Biological applications of ferroelectric materials

The study and applications of ferroelectric materials in the biomedical and biotechnological fields is a novel and very promising scientific area that spans roughly one decade. However, some groups have already provided experimental proof of very interesting biological modulation when living systems are exposed to different ferroelectrics and excitation mechanisms. These materials should offer several advantages in the field of bioelectricity, such as no need of an external electric power source or circuits, scalable size of the electroactive regions, flexible and reconfigurable “virtual electrodes,” or fully proved biocompatibility. In this focused review, we provide the underlying physics of ferroelectric activity and a recount of the research reports already published, along with some tentative biophysical mechanisms that can explain the observed results. More specifically, we focus on the biological actions of domain ferroelectrics and ferroelectrics excited by the bulk photovoltaic effect or the pyroelectric effect. It is our goal to provide a comprehensive account of the published material so far and to set the stage for a vigorous expansion of the field, with envisioned applications that span from cell biology and signaling to cell and tissue regeneration, antitumoral action, or cell bioengineering to name a fe

A Review on Outlier/Anomaly Detection in Time Series Data

Recent advances in technology have brought major breakthroughs in data collection, enabling a large amount of data to be gathered over time and thus generating time series. Mining this data has become an important task for researchers and practitioners in the past few years, including the detection of outliers or anomalies that may represent errors or events of interest. This review aims to provide a structured and comprehensive state-of-the-art on outlier detection techniques in the context of time series. To this end, a taxonomy is presented based on the main aspects that characterize an outlier detection technique.KK/2019-00095 IT1244-19 TIN2016-78365-R PID2019-104966GB-I0

Water leak detection using self-supervised time series classification

Leaks in water distribution networks cause a loss of water that needs to be com- pensated to ensure a continuous supply for all customers. This compensation is achieved by increasing the flow of the network, which entails an undesirable economical expense as well as negative consequences for the environment. For these reasons, detecting and fixing leaks is a relevant task for water distribution companies. This paper proposes a water leak detection method based on a self- supervised classification of flow time series. The aim is to detect the leaks in the network, providing a low false positive rate. The proposed method is applied to two water distribution networks and compared to two other methods in the literature, obtaining the best balance between the number of false positives and detected leaks.IT1244-19 PID2019-104966GB-I0

Análisis del relieve y cartografía de procesos geomorfológicos activos mediante SIG en la zona de confluencia de los ríos Tuerto y Porquera (provincia de León, España)

La configuración del relieve terrestre y los cambios que tienen lugar en el entorno natural de los asentamientos humanos tienen una gran trascendencia social y económica debido a que marcan las condiciones de habitabilidad y desarrollo futuro de las actividades antrópicas. Partiendo de este hecho, el principal objetivo de este estudio es la realización de una cartografía geomorfológica en la cual aparezcan reflejados los principales procesos activos de tipo geológico, como base para la realización en el futuro de estudios de susceptibilidad de riesgos geológicos y determinar las zonas en las que la ocupación humana pueda verse afectada por daños relacionados con procesos naturales relacionados con el medio físico. Para la elaboración de esta cartografía geomorfológica se han realizado tareas de fotointerpretación en visión estereoscópica y representación en un Sistema de Información Geográfica (ArcGis 10.1), utilizando como base el Modelo Digital del Terreno MDT05/MDT05-LIDAR con una resolución espacial de 5x5 metros, aplicando distintas herramientas, utilizando también la capa de la BCN25 de curvas de nivel, así como trabajo de campo de comprobación y descripción del relieve y procesos activos. En el mapa obtenido se pueden distinguir tres tipos de dominios geomorfológicos, cada uno con sus procesos geológicos activos predominantes: dominio paleozoico con procesos gravitacionales, dominio neógeno con procesos gravitacionales y de erosión y, por último, dominio fluvial con presencia de abanicos aluviales y llanuras de inundación principalmente

Construcción de ontologías a partir de tesauros

Tradicionalmente, los tesauros han sido una de las formas más extendidas para la organización y formalización del conocimiento. Estos, a través de su vocabulario controlado y relaciones, resultan destacados instrumentos para la organización y gestión del conocimiento de un área específica. La importancia de estas formas de organización originó tres estándares para llevar a cabo un proceso de construcción normalizado. El surgimiento de la Web Semántica permite que los datos sean compartidos y reutilizados a través de diferentes aplicaciones y comunidades. Este hecho conlleva un replanteamiento de las formas de organización del conocimiento y, por tanto, un cambio de estrategia. Estos cambios están vinculados a la necesidad de especificar de manera formal y explícita la semántica asociada a la información de una manera más eficiente que la realizada hasta el momento por los tesauros. Ante esta situación, el uso y desarrollo de ontologías se manifiesta como la mejor forma de especificar la semántica según lo requiere la Web Semántica. Esto está motivando que el proceso de reingeniería y/o la migración de los tesauros tradicionales a ontologías se esté convirtiendo en una tendencia actual

