Transfer learning or design a custom CNN for tactile object recognition

International Workshop on Robotac: New Progress in Tactile Perception and Learning in RoboticsNovel tactile sensors allow treating pressure lectures as standard images due to its highresolution. Therefore, computer vision algorithms such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be used to identify objects in contact. In this work, a high-resolution tactile sensor has been attached to a robotic end-effector to identify objects in contact. Moreover, two CNNs-based approaches have been tested in an experiment of classification of pressure images. These methods include a transfer learning approach using a pre-trained CNN on an RGB images dataset and a custom-made CNN trained from scratch with tactile information. A comparative study of performance between them has been carried out.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Spanish project DPI2015-65186-R, the European Commission under grant agreement BES-2016-078237, the educational project PIE-118 of the University of Malag

Multirresistencia a fungicidas en oídio de cucurbitáceas (Podosphaera fusca)

El oídio causado por Podosphaera fusca es un factor limitante en la producción de cucurbitáceas en España y su control depende en gran medida de la aplicación de productos fitosanitarios. La resistencia a fungicidas depende de dos factores, uno inherente al propio fungicida, de manera que hay mecanismos de acción a los cuales casi todos los organismos desarrollan resistencia en un plazo más o menos largo y un segundo factor correspondiente al propio hongo que puede de desarrollar resistencias a numerosas materias activas. Los oídios se encuentran entre los organismos que desarrollan resistencia a fungicidas con gran facilidad, por lo que las aplicaciones de fitosanitarios deben efectuarse con precaución, para evitar en lo posible la aparición de estas resistencias. Durante los últimos quince años, nuestro grupo de investigación ha estudiado la resistencia de poblaciones de P. fusca en cultivos del centro y sur de España a fungicidas de diferentes mecanismos de acción: DMI (triademol, fenarimol y miclobutanilo), QoI (kresoxim-metil, azoxistrobin y trifloxistrobin), MBC (metil-tiofanato), aza-naftalenos (quinoxifén) e hidroxi (2 amino) pirimidinas (bupirimato). Las concentraciones discriminatorias se establecieron sobre la dosis máxima autorizada en campo. El hecho más interesante es la presencia de cepas multirresistentes; en nuestro laboratorio se ha determinado la resistencia a estos nueve fungicidas en 67 cepas. Todas fueron sensibles a quinoxifén y miclobutanilo, no se ha observado resistencia a ellos en España, aunque sí hemos notado cierta disminución de la sensibilidad. Para los otros cuatro (puesto que consideramos los tres QoI como un único fungicida), treinta y tres cepas eran resistentes al menos a uno de ellos, veintidós a dos, once a tres y una única cepa a cuatro. Estos datos confirman el riesgo de aparición de cepas multirresistentes en P. fusca, por lo que deben extremarse las precauciones a la hora de efectuar tratamientos fitosanitarios.Este trabajo ha sido financiado por fondos de los proyectos del Plan Nacional AGL2001-1837-CO2-02, AGL2004-06056-CO2-02, AGL2007-65340-CO2-02 y AGL2010-21848-C02-01 y una ayuda del Plan Propio de Investigación de la Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

An overview on armor research for the laser fusion project HiPER

During the current preparatory phase of the European laser fusion project HiPER, an intensive effort has being placed to identify an armour material able to protect the internal walls of the chamber against the high thermal loads and high fluxes of x-rays and ions produced during the fusion explosions. This poster addresses the different threats and limitations of a poly-crystalline Tungsten armour. The analysis is carried out under the conditions of an experimental chamber hypothetically constructed to demonstrate laser fusion in a repetitive mode, subjected to a few thousand 48MJ shock ignition shots during its entire lifetime. If compared to the literature, an extrapolation of the thermomechanical and atomistic effects obtained from the simulations of the experimental chamber to the conditions of a Demo reactor (working 24/7 at hundreds of MW) or a future power plant (producing GW) suggests that “standard” tungsten will not be a suitable armour. Thus, new materials based on nano-structured W and C are being investigated as possible candidates. The research programme launched by the HiPER material team is introduced

TokenTLB+CUP: A Token-Based Page Classification with Cooperative Usage Prediction

