Gorka Azkune news

Adrian Núñez-Marcos, new doctor in MORElab

On December 18th, 2020, MORElab's member Adrian Núñez-Marcos has been honored with the PhD recognition. His dissertation, entitled "Contributions to Human Action Recognition using Deep Learning: Applications in Egocentric Vision” was advised by Dr. Gorka Azkune and Dr. Diego López de Ipiña

The VIVA panel was formed by:

Basilio Sierra (President, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)
Jan Kybic (Czech Technical University in Prague)
Aitor Almeida (Universidad de Deusto)

Aritz Bilbao Jayo participated in the "The 15th IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2018)".

Aritz Bilbao Jayo participated in the "The 15th IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2018)" held in Guangzhou(China) from October 8th to 12th, 2018.

He presented the paper "Embedding-level attention and multi-scale convolutional neural networks for behaviour modelling " authored by Aitor Almeida, Gorka Azkune and himself.

City4Age has been highlighted in the European Commission Digital Single Market Newsletter as a successful project story

The City4Age project has been highlighted in the European Commission Digital Single Market Newsletter as a successful project story. The European funded City4Age project aims to make cities more age-friendly. It will create innovative ICT tools and services for early detection of risks related to frailty and of Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI). The services will be tested in several European cities, as well as in Singapore.

City4Age receives the Deusto Research Social Impact Label

The City4Age project has received the Deusto Research Social Impact Label. The Deusto Research Social Impact Label recognizes research projects that demonstrate a potential social impact through:

its transformative action and potential social impact for people, entities, the environment or society in general;
its involvement, at different levels, with non-academic agents;
its contribution, from the scientific or study scope, and / or the application linked to themes of transformation, welfare, development and social justice.

Congratulations to the City4Age team.

Assistance to the Deep Learn summer school

Last week (17-21 of July), Bilbao had the pleasure of being host for theInternational Deep Learning Summer School. Five researchers of the group attended this event - Aitor Almeida, Gorka Azkune, Aritz Bilbao, Adrián Núñez and David Buján- and were able to meet with well known researchers in the Deep Learning field such as Li Deng, Michael Mozer and Marc’Aurelio Ranzato.

Oihane Gómez-Carmona participated in the “2nd International Multidisciplinary Conference on Computer and Energy Science”

Oihane Gómez Carmona participated in the “2nd International Multidisciplinary Conference on Computer and Energy Science” (Splitech 2017) held in Split (Croatia) from July 12th to 14th, 2017.

The main focus of the Splitech 2017 conference was Smart Cities, E-Health and IoT, including a Symposium on RFID & EMBEDDED SYSTEMS FOR INTERNET OF THINGS.

She presented three MORElab member's articles:

1."SmiWork: An Interactive Smart Mirror Platform for Workplace Health Promotion" authored by herself and Diego Casado-Mansilla.

2."An AAL system based on IoT Technologies and Linked Open Data for elderly monitoring in Smart Cities” authored by Aitor Almeida, Ruben Mulero, Gorka Azkune et al.

3."Improving Trilateration for Indoors Localization Using BLE Beacons" authored by Aitor de Blas and Diego López-de-Ipiña.

Special Collection on the Future of Data Analysis in Smart Cities (IF: 0.906)

http://journals.sagepub.com/page/dsn/collections/special-issues/future-data-analysis-smart-cities

To have your paper included, submit by November 2, 2017

Click here to submit your article

Smart Cities are shifting the focus on intelligent environments from self-contained smart homes to a city-wide holistic approach, where the whole city is a sensorized and computationally capable smart environment. This change of focus provides new research opportunities and challenges. City-wide data analysis systems should combine not only the users home sensor data, but also data recovered from municipal sensors and other relevant public datasets. Moreover, the dataspace of the Smart Cities is not only limited to physical sensors, but also to citizens’ online activity, how they interact in social networks and how this information can be exploited to provide better services. The cities of the future should provide a holistic approach to the problems of their citizens using all of the heterogeneous Big Data collected. Ensuring the privacy of the users’ data is also an important topic which needs specific attention in this upcoming field. The purpose of this special collection is to collect innovative and high-quality research contributions regarding both the data analysis applied to Smart Cities and the management of large quantities of city wide data. This special collection also aims to explore already deployed applications and case studies.

