Macaque cardiac physiology is sensitive to the valence of passively viewed sensory stimuli.

Autonomic nervous system activity is an important component of affective experience. We demonstrate in the rhesus monkey that both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system respond differentially to the affective valence of passively viewed video stimuli. We recorded cardiac impedance and an electrocardiogram while adult macaques watched a series of 300 30-second videos that varied in their affective content. We found that sympathetic activity (as measured by cardiac pre-ejection period) increased and parasympathetic activity (as measured by respiratory sinus arrhythmia) decreased as video content changes from positive to negative. These findings parallel the relationship between autonomic nervous system responsivity and valence of stimuli in humans. Given the relationship between human cardiac physiology and affective processing, these findings suggest that macaque cardiac physiology may be an index of affect in nonverbal animals

Topology-aware GPU scheduling for learning workloads in cloud environments

Recent advances in hardware, such as systems with multiple GPUs and their availability in the cloud, are enabling deep learning in various domains including health care, autonomous vehicles, and Internet of Things. Multi-GPU systems exhibit complex connectivity among GPUs and between GPUs and CPUs. Workload schedulers must consider hardware topology and workload communication requirements in order to allocate CPU and GPU resources for optimal execution time and improved utilization in shared cloud environments. This paper presents a new topology-aware workload placement strategy to schedule deep learning jobs on multi-GPU systems. The placement strategy is evaluated with a prototype on a Power8 machine with Tesla P100 cards, showing speedups of up to ≈1.30x compared to state-of-the-art strategies; the proposed algorithm achieves this result by allocating GPUs that satisfy workload requirements while preventing interference. Additionally, a large-scale simulation shows that the proposed strategy provides higher resource utilization and performance in cloud systems.This project is supported by the IBM/BSC Technology Center for Supercomputing collaboration agreement. It has also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 639595). It is also partially supported by the Ministry of Economy of Spain under contract TIN2015-65316-P and Generalitat de Catalunya under contract 2014SGR1051, by the ICREA Academia program, and by the BSC-CNS Severo Ochoa program (SEV-2015-0493). We thank our IBM Research colleagues Alaa Youssef and Asser Tantawi for the valuable discussions. We also thank SC17 committee member Blair Bethwaite of Monash University for his constructive feedback on the earlier drafts of this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A presença na Internet das juntas de freguesia portuguesas: período 2002-2013

In Memoriam Leonel Santos (1963-2012)Em 2005, foi publicado o primeiro estudo sobre a presença na Internet das juntas de freguesia portuguesas (Santos & Amaral, 2005). Desde então, com uma periodicidade bianual, o Laboratório de Estudo e Desenvolvimento da Sociedade da Informação (Gávea) tem registado e analisado o grau de maturidade e evolução dos sítios web das juntas de freguesia portuguesas. Num momento em que está em curso a reforma territorial das freguesias (Lei n.º 11-A/2013, de 28 de janeiro) justifica-se a compilação deste ciclo de estudos, apresentando o estado e evolução dos sítios web das juntas de freguesia portuguesas, desde o primeiro estudo, em 2002 (Santos & Amaral, 2005), até ao momento atual (março de 2013).Este trabalho é financiado por Fundos FEDER, através do Programa Operacional Fatores de Competitividade – COMPETE, e por Fundos Nacionais, através da FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, no âmbito do Projeto: FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022674

From classroom teaching to e-learning: the way for a strong definition

In any process of adoption of e-learning is important to understand his elements and the way they interrelate. This work tries to achieve the e-Learning definition using a graphical interpretation supported by mathematical language that helps the understanding, step-by-step, of the transition from “Classroom Learning” to “e Learning”. In the last step, the obtained graphic and formula is used in order to reach what we call the strong e Learning definition

Performance Evaluation of Microservices Architectures using Containers

Microservices architecture has started a new trend for application development for a number of reasons: (1) to reduce complexity by using tiny services; (2) to scale, remove and deploy parts of the system easily; (3) to improve flexibility to use different frameworks and tools; (4) to increase the overall scalability; and (5) to improve the resilience of the system. Containers have empowered the usage of microservices architectures by being lightweight, providing fast start-up times, and having a low overhead. Containers can be used to develop applications based on monolithic architectures where the whole system runs inside a single container or inside a microservices architecture where one or few processes run inside the containers. Two models can be used to implement a microservices architecture using containers: master-slave, or nested-container. The goal of this work is to compare the performance of CPU and network running benchmarks in the two aforementioned models of microservices architecture hence provide a benchmark analysis guidance for system designers.Comment: Submitted to the 14th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA15). Partially funded by European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 639595) - HiEST Projec

