Word sense disambiguation is a key step for many natural language processing tasks (e.g. summarization, text classification, relation extraction) and presents a challenge to any system that aims to process documents from the biomedical domain. In this paper, we present a new graph-based unsupervised technique to address this problem. The knowledge base used in this work is a graph built with co-occurrence information from medical concepts found in scientific abstracts, and hence adapted to the specific domain. Unlike other unsupervised approaches based on static graphs such as UMLS, in this work the knowledge base takes the context of the ambiguous terms into account. Abstracts downloaded from PubMed are used for building the graph and disambiguation is performed using the personalized PageRank algorithm. Evaluation is carried out over two test datasets widely explored in the literature. Different parameters of the system are also evaluated to test robustness and scalability. Results show that the system is able to outperform state-of-the-art knowledge-based systems, obtaining more than 10% of accuracy improvement in some cases, while only requiring minimal external resources. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Presently, the ever-increasing use of new technologies helps people to acquire additional skills for developing an applied critical thinking in many contexts of our society. When it comes to education, and more particularly in any Engineering subject, practical learning scenarios are key to achieve a set of competencies and applied skills. In our particular case, the cybersecurity topic with a distance education methodology is considered and a new remote virtual laboratory based on containers will be presented and evaluated in this work. The laboratory is based on the Linux Docker virtualization technology, which allows us to create consistent realistic scenarios with lower configuration requirements for the students. The laboratory is comparatively evaluated with our previous environment, LoT@UNED, from both the points of view of the students’ acceptance with a set of UTAUT models, and their behavior regarding evaluation items, time distribution, and content resources. All data was obtained from students’ surveys and platform registers. The main conclusion of this work is that the proposed laboratory obtains a very high acceptance from the students, in terms of several different indicators (perceived usefulness, estimated effort, social influence, attitude, ease of access, and intention of use). Neither the use of the virtual platform nor the distance methodology employed affect the intention to use the technology proposed in this work.

Today, a great number of attack opportunities for cybercriminals arise in Android, since it is one of the most used operating systems for many mobile applications. Hence, it is very important to anticipate these situations. To minimize this problem, the analysis of malware search applications is based on machine learning algorithms. Our work uses as a starting point the features proposed by the DREBIN project, which today constitutes a key reference in the literature, being the largest public Android malware dataset with labeled families. The authors only employ the support vector machine to determine whether a sample is malware or not. This work first proposes a new efficient dimensionality reduction of features, as well as the application of several supervised machine learning algorithms for prediction purposes. Predictive models based on Random Forest are found to achieve the most promising results. They can detect an average of 91.72% malware samples, with a very low false positive rate of 0.13%, and using only 5,000 features. This is just over 9% of the total number of features of DREBIN. It achieves an accuracy of 99.52%, a total precision of 96.91%, as well as a macro average F1-score of 96.99%.