Alejandro Baldominos

University Carlos III de Madrid | UC3M · Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used over the past years to solve many different artificial intelligence (AI) problems, providing significant advances in some domains and leading to state-of-the-art results. However, the topologies of CNNs involve many different parameters, and in most cases, their design remains a manual process tha...

Neuroevolution is the name given to a field of computer science that applies evolutionary computation for evolving some aspects of neural networks. After the AI Winter came to an end, neural networks reemerged to solve a great variety of problems. However, their usage requires designing their topology, a decision with a potentially high impact on p...

One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a blockchain, with different approaches and philosophies. However, many of them share one common feature: they require...

The education sector has been confronted with different challenges due to the situation caused by the pandemic, when families were asked to be confined at home as well as return when schools were opened. This lockdown situation presented both a challenge for the EdTech sector and for teachers and families. Consequently, this study analyzes the impo...

En Smile and Learn estamos buscando a una persona para realizar un Doctorado Industrial en el área de Inteligencia Artificial. Como parte de nuestra estrategia estamos desarollando un plan que pone a la IA como un elemento central, con el fin de proporcionar un aprendizaje personalizado y enriquecer la experiencia educativa. Algunas de nuestras lín...

Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is one of the most well-known services provided by Amazon for provisioning cloud computing resources, also known as instances. Besides the classical on-demand scheme, where users purchase compute capacity at a fixed cost, EC2 supports so-called spot instances, which are offered following a bidding scheme, where users can...

The use of digital educational material in classrooms has increased in recent years, now constituting a major market for publishers and companies. The present research addresses a digital material assessment in two different areas. First, the study through an evaluation of internal data collected on the platform shows an analysis of the use and imp...

En el sentido más purista del término, hablar de Big Data es hablar de información. Y no de cualquier información: se trata de una cantidad de información tan voluminosa que el simple hecho de almacenarla plantea retos, y tratar de procesarla y estudiarla podría suponer un enorme desafío. Por suerte, desde hace más de una década, científicos e inge...

In this special issue, we want to gather some innovative applications that are currently pushing forward the research on Blockchain technologies. In particular, we are interested also in those applications that put the focus on the data, enabling new processes that are able to leverage relevant knowledge from the data. This special issue will be su...

In the past few years, the use of new technologies and digital, educational material has been increasing. Owing to the situation brought about in Spain by the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, schools have closed and families were asked to confine at home since March 2020. During this period there has been a need of resources to be made available to...

Affiliate systems are a crucial piece of today’s online advertising. In affiliate systems, web traffic is directed from certain sites displaying ads to the websites of those company whose products or services are advertised. The way in which these ads are monetized is diverse and can respond to different models. In many cases, affiliates establish...

Dear Colleagues, In recent years, Deep Learning has quickly been becoming a de facto standard for solving real world problems of very diverse kinds. Techniques such as convolutional neural networks are outstanding performers when tackling computer vision problems, LSTMs and other recurrent architectures are proficiently solving natural language pr...

Dear Colleagues, For over 50 years, evolutionary computation has been widely used to obtain effective solutions to a large variety of problems which are computationally hard, and for which ad hoc heuristics might not exist. Since the origins of evolutionary algorithms, novel nature-inspired algorithms have been presented and successfully applied t...

The ability of detecting infections at an early stage in clinical environments is an important clinical problem. When an infection is not diagnosed on time, it may not only affect the health of the infected patient, but also spread and infect other people. In this paper, we propose the development of a clinical decision support system (CDSS) for d...

Metacognition is a construct that is noteworthy for its relationship with the prediction and enhancement of student performance. It is of interest in education, as well as in the field of cognitive psychology, because it contributes to competencies, such as learning to learn and the understanding of information. This study conducted research at a s...

The Implementation of new technologies in schools is increasing, a fact that invites one to think through and ponder about the cognitive implications that the use of digital material could have on learners (Gros, 2007). This research is about exploring the effect of using a certain number of digital activities that involve training skills related t...

