Bot-Based Emergency Software Applications for Natural Disaster Situations

Upon a serious emergency situation such as a natural disaster, people quickly try to call their friends and family with the software they use every day. On the other hand, people also tend to participate as a volunteer for rescue purposes. It is unlikely and impractical for these people to download and learn to use an application specially designed for aid processes. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of including bots, which provide a mechanism to get inside the software that people use daily, to develop emergency software applications designed to be used by victims and volunteers during stressful situations. In such situations, it is necessary to achieve efficiency, scalability, fault tolerance, elasticity, and mobility between data centers. We evaluate three bot-based applications. The first one, named Jayma, sends information about affected people during the natural disaster to a network of contacts. The second bot-based application, Ayni, manages and assigns tasks to volunteers. The third bot-based application named Rimay registers volunteers and manages campaigns and emergency tasks. The applications are built using common practice for distributed software architecture design. Most of the components forming the architecture are from existing public domain software, and some components are even consumed as an external service as in the case of Telegram. Moreover, the applications are executed on commodity hardware usually available from universities. We evaluate the applications to detect critical tasks, bottlenecks, and the most critical resource. Results show that Ayni and Rimay tend to saturate the CPU faster than other resources. Meanwhile, the RAM memory tends to reach the highest utilization level in the Jayma application.Fil: Ovando Leon, Gabriel. Universidad de Santiago de Chile; ChileFil: Veas Castillo, Luis. Universidad de Santiago de Chile; ChileFil: Gil Costa, Graciela Verónica. Universidad Nacional de San Luis; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis; ArgentinaFil: Marin, Mauricio. Universidad de Santiago de Chile; Chil

Framework experimental para simular operaciones de rescate luego de un desastre natural

Computational simulation is a powerful tool for performance evaluation of computational systems. It is useful to make capacity planning of data center clusters, to obtain profiling reports of software applications and to detect bottlenecks. It has been used in different research areas like large scale Web search engines, natural disaster evacuations, computational biology, human behavior and tendency, among many others. However, properly tuning the parameters of the simulators, defining the scenarios to be simulated and collecting the data traces is not an easy task. It is an incremental process which requires constantly comparing the estimated metrics and the flow of simulated actions against real data. In this work, we present an experimental framework designed for the development of large scale simulations of two applications used upon the occurrence of a natural disaster strikes. The first one is a social application aimed to register volunteers and manage emergency campaigns and tasks. The second one is a benchmark application a data repository named MongoDB. The applications are deployed in a distributed platform which combines different technologies like a Proxy, a Containers Orchestrator, Containers and a NoSQL Database. We simulate both applications and the architecture platform. We validate our simulators using real traces collected during simulacrums of emergency situations.La simulación computacional es una poderosa herramienta para evaluar el rendimiento de sistemas. Resulta útil para realizar el planeamiento de capacidad de clusters de Centros de Datos, para obtener perfiles de aplicaciones y detectar cuellos de botella. Se ha utilizado en diferentes áreas de investigación como buscadores web a gran escala, evacuaciones por desastres naturales, biología computacional, comportamiento y tendencia humana, entre otros. Sin embargo, ajustar correctamente los parámetros de los simuladores, definir los escenarios de simulación y recopilar los rastros de datos no es una tarea fácil. Es un proceso incremental que requiere contrastar constantemente las métricas estimadas y el flujo de acciones simuladas con datos reales. En este trabajo, presentamos el diseño de un marco experimental para el desarrollo de simulaciones a gran escala de aplicaciones sociales utilizadas después de un desastre natural. La primera es una aplicación social destinada a registrar voluntarios y gestionar campañas en emergencias y tareas. La segunda aplicación es un repositorio de datos llamado MongoDB. Las aplicaciones se depliegan en una plataforma distribuida que combina diferentes tecnologías como Proxy, Orquestador de Containers, Containers y una Base de Datos NoSQL. Simulamos ambas aplicaciones y la plataforma computational. Validamos nuestros simuladores utilizando trazas reales recopiladas durante simulacros.Facultad de Informátic

Bot-Based Emergency Software Applications for Natural Disaster Situations

Upon a serious emergency situation such as a natural disaster, people quickly try to call their friends and family with the software they use every day. On the other hand, people also tend to participate as a volunteer for rescue purposes. It is unlikely and impractical for these people to download and learn to use an application specially designed for aid processes. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of including bots, which provide a mechanism to get inside the software that people use daily, to develop emergency software applications designed to be used by victims and volunteers during stressful situations. In such situations, it is necessary to achieve efficiency, scalability, fault tolerance, elasticity, and mobility between data centers. We evaluate three bot-based applications. The first one, named Jayma, sends information about affected people during the natural disaster to a network of contacts. The second bot-based application, Ayni, manages and assigns tasks to volunteers. The third bot-based application named Rimay registers volunteers and manages campaigns and emergency tasks. The applications are built using common practice for distributed software architecture design. Most of the components forming the architecture are from existing public domain software, and some components are even consumed as an external service as in the case of Telegram. Moreover, the applications are executed on commodity hardware usually available from universities. We evaluate the applications to detect critical tasks, bottlenecks, and the most critical resource. Results show that Ayni and Rimay tend to saturate the CPU faster than other resources. Meanwhile, the RAM memory tends to reach the highest utilization level in the Jayma application

