A comparative study of open domain and opinion question answering systems for factual and opinionated queries

The development of the Web 2.0 led to the birth of new textual genres such as blogs, reviews or forum entries. The increasing number of such texts and the highly diverse topics they discuss make blogs a rich source for analysis. This paper presents a comparative study on open domain and opinion QA systems. A collection of opinion and mixed fact-opinion questions in English is defined and two Question Answering systems are employed to retrieve the answers to these queries. The first one is generic, while the second is specific for emotions. We comparatively evaluate and analyze the systems’ results, concluding that opinion Question Answering requires the use of specific resources and methods.

Open-access operating algorithms for commercial videokeratographer and improvement of corneal sampling

We present an algorithm to process images of reflected Placido rings captured by a commercial videokeratoscope. Raw data are obtained with no Cartesian-to-polar-coordinate conversion, thus avoiding interpolation and associated numerical artifacts. The method provides a characteristic equation for the device and is able to process around 6 times more corneal data than the commercial software. Our proposal allows complete control over the whole process from the capture of corneal images until the computation of curvature radii.

OpeNER: open polarity enhanced named entity recognition

Actualmente existe una gran cantidad de empresas ofreciendo servicios para el análisis de contenido y minería de datos de las redes sociales con el objetivo de realizar análisis de opiniones y gestión de la reputación. Un alto porcentaje de pequeñas y medianas empresas (pymes) ofrecen soluciones específicas a un sector o dominio industrial. Sin embargo, la adquisición de la necesaria tecnología básica para ofrecer tales servicios es demasiado compleja y constituye un sobrecoste demasiado alto para sus limitados recursos. El objetivo del proyecto europeo OpeNER es la reutilización y desarrollo de componentes y recursos para el procesamiento lingüístico que proporcione la tecnología necesaria para su uso industrial y/o académico.

Green education using open educational resources (OER): setting up a green OER repository

A wealth of open educational resources (OER) focused on green topics is currently available through a variety of sources, including learning portals, digital repositories and web sites. However, in most cases these resources are not easily accessible and retrievable, while additional issues further complicate this issue. This paper presents an overview of a number of portals hosting OER, as well as a number of “green” thematic portals that provide access to green OER. It also discusses the case of a new collection that aims to support and populate existing green collections and learning portals respectively, providing information on aspects such as quality assurance/collection and curation policies, workflow and tools for both the content and metadata records that apply to the collection. Two case studies of the integration of this new collection to existing learning portals are also presented.

Massive open star clusters using the VVV survey III. A young massive cluster at the far edge of the Galactic bar

Context. Young massive clusters are key to map the Milky Way’s structure, and near-infrared large area sky surveys have contributed strongly to the discovery of new obscured massive stellar clusters. Aims. We present the third article in a series of papers focused on young and massive clusters discovered in the VVV survey. This article is dedicated to the physical characterization of VVV CL086, using part of its OB-stellar population. Methods. We physically characterized the cluster using JHKS near-infrared photometry from ESO public survey VVV images, using the VVV-SkZ pipeline, and near-infrared K-band spectroscopy, following the methodology presented in the first article of the series. Results. Individual distances for two observed stars indicate that the cluster is located at the far edge of the Galactic bar. These stars, which are probable cluster members from the statistically field-star decontaminated CMD, have spectral types between O9 and B0 V. According to our analysis, this young cluster (1.0 Myr < age < 5.0 Myr) is located at a distance of 11+5-6 kpc, and we estimate a lower limit for the cluster total mass of (2.8+1.6-1.4) · 103 M⊙. It is likely that the cluster contains even earlier and more massive stars.

