Endogenous categorization of the human development

[EN] The human development index (HDI) is one of the most well-known measures of welfare. We apply clustering techniques to endogenously determine how similar countries are with respect to the HDI, and into how many categories they can be classified. We find that, in contrast to the usual assumption in the United Nations’ Human Development Reports, the number of categories is not fixed and has varied over time, from three in 1990 to four in 2014. We also find that the countries within each category differ from the United Nation’s proposal.SIThis work was supported by Ministerio de Ciencia under Grants ECO2011-29355 and ECO2014-53767-P; Network MOMA under Grant ECO2014-57673-REDT, Junta de Andalucía under Grants SEJ5980 and SEJ4941; and Grupo PAIDI under Grant SEJ426

MIRACLE’s Naive Approach to Medical Images Annotation

One of the proposed tasks of the ImageCLEF 2005 campaign has been an Automatic Annotation Task. The objective is to provide the classification of a given set of 1,000 previously unseen medical (radiological) images according to 57 predefined categories covering different medical pathologies. 9,000 classified training images are given which can be used in any way to train a classifier. The Automatic Annotation task uses no textual information, but image-content information only. This paper describes our participation in the automatic annotation task of ImageCLEF 2005

MIRACLE Retrieval Experiments with East Asian Languages

This paper describes the participation of MIRACLE in NTCIR 2005 CLIR task. Although our group has a strong background and long expertise in Computational Linguistics and Information Retrieval applied to European languages and using Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, this was our first attempt on East Asian languages. Our main goal was to study the particularities and distinctive characteristics of Japanese, Chinese and Korean, specially focusing on the similarities and differences with European languages, and carry out research on CLIR tasks which include those languages. The basic idea behind our participation in NTCIR is to test if the same familiar linguisticbased techniques may also applicable to East Asian languages, and study the necessary adaptations

A Preliminary Approach to the Automatic Extraction of Business Rules from Unrestricted Text in the Banking Industry

This paper addresses the problem of extracting formal statements, in the form of business rules, from free text descriptions of financial products or services. This automatic process is integrated in the banking software factory, permitting business analysts the formal specification, direct implementation and fast deployment of new products. This system is fully integrated with the typical software methodologies and architectures used in the banking industry for conventional development of back office or online applications

miraQA: Initial experiments in Question Answering

We present the miraQA system that constitutes MIRACLE first experience in Question Answering for monolingual Spanish and has been developed for QA@CLEF 2004. The architecture of the system is described and details of our approach to Statistical Answer Extraction based on Hidden Markov Models are presented. One run that uses last year question set for training purposes has been submitted. The results are presented together with ideas for improvement

