EX-TRIM: A proposal for a Coherent Imaging XUV-FEL users endstation

A proposal for building a Free Electron Laser, Eupraxia@SPARClab, at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, is at present under consideration. This FEL facility would produce ultra-bright photon pulses with durations of few femtoseconds and a wavelength in the extreme ultraviolet region. In this document we describe the proposal for a user endstation that will enable exploiting the high-brilliance, coherent photon flux to perform coherent imaging experiments on a variety of samples, ranging from biological objects to metals and superconductors. Details about the photon beamline, the experimental chamber, sample delivery, photon detection and computational requirements are discussed

Multiple verification in computational modeling of bone pathologies

We introduce a model checking approach to diagnose the emerging of bone pathologies. The implementation of a new model of bone remodeling in PRISM has led to an interesting characterization of osteoporosis as a defective bone remodeling dynamics with respect to other bone pathologies. Our approach allows to derive three types of model checking-based diagnostic estimators. The first diagnostic measure focuses on the level of bone mineral density, which is currently used in medical practice. In addition, we have introduced a novel diagnostic estimator which uses the full patient clinical record, here simulated using the modeling framework. This estimator detects rapid (months) negative changes in bone mineral density. Independently of the actual bone mineral density, when the decrease occurs rapidly it is important to alarm the patient and monitor him/her more closely to detect insurgence of other bone co-morbidities. A third estimator takes into account the variance of the bone density, which could address the investigation of metabolic syndromes, diabetes and cancer. Our implementation could make use of different logical combinations of these statistical estimators and could incorporate other biomarkers for other systemic co-morbidities (for example diabetes and thalassemia). We are delighted to report that the combination of stochastic modeling with formal methods motivate new diagnostic framework for complex pathologies. In particular our approach takes into consideration important properties of biosystems such as multiscale and self-adaptiveness. The multi-diagnosis could be further expanded, inching towards the complexity of human diseases. Finally, we briefly introduce self-adaptiveness in formal methods which is a key property in the regulative mechanisms of biological systems and well known in other mathematical and engineering areas.Comment: In Proceedings CompMod 2011, arXiv:1109.104

Signal Convolution Logic

We introduce a new logic called Signal Convolution Logic (SCL) that combines temporal logic with convolutional filters from digital signal processing. SCL enables to reason about the percentage of time a formula is satisfied in a bounded interval. We demonstrate that this new logic is a suitable formalism to effectively express non-functional requirements in Cyber-Physical Systems displaying noisy and irregular behaviours. We define both a qualitative and quantitative semantics for it, providing an efficient monitoring procedure. Finally, we prove SCL at work to monitor the artificial pancreas controllers that are employed to automate the delivery of insulin for patients with type-1 diabetes

The Influence of Dietary Characteristics on the Milk Quantity and Quality of Riverine Buffaloes: Estimate of the Energy/Protein Requirements, for a Medium-high Production, in the First Ninety Days of Lactation

The data used came from two trials undertaken under the same climatic conditions (spring-summer). In both trials pluriparious buffaloes were utilized similar in weight, body condition score, and milk production from the previous year. From the first trial the data used was from the sub-period 23–88 DIM provided by seven animals fed ad libitum with diet A (6.69 MJ/kg DM; 158.30 g/kg of crude protein) with a forage/concentrate ratio of 48/52. From the second trial the data used was from the sub-period 33–90 DIM provided by seven animals fed ad libitum with diet B (6.63 MJ/kg DM; 179.50 g/kg of crude protein) and by seven animals fed ad libitum with diet C (5.99 MJ/kg DM; 155.40 g/kg of crude protein), each of the diets had the same forage/concentrate ratio (53/47). A significant difference was found in milk production between group B and C (13.08 vs. 11.56 kg/d, p<0.05), an intermediate production (12.10 kg/d) was noted in group A. A significant difference was found between fat (76.58 vs. 69.24 g/kg, p<0.05), protein (46.14 vs. 43.16 g/kg, p<0.05) and casein (39.94 vs. 34.98 g/kg, p<0.05) of the milk of group B with respect to group A. The milk of group C gave fat values (71.80 g/kg), protein (45.52 g/kg) and casein (39.06 g/kg) statistically equal to those of group B. The milk of groups B and C, in respect to the milk of group A, gave values of K20 (1.77, 1.82 vs. 3.68 min, p<0.05), statistically lower and values of A30 (48.28, 47.27 vs. 40.64 mm, p<0.05) statistically higher. Two simple linear regressions were calculated where the independent variable (x) was the daily standardized milk production, the dependent variable (y) or the daily intake of net energy or crude protein. Equation 1) NE (MJ/d) = 74.4049+2.8308×kg of normalized milk; equation 2) CP (kg/d) = 1.4507+0.1085×kg of normalized milk, both the equations were significant (p<0.05) with determination coefficients of 0.58 and 0.50 respectively. For a production of normalized milk that varies from 9 to 13 kg, the respective energy-protein concentrations fluctuate from 6.09 to 6.78 MJ/kg DM and from 148.00 to 174.46 g/kg DM

