The Fog Makes Sense: Enabling Social Sensing Services With Limited Internet Connectivity

Social sensing services use humans as sensor carriers, sensor operators and sensors themselves in order to provide situation-awareness to applications. This promises to provide a multitude of benefits to the users, for example in the management of natural disasters or in community empowerment. However, current social sensing services depend on Internet connectivity since the services are deployed on central Cloud platforms. In many circumstances, Internet connectivity is constrained, for instance when a natural disaster causes Internet outages or when people do not have Internet access due to economical reasons. In this paper, we propose the emerging Fog Computing infrastructure to become a key-enabler of social sensing services in situations of constrained Internet connectivity. To this end, we develop a generic architecture and API of Fog-enabled social sensing services. We exemplify the usage of the proposed social sensing architecture on a number of concrete use cases from two different scenarios.Comment: Ruben Mayer, Harshit Gupta, Enrique Saurez, and Umakishore Ramachandran. 2017. The Fog Makes Sense: Enabling Social Sensing Services With Limited Internet Connectivity. In Proceedings of The 2nd International Workshop on Social Sensing, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, April 21 2017 (SocialSens'17), 6 page

Presencia del principio precautorio del derecho (ambiental) de la Unión Europa en el derecho (ambiental) comunitario centroamericano

Trabajo Final de Graduación Maestría en Estudios Europeos e Integración compuesto de 118 páginas en formato PDF.El problema ambiental y la sostenibilidad del Sistema Comunitario Europeo no son nuevos en esta región del mundo. La preocupación por la presión que ejerce el crecimiento de la población y la economía mundial sobre los recursos renovables y la sobrecarga contaminante que afecta las funciones vitales de los ecosistemas, como son el mantenimiento de la vida vegetal y animal y su diversidad, han tenido importancia para los europeos desde comienzos de la década de los setenta del siglo pasado. El crecimiento industrial y el aumento desmedido del consumo se han efectuado en detrimento del uso racional de los recursos y del medio natural, lo que ha conducido a un grave deterioro de las condiciones ambientales del planeta. El mundo agrícola e industrial europeo utilizan más de 70.000 productos químicos según la Agencia Europea para el Medio Ambiente (AEMA); muchos de ellos como los pesticidas y los disolventes suponen un grave riesgo para la salud de los trabajadores que los manipulan y para el ambiente, y existe un gran desconocimiento acerca de su toxicidad. Europa aporta un 38% de las sustancias tóxicas liberadas en el medio ambiente en el mundo y la AEMA calcula que su aportación aumentará entre un 30% y un 50% de aquí al año 2010, especialmente en hidrocarburos poliaromáticos y en metales pesados. Este panorama ambiental ha provocado que en los últimos veinticinco años haya aumentado el interés en la opinión pública europea por mejorar la protección del entorno ambiental, en consecuencia los órganos comunitarios de la Unión Europea han generado de manera sostenida trascendentales normas de protección al ambiente y por consiguiente de la salud de las personas, de las plantas y los animales.Universidad Estatal a Distancia de Costa Ric

Reporte de caso: Linfoma extranodal de células T/NK tipo nasal en Costa Rica

Nasal T/NK Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma is an infrequent and aggressive entity, more prevalent in men with a nonspecific clinical presentation. The diagnosis is histopathologic, however the clinical suspicion is fundamental to identify it in comparison to its clinical differentials. This is a case report of a young male with nonspecific clinical manifestations that was wrongfully treated for other conditions and then diagnosed with a nasal T/NK cells lymphoma.El linfoma No-Hodgkin T/NK nasal es una entidad infrecuente y agresiva, más prevalente en hombres y de presentación clínica inespecífica. Su diagnóstico se realiza a través de histopatología, sin embargo la sospecha clínica es fundamental para identificarlo entre los diferenciales. Se reporta el caso de un masculino joven con un cuadro clínico inespecífico que luego de tratamientos fallidos para otras condiciones, fue diagnosticado con un linfoma de células T/NK nasal

Characterization of participants adolescents in the clinical trial with Abdala vaccine

