Belén Ruíz-Mezcua

Belén Ruíz-Mezcua
University Carlos III de Madrid | UC3M · Department of Systems Engineering and Automation

PhD

About

141
Publications
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Publications

Publications (141)
Article
Full-text available
La característica más representativa de la música es su capacidad de generar emoción. Pero ¿por qué la música emociona? En este artículo mostramos los conocimientos actuales de la teoría musical y la neurociencia que intentan explicar las relaciones que existen entre la música y las emociones. En primer lugar, se repasan los conocimientos actuales...
Article
Full-text available
The ability of music to induce emotions has been arousing a lot of interest in recent years, especially due to the boom in music streaming platforms and the use of automatic music recommenders. Music Emotion Recognition approaches are based on combining multiple audio features extracted from digital audio samples and different machine learning tech...
Article
Full-text available
Subtitles are critical elements in making TV as accessible as possible for people with hearing impairment, elderly people and other end-users that could need this kind of service. Moreover, delay in live-originated TV captions or subtitles is a significant factor in the audience’s perception of the absence of quality for the deaf and hard of hearin...
Article
Full-text available
Nowadays, the recognition of emotions in people with sensory disabilities still represents a challenge due to the difficulty of generalizing and modeling the set of brain signals. In recent years, the technology that has been used to study a person’s behavior and emotions based on brain signals is the brain–computer interface (BCI). Although previo...
Article
Full-text available
Subtitles are a key element to make any media content accessible for people who suffer from hearing impairment and for elderly people, but also useful when watching TV in a noisy environment or learning new languages. Most of the time, subtitles are generated manually in advance, building a verbatim and synchronised transcription of the audio. Howe...
Chapter
Full-text available
The study of the emotional processing in the brain began from a psychological point of view in the last decades of the 19th century. However, since the discovery of the electrical background of mental activity around 1930, a new scientific way of observing and measuring the functioning of the living brain has opened up. In addition, Functional Magn...
Article
Full-text available
El propósito de la presente investigación es analizar cuál es el estado actual de la representación de las personas con discapacidad en la prensa digital española. Se ha hecho uso de una triangulación metodológica que ha combinado análisis documental, entrevistas con fuentes expertas y el análisis de contenido de doscientas noticias sobre discapaci...
Article
Full-text available
El propósito de la presente investigación es analizar cuál es el estado actual de la representación de las personas con discapacidad en la prensa digital española. Se ha hecho uso de una triangulación metodológica que ha combinado análisis documental, entrevistas con fuentes expertas y el análisis de contenido de doscientas noticias sobre discapaci...
Article
Full-text available
Captioning is the process of transcribing speech and acoustical information into text to help deaf and hard of hearing people accessing to the auditory track of audiovisual media. In addition to the verbal transcription, it includes information such as sound effects, speaker identification, or music tagging. However, it just takes into account a li...
Article
Full-text available
In Spain, the subtitling service on television for the deaf has been improving in quantity since the General Law on Audiovisual Communication was enacted in 2010. This law establishes a series of quality standards that must be followed in the subtitling process. One of the most relevant aspects of subtitle quality is the speed at which they are sho...
Article
Full-text available
Standard captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing people cannot transmit the emotional information that music provides in support of the narrative in audio-visual media. We explore an alternative method using vibrotactile stimulation as a possible channel to transmit the emotional information contained in an audio-visual soundtrack and, thus, el...
Article
Full-text available
A brain–computer interface is an alternative for communication between people and computers, through the acquisition and analysis of brain signals. Research related to this field has focused on serving people with different types of motor, visual or auditory disabilities. On the other hand, affective computing studies and extracts information about...
Article
Full-text available
Individuals with sensory impairment (hearing or visual) encounter serious communication barriers within society and the world around them. These barriers hinder the communication process and make access to information an obstacle they must overcome on a daily basis. In this context, one of most common complaints made by the Television (TV) users wi...
Article
Modern companies generate value by digitalizing their services and products. Knowing what customers are saying about the firm through reviews in social media content constitutes a key factor to succeed in the big data era. However, social media data analysis is a complex discipline due to the subjectivity in text review and the additional features...
Article
In their daily business, bank branches should register their operations with several systems in order to share information with other branches and to have a central repository of records. In this way, information can be analysed and processed according to different requisites: fraud detection, accounting or legal requirements. Within this context,...
