Uncovering the neural basis of cognitive impairment following hearing loss: an all-optical electrophysiology approach

We have access to state-of-the-art equipment that will enable us to visualize specific neuron types in animal models. This is a new approach that combines several recent advances in the field of \u27optogenetics\u27, a technique that uses light to control neurons. This approach will allow us to explore how hearing loss induced by loud noise exposure leads to abnormal neural activity in areas of the brain that control learning, memory and higher cognitive function.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/brainscanprojectsummaries/1030/thumbnail.jp

Pulling and Pushing Stem Cells to Control Their Differentiation

Much has already been done to achieve precisely controlled and customised regenerative therapies. Thanks to recent advances made in several areas relevant to regenerative medicine including the use of stimuli-responsive materials, 4-dimensional biofabrication, inducible pluripotent stem cells, control of stem cell fate using chemical and physical factors, minimal access delivery, and information-communication technology. In this short perspective, recent advances are discussed with a focus on a recent report on the use of mechanical stretching of nanoparticle-laden stem cells by using external magnetic field to induce defined cardiac line differentiation. Although more and more tools are becoming available for engineering tissue models tissues and the range of potential applications is expanding, there is still much work to be done before it is proved to work with human cells, form tissues and ultimately achieve application in the clinic

Theories and Models for Internet Quality of Service

We survey recent advances in theories and models for Internet Quality of Service (QoS). We start with the theory of network calculus, which lays the foundation for support of deterministic performance guarantees in networks, and illustrate its applications to integrated services, differentiated services, and streaming media playback delays. We also present mechanisms and architecture for scalable support of guaranteed services in the Internet, based on the concept of a stateless core. Methods for scalable control operations are also briefly discussed. We then turn our attention to statistical performance guarantees, and describe several new probabilistic results that can be used for a statistical dimensioning of differentiated services. Lastly, we review recent proposals and results in supporting performance guarantees in a best effort context. These include models for elastic throughput guarantees based on TCP performance modeling, techniques for some quality of service differentiation without access control, and methods that allow an application to control the performance it receives, in the absence of network support

Analysis, filtering, and control for Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy models in networked systems

Copyright © 2015 Sunjie Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The fuzzy logic theory has been proven to be effective in dealing with various nonlinear systems and has a great success in industry applications. Among different kinds of models for fuzzy systems, the so-called Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model has been quite popular due to its convenient and simple dynamic structure as well as its capability of approximating any smooth nonlinear function to any specified accuracy within any compact set. In terms of such a model, the performance analysis and the design of controllers and filters play important roles in the research of fuzzy systems. In this paper, we aim to survey some recent advances on the T-S fuzzy control and filtering problems with various network-induced phenomena. The network-induced phenomena under consideration mainly include communication delays, packet dropouts, signal quantization, and randomly occurring uncertainties (ROUs). With such network-induced phenomena, the developments on T-S fuzzy control and filtering issues are reviewed in detail. In addition, some latest results on this topic are highlighted. In the end, conclusions are drawn and some possible future research directions are pointed out.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61134009, 61329301, 11301118 and 61174136, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant BK20130017, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant CUSF-DH-D-2013061, the Royal Society of the U.K., and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Optimization and Control of Communication Networks

Recently, there has been a surge in research activities that utilize the power of recent developments in nonlinear optimization to tackle a wide scope of work in the analysis and design of communication systems, touching every layer of the layered network architecture, and resulting in both intellectual and practical impacts significantly beyond the earlier frameworks. These research activities are driven by both new demands in the areas of communications and networking, and new tools emerging from optimization theory. Such tools include new developments of powerful theories and highly efficient computational algorithms for nonlinear convex optimization, as well as global solution methods and relaxation techniques for nonconvex optimization. Optimization theory can be used to analyze, interpret, or design a communication system, for both forward-engineering and reverse-engineering. Over the last few years, it has been successfully applied to a wide range of communication systems, from the high speed Internet core to wireless networks, from coding and equalization to broadband access, and from information theory to network topology models. Some of the theoretical advances have also been put into practice and started making visible impacts, including new versions of TCP congestion control, power control and scheduling algorithms in wireless networks, and spectrum management in DSL broadband access networks. Under the theme of optimization and control of communication networks, this Hot Topic Session consists of five invited talks covering a wide range of issues, including protocols, pricing, resource allocation, cross layer design, traffic engineering in the Internet, optical transport networks, and wireless networks

MEMOSys: Bioinformatics platform for genome-scale metabolic models

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recent advances in genomic sequencing have enabled the use of genome sequencing in standard biological and biotechnological research projects. The challenge is how to integrate the large amount of data in order to gain novel biological insights. One way to leverage sequence data is to use genome-scale metabolic models. We have therefore designed and implemented a bioinformatics platform which supports the development of such metabolic models.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>MEMOSys (MEtabolic MOdel research and development System) is a versatile platform for the management, storage, and development of genome-scale metabolic models. It supports the development of new models by providing a built-in version control system which offers access to the complete developmental history. Moreover, the integrated web board, the authorization system, and the definition of user roles allow collaborations across departments and institutions. Research on existing models is facilitated by a search system, references to external databases, and a feature-rich comparison mechanism. MEMOSys provides customizable data exchange mechanisms using the SBML format to enable analysis in external tools. The web application is based on the Java EE framework and offers an intuitive user interface. It currently contains six annotated microbial metabolic models.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We have developed a web-based system designed to provide researchers a novel application facilitating the management and development of metabolic models. The system is freely available at <url>http://www.icbi.at/MEMOSys</url>.</p

Deep Content: Unveiling video streaming content from encrypted WiFi Traffic

© 2018 IEEE. The proliferation of smart devices has led to an exponential growth in digital media consumption, especially mobile video for content marketing. The vast majority of the associated Internet traffic is now end-to-end encrypted, and while encryption provides better user privacy and security, it has made network surveillance an impossible task. The result is an unchecked environment for exploiters and attackers to distribute content such as fake, radical and propaganda videos. Recent advances in machine learning techniques have shown great promise in characterising encrypted traffic captured at the end points. However, video fingerprinting from passively listening to encrypted traffic, especially wireless traffic, has been reported as a challenging task due to the difficulty in distinguishing retransmissions and multiple flows on the same link. We show the potential of fingerprinting videos by passively sniffing WiFi frames in air, even without connecting to the WiFi network. We have developed Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) that are able to identify streamed YouTube videos from a closed set, by sniffing WiFi traffic encrypted at both Media Access Control (MAC) and Network layers. We compare these models to the state-of-the-art wired traffic classifier based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and show that our models obtain similar results while requiring significantly less computational power and time (approximately a threefold reduction)