Projects

A significant portion of technologies involves interacting with people through user interfaces in interactive systems. Therefore, it is necessary to design accessible user interfaces which ensure that all people can access and operate these systems regardless of their visual, auditory, cognitive or motor abilities. For this reason, the primary aim of this project is to show the viability and application of accessibility techniques for the design and development of of video conferencing systems that ensure persons with disabilities (PWDs) can access and operate them. Due to the nature of accessibility requirements, this project will use a multidisciplinary approach based on the shared scientific knowledge that methods from fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) can provide.

There are users with sensory impairments, such as blind people, individuals with low vision, deaf individuals, or those with hearing impairments, who need video conferencing applications that include necessary accessibility requirements, such as services providing audio descriptions of videos and images, interfaces that are adapted in relation to sensory characteristics, subtitling services, voice-operated applications or screen readers. Furthermore, there are cognitive accessibility barriers that affect both people with intellectual disabilities and the elderly, all of whom require intuitive user interfaces, text simplification services, and the generation for text summarization summaries, among other tools, to assist in the understanding of texts, as set out in this project.

As specific contributions, design standards will be defined following HCI methods for the design of accessible and adaptable user interfaces. Additionally, affective computing and computational semiotic techniques will be explored with regards to their application in the interactive elements of user interfaces. Moreover, telematic techniques used to generate subtitles will be researched, as well as the use of AI techniques for the generation of high-quality transcriptions through the post-processing of subtitles. In the area of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), approaches will be explored to carry out the lexical simplification and the creation of corpora in the fields of Easy-to-Read texts and Plain Language. Furthermore, deep learning techniques used to text summarization will also be researched.

• Reference: PID2020-116527RB-I00
• Financing: Convocatoria 2020 Proyectos Generación del Conocimiento y Retos Investigación. MINISTERIO DE CIENCIA E INNOVACIÓN
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Lourdes Moreno
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua, Isabel Segura-Bedmar, Israel González Carrasco, Jose Luis Lopez-Cuadrado, José Luis Martínez Fernández, Rodrigo Alarcón, Cristóbal Colón Ruiz
• Duration: 2021 - 2024
• https://access2meet.uc3m.es/

Accessibility in technologies for citizens of the public sector currently entails accessibility barriers for people with disabilities. The Public Administration (AAPP) despite having a history of actions in accessibility with its consequent progress, currently does not mostly comply with the accessibility regulations and does not respond to the needs of all citizens with disabilities.

In this sense, this proposal has three fundamental axes: 1) diagnosis to detect where the problem space is located and define a problem solution space, 2) offer documentary support to the Public Administrations in terms of cognitive and sensory accessibility, and 3) ) design of a proof of concept in a case of use of great impact in society with disabilities to illustrate good practices and their execution.

The diagnosis is made of the current state of compliance with accessibility in web pages, mobile apps, and telematic services for citizen assistance in emergency situations in the public sector (112 (emergencies), 016 (abuse due to gender violence), 024 (Attention to Suicidal Behavior)).

The support, documentation, and guides are provided to help the professionals of the Public administration, as well as to other agents of the private sector. These guides will deal with issues of the regulatory framework in terms of cognitive and sensory accessibility updated with the transpositions of European directives, accessibility to web pages, accessibility to mobile applications, accessibility to telematic services for citizen assistance in emergency situations, and good practices in accessibility policies to implement in an organization.

Finally, the proof of concept aims to provide good practices, as well as guidelines for the design and specification of its implementation of an emergency service for citizen care so that it is accessible and covers the needs of all citizens with disabilities.

• Reference:
• Financing: Financiado a través del Plan de Recuperación,Transformación y Resiliencia del Gobierno de España con los Fondos de la Unión Europea. Aprobado en Real Decreto 670/2022 de 1 agosto.
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Lourdes Moreno, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua
• Other investigators: José Manuel Sánchez-Pena, Paloma Martínez, Israel González Carrasco, Jose Luis Lopez-Cuadrado
• Duration: 2022 - 2023
• https://access2citizen.cesya.es/

El 5% de la población mundial presenta algún tipo de discapacidad sensorial reconocida, ya sea visual o auditiva. Además, en España el 5,79% de la población presenta una discapacidad auditiva reconocida igual o superior al 33%. Esta situación se une al hecho de que España sigue su proceso de envejecimiento y que las personas mayores de 65 años tienden a presentar problemas de audición con el paso de los años. Debido a esto, cada vez más personas están encontrando grandes barreras de comunicación con la sociedad y el mundo que les rodea. Estas barreras dificultan e incluso a veces imposibilitan el proceso de comunicación y también hacen que el acceso a la información se convierta en un obstáculo que deben superar a diario.  Los servicios de subtitulado y audiodescripción asociados a los medios audiovisuales, ayudan a superar las barreras a las que se enfrentan las personas con discapacidad sensorial en su actividad diaria.

Además, en el caso de impartir una clase, actualmente existen servicios ASR que pueden generar una transcripción automática con una calidad muy razonable (siempre que se cumplan una serie de condiciones de contorno) sobre la que se pueden generar subtítulos que incluir en las clases. Por otro lado, se pueden incluir elementos de accesibilidad de lengua de signos y audiodescripción asociados a los contenidos audiovisuales a través de sistemas de producción audiovisual para hacerlos llegar a los estudiantes que los necesiten. 

Las actuales circunstancias asociadas a la pandemia de COVID-19 han llevado a que muchas clases se estén impartiendo online. Esto ha puesto de manifiesto la falta de plataformas que contemplen la inclusión de estos elementos de accesibilidad.

Por tanto, con la propuesta bajo de este proyecto se busca una doble finalidad: (i) conseguir un prototipo de plataforma que facilite la impartición de clases online accesibles y, (ii) como consecuencia de lo anterior, se proyecta incluir en la interfaz de la clase online de dicho prototipo canales de subtitulado automático, audiodescripción y lengua de signos de forma que no sea necesaria la producción audiovisual para incluirlos en la clase. De esta forma un audiodescriptor o un intérprete de lengua de signos podrían participar en la clase y los alumnos, recibir los elementos de accesibilidad que necesiten en tiempo real. Finalmente, se incluirá la puntuación en la transcripción para la generación de los apuntes que los alumnos puedan consultar posteriormente para facilitar el proceso de aprendizaje. De esta forma se conseguiría una plataforma de aprendizaje accesible y usable para diferentes personas con diferentes tipos de discapacidad contribuyendo a asegurar la formación y la educación a personas en graves riesgo de exclusión social.
 

• Reference:
• Financing: Financiado a través del Plan de Recuperación,Transformación y Resiliencia del Gobierno de España con los Fondos de la Unión Europea. Aprobado en Real Decreto 670/2022 de 1 agosto.
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: José Manuel Sánchez-Pena, Jose Luis Lopez-Cuadrado
• Other investigators: Belén Ruiz-Mezcua, Lourdes Moreno, Paloma Martínez Fernández, Israel González Carrasco
• Duration: 2022 - 2023

Gracias a la investigación biomédica, se ha generado una gran cantidad de conocimiento sobre enfermedades raras en los últimos años. El elevado coste de los análisis moleculares y la existencia de una bibliografía reducida, en ocasiones inaccesible o dispersa, dificulta el avance en el diagnóstico y tratamiento de estas patologías. Frecuentemente, los pacientes afectos, a pesar de que sus condiciones son mortales o crónicamente incapacitantes, carecen de tratamiento. Aunque las bases genéticas hayan sido dilucidadas, en muchos casos la pérdida de función de los genes causantes no explica la complejidad fenotípica observada. Este es el caso de genodermatosis como la Epidermólisis bullosa distrófica (EBDR), síndrome de Kindler (SK) o Xeroderma pigmentoso (XPC). Estas enfermedades comparten manifestaciones clínicas y predisposición al cáncer, a pesar de tener diferentes bases genéticas. El proyecto tiene como objetivo aplicar técnicas de Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural (PLN) para analizar la literatura biomédica con el fin de aumentar el conocimiento relativo a las enfermedades raras y desvelar relaciones complejas presentes en estas enfermedades. En concreto, esperamos identificar biomarcadores precisos, dianas terapéuticas de estas patologías, así como facilitar su diagnóstico a clínicos no especialistas. Además, se plantea como caso de uso, el análisis en estas tres genodermatosis (EBDR, KS y XPC) con el fin de correlacionar la información obtenida mediante PLN con los patrones de expresión génica provenientes de arrays moleculares de dichas enfermedades, publicados previamente por el grupo TERMeG.  La trayectoria conjunta de los integrantes del proyecto, su experiencia en los campos del PLN y enfermedades raras, así como su carácter multidisciplinar sumado al interés de los consorcios de investigación especializados (CIBERER) y de las asociaciones de pacientes implicadas (DEBRA), garantizan la viabilidad y el impacto de la propuesta.

• Reference: NPL4RARE-CM-UC3M
• Financing: Convocatoria del Programa de Apoyo a la Realización de Proyectos Interdisciplinares de I+D para jóvenes investigadores de la UC3M 2019-2020
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Isabel Segura Bedmar, Sara Guerrero Aspizua
• Other investigators: Lourdes Moreno, Cristóbal Colón Ruiz, Rodrigo Alarcón, Carlos León Canseco , Lucía Martínez Santamaría , José Bonafont Aragó, Esteban Chacón Solano
• Duration: 2020 - 2021

El objetivo es el desarrollo de un sistema para procesamiento del texto libre de las historias clínicas electrónicas (HCE) del Hospital Universitario Fundación de Alcorcón (HUFA) utilizando técnicas de procesamiento de lenguaje natural y métodos de deep learning. HUFA fue uno de los primeros hospitales de la Comunidad de Madrid en disponer de HCE, desde su apertura a finales de 1997. En la actualidad la Comunidad de Madrid tiene integradas más 5 millones de HCE de las que sólo se procesan los metadatos estructurados. El resto de la información, en formato no estructurado (texto libre), a día de hoy permanece sin ser poder ser explotada por procesos automáticos. El desarrollo de tecnología capaz de procesar y explotar información no estructurada en texto libre de la HCE en el contexto actual de big data, puede tener muchas aplicaciones tanto en la mejora de la práctica clínica (generación automática de resúmenes de episodios relacionados con un paciente, sistemas de ayuda a la decisión clínica para personalizar diagnósticos y tratamiento de enfermedades, alertas de enfermedades infecciosas, mejora de los sistemas de farmacovigilancia, etc.) como en investigación (semi-automatización de los estudios epidemiológicos, por ejemplo en la identificación de los cohortes de pacientes). En concreto, la realización de estudios epidemiológicos implica una ardua labor en la revisión manual de un elevado número de HCE, lo que a su vez conlleva un gran número de recursos humanos y una ingente cantidad de horas de trabajo. Por tanto es crucial promover el desarrollo de técnicas automáticas que permitan obtener información de forma más ágil, convirtiendo la información no estructurada en estructurada y procesable por algoritmos automáticos, y facilitando así la toma de decisiones estratégicas.
El objetivo del proyecto es el desarrollo de técnicas de PLN y método de deep learning para el análisis de la información no estructurada de la HCE, con el fin último del de reducir el coste, en tiempo y recursos, de los estudios epidemiológicos. El proyecto tiene dos centros participantes: (Subproyecto 1) Grupo LABDA de la UC3M que desarrollará el sistema automático para el procesamiento de la HCE y (Subproyeto 2) HUFA cuyo equipo está formado por especialistas de la unidad de Alergología, que serán los encargados de llevar a cabo un estudio epidemiológico a partir de los datos obtenidos de la HCE mediante al uso de PLN y métodos de deep learning. En concreto, el estudio epidemiológico tendrán como principal objetivo estudiar la prevalencia de la anafilaxia en la población definida como caso de uso de aplicación. Varios profesionales del servicio de informática de HUFA serán los encargados de anonimizar las HCE para garantizar la protección de datos de los pacientes.
Aunque el sistema será desarrollado sobre la HCE del HUFA, la tecnología que se pretende desarrollar en el proyecto solicitado, podría ser aplicada directamente a la HCE de cualquier otro hospital. Además, su adaptación al estudio epidemiológico de otras patologías distintas a la anafilaxia (cáncer de mama, ictus, etc) es relativamente sencilla ya que los enfoques (deep learning) que se quieren abordar durante el proyecto son independientes del problema a tratar.

• Reference: TIN2017-87548-C2-1-R
• Financing:
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Isabel Segura Bedmar
• Other investigators: Jose Luis Lopez-Cuadrado, Israel González Carrasco, José Luis Martínez Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua, Cristóbal Colón Ruiz, Rodrigo Alarcón
• Duration: 2018 - 2020

El proyecto EASIER, del Grupo Human Language and Accessibility Technologies (HULAT), del departamento de Informática de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) tiene como objetivo desarrollar una solución que mejore la accesibilidad a la información digital favoreciendo el acceso a las personas con discapacidad intelectual.

Las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC) en la sociedad de la información presentan barreras de accesibilidad, que afectan en mayor grado a las personas que tienen algún tipo de discapacidad. Son más conocidas las necesidades de las personas con discapacidad de tipo sensorial y física, pasando por alto las barreras cognitivas causadas por la difícil comprensión de los textos que afectan principalmente a las personas con discapacidad intelectual y personas mayores.

Con esta motivación se quiere proporcionar, por un lado, tecnología que dé soporte a los procesos de simplificación automática de contenido textual en español para mejorar la facilidad de lectura y, por otro lado, tecnología que genere interfaces de usuario accesibles que incluyan este contenido textual simplificado a los usuarios.

Para la simplificación léxica del contenido textual en español se tendrán en cuenta las pautas de accesibilidad (WCAG) relativas al lenguaje siguiendo legislación en España, así como las pautas de Lectura Fácil (UNE 153101: Lectura fácil. Pautas y recomendaciones para la elaboración de documentos) y Pautas de Lenguaje Llano (Plain Language). Como espacio de solución, se van a utilizar métodos de disciplinas que puedan dar soporte al cumplimiento sistemático de estos requisitos de accesibilidad cognitiva, tal es el caso de la disciplina de Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (PLN) y la Inteligencia Artificial.

• Reference:
• Financing: FUNDACION UNIVERSIA, INDRA
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Lourdes Moreno
• Other investigators: Rodrigo Alarcón, Paloma Martínez Fernández, Isabel Segura Bedmar
• Duration: 2019 - 2020
• Sitio web Más fácil - EASIER

Public administrations are rapidly advancing towards the provision of basic and extended services for the citizen through the Web (EU eGovernment Report 2014). In addition to the decrement of costs, this effort will support all people’s civil right to have access to all public services (including people with disabilities and elderly people). For this reason the EU started diverse initiatives to “Meeting new societal needs by using emerging technologies in the public sector” in order to “foster efficient, open citizen-centric public services”. Efforts have been made for enhancing the usability and accessibility of public administrations’ websites but several studies revealed that this is not sufficient to support acceptable eGovernment applications. Other factors such as content/information quality and security are also required. Our overall objective is to produce a model-based software architecture for methodologically developing personalized inclusive public eServices that allow any user to interact with them in a satisfactory way, no matter the device used. This requires integrating appropriate user profiling and adaptation techniques into the model to tailor eServices to users’ characteristics, available technology, and service’s functionality. Hence, this project has a multidisciplinary nature and will be addressed through collaboration between researchers and experts in information technology and professionals of the eGovernment, combining diverse scientific backgrounds: • Modelling eGovernment services • Data mining to search for user patterns to feed user models • Human-computer interaction for user tailored interfaces, including universal accessibility and multidevice access • Natural language processing for accessible user interfaces • Model based software architectures for the methodological development of eGovernment applications. It is structured into two subprojects: Subproject 1, leaded by the EHU, will exploit real user interaction data from the eServices provided by Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa (PCG) to extract common usage patterns, anomalous usage of services, and accessibility barriers. Models of eServices will be built with the inclusion in the workgroup of experts on eGovernment (from the Quality Institute Netherlander Municipalities, the Service for Modernization of the PCG, and IZFE, a developer of applications for eAdministration). Starting from these models, user adaptive Web access will be provided by means of presentation, content and navigation adaptations. Subproject 2, leaded by UC3M, will create a software architecture for model-based development of eGovernment applications that includes support for accessibility and multidevice use (assisted by experts from the University of Lisbon). The definition of a model-based software architecture will be done in collaboration with the LoUISE research team from UCLM, which is currently developing a framework that can be extended to fit our needs. The results of the complete project will include models of: users of eGovernment applications; e-Services; and web adaptations required to ensure universal and multidevice accessibility. All of them will be integrated by the model-based architecture that will allow the creation of tools to develop fully accessible high quality eGovernment applications. In this way the project will contribute to increase citizens’ participation, to produce savings for governments and businesses, and to reduce administrative burden.

• Reference: TIN2014-52665-C2-2-R
• Financing: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Isabel Segura Bedmar, José Luis Martínez Fernández, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua, Victor Suarez Paniagua, Israel González Carrasco, Jose Luis Lopez-Cuadrado
• Duration: 2015 - 2017
• https://egovernability.wordpress.com

The recent massive growth in online media and the rise of user-authored content (e.g weblogs, Twitter, Facebook) has lead to challenges of how to access and interpret these strongly multilingual data, in a timely, efficient, and affordable manner. Scientifically, streaming online media pose new challenges, due to their shorter, noisier, and more colloquial nature. Moreover, they form a temporal stream strongly grounded in events and context. Consequently, existing language technologies fall short onaccuracy, scalability and portability. The goal of this project is to deliver. innovative, portable open-source real-time methods for cross-lingual mining and summarisation of large-scale stream media. TrendMiner will achieve this through an inter-disciplinary approach, combining deep linguistic methods from text processing, knowledge-based reasoning from web science, machine learning, economics, and political science. No expensive human annotated data will be required due to our use of time-series data (e.g. financial markets, political polls) as a proxy. A key novelty will be weakly supervised machine learning algorithms for automatic discovery of new trends and correlations. Scalability and affordability will be addressed through a cloud-based infrastructure for real-time text mining from stream media. Results will be validated in two high-profile case studies: financial decision support (with analysts, traders, regulators, and economists) and political analysis and monitoring (with politicians, economists, and political journalists). The techniques will be generic with many business applications: business intelligence, customer relations management, community support. The project will also benefit society and ordinary citizens by enabling enhanced access to government data archives, summarisation of online health information, and tracking of hot societal issues.

• Reference: FP7-ICT 287863
• Financing: European Commission
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Isabel Segura Bedmar, Julián Moreno Schneider, María González García, María Herrero Zazo, Ricardo Revert Arenaz
• Duration: 2013 - 2014
• https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/287863

MAVIR is a research network co-funded by the Regional Government of Madrid and the European Social Fund under MA2VICMR (2010-2013) and MAVIR (2006-2009) programs. The core of the consortium consists seven research groups from universities and organisations from the Region of Madrid, namely: namely: •Laboratorio de Cibermetría (CybermetricsLab-CSIC) •Human Language Technologies & Information Retrieval (HLT&IR-UAM) •Laboratorio de Bases de Datos Avanzadas (LABDA-UC3M) •Grupo de Sistemas Inteligentes (GSI-UEM) •Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval Group (NLP&IR-UNED) •Tecnologías de Audio, Habla y Lenguaje Natural en Sistemas Inteligentes (THALES-UPM) •Grupo de Algorítmica aplicada a la Visión Artificial y la Biometría (GAVAB-URJC)

• Reference: S2009/TIC-1542
• Financing:
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, María González García, María Herrero Zazo
• Duration: 2010 - 2013
• http://www.mavir.net

CADOOH is a proposal to offer a new paradigm for access to information through new methods of interactivity, communication-based Machine-to-Machine-M2M. This will allows communication between mobile and static displays, intelligent and interactive, offering the possibility to carry out a direct interaction with the system or through the user's mobile device, providing access to information to anyone, at any anytime, anywhere and from virtually any device. This provides a clear opportunity for innovation in the field of information services through a network of multimedia information nodes providing interactive and fully accessible, and personalized

