Synthesis of a simple self-stabilizing system

With the increasing importance of distributed systems as a computing paradigm, a systematic approach to their design is needed. Although the area of formal verification has made enormous advances towards this goal, the resulting functionalities are limited to detecting problems in a particular design. By means of a classical example, we illustrate a simple template-based approach to computer-aided design of distributed systems based on leveraging the well-known technique of bounded model checking to the synthesis setting.Comment: In Proceedings SYNT 2014, arXiv:1407.493

ROLE OF VIRAL AND HOST FACTORS IN INFLUENZA VIRUS MEDIATED INHIBITION OF INTERLEUKIN-23

Influenza virus is one of the major respiratory pathogens of humans as well as animals, including equines. There is an increasing evidence that bacterial infections are the most common cause of the death during influenza. In horses also, secondary bacterial pneumonia can lead to death, and surviving horses may take up to six months for the complete recovery resulting in heavy economic loss to the equine industry. Interleukin (IL)-23 mediated innate immune response has been shown to protect the host from various respiratory bacterial infections. However, studies to investigate the role of host and viral factors in the regulation of IL-23 are limited. Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress-induced transcription factor CHOP-10 and IFN-β has been shown to participate in the regulation of IL-23. Primary hypothesis for the current study was that influenza A virus (IAV) NS1 protein downregulates the IL-23 expression via inhibition of CHOP-10. In order to test our hypothesis, we infected the RAW264.7 cells - a murine macrophage cell line, and primary murine alveolar macrophage cells either with the wild type Influenza A virus (PR/8/34, PR8) or isogenic mutant virus lacking NS1 (delNS1). Quantitative analysis of mRNA expression revealed a significantly higher mRNA expression of IL23p19, IFN-β and CHOP-10 in delNS1 virus infected cells as compared the PR8 virus infected cells. Additionally, overexpression of CHOP-10 partially restored the expression of IL-23p19 in PR8 virus infected cells and knockdown of CHOP-10 resulted in downregulated expression of IL-23p19 in delNS1 infected cells. Taken together, these results suggest that IAV NS1 protein mediated inhibition of CHOP-10 expression leads to downregulation of IL-23 expression in macrophage cells in-vitro. Similar results were also observed in-vivo using IAV and Streptococcus zoooepidemicus (S. ze) co-infection model. In a co-infection mouse model delNS1 virus co-infection resulted in significantly higher expression of the IL-23 and IL-17. Considering the role of IL-23 in protection against respiratory bacterial pathogens, effect of exogenous supplementation of IL-23 was also investigated in the influenza and S. ze co-infection mouse model. We found that a single intranasal dose of recombinant murine IL-23 significantly improved the survival of mice co-infected with PR8 and S .ze. Overall, our study suggests that IAV infection subverts the IL-23 mediated respiratory innate immune response and restoration of IL-23 could protect from influenza-associated respiratory bacterial infections

Role of Consumer Electronics in Heart Disease Prediction

Acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) is one of the deadliest disease patients face. One of every three deaths in United States is caused by heart disease. The key to cardiovascular disease management is to examine large number of datasets, compare and mine for information that can be used to predict, prevent, manage and treat heart attacks. Predictive analytics, by using Big Data analytics, is expected to help in the prediction, prevention, management and treatment of cardiovascular disease. Consumer wearable electronics has been a great provider of health- related data in past few years. The growing popularity of such devices among consumers is providing a thorough statistics of person’s day to day health status. This data can be very useful is a proactive approach for heart health monitoring which would in turn avoid any danger of potential heart disease. There is a huge market for such devices which is growing at an exponential rate. Although comprehensive and scalable, the data from such devices still can not predict hear disease chances with high confidence. There is a lot to be done for the data to be able to tell accurately about complex human body. There also are some data security risks associated with the use of such devices. The future for such devices looks very promising with the increasing sophisticated technologies making the observation more accurate and useful. The day is not far when the doctors will use smartwatch’s data in their analysis to accurately predict about any impending disease

Cloud Computing Security, Privacy Improvements Using Virtualized High Trust Zone

The benefits of cloud computing are clearly well known which include rapid deployment, ease of customization, reduce cost and low risks. However, some high profile security breaches confuse organizations as they attempt to deploy cloud services in their businesses. Although, the cloud service providers pitch the security of their services. Enhancements in existing security measures and advanced solutions are needed to ensure high level security and privacy of data on cloud. This paper provides a holistic overview of cloud security issues by encompassing unique threats in cloud computing and presents findings of a survey of practitioners view on cloud security. A Virtualized High Trust Zone (VHTZ) is then presented as a solution, especially for infrastructure based cloud services to tackle the attacks and network monitoring in a virtualized infrastructure