Plausible Petri nets as self-adaptive expert systems: A tool for infrastructure asset monitoring

This article provides a computational framework to model self-adaptive expert systems using the Petri net (PN) formalism. Self-adaptive expert systems are understood here as expert systems with the ability to autonomously learn from external inputs, like monitoring data. To this end, the Bayesian learning principles are investigated and also combined with the Plausible PNs (PPNs) methodology. PPNs are a variant within the PN paradigm, which are efficient to jointly consider the dynamics of discrete events, like maintenance actions, together with multiple sources of uncertain information about a state variable. The manuscript shows the mathematical conditions and computational procedure where the Bayesian updating becomes a particular case of a more general basic operation within the PPN execution semantics, which enables the uncertain knowledge being updated from monitoring data. The approach is general, but here it is demonstrated in a novel computational model acting as expert system for railway track inspection management taken as a case study using published data from a laboratory simulation of train loading on ballast. The results reveal selfadaptability and uncertainty management as key enabling aspects to optimize inspection actions in railway track, only being adaptively and autonomously triggered based on the actual learnt state of track and other contextual issues, like resource availability, as opposed to scheduled periodic maintenance activities.Lloyd'sRegister Foundation, Grant/Award Number: RB4539; Engineering and Physical SciencesResearch Council, Grant/Award Number:EP/M023028/

Rationale and design of the United Kingdom Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction Registry

\ua9 Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.Objective: Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) is a common heterogeneous syndrome that remains imprecisely defined and consequently has limited treatment options and poor outcomes. Methods: The UK Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction Registry (UK HFpEF) is a prospective data-enabled cohort and platform study. The study will develop a large, highly characterised cohort of patients with HFpEF. A biobank will be established. Deep clinical phenotyping, imaging, multiomics and centrally held national electronic health record data will be integrated at scale, in order to reclassify HFpEF into distinct subgroups, improve understanding of disease mechanisms and identify new biological pathways and molecular targets. Together, these will form the basis for developing diagnostics and targeted therapeutics specific to subgroups. It will be a platform for more effective and efficient trials, focusing on subgroups in whom targeted interventions are expected to be effective, with consent in place to facilitate rapid recruitment, and linkage for follow-up. Patients with a diagnosis of HFpEF made by a heart failure specialist, who have had natriuretic peptide levels measured and a left ventricular ejection fraction >40% are eligible. Patients with an ejection fraction between 40% and 49% will be limited to no more than 25% of the cohort. Conclusions: UK HFpEF will develop a rich, multimodal data resource to enable the identification of disease endotypes and develop more effective diagnostic strategies, precise risk stratification and targeted therapeutics. Trial registration number: NCT05441839

Hadamard upper bound on optimum joint decoding capacity of Wyner Gaussian cellular MAC

This article presents an original analytical expression for an upper bound on the optimum joint decoding capacity of Wyner circular Gaussian cellular multiple access channel (C-GCMAC) for uniformly distributed mobile terminals (MTs). This upper bound is referred to as Hadamard upper bound (HUB) and is a novel application of the Hadamard inequality established by exploiting the Hadamard operation between the channel fading matrix G and the channel path gain matrix Ω. This article demonstrates that the actual capacity converges to the theoretical upper bound under the constraints like low signal-to-noise ratios and limiting channel path gain among the MTs and the respective base station of interest. In order to determine the usefulness of the HUB, the behavior of the theoretical upper bound is critically observed specially when the inter-cell and the intra-cell time sharing schemes are employed. In this context, we derive an analytical form of HUB by employing an approximation approach based on the estimation of probability density function of trace of Hadamard product of two matrices, i.e., G and Ω. A closed form of expression has been derived to capture the effect of the MT distribution on the optimum joint decoding capacity of C-GCMAC. This article demonstrates that the analytical HUB based on the proposed approximation approach converges to the theoretical upper bound results in the medium to high signal to noise ratio regime and shows a reasonably tighter bound on optimum joint decoding capacity of Wyner GCMAC

Resistance through realism : Youth subculture films in 1970s (and 1980s) Britain

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Nathaniel Weiner, ‘Resistance through realism: Youth subculture films in 1970s (and 1980s) Britain’. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in European Journal of Cultural Studies, November 2015, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415603376. Published by SAGE Publishing.Film scholars have argued that the British social realist films of the late 1950s and early 1960s reflect the concerns articulated by British cultural studies during the same period. This article looks at how the social realist films of the 1970s and early 1980s similarly reflect the concerns of British cultural studies scholarship produced by the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1970s. It argues that the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ approach to stylised working-class youth subcultures is echoed in the portrayal of youth subcultures in the social realist films Pressure (1976), Bloody Kids (1979), Babylon (1980) and Made in Britain (1982). This article explores the ways in which these films show us both the strengths and weaknesses of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ work on subcultures.Peer reviewe

Surfactant mediated nanoparticle aggregation and its application for SERS studies

Silver nanoparticle formation has been examined different micellar media. These nanosize particles can produce linear aggregates with suitable electrolyte. The linear aggregates in micellar media provide information for several biologically active molecules while used as surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate