Mapa de la recerca del Campus de Vilanova i la Geltrú

Postprint (author’s final draft

Fruit Detectability Analysis for Different Camera Positions in Sweet-Pepper

For robotic harvesting of sweet-pepper fruits in greenhouses a sensor system is required to detect and localize the fruits on the plants. Due to the complex structure of the plant, most fruits are (partially) occluded when an image is taken from one viewpoint only. In this research the effect of multiple camera positions and viewing angles on fruit visibility and detectability was investigated. A recording device was built which allowed to place the camera under different azimuth and zenith angles and to move the camera horizontally along the crop row. Fourteen camera positions were chosen and the fruit visibility in the recorded images was manually determined for each position. For images taken from one position only with the criterion of maximum 50% occlusion per fruit, the fruit detectability (FD) was in no case higher than 69%. The best single positions were the front views and looking with a zenith angle of 60° upwards. The FD increased when a combination was made of multiple viewpoint positions. With a combination of five favourite positions the maximum FD was 90%

Attention-based Approaches for Text Analytics in Social Media and Automatic Summarization

[ES] Hoy en día, la sociedad tiene acceso y posibilidad de contribuir a grandes cantidades de contenidos presentes en Internet, como redes sociales, periódicos online, foros, blogs o plataformas de contenido multimedia. Todo este tipo de medios han tenido, durante los últimos años, un impacto abrumador en el día a día de individuos y organizaciones, siendo actualmente medios predominantes para compartir, debatir y analizar contenidos online. Por este motivo, resulta de interés trabajar sobre este tipo de plataformas, desde diferentes puntos de vista, bajo el paraguas del Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. En esta tesis nos centramos en dos áreas amplias dentro de este campo, aplicadas al análisis de contenido en línea: análisis de texto en redes sociales y resumen automático. En paralelo, las redes neuronales también son un tema central de esta tesis, donde toda la experimentación se ha realizado utilizando enfoques de aprendizaje profundo, principalmente basados en mecanismos de atención. Además, trabajamos mayoritariamente con el idioma español, por ser un idioma poco explorado y de gran interés para los proyectos de investigación en los que participamos. Por un lado, para el análisis de texto en redes sociales, nos enfocamos en tareas de análisis afectivo, incluyendo análisis de sentimientos y detección de emociones, junto con el análisis de la ironía. En este sentido, se presenta un enfoque basado en Transformer Encoders, que consiste en contextualizar \textit{word embeddings} pre-entrenados con tweets en español, para abordar tareas de análisis de sentimiento y detección de ironía. También proponemos el uso de métricas de evaluación como funciones de pérdida, con el fin de entrenar redes neuronales, para reducir el impacto del desequilibrio de clases en tareas \textit{multi-class} y \textit{multi-label} de detección de emociones. Adicionalmente, se presenta una especialización de BERT tanto para el idioma español como para el dominio de Twitter, que tiene en cuenta la coherencia entre tweets en conversaciones de Twitter. El desempeño de todos estos enfoques ha sido probado con diferentes corpus, a partir de varios \textit{benchmarks} de referencia, mostrando resultados muy competitivos en todas las tareas abordadas. Por otro lado, nos centramos en el resumen extractivo de artículos periodísticos y de programas televisivos de debate. Con respecto al resumen de artículos, se presenta un marco teórico para el resumen extractivo, basado en redes jerárquicas siamesas con mecanismos de atención. También presentamos dos instancias de este marco: \textit{Siamese Hierarchical Attention Networks} y \textit{Siamese Hierarchical Transformer Encoders}. Estos sistemas han sido evaluados en los corpora CNN/DailyMail y NewsRoom, obteniendo resultados competitivos en comparación con otros enfoques extractivos coetáneos. Con respecto a los programas de debate, se ha propuesto una tarea que consiste en resumir las intervenciones transcritas de los ponentes, sobre un tema determinado, en el programa "La Noche en 24 Horas". Además, se propone un corpus de artículos periodísticos, recogidos de varios periódicos españoles en línea, con el fin de estudiar la transferibilidad de los enfoques propuestos, entre artículos e intervenciones de los participantes en los debates. Este enfoque muestra mejores resultados que otras técnicas extractivas, junto con una transferibilidad de dominio muy prometedora.[CA] Avui en dia, la societat té accés i possibilitat de contribuir a grans quantitats de continguts presents a Internet, com xarxes socials, diaris online, fòrums, blocs o plataformes de contingut multimèdia. Tot aquest tipus de mitjans han tingut, durant els darrers anys, un impacte aclaparador en el dia a dia d'individus i organitzacions, sent actualment mitjans predominants per compartir, debatre i analitzar continguts en línia. Per aquest motiu, resulta d'interès treballar sobre aquest tipus de plataformes, des de diferents punts de vista, sota el paraigua de l'Processament de el Llenguatge Natural. En aquesta tesi ens centrem en dues àrees àmplies dins d'aquest camp, aplicades a l'anàlisi de contingut en línia: anàlisi de text en xarxes socials i resum automàtic. En paral·lel, les xarxes neuronals també són un tema central d'aquesta tesi, on tota l'experimentació s'ha realitzat utilitzant enfocaments d'aprenentatge profund, principalment basats