Desenvolupament d'un component de tolerància a fallades per a un sistema d'agents mòbils sobre plataformes lleugeres

A mesura que la complexitat de les tasques dels agents mòbils va creixent, és més important que aquestes no perdin el treball realitzat. Hem de saber en tot moment que la execució s’està desenvolupant favorablement. Aquest projecte tracta d’explicar el procés d’elaboració d’un component de tolerància a fallades des de la seva idea inicial fins a la seva implementació. Analitzarem la situació i dissenyarem una solució. Procurarem que el nostre component emmascari la fallada d’un agent, detectant-la i posteriorment recuperant l’execució des d’on s’ha interromput. Tot això procurant seguir la metodologia de disseny d’agents mòbils per a plataformes lleugeres.

JMForm, un component per Joomla per a la gestió de formularis

JMForm és una aplicació web amb un espai per la creació dels informes que els usuaris podran omplir, i un altre on es podran veure els resultats en forma tabular i gràfica. D'aquesta manera es facilita el treball en grup, tant de les persones que administraran els formularis, com dels usuaris. Aquesta aplicació serà un component que es podrà utilitzar en un entorn Joomla! 1.5.

New insights on river water chemistry by using non-centred simplicial principal component analysis: a case study

The use of perturbation and power transformation operations permits the investigation of linear processes in the simplex as in a vectorial space. When the investigated geochemical processes can be constrained by the use of well-known starting point, the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix of a non-centred principalcomponent analysis allow to model compositional changes compared with a reference point.The results obtained for the chemistry of water collected in River Arno (central-northern Italy) have open new perspectives for considering relative changes of the analysed variables and to hypothesise the relative effect of different acting physical-chemical processes, thus posing the basis for a quantitative modelling

Variació segons edat i sexe del component força de l'escala de Constant de valoració de la funció de l’espatlla

Un dels instruments més utilitzats per a mesurar la funció de l’espatlla és el conegut com a Constant Score on una quarta part del valor total de la valoració funcional de l’espatlla correspon a la força d’aquesta regió anatòmica. En el disseny original del Constant Score no es tingueren en compte les possibles variacions dels valors normals de força en funció de l’edat o del sexe. Aquesta variació no ha estat mai correctament establerta. Aquest treball pretén establir l’existència de diferències en la força de l’espatlla entre diferents grups d’edat i entre sexes.

Desenvolupament d’un nou component de gestió de clients i facturació d’una immobiliària per Joomla

Disseny i implementació d’ una aplicació per incorporar noves funcionalitats a la gestió de propietats immobles. En els últims anys, el lloguer d’apartaments i cases ha augmentat el seu volum de reserves a través d’Internet, i és per això, que moltes empreses del sector han dedicat molts esforços en potenciar aquest canal i fer tots els tràmits a través de la xarxa. L’hivern del 2009 l’empresa a qui va dirigida aquest projecte, va decidir fer aquest salt i irrompre a Internet. En aquell moment es van plantejar diferents opcions per a la gestió d’immobles: fer una aplicació totalment nova i a mida, comprar una aplicació ja feta a empreses especialitzades o adaptar una aplicació gratuïta a les necessitats de l’empresa. Analitzats amb detall els tres casos, es va decidir implementar la tercera opció ja que satisfeia les necessitats de l’empresa i amb modificacions o adaptacions aconseguiria el resultat esperat. L’aplicació gratuïta és el “com-property” i la seva posada en marxa va ser en dos mesos

Understanding the two-component sensing System of virulent bacteria

Report for the scientific sojourn carried out at the l’ Institute for Computational Molecular Science of the Temple University, United States, from 2010 to 2012. Two-component systems (TCS) are used by pathogenic bacteria to sense the environment within a host and activate mechanisms related to virulence and antimicrobial resistance. A prototypical example is the PhoQ/PhoP system, which is the major regulator of virulence in Salmonella. Hence, PhoQ is an attractive target for the design of new antibiotics against foodborne diseases. Inhibition of the PhoQ-mediated bacterial virulence does not result in growth inhibition, presenting less selective pressure for the generation of antibiotic resistance. Moreover, PhoQ is a histidine kinase (HK) and it is absent in animals. Nevertheless, the design of satisfactory HK inhibitors has been proven to be a challenge. To compete with the intracellular ATP concentrations, the affinity of a HK inhibidor must be in the micromolar-nanomolar range, whereas the current lead compounds have at best millimolar affinities. Moreover, the drug selectivity depends on the conformation of a highly variable loop, referred to as the “ATP-lid, which is difficult to study by X-Ray crystallography due to its flexibility. I have investigated the binding of different HK inhibitors to PhoQ. In particular, all-atom molecular dynamics simulations have been combined with enhanced sampling techniques in order to provide structural and dynamic information of the conformation of the ATP-lid. Transient interactions between these drugs and the ATP-lid have been identified and the free energy of the different binding modes has been estimated. The results obtained pinpoint the importance of protein flexibility in the HK-inhibitor binding, and constitute a first step in developing more potent and selective drugs. The computational resources of the hosting institution as well as the experience of the members of the group in drug binding and free energy methods have been crucial to carry out this work.

