiences in this discipline can shed light on the effective ways of enhancing students' learning and boosting their progress. In this contribution, we have surveyed the opinions of tertiary education teachers based in Spain (mainly) and Spanish-speaking countries. The focus of these surveys is to collect teachers' feedback about their opinions regarding the introduction of the messaging platforms and chatbots in their classes, understand their needs and to gather information about the various educational use cases where these tools are valuable. In addition, an analysis of how and when teachers' opinions towards the use of these tools can vary across gender, experience, and their discipline of specialisation is presented. The key findings of this study highlight the factors that can contribute to the advancement of the adoption of messaging platforms and chatbots in higher education institutions to achieve the desired learning outcomes.
2.4NEMay 14, 2020
Evo* 2020 -- Late-Breaking Abstracts VolumeA. M. Mora, A. I. Esparcia-Alcázar
This volume contains the Late-Breaking Abstracts submitted to the Evo* 2020 Conference, that took place online, from 15 to 17 of April 2020. These papers where presented as short talks and also at the poster session of the conference together with other regular submissions. All of them present ongoing research and preliminary results investigating on the application of different approaches of Bioinspired Methods (mainly Evolutionary Computation) to different problems, most of them real world ones.
2.2NEJul 30, 2019
EVO* 2019 -- Late-Breaking Abstracts VolumeA. M. Mora, A. I. Esparcia-Alcázar
This volume contains the Late-Breaking Abstracts submitted to the EVO* 2019 Conference, that took place in Leipzig, from 24 to 26 of April. These papers where presented as short talks and also at the poster session of the conference together with other regular submissions. All of them present ongoing research and preliminary results investigating on the application of different approaches of Evolutionary Computation to different problems, most of them real world ones.
2.5NEJul 5, 2012
An experimental study of exhaustive solutions for the Mastermind puzzleJ. J. Merelo, Antonio M. Mora, Carlos Cotta et al.
Mastermind is in essence a search problem in which a string of symbols that is kept secret must be found by sequentially playing strings that use the same alphabet, and using the responses that indicate how close are those other strings to the secret one as hints. Although it is commercialized as a game, it is a combinatorial problem of high complexity, with applications on fields that range from computer security to genomics. As such a kind of problem, there are no exact solutions; even exhaustive search methods rely on heuristics to choose, at every step, strings to get the best possible hint. These methods mostly try to play the move that offers the best reduction in search space size in the next step; this move is chosen according to an empirical score. However, in this paper we will examine several state of the art exhaustive search methods and show that another factor, the presence of the actual solution among the candidate moves, or, in other words, the fact that the actual solution has the highest score, plays also a very important role. Using that, we will propose new exhaustive search approaches that obtain results which are comparable to the classic ones, and besides, are better suited as a basis for non-exhaustive search strategies such as evolutionary algorithms, since their behavior in a series of key indicators is better than the classical algorithms.