Determination of Optimum Conditions for the Extraction of Squalene from Olive Pomace with Supercritical CO2

Olive pomace is a standard by-product of olive oil production containing valuable compounds recoverable by supercritical fluid extraction (SFE). The solvent/solubility characteristics of a supercritical fluid may be fine tuned by changing the external pressure-temperature conditions of the extraction. This allows for the selective extraction of certain compounds. The present study describes a series of experiments, the methodology, instrumentation, and results of supercritical extraction of olive pomace with CO2. The effects that primarily affect supercritical extraction, temperature, pressure and flow rate, have been investigated and monitored on, both, the concentration of squalene at the extract and the overall recovery of squalene from pomace. The Box-Behnken approach was used for designing the experiments. The effects are easily visualized in the resulting 3D plots, which were used for identifying the optimum extraction conditions

Dynamically Personalizing Search Results for Mobile Users

International audienceWe introduce a novel situation-aware approach to personalize search results for mobile users. By providing a mobile user with appropriate information that dynamically satisfies his interests according to his situation, we tackle the problem of information overload. To build situation-aware user profile we rely on evidence issued from retrieval situations. A retrieval situation refers to the spatio-temporal context of the user when submitting a query to the search engine. A situation is represented as a combination of geographical and temporal concepts inferred from concrete time and location information by some ontological knowledge. User's interests are inferred from past search activities related to the identified situations. They are represented using concepts issued from a thematic ontology. We also involve a method to maintain the user's interests over his ongoing search activity and to personalize the search results

Cyber insurance of information systems: Security and privacy cyber insurance contracts for ICT and helathcare organizations

Nowadays, more-and-more aspects of our daily activities are digitalized. Data and assets in the cyber-space, both for individuals and organizations, must be safeguarded. Thus, the insurance sector must face the challenge of digital transformation in the 5G era with the right set of tools. In this paper, we present CyberSure-an insurance framework for information systems. CyberSure investigates the interplay between certification, risk management, and insurance of cyber processes. It promotes continuous monitoring as the new building block for cyber insurance in order to overcome the current obstacles of identifying in real-time contractual violations by the insured party and receiving early warning notifications prior the violation. Lightweight monitoring modules capture the status of the operating components and send data to the CyberSure backend system which performs the core decision making. Therefore, an insured system is certified dynamically, with the risk and insurance perspectives being evaluated at runtime as the system operation evolves. As new data become available, the risk management and the insurance policies are adjusted and fine-tuned. When an incident occurs, the insurance company possesses adequate information to assess the situation fast, estimate accurately the level of a potential loss, and decrease the required period for compensating the insured customer. The framework is applied in the ICT and healthcare domains, assessing the system of medium-size organizations. GDPR implications are also considered with the overall setting being effective and scalable

Exploring the feasibility of patient safety huddles in general practice

Background: Patient safety is a key priority for healthcare systems. Patient safety huddles have been advocated as a way to improve safety. We explored the feasibility of huddles in general practice. Methods: We invited all general practices in West Yorkshire to complete an online survey and interviewed practice staff. Results: Thirty-four out of 306 practices (11.1%) responded to our survey. Of these, 22 practices (64.7%) reported having breaks for staff to meet and eight (23.5%) reported no longer having breaks in their practices. Seven interviewees identified several barriers to safety huddles including time and current culture; individuals felt meetings or breaks would not be easily integrated into current primary care structure. Discussion: Despite their initial promise, there are major challenges to introducing patient safety huddles within the current context of UK general practice. General practice staff may need more convincing of potential benefits

On the Complexity of Congestion Free Routing in Transportation Networks

Traffic congestion has been proven a difficult problem to tackle, particularly in big cities where the number of cars are steadily increasing while the infrastructure remains stagnant. Several approaches have been proposed to alleviate the effects of traffic congestion, however, so far congestion is still a big problem in most cities. In this work we investigate a new route reservation approach to address the problem which is motivated by air traffic control. This paper formulates the route reservation problem under different assumptions and examines the complexity of the resulting formulations. Two waiting strategies are investigated, (i) vehicles are allowed to wait at the source before they start their journey, and (ii) they are allowed to wait at every road junction. Strategy (i) though more practical to implement, results to an NP-complete problem while strategy (ii) results to a problem that can be solved in polynomial time but it is not easily implemented since the infrastructure does not have adequate space for vehicles to wait until congestion downstream is cleared. Finally, a heuristic algorithm (based on time-expanded networks) is derived as a solution to both proposed waiting strategies. © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works C. Menelaou, P. Kolios, S. Timotheou and C. Panayiotou, "On the Complexity of Congestion Free Routing in Transportation Networks," 2015 IEEE 18th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Las Palmas, 2015, pp. 2819-2824. doi: 10.1109/ITSC.2015.453 Document type: Conference objec

