Gait-based Gender Classification Considering Resampling and Feature Selection

Two intrinsic data characteristics that arise in many domains are the class imbalance and the high dimensionality, which pose new challenges that should be addressed. When using gait for gender classification, benchmarking public databases and renowned gait representations lead to these two problems, but they have not been jointly studied in depth. This paper is a preliminary study that pursues to investigate the benefits of using several techniques to tackle the aforementioned problems either singly or in combination, and also to evaluate the order of application that leads to the best classification performance. Experimental results show the importance of jointly managing both problems for gait-based gender classification. In particular, it seems that the best strategy consists of applying resampling followed by feature selection

Gait recognition from corrupted silhouettes: a robust statistical approach

This paper introduces a method based on robust statistics to build reliable gait signatures from averaging silhouette descriptions, mainly when gait sequences are affected by severe and persistent defects. The term robust refers to the ability of reducing the impact of silhouette defects (outliers) on the average gait pattern, while taking advantage of clean silhouette regions. An extensive experimental framework was defined based on injecting three types of realistic defects (salt and pepper noise, static occlusion, and dynamic occlusion) to clean gait sequences, both separately in an easy setting and jointly in a hard setting. The robust approach was compared against two other operation modes: (1) simple mean (weak baseline) and (2) defect exclusion (strong benchmark). Three gait representation methods based on silhouette averaging were used: Gait Energy Image (GEI), Gradient Histogram Energy Image (GHEI), and the joint use of GEI and HOG descriptors. Quality of gait signatures was assessed by their discriminant power in a large number of gait recognition tasks. Nonparametric statistical tests were applied on recognition results, searching for significant differences between operation modes.This work has been supported by the grants P1-1B2012-22 and PREDOC/2012/05 from Universitat Jaume I, PROMETEOII/2014/062 from Generalitat Valenciana, and TIN2013-46522-P from Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness

La evaluación de Competencias Básicas en el aula de Educación Infantil: propuesta metodológica para el desarrollo de un área en el aula de 3 años

¿Por qué es necesario trabajar las Competencias Básicas en Educación Infantil? La respuesta a esta pregunta, y mi necesidad de conocer su evaluación aplicada al aula de 3 años, se encuentran en este trabajo. Las Competencias Básicas favorecen el desarrollo personal y la inclusión en la sociedad. Lo que intento demostrar en este trabajo, está en concordancia con el pensamiento de Benjamín Franklin (1706-1790): “Dime y lo olvido, enséñame y lo recuerdo, involúcrame y lo aprendo”, dado que implicando al alumnado en su aprendizaje, conseguimos hacerlo más competente y desarrollar unas mejores competencias docentes. A continuación, es necesaria una buena evaluación por competencias, para conseguir que el alumnado de la clase de 3 años adquiera unos aprendizajes mucho más sólidos. El conocer esta evaluación y cómo aplicarla en el aula, me ha posibilitado reflexionar acerca de la importancia a la hora de plantear los aprendizajes que adquiere el alumnado, y cómo deberían valorarse para conseguir el máximo de competencias posibles

Emotional and Musical Education through the Disney-Pixar Film Coco (2017). Didactic Proposal Necessary in Times of Pandemic

This article combines emotional and musical education through a didactic proposal for the fourth year of Primary Education, which is based on the musical and audiovisual analysis of the Disney-Pixar movie Coco. Given the global pandemic situation that we are experiencing, the didactic proposal is based on the need for Primary Education students to acquire a series of values ??such as: perseverance to achieve dreams through adversity, the importance of life and death, bonding with the family, being true to oneself or the unconditional support that pets can become. All of this is worked with music through the analysis, interpretation and staging of the film's soundtrack, including inclusive musical proposals such as interpretation with sign language. And with the use of a series of ICT tools, which from the very creation of the didactic programming through a large number of activities, turn everything that is proposed into something totally motivating for both the teacher and the students.En este artículo se combina la educación emocional y la educación musical a través de una propuesta didáctica para cuarto curso de Educación Primaria, que parte del análisis musical y audiovisual de la película Coco de Disney- Pixar. Dada la situación de pandemia mundial que vivimos, la propuesta didáctica parte de la necesidad de que el alumnado de Educación Primaria adquiera una serie de valores como son: la perseverancia para conseguir sueños a través de las adversidades, la importancia de la vida y la muerte, la vinculación con la familia, el ser fiel a uno mismo o el apoyo incondicional en el que pueden convertirse los animales domésticos. Todo ello, se trabaja con la música a través del análisis, la interpretación y la puesta en escena de la banda sonora de la película, incluyendo propuestas musicales inclusivas como la interpretación con lenguaje de signos. Y con la utilización de una serie de herramientas TIC, que desde la propia creación de la programación didáctica pasando por un gran número de actividades, convierten en algo totalmente motivante tanto para el docente como para el alumnado todo aquello que se propone

