Modeling Exit and Entry of Farmers in a Crop Insurance Program

This paper examines the factors influencing farmer participation in crop insurance schemes, but unlike previous studies that focus on total demand, participation is disaggregated into entrants and those exiting. Modeling entry and exit decisions separately illustrates that the effect of a given variable is often muted by aggregation. In addition, the approach in this paper distinguishes between price and yield variables rather than total returns and is consequently able to demonstrate that price variables are particularly important for farmers considering enrolling in crop insurance, while yield variables and other risk management opportunities are more important for farmers who have been in the program but are deciding to exit. The result suggests that moral hazard is reduced significantly by calculating the coverage yield level for an individual producer on the basis of a moving average of past yields for that farmer. While yield and its variance are particularly influential in the participation decision for farmers currently enrolled, its significant impact on the insurance decision for all farmers highlights the importance of crop insurance as a potential adaptation strategy to weather events.crop insurance, entry and exit, panel data, Risk and Uncertainty,

Empowering citizens' cognition and decision making in smart sustainable cities

© 2019 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.Advances in Internet technologies have made it possible to gather, store, and process large quantities of data, often in real time. When considering smart and sustainable cities, this big data generates useful information and insights to citizens, service providers, and policy makers. Transforming this data into knowledge allows for empowering citizens' cognition as well as supporting decision-making routines. However, several operational and computing issues need to be taken into account: 1) efficient data description and visualization, 2) forecasting citizens behavior, and 3) supporting decision making with intelligent algorithms. This paper identifies several challenges associated with the use of data analytics in smart sustainable cities and proposes the use of hybrid simulation-optimization and machine learning algorithms as an effective approach to empower citizens' cognition and decision making in such ecosystemsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Current Trends in Simheuristics: from smart transportation to agent-based simheuristics

Simheuristics extend metaheuristics by adding a simulation layer that allows the optimization component to deal efficiently with scenarios under uncertainty. This presentation reviews both initial as well as recent applications of simheuristics, mainly in the area of logistics and transportation. We also discuss a novel agent-based simheuristic (ABSH) approach that combines simheuristic and multi-agent systems to efficiently solve stochastic combinatorial optimization problems. The presentation is based on papers [1], [2], and [3], which have been already accepted in the prestigious Winter Simulation Conference.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Non-local spatially varying finite mixture models for image segmentation

[EN] In this work, we propose a new Bayesian model for unsupervised image segmentation based on a combination of the spatially varying finite mixture models (SVFMMs) and the non-local means (NLM) framework. The probabilistic NLM weighting function is successfully integrated into a varying Gauss¿Markov random field, yielding a prior density that adaptively imposes a local regularization to simultaneously preserve edges and enforce smooth constraints in homogeneous regions of the image. Two versions of our model are proposed: a pixel-based model and a patch-based model, depending on the design of the probabilistic NLM weighting function. Contrary to previous methods proposed in the literature, our approximation does not introduce new parameters to be estimated into the model, because the NLM weighting function is completely known once the neighborhood of a pixel is fixed. The proposed model can be estimated in closed-form solution via a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation in an expectation¿maximization scheme. We have compared our model with previously proposed SVFMMs using two public datasets: the Berkeley Segmentation dataset and the BRATS 2013 dataset. The proposed model performs favorably to previous approaches in the literature, achieving better results in terms of Rand Index and Dice metrics in our experiments.This study is partially supported by Secretaria de Estado de Investigacion, Desarrollo e Innovacion (DPI2016-80054-R, TIN2013-43457-R) and Agencia Valenciana de la Innovacion (INNVAL10/18/048). E.F.G was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skodowska-Curie grant agreement (No. 844646) and also acknowledges the support of NVIDIA GPU Grant Program.Juan -Albarracín, J.; Fuster García, E.; Juan, A.; Garcia-Gomez, JM. (2021). Non-local spatially varying finite mixture models for image segmentation. Statistics and Computing. 31(1):1-10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11222-020-09988-w11031

