Happiness and Technology: Special Consideration of Digital Technology and Internet

This research paper can be considered a survey about the impact of technology in happiness. The article points out that the scientific approach of happiness states that happiness can be measured and explanatory factors of well-being must be searched empirically. The analysis of technology impact on happiness starts with the opinion of philosophers and social thinkers, and then focus on the revision of empirical research works. The paper concludes highlighting that technology, being the motor of economic well-being, has positive and negative effects on the subjective well-being of individuals. Therefore it is essential to undertake an adequate regulation that promotes positive effects and mitigates the possible harm

Editor’s Note

This special issue has been designed with the primary objective of demonstrating the diversity of fields where AI is used and, consequently, how it is gaining increasing importance as a tool for analysis and research. In this sense, there are works related to the following topics: the use of AI with the IoT, campaign management, topic models and fusion methods, sales forecasting, price forecasting for electricity market, NLP techniques in computational medicine, evaluation of patient triage in hospital emergency settings, algorithms for solving the assignment problem, scheduling strategy for scientific workflow, driver fatigue detection mechanisms, virtual reality and specialized training, image segmentation, web service selection, multimedia documents adaptation, 3D navigation in virtual environments, multi-criteria decision-making methods and emotional states classification

La importancia de la recursividad en las matemáticas a nivel elemental

El tema de recursividad está adquiriendo gran relevancia dentro de la enseñanza de las matemáticas y otras ciencias, debido a la introducción del uso de computadoras en el aula y a un nuevo enfoque de enseñanza basado en la modelación matemática. Debido a esto, creemos que es importante que sea incluido de manera substancial dentro del currículum. Otro objetivo de este artículo es mostrar la importancia de introducir en el salón de clase contextos reales que den significado a las matemáticas y desarrollar sus representaciones numéricas y gráficas. En este escrito describiremos e ilustraremos las relaciones recursivas de los tres grupos más importantes de funciones: las lineales, las cuadráticas y las exponenciales. Habrá cierto énfasis en sus formas simbólicas debido a que éstas presentan las ideas en forma general, además de que son muy poco conocidas

Testing BOI and BOB algorithms for solving the Winner Determination

Eighth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems, 2008. HIS '08. Barcelona, 10-12 September 2008Combinatorial auctions are a promising auction format for allocating radio spectrum, as well as other goods. An important handicap of combinatorial auctions is determining the winner bids among many options, that is, solving the winner determination problem (WDP). This paper tackles this computational problem using two approaches in a combinatorial first-price sealed bid auction. The first one, is an A* based on items (BOI). The second one, is an A* based on bids (BOB). These two techniques are tested in several scenarios for allocating radio spectrum licenses. The results obtained reveal that the search algorithm A* with the BOB formulation outperforms the other and always finds the optimal solution very quickly

Applied Computational Intelligence for finance and economics

This article introduces some relevant research works on computational intelligence applied to finance and economics. The objective is to offer an appropriate context and a starting point for those who are new to computational intelligence in finance and economics and to give an overview of the most recent works. A classification with five different main areas is presented. Those areas are related with different applications of the most modern computational intelligence techniques showing a new perspective for approaching finance and economics problems. Each research area is described with several works and applications. Finally, a review of the research works selected for this special issue is given.Publicad

Soft computing techniques applied to finance

Soft computing is progressively gaining presence in the financial world. The number of real and potential applications is very large and, accordingly, so is the presence of applied research papers in the literature. The aim of this paper is both to present relevant application areas, and to serve as an introduction to the subject. This paper provides arguments that justify the growing interest in these techniques among the financial community and introduces domains of application such as stock and currency market prediction, trading, portfolio management, credit scoring or financial distress prediction areas.Publicad

An experimental comparative study for interactive evolutionary computation problems

Proceeding of: EvoWorkshops 2006: EvoBIO, EvoCOMNET, EvoHOT, EvoIASP, EvoINTERACTION, EvoMUSART, and EvoSTOC, Budapest, Hungary, April 10-12, 2006This paper presents an objective experimental comparative study between four algorithms: the Genetic Algorithm, the Fitness Prediction Genetic Algorithm, the Population Based Incremental Learning algorithm and the purposed method based on the Chromosome Appearance Probability Matrix. The comparative is done with a non subjective evaluation function. The main objective is to validate the efficiency of several methods in Interactive Evolutionary Computation environments. The most important constraint of working within those environments is the user interaction, which affects the results adding time restrictions for the experimentation stage and subjectivity to the validation. The experiments done in this paper replace user interaction with several approaches avoiding user limitations. So far, the results show the efficiency of the purposed algorithm in terms of quality of solutions and convergence speed, two known keys to decrease the user fatigue.This article has been financed by the Spanish founded research MCyT project OPLINK, Ref: TIN2006-08818-C04-02

