5G in Public Safety Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

Este documento aborda as possibilidades abertas pela 5G na área das Redes de Segurança Pública, ou seja, nas redes de comunicação destinadas às autoridades, polícia, protecção civil, bombeiros, infra-estruturas críticas, e a todos os envolvidos em actividades de emergência e segurança. É apresentada a evolução dos terminais e serviços, até aos novos elementos de desgaste; os serviços associados são também abordados, até às realidades aumentadas e virtuais, bio-métricas e monitorização de sinais vitais do corpo, bem como uma melhor precisão de localização. Os aspectos técnicos são abordados numa perspectiva geral, nomeadamente a métrica de implementação de serviços-chave (taxas de dados, latência, fiabilidade e capacidade de conectividade), interface rádio (maior flexibilidade e eficiência dos 4G) e características de rede (virtualização/slicing de redes e arquitecturas de nuvem/edge). As oportunidades e desafios na implementação de 5G especificamente para Redes de Segurança Pública são muitos, os primeiros englobando a utilização de redes comerciais e o salto das actuais redes baseadas em 2G para as 5G, enquanto que os segundos incluem escassez de espectro, implementação das características necessárias e problemas de segurança. Ainda assim, as possibilidades que são abertas por 5G para as Redes de Segurança Pública são infinitas e ninguém pode dar-se ao luxo de ficar de fora.This paper addresses the possibilities opened by 5G in the area of Public Safety Networks, i.e., in communication networks aimed at authorities, police, civil protection, fire departments, critical infrastructures, and all of those involved in emergency and security activities. The evolution of terminals and services is presented, up to the new wearables; the associated services are also addressed, up to augmented and virtual realities, bio-metrics and body vital signs monitoring, as well as improved localisation accuracy. Technical aspects are addressed in a general perspective namely key services implementation metrics (data rates, latency, reliability, and connectivity capacity), radio interface (increased flexibility and efficiency of 4G’s) and network features (virtualisation/slicing of networks and cloud/edge architectures). The opportunities and challenges on the deployment of 5G specifically for Public Safety Networks are quite many, the former encompassing the usage of commercial networks and the leap from today’s 2G based networks to 5G ones, while the latter includes shortage of spectrum, implementation of required features and security problems. Still, the possibilities that are opened by 5G for Public Safety Networks are endless and no one can afford to be left out.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

City-wide Analysis of Electronic Health Records Reveals Gender and Age Biases in the Administration of Known Drug-Drug Interactions

The occurrence of drug-drug-interactions (DDI) from multiple drug dispensations is a serious problem, both for individuals and health-care systems, since patients with complications due to DDI are likely to reenter the system at a costlier level. We present a large-scale longitudinal study (18 months) of the DDI phenomenon at the primary- and secondary-care level using electronic health records (EHR) from the city of Blumenau in Southern Brazil (pop. $\approx 340,000$). We found that 181 distinct drug pairs known to interact were dispensed concomitantly to 12\% of the patients in the city's public health-care system. Further, 4\% of the patients were dispensed drug pairs that are likely to result in major adverse drug reactions (ADR)---with costs estimated to be much larger than previously reported in smaller studies. The large-scale analysis reveals that women have a 60\% increased risk of DDI as compared to men; the increase becomes 90\% when considering only DDI known to lead to major ADR. Furthermore, DDI risk increases substantially with age; patients aged 70-79 years have a 34\% risk of DDI when they are dispensed two or more drugs concomitantly. Interestingly, a statistical null model demonstrates that age- and female-specific risks from increased polypharmacy fail by far to explain the observed DDI risks in those populations, suggesting unknown social or biological causes. We also provide a network visualization of drugs and demographic factors that characterize the DDI phenomenon and demonstrate that accurate DDI prediction can be included in healthcare and public-health management, to reduce DDI-related ADR and costs

A model to evaluate vertical handovers on JRRM

In a heterogeneous cellular networks environment, users behaviour and network deployment configuration parameters have an impact on the overall Quality of Service. This paper proposes a new and simple model that, on the one hand, explores the users behaviour impact on the network by having mobility, multi-service usage and traffic generation profiles as inputs, and on the other, enables the network setup configuration evaluation impact on the Joint Radio Resource Management (JRRM), assessing some basic JRRM performance indicators, like Vertical Handover (VHO) probabilities, average bit rates, and number of active users, among others. VHO plays an important role in fulfilling seamless users sessions transfer when mobile terminals cross different Radio Access Technologies (RATs) boundaries. Results show that high bit rate RATs suffer and generate more influence from/on other RATs, by producing additional signalling traffic to a JRRM entity. Results also show that the VHOs probability can range from 5 up to 65%, depending on RATs cluster radius and users mobility profile

