BSC-CNS Newsletter November 2019

BSC announces the opening of the European Laboratory for Open Computer Architecture (LOCA) whose mission will be to design and develop HPC chips in Europe. LOCA will be a collaborative laboratory with companies, foundations and academic institutions that share the vision that it is necessary to create open source hardware to guarantee transparency, competitiveness and technological sovereignty.

FC Barcelona and BSC are working on a ground-breaking project that applies the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence to create a smart system that will analyse and predict the movement of people within and outside the Club facilities. This will provide information that will allow to take real-time decisions to manage, in an optimal manner, activities of the Club and Espai Barça. It is part of the IoTwins project.

The classification is carried out after training automatically the prototype with clinical articles. This prototype can help pathologists to distinguish which of the many genetic mutations that their patients have can contribute to the growth of tumors. The prototype is trained by applying Natural Language Processing techniques and this use case has been carried out within the framework of the Plan TL.

BSC will investigate the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence for generating and augmenting synthetic datasets for remote sensing applications in space domain. BSC together with AIKO and the CNR-ISAC are the members of the consortium of the DeepLIM project, funded by the ESA. BSC will provide its emerging technologies and HPC infrastructure for conducting the activities of this project.

BSC co-organizes the #BitsxlaMarató, a hackathon to collaborate with knowledge and donations in the Marató of TV3 for minority diseases. The MareNostrum supercomputer will participate in the Marató, providing biological data on the minor disease of DENT, and being available to participants to find efficient ways to extract information about these data. It will take place from December 13 to 15 on the UPC Campus Nord.

This new project is jointly funded by the EU and the government of Mexico and brings together 15 institutions in an academic-industry collaboration to solve such real-world engineering problems. Coordinated by BSC in Europe and ININ in Mexico, it will focus on scaling applications in wind energy, oil/gas exploration, reservoir modelling, and biofuels for transportation.

Rosa M. Badia has received the ICT Woman Award in the Academic / Researcher category granted by the Department of Digital Policies and Public Administration of the Generalitat de Catalunya. This award recognizes the international projection of Badia's research work in the area of parallel programming models and its contribution to the promotion of women's participation in the ICT.

Mitiga Solutions, spin-off participated by BSC and UPC, has received a special mention of the jury in the category for the best technology-based company or spin-off in the UPC Awards of Valuation of Research and the Quality of University Management. Mitiga markets software for predicting the impact of atmospheric disasters on air traffic management in emergency situations that involve atmospheric dispersion of particles.

The manager of the Education and Training department at BSC and professor at UPC has been elected as member of the ACM-W Europe’s Executive Committee. Its vision is a transformed European professional and academic landscape where women are supported and inspired to pursue their dreams and ambitions to find fulfillment in the computing field.