The General Context of a dynamic agricultural sector in the Red River Delta

224pThis chapter presents the status of the agricultural sector in the Red River Delta in Vietnam. The sociopolitical environment and development policies are outlined. Thai Binh's development priorities are discussed. The contrasts in the natural environment of the Red River Delta are presented (climate, soil types and agroecological units). The importance of the hydraulic system in the Delta's agriculture is discussed. The intensive vegetable production, dominated by rice cultivation is described. The livestock production, with emphasis on the booming pork commodity chain, is dealt with. An overview of the pig production subsector is given. The pig producers and their various breeding systems are outlined. The husbandry of other animals are discussed (poultry, ruminants and fish). Changes in the integrated production systems are discussed

The E3P Diagnostic Project : An Introduction about Sustainable Pig Production in Vietnam

224pThis chapter describes the current status of Thai Binh province in Vietnam and its agricultural development plans for 2010. The environmental and economic impacts of pig production are discussed. The various stakeholders and their active involvement in agricultural production are analysed. In addition, an innovative approach to sustainable development of animal produce commodity chains in northern Vietnam, is described. The 12-month E3P Project (Environmental Protection and Pig Production) was aimed to establish baseline work for designing and implementing a geographical information system. A large proportion of unknown factors concerning the issue of effluents in the province was studied at the farm, communal and district, and on a scientific levels. These unknown factors justify the regional diagnosis presented by the E3P Project

Trust Put to the Test: a Testcase for a Cognitive Trust Model

International audienceThe wide diffusion of open and decentralized environments like the Web makes it possible for actors to interact with previously unknown peers. As a consequence, trust has become a hot topic in the field of computer science. Many attempts to formalize concepts like trust and reputation have been carried out in the literature, most remarkably the one by Herzig et al. [1]. However, Herzig et al. focus on describing a conceptual framework but do not provide any concrete instantiation of it, thereby not showing any evidence about the effectiveness of their approach. This paper fills the gap by presenting such an instantiation based on agent technologies. Although our instantiation targets a Wikipedia-related scenario and exploits the Jason [2] and CArtAgO [3], [4] frameworks, the methodology we present is general and can be applied to different scenarios and agent technologies

A Genome based approach to characterize genes involved in yeast adaptation to Sherry-like wines’ biological ageing

Wine fermentation and flor ageing are performed by two different lineages of yeast strains, with very different lifestyles. In this thesis we have studied the genome of flor yeast in comparison to wine yeast in order to unravel their specificities. We have first developed a set of haploid flor strains for the molecular evaluation of different targets, and developed as well a synthetic media mimicking wine for that purpose. From the genome sequence of 16 strains (8 wine and 8 flor) from France, Hungary, Italy and Spain we have drawn a phylogeny that showed that flor yeast represent a specific group of yeast different from wine and identified divergent regions. These regions contain genes involved in key functions and several associated with velum growth. Remarkably, many genes involved in FLO11 regulation such as MAP kinase, or Ras/PKA pathways were mutated among flor strains and many variations were encountered in genes involved with metal homeostasis such as zinc and divalent metal transporters. The impact of allelic variation of several genes has been evaluated for: the phosphatidylinositol 4-kinase PIK1 possibly involved in pseudohyphal growth, the high affinity zinc transporter ZRT1, and of the major pyruvate decarboxylase PDC1 in order to assess their role in the flor phenotype

Making Legacy LMS adaptable using Policy and Policy templates

Koesling, A., Herder, E., De Coi, J., & Abel, F. (2008). Making Legacy LMS adaptable using Policy and Policy templates. In J. Baumeister & M. Atzmüller, Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Adaptivity and User Modeling in Interactive System, ABIS 2008 (pp. 35-40). October, 6-8, 2008, Würzburg, Germany: University of Würzburg. Website with link to proceedings: http://lwa08.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/Wiki.jsp?page=FGABIS08In this paper, we discuss how users and designers of existing learning management systems (LMSs) can make use of policies to enhance adaptivity and adaptability. Many widespread LMSs currently only use limited and proprietary rule systems defining the system behaviour. Personalization of those systems is done based on those rule systems allowing only for fairly restricted adaptation rules. Policies allow for more sophisticated and flexible adaptation rules, provided by multiple stakeholders and they can be integrated into legacy systems. We present the benefits and feasibility of our ongoing approach of extending an existing LMS with policies. We will use the LMS ILIAS as a hands-on example to allow users to make use of system personalization.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

Development of Classification Models for Identifying “True” P-glycoprotein (P-gp) Inhibitors Through Inhibition, ATPase Activation and Monolayer Efflux Assays

P-glycoprotein (P-gp) is an efflux pump involved in the protection of tissues of several organs by influencing xenobiotic disposition. P-gp plays a key role in multidrug resistance and in the progression of many neurodegenerative diseases. The development of new and more effective therapeutics targeting P-gp thus represents an intriguing challenge in drug discovery. P-gp inhibition may be considered as a valid approach to improve drug bioavailability as well as to overcome drug resistance to many kinds of tumours characterized by the over-expression of this protein. This study aims to develop classification models from a unique dataset of 59 compounds for which there were homogeneous experimental data on P-gp inhibition, ATPase activation and monolayer efflux. For each experiment, the dataset was split into a training and a test set comprising 39 and 20 molecules, respectively. Rational splitting was accomplished using a sphere-exclusion type algorithm. After a two-step (internal/external) validation, the best-performing classification models were used in a consensus predicting task for the identification of compounds named as “true” P-gp inhibitors, i.e., molecules able to inhibit P-gp without being effluxed by P-gp itself and simultaneously unable to activate the ATPase function