EDP Renewables equity valuation thesis

This dissertation valuates EDP Renewables, a subsidiary company from EDP, listed on PSI20, operating in the Utilities industry - renewables energies field. Due to the energy sector transformations, the continuous search for clean sources of power plus the plausible worldwide utilities industry transformation, becomes imperative to valuate companies that can be game changers. To achieve the value per share it was used the Discounted Cash Flow, both the Free Cash Flow to the Firm & the Free Cash Flow to Equity approaches, giving us an equity value of m7.569€ and m7.564€ respectively – this translates in an 8.68€ and 8.67€ price per share. Based on the Dividend Discount Model, the equity value is m7.555€ meaning a price per share of 8.66€. According with the Multiples EV/Revenue, EV/EBITDA and Price/CF per share, we reached prices of 8.19€, 8.88€ and 8.57€. A real option approach was also developed to quantify a recent investment project (wind farm) in the UK. Due to the uncertainty related with the industry and the markets, sensitivity analysis were incorporated into the model to absorb real life volatility. In the end, we reached a final price of 8.6€ per share and we recommend a buy action (actual price: 7.11€). As benchmark for the final price per share were used valuations from Morgan Staley (8.3€) and Haitong Bank (8.2€) which allowed us to conclude that the value reached in this thesis is in line with the opinion of others financial institutions and provides this dissertation with practical usefulness.Esta dissertação tem como missão avaliar financeiramente a empresa EDP Renováveis, subsidiária da EDP, S.A, listada no PSI20 que opera no mercado das energias renováveis. Devido às transformações do sector, à procura contínua de fontes de energia limpa e a uma plausível transformação do modelo de negócio das Utilities a nível mundial torna-se pertinente avaliar empresas que podem desempenhar um papel crucial nesta mudança. Para obter o valor por acção recorreu-se ao método de Discounted Cash Flow method, foram usados ambos o Free Cash Flow to the Firm e o Free Cash Flow to Equity que indicou um valor de m7.569€ e m7.564€ para o capital próprio o que se traduz num preço por acção de 8.68€ e 8.67€. Com base no modelo Dividend Discount Model o capital próprio é de m7.555€ e um preço por acção de 8.66€. Através dos múltiplos EV/Revenue, EV/EBITDA e Price/CF per share, os preços alcançados foram de 8.19€, 8.88€ e 8.57€ por acção. Foi ainda desenvolvido uma avaliação de um recente projeto de investimento (parque eólico) no UK com base em real options. Devido à incerteza inerente da indústria e dos próprios mercados financeiros foram também criados senários de sensibilidade para incorporar a volatilidade do mundo real. Em termos comparativos, foram revistas avaliações financeiras do Morgan Stanley (8.3€) e do Haitong Bank (8.2€) o que nos permite concluir que os valores alcançados nesta tese estão em harmonia com a opinião de bancos internacionais de investimento e caracteriza esta tese com utilidade prática

Longitudinal analysis of the developing rhesus monkey brain using magnetic resonance imaging: birth to adulthood.

We have longitudinally assessed normative brain growth patterns in naturalistically reared Macaca mulatta monkeys. Postnatal to early adulthood brain development in two cohorts of rhesus monkeys was analyzed using magnetic resonance imaging. Cohort A consisted of 24 rhesus monkeys (12 male, 12 female) and cohort B of 21 monkeys (11 male, 10 female). All subjects were scanned at 1, 4, 8, 13, 26, 39, and 52 weeks; cohort A had additional scans at 156 weeks (3 years) and 260 weeks (5 years). Age-specific segmentation templates were developed for automated volumetric analyses of the T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging scans. Trajectories of total brain size as well as cerebral and subcortical subdivisions were evaluated over this period. Total brain volume was about 64 % of adult estimates in the 1-week-old monkey. Brain volume of the male subjects was always, on average, larger than the female subjects. While brain volume generally increased between any two imaging time points, there was a transient plateau of brain growth between 26 and 39 weeks in both cohorts of monkeys. The trajectory of enlargement differed across cortical regions with the occipital cortex demonstrating the most idiosyncratic pattern of maturation and the frontal and temporal lobes showing the greatest and most protracted growth. A variety of allometric measurements were also acquired and body weight gain was most closely associated with the rate of brain growth. These findings provide a valuable baseline for the effects of fetal and early postnatal manipulations on the pattern of abnormal brain growth related to neurodevelopmental disorders