ESPRIA. Millora de l'Acompanyament dels Estudiants de Primer Any

El projecte ESPRIA (acrònim de l'expressió "EStudiants de PRImer Any") és una intervenció institucional a gran escala de millora de l'acompanyament dels estudiants nouvinguts a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), que té com a objectiu incrementar la seva retenció als programes de grau, establint un conjunt de mesures orientades a facilitar-ne la incorporació a la Universitat durant el seu primer semestre. En darrer terme, aquestes mesures persegueixen la reducció de les taxes d'abandonament que típicament caracteritzen els escenaris d'ensenyament en línia. Per fer-ho, aquest projecte d'innovació promou de forma activa la compatibilització dels estudis en línia amb altres responsabilitats personals, familiars o laborals que caracteritzen als estudiants a distància, implementant millores en el procés de tutorització i matriculació en funció de la disponibilitat de temps d'estudi dels nous estudiants, així com en la revisió de la càrrega de treball, el calendari de les activitats d'aprenentatge i el model d'avaluació del conjunt d'assignatures implicades. Així mateix, aquest projecte té una vocació clarament orientada a l'obtenció d'evidències en relació amb el seu funcionament i els seus resultats, desenvolupant una estratègia d'avaluació de la intervenció basada en l'ús d'analítiques d'aprenentatge a partir dels registres i la informació institucional disponible sobre els resultats acadèmics dels estudiants implicats i la seva evolució durant el seu primer any a la Universitat.El proyecto ESPRIA (acrónimo de la expresión "EStudiantes de PRimer Año") es una intervención institucional a gran escala de mejora del acompañamiento de los estudiantes recién llegados a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), que tiene como objetivo incrementar su retención a los programas de grado, estableciendo un conjunto de medidas orientadas a facilitar su incorporación a la Universidad durante su primer semestre. En último término, estas medidas persiguen la reducción de las tasas de abandono que típicamente caracterizan los escenarios de enseñanza en línea. Para ello, este proyecto de innovación promueve de forma activa la compatibilización de los estudios en línea con otras responsabilidades personales, familiares o laborales que caracterizan a los estudiantes a distancia, implementando mejoras en el proceso de tutorización y matriculación en función de la disponibilidad de tiempo de estudio de los nuevos estudiantes, así como en la revisión de la carga de trabajo, el calendario de las actividades de aprendizaje y el modelo de evaluación del conjunto de asignaturas implicadas. Asimismo, este proyecto tiene una vocación claramente orientada a la obtención de evidencias en relación con su funcionamiento y sus resultados, desarrollando una estrategia de evaluación de la intervención basada en el uso de analíticas de aprendizaje a partir los registros y la información institucional disponible sobre los resultados académicos de los estudiantes implicados y su evolución durante su primer año en la Universidad.The ESPRIA project (acronym of the expression "EStudiantes de PRimer Año") is a large-scale institutional intervention to improve the support of students newcomers to the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), whose objective is to increase their Retention to undergraduate programs, establishing a set of measures aimed at facilitating their incorporation into the University during their first semester. Ultimately, these measures pursue the reduction of abandonment rates that typically characterize the online teaching scenarios. To do this, this innovation project actively promotes the compatibilization of online studies with other personal, family or work responsibilities that characterize distance students, implementing improvements in the process of tutoring and enrollment based on the availability of Study time for new students, as well as in the revision of the workload, the calendar of the learning activities and the evaluation model of the set of subjects involved. Likewise, this project has a clearly oriented vocation to obtain evidence in relation to its operation and its results, developing an evaluation strategy of the intervention based on the use of learning analyzes from the beginning of the registers and the institutional information available on the academic results of the students involved and their evolution during their first year at the University

A Meta-analysis of Gut Microbiota in Children with Autism

Previous studies have reported dysbiosis in the gut microbiota (GM) of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), which may be a determining factor on child development through the microbiota-gut-brain axis. However, it is not clear if there is a specific group of dysbiotic bacteria in ASD. The aim of this study was to carry out a meta-analysis on the studies that analyze GM in children with ASD. 18 studies fulfilled our selection criteria. Our results showed a lower relative abundance of Streptococcus (SMD+ = − 0.999; 95% CI − 1.549, − 0.449) and Bifidobacterium genera (SMD+ = − 0.513; 95% CI − 0.953, − 0.073) in children with ASD. Overall, the Bifidobacterium genera is involved. However, differences found between studies are attributed to factors such as reporting bias

MIRACLE evaluation of results for ImageCLEF 2003

ImageCLEF is a new pilot experiment introduced in CLEF 2003. It is devoted to the cross language retrieval of images using textual descriptions related to images contents. This paper presents MIRACLE research team experiments and results obtained for this track

Evaluation of MIRACLE approach results for CLEF 2003

This paper describes MIRACLE (Multilingual Information RetrievAl for the CLEf campaign) approach and results for the mono, bi and multilingual Cross Language Evaluation Forum tasks. The approach is based on the combination of linguistic and statistic techniques to perform indexing and retrieval tasks

MIRACLE’s hybrid approach to bilingual and monolingual Information Retrieval

The main goal of the bilingual and monolingual participation of the MIRACLE team at CLEF 2004 was testing the effect of combination approaches to information retrieval. The starting point is a set of basic components: stemming, transformation, filtering, generation of n-grams, weighting and relevance feedback. Some of these basic components are used in different combinations and order of application for document indexing and for query processing. Besides this, a second order combination is done, mainly by averaging or by selective combination of the documents retrieved by different approaches for a particular query