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.

Enlarging the Croatian Morphological Lexicon by Automatic Lexical Acquisition from Raw Corpora.

Abstract: This paper presents experiments for enlarging the Croatian Morphological Lexicon by applying an automatic acquisition methodology. The basic sources of information for the system are a set of morphological rules and a raw corpus. The morphological rules have been automatically derived from the existing Croatian Morphological Lexicon and we have used in our experiments a subset of the Croatian National Corpus. The methodology has proved to be efficient for those languages that, like Croatian, present a rich and mainly concatenative morphology. This method can be applied for the creation of new resources, as well as in the enrichment of existing ones. We also present an extension of the system that uses automatic querying to Internet to acquire those entries for which we have not enough information in our corpus.

LockDown: Balance Availability Attack Against Lightning Network Channels

Abstract: The Lightning Network (LN) is a payment network running as a second layer on top of Bitcoin and other Blockchains. This paper presents the possibility of performing a balance lockdown in the LN due to misbehaving nodes associated to a given channel. We formalize and introduce a practical attack, minimizing the economic cost of the attack. We present results that validate our claims, and provide experimental results and potential countermeasures to handle the problem.

Occlusion Aware Hand Pose Recovery from Sequences of Depth Images

Abstract: State-of-the-art approaches on hand pose estimation from depth images have reported promising results under quite controlled considerations. In this paper we propose a two-step pipeline for recovering the hand pose from a sequence of depth images. The pipeline has been designed to deal with images taken from any viewpoint and exhibiting a high degree of finger occlusion. In a first step we initialize the hand pose using a part-based model, fitting a set of hand components in the depth images. In a second step we consider temporal data and estimate the parameters of a trained bilinear model consisting of shape and trajectory bases. Results on a synthetic, highly-occluded dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms most recent pose recovering approaches, including those based on CNNs.

Double Penalty in Returns to Education: Informality and Educational Mismatch in the Colombian Labour Market

Abstract: This article examines the returns to education taking into consideration the existence of educational mismatches in the formal and informal employment of a developing country. Results show that the returns of surplus, required and deficit years of schooling are different in the two sectors. Moreover, they suggest that these returns vary along the wage distribution, and that the pattern of variation differs for formal and informal workers. In particular, informal workers face not only lower returns to their education, but suffer a second penalty associated with educational mismatches that puts them at a greater disadvantage compare to their formal counterparts.