Facing the future : scanning, synthesizing and sense-making in horizon scanning

Erworben im Rahmen der Schweizer Nationallizenen (http://www.nationallizenz.ch)In this paper, we discuss key issues in harnessing horizon scanning to shape systemic policies, particularly in the light of the foresight exercise ‘Facing the future: Time for the EU to meet global challenges’ which was carried out for the Bureau of European Policy Advisors. This exercise illustrates how horizon scanning can enable collective sense-making processes which assist in the identification of emerging signals and policy issues; the synthesis of such issues into encompassing clusters; and the interpretation of resulting clusters as an important step towards the coordinated development of joint policy measures. In order to achieve such objectives, horizon scanning can benefit from methods of multi-criteria decision-making and network analysis for prioritizing, clustering and combining issues. Furthermore, these methods provide support for traceability, which in turn contributes to the enhanced transparency and legitimacy of foresight

Euro Stoxx 50: 1997-2005. Shareholder value creation in Europe

2005 was a very good year for the shareholders of the companies in the Euro Stoxx 50. The shareholder value creation of these 50 companies was €292.9 billion. The companies that created most value for their shareholders were Total (€30 billion), Sanofi-Synthelabo (€23.2 billion) and Eni (€20.7 billion). The companies that destroyed most value were telecoms: Deutsche Telekom (€-14.8 billion), France Telecom (€-11.8 billion) and Telecom Italia (€-7.1 billion). In 2005, the Euro Stoxx 50 was slightly more volatile than the S&P 500. Shareholder value creation in the three-year period 2003-2005 was €551 billion. The market value of the 50 companies included in the Euro Stoxx 50 was €2.1 trillion in 2005, although only €1.8 trillion were included in the index. SAP was the top shareholder value creator and Deutsche Telekom the top shareholder value destroyer during the eight-year period 1997-2005. A portfolio long in the companies that entered the index and short in the companies that abandoned the index had on average a 6.85% return in the 20 days prior to the index recomposition and a 0.97% return in the 20 days after the index recomposition.shareholder value creation; created shareholder value; shareholder value added; shareholder return; required return to equity;

Enhancing Citizen Participation through Serious Games in Virtual Reality

Recently, an increasing number of cities are in the process of developing new strategies and concepts to become Smart Cities. Participatory approaches that include all stakeholders are essential for urban developments to be smart and widely accepted. Nevertheless, only a few cities have linked their citizen participation with city planning. This is where this innovative Virtual Reality (VR) project comes in.Technological progress in VR now enables people to be virtually integrated into an emerging future. Incombination with gamification methods, educational tools with long term impacts can be created. As of yet, gamification in a non-VR environment has been successfully applied in different projects. This project aims to unlock the untapped potential and examines how a serious game in a high-end VR environment can increase citizen participation in a Smart City. To create the VR application, a user-centered design method was applied. In a first step, a prototype, the serious game “Virtual Energy Hero”, was developed, which addresses energy and sustainability topics. The game was very well received by more than 90% of approximately 250 players (by the end of 2018). The storyline of the game, as well as its game mechanics to enhance interactivity and immersion, are the main areas for improvement, as identified through interviews, a literature review, tests and surveys. Theselearnings were considered when designing the second game "Virtual Smart City Hero". By creating virtual scenarios of the Smart City Winterthur, based on the city’s 3D model, people are offered the opportunity to dive into the topic and interact with current and future Smart City elements. Through interactive mini-games, the players are given an immersive experience. The “Virtual Smart City Hero” is currently under development and still in the design phase. It is planned that after playing the game, the players are encouraged to join a web based innovation platform. There, they can conceptualize and discuss new ideas and participate in bottom-up initiatives. The platform will promote collaborations between different actors - citizens, administrations, research institutes and the private sector. Impact assessments will be made and it will be analyzed how the platform has to be designed for citizens to become active Smart Citizens

