A Dystopic or Utopic Future?

de Castro Neto, M., & de Melo Cartaxo, T. (2021). Algorithmic Cities: A Dystopic or Utopic Future? In M. I. A. Ferreira (Ed.), How Smart Is Your City?: Technological Innovation, Ethics and Inclusiveness (Vol. 98, pp. 59-73). (Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering; Vol. 98). Springer Science and Business Media B.V.. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56926-6_6Cities of today face a digital transformation process, leading to a new reality where urban space is taking advantage of information and communication technologies and data science to answer present and future challenges, namely to become more efficient in services and infrastructures management in order to deliver increased quality of life to the people who live, work or visit the city, and addressing at the same time the problems of climate change. This new reality is leveraged by big data produced by the cities Internet of everything (as interconnected systems, sensors and people), information management and data science capabilities, which allow us to measure and describe what happens, predict what can happen, and prescribe what could be the course of actions bringing policy making to a fact-based environment, which had never been possible before. In this work, we will address the opportunities and challenges of this paradigm shift that is leading to the city as a platform reality that supports what we can call the algorithmic city where it is up to us to decide if this will be a dystopic or utopic future for the citizen.authorsversionpublishe

Type I Interferon Induction Is Detrimental during Infection with the Whipple's Disease Bacterium, Tropheryma whipplei

Macrophages are the first line of defense against pathogens. Upon infection macrophages usually produce high levels of proinflammatory mediators. However, macrophages can undergo an alternate polarization leading to a permissive state. In assessing global macrophage responses to the bacterial agent of Whipple's disease, Tropheryma whipplei, we found that T. whipplei induced M2 macrophage polarization which was compatible with bacterial replication. Surprisingly, this M2 polarization of infected macrophages was associated with apoptosis induction and a functional type I interferon (IFN) response, through IRF3 activation and STAT1 phosphorylation. Using macrophages from mice deficient for the type I IFN receptor, we found that this type I IFN response was required for T. whipplei-induced macrophage apoptosis in a JNK-dependent manner and was associated with the intracellular replication of T. whipplei independently of JNK. This study underscores the role of macrophage polarization in host responses and highlights the detrimental role of type I IFN during T. whipplei infection

Investigating transcranial and transcutaneous alternating current stimulation to control tremor

Invasive deep brain stimulation (DBS), involves the chronic implantation of electrodes in a specific deep brain target nucleus to deliver continuous electrical stimulation. It is highly effective in treating a range of neurological disorders such as essential tremor (ET) and Parkinson's disease, and is being explored as a treatment for some psychiatric disorders. The main disadvantage of DBS is that it requires highly invasive surgery with significant risk and discomfort for the patient. Alternatevily transcranial alternating current stimulation (TACS) is a noninvasive neuromodulation method in which a low amplitude current waveform is passed through large pad electrodes attached to the scalp. TACS stimulation cannot penetrate to deep brain targets but it can cause weak neuromodulation in cortical targets. The aim of my PHD is to optimize TACS in order to provide a non-invasive technique with higher neuromodulation effect.status: publishe

Graph-based wormhole attack detection in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs)

International audienc

Graph-based wormhole attack detection in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs)

International audienc

Enabling Social- and Location-Aware IoT Applications in Smart Cities

In the last decade, governments, municipalities, and industries have invested large amounts of funds on research on smart cities with the main goal of developing services to improve people’s quality of life. Many proposals focus on a Cloud-centric network architecture in which all the data collected from a myriad of sensors devices is transferred to the Cloud for processing. However, this approach presents significant limitations when faced with the formidable traffic generated by the Internet of Things and with the need for low-latency services. The deployment of IoT devices in compact groups, connected to the smart city network infrastructure by relatively powerful “gateways”, opens the possibility to depart from the centralized architectures and move the computation closer to the data sources. To this end, this paper proposes SPF, a new middleware solution that supports IoT application and service development, deployment, and management. SPF runs IoT services on capable devices located at the edge of the network and proposes a programming model that enables to take advantage of decentralized computation resources in a seamless fashion. SPF also leverages an information dissemination solution designed for constrained network environments and adopts Value-of-Information based methods to prioritize transmission of essential information

The relationship between smart cities and the internet of things in low density regions

In these times of digital transformation, cities have overcome the challenges of the past and are building the future. The use of technological resources as a means of efficiently delivering various services and improving citizens’ quality of life has transformed regions and cities into smart regions and cities. There have been a remarkable amount of projects implemented by the Municipalities in the last years, taking the technologies to the cities. However, for a project to be interesting, it must have a positive impact on society, that is, citizens. This evidence gave rise to the present study whose goal was to find out if citizens living in inner cities, labeled as smart cities, actually consider them that way, and whether their city uses innovative solutions that optimize their daily lives. The results are discussed in the light of the literature and future work is identified with the aim of shedding some light on a field as emerging, promising and current as this of Intelligent Cities and the Internet of Things.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio