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Mechanical and Functional Responses in Astrocytes under Alternating Deformation Modes Using Magneto-Active Substrates
No full textThis work introduces NeoMag, a system designed to enhance cell mechanics assays in substrate deformation studies. NeoMag uses multidomain magneto-active materials to mechanically actuate the substrate, transmitting reversible mechanical cues to cells. The system boasts full flexibility in alternating loading substrate deformation modes, seamlessly adapting to both upright and inverted microscopes. The multidomain substrates facilitate mechanobiology assays on 2D and 3D cultures. The integration of the system with nanoindenters allows for precise evaluation of cellular mechanical properties under varying substrate deformation modes. The system is used to study the impact of substrate deformation on astrocytes, simulating mechanical conditions akin to traumatic brain injury and ischemic stroke. The results reveal local heterogeneous changes in astrocyte stiffness, influenced by the orientation of subcellular regions relative to substrate strain. These stiffness variations, exceeding 50% in stiffening and softening, and local deformations significantly alter calcium dynamics. Furthermore, sustained deformations induce actin network reorganization and activate Piezo1 channels, leading to an initial increase followed by a long-term inhibition of calcium events. Conversely, fast and dynamic deformations transiently activate Piezo1 channels and disrupt the actin network, causing long-term cell softening. These findings unveil mechanical and functional alterations in astrocytes during substrate deformation, illustrating the multiple opportunities this technology offers.The authors ac-knowledged support from the European Research Council (ERC) underthe European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program(Grant agreement no. 947723, project: 4D-BIOMAP and Grant agreementno. 101081713, project: ISBIOMECH). G.P. acknowledged support fromPID2019-106579RB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/5011 00011033and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, and La Marató TV3 Foundation #225619. AMB acknowledged support from Ministerio de Ciencia, Inno-vación y Universidades, Agencia Estatal de Investigación Grant PID2019-109820RB-I00, MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/, co-financed by theEuropean Regional Development Fund (ERDF), ‘A way of making Eu-rope’. C.G.-C. acknowledged support from the Ministerio de Universi-dades, Spain (FPU20/01459) and A.M.B. from Universidad Carlos III deMadrid (’Ayudas para la recualificación del profesorado funcionario o con-tratado’)
Body Sensations as Design Material: An Approach to Design Sensory Technology for Altering Body Perception
Get PDFSensory technologies alter how we perceive our body, which can have profound implications for multiple domains. Prior work has contributed a myriad of artefacts and evaluative studies, but we still lack design knowledge to design meaningful body perception alterations facilitated by sensory technologies. To address this gap, we draw from soma design to propose a methodological approach centered on body sensations as design material. We articulate our approach based on a project on co-designing wearables to alter body perception together with professional dancers. Our approach involves engaging participants in articulating and sharing body sensations to others, and exploring somatically sensory stimuli to co-design concepts for future technologies. We contribute experiential facets of body sensations, movement and sensory potentials to alter sensations, methods and design strategies, and a collection of ideas. Our work can be relevant to design communities interested in sensory technologies, perceptual alterations and body sensations as material.This research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement nr 101002711; project BODYinTRANSIT). It was also partially supported by: Sweden’s Digital Futures Research Center through a postdoctoral fellowship (nr 81501); the Madrid Government under the Multiannual Agreement with UC3M in the line of Research Funds for Beatriz Galindo Fellowships (MovIntPlayLabCM-UC3M 2021/00050/ 001) and in the context of the V PRICIT (Regional Programme of Research and Technological Innovation); and the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (project MagicOutft PID2019-105579RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/5011 00011033 and Programa I3)
El control de convencionalidad en el ejercicio de la función legislativa. El caso de Chile
No full textPrograma de Doctorado en Estudios Avanzados en Derechos Humanos por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Cástor Díaz Barrado.- Secretario: Carlos Ramón Fernández Liesa.- Vocal: Patricia Pérez Goldber
Teoría del precedente administrativo en Colombia. Un camino hacia su consolidación y la configuración del precedente fiscal y disciplinario
Get PDFPrograma de Doctorado en Derecho por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Alberto Palomar Olmeda.- Secretario: José Rodriguez García.- Vocal: Héctor Santaella Quinter
Ground command unit to DRONE radio control and telemetry
Get PDFDrones represent on of the most significant innovations of today’s world, primarily due to their versatility and efficiency at performing specialized tasks. However, most of the current commercial solutions for communication protocols lack the necessary customization options for a university-developed drone prototype. This limitation is mainly due to tamper protections and intentionally obfuscated designs that safeguard commercial products.
