Ética para máquinas : José Ignacio Latorre. 1a ed. Barcelona: Ariel, 2019. 320pp. ISBN 9788434429659

En este libro el autor nos invita a reflexionar sobre el impacto que, en la sociedad del siglo XXI, están teniendo los avances en ciencia y tecnología informática. Estos avances tecnológicos son la base de la cuarta revolución industrial, progresan a un gran ritmo y plantean grandes retos éticos. Es un gran desafío para la sociedad considerar la interacción con las máquinas inteligentes. El autor nos da una visión amplia y no catastrofista, frente a la irrupción de la inteligencia artificial.Facultad de Informátic

Senyals i sistemes : de l'ensenyament a l'aprenentatge

En aquest article es presenta una experiència docent en el camp de les enginyeries i mes en concret en una assignatura de caire molt matemàtic, Senyals i Sistemes. Les característiques addicionals que presenta l'assignatura es que té un nombre alt d'alumnes (més de 125) per grup, amb les metodologies tradicionals presentava un alt índex de suspesos i era gairebé impossible valorar el treball de l'alumne. Per portat a terme aquesta innovació s'ha canviat l'organització i gestió de l'assignatura, les activitats docents que es duen a terme, l'avaluació dels objectius que es proposen a l'assignatura i per a avaluar l'experiència es realitza una comparació dels resultats que obteníem abans i després d'aplicar les noves metodologies docents. Aquest canvi metodològic ens permet, d'altra banda, valorar el treball que fa l'alumne i tindre una realimentació a partir de les activitats que ens permetrà fer una avaluació formativa i conèixer el grau de satisfacció i implicació de l'alumne.In this paper we will present a teaching experience in the field of engineering and, more concretely, in a very mathematical subject, Signals and Systems. An additional characteristic to this subject is its high number of students (more than 125) per group, which before, with traditional teaching methods, presented a high index of student failure and made it practically impossible to value student work. We will comment on the organization of the class, the teaching activities that are used, the evaluation of the goals that are proposed in the subject and finally, there will be a comparison between the results obtained before and after having applied new teaching methods. This methodological change allows us, on the other hand, to value student work and to get feedback through activities that will allow us to make a formative evaluation and learn the degree of satisfaction and implication among the students

High availability for parallel computers

Fault tolerance has become an important issue for parallel applications in the last few years. The parallel systems' users want them to be reliable considering two main dimensions, availability and data consistency. Availability can be provided with solutions such as RADIC, a fault tolerant architecture with different protection levels, offering high availability with transparency, decentralization, flexibility and scalability for message-passing systems. Transient faults may cause an application running in a computer system to be removed from execution, however the biggest risk of transient faults is to provoke undetected data corruption that changes the final result of the application without anyone knowing. To evaluate the effects of transient faults in the robustness of applications and validate new fault detection mechanism and strategies, we have developed a full-system simulation fault injection environmentFacultad de Informátic

Could be improved the efficiency of SPMD applications on heterogeneous environments?

The goal of this work is to execute SPMD applications efficiently on heterogeneous environments. Applications used to test our work are designed with message-passing interface to communicate and are developed to be executed in a single core cluster. However, we create a methodology to execute e fficiently these SPMD applications over heterogeneous architectures. The SPMD applications are selected because they present high level of synchronism and communications; both elements could generate challenges when we want to obtain our objec- tive, which is de ned as to obtain an improvement in the execution time while maintaining the e fficiency level over a threshold defi ned by programmer, taking into consideration the communications heterogeneities present in a multicore cluster. This objective is achieved using a map-ping and scheduling strategies included in our methodology. Finally, the results obtained show an improvement around 40% in the best case of effi ciency in SPMD applications tested, when our methodology is applied.Presentado en el IX Workshop Procesamiento Distribuido y Paralelo (WPDP)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Fetch unit design for scalable simultaneous multithreading (ScSMT)

Continuous IC process enhancements make possible to integrate on a single chip the re-sources required for simultaneously executing multiple control flows or threads, exploiting different levels of thread-level parallelism: application-, function-, and loop-level. Scalable simultaneous multi-threading combines static and dynamic mechanisms to assemble a complexity-effective design that provides high instruction per cycle rates without sacrificing cycle time nor single-thread performance. This paper addresses the design of the fetch unit for a high-performance, scalable, simultaneous multithreaded processor. We present the detailed microarchitecture of a clustered and reconfigurable fetch unit based on an existing single-thread fetch unit. In order to minimize the occurrence of fetch hazards, the fetch unit dynamically adapts to the available thread-level parallelism and to the fetch characteristics of the active threads, working as a single shared unit or as two separate clusters. It combines static and dynamic methods in a complexity-efficient way. The design is supported by a simulation- based analysis of different instruction cache and branch target buffer configurations on the context of a multithreaded execution workload. Average reductions on the miss rates between 30% and 60% and peak reductions greater than 200% are obtained.Facultad de Informátic

Cloud computing application model for online recommendation through fuzzy logic system

Cloud computing can offer us different distance services over the internet. We propose an online application model for health care systems that works by use of cloud computing. It can provide a higher quality of services remotely and along with that, it decreases the cost of chronic patient. This model is composed of two sub-model that each one uses a different service, one of these is software as a service (SaaS) which is user related and another one is Platform as a service (PaaS) that is engineer related. Doctors classify the chronic diseases into different stages according to their symptoms. As the clinical data has a non-numeric value, we use the fuzzy logic system in Paas model to design this online application model. Based on this classification, patienst can receive the proper recommendation through smart devices (SaaS model).Facultad de Informátic

