URBANO: A Tour-Guide Robot Learning to Make Better Speeches

—Thanks to the numerous attempts that are being made to develop autonomous robots, increasingly intelligent and cognitive skills are allowed. This paper proposes an automatic presentation generator for a robot guide, which is considered one more cognitive skill. The presentations are made up of groups of paragraphs. The selection of the best paragraphs is based on a semantic understanding of the characteristics of the paragraphs, on the restrictions defined for the presentation and by the quality criteria appropriate for a public presentation. This work is part of the ROBONAUTA project of the Intelligent Control Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid to create "awareness" in a robot guide. The software developed in the project has been verified on the tour-guide robot Urbano. The most important aspect of this proposal is that the design uses learning as the means to optimize the quality of the presentations. To achieve this goal, the system has to perform the optimized decision making, in different phases. The modeling of the quality index of the presentation is made using fuzzy logic and it represents the beliefs of the robot about what is good, bad, or indifferent about a presentation. This fuzzy system is used to select the most appropriate group of paragraphs for a presentation. The beliefs of the robot continue to evolving in order to coincide with the opinions of the public. It uses a genetic algorithm for the evolution of the rules. With this tool, the tour guide-robot shows the presentation, which satisfies the objectives and restrictions, and automatically it identifies the best paragraphs in order to find the most suitable set of contents for every public profil

M-Advertising Another way of thinking about marketing and its impact In the usage/consumption ratio

Las acciones comerciales muestran en la actualidad que las plataformas móviles o nuevas pantallas representan una manera efectiva y estratégica para incentivar en las personas la necesidad de comunicar e informar de manera inmediata sus necesidades de consumo. Así pues, el acto comunicativo desde la perspectiva de la comunicación publicitaria se establece desde un enfoque destinado a la persuasión y consumo estratégico de bienes y servicios. De ahí, que la comunicación publicitaria tenga en parte por objeto, la optimización de las posibles formas para pensar el marketing dentro de un núcleo de acción personal a través de la comunicación intencional de marcas de modo simbólico, o por lo que se podría advertir en el caso de mobile marketing, la puesta en escena de una acción de tipo comercial canalizada a través de un móvil o una pantalla, cuyo objetivo central es la persuasión directa para el consumo de bienes y servicios dentro del marco de un movimiento del marketing que hace evidente, la transformación de los vehículos de acción del mundo del marketing.Commercial actions today show that mobile platforms or new screens represent an effective and strategic way to encourage people the need to communicate and inform immediately your consumption needs. The Act of communication from the perspective of advertising communication is thus establishes an approach aimed at persuasion and strategic consumption of goods and services. Hence, that advertising aims in part, establish the possibility of optimization of possible ways to think about the marketing within a core of personal action through intentional communication of symbolic mode marks, or what could notice in the case of mobile marketing, the staging of a commercial type channeled through a mobile phone or a screen action whose central objective is to direct persuasion for the consumption of goods and services within the framework of a movement of marketing that makes evident, the transformation of the action in the world of marketing vehicles

Proposal of a novel design for linear superconducting motor using 2G tape stacks

This paper presents a new design for a su- perconducting linear motor (SLM). This SLM uses stacks of second-generation (2G) superconducting tapes, which are responsible for replacing yttrium barium copper oxide bulks. The proposed SLM may operate as a synchronous motor or as a hysteresis motor, depending on the load force magnitude. A small-scale linear machine prototype with 2G stacks was constructed and tested to investigate the proposed SLM topology. The stator traveling magnetic field wave was represented by several Nd-Fe-B permanent magnets. A relative movement was produced between the stator and the stack, and the force was measured along the displacement. This system was also simulated by the finite element method, in order to calculate the induced currents in the stack and determine the electromagnetic force. The H-formulation was used to solve the problem, and a power law relation was applied to take into account the intrin- sically nonlinearity of the superconductor. The simulated and measured results were in accordance. Simulated re- sults were extrapolated, proving to be an interesting tool to scale up the motor in future projects. The proposed motor presented an estimated force density of almost 500 N/kg, which is much higher than any linear motor.This work was supported in part by the following agencies: CNPq/CAPES/INERGE, CNPq—Ci ˆ encias sem Fronteiras, FAPERJ, Catalan Government 2014- SGR-753, CONSOLIDER Excellence Network MAT2014-56063-C2-1-R and MAT2015-68994-REDC, Eurofusion EU COST ACTIONS MP1201/ MP1014/PPPT-WPMAG 2014, EUROTAPES FP7-NMP-Large-2011- 280432, FORTISSIMO FP7-2013-ICT-609029, and Spanish Govern- ment Agencies—Severo Ochoa Programme Centres of Excellence in R&D. (Corresponding author: Guilherme G. Sotelo.