A Martini coarse-grained model of the calcein fluorescent dye

Calcein leakage assays are a standard experimental set-up for probing the extent of damage induced by external agents on synthetic lipid vesicles. The fluorescence signal associated with calcein release from liposomes is the signature of vesicle disruption, transient pore formation or vesicle fusion. This type of assay is widely used to test the membrane disruptive effect of biological macromolecules, such as proteins, antimicrobial peptides and RNA and is also used on synthetic nanoparticles with a polymer, metal or oxide core. Little is known about the effect that calcein and other fluorescent dyes may have on the properties of lipid bilayers, potentially altering their structure and permeability. Here we develop a coarse-grained model of calcein that is compatible with the Martini force field for lipids. We validate the model by comparing its dimerization free energy, aggregation behavior at different concentrations and interaction with a 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (POPC) membrane to those obtained at atomistic resolution. Our coarse-grained description of calcein makes it suitable for the simulation of large calcein-filled liposomes and of their interactions with external agents, allowing for a direct comparison between simulations and experimental liposome leakage assays

On the irreducibility of some quiver varieties

We prove that certain quiver varieties are irreducible and therefore are isomor-phic to Hilbert schemes of points of the total spaces of the bundles OP1( 12n) for n 65 1

i rexfo life an innovative business model to reduce food waste

Abstract Every year the food produced and wasted consumes a volume of water equal to 250 km3, requires around 30% of the world agricultural land, and it is responsible for the emission of 3,3 billion tons of greenhouse gases. The direct economic consequences of food waste are ranging around 750 billion dollars per year (FAO source). i-REXFO designs an innovative business model with the objective of reducing significantly the amount of landfilled food waste. The actions are economically sustained by public incentives, tax reductions and private revenues from energy valorization of residual food waste. Uptaking the good practices from other EU countries (Denmark) the project will develop a tool to design the integrated model, optimize it from a technical, economic and environmental point of view and transfer it to other EU regions. i-REXFO will increase consumer awareness on food waste reduction in retail malls and HORECA while facilitating the sale and donation to charities and food banks of close to expiration and aesthetically not adequate food; it will also remove the barriers that hamper the use of food residues in biogas plants. The actions are economically sustained from energy valorization of food waste in biogas plant that use the digestate as fertilizer, closing the cycle. I-REXFO will achieve an overall reduction of 17000 tons/year of food waste landfilled during the project duration and in the after life phase. This will correspond to an overall reduction of 41000 tons of CO2 equivalent emissions

Quantitative Regular Expressions for Arrhythmia Detection Algorithms

Motivated by the problem of verifying the correctness of arrhythmia-detection algorithms, we present a formalization of these algorithms in the language of Quantitative Regular Expressions. QREs are a flexible formal language for specifying complex numerical queries over data streams, with provable runtime and memory consumption guarantees. The medical-device algorithms of interest include peak detection (where a peak in a cardiac signal indicates a heartbeat) and various discriminators, each of which uses a feature of the cardiac signal to distinguish fatal from non-fatal arrhythmias. Expressing these algorithms' desired output in current temporal logics, and implementing them via monitor synthesis, is cumbersome, error-prone, computationally expensive, and sometimes infeasible. In contrast, we show that a range of peak detectors (in both the time and wavelet domains) and various discriminators at the heart of today's arrhythmia-detection devices are easily expressible in QREs. The fact that one formalism (QREs) is used to describe the desired end-to-end operation of an arrhythmia detector opens the way to formal analysis and rigorous testing of these detectors' correctness and performance. Such analysis could alleviate the regulatory burden on device developers when modifying their algorithms. The performance of the peak-detection QREs is demonstrated by running them on real patient data, on which they yield results on par with those provided by a cardiologist.Comment: CMSB 2017: 15th Conference on Computational Methods for Systems Biolog