Estimating occupancy levels in enclosed spaces using environmental variables: A fitness gym and living room as evaluation scenarios

The understanding of occupancy patterns has been identified as a key contributor to achieve improvements in energy efficiency in buildings since occupancy information can benefit different systems, such as HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioners), lighting, security, and emergency. This has meant that in the past decade, researchers have focused on improving the precision of occupancy estimation in enclosed spaces. Although several works have been done, one of the less addressed issues, regarding occupancy research, has been the availability of data for contrasting experimental results. Therefore, the main contributions of this work are: (1) the generation of two robust datasets gathered in enclosed spaces (a fitness gym and a living room) labeled with occupancy levels, and (2) the evaluation of three Machine Learning algorithms using different temporal resolutions. The results show that the prediction of 3-4 occupancy levels using the temperature, humidity, and pressure values provides an accuracy of at least 97%

Towards a Ubiquitous User Model for Profile Sharing and Reuse

People interact with systems and applications through several devices and are willing to share information about preferences, interests and characteristics. Social networking profiles, data from advanced sensors attached to personal gadgets, and semantic web technologies such as FOAF and microformats are valuable sources of personal information that could provide a fair understanding of the user, but profile information is scattered over different user models. Some researchers in the ubiquitous user modeling community envision the need to share user model’s information from heterogeneous sources. In this paper, we address the syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of user models in order to enable user modeling interoperability. We present a dynamic user profile structure based in Simple Knowledge Organization for the Web (SKOS) to provide knowledge representation for ubiquitous user model. We propose a two-tier matching strategy for concept schemas alignment to enable user modeling interoperability. Our proposal is proved in the application scenario of sharing and reusing data in order to deal with overweight and obesity

Robust Parking Block Segmentation from a Surveillance Camera Perspective

Parking block regions host dangerous behaviors that can be detected from a surveillance camera perspective. However, these regions are often occluded, subject to ground bumpiness or steep slopes, and thus they are hard to segment. Firstly, the paper proposes a pyramidal solution that takes advantage of satellite views of the same scene, based on a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Training a CNN from the surveillance camera perspective is rather impossible due to the combinatory explosion generated by multiple point-of-views. However, CNNs showed great promise on previous works over satellite images. Secondly, even though there are many datasets for occupancy detection in parking lots, none of them were designed to tackle the parking block segmentation problem directly. Given the lack of a suitable dataset, we also propose APKLOT, a dataset of roughly 7000 polygons for segmenting parking blocks from the satellite perspective and from the camera perspective. Moreover, our method achieves more than 50% intersection over union (IoU) in all the testing sets, that is, at both the satellite view and the camera view