A genomic analysis identifies a novel component in the genetic structure of sub-Saharan African populations

Studies of large sets of SNP data have proven to be a powerful tool in the analysis of the genetic structure of human populations. In this work, we analyze genotyping data for 2,841 SNPs in 12 Sub-Saharan African populations, including a previously unsampled region of south-eastern Africa (Mozambique). We show that robust results in a world-wide perspective can be obtained when analyzing only 1,000 SNPs. Our main results both confirm the results of previous studies, and show new and interesting features in Sub-Saharan African genetic complexity. There is a strong differentiation of Nilo-Saharans, much beyond what would be expected by geography. Hunter-gatherer populations (Khoisan and Pygmies) show a clear distinctiveness with very intrinsic Pygmy (and not only Khoisan) genetic features. Populations of the West Africa present an unexpected similarity among them, possibly the result of a population expansion. Finally, we find a strong differentiation of the south-eastern Bantu population from Mozambique, which suggests an assimilation of a pre-Bantu substrate by Bantu speakers in the region.

Cardiac injuries in blunt chest trauma

Blunt chest traumas are a clinical challenge, both for diagnosis and treatment. The use ofCardiovascular Magnetic Resonance can play a major role in this setting. We present two cases: a12-year-old boy and 45-year-old man. Late gadolinium enhancement imaging enabled visualizationof myocardial damage resulting from the trauma.

Bilinear models for spatio-temporal point distribution analysis: application to extrapolation of left ventricular, biventricular and whole heart cardiac dynamics

In this work we describe the usage of bilinear statistical models as a means of factoring the shape variability into two components attributed to inter-subject variation and to the intrinsic dynamics of the human heart. We show that it is feasible to reconstruct the shape of the heart at discrete points in the cardiac cycle. Provided we are given a small number of shape instances representing the same heart atdifferent points in the same cycle, we can use the bilinearmodel to establish this. Using a temporal and a spatial alignment step in the preprocessing of the shapes, around half of the reconstruction errors were on the order of the axial image resolution of 2 mm, and over 90% was within 3.5 mm. From this, weconclude that the dynamics were indeed separated from theinter-subject variability in our dataset.

Morphodynamic analysis of cerebral aneurysm pulsation from time-resolved rotational angiography

This paper presents a technique to estimate and model patient-specific pulsatility of cerebral aneurysms over onecardiac cycle, using 3D rotational X-ray angiography (3DRA) acquisitions. Aneurysm pulsation is modeled as a time varying-spline tensor field representing the deformation applied to a reference volume image, thus producing the instantaneousmorphology at each time point in the cardiac cycle. The estimated deformation is obtained by matching multiple simulated projections of the deforming volume to their corresponding original projections. A weighting scheme is introduced to account for the relevance of each original projection for the selected time point. The wide coverage of the projections, together with the weighting scheme, ensures motion consistency in all directions. The technique has been tested on digital and physical phantoms that are realistic and clinically relevant in terms of geometry, pulsation and imaging conditions. Results from digital phantomexperiments demonstrate that the proposed technique is able to recover subvoxel pulsation with an error lower than 10% of the maximum pulsation in most cases. The experiments with the physical phantom allowed demonstrating the feasibility of pulsation estimation as well as identifying different pulsation regions under clinical conditions.

Two component Emden sphere

The theory of a self-gravitating gas sphere is given. The gravitational field is generated by two components, each of which is an independent isothermal gas. Various quantities of interest, such as density profiles, core radii of both components, masses, free-free luminosity, surface brightness, central surface density, and overestimate of central mass density, are given for different values of both parameters which arise naturally (ratio of central densities, ratio of rms velocities). Fundamental changes appear when comparison is made with a theory in which the second component is a 'test component'. Procedures are given for the complete analysis of real astrophysical configurations such as clusters of galaxies or globular clusters.

On-line event detection by recursive dynamic principal component analysis and gas sensor arrays under drift conditions

Leakage detection is an important issue in many chemical sensing applications. Leakage detection hy thresholds suffers from important drawbacks when sensors have serious drifts or they are affected by cross-sensitivities. Here we present an adaptive method based in a Dynamic Principal Component Analysis that models the relationships between the sensors in the may. In normal conditions a certain variance distribution characterizes sensor signals. However, in the presence of a new source of variance the PCA decomposition changes drastically. In order to prevent the influence of sensor drifts the model is adaptive and it is calculated in a recursive manner with minimum computational effort. The behavior of this technique is studied with synthetic signals and with real signals arising by oil vapor leakages in an air compressor. Results clearly demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.

Drift compensation of gas sensor array data by common principal component analysis

A new drift compensation method based on Common Principal Component Analysis (CPCA) is proposed. The drift variance in data is found as the principal components computed by CPCA. This method finds components that are common for all gasses in feature space. The method is compared in classification task with respect to the other approaches published where the drift direction is estimated through a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of a reference gas. The proposed new method ¿ employing no specific reference gas, but information from all gases ¿has shown the same performance as the traditional approach with the best-fitted reference gas. Results are shown with data lasting 7-months including three gases at different concentrations for an array of 17 polymeric sensors.

Bargmann-Wigner method and (6S + 1)-component wave equations

A modified Bargmann-Wigner method is used to derive (6s + 1)-component wave equations. The relation between different forms of these equations is shown.

Anomalous specific-heat jump in a two-component ultracold Fermi gas

The thermodynamic functions of a Fermi gas with spin population imbalance are studied in the temperature-asymmetry plane in the BCS limit. The low-temperature domain is characterized by an anomalous enhancement of the entropy and the specific heat above their values in the unpaired state, decrease of the gap and eventual unpairing phase transition as the temperature is lowered. The unpairing phase transition induces a second jump in the specific heat, which can be measured in calorimetric experiments. While the superfluid is unstable against a supercurrent carrying state, it may sustain a metastable state if cooled adiabatically down from the stable high-temperature domain. In the latter domain the temperature dependence of the gap and related functions is analogous to the predictions of the BCS theory.