2020
Authors
Siqueira, JM; Paço, TA; da Silva, JM; Silvestre, JC;
Publication
SENSORS
Abstract
The Biot-Granier (Gbt) is a new thermal dissipation-based sap flow measurement methodology, comprising sensors, data management and automatic data processing. It relies on the conventional Granier (Gcv) methodology upgraded with a modified Granier sensor set, as well as on an algorithm to measure the absolute temperatures in the two observation points and perform the Biot number approach. The work described herein addresses the construction details of the Gbt sensors and the characterization of the overall performance of the Gbt method after comparison with a commercial sap flow sensor and independent data (i.e., volumetric water content, vapor pressure deficit and eddy covariance technique). Its performance was evaluated in three trials: potted olive trees in a greenhouse and two vineyards. The trial with olive trees in a greenhouse showed that the transpiration measures provided by the Gbt sensors showed better agreement with the gravimetric approach, compared to those provided by the Gcv sensors. These tended to overestimate sap flow rates as much as 4 times, while Gbt sensors overestimated gravimetric values 1.5 times. The adjustments based on the Biot equations obtained with Gbt sensors contribute to reduce the overestimates yielded by the conventional approach. On the other hand, the heating capacity of the Gbt sensor provided a minimum of around 7 degrees C and maximum about 9 degrees C, contrasting with a minimum around 6 degrees C and a maximum of 12 degrees C given by the Gcv sensors. The positioning of the temperature sensor on the tip of the sap flow needle proposed in the Gbt sensors, closer to the sap measurement spot, allow to capture sap induced temperature variations more accurately. This explains the higher resolution and sensitivity of the Gbt sensor. Overall, the alternative Biot approach showed a significant improvement in sap flow estimations, contributing to adjust the Granier sap flow index, a vulnerability of that methodology.
2020
Authors
Correia, F; Oliveira, BMPM; Poinhos, R; Sorokina, A; Afonso, C; Franchini, B; Pereira, B; Fonseca, L; Sousa, M; Monteiro, A; de Almeida, MDV;
Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NUTRITION SOCIETY
Abstract
2020
Authors
Sousa, A; Ferreira, M; Oliveira, C; Ferreira, PG;
Publication
FRONTIERS IN GENETICS
Abstract
Cancer has an important and considerable gender differential susceptibility confirmed by several epidemiological studies. Gastric (GC) and thyroid cancer (TC) are examples of malignancies with a higher incidence in males and females, respectively. Beyond environmental predisposing factors, it is expected that gender-specific gene deregulation contributes to this differential incidence. We performed a detailed characterization of the transcriptomic differences between genders in normal and tumor tissues from stomach and thyroid using Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data. We found hundreds of sex-biased genes (SBGs). Most of the SBGs shared by normal and tumor belong to sexual chromosomes, while the normal and tumor-specific tend to be found in the autosomes. Expression of several cancer-associated genes is also found to differ between sexes in both types of tissue. Thousands of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between paired tumor-normal tissues were identified in GC and TC. For both cancers, in the most susceptible gender, the DEGs were mostly under-expressed in the tumor tissue, with an enrichment for tumor-suppressor genes (TSGs). Moreover, we found gene networks preferentially associated to males in GC and to females in TC and correlated with cancer histological subtypes. Our results shed light on the molecular differences and commonalities between genders and provide novel insights in the differential risk underlying these cancers.
2020
Authors
Dantas, B; Carvalho, P; Lima, SR; Silva, JMC;
Publication
NEW2AN/ruSMART (2)
Abstract
This work studies Tor, an anonymous overlay network used to browse the Internet. Apart from its main purpose, this open-source project has gained popularity mainly because it does not hide its implementation. In this way, researchers and security experts can fully examine and confirm its security requirements. Its ease of use has attracted all kinds of people, including ordinary citizens who want to avoid being profiled for targeted advertisements or circumvent censorship, corporations who do not want to reveal information to their competitors, and government intelligence agencies who need to do operations on the Internet without being noticed. In opposition, an anonymous system like this represents a good testbed for attackers, because their actions are naturally untraceable. In this work, the characteristics of Tor traffic are studied in detail in order to devise an inspection methodology able to improve Tor detection. In particular, this methodology considers as new inputs the observer position in the network, the portion of traffic it can monitor, and particularities of the Tor browser for helping in the detection process. In addition, a set of Snort rules were developed as a proof-of-concept for the proposed Tor detection approach.
2020
Authors
Carrera, I; Dutra, I; Tejera, E;
Publication
2020 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON BIOINFORMATICS AND BIOMEDICINE
Abstract
One important problem in Bioinformatics is the discovery of new interactions between cellular lines and chemical compounds. In silico methods for cell-line screening are fundamental to optimize cost and time in the drug discovery processes. In order to build these methods, we need to computationally represent cell lines. Current methods for modeling cell line interactions rely on comparing genetic expression profiles. However, these profiles are usually unknown. In this work, we present a method to characterize and represent cell lines by text processing the related scientific literature. We collect abstracts of scientific papers about cellular lines from Cellosaurus and PubMed. These documents are then represented as TF-IDF vectors. We build a data set for classification with the document vectors having the cell line identifier as the target class. We then apply a multiclass SVM classification method. We use Support Vector Domain Description to describe and characterize each cell line with its corresponding hyperplane obtained with a one-vs-rest training. We evaluated several configurations of classifiers, using micro-averaged precision as metric to choose the best classifier, and were able to differentiate cellular lines from a set of 200+.
2020
Authors
Mello, J; Villar, J; Bessa, RJ; Lopes, M; Martins, J; Pinto, M;
Publication
International Conference on the European Energy Market, EEM
Abstract
This paper proposes a Local Energy Market using a P2P blockchain-powered marketplace where agents bilaterally trade energy after the consumption and production period, and not before, as usual in electricity market design. The EU and MIBEL regulatory framework for Renewable Energy Communities potentially creates space for such a market, but some improvements in the settlement procedures and agent's participation must be met. © 2020 IEEE.
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