Papers by Ana Fernández Vilas
EDULEARN proceedings, Jul 1, 2019
Since the amount of scientific papers is continuously growing, researchers and students are usual... more Since the amount of scientific papers is continuously growing, researchers and students are usually overwhelmed trying to be updated in their fields. In this paper it is presented the architecture of a new tool, coined Enhanced Paper Reader (EPR), that will support readers in this work by providing smart summaries of pdf technical documents. These smart summaries will combine text and images obtained from the documents in order to provide helpful information for them to decide if the document should be read in more detail or what sections are the most relevant. With the idea of adapting the EPR tool to the students, it would use personal information (learning background, other previous readings, etc.) together with learning preferences (text, image, voice, etc.) in order to display the smart summaries in the most efficient way.
Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Sep 20, 2006
Due to the complex infrastructure of web applications (using application servers, web servers, da... more Due to the complex infrastructure of web applications (using application servers, web servers, database servers, etc.) response times perceived by clients can be significantly larger than they would like. The same can be applied to web services that have been implemented using the same web technology. On the other side, repeated invocations to the same "readonly" web service with the same request data may often produce the same response from the provider, what can be considered a useless work. In the search for a performance improvement, we propose a cache-based extension to the architecture that can enhance current web services architecture.
Concentration of population in urban centers is a global problem for which different strategies i... more Concentration of population in urban centers is a global problem for which different strategies in order to organize different processes in cities and improve the quality of life are required. The creation of smart communities is shown as a sustainable solution since they deal with various key aspects, such as traffic management and mobility, through the use of information technologies (ITs). This work presents a review of recent studies using information technologies for urban analysis and mobility in cities. A descriptive analysis of automated methods for collecting and analyzing citizens' mobility patterns is performed; it is centered in smart card use, geolocation and geotagging. It is concluded that a robust communication infrastructure, supported by an efficient computational platform allowing big data management and ubiquitous computing, is a crucial aspect for urban management in a smart community.
Tratamiento formal de sistemas con requisitos de tiempo real críticos
Esta tesis se enmarca dentro de la disciplina del tratamiento formal de sistemas con requisitos d... more Esta tesis se enmarca dentro de la disciplina del tratamiento formal de sistemas con requisitos de tiempo real criticos, una vez han sido completa o parcialmente resueltos los principales problemas teoricos en el ambito de los metodos formales con requisitos de dichas caracteristicas, el objetivo de este trabajo de tesis es ligeramente diferente. Con el fin de mejorar la calidad del software, es nuestra intencion con jugar dos soluciones de diferente naturaleza: la formalizacion del proceso software y una estructura de proceso software iterativa e incremental, cordinando la correccion de los metodos formales y lo flexible de un ciclo de vida que no congela los requisitos en fases tempranas y divide la complejidad. El objetivo central de esta tesis es la extension de la metodologia formal SCTL/ROS, conjugando ambos enfoques, para la aplicacion al ambito de los sistemas con requisitos de tiempo real criticos. En base a este objetivo, se define el modelo de estados MUS-T, y la logica temporal SCTL-T; extensiones con tiempo denso del modelo MUS y la logica SCTL. Ademas se proporcionan metodos de decision orientados K analisis y a sintesis que articulan el modelo de ciclo de vida propuesto en la produccion de este tipo de sistemas. Para garantizar la eficiencia de la metodologia se propone un algoritmo de minimizacion. Por ultimo, para su validacion se presenta un caso de estudio en el estado del arte de los sistemas de tiempo real criticos.
Is interpersonal participation relevant to pass?
The emergence of E-Learning platforms is innovating the learning process. The platforms store inf... more The emergence of E-Learning platforms is innovating the learning process. The platforms store information about the actions of teachers and students in their databases, generating large volumes of data, which enables the measurement of learning acquisition. Nonetheless, interaction with the platform is not always a synonymous of learning. The main objective of this work is the analysis the relationship between the frequencies of interaction with the acquisition of knowledge reflected in academic performance. We analyse the interpersonal and the content's interaction of students of higher education in a blended course to classify students and to infer their performance.
