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Este trabajo presenta una comparativa sobre cómo se está realizando la evaluación por competencias en la asignatura de Trabajo Fin de Grado (TFG) en los distintos Grados en Ingeniería Informática a nivel nacional. Para ello, se han consultado todas las guías docentes disponibles, las rúbricas y el informe que debe realizar la comisión evaluadora (si los hubiere). En esta contribución se analizan las diferencias y similitudes encontradas. Tras realizar un análisis cualitativo y cuantitativo, se llega a la conclusión de que, actualmente, la evaluación de las competencias asignadas a la asignatura de TFG es un proceso sujeto a subjetividades y que no refleja la gran mayoría de las competencias que se supone que deben ser evaluadas y calificadas., This work presents a comparison study about how competency-based evaluation is being performed in the senior degree project (Trabajo fin de Grado in Spanish) subject in the computing curricula of the Spanish universities. All available teaching guides, evaluation rubrics and the reports (if any) to be delivered by the corresponding evaluation committees have been checked, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The analysis of results yields the conclusion that, at present, the evaluation of competencies for the senior degree Project is a subjective process that does not reflects most of competencies that, in theory, should be assessed and marked.

Gene expression regulation is an intricate, dynamic phenomenon essential for all biolog ical functions. The necessary instructions for gen expression are encoded in cis-regulatory elements that work together and interact with the RNA polymerase to confer specific spatial and temporal patterns of transcrip tion. Therefore, the identification of these el ements is currently an active area of research in computational analysis of regulatory se quences. However, the problem is difficult since the combinatorial interactions between the regulating factors can be very complex. Here we present a web server, Cis-cop, that identifies cis-regulatory modules given a set of transcription factor binding sites and, ad ditionally, also RNA pol sites for a group of genes.

Genomes of many organisms have been sequenced over the last few years. However, transforming such raw sequence data into knowledge remains a hard task. A great number of prediction programs have been developed to address part of this problem: the location of genes along a genome and their expression. We propose a multi-objective methodology to combine state-of-the-art algorithms into an aggregation scheme in order to obtain optimal methods’ aggregations. The results obtained show a major improvement in sensitivity when our methodology is compared to the performance of individual methods for gene finding and gene expression problems. The methodology proposed here is an automatic method generator, and a step forward to exploit all already existing methods, by providing alternative optimal methods’ aggregations to answer concrete queries for a certain biological problem with a maximized accuracy of the prediction. As more approaches are integrated for each of the presented problems, de novo accuracy can be expected to improve further.

Biomedical research has been revolutionized by high-throughput techniques and the enor mous amount of biological data they are able to generate. Genetic networks arise as an es sential task to mine these data since they ex plain the function of genes in terms of how they influence other genes. Genetic networks based on discrete states, such as boolean net works, have been widely used and have shown abilities to model some of the complex dy namics of gene expression networks. In this work we propose a new method for the dis cretization of gene expression data based on the fuzzification of already proposed tech niques. The proposal is applied to the mi croarray data obtained from a problem on the inflammation and host response to injury in human beings.

Current tools and techniques devoted to examine the content of large databases are often hampered by their inability to support searches based on criteria that are meaningful to their users. These shortcomings are particularly evident in data banks storing representations of structural data such as biological networks. Conceptual clustering techniques have demonstrated to be appropriate for uncovering relationships between features that characterize objects in structural data. However, typical con ceptual clustering approaches normally recover the most obvious relations, but fail to discover the lessfrequent but more informative underlying data associations. The combination of evolutionary algorithms with multiobjective and multimodal optimization techniques constitutes a suitable tool for solving this problem. We propose a novel conceptual clustering methodology termed evolutionary multiobjective conceptual clustering (EMO-CC), re lying on the NSGA-II multiobjective (MO) genetic algorithm. We apply this methodology to identify conceptual models in struc tural databases generated from gene ontologies. These models can explain and predict phenotypes in the immunoinflammatory response problem, similar to those provided by gene expression or other genetic markers. The analysis of these results reveals that our approach uncovers cohesive clusters, even those comprising a small number of observations explained by several features, which allows describing objects and their interactions from different perspectives and at different levels of detail.