Real-time Soundprism

[EN] This paper presents a parallel real-time sound source separation system for decomposing an audio signal captured with a single microphone in so many audio signals as the number of instruments that are really playing. This approach is usually known as Soundprism. The application scenario of the system is for a concert hall in which users, instead of listening to the mixed audio, want to receive the audio of just an instrument, focusing on a particular performance. The challenge is even greater since we are interested in a real-time system on handheld devices, i.e., devices characterized by both low power consumption and mobility. The results presented show that it is possible to obtain real-time results in the tested scenarios using an ARM processor aided by a GPU, when this one is present.This work has been supported by the "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" of Spain and FEDER under projects TEC2015-67387-C4-{1,2,3}-R.Muñoz-Montoro, AJ.; Ranilla, J.; Vera-Candeas, P.; Combarro, EF.; Alonso-Jordá, P. (2019). Real-time Soundprism. The Journal of Supercomputing. 75(3):1594-1609. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2703-0S15941609753Alonso P, Cortina R, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Alonso-González M, Ranilla J (2017) Parallel online time warping for real-time audio-to-score alignment in multi-core systems. J Supercomput 73:126. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1647-5Carabias-Orti JJ, Cobos M, Vera-Candeas P, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ (2013) Nonnegative signal factorization with learnt instrument models for sound source separation in close-microphone recordings. EURASIP J Adv Signal Process 2013:184. https://doi.org/10.1186/1687-6180-2013-184Carabias-Orti JJ, Rodriguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Canadas-Quesada FJ, Ruiz-Reyes N (2015) An audio to score alignment framework using spectral factorization and dynamic time warping. In: 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, pp 742–748Díaz-Gracia N, Cocaña-Fernández A, Alonso-González M, Martínez-Zaldívar FJ, Cortina R, García-Mollá VM, Alonso P, Ranilla J (2014) NNMFPACK: a versatile approach to an NNMF parallel library. In: Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Computational and Mathematical Methods in Science and Engineering, pp 456–465Díaz-Gracia N, Cocaña-Fernández A, Alonso-González M, Martínez-Zaldívar FJ, Cortina R, García-Mollá VM, Vidal AM (2015) Improving NNMFPACK with heterogeneous and efficient kernels for $$\beta$$ β -divergence metrics. J Supercomput 71:1846–1856. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-014-1363-yDriedger J, Grohganz H, Prätzlich T, Ewert S, Müller M (2013) Score-informed audio decomposition and applications. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp 541–544Duan Z, Pardo B (2011) Soundprism: an online system for score-informed source separation of music audio. IEEE J Sel Top Signal Process 5(6):1205–1215Duong NQ, Vincent E, Gribonval R (2010) Under-determined reverberant audio source separation using a full-rank spatial covariance model. IEEE Trans Audio Speech 18(7):1830–1840. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2010.2050716Ewert S, Müller M (2011) Estimating note intensities in music recordings. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, pp 385–388Ewert S, Pardo B, Mueller M, Plumbley MD (2014) Score-informed source separation for musical audio recordings: an overview. IEEE Signal Process Mag 31:116–124. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2013.2296076Fastl H, Zwicker E (2007) Psychoacoustics. Springer, BerlinGanseman J, Scheunders P, Mysore GJ, Abel JS (2010) Source separation by score synthesis. Int Comput Music Conf 2010:1–4Goto M, Hashiguchi H, Nishimura T, Oka R (2002) RWC music database: popular, classical and jazz music databases. In: ISMIR, vol 2, pp 287–288Goto M (2004) Development of the RWC music database. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2004), ppp 553–556Hennequin R, David B, Badeau R (2011) Score informed audio source separation using a parametric model of non-negative spectrogram. In: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) pp 45–48. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2011.5946324Itoyama K, Goto M, Komatani K et al (2008) Instrument equalizer for query-by-example retrieval: improving sound source separation based on integrated harmonic and inharmonic models. In: ISMIR. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.324.7341.827Marxer R, Janer J, Bonada J (2012) Low-latency instrument separation in polyphonic audio using timbre models. In: International Conference on Latent Variable Analysis and Signal Separation, pp 314–321Miron M, Carabias-Orti JJ, Janer J (2015) Improving score-informed source separation for classical music through note refinement. In: ISMIR, pp 448–454Ozerov A, Févotte C (2010) Multichannel nonnegative matrix factorization in convolutive mixtures for audio source separation. IEEE Trans Audio Speech Lang Process 18:550–563. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2009.2031510Ozerov A, Vincent E, Bimbot F (2012) A general flexible framework for the handling of prior information in audio source separation. IEEE Trans Audio Speech Lang Process 20:1118–1133. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2011.2172425Pätynen J, Pulkki V, Lokki T (2008) Anechoic recording system for symphony orchestra. Acta Acust United Acust 94:856–865. https://doi.org/10.3813/AAA.918104Raphael C (2008) A classifier-based approach to score-guided source separation of musical audio. Comput Music J 32:51–59. https://doi.org/10.1162/comj.2008.32.1.51Rodriguez-Serrano FJ, Duan Z, Vera-Candeas P, Pardo B, Carabias-Orti JJ (2015) Online score-informed source separation with adaptive instrument models. J New Music Res 44:83–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2014.989174Rodriguez-Serrano FJ, Carabias-Orti JJ, Vera-Candeas P, Martinez-Munoz D (2016) Tempo driven audio-to-score alignment using spectral decomposition and online dynamic time warping. ACM Trans Intell Syst Technol 8:1–20. https://doi.org/10.1145/2926717Sawada H, Araki S, Makino S (2011) Underdetermined convolutive blind source separation via frequency bin-wise clustering and permutation alignment. IEEE Trans Audio Speech Lang Process 19(3):516–527. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASL.2010.2051355Vincent E, Araki S, Theis F et al (2012) The signal separation evaluation campaign (2007–2010): achievements and remaining challenges. Signal Process 92:1928–1936. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sigpro.2011.10.007Vincent E, Bertin N, Gribonval R, Bimbot F (2014) From blind to guided audio source separation: how models and side information can improve the separation of sound. IEEE Signal Process Mag 31:107–115. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2013.229744

