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.

Ring Oscillator Clocks and Margins

Abstract: How much margin do we have to add to the delay lines of a bundled-data circuit? This paper is an attempt to give a methodical answer to this question, taking into account all sources of variability and the existing EDA machinery for timing analysis and sign-off. The paper is based on the study of the margins of a ring oscillator that substitutes a PLL as clock generator. A timing model is proposed that shows that a 12% margin for delay lines can be sufficient to cover variability in a 65nm technology. In a typical scenario, performance and energy improvements between 15% and 35% can be obtained by using a ring oscillator instead of a PLL. The paper concludes that a synchronous circuit with a ring oscillator clock shows similar benefits in performance and energy as those of bundled-data asynchronous circuits.

Usos de Internet y éxito académico en estudiantes universitarios

Abstract: El uso de la tecnologia provoca cambios sociales. Esto incluye el trabajo en el ambito universitario en donde esta cambiando tanto la forma de ejercer la docencia como la forma de aprender y se requiere conocer el efecto del uso de la tecnologia sobre el rendimiento del alumnado. En este trabajo se investigo la incidencia del uso de Internet sobre el exito academico del alumnado de cinco universidades de Ecuador. Se levanto una muestra aleatoria de 4.697 personas y se las categorizo en perfiles de uso de Internet para actividades academicas y para entretenimiento, utilizando analisis factorial y analisis cluster. Las categorias resultantes se utilizaron como variables independientes en modelos de regresion logistica multinomial que buscaban determinar si el uso de Internet tenia incidencia sobre el exito academico. Los resultados muestran que quienes realizan actividades interactivas con pares y profesores o quienes utilizan de forma balanceada las distintas herramientas de Internet tienden a un mayor exito academico que aquellos que solo buscan informacion. En lo referente al entretenimiento, se encontro una incidencia positiva del uso de Internet sobre el exito academico. Los estudiantes que realizan descargas de contenido de audio, video y software, y quienes utilizan todas las posibilidades de entretenimiento, presentan menor tendencia a suspender que los estudiantes que utilizan minimamente Internet. En cuanto al genero se presentan diferencias en los usos academicos y de entretenimiento.

Explorando en la identidad: ¿como enfrentan los docentes universitarios los incidentes criticos que ocurren en las aulas de formacion de futuros profesores?

Abstract: Resumen es: A partir de las entrevistas realizadas a cinco docentes universitarios chilenos que forman a futuros profesores, el presente estudio se propone responder...

Verification of Concurrent Systems with Parametric Delays Using Octahedra

Abstract: A technique for the verification of concurrent parametric timed systems is presented. In the systems under study, each action has a bounded delay where the bounds are either constants or parameters. Given a safety property, the analysis computes automatically a set of constraints on the parameters that is sufficient to guarantee the property. The main contribution is an innovative representation of the parametric timed state space based on bit-vectors. Experimental results from the domain of timed circuits show that this representation improves the efficiency of the verification significantly with a small impact on the accuracy of the derived constraints.

On the Effect of Observed Subject Biases in Apparent Personality Analysis From Audio-Visual Signals

Abstract: Personality perception is implicitly biased due to many subjective factors, such as cultural, social, contextual, gender, and appearance. Approaches developed for automatic personality perception are not expected to predict the real personality of the target but the personality external observers attributed to it. Hence, they have to deal with human bias, inherently transferred to the training data. However, bias analysis in personality computing is an almost unexplored area. In this article, we study different possible sources of bias affecting personality perception, including emotions from facial expressions, attractiveness, age, gender, and ethnicity, as well as their influence on prediction ability for apparent personality estimation. To this end, we propose a multimodal deep neural network that combines raw audio and visual information alongside predictions of attribute-specific models to regress apparent personality. We also analyze spatio-temporal aggregation schemes and the effect of different time intervals on first impressions. We base our study on the ChaLearn first impressions dataset, consisting of one-person conversational videos. Our model shows state-of-the-art results regressing apparent personality based on the Big-Five model. Furthermore, given the interpretability nature of our network design, we provide an incremental analysis on the impact of each possible source of bias on final network predictions.