Crafting Coherent Policy Responses to the Crisis in the Philippines

The onslaught of the global economic crisis has thrown many workers in different parts of the world out of their jobs and many in the developing economies have fallen into situations of poverty. In search for the proper response to the crisis, various governments have turned to stimulus spending as a strategy to preserve and create jobs for their affected citizenry. The ILO tripartite constituents – government, workers and employers – designed a Global Jobs Pact (GJP) during the International Labour Conference in 2009. The GJP serves as a guiding framework to national and international policies aimed at stimulating economic recovery, generating jobs and providing protection to working people and their families. It seeks to promote a job-intensive recovery from the crisis. The Pact is built around the principles of the ILO’s Decent Work agenda. It looks at the issues of employment generation and sustainable enterprises. It emphasizes the need for a basic social protection floor. It calls attention to the importance of protecting and promoting rights at work in a crisis situation. It encourages the practice of social dialogue and collective bargaining as critical tools to identify priorities and assist in policy design and implementation. It calls for implementing measures quickly in a coordinated manner, and for integrating gender concerns throughout. The GJP is the response of the ILO and its tripartite constituency to the global crisis. The Pact contains a package of crisis-response and recovery measures. It is not a one-size-fitsall solution, but a portfolio of policy options that countries can adapt to their specific needs and situation. Indeed, a coherent and credible agenda for a rich-job recovery can only result from an in-depth national policy debate and consultation among policy makers and key stakeholders. Since 2001, the Philippines has adopted the Decent Work Common Agenda outlining projects and activities that will help workers, employers and government, achieve the major objectives of Decent Work. The current global crisis could be seen as an opportunity to craft stronger short term and long term responses that can incorporate key elements from the framework of the Global Jobs Pact and help the country restore viable economic growth, employment generation and poverty eradication

Location-aware recommendation systems: Where we are and where we recommend to go

Recommendation systems have been successfully used to provide items of interest to the users (e.g., movies, music, books, news, images). However, traditional recommenda- tion systems do not take into account the location as a relevant factor when providing suggestions. On the other hand, nowadays, there exist an increasing amount of geo- referenced data and users are usually interested only in nearby items (e.g., restaurants, museums, cinemas). Hence, the emergence of location-aware recommendation systems have acquired a great attention by the research community in the last decade. In this paper, we provide a survey of location-aware rec- ommendation systems in mobile computing scenarios. Firstly, we describe briefly the fundamentals of recommendation sys- tems. Then, we introduce some of the most relevant existing approaches for location-aware recommendation. Moreover, we present the main applications of this type of systems in several recommendation scenarios, such as music, news, restaurants, etc. Finally, we discuss new avenues and open issues in the area

Towards Trajectory-Based Recommendations in Museums: Evaluation of Strategies Using Mixed Synthetic and Real Data

Recommendation systems, which suggest items that are of potential interest to the user (e.g., regarding which books to read, which movies to watch, etc.) have grown in popularity due to the ever-increasing amount of data available, that can lead to significant user''s overload. In particular, in recent years, extensive research has focused on the so-called Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CARS), which exploit context data to offer more relevant recommendations. In this paper, we study this problem with a use case scenario: recommending items to observe in a museum. We propose a trajectory-based and user-based collaborative filtering approach, that considers context data such as the location of the user and his/her trajectory to offer personalized recommendations. Besides, we exploit DataGenCARS, a dataset synthetic generator designed to construct datasets for the evaluation of context-aware recommendation systems, to build a mixed scenario based on both real and synthetic data. The experimental results show the advantages of the proposed approach and the usefulness of DataGenCARS for practical evaluation with a real use-case scenario. Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Program Chairs

A new estimation algorithm from measurements with multiple-step random delays and packet dropouts

The least-squares linear estimation problem using covariance information is addressed in discrete-time linear stochastic systems with bounded random observation delays which can lead to bounded packet dropouts. A recursive algorithm, including the computation of predictor, filter, and fixed-point smoother, is obtained by an innovation approach. The random delays are modeled by introducing some Bernoulli random variables with known distributions in the system description. The derivation of the proposed estimation algorithm does not require full knowledge of the state-space model generating the signal to be estimated, but only the delay probabilities and the covariance functions of the processes involved in the observation equation.This research is supported by Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Grant no. MTM2008-05567) and Junta de Andalucía (Grant no. P07-FQM-02701)