Learning Probabilistic Features for Robotic Navigation Using Laser Sensors

SLAM is a popular task used by robots and autonomous vehicles to build a map of an unknown environment and, at the same time, to determine their location within the map. This paper describes a SLAM-based, probabilistic robotic system able to learn the essential features of different parts of its environment. Some previous SLAM implementations had computational complexities ranging from O(Nlog(N)) to O(N2), where N is the number of map features. Unlike these methods, our approach reduces the computational complexity to O(N) by using a model to fuse the information from the sensors after applying the Bayesian paradigm. Once the training process is completed, the robot identifies and locates those areas that potentially match the sections that have been previously learned. After the training, the robot navigates and extracts a three-dimensional map of the environment using a single laser sensor. Thus, it perceives different sections of its world. In addition, in order to make our system able to be used in a low-cost robot, low-complexity algorithms that can be easily implemented on embedded processors or microcontrollers are used.

RGBD Human-Hand recognition for the Interaction with Robot-Hand

New low cost sensors and the new open free libraries for 3D image processing are permitting to achieve important advances for robot vision applications such as tridimensional object recognition, semantic mapping, navigation and localization of robots, human detection and/or gesture recognition for human-machine interaction. In this paper, a method to recognize the human hand and to track the fingers is proposed. This new method is based on point clouds from range images, RGBD. It does not require visual marks, camera calibration, environment knowledge and complex expensive acquisition systems. Furthermore, this method has been implemented to create a human interface in order to move a robot hand. The human hand is recognized and the movement of the fingers is analyzed. Afterwards, it is imitated from a Barret hand, using communication events programmed from ROS.

Trends in socioeconomic inequalities in preventable mortality in urban areas of 33 Spanish cities, 1996–2007 (MEDEA project)

Background: Preventable mortality is a good indicator of possible problems to be investigated in the primary prevention chain, making it also a useful tool with which to evaluate health policies particularly public health policies. This study describes inequalities in preventable avoidable mortality in relation to socioeconomic status in small urban areas of thirty three Spanish cities, and analyses their evolution over the course of the periods 1996–2001 and 2002–2007. Methods: We analysed census tracts and all deaths occurring in the population residing in these cities from 1996 to 2007 were taken into account. The causes included in the study were lung cancer, cirrhosis, AIDS/HIV, motor vehicle traffic accidents injuries, suicide and homicide. The census tracts were classified into three groups, according their socioeconomic level. To analyse inequalities in mortality risks between the highest and lowest socioeconomic levels and over different periods, for each city and separating by sex, Poisson regression were used. Results: Preventable avoidable mortality made a significant contribution to general mortality (around 7.5%, higher among men), having decreased over time in men (12.7 in 1996–2001 and 10.9 in 2002–2007), though not so clearly among women (3.3% in 1996–2001 and 2.9% in 2002–2007). It has been observed in men that the risks of death are higher in areas of greater deprivation, and that these excesses have not modified over time. The result in women is different and differences in mortality risks by socioeconomic level could not be established in many cities. Conclusions: Preventable mortality decreased between the 1996–2001 and 2002–2007 periods, more markedly in men than in women. There were socioeconomic inequalities in mortality in most cities analysed, associating a higher risk of death with higher levels of deprivation. Inequalities have remained over the two periods analysed. This study makes it possible to identify those areas where excess preventable mortality was associated with more deprived zones. It is in these deprived zones where actions to reduce and monitor health inequalities should be put into place. Primary healthcare may play an important role in this process.

3D Visual Data-Driven Spatiotemporal Deformations for Non-Rigid Object Grasping Using Robot Hands