• Reference: TSI-020302-2011-21
• Financing: Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica, 2008-2011
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Francisco Javier Calle Gómez
• Other investigators: Dolores Cuadra Fernández, Francisco Javier Calle Gómez, Garazi Olaziregi, Leonardo Castaño, Esperanza Albacete García, Alejandro Baldominos Gómez
• Duration: 2011 - 2013

The aim of this project is to define and develop information extraction and retrieval techniques based on texts from the medical domain. This will be carried out following two basic tasks: firstly, processing scientific documents in English about pharmacology, and secondly, processing informative texts about health topics in other languages such as Spanish and Arabic. These information extraction techniques include domain entities recognition, pattern recognition, machine learning for extracting semantic relations, and the integration of lexical resources which are specific within the public health system (UMLS, SNOMED and so on) in order to improve applications. On the other hand, the information extracted from the processing task must be used to enrich the information retrieval tools. Thus, three prototypes of searching information will be created in order to show the feasibility of the proposed techniques. The first of them is an application oriented to pharmacists to extract knowledge about drug-drug interactions from scientific publications. The second prototype will be a tool focused on general public or patients to search information about illnesses and medicines. The third one will use the terminology extracted from the Spanish-Arabic parallel corpus to aid terminology teaching in the biomedical domain.

• Reference: TIN2010-20644-C03-01
• Financing: Plan Nacional de I+D, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Elena Castro Galán, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Isabel Segura Bedmar, María Teresa Vicente-Díez, José Luis Martínez Fernández, Julián Moreno Schneider, Daniel Sánchez Cisneros, María Herrero Zazo
• Duration: 2011 - 2013
• http://labda.inf.uc3m.es/multimedica/

• Reference: CEN-20091026
• Financing: DAEDALUS S.A dentro del SUBPROGRAMA DE APOYO A CONSORCIOS ESTRATÉGICOS NACIONALES DE INVESTIGACIÓN TÉCNICA (CENIT-E), CEN-20091026
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Dolores Cuadra Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Elena Castro Galán, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Francisco Javier Calle Gómez, Harith Al-Jumaily, César De Pablo Sánchez, Isabel Segura Bedmar, María Teresa Vicente-Díez, David del Valle Agudo, José Luis Martínez Fernández, Jesica Rivero Espinosa, Daniel Sánchez Cisneros, María González García, María Herrero Zazo
• Duration: 2009 - 2012
• http://www.cenitbuscamedia.es

SemAnts project’s main goal is to promote general access to the information society, thus improving the well-being and everyday life of both citizens and tourists. In order to do this, it is aimed to demonstrate the potential of different technologies to create more sophisticated systems which will have a real impact on the needs of people. The aspect of Information Society focused from SemAnts is the digital content, understood as elements or assemblies of media (video, image, text). These elements may represent information or may also be part of services provided to users. To achieve the intended goal, all activities related to the lifecycle of digital media through its creation, packing and distribution will be carefully analysed. Then, it will be developed a novel system of digital content management following as main guidelines semantic organization, customization, usability and accessibility. Finally, it will be endowed with a Natural Interaction layer for easing its use to not technologically trained users.
Link to project´s coordinator Web page.
Cofinanced by:

• Reference: TSI-020110-2009-419
• Financing: Ministerio de Industria, turismo y comercio
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Francisco Javier Calle Gómez
• Other investigators: Dolores Cuadra Fernández, Elena Castro Galán, David del Valle Agudo, Jesica Rivero Espinosa, Garazi Olaziregi, Leonardo Castaño, Esperanza Albacete García, Pablo José Izquierdo Escudero
• Duration: 2009 - 2011

The main goal of the project is the design and development of a system, which implements a process of automatic generation of subtitles for prerecorded video or audio accompanied by an accurate transcription (screenplay). In this project wants develop a prototype. It will be a tool that will offer support for subtitling of audiovisual content in recorded (movies, documentaries, series, etc…) for different media way such as television, Internet and mobile devices. In this context, the process is called recorded subtitling (off-line or canned) because is not processed in real time; it is treated previously without anytime limits. This automatic support provide a synchronization process of the screenplay with audio by adding time stamps, analyze of errors resulted in the process, and the text subtitles segmentation conform to current standards.

• Reference: Proyecto Avanza - TSI-020100-2010-184
• Financing: Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio (proyecto AVANZA)
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Lourdes Moreno
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, José Luis Martínez Fernández, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua, María González García
• Duration: 2010 - 2011
• http://labda.inf.uc3m.es/sagas

The main aim of GEMMA Project (acronym of the Spanish translation of "Multiplatform manager for Audiovisual Advertisement Media") is to propose a new model for managing audiovisual advertisement contents over platforms of different nature. These audiovisual contents will be distributed lately to multiplatform devices. Furthermore, accessibility issues will be taking into account from the very beginning of the system (from the design of the audiovisual contents to their publication).