Identifying urban crowds using geo-located Social media data: a Twitter experiment in New York City
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, May 2, 2016
The massive growth of GPS equipped smartphones coupled with the increasing importance of Social M... more The massive growth of GPS equipped smartphones coupled with the increasing importance of Social Media has led to the emergence of new services over LBSNs (Location-based Social Networks) where both, opinions and location, are shared. This proactive attitude allow us to consider citizens as sensors in motion whose information supports our approach: monitoring multitudes or crowds all around the city. More specifically, our proposal is mining geotagged data from LBSNs in order to analyze crowds according to different parameters as size, duration, composition, motivation, cohesion and proximity. This analysis is gathered under a methodology for crowd detection in cities that combines social data mining, density-based clustering and outlier detection into a solution that can operate on-the-fly. This methodology enables foreseeing crowds in short term based on the prior analysis of time and previous behavior of individuals in the geographical area under study. Our approach was validated using Twitter, as public social network par excellence, to analyze geotagged data in New York City on a normal day (reference day) and on New Year’s Eve, as the study day, when public crowds are expected.
Journal of Evolutionary Biology, May 3, 2012
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jul 14, 2023
A communication protocol for the distribution of cryptographic keys generated by a quantum random... more A communication protocol for the distribution of cryptographic keys generated by a quantum random number generator (QRNG) has been developed by introducing a minor modification to Kerberos and using SRP as the authentication mechanism. The protocol, named Qerberos, allows two users to acquire the same symmetric key generated by a trusted third party with access to a QRNG, whose keys have higher entropy than a classical generator. An implementation that employs two different QRNGs has been tested for different parameters achieving good performance and short request times.
Using Decentralized Aggregation for Federated Learning with Differential Privacy
Can the type of content you share on eLearning forums reveal what kind of student you are?
Revista Iberoamericana De Tecnologías Del Aprendizaje, 2021
Trending topics on forums or social networks are now being analysed to know our preferences and n... more Trending topics on forums or social networks are now being analysed to know our preferences and needs. This line of thought can be applied to the educational context. In this study we want to analyze what information on the profile of students can be inferred by analyzing their performance in educational forums and if it is possible to classify them by applying a taxonomy with a quantitative and qualitative perspective of their social interaction. To achieve this, our methodology will be divided into two stages. The first stage consists of preprocessing, classifying and analyzing the messages of the educational forum. In the second stage, the analysis of the messages in the forums is combined with a taxonomy of five different student profiles. These profiles were built according to two types of interactions (social interaction and interaction with content) with the online platform from a quantitative perspective. However, this article proposes to analyze the social interactions of the five proposed profiles from a qualitative perspective. Our results validate the application of the Extended Taxonomy when qualitative and quantitative approaches are applied.
Inge-Cuc, Jan 31, 2015
Concentration of population in urban centers is a global problem for which different strategies i... more Concentration of population in urban centers is a global problem for which different strategies in order to organize different processes in cities and improve the quality of life are required. The creation of smart communities is shown as a sustainable solution since they deal with various key aspects, such as traffic management and mobility, through the use of information technologies (ITs). This work presents a review of recent studies using information technologies for urban analysis and mobility in cities. A descriptive analysis of automated methods for collecting and analyzing citizens' mobility patterns is performed; it is centered in smart card use, geolocation and geotagging. It is concluded that a robust communication infrastructure, supported by an efficient computational platform allowing big data management and ubiquitous computing, is a crucial aspect for urban management in a smart community.
Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, Oct 18, 2018
Internet of Things (IoT) merges different technologies to provide the needed infrastructure for a... more Internet of Things (IoT) merges different technologies to provide the needed infrastructure for an adequate inter-device connection and data exchange, with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) being one of the latest acquisitions. The use of BLE beacons offers a straightforward approach to broadcast information to any device being in the coverage zone and able to process such signal. Instead of this static solution, in this paper, we face an alternative approach that, combining both Wi-Fi and BLE beacon technologies, is able to dynamically adapt the information being broadcast depending on the particular devices in the coverage area. Taking advantage of the beacon device communications, we propose to monitor the space occupancy throughout the study area (typically inside a building) by following the beacon device data exchange. This information would be later used to improve space analysis. As a proof of concept, we have conducted an experiment inside a faculty to check the potentiality of the proposal, obtaining promising results.
