Social capacity building in rural Aymara women organizations in Puno, Peru.

Social capacity building has been considered in the last decades an important element of rural development projects, as it helps organizations and communities to better use their resources, design and manage projects locally and improve their living standards. Social capacity building has been related to the development of certain skills and to the concept of leadership development. Social capacity building and leadership development under a social learning approach have guided a rural development project with an Aymara women organization in Puno, Peru, where around 400 women artisans are trying to develop a business organization to improve their lives and their communities. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies have been applied to assess improvements in capacities and leadership. Results show that the technical aspects are the first to be developed but that group process skills and contextual skills take longer and are crucial to the success of the projects.

Implementing the weakest failure detector for solving consensus

The concept of unreliable failure detector was introduced by Chandra and Toueg as a mechanism that provides information about process failures. This mechanism has been used to solve several agreement problems, such as the consensus problem. In this paper, algorithms that implement failure detectors in partially synchronous systems are presented. First two simple algorithms of the weakest class to solve the consensus problem, namely the Eventually Strong class (⋄S), are presented. While the first algorithm is wait-free, the second algorithm is f-resilient, where f is a known upper bound on the number of faulty processes. Both algorithms guarantee that, eventually, all the correct processes agree permanently on a common correct process, i.e. they also implement a failure detector of the class Omega (Ω). They are also shown to be optimal in terms of the number of communication links used forever. Additionally, a wait-free algorithm that implements a failure detector of the Eventually Perfect class (⋄P) is presented. This algorithm is shown to be optimal in terms of the number of bidirectional links used forever.

Building functional surfaces for biosensors development

Polyelectrolyte multilayers (PEM) built by layer-by-layer technique have been extensively studied over the last years, resulting in a wide variety of current and potential applications. This technique can be used to construct thin films with different functionalities, or to functionalize surfaces with substantial different properties of those of the underlying substrates. The multilayering process is achieved by the alternate adsorption of oppositely charged polyelectrolytes. In this work we get advantage of the protein resistant property of the Poly (l-lysine)-graft-(polyethyleneglycol) to create protein patterns. Proteins can be immobilized on a surface by unspecific physical adsorption, covalent binding or through specific interactions. The first protein used in this work was laccase, a copper-containing redox enzyme that catalyse the oxidation of a broad range of polyphenols and aromatic substrates, coupled to the reduction of O2 to H2O without need of cofactors. Applications of laccases have been reported in food, pulp, paper, and textile industry, and also in biosensor development. Some uses require the immobilization of the enzyme on solid supports by adsorption, covalent attachment, entrapment, etc, on several substrates. Especially for biosensor development, highly active, stable and reproducible immobilization of laccase is required.

Construction cost and energy consumption resulting from energy retrofitting in an apartment building in Madrid (Spain).

This theoretical study analyzes the relation between the measures necessesary for the energy retrofitting of a residential building constructed in Madrid, their cost and the improvement of the energy rating of the dwellings. The aim of this work is to establish an evaluation methodology that allows developers and architects to obtain conclusions and orientates therm in the decisioin-making process. It will allow finding the most suitable cost-effective solutions in each case. This paper describes the methodology and the findings obtained. Energy retrofitting and the improvement of the energy behaviour of the building depend on the selection of the retrofitting solutions and also on the investment. In this case study to achieve the best energy rates it is necessary to improve the thermal performance of the envelope as well as the energy systems. Energy retrofitting means an increase in property value but it can't only be considered in economic terms. It is necessary to take into account unquantifiable aspects as increased comfort, improved sound insulation, livability, health, or the elimination of energy poverty situations.

Building lean thinking in a telecom software development organization: strengths and challenges.

