Antoni Martínez Ballesté

• Universitat Rovira i Virgili

The ageing process is a multifaceted phenomenon that affects individuals’ physical, cognitive, and psychological well-being over time. To promote healthy ageing, in the mid-2010s, the World Health Organisation introduced the concept of intrinsic capacity (IC) as the set of physical and mental capacities of an individual. These capacities, categoris...

La profesión docente es una actividad gratificante, al mismo tiempo que se caracteriza por su complejidad, exigencia y estrés. Las herramientas tecnológicas, junto con la Inteligencia Artificial, permiten la transformación de los entonos educativos, propiciando una experiencia más enriquecedora tanto para el profesorado como para el alumnado. La re...

Smart classrooms are the next frontier in education to accelerate and improve both teaching and learning processes. These environments integrate sensors, ubiquitous computing systems, Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, and high-speed data networks to create more cognitive, effective, interactive, and adaptive learning settings. Among other ap...

As society experiences accelerated ageing, understanding the complex biological processes of human ageing, which are affected by a large number of variables and factors, becomes increasingly crucial. Artificial intelligence (AI) presents a promising avenue for ageing research, offering the ability to detect patterns, make accurate predictions, and...

The purpose of the article is to understand the current state of both the technology and the implementation of emotion recognition in the educational environment. The goal is to obtain detailed information about the current state of emotion recognition technology and how its practical use is being carried out in educational settings. In this line,...

Context-aware classrooms augment traditional classrooms with unprecedented sensing and communication capabilities to monitor and analyse large amounts of contextual data. Enriching classrooms with these data opens up new opportunities to enhance the learning experience in education centres. However, implementing and deploying context-aware classroo...

Smart classrooms are physical learning spaces that, using data from the environment, students and teachers, are able to provide timely and valuable information to improve teaching and learning processes and foster decision-making. In this article, we provide an overview of how artificial intelligence techniques are being used to gain insights into...

Smart transportation systems are an integral part of the smart cities of tomorrow. With the proliferation of miniaturised sensors, IoT devices and 5G communication technologies, plenty of opportunities are yet to be developed to make transport systems more convenient, from the user side, and more cost-efficient and sustainable from the service prov...

Smart classrooms augment traditional classrooms with sensors, IoT devices and data networks, and have become a promising arena for context-awareness studies. The collection of contextual data opens the door to numerous applications like environmental sensing, one of the most demanded abilities to face the COVID-19 emergency. To this end, this artic...

The advent of decentralised systems and the continuous collection of personal data managed by public and private entities require the application of measures to guarantee the privacy of individuals. Due to the necessity to preserve both the privacy and the utility of such data, different techniques have been proposed in the literature. Microaggrega...

Intelligent transportation systems will play a key role in the smart cities of the future. In particular, railway transportation is gaining attention as a promising solution to cope with the mobility challenges in large urban areas. Thanks to the miniaturisation of sensors and the deployment of fast data networks, the railway industry is being augm...

The proper exploitation of vast amounts of event data by means of process mining techniques enables the discovery, monitoring and improvement of business processes, allowing organizations to develop more efficient business intelligence systems. However, event data often contain personal and/or confidential information that, unless properly managed,...

Due to society aging, age-related issues such as mild cognitive impairments (MCI) and dementia are attracting the attention of health professionals, scientists and governments. Seniors suffering from such impairments notice a slight deterioration in their cognitive abilities, which may lead to memory loss and behavioural disorders. In consequence,...

The Internet of Things facilitates the collection of large amounts of data: sensors, smartphones, and even home appliances, generate a data deluge about individuals, their context and the events in their daily life. Providers can analyse these data in order to extract patterns and increase knowledge about their services, either on their own or by t...

The advances in the miniaturisation of electronic devices and the deployment of cheaper and faster data networks have propelled environments augmented with contextual and real-time information, such as smart homes and smart cities. These context-aware environments have opened the door to numerous opportunities for providing added-value, accurate an...

Critically ill patients that stay in Intensive Care Units (ICU) for long periods suffer from Post-Intensive Care Syndrome or ICU Acquired Weakness, whose effects can decrease patients’ quality of life for years. To prevent such issues and aiming at shortening intensive care treatments, Early Mobilisation (EM) has been proposed as an encouraging tec...

