Guillermo Arturo Martínez Mascorro

Migration to the city requires in-depth study of the underlying reasons. These reasons include attitudes towards urban and rural areas. To study the relationship between attitudes (implicit and explicit), feelings and beliefs regarding urban and rural areas, we conducted research to measure implicit attitudes through the Implicit Association Test, and explored explicit attitudes, feelings and beliefs through ad hoc questions. The results showed that having a university education (vs. not having one) is associated with less negative feelings towards urban areas. Those who had a favourable implicit and explicit attitude towards urban areas expressed the greatest concern about the depopulation of rural areas. We discuss the results in terms of ‘attitudinal balance’, which would imply a change in attitudes among the population that seeks to increase beliefs about the benefits of rural areas without undermining positive beliefs associated with urban areas.

Artificial neural networks are efficient learning algorithms that are considered to be universal approximators for solving numerous real-world problems in areas such as computer vision, language processing, or reinforcement learning. To approximate any given function, neural networks train a large number of parameters—up to millions, or even billions in some cases. The large number of parameters and hidden layers in neural networks make them hard to interpret, which is why they are often referred to as black boxes. In the quest to make artificial neural networks interpretable in the field of computer vision, feature visualization stands out as one of the most developed and promising research directions. While feature visualizations are a valuable tool to gain insights about the underlying function learned by the network, they are still considered to be simple visual aids requiring human interpretation. In this paper, we propose that feature visualizations—class visualizations in particular—are analogous to mental imagery in humans, resembling the experience of seeing or perceiving the actual training data. Therefore, we propose that class visualizations contain embedded knowledge that can be exploited in a more automated manner. We present a series of experiments that shed light on the nature of class visualizations and demonstrate that class visualizations can be considered a conceptual compression of the data used to train the underlying model. Finally, we show that class visualizations can be regarded as convolutional filters and experimentally show their potential for extreme model compression purposes.

Crime generates significant losses, both human and economic. Every year, billions of dollars are lost due to attacks, crimes, and scams. Surveillance video camera networks generate vast amounts of data, and the surveillance staff cannot process all the information in real-time. Human sight has critical limitations. Among those limitations, visual focus is one of the most critical when dealing with surveillance. For example, in a surveillance room, a crime can occur in a different screen segment or on a distinct monitor, and the surveillance staff may overlook it. Our proposal focuses on shoplifting crimes by analyzing situations that an average person will consider as typical conditions, but may eventually lead to a crime. While other approaches identify the crime itself, we instead model suspicious behavior—the one that may occur before the build-up phase of a crime—by detecting precise segments of a video with a high probability of containing a shoplifting crime. By doing so, we provide the staff with more opportunities to act and prevent crime. We implemented a 3DCNN model as a video feature extractor and tested its performance on a dataset composed of daily action and shoplifting samples. The results are encouraging as the model correctly classifies suspicious behavior in most of the scenarios where it was tested. For example, when classifying suspicious behavior, the best model generated in this work obtains precision and recall values of 0.8571 and 1 in one of the test scenarios, respectively.

Suspicious behavior is likely to threaten security, assets, life, or freedom. This behavior has no particular pattern, which complicates the tasks to detect it and define it. Even for human observers, it is complex to spot suspicious behavior in surveillance videos. Some proposals to tackle abnormal and suspicious behavior-related problems are available in the literature. However, they usually suffer from high false-positive rates due to different classes with high visual similarity. The PreCrime Behavior method removes information related to a crime commission to focus on suspicious behavior before the crime happens. The resulting samples from different types of crime have a high-visual similarity with normal-behavior samples. To address this problem, we implemented 3D Convolutional Neural Networks and trained them under different approaches. Also, we tested different values in the number-of-filter parameter to optimize computational resources. Finally, the comparison between the performance using different training approaches shows the best option to improve the suspicious behavior detection on surveillance videos.

Crime generates significant losses, both human and economic. Every year, billions of dollars are lost due to attacks, crimes, and scams. Surveillance video camera networks are generating vast amounts of data, and the surveillance staff can not process all the information in real-time. The human sight has its limitations, where the visual focus is among the most critical ones when dealing with surveillance. A crime can occur in a different screen segment or on a distinct monitor, and the staff may not notice it. Our proposal focuses on shoplifting crimes by analyzing special situations that an average person will consider as typical conditions, but may lead to a crime. While other approaches identify the crime itself, we instead model suspicious behavior -- the one that may occur before a person commits a crime -- by detecting precise segments of a video with a high probability to contain a shoplifting crime. By doing so, we provide the staff with more opportunities to act and prevent crime. We implemented a 3DCNN model as a video feature extractor and tested its performance on a dataset composed of daily-action and shoplifting samples. The results are encouraging since it correctly identifies 75% of the cases where a crime is about to happen.

En Ecuador existen más de trescientos mil invidentes, cifra que crece cada día. La mayoría de estas personas no tienen independencia de elección en muchas situaciones, siendo una de las más comunes no poder elegir los objetos que deben comprar en algún comercio. En este artículo se describe el diseño e implementación de un sistema que permite identificar objetos mediante la reproducción de una descripción auditiva de los mismos, proporcionando a las personas invidentes la posibilidad de mejorar su calidad de vida. La tecnología base para el funcionamiento del sistema es la RFID-Identificación por Radio Frecuencia. El sistema consta de un dispositivo móvil desarrollado a partir de varios componentes electrónicos y de un software para PC implementado en Visual C# 2010 Express. Los requisitos de diseño fueron definidos mediante una encuesta aplicada a una muestra de la población invidente en la ciudad de Cuenca. Concluida la implementación se realizaron pruebas técnicas y de satisfacción del sistema, en varios centros de ayuda a personas invidentes.