Analysis of electronic and telematic voting systems in binding experiences

This paper is about analysis and assess of three experiences on telematic and electronic voting dealing with such aspects as security and achievement of the social requirements. These experiences have been chosen taking into account the deepness of the public documentation and the technological challenge they faces.

Analysis of electronic and telematic voting systems in binding experiences.

This paper is about analysis and assess of three experiences on telematic and electronic voting dealing with such aspects as security and achievement of the social requirements. These experiences have been chosen taking into account the deepness of the public documentation and the technological challenge they faces.

Assessing user bias in affect detection within context-based spoken dialog systems

This paper presents an empirical evidence of user bias within a laboratory-oriented evaluation of a Spoken Dialog System. Specifically, we addressed user bias in their satisfaction judgements. We question the reliability of this data for modeling user emotion, focusing on contentment and frustration in a spoken dialog system. This bias is detected through machine learning experiments that were conducted on two datasets, users and annotators, which were then compared in order to assess the reliability of these datasets. The target used was the satisfaction rating and the predictors were conversational/dialog features. Our results indicated that standard classifiers were significantly more successful in discriminating frustration and contentment and the intensities of these emotions (reflected by user satisfaction ratings) from annotator data than from user data. Indirectly, the results showed that conversational features are reliable predictors of the two abovementioned emotions.

