Josep Lluis Larriba Pey

This paper aims to present the basic elements of the Smart Contract Framework (SCF) and the value of data sharing in a multimodal system. SCF is a business process that defines data exchange rules among Transport Service Providers (TSPs) that share the common goal of getting the passenger to his/her destination through a multimodal trip chain. It provides a centralized hub for the generation and management of contracts (i.e., data sharing agreements and smart contracts) via a web platform that allows TSPs to create, negotiate and continuously monitoring and making use of signed contracts. Most importantly, the storage of TSPs’ data and all the data sharing processes are executed outside this platform. Moreover, the SCF will provide a data driven environment where exchanged data can be further used for other purposes (e.g., analytics and business relationships’ analysis). Additionally, data sharing has the potential to create benefits for TSPs in the form of greater transparency, reduced costs, increased revenue, strengthened business relationships, etc.

There is high and varied mobility in modern societies which requires a complex transport system that adapts to social needs and guarantees the movement of people and goods in an economically efficient and safe way

The increasing complexity of mobility plus the growing population in cities, together with the importance of privacy when sharing data from vehicles or any device, makes traffic forecasting that uses data from infrastructure and citizens an open and challenging task. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to deal with predictions of speed, volume, and main traffic direction, in a new aggregated way of traffic data presented as videos. The approach leverages the continuity in a sequence of frames and its dynamics, learning to predict changing areas in a low dimensional space and then, recovering static features when reconstructing the original space. Exogenous variables like weather, time and calendar are also added in the model. Furthermore, we introduce a novel sampling approach for sequences that ensures diversity when creating batches, running in parallel to the optimization process.

Discovering conserved three-dimensional (3D) patterns among protein structures may provide valuable insights into protein classification, functional annotations or the rational design of multi-target drugs. Thus, several computational tools have been developed to discover and compare protein 3D-patterns. However, most of them only consider previously known 3D-patterns such as orthosteric binding sites or structural motifs. This fact makes necessary the development of new methods for the identification of all possible 3D-patterns that exist in protein structures (allosteric sites, enzyme-cofactor interaction motifs, among others). In this work, we present 3D-PP, a new free access web server for the discovery and recognition all similar 3D amino acid patterns among a set of proteins structures (independent of their sequence similarity). This new tool does not require any previous structural knowledge about ligands, and all data are organized in a high-performance graph database. The input can be a text file with the PDB access codes or a zip file of PDB coordinates regardless of the origin of the structural data: X-ray crystallographic experiments or in silico homology modeling. The results are presented as lists of sequence patterns that can be further analyzed within the web page. We tested the accuracy and suitability of 3D-PP using two sets of proteins coming from the Protein Data Bank: (a) Zinc finger containing and (b) Serotonin target proteins. We also evaluated its usefulness for the discovering of new 3D-patterns, using a set of protein structures coming from in silico homology modeling methodologies, all of which are overexpressed in different types of cancer. Results indicate that 3D-PP is a reliable, flexible and friendly-user tool to identify conserved structural motifs, which could be relevant to improve the knowledge about protein function or classification. The web server can be freely utilized at https://appsbio.utalca.cl/3d-pp/.

The urban parking spaces for loading/unloading are typically over-occupied, which shifts delivery operations to traffic lanes and pavements, increases traffic, generates noise, and causes pollution. We present a data analytics based routing optimization that improves the circulation of vehicles and utilization of parking spaces. We formalize this new problem and develop a novel multivehicle route planner that avoids congestions at loading/unloading areas and minimizes the total duration. We present the developed tool with an illustration and analysis for the urban freight in the city of Barcelona, which monitors tens of thousands of deliveries every day. Our system includes an effective evaluation of candidate routes by considering the waiting times and further delays of other deliverers as a first class citizen in the optimization. A two-layer local search is proposed with a greedy randomized adaptive method for variable neighborhood search. Our approach is applied and validated over data collected across Barcelona's urban freight transport network, which contains 3,704,034 parking activities. Our solution is shown to significantly improve the use of available parking spaces and the circulation of vehicles, as evidenced by the results. The analysis also provides useful insights on how to manage delivery routes and parking spaces for sustainable urban freight transport and city logistics.

The search for relevant information can be very frustrating for users who, unintentionally, use too general or inappropriate keywords to express their requests. To overcome this situation, query expansion techniques aim at transforming the user request by adding new terms, referred as expansion features, that better describe the real intent of the users. We propose a method that relies exclusively on relevant structures (as opposed to the use of semantics) found in knowledge bases (KBs) to extract the expansion features. We call our method Structural Query Expansion (SQE). The structural analysis of KBs takes us to propose a set of structural motifs that connect their strongly related entries, which can be used to extract expansion features. In this paper we use Wikipedia as our KB, which is probably one of the largest sources of information. SQE is capable of achieving more than 150% improvement over non expanded queries and is able to identify the expansion features in less than 0.2 seconds in the worst case scenario. Most significantly, we believe that we are contributing to open new research directions in query expansion, proposing a method that is orthogonal to many current systems. For example, SQE improves pseudo-relevance feedback techniques up to 13%

Annotation-based techniques for image retrieval suffer from sparse and short image textual descriptions. Moreover, users are often not able to describe their needs with the most appropriate keywords. This situation is a breeding ground for a vocabulary mismatch problem resulting in poor results in terms of retrieval precision. In this paper, we propose a query expansion technique for queries expressed as keywords and short natural language descriptions. We present a new massive query expansion strategy that enriches queries using a graph knowledge base by identifying the query concepts, and adding relevant synonyms and semantically related terms. We propose a topological graph enrichment technique that analyzes the network of relations among the concepts, and suggests semantically related terms by path and community detection analysis of the knowledge graph. We perform our expansions by using two versions of Wikipedia as knowledge base achieving improvements of the system's precision up to more than 27%.

Keyword based search engines have problems with term ambiguity and vocabulary mismatch. In this paper, we propose a query expansion technique that enriches queries expressed as keywords and short natural language descriptions. We present a new massive query expansion strategy that enriches queries using a knowledge base by identifying the query concepts, and adding relevant synonyms and semantically related terms. We propose two approaches: (i) lexical expansion that locates the relevant concepts in the knowledge base; and, (ii) topological expansion that analyzes the network of relations among the concepts, and suggests semantically related terms by path and community analysis of the knowledge graph. We perform our expansions by using two versions of the Wikipedia as knowledge base, concluding that the combination of both lexical and topological expansion provides improvements of the system's precision up to more than 27%.