The potential shown by Lean in different domains has aroused interest in the software industry. However, it remains unclear how Lean can be effectively applied in a domain such as software development that is fundamentally different from manufacturing. This study explores how Lean principles are implemented in software development companies and the challenges that arise when applying Lean Software Development. For that, a case study was conducted at Ericsson R&D Finland, which successfully adopted Scrum in 2009 and subsequently started a comprehensible transition to Lean in 2010. Focus groups were conducted with company representatives to help devise a questionnaire supporting the creation of a Lean mindset in the company (Team Amplifier). Afterwards, the questionnaire was used in 16 teams based in Finland, Hungary and China to evaluate the status of the transformation. By using Lean thinking, Ericsson R&D Finland has made important improvements to the quality of its products, customer satisfaction and transparency within the organization. Moreover, build times have been reduced over ten times and the number of commits per day has increased roughly five times.The study makes two main contributions to research. First, the main factors that have enabled Ericsson R&D?s achievements are analysed. Elements such as ?network of product owners?, ?continuous integration?, ?work in progress limits? and ?communities of practice? have been identified as being of fundamental importance. Second, three categories of challenges in using Lean Software Development were identified: ?achieving flow?, ?transparency? and ?creating a learning culture?

Conceptualización e Infraestructura para la Investigación Experimental en Ingeniería del Software

Antecedentes: Esta investigación se enmarca principalmente en la replicación y secundariamente en la síntesis de experimentos en Ingeniería de Software (IS). Para poder replicar, es necesario disponer de todos los detalles del experimento original. Sin embargo, la descripción de los experimentos es habitualmente incompleta debido a la existencia de conocimiento tácito y a la existencia de otros problemas tales como: La carencia de un formato estándar de reporte, la inexistencia de herramientas que den soporte a la generación de reportes experimentales, etc. Esto provoca que no se pueda reproducir fielmente el experimento original. Esta problemática limita considerablemente la capacidad de los experimentadores para llevar a cabo replicaciones y por ende síntesis de experimentos. Objetivo: La investigación tiene como objetivo formalizar el proceso experimental en IS, de modo que facilite la comunicación de información entre experimentadores. Contexto: El presente trabajo de tesis doctoral ha sido desarrollado en el seno del Grupo de Investigación en Ingeniería del Software Empírica (GrISE) perteneciente a la Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Informáticos (ETSIINF) de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), como parte del proyecto TIN2011-23216 denominado “Tecnologías para la Replicación y Síntesis de Experimentos en Ingeniería de Software”, el cual es financiado por el Gobierno de España. El grupo GrISE cumple a la perfección con los requisitos necesarios (familia de experimentos establecida, con al menos tres líneas experimentales y una amplia experiencia en replicaciones (16 replicaciones hasta 2011 en la línea de técnicas de pruebas de software)) y ofrece las condiciones para que la investigación se lleve a cabo de la mejor manera, como por ejemplo, el acceso total a su información. Método de Investigación: Para cumplir este objetivo se opta por Action Research (AR) como el método de investigación más adecuado a las características de la investigación, para obtener resultados a través de aproximaciones sucesivas que abordan los problemas concretos de comunicación entre experimentadores. Resultados: Se formalizó el modelo conceptual del ciclo experimental desde la perspectiva de los 3 roles principales que representan los experimentadores en el proceso experimental, siendo estos: Gestor de la Investigación (GI), Gestor del Experimento (GE) y Experimentador Senior (ES). Por otra parte, se formalizó el modelo del ciclo experimental, a través de: Un workflow del ciclo y un diagrama de procesos. Paralelamente a la formalización del proceso experimental en IS, se desarrolló ISRE (de las siglas en inglés Infrastructure for Sharing and Replicating Experiments), una prueba de concepto de entorno de soporte a la experimentación en IS. Finalmente, se plantearon guías para el desarrollo de entornos de soporte a la experimentación en IS, en base al estudio de las características principales y comunes de los modelos de las herramientas de soporte a la experimentación en distintas disciplinas experimentales. Conclusiones: La principal contribución de la investigación esta representada por la formalización del proceso experimental en IS. Los modelos que representan la formalización del ciclo experimental, así como la herramienta ISRE, construida a modo de evaluación de los modelos, fueron encontrados satisfactorios por los experimentadores del GrISE. Para consolidar la validez de la formalización, consideramos que este estudio debería ser replicado en otros grupos de investigación representativos en la comunidad de la IS experimental. Futuras Líneas de Investigación: El cumplimiento de los objetivos, de la mano con los hallazgos alcanzados, han dado paso a nuevas líneas de investigación, las cuales son las siguientes: (1) Considerar la construcción de un mecanismo para facilitar el proceso de hacer explícito el conocimiento tácito de los experimentadores por si mismos de forma colaborativa y basados en el debate y el consenso , (2) Continuar la investigación empírica en el mismo grupo de investigación hasta cubrir completamente el ciclo experimental (por ejemplo: experimentos nuevos, síntesis de resultados, etc.), (3) Replicar el proceso de investigación en otros grupos de investigación en ISE, y (4) Renovar la tecnología de la prueba de concepto, tal que responda a las restricciones y necesidades de un entorno real de investigación. ABSTRACT Background: This research addresses first and foremost the replication and also the synthesis of software engineering (SE) experiments. Replication is impossible without access to all the details of the original experiment. But the description of experiments is usually incomplete because knowledge is tacit, there is no standard reporting format or there are hardly any tools to support the generation of experimental reports, etc. This means that the original experiment cannot be reproduced exactly. These issues place considerable constraints on experimenters’ options for carrying out replications and ultimately synthesizing experiments. Aim: The aim of the research is to formalize the SE experimental process in order to facilitate information communication among experimenters. Context: This PhD research was developed within the empirical software engineering research group (GrISE) at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)’s School of Computer Engineering (ETSIINF) as part of project TIN2011-23216 entitled “Technologies for Software Engineering Experiment Replication and Synthesis”, which was funded by the Spanish Government. The GrISE research group fulfils all the requirements (established family of experiments with at least three experimental lines and lengthy replication experience (16 replications prior to 2011 in the software testing techniques line)) and provides favourable conditions for the research to be conducted in the best possible way, like, for example, full access to information. Research Method: We opted for action research (AR) as the research method best suited to the characteristics of the investigation. Results were generated successive rounds of AR addressing specific communication problems among experimenters. Results: The conceptual model of the experimental cycle was formalized from the viewpoint of three key roles representing experimenters in the experimental process. They were: research manager, experiment manager and senior experimenter. The model of the experimental cycle was formalized by means of a workflow and a process diagram. In tandem with the formalization of the SE experimental process, infrastructure for sharing and replicating experiments (ISRE) was developed. ISRE is a proof of concept of a SE experimentation support environment. Finally, guidelines for developing SE experimentation support environments were designed based on the study of the key features that the models of experimentation support tools for different experimental disciplines had in common. Conclusions: The key contribution of this research is the formalization of the SE experimental process. GrISE experimenters were satisfied with both the models representing the formalization of the experimental cycle and the ISRE tool built in order to evaluate the models. In order to further validate the formalization, this study should be replicated at other research groups representative of the experimental SE community. Future Research Lines: The achievement of the aims and the resulting findings have led to new research lines, which are as follows: (1) assess the feasibility of building a mechanism to help experimenters collaboratively specify tacit knowledge based on debate and consensus, (2) continue empirical research at the same research group in order to cover the remainder of the experimental cycle (for example, new experiments, results synthesis, etc.), (3) replicate the research process at other ESE research groups, and (4) update the tools of the proof of concept in order to meet the constraints and needs of a real research environment.