Contribution to proactivity in mobile context-aware recommender systems

Los sistemas de recomendación son potentes herramientas de filtrado de información que permiten a usuarios solicitar sugerencias sobre ítems que cubran sus necesidades. Tradicionalmente estas recomendaciones han estado basadas en opiniones de los mismos, así como en datos obtenidos de su consumo histórico o comportamiento en el propio sistema. Sin embargo, debido a la gran penetración y uso de los dispositivos móviles en nuestra sociedad, han surgido nuevas oportunidades en el campo de los sistemas de recomendación móviles gracias a la información contextual que se puede obtener sobre la localización o actividad de los usuarios. Debido a este estilo de vida en el que todo tiende a la movilidad y donde los usuarios están plenamente interconectados, la información contextual no sólo es física, sino que también adquiere una dimensión social. Todo esto ha dado lugar a una nueva área de investigación relacionada con los Sistemas de Recomendación Basados en Contexto (CARS) móviles donde se busca incrementar el nivel de personalización de las recomendaciones al usar dicha información. Por otro lado, este nuevo escenario en el que los usuarios llevan en todo momento un terminal móvil consigo abre la puerta a nuevas formas de recomendar. Sustituir el tradicional patrón de uso basado en petición-respuesta para evolucionar hacia un sistema proactivo es ahora posible. Estos sistemas deben identificar el momento más adecuado para generar una recomendación sin una petición explícita del usuario, siendo para ello necesario analizar su contexto. Esta tesis doctoral propone un conjunto de modelos, algoritmos y métodos orientados a incorporar proactividad en CARS móviles, a la vez que se estudia el impacto que este tipo de recomendaciones tienen en la experiencia de usuario con el fin de extraer importantes conclusiones sobre "qué", "cuándo" y "cómo" se debe notificar proactivamente. Con este propósito, se comienza planteando una arquitectura general para construir CARS móviles en escenarios sociales. Adicionalmente, se propone una nueva forma de representar el proceso de recomendación a través de una interfaz REST, lo que permite crear una arquitectura independiente de dispositivo y plataforma. Los detalles de su implementación tras su puesta en marcha en el entorno bancario español permiten asimismo validar el sistema construido. Tras esto se presenta un novedoso modelo para incorporar proactividad en CARS móviles. Éste muestra las ideas principales que permiten analizar una situación para decidir cuándo es apropiada una recomendación proactiva. Para ello se presentan algoritmos que establecen relaciones entre lo propicia que es una situación y cómo esto influye en los elementos a recomendar. Asimismo, para demostrar la viabilidad de este modelo se describe su aplicación a un escenario de recomendación para herramientas de creación de contenidos educativos. Siguiendo el modelo anterior, se presenta el diseño e implementación de nuevos interfaces móviles de usuario para recomendaciones proactivas, así como los resultados de su evaluación entre usuarios, lo que aportó importantes conclusiones para identificar cuáles son los factores más relevantes a considerar en el diseño de sistemas proactivos. A raíz de los resultados anteriores, el último punto de esta tesis presenta una metodología para calcular cuán apropiada es una situación de cara a recomendar de manera proactiva siguiendo el modelo propuesto. Como conclusión, se describe la validación llevada a cabo tras la aplicación de la arquitectura, modelo de recomendación y métodos descritos en este trabajo en una red social de aprendizaje europea. Finalmente, esta tesis discute las conclusiones obtenidas a lo largo de la extensa investigación llevada a cabo, y que ha propiciado la consecución de una buena base teórica y práctica para la creación de sistemas de recomendación móviles proactivos basados en información contextual. ABSTRACT Recommender systems are powerful information filtering tools which offer users personalized suggestions about items whose aim is to satisfy their needs. Traditionally the information used to make recommendations has been based on users’ ratings or data on the item’s consumption history and transactions carried out in the system. However, due to the remarkable growth in mobile devices in our society, new opportunities have arisen to improve these systems by implementing them in ubiquitous environments which provide rich context-awareness information on their location or current activity. Because of this current all-mobile lifestyle, users are socially connected permanently, which allows their context to be enhanced not only with physical information, but also with a social dimension. As a result of these novel contextual data sources, the advent of mobile Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CARS) as a research area has appeared to improve the level of personalization in recommendation. On the other hand, this new scenario in which users have their mobile devices with them all the time offers the possibility of looking into new ways of making recommendations. Evolving the traditional user request-response pattern to a proactive approach is now possible as a result of this rich contextual scenario. Thus, the key idea is that recommendations are made to the user when the current situation is appropriate, attending to the available contextual information without an explicit user request being necessary. This dissertation proposes a set of models, algorithms and methods to incorporate proactivity into mobile CARS, while the impact of proactivity is studied in terms of user experience to extract significant outcomes as to "what", "when" and "how" proactive recommendations have to be notified to users. To this end, the development of this dissertation starts from the proposal of a general architecture for building mobile CARS in scenarios with rich social data along with a new way of managing a recommendation process through a REST interface to make this architecture multi-device and cross-platform compatible. Details as regards its implementation and evaluation in a Spanish banking scenario are provided to validate its usefulness and user acceptance. After that, a novel model is presented for proactivity in mobile CARS which shows the key ideas related to decide when a situation warrants a proactive recommendation by establishing algorithms that represent the relationship between the appropriateness of a situation and the suitability of the candidate items to be recommended. A validation of these ideas in the area of e-learning authoring tools is also presented. Following the previous model, this dissertation presents the design and implementation of new mobile user interfaces for proactive notifications. The results of an evaluation among users testing these novel interfaces is also shown to study the impact of proactivity in the user experience of mobile CARS, while significant factors associated to proactivity are also identified. The last stage of this dissertation merges the previous outcomes to design a new methodology to calculate the appropriateness of a situation so as to incorporate proactivity into mobile CARS. Additionally, this work provides details about its validation in a European e-learning social network in which the whole architecture and proactive recommendation model together with its methods have been implemented. Finally, this dissertation opens up a discussion about the conclusions obtained throughout this research, resulting in useful information from the different design and implementation stages of proactive mobile CARS.

