Abstract
Cardiac volume/function assessment remains a critical step in daily cardiology, and 3-D ultrasound plays an increasingly important role. Though development of automatic endocardial segmentation methods has received much attention, the same cannot be said about epicardial segmentation, in spite of the importance of full myocardial segmentation. In this paper, different ways of coupling the endocardial and epicardial segmentations are contrasted and compared with uncoupled segmentation. For this purpose, the B-spline explicit active surfaces framework was used; 27 3-D echocardiographic images were used to validate the different coupling strategies, which were compared with manual contouring of the endocardial and epicardial borders performed by an expert. It is shown that an independent segmentation of the endocardium followed by an epicardial segmentation coupled to the endocardium is the most advantageous. In this way, a framework for fully automatic 3-D myocardial segmentation is proposed using a novel coupling strategy.

Abstract
Navigation in virtual environments is important because it allows the exploration of the virtual worlds. This paper presents an objective performance evaluation (based on the Steering Law) of two types of navigation: natural (real walking) vs. not natural (gamepad). Steering Law was the objective performance metric chosen since it captures the relationship between the time to travel a path and the difficulty of that path. In addition to the performance, subjective metrics were also considered, namely the feeling of presence, cybersickness and user satisfaction. The participants had to complete a series of paths with different difficulty indices and the time that a participant took to go through each one was measured. Overall results show that navigation through real walking had better performance, presence, cybersickness, and satisfaction than the gamepad interface.

Abstract
Energy consumption is an issue that involves all of us, both as individuals and as members of a society, and covers all our areas of activity. It is something so broad that its impact has important reflections on our social, cultural and financial structures. The domain of software, and in particular database systems, is not an exception. Although it seems to be a little bit strange to study the energy consumption of just one query, when we consider the execution of a a few thousand queries per second, quickly we see the importance of the querying consumption in the monthly account of any company that has a conventional data center. To demonstrate the energy consumption of queries in data centers, we idealized a small dashboard for monitoring and analyzing the sales of a company, and implemented all the queries needed for populating it and ensuring its operation. The queries were organized into two groups, oriented especially to two distinct database management systems: one relational (MySQL) and one non relational (Neo4J). The goal is to evaluate the energy consumption of different types of queries, and at the same time compare it in terms of relational and non-relational database approaches. This paper relates the process we implemented to set up the energy consumption application scenario, measure the energy consumption of each query, and present our first preliminary results.

Abstract
The increasing demand for real-time analytics requires the fusion of Transactional (OLTP) and Analytical (OLAP) systems, eschewing ETL processes and introducing a plethora of proposals for the so-called Hybrid Analytical and Trans-actional Processing (HTAP) systems. Unfortunately, current benchmarking approaches are not able to comprehensively produce a unified metric from the assessment of an HTAP system. The evaluation of both engine types is done separately, leading to the use of disjoint sets of benchmarks such as TPC-C or TPC-H. In this paper we propose a new benchmark, HTAPBench, providing a unified metric for HTAP systems geared toward the execution of constantly increasing OLAP requests limited by an admissible impact on OLTP performance. To achieve this, a load balancer within HTAPBench regulates the coexistence of OLTP and OLAP workloads, proposing a method for the generation of both new data and requests, so that OLAP requests over freshly modified data are comparable across runs. We demonstrate the merit of our approach by validating it with different types of systems: OLTP, OLAP and HTAP; showing that the benchmark is able to highlight the differences between them, while producing queries with comparable complexity across experiments with negligible variability. © 2017 ACM.

Abstract

Abstract
In this paper we introduce a new Android library, called ULTEMAT, for the delivery of ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) on mobile devices and we present its use in the MoodBuster app developed in the H2020 E-COMPARED project. We discuss context-aware, or event-based, triggers for the presentation of EMAs and discuss the potential they have to improve the effectiveness of mobile provision of mental health interventions as they allow for the delivery of assessments to the patients when and where these are most appropriate. Following this, we present the abilities of ULTEMAT to use such context-aware triggers to schedule EMAs and we discuss how a similar approach can be used for Ecological Momentary Interventions (EMIs).