The study of artificial learning processes in the area of computer vision context has mainly focused on achieving a fixed output target rather than on identifying the underlying processes as a means to develop solutions capable of performing as good as or better than the human brain. This work reviews the well-known segmentation efforts in computer vision. However, our primary focus is on the quantitative evaluation of the amount of contextual information provided to the neural network. In particular, the information used to mimic the tacit information that a human is capable of using, like a sense of unambiguous order and the capability of improving its estimation by complementing already learned information. Our results show that, after a set of pre and post-processing methods applied to both the training data and the neural network architecture, the predictions made were drastically c...

Global targets to reduce salt intake have been proposed, but their monitoring is challenged by the lack of population-based data on salt consumption. We developed a machine learning (ML) model to predict salt consumption at the population level based on simple predictors and applied this model to national surveys in 54 countries. We used 21 surveys with spot urine samples for the ML model derivation and validation; we developed a supervised ML regression model based on sex, age, weight, height, and systolic and diastolic blood pressure. We applied the ML model to 54 new surveys to quantify the mean salt consumption in the population. The pooled dataset in which we developed the ML model included 49,776 people. Overall, there were no substantial differences between the observed and ML-predicted mean salt intake (p<0.001). The pooled dataset where we applied the ML model included 166,677 p...

Internet of Things (IoT) has posed new requirements to the underlying processing architecture, specially for real-time applications, such as event-detection services. Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines provide a powerful tool to implement these services. Fog computing has raised as a solution to support IoT real-time applications, in contrast to the Cloud-based approach. This work is aimed at analysing a CEP-based Fog architecture for real-time IoT applications that uses a publish-subscribe protocol. A testbed has been developed with low-cost and local resources to verify the suitability of CEP-engines to low-cost computing resources. To assess performance we have analysed the effectiveness and cost of the proposal in terms of latency and resource usage, respectively. Results show that the fog computing architecture reduces event-detection latencies up to 35%, while the available com...