Intelligent fertigation, pillar of sustainable agriculture Intelligent fertigation, pillar of sustainable agriculture

The growing demand for food in the country has required an increase in agricultural production levels and with it, an increase in irrigation systems. Among the most widespread are central pivot irrigation systems, but their large number and variety make their optimal configuration difficult, generating overexploitation of natural resources such as water and threatening the sustainability of agriculture and the country. For this reason, the objective of this research was to implement a software that would allow obtaining the appropriate configuration of this equipment, using information on the type of crop, the agro-climatic conditions of the region and the soil, in order to obtain the maximum utilization. As a result, an application capable of performing the calculations so that the value of water delivered by the system is closer to the estimated needs for a crop in each of its phases was achieved. To demonstrate this, an experimental study was carried out in field conditions in the agricultural enterprise La Cuba, in Ciego de Avila; it showed that, with the use of the software, there was a saving of up to 94.5% of the water previously misused. In addition, the level of liquid provided allows the sowing to be in better conditions to reach its optimum yield. As an added value, the software has a minimalist and intuitive interface, which allows real-time visualization of field information

Improving the Efficiency of MECoMaP: A Protein Residue-Residue Contact Predictor

This work proposes an improvement of the multi-objective evolutionary method for the protein residue-residue contact prediction called MECoMaP. This method bases its prediction on physico chemical properties of amino acids, structural features and evolutionary information of the proteins. The evolutionary algorithm produces a set of decision rules that identifies contacts between amino acids. These decision rules generated by the algorithm represent a set of conditions to predict residue-residue contacts. A new encoding used, a fast evaluation of the examples from the training data set and a treatment of unbalanced classes of data were considered to improve the the efficiency of the algorithm

A decision tree-based method for protein contact map prediction

In this paper, we focus on protein contact map prediction. We describe a method where contact maps are predicted using decision tree-based model. The algorithm includes the subsequence information between the couple of analyzed amino acids. In order to evaluate the method generalization capabilities, we carry out an experiment using 173 non-homologous proteins of known structures. Our results indicate that the method can assign protein contacts with an average accuracy of 0.34, superior to the 0.25 obtained by the FNETCSS method. This shows that our algorithm improves the accuracy with respect to the methods compared, especially with the increase of protein lengt

Short-Range Interactions and Decision Tree-Based Protein Contact Map Predictor

In this paper, we focus on protein contact map prediction, one of the most important intermediate steps of the protein folding prob lem. The objective of this research is to know how short-range interac tions can contribute to a system based on decision trees to learn about the correlation among the covalent structures of a protein residues. We propose a solution to predict protein contact maps that combines the use of decision trees with a new input codification for short-range in teractions. The method’s performance was very satisfactory, improving the accuracy instead using all information of the protein sequence. For a globulin data set the method can predict contacts with a maximal accu racy of 43%. The presented predictive model illustrates that short-range interactions play the predominant role in determining protein structur

SISTEMA DE GESTIÓN PARA LA ADMINISTRACIÓN DE LA POLICLÍNICA DELTA DE CIEGO DE ÁVILA

Los hospitales y policlínicas, al igual que muchas otras empresas, suelen ser administrados bajo el contexto de calidad. En la actualidad, la Policlínica Delta C.A. (Ciego de Ávila), presentó insuficiencias en el manejo de la información relacionada con datos administrativos y médicos afectan el proceso de toma de decisiones de la institución. Debido que este proceso se realiza de forma manual. Es por ello que el objetivo de la presente investigación fue desarrollar un sistema de gestión hospitalaria, sustentado en una plataforma para aplicaciones de bases de datos, que contribuya a mitigar las insuficiencias que afectan el proceso de toma de decisiones de la Policlínica Delta C.A. Como resultado se implementó el sistema PODELCA, el cual sigue principios y estándares de calidad muy rigurosos, atendiendo al nivel de responsabilidad del mismo. Permitiendo, de esta forma, realizar el seguimiento de los pacientes de la policlínica, su estado actual de salud, la disponibilidad de recursos de la Policlínica, así como la gestión de sus recursos humanos. La evaluación de la factibilidad del sistema propuesto se realizó mediante la aplicación de técnicas de corroboración como el criterio de expertos, el análisis del cumplimiento de los estándares de calidad ISO 9126 y el estudio de viabilidad del mismo revela que el sistema cumple con los requerimientos funcionales, de confiabilidad, usabilidad, eficiencia, mantenibilidad, portabilidad y uso. Además de satisfacer las necesidades y requerimientos especificadas por el cliente

