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.

Smart contradictions: The politics of making Barcelona a Self-sufficient city:

Abstract: In recent years, the Smart City has become a very popular concept amongst policy makers and urban planners. In a nutshell, the Smart City refers to projects and planning strategies that aim to join up new forms of inclusive and lowcarbon economic growth based on the knowledge economy through the deployment of information and communication technologies. However, at the same time as new urban Smart interventions are being designed and applied, insufficient attention has been paid to how these strategies are inserted into the wider political economy and, in particular, the political ecology of urban transformation. Therefore, in this paper we critically explore the implementation of the Smart City, tracing how the ‘environment’ and environmental concerns have become an organising principle in Barcelona’s Smart City strategy. Through an urban political ecology prism we aim to critically reflect upon the contradictions of the actually existing Smart City in Barcelona and how Smart discourses and practices might be intentionally or unintentionally mobilised in ways that serve to depoliticise urban redevelopment and environmental management. The paper stresses the need to repoliticise the debates on the Smart City and put citizens back at the centre of the urban debate.

ChaLearn LAP 2016: First Round Challenge on First Impressions - Dataset and Results

Abstract: This paper summarizes the ChaLearn Looking at People 2016 First Impressions challenge data and results obtained by the teams in the first round of the competition. The goal of the competition was to automatically evaluate five “apparent” personality traits (the so-called “Big Five”) from videos of subjects speaking in front of a camera, by using human judgment. In this edition of the ChaLearn challenge, a novel data set consisting of 10,000 shorts clips from YouTube videos has been made publicly available. The ground truth for personality traits was obtained from workers of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). To alleviate calibration problems between workers, we used pairwise comparisons between videos, and variable levels were reconstructed by fitting a Bradley-Terry-Luce model with maximum likelihood. The CodaLab open source platform was used for submission of predictions and scoring. The competition attracted, over a period of 2 months, 84 participants who are grouped in several teams. Nine teams entered the final phase. Despite the difficulty of the task, the teams made great advances in this round of the challenge.

EMU and European government bond market integration.

Abstract: In this study we adopt the CAPM-based model of Bekaert and Harvey (1995) to compare the differences in the relative importance of two sources of systemic risk (world and Eurozone) on Government bond returns, in two groups of countries in EU-15. Results show that euro markets are less vulnerable to the influence of world risk factors, and more vulnerable to EMU risk factors. However, they are only partially integrated. For their part, the markets of the countries that decided to stay out of the Monetary Union present a higher vulnerability to external risk factors.

A Survey on Deep Learning Based Approaches for Action and Gesture Recognition in Image Sequences

Abstract: The interest in action and gesture recognition has grown considerably in the last years. In this paper, we present a survey on current deep learning methodologies for action and gesture recognition in image sequences. We introduce a taxonomy that summarizes important aspects of deep learning for approaching both tasks. We review the details of the proposed architectures, fusion strategies, main datasets, and competitions. We summarize and discuss the main works proposed so far with particular interest on how they treat the temporal dimension of data, discussing their main features and identify opportunities and challenges for future research.

Gamification: a systematic review of design frameworks

Abstract: Learner’s motivation difficulties are recognized as a problem in diverse educational scenarios, reaching up to university degrees Among other techniques that are often applied by instructors to counteract this issue, those related to the use of gaming elements seem to very promising In this context, considering the use of game-like properties in learning scenarios, known as gamification, has received increasing interest by academia in recent years However, its application in higher education can be challenging, due to some unwanted effects caused by the lack of proven design methodologies have been detected Choosing the adequate formal process for gamification design has become an important success requirement This work presents a systematic review of the gamification design frameworks discussed in the literature, providing a useful resource to educational practitioners as well as gamification designers and researchers A total of 2314 unique works are initially recorded, based on queries in databases, libraries, journals and search engines After applying a systematic filtering process, a definitive list of 40 works is more closely analysed Next to review over relevant literature, an assessment of the main features found in the discussed approaches is given, while also categorizing them according to their main application field and its suitability in higher educational environments