Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions

Recent Submissions

Information propagation in the cortex across the sleep-wake cycle: a computational study 

Razi, Farhad (Date of defense: 2023-07-21)

During the deep phases of sleep we do not normally wake up by a thunder, but we nevertheless notice it when awake. The exact same sound gets to our ears and cortex through the thalamus and still, it triggers two very ...

Constraints and rewards in behavior and optimal decision making 

Ramirez-Ruiz, Jorge (Date of defense: 2023-06-22)

The idea of optimal decision-making presupposes certain features about the agent and their environment. This thesis examines two common assumptions in disciplines that study natural and artificial behavior: perfect ...

Representation learning for hierarchical reinforcement learning 

Steccanella, Lorenzo (Date of defense: 2023-05-19)

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) has the potential to simplify the solution of environments with long horizons and sparse rewards. The idea behind HRL is to decompose a complex decision-making problem into ...

Complexity changes in neuroimaging signals point to mechanisms of neuropsychiatric disease 

Blair, David Sutherland (Date of defense: 2023-04-24)

The past decade has seen several attempts to employ the entropy of neuroimaging signals as a potential biomarker for cognitive decline or traumatic brain injury (C. Y. Liu et al. 2013; Adhikari et al. 2017; Li et al. 2018). ...

Re-thinking large scale hate speech identification: beyond common NLP conventions and supervised machine learning 

Teixeira Fortuna, Paula Cristina (Date of defense: 2023-03-06)

The detection of hate speech in online spaces is traditionally conceptualized as a classification task that uses Machine Learning (ML)-driven Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. In accordance with this ...

Towards efficient audio-visual source separation and synthesis 

Montesinos García, Juan Felipe (Date of defense: 2023-03-31)

Nuestro cerebro tiene la habilidad innata de aislar diferentes sonidos en ambientes ruidosos (Efecto de fiesta de coctel), así como de entender la relación entre aquello que vemos y oímos. Esta tesis tiene como objetivo ...

Improvements to incentives in incentive-driven blockchain technologies 

McMenamin, Conor (Date of defense: 2023-03-17)

In this thesis, we present a set of protocols in areas at the core of current blockchain technology literature; consensus, decentralized finance and distributed computing. These areas are bound by a critical dependency ...

Toward empathic systems: implicit understanding and modulation of human cognitive and affective states 

López Carral, Héctor (Date of defense: 2023-03-13)

Emotions are a fundamental part of human life. They play a critical role in how we think, behave, and implicitly understand each other. However, although computing devices are increasingly consequential in our world, they ...

Zero-knowledge proofs for self-sovereign identities in decentralized services 

Salleras, Xavier (Date of defense: 2023-03-13)

Telecommunication systems such as mobile communications are evolving over time, and thanks to that, many digital services have arisen in the last decade. Usually, these services ask their users to provide sensitive information ...

Assessing the digital well-being of educational technologies supported by learning analytics 

Hakami, Eyad (Date of defense: 2023-02-10)

The accelerating adoption of digital technologies creates a direct relationship between the status of individual and societal well-being on one hand, and the state of the digital technologies that underpin human life ...

Automatic characterization and generation of music loops and instrument samples for electronic music production 

Ramires, António (Date of defense: 2023-02-08)

Repurposing audio material to create new music - also known as sampling - was a foundation of electronic music and is a fundamental component of this practice. Currently, large-scale databases of audio offer vast collections ...

Assessing the impact of music recommendation diversity on listeners 

Porcaro, Lorenzo (Date of defense: 2022-12-16)

This thesis focuses on assessing the impact that music recommendation diversity may have on listeners. In the music domain, diversity is one of the values that recommender systems should preserve, because the world music ...

Risk assessment in complex data settings: algorithmic fairness and causal inference 

Karimi-Haghighi, Marzieh (Date of defense: 2023-01-20)

We try to address some challenges in structured risk assessment tools in two application areas of recidivism risk in criminal justice and dropout risk in higher education domain. Using Machine Learning (ML) methods, we ...

Brain states in health and disease: insights from neuroimaging and theoretical neuroscience 

Escrichs, Anira (Date of defense: 2022-12-12)

Spontaneous brain activity persists and transitions between brain states, such as from wakefulness to sleep, from development to ageing, or it may transition to pathological states such as coma. Nevertheless, a consensual ...

Characterizing brain mechanisms underlying Neurofeedback and Meditation through whole-brain computational modeling and artificial intelligence 

De Filippi, Eleonora (Date of defense: 2022-11-23)

En las últimas décadas, un cambio de paradigma en el estudio y el tratamiento de los trastornos cerebrales ha hecho que se preste más atención a nuevas intervenciones terapéuticas. En esta línea, las técnicas de autorregulación, ...

Grounding brain mechanisms in the spatiotemporal properties of cerebral and behavioral networks 

Ulysse, Laura (Date of defense: 2022-11-04)

The spatiotemporal properties of the cerebral and behavioral networks are key elements to understand normal brain functioning and their breakdowns. This dissertation focuses on the cerebral networks of the brain regions’ ...

Algorithmic bias in graph-based recommender systems 

Fabbri, Francesco (Date of defense: 2022-10-25)

Recommender Systems represent a key instrument to convey consumption of contents available on the Web. They enhance the engagement among the users and the online platforms through algorithmic personalization. Injecting ...

The Next Wi-Fi Generation: towards intelligent and multi-link enabled networks 

López Raventós, Álvaro (Date of defense: 2022-10-26)

The next Wi-Fi generation poses in front of a massive challenge as the main enabler for new services and applications. Traffic requirements are expected to keep rising year over year, challenging Wi-Fi networks to cope ...

Human-centered machine learning for music emotion recognition 

Gómez Cañón, Juan sebastián (Date of defense: 2022-10-26)

This doctoral thesis is focused on music in terms of emotion -- such algorithms compose the computational task of music emotion recognition (MER). MER evaluates emotionally relevant features from music, correlates them ...

Coupling by volume conduction as a wireless power transfer and communications method for threadlike biomedical implants. 

Tudela Pi, Marc (Date of defense: 2022-10-27)

Although the use of volumetric conduction to power wireless implants has been experimentally validated in recent years, a theoretical framework to determine the power and efficiency obtained by minimally invasive implants ...