Featured Application This article recalls the concept of cognitive city and provides a timely review of the state of the art in the field of information security and privacy for cognitive cities, understood as artificial-intelligence-augmented smart cities. Also, it suggests several research lines that are going to be relevant in the years ahead, t...

The healthcare sector is rapidly changing to incorporate new technologies Antoni that enable the collection of unprecedented amounts of data. New paradigms such as mobile and smart healthcare are founded on these new technologies, such as the IoT, and the data they collect are no longer only medical but, instead, they refer to contextual informatio...

Worldwide, thousands of video surveillance cameras record our daily activities. People are aware that video surveillance is deployed for the sake of security. However, the privacy of individuals would be endangered if the proper measures were not considered. Privacy-aware video surveillance has historically been addressed by proposals based on dete...

Location-Based Services (LBSs) provide users especially in smartphones with information and services based on their location and interests. Predicting people's next location could help in improving the quality of such services and, in turn, boosting people's confidence on those services. Any successful LBS algorithm or model should target three maj...

Predicting people's next location has attracted the attention of both scientists and large Internet companies, for a variety of reasons. The analysis of location data collected from smart mobile devices paves the way for the improvement of current location based services and the rise of new business models, based on rich notifications related to th...

Smart cities have sensors and communication infrastructures that provide humongous amounts of data. People can extend this infrastructure, acting as independent, mobile sensors through their smartphones, enabling opportunistic sensing. This information provides locality and timeliness of measurements that would otherwise be unavailable. Researchers...

Precision in predicting people's next location plays a key role in the success of advanced Location-Based Services (LBSs). Models in the literature have achieved satisfactory results, but they lack exploiting of timestamps-sensitive property while combining it with locations sequences. In this paper, we propose a location prediction model in which...

In this article, we explain in detail the internal structures and databases of a smart health application. Moreover, we describe how to generate a statistically sound synthetic dataset using real-world medical data.

Instrumentos: Prototipo real de valoración del dolor neonatal Instrumentos: Prototipo real de valoración del dolor neonatal Enferm. anest.-reanim. ter. dolor (Internet) Vol. RESUMEN Introducción y objetivos: Diseñar un sistema inteligente y automático para la valorar el dolor en neonatos ingresados en las unidades de cuidados intensivos (UCIN). Mét...

The aim of this chapter is to describe a system for the private outdoor monitoring of patients with Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI) and dementia. The system has been designed for patients suffering from early stages of Alzheimer's disease and people suffering from MCI and dementia. Virtually, the system may be applied to any person capable of livi...

Face de-identification aims at preserving the privacy of people by concealing faces in images and videos. In this paper, we propose a defeating algorithm for face de-identification methods that are based on DCT-block scrambling. These methods protect faces by scrambling the AC and DC coefficients of the DCT blocks corresponding to a face region in...

The aim of this chapter is to describe a system for the private outdoor monitoring of patients with Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI) and dementia. The system has been designed for patients suffering from early stages of Alzheimer's disease and people suffering from MCI and dementia. Virtually, the system may be applied to any person capable of livi...

The SIMPATIC project (acronym for Intelligent System for the Private and Autonomous Surveillance based on Information and Communication Technologies, in Catalan) addresses the building of a monitoring system for people affected with Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI). It consists of a mobile app running on the patient's smartphone and a server that a...

Thousands of video files are stored in surveillance databases. Pictures of individuals are considered personal data and, thus, their disclosure must be prevented. Although video surveillance is done for the sake of security, the privacy of individuals could be endangered if the proper measures are not taken. In this chapter we claim that a video-su...

Population pyramids have rapidly changed their shape worldwide. Specially in industrialised countries, where a steady ageing process is taking place. Due to the ageing of the population, age-related illnesses such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia are becoming commonplace and healthcare systems struggle to improve the quality of life...

The aim of this chapter is to describe a system for the private outdoor monitoring of patients with Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI) and dementia. The system has been designed for patients suffering from early stages of Alzheimer's disease and people suffering from MCI and dementia. Virtually, the system may be applied to any person capable of livi...

The new era of mobile health ushered in by the wide adoption of ubiquitous computing and mobile communications has brought opportunities for governments and companies to rethink their concept of healthcare. Simultaneously, the worldwide urbanization process represents a formidable challenge and attracts attention toward cities that are expected to...

