La probabilidad en la Olimpiada Matemática Aragonesa de 2.º ESO

Entre todas las actividades organizadas por las distintas sociedades que forman la Federación Española de Sociedades de Profesores de Matemáticas (FESPM), la Olimpiada Matemática de 2.º de Educación Secundaria es una de las más destacadas y emblemáticas. En Aragón, con casi 30 años de historia, la fase autonómica de la Olimpiada Matemática de 2.º de Educación Secundaria, organizada por la Sociedad Aragonesa de Profesores de Matemáticas (SAPM), puede ser considerada un éxito desde distintos puntos de vista. Por un lado, por la abundante participación del alumnado, con más de 1200 estudiantes aragoneses en la edición de 2019, lo que hace necesario la organización de una fase semifinal y una fase final autonómica. Por otro lado, por la implicación del profesorado de matemáticas y los centros educativos, con más de 14 sedes en todo Aragón y la colaboración de muchos profesores de matemáticas en Aragón en la organización, la elaboración de problemas, la corrección, la vigilancia o acompañando a los estudiantes de su centro. Otro factor destacable es que este concurso contribuye a la popularización de las matemáticas entre la comunidad escolar y, en concreto, sirve para situar la resolución de problemas como eje vertebrador del aprendizaje de las matemáticas. Finalmente, la Olimpiada es una actividad que sirve para visibilizar a la SAPM como un agente activo en los procesos de educación matemática en Aragón

Virtual Reality Systems for Upper Limb Motor Function Recovery in Patients With Spinal Cord Injury: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Patients with spinal cord injury (SCI) usually present with different motor impairments, including a deterioration of upper limb motor function (ULMF), that limit their performance of activities of daily living and reduce their quality of life. Virtual reality (VR) is being used in neurological rehabilitation for the assessment and treatment of the physical impairments of this condition. Objective: A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of VR on ULMF in patients with SCI compared with conventional physical therapy. Methods: The search was performed from October to December 2019 in Embase, Web of Science, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Scopus, Medline, Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro), PubMed, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. The inclusion criteria of selected studies were as follows: (1) comprised adults with SCI, (2) included an intervention with VR, (3) compared VR intervention with conventional physical therapy, (4) reported outcomes related to ULMF, and (5) was a controlled clinical trial. The Cochrane Collaboration's tool was used to evaluate the risk of bias. The RevMan 5.3 statistical software was used to obtain the meta-analysis according to the standardized mean difference (SMD) and 95% CIs. Results: Six articles were included in this systematic review. Four of them contributed information to the meta-analysis. A total of 105 subjects were analyzed. All of the studies used semi-immersive or nonimmersive VR systems. The statistical analysis showed nonsignificant results for the Nine-Hole Peg Test (SMD -0.93, 95% CI -1.95 to 0.09), muscle balance test (SMD -0.27, 95% CI -0.82 to 0.27), Motricity Index (SMD 0.16, 95% CI -0.37 to 0.68), Jebsen-Taylor Hand Function Test (JTHFT) subtests (writing, SMD -0.10, 95% CI -4.01 to 3.82; simulated page turning, SMD -0.99, 95% CI -2.01 to 0.02; simulated feeding, SMD -0.64, 95% CI -1.61 to 0.32; stacking checkers, SMD 0.99, 95% CI -0.02 to 2.00; picking up large light objects, SMD -0.42, 95% CI -1.37 to 0.54; and picking up large heavy objects, SMD 0.52, 95% CI -0.44 to 1.49), range of motion of shoulder abduction/adduction (SMD -0.23, 95% CI -1.48 to 1.03), shoulder flexion/extension (SMD 0.56, 95% CI -1.24 to 2.36), elbow flexion (SMD -0.36, 95% CI -1.14 to 0.42), elbow extension (SMD -0.21, 95% CI -0.99 to 0.57), wrist extension (SMD 1.44, 95% CI -2.19 to 5.06), and elbow supination (SMD -0.18, 95% CI -1.80 to 1.44). Favorable results were found for the JTHFT subtest picking up small common objects (SMD -1.33, 95% CI -2.42 to -0.24). Conclusions: The current evidence for VR interventions to improve ULMF in patients with SCI is limited. Future studies employing immersive systems to identify the key aspects that increase the clinical impact of VR interventions are needed, as well as research to prove the benefits of the use of VR in the rehabilitation of patients with SCI in the clinical setting

Energy efficient HPC network topologies with on/off links

Producción CientíficaEnergy efficiency is a must in today HPC systems. To achieve this goal, a holistic design based on the use of power-aware components should be performed. One of the key components of an HPC system is the high-speed interconnect. In this paper, we compare and evaluate several design options for the interconnection network of an HPC system, including torus, fat-trees and dragonflies. State of the art low power modes are also used in the interconnection networks. The paper does not only consider energy efficiency at the interconnection network level but also at the system as a whole. The analysis is performed by using a simple yet realistic power model of the system. The model has been adjusted using actual power consumption values measured on a real system. Using this model, realistic multi-job trace-based workloads have been used, obtaining the execution time and energy consumed. The results are presented to ease choosing a system, depending on which parameter, performance or energy consumption, receives the most importance.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (projects PID2019-105903RB-100 and PID2021-123627OB)Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha (project SBPLY/21/180501/ 000248

POWAR: Power-Aware Routing in HPC Networks with On/Off Links

[EN] In order to save energy in HPC interconnection networks, one usual proposal is to switch idle links into a low-power mode after a certain time without any transmission, as IEEE Energy Efficient Ethernet standard proposes. Extending the low-power mode mechanism, we propose POWer-Aware Routing (POWAR), a simple power-aware routing and selection function for fat-tree and torus networks. POWAR adapts the amount of network links that can be used, taking into account the network load, and obtaining great energy savings in the network (55%-65%) and the entire system (9%-10%) with negligible performance overhead.This work has been supported by the Spanish MINECO and European Commission (FEDER funds) under project TIN2015-66972-C5-1-R. Francisco J. Andujar has been partially funded by the Spanish MICINN and by the ERDF program of the European Union: PCAS Project (TIN2017-88614-R), CAPAP-H6 (TIN2016-81840-REDT), and Junta de Castilla y Leon FEDER Grant VA082P17 (PROPHET Project).Andújar-Muñoz, FJ.; Coll, S.; Alonso Díaz, M.; López Rodríguez, PJ.; Martínez-Rubio, J. (2019). POWAR: Power-Aware Routing in HPC Networks with On/Off Links. ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization. 15(4):1-22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3293445S122154Abts, D., Marty, M. R., Wells, P. M., Klausler, P., & Liu, H. (2010). Energy proportional datacenter networks. Proceedings of the 37th annual international symposium on Computer architecture - ISCA ’10. doi:10.1145/1815961.1816004Adiga, N. R., Blumrich, M. A., Chen, D., Coteus, P., Gara, A., Giampapa, M. E., … Vranas, P. (2005). Blue Gene/L torus interconnection network. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 49(2.3), 265-276. doi:10.1147/rd.492.0265M. Alonso S. Coll J. M. Martínez V. 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Proceedings of the 40th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture - ISCA ’13. doi:10.1145/2485922.2485950Derradji, S., Palfer-Sollier, T., Panziera, J.-P., Poudes, A., & Atos, F. W. (2015). The BXI Interconnect Architecture. 2015 IEEE 23rd Annual Symposium on High-Performance Interconnects. doi:10.1109/hoti.2015.15Jack Dongarra Hans W. Meuer and Erich Strohmaier. 2018. TOP500 Supercomputer Sites. Retrieved from https://www.top500.org. Jack Dongarra Hans W. Meuer and Erich Strohmaier. 2018. TOP500 Supercomputer Sites. Retrieved from https://www.top500.org.Duato, J. (1993). A new theory of deadlock-free adaptive routing in wormhole networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 4(12), 1320-1331. doi:10.1109/71.250114José Duato Sudhakar Yalamanchili and Lionel Ni. 2003. Interconnection Networks. An Engineering Approach. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc. San Francisco CA. José Duato Sudhakar Yalamanchili and Lionel Ni. 2003. Interconnection Networks. An Engineering Approach. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc. San Francisco CA.GALGO 2017. GALGO—Albacete Research Institute of Informatics Supercomputer Center homepage. Retrieved from http://www.i3a.uclm.es/galgo. GALGO 2017. GALGO—Albacete Research Institute of Informatics Supercomputer Center homepage. Retrieved from http://www.i3a.uclm.es/galgo.Greenberg, A., Hamilton, J., Maltz, D. A., & Patel, P. (2008). The cost of a cloud. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 39(1), 68-73. doi:10.1145/1496091.1496103HPCC {n.d.}. HPC Challenge Benchmark. Retrieved from http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/index.html. HPCC {n.d.}. HPC Challenge Benchmark. Retrieved from http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/index.html.Hluchyj, M. G., & Karol, M. J. (1988). Queueing in high-performance packet switching. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 6(9), 1587-1597. doi:10.1109/49.12886Koibuchi, M., Otsuka, T., Hiroki Matsutani, & Amano, H. (2009). An on/off link activation method for low-power ethernet in PC clusters. 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing. doi:10.1109/ipdps.2009.5161069Phillips, J. C., Braun, R., Wang, W., Gumbart, J., Tajkhorshid, E., Villa, E., … Schulten, K. (2005). Scalable molecular dynamics with NAMD. Journal of Computational Chemistry, 26(16), 1781-1802. doi:10.1002/jcc.20289Pronk, S., Páll, S., Schulz, R., Larsson, P., Bjelkmar, P., Apostolov, R., … Lindahl, E. (2013). GROMACS 4.5: a high-throughput and highly parallel open source molecular simulation toolkit. Bioinformatics, 29(7), 845-854. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btt055Reviriego, P., Hernandez, J., Larrabeiti, D., & Maestro, J. (2009). Performance evaluation of energy efficient ethernet. IEEE Communications Letters, 13(9), 697-699. doi:10.1109/lcomm.2009.090880K. P. Saravanan and P. Carpenter. 2018. PerfBound: Conserving energy with bounded overheads in on/off-based HPC interconnects. IEEE Trans. Comput. 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Is Virtual Reality Effective for Balance Recovery in Patients with Spinal Cord Injury? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging tool used in the neurological rehabilitation of patients with spinal cord injury (SCI), focused on recovering balance, mobility, and motor function, among other functional outcomes. The main objective of this study was to analyze the effectiveness of VR systems to recover balance in patients with SCI. The literature search was performed between October and December 2019 in the following databases: Embase, Web of Science, CINAHL, Scopus, Medline, Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro), PubMed, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials. The methodological quality of each study was assessed using the Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Evidence (SCIRE) system and the PEDro scale, while the risk of bias was analyzed by the Cochrane Collaboration's tool. A total of 12 studies, involving 188 participants, were included in the systematic review, of which two were included in the meta-analysis. Statistical analysis showed favorable results for balance measured by the modified Functional Reach Test (standardized mean difference (SMD) = 3.42; 95% confidence interval: 2.54 to 4.29) and by the t-shirt test (SMD= -2.29; 95% confidence interval: -3.00 to -1.59). The results showed that VR interventions provided potential benefits, in addition to conventional physical therapy, to recover balance in patients with SCI

