Intersection Intelligence: Supporting Urban Platooning with Virtual Traffic Lights over Virtualized Intersection-Based Routing.

The advent of the autonomous car is paving the road to the realization of ideas that will help optimize traffic flows, increase safety and reduce fuel consumption, among other advantages. We present one proposal to bring together Virtual Traffics Lights (VTLs) and platooning in urban scenarios, leaning on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication protocols that turn intersections into virtual containers of data. Newly-introduced protocols for the combined management of VTLs and platoons are validated by simulation, comparing a range of routing protocols for the vehicular networks with the baseline given by common deployments of traditional traffic lights ruled by state-of-the-art policies. The simulation results show that the combination of VTLs and platoons can achieve significant reductions in travel times and fuel consumption, provided that proper algorithms are used to handle the V2V communications.

A Bespoke Social Network for Deaf Women in Ecuador to Access Information on Sexual and Reproductive Health.

Many deaf women face the lack of numerous resources related to their personal development. The unavailability of proper information on Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH), in particular, causes problems of sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancy in adolescence, sexual violence, complications during pregnancy, etc. In response to this, we have created a social network that delivers SRH content (verified and validated by experts) to women with different degrees of hearing loss. The site features a recommender system that selects the most relevant pieces of content to deliver to each woman, driven by her individual preferences, needs and levels of knowledge on the different subjects. We report experiments conducted in Cuenca, Ecuador, between 2017 and 2018 with 98 volunteers from low- and middle-income settings, aiming to evaluate the quality and appeal of the contents, the coherence of the methodology followed to create them, and the effectiveness of the content recommendations. The positive results encourage the frequent creation of new content and the refinement of the recommendation logic as the cohort of users expands over time.