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The first step toward a Smart Village is that the community itself can benefit from the novel techniques that are applied. Some communities are far from being able to use the benefits that these technologies usually offer; however, they can benefit from the techniques that have led to the development of smart cities. This is the case of the indigenous people belonging to communities in the Amazon: They have seen their identity drastically eroded in recent decades as a result of the process of Western acculturation. In this context, the use of artificial intelligence techniques may contribute to the detection and quantification of cultural identity loss by identifying the most and least affected identity components of this process. This research work presents a quantitative method, which evaluates several variables of the cultural identity of an Ecuadorian Amazonian indigenous community: the Waorani. The proposed method automatically classifies the individuals and provides a subspace of it able to identify the weights of the subcomponents of this instrument in regard to its contribution to the Waorani identity. The systematic application of the instrument together with the artificial intelligence-based approach can provide decision makers with valuable information about which aspects of their identity are most sensitive to change and thus help design development policies that minimally interfere with their ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robotisation in the footwear sector is a major challenge for the industry with difficulties present due to the inherent adaptive needs of some of the automated tasks performed by robotic arms. One of those of particular concern is collision prevention: working with those robots in automated online environments, considering they have limited awareness of the environment, may lead to dangerous situations with the movement of the robot along the calculated paths. To overcome this problem, a collision prevention layer based on a custom robotic software simulator is presented and justified in this paper to be used on automated shoe sole adhesive spraying cells. The performed experiments prove the feasibility of the proposed method in a real scenario with the speed and precision required by the automated task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local binary patterns (LBP) are an effective texture descriptor for face recognition. In this work, a LBPbased hybrid system for face recognition is proposed. Thus, the dimensionality of LBP histograms is reduced by using principal component analysis and the classification is performed with support vector machines. The experiments were completed using the challenging Indian Movie Face Database and show that our method achieves high recognition rates while reducing 95% the dimensions of the original LBP histograms. Moreover, our algorithm is compared against some state-of-the-art approaches. The results indicate that our method outperforms other approaches, with accurate face recognition results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the different computer tools available enable designers to create complex industrial prototypes. The use of these tools is constrained by the limitations imposed by common devices, such as screens and displays. Recently emerged virtual and augmented reality techniques have started being used as supports in many learning and industrial environments. Beyond the new possibilities that these tools offer for designing industrial objects, the underlying question is whether these new technologies could improve the creativity of designers to enable them to get a better understanding of the designing process itself. This paper presents a methodological proposal for the deployment of an industrial design engineering course aimed not only at learning different design techniques, but also at assessing the creativity skills of students. The practical contents include the use of virtual reality devices, to help the designer overcome the limitations of prototype visualisation and make better designing decisions. Moreover, a creativity test will be performed at the beginning and at the end of the course to assess the changes in creativity skills taking place within the experiment group versus the changes in a traditional learning (control) group. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shoe soles are extremely complex to design and manufacture due to their organically shaped but technically precise nature and their manufacturing constraints. Consequently, there is a need for the increased design process flexibility offered by the use of specific CAD methodologies and techniques, to facilitate the work of expert designers and permit effective construction of the three-dimensional elements comprising the complete structure. Recent advances in additive manufacturing systems have extended the possibilities of shoe sole design. These systems can be used to create the final mould and to incorporate dynamic elements that are of particular value in sports footwear. In this article, we present a new methodology for the design and validation of shoe soles. The methodology assists designers in the design concept process and in transfer of the design to manufacturing. The model incorporates both a structural and a functional approach. To this end, a set of specific tools have been developed that can be used to quantify design quality. For example, the model calculates the coefficient of friction or slip resistance, necessary to comply with international standards concerning safety footwear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematical morphology addresses the problem of describing shapes in an n -dimensional space using the concepts of set theory. A series of standardized morphological operations are defined, and they are applied to the shapes to transform them using another shape called the structuring element. In an industrial environment, the process of manufacturing a piece is based on the manipulation of a primitive object via contact with a tool that transforms the object progressively to obtain the desired design. The analogy with the morphological operation of erosion is obvious. Nevertheless, few references about the relation between the morphological operations and the process of design and manufacturing can be found. The non-deterministic nature of classic mathematical morphology makes it very difficult to adapt their basic operations to the dynamics of concepts such as the ordered trajectory. A new geometric model is presented, inspired by the classic morphological paradigm, which can define objects and apply morphological