BSC-CNS Newsletter May 2023

The BSC decadal forecast system anticipates that global mean surface temperatures will continue to rise in the coming years due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and will likely make 2023 one of the five warmest years on record because of hotter conditions in the tropical Pacific. BSC is a renowned centre for decadal prediction worldwide.

Barcelona City Council and BSC have presented the first results of a collaboration carried out in the framework of a digital twins programme for cities. This is a web platform for analysing the accessibility of public facilities that allows an assessment of whether Barcelona complies with the provision of services or facilities of the so-called 15-minute cities model.

The latest resources and advances of the Language Technologies Plan applied to the field of health and biomedicine, promoted by the State Secretariat for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, were presented at the Infoday "AI and language technologies applied to clinical data: CARMEN-I resources, systems and applications", organised by BSC and the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona.

FARMBANK project aims to create an organoid biobank with different species of farm animals and make it available to the entire scientific community that studies infectious diseases in animals and humans of zoonotic origin, that is, those that are transmitted from animals to people.

Scientists at BSC and IRB Barcelona have participated in a study led by the Andalusian Centre for Developmental Biology which has discovered how the skate’s fins evolved by studying its DNA. The study, published in the journal Nature, confirms that these fish are highly relevant organisms for understanding the evolution of the traits that made us human, such as limbs.

DEEP-SEA project consortium met at BSC to discuss the project’s status at the two-year mark. The meeting provided a platform for BSC researchers to showcase the readiness of BSC-developed tools for integration with the rest of the DEEP-SEA software stack and their use within DEEP-SEA applications such as weather forecast and climate, seismic imaging, space weather, or molecular dynamics among others.

Under the coordination of BSC, PerMedCoE is working towards the creation of digital twins that can virtually represent cell-level systems to computationally predict the response of potential treatments. These cell-level simulations can be personalised with patient-specific data to capture individuals´ genetic and environmental influences to provide a deeper understanding of the biological context of the diseases under study.

Researchers from BSC will train a machine learning model to extract information from social media in real time and develop digital twins that will be used in the health crisis use case to inform reliable decision-making in crisis scenarios. They will do this in the framework of CREXDATA project that aims to provide extremely precise and useful information that support human and automated decision-making in critical situations.

CSIC and BSC have launched a new associated unit, the Computational Geophysics Unit, which combines the expertise and resources of both institutions to carry out research in the field of geophysics and natural hazards. The new unit has been created in response to the synergies and collaborations that were already taking place between the scientific staff of both centres working on similar lines of research, although with different perspectives and resources.

Barcelona will host one of the four new units of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), the pan-European network of excellence in artificial intelligence. The new ELLIS Barcelona unit will be made up of 21 AI researchers from five Catalan universities and five research centres, including Natasa Przulj, a researcher in the Life Sciences Department at BSC

BSC is one of the Spanish organisations participating in ACTRIS, a scientific facility recently established by the European Commission as the European Research Infrastructure Consortium to provide state-of-the-art atmospheric research data and services to support science-based policy making. BSC participates in the ACTRIS Data Centre Core Facility by providing prediction data on Saharan dust intrusions and contributing to the incorporation of data from prediction models and model evaluation.

The video "The next Pandemic" has been produced by the BSC Visualisation group with the collaboration of the Life Sciences department, in the framework of CompBioMed2. This video explores a new weapon in the fight against global disease: the supercomputer. From providing insights into the spread of the virus through the air, to the effectiveness of masks, or simulations revealing key insights for antiviral drug development, supercomputers can help us deal with pandemics.

The President of the Spanish government visited the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer facilities at BSC where he underlined the government's commitment to making Spain a European leader in supercomputing and reinforcing the strategic autonomy of the EU as a priority for the upcoming Spanish Presidency of the EU. "This project exemplifies our country's commitment to the R&D&I system as a vector of growth for Spain.”

The Earth Sciences Department of BSC has received special recognition as a leading initiative in the field of ICT, climate change and sustainability at the awards ceremony of the 28th Nit de les Telecomunicacions i la Informàtica, jointly awarded by the Catalan Association of Telecommunications Engineering and Digital Technologies and the Official College of Computer Engineering of Catalonia.

BSC and Fujitsu Limited have signed a dual collaboration agreement to promote personalized medicine through the exploitation of clinical data and to advance quantum simulation technologies using tensor networks. Mateo Valero, director of BSC, said: “This agreement allows us to advance research in these two important areas and we hope that this joint research will result in new technologies that can ultimately benefit society.”

Esade and BSC have signed an agreement to co-operate on scientific research, training and science and tech development at the intersection of computer science and management. The aim of this alliance is to promote science and tech development through education, research and dissemination ventures and activities in the realms of High-Performance Computing and its application to Big Data Analytics and AI for Business.