Discriminative Bernoulli HMMs for isolated handwritten word recognition

[EN] Bernoulli HMMs (BHMMs) have been successfully applied to handwritten text recognition (HTR) tasks such as continuous and isolated handwritten words. BHMMs belong to the generative model family and, hence, are usually trained by (joint) maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) by means of the Baum-Welch algorithm. Despite the good properties of the MLE criterion, there are better training criteria such as maximum mutual information (MM!). The MMI is the most widespread criterion to train discriminative models such as log-linear (or maximum entropy) models. Inspired by a BHMM classifier, in this work, a log-linear HMM (LLHMM) for binary data is proposed. The proposed model is proved to be equivalent to the BHMM classifier, and, in this way, a discriminative training framework for BHMM classifiers is defined. The behavior of the proposed discriminative training framework is deeply studied in a well known task of isolated word recognition, the RIMES database. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Work supported by the EC (FEDER/FSE) and the Spanish MEC/MICINN under the MIPRCV ‘‘Consolider Ingenio 2010’’ program (CSD2007-00018), iTrans2 (TIN2009-14511) and MITTRAL (TIN2009-14633-C03-01) projects. Also supported by the IST Programme of the European Community, under the PASCAL2 Network of Excellence, IST-2007-216886, and by the Spanish MITyC under the erudito.com (TSI-020110-2009-439).Giménez Pastor, A.; Andrés Ferrer, J.; Juan, A. (2014). Discriminative Bernoulli HMMs for isolated handwritten word recognition. Pattern Recognition Letters. 35:157-168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2013.05.016S1571683

Stream-level Latency Evaluation for Simultaneous Machine Translation

[EN] Simultaneous machine translation has recently gained traction thanks to significant quality improvements and the advent of streaming applications. Simultaneous translation systems need to find a trade-off between translation quality and response time, and with this purpose multiple latency measures have been proposed. However, latency evaluations for simultaneous translation are estimated at the sentence level, not taking into account the sequential nature of a streaming scenario. Indeed, these sentence-level latency measures are not well suited for continuous stream translation, resulting in figures that are not coherent with the simultaneous translation policy of the system being assessed. This work proposes a stream-level adaptation of the current latency measures based on a re-segmentation approach applied to the output translation, that is successfully evaluated on streaming conditions for a reference IWSLT task.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 761758 (X5Gon) and 952215 (TAILOR) and Erasmus+ Education program under grant agreement no. 20-226-093604-SCH; the Government of Spain's research project Multisub, ref. RTI2018-094879-B-I00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER,EU) and FPU scholarships FPU18/04135; and the Generalitat Valenciana's research project Classroom Activity Recognition, ref. PROMETEO/2019/111.Iranzo-Sánchez, J.; Civera Saiz, J.; Juan, A. (2021). Stream-level Latency Evaluation for Simultaneous Machine Translation. The Association for Computational Linguistics. 664-670. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/182203S66467

Window repositioning for Printed Arabic Recognition

[EN] Bernoulli HMMs are conventional HMMs in which the emission probabilities are modeled with Bernoulli mixtures. They have recently been applied, with good results, in off-line text recognition in many languages, in particular, Arabic. A key idea that has proven to be very effective in this application of Bernoulli HMMs is the use of a sliding window of adequate width for feature extraction. This idea has allowed us to obtain very competitive results in the recognition of both Arabic handwriting and printed text. Indeed, a system based on it ranked first at the ICDAR 2011 Arabic recognition competition on the Arabic Printed Text Image (APTI) database. More recently, this idea has been refined by using repositioning techniques for extracted windows, leading to further improvements in Arabic handwriting recognition. In the case of printed text, this refinement led to an improved system which ranked second at the ICDAR 2013 second competition on APTI, only at a marginal distance from the best system. In this work, we describe the development of this improved system. Following evaluation protocols similar to those of the competitions on APTI, exhaustive experiments are detailed from which state-of-the-art results are obtained.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/ICT-287755) under grant agreement no. 287755. The research is also supported by the Spanish Government (Plan E, iTrans2 TIN2009-14511 and AECID 2011/2012 grant).Alkhoury, I.; Giménez Pastor, A.; Juan, A.; Andrés Ferrer, J. (2015). Window repositioning for Printed Arabic Recognition. Pattern Recognition Letters. 51:86-93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2014.08.009S86935

The MLLP-UPV Spanish-Portuguese and Portuguese-Spanish Machine Translation Systems for WMT19 Similar Language Translation Task

[EN] This paper describes the participation of the MLLP research group of the Universitat Politècnica de València in the WMT 2019 Similar Language Translation Shared Task. We have submitted systems for the Portuguese ↔ Spanish language pair, in both directions. We have submitted systems based on the Transformer architecture as well as an in development novel architecture which we have called 2D alternating RNN. We have carried out domain adaptation through fine-tuning.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 761758 (X5gon); the Government of Spain's research project Multisub, ref. RTI2018-094879-B-I00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, EU) and the Generalitat Valenciana's predoctoral research scholarship ACIF/2017/055.Baquero-Arnal, P.; Iranzo-Sánchez, J.; Civera Saiz, J.; Juan, A. (2019). The MLLP-UPV Spanish-Portuguese and Portuguese-Spanish Machine Translation Systems for WMT19 Similar Language Translation Task. The Association for Computational Linguistics. 179-184. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/180621S17918

