Review of Álvarez-Gil, F., J. (2022). Stance devices in tourism-related research articles: A corpus-based study

[EN] This volume in the prestigious Linguistic Insights book series (Peter Lang) fills an acknowledged lacuna in studies considering the tourism research article from a gender perspective. Indeed, the attention paid to the tourism research article (RA) has been, if anything, fragmentary, since, as noted in Lin and Evans (2012), no attempt has been made to fully outline the generic structure of the RA in tourism. This is precisely one of the focuses of interest of this monograph, which aims to provide genre scholars and language professionals with an outline of the genre pattern of the RA and the lexicogrammatical choices associated with each generic section, together with a detailed description of the specific stance-taking devices. This is really the main aim of this book, as its title expressly calls for. Much of the information presented in this monograph, as attributed therein, belongs to a major research project conducted over the years on the language of tourism in English and other languages (cf. Álvarez- Gil, Payet & Sánchez Hernández, 2020).[ES] This volume in the prestigious Linguistic Insights book series (Peter Lang) fills an acknowledged lacuna in studies considering the tourism research article from a gender perspective. Indeed, the attention paid to the tourism research article (RA) has been, if anything, fragmentary, since, as noted in Lin and Evans (2012), no attempt has been made to fully outline the generic structure of the RA in tourism. This is precisely one of the focuses of interest of this monograph, which aims to provide genre scholars and language professionals with an outline of the genre pattern of the RA and the lexicogrammatical choices associated with each generic section, together with a detailed description of the specific stance-taking devices. This is really the main aim of this book, as its title expressly calls for. Much of the information presented in this monograph, as attributed therein, belongs to a major research project conducted over the years on the language of tourism in English and other languages (cf. Álvarez- Gil, Payet & Sánchez Hernández, 2020).Domínguez-Morales, E. (2023). Book review: Álvarez-Gil, F. J. (2022). Stance devices in tourism-related research articles: A corpus-based study. Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas. 18:167-169. https://doi.org/10.4995/rlyla.2023.187061671691

Sound Recognition System Using Spiking and MLP Neural Networks

In this paper, we explore the capabilities of a sound classification system that combines a Neuromorphic Auditory System for feature extraction and an artificial neural network for classification. Two models of neural network have been used: Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network and Spiking Neural Network. To compare their accuracies, both networks have been developed and trained to recognize pure tones in presence of white noise. The spiking neural network has been implemented in a FPGA device. The neuromorphic auditory system that is used in this work produces a form of representation that is analogous to the spike outputs of the biological cochlea. Both systems are able to distinguish the different sounds even in the presence of white noise. The recognition system based in a spiking neural networks has better accuracy, above 91 %, even when the sound has white noise with the same power.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-02Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-130

Modal verbs in the abstract genre in the field of tourism

This paper looks into the use of modal verbs in a corpus of abstracts excerpted from scientific papers in the field of tourism. These texts have been written by specialists in tourism studies. Our study will show the way in which modality is used to show the authors’ intention as to the contents of their texts. The pragmatic implications of modal uses will be highlighted bearing in mind the purposes of the abstractgenre within the academic paper. The methodology of study is corpus linguistics, and the framework of analysis includes the works of Palmer (1979; Palmer, 1986)and Collins (2009), among others. This paper is part of a larger research on modal verbs in touristic scientific papers

Evaluación estocástica de lagunas de estabilización. Aplicación a lagunas facultativas primarias en la provincia de Villa Clara, Cuba

La evaluación estocástica de lagunas de estabilización (LEs) permite el estudio de su fiabilidad, generandose información de utilidad para su diseño, la evaluación de su desempeno y la elaboración de normas de vertimiento. En este trabajo, se desarrolló un procedimiento para la evaluación estocástica del funcionamiento de LEs en un territorio, a partir de un conjunto de datos de caracterizaciones de residuales existentes. El procedimiento combina la generación de datos aleatorios para un número determinado de días de operación, simulados mediante el empleo de las funciones de densidad de probabilidades (FDPs) de cada componente analizado, con la aplicación, a la serie de datos simulados, de la metodología desarrollada por Niku et al. (1979). El procedimiento se aplicó a un conjunto de 36 caracterizaciones de lagunas facultativas primarias (LFPs) en la provincia de Villa Clara, Cuba. Los resultados arrojaron bajos valores de la fiabilidad para el cumplimiento de la norma cubana de vertimiento. Las concentraciones medias reales en el efluente, en general, fueron inferiores a las concentraciones de proyecto requeridas, indicando que el efluente real no logra cumplir con los límites establecidos en la norma cubana de vertimiento, para un nivel de confiabilidad del 95%. Se discuten las causas de este comportamiento

Multilayer Spiking Neural Network for Audio Samples Classification Using SpiNNaker

