Efficient Task Scheduling Approach Relevant to the Hardware/Software Co-Design of Embedded System

Task scheduling is the primary multitasking activity controlled by the real-time executive. As hardware/software co-design of embedded systems has been enabled by advances in computer technologies, reprogrammable hardware can be used to implement a co-processor to perform most of the kernel functions, including task scheduling. In this kind of system design, more complex scheduling approaches can be applied. In this paper, a complex scheduling approach, which takes into account advantages of evolutionary computation (i.e., neurocomputing and genetic search and optimization) is presented. First, we present a model based on the Hopfield-Tank neural network (11). Then, we introduce modifications of the method based on the network model to improve the quality of the solutions. Finally, we propose a mixed approach of this evolutionary computation method and an extension of the Earliest Deadline First approach (3) for scheduling both types of periodic and aperiodic tasks. We also discuss simulation results that demonstrate performance that could be obtained by using this approach

FooDis: a food-disease relation mining pipeline

Nowadays, it is really important and crucial to follow the new biomedical knowledge that is presented in scientific literature. To this end, Information Extraction pipelines can help to automatically extract meaningful relations from textual data that further require additional checks by domain experts. In the last two decades, a lot of work has been performed for extracting relations between phenotype and health concepts, however, the relations with food entities which are one of the most important environmental concepts have never been explored. In this study, we propose FooDis, a novel Information Extraction pipeline that employs state-of-the-art approaches in Natural Language Processing to mine abstracts of biomedical scientific papers and automatically suggests potential cause or treat relations between food and disease entities in different existing semantic resources. A comparison with already known relations indicates that the relations predicted by our pipeline match for 90% of the food-disease pairs that are common in our results and the NutriChem database, and 93% of the common pairs in the DietRx platform. The comparison also shows that the FooDis pipeline can suggest relations with high precision. The FooDis pipeline can be further used to dynamically discover new relations between food and diseases that should be checked by domain experts and further used to populate some of the existing resources used by NutriChem and DietRx

P-NUT: Predicting NUTrient Content from Short Text Descriptions

Assessing nutritional content is very relevant for patients suffering from various diseases, professional athletes, and for health reasons is becoming part of everyday life for many. However, it is a very challenging task as it requires complete and reliable sources. We introduce a machine learning pipeline for predicting macronutrient values of foods using learned vector representations from short text descriptions of food products. On a dataset used from health specialists, containing short descriptions of foods and macronutrient values: we generate paragraph embeddings, introduce clustering in food groups, using graph-based vector representations, that include food domain knowledge information, and train regression models for each cluster. The predictions are for four macronutrients: carbohydrates, fat, protein and water. The highest accuracy was obtained for carbohydrate predictions – 86%, compared to the baseline – 27% and 36%. The protein predictions yielded the best results across all clusters, 53%–77% of the values fall in the tolerance-level range. These results were obtained using short descriptions, the embeddings can be improved if they are learned on longer descriptions, which would lead to better prediction results. Since the task of calculating macronutrients requires exact quantities of ingredients, these results obtained only from short description are a huge leap forward

MsGEN: measuring generalization of nutrient value prediction across different recipe datasets

In this study, we estimate the generalization of the performance of previously proposed predictive models for nutrient value prediction across different recipe datasets. For this purpose, we introduce a quantitative indicator that determines the level of generalization of using the developed predictive model for new unseen data not presented in the training process. On a predefined corpus of recipe embeddings from six publicly available recipe datasets (i.e., projecting them in the same meta-feature vector space), we train predictive models on one of the six recipe datasets and test the models on the rest of the datasets. In parallel, we define and calculate generalizability indexes which are numbers that indicate how generalizable a predictive model is i.e., how well will a predictive model learned on one dataset perform on another one not involved in the training. The evaluation results prove the validity of these indexes – their relation with the accuracy of the predictions. Further, we define three sampling techniques for selecting representative data instances that will cover all parts from the feature space uniformly (involving data from all datasets) and further will improve the generalization of a predictive model. We train predictive models with these generalized datasets and test them on instances from the six recipe datasets that are not selected and included in the generalized datasets. The results from the evaluation of these predictive models show improvement compared to the results from the predictive models trained on one recipe dataset and tested on the others separately

StandFood: Standardization of Foods Using a Semi-Automatic System for Classifying and Describing Foods According to FoodEx2

The European Food Safety Authority has developed a standardized food classification and description system called FoodEx2. It uses facets to describe food properties and aspects from various perspectives, making it easier to compare food consumption data from different sources and perform more detailed data analyses. However, both food composition data and food consumption data, which need to be linked, are lacking in FoodEx2 because the process of classification and description has to be manually performed—a process that is laborious and requires good knowledge of the system and also good knowledge of food (composition, processing, marketing, etc.). In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic system for classifying and describing foods according to FoodEx2, which consists of three parts. The first involves a machine learning approach and classifies foods into four FoodEx2 categories, with two for single foods: raw (r) and derivatives (d), and two for composite foods: simple (s) and aggregated (c). The second uses a natural language processing approach and probability theory to describe foods. The third combines the result from the first and the second part by defining post-processing rules in order to improve the result for the classification part. We tested the system using a set of food items (from Slovenia) manually-coded according to FoodEx2. The new semi-automatic system obtained an accuracy of 89% for the classification part and 79% for the description part, or an overall result of 79% for the whole system

A rule-based named-entity recognition method for knowledge extraction of evidence-based dietary recommendations.

Evidence-based dietary information represented as unstructured text is a crucial information that needs to be accessed in order to help dietitians follow the new knowledge arrives daily with newly published scientific reports. Different named-entity recognition (NER) methods have been introduced previously to extract useful information from the biomedical literature. They are focused on, for example extracting gene mentions, proteins mentions, relationships between genes and proteins, chemical concepts and relationships between drugs and diseases. In this paper, we present a novel NER method, called drNER, for knowledge extraction of evidence-based dietary information. To the best of our knowledge this is the first attempt at extracting dietary concepts. DrNER is a rule-based NER that consists of two phases. The first one involves the detection and determination of the entities mention, and the second one involves the selection and extraction of the entities. We evaluate the method by using text corpora from heterogeneous sources, including text from several scientifically validated web sites and text from scientific publications. Evaluation of the method showed that drNER gives good results and can be used for knowledge extraction of evidence-based dietary recommendations