Time-scale of minor HIV-1 complex circulating recombinant forms from Central and West Africa

Table S1. Sequences reclassified in this study. (PDF 75 kb

Integer linear programming formulation of the vehicle positioning problem in automated manufacturing systems

8 páginasThis paper addresses the problem of vehicle location (positioning) for automated transport in fully automated manufacturing systems. This study is motivated by the complexity of vehicle control found in modern integrated circuit semiconductor fabrication facilities where the material handling network path is composed of multiple loops interconnected. In order to contribute to decrease the manufacturing lead-time of semiconductor products, we propose an integer linear program that minimizes the maximum time needed to serve a transport request. Computation experiments are based on real-life data. We discuss the practical usefulness of the mathematical model by means of a simulation experiment used to analyze the factory operational behavio

Reurbanización calle Manuel de Falla San Vicente del Raspeig (Alicante)

Este TFG consiste en todos los trabajos topográficos necesarios para la realización del estudio: “Reurbanización de la calle de Manuel de Falla (tramo Domínguez Margarit – Pintor Sorolla” en la localidad de San Vicente del Raspeig (Alicante). Además, este TFG lleva la parte del coste económico en el apartado de topografía, véase el apartado 4 de trabajos topográficos. Estas “pequeñas” obras son muy comunes, en todas las ciudades y pueblos de la geografía española, cada remodelación de una o varias calles necesita de un estudio topográfico completo para la realización de un proyecto y su posterior ejecución y control de obra. En este tipo de obras es fácil encontrarnos que la función del ingeniero/a en topografía realice varias funciones al mismo tiempo, por ejemplo, un puede hacer de encargados/as de obra o ser coordinador/a de seguridad y salud, incluso en muchos casos ejercer como jefe/a de obra. El ámbito de actuación comprende la zona indicada en la siguiente imagen, un tramo de la calle Manuel de Falla comprendido entre la calle Pintor Sorolla, calle Domínguez Margarit y calle Lepanto, con una superficie viaria de aproximadamente 880m2, este trabajo nos permitirá conocer los datos altimétricos y planimétricos tomados en el levantamiento topográfico, para la realización del proyecto de reurbanización que antes se mencionó. Esta calle dista mucho del resto de las calles colindantes antes mencionadas por ello se va a proceder a poner unos viales semipeatonales en forma de “zigzag” para evitar la velocidad excesiva de los vehículos, además de una reforma integral de la calle Manuel de Falla. Como objeto fundamental de la obra, además de la mejora de la accesibilidad en el vial, la mejora y/o renovación de las distintas redes como la red de aguas residuales o la red de alumbrado

The Use of Bioinformatics for Studying HIV Evolutionary and Epidemiological History in South America

The South American human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) epidemic is driven by several subtypes (B, C, and F1) and circulating and unique recombinant forms derived from those subtypes. Those variants are heterogeneously distributed around the continent in a country-specific manner. Despite some inconsistencies mainly derived from sampling biases and analytical constrains, most of studies carried out in the area agreed in pointing out specificities in the evolutionary dynamics of the circulating HIV-1 lineages. In this paper, we covered the theoretical basis, and the application of bioinformatics methods to reconstruct the HIV spatial-temporal dynamics, unveiling relevant information to understand the origin, geographical dissemination and the current molecular scenario of the HIV epidemic in the continent, particularly in the countries of Southern Cone

Towards Swarm Diversity: Random Sampling in Variable Neighborhoods Procedure Using a Lévy Distribution

Abstract. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a nondirect search method for numerical optimization. The key advantages of this metaheuristic are principally associated to its simplicity, few parameters and high convergence rate. In the canonical PSO using a fully connected topology, a particle adjusts its position by using two attractors: the best record stored for the current agent, and the best point discovered for the entire swarm. It leads to a high convergence rate, but also progressively deteriorates the swarm diversity. As a result, the particle swarm frequently gets attracted by sub-optimal points. Once the particles have been attracted to a local optimum, they continue the search process within a small region of the solution space, thus reducing the algorithm exploration. To deal with this issue, this paper presents a variant of the Random Sampling in Variable Neighborhoods (RSVN) procedure using a Lévy distribution, which is able to notably improve the PSO search ability in multimodal problems. Keywords. Swarm diversity, local optima, premature convergence, RSVN procedure, Lévy distribution. Hacia la diversidad de la bandada: procedimiento RSVN usando una distribución de Lévy Resumen. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) es un método de búsqueda no directo para la optimización numérica. Las principales ventajas de esta metaheurística están relacionadas principalmente con su simplicidad, pocos parámetros y alta tasa de convergencia. En el PSO canónico usando una topología totalmente conectada, una partícula ajusta su posición usando dos atractores: el mejor registro almacenado por el individuo y el mejor punto descubierto por la bandada completa. Este esquema conduce a un alto factor de convergencia, pero también deteriora la diversidad de la población progresivamente. Como resultado la bandada de partículas frecuentemente es atraída por puntos subóptimos. Una vez que las partículas han sido atraídas hacia un óptimo local, ellas continúan el proceso de búsqueda dentro de una región muy pequeña del espacio de soluciones, reduciendo las capacidades de exploración del algoritmo. Para tratar esta situación este artículo presenta una variante del procedimiento Random Sampling in Variable Neighborhoods (RSVN) usando una distribución de Lévy. Este algoritmo es capaz de mejorar notablemente la capacidad de búsqueda de los algoritmos PSO en problemas multimodales de optimización. Palabras clave. Diversidad de la bandada, óptimos locales, convergencia prematura, procedimiento RSVN, distribución de Lévy

