Projects financed by the European Union’s 6th and 7th Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development in the Andalusian Agrifood sector. A gender perspective analysis

Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development are the European Union’s key tool for financing research projects and initiatives. The objective of this study is to analyse the impact of research projects in the Andalusian agrifood sector that were financed by the 6th and 7th Framework Programmes from a gender perspective. Our methodology is based on the analysis of survey responses of the researchers who have participated in these projects. Using the data from their responses, we conduct a descriptive analysis from a cross-cutting gender perspective and also analyse the outcomes and results of each project. Our conclusions could serve as guidelines to improve the implementation of the Horizon 2020 Programme with regard to the equality of opportunities between men and women.JEL Codes - H6

Neumoperitoneo preoperatorio para el tratamiento de la hernia inguinal gigante: revisión de nuestra experiencia

ResumenObjetivoValoración de las posibles ventajas del neumoperitoneo preoperatorio en el manejo de las hernias inguinales gigantes.Material y métodosEstudio prospectivo mediante el seguimiento de 2 casos clínicos de hernias inguinoescrotales gigantes que requirieron neumoperitoneo preoperatorio en nuestro centro, desde octubre de 2013 hasta marzo de 2014.ResultadosDurante los últimos 5 meses, en nuestro centro se han diagnosticado 2 hernias inguinoescrotales gigantes candidatas a neumoperitoneo preoperatorio. Se trataba de 2 varones con una edad media de 60.5 años (55-66). Ninguno presentaba clínica relevante, y acudieron a consultas externas derivados por otros especialistas. En uno de los pacientes la hernia era bilateral, y en el otro, unilateral. Como prueba de imagen preoperatoria se realizó una tomografía computarizada en ambos casos.Los pacientes ingresaron una semana antes de la intervención (rango: 6-8 días) para efectuar un neumoperitoneo preoperatorio mediante la colocación de aguja de Verres, con insuflación diaria de aire ambiente (entre 240-1 000cc).En ambos casos se realizó como técnica de reparación una hernioplastia con abordaje posterior preperitoneal mediante laparotomía media. Destacó el íleo paralítico como complicación inmediata (2-4 días). La estancia media posoperatoria fue de 17.5 días (15-20 días). Se realizó un mes de seguimiento posquirúrgico, sin que se evidenciaran complicaciones. Únicamente habría que destacar la falta de reducción de tamaño de la bolsa escrotal.ConclusionesEl neumoperitoneo progresivo preoperatorio favorece la reparación de hernias inguinoescrotales gigantes con pérdida de derecho a domicilio. Se trata de un procedimiento seguro y reproducible, con bajo índice de complicaciones y alta tolerabilidad por parte del paciente.AbstractObjectiveTo assess the potential benefits of preoperative pneumoperitoneum in the management of giant inguinal hernias.Material and methodsProspective study using follow-up of two cases of giant hernias inguinoscrotal requiring preoperative pneumoperitoneum in our center from October 2013 to March 2014.ResultsDuring the last 5 months have been diagnosed two subsidiaries of giant hernias inguinoscrotal preoperative pneumoperitoneum in our center. These were 2 men with a mean age of 60.5 (55-66). None had clinically relevant and attended outpatients referred by other specialists. In one patient the hernia was bilateral and the other unilateral. As evidence of preoperative imaging in both cases computed tomography was performed.Patients admitted a week before surgery (range 6-8 days) to perform preoperative pneumoperitoneum by Verres needle placement with daily blow ambient air (between 240-1 000cc).It was performed as a repair technique in the 2 cases with preperitoneal hernioplasty posterior approach through a midline laparotomy. Highlight ileus as immediate complication (2-4 days). The mean postoperative hospital stay was 17.5 days (15-20 days). One month postoperative follow-up was performed with no evidence of complications, only underline the lack of reduction in size of the scrotum.ConclusionsProgressive preoperative pneumoperitoneum favors repairing giants hernias inguinoscrotal loss right at home. It is a safe and reproducible procedure with a low complication rate and high tolerability by the patient

ELIRF at MEDIAEVAL 2013: Spoken Web Search Task

In this paper, we present the systems that the Natural Language Engineering and Pattern Recognition group (ELiRF) has submitted to the MediaEval 2013 Spoken Web Search task. All of them are based on a Subsequence Dynamic Time Warping algorithm and are zero-resources systems.Work funded by the Spanish Government and the E.U. under contract TIN2011-28169-C05 and FPU Grant AP2010- 4193.Gómez Adrian, JA.; Hurtado Oliver, LF.; Calvo Lance, M.; Sanchís Arnal, E. (2013). ELIRF at MEDIAEVAL 2013: Spoken Web Search Task. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 1042:59-60. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/38157S5960104

Guía simplificada de intervención farmacéutica en normopeso con factores de riesgo, sobrepeso y obesidad

Según la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS), “la obesidad es la epidemia del siglo XXI”. Cerca del 20% de la población española es obesa y el 38% tiene sobrepeso. En Estados Unidos es la causa de 300.000 muertes al año y, en España, supone el 6,9% del gasto sanitario anual. Es, por tanto, un problema de salud pública frente al cual la intervención del farmacéutico está justificada por tratarse de una enfermedad crónica con una elevada prevalencia para la que existen tratamientos farmacológicos efectivos y seguros y un elevado número de pacientes en los que el tratamiento no resulta efectivo 1,2