The role of rehabilitation of building in the urban integration, social cohesion and environmental responsibility

In the framework ofthe National Research Plan2008-2011, our research poses estrategy for the design and evaluation of plans and programmes of urban integrated regeneration. The objective is to develop a study on the role of rehabilitation of buildings in concepts like urban integration, social cohesion and environmental responsibility. The research proposes a methodological tool for evaluating urban regeneration processes from a holistic perspective that can serve as a guide for governments and technical teams to address intervention in consolidated urban areas with physical and socio-economic problems. The development of the tool has inevitably led to delve into different areas where you can intervene but has not lost sight of the complex interplay of factors involved in the process.It is an open source tool to visualize Urban Integrated Rehabilitation processes.

Building resilience to water scarcity in Southern Spain: A case study of rice farming in Doñana protected wetlands

Agricultural water management needs to evolve in view of increased water scarcity, especially when farming and natural protected areas are closely linked. In the study site of Don?ana (southern Spain), water is shared by rice producers and a world heritage biodiversity ecosystem. Our aim is to contribute to defining adaptation strategies that may build resilience to increasing water scarcity and minimize water conflicts among agricultural and natural systems. The analytical framework links a participatory process with quantitative methods to prioritize the adaptation options. Bottom-up proposed adaptation measures are evaluated by a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) that includes both socioeconomic criteria and criteria of the ecosystem services affected by the adaptation options. Criteria weights are estimated by three different methods?analytic hierarchy process, Likert scale and equal weights?that are then compared. Finally, scores from an MCA are input into an optimization model used to determine the optimal land-use distribution in order to maximize utility and land-use diversification according to different scenarios of funds and water availability. While our results show a spectrum of perceptions of priorities among stakeholders, there is one overriding theme that is to define a way to restore part of the rice fields to natural wetlands. These results hold true under the current climate scenario and evenmore so under an increased water scarcity scenario.

Greenfield shopping center development. The integration between environmental features, building design and investment analysis at the decision making stage

The Shopping centre is a long term investment in which Greenfield development decisions are often taken based on risks analysis regarding construction costs, location, competition, market and an expected DCF. Furthermore, integration between the building design, project planning, operational costs and investment analysis is not entirely considered by the investor at the decision making stage. The absence of such information tends to produce certain negative impacts on the future running costs and annual maintenance of the building, especially on energy demand and other occupancy expenses paid by the tenants to the landlord. From the investor´s point of view, this blind spot in strategy development will possibly decrease their profit margin as changes in the occupancy expenses[ ] have a direct outcome on the profit margin. In order to try to reduce some higher operating cost components such as energy use and other utility savings as well as their CO2 emissions, quite a few income properties worldwide have some type of environmental label such as BREEAM and LEED. The drawback identified in this labelling is that usually the investments required to get an ecolabel are high and the investor finds no direct evidence that it increases market value. However there is research on certified commercial properties (especially offices) that shows better performance in terms of occupancy rate and rental cost (Warren-Myers, 2012). Additionally, Sayce (2013) says that the certification only provides a quick reference point i.e. the lack of a certificate does not indicate that a building is not sustainable or efficient. Based on the issues described above, this research compares important components of the development stages such as investments costs, concept/ strategy development as well as the current investor income and property value. The subjects for this analysis are a shopping centre designed with passive cooling/bioclimatic strategies evaluated at the decision making stage, a certified regional shopping centre and a non-certified standard regional shopping centre. Moreover, the proposal intends to provide decision makers with some tools for linking green design features to the investment analysis in order to optimize the decision making process when looking into cost savings and design quality.

Determination of the influence of specific building regulations in smart buildings

The automation of domestic services began to be implemented in buildings since the late nineteenth century, and today we are used to terms like ‘intelligent buildings’, ‘digital home’ or ‘domotic buildings’. These concepts tell us about constructions which integrate new technologies in order to improve comfort, optimize energy consumption or enhance the security of users. In conjunction, building regulations have been updated to suit the needs of society and to regulate these new facilities in such structures. However, we are not always sure about how far, from the quantitative or qualitative point of view, legislation should regulate certain aspects of the building activity. Consequently, content analysis is adopted in this research to determine the influence of building regulations in the implementation of new technologies in the construction process. This study includes the analysis of different European regulations, the collection and documentation of such guidelines that have been established and a study of the impact that all of these have had in the way we start thinking an architectural project. The achievements of the research could be explained in terms of the regulatory requirements that must be taken into account in order to achieve a successful implementation of a home automation system, and the key finding has been the confirmation of how the design of smart buildings may be promoted through specific regulatory requirements while other factors, such as the global economic situation, do not seem to affect directly the rate of penetration of home automation in construction.

Is building renovation truly sustainable? The need for applying a multi-criteria assessment through life cycle approach

The aim of the present research is to characterise the international scene in the field of building refurbishment, by thoroughly reviewing the literature relating to building renovation and systematising the results according to the different aspects considered by the authors. Even though there is certain consensus with respect to the criteria for the selection of energy efficiency measures, the assessment criteria differ broadly and widely. The present work highlights the lack of consensus on the assessment criteria and the need of harmonization. A holistic view is required in order to identify the most sustainable strategies in each particular case, considering social, environmental and economic impacts from a life cycle perspective.