en mecanismes d'atenció. A més, treballem majoritàriament amb l'idioma espanyol, per ser un idioma poc explorat i de gran interès per als projectes de recerca en els que participem. D'una banda, per a l'anàlisi de text en xarxes socials, ens enfoquem en tasques d'anàlisi afectiu, incloent anàlisi de sentiments i detecció d'emocions, juntament amb l'anàlisi de la ironia. En aquest sentit, es presenta una aproximació basada en Transformer Encoders, que consisteix en contextualitzar \textit{word embeddings} pre-entrenats amb tweets en espanyol, per abordar tasques d'anàlisi de sentiment i detecció d'ironia. També proposem l'ús de mètriques d'avaluació com a funcions de pèrdua, per tal d'entrenar xarxes neuronals, per reduir l'impacte de l'desequilibri de classes en tasques \textit{multi-class} i \textit{multi-label} de detecció d'emocions. Addicionalment, es presenta una especialització de BERT tant per l'idioma espanyol com per al domini de Twitter, que té en compte la coherència entre tweets en converses de Twitter. El comportament de tots aquests enfocaments s'ha provat amb diferents corpus, a partir de diversos \textit{benchmarks} de referència, mostrant resultats molt competitius en totes les tasques abordades. D'altra banda, ens centrem en el resum extractiu d'articles periodístics i de programes televisius de debat. Pel que fa a l'resum d'articles, es presenta un marc teòric per al resum extractiu, basat en xarxes jeràrquiques siameses amb mecanismes d'atenció. També presentem dues instàncies d'aquest marc: \textit{Siamese Hierarchical Attention Networks} i \textit{Siamese Hierarchical Transformer Encoders}. Aquests sistemes s'han avaluat en els corpora CNN/DailyMail i Newsroom, obtenint resultats competitius en comparació amb altres enfocaments extractius coetanis. Pel que fa als programes de debat, s'ha proposat una tasca que consisteix a resumir les intervencions transcrites dels ponents, sobre un tema determinat, al programa "La Noche en 24 Horas". A més, es proposa un corpus d'articles periodístics, recollits de diversos diaris espanyols en línia, per tal d'estudiar la transferibilitat dels enfocaments proposats, entre articles i intervencions dels participants en els debats. Aquesta aproximació mostra millors resultats que altres tècniques extractives, juntament amb una transferibilitat de domini molt prometedora.[EN] Nowadays, society has access, and the possibility to contribute, to large amounts of the content present on the internet, such as social networks, online newspapers, forums, blogs, or multimedia content platforms. These platforms have had, during the last years, an overwhelming impact on the daily life of individuals and organizations, becoming the predominant ways for sharing, discussing, and analyzing online content. Therefore, it is very interesting to work with these platforms, from different points of view, under the umbrella of Natural Language Processing. In this thesis, we focus on two broad areas inside this field, applied to analyze online content: text analytics in social media and automatic summarization. Neural networks are also a central topic in this thesis, where all the experimentation has been performed by using deep learning approaches, mainly based on attention mechanisms. Besides, we mostly work with the Spanish language, due to it is an interesting and underexplored language with a great interest in the research projects we participated in. On the one hand, for text analytics in social media, we focused on affective analysis tasks, including sentiment analysis and emotion detection, along with the analysis of the irony. In this regard, an approach based on Transformer Encoders, based on contextualizing pretrained Spanish word embeddings from Twitter, to address sentiment analysis and irony detection tasks, is presented. We also propose the use of evaluation metrics as loss functions, in order to train neural networks for reducing the impact of the class imbalance in multi-class and multi-label emotion detection tasks. Additionally, a specialization of BERT both for the Spanish language and the Twitter domain, that takes into account inter-sentence coherence in Twitter conversation flows, is presented. The performance of all these approaches has been tested with different corpora, from several reference evaluation benchmarks, showing very competitive results in all the tasks addressed. On the other hand, we focused on extractive summarization of news articles and TV talk shows. Regarding the summarization of news articles, a theoretical framework for extractive summarization, based on siamese hierarchical networks with attention mechanisms, is presented. Also, we present two instantiations of this framework: Siamese Hierarchical Attention Networks and Siamese Hierarchical Transformer Encoders. These systems were evaluated on the CNN/DailyMail and the NewsRoom corpora, obtaining competitive results in comparison to other contemporary extractive approaches. Concerning the TV talk shows, we proposed a text summarization task, for summarizing the transcribed interventions of the speakers, about a given topic, in the Spanish TV talk shows of the ``La Noche en 24 Horas" program. In addition, a corpus of news articles, collected from several Spanish online newspapers, is proposed, in order to study the domain transferability of siamese hierarchical approaches, between news articles and interventions of debate participants. This approach shows better results than other extractive techniques, along with a very promising domain transferability.González Barba, JÁ. (2021). Attention-based Approaches for Text Analytics in Social Media and Automatic Summarization [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/172245TESI