Chapter
Full-text available
Orientation and mobility are two fields of applications of the so-called Assistive Products, in which we can find a high growth in the last ten years. In this group, the so-called Electronic Travel Aids have a capital importance. These applications are focused on helping blind people in the following aspects of their daily lives, among others: avoi...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Con la aprobación de la Ley General de la Comunicación Audiovisual (LGCA) en el año 2010, Ley 7/2010, se regularon los servicios que las cadenas comerciales y públicas de televisión deberían prestar en el ámbito del subtitulado, la audiodescripción y la lengua de signos para que las personas con discapacidad sensorial puedan disfrutar de la televis...
Chapter
In recent years, a substantial increase in the demand for multimedia products has taken place, an increase that is being met by prerecorded or live multimedia programmes offered by broadcasters, IPTV or the Internet. At the same time, in the coming years, an increase is expected in the number of adults in Europe with problems accessing digital tele...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The recent improvements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, both in performance and computational e ciency, allow us to develop new tools for the welfare of society. One of the social sectors that can highly benefit from these systems are the hearing impaired since they could obtain transcripts of live speech in an increasing number of e...
Article
Full-text available
In this study we present the results of evaluating the sonification protocol of a new assistive product aiming to help the visually impaired in perceiving their surroundings through sounds organized in different cognitive profiles. The evaluation was carried out with 17 sighted and 11 visually impaired participants. The experiment was designed over...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents a survey of existing sonification systems used to represent visual scenes, analyzes their characteristics and proposes a taxonomy of this set of algorithms and devices. This classification is non-exclusive, since many parameters of any sonification procedure work as independent variables and can be recombined in any other set. A...
Article
Full-text available
In this study we present the results of evaluating the sonification protocol of a new assistive product aiming to help the visually impaired move more safely with the help of sounds organized in different cognitive profiles. The evaluation was carried out with 17 sighted and 11 visually impaired participants. The experiment was designed over both v...
Article
With the implementation of digital terrestrial television (DTT) in Latin American countries, and taking into account their ability to develop interactive services, new possibilities have been opened for improved connectivity in rural areas and in those with difficult access by using applications that allow universal information. In order to transfe...
Article
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are flexible computing tools that have been applied to a wide range of domains with a notable level of accuracy. However, there are multiple choices of ANNs classifiers in the literature that produce dissimilar results. As a consequence of this, the selection of this classifier is crucial for the overall performanc...
Chapter
This chapter explores new communication technologies and methods for avoiding accessibility and communication barriers in the educational environment. It is focused on providing real-time captions so students with hearing disabilities and foreign students, among others, could participate in an inclusive way in and outside the classroom. The inclusi...
Article
Full-text available
Revuelta Sanz, P. et al. (2013): “ATAD: Una Ayuda Técnica para la Autonomía en el Desplazamiento”. Revista Española de Discapacidad, I (2): 143-154.
Article
Full-text available
Depth map extraction or estimation is very important for many computer vision applications. However, this process involves high cost. Hence, it is interesting to find new approaches, which could yield faster implementations, when very accurate results are not necessary. These new implementations can be built up for the stereovision problem, taking...
Article
Full-text available
Libro de 102 págs. "Accesibilidad a los contenidos audiovisuales en la Web" es una publicación que revisa la accesibilidad en la red desde el punto de vista de los contenidos audiovisuales que podemos encontrar en Internet. Hay una clara tendencia a incluir elementos audiovisuales y multimedia en las páginas web y es necesario que todas las persona...
Article
Nowadays, organizations cannot afford maintaining people who evidently are not contributing to fulfill the objectives of the project. Project Manager not only must know in a subjective way the development of the staff, but he/she should perform a monitoring what permit him/she knows the human resources development in the project. For that, we have...
Article
Full-text available
Orientation and mobility are two fields of applications of the so-called Assistive Products, in which we can find a high growth in the last ten years. In this group, the so-called Electronic Travel Aids have a capital importance. These applications are focused on helping blind people in the following aspects of their daily lives, among others: avoi...
Article
The evolution of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies has lead to a new way of Customer Relationship Management. Web 2.0 provides communication and collaboration elements that can improve on the one hand the quality of the relationships with customers and, on the other hand, the collaboration among the members of the company. Web 3.0 provides semantic...
Article
Full-text available
This chapter introduces the potential of Automatic Speech Recognition Technology (ASR) in the challenge of inclusive education. ASR technology combined with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enhances the learning of disabled people both in and outside the classroom. In the classroom, deaf and hearing-impaired students can benefit from...