Biomedical research has been revolutionized by high throughput techniques and the enormous amount of data they are able to generate. In particular technology has the capacity to monitor changes in RNA abundance for thou sands of genes simultaneously. The interest shown over microarray analysis methods has rapidly raised. Clustering is widely used in the analysis of microarray data to group genes of interest targeted from microarray experiments on the basis of similarity of expression patterns. In this work we apply two clustering algorithms, K-means and Expecta tion Maximization to particular a problem and we compare the groupings obtained on the basis of the cohesiveness of the gene products associated to the genes in each cluster

One of the biggest challenges in genomics is the elucidation of the design principles controlling gene expression. Current approaches examine promoter sequences for particular features, such as the presence of binding sites for a transcriptional regulator, and identify recurrent relationships among these features termed network motifs. To define the expression dynamics of a group of genes, the strength of the connections in a network must be specified, and these are determined by the cis-promoter features participating in the regulation. Approaches that homogenize features among promoters (e.g., relying on consensuses to describe the various promoter features) and even across species hamper the discovery of the key differences that distinguish promoters that are co-regulated by the same transcriptional regulator. Thus, we have developed a an approach based on fuzzy logic expressions to analyze proteobacterial genomes for promoter features that is specifically designed to account for the variability in sequence, location and topology intrinsic to differential gene expression. We applied our method to characterize network motifs controlled by the PhoP/PhoQ regulatory system of Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium. We identify key features that enable the PhoP protein to produce distinct kinetic patterns in target genes, which could not have been uncovered just by inspecting network motifs.

The increased availability of biological databases contain ing representations of complex objects permits access to vast amounts of data. In spite of the recent renewed interest in knowledge-discovery tech niques (or data mining), there is a dearth of data analysis methods in tended to facilitate understanding of the represented objects and related systems by their most representative features and those relationship de rived from these features (i.e., structural data). In this paper we propose a conceptual clustering methodology termed EMO-CC for Evolution ary Multi-Objective Conceptual Clustering that uses multi-objective and multi-modal optimization techniques based on Evolutionary Algorithms that uncover representative substructures from structural databases. Be sides, EMO-CC provides annotations of the uncovered substructures, and based on them, applies an unsupervised classification approach to retrieve new members of previously discovered substructures. We apply EMO-CC to the Gene Ontology database to recover interesting sub structures that describes problems from different points of view and use them to explain inmuno-inflammatory responses measured in terms of gene expression profiles derived from the analysis of longitudinal blood expression profiles of human volunteers treated with intravenous endo toxin compared to placebo.

A critical challenge of the postgenomic era is to understand how genes are differentially regulated even when they belong to a given network. Because the fundamental mechanism controlling gene expression operates at the level of transcription initiation, computational techniques have been devel oped that identify cis-regulatory features and map such features into differential expression patterns. The fact that such co-regulated genes may be differentially regulated suggests that subtle differences in the shared cis-acting regulatory elements are likely significant. Thus, we carry out an exhaustive description of cis-acting regulatory features including the orientation, location and number of binding sites for a regulatory protein, the presence of binding site submotifs, the class and number of RNA polymerase sites, as well as gene expression data, which is treated as one feature among many. These features, derived from dif ferent domain sources, are analyzed concurrently, and dynamic relations are re cognized to generate profiles, which are groups of promoters sharing common features. We apply this method to probe the regulatory networks governed by the PhoP/PhoQ two-component system in the enteric bacteria Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica. Our analysis uncovered novel members of the PhoP regulon as and the resulting profiles group genes that share underlying biologi cal that characterize the system kinetics. The predictions were experimentally validated to establish that the PhoP protein uses multiple mechanisms to control gene transcription and is a central element in a highly connected network.

The rapid development of methods that select over/under expressed genes from microarray experiments have not yet matched the need for tools that identify informational profiles that differentiate between experimental condi tions such as time, treatment and phenotype. Uncertainty arises when methods devoted to identify significantly expressed genes are evaluated: do all microar ray analysis methods yield similar results from the same input dataset? do dif ferent microarray datasets require distinct analysis methods?. We performed a detailed evaluation of several microarray analysis methods, finding that none of these methods alone identifies all observable differential profiles, nor subsumes the results obtained by the other methods. Consequently, we propose a proce dure that, given certain user-defined preferences, generates an optimal suite of statistical methods. These solutions are optimal in the sense that they constitute partial ordered subsets of all possible method-associations bounded by both, the most specific and the most sensitive available solution.