On-line support vector machines for function approximation

This paper describes an on-line method for building epsilon-insensitive support vector machines for regression as described in (Vapnik, 1995). The method is an extension of the method developed by (Cauwenberghs & Poggio, 2000) for building incremental support vector machines for classification. Machines obtained by using this approach are equivalent to the ones obtained by applying exact methods like quadratic programming, but they are obtained more quickly and allow the incremental addition of new points, removal of existing points and update of target values for existing data. This development opens the application of SVM regression to areas such as on-line prediction of temporal series or generalization of value functions in reinforcement learning.Postprint (published version

La participación del profesorado en un proceso de mejora en el marco de “Una Escuela para Todos”

El presente trabajo muestra el proceso llevado a cabo durante dos años (2007-2009), en el marco de un proyecto de colaboración entre un centro educativo de Educación Infantil y Primaria y el Departamento de Didáctica de la Universidad de Alcalá, cuya finalidad es la participación de la Comunidad Escolar, especialmente el profesorado, en un proceso interno de mejora de la calidad educativa. Las estrategias de cambio educativo, en este caso, se basan en la autoevaluación, reflexión y compromiso del profesorado en relación a una serie de medidas organizativas y metodológicas que se dirigen a crear las bases de una escuela inclusiva. A través de dos fases diferenciadas se va dando forma a una propuesta de mejora cuyos resultados se detallan en el presente artículo; una primera basada en un análisis colectivo de la práctica docente como iniciación a la reflexión, a través de grupos de discusión con los docentes, entendiendo el análisis de la práctica como método de formación del profesorado; de esta primera fase se extraen una serie de medidas dirigidas a la mejora de la calidad educativa con la idea de Educación para Todos como base. Dichas medidas tendrán su aplicación en la práctica en la segunda fase del Proyecto

Evolución de las personas mayores desde el Inicio de la democracia

El objetivo que tiene la historia es estudiar el pasado para comprender el presente y poder adelantarse al futuro. Las personas mayores constituyen un grupo social que, como todos, han cambiado a lo largo de la historia de nuestra sociedad, pero que a diferencia del resto ha ido adquiriendo cierto protagonismo tanto por su crecimiento numérico como por su peso dentro de la economía y de los servicios sociales. Resulta necesario conocer qué hechos han acontecido y afectado a este grupo de personas para comprender las características que tienen hoy. En este Trabajo Fin de Grado se considerarán distintos momentos históricos que han conseguido cambiar su estilo de vida y su concepción del mundo, señalando además las funciones del Trabajo Social. Para ello se ha realizado un análisis bibliográfico de datos secundarios y una serie de entrevistas en profundidad.The objective of History is to study the past in order to understand the present and to be able to anticipate the future. Elderly´s people is a social group that, like all of them, has changed throughout the history of our society, but unlike the rest has been acquiring a certain prominence both for its growth and its weight in the economy and social services, and it is necessary to know what events have happened and affected this group of people to understand the characteristics they have today. In this Final Degree Project, we will consider different historical moments that have managed to change their lifestyle and their conception of the world, also pointing out the functions of Social Work. For this purpose, a bibliographic analysis of secondary data and a series of in-depth interviews have been carried out.Grado en Trabajo Socia

Impacto de la brecha digital en personas sin hogar

El sinhogarismo es uno de los problemas más descarnados de las sociedades contemporáneas que evidencia, como ningún otro, lo que supone la exclusión social. Este trabajo pretende acercarse a la realidad actual que viven los usuarios del Centro Integrado para Personas Sin Hogar1 de la ciudad de Valladolid (el Albergue Municipal) en relación con las nuevas tecnologías, un ámbito que se antoja cada día más fundamental en la actualidad. Este proyecto plantea una pequeña investigación para descubrir qué grado de conocimiento y manejo de las nuevas tecnologías tienen los participantes en situación de sinhogarismo. Y es que, muchas personas en esta situación, tienen una serie de limitaciones que les impide beneficiarse de los servicios que ofrecen estas nuevas tecnologías que, en muchos casos, se están convirtiendo en esenciales para la participación en una sociedad digitalizada. En este sentido, se plantea una propuesta de intervención socio-comunitaria para combatir la brecha digital en estas personas con el objetivo de que, al tiempo que tejen redes sociales de apoyo, puedan incrementar sus conocimientos y capacidades en torno al uso de las nuevas tecnologías, sobre todo, por su utilidad para la inserción socio-laboral.Departamento de PsicologíaMáster en Formación e Intervención sociocomunitari

TransfQMix: transformers for leveraging the graph structure of multi-agent reinforcement learning problems

Coordination is one of the most difficult aspects of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). One reason is that agents normally choose their actions independently of one another. In order to see coordination strategies emerging from the combination of independent policies, the recent research has focused on the use of a centralized function (CF) that learns each agent's contribution to the team reward. However, the structure in which the environment is presented to the agents and to the CF is typically overlooked. We have observed that the features used to describe the coordination problem can be represented as vertex features of a latent graph structure. Here, we present TransfQMix, a new approach that uses transformers to leverage this latent structure and learn better coordination policies. Our transformer agents perform a graph reasoning over the state of the observable entities. Our transformer Q-mixer learns a monotonic mixing-function from a larger graph that includes the internal and external states of the agents. TransfQMix is designed to be entirely transferable, meaning that same parameters can be used to control and train larger or smaller teams of agents. This enables to deploy promising approaches to save training time and derive general policies in MARL, such as transfer learning, zero-shot transfer, and curriculum learning. We report TransfQMix's performances in the Spread and StarCraft II environments. In both settings, it outperforms state-of-the-art Q-Learning models, and it demonstrates effectiveness in solving problems that other methods can not solve.This project has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 893089. This work acknowledges the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S). We gratefully acknowledge the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Elementary School in the Province of Caceres. Torrejoncillo: 1945- 2015

