Vector-borne disease risk indexes in spatially structured populations

There are economic and physical limitations when applying prevention and control strategies for urban vector borne diseases. Consequently, there are increasing concerns and interest in designing efficient strategies and regulations that health agencies can follow in order to reduce the imminent impact of viruses like Dengue, Zika and Chikungunya. That includes fumigation, abatization, reducing the hatcheries, picking up trash, information campaigns. A basic question that arise when designing control strategies is about which and where these ones should focus. In other words, one would like to know whether preventing the contagion or decrease vector population, and in which area of the city, is more efficient. In this work, we propose risk indexes based on the idea of secondary cases from patch to patch. Thus, they take into account human mobility and indicate which patch has more chance to be a corridor for the spread of the disease and which is more vulnerable. They can also indicate the neighborhood where hatchery control will reduce more the number of potential cases. In order to illustrate the usefulness of these indexes, we run a set of numerical simulations in a mathematical model that takes into account the urban mobility and the differences in population density among the areas of a city. If i is a particular neighborhood, the transmission risk index TR_i measures the potential secondary cases caused by a host in that neighborhood. The vector transmission risk index VTR_i measures the potential secondary cases caused by a vector. Finally, the vulnerability risk index VR_i measures the potential secondary cases in the neighborhood. Transmission indexes can be used to give geographical priority to some neighborhoods when applying prevention and control measures. On the other hand, the vulnerability index can be useful to implement monitoring campaigns or public health investment.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

Guided waves in a fluid layer on an elastic irregular bottom

In this paper one considers the linearized problem to determine the movement of an ideal heavy fluid contained in an unbounded container withelastic walls. As initial data one knows the movement of both the bottom and the free surface of the fluid and also the strength of certain perturbation, strong enough to take the bottom out of its rest state. One important point to be considered regards the influence of the bottom's geometry on the propagation of superficial waves. This problem has been already studied in other works without considering the elastic properties of the bottom and considering a cilindrical container with bounded section

Enhanced global optimization methods applied to complex fisheries stock assessment models

[Abstract] Statistical fisheries models are frequently used by researchers and agencies to understand the behavior of marine ecosystems or to estimate the maximum acceptable catch of different species of commercial interest. The parameters of these models are usually adjusted through the use of optimization algorithms. Unfortunately, the choice of the best optimization method is far from trivial. This work proposes the use of population-based algorithms to improve the optimization process of the Globally applicable Area Disaggregated General Ecosystem Toolbox (Gadget), a flexible framework that allows the development of complex statistical marine ecosystem models. Specifically, parallel versions of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) methods are proposed. The proposals include an automatic selection of the internal parameters to reduce the complexity of their usage, and a restart mechanism to avoid local minima. The resulting optimization algorithms were called PMA (Parallel Multirestart Adaptive) DE and PMA PSO respectively. Experimental results prove that the new algorithms are faster and produce more accurate solutions than the other parallel optimization methods already included in Gadget. Although the new proposals have been evaluated on fisheries models, there is nothing specific to the tested models in them, and thus they can be also applied to other optimization problems. Moreover, the PMA scheme proposed can be seen as a template that can be easily applied to other population-based heuristics.Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2017/04Xunta de Galicia; R2016/0

Identificación de la conductividad de un material cuando depende de la presión a la que está sometido

Depto. de Análisis Matemático y Matemática AplicadaInstituto de Matemática Interdisciplinar (IMI)Fac. de Ciencias MatemáticasTRUEpu

Novel parallelization of simulated annealing and Hooke & Jeeves search algorithms for multicore systems with application to complex fisheries stock assessment models

[Abstract] Estimating parameters of a statistical fisheries assessment model typically involves a comparison of disparate datasets to a forward simulation model through a likelihood function. In all but trivial cases the estimations of these models tend to be time-consuming due to issues related to multi-modality and non-linearity. This paper develops novel parallel implementations of popular search algorithms, applicable to expensive function calls typically encountered in fisheries stock assessment. It proposes two versions of both Simulated Annealing and Hooke & Jeeves optimization algorithms with the aim of fully utilizing the processing power of common multicore systems. The proposals have been tested on a 24-core server using three different input models. Results indicate that the parallel versions are able to take advantage of available resources without sacrificing the quality of the solution.Galicia. Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria; R2014/04

