Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamics: a case study

In recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices has led to a massiveincrease in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there.The analysis of these spatio-temporal data can supply high-level human behaviorinformation valuable to urban planners, local authorities, and designer of location-basedservices. In this paper, we describe our approach to collect and analyze the history ofphysical presence of tourists from the digital footprints they publicly disclose on the web.Our work takes place in the Province of Florence in Italy, where the insights on thevisitors’ flows and on the nationalities of the tourists who do not sleep in town has beenlimited to information from survey-based hotel and museums frequentation. In fact, mostlocal authorities in the world must face this dearth of data on tourist dynamics. In thiscase study, we used a corpus of geographically referenced photos taken in the provinceby 4280 photographers over a period of 2 years. Based on the disclosure of the locationof the photos, we design geovisualizations to reveal the tourist concentration and spatiotemporalflows. Our initial results provide insights on the density of tourists, the points ofinterests they visit as well as the most common trajectories they follow.

Aplicación de buenas prácticas para la mejora de la calidad de los trabajos fin de grado en Ing. en Diseño Industrial

El trabajo presentado en esta comunicación se enmarca en un proyecto financiado por la Secretaría de Estado de Universidades, Ministerio de Educación Cultura y Deporte en su Programa de Estudios y Análisis, mejora de la calidad de la enseñanza superior y de la actividad del profesorado universitario en el Eje de Nuevos avances y determinación del impacto de las misiones universitarias, Modalidad de Trabajos de análisis, lideradopor la Universitat Pompeu Fabra y en el que participan docentes de las universidades de Valladolid, Cádiz, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Sevilla, Autónoma de Barcelona, Carlos III de Madrid y Universidat Oberta de Catalunya.En el proyecto se ha realizado un trabajo de análisis de las prácticas programadas en las distintas universidades para velar por la calidad de los trabajos fin de grado, actualmente proyectos fin carrera. Se han recopilado diferentes procedimientos de evaluación llevados a cabo en diferentes Universidades que van desde plantillas de verificación para los tribunales de los proyectos a guías de procedimiento completas que verifican elestablecimiento y cumplimiento de hitos intermedios.En esta comunicación se muestra la aplicación de algunas de las prácticas propuestas en el caso real de proyectos fin de carrera en la titulación de Ingeniería Técnica en Diseño Industrial de la Escuela de Ingenierías Industriales. Se pone de manifiesto la utilidad del uso de dichas prácticas frente a enfoques más clásicos o simplistas.

Efficiency-based evaluation of aligners for industrial applications

This paper presents a novel efficiencybased evaluation of sentence and word aligners. This assessment is critical in order to make a reliable use in industrial scenarios. The evaluation shows that the resourcesrequired by aligners differ rather broadly. Subsequently, we establish limitation mechanisms on a set of aligners deployed as web services. These results, paired with the quality expected from the aligners, allow providers to choose the most appropriate aligner according to the task at hand.

Union activism in an inclusive model of industrial relations : evidence from an Spanish case

In this article we analyze the reasons, within the context of Spanish industrial relations, for trade union members’ active participation in their regional union. The case of Spain is particularly interesting as the unions’ main activity, collective bargaining, is a public good. The text, based on research involving a representative survey of members of a regional branch of the “Workers” Commissions” (Comisiones Obreras) trade union, provides empirical evidence that the union presence in the workplace has a significant influence on members’ propensity for activism. By contrast, the alternative hypothesis based on instrumental reasons appears of little relevance in the Spanish industrial relations context.

Productivity Growth during the English Industrial Revolution: A Dual Approach

This paper presents new estimates of total factor productivity growth in Britain for the period 1770-1860. We use a dual technique recently popularized by Hsieh (1999), and argue that the estimates we derive from factor prices are of similar quality to quantity-based calculations. Our results provide further evidence, derived from this independent set of sources, that productivity growth during the British Industrial Revolution was relatively slow. During the years 1770-1800, TFP growth was close to zero, according to our estimates. The period 1800-1830 experienced an acceleration of productivity growth. The Crafts-Harley view of the Industrial Revolution is thus reinforced. We also consider alternative explanations of slow productivity growth, and reject the interpretation that focuses on the introduction of steam as a general purpose technology.

New Trends in Public Facility Location Modeling

The past four decades have witnessed an explosive growth in the field of networkbased facility location modeling. This is not at all surprising since location policy is one of the most profitable areas of applied systems analysis in regional science and ample theoretical and applied challenges are offered. Location-allocation models seek the location of facilities and/or services (e.g., schools, hospitals, and warehouses) so as to optimize one or several objectives generally related to the efficiency of the system or to the allocation of resources. This paper concerns the location of facilities or services in discrete space or networks, that are related to the public sector, such as emergency services (ambulances, fire stations, and police units), school systems and postal facilities. The paper is structured as follows: first, we will focus on public facility location models that use some type of coverage criterion, with special emphasis in emergency services. The second section will examine models based on the P-Median problem and some of the issues faced by planners when implementing this formulation in real world locational decisions. Finally, the last section will examine new trends in public sector facility location modeling.

Incorporating waiting time in competitive location models: formulations and heuristics

In this paper we propose a metaheuristic to solve a new version of the Maximum Capture Problem. In the original MCP, market capture is obtained by lower traveling distances or lower traveling time, in this new version not only the traveling time but also the waiting time will affect the market share. This problem is hard to solve using standard optimization techniques. Metaheuristics are shown to offer accurate results within acceptable computing times.

Locating emergency services with priority rules: The priority queuing covering location problem

One of the assumptions of the Capacitated Facility Location Problem (CFLP) is thatdemand is known and fixed. Most often, this is not the case when managers take somestrategic decisions such as locating facilities and assigning demand points to thosefacilities. In this paper we consider demand as stochastic and we model each of thefacilities as an independent queue. Stochastic models of manufacturing systems anddeterministic location models are put together in order to obtain a formula for thebacklogging probability at a potential facility location.Several solution techniques have been proposed to solve the CFLP. One of the mostrecently proposed heuristics, a Reactive Greedy Adaptive Search Procedure, isimplemented in order to solve the model formulated. We present some computationalexperiments in order to evaluate the heuristics performance and to illustrate the use ofthis new formulation for the CFLP. The paper finishes with a simple simulationexercise.

Contagion and efficiency in gross and net interbank payment systems

The increased fragility of the banking industry has generatedgrowing concern about the risks associated with the paymentsystems. Although in most industrial countries differentinterbank payment systems coexist, little is really knownabout their propierties in terms of risk and efficiency. Wetackle this question by comparing the two main types ofpayment systems, gross and net, in a framework whereuncertainty arises from several sources: the time ofconsumption, the location of consumption and the return oninvestment. Payments across locations can be made either bydirectly transferrring liquidity or by transferring claimsagainst the bank in the other location. The two mechanism areinterpreted as the gross and net settlement systems ininterbank payments. We characterize the equilibria in the twosystems and identify the trade-off in terms of safety andefficiency.