Insiders and Outsiders: Comparing Urban Impressions between Population Groups

There is a growing interest in social and urban computing to employ crowdsourcing as means to gather impressions of urban perception for indoor and outdoor environments. Previous studies have established that reliable estimates of urban perception can be obtained using online crowdsourcing systems, but implicitly assumed that the judgments provided by the crowd are not dependent on the background knowledge of the observer. In this paper, we investigate how the impressions of outdoor urban spaces judged by online crowd annotators, compare with the impressions elicited by the local inhabitants, along six physical and psychological labels. We focus our study in a developing city where understanding and characterization of these socio-urban perceptions is of societal importance. We found statistically significant differences between the two population groups. Locals perceived places to be more dangerous and dirty, when compared with online crowd workers; while online annotators judged places to be more interesting in comparison to locals. Our results highlight the importance of the degree of familiarity with urban spaces and background knowledge while rating urban perceptions, which is lacking in some of the existing work in urban computing

Inferring Mood-While-Eating with Smartphone Sensing and Community-Based Model Personalization

The interplay between mood and eating has been the subject of extensive research within the fields of nutrition and behavioral science, indicating a strong connection between the two. Further, phone sensor data have been used to characterize both eating behavior and mood, independently, in the context of mobile food diaries and mobile health applications. However, limitations within the current body of literature include: i) the lack of investigation around the generalization of mood inference models trained with passive sensor data from a range of everyday life situations, to specific contexts such as eating, ii) no prior studies that use sensor data to study the intersection of mood and eating, and iii) the inadequate examination of model personalization techniques within limited label settings, as we commonly experience in mood inference. In this study, we sought to examine everyday eating behavior and mood using two datasets of college students in Mexico (N_mex = 84, 1843 mood-while-eating reports) and eight countries (N_mul = 678, 329K mood reports incl. 24K mood-while-eating reports), containing both passive smartphone sensing and self-report data. Our results indicate that generic mood inference models decline in performance in certain contexts, such as when eating. Additionally, we found that population-level (non-personalized) and hybrid (partially personalized) modeling techniques were inadequate for the commonly used three-class mood inference task (positive, neutral, negative). Furthermore, we found that user-level modeling was challenging for the majority of participants due to a lack of sufficient labels and data from the negative class. To address these limitations, we employed a novel community-based approach for personalization by building models with data from a set of similar users to a target user

Diversity and Neocolonialism in Big Data Research. Avoiding extractivism while struggling with paternalism.

The extractive logic of Big Data-driven technology and knowledge production has raised serious concerns. While most criticism initially focused on the impacts on Western societies, attention is now increasingly turning to the consequences for communities in the Global South. To date, debates have focused on private-sector activities. In this article, we start from the conviction that publicly funded knowledge and technology production must also be scrutinized for their potential neocolonial entanglements. To this end, we analyze the dynamics of collaboration in an European Union-funded research project that collects data for developing a social platform focused on diversity. The project includes pilot sites in China, Denmark, the United Kingdom, India, Italy, Mexico, Mongolia, and Paraguay. We present the experience at four field sites and reflect on the project’s initial conception, our collaboration, challenges, progress, and results. We then analyze the different experiences in comparison. We conclude that while we have succeeded in finding viable strategies to avoid contributing to the dynamics of unilateral data extraction as one side of the neocolonial circle, it has been infinitely more difficult to break through the much more subtle but no less powerful mechanisms of paternalism that we find to be prevalent in data-driven North–South relations. These mechanisms, however, can be identified as the other side of the neocolonial circle.</p

