Project Listing

The GOT-Energy-TALENT proposal hereby presented by GEINTRA Group involves different tasks related to the monitoring and analysis of different indicators in the context of home and city surveillance in order to optimize the smart cities capabilities in terms of energy management and security. Works hereby focused thus involve two different important aims in the actual and future society: security and energy.
This proposal in the GOT-Energy-Talent call is oriented to support the transition to a reliable, sustainable and competitive smart city, within the Smart Cities & Communities area: sustainable development of urban areas is a challenge of key importance. It requires new, efficient, and user-friendly technologies and services, in which surveillance applications for people monitoring and analysis, is already a well-developed field in some other advanced societies such as the Asian one. The proposal hereby presented tackles the attainment of a commercial-scale solution with a high market potential that analyzes energy, transport and communications resources and use in which people audio-visual surveillance is the main key.

The GOT-Energy-TALENT proposal hereby presented by GEINTRA Group involves tasks related to the monitoring and analysis of different indicators in the context of home and city surveillance in order to optimize the smart cities capabilities in terms of energy management and security. The works under this proposal are thus focused in two relevant aims in technology supporting current and future societies: security and energy. This proposal in the GOT-Energy-Talent call is oriented to support the transition to a reliable, sustainable and competitive smart city, within the Energy Efficiency topic: being a no-regret option for Europe, energy consumption is needed to progressively decrease by 2020 to 2030.

Energy-efficient desalination and water treatment technologies play a critical role in augmenting freshwater resources without placing an excessive strain on limited energy supplies. In this sense, the high energy efficiency and often superior efficacy of membrane-based technologies have gained widespread implementation in various water treatment processes. Thus, new processes has been proposed merging areas such as biotechnology, energy productions or nutrient recovery with membrane-based technology. Our research group is fully devoted to merge membrane technology with other areas such as biotechnology, renewable energy and resources recovery to develop the next generation of hybrid technologies for water resource management, sustainable desalination, brine valorization and salinity gradient energy production, while increasing the impact of innovation in the water sector.

Our research group is fully devoted to merge environmental microbiology and electrochemical tools to restore soil and sediments polluted with organics compounds, while harvesting clean energy from enviroments. We truly believe that investing time in studying the basic aspects of this novel field will accelerate the design and implementation of innovative applications able to make Earth a better place to live in.
Our activities are mainly focus on: 1. designing and constructing electrochemical devices for harvesting electrical current from microbial metabolism in polluted enviroments like soils and sediments and 2. Designing strategies for cleaning-up polluted soils and sediments using electroactive microorganisms stimulated with electrochemical tools.

Water contamination with biological (nucleic acids; bacteria, viruses) or chemical (aromatic compounds, metal ions) traces is an important healthy issue. These traces are almost impossible to eliminate by traditional methods and require alternatives, as can be the use of trapping systems, which would interact or bind to these traces, eliminating them from water. For example, chelating systems can be used for metal ions or ammonium compounds can interact with aromatic rings. Regarding biological residues, it has been shown that polyionic macromolecules have high affinity for them, even being able to kill bacteria and viruses. For this project, we propose the study of magnetic nanoparticles and of bulk silica covered with cationic and chelating moieties as water purification systems. Since we have prepared silica with cationic fragments, we have to develop a synthetic procedure for analogous systems on magnetic nanoparticles surface. On the other hand, we have to develop also multichelating systems to be grafted to magnetic nanoparticles and bulk silica. The active groups will be supported on dendritic structures that will generate multiple points of interaction on the surface of materials.

Power systems based on clean energy such as photovoltaic or eolic energy are increasingly being used as a method of obtaining clean
energy. In particular, mixed systems of solar and wind energy are interesting because their combination makes them ideal since solar
energy can be obtained in days with high irradiation, while wind energy can provide complementary energy when the photovoltaic system
can not, as during the night or on days with high cloudiness that however are usually windy. The possibility that these power systems
connect to the electricity network means that most buildings can be energy producers. These power systems can be mounted insulated to provide useful energy throughout the day and used for feeding instrumentation or
domestic power in isolated areas where there is no established electrical network.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems are powerful Earth Observation (EO) tools that can be used for marine safety, monitoring the traffic, trying to prevent illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, supporting search and rescue tasks and for oil spill pollution surveillance. SAR systems produce high-resolution imagery of wide areas under any weather condition, and during day and night. However, automatic interpretation of SAR images is very difficult taking into consideration SAR speckle noise and the complex marine environment and the wind conditions. Research areas: estimation of sea surface wind speed and wind direction from SAR data; classification of oil spills using the external data provided by the wind conditions and vessel detection; design of processing architectures fulfilling the near-real-time requirements.

Passive Radars (PRs) are defined as a set of techniques whose main objective is to detect targets and to estimate parameters using non-cooperative signals (such as broadcast, communications, radar, or radio-navigation signals) as Illuminators of Opportunity (IoO), rather than using a dedicated radar transmitter. As a result, they overcome all active radar drawbacks associated to the use of a dedicated transmitter. On the other hand, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices can be used for signal reception (antenna, RF front-end and acquisition systems). Research areas: improved digital array signal processing techniques for 3D-detection and tracking of targets in PRs with moving IoOs (on satellites), moving PR receivers (on aircrafts); data fusion in multistatic configurations: several IoOs, several PR receivers or both; design of new antenna solutions for generating multiple narrow beams capable of fulfilling design requirements imposed by PRs exploiting GPS and Digital Video Broadcasting- Satellite (DVB-S) illuminators.

In order to address the nowadays challenges faced by the Circular Economy frame, biomass is the most promising renewable carbon source alternative to oil and coal. In this raw material, terpenes are prominent molecules since they show double bonds able to be oxidized for giving rise epoxides, appealing building-blocks for the preparation of a wide variety of commodities as well as fine products. In addition, sulfide oxidation is currently of much interest because it is related with a new alternative for the desulfurization of fuels that allow to avoid the use of hydrogen. Then, getting the oxidation process in mild conditions and catalytically could be an interesting way of biomass transformation. As such, the group at the University of Alcala has a strong experience in the tailoring of molecular catalysts for polymerization, hydrogenation and oxidation processes. On its side the groups form IMDEA Energía, have a strong experience in the development of both inorganic and organic semiconductors and hybrid materials with photocatalytic properties. In addition, their research activities are also focused on the development of photocatalytic processes related to energetic and environmental applications. These actions are completed with structure-reactivity relationship studies using a combination of in-situ characterizations tools and theoretical calculations. Our specific facilities are fully equipped laboratories for the synthesis and characterization of the catalysts and for studying catalytic processes.

Semantic Segmentation methods play a key role in today’s Autonomous Driving research, since they provide a global understanding of the traffic scene for upper-level tasks like navigation. However, main research efforts are being put on enlarging deep architectures to achieve marginal accuracy boosts in existing datasets, forgetting that these algorithms must be deployed in a real vehicle with images that weren’t seen during training. On the other hand, achieving robustness in any domain is not an easy task, since deep networks are prone to overfitting even with thousands of training images.
This research line proposes to analyze different techniques to be applied to existing deep networks in order to improve their robustness when deployed in any domain. Our proposal is to analyze semi-supervised methods in this context with the aim of implementing real applications for autonomous vehicles.