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Accessibility gains arising from transport infrastructure improvements are one of the key elements boosting a complex process involving transport, land use and regional development effects. The inclusion of the wider socio-economic effects stemming from large-scale transport infrastructure investments is uneven among national evaluation procedures, and there is no commonly accepted methodology to measure them. In addition, there are other effects which do not take into account the overall change in the value of a specific variable, -normally GDP or employment-, but only the changes in its spatial distribution. These distributive effects, related to spatial equity issues, are increasingly included as a policy objective in most infrastructure Master Plans. More over, at a European level, economic and social cohesion is considered among the priority objectives in the enlarged EU. However, the inclusion of cohesion effects in national assessment methodologies is quite limited. If cohesion issues are not taken into account, new infrastructure schemes may induce spatial polarising effects, as more profitable projects are usually the ones which interconnect central regions, at the expense of the relative position of peripheral regions. Moreover, each transport mode has its special features which make it more inclined towards cohesion or polarising effects. In this sense, recent studies at a European level on the impacts of RTE-T show that HSR lines seem to have rather polarising effects, while new road schemes seem to have slight cohesion effects. In this context, activity-based accessibility indicators can be used as a proxy to measure these distributive effects. Changes in the relative positions of the regions in terms of accessibility provide an estimate to test if the Master Plan increases or reduces disparities among regions- i.e. reduces or increases cohesion, respectively. The paper analyses these issues measuring the changes in accessibility stemming from the implementation of different high-capacity road and HSR schemes in Spain. Results show a slight cohesion effect after the implementation of the high-capacity road network, along with a polarising effect arising from the implementation of new HSR lines, in line with the results included in recent European- level studies. The paper is based on the work being carried out for the author's Ph.D. Dissertation, titled: "Assessment of Transport Infrastructure Plans: a strategic approach integrating environmental, economic and spatial equity aspects".

District heating and cooling (DHC) systems play an important role under the new European Union (EU) energy transition strategy. Thermal energy networks are helping to stimulate the development of alternative technologies based on a broad range of renewable energy sources. The present study analysed the current situation of DHC systems in Spain and provides an overview of the challenges and future opportunities that their use will entail. Its objective is to assess thermal energy conversion and management from a holistic perspective, including a study of existing energy infrastructures. The focus of this study lies on Spain given the country's abundance of natural resources such as renewable energy sources including solar energy, biomass and geothermal energy, among others, as well as its strategic location on the map of the EU. Based on the analysis of the three factors for energy conversion in a district heating system, namely resources, technology, and management, the methodology provided an assessment of the different factors involved in running a DHC system. The results show an estimated total production for DHC networks of 1448 MWth, of which 72% is supplied purely by renewable energy sources. ; INTERREG V-A España – Portugal 2014–2020 (POCTEP) | Ref. proyecto Biomasa-AP ; European Commission | Ref. H2020-FTI-Pilot- 2016-1-760551-CYCLOMB

District heating and cooling (DHC) systems play an important role under the new European Union (EU) energy transition strategy. Thermal energy networks are helping to stimulate the development of alternative technologies based on a broad range of renewable energy sources. The present study analysed the current situation of DHC systems in Spain and provides an overview of the challenges and future opportunities that their use will entail. Its objective is to assess thermal energy conversion and management from a holistic perspective, including a study of existing energy infrastructures. The focus of this study lies on Spain given the country's abundance of natural resources such as renewable energy sources including solar energy, biomass and geothermal energy, among others, as well as its strategic location on the map of the EU. Based on the analysis of the three factors for energy conversion in a district heating system, namely resources, technology, and management, the methodology provided an assessment of the different factors involved in running a DHC system. The results show an estimated total production for DHC networks of 1448 MWth, of which 72% is supplied purely by renewable energy sources. ; INTERREG V-A España – Portugal 2014–2020 (POCTEP) | Ref. proyecto Biomasa-AP ; European Commission | Ref. H2020-FTI-Pilot- 2016-1-760551-CYCLOMB

This work presents the development of an ADAS (advanced driving assistance system) focused on driver drowsiness detection, whose objective is to alert drivers of their drowsy state to avoid road traffic accidents. In a driving environment, it is necessary that fatigue detection is performed in a non-intrusive way, and that the driver is not bothered with alarms when he or she is not drowsy. Our approach to this open problem uses sequences of images that are 60 s long and are recorded in such a way that the subject's face is visible. To detect whether the driver shows symptoms of drowsiness or not, two alternative solutions are developed, focusing on the minimization of false positives. The first alternative uses a recurrent and convolutional neural network, while the second one uses deep learning techniques to extract numeric features from images, which are introduced into a fuzzy logic-based system afterwards. The accuracy obtained by both systems is similar: around 65% accuracy over training data, and 60% accuracy on test data. However, the fuzzy logic-based system stands out because it avoids raising false alarms and reaches a specificity (proportion of videos in which the driver is not drowsy that are correctly classified) of 93%. Although the obtained results do not achieve very satisfactory rates, the proposals presented in this work are promising and can be considered a solid baseline for future works. ; This work was supported by the Spanish Government under projects PID2019- 104793RB-C31, TRA2016-78886-C3-1-R, RTI2018-096036-B-C22, PEAVAUTO-CM-UC3M and by the Region of Madrid's Excellence Program (EPUC3M17).

Background : Supported by the International Society for Translational Medicine (ISTM), Wenzhou Medical College and the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical College, the International Conference on Translational Medicine (ICTM) was held on October 22–23, 2011 in Wenzhou, China. Nearly 800 registrants attended the meeting, primarily representing institutes and hospitals in Europe, The United States of America, And Asia, and China. The meeting was chaired and organized by Dr. Xiangdong Wang, Xiaoming Chen, Richard Coico, Jeffrey M. Drazen, Richard Horton, Francesco M. Marincola, Laurentiu M. Popescu, Jia Qu and Aamir Shahzad. Findings : The meeting focused on the communication of the need to foster translational medicine (TM) by building and broadening bridges between basic research and clinical studies at the international level. The meeting included distinguished TM experts from academia, the pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries, government agencies, regulators, and clinicians and provided the opportunity to identify shared interests and efforts for collaborative approaches utilizing cutting edge technologies, innovative approaches and novel therapeutic interventions. The meeting defined the concept of TM in its two-way operational scheme and emphasized the need for bed to bench efforts based directly on clinical observation. Conclusions : It was the meeting participants' realization that the shared main goals of TM include breaking the separation between clinic practice and basic research, establishing positive feedback by understanding the basis of expected and unexpected clinical outcomes and accelerating basic research relevant to human suffering. The primary objectives of the meeting were two-fold: to accelerate the two-way translation by informing the participants representing the different disciplines about the state of art activities around TM approaches; and to identify areas that need to be supported by redirecting limited resources as well as identifying new sources of funding. This report summarizes key concepts presented during the meeting representing the state-of-art translational research and salient aspects of the ensuing discussions.