A theory of sensorimotor learning for brain-machine interface control

A remarkable demonstration of the flexibility of mammalian motor systems is primates’ ability to learn to control brain-machine interfaces (BMI’s). This constitutes a completely novel and artificial form of motor behavior, yet primates are capable of learning to control BMI’s under a wide range of conditions. BMI’s with carefully calibrated decoders, for example, can be learned with only minutes to hours of practice. With a few weeks of practice, even BMI’s with random decoders can be learned. What are the biological substrates of this learning process? This thesis proposes a simple theory of the computational principles underlying BMI learning. Through comprehensive numerical and formal analysis, we demonstrate that this theory can provide a unifying explanation for various disparate phenomena observed during BMI learning in three different BMI learning tasks. By explicitly modeling the underlying neural circuitry, the theory reveals an interpretation of these phenomena in terms of the biological non-linear dynamics of neural circuits

Emergency management in the highways of the future. A performance-based multilayered ITS architecture design proposal

Emergency management is one of the key aspects within the day-to-day operation procedures in a highway. Efficiency in the overall response in case of an incident is paramount in reducing the consequences of any incident. However, the approach of highway operators to the issue of incident management is still usually far from a systematic, standardized way. This paper attempts to address the issue and provide several hints on why this happens, and a proposal on how the situation could be overcome. An introduction to a performance based approach to a general system specification will be described, and then applied to a particular road emergency management task. A real testbed has been implemented to show the validity of the proposed approach. Ad-hoc sensors (one camera and one laser scanner) were efficiently deployed to acquire data, and advanced fusion techniques applied at the processing stage to reach the specific user requirements in terms of functionality, flexibility and accuracy

Problems for the Purported Cognitive Penetration of Perceptual Color Experience and Macpherson’s Proposed Mechanism

Fiona Macpherson (2012) argues that various experimental results provide strong evidence in favor of the cognitive penetration of perceptual color experience. Moreover, she proposes a mechanism for how such cognitive penetration occurs. We argue, first, that the results on which Macpherson relies do not provide strong grounds for her claim of cognitive penetrability; and, second, that, if the results do reflect cognitive penetrability, then time-course considerations raise worries for her proposed mechanism. We base our arguments in part on several of our own experiments, reported herein

Estudio de la resistividad eléctrica de distintos papeles de impresión y escritura

Las propiedades eléctricas del papel tienen gran interés debido al amplio espectro de sus aplicaciones. En este trabajo se han utilizado varios tipos de papel, de fibra virgen y fibra reciclada, con el fin de comprobar si las propiedades eléctricas dependen de la composición fibrosa y el tratamiento al que se ha les ha sometido. La resistencia eléctrica se ha medido utilizando un dispositivo que consta de dos electros de geometría circular, entre los que se coloca el papel. A continuación se establece una diferencia de potencial y se determina directamente la resistencia eléctrica en distintas condiciones de humedad relativa. Se ha validado el método de medida utilizando papel de impresión de 80 g/m2, comprobándose que los valores obtenidos están dentro de los rangos que se indican en la bibliografía. Una vez que se conocen la resistencia eléctrica, el espesor del papel y la sección de los electrodos, se puede determinar la resistividad de los papeles. A partir de estos resultados se ha buscado una relación entre la resistividad y el contenido de humedad, utilizando diversos modelos de regresión cuya validez se analiza en el trabajo. Se ha analizado también la influencia de varias propiedades del papel, como la densidad aparente o el contenido de cenizas, discutiéndose la influencia de estas propiedades en la resistividad

An ITS architecture specification - The FOTsis project experience

The recent continuous development of Cooperative ITS has resulted in several initiatives which focus on different parts of the Cooperative environment landscape. The FOTsis project focuses on the infrastructure side of the Cooperative environment and will deploy and test 7 services designed to maximise the benefits of the integration of the road operator and infrastructure-based information providers into the ITS environment. This integration can take place in any of the stages of data collection, processing and actuations of the services, but also support and trigger external tasks such as operations of the emergency response entities, etc. This paper describes the current status of the project and focuses on the specification of the supporting architecture to the services tested: references, a brief outline of the requirements’ definition, and the FOTsis architecture proposal, with some conclusions about the architecture tests conducted. The outlook on the project’s next steps is given in the last section of the paper

Especificación de arquitecturas ITS: la experiencia del proyecto FOTsis

El constante desarrollo reciente de los ITS Cooperativos ha resultado en diferentes iniciativas que se centran en distintos aspectos del entorno Cooperativo. El proyecto Europeo FOTsis perteneciente al FP7 gira alrededor de la infraestructura de este entorno. El proyecto tiene como objetivos básicos desplegar y validar 7 servicios que han sido diseñados para maximizar los beneficios de la integración de diferentes entidades basadas en la infraestructura en el paisaje ITS: el operador de infraestructura, proveedores de datos externos, entre otros. Este artículo describe el estado actual del proyecto, destacando la especificación de la arquitectura ITS que lo sustenta: referencias, una breve reseña a la definición de los requisitos de los servicios, y finalmente la propuesta de arquitectura FOTsis, junto con algunas conclusiones sobre las pruebas realizadas sobre la arquitectura propuesta. Al final del artículo se da una visión general de los próximos pasos en el proyecto

Cooperative ITS communications architecture: the FOTsis project approach and beyond