Audio classification has always been an interesting subject of research inside the neuromorphic engineering field. Tools like Nengo or Brian, and hardware platforms like the SpiNNaker board are rapidly increasing in popularity in the neuromorphic community due to the ease of modelling spiking neural networks with them. In this manuscript a multilayer spiking neural network for audio samples classification using SpiNNaker is presented. The network consists of different leaky integrate-and-fire neuron layers. The connections between them are trained using novel firing rate based algorithms and tested using sets of pure tones with frequencies that range from 130.813 to 1396.91 Hz. The hit rate percentage values are obtained after adding a random noise signal to the original pure tone signal. The results show very good classification results (above 85 % hit rate) for each class when the Signal-to-noise ratio is above 3 decibels, validating the robustness of the network configuration and the training step.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-02Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-130

Los verbos modales en las introducciones y en las conclusiones de los artículos científicos de turismo

[ES] El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar las perífrasis modales, sus significados y la existencia de variación en las secciones mencionadas del artículo científico en un corpus de las secciones denominadas "introducción" y "conclusión" del artículo de investigación en la disciplina de turismo. Estos textos se han extraído de revistas en el campo y con un índice de impacto notorio en la especialidad. Las perífrasis modales reflejan el punto de vista del hablante. Como parte de la metodología, se usan herramientas de lingüística de corpus que permiten la gestión de los textos y su consulta, además de la extracción de ejemplos concretos que ilustren las formas, las categorías semánticas y las funciones que se encuentren en los textos estudiados. Sin embargo, dado que el contexto es fundamental para poder identificar los significados modales, parte del análisis de los textos requiere de un reconocimiento visual directo de cada caso, pues una misma perífrasis modal puede indicar diferentes significados. El análisis y discusión de los datos se nutre de estudios en lingüística funcional que permitan dar cuenta de los usos y funciones. Las conclusiones indican que, en efecto, existe variación no solo en cuanto a las formas usadas en cada una de las introducciones y en las conclusiones, sino también con respecto al significado. En este sentido, se constata que la modalidad dinámica es más frecuente en las introducciones, según frecuencias relativas, y la modalidad epistémica es más frecuente en las conclusiones. Igualmente, se han detectado varias funciones estrechamente relacionadas con los significados modales. Así, la función de mitigación y cortesía lingüística se relaciona en mayor medida con la modalidad epistémica y lo mismo ocurre con la formulación del significado inferencial, que refiere a la necesidad epistémica. La expresión de la factualidad y de la imposibilidad se nutren de la modalidad dinámica, mientras que la predicción, la organización de los contenidos, la autoridad y la recomendación se manifiestan con el uso de la modalidad deóntica.[CA] L'article d'investigació en el camp dels estudis de turisme no ha sigut prou estudiat, malgrat ser una disciplina que representa un sector de desenvolupament econòmic per a nombrosos països. Altres gèneres textuals relacionats amb el registre turístic com el resum, els fullets i les pàgines webs en el registre turístic, els últims amb gran rellevància pel seu clar impacte social i econòmic dels estudis turístics, han rebut major atenció. La investigació científica en turisme, no obstant això, proveeix a les organitzacions, ja siguen públiques o privades, d'informació rellevant per a la millora de l'activitat que es tradueixen en recomanacions que, amb freqüència, s'aporten en les conclusions d'aquests treballs. S'entén, per tant, que existeix una relació directa entre el progrés del sector i la investigació empírica, la qual cosa, al seu torn, indica l'interés per la publicació acadèmica periòdica. Per aquest motiu, en aquest treball, s'inclou una caracterització formal del gènere en una estructura de seccions. Aquest estudi es complementa amb una anàlisi de les estructures lèxic-gramaticals recurrents en cadascuna de les seccions de l'article científic i les variables lèxiques i sintàctiques que caracteritzen al text dins del registre científic, tant per la complexitat com pel nivell d'elaboració que exhibeix la llengua usada en aquests treballs. Aquestes estructures persegueixen indicar la perspectiva dels autors, entre altres aspectes. Dit això, l'objectiu d'aquest treball és analitzar les perífrasis modals, els seus significats i l'existència de variació en les seccions denominades "introducció" i "conclusió" de l'article d'investigació en la disciplina de turisme. Aquests textos s'han extret de revistes en el camp i amb un índex d'impacte notori en l'especialitat. Les perífrasis modals reflecteixen el punt de vista del parlant. Com a part de la metodologia, s'usen eines de lingüística de corpus que permeten la gestió dels textos i la seua consulta, a més de l'extracció d'exemples concrets que il·lustren les formes, les categories semàntiques i les funcions que es troben en els textos estudiats. No obstant això, atés que el context és fonamental per a poder identificar els significats modals, part de l'anàlisi dels textos requereix d'un reconeixement visual directe de cada cas, perquè una mateixa perífrasi modal pot indicar diferents significats. L'anàlisi i discussió de les dades es nodreix d'estudis en lingüística funcional que permeten donar compte dels usos i funcions Les conclusions indiquen que, en efecte, existeix variació no sols quant a les formes usades en cadascuna de les introduccions i en les conclusions, sinó també respecte al significat. En aquest sentit, es constata que la modalitat dinàmica és més freqüent en les introduccions, segons freqüències relatives, i la modalitat epistémica és més freqüent en les conclusions. Igualment, s'han detectat diverses funcions estretament relacionades amb els significats modals. Així, la funció de mitigació i cortesia lingüística es relaciona en major mesura amb la modalitat epistémica i el mateix ocorre amb la formulació del significat inferencial, que es refereix a la necessitat epistémica. L'expressió de la factualidad i de la impossibilitat es nodreixen de la modalitat dinàmica, mentre que la predicció, l'organització dels continguts, l'autoritat i la recomanació es manifesten amb l'ús de la modalitat dóntica.[EN] The research article in the field of tourism studies has not been sufficiently studied, despite being a discipline strongly connected with a sector of economic growth for many countries. Other textual genres related to the tourism register such as the summary, brochures and web pages in the tourism register, the latter with great relevance for their clear social and economic impact of tourism studies, have enjoyed more scholarly attention. Scientific research in tourism, however, provides organisations, whether public or private, with relevant information for the improvement of the activity, which translates into recommendations that are often included in the conclusions of these studies. It is held, therefore, that there is a direct relationship between the development of the sector and empirical research, which, in turn, shows the interest in academic publications in leading journal. For this reason, this paper includes a formal characterisation of the genre into sections. This study is supplemented with a description of the recurrent lexicalgrammatical structures in each of the sections of the scientific article and the lexical and syntactic variables that characterise the text within the scientific register, both in terms of the complexity and the level of elaboration exhibited in the language used in these works. These structures are intended to signal the authors' perspective, among other aspects. That said, the aim of this paper is to analyse modal verbs, their meanings and the existence of variation in the "introduction" and "conclusion" sections of the research article in the discipline of tourism. These texts have been taken from leading journals in the field and with a clear impact index in the discipline. Modal verbs reflect the speaker's point of view. As part of the methodology, corpus linguistics tools are used to allow the management of the texts and their consultation, as well as the excerption of concrete examples illustrating the forms, the semantic categories and the functions found in the texts studied. However, given that context is fundamental to the identification of modal meanings, part of the analysis of the texts requires direct visual recognition in each occurrence, as the same modal verb may entail several meanings. The analysis and discussion of the data is informed by studies in functional linguistics which allow us to count on the uses and functions of the different modal forms. The conclusions indicate that there is indeed variation not only in terms of the forms used in each of the introductions and conclusions, but also in terms of meaning. In this sense, it is found that dynamic modality is more frequent in the introductions, according to their relative frequencies, and epistemic modality is more frequent in the conclusions. Likewise, several functions closely related to modal meanings have been detected. Thus, the function of mitigation and linguistic politeness is most closely related to epistemic modality, as is the formulation of inferential meaning, which refers to epistemic necessity. The expression of factuality and impossibility are nourished by the dynamic modality, while prediction, content while prediction, content organisation, authority and recommendation are manifested using deontic modality. The thesis is structured in five chapters, and bibliographical references are included finally in this dissertation.Domínguez Morales, ME. (2021). Los verbos modales en las introducciones y en las conclusiones de los artículos científicos de turismo [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/172247TESI