Automatic deployment of an RPAS Mission Manager to an ARINC-653 compliant system

[EN] The development process of avionics system requiring a high level of safety is subjected to rigorous development and verification standards. In order to accelerate and facilitate this process, we present a testbed that uses a suite of methods and tools to comply with aerospace standards for certification. To illustrate the proposed methodology, we designed a Mission Management System for Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) that was deployed on a particular run-time execution platform called XtratuM, an ARINC-653 compliant system developed in our research group. The paper discusses the system requirements, the software architecture, the key issues for porting designs to XtratuM, and how to automatize this process. Results show that the proposed testbed is a good platform for designing and qualifying avionics applications.This research has been financed by the Institute of Control Systems and Industrial Computing (Ai2), and by projects GVA AICO/2015/126 (Ayudas para Grupos de Investigacion Consolidables) and GVA ACIF/2016/197 (Ayudas para la contratacion de personal investigador en formacion de caracter predoctoral) of the Spanish Regional Government "Generalitat Valenciana".Usach Molina, H.; Vila Carbó, JA.; Crespo, A.; Yuste Pérez, P. (2018). Automatic deployment of an RPAS Mission Manager to an ARINC-653 compliant system. Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems. 92(3-4):587-598. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-017-0694-3S587598923-4Aeronautical Radio, Inc.: ARINC specification 653-1. Avionics Application Software Standard Interface (2003)Bonasso, R., Kerri, R., Jenks, K., Johnson, G.: Using the 3T architecture for tracking Shuttle RMS procedures. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Joint Symposia on Intelligence and Systems. IEEE, Rockville, MD, USA (1998) https://doi.org/10.1109/IJSIS.1998.685440fentISS: XtratuM Hypervisor Emulator (SKE) start guide. Tech. rep., Universidad Politècnica de València (2015)Fons, B.: Plataforma para diseño y ejecución de aplicaciones de aviónica. Universitat Politècnica de València, Master’s thesis (2013)International Civil Aviation Organization: Doc. 9613 AN/937: Performance-based Navigation (PBN) Manual, 4th edn. (2013)International Civil Aviation Organization: Doc. 10019, AN/507: Manual on Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), 1st edn. (2015)Koehl, D.: SESAR initiatives for RPAS integration. In: ICAO Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems Symposium. Montreal, Canada (2015)Masmano, M., Ripoll, I., Crespo, A., Metge, J.: XtratuM: A hypervisor for safety critical embedded systems. In: Proceedings of the 11th Real-Time Linux Workshop. Dresden, Germany (2009)Masmano, M., Valiente, Y., Balbastre, P., Ripoll, I., Crespo, A., Metge, J.: LithOS: A ARINC-653 guest operating for XtratuM. In: Proceedings of the 12th Real-Time Linux Workshop. Nairobi, Kenia (2010)McCarley, J.S., Wickens, C.D.: Human factors implications of UAVs in the national airspace. Tech. Rep. AHFD-05-05/FAA-05-01, University of Illinois, Institute of Aviation, Aviation Human Factors Division (2005)North Atlantic Treaty Organization: STANAG 4703: Light Unmanned Aircraft Systems Airworthiness Requirements. NATO Standarization Agency (2014)Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA): DO-178C/ED-12C Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification. RTCA (2011)Ribeiro, L.R., Oliveira, N.M.R.: UAV autopilot controllers test platform using Matlab/Simulink and X-Plane. In: 40th ASEE/ IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference. IEEE, Washington, DC, USA (2010). https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2010.5673378Spitzer, C.R.: Digital Avionics Handbook: Elements, Software and Functions, 2nd edn. CRC Press (2006)The MathWorks Inc.: Simulink Coder Target Language Compiler (2012)Usach, H.: Integridad y tolerancia a fallos en sistemas de aviónica. Universitat Politècnica de València, Master’s thesis (2014)Usach, H., Fons, B., Vila, J., Crespo, A.: An autopilot testbed for IMA (Integrated Modular Avionics) architectures. In: Proceedings of the 19th IFAC Symposium on Automatic Control in Aerospace. Elsevier, Würzburg, Germany (2013). https://doi.org/10.3182/20130902-5-DE-2040.00076Usach, H., Vila, J., Crespo, A., Yuste, P.: A highly-automated RPAS Mission Manager for integrated airspace. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Application and Theory of Automation in Command and Control Systems, ATACCS’15. ACM, Toulouse, France (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2899361.289936