Data wrangling, computational burden, automation, robustness and accuracy in ecological inference forecasting of R×C tables

Acknowledgments. The authors wish to thank Carolina Plescia for providing us with the electoral Scottish data handled in this paper and two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their really valuable comments and suggestions. We are grateful to M. Hodkinson for translating and revising the English of the paper and Priscila Espinosa for her tips about LATEX. This research has been supported by Conseller'ıa d'Innovacio, Universitats, Ciència i Societat Digital, Generalitat Valenciana [grant number AICO/2021/257] and by the Ministerio de Economía e Innovacion [grant number PID2021-128228NB-I00].This paper assesses the two current major alternatives for ecological inference, based on a multinomial-Dirichlet Bayesian model and on mathematical programming. Their performance is evaluated in a database made up of almost 2000 real datasets for which the actual cross-distributions are known. The analysis reveals both approaches as complementarity, each one of them performing better in a different area of the simplex space, although with Bayesian solutions deteriorating when the amount of information is scarce. After offering some guidelines regarding the appropriate contexts for employing each one of the algorithms, we conclude with some ideas for exploiting their complementarities

Thermorresponsive magnetic nanoparticles as target drug delivery for cancer treatment

In this research, temperature sensitive microgels with magnetic core for controlled release of 5-fluoruracil was synthesized. Magnetic nanoparticles (Fe3O4) were prepared by coprecipitation method and the surface was functionalized by acrylic acid. Polymer poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) were grown by free radical polymerization in presence of cross-liker and initiator. The size of the polymer was manipulated by changing the mole percent of the crosslinker and evaluated for their morphology (TEM), particle size, zeta potential, loading efficiency, drug content and drug release. Furthermore, microgels were tagged with FITC, a fluorochrome which could be applied for cell imaging. Cytotoxicity studies revealed that the microgels were not toxic. These complex nanoparticles (Fe3O4/pNIPAM/FITC/5-Fu) appear to be a great promise to be used in controlled drug delivery and tumor targeting.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Synthesis of New Analogues of the Bengamides to encapsulate in magnetic nanoparticles

The development and identification of new antitumoral has become a research area of great interest and maximum priority due to secondary effects of current antitumoral and the appearance of tumours resistant to these agents. Marine sponges corresponding to the Jaspidae family have proved to be a prolific source of bioactive natural products. Among these, the Bengamides have showed an important biological profile, including antitumor, antibiotic and anthelmintic properties. Due to the interest of theses natural products, we describe a study directed towards the total synthesis of this class of compounds. Then we encapsulate Bengamides in temperature sensitive microgels with a magnetic core. Magnetic nanoparticles (Fe3O 4) were prepared by coprecipitation method and the surface was functionalized by acrylic acid. Polymer poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) were grown by free radical polymerization in presence of cross-liker and initiator.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Explotando el nuevo módulo OpenCL de Intel TBB

Este artículo tiene como objetivo contribuir al desarrollo de la programación paralela trabajando en una de las herramientas desarrolladas por Intel: Intel Threading Building Blocks (Intel TBB). Hemos implementado una versión paralela de la aplicación ViVid, un algoritmo de detección de objetos, aprovechando la librería Flow Graph de TBB. En la última versión de esta librería se soporta un nuevo tipo de nodos que simplifica la ejecución de kernels OpenCL. Estos nodos OpenCL_node han simplificado la codificación de nuestro algoritmo para aprovechar al mismo tiempo tanto la CPU como la GPU. A la vista de los resultados obtenidos, podemos concluir que nuestra implementación heterogénea con Flow Graph y OpenCL_node mejora en gran medida a desarrollos anteriores, debido principalmente a explotar la técnica de zero-copy buffer entre GPU y CPU, en vez de lectura y escritura de buffers.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Proyecto TIN2016-80920-R del Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitivida

Using virtual reality for industrial design learning: a methodological proposal

Nowadays, the different computer tools available enable designers to create complex industrial prototypes. The use of these tools is constrained by the limitations imposed by common devices, such as screens and displays. Recently emerged virtual and augmented reality techniques have started being used as supports in many learning and industrial environments. Beyond the new possibilities that these tools offer for designing industrial objects, the underlying question is whether these new technologies could improve the creativity of designers to enable them to get a better understanding of the designing process itself. This paper presents a methodological proposal for the deployment of an industrial design engineering course aimed not only at learning different design techniques, but also at assessing the creativity skills of students. The practical contents include the use of virtual reality devices, to help the designer overcome the limitations of prototype visualisation and make better designing decisions. Moreover, a creativity test will be performed at the beginning and at the end of the course to assess the changes in creativity skills taking place within the experiment group versus the changes in a traditional learning (control) group

An approach to the application of shift-and-add algorithms on engineering and industrial processes

Different kinds of algorithms can be chosen so as to compute elementary functions. Among all of them, it is worthwhile mentioning the shift-and-add algorithms due to the fact that they have been specifically designed to be very simple and to save computer resources. In fact, almost the only operations usually involved with these methods are additions and shifts, which can be easily and efficiently performed by a digital processor. Shift-and-add algorithms allow fairly good precision with low cost iterations. The most famous algorithm belonging to this type is CORDIC. CORDIC has the capability of approximating a wide variety of functions with only the help of a slight change in their iterations. In this paper, we will analyze the requirements of some engineering and industrial problems in terms of type of operands and functions to approximate. Then, we will propose the application of shift-and-add algorithms based on CORDIC to these problems. We will make a comparison between the different methods applied in terms of the precision of the results and the number of iterations required.This research was supported by the Conselleria de Educacion of the Valencia Region Government under grant number GV/2011/043

Suzuki reaction on pyridinium N-haloheteroarylaminides: regioselective synthesis of 3,5-disubstituted 2-aminopyrazines

An extensive study of Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling processes on N-pyridinium bromoazinyl aminides has been performed. Mono- and disubstitution on 5- and 3,5-bromo derivatives produced the corresponding aryl derivatives. In the disubstituted compounds regioselective substitution at the 3-position occurred, vicinal to the aminide nitrogen, and this was more evident in pyrazine derivatives. The commonly used strategy involving N-alkylation and reduction of the N–N bond gave rise to a series of 2-alkylamino-3,5-disubstituted-pyrazines.The authors wish to thank the Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT-BQU2001-1508 and CTQ2005-08902) and the Universidad de Alcalá (UAH GC2005/006) for financial support and the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (MEC) for two studentships (M.J.R. and R.C.). We also thank Professor Mijail Galajov for his assistance in the NMR study

Trajectory-Based Morphological Operators: A Model for Efficient Image Processing

Mathematical morphology has been an area of intensive research over the last few years. Although many remarkable advances have been achieved throughout these years, there is still a great interest in accelerating morphological operations in order for them to be implemented in real-time systems. In this work, we present a new model for computing mathematical morphology operations, the so-called morphological trajectory model (MTM), in which a morphological filter will be divided into a sequence of basic operations. Then, a trajectory-based morphological operation (such as dilation, and erosion) is defined as the set of points resulting from the ordered application of the instant basic operations. The MTM approach allows working with different structuring elements, such as disks, and from the experiments, it can be extracted that our method is independent of the structuring element size and can be easily applied to industrial systems and high-resolution images