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.

Integrating what and for whom? Financialisation and the Thames Tideway Tunnel:

Abstract: The Thames Tideway Tunnel (TTT), often referred to as the Thames super sewer, is currently one of the largest infrastructure projects underway in any European city. Costing an estimated £4.2 billio...

First Impressions: A Survey on Vision-Based Apparent Personality Trait Analysis

Abstract: Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.

Consumer choice in competitive location models: Formulations and heuristics

Abstract: A new direction of research in Competitive Location theory incorporates theories of Consumer Choice Behavior in its models. Following this direction, this paper studies the importance of consumer behavior with respect to distance or transportation costs in the optimality of locations obtained by traditional Competitive Location models. To do this, it considers different ways of defining a key parameter in the basic Maximum Capture model (MAXCAP). This parameter will reflect various ways of taking into account distance based on several Consumer Choice Behavior theories. The optimal locations and the deviation in demand captured when the optimal locations of the other models are used instead of the true ones, are computed for each model. A metaheuristic based on GRASP and Tabu search procedure is presented to solve all the models. Computational experience and an application to 55-node network are also presented.

La calidad de la democracia: Un análisis comparado de América Latina

Abstract: Este trabajo examina de forma comparada la calidad de las democracias latinoamericanas, a partir de un indicador agregado (resultante de un analisis factorial). Los datos muestran diferencias muy destacadas entre los paises y, a la vez, cierta estabilidad del nivel de calidad democratica durante el periodo 2000-2008. El analisis de regresion efectuado evidencia que el principal factor explicativo de tales diferencias es la experiencia democra- tica, lo que coincide con algunos estudios recientes. Esto no significa que se trate de determinismo institucional o de una logica de path dependence. El analisis revela tambien algunos puntos de discrepancia respecto a las tesis extendidas en la literatura, sobre todo en relacion con la capacidad explicativa del capital social, que aqui no se comprueba