Infections encompass a set of medical conditions of very diverse kinds that can pose a significant risk to health, and even death. As with many other diseases, early diagnosis can help to provide patients with proper care to minimize the damage produced by the disease, or to isolate them to avoid the risk of spread. In this context, computational i...

Smile and Learn is an intelligent platform with more than 4500 educational activities for children aged 3-12. The digital material developed covers all courses of primary education and most of the subjects with the different topic-related worlds with activities in the field of logics and mathematics, science, linguistics and tales, visual-spatial a...

The Blockchain is a distributed data structure implementing cryptographic mechanisms ensuring that the information cannot be tampered. Since its introduction in 2009 along with Bitcoin, Blockchains have successfully led not only to the appearance of new cryptocurrencies but also to the development of innovative and successful applications. Along wi...

Teaching and learning are changing and we need to adapt our materials through new ages. The digital material that are created have to adapt new pedagogical and technology changes. The tool Smile and Learn is a 360 adaptive, educational platform, for children aged 3 to 12 years. Designed by lead expert educators, its content reinforces multiple inte...

The use of digital materials for learning is increasing in the last years but, how these materials improve the students learning? In this research we explore the relation of how digital material, that include game elements, motivates our students and develop a cognitive performance. The use of game elements is also knowing as gamification. Previous...

Artificial Intelligence is becoming the main character of what is now being called the fourth industrial revolution. Its role is gaining importance in everyday life, and the reason is straightforward: it offers a wide range of possibilities to make life easier in many different aspects. This Special Issue has gathered a diverse set of applications...

This paper summarizes the top state-of-the-art contributions reported on the MNIST dataset for handwritten digit recognition. This dataset has been extensively used to validate novel techniques in computer vision, and in recent years, many authors have explored the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and other deep learning techniqu...

Being able to detect an infection at an early stage is a clinical problem of the utmost importance. An infection not diagnosed on time might not only severely affect the infected patient's health, but also to spread and start a focus of contagion to other people. In this paper, we propose a clinical decision support system to automatically diagnose...

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition due to the reaction to an infection. With certain changes in circulatory system, sepsis may progress to septic shock if it is left untreated. Therefore, early prognosis of septic shock may facilitate implementing correct treatment and prevent more serious complications. In this study, we assess the feasibility...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been considered by some experts as "the new electricity": it is called to revolutionize most knowledge fields, and change the way we approach development and innovation in every and each of those fields. Everyday, AI is breaking a new record in medicine, self-driving or gaming. Did you know that AI was able to beat...

Smile and Learn is an Ed-Tech company that runs a smart library with more that 100 applications, games and interactive stories, aimed at children aged two to 10 and their families. The platform gathers thousands of data points from the interaction with the system to subsequently offer reports and recommendations. Given the complexity of navigating...

Neuroevolution is the field of study that uses evolutionary computation in order to optimize certain aspect of the design of neural networks, most often its topology and hyperparameters. The field was introduced in the late-1980s, but only in the latest years the field has become mature enough to enable the optimization of deep learning models, suc...

One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a blockchain, with different approaches and philosofies. However, many of them share one common feature: they require p...

We have compared the performance of different machine learning techniques for human activity recognition. Experiments were made using a benchmark dataset where each subject wore a device in the pocket and another on the wrist. The dataset comprises thirteen activities, including physical activities, common postures, working activities and leisure a...

Introduction. Infections encompass a set of medical conditions of very diverse kinds that can pose a significant risk to health, or even death in some extreme cases. As with many other diseases, early diagnosis can help to provide patients' with proper care (e.g., supply of antibiotics) to minimize the damage produced by the disease, or in some cas...

Neuroevolution is a technique that has been successfully applied for over three decades in order to optimize certain aspects of neural networks by applying evolutionary algorithms. However, only in the recent years, the increase of computational resources has enabled to apply such techniques to deep and convolutional neural networks, where the numb...

