Advances in computational modelling for personalised medicine after myocardial infarction

Myocardial infarction (MI) is a leading cause of premature morbidity and mortality worldwide. Determining which patients will experience heart failure and sudden cardiac death after an acute MI is notoriously difficult for clinicians. The extent of heart damage after an acute MI is informed by cardiac imaging, typically using echocardiography or sometimes, cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR). These scans provide complex data sets that are only partially exploited by clinicians in daily practice, implying potential for improved risk assessment. Computational modelling of left ventricular (LV) function can bridge the gap towards personalised medicine using cardiac imaging in patients with post-MI. Several novel biomechanical parameters have theoretical prognostic value and may be useful to reflect the biomechanical effects of novel preventive therapy for adverse remodelling post-MI. These parameters include myocardial contractility (regional and global), stiffness and stress. Further, the parameters can be delineated spatially to correspond with infarct pathology and the remote zone. While these parameters hold promise, there are challenges for translating MI modelling into clinical practice, including model uncertainty, validation and verification, as well as time-efficient processing. More research is needed to (1) simplify imaging with CMR in patients with post-MI, while preserving diagnostic accuracy and patient tolerance (2) to assess and validate novel biomechanical parameters against established prognostic biomarkers, such as LV ejection fraction and infarct size. Accessible software packages with minimal user interaction are also needed. Translating benefits to patients will be achieved through a multidisciplinary approach including clinicians, mathematicians, statisticians and industry partners

Twenty years of "Lipid World": a fertile partnership with David Deamer

"The Lipid World" was published in 2001, stemming from a highly effective collaboration with David Deamer during a sabbatical year 20 years ago at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The present review paper highlights the benefits of this scientific interaction and assesses the impact of the lipid world paper on the present understanding of the possible roles of amphiphiles and their assemblies in the origin of life. The lipid world is defined as a putative stage in the progression towards life's origin, during which diverse amphiphiles or other spontaneously aggregating small molecules could have concurrently played multiple key roles, including compartment formation, the appearance of mutually catalytic networks, molecular information processing, and the rise of collective self-reproduction and compositional inheritance. This review brings back into a broader perspective some key points originally made in the lipid world paper, stressing the distinction between the widely accepted role of lipids in forming compartments and their expanded capacities as delineated above. In the light of recent advancements, we discussed the topical relevance of the lipid worldview as an alternative to broadly accepted scenarios, and the need for further experimental and computer-based validation of the feasibility and implications of the individual attributes of this point of view. Finally, we point to possible avenues for exploring transition paths from small molecule-based noncovalent structures to more complex biopolymer-containing proto-cellular systems.711473 - Minerva Foundation; 80NSSC17K0295, 80NSSC17K0296, 1724150 - National Science FoundationPublished versio

On Making Emerging Trusted Execution Environments Accessible to Developers

New types of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) architectures like TrustLite and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) are emerging. They bring new features that can lead to innovative security and privacy solutions. But each new TEE environment comes with its own set of interfaces and programming paradigms, thus raising the barrier for entry for developers who want to make use of these TEEs. In this paper, we motivate the need for realizing standard TEE interfaces on such emerging TEE architectures and show that this exercise is not straightforward. We report on our on-going work in mapping GlobalPlatform standard interfaces to TrustLite and SGX.Comment: Author's version of article to appear in 8th Internation Conference of Trust & Trustworthy Computing, TRUST 2015, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, August 24-26, 201

Intelligent Embedded Software: New Perspectives and Challenges

Intelligent embedded systems (IES) represent a novel and promising generation of embedded systems (ES). IES have the capacity of reasoning about their external environments and adapt their behavior accordingly. Such systems are situated in the intersection of two different branches that are the embedded computing and the intelligent computing. On the other hand, intelligent embedded software (IESo) is becoming a large part of the engineering cost of intelligent embedded systems. IESo can include some artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems such as expert systems, neural networks and other sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) models to guarantee some important characteristics such as self-learning, self-optimizing and self-repairing. Despite the widespread of such systems, some design challenging issues are arising. Designing a resource-constrained software and at the same time intelligent is not a trivial task especially in a real-time context. To deal with this dilemma, embedded system researchers have profited from the progress in semiconductor technology to develop specific hardware to support well AI models and render the integration of AI with the embedded world a reality

HERO: Heterogeneous Embedded Research Platform for Exploring RISC-V Manycore Accelerators on FPGA

Heterogeneous embedded systems on chip (HESoCs) co-integrate a standard host processor with programmable manycore accelerators (PMCAs) to combine general-purpose computing with domain-specific, efficient processing capabilities. While leading companies successfully advance their HESoC products, research lags behind due to the challenges of building a prototyping platform that unites an industry-standard host processor with an open research PMCA architecture. In this work we introduce HERO, an FPGA-based research platform that combines a PMCA composed of clusters of RISC-V cores, implemented as soft cores on an FPGA fabric, with a hard ARM Cortex-A multicore host processor. The PMCA architecture mapped on the FPGA is silicon-proven, scalable, configurable, and fully modifiable. HERO includes a complete software stack that consists of a heterogeneous cross-compilation toolchain with support for OpenMP accelerator programming, a Linux driver, and runtime libraries for both host and PMCA. HERO is designed to facilitate rapid exploration on all software and hardware layers: run-time behavior can be accurately analyzed by tracing events, and modifications can be validated through fully automated hard ware and software builds and executed tests. We demonstrate the usefulness of HERO by means of case studies from our research

Rapid Flight Control Prototyping - Steps Toward Cooperative Mission-Oriented Capabilities

The paper describes the latest advancements in the development of the Rapid Flight Control Prototyping system that were motivated primarily by the need to enable cooperative missions of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles and to enhance the capabilities of human operators to design and oversee the collaborative behaviors of multiple heterogeneous UAVs. The evolution of the system is driven by the mission level objectives and supported on one hand by the progress in miniature sensors, computational power, communication and portable energy technologies and on the other hand by the advanced capabilities of embedded control and communication-oriented software. As a result the developed system enables rapid design, onboard integration and in-flight verification of multiple UAV collaborative concepts that seemed impossible just a couple of years ago. Advantages of the designed system are illustrated by a couple of scenarios that were recently developed and verified in flight by multiple cooperating UAVs. The paper concentrates on presenting the motivation and the conceptual design ideas which drive the evolution of the flight prototyping platform.Evolution of RFCPS system has been funded in part by the National Air and Space Administration under Contracts NNX08BA64A, NNX08BA65A, NNX08AB97A, NNX08AC81A, and NNL08AA12I; ARO under Contract No.W911NF-06-1-0330, the USSOCOM/NPS Field Experimentation Cooperative, the Office of Naval Research under Contract N00014-05-1-0828

Towards a Smarter organization for a Self-servicing Society

Traditional social organizations such as those for the management of healthcare are the result of designs that matched well with an operational context considerably different from the one we are experiencing today. The new context reveals all the fragility of our societies. In this paper, a platform is introduced by combining social-oriented communities and complex-event processing concepts: SELFSERV. Its aim is to complement the "old recipes" with smarter forms of social organization based on the self-service paradigm and by exploring culture-specific aspects and technological challenges.Comment: Final version of a paper published in the Proceedings of International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion (DSAI'16), special track on Emergent Technologies for Ambient Assisted Living (ETAAL