E-Cognocracy and the Participation of Immigrants in E-Governance

This paper develops a new approach for a political support system related to the integration of immigrants using e-governance. Through the Internet the participation of immigrants is possible in both societies, the original and the new one, and at the three different levels: local, regional and national. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), we discuss how to consider immigrants as e-citizens and, through a questionnaire, and we measure the relative importance of these attributes for party decision makers. The focus of this paper is less on technological aspects of e-decision making, or the diffusion of knowledge and e-learning; Rather on the new aspects as how to integrate immigrants in e-governance. The mission is to increase the society-oriented knowledge derived from participatory decision-making and to increase the background and the scope of the learning process that goes along with the modification of the initial preferences in the interactive political resolution process.E-cognocracy, E-democracy, E-citizen, E-participation, Immigration, Knowledge society

E-Democracy and Knowledge. A Multicriteria Framework for the New Democratic Era

This paper analyses a new framework for decision-making in e-democracies that exploits the power of Internet based public knowledge, which is called briefly e-cognocracy. This is not a procedure to improve technical aspects using the Internet (e.g. e-voting); it is rather a procedure to add a new quality to the democratic system by using the network. This proposed system of e-cognocracy would allow those who are interested to solve highly complex problems by participatory decision-making. Furthermore, we suggest the multicriteria framework for the modelling and resolution of such complex problems. Similarly, using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach, we propose decisional (analytic and informatic) tools for searching the knowledge - relevant for the decision-making process. This knowledge of patterns of behaviour, trends, opportunities, decisions and stylised facts will be the starting point of a consensus-reaching process, which is aimed to effectively solve problems of high complexity of the Internet society.E-democracy, Knowledge society, E-cognocracy, Multicriteria, AHP criterion, Consensus

Output subsidies and quotas under uncertainty and firm heterogeneity

This paper studies the relative efficiency of two kinds of regulations, quantity restrictions (quotas) and output subsidies, in an imperfectly competitive market under the existence of two sources of uncertainty: uncertainty in both costs and prices. We find that when the two sources of uncertainty are independently distributed, the output subsidy instrument has comparative advantage over the quantity instrument. However, when we take into account the possibility of correlation between the random components and across firms marginal costs, we find that a positive (negative) correlation tends to favor the quantity (subsidy) instrument. Finally, we show that when the correlation is positive, it is possible to find situations in which the quantity instrument has comparative advantage over the subsidy instrument.Cost uncertainty, demand uncertainty, firm heterogeneity, output subsidy and quantity instruments

Spike-based control monitoring and analysis with Address Event Representation

Neuromorphic engineering tries to mimic biological information processing. Address-Event Representation (AER) is a neuromorphic communication protocol for spiking neurons between different chips. We present a new way to drive robotic platforms using spiking neurons. We have simulated spiking control models for DC motors, and developed a mobile robot (Eddie) controlled only by spikes. We apply AER to the robot control, monitoring and measuring the spike activity inside the robot. The mobile robot is controlled by the AER-Robot tool, and the AER information is sent to a PC using the USBAERmini2 interface.Junta de Andalucía P06-TIC-01417Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TEC2006-11730-C03-0

Deep Neural Networks for the Recognition and Classification of Heart Murmurs Using Neuromorphic Auditory Sensors

Auscultation is one of the most used techniques for detecting cardiovascular diseases, which is one of the main causes of death in the world. Heart murmurs are the most common abnormal finding when a patient visits the physician for auscultation. These heart sounds can either be innocent, which are harmless, or abnormal, which may be a sign of a more serious heart condition. However, the accuracy rate of primary care physicians and expert cardiologists when auscultating is not good enough to avoid most of both type-I (healthy patients are sent for echocardiogram) and type-II (pathological patients are sent home without medication or treatment) errors made. In this paper, the authors present a novel convolutional neural network based tool for classifying between healthy people and pathological patients using a neuromorphic auditory sensor for FPGA that is able to decompose the audio into frequency bands in real time. For this purpose, different networks have been trained with the heart murmur information contained in heart sound recordings obtained from nine different heart sound databases sourced from multiple research groups. These samples are segmented and preprocessed using the neuromorphic auditory sensor to decompose their audio information into frequency bands and, after that, sonogram images with the same size are generated. These images have been used to train and test different convolutional neural network architectures. The best results have been obtained with a modified version of the AlexNet model, achieving 97% accuracy (specificity: 95.12%, sensitivity: 93.20%, PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2016 score: 0.9416). This tool could aid cardiologists and primary care physicians in the auscultation process, improving the decision making task and reducing type-I and type-II errors.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

An AER-Based Actuator Interface for Controlling an Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand

Bio-Inspired and Neuro-Inspired systems or circuits are a relatively novel approaches to solve real problems by mimicking the biology in its efficient solutions. Robotic also tries to mimic the biology and more particularly the human body structure and efficiency of the muscles, bones, articulations, etc. Address-Event-Representation (AER) is a communication protocol for transferring asynchronous events between VLSI chips, originally developed for neuro-inspired processing systems (for example, image processing). Such systems may consist of a complicated hierarchical structure with many chips that transmit data among them in real time, while performing some processing (for example, convolutions). The information transmitted is a sequence of spikes coded using high speed digital buses. These multi-layer and multi-chip AER systems perform actually not only image processing, but also audio processing, filtering, learning, locomotion, etc. This paper present an AER interface for controlling an anthropomorphic robotic hand with a neuro-inspired system.Unión Europea IST-2001-34124 (CAVIAR)Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC-2003-08164-C03-0

La medición de las externalidades ambientales: un enfoque espacio-temporal.

Sin resume

NAVIS: Neuromorphic Auditory VISualizer Tool

This software presents diverse utilities to perform the first post-processing layer taking the neuromorphic auditory sensors (NAS) information. The used NAS implements in FPGA a cascade filters architecture, imitating the behavior of the basilar membrane and inner hair cells and working with the sound information decomposed into its frequency components as spike streams. The well-known neuromorphic hardware interface Address-Event-Representation (AER) is used to propagate auditory information out of the NAS, emulating the auditory vestibular nerve. Using the information packetized into aedat files, which are generated through the jAER software plus an AER to USB computer interface, NAVIS implements a set of graphs that allows to represent the auditory information as cochleograms, histograms, sonograms, etc. It can also split the auditory information into different sets depending on the activity level of the spike streams. The main contribution of this software tool is that it allows complex audio post-processing treatments and representations, which is a novelty for spike-based systems in the neuromorphic community and it will help neuromorphic engineers to build sets for training spiking neural networks (SNN).Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-0

El original de la loa "Pariendo juró Pelaya", recogida en la "Octava Parte"

El presente trabajo estudia y edita el original de la loa "Pariendo juró Pelaya", recogida en la Octava parte de las comedias de Lope de Vega. El original, firmado y melior, ha sido hallado en una colección de poemas custodiada por la Hispanic Society of America de Nueva York.The original of the loa "Pariendo juró Pelaya", collected in the Octava parte of Lope de Vega's comedies, is studied and edited. The original, autographed and melior, has been recently found in a compilation of poetry kept at the Hispanic Society of America