Smile and Learn is an Ed-Tech company that runs a smart library with more that 100 applications, games and interactive stories, aimed at children aged 2 to 10 and their families. Given the complexity of navigating all the content, the library implements a recommender system. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two aspects of such system: the i...

Smile and Learn is an EdTech digital publisher that offers a smart library of close to 100 educational stories and gaming apps for mobile devices aimed at children aged 2 to 10 and their families. Given the complexity of navigating the content, a recommender system was developed. The system consists of two major components: one that generates conte...

The real estate market is exposed to many fluctuations in prices because of existing correlations with many variables, some of which cannot be controlled or might even be unknown. Housing prices can increase rapidly (or in some cases, also drop very fast), yet the numerous listings available online where houses are sold or rented are not likely to...

This paper describes an application of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), a well-known biologically-inspired technique for graph search, for solving a complex multi-objective task posed in the form of a video game, namely Planet Wars, which is itself based on a popular video game known as Galcon and was presented in the Google AI Challenge 2010. Throug...

The real estate market is exposed to many fluctuations in prices, because of existing correlations with many variables, some of which cannot be controlled or might even be unknown. Housing prices can increase rapidly (or in some cases, also drop very fast), yet the numerous listings available online where houses are sold or rented are not likely to...

The real estate market is exposed to many fluctuations in prices, because of existing correlations with many variables, some of which cannot be controlled or might even be unknown. Housing prices can increase rapidly (or in some cases, also drop very fast), yet the numerous listings available online where houses are sold or rented are not likely to...

For three decades, neuroevolution has applied evolutionary computation to the optimization of the topology of artificial neural networks, with most works focusing on very simple architectures. However, times have changed, and nowadays convolutional neural networks are the industry and academia standard for solving a variety of problems, many of whi...

Respected colleagues, We are now welcoming submissions for a Special Issue of the IJIMAI journal for March 2019. The Special Issue (SI) is entitled "Use Cases of Artificial Intelligence, Digital Marketing and Neuroscience". Please find all the information regarding this special issue in the attached file. IJIMAI (International Journal of Interac...

Human activity recognition is a challenging problem for context-aware systems and applications. It is gaining interest due to the ubiquity of different sensor sources, wearable smart objects, ambient sensors, etc. This task is usually approached as a supervised machine learning problem, where a label is to be predicted given some input data, such a...

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological conditions, affecting 2.2 million people only in the U.S., causing seizures that can have a very serious impact in affected people's lives, including death. Because of this, there is a remarkable research interest in detecting epilepsy as it occurs, so that it effects and consequences can be mitigated...

Physical activity is widely known to be a key factor towards achieving a healthy life and reducing the chance of developing certain diseases. However, there are many different physical activities having different effort requirements or having different benefits on health. The reason why automatic recognition of physical activity is useful is twofol...

This paper presents DataCare, a solution for intelligent healthcare management. This product is able not only to retrieve and aggregate data from different key performance indicators in healthcare centers, but also to estimate future values for these key performance indicators and, as a result, fire early alerts when undesirable values are about to...

This work aims at discovering and extracting relevant patterns underlying social interactions. To do so, some knowledge extracted from Facebook, a social networking site, is formalised by means of an Extended Social Graph, a data structure which goes beyond the original concept of a social graph by also incorporating information on interests. When...

Physical activity is widely known to be one of the key elements of a healthy life. The many benefits of physical activity described in the medical literature include weight loss and reductions in the risk factors for chronic diseases. With the recent advances in wearable devices, such as smartwatches or physical activity wristbands, motion tracking...

This paper focuses on the problem of physical activity recognition, i.e., the development of a system which is able to learn patterns from data in order to be able to detect which physical activity (e.g. running, walking, ascending stairs, etc.) a certain user is performing. While this field is broadly explored in the literature, there are few work...