Introduction: The clinical evaluation of anti-COVID-19 vaccines in pediatric population, is a challenge in times of pandemic, to respond to the urgency of representative samples that contribute to the reproducibility of the study in the real population. Objective: To characterize the adolescents participating in the clinical trial with the Abdala anti-COVID-19 vaccine, to evaluate compliance with the vaccination schedule and to estimate whether they are representative of this population group. Methods: Data from a phase II trial with Abdala vaccine were used. A total of 703 subjects were included, 207 (29.4 %) of them were adolescents, between 12 and 18 years of age, with apparently healthy or controlled chronic diseases, nutritional assessment between 10 and 90 percentiles, and willingness to participate in the study. Sociodemographic data, personal pathological history, toxic habits and compliance with the vaccination scheme of 3 doses every 14 days were the variables studied. Results: The average age was 15 years, it was predominant female sex (51.7 %), white skin color (55.6 %) and nutritional assessment above 75 to 90 percentiles (40.6 %). The 9.6 % had toxic habits such as smoking and ingestion of alcoholic beverages. Some personal pathological history was in 51.2 % with a higher prevalence for bronchial asthma, rhinitis and other allergies. The vaccination scheme was fulfilled for 95.8 % of individuals. Conclusions: Sociodemographic characteristics, pathological history and toxic habits described for adolescents on the study are representative for this population group in Cuba. The vaccination schedule had an optimal compliance

Control plane for situation-awareness applications on geo-distributed resources

Situation-awareness applications generate actionable knowledge from sensor and user data. Two trends are unlocking new situation-awareness applications: geo-distributed resources and pervasive sensors. Geo-distributed computing infrastructure is now available worldwide, ranging from multi-region cloud deployments to newer 5G deployments. On the other hand, pervasive sensors have seen a boom, with examples like geo-distributed camera deployments, smart cities, and users’ gadgets (smartphones). Having computational resources closer to the data source improves the response time and the efficient use of the available resources. Geo-distributed resources reduce the physical distance to the data source, cutting the time it takes to transmit, filter, and process information, reducing unnecessary data transmission. However, efficient management of resources is challenging for densely geo-distributed resources while also providing spatio-temporal context and latency quality-of-service objectives. This dissertation proposes a control plane that makes three contributions for efficiently managing situation awareness applications running on geo-distributed computational resources: 1. It defines a programming model capable of expressing situation-awareness applications and their requirements. Additionally, it defines a new taxonomy for situation-awareness applications. 2. It describes the requirements of the control plane and the components needed to support geo-distributed resources and situation-awareness applications. 3. It proposes an efficient control plane architecture and mechanisms to support the above requirements. First, this work extends the data-flow graph programming model to better suit the geo-distributed context of both applications and computational resources. Then, we analyze and classify distinct types of situation-awareness applications that would benefit from geo-distributed resources. Finally, it presents ways to represent the requirements of such applications as part of an extended data-flow graph. Second, this thesis defines the different building blocks required to manage geo-distributed resources efficiently. Then, starting from the programming model, we show how the different components interact with the geo-distributed physical computational resources. Finally, we analyze why state-of-the-art centralized control planes cannot fulfill situation-awareness application’s requirements. Third, this dissertation contributes Foglets, a fully decentralized control plane architecture. A fully decentralized design reduces the overhead of a centralized design while still providing low-latency access to computational resources. In addition, we present mechanisms to propagate information to allow entirely local decisions and support application migrations between different computational resources’ localities. Finally, this thesis proposes OneEdge, a hybrid control plane architecture, extending the decentralized and centralized designs from the previous section. The control plane for geo-distributed resources has an inherent trade-off between response time and the quality of decisions. The main factor that defines the trade-off is the transmission latency incurred between the resources being managed and the control plane component making those decisions for the resources. For example, if the control plane decisions are made in a centralized fashion, we can calculate optimal decisions, but there is a high likelihood that all these decisions would incur at least one wide-area network round-trip, given that the resources are geo-distributed. On the other hand, the latency can be minimized if the control plane components are close to the resources, but then the complexity and cost of maintaining an up-to-date view of other resources and making optimal decisions are increased. We present an architecture that allows us to configure the control plane for different trade-off points and provide all the required service-level objectives presented in the programming model chapter.Ph.D