Papers by María J. Santofimia
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, Dec 1, 2014
Expert Systems With Applications, Mar 1, 2017
Safety on public transport is a major concern for the relevant authorities. We address this issue... more Safety on public transport is a major concern for the relevant authorities. We address this issue by proposing an automated surveillance platform which combines data from video, infrared and pressure sensors. Data homogenisation and integration is achieved by a distributed architecture based on communication middleware that resolves interconnection issues, thereby enabling data modelling. A common-sense knowledge base models and encodes knowledge about public-transport platforms and the actions and activities of passengers. Trajectory data from passengers is modelled as a time-series of human activities. Common-sense knowledge and rules are then applied to detect inconsistencies or errors in the data interpretation. Lastly, the rationality that characterises human behaviour is also captured here through a bottom-up Hierarchical Task Network planner that, along with common-sense, corrects misinterpretations to explain passenger behaviour. The system is validated using a simulated bus saloon scenario as a case-study. Eighteen video sequences were recorded with up to six passengers. Four metrics were used to evaluate performance. The system, with an accuracy greater than 90% for each of the four metrics, was found to
Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Mar 1, 2016
This paper presents a new framework for multi-subject event inference in surveillance video, wher... more This paper presents a new framework for multi-subject event inference in surveillance video, where measurements produced by low-level vision analytics usually are noisy, incomplete or incorrect. Our goal is to infer the composite events undertaken by each subject from noise observations. To achieve this, we consider the temporal characteristics of event relations and propose a method to correctly associate the detected events with individual subjects. The Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory of belief functions is used to infer events of interest from the results of our vision analytics and to measure conflicts occurring during the event association. Our system is evaluated against a number of videos that present passenger behaviours on a public transport platform namely buses at different levels of complexity. The experimental results demonstrate that by reasoning with spatio-temporal correlations, the proposed method achieves a satisfying performance when associating atomic events and recognising composite events involving multiple subjects in dynamic environments.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Life expectancy has increased, so the number of people in need of intensive care and attention is... more Life expectancy has increased, so the number of people in need of intensive care and attention is also growing. Falls are a major problem for older adult health, mainly because of the consequences they entail. Falls are indeed the second leading cause of unintentional death in the world. The impact on privacy, the cost, low performance, or the need to wear uncomfortable devices are the main causes for the lack of widespread solutions for fall detection and prevention. This work present a solution focused on bedtime that addresses all these causes. Bed exit is one of the most critical moments, especially when the person suffers from a cognitive impairment or has mobility problems. For this reason, this work proposes a system that monitors the position in bed in order to identify risk situations as soon as possible. This system is also combined with an automatic fall detection system. Both systems work together, in real time, offering a comprehensive solution to automatic fall detecti...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Mar 28, 2022
This publication is based upon work from COST Action GoodBrother-Network on Privacy-Aware Audioan... more This publication is based upon work from COST Action GoodBrother-Network on Privacy-Aware Audioand Video-Based Applications for Active and Assisted Living, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation. www.cost.eu Other documents published by the Goodbrother COST Action are available at https://goodbrother.eu/deliverables. debate among experts and stakeholders is paving the way towards AAL ensuring ergonomics, usability, acceptance and privacy preservation. The DIANA, PAAL, and VisuAAL projects are examples of this fresh approach. This report provides the reader with a review of the most recent advances in audio-and video-based monitoring technologies for AAL. It has been drafted as a collective effort of WG3 to supply an introduction to AAL, its evolution over time and its main functional and technological underpinnings. In this respect, the report contributes to the field with the outline of a new generation of ethical-aware AAL technologies and a proposal for a novel comprehensive taxonomy of AAL systems and applications. Moreover, the report allows non-technical readers to gather an overview of the main components of an AAL system and how these function and interact with the end-users. The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely (i) lifelogging and self-monitoring, (ii) remote monitoring of vital signs, (iii) emotional state recognition, (iv) food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, (v) activity and personal assistance, (vi) gesture recognition, (vii) fall detection and prevention, (viii) mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and (ix) cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted. The report ends with an overview of the challenges, the hindrances and the opportunities posed by the uptake in real world settings of AAL technologies. In this respect, the report illustrates the current procedural and technological approaches to cope with acceptability, usability and trust in the AAL technology, by surveying strategies and approaches to co-design, to privacy preservation in video and audio data, to transparency and explainability in data processing, and to data transmission and communication. User acceptance and ethical considerations are also debated. Finally, the potentials coming from the silver economy are overviewed.
