Solar, Mauricio

A virtual model of fibro-bronchoscopy is reported. The virtual model represents in 3D the trachea and the bronchi creating a virtual world of the bronchial tree. The bronchoscope is modeled to look over the bronchial tree imitating the displacement and rotation of the real bronchoscope. The parameters of the virtual model were gradually adjusted according to expert opinion and allowed the training of specialists with a virtual bronchoscope of great realism. The virtual bronchial tree provides clues of reality regarding the movement of the bronchoscope, creating the illusion that the virtual instrument is behaving as the real one with all the benefits in costs that this means.

In this article a maturity model is proposed, named OD-MM (Open Data Maturity Model) to assess the commitment and capabilities of public agencies in pursuing the principles and practices of open data. The OD-MM model has a three level hierarchical structure, called domains, sub-domains and critical variables. Four capacity levels are defined for each of the 33 critical variables distributed in nine sub-domains in order to determine the organization maturity level. The model is a very valuable diagnosis tool for public services, given it shows all weaknesses and the way (a roadmap) to progress in the implementation of open data

E-government research deals with ‘wicked’ problems that require multidisciplinary approaches to gain a full understanding. One of the main challenges of e-government is to induce change in the structure of public organizations to realize its full potential. This paper investigates e-government induced change using two complementary theoretical lenses applied to an egovernment case study. We use organization theories to explore aspects of organizational structure that may change when implementating e-government and structuration theory to investigate how these aspects are affected by human action within its social structure. This combination allows us to investigate the discrepancy between the ambitions of e-government induced change and the actual changes accomplished in practice. Our analysis shows that using these two frames gives us better insight into the thorny subject of e-government than using a single theory. Further research should look into how these theories can be used to deepen our knowledge of e-government.

The tasks execution scheduling is a common problem in computer science. The typical problem, as in industrial or computer processing applications, has some restrictions that are inapplicable for certain cases. For example, all available tasks have to be executed at some point, and ambient factors do not affect the execution order. In the astronomical observations field, projects are scheduled as observation blocks, and their execution depends on parameters like science goals priority and target visibility, but is also restricted by external factors: atmospheric conditions, equipment failure, etc. A telescope scheduler is mainly in charge of handling projects, commanding the telescope’s high level movement to targets, and starting data acquisition. With the growth of observatories’ capacities and maintenance costs, it is now mandatory to optimize the observation time allocation. Currently, at professional observatories there is still strong human intervention dependency, with no fully automatic solution so far. This paper aims to describe the dynamic scheduling problem in astronomical observations, and to provide a survey on existing solutions, opening some new application opportunities for computer science.