65 research outputs found

    New Traits of Agriculture/Food Quality Interface

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    There is a close link between food and territory. The current challenges are located in precision agriculture and food metrology from the perspective of monitoring and improving food quality, and addressing the promotion of diversity of agroecosystems and diets. Research studies describing factors affecting food quality—such as agronomic conditions, post-harvest elicitors, cultivar selection, harvest date, or environmental influences—are welcome. Sustainable environmental and innovative practices should be promoted. Advanced techniques, such as mass spectrometry, infrared, and Raman spectroscopy in the monitoring and control of foodstuffs to model the agrofood system should be considered. Innovative green technologies should be taken into account. Targeting food approaches should be promoted. Chemometrics applications are welcome. This issue promotes highly interdisciplinary studies, including disciplines from agriculture and biology, chemistry, and nutrition. All types of articles, such as original research, opinions, and reviews, are welcome

    Цифровая трансформация : научный журнал

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    В журнале «Цифровая трансформация» публикуются статьи в области технических и экономических наук. Он посвящен анализу процессов цифровой трансформации экономики и, в частности, системы образования

    Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Conservation

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    Soil degradation is one of the most topical environmental threats. A number of processes causing soil degradation, specifically erosion, compaction, salinization, pollution, and loss of both organic matter and soil biodiversity, are also strictly connected to agricultural activity and its intensification. The development and adoption of sustainable agronomic practices able to preserve and enhance the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soils and improve agroecosystem functions is a challenge for both scientists and farmers. The Special Issue entitled “Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Conservation” collects 12 original contributions addressing the state of the art of sustainable agriculture and soil conservation. The papers cover a wide range of topics, including organic agriculture, soil amendment and soil organic carbon (SOC) management, the impact of SOC on soil water repellency, the effects of soil tillage on the quantity of SOC associated with several fractions of soil particles and depth, and SOC prediction, using visible and near-infrared spectra and multivariate modeling. Moreover, the effects of some soil contaminants (e.g., crude oil, tungsten, copper, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) are discussed or reviewed in light of the recent literature. The collection of the manuscripts presented in this Special Issue provides a relevant knowledge contribution for improving our understanding on sustainable agriculture and soil conservation, thus stimulating new views on this main topic