MiRNAs in Cervical Cancer Radio- and Chemotherapy Response

Cervical cancer (CC) is a very frequent women disease with high mortality and morbidity incidence worldwide, being the developing countries the most affected. Persistent infection with an oncogenic high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) type is the primary cause of cervical cancer, but other etiologies are needed for complete malignancy such as patient immune response, genetic, and cellular factors, and/or environment. Radiotherapy in combination with cisplatinum is the standard treatment for invasive cervical cancer. Nevertheless, this conventional treatment is restricted due to eventual development of drug resistance and systemic toxicity. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that regulate the expression of protein-coding genes involved in various cellular processes including cancer where they play a very important role in the development and progression of malignancy. As part of this complex disease, miRNAs have been implicated in the process of drug and radiation resistance and sensitivity. Recent studies have been directed to understand how miRNAs under or over-expressed are determinants of clinical response, and other studies have focused to clarify how the process of radio and/or chemotherapy affects miRNA expression. These works could lead to the design of safer and more effective therapy approaches based on miRNA expression and their target regulation

Seguro animal, ¿animal seguro?

Treball presentat a l'assignatura de Deontologia i Veterinària Legal (21223

Design of a small-size, low-profile, and low-cost normal-mode helical antenna for UHF RFID wristbands

Emerging RFID applications in the UHF band in some cases require very specific antenna solutions. This letter considers the identification and tracking of patients inside hospital facilities using wristbands, which impose strict tag size and cost limitations. We propose a solution for passive tags based on a normal-mode helical antenna as an alternative to bulky and/or expensive solutions that can be found in the literature. The robustness of the resulting wristband will be assessed in a particular implementation by measuring the maximum read range for a variety of subjects with different physical constitutions

Performance assessment of a novel miniaturized RFID tag for inventorying and tracking metallic tools

This contribution proposes a novel radio frequency identification tag antenna operating in the EU UHF band (865-868 MHz). Miniaturization techniques have been used to achieve a reduced volume (20 × 2.56 × 3 mm 3 ) in order to make it suitable for labeling metallic tools. Simulations are used to assess the tag performance when operating on tools of different sizes. These simulations are validated through measurements in a reference scenario (anechoic chamber). Finally, a real scenario (tool hanging board) is considered in order to evaluate tag performance when interacting with other tags and tools

La presa de Campos del Paraíso. Cabecera de la red de abastecimiento de la Llanura Manchega

La presa de Campos del Paraíso (Cuenca), recientemente construida, es el órgano de regulación y distribución de los recursos suministrados por el Acueducto Tajo-Segura para abastecimiento de la Llanura Manchega. De ella parte una importante red de conducciones de más de 1.000 km de longitud, con la que se abastecerá a más de 100 núcleos urbanos, con una población global de unos 800.000 habitantes. Tiene este embalse encomendadas dos misiones importantes, una cotidiana consistente en regular los volúmenes de agua que ha de servir a la Llanura Manchega y otra de seguridad como receptor en emergencia del vaciado del Acueducto Tajo- Segura. El emplazamiento tiene la singularidad geológica de la existencia, bajo la plana aluvial del vaso, de capas subhorizontales de brechas calcáreas cretácicas permeables, lo que ha precisado ajustar su diseño a este condicionante para evitar pérdidas de agua por infiltración. En este artículo se describe el alcance de la actuación, el diseño estructural de esta presa de materiales sueltos, la solución dada a la impermeabilización del embalse, los detalles constructivos del sistema hidráulico (tomas, desagües y aliviadero) y la repercusión que esta obra tiene sobre la seguridad funcional del Acueducto Tajo-Segur

Learning to Be a Good Tour-Guide Robot

Thanks to the numerous attempts that are being made to develop autonomous robots, increasingly intelligent and cognitive skills are allowed. This paper proposes an automatic presentation generator for a robot guide, which is considered one more cognitive skill. The presentations are made up of groups of paragraphs. The selection of the best paragraphs is based on a semantic understanding of the characteristics of the paragraphs, on the restrictions defined for the presentation and by the quality criteria appropriate for a public presentation. This work is part of the ROBONAUTA project of the Intelligent Control Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid to create "awareness" in a robot guide. The software developed in the project has been verified on the tour-guide robot Urbano. The most important aspect of this proposal is that the design uses learning as the means to optimize the quality of the presentations. To achieve this goal, the system has to perform the optimized decision making, in different phases. The modeling of the quality index of the presentation is made using fuzzy logic and it represents the beliefs of the robot about what is good, bad, or indifferent about a presentation. This fuzzy system is used to select the most appropriate group of paragraphs for a presentation. The beliefs of the robot continue to evolving in order to coincide with the opinions of the public. It uses a genetic algorithm for the evolution of the rules. With this tool, the tour guide-robot shows the presentation, which satisfies the objectives and restrictions, and automatically it identifies the best paragraphs in order to find the most suitable set of contents for every public profile