Culture as Soft Power

Including a thorough literature review and a number of case studies referred to cultural institutions and organisations, this book sheds light on different usages of culture as a source of soft power. Through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach, it addresses issues tackled in international cultural relations, intellectual history, comparative literature, sociology of literature and global literary studies

Visualizing Knowledge in the Illuminated Manuscripts of the \u3ci\u3eBreviari d’amor\u3c/i\u3e

Diagrams blur the line between text and image; they are both tools for communicating linguistic meaning and powerfully evocative visual forms. However, scholarship on medieval diagrams has focused primarily on their didactic functions, emphasizing the ways in which monks and other scholars used diagrams as tools for learning—about everything from Christian theology to ancient philosophy—and for developing modes of thought that support such learning. In the late Middle Ages, as education expanded beyond the realm of the intellectual elite, new book types emerged. One of which, the encyclopedia, endeavored to simultaneously instruct and delight a broader, non-monastic and non-scholastic audience, including court society and a burgeoning merchant class. In this new manuscript context, diagrams supported didacticism, but surpassed their role as instruments of learning; they became sensuous art objects that incited wonder for knowledge itself. One particular encyclopedia, the Breviari d’amor (Occitan, ca. 1288-1292), takes an original artistic approach. With over two hundred images in complete manuscripts, the Breviari is a highly inventive “visual encyclopedia,” a spectacular manifestation of the idea of the encyclopedia as a “mirror” to the world. Its vast cycle of imagery accompanies a summa of knowledge framed around the concept of love—a historically contingent idea defined in this work by its permeation through three branches of thought: natural philosophy, Christian history, and fin’amor (courtly love) ethics. Of its vast cycle of imagery, the Breviari’s series of cosmological schemata stand out as the most visually stunning, inventive, and original; unlike the narrative and figural scenes pertaining to Christian history, they are unparalleled in late-medieval manuscript culture. This dissertation reveals the ways in which late-medieval encyclopedic diagrams are more than mere learning aids for introductory scholastic education, elucidating numerous aspects that parallel, exceed, and/or contradict epistemic instrumentality. Crucially, the Breviari’s cosmological diagrams prompt consideration of the artistic potentiality of schematic forms, as their dynamic compositions, luxurious coloration, and patterned ornamentation rival the finest illuminations of their time. Their spectacular qualities are achieved through intervisual connections with arts in other media; these diagrams integrate elements from elite materials like sumptuous metalwork and textile, as well as more utilitarian objects like state-of-the art scientific technology. In the meta-context of the encyclopedia, these intervisual connections negotiate the special place of the diagrammatic, as a mode of representation, in the pursuit of knowledge. But they are also often incomprehensible—whether due to corruptions or by design, whether because of their overwhelming complexity or their arresting sensorial appeal. Thus, this dissertation argues, these diagrams express a historically contingent type of wonder rife with contradiction: they both invite intellectual engagement and confound understanding; they both celebrate facts and revel in the mysteries of the natural cosmos