A phonetic-based approach to query-by-example spoken term detection

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41822-8_63Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection (QbE-STD) tasks are usually addressed by representing speech signals as a sequence of feature vectors by means of a parametrization step, and then using a pattern matching technique to find the candidate detections. In this paper, we propose a phoneme-based approach in which the acoustic frames are first converted into vectors representing the a posteriori probabilities for every phoneme. This strategy is specially useful when the language of the task is a priori known. Then, we show how this representation can be used for QbE-STD using both a Segmental Dynamic Time Warping algorithm and a graph-based method. The proposed approach has been evaluated with a QbE-STD task in Spanish, and the results show that it can be an adequate strategy for tackling this kind of problemsWork partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under contract TIN2011-28169-C05-01 and FPU Grant AP2010-4193, and by the Vic. d’Investigació of the UPV (PAID-06-10)Hurtado Oliver, LF.; Calvo Lance, M.; Gómez Adrian, JA.; García Granada, F.; Sanchís Arnal, E. (2013). A phonetic-based approach to query-by-example spoken term detection. En Progress in Pattern Recognition, Image Analysis, Computer Vision, and Applications. Springer Verlag (Germany). 8529:504-511. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41822-8_63S5045118529Anguera, X., Macrae, R., Oliver, N.: Partial sequence matching using an unbounded dynamic time warping algorithm. In: ICASSP, pp. 3582–3585 (2010)Hazen, T., Shen, W., White, C.: Query-by-example spoken term detection using phonetic posteriorgram templates. In: ASRU, pp. 421–426 (2009)Zhang, Y., Glass, J.: Unsupervised spoken keyword spotting via segmental DTW on gaussian posteriorgrams. In: ASRU, pp. 398–403 (2009)Akbacak, M., Vergyri, D., Stolcke, A.: Open-vocabulary spoken term detection using graphone-based hybrid recognition systems. In: ICASSP, pp. 5240–5243 (2008)Fiscus, J.G., Ajot, J., Garofolo, J.S., Doddingtion, G.: Results of the 2006 spoken term detection evaluation. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGIR Workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational, pp. 51–55 (2007)Metze, F., Barnard, E., Davel, M., Van Heerden, C., Anguera, X., Gravier, G., Rajput, N., et al.: The spoken web search task. In: Working Notes Proceedings of the MediaEval 2012 Workshop (2012)Gómez, J.A., Castro, M.J.: Automatic segmentation of speech at the phonetic level. In: Caelli, T.M., Amin, A., Duin, R.P.W., Kamel, M.S., de Ridder, D. (eds.) SSPR & SPR 2002. LNCS, vol. 2396, pp. 672–680. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)Gómez, J.A., Sanchis, E., Castro-Bleda, M.J.: Automatic speech segmentation based on acoustical clustering. In: Hancock, E.R., Wilson, R.C., Windeatt, T., Ulusoy, I., Escolano, F. (eds.) SSPR & SPR 2010. LNCS, vol. 6218, pp. 540–548. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Moreno, A., Poch, D., Bonafonte, A., Lleida, E., Llisterri, J., Marino, J., Nadeu, C.: Albayzin speech database: Design of the phonetic corpus. In: Third European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (1993)Park, A., Glass, J.: Towards unsupervised pattern discovery in speech. In: ASRU, pp. 53–58 (2005)Kullback, S.: Information theory and statistics. Courier Dover Publications (1997)MAVIR corpus, http://www.lllf.uam.es/ESP/CorpusMavir.htm

Effect of Pulp Pigmentation Intensity on Consumer Acceptance of New Blood Mandarins: A Cross-Cultural Study in Spain and Italy

One of the current objectives of different citrus breeding programmes is obtaining new pigmented mandarins. This study investigates to what extent consumer preferences, expectations and purchase intention are affected by the appearance of new mandarins, specifically pulp pigmentation intensity. Four hundred consumers from both Italy and Spain (800 in all) participated in the study. In each country, half were informed about the healthy properties of the anthocyanins responsible for red pulp colouration, while the other half were not. Italians more readily accepted new mandarin varieties than Spaniards, which was linked to them being more familiar with blood oranges. In Italy, both slight-and medium-pigmented mandarins were well-accepted. Spanish consumers preferred the slight-pigmented variety. The most intense pigmented varieties were not well-accepted in either country. Health-related information positively affected Spaniards’ consumer response but did not modify that of Italians. A halo effect was detected in Spain, where health-related information positively affected mandarin appearance liking and its expected taste liking. Consumer perception that new varieties were unnatural was identified as a consumption barrier, mainly in Spain. Blood orange familiarity and health claims are revealed as conditioning factors for consumer response to pigmented mandarins. Interventions should be made to inform consumers that these varieties are obtained by conventional breeding and not by transgenic technology. Future studies should evaluate consumer response to other sensory characteristics, such as odour, taste and texture

Approaching sales forecasting using recurrent neural networks and transformers

Accurate and fast demand forecast is one of the hot topics in supply chain for enabling the precise execution of the corresponding downstream processes (inbound and outbound planning, inventory placement, network planning, etc). We develop three alternatives to tackle the problem of forecasting the customer sales at day/store/item level using deep learning techniques and the Corporaci\'on Favorita data set, published as part of a Kaggle competition. Our empirical results show how good performance can be achieved by using a simple sequence to sequence architecture with minimal data preprocessing effort. Additionally, we describe a training trick for making the model more time independent and hence improving generalization over time. The proposed solution achieves a RMSLE of around 0.54, which is competitive with other more specific solutions to the problem proposed in the Kaggle competition.Comment: Accepted for publication in Expert Systems and Application

Hyperspectral detection of citrus damage with Mahalanobis kernel classifier

Presented is a full computer vision system for the identification of post-harvest damage in citrus packing houses. The method is based on the combined use of hyperspectral images and the Mahalanobis kernel classifier. More accurate and reliable results compared to other methods are obtained in several scenarios and acquired images