CloudRoom: una plataforma universitaria social, semántica y ubicua

Estamos viviendo la era de la Internetificación. A día de hoy, las conexiones a Internet se asumen presentes en nuestro entorno como una necesidad más. La Web, se ha convertido en un lugar de generación de contenido por los usuarios. Una información generada, que sobrepasa la idea con la que surgió esta, ya que en la mayoría de casos, su contenido no se ha diseñado más que para ser consumido por humanos, y no por máquinas. Esto supone un cambio de mentalidad en la forma en que diseñamos sistemas capaces de soportar una carga computacional y de almacenamiento que crece sin un fin aparente. Al mismo tiempo, vivimos un momento de crisis de la educación superior: los altos costes de una educación de calidad suponen una amenaza para el mundo académico. Mediante el uso de la tecnología, se puede lograr un incremento de la productividad, y una reducción en dichos costes en un campo, en el que apenas se ha avanzado desde el Renacimiento. En CloudRoom se ha diseñado una plataforma MOOC con una arquitectura ajustada a las últimas convenciones en Cloud Computing, que implica el uso de Servicios REST, bases de datos NoSQL, y que hace uso de las últimas recomendaciones del W3C en materia de desarrollo web y Linked Data. Para su construcción, se ha hecho uso de métodos ágiles de Ingeniería del Software, técnicas de Interacción Persona-Ordenador, y tecnologías de última generación como Neo4j, Redis, Node.js, AngularJS, Bootstrap, HTML5, CSS3 o Amazon Web Services. Se ha realizado un trabajo integral de Ingeniería Informática, combinando prácticamente la totalidad de aquellas áreas de conocimiento fundamentales en Informática. En definitiva se han ideado las bases de un sistema distribuido robusto, mantenible, con características sociales y semánticas, que puede ser ejecutado en múltiples dispositivos, y que es capaz de responder ante millones de usuarios. We are living through an age of Internetification. Nowadays, Internet connections are a utility whose presence one can simply assume. The web has become a place of generation of content by users. The information generated surpasses the notion with which the World Wide Web emerged because, in most cases, this content has been designed to be consumed by humans and not by machines. This fact implies a change of mindset in the way that we design systems; these systems should be able to support a computational and storage capacity that apparently grows endlessly. At the same time, our education system is in a state of crisis: the high costs of high-quality education threaten the academic world. With the use of technology, we could achieve an increase of productivity and quality, and a reduction of these costs in this field, which has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance. In CloudRoom, a MOOC platform has been designed with an architecture that satisfies the last conventions on Cloud Computing; which involves the use of REST services, NoSQL databases, and uses the last recommendations from W3C in terms of web development and Linked Data. For its building process, agile methods of Software Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction techniques, and state of the art technologies such as Neo4j, Redis, Node.js, AngularJS, Bootstrap, HTML5, CSS3 or Amazon Web Services have been used. Furthermore, a comprehensive Informatics Engineering work has been performed, by combining virtually all of the areas of knowledge in Computer Science. Summarizing, the pillars of a robust, maintainable, and distributed system have been devised; a system with social and semantic capabilities, which runs in multiple devices, and scales to millions of users.

An integrated framework for office information systems design and management

Information Technologies are complex and this is true even in the smallest piece of equipment. But this kind of complexity is nothing comparejwith the one that arises when this technology interact with society. Office Automation has been traditionally considered as a technical field but there is no way to find solutions from a technical point of view when the problems are primarily social in their origin. Technology management has to change its focus from a pure technical perspective to a sociotechnical point of view. To facilitate this change, we propose a model that allows a better understanding between the managerial and the technical world, offering a coherent, complete and integrated perspective of both. The base for this model is an unfolding of the complexity found in information Technologies and a matching of these complexities with several levels considered within the Office, Office Automation and Human Factors dimensions. Each one of these domains is studied trough a set of distinctions that create a new and powerful understanding of its reality. Using this model we build up a map of Office Automation to be use^not only by managers but also by technicians because the primaty advantage of such a framework is that it allows a comprehensive evaluation of technology without requhing extensive technical knowledge. Thus, the model can be seen as principle for design and diagnosis of Office Automation and as a common reference for managers and specialist avoiding the severe limitations arising from the language used by the last

