Intelligent data leak detection through behavioural analysis

In this paper we discuss a solution to detect data leaks in an intelligent and furtive way through a real time analysis of the user’s behaviour while handling classified information. Data is based on experiences with real world use cases and a variety of data preparation and data analysis techniques have been tried. Results show the feasibility of the approach, but also the necessity to correlate with other security events to improve the precision.UID/CEC/00319/201

Estudo Hidrológico da Bacia de Alenquer com recurso ao modelo SWAT

Mestrado em Engenharia do Ambiente / Instituto Superior de Agronomia. Universidade de LisboaApesar dos programas de Mitigação e Diretivas emitidos pela Comunidade Europeia para a melhoria da qualidade das águas superficiais e subterrâneas, os relatórios dos Estados-Membros sobre a condição das mesmas mostram ter sido insuficientes. Uma razão apontada é a delimitação inadequada das Zonas Vulneráveis aos Nitratos. É necessário desenvolver metodologias para a correta delimitação destas zonas, considerando as direções e sentidos dos escoamentos das áreas envolventes. Esta dissertação visa contribuir para a melhoria na delimitação da Zona Vulnerável do Tejo (ZVT) analisando o balanço hidrológico da bacia de Alenquer, localizada a montante, e da identificação dos principais fluxos de escoamento, potenciais transportadores dos nitratos. O modelo hidrológico Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) foi calibrado para as sub-bacias, Barnabé e Ota, com recurso a séries de dados meteorológicos, hidrológicos, ocupação cultural e práticas agrícolas. Os caudais médios mensais nas secções de jusante das sub-bacias foram simulados com eficiências de 0,83 e 0,93 (coeficiente de Nash-Sutcliffe) para Barnabé e Ota, respetivamente. O modelo respondeu satisfatoriamente a diferentes condições de fronteira, práticas agronómicas e aos anos secos e húmidos. Os parâmetros obtidos foram posteriormente regionalizados para a bacia de Alenquer. Os resultados mostram aproximadamente 5 % da água percolada da zona radical atinge o aquífero confinado, destinando-se maior percentagem à recarga do aquífero freático. Esta apresenta os valores médios (30 anos) de 220 e 93 mm, para estações húmida e seca, respetivamente. Da quantidade de água que atinge o aquífero freático, 23 % alimenta os cursos de água como escoamento de base. Conclui-se que o impacto da Bacia de Alenquer sobre as águas superficiais da ZVT pode ser significativo, o que suporta a realização de trabalhos futuros para re-delimitação da ZVT, com base nas estimativas da recarga dos aquíferos e dos escoamentos superficiais e de base, em vez dos limites administrativosN/

The forums of Conimbriga and Aeminium: comparison and summary of the state of the art.

This paper presents the forums of the Roman cities of Conimbriga (Condeixa-a-Velha, Portugal) and Aeminium (Coimbra, Portugal), both of which date from the time of Augustus. The Aeminium forum was completely rebuilt in the time of Claudius/Nero, while the Conimbriga one was remodelled in the same period, before being demolished under the Flavians to make way for a completely new construction. This article offers a state-of-the-art comparison of the architectural models used in these two cities, based on the analysis and review of the available data, partly supplied by recent archaeological excavations. The geographic and chronological proximity of these two forums mean that it is of interest to compare their architectural design, which differ considerably in aspects such as volumetry, layout and the conceptual model used. The article discusses the proposals for the development of the Conimbriga forum and indicates an up-to-date bibliography for both public spaces, resulting, in the case of Aeminium, from a large-scale research and intervention project carried out in recent years

Early stages of the roman occupation of Lagos, Portugal, from a Julian-Claudian ceramic context