Pain is an issue that medicine considers of great importance. The treatment of pain and discomfort is essential during hospitalisation procedures, specially for newborn infants because, first, they are not able to communicate that they are in pain; and second large periods of pain or discomfort can lead to major issues. In order to assess the pain/...

The so-called Information Society is founded on information and communication technologies (ICT). A wide variety of people use ICT to create, distribute, consume and manipulate information in a daily basis. Although there are experts skilled in security issues, most ICT users have not got a vast knowledge and understanding of the risks that a wrong...

Age-related diseases are becoming more prominent due to life expectancy increase in developed countries. Mild cognitive impairment and several types of dementia like Alzheimer's disease are gaining importance both socially and economically. Patients suffering from these diseases have different degrees of autonomy and, thus, different needs. Often,...

The so-called Information Society is founded on information and communication technologies (ICT). A wide variety of people use ICT to create, distribute, consume and manipulate information in a daily basis. Although there are experts skilled in security issues, most ICT users have not got a vast knowledge and understanding of the risks that a wrong...

In this paper, we present the concept of double-phase microaggregation as an improvement of classical microaggregation for the protection of privacy in distributed scenarios without fully trusted parties. We apply this new concept in the context of mobile health and we show that a distributed architecture consisting of patients and several intermed...

Cities are growing steadily, and the process of urbanization is a common trend in the world. Although cities are getting bigger, they are not necessarily getting better. With the aim to provide citizens with a better place to live, a new concept of a city was born: the smart city. The real meaning of smart city is not strictly defined, but it has g...

This paper defines a new methodology for trustworthy video surveillance databases, which fulfills four crucial properties: high accuracy, reversibility, real-time performance and information security. We detect the regions of interest (e.g. faces of people), which are protected by means of the alteration of the coefficients of the compressed video...

Cities are steadily growing and the process of urbanisation is prevalent worldwide. With the aim to provide citizens with a better place to live, a new concept of city was born: the Smart City. This concept has gained much attention and many "regular" cities are taking action so as to become "smart". To do so, cities are deploying and using informa...

The consideration of security and privacy is a linchpin of the social acceptance of pervasive technology. This paper paves the way to the development of trustworthy pervasive video surveillance systems, by emphasizing the need to properly combine different aspects that current systems do not manage. In particular, in this paper we propose the combi...

The field of Computational Intelligence relates to the development of biologically inspired computational algorithms. The field includes three main areas: neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy systems. This book presents recent research on the application of Computational Intelligence models, algorithms and technologies to the areas of Priv...

In daily life, people are faced with problems that have more than one solution. In computing, and other fields, researchers and developers encounter computational problems that may have a large number of solutions. In these cases, it may be almost unfeasible to determine the best one. Evolutionary computation is an appropriate technique for finding...

Protecting the privacy of individuals, whose data are released to untrusted parties, is a problem that has captured the attention of the scientific community for years. Several techniques have been proposed to cope with this problem. Amongst these techniques, microaggregation is able to provide a good trade-off between information loss and disclosu...

The book is a collection of invited papers on Computational Intelligence for Privacy and Security. The majority of the chapters are extended versions of works presented at the special session on Computational Intelligence for Privacy and Security of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN-2010) held July 2010 in Barcelona, Spai...

Services in the information society allow automatically and routinely collecting large amounts of data. Those data are often used to train classification rules in view of making automated decisions, like loan granting/denial, insurance premium computation, etc. If the training datasets are biased in what regards sensitive attributes like gender, ra...

Automated data collection has fostered the use of data mining for intrusion and crime detection. Indeed, banks, large corporations, insurance companies, casinos, etc. are increasingly mining data about their customers or employees in view of detecting potential intrusion, fraud or even crime. Mining algorithms are trained from datasets which may be...

Microaggregation is a Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) technique that aims at protecting the privacy of individual respondents before their data are released. Optimally microaggregating multivariate data sets is known to be an NP-hard problem. Thus, using heuristics has been suggested as a possible strategy to tackle it. Specifically, Genetic A...