Surrounding neighborhood-based SMOTE for learning from imbalanced data sets

Many traditional approaches to pattern classifi- cation assume that the problem classes share similar prior probabilities. However, in many real-life applications, this assumption is grossly violated. Often, the ratios of prior probabilities between classes are extremely skewed. This situation is known as the class imbalance problem. One of the strategies to tackle this problem consists of balancing the classes by resampling the original data set. The SMOTE algorithm is probably the most popular technique to increase the size of the minority class by generating synthetic instances. From the idea of the original SMOTE, we here propose the use of three approaches to surrounding neighborhood with the aim of generating artificial minority instances, but taking into account both the proximity and the spatial distribution of the examples. Experiments over a large collection of databases and using three different classifiers demonstrate that the new surrounding neighborhood-based SMOTE procedures significantly outperform other existing over-sampling algorithms

A GENDER RECOGNITION EXPERIMENT ON THE CASIA GAIT DATABASE DEALING WITH ITS IMBALANCED NATURE

Abstract: The CASIA Gait Database is one of the most used benchmarks for gait analysis among the few non-smallsize datasets available. It is composed of gait sequences of 124 subjects, which are unequally distributed, comprising 31 women and 93 men. This imbalanced situation could correspond to some real contexts where men are in the majority, for example, a sports stadium or a factory. Learning from imbalanced scenarios usually requires suitable methodologies and performance metrics capable of managing and explaining biased results. Nevertheless, most of the reported experiments using the CASIA Gait Database in gender recognition tasks limit their analysis to global results obtained from reduced subsets, thus avoiding having to deal with the original setting. This paper uses a methodology to gain an insight into the discriminative capacity of the whole CASIA Gait Database for gender recognition under its imbalanced condition. The classification results are expected to be more reliable than those reported in previous papers

Removal of bacteria from boar semen using a low-density colloid

P. 272-278Antibiotics are added to semen extenders when preparing commercial semen doses for artificial insemination according to national and international guidelines. However, this addition of antibiotics represents non-therapeutic usage and could be contributing to the development of antibiotic resistance. Colloid centrifugation was shown to reduce the load of bacteria present in boar semen and was capable of removing all bacteria if performed directly after semen collection, albeit with some loss of spermatozoa. The present experiment was conducted with a low density colloid to investigate whether it was possible to separate all of the spermatozoa from seminal plasma i.e. without selection for robust spermatozoa, or whether this would have a detrimental effect on sperm quality. Ejaculates from nine boars were extended in Beltsville Thawing Solution without antibiotics and were transported to the laboratory for Single Layer Centrifugation (SLC) on modified Porcicoll i.e. at a low density (S). A further modification was that a sterile inner tube was included inside some of the 50 mL centrifuge tubes to facilitate harvesting of the sperm pellet (M). Aliquots of all samples (control, S and M) were cultured for bacterial quantification and identification using standard microbiological methods. Sperm quality was evaluated daily. Three of the C and M samples and five of the S samples did not contain any bacteria. Mean bacterial counts for the remaining samples (colony forming units/mL) were as follows: C 259 ± 216; S 30 ± 22; M 33 ± 15 (P < 0.01). Citrobacter spp., Staphylococcus simulans, Klebsiella variicola, Escherichia coli, Myroides odoratimimus, Proteus spp. and Enterococcus faecalis were identified in the control samples. There were marginal differences in sperm quality among treatments, with sperm velocity and linearity being higher in S and M samples than in C at all time points. However, sperm viability, capacitation and acrosome status were marginally better in controls than in S or M on day 0, but these differences disappeared during storage. Conclusions: centrifugation through a low density colloid can remove or reduce bacterial contamination in boar ejaculates without using antibiotics. Furthermore, it is possible to collect boar ejaculates without bacterial contamination by paying strict attention to hygiene.S

Person re-identification by unsupervised video matching

This work was partially supported by National Basic Research Program of China (973 Project) 2012CB725405, the National Science and Technology Support Program (2014BAG03B01), National Natural Science Foundation China61273238, Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Project (D15110900280000), Tsinghua University Project (20131089307). Xiatian Zhu and Xiaolong Ma equally contributed to this work

Seguimiento de las guías españolas para el manejo del asma por el médico de atención primaria: un estudio observacional ambispectivo

