CYCLOPS: A cyclists' orientation data acquisition system using RGB camera and inertial measurement units (IMU).

This paper introduces CYCLOPS, an acquisition system developed to capture images and inertial measurement data of moving cyclists from a vehicle. The development of CYCLOPS addresses the need to acquire useful data for training machine learning models capable of predicting the motion intentions of cyclists on urban roads. Considering its application, it is a completely original development. The system consists of two devices. The first device is installed on the bicycle and is based on an electronic acquisition board comprising an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a microcontroller, and a transceiver for sending the cyclist's acceleration and orientation data to a vehicle. The second device is installed on the vehicle and uses the same board architecture to acquire the vehicle's accelerations and orientations, along with an RGB monocular camera. The data is stored in real-time in a laptop's drive for subsequent analysis and manipulation. The hardware architecture is presented in detail, including the designs to install the devices, for IMUs configuration, and software installation on the laptop. All design and software files required to develop the proposed system are available for download at: doi.org/10.17632/3yx5y8b7tm.1, licensed under the Open-source license CC BY 4.0.

Antimicrobial peptides designed by computational analysis of proteomes.

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are promising cationic and amphipathic molecules to fight antibiotic resistance. To search for novel AMPs, we applied a computational strategy to identify peptide sequences within the organisms' proteome, including in-house developed software and artificial intelligence tools. After analyzing 150.450 proteins from eight proteomes of bacteria, plants, a protist, and a nematode, nine peptides were selected and modified to increase their antimicrobial potential. The 18 resulting peptides were validated by bioassays with four pathogenic bacterial species, one yeast species, and two cancer cell-lines. Fourteen of the 18 tested peptides were antimicrobial, with minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) values under 10 µM against at least three bacterial species; seven were active against Candida albicans with MICs values under 10 µM; six had a therapeutic index above 20; two peptides were active against A549 cells, and eight were active against MCF-7 cells under 30 µM. This study's most active antimicrobial peptides damage the bacterial cell membrane, including grooves, dents, membrane wrinkling, cell destruction, and leakage of cytoplasmic material. The results confirm that the proposed approach, which uses bioinformatic tools and rational modifications, is highly efficient and allows the discovery, with high accuracy, of potent AMPs encrypted in proteins.

Influence of motivation and academic performance in the use of Augmented Reality in education. A systematic review.

The recent technologies rise today as a tool of significant importance today, especially in the educational context. In this sense, Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that is achieving a greater presence in educational centers in the last decade. However, Augmented Reality has not been explored in depth at the Secondary Education stage. Due to this, it is essential to analyze and concentrate the scientific research developed around this educational technology at that stage. Therefore, the aim of this research is to describe the influence that Augmented Reality shows on the motivation and academic performance of students in the Secondary Education stage. In relation to the methodology, a systematic review of the literature has been conducted using the Kitchenham protocol, where several factors have been analyzed, such as subjects, activities, and electronic implementation devices, together with the effects on motivation and student's academic performance. The Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases have been used to search for scientific papers, with a total of 344 investigations being analyzed between 2012 and 2022. The methodological stages considered were the formulation of research questions, the choice of data sources, search strategies, inclusion and exclusion criteria and quality assessment, and finally, data extraction and synthesis. The results obtained have shown that the use of AR in the classroom provides higher levels of motivation, reflected by factors such as attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction, and reflects better results in the tests carried out on the experimental groups compared to the control groups, which means an improvement in the academic performance of students. These results supply a fundamental theoretical basis, where the different teachers should be supported for the incorporation of AR in the classroom, since how this educational technology has been shown offers great opportunities. Likewise, the development of research in areas not so addressed can further clarify the generality of AR based on its influence on learning. In addition, the fields of natural sciences and logical-mathematical have been the most addressed, managing to implement their contents through object modeling. In short, this research highlights the importance of incorporating Augmented Reality into all areas and educational stages, since it is a significant improvement in the teaching and learning process.

Industry 4.0 Technologies Applied to Inland Waterway Transport: Systematic Literature Review.