Resource management for software defined data centers for heterogeneous infrastructures

Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) provides more resource management flexibility since everything is defined as a software, including the network as Software Defined Network (SDN).Typically, cloud providers overlook the network, which is configured in static way. SDN can help to meet applications goals with dynamic network configuration and provide best-efforts for QoS. Additionally, SDDC might benefit by instead of be composed by heavy Virtual Machines, use light-weight OS Containers. Despite the advantages of SDDC and OS Containers, it brings more complexity for resource provisioning. The goal of this project is to optimize the management of container based workloads deployed on Software defined Data Centers enabled with heterogeneous network fabrics through the use of network-aware placement algorithms that are driven by performance models

Condition Monitoring Philosophy for Tidal Turbines

Renewable energy is currently considered as the main solution to reduce greenhouse gas emission. This has led to great developments in the use of renewable energy for electricity generation. Among many renewable energy resources, tidal energy has the advantage of being predictable, particularly when compared to wind energy. Currently the UK is the world leader in extracting energy from the tide; an estimation shows a potential of 67 TWh per year. In order to ensure safe operation and prolonged life for tidal turbines, condition monitoring is essential. The technology for power generation using tidal turbines is new therefore the condition monitoring concept for these devices is yet to be established. Also, there is a lack of understanding of techniques suitable for health monitoring of the turbine components and support structure given their unique operating environment.In this paper the condition monitoring of a tidal turbine is investigated. The objective is to highlight the need for condition monitoring and establish procedures to decide the condition monitoring techniques required, in addition to highlighting the impact and benefits of applying condition based maintenance. A model for failure analysis is developed to assess the needs for condition monitoring and identify critical components, after which a ‘symptoms analysis’ was performed to decide the appropriate condition monitoring techniques. Finally, the impact of condition monitoring on system reliability is considered

Hedge Fund evaluation: mean variance vs performance ratios

JEL Classification: G11, G19Combining the Mean Variance Utility function with the overall metrics that evaluate portfolios’ performance, this project aims to study the correlations of equal weighted portfolios based on the top 10 hedge funds of the studied sample, that maximize the expected utility of an investor and the performance measures; and to understand the overall results of the correlations between those portfolios. Hedge funds are instruments that can represent different strategies, and in order to have an approximation to the different risk profiles, the correlations between the final ranks based on the different risk aversion coefficients in the Mean Variance Utility Function were studied. Constructing equal weighted portfolios with the top ten hedge funds that maximize the different levels of risk aversion, as well as the different performance metrics, the correlation between those portfolios will provide the final conclusion of the project. These correlations proved that, since there are different types of investors that have different preferences, the process of evaluation of the portfolios cannot have the same methodology. Preferences should be taken in consideration, and there are metrics that are more correlated to the objectives of the final investor, than others.Ao agrupar a função de utilidade média e variância com as mais conhecidas métricas que são utilizadas na avaliação de performance de portefólios, este projeto tem como objetivo estudar as correlações entre os portefólios, que maximizam as equações de utilidade média e variância, e os que maximizam as métricas de performance, tentado assim possibilitar uma conclusão sobre quais métricas que deverão ser utilizadas, ou que melhor representam as preferências de investidores com variados perfis de risco. Os hedge funds são instrumentos que representam diferentes estratégias, e de forma a aproximar os diferentes perfis de risco, as correlações dos rankings que têm por base a maximização dos diferentes patamares de aversão ao risco na função de Média e Variância, foram estudadas. Ao construir portefólios com base nos primeiros dez hedge funds, ponderados igualmente, que maximização as diferentes equações de Média Variância, traduzindo os diferentes perfis de risco, bem como os portefólios que maximizam as diferentes métricas que são utilizadas na avaliação de performance, o estudo das correlações destes portefólios irá proporcionar a conclusão final do projeto. Estas correlações provam que, visto que existem diferentes tipos de investidores com diferentes preferências e objetivos, o processo de avaliação das diferentes performances não pode ter as mesmas metodologias. Estas preferências devem ser tidas em consideração, visto que existem métricas que são mais correlacionadas, do que outras, com os objetivos dos diferentes investidores