BSC-CNS Newsletter May 2021

BSC has been selected as coordinator of three research projects of the call launched by the EuroHPC JU to promote the research and development of the new supercomputers of the future. In its first call, EuroHPC has selected 20 projects, of which the BSC coordinates three (eProcessor, eFlows4HPC and NextSim) and participates in another six.

BSC will coordinate the eProcessor project contributing its experience on hardware design, FPGA emulation, benchmarking, and system simulation tools. The project aims to build a new open source OoO processor, and its objective is to deliver the first completely open source European full-stack ecosystem based on this new RISC-V CPU.

Coordinated by BSC and funded by the EuroHPC JU, the eFlows4HPC project will create a European workflow platform for the design of complex applications that integrate HPC processes, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. The project aims to demonstrate the novel technologies through use cases of three application pillars: manufacturing, climate, and urgent computing for natural hazards.

The How2Sign dataset will enable the development of technologies for over 466 million deaf or hard-of-hearing people worldwide. Amanda Duarte, researcher in the Emerging Technologies for Artificial Intelligence group at BSC, has developed an extensive dataset for the automatic translation of sign language with artificial intelligence. This new resource will be presented at the CVPR 2021 conference.

Researchers from the Computational Biology group have developed a novel method for the characterization of rare diseases and applied it to the study of a childhood brain tumor called medulloblastoma. The article “The multilayer community structure of medulloblastoma” has been published in Cell iScience and represents a pivotal research achievement for the European project iPC: individualizedPaediatricCure.

The review article “Artificial intelligence in cancer research: learning at different levels of data granularity” by Davide Cirillo and Iker Núñez-Carpintero, from the Computational Biology group, is featured on the cover of the April issue of the Molecular Oncology journal. In this review article, BSC researchers survey the challenges and limitations of the state-of-the-art AI approaches for cancer research.

BSC participates in the new European-funded Center of Excellence "Research on AI- and Simulation-Based Engineering at Exascale" (CoE RAISE). The project aims to close the gap in full cycles by using forward simulation models and AI-based inverse inference models in conjunction with statistical methods to learn from current and historical data.

A better representation of the equatorial Atlantic variability in summer and its lagged connection mechanism with the Pacific relates to enhanced capacity in predicting autumn/winter ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation). BSC researchers Eleftheria Exarchou and Pablo Ortega were able to demonstrate, for the first time, this relation by using a multi-model ensemble of seasonal forecast systems.

BSC, AEMET and the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) organized a virtual event to analyze the challenge and need for information that climate change implies in Spain, with special attention to the situation of Barcelona and Valencia. At the event, ministers, mayors, experts and representatives of the private were able to discover the tools offered by the C3S service, with special attention to those aimed at the water and energy sectors, as well as to climatic extremes.

Coordinated by BSC and the Institute for Health Sciences in Aragon (IACS), HealthyCloud will contribute a Strategic Agenda towards the European Health Research and Innovation Cloud. The project will work in collaboration with a broad range of stakeholders to ensure that all voices are included and that the results are technically and ethically sound.

BSC has been selected by the European Commission’s (EC) Innovation Radar among the key innovators within the I-BiDaas project, coordinated by the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH). Specifically, two out four innovations coming out of the I-BiDaas research identified BSC as one of the key innovators outperforming in innovation management, market potential, and woman-led innovations.

Two spin-offs from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, FrontWave Imaging and Qbeast have got a Startup Capital from ACCIÓ, which will be a significant step forward to bring their technologies closer to the market. Another technology developed at BSC, Migalabs project, will also receive support, in this case from the Preaccelerator Program by Barcelona Activa.

Candidiasis is a fungal infection caused by a yeast called Candida and it is a serious global health problem. Scientists led by BSC researcher Toni Gabaldón in collaboration with Dr. Bernhard Hube's group at the Hans Knoell Institute and the University of Jena in Germany, have described the various mechanisms used by the fungus Candida to infect the epithelium of the vagina and how human cells respond.

The ”la Caixa” Foundation Social Observatory offers the cycle “Sex and gender biases in artificial intelligence and health”, one of the innovative projects selected in the last call, organized by Bioinfo4Women programme. The objective of the cycle is to exchange knowledge and analyze the social, ethical and technological challenges of sex and gender bias in research in the field of health, personalized medicine and AI.