A Reactive Competitive Emotion Selection System

We present a reactive emotion selection system designed to be used in a robot that needs to respond autonomously to relevant events. A variety of emotion selection models based on “cognitive appraisal” theories exist, but the complexity of the concepts used by most of these models limits their use in robotics. Robots have physical constrains that condition their understanding of the world and limit their capacity to built the complex concepts needed for such models. The system presented in this paper was conceived to respond to “disturbances” detected in the environment through a stream of images, and use this low-level information to update emotion intensities. They are increased when specific patterns, based on Tomkins’ affect theory, are detected or reduced when it is not. This system could also be used as part of (or as first step in the incremental design of) a more cognitively complex emotional system for autonomous robots

Extremadura representada de los medios de comunicación. Intertextualidad y estereotipos

La primera mitad del siglo XX es rica en manifestaciones iconográficas en los medios de Comunicación, una zona concreta, Extremadura, se convierte en objeto iconográfico en portadas, revistas o documentales. Tres obras son claves para la expansión de los referentes iconográficos: Ruth M. Anderson, In the lands of Extremadura, Luis Buñuel Las Hurdes: Tierra sin Pan y Spanish Village: It lives at ancient poverty and faith, W. Eugene Smith. El objetivo que se plantea es mostrar las líneas de intertextualidad que contienen las imágenes del estudio a través de las representaciones visuales

Making New "New AI" Friends : Designing a Social Robot for Diabetic Children from an Embodied AI Perspective

Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Robin is a cognitively and motivationally autonomous affective robot toddler with "robot diabetes" that we have developed to support perceived self-efficacy and emotional wellbeing in children with diabetes by providing them with positive mastery experiences of diabetes management in a playful but realistic and natural interaction context. Underlying the design of Robin is an "Embodied" (formerly also known as "New") Artificial Intelligence approach to robotics. In this paper we discuss the rationale behind the design of Robin to meet the needs of our intended end users (both children and medical staff), and how "New AI" provides a suitable approach to developing a friendly companion that fulfills the therapeutic and affective requirements of our end users beyond other approaches commonly used in assistive robotics and child-robot interaction. Finally, we discuss how our approach permitted our robot to interact with and provide suitable experiences of diabetes management to children with very different social interaction styles.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Intertextuality compositional iconographic representations in Extremadura

Durante la primera mitad del siglo XX, la fotografía y el cine documental tuvieron un gran peso dentro de los medios de comunicación, acercando con sus imágenes los acontecimientos, tipos, formas, cultura… Desde cualquier punto de la tierra. Extremadura se convierte en un inusitado objeto de estudio por parte de diferentes autores nacionales e internacionales, como Ruth Matilda Anderson, Luis Buñuel o W. Eugene Smith, erigiéndose en unas décadas como protagonista de la imagen que España proyecta al exterior. Dichos autores trabajarán en diferentes décadas mostrando en sus obras líneas de intertextualidad compositiva, que vendrán dadas por los elementos iconográficos comunes. Presentamos un análisis de imágenes, en cuatro grupos de muestra: vivienda; infraestructuras; maternidad e infancia. Para poder realizar un estudio de imágenes que diferente procedencia seguiremos una plantilla de análisis para mostrar las semejanzas morfológicas y compositivas

A flexible component-based robot control architecture for hormonal modulation of behaviour and affect

This document is the Accepted Manuscritpt of a paper published in Proceedings of 18th Annual Conference, TAROS 2017, Guildford, UK, July 19–21, 2017. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 20 July 2018. The final publication is available at Springer via https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-64107-2_36. © 2017 Springer, Cham.In this paper we present the foundations of an architecture that will support the wider context of our work, which is to explore the link between affect, perception and behaviour from an embodied perspective and assess their relevance to Human Robot Interaction (HRI). Our approach builds upon existing affect-based architectures by combining artificial hormones with discrete abstract components that are designed with the explicit consideration of influencing, and being receptive to, the wider affective state of the robot

Electrocatalytic properties of cobalt phosphides and pyrophosphates derived from phosphonate-based-MOFs