Privacy and security are paramount in the proper deployment of location-based services (LBSs). We present a novel protocol based on user collaboration to privately retrieve location-based information from an LBS provider. Our approach does not assume that users or providers can be completely trusted with regard to privacy, and does not rely on a tr...

Mobile devices able to locate themselves such as mobile phones and PDAs are virtually everywhere, and they are expected to gain more importance in the near future. Their ability to determine locations opens the door to a new bunch of services: the so-called location-based services (LBS). The commercial sector will highly benefit from LBS. However,...

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are fostering the appearance of a plethora of new services and applications. On the one hand, ICT will improve the efficiency of a variety of processes and will provide users with amazing amounts and varieties of services. On the other hand, the universal deployment of these new technologies and the...

Privacy and security are paramount for the proper deployment of location-based services (LBSs). We present a novel protocol based on user collaboration to privately retrieve location-based information from an LBS provider. Our approach neither assumes that users or the LBS can be completely trusted with regard to privacy, nor relies on a trusted th...

Checking data possession in networked information systems such as those related to critical infrastructures (power facilities, airports, data vaults, defense systems, etc.) is a matter of crucial importance. Remote data possession checking protocols permit to check that a remote server can access an uncorrupted file in such a way that the verifier...

Location-based services (LBS) will be a keystone of the new information society that is founded on the information and communications technologies (ICTs). Mobile devices such as cell phones or laptops have become ubiquitous. They are equipped with a variety of localisation systems that make them proper for making use of the new LBS. Most of the tim...

Protecting personal data is essential to guarantee the rule of law1. Due to the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) unprecedented amounts of personal data can be stored and analysed. Thus, if the proper measures are not taken, individual privacy could be in jeopardy. Being the aim to protect individual privacy, a great variety of...

Location-Based Services (LBS) are gaining importance due to the advances in mobile networks and positioning technologies. Nevertheless, the wide deployment of LBS can jeopardise the privacy of their users, so ensuring user privacy is paramount to the success of those services. This article surveys the most relevant techniques for guaranteeing locat...

Information and communications technologies (ICT) are fostering the appearance of a plethora of new services and applications. On the one hand, ICT will improve the efficiency of a variety of processes (e.g. supply chains, e-commerce, etc.) and they will make easy the development of new services. On the other hand, the massive deployment of these n...

Location-Based Services (LBS) can be accessed from a variety of mobile devices to obtain value added information related to the location of the user. Most of the times, these services are provided by a trusted company (e.g. a telecommunications company). However, the massive use of mobile devices pave the way for the creation of ad hoc wireless net...

The fast growth of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) implies a deployment challenge, namely how to keep this technology scalable without renouncing security and privacy features. This paper focuses on combining tag privacy and scalability using the hash locks mechanism. Our contribution is twofold: (i) a cell-based architecture is proposed in w...

Microaggregation is a technique used to protect privacy in databases and location-based services. We propose a new hybrid technique for multivariate microaggregation. Our technique combines a heuristic yielding fixed-size groups and a genetic algorithm yielding variable-sized groups. Fixed-size heuristics are fast and able to deal with large data s...

In this survey we take a look at dier- ent approaches proposed in the literature for address- ing the privacy and security issues derived from the Radio-Frequency IDentication (RFID) deployment. We concentrate on the lack of privacy that RFID users can suer from, and we elaborate on how the security in the communications between RFID devices can be...

Microaggregation is a family of methods for statistical disclosure control (SDC) of microdata (records on individuals and/or companies), that is, for masking microdata so that they can be released while preserving the privacy of the underlying individuals. The principle of microaggregation is to aggregate original database records into small groups...

Microaggregation is a clustering problem with cardinality constraints that originated in the area of statistical disclosure control for micro data. This article presents a method for multivariate microaggregation based on genetic algorithms (GA). The adaptations required to characterize the multivariate microaggregation problem are explained and ju...

The amount of computer-stored information is growing faster with each passing day. This growth and the way in which the stored data are accessed through a variety of channels have raised the alarm about the protection of the individual privacy of the respondents whose data are being collected and stored. On the one hand, data should be available to...

Resumen El Control de Revelación Estadística es una disciplina de protección de datos cuyo objetivo es impedir que la identidad de los respondedores quede revelada cuando terceras partes tienen acceso a grandes ficheros de estadísticas. En este artículo presentamos un conjunto de métodos para k-anonimato en bases de datos estadísticas usando microa...