Objetivo Evaluar el grado de seguimiento de las recomendaciones de las versiones de la Guía española para el manejo del asma (GEMA 2009 y 2015) y su repercusión en el control de la enfermedad. Material y métodos Estudio observacional y ambispectivo realizado entre septiembre del 2015 y abril del 2016, en el que participaron 314 médicos de atención primaria y 2.864 pacientes. Resultados Utilizando datos retrospectivos, 81 de los 314 médicos (25, 8% [IC del 95%, 21, 3 a 30, 9]) comunicaron seguir las recomendaciones de la GEMA 2009. Al inicio del estudio, 88 de los 314 médicos (28, 0% [IC del 95%, 23, 4 a 33, 2]) seguían las recomendaciones de la GEMA 2015. El tener un asma mal controlada (OR 0, 19, IC del 95%, 0, 13 a 0, 28) y presentar un asma persistente grave al inicio del estudio (OR 0, 20, IC del 95%, 0, 12 a 0, 34) se asociaron negativamente con tener un asma bien controlada al final del seguimiento. Por el contrario, el seguimiento de las recomendaciones de la GEMA 2015 se asoció de manera positiva con una mayor posibilidad de que el paciente tuviera un asma bien controlada al final del periodo de seguimiento (OR 1, 70, IC del 95%, 1, 40 a 2, 06). Conclusiones El escaso seguimiento de las guías clínicas para el manejo del asma constituye un problema común entre los médicos de atención primaria. Un seguimiento de estas guías se asocia con un control mejor del asma. Existe la necesidad de actuaciones que puedan mejorar el seguimiento por parte de los médicos de atención primaria de las guías para el manejo del asma. Objective: To assess the degree of compliance with the recommendations of the 2009 and 2015 versions of the Spanish guidelines for managing asthma (Guía Española para el Manejo del Asma [GEMA]) and the effect of this compliance on controlling the disease. Material and methods: We conducted an observational ambispective study between September 2015 and April 2016 in which 314 primary care physicians and 2864 patients participated. Results: Using retrospective data, we found that 81 of the 314 physicians (25.8%; 95% CI 21.3–30.9) stated that they complied with the GEMA2009 recommendations. At the start of the study, 88 of the 314 physicians (28.0%; 95% CI 23.4–33.2) complied with the GEMA2015 recommendations. Poorly controlled asthma (OR, 0.19; 95% CI 0.13–0.28) and persistent severe asthma at the start of the study (OR, 0.20; 95% CI 0.12–0.34) were negatively associated with having well-controlled asthma by the end of the follow-up. In contrast, compliance with the GEMA2015 recommendations was positively associated with a greater likelihood that the patient would have well-controlled asthma by the end of the follow-up (OR, 1.70; 95% CI 1.40–2.06). Conclusions: Low compliance with the clinical guidelines for managing asthma is a common problem among primary care physicians. Compliance with these guidelines is associated with better asthma control. Actions need to be taken to improve primary care physician compliance with the asthma management guidelines

Soundtracks and ICT Tools as Main Axes of Music Didactics for Future Primary Education Teachers. Resources Provided in the Area «Fundamentos de la Educación Musical»

El objetivo principal de este artículo es dar a conocer la importancia de la música que nos ofrecen distintos portales, aplicaciones informáticas, así como fragmentos de bandas sonoras, a la hora de poder ofrecer didácticamente la asignatura «Fundamentos de la Educación Musical» a los alumnos de tercero del Grado en Magisterio en Educación Primaria, y que les pueden ser útiles en su futura vida profesional. La metodología está basada en elegir fragmentos significativos de obras musicales que deben conocer, así como en ofrecerles una serie de recursos donde la música se mezcla con distintas herramientas TIC, que hacen que el enseñar y aprender música sea más significativo y más cercano a los futuros docentes, y que además les pueda servir para utilizarlas con otras áreas de las que se puedan llegar a hacer cargo. La conclusión es que la utilización de la música de los medios audiovisuales y de herramientas informáticas, que posibilita la adquisición de los contenidos musicales de manera más atractiva al alumnado, puede ser el camino para mejorar la educación del siglo XXI universitaria, y de un alumnado de Primaria que tenga una mayor, mejor y más amplia y abierta cultura musical.The main aim of this article is to show the importance of the music in different sites, apps and fragments of soundtracks in order to introduce this entire staff in the subject «Fundamentos de la Educación Musical» studied during 3th year of an Education degree to new teachers of Primary. All of this will be very useful in their jobs. Methodology is based on choosing remarkable music works fragments that students should know, and at the same time, give them a sort of resources where music is mixed with different ITC tools. In this way, teaching and learning will be more meaningful for new teachers and they could use these knowledge in different areas. As a conclusion, we can say the use of the music in mass media as well as music of some ITC tools let the students to acquire the contents easily. It can be the path to improve education at a real university of the 21th century and students of Primary levels will achieve a better, a wider, an opener musical culture