Chapter
This chapter explores new communication technologies and methods for avoiding accessibility and communication barriers in the educational environment. It is focused on providing real-time captions so students with hearing disabilities and foreign students, among others, could participate in an inclusive way in and outside the classroom. The inclusi...
Article
Full-text available
Private banking is a business area in which the investor requires tailor-made advice. Because of the current market situation, investors are requiring answers to difficult questions and looking for assurance from wealth managers. Private bankers need to have deep knowledge about an innumerable list of products and their characteristics as well as t...
Article
Knowledge is one the most valuable assets in todays companies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques aim to represent the knowledge in a way that can be applied to solving complex problems or supporting decision making processes. During the last years the semantic web techniques have supported the share of knowledge by means of ontologies. Ontolo...
Article
Full-text available
This paper addresses methodology and tools applied to the monitoring of accessibility services in digital television at a time when the principles of accessibility and design are being considered in all new audiovisual media communication services. The main objective of this research is to measure the quality and quantity of existing accessibility...
Article
In domains with limited data, such as ballistic impact, prior researches have proven that the optimization of artificial neural models is an efficient tool for improving the performance of a classifier based on MultiLayer Perceptron. In addition, this research aims to explore, in the ballistic domain, the optimization of other machine learning stra...
Article
The prediction of the consequences of a ballistic impact is highly relevant in the advanced material engineering. Traditionally, the solution of this kind of problems was made by means of experimental tests, analytical models or numerical simulations. In this domain, the particularities of the phenomenon at high speed increase the difficulty of the...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter explores new communication technologies and methods for avoiding accessibility and communication barriers in the educational environment. It is focused on providing real-time captions so students with hearing disabilities and foreign students, among others, could participate in an inclusive way in and outside the classroom. The inclusi...
Chapter
This chapter presents a tool that distinguishes selects and supplies, among all products with similar characteristics that appear in the catalogue of a company, the product that better adapts to the necessities of the users. In order to achieve this, it uses a search system based on fuzzy logic techniques, being able to handle vague information or...
Chapter
In the past few years, many frameworks and standards have been developed to cover different aspects of IT to provide best practices, such as COBIT, ITIL, CMMI, ISO/IEC 20000, ISO/IEC 38500 and ISO/IEC 27000, and improve IT governance and IT service management in organizations. This research presents how self-assessments for IT standards improve sig...
Chapter
The evolution of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 technologies has lead to a new way of Customer Relationship Management. Web 2.0 provides communication and collaboration elements that can improve on the one hand the quality of the relationships with customers and, on the other hand, the collaboration among the members of the company. Web 3.0 provides semantic...
Article
Price estimation for the preparation of quotations is critical process for companies that have to struggle to get orders by offering competitive pricing. For machining companies, said process is complex because of the large amount of variation that can occur. In this case, a manufacturing expert is generally in charge of this task. However, manufac...
Article
Full-text available
Stereo vision is the normal method to obtain the depth information from images. The problems encountered when applying well established algorithms to real time applications are due to the high computational load required. In this article, the authors address this issue by performing a region-based analysis which considers each pixel only once. Addi...
Article
In the domain of high-speed impact between solids, the simulation of one trial entails the use of large resources and an elevated computational cost. The objective of this research is to find the best neural network associated with a new problem of ballistic impact, maximizing the quantity of trials available and simplifying their architecture. To...
Article
The Design for All principles define the characteristics which a device should possess in order for it be utilised by every type of user, independent of his or her sensory disabilities or technological competency. These principles are realised in the current work as an integrative tool with which to facilitate universal access to museums via multim...
Article
Full-text available
One of the most important tasks of a software development project manager is to produce accurate time and effort estimations. Improving the estimation accuracy is a widely recognized benefit for several software development processes. In order to achieve these objectives, there are proposals based on Artificial Intelligence techniques and specifica...
Article
The number of live programs in broadcast and IPTV Digital Television is increasing as the offer of pre-recorded multimedia in Internet television and video on-demand grows. For many people, subtitles are the only way to access the audio of television programs and in live subtitling environments the audio transcription process will deliver the corre...
Article
Full-text available
New options offer the promise that those who require assistive technology to access Web content will soon enjoy the full range of interactivity, thereby realizing the equal accessibility goal.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents the web-based educational services included in the APEINTA project. The main aim of APEINTA is to avoid barriers among the students and the education. Taking into account the advantage of cloud computing paradigm, the next web-based services are proposed: First, a captioning service, so students with hearing disabilities, for in...
