Advances in Autism Research

This book represents one of the most up-to-date collections of articles on clinical practice and research in the field of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The scholars who contributed to this book are experts in their field, carrying out cutting edge research in prestigious institutes worldwide (e.g., Harvard Medical School, University of California, MIND Institute, King’s College, Karolinska Institute, and many others). The book addressed many topics, including (1) The COVID-19 pandemic; (2) Epidemiology and prevalence; (3) Screening and early behavioral markers; (4) Diagnostic and phenotypic profile; (5) Treatment and intervention; (6) Etiopathogenesis (biomarkers, biology, and genetic, epigenetic, and risk factors); (7) Comorbidity; (8) Adulthood; and (9) Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP). This book testifies to the complexity of performing research in the field of ASD. The published contributions underline areas of progress and ongoing challenges in which more certain data is expected in the coming years. It would be desirable that experts, clinicians, researchers, and trainees could have the opportunity to read this updated text describing the challenging heterogeneity of Autism Spectrum Disorder

Integrated Scheduling and Beam Steering for Spatial Reuse

This document describes an approach to integrating antenna selection and control into a time-division MAC scheduling process. I argue that through such integration it is possible to achieve greater spatial reuse and interference mitigation than by solving the two problems separately. Without coupling between the MAC scheduling and physical antenna configuration processes, a \u22chicken-and-egg\u22 problem exists: If antenna decisions are made before scheduling, they cannot be optimized for the communication that will actually occur. If, on the other hand, the scheduling decisions are made first, the scheduler cannot know what the actual interference and communications properties of the network will be. This dissertation presents algorithms for optimal spatial reuse TDMA scheduling with reconfigurable antennas. I present and solve the joint beam steering and scheduling problem for spatial reuse TDMA and describe an implemented system based on the algorithms developed. The algorithms described achieve up to a 600% speedup over TDMA in the experiments performed. This is based on using an optimization decomposition approach to arrive at a working distributed protocol which is equivalent to the original problem statement while also producing optimal solutions in an amount of time that is at worst linear in the size of the input. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first actually implemented STDMA scheduling system based on dual decomposition. This dissertation identifies and briefly address some of the challenges that arise in taking such a system from theory to reality

Senescence

The book "Senescence" is aimed to describe all the phenomena related to aging and senescence of all forms of life on Earth, i.e. plants, animals and the human beings. The book contains 36 carefully reviewed chapters written by different authors, aiming to describe the aging and senescent changes of living creatures, i.e. plants and animals