Sensing techniques are important for solving problems of uncertainty inherent to intelligent grasping tasks. The main goal here is to present a visual sensing system based on range imaging technology for robot manipulation of non-rigid objects. Our proposal provides a suitable visual perception system of complex grasping tasks to support a robot controller when other sensor systems, such as tactile and force, are not able to obtain useful data relevant to the grasping manipulation task. In particular, a new visual approach based on RGBD data was implemented to help a robot controller carry out intelligent manipulation tasks with flexible objects. The proposed method supervises the interaction between the grasped object and the robot hand in order to avoid poor contact between the fingertips and an object when there is neither force nor pressure data. This new approach is also used to measure changes to the shape of an object’s surfaces and so allows us to find deformations caused by inappropriate pressure being applied by the hand’s fingers. Test was carried out for grasping tasks involving several flexible household objects with a multi-fingered robot hand working in real time. Our approach generates pulses from the deformation detection method and sends an event message to the robot controller when surface deformation is detected. In comparison with other methods, the obtained results reveal that our visual pipeline does not use deformations models of objects and materials, as well as the approach works well both planar and 3D household objects in real time. In addition, our method does not depend on the pose of the robot hand because the location of the reference system is computed from a recognition process of a pattern located place at the robot forearm. The presented experiments demonstrate that the proposed method accomplishes a good monitoring of grasping task with several objects and different grasping configurations in indoor environments.

Fortification and Frontier: The Project Drawn up by Juan Martín Zermeño for Puebla de Sanabria in 1766

Following the death of engineer General Jorge Próspero de Verboom in 1744 and after a few years of transition in the management of Spanish fortifications, Juan Martín Zermeño took on the role, initially with a temporary mandate, but then definitively during a second period that ran from 1766 until his death in 1772. He began this second period with a certain amount of concern because of what had taken place during the last period of conflict. The Seven Years War (1756–1763) which had brought Spain into conflict with Portugal and England in the Caribbean had also lead to conflict episodes along the Spanish–Portuguese border. Zermeño’s efforts as a planner and general engineer gave priority to the northern part of the Spanish–Portuguese border. After studying the territory and the existing fortifications on both sides of the border, Zermeño drew up three important projects in 1766. The outposts that needed to be reinforced were located, from north to south, at Puebla de Sanabria, Zamora and Ciudad Rodrigo, which is where he is believed to have come from. This latter township already had a modern installation built immediately after the war of the Spanish Succession and reinforced with the Fort of La Concepción. However, Zamora and Puebla de Sanabria had some obsolete fortifications that needed modernising. Since the middle of the 15th century Puebla de Sanabria had had a modern castle with rounded turrets, that of the counts of benavente. During the 16th and 17th centuries it had also been equipped with a walled enclosure with small bastions. During the war of the Spanish Succession the Portuguese had enlarged the enclosure and had erected a tentative offshoot to the west. In order to draw up the ambitious Puebla de Sanabria project Zermeño had the aid of some previous reports and projects, such as those by the count of robelin in 1722, the one by Antonio de Gaver in 1752, and Pedro Moreau’s report dated June 1755. This study includes a technical analysis of Zermeño’s project and its strategic position within the system of fortifications along the Spanish–Portuguese border.

Where Are We After Five Editions?: Robot Vision Challenge, a Competition that Evaluates Solutions for the Visual Place Classification Problem

This article describes the Robot Vision challenge, a competition that evaluates solutions for the visual place classification problem. Since its origin, this challenge has been proposed as a common benchmark where worldwide proposals are measured using a common overall score. Each new edition of the competition introduced novelties, both for the type of input data and subobjectives of the challenge. All the techniques used by the participants have been gathered up and published to make it accessible for future developments. The legacy of the Robot Vision challenge includes data sets, benchmarking techniques, and a wide experience in the place classification research that is reflected in this article.

ViDRILO: The Visual and Depth Robot Indoor Localization with Objects information dataset

In this article we describe a semantic localization dataset for indoor environments named ViDRILO. The dataset provides five sequences of frames acquired with a mobile robot in two similar office buildings under different lighting conditions. Each frame consists of a point cloud representation of the scene and a perspective image. The frames in the dataset are annotated with the semantic category of the scene, but also with the presence or absence of a list of predefined objects appearing in the scene. In addition to the frames and annotations, the dataset is distributed with a set of tools for its use in both place classification and object recognition tasks. The large number of labeled frames in conjunction with the annotation scheme make this dataset different from existing ones. The ViDRILO dataset is released for use as a benchmark for different problems such as multimodal place classification and object recognition, 3D reconstruction or point cloud data compression.