Nova metodologia per a la docència de projectes fi de carrera basada en grups de debat i cooperació

En aquest treball s'analitza un canvi metodològic durant la realització i seguiment del Projectes de Fi de Carrera (PFC), que permeti un seguiment actiu, afavoreixi el treball en grups col·laboratius, la avaluació formativa, amb l'objectiu de millorar la qualitat i els resultats acadèmics dels Projectes de Fi de Carrera. Es proposa un canvi en la metodologia usada per a la direcció dels PFC, de manera que existeixi un treball individual i en grup, una supervisió i avaluació continuada del treball realitzat per l'estudiant i una visió docent i professional del projecte. La proposta es concreta en fer un seguiment del projecte mitjançant l'assistència a reunions periòdiques de grup per la presentació i debat del treball realitzat a cada fase del projecte. A cada reunió es fa una introducció per part del professor responsable sobre el tema del dia, a continuació una exposició breu per part de cada alumne a on es presentarà el treball realitzat i la planificació futura i es debatrà entre tots, finalment es faran les conclusions finals i s'establiran els objectius per la propera reunió. A mes a mes, cada alumne entrega un comentari escrit sobre les exposicions que s'han fet a la reunió, valorant els punts forts i punts febles de cadascuna. Finalment, per cada reunió es fa una entrega via campus virtual de les diapositives de la presentació del tema de cada reunió i un document escrit de la fase de la reunió anterior amb les correccions o comentaris incorporats. Addicionalment, es fan tutories individuals per tractat temes o dubtes específics de cada projecte

Fetch unit design for scalable simultaneous multithreading (ScSMT)

Continuous IC process enhancements make possible to integrate on a single chip the re-sources required for simultaneously executing multiple control flows or threads, exploiting different levels of thread-level parallelism: application-, function-, and loop-level. Scalable simultaneous multi-threading combines static and dynamic mechanisms to assemble a complexity-effective design that provides high instruction per cycle rates without sacrificing cycle time nor single-thread performance. This paper addresses the design of the fetch unit for a high-performance, scalable, simultaneous multithreaded processor. We present the detailed microarchitecture of a clustered and reconfigurable fetch unit based on an existing single-thread fetch unit. In order to minimize the occurrence of fetch hazards, the fetch unit dynamically adapts to the available thread-level parallelism and to the fetch characteristics of the active threads, working as a single shared unit or as two separate clusters. It combines static and dynamic methods in a complexity-efficient way. The design is supported by a simulation- based analysis of different instruction cache and branch target buffer configurations on the context of a multithreaded execution workload. Average reductions on the miss rates between 30% and 60% and peak reductions greater than 200% are obtained.Facultad de Informátic

Support managing population aging stress of emergency departments in a computational way

Agraïments "Partially supported by a grant from the China Scholarship Council (CSC) under reference number: 2013062900.Old people usually have more complex health problems and use healthcare services more frequently than young people. It is obvious that the increasing old people both in number and proportion will challenge the emergency departments (ED). This paper firstly presents a way to quantitatively predict and explain this challenge by using simulation techniques. Then, we outline the capability of simulation for decision support to overcome this challenge. Specifically, we use simulation to predict and explain the impact of population aging over an ED. In which, a precise ED simulator which has been validated for a public hospital ED will be used to predict the behavior of an ED under population aging in the next 15 years. Our prediction shows that the stress of population aging to EDs can no longer be ignored and ED upgrade must be carefully planned. Based on this prediction, the cost and benefits of several upgrade proposals are evaluated

Defining Asymptotic Parallel Time Complexity of Data-dependent Algorithms

The scientific research community has reached a stage of maturity where its strong need for high-performance computing has diffused into also everyday life of engineering and industry algorithms. In efforts to satisfy this need, parallel computers provide an efficient and economical way to solve large-scale and/or time-constrained problems. As a consequence, the end-users of these systems have a vested interest in defining the asymptotic time complexity of parallel algorithms to predict their performance on a particular parallel computer. The asymptotic parallel time complexity of data-dependent algorithms depends on the number of processors, data size, and other parameters. Discovering the main other parameters is a challenging problem and the clue in obtaining a good estimate of performance order. Great examples of these types of applications are sorting algorithms, searching algorithms and solvers of the traveling salesman problem (TSP). This article encompasses all the knowledge discovery aspects to the problem of defining the asymptotic parallel time complexity of datadependent algorithms. The knowledge discovery methodology begins by designing a considerable number of experiments and measuring their execution times. Then, an interactive and iterative process explores data in search of patterns and/or relationships detecting some parameters that affect performance. Knowing the key parameters which characterise time complexity, it becomes possible to hypothesise to restart the process and to produce a subsequent improved time complexity model. Finally, the methodology predicts the performance order for new data sets on a particular parallel computer by replacing a numerical identification. As a case of study, a global pruning traveling salesman problem implementation (GP-TSP) has been chosen to analyze the influence of indeterminism in performance prediction of data-dependent parallel algorithms, and also to show the usefulness of the defined knowledge discovery methodology. The subsequent hypotheses generated to define the asymptotic parallel time complexity of the TSP were corroborated one by one. The experimental results confirm the expected capability of the proposed methodology; the predictions of performance time order were rather good comparing with real execution time (in the order of 85%)