Vehicle Classification in Traffic Environments Using the Growing Neural Gas

Traffic monitoring is one of the most popular applications of automated video surveillance. Classification of the vehicles into types is important in order to provide the human traffic controllers with updated information about the characteristics of the traffic flow, which facilitates their decision making process. In this work, a video surveillance system is proposed to carry out such classification. First of all, a feature extraction process is carried out to obtain the most significant features of the detected vehicles. After that, a set of Growing Neural Gas neural networks is employed to determine their types. A qualitative and quantitative assessment of the proposal is carried out on a set of benchmark traffic video sequences, with favorable results.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The chaperonin CCT inhibits assembly of α-synuclein amyloid fibrils by a specific, conformation-dependent interaction

The eukaryotic chaperonin CCT (chaperonin containing TCP-1) uses cavities built into its double-ring structure to encapsulate and to assist folding of a large subset of proteins. CCT can inhibit amyloid fibre assembly and toxicity of the polyQ extended mutant of huntingtin, the protein responsible for Huntington's disease. This raises the possibility that CCT modulates other amyloidopathies, a still-unaddressed question. We show here that CCT inhibits amyloid fibre assembly of α-synuclein A53T, one of the mutants responsible for Parkinson's disease. We evaluated fibrillation blockade in α-synuclein A53T deletion mutants and CCT interactions of full-length A53T in distinct oligomeric states to define an inhibition mechanism specific for α-synuclein. CCT interferes with fibre assembly by interaction of its CCT and CCT 3 subunits with the A53T central hydrophobic region (NAC). This interaction is specific to NAC conformation, as it is produced once soluble α-synuclein A53T oligomers form and blocks the reaction before fibres begin to grow. Finally, we show that this association inhibits α-synuclein A53T oligomer toxicity in neuroblastoma cells. In summary, our results and those for huntingtin suggest that CCT is a general modulator of amyloidogenesis via a specific mechanism.Ministerio de Economía RYC- 2011-08746 , RTC-2015-3309-1 y BFU2016-75984Ministerio de Salud CP10/00527Comunidad de Madrid S2013/MIT-280

Plasmodium species differentiation by non-expert on-line volunteers for remote malaria field diagnosis