Building an ontology catalogue for smart cities

Apart from providing semantics and reasoning power to data, ontologies enable and facilitate interoperability across heterogeneous systems or environments. A good practice when developing ontologies is to reuse as much knowledge as possible in order to increase interoperability by reducing heterogeneity across models and to reduce development effort. Ontology registries, indexes and catalogues facilitate the task of finding, exploring and reusing ontologies by collecting them from different sources. This paper presents an ontology catalogue for the smart cities and related domains. This catalogue is based on curated metadata and incorporates ontology evaluation features. Such catalogue represents the first approach within this community and it would be highly useful for new ontology developments or for describing and annotating existing ontologies.

Eventual election of multiple leaders for solving consensus in anonymous systems

In classical distributed systems, each process has a unique identity. Today, new distributed systems have emerged where a unique identity is not always possible to be assigned to each process. For example, in many sensor networks a unique identity is not possible to be included in each device due to its small storage capacity, reduced computational power, or the huge number of devices to be identified. In these cases, we have to work with anonymous distributed systems where processes cannot be identified. Consensus cannot be solved in classical and anonymous asynchronous distributed systems where processes can crash. To bypass this impossibility result, failure detectors are added to these systems. It is known that ? is the weakest failure detector class for solving consensus in classical asynchronous systems when amajority of processes never crashes. Although A? was introduced as an anonymous version of ?, to find the weakest failure detector in anonymous systems to solve consensus when amajority of processes never crashes is nowadays an open question. Furthermore, A? has the important drawback that it is not implementable. Very recently, A? has been introduced as a counterpart of ? for anonymous systems. In this paper, we show that the A? failure detector class is strictly weaker than A? (i.e., A? provides less information about process crashes than A?). We also present in this paper the first implementation of A? (hence, we also show that A? is implementable), and, finally, we include the first implementation of consensus in anonymous asynchronous systems augmented with A? and where a majority of processes does not crash.

Nagele, a green building without a roof

The paper shows the design process of Nagele, a Dutch modernist agrarian settlement designed during the Post-Second World War period by the internationally recognized group of architects De 8 en Opbouw: Rietveld, Van Eesteren, Merkelbach, van Eyck, Bakema, Stam, Ruys, etc. It is located in the Noordoostpolder (NOP), in the Flevoland province, which was entirely reclaimed from the sea. The country planning of the Noodoostpolder reveals a high rationalization in the disposal of roads, canals, cities, agrarian land and forests, which can be an inspiration for the cities of today. The configurational elements of Nagele must be understood in terms of their relationship to the overall system of the polder. Important territorial principles in structure, form and landscape can be seen in the project of Nagele. This relationship is an additional example of the continuing transformation that the entire length and breadth of The Netherlands in subjected to. The research developed to date reveals a plan which shows the evolution of functionalistic paradigm at the CIAM postwar congresses. The particular case of Nagele points to the incorporation of human scale, green design and social co-existence. The source of these theories mainly came from Aldo van Eyck, who played an important role during the second phase of design. The research will be developed analyzing his drawings and texts and will show the way his theories appear in the project. Can Nagele be a materialization of Van Eyck¿s ideas? Nagele constitutes one of the most outstanding contributions to modern urban planning as far as both urbanism and landscape, are at the service of human well-being. Not only were urban independently designed parts, but their relationships also formed a perfect urban whole.

Bayesian network modeling of the consensus between experts: an application to neuron classification

Neuronal morphology is hugely variable across brain regions and species, and their classification strategies are a matter of intense debate in neuroscience. GABAergic cortical interneurons have been a challenge because it is difficult to find a set of morphological properties which clearly define neuronal types. A group of 48 neuroscience experts around the world were asked to classify a set of 320 cortical GABAergic interneurons according to the main features of their three-dimensional morphological reconstructions. A methodology for building a model which captures the opinions of all the experts was proposed. First, one Bayesian network was learned for each expert, and we proposed an algorithm for clustering Bayesian networks corresponding to experts with similar behaviors. Then, a Bayesian network which represents the opinions of each group of experts was induced. Finally, a consensus Bayesian multinet which models the opinions of the whole group of experts was built. A thorough analysis of the consensus model identified different behaviors between the experts when classifying the interneurons in the experiment. A set of characterizing morphological traits for the neuronal types was defined by performing inference in the Bayesian multinet. These findings were used to validate the model and to gain some insights into neuron morphology.