Advances in the Hierarchical Emergent Behaviors (HEB) approach to autonomous vehicles

Widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) presents formidable challenges in terms on handling scalability and complexity, particularly regarding vehicular reaction in the face of unforeseen corner cases. Hierarchical Emergent Behaviors (HEB) is a scalable architecture based on the concepts of emergent behaviors and hierarchical decomposition. It relies on a few simple but powerful rules to govern local vehicular interactions. Rather than requiring prescriptive programming of every possible scenario, HEB’s approach relies on global behaviors induced by the application of these local, well-understood rules. Our first two papers on HEB focused on a primal set of rules applied at the first hierarchical level. On the path to systematize a solid design methodology, this paper proposes additional rules for the second level, studies through simulations the resultant richer set of emergent behaviors, and discusses the communica-tion mechanisms between the different levels.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Emergent behaviors in the Internet of things: The ultimate ultra-large-scale system

To reach its potential, the Internet of Things (IoT) must break down the silos that limit applications' interoperability and hinder their manageability. Doing so leads to the building of ultra-large-scale systems (ULSS) in several areas, including autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and smart grids. The scope of ULSS is both large and complex. Thus, the authors propose Hierarchical Emergent Behaviors (HEB), a paradigm that builds on the concepts of emergent behavior and hierarchical organization. Rather than explicitly programming all possible decisions in the vast space of ULSS scenarios, HEB relies on the emergent behaviors induced by local rules at each level of the hierarchy. The authors discuss the modifications to classical IoT architectures required by HEB, as well as the new challenges. They also illustrate the HEB concepts in reference to autonomous vehicles. This use case paves the way to the discussion of new lines of research.Damian Roca work was supported by a Doctoral Scholarship provided by Fundación La Caixa. This work has been supported by the Spanish Government (Severo Ochoa grants SEV2015-0493) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contracts TIN2015-65316-P).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Construcción del pensamiento lógico matemático, programa “CENDI PARA TODOS”

Los primeros años de vida del niño se caracterizan por el rápido crecimiento, cambios que se ven notablemente influenciados por el medio circundante, y tener una importante significación para la formación de la personalidad de las futuras generaciones. El programa CENDI “Para Todos”, traslada a las comunidades urbano marginales a un equipo de especialistas, con la función de orientar a la familia en actividades que potencialicen el desarrollo de sus hijos y supervisar las etapas de crecimiento a través de los especialistas, los que evalúan adecuadamente el crecimiento de los pequeños. Con ello se pretende evitar que la estimulación temprana comience de manera tardía y se tenga un sesgo importante de niños que no participan en actividades de estimulación temprana desde su nacimiento o incluso antes de ésta. Así mismo, el propiciar del desarrollo de habilidades matemáticas mediante la vinculación de actividades lúdicas y lectoras

Tackling IoT ultra large scale systems: Fog computing in support of hierarchical emergent behaviors

The Internet of Things (IoT) marks a phase transition in the evolution of the Internet, distinguished by a massive connectivity and the interaction with the physical world. The organic evolution of IoT requires the consideration of three dimensions: scale, organization, and context. These dimensions are particularly relevant in Ultra Large Scale Systems (ULSS), of which autonomous vehicles is a prime example. Fog Computing is well positioned to support contextual awareness and communication, critical for ULSS. The design and orchestration of ULSS require fresh approaches, new organizing principles. A recent paper proposed Hierarchical Emergent Behaviors (HEB), an architecture that builds on established concepts of emergent behaviors and hierarchical decomposition and organization. HEB’s local rules induce emergent behaviors, i.e., useful behaviors not explicitly programmed. In this chapter we take a first step to validate HEB concepts through the study of two basic self-driven car “primitives”: exiting a platoon formation, and maneuvering in anticipation of obstacles beyond the range of on-board sensors. Fog nodes provide the critical contextual information required.Damian Roca work was supported by a Doctoral Scholarship provided by Fundación La Caixa. This work has been supported by the Spanish Government (Severo Ochoa grants SEV2015-0493) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contracts TIN2015-65316-P).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fog function virtualization: A flexible solution for IoT applications

The Internet of Things applications must carefully assess certain crucial factors such as the real-time and largely distributed nature of the “things”. Fog Computing provides an architecture to satisfy those requirements through nodes located from near the “things” till the edge. The problem comes with the integration of the Fog nodes into current infrastructures. This process requires the development of complex software solutions and prevents Fog growth. In this paper we propose three innovations to enhance Fog: (i) a new orchestration policy, (ii) the creation of constellations of nodes, and (iii) Fog Function Virtualization (FFV). All together will complement Fog to reach its true potential as a generic scalable platform, running multiple IoT applications simultaneously. Deploying a new service is reduced to the development of the application code, fact that brings the democratization of the Fog Computing paradigm through ease of deployment and cost reduction.The authors thanks Rodolfo Milito for his insightful comments and revisions. Damian Roca work was supported by a Doctoral Scholarship provided by Fundación La Caixa. Josue V. Quiroga work was supported by a Doctoral Scholarship provided by the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT). This work has been supported by the Spanish Government (Severo Ochoa grants SEV2015-0493) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contracts TIN2015-65316-P).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Disaggregated Computing. An Evaluation of Current Trends for Datacentres

Next generation data centers will likely be based on the emerging paradigm of disaggregated function-blocks-as-a-unit departing from the current state of mainboard-as-a-unit. Multiple functional blocks or bricks such as compute, memory and peripheral will be spread through the entire system and interconnected together via one or multiple high speed networks. The amount of memory available will be very large distributed among multiple bricks. This new architecture brings various benefits that are desirable in today’s data centers such as fine-grained technology upgrade cycles, fine-grained resource allocation, and access to a larger amount of memory and accelerators. An analysis of the impact and benefits of memory disaggregation is presented in this paper. One of the biggest challenges when analyzing these architectures is that memory accesses should be modeled correctly in order to obtain accurate results. However, modeling every memory access would generate a high overhead that can make the simulation unfeasible for real data center applications. A model to represent and analyze memory disaggregation has been designed and a statistics-based queuing-based full system simulator was developed to rapidly and accurately analyze applications performance in disaggregated systems. With a mean error of 10%, simulation results pointed out that the network layers may introduce overheads that degrade applications’ performance up to 66%. Initial results also suggest that low memory access bandwidth may degrade up to 20% applications’ performance.This project has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 687632 (dReDBox project) and TIN2015-65316-P - Computacion de Altas Prestaciones VII.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Cellular intrinsic factors involved in the resistance of squamous cell carcinoma to photodynamic therapy

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is widely used to treat non-melanoma skin cancer. However, some patients affected with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) do not respond adequately to PDT with methyl-δ-aminolevulinic acid (MAL-PDT) and the tumors acquire an infiltrative phenotype and became histologically more aggressive, less differentiated, and more fibroblastic. To search for potential factors implicated in SCC resistance to PDT, we have used the SCC-13 cell line (parental) and resistant SCC-13 cells obtained by repeated MAL-PDT treatments (5th and 10th PDT-resistant generations). Xenografts assays in immunodeficient mice showed that the tumors generated by resistant cells were bigger than those induced by parental cells. Comparative genomic hybridization array (aCGH) showed that the three cell types presented amplicons in 3p12.1 CADM2, 7p11.2 EFGR, and 11q13.3 CCND1 genes. The 5th and 10th PDT-resistant cells showed an amplicon in 5q11.2 MAP3K1, which was not present in parental cells. The changes detected by aCGH on CCND1, EFGR, and MAP3K1 were confirmed in extracts of SCC-13 cells by reverse-transcriptase PCR and by western blot, and by immunohistochemistry in human biopsies from persistent tumors after MAL-PDT. Our data suggest that genomic imbalances related to CCND1, EFGR, and particularly MAP3K1 seem to be involved in the development of the resistance of SCC to PDT. © 2014 The Society for Investigative DermatologyThe work was supported by MINECO (FIS PI12/01253), and Comunidad de Madrid (S2010/BMD-2359). We recognize the valuable contributions of Javier Suela and Juan Cruz Cigudos

Broadcast-enabled massive multicore architectures: a wireless RF approach

Broadcast traditionally has been regarded as a prohibitive communication transaction in multiprocessor environments. Nowadays, such a constraint largely drives the design of architectures and algorithms all-pervasive in diverse computing domains, directly and indirectly leading to diminishing performance returns as the many-core era is approaching. Novel interconnect technologies could help revert this trend by offering, among others, improved broadcast support, even in large-scale chip multiprocessors. This article outlines the prospects of wireless on-chip communication technologies pointing toward low-latency (a few cycles) and energy-efficient broadcast (a few picojoules per bit). It also discusses the challenges and potential impact of adopting these technologies as key enablers of unconventional hardware architectures and algorithmic approaches, in the pathway of significantly improving the performance, energy efficiency, scalability, and programmability of many-core chips.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Post-Franco Theatre

In the multiple realms and layers that comprise the contemporary Spanish theatrical landscape, “crisis” would seem to be the word that most often lingers in the air, as though it were a common mantra, ready to roll off the tongue of so many theatre professionals with such enormous ease, and even enthusiasm, that one is prompted to wonder whether it might indeed be a miracle that the contemporary technological revolution – coupled with perpetual quandaries concerning public and private funding for the arts – had not by now brought an end to the evolution of the oldest of live arts, or, at the very least, an end to drama as we know it

A comprehensive overview of radioguided surgery using gamma detection probe technology

The concept of radioguided surgery, which was first developed some 60 years ago, involves the use of a radiation detection probe system for the intraoperative detection of radionuclides. The use of gamma detection probe technology in radioguided surgery has tremendously expanded and has evolved into what is now considered an established discipline within the practice of surgery, revolutionizing the surgical management of many malignancies, including breast cancer, melanoma, and colorectal cancer, as well as the surgical management of parathyroid disease. The impact of radioguided surgery on the surgical management of cancer patients includes providing vital and real-time information to the surgeon regarding the location and extent of disease, as well as regarding the assessment of surgical resection margins. Additionally, it has allowed the surgeon to minimize the surgical invasiveness of many diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, while still maintaining maximum benefit to the cancer patient. In the current review, we have attempted to comprehensively evaluate the history, technical aspects, and clinical applications of radioguided surgery using gamma detection probe technology