Online learning and detection of faces with low human supervision

The final publication is available at link.springer.comWe present an efficient,online,and interactive approach for computing a classifier, called Wild Lady Ferns (WiLFs), for face learning and detection using small human supervision. More precisely, on the one hand, WiLFs combine online boosting and extremely randomized trees (Random Ferns) to compute progressively an efficient and discriminative classifier. On the other hand, WiLFs use an interactive human-machine approach that combines two complementary learning strategies to reduce considerably the degree of human supervision during learning. While the first strategy corresponds to query-by-boosting active learning, that requests human assistance over difficult samples in function of the classifier confidence, the second strategy refers to a memory-based learning which uses ¿ Exemplar-based Nearest Neighbors (¿ENN) to assist automatically the classifier. A pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to perform ¿ENN with high-level feature descriptors. The proposed approach is therefore fast (WilFs run in 1 FPS using a code not fully optimized), accurate (we obtain detection rates over 82% in complex datasets), and labor-saving (human assistance percentages of less than 20%). As a byproduct, we demonstrate that WiLFs also perform semi-automatic annotation during learning, as while the classifier is being computed, WiLFs are discovering faces instances in input images which are used subsequently for training online the classifier. The advantages of our approach are demonstrated in synthetic and publicly available databases, showing comparable detection rates as offline approaches that require larger amounts of handmade training data.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Inclusive Digital Content for the Teaching-Learning of Deaf University Students in Computer Networks

Inclusive education recognizes and values the diversity of students, guaranteeing their development, participation, and learning within the same classroom. However, this form of social and academic inclusion requires extra effort from teachers and educational institutions. This project, aimed at the deaf community, focused on transmitting in their native language, elementary knowledge of computer networks, which is indispensable in this technological age. Specialized teachers selected the content of the topic of study and proposed a methodology for creating new signs with the participation of deaf telecommunications engineering students and professional interpreters, who adequately transmitted the concepts from one language to another. The educational content created in sign language was organized in an electronic book to facilitate access to the deaf student community. The final product was evaluated in four aspects by deaf people and interpreters, obtaining a positive evaluation by most respondents. In conclusion, the importance of developing this type of inclusive pedagogical support tool aimed at university-level students with disabilities is highlighted

Boosted Random ferns for object detection

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this paper we introduce the Boosted Random Ferns (BRFs) to rapidly build discriminative classifiers for learning and detecting object categories. At the core of our approach we use standard random ferns, but we introduce four main innovations that let us bring ferns from an instance to a category level, and still retain efficiency. First, we define binary features on the histogram of oriented gradients-domain (as opposed to intensity-), allowing for a better representation of intra-class variability. Second, both the positions where ferns are evaluated within the sliding window, and the location of the binary features for each fern are not chosen completely at random, but instead we use a boosting strategy to pick the most discriminative combination of them. This is further enhanced by our third contribution, that is to adapt the boosting strategy to enable sharing of binary features among different ferns, yielding high recognition rates at a low computational cost. And finally, we show that training can be performed online, for sequentially arriving images. Overall, the resulting classifier can be very efficiently trained, densely evaluated for all image locations in about 0.1 seconds, and provides detection rates similar to competing approaches that require expensive and significantly slower processing times. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by thorough experimentation in publicly available datasets in which we compare against state-of-the-art, and for tasks of both 2D detection and 3D multi-view estimation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Interactive multiple object learning with scanty human supervision

© 2016. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/We present a fast and online human-robot interaction approach that progressively learns multiple object classifiers using scanty human supervision. Given an input video stream recorded during the human robot interaction, the user just needs to annotate a small fraction of frames to compute object specific classifiers based on random ferns which share the same features. The resulting methodology is fast (in a few seconds, complex object appearances can be learned), versatile (it can be applied to unconstrained scenarios), scalable (real experiments show we can model up to 30 different object classes), and minimizes the amount of human intervention by leveraging the uncertainty measures associated to each classifier.; We thoroughly validate the approach on synthetic data and on real sequences acquired with a mobile platform in indoor and outdoor scenarios containing a multitude of different objects. We show that with little human assistance, we are able to build object classifiers robust to viewpoint changes, partial occlusions, varying lighting and cluttered backgrounds. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Proactive behavior of an autonomous mobile robot for human-assisted learning

Presentado al 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication celebrado en Gyeongju (Korea) del 26 al 29 de agosto de 2013.During the last decade, there has been a growing interest in making autonomous social robots able to interact with people. However, there are still many open issues regarding the social capabilities that robots should have in order to perform these interactions more naturally. In this paper we present the results of several experiments conducted at the Barcelona Robot Lab in the campus of the “Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya” in which we have analyzed different important aspects of the interaction between a mobile robot and nontrained human volunteers. First, we have proposed different robot behaviors to approach a person and create an engagement with him/her. In order to perform this task we have provided the robot with several perception and action capabilities, such as that of detecting people, planning an approach and verbally communicating its intention to initiate a conversation. Once the initial engagement has been created, we have developed further communication skills in order to let people assist the robot and improve its face recognition system. After this assisted and online learning stage, the robot becomes able to detect people under severe changing conditions, which, in turn enhances the number and the manner that subsequent human-robot interactions are performed.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under projects RobTaskCoop(DPI2010-17112) and the EU ARCAS Project FP7-ICT-2011-287617.Peer Reviewe

Desconstrução das principais garantias constitucionais relativas à seguridade social dos trabalhadores informais na Colômbia

Objectives: The objective of this article is to link the principled trilemmatic nature of the efficiency, solidarity and universality of the comprehensive social security system in the face of informality in the Colombian territory, which ignores the minimum constitutional and legal guarantees provided by the Social State of Law in the defense and protection of rights inherent to the human condition. Social security has a fundamental character in the Social State of Law that contrasts with reality and, specifically, in the labor and social security context of the informal sector. Informality in Colombia is a reflection of social injustice and inequality as a consequence of the phenomenon of globalization and labor flexibility that leads to increasing job insecurity, since the State restricts and limits rights with some characteristics of public policy of exclusion, primacy of the neoliberal economic model and prevailing legalism. Methodology: The applied research model is chosen as a research reference when it is correlated with other disciplines of knowledge and realities that are articulated with the social sciences. A legal philosophical approach is assumed that seeks the analysis of legal norms, their correspondence or discrepancy in the face of the set of values and principles of society, by determining the relationship between law and justice as the central axis of the investigation. Conclusion: Informality needs to be analyzed, reconstructed and interpreted from the philosophy of law by redefining labor law and social security as inherent rights of man.Objeto: el presente artículo tiene como objetivo vincular el carácter trilemático principista de la eficiencia, la solidaridad y la universalidad del sistema de seguridad social integral frente a la informalidad en el territorio colombiano, que desconoce garantías mínimas constitucionales y legales que brinda el Estado Social de Derecho en la defensa y protección de derechos inherentes a la condición humana. La seguridad social tiene un carácter fundamental en el Estado Social de Derecho que contrasta con la realidad y, de forma concreta, en el contexto laboral y de la seguridad social del sector informal. La informalidad en Colombia es un reflejo de la injusticia y desigualdad social como consecuencia del fenómeno de la globalización y flexibilización laboral que conduce a una precarización laboral en aumento, pues el Estado  restringe y limita derechos con unas características de política pública de exclusión, primacía del modelo económico neoliberal y legalismo jurídico imperante. Metodología: se elige como referente de investigación el modelo de investigación aplicada al correlacionarse con otras disciplinas del conocimiento y realidades que se articulan con las ciencias sociales. Se asume un enfoque de carácter iusfilosófico que busca el análisis de las normas jurídicas, su correspondencia o discrepancia frente al conjunto de valores y principios de la sociedad, al determinar como eje central de la investigación la relación que existe entre el derecho y la justicia. Conclusión: la informalidad requiere ser analizada, reconstruida e interpretada desde la filosofía del derecho como deconstrucción al resignificar el derecho laboral y la seguridad social como derechos inherentes al hombre.Objetivos: O objetivo deste artigo é vincular a natureza trilemática de princípios da eficácia, solidariedade e universalidade do sistema de previdência integral frente à informalidade no território colombiano, que ignora as garantias constitucionais e jurídicas mínimas proporcionadas pelo Estado Social do Direito na defesa e proteção dos direitos inerentes à condição humana. A seguridade social tem um caráter fundamental no Estado Social de Direito que se contrapõe à realidade e, especificamente, no contexto trabalhista e previdenciário do setor informal. A informalidade na Colômbia é um reflexo da injustiça social e da desigualdade como consequência do fenômeno da globalização e da flexibilidade trabalhista que leva ao aumento da precarização do emprego, uma vez que o Estado restringe e limita direitos com algumas características de política pública de exclusão, primado da economia neoliberal modelo e legalismo prevalecente. Metodologia: O modelo de pesquisa aplicada é escolhido como referência de pesquisa quando correlacionado com outras disciplinas do conhecimento e realidades que se articulam com as ciências sociais. Pressupõe-se uma abordagem filosófica do direito que visa a análise das normas jurídicas, sua correspondência ou discrepância face ao conjunto de valores e princípios da sociedade, determinando a relação entre direito e justiça como eixo central da investigação.  Conclusão: A informalidade precisa ser analisada, reconstruída e interpretada a partir da filosofia do direito, redefinindo o direito do trabalho e a seguridade social como direitos inerentes ao homem