This project aims to establish a duplex communication channel between a ground station and drone. This channel is divided into an uplink connection (from ground station to drone) as well as a downlink (from drone to ground station) connection. The uplink channel shall be used for the control of the drone, while the downlink channel for telemetry data. Nonetheless, the design is generic enough that any arbitrary data can also be transmitted, thus accommodating a wide range of requirements for different drone designs.
Therefore, the main objective of this work is to reuse and adapt a current commercial solution to support repetitive flight patterns from a computer and be able to remotely change arbitrary drone parameters in-flight without having to land the drone.
In this work, a commercial RC remote has been disassembled and reverse engineered together with its matching receiver pair, in order to gather full control of the raw radio signals that are transmitted. The encoding and decoding control of these signals are managed by an FPGA board, which has been programmed specifically for this purpose. Additionally, the FPGA connected to a personal computer that functions as the ground station and also runs a custom host application developed to manage communication between the computer and the board.
It should be noted that this project is a subset of a more complex initiative: the final project, which involves the development of a fully custom drone by the UC3M (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) university.Los drones representan una de las innovaciones más importantes del mundo actual, principalmente debido a su versatilidad y eficiencia en la realización de tareas especializadas. Sin embargo, la mayoría de las actuales soluciones comerciales para los protocolos de comunicación carecen de las opciones de personalización necesarias para un prototipo de dron desarrollado por una universidad. Esta limitación se debe principalmente a las protecciones contra manipulaciones y los diseños intencionalmente ofuscados que protegen los productos comerciales.
Este proyecto tiene como objetivo establecer un canal de comunicación dúplex entre una estación terrestre y un dron. Este canal se divide en una conexión uplink (de la estación terrestre al dron) y una conexión downlink (del dron a la estación terrestre). El canal uplink se debe utilizar para el control del dron, mientras que el canal downlink se utilizará para los datos de telemetría. No obstante, el diseño es lo suficientemente genérico como para permitir la transmisión de cualquier tipo de datos, acomodando así una amplia gama de requisitos para diferentes diseños de drones. Por tanto, el objetivo principal de este trabajo es reutilizar y adaptar una solución comercial actual para soportar patrones de vuelo repetitivos desde un ordernador y poder cambiar remotamente parámetros arbitrarios del dron en vuelo, sin tener que aterrizar el dron.
En este trabajo, se ha desmontado y realizado ingeniería inversa a un mando RC (Remote Control) comercial junto con su receptor correspondiente, con el fin de obtener control total sobre las señales de radio en bruto que se transmiten. El control de la codificación y decodificación de estas señales está a cargo de una placa FPGA, que ha sido programada específicamente para este propósito. Además, la FPGA está conectada a un ordenador personal que funciona como la estación terrestre y que también ejecuta una aplicación personalizada desarrollada para gestionar la comunicación entre el ordenador y la placa.