IECON 2021 – 47th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, 2021
The general aim of a cognitive Cyber Physical System of Systems (CPSoS) is to provide managed acc... more The general aim of a cognitive Cyber Physical System of Systems (CPSoS) is to provide managed access to data in a smart fashion such that sensing and actuation capabilities are connected. Whilst there is significant funding and research devoted to this area, focus remains purely on creating bespoke systems. This paper presents a novel approach, based on a set of components to leverage Situational Awareness and Smart Actuation in large manufacturing industries with the focus on enabling predictive maintenance for asset and abnormal situation management. This paper presents a novel generic platform, named AtiCoS, that combines case-based and common-sense reasoning, as the enabling methodologies for enhancing CPSoS with cognitive capabilities.
Sensors, 2021
The benefits that technology can provide in terms of health and support for independent living ar... more The benefits that technology can provide in terms of health and support for independent living are in many cases not enough to break the barriers that prevent older adults from accepting and embracing technology. This work proposes a hardware and software platform based on a smart mirror, which is equipped with a set of digital solutions whose main focus is to overcome older adults’ reluctance to use technology at home and wearable devices on the move. The system has been developed in the context of two use cases: the support of independent living for older individuals with neurodegenerative diseases and the promotion of physical rehabilitation activities at home. Aspects such as reliability, usability, consumption of computational resources, performance and accuracy of the proposed platform and digital solutions have been evaluated in the initial stages of the pilots within the SHAPES project, an EU-funded innovation action. It can be concluded that the SHAPES smart mirror has the ...
Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering, 2018
This research is intended to evaluate the suitability of a common-sense-based approach for provid... more This research is intended to evaluate the suitability of a common-sense-based approach for providing causal explanations to power quality disturbances and, more specifically, to voltage-sage events, with the aim of improving the security and reliability of the electrical grid. Since voltage sags are one of the most common power-quality disturbance and may have a severe impact on sensitive loads and users, the case study presented is dedicated to find their causes as a prerequisite to prevent them. The main contribution presented in this work is in the knowledge management domain. However, the proposed architecture adopts a multi-layer approach that comprehensively faces all the necessary stages, comprising: measurement and data collection, filtering, distribution, homogenization, and integration up to the process of inference of the possible cause of the event. The architecture of the proposed system comprises three layers, namely: the information gathering, the information modeling and the information understanding layers. The proposed system has been evaluated using a synthetic dataset of simulated voltages sags. Information about weather conditions and different location features and environmental circumstances is aggregated to the electrical features of the voltage sag, in order to improve the inference of the external cause of the event. Even though a real-world dataset would be required to fully validate the proposed system and assess the benefits in a real scenario, the results obtained with the synthetic dataset are satisfactory and an overall accuracy above 90% of the cause identification is achieved.
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2018
This article presents an Internet of Things architecture for Smart Homes that specifically target... more This article presents an Internet of Things architecture for Smart Homes that specifically targets service composition and reconfiguration as enablers for the actuation and smart behavior capabilities. To this end, the main challenge that has to be addressed is the support to a seamless integration, composition, and reconfiguration of Internet of Things objects. Two enabling technologies are proposed here: a planning strategy based on a common-sense reasoning approach for service composition and a virtual-network protocol for Inter-Domain Messaging. The planner will identify the services that, properly connected, will cater for arisen, and therefore, unexpected needs. The virtual-network protocol will provide the support for this interconnection to take place in a transparent and orthogonal manner. This is particularly important to enable autonomous systems to instantiate composite services. To demonstrate the capabilities of the resulting framework, two use cases are presented, whi...
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2018
Rankings are a valuable element for city-comparison purposes since results withdrawn from these c... more Rankings are a valuable element for city-comparison purposes since results withdrawn from these comparisons can, eventually, support the evaluation of strategic decisions taken by cities. Smart city rankings are not an exception and, as they draw more attention, the number of them exponentially increases. This paper evaluates the appropriateness of existing smart city rankings for quantifying the materialization degree of the smart city concept. The analysis reveals that current rankings generally overlook indicators of the Information and Communication Technologies dimension. To bridge this gap, this work proposes a methodology based on Multiple-Attribute Decision Making that uses technological criteria for designing smart city rankings. The proposed methodology is evaluated against the cities of New York, Seoul, and Santander. Imbalances between results provided by the studied rankings and our evaluation are detected, which suggests the need for a new insight into more suitable and precise evaluation of the smartness degree of cities.