La importancia del Big Data descansa en la inmensa cantidad de datos que se generan cada día, especialmente a raíz de la eclosión de las redes sociales online (Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus. etc.) y del crecimiento exponencial de dispositivos, tales como los smartphones, smartwatches, wearables, etc. o las redes de sensores; así como en la posibil...

This paper presents the results and conclusions found when predicting the behavior of gamers in commercial videogames datasets. In particular, it uses Variable-Order Markov (VOM) to build a probabilistic model that is able to use the historic behavior of gamers and to infer what will be their next actions. Being able to predict with accuracy the ne...

This paper introduces an approach based on Genetic Algorithms to learn levels from the Mario AI simulator, based on the Infinite Mario Bros. game (which is, at the same time, based on the Super Mario World game from Nintendo). In this approach, an autonomous agent playing Mario is able to learn a sequence of actions in order to maximize the score,...

This work describes the development of a web recommender system implementing both collaborative filtering and content-based filtering. Moreover, it supports two different working modes, either sponsored or related, depending on whether websites are to be recommended based on a list of ongoing ad campaigns or in the user preferences. Novel recommend...

This paper explores an approach to physical rehabilitation using state-of-the-art technologies in virtual reality and motion tracking; in particular, Oculus Rift DK2 (released in July, 2014) and Intel RealSense (released in November, 2014) are used. A game is developed which requires from the patient to perform an established set of abduction and a...

Medical literature have recognized physical activity as a key factor for a healthy life due to its remarkable benefits. However, there is a great variety of physical activities and not all of them have the same effects on health nor require the same effort. As a result, and due to the ubiquity of commodity devices able to track users' motion, there...

Physical activity is recognized as one of the key factors for a healthy life due to its beneficial effects. The range of physical activities is very broad, and not all of them require the same effort to be performed nor have the same effects on health. For this reason, automatically recognizing the physical activity performed by a user (or patient)...

Vivimos en un mundo lleno de emprendedores, donde cada día se crean nuevas empresas que han detectado un nicho de negocio donde ejercer su actividad. Algunas tendrán éxito y otras fracasarán. ¿Podemos saber de primeras cuál será el futuro de nuestra empresa? Dar respuesta a esta pregunta es difícil, porque el éxito depende de muchos factores. Sin...

This paper proposes the design of an evolutionary algorithm for building classifiers specifically aimed towards performing classification and sentiment analysis over texts. Moreover, it has properties taken from Artificial Immune Systems, as it tries to resemble biological systems since they are able to discriminate harmful from innocuous bodies (i...

This work describes a proposal for developing and testing a scalable machine learning architecture able to provide real-time predictions or analytics as a service over domain-independent big data, working on top of the Hadoop ecosystem and providing real-time analytics as a service through a RESTful API. Systems implementing this architecture could...

This paper proposes the design of a general-purpose domain-independent knowledge model formalizing and managing the circumstantial knowledge involved in the human interaction process, i.e., a Situation Model. Its design is aimed to be embodied into a human-like interaction system, thus enriching the quality of the interaction by providing context-a...

This work aims at discovering and extracting relevant patterns underlying social inter- actions. To do so, some knowledge extracted from Facebook, a social networking site, is formalized by means of an Extended Social Graph, a data structure which goes beyond the original concept of a social graph by also incorporating information on interests. Wh...

This project focuses on the circumstantial aspects of human-like interaction. Its purpose is in the first place to design and develop a general-purpose Situation Model, which would enhance any natural interaction system by providing knowledge on the interaction context, and secondly to implement an intuitive management tool to edit the knowledge ba...

In this paper we present Cognos Toolkit, a set of tools (methodology, formalization scheme based on XML and software components) which allow do the integral process of annotation the pragmatic information of a corpus, facilitating the training of Models of Dialogue. To do this, firstly we analyzed the existing software oriented to the Corpus annota...