A real-time decision support system for the adjustment of sailboat rigging

The operational complexity and performance requirements of modern racing yachts demand the use of advanced applications, such as a decision support system (DSS) able to assist crew members during navigation. In this article, the authors describe a near-time computational solver as the main piece of a DSS which analyses and monitors the behaviour of sails and rigging. The solver is made up of two different interconnected tools: an iterative FluidStructure Interaction algorithm and an advanced Wireless Sensor Network to monitor rigging. The real-time DSS quantifies crew manoeuvres in physical terms, which are reproduced by a simulation program. It can be used in the design phase of sailing yachts and as an aid for realtime boat performance optimisation and accident prevention. This novel DSS is a useful tool for navigation, especially in races

Development of a decision support system for the design and adjustment of sailboat rigging

The two main objective of this work are: - To develop a simulation program of the behaviour of upwind sails and rigging, to help the crew to optimize the performance of the sailing yacht in real time. For this purpose, it will be necessary to formulate a fluid-structure interaction algorithm to compute the performance of a particular sail/rigging configuration. Since the crew dynamically trims the rigging and sails, in order to evaluate the performance of the actual configuration, a tool to monitor the rigging and sails will be necessary, too. - To adjust a monitoring element to quantify in physic values the manoeuvre of the crew. This will be our monitoring tool. - To reproduce the crew manoeuvre in the simulation program with the data obtained with the monitoring tool. Once the sail/rigging configuration has been adapted ‘in real time’ to the actual one, the performance of this new configuration can be computed. For this purpose the simulation program and the monitoring tool must communicate among them

Measuring the Class-imbalance Extent of Multi-class Problems

Since many important real-world classification problems involve learning from unbalanced data, the challenging class-imbalance problem has lately received con- siderable attention in the community. Most of the methodological contributions proposed in the literature carry out a set of experiments over a battery of specific datasets. In these cases, in order to be able to draw meaningful conclusions from the experiments, authors often measure the class-imbalance extent of each tested dataset using imbalance-ratio, i.e. dividing the frequencies of the majority class by the minority class. In this paper, we argue that, although imbalance-ratio is an informative measure for binary problems, it is not adequate for the multi-class scenario due to the fact that, in that scenario, it groups problems with disparate class-imbalance extents under the same numerical value. Thus, in order to overcome this drawback, in this paper, we propose imbalance-degree as a novel and normalised measure which is capable of properly measuring the class-imbalance extent of a multi-class problem. Experimental results show that imbalance-degree is more adequate than imbalance- ratio since it is more sensitive in reflecting the hindrance produced by skewed multi- class distributions to the learning processes.TIN2013-41272P, IT609-13, AP2008-0076

El dibuix de la figura humana com a llenguatge expressiu

El dibuix de la figura humana utilitzat com a llenguatge expressiu es pot contemplar a diferents exposicions artístiques com a font d’informació històrica on es relacionen les vivències personals amb la seva representació pictòrica. Les exposicions més representatives d’aquest tema que han tingut lloc a la nostra ciutat en els darrers anys han estat La col·lecció Prinzhorn (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2001), En guerra (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 2004) i Hi havia una vegada Txernòbil (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 2006). En el grup de recerca Salut Activitat Física i Esport (SAFE) de la Facultat de Psicologia Ciències de l’Educació i l’Esport Blanquerna, dins el projecte Dansa Esquema Corporal (DEC) hi ha una línia d’investigació dedicada a avaluar l’impacte de les sessions d’expressió corporal, entesa principalment com a vivència personal, i la seva representació gràfica en paper. Els objectius principals de la nostra recerca son examinar si el dibuix de la figura humana és una eina eficaç per avaluar el coneixement de l’esquema corporal en població general infantil i en població d’adolescents amb Síndrome de Down amb el test de Goodenough, i avaluar la repercussió de la sessió d’expressió corporal en el desenvolupament emocional amb el test de Koppitz