Fortalecer Raíces y Formar Alas: Empowerment, Advancement, and Retention of Latinx Educators and Leaders in Catholic Schools

While Latinx children are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. school population, the majority of Latinx Catholic school children may never be instructed or led by a Latinx teacher, principal, or administrator. This is a lamentable gap given that a shared student and teacher identity (i.e., home language, ethnicity, background knowledge, lived experiences) can lead to improved academic outcomes (Dixon, 2017) and non-academic outcomes (Carver-Thomas, 2018), that Latinx educators have conveyed a more profound sense of dedication and belonging when their identity is recognized and valued (Flores et al., 2018), and that there are persistent challenges in the retention of Latinx educators (Ocasio, 2019). To address these gaps, a year-long formation program was developed for Latinx educators and leaders in Catholic schools. Through surveys and interviews from participants in the first cohort, insights and evidence in this pilot study are shared in regard to the impact of the affinity group experience upon empowerment, advancement, and retention of Latinx leadership in Catholic education. Implications discuss how educator and leadership formation programs can support the needs of Latinx educators and leaders in Catholic education

Usos de la Educación en Filosofía en la Emancipación Intelectual de Estudiantes de Bachillerato en la Modalidad Virtual

La presente investigación aborda la problemática ¿Cómo es el aporte del curso de filosofía del Sistema Nacional de Educación Permanente -SINEP- a la emancipación intelectual de los estudiantes del ciclo VI? esto con el propósito de ofrecer una descripción que permita detallar los aspectos de la estructura organizativa del plantel, del ejercicio docente y del rol del estudiante de cara a lograr la emancipación en el entorno virtual que ofrece el SINEP. Este proyecto constituye un aporte a la cualificación de los procesos de aprendizaje facilitados por las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación, así como un ejercicio de contrastación fáctica desde el cual es posible evidenciar la relación que tiene la educación virtual con la liberación intelectual de los estudiantes.This research addresses the problem How is the contribution of the philosophy course of the National System of Permanent Education -SINEP- to the intellectual emancipation of students in cycle VI? This with the purpose of offering a description that allows detailing the aspects of the organizational structure of the campus, the teaching exercise and the role of the student in order to achieve emancipation in the virtual environment offered by SINEP. This project constitutes a contribution to the qualification of the learning processes facilitated by Information and Communication Technologies, as well as an exercise of factual contrast from which it is possible to demonstrate the relationship that virtual education has with the intellectual liberation of students

Inequidad en la cobertura del Sistema de Seguridad Social de los trabajadores que se encuentran en la economía informal en Colombia: propuesta de interpretación para la garantía de sus derechos a partir de los postulados del derecho como integridad

