Critical assessment of enhancement factor measurements in surface-enhanced raman scattering on different substrates

The SERS enhancement factor (SERS-EF) is one of the most important parameters that characterizes the ability of a given substrate to enhance the Raman signal for SERS applications. The comparison of SERS intensities and SERS-EF values across different substrates is a common practice to unravel the performance of a given substrate. In this study, it is shown that such a comparison may lack significance if we compare substrates of very distinct nature and optical properties. It is specifically shown that the SERS-EF values for static substrates (e.g. immobilized metallic nanostructures) cannot be compared to those of dynamic ones (e.g. colloidal metal nanoparticle solutions), and that the optical properties for the latter show strong dependence on the metal-molecule interaction dynamics. The most representative experimental results concerning the dynamic substrates have been supported by generalized Mie theory simulations, which are tools used to describe the substrate complexity and the microscopic information not usually taken into account17332129421301CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQFUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE MINAS GERAIS - FAPEMIGFUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO - FAPES

Service Provisioning in Edge-Cloud Continuum Emerging Applications for Mobile Devices

Disruptive applications for mobile devices can be enhanced by Edge computing facilities. In this context, Edge Computing (EC) is a proposed architecture to meet the mobility requirements imposed by these applications in a wide range of domains, such as the Internet of Things, Immersive Media, and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. EC architecture aims to introduce computing capabilities in the path between the user and the Cloud to execute tasks closer to where they are consumed, thus mitigating issues related to latency, context awareness, and mobility support. In this survey, we describe which are the leading technologies to support the deployment of EC infrastructure. Thereafter, we discuss the applications that can take advantage of EC and how they were proposed in the literature. Finally, after examining enabling technologies and related applications, we identify some open challenges to fully achieve the potential of EC, and also research opportunities on upcoming paradigms for service provisioning. This survey is a guide to comprehend the recent advances on the provisioning of mobile applications, as well as foresee the expected next stages of evolution for these applications

GPU Parallelization of HEVC In-Loop Filters

In the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, multiple decoding modules have been designed to take advantage of parallel processing. In particular, the HEVC in-loop filters (i.e., the deblocking filter and sample adaptive offset) were conceived to be exploited by parallel architectures. However, the type of the offered parallelism mostly suits the capabilities of multi-core CPUs, thus making a real challenge to efficiently exploit massively parallel architectures such as Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), mainly due to the existing data dependencies between the HEVC decoding procedures. In accordance, this paper presents a novel strategy to increase the amount of parallelism and the resulting performance of the HEVC in-loop filters on GPU devices. For this purpose, the proposed algorithm performs the HEVC filtering at frame-level and employs intrinsic GPU vector instructions. When compared to the state-of-the-art HEVC in-loop filter implementations, the proposed approach also reduces the amount of required memory transfers, thus further boosting the performance. Experimental results show that the proposed GPU in-loop filters deliver a significant improvement in decoding performance. For example, average frame rates of 76 frames per second (FPS) and 125 FPS for Ultra HD 4K are achieved on an embedded NVIDIA GPU for All Intra and Random Access configurations, respectively

Ferramentas de Apoio ao Ensino Introdutório de Programação: um Mapeamento Sistemático

Ao longo dos anos, várias ferramentas foram propostas na literatura visando auxiliar e apoiar o ensino de programação, sobretudo em disciplinas introdutórias. Essas ferramentas podem auxiliar o aprendizado dos estudantes ao mesmo tempo em que proporcionam dinamismo e inovação, contribuindo para o aumento da motivação no estudo do tema tratado e, por conseguinte, reduzindo os índices de evasão. Esta pesquisa visa analisar ferramentas educacionais de apoio ao ensino introdutório de programação por meio de um mapeamento sistemático da literatura. A principal contribuição do estudo consistiu na apresentação de uma classificação das ferramentas levantadas em nove categorias, podendo auxiliar docentes e discentes na busca de recursos mais adequados às suas necessidades

Highly parallel HEVC decoding for heterogeneous systems with CPU and GPU

The High Efficiency Video Coding HEVC standard provides a higher compression efficiency than other video coding standards but at the cost of an increased computational load, which makes hard to achieve real-time encoding/decoding for ultra high-resolution and high-quality video sequences. Graphics Processing Units GPU are known to provide massive processing capability for highly parallel and regular computing kernels, but not all HEVC decoding procedures are suited for GPU execution. Furthermore, if HEVC decoding is accelerated by GPUs, energy efficiency is another concern for heterogeneous CPU+GPU decoding. In this paper, a highly parallel HEVC decoder for heterogeneous CPU+GPU system is proposed. It exploits available parallelism in HEVC decoding on the CPU, GPU, and between the CPU and GPU devices simultaneously. On top of that, different workload balancing schemes can be selected according to the devoted CPU and GPU computing resources. Furthermore, an energy optimized solution is proposed by tuning GPU clock rates. Results show that the proposed decoder achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art CPU decoder, and the best performance among the workload balancing schemes depends on the available CPU and GPU computing resources. In particular, with an NVIDIA Titan X Maxwell GPU and an Intel Xeon E5-2699v3 CPU, the proposed decoder delivers 167 frames per second (fps) for Ultra HD 4K videos, when four CPU cores are used. Compared to the state-of-the-art CPU decoder using four CPU cores, the proposed decoder gains a speedup factor of . When decoding performance is bounded by the CPU, a system wise energy reduction up to 36% is achieved by using fixed (and lower) GPU clocks, compared to the default dynamic clock settings on the GPU.EC/H2020/688759/EU/Low-Power Parallel Computing on GPUs 2/LPGPU

