Abstract: In order to make improvements to teaching, it is vital to know what students think of the way they are taught. With that purpose in mind, exhaustively analyzing the forums associated with the subjects taught at the Universitat Oberta de Cataluya (UOC) would be extremely helpful, as the university's students often post comments on their learning experiences in them. Exploiting the content of such forums is not a simple undertaking. The volume of data involved is very large, and performing the task manually would require a great deal of effort from lecturers. As a first step to solve this problem, we propose a tool to automatically analyze the posts in forums of communities of UOC students and teachers, with a view to systematically mining the opinions they contain. This article defines the architecture of such tool and explains how lexical-semantic and language technology resources can be used to that end. For pilot testing purposes, the tool has been used to identify students' opinions on the UOC's Business Intelligence master's degree course during the last two years. The paper discusses the results of such test. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it demonstrates the feasibility of using natural language parsing techniques to help teachers to make decisions. Secondly, it introduces a simple tool that can be refined and adapted to a virtual environment for the purpose in question.

Abstract: Every day, lifelogging devices, available for recording different aspects of our daily life, increase in number, quality and functions, just like the multiple applications that we give to them. Applying wearable devices to analyse the nutritional habits of people is a challenging application based on acquiring and analyzing life records in long periods of time. However, to extract the information of interest related to the eating patterns of people, we need automatic methods to process large amount of life-logging data (e.g. recognition of food-related objects). Creating a rich set of manually labeled samples to train the algorithms is slow, tedious and subjective. To address this problem, we propose a novel method in the framework of Active Labeling for construct- ing a training set of thousands of images. Inspired by the hierarchical sampling method for active learning [6], we propose an Active forest that organizes hierarchically the data for easy and fast labeling. Moreover, introducing a classifier into the hierarchical structures, as well as transforming the feature space for better data clustering, additionally im- prove the algorithm. Our method is successfully tested to label 89.700 food-related objects and achieves significant reduction in expert time labelling.
Active labeling application applied to food-related object recognition ResearchGate. Available from: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/262252017Activelabelingapplicationappliedtofood-relatedobjectrecognition [accessed Jul 14, 2015].

Abstract: In this paper we define a bidimensional extension of Stochastic Context-Free Grammars for page segmentation of structured documents. Two sets of text classification features are used to perform an initial classification of each zone of the page. Then, the page segmentation is obtained as the most likely hypothesis according to a grammar. This approach is compared to Conditional Random Fields and results show significant improvements in several cases. Furthermore, grammars provide a detailed segmentation that allowed a semantic evaluation which also validates this model.

Abstract: This note introduces a visual attention model of text localization in real-world scenes. The core of the model built upon the proto-object concept is discussed. It is shown how such dynamic mid-level representation of the scene can be derived in the framework of an action-perception loop engaging salience, text information value computation, and eye guidance mechanisms.
Preliminary results that compare model generated scanpaths with those eye-tracked from human subjects are presented.

Abstract: Human body segmentation is a hard task because of the high variability in appearance produced by changes in the point of view, lighting conditions, and number of articulations of the human body. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach for the segmentation of the human body. In a first step, a set of human limbs are described, normalized to be rotation invariant, and trained using cascade of classifiers to be split in a tree structure way. Once the tree structure is trained, it is included in a ternary Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. This first classification step is applied in a windowing way on a new test image, defining a body-like probability map, which is used as an initialization of a GMM color modelling and binary Graph Cuts optimization procedure. The proposed methodology is tested in a novel limb-labelled data set. Results show performance improvements of the novel approach in comparison to classical cascade of classifiers and human detector-based Graph Cuts segmentation approaches.

Abstract: The recognition of unconstrained handwriting images is usually based on vectorial representation and statistical classification. Despite their high representational power, graphs are rarely used in this field due to a lack of efficient graph-based recognition methods. Recently, graph similarity features have been proposed to bridge the gap between structural representation and statistical classification by means of vector space embedding. This approach has shown a high performance in terms of accuracy but had shortcomings in terms of computational speed. The time complexity of the Hungarian algorithm that is used to approximate the edit distance between two handwriting graphs is demanding for a real-world scenario. In this paper, we propose a faster graph matching algorithm which is derived from the Hausdorff distance. On the historical Parzival database it is demonstrated that the proposed method achieves a speedup factor of 12.9 without significant loss in recognition accuracy.

Abstract: Confident use of medial surfaces in medical decision support systems requires evaluating their quality for detecting pathological deformations and describing anatomical volumes. Validation in the medical imaging field is a challenging task mainly due to the difficulties for getting consensual ground truth. In this paper we propose a validation benchmark for assessing medial surfaces in the context of medical applications. Our benchmark includes a home-made database of synthetic medial surfaces and volumes and specific scores for evaluating surface accuracy, its stability against volume deformations and its capabilities for accurate reconstruction of anatomical volumes.