Incorporating proactivity to context-aware recommender systems for e-learning

Recommender systems in e-learning have proved to be powerful tools to find suitable educational material during the learning experience. But traditional user request-response patterns are still being used to generate these recommendations. By including contextual information derived from the use of ubiquitous learning environments, the possibility of incorporating proactivity to the recommendation process has arisen. In this paper we describe methods to push proactive recommendations to e-learning systems users when the situation is appropriate without being needed their explicit request. As a result, interesting learning objects can be recommended attending to the user?s needs in every situation. The impact of this proactive recommendations generated have been evaluated among teachers and scientists in a real e-learning social network called Virtual Science Hub related to the GLOBAL excursion European project. Outcomes indicate that the methods proposed are valid to generate such kind of recommendations in e-learning scenarios. The results also show that the users' perceived appropriateness of having proactive recommendations is high.

Cambios de la identidad social en organizaciones en red

Las organizaciones están viviendo cambios estratégicos, culturales y organizativos para adaptarse a la sociedad de la información. La incorporación de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC), facilita los esquemas de trabajo en red de los y las profesionales y la virtualización de las organizaciones. En este nuevo contexto, el sistema de significados cambia, y la identidad social de los trabajadores se ve afectada. Este trabajo explora cómo se comporta la identidad social y cuál es su relación con la necesidad de afiliación, estudiando un grupo de 205 profesionales con distintas características, lo que ha permitido dividirlos en profesionales red y profesionales no red. A su vez, estos profesionales pertenecían a organizaciones que, en función de ciertas características, se han categorizado en más o menos virtuales. Los resultados principales del trabajo son el establecimiento de un método de análisis en organizaciones red y la confirmación de que en la transformación de una organización hacia modelos virtuales, la identidad social se debilita para profesionales con alta necesidad de afiliación. Organizations are experiencing strategic, cultural and organizational changes in order to adapt themselves to the Information Society. Incorporating Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) allow for network schemes of work for employees (including telecommuting) and staff virtualization. In this new context, systems of meaning change and the social identity of the staff is affected. This paper analyses how social identity evolves and how it is related to affiliation needs by studying a group of 205 professionals with different characteristics, divided into network and non-network professionals. In turn, these professionals belonged to organizations, which depending on certain characteristics, have been categorized as more or less virtual. Two main research results emerge. The first is an analytical methodology for networked organizations. The second is the confirmation that social identity weakens for professionals with high affiliation needs when virtualization occurs in an organization.

Dynamics in the governance of collective irrigation systems: Evidence from field experiments in Nicaragua.

The objective of this study is to analyze the common pool resource appropriation and public good provisiondecisions in a dynamic setting, testing the differences in behavior and performance between lab and field subjects. We performeda total of 45 games in Nicaragua, including 88 villagers in rural communities and 92 undergraduate students. In order to analyze sequential decision making, we introduce a dynamic and asymmetric irrigation game that combines the typical social dilemmas associated to irrigation systems management.In addition, in 9 out of 22 villagers’ groups, we implemented a treatment that included the disclosure of subjects’ appropriation of the common pool resource. The results reveal that the provision of individuals’ appropriation level results in higher appropriation in subsequent rounds. In addition, the results show that non-treated villagers provide more public good than treated villagers but if compared with students the differences are not significant. The results also suggest that appropriation levels are below the Nash prediction of full appropriation, but above the social efficient level. This results in an efficiency loss in the game that can be explained to a large extent by individual decisions on appropriation and public good contribution and by group appropriation behavior.

AFRICA BUILD Portal: developing a social network of African health researchers and educators

One of the main outputs of the project is a collaborative platform which integrates a myriad of research and learning resources. This article presents the first prototype of this platform: the AFRICA BUILD Portal (ABP 1.0). The ABP is a Web 2.0 platform which facilitates the access, in a collaborative manner, to these resources. Through a usable web interface, the ABP has been designed to avoid, as much as possible, the connectivity problems of African institutions. In this paper, we suggest that the access to complex systems does not imply slow response rates, and that their development model guides the project to a natural technological transfer, adaptation and user acceptance. Finally, this platform aims to motivate research attitudes during the learning process and stimulate user?s collaborations.