Soft computing methods for the prediction of protein tertiary structures: A survey

The problem of protein structure prediction (PSP) represents one of the most important challenges in computational biology. Determining the three dimensional structure of proteins is necessary to under stand their functions at molecular level. The most representative soft computing approaches for solving the protein tertiary structure prediction problem are summarized in this paper. These approaches have been categorized following the type of methodology. A total of 90 relevant works published in last 15 years in the field of protein structure prediction have been reported, including the best competitors in last CASP editions. However, despite large research effort in last decades, a considerable scope for further improvement still remains in this area.Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-02611Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2011-28956-C02-0

Prediction of Mitochondrial Matrix Protein Structures Based on Feature Selection and Fragment Assembly

Protein structure prediction consists in determining the thre e-dimensional conformation of a protein based only on its amino acid se quence. This is currently a difficult and significant challenge in structural bioinformatics because these structures are necessary for drug designing. This work proposes a method that reconstructs protein structures from protein fragments assembled according to their physico-chemical simi larities, using information extracted from known protein structures. Our prediction system produces distance maps to represent protein struc tures, which provides more information than contact maps, which are predicted by many proposals in the literature. Most commonly used amino acid physico-chemical properties are hydrophobicity, polarity and charge. In our method, we performed a feature selection on the 544 prop erties of the AAindex repository, resulting in 16 properties which were used to predictions. We tested our proposal on 74 mitochondrial ma trix proteins with a maximum sequence identity of 30% obtained from the Protein Data Bank. We achieved a recall of 0.80 and a precision of 0.79 with an 8-angstrom cut-off and a minimum sequence separation of 7 amino acids. Finally, we compared our system with other relevant proposal on the same benchmark and we achieved a recall improvement of 50.82%. Therefore, for the studied proteins, our method provides a notable improvement in terms of recall

Nuevos índices de consumo energético para hoteles tropicales

Tropical and subtropical hotels, even others hotels in hot conditions, employs about 60 % or more of its energy on climate demand satisfaction. Several studies demonstrate kWh/HDO index traditionally used in the hotel sector, it is not adequate. It is due to the low correlation between energetic consumption and the daily habitational occupation, achieving just a 1,4 % for hotels in the city. This low correlation could be related to the omission of the weather impact. In this research, we propose a new adjusted energy indicator (Ic adjusted) that takes into account the Temperature Factor of Positives Hours Degree (FtHG+). By the other hand, we propose another index with the aim of the optimal energy consumption characterization, called (Ic base). As a result, the employment of new energy consumption indexes able to describe the energy consumption with an accuracy of 65%, significantly higher to the energy consumption index (Ic actual), actually employed by the sectorLos hoteles de regiones tropicales emplean el 60 % y más de la energía eléctrica en satisfacer las demandas de climatización. Estudios realizados demuestran que el índice kWh/HDO, usado tradicionalmente por el sector hotelero, no resulta adecuado, debido a que es baja la correlación entre el consumo energético y la ocupación habitacional diaria, alcanzando solo un 1,4 % en un hotel de ciudad. Esto se debe a que el indicador no considera el efecto de las variables climatológicas. Es por ello que se propone un nuevo índice de consumo ajustado (Ic ajustado), el cual toma en cuenta el Factor de Temperatura de Horas Grado Positivas (FtHG+). Se propone también un índice de consumo base (Ic base), capaz de caracterizar el consumo energético de la instalación específica y que apunta a su desempeño óptimo. Como resultado, se logra describir el consumo electro energético con una precisión de hasta el 65 %, lo cual es significativamente superio

A NSGA-II Algorithm for the Residue-Residue Contact Prediction

We present a multi-objective evolutionary approach to predict protein contact maps. The algorithm provides a set of rules, inferring whether there is contact between a pair of residues or not. Such rules are based on a set of specific amino acid properties. These properties determine the particular features of each amino acid represented in the rules. In order to test the validity of our proposal, we have compared results obtained by our method with results obtained by other classification methods. The algorithm shows better accuracy and coverage rates than other contact map predictor algorithms. A statistical analysis of the resulting rules was also performed in order to extract conclusions of the protein folding problem.Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-02611Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2007-68084-C02-0