SCIRIA Openmind seminar series, architecture/pure data/graphical programming

SCIRIA ‘OpenMind’ was a regular seminar series for University of the Arts London staff, MA and PhD students and the public. The seminars were hosted at Camberwell College of Arts and Chelsea College of Art and Design. The footage, audio and flyers offer an insight into the research processes and activities of SCIRIA members, associates and external speakers

Distributed Management of Massive Data: an Efficient Fine-Grain Data Access Scheme

This paper addresses the problem of efficiently storing and accessing massive data blocks in a large-scale distributed environment, while providing efficient fine-grain access to data subsets. This issue is crucial in the context of applications in the field of databases, data mining and multimedia. We propose a data sharing service based on distributed, RAM-based storage of data, while leveraging a DHT-based, natively parallel metadata management scheme. As opposed to the most commonly used grid storage infrastructures that provide mechanisms for explicit data localization and transfer, we provide a transparent access model, where data are accessed through global identifiers. Our proposal has been validated through a prototype implementation whose preliminary evaluation provides promising results

"Dime dónde consumes y te diré..." : Cocaína, cultura y salud: más allá del modelo de adicción

En este artículo se presenta un modelo de análisis sociocultural del uso de cocaína a partir de la identificación de distintos espacios de consumo. Este modelo forma parte de una investigación sobre las diferentes variables socioculturales que influyen en la salud de las personas consumidoras de cocaína, así como en el mantenimiento de sus funciones y relaciones sociales. Se ha realizado trabajo de campo etnográfico durante un año y medio en Reus guiado por las teorías fenomenológicas y del interaccionismo simbólico. También se han realizado 36 entrevistas en profundidad a consumidores de distintas modalidades. Los principales resultados han sido comprender cómo los espacios de consumo moldean la experiencia y las condiciones de riesgo donde estas prácticas se llevan a cabo y visibilizan al mismo tiempo cómo los factores socio-estructurales impactan sobre la salud y el estatus social de los consumidores.This article presents a model of socio-cultural analysis of cocaine use based on the identification of different consumption spaces. This model is part of a research on the different socio-cultural variables that influence the health of cocaine users, as well as the maintenance of their social functions and relationships. Ethnographic field work has been carried out for a year and a half in Reus guided by phenomenological theories and symbolic interactionism. There have also been 36 in-depth interviews with consumers of different modalities. The main results have been to understand how consumption spaces shape the experience and risk conditions where these practices are carried out and at the same time make visible how socio-structural factors impact on the health and social status of consumers

Enhanced Failure Detection Mechanism in MapReduce

The popularity of MapReduce programming model has increased interest in the research community for its improvement. Among the other directions, the point of fault tolerance, concretely the failure detection issue seems to be a crucial one, but that until now has not reached its satisfying level. Motivated by this, I decided to devote my main research during this period into having a prototype system architecture of MapReduce framework with a new failure detection service, containing both analytical (theoretical) and implementation part. I am confident that this work should lead the way for further contributions in detecting failures to any NoSQL App frameworks, and cloud storage systems in general

Critical Remarks on the New Criminal Code

This article analyzes some of the provisions of the New Criminal Code adopted by Law No. 286/2009 under Government responsibility, namely by formulating critical remarks regarding the provisions stated under Title I and Title II of the General Part.new Criminal Code, principle, criminal law, crime, guilt

Nintedanib (BIBF 1120) for IPF: a tomorrow therapy?