Culture as Soft Power

Including a thorough literature review and a number of case studies referred to cultural institutions and organisations, this book sheds light on different usages of culture as a source of soft power. Through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach, it addresses issues tackled in international cultural relations, intellectual history, comparative literature, sociology of literature and global literary studies

Dynamic adaptation of user profiles in recommender systems

In a period of time in which the content available through the Internet increases exponentially and is more easily accessible every day, techniques for aiding the selection and extraction of important and personalised information are of vital importance. Recommender Systems (RS) appear as a tool to help the user in a decision making process by evaluating a set of objects or alternatives and aiding the user at choosing which one/s of them suits better his/her interests or preferences. Those preferences need to be accurate enough to produce adequate recommendations and should be updated if the user changes his/her likes or if they are incorrect or incomplete. In this work an adequate model for managing user preferences in a multi-attribute (numerical and categorical) environment is presented to aid at providing recommendations in those kinds of contexts. The evaluation process of the recommender system designed is supported by a new aggregation operator (Unbalanced LOWA) that enables the combination of the information that defines an alternative into a single value, which then is used to rank the whole set of alternatives. After the recommendation has been made, learning processes have been designed to evaluate the user interaction with the system to find out, in a dynamic and unsupervised way, if the user profile in which the recommendation process relies on needs to be updated with new preferences. The work detailed in this document also includes extensive evaluation and testing of all the elements that take part in the recommendation and learning processes

Future Intelligent Systems and Networks 2019

In this Special Issue, we present current developments and future directions of future intelligent systems and networks. This is the second Special Issue regarding the future of the Internet. This subject remains of interest for firms applying technological possibilities to promote more innovative business models. This Special Issue widens the application of intelligent systems and networks to firms so that they can evolve to more innovative models. The five contributions highlight useful applications, business models, or innovative practices based on intelligent systems and networks. We hope our findings become an inspiration for firms operating in various industries

From the projected to the transmitted image: the 2.0 construction of tourist destination image and identity in Catalonia