Specifically, we seek original contributions on the following topics:

Theoretical foundations of Smart Cities
Information fusion and data collection frameworks for heterogeneous data in Smart Cities
Sensor networks for diffused data sensing in Smart Cities
Pattern learning, activity recognition and behavior assessment
Applications of machine learning (e.g. unsupervised approaches, deep learning, neural networks...) and exploratory data analysis (e.g. statistical analysis, multivariate/univariate methods...) techniques to Smart Cities
Context and data management in city-wide infrastructure, Big Data approaches to heterogeneous information
Exploitation of citizens' activity in social networks as an online representation of the cities
User acceptance of Smart Cities technologies
Privacy, Security and Ethics aspects of large data management in Smart Cities
Case studies and applications of data analysis in Smart Cities

Keywords: Smart Cities, activity recognition, behavior modeling, pattern learning, information fusion, data management

The submitted manuscripts for this special collection will be peer-reviewed before publication.

Please submit your paper according to the following timetable for the special collection:

Manuscript Deadline

November 2, 2017

First Round of Reviews

February 2018

First Papers Published

May 2018

Lead Guest Editor

Aitor Almeida, DeustoTech – Fundación Deusto, Spain

aitor.almeida@deusto.es

Dr. Aitor Almeida is a researcher and project manager at the MORELab Research Group, DeustoTech-INTERNET Research Unit belonging to DeustoTech - Deusto Institute of Technology. He received a Bsc in Computer Engineering at the University of Deusto in 2004, an MSc in Software Development at the University of Deusto in 2005, and a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Deusto in 2013. During his PhD he researched the inclusion of vagueness and uncertainty in semantic context management and the distribution of the reasoning process in pervasive environments. He has taken part in several national and European projects, both as a researcher and as a team leader. His research interests include social network analysis, data mining, machine learning, pervasive computing, context-aware computing and the semantic web.

Guest Editors

Gorka Azkune, University of Deusto, Spain

gorka.azkune@deusto.es

Dr. Gorka Azkune is a researcher and lecturer in the University of Deusto, working at the MORElab Research Group at DeustoTech - Deusto Institute of Technology. He finished his studies in Computer Sciences in 2006 at the University of the Basque Country. He developed his Final Degree Project in the Max Planck Institut für Quantenoptik in the area of quantum voting protocols. In 2010, he obtained a MsC in Computer Science at the University of the Basque Country. He achieved his PhD in 2015 with a dissertation entitled "Learning for Dynamic and Personalised Knowledge-Based Activity Models" at the University of Deusto. His current research interests lie on human-centred intelligent systems and artificial intelligence. From 2006 to 2013, Gorka worked as a researcher in Tecnalia , working on national and international projects, such as Iward , Autorecon and Across . His main research areas were mobile robotics, artificial intelligence and artificial vision. He has several publications in peer-reviewed conferences and journals and he has participated in research summer schools such as ROS Fall School on cognition-enabled mobile manipulation and IFR research lectures.

Somaya Ben Allouch, Saxion University, The Netherlands

s.benallouch@saxion.nl

Somaya Ben Allouch, PhD is a senior researcher. She has lead the Technology, Health and Care research group at Saxion University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands since 2014. Her research interests are in the areas of adoption and acceptance of pervasive technologies and social robotics. She obtained her PhD in 2008 from the University of Twente where she was an assistant professor until 2014. During her PhD research she investigated the adoption and acceptance of pervasive technologies. Dr Ben Allouch was a visiting researcher at the Ambient Intelligence Research Lab of Stanford University in 2011 and 2012. Since 2013, she has been part of the editorial board of the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments. She has been and is currently involved in both European as national funded research projects with regard to the adoption and acceptance of pervasive technologies.

Bessam Abdulrazak, University of Sherbrooke, Canada

Bessam.Abdulrazak@usherbrooke.ca

Dr. Abdulrazak is professor at the University of Sherbrooke (Québec - Canada), director of the research center on smart habitats, and active researcher at the Research center on Aging and the Interdisciplinary Institute for Technological Innovation. He received a PhD of computer science from Telecom SudParis (France), a MSc in Robotics from UPMC - Paris VI (France), and a BSc engineering in Electronics from USTHB (Algeria). His research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Context-Awareness, Ambient Intelligence, Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing, Smart City, Gerontechnology and Assistive Technology. He has published more than 150 academic articles, and served on numerous conference/ journal committees related to his research interests.

Quarter Meeting of City4Age project in Montpellier, France

On the 27th and 28th of February, the Deustotech-Internet team represented by Gorka Azkune and Aitor Almeida attended the plenary meeting of the City4Age project in Montpellier, France. Special thanks for the CNRS team for hosting us.

First Project Review

MORElab members Aitor Almeida and Gorka Azkune attended the first review for the City4Age project, which took place in Brussels.

