Hello, I am a second year PhD student on Computer Science and I am working on Affective Tutoring Systems development…. My work is about affective computing, software engineering and software architecture.

This was the first time I attended ITS conference and I think the experience worth it. I participate at one hand, as student volunteer and at the other hand as tutorial speaker. Both activities let me meet and interact with different members of the ITS community.

AS STUDENT VOLUNTER, I learned more about the efforts and initiatives of the ITS community mainly about the implications of affective elements on the learning process, a topic in which I am focusing my effort in order to make synergy and create new opportunities for new projects. In this area I have the opportunity to talk and share with speakers, poster presenters and other student volunteers.

In particular I had the chance to meet a Canadian student (he was assisting me as student volunteer during my tutorial) and we shared common interests in project topics and entrepreneur initiatives. We had very rich conversations where we found synergy opportunities and shared research development. For sure we will be working together soon!

Beside that, it was positive surprising for me to find people from Latin America (LA) who are actively working in the ITS community. That is because besides being a PhD student at Arizona State University, I am part of the Latin American faculty. During ITS we was able to create a small--‐but--‐full--‐of--‐ideas--‐group with people from Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica and Spain. Our goal as a group will be to create initiatives that could positively impact the different regions we represent in LA.

AS TUTORIAL SPEAKER, I shared my experience with the tutorial named “How to Apply Software Architecture and Patterns to Tutoring System Development?”. This talk was motivated because during my research work, I had found that there is some level of misunderstanding and misconception about software engineering and software architecture processes inside the ITS community.

It was an interesting talk about different concerns on the community such as cost, time of development, flexibility, modularity, robustness, data log, and creation of distributed applications, and share ideas about the best way to apply software architecture principles and mainly try to explain to the attendees how having a common language and a common set of tools helps and facilitates activities of both, the authors and the developers. Besides sharing knowledge, ideas and experiences, I was interested on learning more about how ITS community conceives the whole software engineering process, and how to better clarify misconceptions. I believe this will help me to guide my research about them. I submitted a paper to ITS 2010 conference, it was rejected, however now I know that the software engineering vocabulary is pretty different from the one used among ITS community; terms such as module, component, client have a different meaning inside ITS community compared with software engineering community. Definitively the interchange of ideas generated during the tutorial will positively impact my writing guidelines in order to be able to share my work among the ITS community.

Summarizing, this was a really good opportunity to get involved with the ITS community, create collaboration opportunities, share ideas and rethink my writing guidelines.