Optical Fiber Sensor boosts aircraft engine monitoring

A reflective, intensity-modulated optical fiber sensor enables monitoring of tip clearance and tip timing in aircraft engines at low cost and high resolution.This work has been sponsored by the institutions Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under project TEC2012-37983-C03; Gobierno Vasco/Eusko Jaurlaritza under projects IT664-13, S-PE13CA004, SPE13UN151, and S-PE12CA001; and by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) through program UFI11/16.Publicatio

Comparison of ALBAYZIN query-by-example spoken term detection 2012 and 2014 evaluations

Query-by-example spoken term detection (QbE STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech repository given an acoustic query containing the term of interest as input. Nowadays, it is receiving much interest due to the large volume of multimedia information. This paper presents the systems submitted to the ALBAYZIN QbE STD 2014 evaluation held as a part of the ALBAYZIN 2014 Evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2014 conference. This is the second QbE STD evaluation in Spanish, which allows us to evaluate the progress in this technology for this language. The evaluation consists in retrieving the speech files that contain the input queries, indicating the start and end times where the input queries were found, along with a score value that reflects the confidence given to the detection of the query. Evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database containing a set of talks from workshops, which amount to about 7 h of speech. We present the database, the evaluation metric, the systems submitted to the evaluation, the results, and compare this second evaluation with the first ALBAYZIN QbE STD evaluation held in 2012. Four different research groups took part in the evaluations held in 2012 and 2014. In 2014, new multi-word and foreign queries were added to the single-word and in-language queries used in 2012. Systems submitted to the second evaluation are hybrid systems which integrate letter transcription- and template matching-based systems. Despite the significant improvement obtained by the systems submitted to this second evaluation compared to those of the first evaluation, results still show the difficulty of this task and indicate that there is still room for improvement.This research was funded by the Spanish Government ('SpeechTech4All Project' TEC2012 38939 C03 01 and 'CMC-V2 Project' TEC2012 37585 C02 01), the Galician Government through the research contract GRC2014/024 (Modalidade: Grupos de Referencia Competitiva 2014) and 'AtlantTIC Project' CN2012/160, and also by the Spanish Government and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under project TACTICA

Sustainability of continuous improvement systems in industry: Survey of BAC and Navarre

Este artículo analiza el grado de sostenibilidad de las empresas en la gestión de la mejora continua y los factores que apoyan la sostenibilidad en el tiempo, a través de una encuesta enviada a 350 empresas de la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca y Navarra durante el mes de junio de 2009. El estudio presenta datos sobre la evolución de los sistemas de mejora en los últimos años, y la implantación de las distintas metodologías utilizadas. A continuación realiza un análisis de los factores que las empresas asocian con el abandono de los sistemas de mejora. Dado que los sistemas de mejora se basan en la participación de las personas, el estudio caracteriza cómo es dicha participación. Finalmente se analizan los elementos que las empresas utilizan en sus sistemas de mejora, y en qué grado se han introducido indicadores y objetivos en la gestión de la mejora. Como conclusiones se apuntan las siguientes claves para la mejora sostenible: una mayor implicación del personal directo en el sistema de mejora continua, la integración del sistema de mejora continua en la organización y el establecimiento de indicadores asociados al sistema.This article will examine the level of sustainability for companies in Continuous Improvement Management and the factors which are supporting sustainability during time, through a survey to 350 companies of Basque Autonomous Community and Navarra in June of 2009. The study presents some data about the development of the improvement systems. Then, factors that companies have related to the abandonment of improvement systems are analysed. Since improvement systems are based on workers’ participation, this study characterizes this participation. Finally, the elements which have been used in the improvement systems by the companies are analyzed, and how objectives and indicators are used in their management system. To conclude, the following key issues are emphasized: a higher involvement of workforce in improvement systems, the integration of improvement system in the management system and the establishment of associated indicators to the system.Peer Reviewe

Ethical challenges in the development of virtual assistants powered by large language models

Virtual assistants (VAs) have gained widespread popularity across a wide range of applications, and the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has opened up new possibilities for developing even more sophisticated VAs. However, this integration poses new ethical issues and challenges that must be carefully considered, particularly as these systems are increasingly used in public services: transfer of personal data, decision-making transparency, potential biases, and privacy risks. This paper, an extension of the work presented at IberSPEECH 2022, analyzes the current regulatory framework for AI-based VAs in Europe and delves into ethical issues in depth, examining potential benefits and drawbacks of integrating LLMs with VAs. Based on the analysis, this paper argues that the development and use of VAs powered by LLMs should be guided by a set of ethical principles that prioritize transparency, fairness, and harm prevention. The paper presents specific guidelines for the ethical use and development of this technology, including recommendations for data privacy, bias mitigation, and user control. By implementing these guidelines, the potential benefits of VAs powered by LLMs can be fully realized while minimizing the risks of harm and ensuring that ethical considerations are at the forefront of the development process.Agencia Gallega de Innovación (GAIN)Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431B 2021/2