Fusion Estimation from Multisensor Observations with Multiplicative Noises and Correlated Random Delays in Transmission

In this paper, the information fusion estimation problem is investigated for a class of multisensor linear systems affected by different kinds of stochastic uncertainties, using both the distributed and the centralized fusion methodologies. It is assumed that the measured outputs are perturbed by one-step autocorrelated and cross-correlated additive noises, and also stochastic uncertainties caused by multiplicative noises and randomly missing measurements in the sensor outputs are considered. At each sampling time, every sensor output is sent to a local processor and, due to some kind of transmission failures, one-step correlated random delays may occur. Using only covariance information, without requiring the evolution model of the signal process, a local least-squares (LS) filter based on the measurements received from each sensor is designed by an innovation approach. All these local filters are then fused to generate an optimal distributed fusion filter by a matrix-weighted linear combination, using the LS optimality criterion. Moreover, a recursive algorithm for the centralized fusion filter is also proposed and the accuracy of the proposed estimators, which is measured by the estimation error covariances, is analyzed by a simulation example.This research is supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER (grant No. MTM2014-52291-P)

Covariance-Based Estimation from Multisensor Delayed Measurements with Random Parameter Matrices and Correlated Noises

The optimal least-squares linear estimation problem is addressed for a class of discrete-time multisensor linear stochastic systems subject to randomly delayed measurements with different delay rates. For each sensor, a different binary sequence is used to model the delay process. The measured outputs are perturbed by both random parameter matrices and one-step autocorrelated and cross correlated noises. Using an innovation approach, computationally simple recursive algorithms are obtained for the prediction, filtering, and smoothing problems, without requiring full knowledge of the state-space model generating the signal process, but only the information provided by the delay probabilities and the mean and covariance functions of the processes (signal, random parameter matrices, and noises) involved in the observation model. The accuracy of the estimators is measured by their error covariance matrices, which allow us to analyze the estimator performance in a numerical simulation example that illustrates the feasibility of the proposed algorithms

Signal Estimation with Random Parameter Matrices and Time-correlated Measurement Noises

This paper is concerned with the least-squares linear estimation problem for a class of discrete-time networked systems whose measurements are perturbed by random parameter matrices and time-correlated additive noise, without requiring a full knowledge of the state-space model generating the signal process, but only information about its mean and covariance functions. Assuming that the measurement additive noise is the output of a known linear systemdriven by white noise, the time-differencing method is used to remove this time-correlated noise and recursive algorithms for the linear filtering and fixed-point smoothing estimators are obtained by an innovation approach. These estimators are optimal in the least-squares sense and, consequently, their accuracy is evaluated by the estimation error covariance matrices, for which recursive formulas are also deduced. The proposed algorithms are easily implementable, as it is shown in the computer simulation example, where they are applied to estimate a signal from measured outputs which, besides including time-correlated additive noise, are affected by the missing measurement phenomenon and multiplicative noise (random uncertainties that can be covered by the current model with random parameter matrices). The computer simulations also illustrate the behaviour of the filtering estimators for different values of the missing measurement probability.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y CompetitividadAgencia Estatal de InvestigaciónEuropean Union (EU) MTM201784199-

Optimal Fusion Estimation with Multi-Step Random Delays and Losses in Transmission

This paper is concerned with the optimal fusion estimation problem in networked stochastic systems with bounded random delays and packet dropouts, which unavoidably occur during the data transmission in the network. The measured outputs from each sensor are perturbed by random parameter matrices and white additive noises, which are cross-correlated between the different sensors. Least-squares fusion linear estimators including filter, predictor and fixed-point smoother, as well as the corresponding estimation error covariance matrices are designed via the innovation analysis approach. The proposed recursive algorithms depend on the delay probabilities at each sampling time, but do not to need to know if a particular measurement is delayed or not. Moreover, the knowledge of the signal evolution model is not required, as the algorithms need only the first and second order moments of the processes involved. Some of the practical situations covered by the proposed system model with random parameter matrices are analyzed and the influence of the delays in the estimation accuracy are examined in a numerical example.This research is supported by the “Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad” and “Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional” FEDER (Grant No. MTM2014-52291-P)