Factors in human recognition of timbre lexicons generated by data clustering

Since the development of sound recording technologies, the palette of sound timbres available for music creation was extended way beyond traditional musical instruments. The organization and categorization of timbre has been a common endeavor. The availability of large databases of sound clips provides an opportunity for obtaining datadriven timbre categorizations via content-based clustering. In this article we describe an experiment aimed at understanding what factors influence the process of learning a given clustering of sound samples. We clustered a large database of short sound clips, and analyzed the success of participants in assigning sounds to the “correct” clusters after listening to a few examples of each. The results of the experiment suggest a number of relevant factors related both to the strategies followed by users and to the quality measures of the clustering solution, which can guide the design of creative applications based on audio clip clustering

Dynamic energy budget approach to evaluate antibiotic effects on biofilms

Quantifying the action of antibiotics on biofilms is essential to devise therapies against chronic infections. Biofilms are bacterial communities attached to moist surfaces, sheltered from external aggressions by a polymeric matrix. Coupling a dynamic energy budget based description of cell metabolism to surrounding concentration fields, we are able to approximate survival curves measured for different antibiotics. We reproduce numerically stratified distributions of cell types within the biofilm and introduce ways to incorporate different resistance mechanisms. Qualitative predictions follow that are in agreement with experimental observations, such as higher survival rates of cells close to the substratum when employing antibiotics targeting active cells or enhanced polymer production when antibiotics are administered. The current computational model enables validation and hypothesis testing when developing therapies.Comment: to appear in Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulatio

The impact of agro-biodiversity and eco-system services in development or A new vision for a just, sustainable and productive agriculture

In this presentation I challenge the assumption that increasing yields should be a priority under all circumstances. Today we produce enough food to feed the world but still there are 1 billion people that are hungry. The problem is not that there isn’t enough food but the poor people don’t have access to that food. Then I examine the relationship between biodiversity and agriculture and the idea that biodiversity provides ecosystem services. I describe an example showing that complex ecological interaction result in the control of insect pests. Then I discuss the debate between two paradigms regarding agriculture and conservation of biodiverisy: separation (land sparing) versus integration (land sharing), and argue that the separation paradigm is flawed. I finish with a discussion of what I perceived is needed to solve the biodiversity and food crises in the world: a focus on small-scale agroecological farms with strong social and ecological relationships