BSC-CNS Newsletter May 2023

Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Newsletter
NEWSLETTER May 2023
News

BSC develops pioneering artificial intelligence method to fight urban air pollution

BSC researchers are using machine learning techniques to produce air quality maps and predict the likelihood of legal pollution limits being exceeded. The new method combines, for the first time in this pilot phase, the forecast of the CALIOPE-Urban air quality model, developed at the BSC and unique in Spain, with an extensive database of the city of Barcelona.

BSC predicts global-mean temperature increase could reach 1.5ºC within 5 years

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 tests with a digital twin developed by BSC if it is a 15-minute city

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.

BSC presents AI models, protocols and the most complete anonymised corpus of medical records in Spanish

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.

BSC participates in Spain’s first farm animal organoid biobank to allow research into infectious diseases without the use of live animals

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.

A study involving the BSC and IRB Barcelona describes how skates evolved to develop wing-shaped fins

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.

BSC leads multi-partner consortium in innovative data mining project across compute continuum

BSC coordinates f the EU-funded EXTRACT project that will work to provide a distributed data-mining software platform for extreme data across the compute continuum. It pursues an innovative and holistic approach to data mining workflows across edge, cloud and HPC environments and will be validated through two use cases that require extreme data: crisis management in the City of Venice and an astrophysics use case.

BSC showcases enhanced software stack for heterogenous HPC systems

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.

Digital twins at the cellular level help personalize prognosis and treatment in three cancer scenarios

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.

BSC lends expertise in machine learning and digital twins to enhance emergency management over extreme-scale data

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 establish the joint Computational Geophysics Unit

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 hosts one of the new ELLIS units, the European network of excellence in AI

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 participates in the European infrastructure ACTRIS for atmospheric research

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.

BSC presents its new video on digital humans at the Science Museum in London

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.

Pedro Sánchez highlights at BSC the Government's determination to make Spain a European leader in supercomputing

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 MultiSeq project receives funding from the ERC to optimise sequencing and explore market potential

The laboratory led by Toni Gabaldón at IRB Barcelona and BSC is exploring an innovative solution that minimises the time and cost of sequencing. The research team has now received €150,000 through an ERC Consolidator Grant to explore the market potential of the MultiSeq technique. Over the next three years, the technique will be tested in different environments, market analyses will be carried out, and marketing options will be evaluated.

BSC’s Earth Sciences Department, awarded at the 28th Nit de les Telecomunicacions i la Informàtica

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.

Fujitsu and BSC collaborate to advance research in personalized medicine and quantum computing

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 join forces to boost links between science and business

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.

Coming up
09 MAY 2023 10th International BSC Severo Ochoa Doctoral Symposium 2023 Location: Aula Master (UPC)
16 MAY 2023 LOCA SERIES. Reading Club. 4th session Location: BSC
05 JUN 2023 RISC-V Summit Europe Location: Barceló Sants
26 JUN 2023 PUMPS+AI Summer School Location: UPC
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