Article
Semantic knowledge representation is the key for the development of present intelligent systems. Furthermore, the Semantic Web provide a formal representation and knowledge-driven set of technologies to enable automation of business processes. Despite the new trends on business process automation based on semantic technologies and Web Services, a n...
Article
From their first applications until now, expert systems have provided solutions to multiple problems in companies of all types. With the advent of the Internet and its evolution, web-based expert systems have become very important. Moreover, the arrival of new mobile devices that can connect to the Internet has made it easy to access information fr...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Stereo vision is one of the most important passive methods to extract depth maps. Among them, there are several approaches with advantages and disadvantages. Computational load is especially important in both the block matching and graphical cues approaches. In a previous work, we proposed a region growing segmentation solution to the matching proc...
Article
Portfolio selection addresses the problem of how to diversify investments in the most efficient and profitable way possible. Portfolio selection is a field of study that has been broached from several perspectives, including, among others, recommender systems. This paper presents SINVLIO (Semantic INVestment portfoLIO), a tool based on semantic tec...
Article
Accesibilidad a los medios audiovisuales -- Los servicios de subtitulado y audiodescripción en los medios audiovisales en España -- Soporte tecnológico al subtitulado y la audiodescripción -- Formación de profesionales del subtitulado y la audiodescripción -- Experiencia empresarial. En port.: Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales
Article
Industrial manufacturing processes representation is a key challenge for leveraging interoperability among business partners. The Semantic representation of information enables the creation of intelligent systems, which can interpret and understand potentially automated tasks, harnessing added-value decision-making processes. Particularly, the Sema...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Region labeling is an important task in automatic image processing. It consists of assigning information (labels) to each pixel regarding their position, level, etc. and also information regarding the group to which each pixel belongs. This information is useful for many diverse purposes. There are several approaches within this field to perform th...
Article
Full-text available
The increasing importance of the Internet in most domains has brought about a paradigm change in consumer relations. The influence of Social Networks has entered the Customer Relationship Management domain under the coined term CRM 2.0. In this context, the need to understand and classify the interactions of customers by means of new platforms has...
Article
In the past few years, many frameworks and standards have been developed to cover different aspects of IT to provide best practices, such as COBIT, ITIL, CMMI, ISO/IEC 20000, ISO/IEC 38500 and ISO/IEC 27000, and improve IT governance and IT service management in organizations. This research presents how self-assessments for IT standards improve sig...
Chapter
Full-text available
Education for students with disabilities now takes place in a wide range of settings, thus, including a wider range of assistive tools. As a result of this, one of the most interesting application domains of technology enhanced learning is related to the adoption of learning technologies and designs for people with disabilities. Following this unst...
Article
When a factory produces mechanised parts on a client demand, short lead-times and accuracy in quotations are fundamental factors to gain or lose a client. Cost and price are usually estimated by an expert engineer based on the specific characteristics of the required part and his or her experience. The lack of qualified employees in factories impli...
Article
Full-text available
Intellectual disability is common and lifelong, with lifetime cost. Thus, this people have been the focus of recent major national policy developments in Europe, the USA, Australia and across high-income countries. The education of these students with disabilities now can benefit from a wider range of assistive tools. Following this unstoppable tre...
Article
Full-text available
The paper discusses a platform that enables the semantic annotation of multimedia content when the subtitling and audio description tasks are being carried out.
Article
This chapter introduces the potential of Automatic Speech Recognition Technology (ASR) in the challenge of inclusive education. ASR technology combined with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enhances the learning of disabled people both in and outside the classroom. In the classroom, deaf and hearing-impaired students can benefit from...
Article
Full-text available
Stereo vision is a usual method to obtain depth information from images. The problems encountered when applying the majority of well established algorithms to provide this information are due to the high computational load required. This occurs in both the block matching and graphical cues (such as edges) matching. In this article we address this i...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
There is not a clear distinction between accessibility and usability for all. This work shows the overlap between usability and accessibility proposing a bridge from the usability heuristics to WCAG 2.0 guidelines. The mapping between some usability and accessibility concepts can be a useful resource to know what aspects of accessibility were colle...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The treatment of Web accessibility is not only following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to strictly comply with technical aspects. The development processes of web applications are very much centred in the architecture, which are normally very distant to the user. This requires integrating usability and accessibility in software en...