operations that transform these objects. The model specializes in classic morphological operations, providing them with the determinism inherent in dynamic processes that require an order of application, as is the case for designing and manufacturing objects in professional computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) environments. The operators are boundary-based so that only the points in the frontier are handled. As a consequence, the process is more efficient and more suitable for use in CAD/CAM systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a new geometric model based on the mathematical morphology paradigm, specialized to provide determinism to the classic morphological operations. The determinism is needed to model dynamic processes that require an order of application, as is the case for designing and manufacturing objects in CAD/CAM environments. Design/methodology/approach – The basic trajectory-based operation is the basis of the proposed morphological specialization. This operation allows the definition of morphological operators that obtain sequentially ordered sets of points from the boundary of the target objects, inexistent determinism in the classical morphological paradigm. From this basic operation, the complete set of morphological operators is redefined, incorporating the concept of boundary and determinism: trajectory-based erosion and dilation, and other morphological filtering operations. Findings – This new morphological framework allows the definition of complex three-dimensional objects, providing arithmetical support to generating machining trajectories, one of the most complex problems currently occurring in CAD/CAM. Originality/value – The model proposes the integration of the processes of design and manufacture, so that it avoids the problems of accuracy and integrity that present other classic geometric models that divide these processes in two phases. Furthermore, the morphological operative is based on points sets, so the geometric data structures and the operations are intrinsically simple and efficient. Another important value that no excessive computational resources are needed, because only the points in the boundary are processed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: There is a growing need within the footwear sector to customise the design of the last from which a specific footwear style is to be produced. This customisation is necessary for user comfort and health reasons, as the user needs to wear a suitable shoe. For this purpose, a relationship must be established between the user foot and the last with which the style will be made; up until now, no model has existed that integrates both elements. On the one hand, traditional customised footwear manufacturing techniques are based on purely artisanal procedures which make the process arduous and complex; on the other hand, geometric models proposed by different authors present the impossibility of implementing them in an industrial environment with limited resources for the acquisition of morphometric and structural data for the foot, apart from the fact that they do not prove to be sufficiently accurate given the non-similarity of the foot and last. In this paper, two interrelated geometric models are defined, the first, a bio-deformable foot model and the second, a deformable last model. The experiments completed show the goodness of the model, with it obtaining satisfactory results in terms of comfort, efficiency and precision, which make it viable for use in the sector. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Customizing shoe manufacturing is one of the great challenges in the footwear industry. It is a production model change where design adopts not only the main role, but also the main bottleneck. It is therefore necessary to accelerate this process by improving the accuracy of current methods. Rapid prototyping techniques are based on the reuse of manufactured footwear lasts so that they can be modified with CAD systems leading rapidly to new shoe models. In this work, we present a shoe last fast reconstruction method that fits current design and manufacturing processes. The method is based on the scanning of shoe last obtaining sections and establishing a fixed number of landmarks onto those sections to reconstruct the shoe last 3D surface. Automated landmark extraction is accomplished through the use of the self-organizing network, the growing neural gas (GNG), which is able to topographically map the low dimensionality of the network to the high dimensionality of the contour manifold without requiring a priori knowledge of the input space structure. Moreover, our GNG landmark method is tolerant to noise and eliminates outliers. Our method accelerates up to 12 times the surface reconstruction and filtering processes used by the current shoe last design software. The proposed method offers higher accuracy compared with methods with similar efficiency as voxel grid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The footwear industry is a traditional craft sector, where technological advances are difficult to implement owing to the complexity of the processes being carried out, and the level of precision demanded by most of them. The shoe last joining operation is one clear example, where two halves from different lasts are put together, following a specifically traditional process, to create a new one. Existing surface joining techniques analysed in this paper are not well adapted to shoe last design and production processes, which makes their implementation in the industry difficult. This paper presents an alternative surface joining technique, inspired by the traditional work of lastmakers. This way, lastmakers will be able to easily adapt to the new tool and make the most out of their know-how. The technique is based on the use of curve networks that are created on the surfaces to be joined, instead of using discrete data. Finally, a series of joining tests are presented, in which real lasts were successfully joined using a commercial last design software. The method has shown to be valid, efficient, and feasible within the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Different kinds of algorithms can be chosen so as to compute elementary functions. Among all of them, it is worthwhile mentioning the shift-and-add algorithms due to the fact that they have been specifically designed to be very simple and to save computer resources. In fact, almost the only operations usually involved with these methods are additions and shifts, which can be easily and efficiently performed by a digital processor. Shift-and-add algorithms allow fairly good precision with low cost iterations. The most famous algorithm belonging to this type is CORDIC. CORDIC has the capability of approximating a wide variety of functions with only the help of a slight change in their iterations. In this paper, we will analyze the requirements of some engineering and industrial problems in terms of type of operands and functions to approximate. Then, we will propose the application of shift-and-add algorithms based on CORDIC to these problems. We will make a comparison between the different methods applied in terms of the precision of the results and the number of iterations required. