Intelligent approaches in sports using IoT devices to gather data, attempting to optimize athlete’s training and performance, are cutting edge research. Synergies between recent wearable hardware and wireless communication strategies, together with the advances in intelligent algorithms, which are able to perform online pattern recognition and classification with seamless results, are at the front line of high-performance sports coaching. In this work, an intelligent data analytics system for swimmer performance is proposed. The system includes (i) pre-processing of raw signals; (ii) feature representation of wearable sensors and biosensors; (iii) online recognition of the swimming style and turns; and (iv) post-analysis of the performance for coaching decision support, including stroke counting and average speed. The system is supported by wearable inertial (AHRS) and biosensors (heart rate and pulse oximetry) placed on a swimmer’s body. Radio-frequency links are employed to communicate with the heart rate sensor and the station in the vicinity of the swimming pool, where analytics is carried out. Experiments were carried out in a real training setup, including 10 athletes aged 15 to 17 years. This scenario resulted in a set of circa 8000 samples. The experimental results show that the proposed system for intelligent swimming analytics with wearable sensors effectively yields immediate feedback to coaches and swimmers based on real-time data analysis. The best result was achieved with a Random Forest classifier with a macro-averaged $F_1$ of 95.02%. The benefit of the proposed framework was demonstrated by effectively supporting coaches while monitoring the training of several swimmers.

With the increase of smart farming in the agricultural sector, farmers have better control over the entire production cycle, notably in terms of pest monitoring. In fact, pest monitoring has gained significant importance, since the excessive use of pesticides can lead to great damage to crops, substantial environmental impact, and unnecessary costs both in material and manpower. Despite the potential of new technologies, pest monitoring is still done in a traditional way, leading to excessive costs, lack of precision, and excessive use of human labour. In this paper, we present an Internet of Things (IoT) network combined with intelligent Computer Vision (CV) techniques to improve pest monitoring. First, we propose to use low-cost cameras at the edge that capture images of pest traps and send them to the cloud. Second, we use deep neural models, notably R-CNN and YOLO models, to detect the Whitefly (WF) pest in yellow sticky traps. Finally, the predicted number of WF is analysed over time and results are accessible to farmers through a mobile app that allows them to visualise the pest in each specific field. The contribution is to make pest monitoring autonomous, cheaper, data-driven, and precise. Results demonstrate that, by combining IoT, CV technology, and deep models, it is possible to enhance pest monitoring.

Crowdsourcing is an emergent trend for general-purpose classification problem solving. Over the past decade, this notion has been embodied by enlisting a crowd of humans to help solve problems. There are a growing number of real-world problems that take advantage of this technique, such as Wikipedia, Linux or Amazon Mechanical Turk. In this paper, we evaluate its suitability for classification, namely if it can outperform state-of-the-art models by combining it with active learning techniques. We propose two approaches based on crowdsourcing and active learning and empirically evaluate the performance of a baseline Support Vector Machine when active learning examples are chosen and made available for classification to a crowd in a web-based scenario. The proposed crowdsourcing active learning approach was tested with Jester data set, a text humour classification benchmark, resulting in promising improvements over baseline results.

Learning in non-stationary environments is not an easy task and requires a distinctive approach. The learning model must not only have the ability to continuously learn, but also the ability to acquired new concepts and forget the old ones. Additionally, given the significant importance that social networks gained as information networks, there is an ever-growing interest in the extraction of complex information used for trend detection, promoting services or market sensing. This dynamic nature tends to limit the performance of traditional static learning models and dynamic learning strategies must be put forward. In this paper we present a learning strategy to learn with drift in the occurrence of concepts in Twitter. We propose three different models: a time-window model, an ensemble-based model and an incremental model. Since little is known about the types of drift that can occur in Twitter, we simulate different types of drift by artificially time stamping real Twitter messages in order to evaluate and validate our strategy. Results are so far encouraging regarding learning in the presence of drift, along with classifying messages in Twitter streams.