The focus of this article is inland waterway transport. Different problems in this domain have been studied due to the increase in waterway traffic globally. Industry 4.0 technologies have become an alternative for the possible solution of these problems. For this reason, this paper aims to answer the following research questions: (1) What are the main problems in transporting cargo by inland waterway? (2) What technological strategies are being studied to solve these problems? (3) What technologies from Industry 4.0 are used within the technological strategies to solve the exposed problems? This study adopts a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach. For this work, were recovered 645 articles, 88 of which were eligible, from which we could identify five domains corresponding to (1) traffic monitoring, (2) smart navigation, (3) emission reduction, (4) analytics with big data, and (5) cybersecurity. The strategies currently being considered combine navigation technologies, such as AIS (Automatic Identification System), which offers a large amount of data, with Industry 4.0 tools and mainly machine learning techniques, to take advantage of data collected over a long time. This study is, to our knowledge, one of the first to show how Industry 4.0 technologies are currently being used to tackle inland waterway transport problems and current application trends in the scientific community, which is a first step for the development of future studies and more advanced solutions.

Industry 4.0 Technologies Applied to the Rail Transportation Industry: A Systematic Review.

BACKGROUND: Industry 4.0 technologies have been widely used in the railway industry, focusing mainly on maintenance and control tasks necessary in the railway infrastructure. Given the great potential that these technologies offer, the scientific community has come to use them in varied ways to solve a wide range of problems such as train failures, train station security, rail system control and communication in hard-to-reach areas, among others. For this reason, this paper aims to answer the following research questions: what are the main issues in the railway transport industry, what are the technologic strategies that are currently being used to solve these issues and what are the technologies from industry 4.0 that are used in the railway transport industry to solve the aforementioned issues? METHODS: This study adopts a systematic literature review approach. We searched the Science Direct and Web of Science database inception from January 2017 to November 2021. Studies published in conferences or journals written in English or Spanish were included for initial process evaluation. The initial included papers were analyzed by authors and selected based on whether they helped answer the proposed research questions or not. RESULTS: Of the recovered 515 articles, 109 were eligible, from which we could identify three main application domains in the railway industry: monitoring, decision and planification techniques, and communication and security. Regarding industry 4.0 technologies, we identified 9 different technologies applied in reviewed studies: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, Big Data, Cybersecurity, Modelling and Simulation, Smart Decision Support Systems (SDSS), Computer Vision and Virtual Reality (VR). This study is, to our knowledge, one of the first to show how industry 4.0 technologies are currently being used to tackle railway industry problems and current application trends in the scientific community, which is highly useful for the development of future studies and more advanced solutions. FUNDING: Colombian national organizations Minciencias and the Mining-Energy Planning Unit.

Deep 3D Neural Network for Brain Structures Segmentation Using Self-Attention Modules in MRI Images.

In recent years, the use of deep learning-based models for developing advanced healthcare systems has been growing due to the results they can achieve. However, the majority of the proposed deep learning-models largely use convolutional and pooling operations, causing a loss in valuable data and focusing on local information. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based approach that uses global and local features which are of importance in the medical image segmentation process. In order to train the architecture, we used extracted three-dimensional (3D) blocks from the full magnetic resonance image resolution, which were sent through a set of successive convolutional neural network (CNN) layers free of pooling operations to extract local information. Later, we sent the resulting feature maps to successive layers of self-attention modules to obtain the global context, whose output was later dispatched to the decoder pipeline composed mostly of upsampling layers. The model was trained using the Mindboggle-101 dataset. The experimental results showed that the self-attention modules allow segmentation with a higher Mean Dice Score of 0.90 ± 0.036 compared with other UNet-based approaches. The average segmentation time was approximately 0.038 s per brain structure. The proposed model allows tackling the brain structure segmentation task properly. Exploiting the global context that the self-attention modules incorporate allows for more precise and faster segmentation. We segmented 37 brain structures and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the largest number of structures under a 3D approach using attention mechanisms.

A Saliency-Based Sparse Representation Method for Point Cloud Simplification.

High-resolution 3D scanning devices produce high-density point clouds, which require a large capacity of storage and time-consuming processing algorithms. In order to reduce both needs, it is common to apply surface simplification algorithms as a preprocessing stage. The goal of point cloud simplification algorithms is to reduce the volume of data while preserving the most relevant features of the original point cloud. In this paper, we present a new point cloud feature-preserving simplification algorithm. We use a global approach to detect saliencies on a given point cloud. Our method estimates a feature vector for each point in the cloud. The components of the feature vector are the normal vector coordinates, the point coordinates, and the surface curvature at each point. Feature vectors are used as basis signals to carry out a dictionary learning process, producing a trained dictionary. We perform the corresponding sparse coding process to produce a sparse matrix. To detect the saliencies, the proposed method uses two measures, the first of which takes into account the quantity of nonzero elements in each column vector of the sparse matrix and the second the reconstruction error of each signal. These measures are then combined to produce the final saliency value for each point in the cloud. Next, we proceed with the simplification of the point cloud, guided by the detected saliency and using the saliency values of each point as a dynamic clusterization radius. We validate the proposed method by comparing it with a set of state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of the simplification method.

Digital Transformation in Higher Education Institutions: A Systematic Literature Review.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have been permeated by the technological advancement that the Industrial Revolution 4.0 brings with it, and forces institutions to deal with a digital transformation in all dimensions. Applying the approaches of digital transformation to the HEI domain is an emerging field that has aroused interest during the recent past, as they allow us to describe the complex relationships between actors in a technologically supported education domain. The objective of this paper is to summarize the distinctive characteristics of the digital transformation (DT) implementation process that have taken place in HEIs. The Kitchenham protocol was conducted by authors to answer the research questions and selection criteria to retrieve the eligible papers. Nineteen papers (1980-2019) were identified in the literature as relevant and consequently analyzed in detail. The main findings show that it is indeed an emerging field, none of the found DT in HEI proposals have been developed in a holistic dimension. This situation calls for further research efforts on how HEIs can understand DT and face the current requirements that the fourth industrial revolution forced.

Apropiación social de la ciencia y la tecnología a través de una iniciativa de intervención e inclusión educativa de niños y adolescentes de territorios vulnerables de la minería usando la robótica, como una alternativa para la construcción de la paz / Social appropriation of science and technology through an initiative of intervention and educational inclusion of children and adolescents in mining vulnerable territories, by using robotics as an alternative to building peace

Resumen En este artículo se presenta una iniciativa de intervención e inclusión educativa de niños y adolescentes de territorios vulnerables de influencia de la minería. Para lograr lo anterior se diseñaron un conjunto de robots educativos y material didáctico complementario que fueron utilizados en las diferentes sesiones de la iniciativa. La población beneficiada fueron niños y adolescentes que trabajan día a día en tareas propias de la minería y no han tenido la oportunidad de ingresar a la escuela o han desertado de ella buscando recursos económicos para sostener sus familias. Dentro de la población beneficiada, también se cuenta con los maestros de las escuelas asentadas en los territorios mineros, con el propósito de enseñarles nuevas metodologías de enseñanza y aprendizaje para atender a la población desescolarizada. 2500 niños y adolescentes fueron beneficiados con la iniciativa, así como 250 maestros.

Abstract This article presents an intervention initiative and an educational inclusion of children and adolescents from vulnerable territories of mining influence. In order to achieve this, a set of educational robots and complementary teaching materials was designed and used in the different sessions of the initiative. The beneficiaries were children and adolescents who work day by day in mining tasks and have not had the opportunity to enter the school system or to have defected from it, by seeking financial resources in order to support their families. Within the beneficiaries, there are also the teachers of the schools settled in the mining territories, in order to teach them new teaching and learning methodologies in order to serve the deschooled population. Two thousand five hundred children and adolescents benefited from the initiative and two hundred and fifty teachers did, too.