    Programming model abstractions for optimizing I/O intensive applications

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    This thesis contributes from the perspective of task-based programming models to the efforts of optimizing I/O intensive applications. Throughout this thesis, we propose programming model abstractions and mechanisms that target a twofold objective: from the one hand, improve the I/O and total performance of applications on nowadays complex storage infrastructures. From the other hand, achieve such performance improvement without increasing the complexity of applications programming. The following paragraphs briefly summarize each of our contributions. First, towards exploiting compute-I/O patterns of I/O intensive applications and transparently improving I/O and total performance, we propose a number of abstractions that we refer to as I/O Awareness abstractions. An I/O aware task-based programming model is able to separate the handling of I/O and computations by supporting I/O Tasks. The execution of such tasks can overlap with compute tasks execution. Moreover, we provide programming model support to improve I/O performance by addressing the issue of I/O congestion. This is achieved by using Storage Bandwidth Constraints to control the level of task parallelism. We support two types of such constraints: (i) Static storage bandwidth constraints that are manually set by application developers. (ii) Auto-tunable constraints that are automatically set and tuned throughout the execution of application. Second, in order to exploit the heterogeneity of modern storage systems to improve performance in a transparent manner, we propose a set of capabilities that we refer to as Storage heterogeneity Awareness. A storage-heterogeneity aware task-based programming model builds on the concepts and abstractions that are introduced in the first contribution to improve the I/O performance of applications on heterogeneous storage systems. More specifically, such programming models support the following features: (i) abstracting the heterogeneity of the storage devices and exposing them as one hierarchical storage resource. (ii) supporting dedicated I/O scheduling. (iii) Finally, we introduce a mechanism that automatically and periodically flushes obsolete data from higher storage layers to lower storage layers. Third, targeting increasing parallelism levels of applications, we propose a Hybrid Programming Model that combines task-based programming models and MPI. In this programming model, tasks are used to achieve coarse-grained parallelism on large-scale distributed infrastructures, whereas MPI is used to gain fine-grained parallelism by parallelizing tasks execution. Such a hybrid programming model offers the possibility to enable parallel I/O and high-level I/O libraries in tasks. We enable such a hybrid programming model by supporting Native MPI Tasks. These tasks are native to the programming model for two reasons: they execute task code as opposed to calling external MPI binaries or scripts. Also, the data transfers and input/output handling is done in a completely transparent manner to application developers. Therefore, increasing parallelism levels while easing the design and programming of applications. Finally, to exploit the inherent parallelism opportunities in applications and overlap computation with I/O, we propose an Eager mechanism for releasing data dependencies. Unlike the traditional approach for releasing dependencies, eagerly releasing data dependencies allows successor tasks to be released for execution as soon as their data dependencies are ready, without having to wait for predecessor task(s) to completely finish execution. In order to support the eager-release of data dependencies, we describe the following core modifications to the design of task-based programming models: (i) defining and managing data dependency relationships as parameter-aware dependencies (ii) a mechanism for notifying the programming model that an output data has been generated before the execution of the producer task ends.Aquesta tesi contribueix des de la perspectiva dels models de programació basats en tasques als esforços d’optimitzar les aplicacions intensives de I/O. Al llarg d'aquesta tesi, proposem abstraccions i mecanismes del model de programació que persegueixen un doble objectiu: per una banda, millorar la I/O i el rendiment total de les aplicacions a les complexes infraestructures d'emmagatzematge de l'actualitat. D'altra banda, aconsegueixi aquesta millora del rendiment sense augmentar la complexitat de la programació d'aplicacions. Els paràgrafs següents resumeixen cadascuna de les nostres contribucions. En primer lloc, proposem una sèrie d'abstraccions a què ens referim com a abstraccions de consciència de I/O. Un model de programació basat en tasques amb reconeixement d'I/O pot separar el maneig d'I/O i els càlculs en admetre Tasques d'I/O. L'execució d'aquestes tasques es pot superposar amb l'execució de tasques de càlcul. A més, proporcionem suport de model de programació per millorar el rendiment d'I/O en abordar el problema de la congestió d'I/O. Això s'aconsegueix mitjançant l'ús de restriccions d'amplada de banda d'emmagatzematge per controlar el nivell de paral·lelisme de tasques. Admetem dos tipus d'aquestes restriccions: estàtic i autoajustable. En segon lloc, proposem un conjunt de capacitats a què ens referim com a Consciència d'heterogeneïtat d'emmagatzematge. Un model de programació basat en tasques conscient de l'heterogeneïtat de l'emmagatzematge es basa en els conceptes i les abstraccions que s'introdueixen en la primera contribució per millorar el rendiment d'I/O de les aplicacions en sistemes d'emmagatzematge heterogenis. Més específicament, aquests models de programació admeten les característiques següents: (i) abstreure l'heterogeneïtat dels dispositius d'emmagatzematge i exposar-los com a recurs d'emmagatzematge jeràrquic. (ii) admetre la programació d'I/O dedicada. (iii) Finalment, presentem un mecanisme que descarrega automàticament i periòdicament les dades obsoletes de les capes d'emmagatzematge superiors a les capes d'emmagatzematge inferiors. En tercer lloc, proposem un model de programació híbrid que combina models de programació basats en tasques i MPI. En aquest model de programació, les tasques s'utilitzen per aconseguir un paral·lelisme de gra gruixut en infraestructures distribuïdes a gran escala, mentre que MPI es fa servir per obtenir un paral·lelisme de gra fi en paral·lelitzar l'execució de tasques. Un model d'aquest tipus de programació híbrid ofereix la possibilitat d'habilitar I/O paral·leles i biblioteques d'I/O d'alt nivell en tasques. Habilitem un model de programació híbrid d'aquest tipus en admetre tasques MPI natives que executen codi de tasca en lloc de trucar a binaris o scripts MPI externs. A més, la transferència de dades i el maneig d’entrada / sortida es realitza d’una manera completament transparent per als desenvolupadors d’aplicacions. Per tant, augmenta els nivells de paral·lelisme alhora que se'n facilita el disseny i la programació d'aplicacions. Finalment proposem un mecanisme Eager per alliberar dependències de dades. A diferència de l'enfocament tradicional per alliberar dependències, alliberar amb entusiasme les dependències de dades permet que les tasques successores s'alliberin per a la seva execució tan aviat com les dependències de dades estiguin llestes, sense haver d'esperar que les tasques predecessores acabin completament l'execució. Per tal de donar suport a l'alliberament ansiós de les dependències de dades, descrivim les següents modificacions centrals al disseny de models de programació basats en tasques: (i) definir i administrar les relacions de dependència de dades com a dependències conscients de paràmetres (ii ) un mecanisme per notificar la model de programació que s'ha generat una dada de sortida abans que finalitzi l'execució de la tasca de productor.Postprint (published version

    Awareness and perception of phishing variants from Policing, Computing and Criminology students in Canterbury Christ Church University

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    This study focuses on gauging awareness of different phishing communication students in the School of Law, Policing and Social Sciences and the School of Engineering, Technology and Design in Canterbury Christ Church University and their perception of different phishing variants. There is an exploration of the underlying factors in which students fall victim to different types of phishing attacks from questionnaires and a focus group. The students’ perception of different types of phishing variants was varied from the focus group and anonymised questionnaires. A total of 177 respondents participated in anonymised questionnaires in the study. Students were asked a mixture of scenario-based questions on different phishing attacks, their awareness levels of security tools that can be used against some phishing variants, and if they received any phishing emails in the past. Additionally, 6 computing students in a focus group discussed different types of phishing attacks and recommended potential security countermeasures against them. The vulnerabilities and issues of anti-phishing software, firewalls, and internet browsers that have security toolbars are explained in the study against different types of phishing attacks. The focus group was with computing students and their knowledge about certain phishing variants was limited. The discussion within the focus group was gauging the computing students' understanding and awareness of phishing variants. The questionnaire data collection sample was with first year criminology and final year policing students which may have influenced the results of the questionnaire in terms of their understanding, security countermeasures, and how they identify certain phishing variants. The anonymised questionnaire awareness levels on different types of phishing fluctuated in terms of lack of awareness on certain phishing variants. Some criminology and policing students either did not know about phishing variants or had limited knowledge about different types of phishing communication, security countermeasures, the identifying features of a phishing message, and the precautions they should take against phishing variants from fraudsters