With the continuous development in the fields of sensors, advanced data processing and communications, road transport oriented intelligent applications and services have reached a significant maturity and complexity. Cooperative ITS services, based on the idea of sharing accurate information among road entities, are currently being tested on a large scale by different initiatives. The field operational test (FOTsis) project contributes to the deployment environment with services that involve a significant number of entities out of the vehicle. This made necessary the specification of an architecture which, based on the ISO ITS station reference architecture for communications, could support the requirements of the services proposed in the project. During the project, internal implementation tests and external interoperability tests have resulted in the validation of the proposed architecture. At the same time, these tests have had as a result the awareness of areas in which the FOTsis architecture could be completed, mainly to take full advantage of all the emerging and foreseeable data sources which may be relevant in the road environment. In this study, the authors will outline an approach that, based on the current cooperative ITS architecture and the SmartCities and Internet Of Things (IoT) architectures, can provide a common convergence platform to maximise the information available for ITS purposes

Germline BRCA1 mutation reprograms breast epithelial cell metabolism towards mitochondrial-dependent biosynthesis : evidence for metformin-based "starvation" strategies in BRCA1 carriers

Altres ajuts: This work was supported by grants from the European Regional Development Fund [FEDER] to JJ and Grant CD12/00672 to SFA), co-founded by theand Departament d'Economia I Coneixement, Catalonia, Spain.Altres ajuts: MSCBS/CD15-00033We hypothesized that women inheriting one germline mutation of the BRCA1 gene ("one-hit") undergo cell-type-specific metabolic reprogramming that supports the high biosynthetic requirements of breast epithelial cells to progress to a fully malignant phenotype. Targeted metabolomic analysis was performed in isogenic pairs of nontumorigenic human breast epithelial cells in which the knock-in of 185delAG mutation in a single BRCA1 allele leads to genomic instability. Mutant BRCA1 one-hit epithelial cells displayed constitutively enhanced activation of biosynthetic nodes within mitochondria. This metabolic rewiring involved the increased incorporation of glutamine- and glucose-dependent carbon into tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle metabolite pools to ultimately generate elevated levels of acetyl-CoA and malonyl-CoA, the major building blocks for lipid biosynthesis. The significant increase of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) including the anabolic trigger leucine, which can not only promote protein translation via mTOR but also feed into the TCA cycle via succinyl-CoA, further underscored the anabolic reprogramming of BRCA1 haploinsufficient cells. The anti-diabetic biguanide metformin "reversed" the metabolomic signature and anabolic phenotype of BRCA1 one-hit cells by shutting down mitochondria-driven generation of precursors for lipogenic pathways and reducing the BCAA pool for protein synthesis and TCA fueling. Metformin-induced restriction of mitochondrial biosynthetic capacity was sufficient to impair the tumor-initiating capacity of BRCA1 one-hit cells in mammosphere assays. Metabolic rewiring of the breast epithelium towards increased anabolism might constitute an unanticipated and inherited form of metabolic reprogramming linked to increased risk of oncogenesis in women bearing pathogenic germline BRCA1 mutations. The ability of metformin to constrain the production of mitochondrial-dependent biosynthetic intermediates might open a new avenue for "starvation" chemopreventive strategies in BRCA1 carriers

Cation distribution of cobalt ferrite electrosynthesized nanoparticles: A methodological comparison

Final publication at http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jallcom.2017.12.342, © 2017 Elsevier B.V.The present work seeks to analyse the structural and magnetic properties of cobalt ferrite nanoparticles obtained by electrochemical synthesis by high-resolution transmission electronic microscopy (HRTEM), X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), Mössbauer spectroscopy (MS), neutron diffraction (ND) and SQUID magnetometer. The cationic distribution is analyzed by different techniques. The inversion degree determined by the most accurate measurements was 0.73(1), and the formula for the nanoparticles therefore was (↑Co 0.27 Fe 0.73 )[↓Co 0.73 Fe 1.27 ]O 4 . The magnetic moment found from DC and Mössbauer spectroscopy measurements was 3.8(3) μB, and the coercivity was 7870 Oe at 100 K.This work is supported by the MINECO/FEDER Project MAT2015-67557-C2-2-

Multisensor data fusion for accurate modelling of mobile objects

In the last decade, multi-sensor data fusion has become a broadly demanded discipline to achieve advanced solutions that can be applied in many real world situations, either civil or military. In Defence,accurate detection of all target objects is fundamental to maintaining situational awareness, to locating threats in the battlefield and to identifying and protecting strategically own forces. Civil applications, such as traffic monitoring, have similar requirements in terms of object detection and reliable identification of incidents in order to ensure safety of road users. Thanks to the appropriate data fusion technique, we can give these systems the power to exploit automatically all relevant information from multiple sources to face for instance mission needs or assess daily supervision operations. This paper focuses on its application to active vehicle monitoring in a particular area of high density traffic, and how it is redirecting the research activities being carried out in the computer vision, signal processing and machine learning fields for improving the effectiveness of detection and tracking in ground surveillance scenarios in general. Specifically, our system proposes fusion of data at a feature level which is extracted from a video camera and a laser scanner. In addition, a stochastic-based tracking which introduces some particle filters into the model to deal with uncertainty due to occlusions and improve the previous detection output is presented in this paper. It has been shown that this computer vision tracker contributes to detect objects even under poor visual information. Finally, in the same way that humans are able to analyze both temporal and spatial relations among items in the scene to associate them a meaning, once the targets objects have been correctly detected and tracked, it is desired that machines can provide a trustworthy description of what is happening in the scene under surveillance. Accomplishing so ambitious task requires a machine learning-based hierarchic architecture able to extract and analyse behaviours at different abstraction levels. A real experimental testbed has been implemented for the evaluation of the proposed modular system. Such scenario is a closed circuit where real traffic situations can be simulated. First results have shown the strength of the proposed system