Combination of DROOL rules and Protégé knowledge bases in the ONTO-H annotation tool

ONTO-H is a semi-automatic collaborative tool for the semantic annotation of documents, built as a Protégé 3.0 tab plug-in. Among its multiple functionalities aimed at easing the document annotation process, ONTO-H uses a rule-based system to create cascading annotations out from a single drag and drop operation from a part of a document into an already existing concept or instance of the domain ontology being used for annotation. It also gives support to the detection of name conflicts and instance duplications in the creation of the annotations. The rule system runs on top of the open source rule engine DROOLS and is connected to the domain ontology used for annotation by means of an ad-hoc programmed Java proxy

Inductive hot-pressing of titanium and titanium alloy powders

Inductive hot-pressing is a field-assisted sintering process (FAST) in which an electrical current is used to enhance the densification of the powder. Inductive hot-pressing could be employed to enable titanium powder to reach a higher density in less time than the pressing and sintering process. In this study, titanium and titanium alloy powders with different features were processed by means of inductive hot-pressing. The influence of processing temperature on density, microstructure, quantity of interstitial elements and hardness was investigated. Generally, practically fully dense materials were obtained without any carbon pick-up, even if the materials were in contact with the graphite matrix during processing. Nevertheless, there was an increment of the nitrogen content and some oxygen pick-up, especially for the powders with smaller particle size. Hardness is not significantly affected by the pressing temperature, but it strongly depends on the amount of interstitials.The authors are thankful for the financial support from Comunidad de Madrid through the ESTRUMAT (S-2009/MAT-1585) project and from the Spanish Ministry of Education through the R&D MAT2009-14448 ProjectPublicad

SIMULACIÓN CLIMÁTICA DE INVERNADEROS EN DIFERENTES REGIONES DE PORTUGAL: ESTIMACIÓN DE INDICADORES DE VIABILIDAD ENERGÉTICA Y ECONÓMICA

En el presente trabajo se muestran los resultados de un estudio de viabilidad técnica y económica de la instalación de un invernadero calefactado en seis zonas de Portugal (Dois Portos, Faro, Marinha Grande, Ponta Delgada, Porto y Zambujeira). Se tomaron como referencia tres cultivos con distintos requerimientos energéticos (tomate, fresa y lechuga). En todos los casos analizados se empleó un invernadero multitúnel con generadores de aire caliente como calefacción, considerando como alternativas de combustible gasoil y gas natural. Para la realización del trabajo se utilizó el Simulador Climático de Invernaderos (SCI). Las conclusiones extraídas muestran que en tomate y fresa no resulta rentable instalar un sistema de calefacción en invernadero, en ninguno de los emplazamientos seleccionados. Únicamente en el cultivo de fresa lo es si se utiliza gas natural como combustible, en Ponta Delgada San Miguel si aumentase el precio de venta de la producción en más de un 50 %. En el cultivo de lechuga, en las localidades que es rentable, el período de retorno de la inversión es inferior a 2 años. Esto ocurre, en el caso de usar como combustible gasoil en Faro, Ponta Delgada y Zambujeira, y usando gas natural en Dois Portos, Faro, Ponta Delgada, Porto y Zambujeira

Study of the properties of low-cost powder metallurgy titanium alloys by 430 stainless steel addition

Titanium is a lightweight metal with an outstanding combination of properties which make it the material of choice for many different applications. Nonetheless, its employment at industrial level is not widespread due to higher production costs with respect to competitor metals like steel and aluminium. In this work the production of low-cost titanium alloys is attempted by combining the utilisation of a powder metallurgy process and cheap alloying elements (i.e. commercial 430 stainless steel powder optimised for the powder metallurgy industry). Low-cost titanium alloys are fabricated by blending elemental titanium with stainless steel. The behaviour of the powders as well as that of the sintered materials are analysed and compared to that of a master alloy addition Ti6Al4V alloy. The produced low-cost titanium alloys show comparable properties to both wrought and powder metallurgy titanium alloys and, therefore, they are proposed as an alternative to obtain structural component made out of titanium alloys.The authors want to acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science through the R&D Projects MAT2012-38650-C02-01, and from Regional Government of Madrid through the ESTRUMAT (S2009/MAT-1585) projec

Evaluación de la calidad de vida en personas drogodopendientes mediante el modelo de Rasch