El conocimiento matemático para la enseñanza de profesores en formación: un curso-taller

La formación inicial del profesor de secundaria en el ámbito específico de la educación matemática sigue siendo una asignatura pendiente de nuestro sistema educativo. La reflexión sobre las características del conocimiento profesional deseable para estos profesionales y sus fuentes de información básicas sobre las que es necesario estructurar su formación inicial es actualmente un tema de especial interés. La presente es una investigación de carácter cualitativo con enseñanza, la cual indaga el conocimiento matemático para la enseñanza que posee un grupo de futuros profesores y las posibilidades de mejorar dicho conocimiento a través de la reflexión mediante un taller de apoyo educativo

Content analysis of microalgae Scenedesmus sp. UCV strain harvested at different stages of growth

The demand for renewable energy has driven interest in microalgae as a promising resource. However, commercial production is hampered by two bottlenecks, biomass harvesting and extraction of high-value compounds. This study focuses on the self flocculating strain Scenedesmus sp. UCV, which addresses the first bottleneck. The cell content of this strain from different samples obtained or not, by a two-step culture method was characterized and an extraction protocol was optimized by comparing two cell lysis techniques: acid hydrolysis (AH) and sonication bath (SB), targeting the bottleneck of compound extraction. The results revealed that SB showed superior efficiency in the extraction of carbohydrates, chlorophyll a and b, while no significant differences were observed for proteins, lipids, polyphenols, and carotenoids. Both methods successfully extracted chlorophyll a and b pigments but, were less effective for carotenoids. The strain showed relatively low carbohydrate and protein contents, reaching up to 21.04 ± 5.79 % and 14.59 ± 10.44 %, respectively. However, it showed high lipid storage capacity and antioxidant potential, with lipid content up to 34.06 ± 19.36 % and polyphenol content up to 6.05 ± 4.56 %. Interestingly, samples subjected to two-stage culture did not show the expected increase in lipid and carotenoid content. This was probably because the lysis methods were not as effective due to cell wall thickening with culture under stress. However, further investigations on the cell wall would be necessary to facilitate its breakdown and provide valuable clues for the selection of strains for specific applications.La demanda de energías renovables ha impulsado el interés por las microalgas como recurso prometedor. Sin embargo, la producción comercial está obstaculizada por dos cuellos de botella, la recolección de biomasa y la extracción de compuestos de alto valor. Este estudio se centra en la cepa Scenedesmus sp. UCV con capacidad de autofloculación, que aborda el primer cuello de botella. Se caracterizó el contenido celular de esta cepa de diferentes muestras obtenidas o no mediante un método de cultivo en dos etapas y se optimizó un protocolo de extracción comparando dos técnicas de lisis celular: hidrólisis ácida (AH) y baño de sonicación (SB), dirigidas al cuello de botella de la extracción de compuestos. Los resultados revelaron que el SB mostró una eficacia superior en la extracción de carbohidratos, clorofila a y b, mientras que no se observaron diferencias significativas en proteínas, lípidos, polifenoles y carotenoides. Ambos métodos extrajeron con éxito los pigmentos de clorofila a y b, pero resultaron menos eficaces para los carotenoides. La cepa mostró un contenido relativamente bajo en carbohidratos y proteínas, alcanzando hasta un 21,04 ± 5,79 % y un 14,59 ± 10,44 %, respectivamente. Sin embargo, mostró una alta capacidad de almacenamiento de lípidos y potencial antioxidante, con un contenido en lípidos de hasta el 34,06 ± 19,36 % y en polifenoles de hasta el 6,05 ± 4,56 %. Curiosamente, las muestras sometidas al cultivo en dos etapas no mostraron el aumento esperado en el contenido de lípidos y carotenoides. Esto se debió probablemente a que los métodos de lisis no fueron tan eficaces debido al engrosamiento de la pared celular en los cultivos sometidos a estrés. Sin embargo, serían necesarias más investigaciones sobre la pared celular para facilitar su ruptura y proporcionar pistas valiosas para la selección de cepas para aplicaciones específicas.Biotecnologí