Technologies for Inclusive Education

By providing students with the opportunities to receive a high quality education regardless of their social or cultural background, inclusive education is a new area that goes beyond traditional integration approaches. These approaches hope to provide the educative system with the ability to adapt to the diversity of its students. Technologies for Inclusive Education: Beyond Traditional Integration Approaches introduces the basic concepts, current research guidelines and future perspectives on the current state of these approaches. This book aims to make inclusive education a reality in the future by highlighting technological advances in applied e-learning, cognitive learning and education multimedia. Novel approaches to human-computer interaction are essential to make these contents available for every student regardless of their disabilities and learning styles.

David Griol Barresobtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of València (Spain) in 2007. He has also a B.S. in Telecommunication Science from this University. He is currently professor at the Department of Computer Science in the Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain). He has participated in several European and Spanish projects related to natural language processing and dialogue systems. His research activities are mostly related to the development of statistical methodologies for the design of spoken dialogue systems. His research interests include dialogue management/optimization/simulation, corpus-based methodologies, user modeling, adaptation and evaluation of spoken dialogue systems and machine learning approaches. Before starting his Ph.D. study, he worked as a network engineer in Motorola. He is a member of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and AEPIA (Spanish Association of Artificial Intelligence).

Zoraida Callejas Carrión is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Computer Systems at the Technical School of Computer Science and Telecommunications of the University of Granada (Spain). She completed a PhD in Computer Science at University of Granada in 2008 and has been a visiting researcher in University of Ulster (Belfast, UK), Technical University of Liberec (Liberec, Czech Republic) University of Trento (Trento, Italy), and Technical University of Berlin (Berlin, Germany). Her research activities have been mostly related to speech technologies and in particular to the investigation of dialogue systems. Her results have been published in several international journals and conferences. She has participated in numerous research projects, and is a member of several research associations focused on speech processing and human-computer interaction.

Ramón López-Cózar Delgado is Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science and Telecommunications of the University of Granada (Spain). His main research interests in the last 15 years include spoken and multimodal dialogue systems, focusing on speech processing and dialogue management. He has coordinated several research projects, has published a number of journal and conference papers, and has been invited speaker at several scientific events addressing these topics. In 2005 he published the book Spoken, Multilingual and Multimodal Dialogue Systems: Development and Assessment (Wiley). Recently he has co-edited the book Human-Centric Interfaces for Ambient Intelligence (Elsevier Academic Press, 2010), in which he has coordinated the section concerning speech processing and dialogue management. He is a member of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association), FoLLI (Association for Logic, Language and Information), AIPO (Spanish Society on Human-Computer Interaction) and SEPLN (Spanish Society on Natural Language Processing).