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a rare, life threatening disease characterized by an anarchic fibrogenesis, limited survival and few therapeutic options. Its pathogenesis is complex and involves the interaction among various pathways driven by proinflammatory/profibrogenetic mediators such as platelet -derived growth factor, vascular endothelial growth factor or basic fibroblast growth factor. Given their prominent pathogenic roles in this disease such growth factor might be suitable therapeutic targets.In fact, the existing preclinical and clinical data demonstrated that their therapeutic inhibition results in a delayed progression of the pulmonary fibrosis and in the improvement of the disease outcome. BIBF 1120 is a potent triple blocker of the receptors of these growth factors which is currently evaluated as a potential therapy in the idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. This review discusses the existing data supporting its potential use in this disease

Optimal admission policies for small star networks

In this thesis admission stationary policies for small Symmetric Star telecommunication networks in which there are two types of calls requesting access are considered. Arrivals form independent Poisson streams on each route. We consider the routing to be fixed. The holding times of the calls are exponentially distributed periods of time. Rewards are earned for carrying calls and future returns are discounted at a fixed rate. The operation of the network is viewed as a Markov Decision Process and we solve the optimality equation for this network model numerically for a range of small examples by using the policy improvement algorithm of Dynamic Programming. The optimal policies we study involve acceptance or rejection of traffic requests in order to maximise the Total Expected Discounted Reward. Our Star networks are in some respect the simplest networks more complex than single links in isolation but even so only very small examples can be treated numerically. From those examples we find evidence that suggests that despite their complexity, optimal policies have some interesting properties. Admission Price policies are also investigated in this thesis. These policies are not optimal but they are believed to be asymptotically optimal for large networks. In this thesis we investigate if such policies are any good for small networks; we suggest that they are. A reduced state-space model is also considered in which a call on a 2-link route, once accepted, is split into two independent calls on the links involved. This greatly reduces the size of the state-space. We present properties of the optimal policies and the Admission Price policies and conclude that they are very good for the examples considered. Finally we look at Asymmetric Star networks with different number of circuits per link and different exponential holding times. Properties of the optimal policies as well as Admission Price policies are investigated for such networks

Preserving high-level semantics of parallel programming annotations through the compilation flow of optimizing compilers

International audienceThis paper presents a technique for representing the high level semantics of parallel programming languages in the intermediate representation of optimizing compilers. The semantics of these languages does not fit well in the intermediate representation of classical optimizing compilers, designed for single-threaded applications, and is usually lowered to threaded code with opaque concurrency bindings through source-to-source compilation or a front-end compiler pass. The semantical properties of the high-level parallel language are obfuscated at a very early stage of the compilation flow. This is detrimental to the effectiveness of downstream optimizations. We define the properties we introduce in this representation and prove that they are preserved by existing optimization passes. We characterize the optimizations that are enabled or interfere with this representation and evaluate the impact of the serial optimizations enabled by this technique for concurrent programs, using a prototype implemented in a branch of GCC 4.6. While we focus on the OpenMP language as a running example, we also analyze how our semantical abstraction can serve the unification of the analyses and optimizations for a variety of parallel programming languages

Automatic Detection of Performance Anomalies in Task-Parallel Programs

To efficiently exploit the resources of new many-core architectures, integrating dozens or even hundreds of cores per chip, parallel programming models have evolved to expose massive amounts of parallelism, often in the form of fine-grained tasks. Task-parallel languages, such as OpenStream, X10, Habanero Java and C or StarSs, simplify the development of applications for new architectures, but tuning task-parallel applications remains a major challenge. Performance bottlenecks can occur at any level of the implementation, from the algorithmic level (e.g., lack of parallelism or over-synchronization), to interactions with the operating and runtime systems (e.g., data placement on NUMA architectures), to inefficient use of the hardware (e.g., frequent cache misses or misaligned memory accesses); detecting such issues and determining the exact cause is a difficult task. In previous work, we developed Aftermath, an interactive tool for trace-based performance analysis and debugging of task-parallel programs and run-time systems. In contrast to other trace-based analysis tools, such as Paraver or Vampir, Aftermath offers native support for tasks, i.e., visualization, statistics and analysis tools adapted for performance debugging at task granularity. However, the tool currently does not provide support for the automatic detection of performance bottlenecks and it is up to the user to investigate the relevant aspects of program execution by focusing the inspection on specific slices of a trace file. In this paper, we present ongoing work on two extensions that guide the user through this process.Comment: Presented at 1st Workshop on Resource Awareness and Adaptivity in Multi-Core Computing (Racing 2014) (arXiv:1405.2281