Enhanced CORILGA: Introducing the Automatic Phonetic Alignment Tool for Continuous Speech

The Corpus Oral Informatizado da Lingua Galega (CORILGA) project aims at building a corpus of oral language for Galician, primarily designed to study the linguistic variation and change. This project is currently under development and it is periodically enriched with new contributions. The long-term goal is that all the speech recordings will be enriched with phonetic, syllabic, morphosyntactic, lexical and sentence ELAN-complaint annotations. A way to speed up the process of annotation is to use automatic speech-recognition-based tools tailored to the application. Therefore, CORILGA repository has been enhanced with an automatic alignment tool, available to the administrator of the repository, that aligns speech with an orthographic transcription. In the event that no transcription, or just a partial one, were available, a speech recognizer for Galician is used to generate word and phonetic segmentations. These recognized outputs may contain errors that will have to be manually corrected by the administrator. For assisting this task, the tool also provides an ELAN tier with the confidence measure of each recognized word. In this paper, after the description of the main facts of the CORILGA corpus, the speech alignment and recognition tools are described. Both have been developed using the Kaldi toolki

A characterization of metrics for comparing satellite-based and ground-measured global horizontal irradiance data: a principal component analysis application

The increasing integration of photovoltaic (PV) power plants into power systems demands a high accuracy of yield prediction and measurement. With this aim, different global horizontal irradiance (GHI) estimations based on new-generation geostationary satellites have been recently proposed, providing a growing number of solutions and databases, mostly available online, in addition to the many ground-based irradiance data installations currently available. According to the specific literature, there is a lack of agreement in validation strategies for a bankable, satellite-derived irradiance dataset. Moreover, different irradiance data sources are compared in recent contributions based on a diversity of arbitrary metrics. Under this framework, this paper describes a characterization of metrics based on a principal component analysis (PCA) application to classify such metrics, aiming to provide non-redundant and complementary information. Therefore, different groups of metrics are identified by applying the PCA process, allowing us to compare, in a more extensive way, different irradiance data sources and exploring and identifying their differences. The methodology has been evaluated using satellite-based and ground-measured GHI data collected for one year in seven different Spanish locations, with a one-hour sample time. Data characterization, results, and a discussion about the suitability of the proposed methodology are also included in the paper.The paper includes results of activities conducted under the Research Program for Groups of Scientific Excellence at Region of Murcia (Spain), the Seneca Foundation, and the Agency for Science and Technology of the Region of Murcia (Spain). This work was also supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Union–FEDER Funds, ENE2016-78214–C2-1-R

Sensitive parameter analysis for solar irradiance short-term forecasting: application to LoRa-based monitoring technology

Due to the relevant penetration of solar PV power plants, an accurate power generation forecasting of these installations is crucial to provide both reliability and stability of current grids. At the same time, PV monitoring requirements are more and more demanded by different agents to provide reliable information regarding performances, efficiencies, and possible predictive maintenance tasks. Under this framework, this paper proposes a methodology to evaluate different LoRa-based PV monitoring architectures and node layouts in terms of short-term solar power generation forecasting. A random forest model is proposed as forecasting method, simplifying the forecasting problem especially when the time series exhibits heteroscedasticity, nonstationarity, and multiple seasonal cycles. This approach provides a sensitive analysis of LoRa parameters in terms of node layout, loss of data, spreading factor and short time intervals to evaluate their influence on PV forecasting accuracy. A case example located in the southeast of Spain is included in the paper to evaluate the proposed analysis. This methodology is applicable to other locations, as well as different LoRa configurations, parameters, and networks structures; providing detailed analysis regarding PV monitoring performances and short-term PV generation forecasting discrepancies.This research was funded by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional/Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación–Agencia Estatal de Investigación (FEDER/MICINN-AEI), project RTI2018–099139–B–C21

One photon and two photon spectroscopy in polymer optical fibres doped with conjugated polymer

The proceeding at: 22nd International Conference on Plastic Optical Fibers (POF 2013), took place in 2013 September,11-13, in Armação dos Buzios, Rio de Janeiro, (Brasil). The event Web site at: http://www.pof2013.org.br/ .In this work, we have compared the characteristics of the spectral emission of plastic optical fibers (POFs) doped with the conjugated polymer poly(9,9 dioctylfluorene)-alt-benzothiadiazole (F8BT), under oneand two-photon excitation. Measurements include evolutions of the fluorescence spectra with excitation wavelength and propagation distance, together with an analysis of the emission photostability.This work has been sponsored by the institutions Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under projects TEC2009-147-C03-01, TEC2012-37983-C03-01, Gobierno Vasco/Eusko Jaurlaritza under projects AIRHEM-II, S-PE12CA001, IT664-13, and by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) through program UFI11/16.Publicad