[EN] Discerning the private or shared condition of the data accessed by the applications is an increasingly decisive approach to achieving efficiency and scalability in multi- and many-core systems. Since most memory accesses in both sequential and parallel applications are either private (accessed only by one core) or read-only (not written) data, devoting the full cost of coherence to every memory access results in sub-optimal performance and limits the scalability and efficiency of the multiprocessor. This paper introduces TokenTLB, a TLB-based page classification approach based on exchange and count of tokens. Token counting on TLBs is a natural and efficient way for classifying memory pages, and it does not require the use of complex and undesirable persistent requests or arbitration. In addition, classification is extended with Cooperative Usage Predictor (CUP), a token-based system-wide page usage predictor retrieved through TLB cooperation, in order to perform a classification unaffected by TLB size. Through cycle-accurate simulation we observed that TokenTLB spends 43.6% of cycles as private per page on average, and CUP further increases the time spent as private by 22.0%. CUP avoids 4 out of 5 TLB invalidations when compared to state-of-the-art predictors, thus proving far better prediction accuracy and making usage prediction an attractive mechanism for the first time.This work has been jointly supported by the MINECO and European Commission (FEDER funds) under the project TIN2015-66972-C5-1-R and TIN2015-66972-C5-3-R and the Fundacion Seneca-Agencia de Ciencia y Tecnologia de la Region de Murcia under the project Jovenes Lideres en Investigacion 18956/JLI/13.Esteve Garcia, A.; Ros Bardisa, A.; Robles Martínez, A.; Gómez Requena, ME. (2018). TokenTLB+CUP: A Token-Based Page Classification with Cooperative Usage Prediction. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 29(5):1188-1201. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2017.2782808S1188120129

La heteroplasmia mitocondrial explica la resistencia a fungicidas QoI en Podosphaera xanthii, agente causal de oídio de cucurbitáceas

En España, el control del oídio de las cucurbitáceas (Podosphaera xanthii) depende principalmente del empleo de fungicidas como los inhibidores de la quinona externa (QoI). En un trabajo anterior, se observó una resistencia generalizada a los fungicidas QoI en poblaciones de P. xanthii en el centro-sur de España, pero no se terminaron de aclarar los mecanismos moleculares implicados. En este trabajo hemos estudiado el papel de la proteína de Rieske-FeS (risp) y de las mutaciones en el gen del citocromo b (cytb) en la resistencia a fungicidas QoI en P. xanthii. No se detectaron mutaciones en el gen risp en los aislados resistentes analizados. Para cytb, el análisis de las secuencias reveló la presencia de la sustitución G143A, previamente descrita y asociada a la resistencia a QoI en varias especies. Esta mutación siempre se detectaba en aislados resistentes a QoI; sin embargo, también se detectaba en aislados sensibles aunque con menor frecuencia. Para comprobar si la heteroplasmia del gen cytb estaba implicada en la resistencia a los fungicidas QoI en P. xanthii, se desarrolló una reacción en cadena de la polimerasa específica de alelo y cuantitativa, para determinar la abundancia relativa de los alelos G143 (sensible) y A143 (resistente). En los aislados resistentes a los fungicidas QoI se observó una abundancia relativa de los alelos A143 del 70% y en los aislados sensibles estas frecuencias variaban entre el 10% y el 60%. Nuestros datos sugieren que la mutación G143A en el gen cytb es el principal factor implicado en la resistencia a QoI en P. xanthii, pero la proporción de los alelos G143 y A143 en cada aislado puede determinar su nivel de resistencia.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Improved Adhesion of the DLC Coating Using HiPIMS with Positive Pulses and Plasma Immersion Pretreatment

Diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings are used due to their extraordinary tribomechanical properties, great hardness, high elastic modulus, high wear resistance, low friction coefficient and chemical inertness, which provide them with biocompatibility. Compared to other physical vapor deposition (PVD) coatings of transition nitrides and carbonitrides, DLC has limited adhesion, so it is necessary to develop new techniques to overcome this limitation. This work reports the results of scratch testing for the measurement of adhesion and of tests for wear resistance and nanoindentation in AISI 316L stainless steel coated with a WC:C coating, produced using novel high-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) technology with positive pulses. In addition, the use of a preceding surface modification technique, specifically plasma immersion ion implantation (PIII), was studied with the aim of optimizing the adhesion of the coating. The results show how the coating improved the tribomechanical properties through the use of positive pulse HiPIMS compared to conventional HiPIMS, with an adhesion result that reached critical load values of 48.5 N and a wear coefficient of 3.96 × 10−7 mm3/n