Worker’s physical fatigue classification using neural networks

Physical fatigue is not only an indication of the user’s physical condition and/or need for sleep or rest, but can also be a significant symptom of various diseases. This fatigue affects the performance of workers in jobs that involve some continuous physical activity, and is the cause of a large proportion of accidents at work. The physical fatigue is commonly measured by the perceived exertion (RPE). Many previous studies have attempted to continuously monitor workers in order to detect the level of fatigue and prevent these accidents, but most have used invasive sensors that are difficult to place and prevent the worker from performing their tasks correctly. Other works use activity measurement sensors such as accelerometers, but the large amount of information obtained is difficult to analyse in order to extract the characteristics of each fatigue state. In this work, we use a dataset that contains data from inertial sensors of several workers performing various activities during their working day, labelled every 10 min based on their level of fatigue using questionnaires and the Borg fatigue scale. Applying Machine Learning techniques, we design, develop and test a system based on a neural network capable of classifying the variation of fatigue caused by the physical activity collected every 10 min; for this purpose, a feature extraction is performed after the time decomposition done with the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The results show that the proposed system has an accuracy higher than 92% for all the cases, being viable for its application in the proposed scenario.European Commission (EC). Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER)Consejería de Economía, Conocimiento, Empresas y Universidad (Junta de Andalucía) US-126371