Modelo de gestión de la responsabilidad social para las empresas del sector petrolero venezolano

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo diseñar un modelo de gestión de responsabilidad social sustentado en estándares internacionales para las empresas del sector petrolero venezolano. Esta investigación no se suscribe a un modelo epistémico en particular, como forma parcializada de ver la realidad. Por el contrario, se realizó un abordaje holístico de la investigación, entendiendo el evento de estudio, la gestión de la responsabilidad social, como un evento integrado por distintas visiones de la relación empresa – sociedad. La holística se refiere a una tendencia que permite entender la realidad desde el punto de vista de las múltiples interacciones que la caracterizan. Corresponde a una actitud integradora como también a una teoría explicativa que se orienta hacia una comprensión contextual de los procesos, de los protagonistas y de los eventos. Desde la concepción holística se determinó que la investigación es de tipo proyectiva. Este tipo de investigación propone soluciones a una situación determinada a partir de un proceso de indagación. Implica describir, comparar, explicar y proponer alternativas de cambios, lo que da lugar a los estadios de investigación. En cuanto al diseño de la investigación, aplicando el ciclo holístico, se tiene un diseño que es univariable, transeccional contemporáneo y de fuente mixta. Univariable, porque se enfoca en la gestión de responsabilidad social. Transeccional contemporáneo, porque el evento se estudia en la actualidad y se realiza una sola medición de los datos. De fuente mixta, porque en los estadios descriptivo y explicativo se aplica un diseño de campo, al recolectar los datos directamente en las empresas objeto de estudio, mientras que para los estadios analítico y comparativo se aplica un diseño documental. Las técnicas de recolección de la información estuvieron constituidas por fuentes primarias provenientes de la observación directa, la revisión documental y la aplicación de un cuestionario estructurado tipo escala Likert. El análisis de los datos comprendió el análisis estadístico descriptivo, la estimación de la fiabilidad y el análisis de coeficientes de correlación y análisis de ruta, a través del software estadístico SPSS v.19.0 y AMOS v.20. En los estadios descriptivo y explicativo se estudió la gestión de la responsabilidad social en las empresas del sector petrolero. Los resultados indicaron que las empresas del sector petrolero actúan bajo los lineamientos trazados en el Plan de Desarrollo Nacional y de acuerdo con las políticas, directrices, planes y estrategias para el sector de los hidrocarburos, dictadas por el Ministerio de Energía y Petróleo. También incluyen el compromiso social y la política ambiental en su filosofía de gestión. Tienen en su estructura organizacional una gerencia de desarrollo social que gestiona la responsabilidad social. Las actividades de inversión social se presentan poco estructuradas y en ocasiones se improvisan ya que atienden a los lineamientos políticos del Estado y no a una política interna de sostenibilidad del negocio petrolero. En cuanto a la integralidad de la gestión las empresas no consideran la responsabilidad social en todas las áreas, por lo que deben ampliar su concepción de una gestión responsable, redefiniendo estructuras, estrategias y procesos, con una orientación hacia una gestión sustentable. En cuanto a los estadios analítico y comparativo aplicados al estudio de las guías y estándares internacionales de responsabilidad social, se determinó que en términos de la integralidad de la gestión las iniciativas que destacan son: en cuanto a los principios, las directrices para empresas multinacionales según la OCDE y el Libro Verde de la Unión Europea. En relación con las guías de implementación y control, el Global Reporting Initiative y la norma ISO 26000. Y en cuanto a los sistemas de gestión el Sistema de Gestión Ética y Responsable (SGE 21) y el Sistema de Gestión de Responsabilidad Social IQNET SR10. Finalmente se diseñó una estructura para la gestión integral de responsabilidad social basada en los estándares internacionales y en el concepto de desarrollo sostenible. Por tanto abarca el desarrollo social, el equilibrio ecológico y el crecimiento económico, lo que permite un desarrollo sinérgico. La originalidad del enfoque consistió en la comprensión de la investigación desde una concepción