Performance tuning of a smartphone-based overtaking assistant

ITS solutions suffer from the slow pace of adoption by manufacturers despite the interest shown by both consumers and industry. Our goal is to develop ITS applications using already available technologies to make them affordable, quick to deploy, and easy to adopt. In this paper we introduce EYES, an overtaking assistance solution that provides drivers with a real-time video feed from the vehicle located just in front. Our application thus provides a better view of the road ahead, and of any vehicles travelling in the opposite direction, being especially useful when the front view of the driver is blocked by large vehicles. We evaluated our application using the MJPEG video encoding format, and have determined the most effective resolution and JPEG quality choice for our case. Experimental results from the tests performed with the application in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, allow us to be optimistic about the effectiveness and applicability of smartphones in providing overtaking assistance based on video streaming in vehicular networks

Determining the relative position of vehicles considering bidirectional traffic scenarios in VANETS

Researchers pertaining to both academia and industry have shown strong interest in developing and improving the existing critical ITS solutions. In some of the existing solutions, specially the ones that aim at providing context aware services, the knowledge of relative positioning of one node by other nodes becomes crucial. In this paper we explore, apart from the conventional use of GPS data, the applicability of image processing to aid in determining the relative positions of nodes in a vehicular network. Experiments conducted show that both the use of location information and image processing works well and can be deployed depending on the requirement of the application. Our experiments show that the results that used location information were affected by GPS errors, while the use of image processing, although producing more accurate results, require significantly more processing power

A novel on-board Unit to accelerate the penetration of ITS services

In-vehicle connectivity has experienced a big expansion in recent years. Car manufacturers have mainly proposed OBU-based solutions, but these solutions do not take full advantage of the opportunities of inter-vehicle peer-to-peer communications. In this paper we introduce GRCBox, a novel architecture that allows OEM user-devices to directly communicate when located in neighboring vehicles. In this paper we also describe EYES, an application we developed to illustrate the type of novel applications that can be implemented on top of the GRCBox. EYES is an ITS overtaking assistance system that provides the driver with real-time video fed from the vehicle located in front. Finally, we evaluated the GRCbox and the EYES application and showed that, for device-to-device communication, the performance of the GRCBox architecture is comparable to an infrastructure network, introducing a negligible impact

EYES : a novel overtaking assistance system for vehicular networks

Developments in the ITS area are received with great expectation by both consumers and industry. Despite their huge potential benefits, ITS solutions suffer from the slow pace of adoption by manufacturers. In this paper we propose EYES, an ITS system that aims at helping drivers in overtaking. The system autonomously creates a network of the devices running EYES, and provides drivers with a video feed from the vehicle located just ahead, thus presenting a better view of any vehicles coming from the opposite direction and the road ahead. This is specially useful when the front view of the driver is blocked by large vehicles, and thus the decision whether to overtake can be taken based on the visuals provided by the application. We have validated EYES, the proposed overtaking assistance system, in both indoor and realistic scenarios involving vehicular network, and preliminary results allow being optimistic about its effectiveness and applicability

Messiah: An ITS drive safety application

This article describes a novel safety application based on the open source navigation software OsmAnd, which runs on the Android platform. The application offers vehicles with "smart navigation", and maintains a network of the vehicles that use our application. The process of network creation and maintenance is important as our application enables vehicles to communicate with one another to exchange useful information. The main function of the application is to inform vehicles of relevant vehicles approaching, termed as "administrative vehicles" in this article, and include ambulances, police cars and fire brigades. Based on the received information, our application notifies the driver, who can now take navigation decisions based on it. While developing the application, problems were found when attempting to create an Ad-hoc network. A solution to the problem of managing the Ad-hoc network has been proposed and is under development

Evaluación de mapas conceptuales en asignaturas de informática utilizando métricas objetivas

Los Mapas Conceptuales han sido utilizados desde hace bastante tiempo y sus principios han dado lugar a diferentes teorías de aprendizaje. Cuando éstos son utilizados como una herramienta para evaluar el aprendizaje, su utilización reporta importante beneficios, debido a que permiten que el alumno exprese de una forma natural su árbol mental de conceptos asimilados. Sin embargo, el proceso de evaluación de los mismos conlleva un importante grado de subjetividad, el cual debería ser reducido para promover su utilización. En este trabajo, proponemos separar el proceso de evaluación de mapas conceptuales, siguiendo los mismos pasos utilizados para la creación de los mismos, utilizando además métricas objetivas para dar una puntuación a cada uno de los pasos utilizados en su elaboración. Se propone una fórmula que combina las puntuaciones intermedias para obtener la puntuación final del mapa conceptual. La técnica de evaluación propuesta ha sido validada utilizando diferentes mapas conceptuales de estudiantes que han sido evaluados utilizando o no la técnica aquí propuesta. Los resultados muestran que la técnica propuesta permite reducir la alta variabilidad de las evaluaciones realizadas por diferentes instructores, permitiendo además reducir considerablemente el esfuerzo necesario en el proceso de evaluación.Peer Reviewe

Raman Spectroscopy and DFT calculations for the Electronic Structure Characterization of Conjugated Polymers

Flash presentationIn the last three decades, there has been a broad academic and industrial interest in conjugated polymers as semiconducting materials for organic electronics. Their applications in polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs), polymer solar cells (PSCs), and organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) offer opportunities for the resolution of energy issues as well as the development of display and information technologies1. Conjugated polymers provide several advantages including low cost, light weight, good flexibility, as well as solubility which make them readily processed and easily printed, removing the conventional photolithography for patterning2. A large library of polymer semiconductors have been synthesized and investigated with different building blocks, such as acenes or thiophene and derivatives, which have been employed to design new materials according to individual demands for specific applications. To design ideal conjugated polymers for specific applications, some general principles should be taken into account, including (i) side chains (ii) molecular weights, (iii) band gap and HOMO and LUMO energy levels, and (iv) suited morphology.3-6 The aim of this study is to elucidate the impact that substitution exerts on the molecular and electronic structure of π-conjugated polymers with outstanding performances in organic electronic devices. Different configurations of the π-conjugated backbones are analyzed: (i) donor-acceptor configuration, (ii) 1D lineal or 2D branched conjugated backbones, and (iii) encapsulated polymers (see Figure 1). Our combined vibrational spectroscopy and DFT study shows that small changes in the substitution pattern and in the molecular configuration have a strong impact on the electronic characteristics of these polymers. We hope this study can advance useful structure-property relationships of conjugated polymers and guide the design of new materials for organic electronic applications.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Precisión de los métodos estadísticos para la detección del síndrome de Down en mujeres panameñas

Actualmente, el síndrome de Down es la enfermedad genética más común en Panamá, y las estadísticas más recientes indican que en 2010, 474 niños recibieron tratamientos con síndrome de Down en nuestro país. La detección temprana de los pacientes con síndrome de Down es extremadamente importante porque permite aplicar tratamientos clínicos apropiados que reduzcan las complicaciones que tanto la madre como el bebé tienen durante el embarazo[1]. Sin embargo, no hay biomarcadores adaptados a la región, por lo tanto, existen falsos positivos o falsos negativos durante el resultado. Establecer la exactitud de los biomarcadores actuales sería una contribución para determinar que podemos mejorar los métodos de cribado actuales. Este artículo utiliza datos recientes de cien muestras de biomarcadores y la precisión de sus resultados para sacar conclusiones sobre su uso en mujeres panameñas