Determination of Added Sulfites and Total Sulfite in Foods

Sulfites are widely employed food additives, able to inhibit the enzymatic and nonenzymatic browning, antimicrobial actions and antioxidant impact during processing, storage and distribution [1]. However, sulphites can have negative effects on human health such as asthma, allergic reactions and neurotoxicity [2]. For this reason, sulfites concentration in products intended for consumption is highly regulated by Codex Alimentarius and at amounts greater than 10 ppm it is considered an allergen. In such cases, the concentrarion of sulfites should be explicitely labelled in the product container[3], and thus makes it necessary to develop methods that allow a correct, quick and simple detection.In order to develop simple and practical method for sulfite determination in food, a general-purpose commercial kit was used to measure the level of sulphites by iodometric titration. This implies the design of methodologies specific for the targeted food. This includes pre-treatment of the samples , which aims at extracting the analyte from the matrix bodies, thus, to allow a correct titration. The sample is aliquoted, subjected to a hydrothermal procedure to preform the extraction, which may vary according to the type of sample, and finally the supernatant are filtered.Preliminary results show that the kit works properly, as the calibration curve was successfully performed. We have found that the treatment of the samples generates a bottleneck, as there is a great variety of food matrices (meat, fish, nutritional complements, biscuits...), having each one its own peculiarities. We need to establish specific protocols for each matrix, and testing the results against those provided by certified laboratory incidcated that there are good results in some matrices such as meat, fish and jam, but unsatisfactory results in rest.The kit has another limitation, when we work with samples without sulphite content (less than 10 ppm) should turn colour quickly, using very little titrant. However, due to the way the kit works and the fact that the solution is introduced into the kit in a diluted form, false positives can occur when extrapolation is carried out.Due to the two aforementioned limitations, it is necessary to continue applying different protocols in order to establish working guidelines that allow the precise detection of the amount of sulfites

Apoyo a la toma de decisiones para la mejora de la gestión en explotaciones agroforestales

La agricultura actual se encuentra inmersa en un proceso acelerado de actualización y adaptación a un modelo digital de trabajo que se extiende imparable a lo largo de toda la cadena agroalimentaria. Parte de esta evolución viene marcada por la incorporación de las TIC (tecnologías de la información y la comunicación), y por la disponibilidad de nuevas soluciones de hardware y software que están cambiando la forma de trabajar en el campo mediante la monitorización de las labores agrícolas y el análisis de los datos generados en las explotaciones

SenseCityVity: Mobile Crowdsourcing, Urban Awareness, and Collective Action in Mexico

This work describes SenseCityVity, an approach to engage and support youth in a city in Mexico as they investigate, document, and reflect upon urban problems through mobile crowdsourcing. SenseCityVity focused on the development of a mobile crowdsourcing platform; the deployment of the Urban Data Challenge, codesigned by the authors' research team and actors to collect geolocalized images, audio, and video; and the analysis, appropriation, and creative use of the collected data for community reflection and artistic creation. The approach integrates mobile technology and community practices involving a large population of young people for urban engagement. The collective action generated a new multimedia dataset that is rich in terms of content and is enabling a number of studies aimed at better understanding the urban landscape of cities in the Global South. This article is part of a special issue on smart cities

Different profiles of immune reconstitution in children and adults with HIV-infection after highly active antiretroviral therapy

BACKGROUND: Recent advances in characterizing the immune recovery of HIV-1-infected people have highlighted the importance of the thymus for peripheral T-cell diversity and function. The aim of this study was to investigate differences in immune reconstitution profiles after highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) between HIV-children and adults. METHODS: HIV patients were grouped according to their previous clinical and immunological status: 9 HIV-Reconstituting-adults (HIV-Rec-adults) and 10 HIV-Reconstituting-children (HIV-Rec-children) on HAART with viral load (VL) ≤400 copies/ml and CD4(+ )≥500 cells/μL at least during 6 months before the study and CD4(+ )≤300 cells/μL anytime before. Fifteen healthy-adults and 20 healthy-children (control subjects) were used to calculate Z-score values to unify value scales between children and adults to make them comparable. RESULTS: HIV-Rec-children had higher T-cell receptor excision circles (TREC) and lower interleukin (IL)-7 levels than HIV-Rec-adults (p < 0.05). When we analyzed Z-score values, HIV-Rec-children had higher TREC Z-score levels (p = 0.03) than HIV-Rec-adults but similar IL-7 Z-score levels. Regarding T-cell subsets, HIV-Rec-children had higher naïve CD4(+ )(CD4(+)CD45RA (hi+)CD27(+)), naïve CD8(+ )(CD8(+)CD45RA (hi+)CD27(+)), and memory CD8(+ )(CD8(+)CD45RO(+)) cells/μl than HIV-Rec-adults, but similar memory CD4(+ )(CD4(+)CD45RO(+)) counts. HIV-Rec-children had lower naïve CD8(+ )Z-score values than HIV-Rec-adults (p = 0.05). CONCLUSION: Our data suggest that HIV-Rec-children had better thymic function than HIV-Rec-adults and this fact affects the peripheral T-cell subsets. Thus, T-cell recovery after HAART in HIV-Rec-adults could be the consequence of antigen-independent peripheral T-cell expansion while in HIV-Rec-children thymic output could play a predominant role in immune reconstitution