Computer Networks, Feb 1, 2018
Ad hoc architectures have emerged as a valuable alternative to centralized participatory sensing ... more Ad hoc architectures have emerged as a valuable alternative to centralized participatory sensing systems due to their infrastructure-less nature, which ensures good availability, easy maintenance and direct user communication. As a result, they need to incorporate content-aware assessment mechanisms to deal with a common problem in participatory sensing: information assessment. Easy contribution encourages users' participation and improves the sensing task but may result in large amounts of data, which may not be valid or relevant. Currently, prioritization is the only totally ad hoc scheme to assess user-generated alerts. This strategy prevents duplicates from congesting the network. However, it does not include the assessment of every generated alert and does not deal with low-quality or irrelevant alerts. In order to ensure users receive only interesting alerts and the network is not compromised, we propose two collaborative alert assessment mechanisms that, while keeping the network flat, provide an effective message filter. Both of them rely on opportunistic collaboration with nearby peers. By simulating their behavior in a real urban area, we have proved them able to decrease network load while maintaining alert delivery ratio.
Am I failing this course?
The inclusion of e-learning platforms in the traditional education allows obtaining a lot of data... more The inclusion of e-learning platforms in the traditional education allows obtaining a lot of data about the students' behavior. Studying these data using data mining and learning analytics techniques allows detecting different behavior patterns and predicting future results. One of the big challenges in education is being able to predict the students' failure before it occurs, and avoid it. Being aware of this challenge, and inside the learning analytics context, this paper describes a detection risk algorithm that tries to detect the students who are at risk of failing the course based on their interaction with an e-learning platform. The algorithm is based on time series formed by the daily students' interactions with the platform. More concretely, the trend component of the time series is used as a predictor for the students' results. We apply our algorithm to one course of the 2nd-year of the Telecommunication Engineering Degree at the University of Vigo, obtaining some encouraging results.
A Review on Cryptocurrency Transaction Methods for Money Laundering
Molecular Ecology, Aug 24, 2015
The adaptive potential of a population depends on the amount of additive genetic variance for qua... more The adaptive potential of a population depends on the amount of additive genetic variance for quantitative traits of evolutionary importance. This variance is a direct function of the expected frequency of heterozygotes for the loci which affect the trait (QTL). It has been argued, but not demonstrated experimentally, that long-term response to selection is more dependent on QTL allelic diversity than on QTL heterozygosity. Conservation programmes, aimed at preserving this variation, usually rely on neutral markers rather than on quantitative traits for making decisions on management. Here, we address, both through simulation analyses and experimental studies with Drosophila melanogaster, the question of whether allelic diversity for neutral markers is a better indicator of a high adaptive potential than expected heterozygosity. In both experimental and simulation studies, we established synthetic populations for which either heterozygosity or allelic diversity was maximized using information from QTL (simulations) or unlinked neutral markers (simulations and experiment). The synthetic populations were selected for the quantitative trait to evaluate the evolutionary potential provided by the two optimization methods. Our results show that maximizing the number of alleles of a low number of markers implies higher responses to selection than maximizing their heterozygosity.
Reduction of Energy Consumption in the Home Using Gamification in the Systems of Energy Management (HEM)
The worldwide trend in the increase of energy consumption has led many researchers to be interest... more The worldwide trend in the increase of energy consumption has led many researchers to be interested in proposing methods that allow the reduction of their consumption. It has been shown in various cases how positive changes in human behavior have been achieved through gamification. This article proposes a gamification approach that uses a system of energy management in the home to achieve greater energy saving.
Applied sciences, Mar 29, 2023
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jan 29, 2021
In this paper, we present a novel approach for broadcasting information based on a Bluetooth Low ... more In this paper, we present a novel approach for broadcasting information based on a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) ibeacon technology. We propose a dynamic method that uses a combination of Wi-Fi and BLE technology where every technology plays a part in a user discovery and broadcasting process. In such system, a specific ibeacon device broadcasts the information when a user is in proximity. Using experiments, we conduct a scenario where the system discovers users, disseminates information, and later we use collected data to examine the system performance and capability. The results show that our proposed approach has a promising potential to become a powerful tool in the discovery and broadcasting concept that can be easily implemented and used in business environments.
Virtual Web Services
IGI Global eBooks, Jan 18, 2011
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Papers by Ana Fernández Vilas