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In general geometric models, the design of objects is usually separated from the manufacture. Some advanced models give solutions to some of the derived problems but lack a related model of representation. The proposed model addresses the process of designing objects by assimilation of the machining process. It is based on set theory and mathematical morphology and no operation between solids or surfaces is done. Mathematical morphology describes geometric shapes from simpler ones. Sets represent object shapes in a -dimensional space and morphological operations represent geometric relationships between the points in the sets. An analogy between the design and the machining processes can be established: in the machining, the geometry of an object (piece) is also described by the geometry of another object (tool). Specifically, the specification of pieces and tools can be achieved through the use of new operations describing geometric processes of cutting and reconstruction (erosion and dilation respectively, in morphological terms). For manufacturing purposes, the new morphologic operations must be restricted to support an order that will represent the tool trajectory. As a result, the model is generic (as it can be extended to any other tool shape), robust (the set theory avoids special cases or incorrect solutions) and directly displayable. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The mechanical digitizers are robust and accurate but they have the disadvantage of not providing the digitized surface directly. Moreover, the information provided is often presented as a cloud of points, which makes the surface interpolation process difficult. Presented in the paper there is an algorithm that virtually reproduces the digitalization process of traditional mechanical copiers. The reconstructed surface is computed from a 'virtually digitised' model of the external cloud of points provided by digitizer. The algorithm is then analysed in terms of computing cost and accuracy. The proposed algorithm has been successfully implemented in a commercial CAD/CAM system specialized in shoe last design and machining. Finally, some illustrative examples are shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is becoming increasingly dependant in computing intensive applications. The appearance of new paradigms, such as Internet of Things (IoT), and advances in technologies such as Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are creating a demand for high-performance applications. In this regard, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have the ability to provide better performance by allowing a high degree of data parallelism. These devices are also beneficial in specialized fields of manufacturing industry such as CAD/CAM. For all these applications, there is a recent tendency to offload these computations to the Cloud, using a computing offloading Cloud architecture. However, the use of GPUs in the Cloud presents some inefficiencies, where GPU virtualization is still not fully resolved, as our research on what main Cloud providers currently offer in terms of GPU Cloud instances shows. To address these problems, this paper first makes a review of current GPU technologies and programming techniques that increase concurrency, to then propose a Cloud computing outsourcing architecture to make more efficient use of these devices in the Cloud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 3D modelling, a surface mesh is a collection of vertices, edges, and faces that define the shape of a 3D object. The surface mesh is typically used to represent the outer surface of an object, as opposed to the internal structure. A surface mesh is usually defined as a polygon mesh, which is a collection of polygons (triangles or quadrilaterals are the most common) that are connected at their vertices. The vertices of the mesh define the shape of the object, and the edges and faces provide the topological information that describes how the vertices are connected. Surface meshes are often used in 3D modelling software to create 3D objects for animation, video games, and other purposes. Although triangular meshes are the most widely used in various fields, they have a series of disadvantages that quad meshes solve in most cases. This article presents a set of algorithms capable of generating quad meshes from any type of input triangular mesh, preserving the geometric characteristics of the initial model. This process is known as 'remeshing'. The results obtained by these algorithms on a large number of models related to the footwear industry have been compared, as well as analysing the advantages and disadvantages of each one of them applied to geometric models commonly used in footwear industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in the area of the Internet of Things shows that devices are usually resource-constrained. To enable advanced applications on these devices, it is necessary to enhance their performance by leveraging external computing resources available in the network. This work presents a study of computational platforms to increase the performance of these devices based on the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) paradigm. The main contribution of this paper is to research the advantages and possibilities of architectures with multiple offloading options. To this end, a review of architectures that use a combination of the computing layers in the available infrastructure to perform this paradigm and outsource processing load is presented. In addition, a proof-of-concept application is introduced to demonstrate its realization along all the network layers. The results of the simulations confirm the high flexibility to offload numerous tasks using different layers and the ability to overcome unfavorable scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within various industrial settings, such as shipping, aeronautics, woodworking, and footwear, there exists a significant challenge: optimizing the extraction of sections from material sheets, a process