Multi-agent simulations for emergency situations in an airport scenario

This paper presents a multi-agent framework using Net- Logo to simulate humanand collective behaviors during emergency evacuations. Emergency situationappears when an unexpected event occurs. In indoor emergency situation, evacuation plans defined by facility manager explain procedure and safety ways tofollow in an emergency situation. A critical and public scenario is an airportwhere there is an everyday transit of thousands of people. In this scenario theimportance is related with incidents statistics regarding overcrowding andcrushing in public buildings. Simulation has the objective of evaluating buildinglayouts considering several possible configurations. Agents could be based onreactive behavior like avoid danger or follow other agent, or in deliberative behaviorbased on BDI model. This tool provides decision support in a real emergencyscenario like an airport, analyzing alternative solutions to the evacuationprocess.Publicad

MONITORING POTENTIAL DRUG INTERACTIONS AND REACTIONS VIA NETWORK ANALYSIS OF INSTAGRAM USER TIMELINES

Much recent research aims to identify evidence for Drug-Drug Interactions (DDI) and Adverse Drug reactions (ADR) from the biomedical scientific literature. In addition to this "Bibliome", the universe of social media provides a very promising source of large-scale data that can help identify DDI and ADR in ways that have not been hitherto possible. Given the large number of users, analysis of social media data may be useful to identify under-reported, population-level pathology associated with DDI, thus further contributing to improvements in population health. Moreover, tapping into this data allows us to infer drug interactions with natural products-including cannabis-which constitute an array of DDI very poorly explored by biomedical research thus far. Our goal is to determine the potential of Instagram for public health monitoring and surveillance for DDI, ADR, and behavioral pathology at large. Most social media analysis focuses on Twitter and Facebook, but Instagram is an increasingly important platform, especially among teens, with unrestricted access of public posts, high availability of posts with geolocation coordinates, and images to supplement textual analysis. Using drug, symptom, and natural product dictionaries for identification of the various types of DDI and ADR evidence, we have collected close to 7000 user timelines spanning from October 2010 to June 2015.We report on 1) the development of a monitoring tool to easily observe user-level timelines associated with drug and symptom terms of interest, and 2) population-level behavior via the analysis of co-occurrence networks computed from user timelines at three different scales: monthly, weekly, and daily occurrences. Analysis of these networks further reveals 3) drug and symptom direct and indirect associations with greater support in user timelines, as well as 4) clusters of symptoms and drugs revealed by the collective behavior of the observed population. This demonstrates that Instagram contains much drug- and pathology specific data for public health monitoring of DDI and ADR, and that complex network analysis provides an important toolbox to extract health-related associations and their support from large-scale social media data

Key Enabling Technologies for 5G: Millimeter-Wave and Massive MIMO

[EN] 5G wireless networks are expected to operate with orders of magnitude higher performance than the current 4G deployments. The demand for 5000 times higher data rates leads to the necessity of finding new techniques to increase spectral efficiency and of exploring new frequency bands above 6 GHz. It has been proved that from UHF up to C band, a significant increase in system spectral efficiency can be reached through various techniques, such as Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP), Massive Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO), and interference management and cancellation; still, the resulting performance will not cope with the full expectations of IMT-2020 and 5G-PPP requirements for 5G networks, mainly in terms of offering 10 Gbps peak data rates with connection densities of 100 k¿1 M devices/km2. To overcome this limitation, the future architecture of such 5G networks is being defined to be deployed on small cells and to use higher frequency bands, such as super high frequency (SHF, 3¿30 GHz) or extremely high frequency (EHF, 30¿300 GHz), also referred as to centimeter and millimeter wave bands, respectively.Cardona Marcet, N.; Correia, LM.; Calabuig Soler, D. (2017). Key Enabling Technologies for 5G: Millimeter-Wave and Massive MIMO. International Journal of Wireless Information Networks. 24(3):201-203. doi:10.1007/s10776-017-0366-zS20120324

CANA: A python package for quantifying control and canalization in Boolean Networks

Logical models offer a simple but powerful means to understand the complex dynamics of biochemical regulation, without the need to estimate kinetic parameters. However, even simple automata components can lead to collective dynamics that are computationally intractable when aggregated into networks. In previous work we demonstrated that automata network models of biochemical regulation are highly canalizing, whereby many variable states and their groupings are redundant (Marques-Pita and Rocha, 2013). The precise charting and measurement of such canalization simplifies these models, making even very large networks amenable to analysis. Moreover, canalization plays an important role in the control, robustness, modularity and criticality of Boolean network dynamics, especially those used to model biochemical regulation (Gates and Rocha, 2016; Gates et al., 2016; Manicka, 2017). Here we describe a new publicly-available Python package that provides the necessary tools to extract, measure, and visualize canalizing redundancy present in Boolean network models. It extracts the pathways most effective in controlling dynamics in these models, including their effective graph and dynamics canalizing map, as well as other tools to uncover minimum sets of control variables.Comment: Submitted to the Systems Biology section of Frontiers in Physiolog