holística, que permitió la integración de las teorías que tratan el tema de la responsabilidad social a través de un abordaje estructurado. ABSTRACT The present research aims to design a model of social responsibility management underpinned by international standards for companies in the Venezuelan oil sector. This research is not framed in a particular epistemic model as a biased way of looking at reality. Instead, a holistic approach to the research was conducted, understanding the event under study, the management of social responsibility as an event composed of different views of the relationship between corporation and society. The term holistic refers to a trend in understanding the reality from the point of view of the multiple interactions that characterize it. It corresponds to an integrative as well as an explanatory theory that is oriented towards a contextual understanding of the processes, of the participants and of the events. From the holistic conception it was determined that this research is of a projective type. The research proposes solutions to a given situation from a process of inquiry. It implies describing, comparing, explaining and proposing alternative changes, which results in the different research stages. Regarding the research design, applying the holistic cycle, an univariate, contemporary cross-sectional and mixed source design is obtained. It is univariate, because it focuses on the management of social responsibility. It is contemporary cross-sectional, because the event is studied in the present time and a single measurement of data is performed. It relies on mixed source, because in the descriptive and explanatory stages a field design is applied when collecting data directly from the companies under study, while for the analytical and comparative stages applies a documentary design is applied. The data collection techniques were constituted by primary sources from direct observation, document review and the implementation of a structured Likert scale questionnaire. The data analysis comprised descriptive statistical analysis, reliability estimates and analysis of correlation and the path analysis through the SPSS v.19.0 and AMOS V.20 statistical software. In the descriptive and explanatory stages social responsibility management in the oil sector companies was studied. The results indicated that the oil companies operate under the guidelines outlined in the National Development Plan and in accordance with the policies, guidelines, plans and strategies for the hydrocarbons sector, issued by the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum. They also include the social commitment and the environmental policy in their management philosophy. They have in their organizational structure a social development management which deals with social responsibility. Corporate social investment is presented poorly structured and is sometimes improvised since they follow the policy guidelines of the state and not the internal sustainability policy of the oil business. As for the integrity of management companies they do not consider social responsibility in all areas, so they need to expand their conception of responsible management, redefining structures, strategies and processes, with a focus on sustainable management. As for the analytical and comparative stages applied to the study of international guidelines and standards of social responsibility, it was determined that, in terms of the comprehensiveness of management, the initiatives that stand out are the following: With respect to principles, the guidelines for multinational enterprises as indicated by OECD and the Green Paper of the European Union. Regarding the implementation and control guides, the Global Reporting Initiative and the ISO 26000 standard are relevant. And as for management systems the Ethics and Responsible Management System (SGE 21) and the IQNet SR10 Social responsibility management system have to be considered. Finally a framework for the comprehensive management of social responsibility based on international standards and the concept of sustainable development was designed. Hence, social development, ecological balance and economic growth are included allowing therefore a synergistic development. The originality of this approach is the understanding of research in a holistic way, which allows the integration of theories that address the issue of social responsibility through a structured approximation.

