Managing Mass Tourism in Barcelona. A Study of the Impact of Hotel Moratorium on the Tourist Accommodation Sector and the Weight of Home Sharing in the City of Barcelona

Treballs Finals del Grau d'Economia, Facultat d'Economia i Empresa, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2017-2018 , Tutor: Esteve Sanromà i Meléndez(eng) In recent years, Barcelona has witnessed the arrival of a large number of tourists. This situation has led to an increase of tourist accommodation in the city center, causing a series of negative externalities. Facing this situation, the Barcelona City Council decided to carry out two Moratoria, in 2014 and 2015, and also passed the Special Urbanistic Plan for Tourist Accommodation (PEUAT in Catalan) in 2017, of a very restrictive nature. This academic piece of work assesses the impact of this regulation in the tourist accommodation sector, and also provides an analysis from the point of view of the principles of good regulation and minimum distortion. Another relevant aspect on which this piece of work focuses is the study of the weight of home sharing in the city, the annual revenues for hosts and the amount that the Administration is not collecting due to the fact that this activity is not regulated, bearing in mind that different European institutions encourage such regulation. The conclusion reached is that this regulation has had a very significant impact on the prices of tourist accommodation, the number of places available and the change in the type of demand for tourists. We should look for alternatives to the current regulation, since the supply of tourist accommodation cannot be limited indefinitely.(cast) En els últims anys, Barcelona ha estat testimoni de l’arribada d’un gran nombre de turistes. Aquesta situació ha desencadenat un creixement dels allotjaments turístics a les zones més cèntriques de la ciutat, provocant un seguit d’externalitats negatives. Davant aquesta situació, l’Ajuntament de Barcelona va decidir dur a terme dues Moratòries, als anys 2014 i 2015, i l’aprovació al 2017 d’un Pla Especial Urbanístic d’Allotjament Turístics (PEUAT) molt restrictiu. En aquest treball s’analitzarà quin impacte ha tingut aquesta regulació al sector dels allotjaments turístics, a més d’una anàlisis des del punt de vista dels principis de bona regulació i mínima distorsió. Un dels altres punts importants en què es centra el treball és l’anàlisi del pes que té a la ciutat el home sharing, quins ingressos genera anualment i la quantia que estem deixant de recaptar per no regular aquesta activitat, sabent que des de diferents organismes Europeus es fomenta la seva regulació. La conclusió a la qual s’arriba és que realment aquesta regulació ha tingut un impacte molt significatiu en els preus dels allotjaments turístics, en el nombre de places disponible i en el canvi de tipologia de demanda dels turistes. S’hauran de cercar alternatives a la regulació actual, ja que no es pot limitar l’oferta d’allotjaments turístics indefinidament

MammoApplet: an interactive Java applet tool for manual annotation in medical imaging

Web-based applications in computational medicine have become increasingly important during the last years. The rapid growth of the World Wide Web supposes a new paradigm in the telemedicine and eHealth areas in order to assist and enhance the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of patients. Furthermore, training of radiologists and management of medical databases are also becoming increasingly important issues in the field. In this paper, we present MammoApplet , an interactive Java applet interface designed as a web-based tool. It aims to facilitate the diagnosis of new mammographic cases by providing a set of image processing tools that allow a better visualization of the images, and a set of drawing tools, used to annotate the suspicious regions. Each annotation allows including the attributes considered by the experts when issuing the final diagnosis. The overall set of overlays is stored in a database as XML files associated with the original images. The final goal is to obtain a database of already diagnosed cases for training and enhancing the performance of novice radiologistsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Texture descriptors applied to digital mammography

Breast cancer is the second cause of death among women cancers. Computer Aided Detection has been demon- strated an useful tool for early diagnosis, a crucial as- pect for a high survival rate. In this context, several re- search works have incorporated texture features in mam- mographic image segmentation and description such as Gray-Level co-occurrence matrices, Local Binary Pat- terns, and many others. This paper presents an approach for breast density classi¯cation based on segmentation and texture feature extraction techniques in order to clas- sify digital mammograms according to their internal tis- sue. The aim of this work is to compare di®erent texture descriptors on the same framework (same algorithms for segmentation and classi¯cation, as well as same images). Extensive results prove the feasibility of the proposed ap- proach.Postprint (published version

On the Use of XML in Medical Imaging Web-Based Applications

The rapid growth of digital technology in medical fields over recent years has increased the need for applications able to manage patient medical records, imaging data, and chart information. Web-based applications are implemented with the purpose to link digital databases, storage and transmission protocols, management of large volumes of data and security concepts, allowing the possibility to read, analyze, and even diagnose remotely from the medical center where the information was acquired. The objective of this paper is to analyze the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) language in web-based applications that aid in diagnosis or treatment of patients, considering how this protocol allows indexing and exchanging the huge amount of information associated with each medical case. The purpose of this paper is to point out the main advantages and drawbacks of the XML technology in order to provide key ideas for future web-based applicationsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

One-shot domain adaptation in multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation using convolutional neural networks

In recent years, several convolutional neural network (CNN) methods have been proposed for the automated white matter lesion segmentation of multiple sclerosis (MS) patient images, due to their superior performance compared with those of other state-of-the-art methods. However, the accuracies of CNN methods tend to decrease significantly when evaluated on different image domains compared with those used for training, which demonstrates the lack of adaptability of CNNs to unseen imaging data. In this study, we analyzed the effect of intensity domain adaptation on our recently proposed CNN-based MS lesion segmentation method. Given a source model trained on two public MS datasets, we investigated the transferability of the CNN model when applied to other MRI scanners and protocols, evaluating the minimum number of annotated images needed from the new domain and the minimum number of layers needed to re-train to obtain comparable accuracy. Our analysis comprised MS patient data from both a clinical center and the public ISBI2015 challenge database, which permitted us to compare the domain adaptation capability of our model to that of other state-of-the-art methods. For the ISBI2015 challenge, our one-shot domain adaptation model trained using only a single image showed a performance similar to that of other CNN methods that were fully trained using the entire available training set, yielding a comparable human expert rater performance. We believe that our experiments will encourage the MS community to incorporate its use in different clinical settings with reduced amounts of annotated data. This approach could be meaningful not only in terms of the accuracy in delineating MS lesions but also in the related reductions in time and economic costs derived from manual lesion labeling

L'Arqueologia serà feminista o no serà

Aquest article s'inicia amb un breu repàs sobre alguns dels moviments polítics feministes occidentals, per tal de contextualitzar i argumentar la pràctica arqueològica feminista. Posteriorment es pretén justificar la politització com un fet intrínsec en la vida social i per tant, en el desplegament científic, afirmant que no va en detriment de la objectivitat i la cientificitat. Finalment es presenta una proposta d'anàlisi de la materialitat arqueològica, per tal de detectar les pràctiques sexistes. La finalitat d'aquest article és remarcar la utilitat de l'Arqueologia com a eina de transformació social