IECON 2016 - 42nd Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, 2016
Smart environments, enabled by the Internet of Thing (IoT) paradigm, advocate for more intelligen... more Smart environments, enabled by the Internet of Thing (IoT) paradigm, advocate for more intelligent and interconnected systems, electronic devices, tools, and appliances. While most efforts are nowadays addressed to provide connectivity or smartness to IoT devices, unfortunately, few have realised the importance of supporting automatic service composition and service reconfiguration capabilities at middleware level. Due to the openness that characterise such environments, the range of possible interactions and available services and devices cannot be totally defined nor prescribed in advanced. This uncertainty demands mechanisms to dynamically adapt existing systems, and their functionality, to address unforeseen needs. In order to do so, a general understanding of contexts, services, and device capabilities is needed. From that understanding, new responses can be automatically devised on run-time. This paper presents a semantic middleware specifically devised to support automatic and autonomous service reconfiguration and composition. The novelty consists in moving the semantics, traditionally held at the programming-interface level, to a common-sense knowledge-base system, with higher expressive power and reasoning capabilities.
Expert Systems with Applications, 2017
Safety on public transport is a major concern for the relevant authorities. We address this issue... more Safety on public transport is a major concern for the relevant authorities. We address this issue by proposing an automated surveillance platform which combines data from video, infrared and pressure sensors. Data homogenisation and integration is achieved by a distributed architecture based on communication middleware that resolves interconnection issues, thereby enabling data modelling. A common-sense knowledge base models and encodes knowledge about public-transport platforms and the actions and activities of passengers. Trajectory data from passengers is modelled as a time-series of human activities. Common-sense knowledge and rules are then applied to detect inconsistencies or errors in the data interpretation. Lastly, the rationality that characterises human behaviour is also captured here through a bottom-up Hierarchical Task Network planner that, along with common-sense, corrects misinterpretations to explain passenger behaviour. The system is validated using a simulated bus saloon scenario as a case-study. Eighteen video sequences were recorded with up to six passengers. Four metrics were used to evaluate performance. The system, with an accuracy greater than 90% for each of the four metrics, was found to
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2016
This paper presents a method for rational behaviour recognition that combines vision-based pose e... more This paper presents a method for rational behaviour recognition that combines vision-based pose estimation with knowledge modeling and reasoning. The proposed method consists of two stages. First, RGB-D images are used in the estimation of the body postures. Then, estimated actions are evaluated to verify that they make sense. This method requires rational behaviour to be exhibited. To comply with this requirement, this work proposes a rational RGB-D dataset with two types of sequences, some for training and some for testing. Preliminary results show the addition of knowledge modeling and reasoning leads to a significant increase of recognition accuracy when compared to a system based only on computer vision.
2011 International Conference on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing, 2011
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2010
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2012
This work presents a novel approach for human action recognition based on the combination of comp... more This work presents a novel approach for human action recognition based on the combination of computer vision techniques and commonsense knowledge and reasoning capabilities. The emphasis of this work is on how common sense has to be leveraged to a vision-based human action recognition so that nonsensical errors can be amended at the understanding stage. The proposed framework is to be deployed in a realistic environment in which humans behave rationally, that is, motivated by an aim or a reason.
Smart Spaces, Ambient Intelligence, and Ambient Assisted Living are environmental paradigms that ... more Smart Spaces, Ambient Intelligence, and Ambient Assisted Living are environmental paradigms that strongly depend on their capability to recognize human actions. While most solutions rest on sensor value interpretations and video analysis applications, few have realized the importance of incorporating common-sense capabilities to support the recognition process. Unfortunately, human action recognition cannot be successfully accomplished by only analyzing body postures. On the contrary, this task should be supported by profound knowledge of human agency nature and its tight connection to the reasons and motivations that explain it. The combination of this knowledge and the knowledge about how the world works is essential for recognizing and understanding human actions without committing common-senseless mistakes. This work demonstrates the impact that episodic reasoning has in improving the accuracy of a computer vision system for human action recognition. This work also presents formalization, implementation, and evaluation details of the knowledge model that supports the episodic reasoning.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012
This work presents a recognition system for epileptiform abnormalities based on electroencephalog... more This work presents a recognition system for epileptiform abnormalities based on electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis. The proposed system combines a Support Vector Machine classifier automatically trained by an implementation of machine learning approach known as Bag of Words.
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Papers by María J. Santofimia