Embedding-based real-time change point detection with application to activity segmentation in smart home time series data

[EN]Human activity recognition systems are essential to enable many assistive applications. Those systems can be sensor-based or vision-based. When sensor-based systems are deployed in real environments, they must segment sensor data streams on the fly in order to extract features and recognize the ongoing activities. This segmentation can be done with different approaches. One effective approach is to employ change point detection (CPD) algorithms to detect activity transitions (i.e. determine when activities start and end). In this paper, we present a novel real-time CPD method to perform activity segmentation, where neural embeddings (vectors of continuous numbers) are used to represent sensor events. Through empirical evaluation with 3 publicly available benchmark datasets, we conclude that our method is useful for segmenting sensor data, offering significant better performance than state of the art algorithms in two of them. Besides, we propose the use of retrofitting, a graph-based technique, to adjust the embeddings and introduce expert knowledge in the activity segmentation task, showing empirically that it can improve the performance of our method using three graphs generated from two sources of information. Finally, we discuss the advantages of our approach regarding computational cost, manual effort reduction (no need of hand-crafted features) and cross-environment possibilities (transfer learning) in comparison to others.This work was carried out with the financial support of FuturAALEgo (RTI2018-101045-A-C22) granted by Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities

A critical analysis of an IoT—aware AAL system for elderly monitoring

Abstract A growing number of elderly people (65+ years old) are affected by particular conditions, such as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and frailty, which are characterized by a gradual cognitive and physical decline. Early symptoms may spread across years and often they are noticed only at late stages, when the outcomes remain irrevocable and require costly intervention plans. Therefore, the clinical utility of early detecting these conditions is of substantial importance in order to avoid hospitalization and lessen the socio-economic costs of caring, while it may also significantly improve elderly people's quality of life. This work deals with a critical performance analysis of an Internet of Things aware Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) system for elderly monitoring. The analysis is focused on three main system components: (i) the City-wide data capturing layer, (ii) the Cloud-based centralized data management repository, and (iii) the risk analysis and prediction module. Each module can provide different operating modes, therefore the critical analysis aims at defining which are the best solutions according to context's needs. The proposed system architecture is used by the H2020 City4Age project to support geriatricians for the early detection of MCI and frailty conditions

Hotel rooftops as a space for consumption in historic centres: the case study of Palma (Spain)

This research analysed the transformation of hotel rooftops in the historic centre of Palma into new spaces for tourist consumption. Nowadays, tourists are looking for unique and special experiences, which has led tourist destinations to seek new attractions to offer. Rooftops are becoming privileged places and provide a differential experience, leading to an increase in the offer of tourist services on hotel rooftops. This study explored the change of use in hotel rooftops in historic city centres for the commercialization of tourism. In this sense, this research sheds light on the factors that influence the commodification of rooftops and the attributes that are most valued by users in Google Maps and TripAdvisor reviews of their experiences. Furthermore, the transformation of rooftops has not followed a single model of commodification, but different typologies were identified according to uses and access modalities. Finally, implications for the city’s tourism planning and management are presented.Partial funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málag

Assessing Ambiguity of Context Data in Intelligent Environments: Towards a More Reliable Context Managing System

Modeling and managing correctly the user context in Smart Environments is important to achieve robust and reliable systems. When modeling reality we must take into account its ambiguous nature. Considering the uncertainty and vagueness in context data information it is possible to attain a more precise picture of the environment, thus leading to a more accurate inference process. To achieve these goals we present an ontology that models the ambiguity in intelligent environments and a data fusion and inference process that takes advantage of that extra information to provide better results. Our system can assess the certainty of the captured measurements, discarding the unreliable ones and combining the rest into a unified vision of the current user context. It also models the vagueness of the system, combining it with the uncertainty to obtain a richer inference process

Entre as práticas e as políticas. O Programa Habitar Porto

O artigo toma por base o trabalho do programa Habitar Porto, um agente do terceiro setor que, para democratizar o acesso à produção de habitação, procura inserir as respostas criadas na sociedade civil dentro de um enquadramento institucional estável. Este passo do “coletivo” ao “público” permite tornar as soluções sustentáveis no tempo e acessíveis a uma maioria, mas obriga a um constante e difícil trabalho realizado entre o dentro e o fora das instituições. A partir da reflexão sobre o percurso do Habitar Porto nos últimos dois anos, perspetivado a partir do trabalho de autores que analisaram os processos de articulação e inovação social, o texto visará ilustrar de que maneira concreta acontecem estes processos e apontará para as oportunidades e resistências que devem ser objeto de reflexão para tornar estas iniciativas mais eficazes.The article is based on the work of the programme Habitar Porto, a third sector agent that, in order to democratize access to housing production, seeks to insert the responses created in civil society within a stable institutional framework. This move from "collective" to "public" allows solutions to be sustainable over time and accessible to a majority, but it requires a constant and difficult work done between the inside and outside the institutions. Based on the reflection on the course of Habitar in the last two years, which will be framed on the work of authors who analyzed the processes of articulation and social innovation, the text will illustrate how these processes take place and will point out some opportunities and resistances that should be addressed in order to make these initiatives more effective