• Reference: Proyecto AVANZA - TSI-020302-2010-14
• Financing: Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio (proyecto AVANZA)
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua, Francisco Utray, Mercedes de Castro Álvarez
• Duration: 2010 - 2011

The “Thuban” project is focused to develop a virtual attendant which interacts with the user and takes into account his position in the environment. This feature provides access to services such as: services relative to the position and trajectory (for example, notice), oriented services to manage these parameters (for example, tracking and guiding to fixed and moving objects) or the description of the situation and/or trajectory and in general, every available service in the system. The Spatio-Temporal database will be the technology used to handle the user tracking and guiding. This kind of database should be able to generate and manage spatio-temporal events. On the other hand, the system interaction must be oriented to imitate the human interaction (Natural Interaction) providing support to any sort of user. The Spatio-Temporal database and Interaction System integration are the fundamental basis for achieving the interaction platform. Therefore, Virtual Attendants development is feasible for different environments and applications, which will strengthen the Information Societies for all.

• Reference: TIN2007-66660
• Financing: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Dolores Cuadra Fernández
• Other investigators: Francisco Javier Calle Gómez, Harith Al-Jumaily, Isabel Segura Bedmar, David del Valle Agudo, Juan Ignacio Perea Moraleda, David Rodríguez Álvarez, Jack Mario Mingo Postiglioni, Manuel Velasco de Diego, Jesica Rivero Espinosa
• Duration: 2008 - 2011

The project is carried out by a broad Consortium, integrating development enterprises as iSOCO, research centers such as the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), and user entities as is the Bankinter Foundation. It aims to develop a new digital platform providing access to information and services through secure and accessible interaction. It will gather multiple channels of communication, such as web access, instant messaging and intelligent speech processing, that is, able of communicating by means of natural language dialogues.

• Reference: TSI-020501-2008-54
• Financing: Ministerio de Industria, turismo y comercio
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Dolores Cuadra Fernández
• Other investigators: Elena Castro Galán, Francisco Javier Calle Gómez, David del Valle Agudo, Jesica Rivero Espinosa
• Duration: 2008 - 2010

Adaptation of APEINTA project so students can use eReader devices (specifically iPads) into the classroom for real-time captioning. Moreover, a feasibility study of new ways of communications based on VoIP between the teacher and APEINTA will be carried out.

• Reference: EA2008-0312
• Financing: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Proyectos de I+D 2007). Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. Convocatoria del Programa de Estudios y Análisis. Acciones Destinadas a la Mejora de la Calidad de la Enseñanza
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua, Pablo Revuelta, Javier Jiménez
• Duration: 2008 - 2009
• http://apeinta.cesya.es

The main objective of the project is developing a universal platform for Internet access via wireless public access networks, through which you can easily manage and monitor the provision of such services, with compliance with all universal accessibility standards, allowing access from any user terminal (personal computers, PDAs, smart phones, etc..) being used by any person, irrespective of any disabilities or impairments that may possess, across the adequate terminals.

• Reference: TSI-020302-2008-55
• Financing: Acción Estratégica de Telecomunicaciones y Sociedad de la Información. AVANZA I+D
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda
• Duration: 2008 - 2010
• http://www.eng.conectate.es/IDI/DISUIPA/

BRAVO is devoted to research on technologies to improve the answers search in both text and voice, and the main result is a platform for a modular answers search system which allows to measure the improvement of different techniques for questions classification, answer extraction, passages retrieval, etc. SPINDEL is one of the techniques developed in this project, an entity recognizer which, regardless of language, applies machine learning based on bootstrapping. In the framework of BRAVO project, one of the current research areas is related to the location of drug names and interactions between them in the medical literature using UMLS, dictionaries and USAN rules of naming drugs. As a result, it is available automatically annotated corpus using the DrugNer system (developed by the Advances Databases Group) with generic drug names and other biomedical concepts and manually evaluated by a pharmacological expert. The system combines information obtained by the UMLS MetaMap Transfer (MMTx) program and nomenclature rules recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) International Nonproprietary Names (INNs) Program to identify and classify pharmaceutical substances

• Reference: TIN2007-67407-C03-01
• Financing:
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Lourdes Moreno, Elena Castro Galán, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, César De Pablo Sánchez, Isabel Segura Bedmar, María Teresa Vicente-Díez, José Luis Martínez Fernández, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua, Julián Moreno Schneider, Mario Crespo
• Duration: 2007 - 2010

MAVIR Consortium is a research network co-funded by the Regional Government of Madrid under the IV Plan Regional de Investigación Científica e Innovación Tecnológica (IV PRICIT) integrating a multi-disciplinar team made of scientists, engineers, linguists and documentalists working together on two main areas:Human Language Technologies and Scientific Communication via WWW. The thematic network suggested includes 25 doctors organised in 6 research groups (UNED, UAM, UC3M, UEM, UPM and CINDOC) of the CM that from a multi-discipline perspective complement in various dimensions: academic vs. professional, research vs. services, resources’ generation vs. applications. Furthermore, there are 6 other national and international groups of research associated to the project as well as, among others, the following contributor organizations: RAE, Instituto Cervantes, Fuenlabrada Hospital, EFE Agency and DAEDALUS.

