CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

A critical overview of computational approaches employed for COVID-19 drug discovery

COVID-19 has resulted in huge numbers of infections and deaths worldwide and brought the most severe disruptions to societies and economies since the Great Depression. Massive experimental and computational research effort to understand and characterize the disease and rapidly develop diagnostics, vaccines, and drugs has emerged in response to this devastating pandemic and more than 130 000 COVID-19-related research papers have been published in peer-reviewed journals or deposited in preprint servers. Much of the research effort has focused on the discovery of novel drug candidates or repurposing of existing drugs against COVID-19, and many such projects have been either exclusively computational or computer-aided experimental studies. Herein, we provide an expert overview of the key computational methods and their applications for the discovery of COVID-19 small-molecule therapeutics that have been reported in the research literature. We further outline that, after the first year the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears that drug repurposing has not produced rapid and global solutions. However, several known drugs have been used in the clinic to cure COVID-19 patients, and a few repurposed drugs continue to be considered in clinical trials, along with several novel clinical candidates. We posit that truly impactful computational tools must deliver actionable, experimentally testable hypotheses enabling the discovery of novel drugs and drug combinations, and that open science and rapid sharing of research results are critical to accelerate the development of novel, much needed therapeutics for COVID-19

The Short-Term Impact of COVID-19 on Labour Market Outcomes: Comparative Systematic Evidence

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Leveraging big data resources and data integration in biology: applying computational systems analyses and machine learning to gain insights into the biology of cancers

Recently, many "molecular profiling" projects have yielded vast amounts of genetic, epigenetic, transcription, protein expression, metabolic and drug response data for cancerous tumours, healthy tissues, and cell lines. We aim to facilitate a multi-scale understanding of these high-dimensional biological data and the complexity of the relationships between the different data types taken from human tumours. Further, we intend to identify molecular disease subtypes of various cancers, uncover the subtype-specific drug targets and identify sets of therapeutic molecules that could potentially be used to inhibit these targets. We collected data from over 20 publicly available resources. We then leverage integrative computational systems analyses, network analyses and machine learning, to gain insights into the pathophysiology of pancreatic cancer and 32 other human cancer types. Here, we uncover aberrations in multiple cell signalling and metabolic pathways that implicate regulatory kinases and the Warburg effect as the likely drivers of the distinct molecular signatures of three established pancreatic cancer subtypes. Then, we apply an integrative clustering method to four different types of molecular data to reveal that pancreatic tumours can be segregated into two distinct subtypes. We define sets of proteins, mRNAs, miRNAs and DNA methylation patterns that could serve as biomarkers to accurately differentiate between the two pancreatic cancer subtypes. Then we confirm the biological relevance of the identified biomarkers by showing that these can be used together with pattern-recognition algorithms to infer the drug sensitivity of pancreatic cancer cell lines accurately. Further, we evaluate the alterations of metabolic pathway genes across 32 human cancers. We find that while alterations of metabolic genes are pervasive across all human cancers, the extent of these gene alterations varies between them. Based on these gene alterations, we define two distinct cancer supertypes that tend to be associated with different clinical outcomes and show that these supertypes are likely to respond differently to anticancer drugs. Overall, we show that the time has already arrived where we can leverage available data resources to potentially elicit more precise and personalised cancer therapies that would yield better clinical outcomes at a much lower cost than is currently being achieved

Improving Strategic Management Planning in Non-Profit Organizations: Federally Qualified Health Centers

This qualitative multiple case study included the challenges non-profits, specifically Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) leaders face when utilizing ineffective methods for strategic planning and management. The researcher conducted 21 semistructured interviews with critical decision makers involving executive, senior, and middle managers at three health centers in Texas to obtain a better understanding of their perspective on strategic planning and management. The results of the findings revealed that FQHC leaders face many barriers that limit their success or expansion of the mission, organizational growth, financial stability, and strategic alliances. However, the results demonstrated that leaders from non-profits, particularly FQHCs can create and produce sustainable and practical business applications when leveraging dynamic capabilities, systems thinking, and effective human asset management concepts. Additionally, the results showed that improving organizational culture, leadership competencies, and strategic alliances impact strategic management processes and practices. Furthermore, the results of the study proposed practical strategies to assist leaders in the management of planning, development, and implementation of strategic initiatives, leading to increased profitability, productivity, and financial sustainability. This research could fill a potential gap in identifying the need for effective strategic management processes for FQHCs

Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1

The writers in the volume ask, implicitly, how the 21st century horizons that exceed any political, economic, or conceptual models alters or redefines a series of key topoi. These range through figures of sexual difference, bioethics, care, species invasion, war, post-carbon thought, ecotechnics, time, and so on. As such, the volume is also a dossier on what metamorphoses await the legacies of -humanistic- thought in adapting to, or rethinking, the other materialities that impinge of contemporary -life as we know it.- With essays by Robert Markley, J. Hillis Miller, Bernard Stiegler, Justin Read, Timothy Clark, Claire Colebrook, Jason Groves, Joanna Zylinska, Catherine Malabou, Mike Hill, Martin McQuillan, Eduardo Cadava and Tom Cohen