User Profile Based Activities in Flexible Processes

International audienceCOOPER platform is a collaborative, open environment that leverages on the idea of flexible, user-centric process support. It allows cooperating team members to define collaborative processes and flexibly modify the process activities even during process execution. In this paper we describe how the incorporation of decentralized user data through mashups, allows the COOPER platform to support the definition and execution of the so called user profile based activities, i.e., process activities that are adapted based on the preferences of the process actors. We define two basic types of user profile based activities, namely user adapted activities and user conditional activities. The first are modeled according to the user profile data, while the second employs the same user data to enable automatic workflow decisions

Security control brought back to the user

The activity of the Ph.D. student Juri Luca De Coi involved the research field of policy languages and can be divided in three parts. The first part of the Ph.D. work investigated the state of the art in policy languages, ending up with: (i) identifying the requirements up-to-date policy languages have to fulfill; (ii) defining a policy language able to fulfill such requirements (namely, the Protune policy language); and (iii) implementing an infrastructure able to enforce policies expressed in the Protune policy language. The second part of the Ph.D. work focused on simplifying the activity of defining policies and ended up with: (i) identifying a subset of the controlled natural language ACE to express Protune policies; (ii) implementing a mapping between ACE policies and Protune policies; and (iii) adapting the ACE Editor to guide users step by step when defining ACE policies. The third part of the Ph.D. work tested the feasibility of the chosen approach by applying it to meaningful real-world problems, among which: (i) development of a security layer on top of RDF stores; and (ii) efficient policy-aware access to metadata stores. The research activity has been performed in tight collaboration with the Leibniz Universität Hannover and further European partners within the projects REWERSE, TENCompetence and OKKAM

Long-term survival of children born with congenital anomalies: A systematic review and meta-analysis of population-based studies.

BACKGROUND: Following a reduction in global child mortality due to communicable diseases, the relative contribution of congenital anomalies to child mortality is increasing. Although infant survival of children born with congenital anomalies has improved for many anomaly types in recent decades, there is less evidence on survival beyond infancy. We aimed to systematically review, summarise, and quantify the existing population-based data on long-term survival of individuals born with specific major congenital anomalies and examine the factors associated with survival. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Seven electronic databases (Medline, Embase, Scopus, PsycINFO, CINAHL, ProQuest Natural, and Biological Science Collections), reference lists, and citations of the included articles for studies published 1 January 1995 to 30 April 2020 were searched. Screening for eligibility, data extraction, and quality appraisal were performed in duplicate. We included original population-based studies that reported long-term survival (beyond 1 year of life) of children born with a major congenital anomaly with the follow-up starting from birth that were published in the English language as peer-reviewed papers. Studies on congenital heart defects (CHDs) were excluded because of a recent systematic review of population-based studies of CHD survival. Meta-analysis was performed to pool survival estimates, accounting for trends over time. Of 10,888 identified articles, 55 (n = 367,801 live births) met the inclusion criteria and were summarised narratively, 41 studies (n = 54,676) investigating eight congenital anomaly types (spina bifida [n = 7,422], encephalocele [n = 1,562], oesophageal atresia [n = 6,303], biliary atresia [n = 3,877], diaphragmatic hernia [n = 6,176], gastroschisis [n = 4,845], Down syndrome by presence of CHD [n = 22,317], and trisomy 18 [n = 2,174]) were included in the meta-analysis. These studies covered birth years from 1970 to 2015. Survival for children with spina bifida, oesophageal atresia, biliary atresia, diaphragmatic hernia, gastroschisis, and Down syndrome with an associated CHD has significantly improved over time, with the pooled odds ratios (ORs) of surviving per 10-year increase in birth year being OR = 1.34 (95% confidence interval [95% CI] 1.24-1.46), OR = 1.50 (95% CI 1.38-1.62), OR = 1.62 (95% CI 1.28-2.05), OR = 1.57 (95% CI 1.37-1.81), OR = 1.24 (95% CI 1.02-1.5), and OR = 1.99 (95% CI 1.67-2.37), respectively (p < 0.001 for all, except for gastroschisis [p = 0.029]). There was no observed improvement for children with encephalocele (OR = 0.98, 95% CI 0.95-1.01, p = 0.19) and children with biliary atresia surviving with native liver (OR = 0.96, 95% CI 0.88-1.03, p = 0.26). The presence of additional structural anomalies, low birth weight, and earlier year of birth were the most commonly reported predictors of reduced survival for any congenital anomaly type. The main limitation of the meta-analysis was the small number of studies and the small size of the cohorts, which limited the predictive capabilities of the models resulting in wide confidence intervals. CONCLUSIONS: This systematic review and meta-analysis summarises estimates of long-term survival associated with major congenital anomalies. We report a significant improvement in survival of children with specific congenital anomalies over the last few decades and predict survival estimates up to 20 years of age for those born in 2020. This information is important for the planning and delivery of specialised medical, social, and education services and for counselling affected families. This trial was registered on the PROSPERO database (CRD42017074675)