Normalizar la utopía: Un proyecto de sistematización de la normativa en vivienda social = Normalizing Utopia: A Project of Systematization of Regulations on Social Housing

La presente tesis doctoral aborda el estudio del proyecto de vivienda colectiva social desde la noción de norma, entendida desde la sistematización o normalización de los instrumentos del proyecto arquitectónico de vivienda protegida. Esto es, desde una idea de tipificación taxonómica en cuanto ajuste a un conjunto de reglas comunes productoras de sistemas normativos. La hipótesis de partida se basa en la consideración de la vivienda pública como un laboratorio de estudio histórico de los ideales de confort y calidad de vida. Este campo de pruebas ha constituido una sólida base que ha servido como punto de encuentro muy particular entre proyecto y normativa desde las primeras vanguardias europeas hasta la actualidad. El principal objetivo de la investigación es la revalorización de una normativa de vivienda que ha producido ejemplos de innegable calidad en el contexto nacional e internacional, así como un intento de actualización de su codificación. La investigación se sirve de los instrumentos específicos de la disciplina arquitectónica para explicar una disociación detectada desde la segunda mitad del siglo pasado entre la utopía del proyecto social de vivienda y el pragmatismo de la norma que lo regula, más allá de los aspectos sociales y culturales asociados a las nuevas composiciones familiares, las tecnologías cambiantes, los ritos domésticos contemporáneos o el valor creciente del tiempo libre. La propuesta de una nueva terminología que aborde nuevas relaciones en el acercamiento al proyecto de vivienda desde la normativa española deriva en un conjunto de estrategias de proyecto desde las que proponer sistemas normativos. Dichas estrategias se basan principalmente en mecanismos de cualificación espacial que permitan un nuevo acercamiento entre dichas normas y las formas de habitar actuales. ABSTRACT This doctoral thesis deals with the study of the project of social collective housing from the notion of rule, understanding it from the systematization or standardization of the instruments of architectural project for social housing. Thus, it deals with an idea of taxonomic typification as an adjustment to a set of common rules which produce regulation systems. The initial hypothesis is based on the consideration of public housing as a laboratory for studying the historical ideals of comfort and quality of life. This testing ground has been a solid base that has served as a very specific meeting point between project and regulations from the first European avant‐garde to nowadays. The main objective of this research is the revaluation of housing regulations, which have produced examples of undeniable quality in the national and international stage, as well as an attempt to update their codification. The research assumes the specific tools of the discipline of architecture for explaining a dissociation detected between the utopia of the project for social housing and the pragmatism of the regulations from the second half of last century, beyond social and cultural aspects associated to the new family arrangements, the changing technologies, the contemporary domestic rituals or the rising value of leisure time. The proposal of a new terminology that tackles new relations in the approach to housing project from the Spanish legislation results in a set of strategies to propose regulation systems. Those strategies are mainly based on mechanisms for spatial qualification which allow a new approach between these rules and the current ways of living.

Evaluating social choice techniques into intelligent environments by agent based social simulation

The primary hypothesis stated by this paper is that the use of social choice theory in Ambient Intelligence systems can improve significantly users satisfaction when accessing shared resources. A research methodology based on agent based social simulations is employed to support this hypothesis and to evaluate these benefits. The result is a six-fold contribution summarized as follows. Firstly, several considerable differences between this application case and the most prominent social choice application, political elections, have been found and described. Secondly, given these differences, a number of metrics to evaluate different voting systems in this scope have been proposed and formalized. Thirdly, given the presented application and the metrics proposed, the performance of a number of well known electoral systems is compared. Fourthly, as a result of the performance study, a novel voting algorithm capable of obtaining the best balance between the metrics reviewed is introduced. Fifthly, to improve the social welfare in the experiments, the voting methods are combined with cluster analysis techniques. Finally, the article is complemented by a free and open-source tool, VoteSim, which ensures not only the reproducibility of the experimental results presented, but also allows the interested reader to adapt the case study presented to different environments.

Assessment of innovative measures implemented in European bus systems using key performance indicators

This paper reports the results of the assessment of a range of measures implemented in bus systems in five European cities to improve the use of public transport by increasing its attractiveness and enhancing its image in urban areas. This research was conducted as part of the EBSF project (European Bus System of the Future) from 2008 to 2012. New buses (prototypes), new vehicle and infrastructure technologies, and operational best practices were introduced, all of which were combined in a system approach. The measures were assessed using multicriteria analysis to simultaneously evaluate a certain number of criteria that need to be aggregated. Each criterion is measured by one or more key performance indicators (KPI) calculated in two scenarios (reference scenario, with no measure implemented; and project scenario, with the implementation of some measures), in order to evaluate the difference in the KPI performance between the reference and project scenario. The results indicate that the measures produce a greater benefit in issues related to bus system productivity and customer satisfaction, with the greatest impact on aspects of perceptions of comfort, cleanliness and quality of service, information to passengers and environmental issues. The study also reveals that the implementation of several measures has greater social utility than very specific and isolated measures.

Incorporating Group Recommendations to Recommender Systems: Alternatives and Performance

La importancia de los sistemas de recomendación ha experimentado un crecimiento exponencial como consecuencia del auge de las redes sociales. En esta tesis doctoral presentaré una amplia visión sobre el estado del arte de los sistemas de recomendación. Incialmente, estos estaba basados en fitrado demográfico, basado en contendio o colaborativo. En la actualidad, estos sistemas incorporan alguna información social al proceso de recomendación. En el futuro utilizarán información implicita, local y personal proveniente del Internet de las cosas. Los sistemas de recomendación basados en filtrado colaborativo se pueden modificar con el fin de realizar recomendaciones a grupos de usuarios. Existen trabajos previos que han incluido estas modificaciones en diferentes etapas del algoritmo de filtrado colaborativo: búsqueda de los vecinos, predicción de las votaciones y elección de las recomendaciones. En esta tesis doctoral proporcionaré un nuevo método que realizar el proceso de unficación (pasar de varios usuarios a un grupo) en el primer paso del algoritmo de filtrado colaborativo: cálculo de la métrica de similaridad. Proporcionaré una formalización completa del método propuesto. Explicaré cómo obtener el conjunto de k vecinos del grupo de usuarios y mostraré cómo obtener recomendaciones usando dichos vecinos. Asimismo, incluiré un ejemplo detallando cada paso del método propuesto en un sistema de recomendación compuesto por 8 usuarios y 10 items. Las principales características del método propuesto son: (a) es más rápido (más eficiente) que las alternativas proporcionadas por otros autores, y (b) es al menos tan exacto y preciso como otras soluciones estudiadas. Para contrastar esta hipótesis realizaré varios experimentos que miden la precisión, la exactitud y el rendimiento del método. Los resultados obtenidos se compararán con los resultados de otras alternativas utilizadas en la recomendación de grupos. Los experimentos se realizarán con las bases de datos de MovieLens y Netflix. ABSTRACT The importance of recommender systems has grown exponentially with the advent of social networks. In this PhD thesis I will provide a wide vision about the state of the art of recommender systems. They were initially based on demographic, contentbased and collaborative filtering. Currently, these systems incorporate some social information to the recommendation process. In the future, they will use implicit, local and personal information from the Internet of Things. As we will see here, recommender systems based on collaborative filtering can be used to perform recommendations to group of users. Previous works have made this modification in different stages of the collaborative filtering algorithm: establishing the neighborhood, prediction phase and determination of recommended items. In this PhD thesis I will provide a new method that carry out the unification process (many users to one group) in the first stage of the collaborative filtering algorithm: similarity metric computation. I will provide a full formalization of the proposed method. I will explain how to obtain the k nearest neighbors of the group of users and I will show how to get recommendations using those users. I will also include a running example of a recommender system with 8 users and 10 items detailing all the steps of the method I will present. The main highlights of the proposed method are: (a) it will be faster (more efficient) that the alternatives provided by other authors, and (b) it will be at least as precise and accurate as other studied solutions. To check this hypothesis I will conduct several experiments measuring the accuracy, the precision and the performance of my method. I will compare these results with the results generated by other methods of group recommendation. The experiments will be carried out using MovieLens and Netflix datasets.