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Denoising of biomedical signals using wavelet transform is a widely used technique. The use of undecimated wavelet transform (UWT) assures better denoising results but implies a higher complexity than discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Some implementation schemes have been proposed to perform UWT, one of them is Cycle Spinning (CS). CS is performed using the DWT of several circular shifted versions of the signal to analyse. The reduction of the number of shifted versions of the biomedical signal during denoising process used is addressed in the present work. This paper is about a variant of CS with a reduced number of shifts, called Partial Cycle Spinning (PCS), applied to ultrasonic trace denoising. The influence of the choice of PCS shifts in the denoised registers quality is studied. Several shifts selection rules are proposed, compared and evaluated. Denoising results over a set of ultrasonic registers are provided for PCS with different shift selection rules, CS and DWT. The work shows that PCS with the appropriate choice of shifts could be the best option to denoise biomedical ultrasonic traces. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ; This work was partially supported by Spanish Government MEC Project TIN2013-47272-C2-1-R. ; Rodríguez-Hernández, MA. (2016). Shift Selection Influence in Partial Cycle Spinning Denoising of Biomedical Signals. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control. 26:64-68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bspc.2015.12.002 ; S ; 64 ; 68 ; 26

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[EN] Communication networks have become a critical element in the development of smart cities. The information flows generated by thousands of sensors and systems must be managed to assure the adequate guarantees of quality, availability, and security. This paper introduces the SimulCity tool, which assists in the design of a smart city's communications convergent network. SimulCity allows a flexible simulation of different scenarios where multiple heterogeneous sources of human type communications (HTCs) and machine type communications (MTCs) compete for limited bandwidth resources. SimulCity evaluates the impact of new services on the performance of a municipal communications network and, consequently, assists the modification of network values to optimize bandwidth and reduce costs. Several network characteristics can be easily configured in SimulCity, such as the definition of traffic sources, the parametrization of different network mechanisms, access admission control, quality of service (QoS), and traffic in the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) network. SimulCity was used to simulate different projects in the smart city of Valencia (Spain). Specifically, SimulCity was used to study the impact on the Valencia City Council's communications network of several new services: the solid waste collection supervision, the street lighting management, the control of regulated parking areas, and the upgrade of voice and video communications systems of the city government buildings. The results obtained have allowed the analysis of the impact that these new services have on the existing network and to perform an adequate dimensioning of the future municipal communications network. ; This work was supported in part by the Spanish Government under Project TIN2013-47272-C2-1-R and Project TEC2015-71932-REDT, and in part by the ITACA Institute Ayudas 2019 ; Rodríguez-Hernández, MA.; Gomez-Sacristan, Á.; Gomez-Cuadrado, D. (2019). SimulCity: Planning Communications in Smart Cities. IEEE Access. 7:46870-46884. ...

[EN] The monitoring of cultural heritage is becoming common in cities to provide heritage preservation and prevent vandalism. Using sensors and video cameras for this task implies the need to transmit information. In this paper, the teletraffic that cameras and sensors generate is characterized and the transmissions¿ influence on the municipal communications network is evaluated. Then, we propose models for telecommunication traffic sources in an intelligent municipal heritage management service inside a smart sustainable city. The sources were simulated in a smart city scenario to find the proper quality of service (QoS) parameters for the communication network, using Valencia City as background. Specific sensors for intelligent municipal heritage management were selected and four telecommunication traffic sources were modelled according to real-life requirements and sensors datasheet. Different simulations were performed to find the proper CIR (Committed Information Rate) and PIR (Peak Information Rate) values and to study the effects of limited bandwidth networks. Packet loss, throughput, delay, and jitter were used to evaluate the network¿s performance. Consequently, the result was the selection of the minimum values for PIR and CIR that ensured QoS and thus optimized the traffic telecommunication costs associated with an intelligent municipal heritage management service. ; This work was partially supported by Spanish Government Projects TIN2013-47272-C2-1-R and TEC2015-71932-REDT ; Rodríguez-Hernández, MA.; Jiang, Z.; Gomez-Sacristan, Á.; Pla, V. (2019). Intelligent Municipal Heritage Management Service in a Smart City: Telecommunication Traffic Characterizationand Quality of Service. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (Online). 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/8412542 ; S ; 1 ; 10