Cabe destacar que este proyecto es un subconjunto de una iniciativa más compleja: el proyecto final, que implica el desarrollo de un dron completamente personalizado por la UC3M (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid).Máster Universitario en Ingeniería Informátic
Historiografía de la Historia Antigua en España y América Latina
No full textEste libro es el resultado de la actividad investigadora del proyecto PID2020-113314GB-I00 “Antigüedad, nacionalismos e identidades complejas en la historiografía occidental: De la historiografía académica a la cultura de masas en Europa y América Latina (1870-2020)” (ANIHO), nanciado por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación y la Agencia Estatal de Investigación (MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033)
Towards Equitable Representations of Ageing: Evaluation of Gender, Territories, Aids and Artificial Intelligence
No full textThere are few studies on the representation of older people regarding aids and assistive devices and even fewer that incorporate more inclusive views (gender, emotions, anti-ageist, territorial or land approach) as well as virtual or land ethnography or artificial intelligence. The general objective was to evaluate digital images of aids and assistive aids in the older population, from the perspectives mentioned above. Method. A descriptive and cross-sectional study that searched, observed and analyzed images. An evaluation of intentionally selected images from Freepik, Pixabay, Storyblocks, Splitshire, Gratisography and ArtGPT, included in an original database constructured by several authors of this article, was carried out in the context of the ENCAGEn-CM project (2020–2023, financed by the CAM and FSE). This base was updated and expanded in October and November 2023. In addition, an image generation process was carried out using artificial intelligence, and this was also part of the analysis (ArtGPT). Finally, algorithms were used to solve and retrain with the images. Results. Of the total final images included in the expanded database until November 2023 (n = 427), only a third (28.3%, 121/427) included the aids and assistive aids label. Representations of mixed groups predominated (38.8%) and, to a lesser extent, those of women. A large proportion of the devices were ‘glasses’ (74.6%) and the ‘use of a cane’ (14.9%). To a lesser extent, ‘wheelchairs’ (4.4%) or ‘hearing aids’ (0.9%) and the presence of more than one device (simultaneously) (5.3%) were noted. The main emotions represented were ‘joy’ (45.6%) and ‘emotion not recognized’ (45.6%), with, to a lesser extent, ‘sadness’ (3.5%), ‘surprise’ (4.4%) and ‘anger’ (0.9%). Differences by sex were found in the represented emotions linked to aids and assistive aids. The representation of images of the built environment predominated significantly (70.2%), and it was observed that older women were less represented in natural environments than men. Based on the previous findings, a method is proposed to address stereotypes in images of older individuals. It involves identifying common stereotypical features, like glasses and hospital settings, using deep learning and quantum computing techniques. A convolutional neural network identifies and suppresses these elements, followed by the use of quantum algorithms to manipulate features. This systematic approach aims to mitigate biases and enhance the accuracy in representing older people in digital imagery. Conclusion. A limited proportion of images of assistive devices and older people were observed. Furthermore, among them, the lower representation of images of women in a built environment was confirmed, and the expressions of emotions were limited to only three basic ones (joy, sadness and surprise). In these evaluated digital images, the collective imagination of older people continues to be limited to a few spaces/contexts and emotions and is stereotyped regarding the same variables (sex, age, environment). Technology often overlooks innovative support tools for older adults, and AI struggles in accurately depicting emotions and environments in digital images. There is a pressing need for thorough pretraining analysis and ethical considerations to address these challenges and ensure more accurate and inclusive representations of older persons in digital media.This research was part of the R&D Activities Program ENCAGEn-CM: “Active Ageing, Quality of Life and Gender. Promoting a positive image of old age and ageing, against the ageism”, https://encage-cm.csic.es/, accessed on 12 August 2024 (Ref. number: H2019/HUM-5698) main research GFM, 2020–2023. It was funded by the Ministry of Science, Universities, and Innovation, corresponding to the Program of R&D Activities between research groups of the Madrid Region, and co-financed by the European Social Fund. M.S. Agulló-Tomás contributed with personal provisions and provisions proceeding from UC3M. This project (ENCAGEn-CM) was approved in 2020 (see more information at (https://encage-cm.csic.es/) (accessed on 12 August 2024). This project was granted in 2022 (see more information: https://www.ipp.csic.es/es/article/programa-actividades-id-encagen-cm-coordinado-csic-recibe-premio-fundacion-pilares) (accessed on 12 August 2024). Furthermore, this contribution was part of the INNTA1/2022/23 Project “Innovation Agent for the Miguel Hernandez University Bioengineering Institute”, led by E. Fernández and innovation agent V. Zorrilla-Muñoz (2022–2024), and the INNTA1/2024/11 project “Maintenance of the Innovation Agent for the Miguel Hernandez University Bioengineering Institute”, co-financed by the Valencian Community EU-ERDF Program, 2021–2027
A self-supervised embedding of cell migration features for behavior discovery over cell populations
Get PDFBackground and objective: Recent studies point out that the dynamics and interaction of cell populations within their environment are related to several biological processes in immunology. Hence, single-cell analysis in immunology now relies on spatial omics. Moreover, recent literature suggests that immunology scenarios are hierarchically organized, including unknown cell behaviors appearing in different proportions across some observable control and therapy groups. These dynamic behaviors play a crucial role in identifying the causes of processes such as inflammation, aging, and fighting off pathogens or cancerous cells. In this work, we use a self-supervised learning approach to discover these behaviors associated with cell dynamics in an immunology scenario.
