Thesis - Instituto de Telecomunicações

1.2. MOTIVATION 5authentication situation just require a property of our identity, eliminating an integralbiometric verification. This is the case of the detection of the person gender, ethnicity orsome similar characteristic. Some soft-biometrics techniques such as the ones proposed inthe present thesis, can contribute to less-intrusive and better privacy protection approaches.1.2.2 New-learningThe possibility of using the remote user interaction as a source of information had its genesison our previous work in remote web-based learning, conventionally named e-learning[86]. We were interested in enhancing the learning experience by creating intelligent tutoringenvironments. Our preliminary work on the topic of intelligent tutoring systems [81],provided us insight on the user cognitive state. The developed system, based on relativelyscarce information about the user activity, could be used to discover the areas of interestand pedagogical preferences of a user. With this experience, our research group then raisedthe question: can we unveil more information about the user cognitive/emotional statewith access to more user information? At that moment we developed tools to collect moreinformation from the user. To this end we started by studying the user human-computerinteraction signals and later, some physiological signals. The identity question posed in thepresent thesis is also pertinent in the context of remote learning environments in particularfor remote evaluation purposes. There is the need to ensure the authenticity of the identityof the user in situations such as when answering a questionnaire.A related concept for a broader view of learning technologies is the New-Learningparadigm introduced by Roberto Carneiro [38]. This concept expresses that the introductionof advanced technologies (web-based or not) to the learning scenario, should createa new experience, producing a paradigm shift from the one century long model of learning.The methods developed in the present thesis can be one of the enabling technologies forsuch a new learning framework.1.2.3 Research ContextThe research undertaken in this thesis is part of a wider research context being followedby our group, focused on extracting and exploring information from two mains sources:(1) human interaction with the computer; and (2) electrophysiological data. We define a