Professor Philippe Rasoanaivo Unveiling the ethnopharmacological potential of the flora of Madagascar: in memory of Philippe Rasoanaivo

Professor Philippe Rasoanaivo, University of Antananarivo, Madagascar, died on Wednesday, 13 July 2016 from a heart attack, at the age of 70. Professor Rasoanaivo was well known as one of the most distinguished African phytochemists, as also recognised by several international prizes. He won the 2015 Olusegun Obasanjo Prize for using traditional medicine to improve the efficacy of existing drugs for brain disorders and also treating sexual dysfunction among men. He had just been awarded the Prize at the last General Assembly meeting in Kasane, Botswana, in June 2016. Professor Rasoanaivo authored several books and more than 150 international research articles, including some recently published in Natural Product Research. Professor Rasoanaivo developed a unique mixture of scientific knowledge dedicated to the utilisation of endemic plants for ethnobotanical, economic, medicinal and social uses. He wanted to learn everything that was necessary to understand and study the extraordinary flora of his country, obtaining this information to help its people. Throughout his life, countless examples of his remarkableness can easily be found. He was an excellent botanist and, living in a country well known for an exceptional endemic flora, he was able to find and collect many species, and show the world their importance. He was a great ethnopharmacologist, learning the popular uses of plants from the people of his country, and using this information to start a scientific validation of their efficacy. He was a modern researcher: in times of fragmented research, he was able to perform the full range of research on natural products, from chemistry to applied pharmacology. He was successful and organised director of the Institut Malgache de Recherches Appliquées, promoting the cultivation of crops of economic importance. In this obituary, we have provided a synthesis of his important scientific achievements and human qualities, since we had the privilege of working with him and he was able to teach us what modern ethnopharmacology is

Robotic Process Mining: Vision and Challenges

Robotic process automation (RPA) is an emerging technology that allows organizations automating repetitive clerical tasks by executing scripts that encode sequences of fine-grained interactions with Web and desktop applications. Examples of clerical tasks include opening a file, selecting a field in a Web form or a cell in a spreadsheet, and copy-pasting data across fields or cells. Given that RPA can automate a wide range of routines, this raises the question of which routines should be automated in the first place. This paper presents a vision towards a family of techniques, termed robotic process mining (RPM), aimed at filling this gap. The core idea of RPM is that repetitive routines amenable for automation can be discovered from logs of interactions between workers and Web and desktop applications, also known as user interactions (UI) logs. The paper defines a set of basic concepts underpinning RPM and presents a pipeline of processing steps that would allow an RPM tool to generate RPA scripts from UI logs. The paper also discusses research challenges to realize the envisioned pipeline

Data Preservation at LEP

The four LEP experiments ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL successfully recorded e+e- collision data during the years 1989 to 2000. As part of the ordinary evolution in High Energy Physics, these experiments can not be repeated and their data is therefore unique. This article briefly reviews the data preservation efforts undertaken by the four experiments beyond the end of data taking. The current status of the preserved data and associated tools is summarised.Comment: 7 pages, contribution to proceedings of the "First Workshop on Data Preservation and Long Term Analysis in HEP

Oviposition inhibitory activity of the Mexican sunflower Tithonia diversifolia (Asteraceae) polar extracts against the two-spotted spider mite Tetranychus urticae (Tetranychidae)

The Mexican sunflower (Tithonia diversifolia, Asteraceae) is an invasive shrub of agricultural and non-agricultural lands in tropical countries. Besides extensive utilizations in the traditional medicine, mainly to treat malaria, the plant is believed to have a great potential in agriculture of developing countries as a green biomass to produce fertilizer, fodder and biopesticides. The plant is known to produce tagitinins, which are sesquiterpene lactones with a bitter taste endowed with toxicity against several insects such as mosquitoes, aphids, and beetles. Here, we evaluated the potential of T. diversifolia against the two-spotted spider mite Tetranychus urticae (Tetranychidae), which is one of the most economically important arthropod pests worldwide. The leaf methanolic extract and its ethyl acetate fraction were tested for acute and chronic toxicity and for oviposition inhibitory effects. The chemical composition of the extracts was analyzed by HPLC-MSn and NMR. The main constituents were flavonoid derivatives, phenylpropanoids and sesquiterpene lactones. Among the latter, tagitinin C and tagitinin A were the major compounds. In acute toxicity assays, mortality did not exceed 50% even for the highest tested dose of 150 \u3bcg cm-3. However, in chronic toxicity assays, on day 5 from application, the methanolic extract LD50 was 41.3 \u3bcg cm-3 while LD90 was 98.7 \u3bcg cm-3. Furthermore, both T. diversifolia extracts inhibited oviposition in T. urticae. The ethyl acetate extract was the most active oviposition inhibitor, with an ED50 value of 44.3 \u3bcg cm-3 and an ED90 of 121.5 \u3bcg cm-3. Overall, the good yield rate of the extract and the high crop yield highlighted good prospects of using the extract from this plant for the development of oviposition inhibitors against mite