Estudio de las capacidades cognoscitivas en el fútbol-sala

Este estudio tuvo como objeto analizar la conducta cognoscitiva de los jugadores de fútbolsala, verificando de que forma se producen las modificaciones en el pensamiento táctico tras el desarrollo de un programa de entrenamiento específico de las capacidades de percepción, anticipación y toma de decisiones. Se llevó a cabo una investigación de carácter experimental con dos grupos de atletas practicantes de fútbol-sala: un grupo de control y un grupo experimental en el que se realizó un entrenamiento específico de las capacidades cognoscitivas. Se utilizó un test para medir la capacidad de concentración de los atletas, una prueba para medir la capacidad de captar senales importantes en situación de juego resuelta, un test para medir la capacidad de elaboración de esquemas en situaciones concretas de juego y un test para medir la capacidad para captar y procesar información bajo la presión de un tiempo limitado para emitir la respuesta. Los resultados obtenidos indican que el entrenamiento específico de las capacidades cognoscitivas es más eficaz para el desarrollo de las mismas que el entrenamiento tradicional basado en el desarrollo de las capacidades físicas y técnicas, optimizando la resolución de situaciones-problema en secuencia con intervalos de tiempo reducidas. Se pone además de manifiesto que el volumen de entrenamiento no garantiza la calidad en el aprendizaje cognoscitivo ni una mejora del rendimiento cognoscitivo en el fútbol-sala y que el entrenamiento específico no edad y la experiencia para el desarrollo de las capacidades cognoscitivas de los atletas.The purpose of our study was to analyze cognoscitive behaviour of indoor soccer players, verifying how modifications in tactical thinking develop with an specific programme for training capacities of perception, anticipation and decision making. The investigation was carried out with two groups of players: a control group and a experimental group with specific training of cognitive capacities. Concentration capacity, capacity for picking up important signals in playing situations, capacity of scheme elaboration and capacity for processing information under limited time were studied by specific tests. Results obtained indicate that specific training of cognitive capacities results more efficient in terms of its development that a traditional training based in development of physical and technical capacities and that there is an optimization of the solution of problem situations in sequence with reduced time intervals. Training volume does not guarantee quality of cognitive learning and specific training is not dependent on age or experience for the development of cognitive capacities

INNOVATIVE BIOSTATISTICAL AND BIOINFORMATIC APPROACHES IN THE ANALYSIS OF BREAST CANCER: COMPETING RISK SURVIVAL ANALYSIS THROUGH PSEUDO-VALUES AND COMPREHENSIVE EVALUATION OF METHODS FOR THE TUMOR MICROENVIRONMENT DISSECTION AVAILABLE AT THE PRESENT DAY.

Since my personal original background was quite distant from the statistical bioinformatic approaches for data analysis, having a master degree in Sanitary Biotechnology and Molecular Medicine, my PhD fellowship was spent in building my skills in this field while studying and trying to contribute to the development of biostatistical and bioinformatic approaches to be applied in clinic, with a special focus on oncology, in the optic to contribute to the field of personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is indeed the ultimate goal for life sciences, particularly for oncology, and, in my opinion, a key aspect of the future wellness of humanity. Personalized medicine is the idea of developing the ability to identify the best therapeutic strategy for each unique person and its efficacy relies on having accurate diagnostic tests that identify patients who can benefit from targeted therapies. A striking example consists in the determination of the overexpression of the human epidermal growth factor receptor type 2 (HER2) in the routinely diagnosis of Breast Cancer (BC). HER2 is indeed associated with a worse prognosis but also predicts a better response to the medication trastuzumab; a test for HER2 was approved along with the drug (as a \u201ccompanion diagnostic\u201d) so that clinicians can better target patients' treatment. My thesis is composed by the description of the two projects that have mainly characterized my fellowship. Both projects rely on breast cancer (BC) and the objective of understanding the effects of chronic low inflammation, which has been studied in my projects as the leucocyte infiltration and the body mass index. The focus on BC derives from a practical aspect and an epidemiological aspect. The practical aspect consists on the fact that my group is part of a European research group, led by Christine Desmedt from Belgium, which allowed me to obtain unique data and to interact with experts of BC and bioinformatics from different countries. The epidemiological aspect is represented by the fact that breast cancer is actually a hot topic, being the second most common cancer worldwide and the first among women, but still open to investigations, since the complexity and variability of BC, reflected both at histopathological and molecular level, have proven challenging to classify and therefore to effectively treat to the present day. The first project presented, the tumor microenvironment (TME) dissection project, occupied the first part of my fellowship and was focused on the managing of an enormous quantity of data in order to compare different tools and approaches used to analyze breast cancer. This project consisted in a big European collaboration which tried to establish the reliability of bioinformatic tools in retrieving the TME composition by analyzing bulk transcriptome and methylome and comparing the obtained results to standard approaches, as the pathologist evaluation, and emerging methods, as digital image analysis. This project led to the preparation of a paper, which is currently under submission, under the supervision of Christine Desmedt, the leader of this breast cancer research group, and Elia Biganzoli, my supervisor and member of the cited group. The second project presented, the competing risk analysis through pseudo-values project, which characterized the third year of my PhD, is more focused on the statistical aspects of clinical data analysis and represent the arrival point of my studies of statistical methodology. The project consisted in the exploration of a forefront approach to the analysis of survival data based on pseudo-values, which has the desirable feature to generate measures with a clear and direct interpretation at a clinical level, becoming an invaluable tool for clinical decision making. This project represents a first step in a longer-term project that will led to the preparation of several papers in the future