En los últimos años, como resultado de la progresiva renovación y rehabilitación urbana de la ciudad de Lagos, se han realizado en el centro histórico un importante número de intervenciones arqueológicas de urgencia. Las noticias de nuevos hallazgos se han sucedido en el tiempo destacando para el período romano, las relacionadas con la presencia de varias fábricas de preparados piscícolas en la ribera de la ciudad, especialmente concentradas a lo largo de la calle 25 de Abril y la calle Silva Lopes. A pesar de las continuas informaciones que estas intervenciones han proporcionado todavía quedan por aclarar varias cuestiones relacionadas con las dimensiones de la zona fabril y sus ritmos productivos, especialmente las relacionadas con su fecha de inicio. Una reciente intervención en los nos. 72-78 de la calle 25 de Abril, nos ha permitido gracias a un excepcional contexto cerrado de mediados del s. I, profundizar y esclarecer dichas cuestiones. Además, el conjunto cerámico del pozo se postula como un auténtico “contexto de referencia” para el comercio en la región durante los cuartos centrales del s. I d.C.In recent years, as a result of the ongoing urban development at Lagos, a significant number of rescue excavations have been carried out in the historic centre. New discoveries dating back to Roman times have been made in connection with fish salting factories on the city shores, mainly concentrated along 25 de Abril street and Silva Lopes street. Some historical and archaeological questions related to the dimensions of this industrial area, its productive rhythms and, especially, the starting date of salt fishing activities are still elusive. However, at least the last issue can be partially clarified thanks to the archaeological excavation at number 72-78 of 25 de Abril street, which has provided an exceptional ceramic context from a well dated period back in the middle of the 1st century. In addition to that, this ceramic set can be regarded as an authentic “reference context” for trade in the region during the central years of the 1st century A.D

Pose Guided Attention for Multi-label Fashion Image Classification

We propose a compact framework with guided attention for multi-label classification in the fashion domain. Our visual semantic attention model (VSAM) is supervised by automatic pose extraction creating a discriminative feature space. VSAM outperforms the state of the art for an in-house dataset and performs on par with previous works on the DeepFashion dataset, even without using any landmark annotations. Additionally, we show that our semantic attention module brings robustness to large quantities of wrong annotations and provides more interpretable results.Comment: Published at ICCV 2019 Workshop on Computer Vision for Fashion, Art and Desig

Bacteriophages, gut bacteria, and microbial pathways interplay in cardiometabolic health

Cardiometabolic diseases are leading causes of mortality in Western countries. Well-established risk factors include host genetics, lifestyle, diet, and the gut microbiome. Moreover, gut bacterial communities and their activities can be altered by bacteriophages (also known simply as phages), bacteria-infecting viruses, making these biological entities key regulators of human cardiometabolic health. The manipulation of bacterial populations by phages enables the possibility of using phages in the treatment of cardiometabolic diseases through phage therapy and fecal viral transplants. First, however, a deeper understanding of the role of the phageome in cardiometabolic diseases is required. In this review, we first introduce the phageome as a component of the gut microbiome and discuss fecal viral transplants and phage therapy in relation to cardiometabolic diseases. We then summarize the current state of phageome research in cardiometabolic diseases and propose how the phageome might indirectly influence cardiometabolic health through gut bacteria and their metabolites

Age acquired skewed X chromosome inactivation is associated with adverse health outcomes in humans

Background: Ageing is a heterogenous process characterised by cellular and molecular hallmarks, including changes to haematopoietic stem cells and is a primary risk factor for chronic diseases. X chromosome inactivation (XCI) randomly transcriptionally silences either the maternal or paternal X in each cell of 46, XX females to balance the gene expression with 46, XY males. Age acquired XCI-skew describes the preferential selection of cells across a tissue resulting in an imbalance of XCI, which is particularly prevalent in blood tissues of ageing females, and yet its clinical consequences are unknown. Methods: We assayed XCI in 1575 females from the TwinsUK population cohort using DNA extracted from whole blood. We employed prospective, cross-sectional, and intra-twin study designs to characterise the relationship of XCI-skew with molecular and cellular measures of ageing, cardiovascular disease risk, and cancer diagnosis. Results: We demonstrate that XCI-skew is independent of traditional markers of biological ageing and is associated with a haematopoietic bias towards the myeloid lineage. Using an atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk score, which captures traditional risk factors, XCI-skew is associated with an increased cardiovascular disease risk both cross-sectionally and within XCI-skew discordant twin pairs. In a prospective 10 year follow-up study, XCI-skew is predictive of future cancer incidence. Conclusions: Our study demonstrates that age acquired XCI-skew captures changes to the haematopoietic stem cell population and has clinical potential as a unique biomarker of chronic disease risk

Metabolomic biomarkers of habitual B vitamin intakes unveil novel differentially methylated positions in the human epigenome