Performance Evaluation of MPI, UPC and OpenMP on Multicore Architectures

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03770-2_24[Abstract] The current trend to multicore architectures underscores the need of parallelism. While new languages and alternatives for supporting more efficiently these systems are proposed, MPI faces this new challenge. Therefore, up-to-date performance evaluations of current options for programming multicore systems are needed. This paper evaluates MPI performance against Unified Parallel C (UPC) and OpenMP on multicore architectures. From the analysis of the results, it can be concluded that MPI is generally the best choice on multicore systems with both shared and hybrid shared/distributed memory, as it takes the highest advantage of data locality, the key factor for performance in these systems. Regarding UPC, although it exploits efficiently the data layout in memory, it suffers from remote shared memory accesses, whereas OpenMP usually lacks efficient data locality support and is restricted to shared memory systems, which limits its scalability.Gobierno de España; TIN2007-67537-C03-0

Inverse problems in high pressure processes and food engineering

Depto. de Análisis Matemático y Matemática AplicadaInstituto de Matemática Interdisciplinar (IMI)Fac. de Ciencias MatemáticasTRUEpu

Performance Evaluation of Unified Parallel C Collective Communications

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HPCC.2009.88[Abstract] Unified Parallel C (UPC) is an extension of ANSI C designed for parallel programming. UPC collective primitives, which are part of the UPC standard, increase programming productivity while reducing the communication overhead. This paper presents an up-to-date performance evaluation of two publicly available UPC collective implementations on three scenarios: shared, distributed, and hybrid shared/distributed memory architectures. The characterization of the throughput of collective primitives is useful for increasing performance through the runtime selection of the appropriate primitive implementation, which depends on the message size and the memory architecture, as well as to detect inefficient implementations. In fact, based on the analysis of the UPC collectives performance, we proposed some optimizations for the current UPC collective libraries. We have also compared the performance of the UPC collective primitives and their MPI counterparts, showing that there is room for improvement. Finally, this paper concludes with an analysis of the influence of the performance of the UPC collectives on a representative communication-intensive application, showing that their optimization is highly important for UPC scalability.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2007-67537-C03-02Xunta de Galicia; 3/2006 DOGA 13/12/200

Increased efficiency in the second-hand tire trade provides opportunity for dengue control

Dengue fever is increasing in geographical range, spread by invasion of its vector mosquitoes. The trade in second-hand tires has been implicated as a factor in this process because they act as mobile reservoirs of mosquito eggs and larvae. Regional transportation of tires can create linkages between rural areas with dengue and disease-free urban areas, potentially giving rise to outbreaks even in areas with strong local control measures. In this work we sought to model the dynamics of mosquito transportation via the tire trade, in particular to predict its role in causing unexpected dengue outbreaks through vertical transmission of the virus across generations of mosquitoes. We also aimed to identify strategies for regulating the trade in second-hand tires, improving disease control. We created a mathematical model which captures the dynamics of dengue between rural and urban areas, taking into account the movement and storage time of tires, and mosquito diapause. We simulate a series of scenarios in which a mosquito population is introduced to a dengue-free area via movement of tires, either as single or multiple events, increasing the likelihood of a dengue outbreak. A persistent disease state can be induced regardless of whether urban conditions for an outbreak are met, and an existing endemic state can be enhanced by vector input. Finally we assess the potential for regulation of tire processing as a means of reducing the transmission of dengue fever using a specific case study from Puerto Rico. Our work demonstrates the importance of the second-hand tire trade in modulating the spread of dengue fever across regions, in particular its role in introducing dengue to disease-free areas. We propose that reduction of tire storage time and control of their movement can play a crucial role in containing dengue outbreaks

Mathematical modelling in food engineering

Depto. de Análisis Matemático y Matemática AplicadaInstituto de Matemática Interdisciplinar (IMI)Fac. de Ciencias MatemáticasTRUEpu