Search results for " computing"
showing 10 items of 2075 documents
Mapreduce in computational biology - A synopsis
2017
In the past 20 years, the Life Sciences have witnessed a paradigm shift in the way research is performed. Indeed, the computational part of biological and clinical studies has become central or is becoming so. Correspondingly, the amount of data that one needs to process, compare and analyze, has experienced an exponential growth. As a consequence, High Performance Computing (HPC, for short) is being used intensively, in particular in terms of multi-core architectures. However, recently and thanks to the advances in the processing of other scientific and commercial data, Distributed Computing is also being considered for Bioinformatics applications. In particular, the MapReduce paradigm, to…
Mapreduce in computational biology via hadoop and spark
2017
Bioinformatics has a long history of software solutions developed on multi-core computing systems for solving computational intensive problems. This option suffer from some issues solvable by shifting to Distributed Systems. In particular, the MapReduce computing paradigm, and its implementations, Hadoop and Spark, is becoming increasingly popular in the Bioinformatics field because it allows for virtual-unlimited horizontal scalability while being easy-to-use. Here we provide a qualitative evaluation of some of the most significant MapReduce bioinformatics applications. We also focus on one of these applications to show the importance of correctly engineering an application to fully exploi…
Spin qubits with electrically gated polyoxometalate molecules
2007
Spin qubits offer one of the most promising routes to the implementation of quantum computers. Very recent results in semiconductor quantum dots show that electrically-controlled gating schemes are particularly well-suited for the realization of a universal set of quantum logical gates. Scalability to a larger number of qubits, however, remains an issue for such semiconductor quantum dots. In contrast, a chemical bottom-up approach allows one to produce identical units in which localized spins represent the qubits. Molecular magnetism has produced a wide range of systems with tailored properties, but molecules permitting electrical gating have been lacking. Here we propose to use the polyox…
EVpedia: a community web portal for extracellular vesicles research
2014
Abstract Motivation: Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are spherical bilayered proteolipids, harboring various bioactive molecules. Due to the complexity of the vesicular nomenclatures and components, online searches for EV-related publications and vesicular components are currently challenging. Results: We present an improved version of EVpedia, a public database for EVs research. This community web portal contains a database of publications and vesicular components, identification of orthologous vesicular components, bioinformatic tools and a personalized function. EVpedia includes 6879 publications, 172 080 vesicular components from 263 high-throughput datasets, and has been accessed more tha…
A multimodal retina-iris biometric system using the Levenshtein distance for spatial feature comparison
2020
Abstract The recent developments of information technologies, and the consequent need for access to distributed services and resources, require robust and reliable authentication systems. Biometric systems can guarantee high levels of security and multimodal techniques, which combine two or more biometric traits, warranting constraints that are more stringent during the access phases. This work proposes a novel multimodal biometric system based on iris and retina combination in the spatial domain. The proposed solution follows the alignment and recognition approach commonly adopted in computational linguistics and bioinformatics; in particular, features are extracted separately for iris and…
Quantitative comparison of motion history image variants for video-based depression assessment
2017
Abstract Depression is the most prevalent mood disorder and a leading cause of disability worldwide. Automated video-based analyses may afford objective measures to support clinical judgments. In the present paper, categorical depression assessment is addressed by proposing a novel variant of the Motion History Image (MHI) which considers Gabor-inhibited filtered data instead of the original image. Classification results obtained with this method on the AVEC’14 dataset are compared to those derived using (a) an earlier MHI variant, the Landmark Motion History Image (LMHI), and (b) the original MHI. The different motion representations were tested in several combinations of appearance-based …
Iterative sparse matrix-vector multiplication for accelerating the block Wiedemann algorithm over GF(2) on multi-graphics processing unit systems
2012
SUMMARY The block Wiedemann (BW) algorithm is frequently used to solve sparse linear systems over GF(2). Iterative sparse matrix–vector multiplication is the most time-consuming operation. The necessity to accelerate this step is motivated by the application of BW to very large matrices used in the linear algebra step of the number field sieve (NFS) for integer factorization. In this paper, we derive an efficient CUDA implementation of this operation by using a newly designed hybrid sparse matrix format. This leads to speedups between 4 and 8 on a single graphics processing unit (GPU) for a number of tested NFS matrices compared with an optimized multicore implementation. We further present…
Ancillary Services in the Energy Blockchain for Microgrids
2019
The energy blockchain is a distributed Internet protocol for energy transactions between nodes of a power system. Recent applications of the energy blockchain in microgrids only consider the energy transactions between peers without considering the technical issues that can arise, especially when the system is islanded. One contribution of the paper is, thus, to depict a comprehensive framework of the technical and economic management of microgrids in the blockchain era, considering, for the first time, the provision of ancillary services and, in particular, of the voltage regulation service. When more PV nodes are operating in the grid, large reactive power flows may appear in the branches…
On the design of pervasive computing applications based on Bluetooth and a P2P concept
2006
As an example of implementing the pervasive computing, we developed an application framework to deploy an easy, spontaneous, and infrastructureless network. We selected the Bluetooth technology with the peer-to-peer (P2P) concept to develop an experimental application which enables peers to exchange their resources. Overall network architecture and the prototype application are presented. We selected a small test-bed and simulation to evaluate the overall performance and system behaviour. We measured and present our findings in term of the duration of inquiry procedure and the throughput, according to various experimental parameters such as physical distance between nodes and their speeds.
Three Step Bluetooth Positioning
2005
This paper discusses a three step procedure to perform high definition positioning by the use of low cost Bluetooth devices. The three steps are: Sampling, Deployment, and Real Time Positioning. A genetic algorithm is discussed for deployment optimization and a neural network for real time positioning. A case study, along with experiments and results, are finally discussed dealing with a castle in Sicily where many trials were carried out to the end of arranging a positioning system for context aware service provision to visitors.