Background B vitamins such as folate (B9), B6, and B12 are key in one carbon metabolism, which generates methyl donors for DNA methylation. Several studies have linked differential methylation to self-reported intakes of folate and B12, but these estimates can be imprecise, while metabolomic biomarkers can offer an objective assessment of dietary intakes. We explored blood metabolomic biomarkers of folate and vitamins B6 and B12, to carry out epigenome-wide analyses across up to three European cohorts. Associations between self-reported habitual daily B vitamin intakes and 756 metabolites (Metabolon Inc.) were assessed in serum samples from 1064 UK participants from the TwinsUK cohort. The identified B vitamin metabolomic biomarkers were then used in epigenome-wide association tests with fasting blood DNA methylation levels at 430,768 sites from the Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip in blood samples from 2182 European participants from the TwinsUK and KORA cohorts. Candidate signals were explored for metabolite associations with gene expression levels in a subset of the TwinsUK sample (n = 297). Metabolomic biomarker epigenetic associations were also compared with epigenetic associations of self-reported habitual B vitamin intakes in samples from 2294 European participants. Results Eighteen metabolites were associated with B vitamin intakes after correction for multiple testing (Bonferroni-adj. p < 0.05), of which 7 metabolites were available in both cohorts and tested for epigenome-wide association. Three metabolites — pipecolate (metabolomic biomarker of B6 and folate intakes), pyridoxate (marker of B6 and folate) and docosahexaenoate (DHA, marker of B6) — were associated with 10, 3 and 1 differentially methylated positions (DMPs), respectively. The strongest association was observed between DHA and DMP cg03440556 in the SCD gene (effect = 0.093 ± 0.016, p = 4.07E−09). Pyridoxate, a catabolic product of vitamin B6, was inversely associated with CpG methylation near the SLC1A5 gene promoter region (cg02711608 and cg22304262) and with SLC7A11 (cg06690548), but not with corresponding changes in gene expression levels. The self-reported intake of folate and vitamin B6 had consistent but non-significant associations with the epigenetic signals. Conclusion Metabolomic biomarkers are a valuable approach to investigate the effects of dietary B vitamin intake on the human epigenome

Metabolomic biomarkers of habitual B vitamin intakes unveil novel differentially methylated positions in the human epigenome

Background: B vitamins such as folate (B9), B6, and B12 are key in one carbon metabolism, which generates methyl donors for DNA methylation. Several studies have linked differential methylation to self-reported intakes of folate and B12, but these estimates can be imprecise, while metabolomic biomarkers can offer an objective assessment of dietary intakes. We explored blood metabolomic biomarkers of folate and vitamins B6 and B12, to carry out epigenome-wide analyses across up to three European cohorts. Associations between self-reported habitual daily B vitamin intakes and 756 metabolites (Metabolon Inc.) were assessed in serum samples from 1064 UK participants from the TwinsUK cohort. The identified B vitamin metabolomic biomarkers were then used in epigenome-wide association tests with fasting blood DNA methylation levels at 430,768 sites from the Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip in blood samples from 2182 European participants from the TwinsUK and KORA cohorts. Candidate signals were explored for metabolite associations with gene expression levels in a subset of the TwinsUK sample (n = 297). Metabolomic biomarker epigenetic associations were also compared with epigenetic associations of self-reported habitual B vitamin intakes in samples from 2294 European participants. Results: Eighteen metabolites were associated with B vitamin intakes after correction for multiple testing (Bonferroni-adj. p < 0.05), of which 7 metabolites were available in both cohorts and tested for epigenome-wide association. Three metabolites — pipecolate (metabolomic biomarker of B6 and folate intakes), pyridoxate (marker of B6 and folate) and docosahexaenoate (DHA, marker of B6) — were associated with 10, 3 and 1 differentially methylated positions (DMPs), respectively. The strongest association was observed between DHA and DMP cg03440556 in the SCD gene (effect = 0.093 ± 0.016, p = 4.07E−09). Pyridoxate, a catabolic product of vitamin B6, was inversely associated with CpG methylation near the SLC1A5 gene promoter region (cg02711608 and cg22304262) and with SLC7A11 (cg06690548), but not with corresponding changes in gene expression levels. The self-reported intake of folate and vitamin B6 had consistent but non-significant associations with the epigenetic signals. Conclusion: Metabolomic biomarkers are a valuable approach to investigate the effects of dietary B vitamin intake on the human epigenome