La presente disertación doctoral desvela la injusticia e inequidad que están sujetos los trabajadores informales, quienes se encuentran en situaciones de pobreza, precarización y desprotegidos de la seguridad social, trivializando los fines esenciales del Estado y reconocimiento prevalente de la condición humana en el ordenamiento, analizando la realidad jurídica desde la óptica del derecho como integridad, de acuerdo al planteamiento de Ronald Dworkin. Se propone interpretar de la mejor manera posible la teoría del derecho teniendo en cuenta las circunstancias particulares de los trabajadores que se ubican en la economía informal frente a la cobertura del sistema al momento de tomar una decisión jurídica, que en últimas debe propender la reivindicación del ser humano de acuerdo a los lineamientos establecidos por la comunidad política.Universidad Libre – Facultad de Derecho -- Doctorado en DerechoDworkin, R. (2014). Justicia para erizos.México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Obtenido de https://filadd.com/doc/dworkin-ronald-dworkin-justicia-para-erizos-pdfEl Espectador. (9 de Junio de 2020). Policía se negó a cumplir orden de desalojo en barrio de invasión de Cali y entregó su arma. El Espectador, pág. 1. Obtenido de https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/nacional/policia-se-niega-a-desalojar-familias/The present doctoral dissertation reveals the injustice and inequity that are subject to informal workers, who are in situations of poverty, precarization and unprotected from social security, Trivializing the essential purposes of the State and the prevailing recognition of the human condition in the legal system, analyzing the legal reality from the perspective of law as integrity, according to the approach of Ronald Dworkin. Proposes to interpret the theory of law in the best possible way, taking into account the particular circumstances of workers in the informal economy as opposed to the coverage of the system at the time of taking a legal decision, that in the final analysis it should promote the claim of the human being according to the guidelines established by the political community

Representaciones sociales del concepto de ciudadanía desde las narrativas de la comunidad docente del colegio confiar en el programa de educación para sexualidad y construcción de ciudadanía.

El objetivo de esta investigación es comprender las representaciones sociales del concepto de ciudadanía desde las narrativas de la comunidad docente del colegio Confiar en el programa de educación para sexualidad y construcción de ciudadanía PESCC; la cual es de enfoque cualitativo, el tipo de investigación es de orden fenomenológico puesto que esta investigación según lo referido por Borda (2013) trata de entender la sociedad desde la perspectiva del sujeto-actor, de quien la vive, pues se considera que la realidad no existe sin sus autores, ya que es aquello que es percibido y entendido por las personas. Los resultados permitieron establecer seis (6) categorías emergentes para el desarrollo del análisis de datos: 1) ) experiencias vividas desde el rol para construir el concepto de ciudadanía; 2) influencia del contexto para construir el concepto de ciudadanía; 3) actitud frente a la construcción de ciudadanía; 4) actitud frente al desarrollo de los proyectos transversales para construir ciudadanía en el colegio; 5) relaciones entre sujetos de la comunidad educativa para construir ciudadanía y; 6) roles y relaciones de poder en la construcción de ciudadanía. La investigación logra concluir que el concepto de ciudadanía de los docentes es comprendido como una ciudadanía que se construye en primera instancia desde el hogar, se infiere que es una ciudadanía de tipo hegemónica, se comprende que la comunidad docente conoce solo unos aspectos de lo que corresponde a los cinco (5) proyectos transversales ejecutados por el colegio Confiar y que el eje de sexualidad es poco abordado por los docentes a la hora de orientar las prácticas de ciudadanía en el colegio.The objective of this research is to understand the social representations of the concept of citizenship from the narratives of the teaching community of Comfiar School in the program of education for sexuality and construction of citizenship PESCC; whose approach is qualitative, and its nature is phenomenological, since this research, according to Borda (2013), tries to understand society from the perspective of the subject-actor, the person who lives it, given that it is believed that reality does not exist without its authors, because it is what is perceived and understood by people. The results allowed establishing six (6) emerging categories for the development of data analysis: 1)) experiences lived from the role in order to make the concept of citizenship; 2) influence of context to generate the concept of citizenship; 3) attitude towards the construction of citizenship; 4) attitude towards the development of transversal projects to build citizenship in the school; 5) relations between subjects of the educational community to achieve citizenship and; 6) roles and power relations in the construction of citizenship. The research concludes that the concept of citizenship by teachers is understood as a citizenship that is constructed in the first instance from home. Moreover, it is inferred that it is a hegemonic citizenship; also, it is understood that the teaching community knows only some aspects of what corresponds to the five (5) transversal projects carried out by Comfiar School. Finally, the axis of sexuality is little addressed by teachers when it comes to guide citizenship practices in the school