    Parallel and Distributed Computing

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    The 14 chapters presented in this book cover a wide variety of representative works ranging from hardware design to application development. Particularly, the topics that are addressed are programmable and reconfigurable devices and systems, dependability of GPUs (General Purpose Units), network topologies, cache coherence protocols, resource allocation, scheduling algorithms, peertopeer networks, largescale network simulation, and parallel routines and algorithms. In this way, the articles included in this book constitute an excellent reference for engineers and researchers who have particular interests in each of these topics in parallel and distributed computing

    Development and application of CRISPR technology for the study of reproductive processes in mammals

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    Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Veterinaria, Departamento de Fisiología Animal, leída el 13-01-2021Las aplicaciones de la mutagénesis dirigida se han visto obstaculizadas por dificultades técnicas. La baja eficiencia de la recombinación homóloga (HR), el único método disponible para llevar a cabo esta tarea antes del descubrimiento de las endonucleasas específicas de sitio, hace necesario el uso de células intermedias. Este requisito ha restringido en gran medida la mutagénesis dirigida al modelo del ratón de laboratorio, la única especie en la que se disponía de células madre pluripotentes como células intermediarias. El desarrollo de endonucleasas específicas sitios en los últimos años ha facilitado en gran medida la tarea de lograr una mutación en un lugar específico del genoma. Estas tecnologías incluyen la incorporación más notoria y reciente: CRISPR-Cas9. Mediante esta tecnología, pueden lograrse directamente modificaciones en un lugar específico del genoma mediante la transmisión de los componentes de CRISPR a un cigoto, evitando así la necesidad de células intermedias. Este avance facilita enormemente el proceso en ratones y, especialmente, en otras especies en las que, en ausencia de células madre, se requería la transferencia nuclear de células somáticas [en inglés “somatic cell nuclear transfer” (SCNT)], para generar mutagénesis dirigida. Además, la generación de mutantes en un solo paso permite el estudio de la función génica durante el desarrollo embrionario sin necesidad de mantener colonias de animales mutantes...The applications of targeted mutagenesis have been hampered by technical difficulties. The low efficiency of homologous recombination (HR), the only available method before the discovery of site-specific endonucleases, requires the use of intermediary cells. This requirement has largely restricted targeted mutagenesis to the mouse model, the only species where pluripotent stem cells were available as intermediary cells. The development of site-specific endonucleases in recent years has greatly facilitated the task of achieving a mutation at a specific locus of the genome. These technologies include the latest and most notable incorporation: CRISPR-Cas9. By this technology, site-specific genome modifications can be directly achieved by delivering of CRISPR components into a zygote, thereby avoiding the need of intermediary cells. This improvement greatly facilitates the process in mice and, specially, in other species where, in the absence of stem cells, somatic cell nuclear transfer was required to generate site-specific mutagenesis. Besides, the generation of mutants in a single step allows the study of the gene function during embryo development without the need of maintaining colonies of mutant animals...Fac. de VeterinariaTRUEunpu

    High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications

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    This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications

    Bioinformatics

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    This book is divided into different research areas relevant in Bioinformatics such as biological networks, next generation sequencing, high performance computing, molecular modeling, structural bioinformatics, molecular modeling and intelligent data analysis. Each book section introduces the basic concepts and then explains its application to problems of great relevance, so both novice and expert readers can benefit from the information and research works presented here

    Communication-Efficient Jaccard Similarity for High-Performance Distributed Genome Comparisons

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    The Jaccard similarity index is an important measure of the overlap of two sets, widely used in machine learning, computational genomics, information retrieval, and many other areas. We design and implement SimilarityAtScale, the first communication-efficient distributed algorithm for computing the Jaccard similarity among pairs of large datasets. Our algorithm provides an efficient encoding of this problem into a multiplication of sparse matrices. Both the encoding and sparse matrix product are performed in a way that minimizes data movement in terms of communication and synchronization costs. We apply our algorithm to obtain similarity among all pairs of a set of large samples of genomes. This task is a key part of modern metagenomics analysis and an evergrowing need due to the increasing availability of high-throughput DNA sequencing data. The resulting scheme is the first to enable accurate Jaccard distance derivations for massive datasets, using largescale distributed-memory systems. We package our routines in a tool, called GenomeAtScale, that combines the proposed algorithm with tools for processing input sequences. Our evaluation on real data illustrates that one can use GenomeAtScale to effectively employ tens of thousands of processors to reach new frontiers in large-scale genomic and metagenomic analysis. While GenomeAtScale can be used to foster DNA research, the more general underlying SimilarityAtScale algorithm may be used for high-performance distributed similarity computations in other data analytics application domains
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