Software Product Line Engineering via Software Transplantation

For companies producing related products, a Software Product Line (SPL) is a software reuse method that improves time-to-market and software quality, achieving substantial cost reductions.These benefits do not come for free. It often takes years to re-architect and re-engineer a codebase to support SPL and, once adopted, it must be maintained. Current SPL practice relies on a collection of tools, tailored for different reengineering phases, whose output developers must coordinate and integrate. We present Foundry, a general automated approach for leveraging software transplantation to speed conversion to and maintenance of SPL. Foundry facilitates feature extraction and migration. It can efficiently, repeatedly, transplant a sequence of features, implemented in multiple files. We used Foundry to create two valid product lines that integrate features from three real-world systems in an automated way. Moreover, we conducted an experiment comparing Foundry's feature migration with manual effort. We show that Foundry automatically migrated features across codebases 4.8 times faster, on average, than the average time a group of SPL experts took to accomplish the task

Reconhecimento de Dígitos de Medidores de Energia por meio da Voz no Contexto de um Aplicativo de Autoleitura / Digit Recognition of Energy Meters through Voice in the Context of an Authentication Application

A Agência Nacional de Energia Elétrica (ANEEL) destaca que perdas não-técnicas estão relacionadas a entraves no processo de leitura de consumo. Para a redução dessas falhas, uma alternativa factível e de menor custo seria a leitura realizada pelo próprio consumidor, denominada de autoleitura.  Este processo leva em consideração o uso de plataformas digitais, através das quais o consumidor registraria e enviaria as informações de consumo.  Uma etapa importante desse processo é o reconhecimento automático de dígitos de medidores por meio da voz.  Este trabalho, portanto, propõe um método para a realização dessa tarefa, que utiliza processamento de áudio e inteligência computacional. Para a extração de características de áudio, utiliza-se Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) e MelSpectrogram de forma combinada. O método apresenta Recall de 94,74%; Precision de 94,91%; F1 score de 94,72% e 0,9419 de índice Kappa utilizando-se o classificador Support Vector Machine (SVM)

Resistance of Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis to nitric oxide: correlation with antimony therapy and TNF-α production

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Nitric oxide (NO) produced in macrophages plays a pivotal role as a leishmanicidal agent. A previous study has demonstrated that 20% of the <it>L. (V.) braziliensis </it>isolated from initial cutaneous lesions of patients from the endemic area of Corte de Pedra, Bahia, Brazil, were NO resistant. Additionally, 5 to 11% of the patients did not respond to three or more antimony treatments" (refractory patients). The aim of this study is to investigate if there is an association between the resistance of <it>L. (V.) braziliensis </it>to NO and nonresponsiveness to antimony therapy and cytokine production.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We evaluated the <it>in vitro </it>toxicity of NO against the promastigotes stages of <it>L. (V.) braziliensis </it>isolated from responsive and refractory patients, and the infectivity of the amastigote forms of these isolates against human macrophages. The supernatants from <it>Leishmania </it>infected macrophage were used to measure TNF-α and IL-10 levels.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Using NaNO₂(pH 5.0) as the NO source, <it>L. (V.) braziliensis </it>isolated from refractory patients were more NO resistant (IC50 = 5.8 ± 4.8) than <it>L. (V.) braziliensis </it>isolated from responsive patients (IC50 = 2.0 ± 1.4). Four isolates were selected to infect human macrophages: NO-susceptible and NO-resistant <it>L. (V.) braziliensis </it>isolated from responsive and refractory patients. NO-resistant <it>L. (V.) braziliensis </it>isolated from refractory patients infected more macrophages stimulated with LPS and IFN-γ at 120 hours than NO-susceptible <it>L. (V.) braziliensis </it>isolated from refractory patients. Also, lower levels of TNF-α were detected in supernatants of macrophages infected with NO-resistant <it>L. (V.) braziliensis </it>as compared to macrophages infected with NO-susceptible <it>L. (V.) braziliensis </it>(p < 0.05 at 2, 24 and 120 hours), while no differences were detected in IL-10 levels.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These data suggest that NO resistance could be related to the nonresponsiveness to antimony therapy seen in American Tegumentary Leishmaniasis.</p

Canagliflozin and renal outcomes in type 2 diabetes and nephropathy

BACKGROUND Type 2 diabetes mellitus is the leading cause of kidney failure worldwide, but few effective long-term treatments are available. In cardiovascular trials of inhibitors of sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2), exploratory results have suggested that such drugs may improve renal outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes. METHODS In this double-blind, randomized trial, we assigned patients with type 2 diabetes and albuminuric chronic kidney disease to receive canagliflozin, an oral SGLT2 inhibitor, at a dose of 100 mg daily or placebo. All the patients had an estimated glomerular filtration rate (GFR) of 30 to &lt;90 ml per minute per 1.73 m2 of body-surface area and albuminuria (ratio of albumin [mg] to creatinine [g], &gt;300 to 5000) and were treated with renin–angiotensin system blockade. The primary outcome was a composite of end-stage kidney disease (dialysis, transplantation, or a sustained estimated GFR of &lt;15 ml per minute per 1.73 m2), a doubling of the serum creatinine level, or death from renal or cardiovascular causes. Prespecified secondary outcomes were tested hierarchically. RESULTS The trial was stopped early after a planned interim analysis on the recommendation of the data and safety monitoring committee. At that time, 4401 patients had undergone randomization, with a median follow-up of 2.62 years. The relative risk of the primary outcome was 30% lower in the canagliflozin group than in the placebo group, with event rates of 43.2 and 61.2 per 1000 patient-years, respectively (hazard ratio, 0.70; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.59 to 0.82; P=0.00001). The relative risk of the renal-specific composite of end-stage kidney disease, a doubling of the creatinine level, or death from renal causes was lower by 34% (hazard ratio, 0.66; 95% CI, 0.53 to 0.81; P&lt;0.001), and the relative risk of end-stage kidney disease was lower by 32% (hazard ratio, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.54 to 0.86; P=0.002). The canagliflozin group also had a lower risk of cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, or stroke (hazard ratio, 0.80; 95% CI, 0.67 to 0.95; P=0.01) and hospitalization for heart failure (hazard ratio, 0.61; 95% CI, 0.47 to 0.80; P&lt;0.001). There were no significant differences in rates of amputation or fracture. CONCLUSIONS In patients with type 2 diabetes and kidney disease, the risk of kidney failure and cardiovascular events was lower in the canagliflozin group than in the placebo group at a median follow-up of 2.62 years