• Reference: S-505/TIC/0267
• Financing: IV Plan Regional de Investigación Científica e Innovación Tecnológica (IV PRICIT), Comunidad de Madrid
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Dolores Cuadra Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Elena Castro Galán, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Francisco Javier Calle Gómez, Harith Al-Jumaily, César De Pablo Sánchez, Isabel Segura Bedmar, María Teresa Vicente-Díez, David del Valle Agudo, Jesica Rivero Espinosa, Doaa Samy, Mario Crespo, Daniel Sánchez Cisneros, María Herrero Zazo
• Duration: 2006 - 2009
• http://www.mavir.net

APEINTA is an educational project that aims for inclusive education for every student of all abilities in and out of the classroom. We propose to use new computer science and electronic technologies in order to avoid learning barriers that we can unfortunately find already in the educational environment. The APEINTA project is focused in two main inclusive proposals: One Inside the classroom and the other one Outside the classroom. 1.The Inside the classroom proposal is to use two mechanisms in order to eliminate students’ communication barriers. First, the use of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) provides automatic real-time transcription. And second, a text to speech system (TTS) makes easier the communication with the teacher and other students for people with speech problems. 2.The Outside the classroom proposal provides an accessible Web learning platform with digital resources, so every student can access them in and out of the classroom. The project and its evaluation have being carried out at the Carlos III University of Madrid, in 3rd course of Computer Science degree. Good results and a high satisfaction level have been obtained. Moreover, new research and work lines have born from this project. Computer Science Department and Telecommunication department at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid and the Spanish Center of Captioning and Audiodescription (CESyA) are collaborating in the APEINTA Project. This project received in 2009 the FIAPAS (Spanish Confederation of Parents and Friends of Deaf People) award for research and innovation in education area related to hearing disability.

• Reference: EA2008-0312
• Financing: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Proyectos de I+D 2007). Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. Convocatoria del Programa de Estudios y Análisis. Acciones Destinadas a la Mejora de la Calidad de la Enseñanza
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Belén Ruiz-Mezcua, Pablo Revuelta, Javier Jiménez
• Duration: 2008 - 2009
• http://apeinta.cesya.es

The main project purpose is the design and development of a set of software tools to support Software Engineering Best Practices, defined by international standardization organizations such as ISO, SEI and PMI. These tools will allow the definition of software processes and will assist in the software project management based on Best Practices Models. In order to get the project effectively, it is necessary to develop formal specifications language to represent processes and also an advanced system to store, classify and retrieve assets and artifacts, as work products, project planning, requirement documents, metrics, risks, etc.

• Reference: TIN2004-07083
• Financing: MINISTERIO DE EDUCACION Y CIENCIA, DIR. GRAL. INVESTIGACION
• Project type: Público
• State: Activo
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Dolores Cuadra Fernández, Lourdes Moreno, Elena Castro Galán, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Francisco Javier Calle Gómez, Harith Al-Jumaily, César De Pablo Sánchez
• Duration: 2004 - 2008

This project is related to the strategic action line of ‘Tourism related technologies’ with the aim of improving the existing signaling systems for tourists (of any language) and develop accessible systems in tourist accommodation to help overcome some disabilities (motor, audible, and visual). The consortium created for this project joins together experienced companies in the IT (TMT Factory, Signaletics) and academic research groups (La Salle, UPM, UC3M). SOPAT aims to characterize, develop and validate a new universal signaling system based on the complementary use of: (1) radio-electrical positioning signals emitted by the user (willingly or automatically by some device); and (2) keep natural interactions with the user in order to provide customized services and information. At the technological level, two configurations are raised based on respective communication channels, such as (a) a portable device (PDA), and (b) a fixed-position interface (SmartPoint). The applied positioning technology is the identification by radio frequency (RFID and ZigBee). The interaction subsystem counts on advanced UI elements (recognition and synthesis of speech, and natural language processing) and Natural Interaction models. Our group is involved in this project to provide Natural Interaction mechanisms, supported by a multi-agent platform (Ecosystem) and knowledge models cooperating on it. Among others, in this project can be highlighted the Situation Model (aimed to the management of the circumstances, and supported by spatio-temporal DB) and the Dialogue Model (for controlling and endow coherence to interaction; based on the Threads Model).

• Reference: CIT-410000-2007-12
• Financing: Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Francisco Javier Calle Gómez
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Dolores Cuadra Fernández, Elena Castro Galán, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Francisco Javier Calle Gómez, David del Valle Agudo, Jesica Rivero Espinosa
• Duration: 2007 - 2008
• http://www.tmtfactory.com/proyecto_SOPAT.asp

The aim is to research in technology based on automatic language processing for information location and retrieval from medical texts and other resources (reports, electronic medical records, scientific documentation, etc..) specially in Spanish language. Thus, we worked in browsers with different levels of complexity that integrate medical domain-specific resources and terminology (UMLS, SNOMED, etc.) and with different treatment of syntactic and semantic levels.

