Juan Carlos Yelmo Garcia

Prosumers and accessibility: how to ensure a productive interaction

User-generated content (UGC) has become prevalent on the Web. It is not created by professional developers, but by prosumers: basic web users that also produce their own content. Thus, they lack any background, training, wherewithal, awareness and accountability regarding accessibility. We have extracted from top-used UGC sites a set of best practices to improve accessibility of UGC, focusing on the role the community itself plays in ensuring it. As we have merely compiled best practices, authoring tools and web content guidelines have not been redefined, but rather referenced and instantiated by UGC-specific recommendations.

Transf-ID: Automatic ID and Data Capture for Rail Freight Asset Management

Accurate tracing at the parts level can play a key role in easing and managing maintenance operations within the railway industry, the same way it streamlines freight operations on more traditional deployments. Transf-ID is an RFID-based tracking system for use in the rail freight industry that will identify cargo and rail vehicles but also mechanical parts that are frequently serviced. The system includes middleware as well as hardware components, combined in an end-to-end solution that translates tag scans into meaningful business events. All tagged items are scanned on the move at checkpoints, leading to valuable information regarding their traveled routes.

Finite element models for mechanical simulation of coronary arteries

Mechanical simulation of tissue in the walls of coronary arteries may provide valuable quantitative information for medical practice, such as understanding the evolution of stenosis, angioplasty processes, and placement of stents and possible restenosis. The material constitutive models which represent the mechanical response to strain are highly nonlinear as well as anisotropic, thus precluding standard finite element formulations with isotropic or linear elastic materials. Further, in order to study phenomena such as stenosis or restenosis, they must include essential phenomena in biological soft tissues such as growth and remodeling, as well as the consideration of initial stresses and strains. This paper discusses these issues and proposes some mathematical models for their mechanical simulation within a finite element framework. Some preliminary applications to the study of clinical cases are shown.

TelecomI+D02: Next Generation Mashups: How to Create my Own Services in a Convergent World

Service and content mashups are becoming more and more a mainstream of the Web. Recently, several mashup platforms have introduced the user-centric paradigm, thus allowing novice end-users to easily create, share and enjoy their own services. However, these platforms still lack the advanced features that the Mobile Internet is able to support, other than just browsing on the mobile telephone. Advanced location features and the possibility of communicating from anywhere at anytime will leverage new business models thus providing end-users with amazing new services. This paper introduces a platform that merges user-centricity and Mobile Web services with a mashup environment where users can create and share their own services, describing its main features.

Automatic Music Generation by Deep Learning

This paper presents a model capable of generating and completing musical compositions automatically. The model is based on generative learning paradigms of machine learning and deep learning, such as recurrent neural networks. Related works consider music as a text of a natural language, requiring the network to learn the syntax of the sheet music completely and the dependencies among symbols. This involves a very intense training and may produce overfitting in many cases. This paper contributes with a data preprocessing that eliminates the most complex dependencies allowing the musical content to be abstracted from the syntax. Moreover, a web application based on the trained models is presented. The tool allows inexperienced users to generate automatic music from scratch or from a given fragment of sheet music.

Semantic Characterization of Context of Use and Contents for User-Centric Media Retrieval

When users access online media, they need and desire to get an experience tailored to their specific, personal context and situation. This is becoming more and more relevant with the ever-increasing amount of available contents users may choose from. In order to provide user-centric functionalities (such as relevant searches, content adaptation, customization and recommendation), both the annotation of contents with semantically rich metadata and an accurate model of the individual users and their respective contexts of use are needed. In this context, we propose a solution to automatically characterize both the context of use and the contents. It provides dynamic, adaptive user models, with explicit and implicit information; as well as content descriptors that may be later used to match the most suitable contents for each user. Users always keep a pivotal role throughout the whole process: providing new contents, contributing to moderated folksonomies, overseeing their own user model, etc.