This thesis aims to explore online projected and perceived images of a tourist destination, to assess their mutual correspondence, and to shed light on the role of online user-generated images in destination image formation. It also seeks to analyse the spatial distribution of image by tourists and the complex image identity issues concerning a destination. To achieve this, online image sources regarding the case study of Catalonia were analysed through massive computerized quantitative content analysis of some 25,000 travel blog and review entries (perceived image) and around 3,000 official tourism webpages (projected image). The results showed significant dissonance between tourists’ images and official images of the destination in several aspects, notably its attraction factors and cultural identity. Tourists' destination images were found to be greatly concentrated on certain elements and spaces. Finally, this thesis proposes the concept of "transmitted image" to reflect the new central role of tourists’ online images in the creation, dissemination and formation of destination image. Keywords: tourist destination image; destination identity; online image; perceived image; projected image; transmitted image; travel blog; travel review; official tourism websites; Web 2.0; quantitative content analysis; Catalonia.Aquesta tesi té com a objectiu explorar les imatges projectades i percebudes online d’una destinació turística, examinar la seva correspondència mútua, i contribuir a aclarir el rol de les imatges online generades pels usuaris en la formació de la imatge d’una destinació. Amb aquests propòsits, es van analitzar fonts d’imatge online sobre el cas d’estudi de Catalunya a través d’una anàlisi computeritzada quantitativa de contingut massiu d’aproximadament 25.000 entrades de travel blogs i travel reviews (imatge percebuda) i aproximadament 3.000 pàgines de webs oficials (imatge projectada). Els resultats mostren que hi ha una dissonància important entre les imatges dels turistes i les imatges oficials de la destinació en diversos aspectes, notablement en els seus factors d’atracció i identitat cultural. S’ha trobat que les imatges dels turistes sobre la destinació estaven altament concentrades en certs elements i espais. Finalment, aquesta tesi proposa el concepte d’ “imatge transmesa” per tal de reflectir el nou rol central de les imatges online dels turistes en la creació, disseminació i formació de la imatge d’una destinació. Paraules clau: imatge d’una destinació turística; identitat de la destinació; imatge online; imatge percebuda; imatge projectada; imatge transmesa; blog de viatges; review de viatges; webs oficials de turisme; web 2.0; anàlisi de contingut quantitatiu; Catalunya.Esta tesis tiene como objetivo explorar las imágenes proyectadas y percibidas online de un destino turístico, examinar su correspondencia mutua, y contribuir a aclarar el rol de las imágenes online generadas por los usuarios en la formación de la imagen de un destino. Con estos propósitos, se analizaron fuentes de imagen online sobre el caso de estudio de Cataluña a través de un análisis computerizado cuantitativo de contenido masivo de aproximadamente 25.000 entradas de travel blogs y travel reviews (imagen percibida) y aproximadamente 3.000 páginas de webs oficiales (imagen proyectada). Los resultados muestran que hay una disonancia importante entre las imágenes de los turistas y las imágenes oficiales del destino en varios aspectos, notablemente en sus factores de atracción e identidad cultural. Se ha encontrado que las imágenes de los turistas sobre el destino estaban altamente concentradas en ciertos elementos y espacios. Finalmente, esta tesis propone el concepto de “imagen transmitida” para reflejar el nuevo rol central de las imágenes online de los turistas en la creación, diseminación y formación de la imagen de un destino. Palabras clave: imagen de un destino turístico; identidad del destino; imagen online; imagen percibida; imagen proyectada; imagen transmitida; blog de viajes; review de viajes; webs oficiales de turismo; web 2.0; análisis de contenido cuantitativo; Cataluña.Cette thèse a pour objectif d’explorer les images projetées et perçues en ligne d'une destination touristique, examiner sa correspondance mutuelle, et contribuer à clarifier le rôle des images en ligne générées par les usagers dans la formation de l'image d'une destination. Dans ce but, des sources d’image en ligne sur le cas d'étude de la Catalogne ont été analysées à travers d'une analyse informatisée quantitative d'un contenu massif d'à peu près 25.000 travel blogs et travel reviews (image perçue) et à peu près 3.000 pages de sites web officiels (image projetée). Les résultats montrent qu'il y a une dissonance importante entre les images des touristes et les images officielles de la destination selon quelques aspects, surtout dans ses facteurs d'attraction et d'identité culturelle. On a trouvé que les images des touristes sur la destination étaient hautement concentrées dans certains éléments et des espaces. Finalement, cette thèse propose le concept d’ "image transmise" pour refléter le nouveau rôle central des images en ligne des touristes dans la création, la dissémination et la formation de l'image d'une destination. Mots clés: image d'une destination touristique; identité de la destination; image en ligne; image perçue; image projetée; image transmise; blog de voyage; review de voyage; sites web officiels de tourisme; web 2.0; analyse de contenu quantitatif; Catalogne