Sistemes lidar (radar laser) d'ona contínua i baixa potència per a la detecció i mesura de concentració de gasos amb resolució espacial

The present project has performed the study and development of a new technique for the detection of gases with range resolution. This technique called FMCW-lidar is a technique that evolves from the FMCW-radar technique to be applied to lidar systems. Moreover, it takes advantage of the appearance of spectral absorption lines because of the interaction between light and gases to tune the light wavelength of a laser emitter with one of this spectral lines and then detects the backscattered light and analyzes it in order to obtain gas concentration measurements. The first part of the project consisted in the analysis of the WMS technique which is a technique for the in-situ measurement of gases. A complete theoretical analysis has been performed and some experiments have been carried out in order to test the technique and to validate its application to an FMCW-modulated system for the detection of gases. The second part of the project consisted in the analysis of the lidar FMCW technique for solid target detection and its extension to continuous media. The classical form of this technique has been analyzed for a distributed medium and a filtering effect has been found which prevents the accurate acquisition of the medium response. A modification of the technique has been proposed and a validation via simulations and some experiments has been carried on. After performing these tests, a novel system is proposed to be developed and tested in order to perform the indicated gas detection with range resolution.

Including the workload effect in the parallel program signature

Performance prediction and application behavior modeling have been the subject of exten- sive research that aim to estimate applications performance with an acceptable precision. A novel approach to predict the performance of parallel applications is based in the con- cept of Parallel Application Signatures that consists in extract an application most relevant parts (phases) and the number of times they repeat (weights). Executing these phases in a target machine and multiplying its exeuction time by its weight an estimation of the application total execution time can be made. One of the problems is that the performance of an application depends on the program workload. Every type of workload affects differently how an application performs in a given system and so affects the signature execution time. Since the workloads used in most scientific parallel applications have dimensions and data ranges well known and the behavior of these applications are mostly deterministic, a model of how the programs workload affect its performance can be obtained. We create a new methodology to model how a program’s workload affect the parallel application signature. Using regression analysis we are able to generalize each phase time execution and weight function to predict an application performance in a target system for any type of workload within predefined range. We validate our methodology using a synthetic program, benchmarks applications and well known real scientific applications.

PSyscal: disseny i implementació d'un sistema paral·lel per al calibratge automàtic de models P-Sistema

Es tracta d'un projecte que proposa una aplicació per al calibratge automàtic de models P-sistema. Per a fer-ho primer es farà un estudi sobre els models P-sistema i el procediment seguit pels investigadors per desenvolupar aquest tipus de models. Es desenvoluparà una primera solució sèrie per al problema, i s'analitzaran els seus punts febles. Seguidament es proposarà una versió paral·lela que millori significativament el temps d'execució, tot mantenint una alta eficiència i escalabilitat.

Upgrading or polarization? occupational change in Britain, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, 1990-2008

This paper analyzes the pattern of occupational change in four Western European countries over the last two decades: what kind of jobs have been expanding -- high-paid jobs, low-paid jobs or both? By addressing this issue, we also examine what theoretical account is consistent with the observed pattern of change: skill-biased technical change, skill supply evolution or wage-setting institutions? Our empirical findings show a picture of massive occupational upgrading that closely matches educational expansion. In all four countries, by far the strongest employment growth occurred at the top of the occupational hierarchy, among managers and professionals. Yet in parallel, in Britain and Switzerland, as well as in Germany and Spain after 1996 and 2002 respectively, relative employment declined more strongly in the middling occupations (among clerks and production workers) than at the bottom (among interpersonal service workers). This slightly polarized pattern of occupational upgrading is consistent with the "routinization" hypothesis that technology is a better substitute for average-paid jobs in production and the office that for low-paid jobs in interpersonal services. However, we find large cross-country differences in the employment evolution at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy, among low-paid services workers: sizeable growth in Britain and Spain, but stagnation in Germany and Switzerland. This results points towards the possibility that wage-setting institutions filter the pattern of occupational change.

Parallel scheduling of multiclass M/M/m queues: Approximate and heavy-traffic optimization of achievable performance

We address the problem of scheduling a multiclass $M/M/m$ queue with Bernoulli feedback on $m$ parallel servers to minimize time-average linear holding costs. We analyze the performance of a heuristic priority-index rule, which extends Klimov's optimal solution to the single-server case: servers select preemptively customers with larger Klimov indices. We present closed-form suboptimality bounds (approximate optimality) for Klimov's rule, which imply that its suboptimality gap is uniformly bounded above with respect to (i) external arrival rates, as long as they stay within system capacity;and (ii) the number of servers. It follows that its relativesuboptimality gap vanishes in a heavy-traffic limit, as external arrival rates approach system capacity (heavy-traffic optimality). We obtain simpler expressions for the special no-feedback case, where the heuristic reduces to the classical $c \mu$ rule. Our analysis is based on comparing the expected cost of Klimov's ruleto the value of a strong linear programming (LP) relaxation of the system's region of achievable performance of mean queue lengths. In order to obtain this relaxation, we derive and exploit a new set ofwork decomposition laws for the parallel-server system. We further report on the results of a computational study on the quality of the $c \mu$ rule for parallel scheduling.

Surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionisation time-of-flight mass spectrometry: A tool to predict pork quality

Expression of water soluble proteins of fresh pork Longissimus thoracis from 4 pure breed pigs (Duroc, Large White, Landrace, and Piétrain) was studied to identify candidate protein markers for meat quality. Surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionisation time-of-flight mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF-MS) was used to obtain the soluble protein profiles of Longissimus thoracis muscles. The pure breeds showed differences among the studied meat quality traits (pHu, drip loss, androstenone, marbling, intramuscular fat, texture, and moisture), but no significant differences were detected in sensory analysis. Associations between protein peaks obtained with SELDI-TOF-MS and meat quality traits, mainly water holding capacity, texture and skatole were observed. Of these peaks, a total of 10 peaks from CM10 array and 6 peaks from Q10 array were candidate soluble protein markers for pork loin quality. The developed models explained a limited proportion of the variability, however they point out interesting relationships between protein expression and meat quality

Measuring gait using a ground laser range sensor

This paper describes a mesurement system designed to register the displacement of the legs using a two-dimensional laser range sensor with a scanning plane parallel to the ground and extract gait parameters. In the proposed methodology, the position of the legs is estimated by fitting two circles with the laser points that define their contour and the gait parameters are extracted applying a step-line model to the estimated displacement of the legs to reduce uncertainty in the determination of the stand and swing phase of the gait. Results obtained in a range up to 8 m shows that the systematic error in the location of one static leg is lower than 10 mm with and standard deviation lower than 8 mm; this deviation increases to 11 mm in the case of a moving leg. The proposed measurement system has been applied to estimate the gait parameters of six volunteers in a preliminary walking experiment.

Behavior of propagating and evanescent components in azimuthally polarized non-paraxial fields

The contribution of the propagating and the evanescent waves associated with freely propagating non-paraxial light fields whose transverse component is azimuthally polarized at some plane is investigated. Analytic expressions are derived for describing both the spatial shape and the relative weight of the propagating and the evanescent components integrated over the transverse plane. The analysis is carried out within the framework of the plane-wave angular spectrum approach. These results are used to illustrate the behavior of a kind of donut-like beams with transverse azimuthal polarization at some plane.