BACKGROUND: Routine field diagnosis of malaria is a considerable challenge in rural and low resources endemic areas mainly due to lack of personnel, training and sample processing capacity. In addition, differential diagnosis of Plasmodium species has a high level of misdiagnosis. Real time remote microscopical diagnosis through on-line crowdsourcing platforms could be converted into an agile network to support diagnosis-based treatment and malaria control in low resources areas. This study explores whether accurate Plasmodium species identification-a critical step during the diagnosis protocol in order to choose the appropriate medication-is possible through the information provided by non-trained on-line volunteers. METHODS: 88 volunteers have performed a series of questionnaires over 110 images to differentiate species (Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium ovale, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium malariae, Plasmodium knowlesi) and parasite staging from thin blood smear images digitalized with a smartphone camera adapted to the ocular of a conventional light microscope. Visual cues evaluated in the surveys include texture and colour, parasite shape and red blood size. RESULTS: On-line volunteers are able to discriminate Plasmodium species (P. falciparum, P. malariae, P. vivax, P. ovale, P. knowlesi) and stages in thin-blood smears according to visual cues observed on digitalized images of parasitized red blood cells. Friendly textual descriptions of the visual cues and specialized malaria terminology is key for volunteers learning and efficiency. CONCLUSIONS: On-line volunteers with short-training are able to differentiate malaria parasite species and parasite stages from digitalized thin smears based on simple visual cues (shape, size, texture and colour). While the accuracy of a single on-line expert is far from perfect, a single parasite classification obtained by combining the opinions of multiple on-line volunteers over the same smear, could improve accuracy and reliability of Plasmodium species identification in remote malaria diagnosis.M.L. holds a postdoctoral Fellowship of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FPDI-2013-16409). JMB thanks the support by MINECO through research Grants BIO2013-44565R and BIO2016-77430R. MP, SGC, DC and MLO work was supported by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (COOP-XVII-02), Madrid Regional Government (TOPUS S2013/MIT-3024), the European Regional Development Funds, Amazon Web Services and Fundación Renta CorporaciónS

Energy efficient HPC network topologies with on/off links

[EN] Energy efficiency is a must in today HPC systems. To achieve this goal, a holistic design based on the use of power-aware components should be performed. One of the key components of an HPC system is the high-speed interconnect. In this paper, we compare and evaluate several design options for the interconnection network of an HPC system, including torus, fat-trees and dragonflies. State of the art low power modes are also used in the interconnection networks. The paper does not only consider energy efficiency at the interconnection network level but also at the system as a whole.The analysis is performed by using a simple yet realistic power model of the system. The model has been adjusted using actual power consumption values measured on a real system. Using this model, realistic multi-job trace-based workloads have been used, obtaining the execution time and energy consumed. The results are presented to ease choosing a system, depending on which parameter, performance or energy consumption, receives the most importance.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (MICINN, formerly MINECO) , and the European Commission (FEDER funds) under the projects PID2019- 105903RB-100 and PID2021-123627OB-C5, and by Junta de Comunidades de Castilla -La Mancha under the project SBPLY/21/180501/000248.Andújar-Muñoz, FJ.; Coll, S.; Alonso Díaz, M.; Martínez-Rubio, J.; López Rodríguez, PJ.; Sánchez García, JL.; Alfaro Cortés, FJ. (2023). Energy efficient HPC network topologies with on/off links. Future Generation Computer Systems. 139:126-138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2022.09.01212613813

TransformEHRs: a flexible methodology for building transparent ETL processes for EHR reuse

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, several methodologies were designed for obtaining electronic health record (EHR)-derived datasets for research. These processes are often based on black boxes, on which clinical researchers are unaware of how the data were recorded, extracted, and transformed. In order to solve this, it is essential that extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes are based on transparent, homogeneous, and formal methodologies, making them understandable, reproducible, and auditable. Objectives: This study aims to design and implement a methodology, according with FAIR Principles, for building ETL processes (focused on data extraction, selection, and transformation) for EHR reuse in a transparent and flexible manner, applicable to any clinical condition and health care organization. Methods: The proposed methodology comprises four stages: (1) analysis of secondary use models and identification of data operations, based on internationally used clinical repositories, case report forms, and aggregated datasets; (2) modeling and formalization of data operations, through the paradigm of the Detailed Clinical Models; (3) agnostic development of data operations, selecting SQL and R as programming languages; and (4) automation of the ETL instantiation, building a formal configuration file with XML. Results: First, four international projects were analyzed to identify 17 operations, necessary to obtain datasets according to the specifications of these projects from the EHR. With this, each of the data operations was formalized, using the ISO 13606 reference model, specifying the valid data types as arguments, inputs and outputs, and their cardinality. Then, an agnostic catalog of data was developed through data-oriented programming languages previously selected. Finally, an automated ETL instantiation process was built from an ETL configuration file formally defined. Conclusions: This study has provided a transparent and flexible solution to the difficulty of making the processes for obtaining EHR-derived data for secondary use understandable, auditable, and reproducible. Moreover, the abstraction carried out in this study means that any previous EHR reuse methodology can incorporate these results into them.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad Instituto de Salud Carlos III PI18/00981, PI18/01047, PI18CIII/00019.S