Congestion Free Vehicle Scheduling Using a Route Reservation Strategy

Traffic congestion in big cities has been proven to be a difficult problem with adverse effects in terms of driver delay and frustration, cost and impact to the environment. Motivated by the approaches used in air-traffic control, this work investigates a method for controlling traffic congestion using time-dependent route reservation. The advances in information, communication and computation technologies has made such a reservation strategy feasible. This paper illustrates that the new reservation strategy is scalable and can be applied even to large metropolitan areas. To do so, we decompose the road network spatially and temporarily and propose a vehicle scheduling and routing algorithm which completely eliminate congestion. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is very promising. © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, in-cluding reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to serv-ers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. C. Menelaou, P. Kolios, S. Timotheou and C. G. Panayiotou, "Congestion Free Vehicle Scheduling Using a Route Reservation Strategy," 2015 IEEE 18th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Las Palmas, 2015, pp. 2103-2108. doi: 10.1109/ITSC.2015.340 https://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/rights_policies.html Document type: Conference objec

Joint route guidance and demand management for multi-region traffic networks

Traffic congestion occurs as demand surpasses the available capacity of a road network, resulting to lower speeds and longer journey times; with route guidance constituting the primary control strategy to alleviate the problem. However, the effectiveness of route guidance is limited in high-demand conditions. In this work, we proposed a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework that combines multi-regional route guidance with a novel demand management method. Route guidance is used to minimize the network's density imbalance while demand management is utilized to reduce the conditions that cause congestion. This can be achieved by manipulating vehicle routes (i.e., using route guidance) and/or by instructing a portion of the vehicles to wait at their origin before commencing their journey (demand management). Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed MPC optimization indicating the substantial improvements that can be achieved in traffic flow performance. Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development and through the Research Promotion Foundation (Project: CULTURE/BR-NE/0517/14) © 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, in-cluding reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to serv-ers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Menelaou, C., Timotheou, S., Kolios, P. and Panayiotou, C.G., 2019, June. "Joint route guidance and demand management for multi-region traffic networks," 2019 18th European Control Conference (ECC), Naples, pp. 2183-2188, IEEE. doi:10.23919/ECC.2019.8795819 Document type: Conference objec

A congestion-free vehicle route reservation architecture

Transportation research is mainly focused on answering the question of how to eliminate traffic congestion over large scale areas. Inasmuch as a large portion of big cities suffers from traffic congestion with severe (in many cases) consequences on personal mobility. Drawbacks of congestion include driver delay and frustration, higher fuel consumption, air pollution and financial losses (in terms of man-hours lost on working days). Congestion has, traditionally, been a difficult problem to tackle since traffic demand fluctuates dynamically. The major cause of congestion is that a portion of the network is conferred to accommodate higher number of vehicles than its actual capacity. Nonetheless, congestion usually occurs due to lack of an efficient management of transport network utilization and not because demand exceeds network's capacity [1]. Therefore, it is possible to alleviate congestion if vehicles are more effectively distributed over the entire network achieving better load balancing. • "© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, in-cluding reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to serv-ers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. C. Menelaou, P. Kolios, S. Timotheou and C. G. Panayiotou, "A congestion-free vehicle route reservation architecture," 2016 18th Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference (MELECON), Lemesos, 2016, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/MELCON.2016.7495458 • https://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/rights_policies.html Document type: Conference objec

Microcalorimetry of the intestinal mucus: Hydrogen bonding and self-assembly of mucin

The effect of mucin hydrogen bonding on the structure of intestinal mucus has been studied with micro-differential scanning mirocalorimetry (μ-DSC), supported by spectroscopy. The experiments were performed in water–dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) solutions, using either water–DMSO mixtures of an appropriate DMSO content or water as blanks, as to isolate the effects of the solvent to hydrogen bonding. When using matched water–DMSO blanks, thermal events at low temperatures are linked to the negation of mucin–DMSO interactions, while events at higher temperatures are linked to the break-up of hydrogen bonds connecting the sugars of the individual macromolecules. When using a matched solvent as blank, alterations in Cp, such as increases at 10% and 15% DMSO, have been linked to the break-up and creation of quaternary structures. In the case of water as blank, a monotonic but not linear decrease in enthalpy, hence extent of hydrogen bonding, is observed. The above are complemented by UV spectroscopy: A blue shift of the conjugated aminoacids in the presence of DMSO suggests that the inherent stability of mucin is not only due to steric volume exclusions, but also due to extensive hydrogen bonding on behalf of the sugar moieties