known as “nesting”, to minimize wasted surface area. This paper investigates efficient solutions to complex nesting problems, emphasizing rapid computation over ultimate precision. We introduce a dual-approach methodology that couples both a greedy technique and a genetic algorithm. The genetic algorithm is instrumental in determining the optimal sequence for placing sections, ensuring each is located in its current best position. A specialized representation system is devised for both the sections and the material sheet, promoting streamlined computation and tangible results. By balancing speed and accuracy, this study offers robust solutions for real-world nesting challenges within a reduced computational timeframe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latin American indigenous people have undergone changes in their cultural identity, especially as a result of their contact with Western cultures. As such, a measuring instrument is required to determine the extent of this change. In the Amazon, difficulties in obtaining field data have not allowed the establishment of cultural indicators. This paper presents an instrument designed from the indigenous perspective that allows us to measure their cultural identity. The qualitative study focusing on the Ecuadorian Amazon resulted in an instrument that provides information on thirty subscale and five cultural scales, and was successfully tested for validity and reliability. Finally, it was applied to three populations with different degrees of contact with Western society in order to determine their differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interdisciplinary projects in the industry typically require collaboration between professionals from various fields. However, this relationship is not generally addressed in the training offered by university programs, which often ignore this interdisciplinary approach. This paper offers an example of interdisciplinary interaction through joint laboratory activities in the curricula of two very different degree programs, i.e., Multimedia Engineering and Teacher Training in Primary Education. The programs' students formed an interdisciplinary team of multimedia engineers and trainee teachers to develop a Web product for children's cognitive development. The complexity of the task required students to engage in close and strong interdisciplinary cooperation and communication; in turn, they benefited from the synergy offered by collaborative work. The results of this paper, presented from the perspective of the multimedia engineering students, demonstrate a significant increase in their academic performance compared to the control group. This paper shows that university studies can incorporate an interdisciplinary perspective to engineering education without the need to introduce a specific course on the topic, thus avoiding further demands on the curriculum schedule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Face detection is the first step of any automated face recognition system. One of the most popular approaches to detect faces in color images is using a skin color segmentation scheme, which in many cases needs a proper representation of color spaces to interpret image information. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy system for detecting skin in color images, so that each color tone is assumed to be a fuzzy set. The Red, Green, and Blue (RGB), the Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV), and the YCbCr (where Y is the luminance and Cb,Cr are the chroma components) color systems are used for the development of our fuzzy design. Thus, a fuzzy three-partition entropy approach is used to calculate all of the parameters needed for the fuzzy systems, and then, a face detection method is also developed to validate the segmentation results. The results of the experiments show a correct skin detection rate between 94% and 96% for our fuzzy segmentation methods, with a false positive rate of about 0.5% in all cases. Furthermore, the average correct face detection rate is above 93%, and even when working with heterogeneous backgrounds and different light conditions, it achieves almost 88% correct detections. Thus, our method leads to accurate face detection results with low false positive and false negative rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last is the basic industrial component in footwear manufacturing, from which product development starts. Correct last grading ensures the best fit for the intended group of users of the footwear model to be produced. The size marked on the last should respect the specific intervals defined in the different international sizing systems, like the European, UK, US or Mondopoint systems, which are all described in international standards. New approaches in the field of CAD/CAM have emerged over recent years towards the automation of this process. However, these are partial approaches that neither address the grading process according to the different standards nor consider the various parts of the shoe that are not affected by size increments. This paper presents a new accurate and efficient technique for the automation of the shoe last grading process based on the conjugate gradient method. Through this method, it is possible to obtain a graded shoe last that conforms to the international standards in force relative to shoe sizing and allows for the shoe parts that are not affected by size increments. This technique is based on the target measures of length and perimeter of the last to be graded and aims to minimise the quadratic difference between these values and those obtained from the graded last. This method has been evaluated through a battery of tests performed on a geometrically heterogeneous group of shoe lasts. The results obtained were accurate and the execution time was fast enough to be used for mass production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evidence suggests that emotional intelligence and personality traits are important qualities that workers need in order to successfully exercise a profession. This article assumes that the main purpose of universities is to promote employment by providing an education that facilitates the acquisition of abilities, skills, competencies and values. In this study, the emotional intelligence and personality profiles of two groups of Spanish students studying degrees in two different academic disciplines – computer engineering and teacher training – were analysed and compared. In addition, the skills forming part of the emotional intelligence and personality traits required by professionals (computer engineers and teachers) in their work were studied, and the profiles obtained for the students were compared with those identified by the professionals in each field. Results revealed significant differences between the profiles of the two groups of students, with the teacher training students scoring higher on interpersonal skills; differences were also found between professionals and students for most competencies, with professionals in both fields demanding more competencies that those evidenced by graduates. The implications of these results for the incorporation of generic social, emotional and personal competencies into the university curriculum are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sine cosine algorithm's main idea is the sine and cosine-based vacillation outwards or towards the best solution. The first main contribution of this paper proposes an enhanced version of the SCA algorithm called as ESCA algorithm. The supremacy of the proposed algorithm over a set of state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of solution accuracy and convergence speed will be demonstrated by experimental tests. When these algorithms are transferred to the business sector, they must meet time requirements dependent on the industrial process. If these temporal requirements are not met, an efficient solution is to speed them up by designing parallel algorithms. The second major contribution of this work is the design of several parallel algorithms for efficiently exploiting current multicore processor architectures. First, one-level synchronous and asynchronous parallel ESCA algorithms are designed. They have two favors; retain the proposed algorithm's behavior and provide excellent parallel performance by combining coarse-grained parallelism with fine-grained parallelism. Moreover, the parallel scalability of the proposed algorithms is further improved by employing a two-level parallel strategy. Indeed, the experimental results suggest that the one-level parallel ESCA algorithms reduce the computing time, on average, by 87.4% and 90.8%, respectively, using 12 physical processing cores. The two-level parallel algorithms provide extra reductions of the computing time by 91.4%, 93.1%, and 94.5% with 16, 20, and 24 processing cores, including physical and logical cores. Comparison analysis is carried out on 30 unconstrained benchmark functions and three challenging engineering design problems. The experimental outcomes show that the proposed ESCA algorithm behaves outstandingly well in terms of exploration and exploitation behaviors, local optima avoidance, and convergence speed toward the optimum. The overall performance of the proposed algorithm is statistically validated using three non-parametric statistical tests, namely Friedman, Friedman aligned, and Quade tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Tuning compilations is the process of adjusting the values of a compiler options to improve some features of the final application. In this paper, a strategy based on the use of a genetic algorithm and a multi-objective scheme is proposed to deal with this task. Unlike previous works, we try to take advantage of the knowledge of this domain to provide a problem-specific genetic operation that improves both the speed of convergence and the quality of the results. The evaluation of the strategy is carried out by means of a case of study aimed to improve the performance of the well-known web server Apache. Experimental results show that a 7.5% of overall improvement can be achieved. Furthermore, the adaptive approach has shown an ability to markedly speed-up the convergence of the original strategy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Commercial off-the-shelf microprocessors are the core of low-cost embedded systems due to their programmability and cost-effectiveness. Recent advances in electronic technologies have allowed remarkable improvements in their performance. However, they have also made microprocessors more susceptible to transient faults induced by radiation. These non-destructive events ( soft errors), may cause a microprocessor to produce a wrong computation result or lose control of a system with catastrophic consequences. Therefore, soft error mitigation has become a compulsory requirement for an increasing number of applications, which operate from the space to the ground level. In this context, this paper uses the concept of selective hardening, which is aimed to design reduced-overhead and flexible mitigation techniques. Following this concept, a novel flexible version of the software-based fault recovery technique known as SWIFT-R is proposed. Our approach makes possible to select different registers subsets from the microprocessor register file to be protected on software. Thus, design space is enriched with a wide spectrum of new partially protected versions, which offer more flexibility to designers. This permits to find the best trade-offs between performance, code size, and fault coverage. Three case studies have been developed to show the applicability and flexibility of the proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithms have been proposed in the last decades, none of which are able either to outperform all existing algorithms or to solve all optimization problems according to the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorem. Many of these algorithms behave effectively, under a correct setting of the control parameter(s), when solving different engineering problems. The optimization behavior of these algorithms is boosted by applying various strategies, which include the hybridization technique and the use of chaotic maps instead of the pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs). The hybrid algorithms are suitable for a large number of engineering applications in which they behave more effectively than the thoroughbred optimization algorithms. However, they increase the difficulty of correctly setting control parameters, and sometimes they are designed to solve particular problems. This paper presents three hybridizations dubbed HYBPOP, HYBSUBPOP, and HYBIND of up to seven algorithms free of control parameters. Each hybrid proposal uses a different strategy to switch the algorithm charged with generating each new individual. These algorithms are Jaya, sine cosine algorithm (SCA), Rao's algorithms, teaching-learning-based optimization (TLBO), and chaotic Jaya. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms perform better than the original algorithms, which implies the optimal use of these algorithms according to the problem to be solved. One more advantage of the hybrid algorithms is that no prior process of control parameter tuning is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]