Embedded neural network for real-time animal behavior classification

Recent biological studies have focused on understanding animal interactions and welfare. To help biolo- gists to obtain animals’ behavior information, resources like wireless sensor networks are needed. More- over, large amounts of obtained data have to be processed off-line in order to classify different behaviors.There are recent research projects focused on designing monitoring systems capable of measuring someanimals’ parameters in order to recognize and monitor their gaits or behaviors. However, network unre- liability and high power consumption have limited their applicability.In this work, we present an animal behavior recognition, classification and monitoring system based ona wireless sensor network and a smart collar device, provided with inertial sensors and an embeddedmulti-layer perceptron-based feed-forward neural network, to classify the different gaits or behaviorsbased on the collected information. In similar works, classification mechanisms are implemented in aserver (or base station). The main novelty of this work is the full implementation of a reconfigurableneural network embedded into the animal’s collar, which allows a real-time behavior classification andenables its local storage in SD memory. Moreover, this approach reduces the amount of data transmittedto the base station (and its periodicity), achieving a significantly improving battery life. The system hasbeen simulated and tested in a real scenario for three different horse gaits, using different heuristics andsensors to improve the accuracy of behavior recognition, achieving a maximum of 81%.Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-130

Desde CoOs hasta .NetFramework: comunicación hardware/software mediante VCP

En este artículo se describe una práctica de laboratorio para la docencia de sistemas operativos en tiempo real (RTOS) para microcontroladores de 32bits en el ámbito de los grados en Ingeniería de Computadores, mediante una metodología de aprendizaje basado en proyectos (ABP) [1]. En concreto esta práctica abarca la comunicación Hardware/ Software entre un RTOS en un microcontrolador con un núcleo vectorial Cortex-M4 y una aplicación software escrita en C# usando Visual Studio 2010 a través de puertos series virtuales (VCP). Esta práctica está enfocada como un proyecto que los alumnos han de ir realizando desde cero, avanzando mediante la consecución de hitos, hasta conseguir obtener un sistema final. El sistema a desarrollar se divide en dos partes, por un lado tenemos un microcontrolador de la familia STM32 ejecutando un RTOS completamente libre, CoOs, el cual recibe comandos para mover un motor y un servo, y simultáneamente envía la información de sensores de distancia y contacto usando el puerto serie. Por otro lado tenemos un PC con un sistema operativo de la familia Windows, en el que se construye una aplicación visual, la cual muestra el valor de los sensores y permite enviar comandos de movimiento y posición al microcontrolador. El desarrollo de este tipo de proyectos se añade a la necesidad del uso de diferentes herramientas para el desarrollo del firmware y del software en paralelo, de manera incremental, y enfocadas para ámbitos de uso muy distintos. Esta práctica ha tenido una gran acogida por parte de los alumnos, ya que les ha servido de ejemplo del desarrollo de periféricos empotrados y tiempo real, con una aplicación directa en el campo de la robótica, instrumentación o control automático.SUMMARY -- In this article a practical laboratory session for teaching operating systems in real time (RTOS) with 32-bit microcontrollers is described. This session is thought to be imparted in the Computer Engineering degree, through a methodology of project-based learning (PBL) [1]. Specifically, this practice session encompasses Hardware/Software RTOS communication between a microcontroller with Cortex- M4 core vector and a software application written in C # using Visual Studio 2010 via virtual serial ports (VCP). This practice is focused as a project that students must be making from scratch, by achieving several milestones, to obtain a final system. The system to develop is divided into two parts. First, we have a STM32 microcontroller family running a completely free RTOS, CoOS, which receives commands to move motors, and simultaneously sends information about distance sensors and using the serial port. On the other hand we have a PC with a Windows system operating family, where a visual application, which shows the value of the sensors and allows to send commands to the microcontroller motion and position is constructed. The development of this type of project is added to the need to use different development tools for firmware and software in parallel, incrementally, and focused to very different fields of use. This practice has been well received by the students, because it has served as an example of the development of a real-time system with embedded peripherals; and it has a direct application in the field of robotics, instrumentation and automatic control

Performance Evaluation of Neural Networks for Animal Behaviors Classification: Horse Gaits Case Study

The study and monitoring of wildlife has always been a subject of great interest. Studying the behavior of wildlife animals is a very complex task due to the difficulties to track them and classify their behaviors through the collected sensory information. Novel technology allows designing low cost systems that facilitate these tasks. There are currently some commercial solutions to this problem; however, it is not possible to obtain a highly accurate classification due to the lack of gathered information. In this work, we propose an animal behavior recognition, classification and monitoring system based on a smart collar device provided with inertial sensors and a feed-forward neural network or Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) to classify the possible animal behavior based on the collected sensory information. Experimental results over horse gaits case study show that the recognition system achieves an accuracy of up to 95.6%.Junta de Andalucía P12-TIC-130