Snapshots issue 16: How much effort are students putting into PISA?

The most recent OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey enables educators, policymakers and the wider community to compare Australian students with each other, as well as with their counterparts across the world. PISA measures the extent to which 15-year-old students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the knowledge and skills that young adults need to meet the challenges of the future. PISA’s results have become increasingly important in evidence-based education policy. The assessment allows students to analyse and reason; apply their knowledge and skills to interpret and solve real-life problems. PISA is regarded as low-stakes for both schools and students. This is because, unlike other formal assessments, students’ results do not impact their grades and the data cannot be linked to the school (although schools do receive feedback on their students’ performance). This Snapshot examines the self-reported levels of effort students invested in the PISA 2018 test and compares it with the effort they reported that they would have invested if the results counted towards their school marks

Integrating Reasoning Services for Description Logics with Cardinality Constraints with Numerical Optimization Techniques

Recent research in the field of Description Logic (DL) investigated the complexity of the satisfiability problem for description logics that are obtained by enriching the well-known DL ALCQ with more complex set and cardinality constraints over role successors. The algorithms that have been proposed so far, despite providing worst-case optimal decision procedures for the concept satisfiability problem (both without and with a terminology) lack the efficiency needed to obtain usable implementations. In particular, the algorithm for the case without terminology is non-deterministic and the one for the case with a terminology is also best-case exponential. The goal of this thesis is to use well-established techniques from the field of numerical optimization, such as column generation, in order to obtain more practical algorithms. As a starting point, efficient approaches for dealing with counting quantifiers over unary predicates based on SAT-based column generation should be considered.:1. Introduction 2. Preliminaries 2.1. First-order logic 2.2. Linear Programming 2.3. The description logic ALCQ 2.4. Extending ALCQ with expressive role successor constraints 2.4.1. The logic QFBAPA 2.4.2 The description logic ALCSCC 3. The description logic ALCCQU 3.1. A normal form for ALCCQU 3.2. ALCQt as an equivalent formulation of ALCCQU 3.2.1. ALCQt is a sublogic of ALCCQU 3.2.2. ALCCQU is a sublogic of ALCQt 3.3. Model-theoretic characterization of ALCQt 3.3.1. ALCQt-bisimulation and invariance for ALCQt 3.3.2. Characterization of ALCQt concept descriptions 3.4. Expressive power 3.4.1. Relative expressivity of ALCQ and ALCCQU 3.4.2. Relative expressivity of ALCCQU and ALCSCC 3.5. ALCCQU as the first-order fragment of ALCSCC 4. Concept satisfiability in ALCCQU 4.1. The first-order fragment CQU 4.2. Column generation with SAT oracle 4.2.1. Column generation and CQU 4.2.2. From linear inequalities to propositional formulae 4.2.3. Column generation and ALCCQU 4.3. Branch-and-Price for ALCCQU concept satisfiability 4.4. Correctness of ALCCQU-BB 4.4.1. Complexity of ALCCQU-BB 5. Conclusion - Bibliograph