Microaggregation is a clustering problem with minimum size constraints on the resulting clusters or groups; the number of groups is unconstrained and the within-group homogeneity should be maximized. In the context of privacy in statistical databases, microaggregation is a well-known approach to obtaining anonymized versions of confidential microda...

Intellectual property protection of multimedia is a thorny and largely unsolved problem. Despite its practical limitations, copy detection is an excellent complement to copy prevention. Fingerprinting techniques make redistributor tracing possible by relying on invisible watermarks embedded in the content sold which are unique for each particular b...

There is a number of applications requiring a community of many senders to transmit some real-time information to a single receiver. Using unicast connections to send this traffic can result in data implosion and swamp the receiver. In [Domi04], a mechanism was proposed for secure bit transmission in large-scale many-to-one communications; we propo...

There is a number of applications requiring a community of many senders to transmit some real-time information to a single receiver.

Dir que aquesta tesi tracta de comerc electronic payperview de video. La primera part es mes aviat practica, unicast, basada en el projecte streamobile. La segona part tracta els temes de pagament i proteccio del copyright en l'entorn multicast.

When designing a secure Internet version for keno or bingo for a large group of players, a multicast communication model is likely to be used for source-toplayers communication. For a large group of players, this can potentially overwhelm the source, a problem which is known as implosion. This paper presents a scheme for large-scale bingo which avo...

With the increased availability of broadband fixed and mobile communications, multicast content delivery can be expected to become a very important market. Especially for wireless multicast delivery, it is important that payment collection be fine-grain: the customer should pay only for the content that she actually consumes. This can be achieved b...

Generation of a synthetic microdata set that reproduces the statistical properties of an original microdata set is a promising approach to statistical disclosure control (SDC) of microdata. In this paper, a new method for generating continuous synthetic microdata is proposed. The covariance matrix and the univariate statistics of the original data...

This paper addresses the problem of pay-as-you-watch services over unicast and multicast communications. For each communication model, we present two solutions, non-verifiable and verifiable, depending on the existence or non-existence of trust between the source and the receiver(s). In verifiable schemes, the source obtains a proof of correct rece...

This paper addresses the problem of pay-as-you-watch services over unicast and multicast communications. For each communication model, we present two solutions, non-veriflable and veriflable, depending on the existence or non-existence of trust between the source and the receiver(s). In veriflable schemes, the source obtains a proof of correct rece...

Generation of a synthetic microdata set that reproduces the statistical properties of an original microdata set is a promising approach to statistical disclosure control (SDC) of microdata. In this paper, a new method for generating continuous synthetic microdata is proposed. The covariance matrix and the univariate statistics of the original data...

Abstract Multicast content delivery can be expected to become a ma - jor source of revenue with the increase of private broadband fixed and mobile communications Several multicast applications require the re - ceivers to securely send some real - time information back to the source, which leads to a many - to - one communication scenario Using unic...

The knowledge of computer applications such as word processing or Internet-based communication is essential in most jobs. On the other hand, most professional training programs for unemployed people contain a computer course for those who have never used a computer. Middle-aged adults present several difficulties in order to learn core computer ski...

When designing a secure Internet version for keno or bingo for a large group of players, a multicast communication model is likely to be used for source-to-players communication. For a large group of players, this can potentially overwhelm the source, a problem which is known as implosion. We present a scheme for large-scale bingo which avoids impl...

Successive failure of copy prevention systems has caused copy detection to become the most promising option to protect the intellectual property of multimedia content. Fingerprinting techniques rely on invisible watermarks embedded in the copy sold in order to identify the buyer. We address the problem of security against collusion attacks in propo...

New mobile communication technologies are expected to be broadly available in the near future. Those technologies (multimedia-enabled devices and broadband access to the Internet) will enable new services involving video transmission. Service providers are likely to want the customer to pay for contents, whereas they will also want their intellectu...

Fingerprinting schemes allow tracing of illegally redistributed multimedia contents. When using asymmetric fingerprinting, the merchant does not know the marked copy nor the embedded mark, so fraudulent distribution of the content by the merchant - which could lead to framing honest customers - is not possible. A problem with the deployment of clas...