El trabajo que se presenta es una investigación de corte cualitativo a través del análisis de la Educación Primaria en Torrejoncillo (Cáceres) desde una perspectiva históricoeducativa. Para que se pueda comprender la historia educativa contemporánea, es muy importante conocer su pasado. Igualmente, la comunidad científica se inclina por recuperar la historia educativa local y regional, con el único propósito de saber más acerca del conocimiento histórico-educativo más cercano. El objetivo de este trabajo es conocer el pasado educativo de este pueblo cacereño, haciendo un recorrido en el tiempo desde mediados del siglo XX, concretamente a partir de 1945, cuando la escuela estaba dividida en varias unidades repartidas por Torrejoncillo y donde las condiciones no eran las más favorables, hasta llegar a nuestros días.The work presented is a qualitative research through analysis of primary education in Torrejoncillo (Cáceres) from a historical and educational perspective. To be able to understand contemporary educational history, it is very important to know your past. Similarly, the scientific community is inclined to retrieve local and regional educational history, with the sole purpose of knowing more about the closest historical-educational knowledge. The aim of this study was to determine the educational background of the people Caceres, making a journey through time from the mid-twentieth century, particularly after 1945, when the school was divided into several units distributed in Torrejoncillo and where conditions were not the most favorable, until our days.peerReviewe

UN MODELO ORGANIZATIVO PARA LA MEJORA ESCOLAR: PARTICIPACIÓN Y COOPERACIÓN

El proyecto de colaboración entre un Centro Educativo de Educación Infantil y Primaria y el Departamento de Didáctica de la Universidad de Alcalá, que aquí se presenta, tenía la finalidad de desarrollar estrategias de mejora de la calidad educativa, basadas en la autoevaluación, reflexión y compromiso de toda la Comunidad Educativa, sobre la búsqueda de mejores formas de atender a La diversidad del alumnado.El modelo educativo en el que se basan las prácticas de un Centro Educativo, es fundamental para comprender las mismas, y sobre todo para establecer medidas de mejora; Del mismo modo dicho modelo educativo viene marcado por la Legislación Educativa, de ahí La importancia de hacer el repaso sobre la misma, que aquí se presenta

Feature selection for support vector machines by alignment with ideal kernel

Feature selection has several potentially beneficial uses in machine learning. Some of them are to improve the performance of the learning method by removing noisy features, to reduce the feature set in data collection, and to better understand the data. In this report we present how to use empirical alignment, a well known measure for the fitness of kernels to data labels, to perform feature selection for support vector machines. We show that this measure improves the results obtained with other widely used measures for feature selection (like information gain or correlation) in linearly separable problems. We also show how alignment can be successfully used to select relevant features in non-linearly separable problems when using support vector machines.Postprint (published version

An adaptable approach to learn realistic legged locomotion without examples

© 2022 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.Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems of different morphologies. This is partly because they often rely on precise motion capture references or elaborate learning environments that ensure the naturality of the emergent locomotion gaits but prevent generalization. This work proposes a generic approach for ensuring realism in locomotion by guiding the learning process with the spring-loaded inverted pendulum model as a reference. Leveraging on the exploration capacities of Reinforcement Learning (RL), we learn a control policy that fills in the information gap between the template model and full-body dynamics required to maintain stable and periodic locomotion. The proposed approach can be applied to robots of different sizes and morphologies and adapted to any RL technique and control architecture. We present experimental results showing that even in a model-free setup and with a simple reactive control architecture, the learned policies can generate realistic and energy-efficient locomotion gaits for a bipedal and a quadrupedal robot. And most importantly, this is achieved without using motion capture, strong constraints in the dynamics or kinematics of the robot, nor prescribing limb coordination. We provide supplemental videos for qualitative analysis of the naturality of the learned gaits.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Morphological symmetries in robot learning

This work studies the impact of morphological symmetries in learning applications in robotics. Morphological symmetries are a predominant feature in both biological and robotic systems, arising from the presence of planes/axis of symmetry in the system's morphology. This results in harmonious duplication and distribution of body parts (e.g., humans' sagittal/left-right symmetry). Morphological symmetries become a significant learning prior as they extend to symmetries in the system's dynamics, optimal control policies, and in all proprioceptive and exteroceptive measurements, related to the system's dynamics evolution \cite{ordonez2023discrete}. Exploiting these symmetries in learning applications offers several advantageous outcomes, such as the use of data augmentation to mitigate the cost and challenges of data collection, or the use of equivariant/invariant function approximation models (e.g., neural networks) to improve sample efficiency and generalization, while reducing the number of trainable parameters. Lastly, we provide a video presentation and an open access repository reproducing our experiments and allowing for rapid prototyping in robot learning applications exploiting morphological symmetries.This work is supported by the Spanish government with the project MoHuCo PID2020-120049RB-I00 and the ERA-Net Chistera project IPALM PCI2019-103386.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version