Materials and methods: Specifically, we study the different responses of control group and therapy groups in a scenario involving inflammation due to infarct, with a focus on neutrophil migration within blood vessels. Starting from a set of hand-crafted spatio-temporal features, we use a recurrent neural network to generate embeddings that properly describe the dynamics of the migration processes. The network is trained using a novel multi-task contrastive loss that, on the one hand, models the hierarchical structure of our scenario (groups-behaviors-samples) and, on the other, ensures temporal consistency within the embedding, enforcing that subsequent temporal samples obtained from a given cell stay close in the latent space.
Results: Our experimental results demonstrate that the resulting embeddings improve the separability of cell behaviors and log-likelihood of the therapies, when compared to the hand-crafted feature extraction and recent methods from the state of the art, even with dimensionality reduction (16 vs. 21 hand-crafted features).
Conclusions: Our approach enables single-cell analyses at a population level, being able to automatically discover shared behaviors among different groups. This, in turn, enables the prediction of the therapy effectiveness based on their proportions within a study group.This work has been partially supported by the National Grant PID2020-118504GB-I00 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (State Research Agency) and Madrid Regional Government Grant Y2020/NMT-6660 (synergistic R&D interdisciplinary project COMPANION-CM). Miguel Molina-Moreno is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports FPU Grant FPU18/02825. Ralf Mikut is supported by the Helmholtz Association in the programs Natural, Artificial and Cognitive Information Processing. Funding for APC: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Agreement CRUE-Madroño 2024)
High-performance, miniaturized and configurable power and control unit for electrospray thrusters
No full textElectrospray thrusters offer remarkable efficiency at low power levels and compact form factor, positioning them as promising propulsion systems for small satellite platforms. This paper introduces the design of a miniaturized Power and Control Unit for electrospray thrusters. The system fits within the pocketsat form factor while ensuring high-performance, high-voltage power conversion and effective thrust generation in this propulsion technology. The paper goes through the architecture of the Power and Control Unit and its different subsystems, where the high-performance power converter is studied in detail. The system is built in a 42 × 42 × 25 mm3 and 39 g weight stacked hardware unit, achieving a configurable bipolar voltage output with the implemented control algorithm. The system undergoes experimental verification, where a power conversion efficiency over 90% was measured within the output range of 2-10W and 1-2kV, validating soft-start, thruster voltage alternation, and variation of the thruster set point in real time. The final milestone is the successful 7-hour emission test with electrospray thrusters under vacuum conditions, ensuring the system¿s suitability for real-world applications related to electrospray propulsion for small satellites.Sponsored by “Comunidad de Madrid” and the research project “Ayudas para la realización de Doctorados Industriales” IND2022/TIC-23688. Funding for APC: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Agreement CRUE-Madroño 2024)
Mission based systems for connected automated mobility
Get PDFCooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM) is one of the next big steps in the automotive industry. Thanks to recent improvements in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, and novel methods for automating vehicles, more safe and efficient transport mechanisms have been achieved. Current vehicles are already connected devices, and communications between vehicles, infrastructure and other road users will allow traffic agents to share information and use it to coordinate their actions. The full integration between cooperation, connectivity, and automation technologies entail an important achievement to improve road safety, traffic efficiency and comfort of driving. To approach this goal, the main contributions of this work propose a new distributed mission system based on Advanced Behavioral Points (ABP). That is, based on relevant points inside a plan which store a collection of predefined tasks that operate at the high level layer of an automated and connected vehicle to coordinate behaviors when connecting to critical emplacements like junctions and roundabouts. This approach, which has been tested in the simulation environment of Carla, provide a collaboration stack between the traffic infrastructure and the ego vehicle so as to cope with actual problems such as traffic congestion and road accidents.Grant PID2019-104793RB-C31, PDC2021-121517-C31, PDC2022-133684-C31, PID2022-140554OB-C32 and PID2021-124335OB-C21 funded by MCIN AEI/10.13039/5011000 11033 and by the European Union “NextGenerationEU/PRTR” and the Comunidad de Madrid through SEGVAUTO-4.0-CM (P2018/EMT-4362)