As a class of coordination polymers (CPs), metal phosphonates (MPs) are constructed by coordination bonds connecting metal sites and phosphonate (RPO32−) ligands, where the metal sites are dispersed uniformly at the atomic level. This feature facilitates the construction of metalphosphorous-based/nano-carbon composites by one-step pyrolysis, making them very attractive precursors of Non-Precious Metal Electrocatalysts (NPMCs) [1, 2] In this work, we report the synthesis, characterization and electrochemical properties of three cobalt(II) coordination polymers erived from the N,N-bis(phosphonomethyl)glycine (BPMGLY), Co(C4H9O8NP2·nH2O (n=2-4). These MPs, with different frameworks according to the crystallographic data, are used as precursors of new NPMCs by pyrolytic treatment under 5%-H2/Ar at different temperatures. The electrochemical behavior of the resulting compounds, mainly crystalline cobalt pyrophosphates and/or phosphides, is fully investigated regarding to the Oxygen Evolution and Reduction Reactions (OER and ORR, respectively) as well as Hydrogen Evolution Reaction (HER). In general, cobalt phosphides (CoP) derived from compound Co-BPMGLY-I (n=4), displayed better performances for the HER with an overpotential of 156 mVUniversidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Influence of the Type of Diet on the Incidence of Pathogenic Factors and Antibiotic Resistance in Enterococci Isolated from Faeces in Mice

A comparative study on potential risks was carried out in a collection of 50 enterococci isolated from faeces of mice fed a standard or a high-fat diet enriched with extra virgin olive oil, refined olive oil or butter, at the beginning, after six weeks and after twelve weeks of experiments. Strains were biochemically assessed and genetically characterized. E. faecalis and E. casseliflavus were the most frequently isolated species in any diet and time points. Apart from the fact of not having isolated any strain from the virgin olive oil group during the last balance, we found statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) among the diets in the percentage of antibiotic resistance and in the presence of the enterococcal surface protein gene (esp), as well as a tendency (p < 0.1) for the presence of the tyrosine decarboxylase gene (tdc) to increase over time in the group of isolates from the standard diet. When the resistance of the strains to virgin or refined olive oil was studied, only the group of enterococci from high fat diets showed a significantly higher percentage of resistance to refined olive oil (p < 0.05), while both types of oil equally inhibited those isolated from the standard diet (p > 0.05).This research was funded by University of Jaén (PP2009/13/03) (to IP) and Junta de Andalucía (PI Excelencia_2010 AGR 6340) (to M.M.-C)

Combining intention and emotional state inference in a dynamic neural field architecture for human-robot joint action

We report on our approach towards creating socially intelligent robots, which is heavily inspired by recent experimental findings about the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying action and emotion understanding in humans. Our approach uses neuro-dynamics as a theoretical language to model cognition, emotional states, decision making and action. The control architecture is formalized by a coupled system of dynamic neural fields representing a distributed network of local but connected neural populations. Different pools of neurons encode relevant information in the form of self-sustained activation patterns, which are triggered by input from connected populations and evolve continuously in time. The architecture implements a dynamic and flexible context-dependent mapping from observed hand and facial actions of the human onto adequate complementary behaviors of the robot that take into account the inferred goal and inferred emotional state of the co-actor. The dynamic control architecture was validated in multiple scenarios in which an anthropomorphic robot and a human operator assemble a toy object from its components. The scenarios focus on the robot’s capacity to understand the human’s actions, and emotional states, detect errors and adapt its behavior accordingly by adjusting its decisions and movements during the execution of the task.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was possible in part by the funding of research grants from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (grant numbers SFRH/BD/48527/2008, SFRH/BPD/71874/2010, SFRH/BD/81334/2011), and with funding from FP6-IST2 EU-IP Project JAST (project number 003747) and FP7 Marie Curie ITN Neural Engineering Transformative Technologies NETT (project number 289146).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Programmed cell senescence during mammalian embryonic development

Cellular senescence disables proliferation in damaged cells, and it is relevant for cancer and aging. Here, we show that senescence occurs during mammalian embryonic development at multiple locations, including the mesonephros and the endolymphatic sac of the inner ear, which we have analyzed in detail. Mechanistically, senescence in both structures is strictly dependent on p21, but independent of DNA damage, p53, or other cell-cycle inhibitors, and it is regulated by the TGF-beta/SMAD and PI3K/FOXO pathways. Developmentally programmed senescence is followed by macrophage infiltration, clearance of senescent cells, and tissue remodeling. Loss of senescence due to the absence of p21 is partially compensated by apoptosis but still results in detectable developmental abnormalities. Importantly, the mesonephros and endolymphatic sac of human embryos also show evidence of senescence. We conclude that the role of developmentally programmed senescence is to promote tissue remodeling and propose that this is the evolutionary origin of damage-induced senescence