Mechanisms Involved in Treadmill Walking Improvements in Parkinson's Disease

[Abstract] Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) improve gait after treadmill training and while they are walking over the treadmill. However, the mechanisms of these improvements have not been addressed. We designed a treadmill simulator without a belt that could move on a walkway in a constant speed, in order to explore the mechanism underlying treadmill walking improvements in PD. All subjects were tested in three different sessions (treadmill, simulatorassisted and simulatornot assisted). In each session, subjects first walked overground and then walked using the treadmill or simulator with the hands over the handrails (simulatorassisted) or with the hands free (simulatornot assisted). Step length, cadence, double support time, swing time, support time and the coefficient of variation (CV) of step time and double support time were recorded. Over the treadmill PD patients increased their step length and reduced significantly their cadence and CV of double support time in comparison with overground walking. In the simulatorassisted condition PD patients reduced significantly the CV of double support time in comparison with overground walking. With the simulatornot assisted both groups decreased their step length and increased their cadence and CV of double support time, compared with walking overground. These findings suggest that the step length improvement observed in PD patients, walking over a treadmill, is due to the proprioceptive information generated by the belt movement, since no improvement was reported when patients using a treadmill simulator.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; PSI2008-03175Xunta de Galicia; 2009/00

Forward Composition Propagation for Explainable Neural Reasoning

This paper proposes an algorithm called Forward Composition Propagation (FCP) to explain the predictions of feed-forward neural networks operating on structured classification problems. In the proposed FCP algorithm, each neuron is described by a composition vector indicating the role of each problem feature in that neuron. Composition vectors are initialized using a given input instance and subsequently propagated through the whole network until reaching the output layer. The sign of each composition value indicates whether the corresponding feature excites or inhibits the neuron, while the absolute value quantifies its impact. The FCP algorithm is executed on a post-hoc basis, i.e., once the learning process is completed. Aiming to illustrate the FCP algorithm, this paper develops a case study concerning bias detection in a fairness problem in which the ground truth is known. The simulation results show that the composition values closely align with the expected behavior of protected features. The source code and supplementary material for this paper are available at https://github.com/igraugar/fcp

Decoupling between SARS-CoV-2 transmissibility and population mobility associated with increasing immunity from vaccination and infection in South America

All South American countries from the Southern cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) experienced severe COVID-19 epidemic waves during early 2021 driven by the expansion of variants Gamma and Lambda, however, there was an improvement in different epidemic indicators since June 2021. To investigate the impact of national vaccination programs and natural infection on viral transmission in those South American countries, we analyzed the coupling between population mobility and the viral effective reproduction number Rt. Our analyses reveal that population mobility was highly correlated with viral Rt from January to May 2021 in all countries analyzed; but a clear decoupling occurred since May–June 2021, when the rate of viral spread started to be lower than expected from the levels of social interactions. These findings support that populations from the South American Southern cone probably achieved the conditional herd immunity threshold to contain the spread of regional SARS-CoV-2 variants circulating at that time

Structure and evolution of magnetohydrodynamic solitary waves with Hall and finite Larmor radius effects

Nonlinear and low-frequency solitary waves are investigated in the framework of the one-dimensional Hall-magnetohydrodynamic model with finite Larmor effects and two different closure models for the pressures. For a double adiabatic pressure model, the organization of these localized structures in terms of the propagation angle with respect to the ambient magnetic field Θ and the propagation velocity C is discussed. There are three types of regions in the Θ-C plane that correspond to domains where either solitary waves cannot exist, are organized in branches, or have a continuous spectrum. A numerical method valid for the two latter cases, which rigorously proves the existence of the waves, is presented and used to locate many waves, including bright and dark structures. Some of them belong to parametric domains where solitary waves were not found in previous works. The stability of the structures has been investigated by performing a linear analysis of the background plasma state and by means of numerical simulations. They show that the cores of some waves can be robust, but, for the parameters considered in the analysis, the tails are unstable. The substitution of the double adiabatic model by evolution equations for the plasma pressures appears to suppress the instability in some cases and to allow the propagation of the solitary waves during long timesG.S.A. is supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain under Grant No. RYC-2014-15357. E.S. was supported by the Swedish Research Council, Grant No. 2016-05012, and by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation

A comparison of techniques for robust gender recognition

Reprinted, with permission, from [Rojas Bello, R.N., Lago Fernández, L.F., Martínez Muñoz, G., y Sánchez Montañés, M.A., A comparision of techniques for robust gender recognition, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, ICIP 2011]. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.Proceedings of 2011 18th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 11-14 Sept. 2011, BrusselsAutomatic gender classification of face images is an area of growing interest with multiple applications. Appropriate classifiers should be robust against variations such as illumination, scale and orientation that occur in real world applications. This can be achieved by normalizing the images in order to reduce those variations (alignment, re-scaling, histogram-equalization, etc.), or by extracting features from the original images which are invariant respect to those variations. In this work we perform a robust comparison of eight different classifiers across 100 random partitions of a set of frontal face images. Four of them are state-of-the-art methods in automatic gender classification that use image normalization (SVMs, Neural Networks, ADABOOST and PCA+LDA). The other four strategies use invariant features extracted by SIFT (BOW, Evidence Random Trees, NBNN and Voted Nearest-Neighbor). The best strategies are SVM using normalized images and NBNN, the latter having the advantage that no strong image pre-processing is needed.This work has been supported by CDTI (project INTEGRA) and DGUICAM/UAM (project CCG10-UAM/TIC-5864