Bot-Based Emergency Software Applications for Natural Disaster Situations

Upon a serious emergency situation such as a natural disaster, people quickly try to call their friends and family with the software they use every day. On the other hand, people also tend to participate as a volunteer for rescue purposes. It is unlikely and impractical for these people to download and learn to use an application specially designed for aid processes. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of including bots, which provide a mechanism to get inside the software that people use daily, to develop emergency software applications designed to be used by victims and volunteers during stressful situations. In such situations, it is necessary to achieve efficiency, scalability, fault tolerance, elasticity, and mobility between data centers. We evaluate three bot-based applications. The first one, named Jayma, sends information about affected people during the natural disaster to a network of contacts. The second bot-based application, Ayni, manages and assigns tasks to volunteers. The third bot-based application named Rimay registers volunteers and manages campaigns and emergency tasks. The applications are built using common practice for distributed software architecture design. Most of the components forming the architecture are from existing public domain software, and some components are even consumed as an external service as in the case of Telegram. Moreover, the applications are executed on commodity hardware usually available from universities. We evaluate the applications to detect critical tasks, bottlenecks, and the most critical resource. Results show that Ayni and Rimay tend to saturate the CPU faster than other resources. Meanwhile, the RAM memory tends to reach the highest utilization level in the Jayma application

A simulation tool for a large-scale NoSQL database

The amount of data on the Web and the number of users accessing those data drastically grows every year. Web-based services have to be able to receive and process those requirements within the shortest possible time. Additionally, they have to manage sudden and unpredictable peaks of user requirements for accessing the data. To tackle these problems, NoSQL databases have been designed to provide scalability and good performance. However, it is important to know in advance the number of resources (i.e. computers, network capacity) to efficiently deploy a database application. In this work, we propose a simulator for a NoSQL database named MongoDB. Our simulator aims to detect saturation levels of the resources to ensure an efficient execution of MongoDB upon different users demands and upon failures of resources.Fil: Ovando León, Gabriel. Universidad de Santiago de Chile; ChileFil: Veas Castillo, Luis. Universidad de Santiago de Chile; ChileFil: Marín, Mauricio. Universidad de Santiago de Chile; ChileFil: Gil Costa, Graciela Verónica. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Luis; ArgentinaSpring Simulation ConferenceTucsonEstados UnidosThe Society for Modeling and Simulation Internationa

Atacama Database: a platform of the microbiome of the Atacama Desert

The Atacama Desert is one of the oldest and driest places on Earth. In the last decade, microbial richness and diversity has been acknowledged as an important biological resource of this region. Owing to the value of the microbial diversity apparent in potential biotechnology applications and conservation purposes, it is necessary to catalogue these microbial communities to promote research activities and help to preserve the wide range of ecological niches of the Atacama region. A prototype Atacama Database has been designed and it provides a description of the rich microbial diversity of the Atacama Desert, and helps to visualise available literature resources. Data has been collected, curated, and organised into several categories to generate a single record for each organism in the database that covers classification, isolation metadata, morphology, physiology, genome and metabolism information. The current version of Atacama Database contains 2302 microorganisms and includes cultured and uncultured organisms retrieved from different environments within the desert between 1984 and 2016. These organisms are distributed in bacterial, archaeal or eukaryotic domains, along with those that are unclassified taxonomically. The initial prototype of the Atacama Database includes a basic search and taxonomic and advanced search tools to allow identification and comparison of microbial populations, and space distribution within this biome. A geolocation search was implemented to visualise the microbial diversity of the ecological niches defined by sectors and extract general information of the sampling sites. This effort will aid understanding of the microbial ecology of the desert, microbial population dynamics, seasonal behaviour, impact of climate change over time, and reveal further biotechnological applications of these microorganisms.Comisión Nacional de Investigación Cientifica y Tecnológica FB000

Acceso, democracia y comunidades virtuales : apropiación de tecnologías digitales desde el Cono Sur

Es tiempo de empezar a desarrollar tecnologías alternativas que se basen en otros modelos de negocios, en la resolución de otras necesidades, que se configuren con otros procesos, como la construcción colectiva de algoritmos, que sean procesos transparentes y abiertos, que tengan principios comunitarios de manejo de datos. Una tecnología construida por las comunidades y poblaciones que hasta ahora han sido etiquetadas como las grandes consumidoras y que nuestro grupo propone que tengan el derecho de diseñar, definir y proponer la tecnología que requieren y que quieren. Especialmente nos referimos a las mujeres, las poblaciones indígenas, las poblaciones migrantes, fronterizas, costeras, rurales, entre otros. Partimos del principio de que en estos momentos históricos en que vivimos en una sociedad digital, es un derecho humano fundamental que todo grupo social diseñe y construya la tecnología que necesita. Además, estamos convencidos y convencidas de que pueden/podemos hacerlo. Del Pronunciamiento conjunto del Grupo de Trabajo CLACSO Apropiación de Tecnologías Digitales e interseccionalidades y RIAT