Deciphering biomarkers for leptomeningeal metastasis in malignant hemopathies (Lymphoma/Leukemia) patients by comprehensive multipronged proteomics characterization of cerebrospinal fluid

In the present work, leptomeningeal disease, a very destructive form of systemic cancer, was characterized from several proteomics points of view. This pathology involves the invasion of the leptomeninges by malignant tumor cells. The tumor spreads to the central nervous system through the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and has a very grim prognosis; the average life expectancy of patients who suffer it does not exceed 3 months. The early diagnosis of leptomeningeal disease is a challenge because, in most of the cases, it is an asymptomatic pathology. When the symptoms are clear, the disease is already in the very advanced stages and life expectancy is low. Consequently, there is a pressing need to determine useful CSF proteins to help in the diagnosis and/or prognosis of this disease. For this purpose, a systematic and exhaustive proteomics characterization of CSF by multipronged proteomics approaches was performed to determine different protein profiles as potential biomarkers. Proteins such as PTPRC, SERPINC1, sCD44, sCD14, ANPEP, SPP1, FCGR1A, C9, sCD19, and sCD34, among others, and their functional analysis, reveals that most of them are linked to the pathology and are not detected on normal CSF. Finally, a panel of biomarkers was verified by a prediction model for leptomeningeal disease, showing new insights into the research for potential biomarkers that are easy to translate into the clinic for the diagnosis of this devastating disease.We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Health Institute, Carlos III (ISCIII), for the grants: FIS PI14/01538, FIS PI17/01930 and CB16/12/00400. We also acknowledge Fondos FEDER (EU) and Junta Castilla-León (COVID-19 grant COV20EDU/00187). The Proteomics Unit belongs to ProteoRed, PRB3-ISCIII, supported by grant PT17/0019/0023 of the PE I + D + I2017-2020, funded by ISCIII and FEDER—Norma Galicia is supported by the CONACYT Program. P. Juanes-Velasco is supported by JCYL PhD Program “Nos Impulsa-JCYL” and scholarship JCYLEDU/601/2020

Impacts of land management and climate change in a developing and socioenvironmental challenging transboundary region

Land-use/cover change is the major cause of terrestrial ecosystem degradation. However, its impacts will be exacerbated due to climate change and population growth, driving agricultural expansion because of higher demand of food and lower agricultural yields in some tropical areas. International strategies aimed to mitigate impacts of climate change and land use-cover change are challenging in developing regions. This study aims to evaluate alternatives to minimize the impacts of these threats under socioeconomic trajectories, in one of the biologically richest regions in Guatemala and Mexico. This study is located at the Usumacinta watershed, a transboundary region that shares a common history, with similar biophysical properties and economic constraints which have led to large land use/cover changes. To understand the impacts on deforestation and carbon emissions of different land-management practices, we developed three scenarios (1): business as usual (BAU), (2) a reducing emissions scenario aimed to reduce deforestation and degradation (REDD+), and (3) zero-deforestation from 2030 onwards based on the international commitments. Our results suggest that by 2050, natural land cover might reduce 22.3 and 12.2% of its extent under the BAU and REDD + scenarios, respectively in comparison with 2012. However, the zero-deforestation scenario shows that by 2050, it would be possible to avoid losing 22.4% of the forested watershed (1.7 million ha) and recover 5.9% (0.4 million hectares) of it. In terms of carbon sequestration, REDD + projects can reduce the carbon losses in natural vegetation, but a zero-deforestation policy can double the carbon sequestration produced by REDD + projects only. This study shows that to reduce the pressures on ecosystems, particularly in regions highly marginalized with significant migration, it is necessary to implement transboundary land-management policies that also integrate poverty alleviation strategies

Phenolic and furanic compounds of Portuguese chestnut and French, American and Portuguese oak wood chips

Botanical species used on aging process must be wisely and judiciously chosen, and for this selection, a basic knowledge of the chemical composition of woods is warranted. Aiming to contribute to extend the knowledge of the chemical composition of several wood species useful for enological purposes, we have focused our studies on Portuguese chestnut and French, American and Portuguese oak chips. The profile of low molecular weight phenolic composition of these chips was achieved, using an optimized extraction method based on pressurized liquid extraction, followed by the quantification of phenolic acids, phenolic aldehydes and furanic derivatives by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC-DAD). The identification of those compounds was also confirmed by LC-DAD/ESI-MS. This study allowed the determination of the low molecular phenolic composition of Portuguese chestnut and French, American and Portuguese oak wood. According to our results, the influence of the botanical species seems to be more relevant than the geographic origin of the wood species