• Reference: FIT-350300-2007-75
• Financing: Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Dolores Cuadra Fernández, Elena Castro Galán, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Harith Al-Jumaily, César De Pablo Sánchez, Isabel Segura Bedmar, María Teresa Vicente-Díez, José Luis Martínez Fernández
• Duration: 2007 - 2008

IntegraTV-4all is an effort towards a new television for all and to promote the access of people with disabilities to the new technologies, with a development adapted and oriented to their possibilities and necessities, which includes both graphical and natural-language interfaces. The consortium is formed by industrial and academic partners(TMT Factory, Ramón Llull University, Technical University of Madrid and Carlos III University). IntegraTV-4all wants to extend interactive television in new directions through the development and integration into the IntegraTV of a new module that contributes to facilitate the personal autonomy and the social integration of groups such as, primarily, people with some sensorial impairment (blindness, visual deficiencies, deafness, impaired hearing ability, limitations of speech). Potentially, nevertheless, the results of the project are also useful for people with some physical or psychic impairment as well as for the elderly. Initially in the project, a basic service of interactive television was implemented, which lets users navigate through the menus using their voice. This service is in operation as a prototype so that users are able to take advantage of all the services of IntegraTV-4all and to navigate through the system without the need of visual references, given that all the options on the screen and all the texts are presented by voice. In a later phase, adapted content (created for users with disabilities) and conversational capabilities (within a limited domain) are added to the system.

• Reference: FIT-350301-2004-2
• Financing: MINISTERIO INDUSTRIA, TURISMO Y COMERCIO DIR. GRAL. DESARROLLO SOC. INFORMACION
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Dolores Cuadra Fernández, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Francisco Javier Calle Gómez, David del Valle Agudo
• Duration: 2005 - 2006
• http://research.tmtfactory.com/index.php/tmtresearch/projects/12/

In order to encourage productive patterns of collaborative discourse, language technologies are used to develop an infrastructure for scaffolding the interactions between students in computer supported collaborative learning environments, to help coordinate their communication, and to encourage deep thinking and reflection. Tutorial dialogue agents for supporting learning of individuals working alone in thermodynamic domain.

• Reference:
• Financing:
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Carolyn P. Rosé
• Other investigators: Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Rohit Kumar, Carolyn P. Rosé, Vincent Aleven, Allen Robinson
• Duration: 2005 - 2005
• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cprose/Cycletalk.html

The main purpose of MIRACLE project has been to develop an Information Retrieval system that integrates several techniques and available resources (proceeding from the statistical field as well as from the linguistic technology area) in order to enhance the quality of retrieval in the scope of multilingual information retrieval. This system has been carried out togheter with the Technical University of Madrid and has been succesfuly validated in the CLEF forum (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) in 2003 and 2004 editions. Particularly, MIRACLE systems has taken part in multilingual, bilingual and monolingual tasks as well as in Image retrieval. Moreover, in 2004 edition we have also taken part in question answering task.

• Reference: 07T/0055/2003 2
• Financing: Comunidad de Madrid
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, César De Pablo Sánchez, José Luis Martínez Fernández
• Duration: 2003 - 2004

The aim of the OmniPaper project is to offer a personalized and standarized interface to the articles of European newspapers. In order to improve this access, the browsing through a multilingual taxonomy of subjects is combined with full-text searching and other techniques which involve metadata handling.

• Reference: Subcontratación en proyecto IST-2001-32174
• Financing: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Duration: 2002 - 2004

The objective is to develop a virtual personal insurance and finance assistant with new means of interaction. This personal assistant will be specialized in risk management counselling for small and medium enterprises. The virtual advisor shows up and behaves almost like a "real" serious insurance consultant. The virtual assistant is reactive and easy to use through the use of natural language processing and speech recognition technologies.

• Reference: Subcontratacion en proyecto IST-2001-32440
• Financing: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Francisco Javier Calle Gómez
• Duration: 2002 - 2003

The ADVICE project consists on the development of a new interface for a craftsmanship tools e-commerce system. With the aim of providing full support to customers of online shops and to the users of electronic services on the Internet during the complete customer service lifecycle. The ADVICE system provides: An advanced multimedia user interface supporting natural language text input and output, as well as an animated assistant, that ensures a high level of user-system interaction. A software environment for building intelligent sales assistants for two types of selling and marketing services: sales-service and after sales service. The virtual assistant supported by this application will be capable of interacting with the user in natural language, adapt its recommendations to the requirements and characteristics of the customers and provide explanations of the advised products as well as of the different interesting alternatives.

• Reference: Subcontratacion en proyecto IST-1999-11305
• Financing: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Paloma Martínez Fernández
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Francisco Javier Calle Gómez
• Duration: 2001 - 2002

Database Design discipline involves so different aspects as conceptual and logical modelling knowledge or domain understanding. That implies a great effort to carry out the real world abstraction task and represent it through a data model. CASE tools emerge in order to automating the database development process. These platforms try to help to the database designer in different database design phases. Nevertheless, this tools are frequently mere diagrammers and do not carry completely out the design methodology that they are supposed to support; furthermore, they do not offer intelligent methodological advice to novice designers. A software tool has been developed which tries to mitigate some of the deficiencies observed in several CASE tools, defining methods and techniques for database development which are useful for students and practitioners

• Reference: TIC99-0215
• Financing: C.I.C.Y.T. SECRETARIA GRAL. DEL PLAN NACIONAL DE I+D
• Project type: Público
• State: Terminado
• Principal investigator: Antonio de Amescua
• Other investigators: Paloma Martínez Fernández, Dolores Cuadra Fernández, Elena Castro Galán, Ana M. Iglesias Maqueda, Antonio de Amescua
• Duration: 1999 - 2001