City4Age pilot sites videos

Check out the videos describing the project pilot sites on the City4Age YouTube channel.

MORElab receives a NVIDIA GPU Grant

We would like to thank NVIDIA for the GPU donated to our research group via the academic GPU seeding program. The donated hardware will be used to train deep neural networks for the analysis of the political discourse, allowing us to shorten the training times of the neural networks.

Quarter Meeting of City4Age project in Milan, Italy

On the 4th and 5th of September, the Deustotech-Internet team represented by Aitor Almeida and Gorka Azkune attended the Quarter Meeting of the City4Age project in Milan, Italy. The meeting was held at the Politecnico di Milano. In addition to discussing technical aspects of the project, the meeting also focused on the deployment of the pilots.

3rd general meeting for the City4Age project in Athens

On the 30^th and 31^th of May, the Deustotech-Internet team represented by Aitor Almeida and Gorka Azkune attended the 3^rd general meeting of the City4Age project in Athens, Greece. The discussion focused on the organization of the common infrastructure developed for the six pilot sites and the relations between the actions, activities, behaviors and risks.

Kick-off meeting for the City4Age project in Milan

On the 9^th and 10^th of December, the Deustotech-Internet team represented by Aitor Almeida, Gorka Azkune and Diego López-de-Ipiña attended the kick-off meeting of the City4Age project in Milan, Italy. The meeting was organized in the campus of the Politecnico di Milano. The discussions focused on the organization of the work packages and the deployments in six different cities.

Halmstad Workshop on Intelligent Environments Supporting Health and Wellbeing

MORElab researchers Gorka Azkune and Pablo Orduña participated on the Halmstad Workshop on Intelligent Environments Supporting Health and Wellbeing in Halmstad University (Sweden) on November 4th, 2015. Researchers from 8 universities participated. The focus of the workshop was on potential collaborations on configuring test bed resources to allow annotated data to be generated in different sites, shared through one common format to facilitate research and collaborations across research groups.

Approval of City4Age H2020 project

Last August, DeustoTech-Internet was notified about the approval of its 2^nd H2020 project in the topic “PHC 21 – 2015: Advancing active and healthy ageing with ICT: Early risk detection and intervention”. The project title is “City4Age: Elderly-friendly City services for active and healthy ageing”. It is a 30-month project that will deal with the research challenges associated to interlinking Active Assisted Living and Smart Cities domains in order to give place to Ambient Assisted Cities, which support elderly population in their daily interactions with the urban environment. It will explore city-wide services in order to monitor and support elderlies with mild cognitive impairments and frailty problems. In this project, the activity recognition work carried out by Dr. Gorka Azkune in his PhD thesis (http://morelab.deusto.es/media/publications/theses/gorka-azkune.pdf) will be further developed.

Open Data Day 2015

On February 20, MORElab research group and the "Diploma in Data Analysis, Research and Communication" organized the Open Data Day within the University of Deusto in Donostia/San Sebastián. For the third consecutive year, this event has been celebrated in conjunction with the International Open Data Hackathon. The meeting began with the talks by Imanol Argüeso (Open Data Euskadi), Leire Bardají (EuroHelp Consulting), Jorge Campanillas (Iurismática Abogados) and Iñaki Pariente de Prada (Basque Data Protection Authority). After the talks and throughout the day, the participants worked in these three workgroups:

Photos and videos of the meeting are available:

Visit to De Montfort University: Towards Ambient Assisted Cities

The Principal Researcher of DeustoTech-INTERNET (MORElab) Dr. Diego López-de-Ipiña visited De Montfort University in Leicester, England, where the PhD candidate Gorka Azkune Galparsoro is having a 6 week long placement to complete his PhD on the topic of activity modelling and identification using a hybrid knowledge- and data-based approach. There, Dr. Ipiña gave a talk about the activities of the DeustoTech-INTERNET research unit and more specifically, he reviewed in depth the concept of Ambient Assisted Cities: cities which are more accessible, inclusive and participative (the link to the pdf to be downloaded: ambientassitedcities.pdf )

Attendance to IEEE IS'14

Gorka Azkune participated in the 7th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Systems IS'14 held in Warsaw (Poland) from September 24th to 26th, 2014. He presented the article entitled "A Knowledge-Driven Tool for Automatic Activity Dataset Annotation".

MORElab's members will lead two workshops within the e-ghost summer courses

MORElab's members will organize two courses within the 2014 e-ghost series. The courses, which are hosted by the University of Deusto, are free and open to everyone who is interested in new open hardware/software technologies and science tendencies.

This year the courses lead by MORElab's members are: