Emotional Brain-Computer Interfaces

Research in Brain-computer interface (BCI) has significantly increased during the last few years. In addition to their initial role as assisting devices for the physically challenged, BCIs are now proposed for a wider range of applications. As in any HCI application, BCIs can also benefit from adapting their operation to the emotional state of the user. BCIs have the advantage of having access to brain activity which can provide signicant insight into the user's emotional state. This information can be utilized in two manners. 1) Knowledge of the inuence of the emotional state on brain activity patterns can allow the BCI to adapt its recognition algorithms, so that the intention of the user is still correctly interpreted in spite of signal deviations induced by the subject's emotional state. 2) The ability to recognize emotions can be used in BCIs to provide the user with more natural ways of controlling the BCI through affective modulation. Thus, controlling a BCI by recollecting a pleasant memory can be possible and can potentially lead to higher information transfer rates.\ud These two approaches of emotion utilization in BCI are elaborated in detail in this paper in the framework of noninvasive EEG based BCIs

Interactive Data Exploration with Smart Drill-Down

We present {\em smart drill-down}, an operator for interactively exploring a relational table to discover and summarize "interesting" groups of tuples. Each group of tuples is described by a {\em rule}. For instance, the rule $(a, b, \star, 1000)$ tells us that there are a thousand tuples with value $a$ in the first column and $b$ in the second column (and any value in the third column). Smart drill-down presents an analyst with a list of rules that together describe interesting aspects of the table. The analyst can tailor the definition of interesting, and can interactively apply smart drill-down on an existing rule to explore that part of the table. We demonstrate that the underlying optimization problems are {\sc NP-Hard}, and describe an algorithm for finding the approximately optimal list of rules to display when the user uses a smart drill-down, and a dynamic sampling scheme for efficiently interacting with large tables. Finally, we perform experiments on real datasets on our experimental prototype to demonstrate the usefulness of smart drill-down and study the performance of our algorithms

L’orientació dels estudiants amb discapacitat de la Universitat Jaume I

XVII Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la FCHS (Any 2012)L’objectiu d’aquesta investigació és conèixer la percepció que tenen sobre l’orientació els alumnes amb discapacitat de la Universitat Jaume I (UJI). Aquest treball, parteix d’un treball previ realitzat en el 2011 per varies estudiants entre qui es troba l’autora d’aquest estudi actual). En el primer, es va realitzar un primer anàlisi, enfocant les dades recollides en quatre tipus de població: alumnes amb discapacitat, professors, companys d’alumnes amb discapacitat i personal d’administració i serveis. Es tracta d’un disseny de tipus descriptiu, que utilitza el mètode d’enquesta i com a instrument el qüestionari, realitzat per les integrants del primer estudi. A més, també s’hi afegeixen dades per mitjà de l’entrevista a un subjecte amb discapacitat, que dóna una visió més concreta sobre el tema a analitzar. Els resultats, semblen indicar que la majoria dels estudiants amb discapacitat han rebut Orientació Escolar i opinen que aquesta els ha servit per prendre decisions futures; destaca l’orientació Informativa i d’Assessorament, i aquella rebuda al Batxillerat; a més, destaca que la meitat d’aquests ha buscat orientació fora del Centre Escolar. Pel que fa a les respostes qualitatives, denoten aquest últim ítem i resolen dubtes entorn a les respostes dicotòmiques del qüestionari

Coexistence in neutral theories: interplay of criticality and mild local preferences

Neutral theories have played a crucial and revolutionary role in fields such as population genetics and biogeography. These theories are critical by definition, in the sense that the overall growth rate of each single allele/species/type vanishes. Thus each species in a neutral model sits at the edge between invasion and extinction, allowing for the coexistence of symmetric/neutral types. However, in finite systems, mono-dominated states are ineludibly reached in relatively short times owing to demographic fluctuations, thus leaving us with an unsatisfactory framework to rationalize empirically-observed long-term coexistence. Here, we scrutinize the effect of heterogeneity in quasi-neutral theories, in which there can be a local mild preference for some of the competing species at some sites, even if the overall species symmetry is maintained. As we show here, mild biases at a small fraction of locations suffice to induce overall robust and durable species coexistence, even in regions arbitrarily far apart from the biased locations. This result stems from the long-range nature of the underlying critical bulk dynamics and has a number of implications, for example, in conservation ecology as it suggests that constructing local specific "sanctuaries" for different competing species can result in global enhancement of biodiversity, even in regions arbitrarily distant from the protected refuges.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experimen

Mesures d’eficàcia publicitària i models teòrics de processament de la publicitat en formats off i online

The effectiveness of advertising has been and continues to be studied by different authors using various measures and establishing different models.Studies and research has been collected and it has been observed whichmeasures are most used for the study of advertising effectiveness in recent years and at present, the results are as follows; attitude toward the ad (AA),attitude toward the brand (AM), attitude toward the product (AP) and purchase intention (IC). Over time, different theoretical models have been created to study the processing of persuasive advertising as the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and the Advertising Response Modeling (ARM) among others. Thiscollection of studies shows how the most persuasive advertising models are not valid or functional for the study of the effectiveness of interactive advertising formats such as these ones: banners, SMS's, advergames or branded apps,with the exception of a theoretical model that has mark! ed a key turning point in the study area discussed