El atrium paleocristiano de Algezares (Murcia)

This work is an advance of the results obtained in the first excavation campaign carried out in an area near the Basílica of Algezares (Murcia). The most important novelty has been the discovery of a new architectural complex of palace character, which has a representation room with square central upper end, higher than the rest of the room, preceded by a portico/passage and an atrium with proch, at three of its sides, it has a central part twice as wide as the lateral naves. Both rooms, situated at a different level, are joined up by a nomumental flight of steps that makes movement between them easy and stresses the processional effect. On the other side, an archaelogical exploration (20 hectares of surface) has allowed to locate new factories (of a maintained length that overpasses 30 metres) and it has also permitted to check that all of them, included the basilica, use materials and similar constructive techniques. These findings open new perspectives and involve an important adavance regarding the christian construction of the surronundings of the Basílica of Algezares, reinforcing the hypothesis of the existence of an urban contex in which the church was, until now, its only known vestige.Este trabajo es un avance de los resultados obtenidos en la primera campaña de excavación efectuada en un sector próximo a la Basílica de Algezares (Murcia). La novedad más importante ha sido el descubrimiento de un nuevo complejo arquitectónico, de carácter áulico, que consta de una gran sala de representación con cabecera central cuadrada, sobreelevada respecto del resto de la estancia, precedida de un pórtico/corredor y un atrio porticado, en tres de sus lados, con un ámbito central de doble anchura que las naves laterales. Ambos espacios, situados a diferente nivel, se hallan articulados mediante una escalinata monumental que facilita el tránsito entre ellos y acentúa el efecto procesional. De otra parte, una prospección arqueológica (20 Ha de superficie) ha permitido localizar nuevas fábricas   (con una longitud conservada que supera los 30 m) y comprobar que todas ellas, incluida la basílica, emplean materiales y técnicas constructivas similares. Estos hallazgos abren nuevas perspectivas y suponen un avance sustancial respecto a la edilicia cristiana del entorno de la Basílica de Algezares, reforzando la hipótesis de la existencia de un contexto urbano en el cual la iglesia era, hasta ahora, su único vestigio conocido

Building Ontologies at the Knowledge Level using the Ontology Design Environment

This paper discusses how ontologies can be specified at the knowledge level using the set of intermediate representations (Gómez-Pérez, Fernández & de Vicente 1996) proposed by METHONTOLOGY (Fernández, Gómez-Pérez & Juristo 1997; and Gómez-Pérez 1998). These intermediate representations bridge the gap between how people think about a domain and the languages in which ontologies are formalized. Thus, METHONTOLOGY enables experts and ontology makers unfamiliar with implementation environments to build ontologies from scratch. In this paper, we also present the ODE (Ontology Design Environment) as a software tool to specify ontologies at the knowledge level. ODE allows developers to specify their ontology by filling in tables and drawing graphs. Its multilingual generator module automatically translates the specification of the ontology into target languages

Photon statistics in collective strong coupling: Nanocavities and microcavities

There exists a growing interest in the properties of the light generated by hybrid systems involving a mesoscopic number of emitters as a means of providing macroscopic quantum light sources. In this work, the quantum correlations of the light emitted by a collection of emitters coupled to a generic optical cavity are studied theoretically using an effective Hamiltonian approach. Starting from the single-emitter level, we analyze the persistence of photon antibunching as the ensemble size increases. Not only is the photon blockade effect identifiable, but photon antibunching originated from destructive interference processes, the so-called unconventional antibunching, is also present. We study the dependence of these two types of negative correlations on the spectral detuning between cavity and emitters, as well as its evolution as the time delay between photon detections increases. Throughout this work, the performance of plasmonic nanocavities and dielectric microcavities is compared: despite the distinct energy scales and the differences introduced by their respectively open and closed character, the bunching and antibunching phenomenology presents remarkable similarities in both types of cavitiesThis work has been funded by the European Research Council under Grant Agreements No. ERC-2011-AdG 290981 and No. ERC-2016-STG-714870, the EU Seventh Framework Programme (Grants No. FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG-630996 and No. FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG-618229), and the Spanish MINECO under Contracts No. MAT2014-53432-C5-5-R and No. FIS2015-64951-R, as well as through the “María de Maeztu” programme for Units of Excellence in R&D (Grant No. MDM-2014-0377)

Combination of DROOL rules and Protégé knowledge bases in the ONTO-H annotation tool

ONTO-H is a semi-automatic collaborative tool for the semantic annotation of documents, built as a Protégé 3.0 tab plug-in. Among its multiple functionalities aimed at easing the document annotation process, ONTO-H uses a rule-based system to create cascading annotations out from a single drag and drop operation from a part of a document into an already existing concept or instance of the domain ontology being used for annotation. It also gives support to the detection of name conflicts and instance duplications in the creation of the annotations. The rule system runs on top of the open source rule engine DROOLS and is connected to the domain ontology used for annotation by means of an ad-hoc programmed Java proxy