Geographic patterns of tree dispersal modes in Amazonia and their ecological correlates

Indaga sobre los patrones geográficos y los correlatos ecológicos en la distribución geográfica de los modos de dispersión arbórea más comunes en la Amazonia (endozoocoria, sinzoocoria, anemoocoria e hidrocoria). Se examina si la abundancia proporcional de estos modos de dispersión podría explicarse por la disponibilidad de agentes dispersores (hipótesis de disponibilidad de dispersores) y/o la disponibilidad de recursos para la poducción de frutos zoocorios (hipótesis de disponibilidad de recursos). Para ello se usaron parcelas de inventario de árboles establecidas entre 1934 y 2019, con un diámetro a la altura del pecho (DAP) ≥ 9,55 cm. Ubicados en las selvas tropicales de tierras bajas de la cuenca del río Amazonas y el Escudo Guayanés. Se asignaron modos de dispersión a un total de 5433 especies y morfoespecies en 1877 parcelas de inventario de árboles en bosques de abeto, inundados estacionalmente y permanentemente inundados. Se investigaron los patrones geográficos en la abundancia proporcional de los modos de dispersión. Se realizó una prueba de distancia media entre pares ponderada por abundancia (MPD) y ajustamos modelos lineales generalizados (GLM) para explicar la distribución geográfica de los modos de dispersión. La anemocoria se asoció significativa y positivamente con la velocidad media anual del viento, y la hidrocoria fue significativamente mayor en los bosques inundados. Los modos de dispersión no mostraron consistentemente asociaciones significativas con la disponibilidad de recursos para la construcción de frutos zoochorous. Una menor disimilitud en los modos de dispersión, resultante de una mayor dominancia de la endozoocoria, se produjo en los bosques de abeto (excluyendo los podzoles) en comparación con los bosques inundados. La hipótesis dispersor-disponibilidad fue bien apoyada para los modos de dispersión abióticos (anemochoria e hidrochoria). La disponibilidad de recursos para la construcción de frutos zoocorios parece una explicación poco probable para la distribución de los modos de dispersión en la Amazonia. La asociación entre los frugívoros y la abundancia proporcional de zoocoría requiere más investigación, ya que el reclutamiento de árboles no sólo depende de los vectores de dispersión, sino también de las condiciones que favorecen o limitan el reclutamiento de plántulas en los distintos tipos de bosque.Revisión por pares

Energy Estimation of Cosmic Rays with the Engineering Radio Array of the Pierre Auger Observatory

The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) is part of the Pierre Auger Observatory and is used to detect the radio emission of cosmic-ray air showers. These observations are compared to the data of the surface detector stations of the Observatory, which provide well-calibrated information on the cosmic-ray energies and arrival directions. The response of the radio stations in the 30 to 80 MHz regime has been thoroughly calibrated to enable the reconstruction of the incoming electric field. For the latter, the energy deposit per area is determined from the radio pulses at each observer position and is interpolated using a two-dimensional function that takes into account signal asymmetries due to interference between the geomagnetic and charge-excess emission components. The spatial integral over the signal distribution gives a direct measurement of the energy transferred from the primary cosmic ray into radio emission in the AERA frequency range. We measure 15.8 MeV of radiation energy for a 1 EeV air shower arriving perpendicularly to the geomagnetic field. This radiation energy -- corrected for geometrical effects -- is used as a cosmic-ray energy estimator. Performing an absolute energy calibration against the surface-detector information, we observe that this radio-energy estimator scales quadratically with the cosmic-ray energy as expected for coherent emission. We find an energy resolution of the radio reconstruction of 22% for the data set and 17% for a high-quality subset containing only events with at least five radio stations with signal.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Measurement of the Radiation Energy in the Radio Signal of Extensive Air Showers as a Universal Estimator of Cosmic-Ray Energy

We measure the energy emitted by extensive air showers in the form of radio emission in the frequency range from 30 to 80 MHz. Exploiting the accurate energy scale of the Pierre Auger Observatory, we obtain a radiation energy of 15.8 \pm 0.7 (stat) \pm 6.7 (sys) MeV for cosmic rays with an energy of 1 EeV arriving perpendicularly to a geomagnetic field of 0.24 G, scaling quadratically with the cosmic-ray energy. A comparison with predictions from state-of-the-art first-principle calculations shows agreement with our measurement. The radiation energy provides direct access to the calorimetric energy in the electromagnetic cascade of extensive air showers. Comparison with our result thus allows the direct calibration of any cosmic-ray radio detector against the well-established energy scale of the Pierre Auger Observatory.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DOI. Supplemental material in the ancillary file