• Publicationsclose
• Research dataclose
• Other research productsclose
• Conference object close
• CA close
• AT close
• English close

We present preliminary results on a study of the 2--850 micron SEDs of a sample of 30 FIRBACK galaxies selected at 170 micron. These sources are representative of the brightest ~10% of the Cosmic Infrared Background. They are a mixture of mostly local (z<~0.3) starforming galaxies, and a tail of ULIGs that extend up to z~1, and are likely to be a similar population to faint SCUBA sources. We use archival Spitzer IRAC and MIPS data to extend the spectral coverage to the mid-IR regime, resulting in an unprecended (for this redshift range) census of their infrared SEDs. This allows us to study in far greater detail this important population linking the near-IR stellar emission with PAH and thermal dust emission. We do this using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method, which easily allows for the inclusion of ~6 free parameters, as well as an estimate of parameter uncertainties and correlations. Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Proceeding for the conference "Starbursts: From 30 Doradus to Lyman Break Galaxies", held in Cambridge (UK) in September, 2004

Big Data has become prominent throughout many scientific fields, and as a result, scientific communities have sought out Big Data frameworks to accelerate the processing of their increasingly data-intensive pipelines. However, while scientific communities typically rely on High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters for the parallelization of their pipelines, many popular Big Data frameworks such as Hadoop and Apache Spark were primarily designed to be executed on dedicated commodity infrastructures. This paper evaluates the benefits of pilot jobs over traditional batch submission for Apache Spark on HPC clusters. Surprisingly, our results show that the speed-up provided by pilot jobs over batch scheduling is moderate to non-existent (0.98 on average) despite the presence of long queuing times. In addition, pilot jobs provide an extra layer of scheduling that complicates debugging and deployment. We conclude that traditional batch scheduling should remain the default strategy to deploy Apache Spark applications on HPC clusters.

With the purpose of automatic detection of crowd patterns including abrupt and abnormal changes, a novel approach for extracting motion “textures” from dynamic Spatio-Temporal Volume (STV) blocks formulated by live video streams has been proposed. This paper starts from introducing the common approach for STV construction and corresponding Spatio-Temporal Texture (STT) extraction techniques. Next the crowd motion information contained within the random STT slices are evaluated based on the information entropy theory to cull the static background and noises occupying most of the STV spaces. A preprocessing step using Gabor filtering for improving the STT sampling efficiency and motion fidelity has been devised and tested. The technique has been applied on benchmarking video databases for proof-of-concept and performance evaluation. Preliminary results have shown encouraging outcomes and promising potentials for its real-world crowd monitoring and control applications.

AbstractUnderstanding child-related costs is crucial given their impact on fertility and labour supply decisions. We explore the subjective cost of young children in Europe by analysing the effect of child births on parents’ self-reported ability to make ends meet, and link it to changes in objective economic well-being such as income, benefits, and employment. The study is based on EU-SILC longitudinal data for 30 European countries from 2004 to 2019, enabling comparisons between country groups of different welfare regimes. Results show that newborns decrease subjective economic well-being in all regions, yet with economies of scale for the number of children. Mediation analyses reveal that the substantial labour income losses of mothers (indirect costs) explain only a small part of subjective child costs. In the first year after birth, these losses are mostly compensated for via public transfers or increased labour income of fathers, except in regions where women take extensive parental leave. This suggests that the initial drop in subjective economic well-being after childbirth is caused by increased expenses due to the birth of a child (direct costs) and other drivers such as stress that are reflected in the self-reported indicator.

Communication between practitioners is essential for the system's quality in the DevOps context. To improve this communication, practitioners often use informal diagrams to represent the components of a system. However, as systems evolve, it is a challenge to synchronize diagrams with production environments consistently. Hence, the inconsistency of architectural diagrams can affect communication between practitioner and their understanding of systems. In this paper, we propose the use of system descriptors to improve deployment diagram consistency. We state two main hypotheses: (1) if an architectural diagram is generated from a valid system descriptor, then the diagram is consistent; (2) if a valid system descriptor is generated from an architectural diagram, then the diagram is consistent. We report a case study to explore our hypotheses. Furthermore, we constructed a system descriptor from the Netflix deployment diagram, and we applied our tool to generate a new architectural diagram. Finally, we compare the original and generated diagrams to evaluate our proposal. Our case study shows all Docker compose description elements can be graphically represented in the generated architectural diagram, and the generated diagram does not present inconsistent aspects of the original diagram. Thus, our preliminary results lead to further evaluation in controlled and empirical experiments to test our hypotheses. 5 pages. This is the camera ready version to be published in proceedings of 29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2021). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2008.11060

The beta decay of the free neutron provides several probes to test the Standard Model of particle physics as well as to search for extensions thereof. Hence, multiple experiments investigating the decay have already been performed, are under way or are being prepared. These measure the mean lifetime, angular correlation coefficients or various spectra of the charged decay products (proton and electron). NoMoS, the Neutron decay prOducts MOmentum Spectrometer, presents a novel method of momentum spectroscopy: it utilizes the $R \times B$ drift effect to disperse charged particles dependent on their momentum in an uniformly curved magnetic field. This spectrometer is designed to precisely measure momentum spectra and angular correlation coefficients in free neutron beta decay to test the Standard Model and to search for new physics beyond. With NoMoS, we aim to measure inter alia the electron-antineutrino correlation coefficient $a$ and the Fierz interference term $b$ with an ultimate precision of $\Delta a/a < 0.3\%$ and $\Delta b < 10^{-3}$ respectively. In this paper, we present the measurement principles, discuss measurement uncertainties and systematics, and give a status update. Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, accepted to the Proceedings of the International Workshop on Particle Physics at Neutron Sources PPNS 2018, Grenoble, France, May 24-26, 2018

Communities are social entities whose actors share common needs, interests, or practices: they constitute the basic units of social experience. With regard to communities, social capital captures the structural, relational and cognitive aspects of the relationships among their members. Social capital is defined as a set of properties of a social entity (e.g. norms, level of trust, and intensive social networking) which enables joint activities and cooperation for mutual benefit. It can be understood as the glue which holds communities together. On this panel we will discuss whether and how information technology can strengthen communities by fostering social capital.

The objective of the European project HELIOS is to combine a photonic layer with a CMOS circuit by different innovative means, using microelectronics processes. Bonding of AWG + Ge Photodiodes on CMOS wafer is achieved.