Bidimensional Cross-Cloud Application Management with TOSCA and Brooklyn (summary)

The diversity in the way different cloud providers offer their services, give their SLAs, present their QoS, support different technologies, etc., complicates the portability and interoperability of cloud applications, and favors vendor lock-in. Standards like TOSCA, and tools supporting them, have come to help in the provider-independent description of cloud applications. After the variety of proposed cross-cloud application management tools, we propose going one step further in the unification of cloud services with a deployment tool in which IaaS and PaaS services are integrated into a unified interface. We provide support for applications whose components are to be deployed on different providers, indistinctly using IaaS and PaaS services. The TOSCA standard is used to define a portable model describing the topology of the cloud applications and the required resources in an agnostic, and providers- and resources-independent way. We include in this paper some highlights on our implementation on Apache Brooklyn and present a non-trivial example that illustrates our approach. Resumen del artículo publicado en: Jose Carrasco, Javier Cubo, Francisco Durán, Ernesto Pimentel. Bidimensional Cross-Cloud Application Management with TOSCA and Brooklyn, 9th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2016), San Francisco, (EEUU). IEEE Computer Society, 2016.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Sfrp1 promotes neuroinflammation through the modulation of ADAM10 proteolytic activity

Tesis Doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias, Departamento de Biología Molecular. Fecha de lectura: 28-07-2017Esta tesis tiene embargado el acceso al texto completo hasta el 28-01-2019Growing evidence suggests the importance of immune response regulation for the maintenance of neural tissue homeostasis. Disruption of this homeostasis might be one of the causes contributing to the onset and development of neurological disorders. Inflammatory responses in the Central Nervous System (CNS) are mediated by astrocytes and microglial cells, which help to protect from pathogen invasion and respond to any kind of injury, in the attempt to repair the tissue. However, exacerbated inflammatory responses lead to pathogenic neurotoxicity and chronic neuroinflammation. The latter has been recognized as one of the drivers of diverse neurodegenerative and autoimmune diseases of the CNS. Previous work from our laboratory has demonstrated that Sfrp1 contributes to AD progression by inducing Aβ peptide generation. In the course of this study, we also observed that genetic inactivation of Sfrp1 was associated with particularly low levels of neuroinflammation. Because an increased Sfrp1 expression has been reported in several peripheral diseases associated with chronic inflammation, we hypothesised that Sfrp1 could directly contribute to the regulation of neuroinflammation. In this thesis, we have addressed this issue, providing evidence that support this hypothesis. Indeed, we show that Sfrp1 expression is upregulated in activated microglial cells and reactive astrocytes under diverse experimental pro-inflammatory conditions, including experimentally induced neuroinflammation, in mouse models for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and in Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis. On the contrary, genetic inactivation of Sfrp1 strongly reduces glial cells activation, ameliorating the pathological traits of the diseases. Sfrp1 overexpression is sufficient to induce an inflammatory response, activating glial cells and promoting the infiltration of immune cells, whereas preliminary studies indicate that antibody-mediated neutralization of Sfrp1 activity ameliorates AD pathological traits. From a mechanistic point of view, Sfrp1 seems to promote neuroinflammation by regulating ADAM10-mediated shedding of TREM2, CD200 and CX3CL1, proteins implicated in the activation of microglial cells. We thus propose that Sfrp1 is directly involved in modulating microglial activation during brain inflammation. We also suggest that Sfrp1 may represent a new therapeutic target to attenuate the exacerbated neuroinflammation present in numerous neurodegenerative diseases

Performance evaluation of space-time block coding using a realistic mobile radio channel

This paper presents a performance evaluation of space-time block coding (STBC) employing a realistic mobile radio channel model in macrocellular and urban environments. The bit error rate (BER) is computed by Monte-Carlo simulations in the down-link to evaluate its sensitivity to channel correlation. We consider a horizontal uniform linear array at the base station (BS) formed by up to four antenna elements, and one and two uncorrelated antenna elements at the mobile station (MS). The channel model includes the probability density function (pdf) of the azimuth and delay of the impinging waves and their expected power conditioned on the azimuth and delay. The statistical properties of the model are extracted from macrocellular measurements made in urban environments. Simulation results show that the use of STBC can provide significant gains with acceptable sensitivity to the channel correlation under realistic conditions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Analysis for the Knowledge Management application in maintenance engineering: Perception from maintenance technicians