On The Modeling And Real-Time Control Of Urban Drainage Systems: A Survey

Drainage network are complex systems composed by several processes including recollection, transport, storing, wastewater and/or rain treatment, and return of the water to a receiving environment. Urban drainage systems (UDS) involve most of these processes inside cities and can be either separate or combined systems, depending on how wastewater and rainwater are managed. The way UDS manage the wastewater is through the convenient handling of active elements such as gates (redirection and/or retention), storing tanks and pumping stations, when needed. Therefore, the modeling and control of UDS basically consists in knowing and representing the (dynamical) behavior of those elements and manage them properly in order to achieve a given set of control objectives, such as minimization of flooding in streets or maximization of treated wastewater in the system. Given the large number of elements composing a UDS and the interaction between them, management and control strategies may depend on highly complex system models, what implies the explicit difficulty for designing real-time control strategies. This paper makes a review on the huge world of models used to describe, simulate, and control UDS. Moreover, a revision of the techniques and strategies commonly used for the control of these systems is also presented and discussed. Mechanisms that ensure the correct operation of the UDS under presence of failures or communication flaws in the system are considered as well

TLB-Based Temporality-Aware Classification in CMPs with Multilevel TLBs

"© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works."[EN] Recent proposals are based on classifying memory accesses into private or shared in order to process private accesses more efficiently and reduce coherence overhead. The classification mechanisms previously proposed are either not able to adapt to the dynamic sharing behavior of the applications or require frequent broadcast messages. Additionally, most of these classification approaches assume single-level translation lookaside buffers (TLBs). However, deeper and more efficient TLB hierarchies, such as the ones implemented in current commodity processors, have not been appropriately explored. This paper analyzes accurate classification mechanisms in multilevel TLB hierarchies. In particular, we propose an efficient data classification strategy for systems with distributed shared last-level TLBs. Our approach classifies data accounting for temporal private accesses and constrains TLB-related traffic by issuing unicast messages on first-level TLB misses. When our classification is employed to deactivate coherence for private data in directory-based protocols, it improves the directory efficiency and, consequently, reduces coherence traffic to merely 53.0%, on average. Additionally, it avoids some of the overheads of previous classification approaches for purely private TLBs, improving average execution time by nearly 9% for large-scale systems.This work has been jointly supported by the MINECO and European Commission (FEDER funds) under the project TIN2015-66972-C5-1-R and TIN2015-66972-C5-3-R and the Fundacion Seneca-Agencia de Ciencia y Tecnologia de la Region de Murcia under the project Jovenes Lideres en Investigacion 18956/JLI/13.Esteve Garcia, A.; Ros Bardisa, A.; Gómez Requena, ME.; Robles Martínez, A.; Duato Marín, JF. (2017). TLB-Based Temporality-Aware Classification in CMPs with Multilevel TLBs. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. 28(8):2401-2413. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2017.2658576S2401241328

Active fault databases and seismic hazard calculations: a compromise between science and practice. Review of case studies from Spain

Since the Quaternary Active Faults Database of Iberia (QAFI) was released in February 2012 a number of studies aimed at producing seismic hazard assessments have made use of it. We will present a summary of the shortcomings and advantages that were faced when QAFI was considered in different seismic hazard studies. These include the production of the new official seismic hazard map of Spain, performed in the view of the foreseen adoption of Eurocode-8 throughout 2017. The QAFI database was considered as a complementary source of information for designing the seismogenic source-zone models used in the calculations, and particularly for the estimation of maximum magnitude distribution in each zone, as well as for assigning the predominant rupture mechanism based on style of faulting. We will also review the different results obtained by other studies that considered QAFI faults as independent seismogenic-sources in opposition to source-zones, revealing, on one hand, the crucial importance of data-reliability and, on the other, the very much influence that ground motion attenuation models have on the actual impact of fault-sources on hazard results. Finally, we will present briefly the updated version of the database (QAFI v.3, 2015), which includes an original scheme for evaluating the reliability of fault seismic parameters specifically devised to facilitate decision-making to seismic hazard practitioners