Pablo Chamoso

UAVs Applied to the Counting and Monitoring of Animals

The advantages of intelligent approaches such as the conjunction of artificial vision and the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been recently emerging. This paper presents a focused on obtaining scans of large areas of livestock system. Counting and monitoring of animal species can be performed with video recordings taken from UAVs. Moreover the system keeps track of the number of animals detected by analyzing the images taken with the UAVs cameras. Several tests have been performed to evaluate this system and preliminary results and the conclusions are presented in this paper.

A Gateway Protocol Based on FIPA-ACL for the New Agent Platform PANGEA

Communication is one of the cornerstones of the intelligent agents paradigm. There are different forms of communication between agents, just as there are many platforms for creating them. However, one of the problems we encountered when using the agent paradigm is the actual communication between platforms. That is, to have a gateway of communication between different types of agents regardless of the platform has been used to create them. To this end, a new way of communication between PANGEA and other multiagent platforms is presented in this paper. In this communication process the FIPA-ACL standards are used.

Relationship recommender system in a business and employment-oriented social network

Abstract In the last ten years, social networks have had a great influence on people’s lifestyles and have changed, above all, the way users communicate and relate. This is why, one of the main lines of research in the field of social networks focuses on finding and analyzing possible connections between users. These developments allow users to expand on their network of contacts without having to search among the total set of users. However, there are many types of social networks which attract users with specific needs, these needs influence on the type of contacts users are looking for. Our article proposes a relationship recommender system for a business and employment-oriented social network. The presented system functions by extracting relevant information from the social network which it then uses to adequately recommend new contacts and job offers to users. The recommender system uses information gathered from job offer descriptions, user profiles and users’ actions. Then, different metrics are applied in order to discover new ties that are likely to convert into relationships.

A Hash Based Image Matching Algorithm for Social Networks

One of the main research trends over the last years has focused on knowledge extraction from social networks users. One of the main difficulties of this analysis is the lack of structure of the information and the multiple formats in which it can appear. The present article focuses on the analysis of the information provided by different users in image form. The problem that is intended to be solved is the detection of equal images (although they may have minimal transformations, such as a watermark), which allows establishing links between users who publish the same images. The solution proposed in the article is based on the comparison of hashes, which allows certain transformations that can be made to an image from a computational point of view.

Artificial neural networks used in optimization problems

Abstract Optimization problems often require the use of optimization methods that permit the minimization or maximization of certain objective functions. Occasionally, the problems that must be optimized are not linear or polynomial; they cannot be precisely resolved, and they must be approximated. In these cases, it is necessary to apply heuristics, which are able to resolve these kinds of problems. Some algorithms linearize the restrictions and objective functions at a specific point of the space by applying derivatives and partial derivatives for some cases, while in other cases evolutionary algorithms are used to approximate the solution. This work proposes the use of artificial neural networks to approximate the objective function in optimization problems to make it possible to apply other techniques to resolve the problem. The objective function is approximated by a non-linear regression that can be used to resolve an optimization problem. The derivate of the new objective function should be polynomial so that the solution of the optimization problem can be calculated.

GreenVMAS: Virtual Organization Based Platform for Heating Greenhouses Using Waste Energy from Power Plants

The gradual depletion of energy resources makes it necessary to optimize their use and to reuse them. Although great advances have already been made in optimizing energy generation processes, many of these processes generate energy that inevitably gets wasted. A clear example of this are nuclear, thermal and carbon power plants, which lose a large amount of energy that could otherwise be used for different purposes, such as heating greenhouses. The role of GreenVMAS is to maintain the required temperature level in greenhouses by using the waste energy generated by power plants. It incorporates a case-based reasoning system, virtual organizations and algorithms for data analysis and for efficient interaction with sensors and actuators. The system is context aware and scalable as it incorporates an artificial neural network, this means that it can operate correctly even if the number and characteristics of the greenhouses participating in the case study change. The architecture was evaluated empirically and the results show that the user’s energy bill is greatly reduced with the implemented system.

Swarm-Based Smart City Platform: A Traffic Application

Smart cities are proposed as a medium-term option for all cities. This article aims to propose an architecture that allows cities to provide solutions to interconnect all their elements. The study case focuses in locating and optimized regulation of traffic in cities. However, thanks to the proposed structure and the applied algorithms, the architecture is scalable in size of the sensor network, in functionality or even in the use of resources. A simulation environment that is able to show the operation of the architecture in the same way that a real city would, is presented.

Smart Cities Simulation Environment for Intelligent Algorithms Evaluation

This paper presents an adaptive platform that can simulate the centralized control of different smart city areas. For example, public lighting and intelligent management, public zones of buildings, energy distribution, etc. It can operate the hardware infrastructure and perform optimization both in energy consumption and economic control from a modular architecture which is fully adaptable to most cities. Machine-to-machine (M2M) permits connecting all the sensors of the city so that they provide the platform with a perfect perspective of the global city status. To carry out this optimization, the platform offers the developers a software that operates on the hardware infrastructure and merges various techniques of artificial intelligence (AI) and statistics, such as artificial neural networks (ANN), multi-agent systems (MAS) or a Service Oriented Approach (SOA), forming an Internet of Services (IoS). Different case studies were tested by using the presented platform, and further development is still underway with additional case studies.

ALTAIR: supervised methodology to obtain retinal vessels caliber

A back of the eye examination allows performing a noninvasive evaluation of the retinal microcirculation, as well as of the vascular damage induced by multiple cardiovascular risk factors. The objective of this work is to study the existing needs to lead to the development and validation (reliability and validity) of a methodology able to extract all the information from the images of the back of the eye to solve the studied needs. Its development will subsequently allow analyzing its utility in various clinical environments. Currently there are different works that evaluate the thickness of the retinal veins and arteries, but they require either full intervention by an observer or no intervention at all, so when facing incorrect analysis (none of them achieves a 100 % accuracy in automatic analysis) erroneous results can be a serious problem when drawing conclusions. The proposed solution refers to the second group (automatic), but providing a supervisor the possibility to interfere with the analysis when any kind of error is produced, which ideally will not happen many times. Thanks to this the possible subjectivity that can be introduced by the supervisor does not affect the final result of the analysis.

The Use of Drones in Spain: Towards a Platform for Controlling UAVs in Urban Environments

Rapid advances in technology make it necessary to prepare our society in every aspect. Some of the most significant technological developments of the last decade are the UAVs (Unnamed Aerial Vehicles) or drones. UAVs provide a wide range of new possibilities and have become a tool that we now use on a daily basis. However, if their use is not controlled, it could entail several risks, which make it necessary to legislate and monitor UAV flights to ensure, inter alia, the security and privacy of all citizens. As a result of this problem, several laws have been passed which seek to regulate their use; however, no proposals have been made with regards to the control of airspace from a technological point of view. This is exactly what we propose in this article: a platform with different modes designed to control UAVs and monitor their status. The features of the proposed platform provide multiple advantages that make the use of UAVs more secure, such as prohibiting UAVs’ access to restricted areas or avoiding collisions between vehicles. The platform has been successfully tested in Salamanca, Spain.