[EN] Knowledge based on personal experience (tacit knowledge) acquired in problem solving actions and in maintenance actions is the fundamental basis for maintenance technicians in companies with great physical assets. Generally, there is no proper policy for managing strategic knowledge and its capture. In this article, through qualitative studies (grounded theory) and surveys conducted with technicians, the aim was to obtain the perception of the maintenance technicians' part of the companies, in order to establish the characteristics of the relation between the strategic aspects and the engineering aspects of industrial maintenance, regarding knowledge management, as well as the enablers and barriers to its application. The results show how a high level of tacit knowledge is used in this activity, which requires more time for new staff. The values obtained from this survey show that the knowledge recorded by the companies (explicit) is 51.25%, compared to the personal knowledge (tacit) of maintenance technicians regarding reliability and breakdowns. In operational/exploitational actions it is 43.90%, for energy efficiency actions it is 49.61%, and in maintenance actions (preventive, predictive, and corrective) the value is 68.78%. This shows the significant gap between the perception of recorded knowledge (explicit), and the knowledge that maintenance technicians have (tacit knowledge). All this can affect the companies, as part of the strategic knowledge is lost when a maintenance technician leaves the company.This work has been conducted within the framework of "Sistemas de mantenimiento industrial" project (Ref. 20140432) and the CONDAP project "Digital skills for workplace mentors in construction sector apprenticeships" funded by the European Commission within the Key Action 2: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices, reference number 2018-1-UK01KA202-048122Cárcel-Carrasco, J.; Cárcel-Carrasco, J. (2021). Analysis for the Knowledge Management application in maintenance engineering: Perception from maintenance technicians. Applied Sciences. 11 (2)(2):1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11020703S11611 (2)

Inhomogeneous nucleation in quark hadron phase transition

The effect of subcritical hadron bubbles on a first-order quark-hadron phase transition is studied. These subcritical hadron bubbles are created due to thermal fluctuations, and can introduce a finite amount of phase mixing (quark phase mixed with hadron phase) even at and above the critical temperature. For reasonable choices of surface tension and correlation length, as obtained from the lattice QCD calculations, we show that the amount of phase mixing at the critical temperature remains below the percolation threshold. Thus, as the system cools below the critical temperature, the transition proceeds through the nucleation of critical-size hadron bubbles from a metastable quark-gluon phase (QGP), within an inhomogeneous background populated by an equilibrium distribution of subcritical hadron bubbles. The inhomogeneity of the medium results in a substantial reduction of the nucleation barrier for critical bubbles. Using the corrected nucleation barrier, we estimate the amount of supercooling for different parameters controlling the phase transition, and briefly discuss its implications to cosmology and heavy-ion collisions.Comment: LaTeX, 14 pages with 8 Postscript figures. Discussion added in introduction and conclusion, Fig. 8 added, few more references added, Typographical errors corrected. Version to appear in Phys. Rev.

A "quick look" at ultrafast ablation using fs-resolved phase-change microscopy

A pump-probe phase-change microscope with fs temporal resolution has been used to understand the transformation induced in the sample surface as a consequence of laser-matter interaction.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The evolution of the scientific productivity of highly productive economists

This paper studies the evolution of research productivity of a sample of economists working in the best 81 departments in the world in 2007. The main novelty is that, in so far as a productivity distribution can be identified with an income distribution, we measure productivity mobility in a dynamic context using an indicator inspired in an income mobility index suggested by Fields (2010) for a two-period world. Productivity is measured in terms of publications, weighted by the citation impact of the journals where each article is published in the periodical literature. We study the evolution of average productivity, productivity inequality, the extent of rank reversals, and productivity mobility for seven cohorts, as well as the population as a whole. We offer new evidence confirming previous results about the heterogeneity of the evolution of productivity for top and other researchers. However, the major result is that-contrary to what was expected-for our sample of very highly productive scholars the effect of rank reversals between the two periods on overall productivity mobility offsets the effect of an increase in productivity inequality from the first to the second period in the youngest five out of seven cohorts.This paper is produced as part of the project Science, Innovation, Firms and markets in a Globalized World (SCIFI-GLOW), a Collaborative Project funded by the European Commission's Seventh Research Framework Programme, Contract number SSH7-CT-2008-217436. Carrasco and Ruiz- Castillo acknowledge additional financial support from the Spanish MEC through grant No. ECO2009-11165, and SEJ2007-67436, respectivel

Temporally-aware algorithms for the classification of anuran sounds

Several authors have shown that the sounds of anurans can be used as an indicator of climate change. Hence, the recording, storage and further processing of a huge number of anuran sounds, distributed over time and space, are required in order to obtain this indicator. Furthermore, it is desirable to have algorithms and tools for the automatic classification of the different classes of sounds. In this paper, six classification methods are proposed, all based on the data-mining domain, which strive to take advantage of the temporal character of the sounds. The definition and comparison of these classification methods is undertaken using several approaches. The main conclusions of this paper are that: (i) the sliding window method attained the best results in the experiments presented, and even outperformed the hidden Markov models usually employed in similar applications; (ii) noteworthy overall classification performance has been obtained, which is an especially striking result considering that the sounds analysed were affected by a highly noisy background; (iii) the instance selection for the determination of the sounds in the training dataset offers better results than cross-validation techniques; and (iv) the temporally-aware classifiers have revealed that they can obtain better performance than their nontemporally-aware counterparts.Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa (Junta de Andalucía, Spain): excellence eSAPIENS number TIC 570