[EN] Ultrasound diagnosis is a widely used medical tool. Among the various ultrasound techniques, ultrasonic imaging is particularly relevant. This paper presents an improvement to a two-dimensional (2D) ultrasonic system using measurements taken from perpendicular planes, where digital signal processing techniques are used to combine one-dimensional (1D) A-scans were acquired by individual transducers in arrays located in perpendicular planes. An algorithm used to combine measurements is improved based on the wavelet transform, which includes a denoising step during the 2D representation generation process. The inclusion of this new denoising stage generates higher quality 2D representations with a reduced level of speckling. The paper includes different 2D representations obtained from noisy A-scans and compares the improvements obtained by including the denoising stage. ; This work was supported by Spanish Government MEC Project TIN2013-47272-C2-1-R and by ITACA (Universitat Politècnica de València). ; Rodríguez-Hernández, MA.; Gomez Sacristan, Á.; Sempere Paya, VM. (2016). 2D biological representations with reduced speckle obtained from two perpendicular ultrasonic arrays. Technology and Health Care. 24:S561-S568. https://doi.org/10.3233/THC-161182 ; S ; S561 ; S568 ; 24

The concept of Smart-Hospital is generally associated with a comprehensive care model capable of responding to the needs of health institutions, companies and patients in an optimum way in terms of economic, operative and environmental aspects aiming the improvement of care quality and sustainable use of resources. In this context, a Smart-Hospital is a technological and hyper-connected hospital in terms of telecommunications. Ahuge range of systems and devices generate information of a heterogeneous nature. In many cases, for reasons of efficiency and availability, this information is stored and processed in architectures external to the hospital itself. Centralized services housed in Cloud architectures or telemedicine / tele-assistance services are proof of this. Guaranteeing an adequate level of quality of service is a complex task when approached from an analytical point of view due to the large number of sources and their heterogeneous nature. The use of simulation tools allows this task to be undertaken and using different hypotheses in less time and at a reasonable cost. This article presents the results obtained, in terms of quality of communications, for a Smart-Hospital with an arbitrary collection of heterogeneous services connected by Metro-Ethernet access. The results obtained: loss of information, delays and jitter will be used to outline the capacities to be contracted from the telecommunications supplier. ; This work was supported by Spanish Government MEC Project TIN2013-47272-C2-1-R and by ITACA (Universitat Politecnica de Valencia). ; Gomez Sacristan, Á.; Rodríguez-Hernández, MA.; Sempere Paya, VM. (2015). Evaluation of Quality of Service in Smart-Hospital Communications. Journal of Medical Imaging and Health Informatics. 5(8):1864-1869. https://doi.org/10.1166/jmihi.2015.1660 ; S ; 1864 ; 1869 ; 5 ; 8

The Center for Research and Teaching in Education -CIDE- developed a rather novel admission system to select students, with an appropriate profile, interested in enrolling in the different career options offered by CIDE in 2002. A lot of people filed their application forms to participate in the admission process, and it was not viable to admit them all, due to limited resources and space. In search for excellence, an interdisciplinary team of academics researched and defined the future educat´s profile. They also designed the appropriate instruments to select the students, taking into account the Costa Rican legislation. The objective was to select students with the necessary aptitude and attitude to become professionals in the different educational fields. ; El Centro de Investigación y Docencia en Educación (CIDE) desarrolló un novedoso sistema para seleccionar los estudiantes que, con un perfil idóneo, entrarían a las distintas carreras en el 2002. Numerosas personas hicieron solicitud para ingresar a alguna carrera y no se contaba con cupo para todos ellos. En búsqueda de la excelencia, un equipo interdisciplinario de académicos profundizó en el perfil de educador del futuro, los instrumentos adecuados para seleccionar estudiantes y la legislación costarricense que permitiera encontrar personas con aptitudes y actitudes necesarias para profesionalizarse en diversos campos de la educación.