System for robot control inspired by the functionality and organisation of the human nervous system

This paper presents a model of a control system for robot systems inspired by the functionality and organisation of human neuroregulatory system. Our model was specified using software agents within a formal framework and implemented through Web Services. This approach allows the implementation of the control logic of a robot system with relative ease, in an incremental way, using the addition of new control centres to the system as its behaviour is observed or needs to be detailed with greater precision, without the need to modify existing functionality. The tests performed verify that the proposed model has the general characteristics of biological systems together with the desirable features of software, such as robustness, flexibility, reuse and decoupling.

Multi-agent system for control of robots inspired on the distributed activity and hormonal regulation of humans

Robotics is an emerging field with great activity. Robotics is a field that presents several problems because it depends on a large number of disciplines, technologies, devices and tasks. Its expansion from perfectly controlled industrial environments toward open and dynamic environment presents a many new challenges. New uses are, for example, household robots or professional robots. To facilitate the low cost, rapid development of robotic systems, reusability of code, its medium and long term maintainability and robustness are required novel approaches to provide generic models and software systems who develop paradigms capable of solving these problems. For this purpose, in this paper we propose a model based on multi-agent systems inspired by the human nervous system able to transfer the control characteristics of the biological system and able to take advantage of the best properties of distributed software systems. Specifically, we model the decentralized activity and hormonal variation.

Data normalization and integration in robotic systems using web services technologies

The robotics is one of the most active areas. We also need to join a large number of disciplines to create robots. With these premises, one problem is the management of information from multiple heterogeneous sources. Each component, hardware or software, produces data with different nature: temporal frequencies, processing needs, size, type, etc. Nowadays, technologies and software engineering paradigms such as service-oriented architectures are applied to solve this problem in other areas. This paper proposes the use of these technologies to implement a robotic control system based on services. This type of system will allow integration and collaborative work of different elements that make up a robotic system.

La divulgación de la Ciencia española en la Web 2.0: el caso del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas en Andalucía y Cataluña

El sistema ciencia, tecnología y sociedad no está consolidado en España por el desequilibrio que existe entre el desarrollo de la investigación y su divulgación. Además, la cultura científica de la sociedad está por debajo de la media europea y en la última década han descendido las vocaciones científicas entre los más jóvenes. En este contexto, se ha analizado si las instituciones de investigación utilizan las herramientas de la Web 2.0, principal canal de comunicación de los jóvenes entre 15 y 24 años, para mostrar a la sociedad los resultados de sus trabajos. Para ello, se han seleccionado como objeto de estudio los centros de investigación del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas en Andalucía y Cataluña. Entre los principales resultados obtenidos, a través del diseño de una checklist ad hoc, destaca el escaso uso que hacen de este canal de comunicación, ya que solo un 4,5% de los centros analizados utilizan todas las herramientas estudiadas. La efectividad de la comunicación ha sido otro de los valores observados, en este caso, en función de la conectividad (seguidores en sus perfiles sociales) e intensidad (número de publicaciones). Ambos ítems presentan también valores muy bajos. Por otro lado se observa un escaso nivel de popularidad de sus sitios web (número de enlaces que reciben) y una casi inexistente relación entre los mismos a través de hipervínculos que los conecten. Este último aspecto, se ha determinado con las herramientas webmétricas Webometric Analyst y ScoSciBot.

PoS-tagging the Web in Portuguese. National varieties, text typologies and spelling systems

The great amount of text produced every day in the Web turned it as one of the main sources for obtaining linguistic corpora, that are further analyzed with Natural Language Processing techniques. On a global scale, languages such as Portuguese - official in 9 countries - appear on the Web in several varieties, with lexical, morphological and syntactic (among others) differences. Besides, a unified spelling system for Portuguese has been recently approved, and its implementation process has already started in some countries. However, it will last several years, so different varieties and spelling systems coexist. Since PoS-taggers for Portuguese are specifically built for a particular variety, this work analyzes different training corpora and lexica combinations aimed at building a model with high-precision annotation in several varieties and spelling systems of this language. Moreover, this paper presents different dictionaries of the new orthography (Spelling Agreement) as well as a new freely available testing corpus, containing different varieties and textual typologies.

Symbionts in Mesozooplankton Communities from NE Atlantic Ocean: Ecology and Recruitment of Parasites to the Marine Trophic Web

Beca JAE-Predoctoral CISC; Proyecto LARECO CTM2011-25929