La Escala GENCAT aparece como el único instrumento que permite evaluar la calidad de vida individual de personas con drogodependencias desde una perspectiva diferente a la de calidad de vida relacionada con la salud (CVRS). Dado que las propiedades psicométricas de la mencionada escala sólo se han estudiado para la muestra general de usuarios de servicios sociales, este estudio tiene como objetivo analizar su fiabilidad y validez en un grupo específico de personas con drogodependencias. Para ello, se aplicó a 75 drogodependientes usuarios de servicios sociales en Cataluña. Los datos obtenidos permiten concluir que la escala, para este colectivo, presenta una adecuada consistencia interna (que supera en algunos casos la obtenida para la muestra general) según la Teoría Clásica de los Tests. Además, se observó que el ajuste medio de los ítems al modelo y la fiabilidad promedio de las estimaciones de los ítems fueron altos según el modelo de Rasch, aunque los índices de fiabilidad de las personas resultaron más moderados en la mayoría de las subescalas y deficiente en el caso de la dimensión bienestar físico. Se concluye que, aunque la escala es válida y fiable en términos generales, es aconsejable una revisión de la dimensión mencionada

Resource bounds analysis.

We present a generic analysis that infers both upper and lower bounds on the usage that a program makes of a set of user-definable resources. The inferred bounds will in general be functions of input data sizes. A resource in our approach is a quite general, user-defined notion which associates a basic cost function with elementary operations. The analysis then derives the related (upper- and lower- bound) cost functions for all procedures in the program. We also present an assertion language which is used to define both such resources and resource-related properties that the system can then check based on the results of the analysis. We have performed some experiments with some concrete resource-related properties such as execution steps, bits sent or received by an application, number of arithmetic operations performed, number of calls to a procedure, number of transactions, etc. presenting the resource usage functions inferred and the times taken to perform the analysis. Applications of our analysis include resource consumption verification and debugging (including for mobile code), resource control in parallel/distributed computing, and resource-oriented specialization

Tactile Sensors Based on Conductive Polymers

This paper presents results from a selection of tactile sensors that have been designed and fabricated. These sensors are based on a common approach that consists in placing a sheet of piezoresistive material on the top of a set of electrodes. We use a thin film of conductive polymer as the piezoresistive mate¬rial. Specifically, a conductive water-based ink of this polymer is deposited by spin coating on a flexible plastic sheet, giving it a smooth, homogeneous and conducting thin film. The main interest in this procedure is that it is cheap and it allows the fabrication of flexible and low cost tactile sensors. In this work we present results from sensors made using two technologies. Firstly, we have used a flexible Printed Circuit Board (PCB) technology to fabricate the set of electrodes and addressing tracks. The result is a simple, flexible tactile sensor. In addition to these sensors on PCB, we have proposed, designed and fabricated sensors with screen printing technology. In this case, the set of electrodes and addressing tracks are made by printing an ink based on silver nanoparticles. The intense characterization provides us insights into the design of these tactile sensors.This work has been partially funded by the spanish government under contract TEC2006-12376-C02

Inferring Energy Bounds via Static Program Analysis and Evolutionary Modeling of Basic Blocks

The ever increasing number and complexity of energy-bound devices (such as the ones used in Internet of Things applications, smart phones, and mission critical systems) pose an important challenge on techniques to optimize their energy consumption and to verify that they will perform their function within the available energy budget. In this work we address this challenge from the software point of view and propose a novel parametric approach to estimating tight bounds on the energy consumed by program executions that are practical for their application to energy verification and optimization. Our approach divides a program into basic (branchless) blocks and estimates the maximal and minimal energy consumption for each block using an evolutionary algorithm. Then it combines the obtained values according to the program control flow, using static analysis, to infer functions that give both upper and lower bounds on the energy consumption of the whole program and its procedures as functions on input data sizes. We have tested our approach on (C-like) embedded programs running on the XMOS hardware platform. However, our method is general enough to be applied to other microprocessor architectures and programming languages. The bounds obtained by our prototype implementation can be tight while remaining on the safe side of budgets in practice, as shown by our experimental evaluation.Comment: Pre-proceedings paper presented at the 27th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2017), Namur, Belgium, 10-12 October 2017 (arXiv:1708.07854). Improved version of the one presented at the HIP3ES 2016 workshop (v1): more experimental results (added benchmark to Table 1, added figure for new benchmark, added Table 3), improved Fig. 1, added Fig.