PADL: A Modeling and Deployment Language for Advanced Analytical Services

In the smart city context, Big Data analytics plays an important role in processing the data collected through IoT devices. The analysis of the information gathered by sensors favors the generation of specific services and systems that not only improve the quality of life of the citizens, but also optimize the city resources. However, the difficulties of implementing this entire process in real scenarios are manifold, including the huge amount and heterogeneity of the devices, their geographical distribution, and the complexity of the necessary IT infrastructures. For this reason, the main contribution of this paper is the PADL description language, which has been specifically tailored to assist in the definition and operationalization phases of the machine learning life cycle. It provides annotations that serve as an abstraction layer from the underlying infrastructure and technologies, hence facilitating the work of data scientists and engineers. Due to its proficiency in the operationalization of distributed pipelines over edge, fog, and cloud layers, it is particularly useful in the complex and heterogeneous environments of smart cities. For this purpose, PADL contains functionalities for the specification of monitoring, notifications, and actuation capabilities. In addition, we provide tools that facilitate its adoption in production environments. Finally, we showcase the usefulness of the language by showing the definition of PADL-compliant analytical pipelines over two uses cases in a smart city context (flood control and waste management), demonstrating that its adoption is simple and beneficial for the definition of information and process flows in such environments.This work was partially supported by the SPRI–Basque Government through their ELKARTEK program (3KIA project, ref. KK-2020/00049). Aitor Almeida’s participation was supported by the FuturAAL-Ego project (RTI2018-101045-A-C22) granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. Javier Del Ser also acknowledges funding support from the Consolidated Research Group MATHMODE (IT1294-19), granted by the Department of Education of the Basque Government

DeustoTech Internet at TASS 2015: Sentiment analysis and polarity classification in spanish tweets

Resumen: Este artículo describe nuestro sistema presentado en el taller de análisis de sentimiento TASS 2015. Nuestro sistema aborda la tarea 1 del workshop, que consiste en realizar un análisis automático de sentimiento para determinar la polaridad global de un conjunto de tweets en español. Para ello, nuestro sistema se basa en un modelo supervisado con máquinas de soporte vectorial lineales en combinación con varios léxicos de polaridad. Se estudia la influencia de las diferentes característi-cas linguísticas y de diferentes tamaños de n-gramas en la mejora del algoritmo. Así mismo se presentan los resultados obtenidos, las diferentes pruebas que se han realizado, y una discusión sobre los resultados. Palabras clave: Análisis de sentimientos, clasificación de la polaridad, Twitter Abstract: This article describes our system presented at the workshop for sentiment analysis TASS 2015. Our system approaches the task 1 of the workshop, which consists on performing an automatic sentiment analysis to determine the global polarity of a set of tweets in Spanish. To do this, our system is based on a model supervised Linear Support Vector Machines combined with some polarity lexicons. The influence of the different linguistic features and the different sizes of n-grams in improving algorithm performance. Also the results obtained, the various tests that have been conducted, and a discussion of the results are presented

Comparing effects of tillage treatments performed with animal tractionon soil physical properties: preliminary experimental results

La compactación del suelo es causada por las fuerzas que compresión aplicadas al suelo mediante la maquinaria agrícola así como las operaciones de labrado, siendo particularmente preocupantes cuando el suelo está húme- do y sufre más riesgos de deformación. La tracción animal (e incluso la humana) también puede causarla, si bien no ha sido estudiada en profundidad. Hoy en día la tracción animal surge como alternativa sostenible a la meca- nizada, en especial en áreas de montaña. Este estudió se llevo a cabo para evaluar el impacto en la compacta- ción del suelo del laboreo utilizando tracción mecánica y tracción animal. La parcela estudiada está situada en Vale de Frades, NE de Portugal. En ella se aplicaron los tratamientos en sub-parcelas (30x3m), que consistían en dos pases con tractor, un par de vacas y un par de burros; siendo los aperos de volteo (arado romano) y de corte (cultivador y escarificador). Se tomaron 120 muestras de suelo antes y después de las labores para estu- diar diferentes propiedades físicas del suelo: densidad aparente, porosidad y conductividad hidráulica.Los resul- tados de este ensayo si bien parecen mostrar la tracción animal como una alternativa sostenible a la motoriza- ción, no son todavía concluyentes, haciendo necesarios estudios futuros.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio