Open University of Catalonia

About: Open University of Catalonia is a education organization based out in Barcelona, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Context (language use) & Higher education. The organization has 1943 authors who have published 4646 publications receiving 64200 citations. The organization is also known as: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya & UOC.

Incorporación de las TIC en la enseñanza y el aprendizaje basados en la elaboración colaborativa de proyectos

Abstract: Articulo en PDF. 14 paginas. Publicado bajo la iniciativa de Open Access por el RUSC. Universities and Knowledge Society Journal, mediante el portal Redalyc

Mendelian genes for Parkinson's disease contribute to the sporadic forms of the disease

Abstract: Parkinson’s disease (PD) can be divided into familial (Mendelian) and sporadic forms. A number of causal genes have been discovered for the Mendelian form, which constitutes 10–20% of the total cases. Genome-wide association studies have successfully uncovered a number of susceptibility loci for sporadic cases but those only explain a small fraction (6–7%) of PD heritability. It has been observed that some genes that confer susceptibility to PD through common risk variants also contain rare causing mutations for the Mendelian forms of the disease. These results suggest a possible functional link between Mendelian and sporadic PD and led us to investigate the role that rare and low-frequency variants could have on the sporadic form. Through a targeting approach, we have resequenced at 49× coverage the exons and regulatory regions of 38 genes (including Mendelian and susceptibility PD genes) in 249 sporadic PD patients and 145 unrelated controls of European origin. Unlike susceptibility genes, Mendelian genes show a clear general enrichment of rare functional variants in PD cases, observed directly as well as with Tajima’s D statistic and several collapsing methods. Our findings suggest that rare variation on PD Mendelian genes may have a role in the sporadic forms of the disease.

FairFace Challenge at ECCV 2020: Analyzing Bias in Face Recognition

Abstract: This work summarizes the 2020 ChaLearn Looking at People Fair Face Recognition and Analysis Challenge and provides a description of the top-winning solutions and analysis of the results. The aim of the challenge was to evaluate accuracy and bias in gender and skin colour of submitted algorithms on the task of 1:1 face verification in the presence of other confounding attributes. Participants were evaluated using an in-the-wild dataset based on reannotated IJB-C, further enriched 12.5K new images and additional labels. The dataset is not balanced, which simulates a real world scenario where AI-based models supposed to present fair outcomes are trained and evaluated on imbalanced data. The challenge attracted 151 participants, who made more 1.8K submissions in total. The final phase of the challenge attracted 36 active teams out of which 10 exceeded 0.999 AUC-ROC while achieving very low scores in the proposed bias metrics. Common strategies by the participants were face pre-processing, homogenization of data distributions, the use of bias aware loss functions and ensemble models. The analysis of top-10 teams shows higher false positive rates (and lower false negative rates) for females with dark skin tone as well as the potential of eyeglasses and young age to increase the false positive rates too.

Taming, controlling and metabolizing flows: Water and the urbanization process of Barcelona and Madrid (1850–2012)

Abstract: This paper aims to provide a historical reading of the urbanization of the water cycle in Madrid and Barcelona. Starting from an urban political ecology view, the urbanization of the water cycle is...

The grape phylloxera plague as a natural experiment: the upkeep of vineyards in catalonia (spain), 1858–1935

Abstract: This paper analyses the impact in Catalonia of the grape Phylloxera plague in Europe (1865–90). A statistical model is used to analyse the economic resilience of 35 districts in Catalonia to this external ecological and economic shock, and to explain why districts in the provinces of Barcelona and Tarragona resumed growing wine grapes after the plague, in contrast to districts in Girona and Lleida provinces. The opportunity cost of labour, the demand pull of Barcelona’s commercial growth, and the agro-climatic suitability of land for growing grapes are used to explain the differing capacities of districts to endure the Phylloxera plague in Catalonia. aehr_271 39..61