Parallel simulation of spiral waves in reacting and diffusing media

The propagation of the spiral waves in excitable media is governed by the non-linear reaction-diffusion equations. In order to solve these equations in the three-dimensional space, two methods have been implemented and parallelized on both shared- and distributed-memory computers. These implicit methods linearize the equations in time, following alternate directions in the first case (ADI), and using the Crank-Nicolson discretization in the second case. A linear system of algebraic equations has been obtained and it has been solved using direct methods in the ADI technique, while in the second case has been used the conjugated gradient (CG) method. An optimized version of the CG algorithm is presented here, in which the largest efficiency has been obtained

The value of adaptive link annotation in e-learning: A study of a portal-based approach

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1810617.1810657Adaptive link annotation is one of the most popular adaptive educational hypermedia techniques. It has been widely studied and demonstrated its ability to help students to acquire knowledge faster, improve learning outcomes, reduce navigation overhead, increase motivation, and encourage the beneficial non-sequential navigation. However, almost all studies of adaptive link annotation have been performed in the context of dedicated adaptive educational hypermedia systems. The role of this technique in the context of widely popular learning portals has not yet been demonstrated. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by investigating the value of adaptive navigation support embedded into the learning portal. We compare the effect of portal-based adaptive navigation support to both the effect of the adaptive navigation support in adaptive educational hypermedia systems and to non-adaptive learning portals.This work is supported by National Science Foundation under Grant IIS-0447083, Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (TIN2007-64718) and the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid (S2009/TIC-1650

Parallelization of an algorithm for the automatic detection of deformable objects

This work presents the parallelization of an algorithm for the detection of deformable objects in digital images. The parallelization has been implemented with the message passing paradigm, using a master-slave model. Two versions have been developed, with synchronous and asynchronous communications

Efectes d’un entrenament propioceptiu (TRAL) de tres mesos sobre el control postural en joves esportistes.

Introducció: És un estudi d’intervenció de disseny longitudinal amb una duració de 6 mesos, de grup únic amb avaluació abans-després; que pretén d’avaluar l’eficàcia d’un programa propioceptiu com a mètode per a millorar el control postural en joves esportistes. Mètodes: La mostra d’estudi van ser 28 jugadors/es de voleibol (15-18 anys). Es van prendre dades un primer cop abans d’un primer trimestre sense intervenció, un segon cop finalitzat aquest període i un tercer cop després  d’un segon trimestre amb entrenament. L’entrenament propioceptiu utilitzat es va fer mitjançant el mètode Teràpia Reequilibradora de l’Aparell Locomotor (TRAL). L’estabilitat corporal  es va mesurar calculant l’àrea de desviació del centre de pressions mitjançant una plataforma de forces amb sensors electrònics Buratto Advanced. Les posicions mesurades van ser la posició unipodal amb ulls oberts i tancats de les dues cames. Resultats: Reducció significant de l’àrea de desviació del centre de pressions en els quatre tests en el cas de les noies i només una reducció significant en un dels tests amb el grup de nois. Conclusions: L’entrenament amb TRAL millora el control postural en noies i produeix tendència a la millora en el cas dels nois. Nous estudis amb grup control i mostra més gran són requerits

Surface electromyography applications

The electrophysiological techniques (neurography and needle electromyography) allow us an approach to the knowledge of the neuromuscular function. Electromyography obtains the electrical activity from the muscle in rest or in contraction (maximum and static voluntary contraction) In its clinical application, electromyography helps to the diagnosis and follow-up of a process of neuromuscular type. On the other hand, kinesiological or surface electromyography (SEMG) allows the study of the muscular activity in dynamics, which we can apply to the biomechanical movement analysis, gait analysis, studies of muscular fatigue, sport performance| and applications in work medicine and ergonomics. SEMG brings advantages like the fact that is a bloodless test, of being able to analyze varying muscles at the same time, in motion and in actions of non limited duration. The processed one brings us parameters of amplitude and frequencies, which we will use for descriptive and comparative studies. As a balancing entry, it does not allow us to study deep musculature, and some aspects of definition are lost in the obtained outlines