Cooperative vehicular systems are being developed to improve traffic safety and management. Reducing road traffic congestion can be achieved through effective management strategies. In this sense, mechanisms for its rapid and accurate detection that allow evaluating the road network performance are crucial. Current Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) require the deployment of infrastructure sensors to monitor traffic conditions. Their installation is often expensive and their capability to provide accurate traffic information is limited. In this context, this paper proposes CoTEC (COperative Traffic congestion detECtion), a novel cooperative technique based on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications and fuzzy logic to detect road traffic congestion without the need to deploy infrastructure sensors. The proposed technique is also capable to accurately detect the traffic congestion intensity and length.

Student response systems (SRSs) are becoming popular among instructors in nearly all levels of learning. The benefits of using SRSs in terms of attendance, attention, participation, or motivation have been shown in many studies. Moreover, several studies demonstrate that the use of some kind of gaming techniques in education are useful to stimulate students to learn in wider, longer, and deeper ways. This paper analyzes whether the integration of both SRSs and gaming techniques leads to better results in motivation, attention, engagement, and learning performance than SRSs alone. For this purpose, a new tool has been developed for conducting an experimental study with students from different subjects and from different academic levels. A randomized post-test-only control group analysis was conducted to evaluate the impact of the gamified SRS. In addition, a multivariate three-way factorial design has been performed considering three relevant factors: 1) learning tool (non-gamified SRS or gamified SRS); 2) study type; and 3) gender. The main finding is that students who took lecture sessions with a gamified SRS had more positive perceptions with respect to motivation, attention, and learning performance than students who took lecture sessions with a non-gamified SRS.

Despite the large number of genes known to affect leaf shape or size, we still have a relatively poor understanding of how leaf morphology is established. For example, little is known about how cell division and cell expansion are controlled and coordinated within a growing leaf to eventually develop into a laminar organ of a definite size. To obtain a global perspective of the cellular basis of variations in leaf morphology at the organ, tissue and cell levels, we studied a collection of 111 non‐allelic mutants with abnormally shaped and/or sized leaves, which broadly represent the mutational variations in Arabidopsis thaliana leaf morphology not associated with lethality. We used image‐processing techniques on these mutants to quantify morphological parameters running the gamut from the palisade mesophyll and epidermal cells to the venation, whole leaf and rosette levels. We found positive correlations between epidermal cell size and leaf area, which is consistent with long‐standing Avery's hypothesis that the epidermis drives leaf growth. In addition, venation parameters were positively correlated with leaf area, suggesting that leaf growth and vein patterning share some genetic controls. Positional cloning of the genes affected by the studied mutations will eventually establish functional links between genotypes, molecular functions, cellular parameters and leaf phenotypes.