Trends in the knowledge, attitudes and practices of travel risk groups towards prevention of malaria: Results from the Dutch Schiphol airport survey 2002 to 2009

Background: Previous studies investigating the travellers knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) profile indicated an important educational need among those travelling to risk destinations. Initiatives to improve such education should target all groups of travellers, including business travellers, those visiting friends and relatives (VFRs), and elderly travellers. Methods: In the years 2002 to 2009, a questionnaire-based survey was conducted at the Dutch Schiphol Airport with the aim to study trends in KAP of travel risk groups towards prevention of malaria. The risk groups last-minute travellers, solo-travellers, business travellers, VFRs and elderly travellers were specifically studied. Results: A total of 3,045 respondents were included in the survey. Travellers to destinations with a high risk for malaria had significantly more accurate risk perceptions (knowledge) than travellers to low-risk destinations. The relative risk for malaria in travellers to high-risk destinations was probably mitigated by higher protection rates against malaria as compared with travellers to low risk destinations. There were no significant differences in intended risk-taking behaviour. Trend analyses showed a significant change over time in attitude towards more risk-avoiding behaviour and towards higher protection rates against malaria in travellers to high-risk destinations. The KAP profile of last-minute travellers substantially increased their relative risk for malaria, which contrasts to the slight increase in relative risk of solo travellers, business travellers and VFRs for malaria. Conclusions: The results of this sequential cohort survey in Dutch travellers suggest an annual 1.8% increase in protection rates against malaria coinciding with an annual 2.5% decrease in intended risk-seeking behaviour. This improvement may reflect the continuous efforts of travel health advice providers to create awareness and to propagate safe and healthy travel. The KAP profile of last-minute travellers, in particular, substantially increased their relative risk for malaria, underlining the continuous need for personal protective measures and malaria chemoprophylaxis for this risk group

Quantum machine learning: a classical perspective

Recently, increased computational power and data availability, as well as algorithmic advances, have led machine learning techniques to impressive results in regression, classification, data-generation and reinforcement learning tasks. Despite these successes, the proximity to the physical limits of chip fabrication alongside the increasing size of datasets are motivating a growing number of researchers to explore the possibility of harnessing the power of quantum computation to speed-up classical machine learning algorithms. Here we review the literature in quantum machine learning and discuss perspectives for a mixed readership of classical machine learning and quantum computation experts. Particular emphasis will be placed on clarifying the limitations of quantum algorithms, how they compare with their best classical counterparts and why quantum resources are expected to provide advantages for learning problems. Learning in the presence of noise and certain computationally hard problems in machine learning are identified as promising directions for the field. Practical questions, like how to upload classical data into quantum form, will also be addressed.Comment: v3 33 pages; typos corrected and references adde

Refined saddle-point preconditioners for discretized Stokes problems

This paper is concerned with the implementation of efficient solution algorithms for elliptic problems with constraints. We establish theory which shows that including a simple scaling within well-established block diagonal preconditioners for Stokes problems can result in significantly faster convergence when applying the preconditioned MINRES method. The codes used in the numerical studies are available online

The novel mu-opioid antagonist, GSK1521498, reduces ethanol consumption in C57BL/6J mice.

RATIONALE Using the drinking-in-the-dark (DID) model, we compared the effects of a novel mu-opioid receptor antagonist, GSK1521498, with naltrexone, a licensed treatment of alcohol dependence, on ethanol consumption in mice. OBJECTIVE We test the ability of GSK1521498 to reduce alcohol consumption and compare its intrinsic efficacy to that of naltrexone by comparing the two drugs at doses matched for equivalent receptor occupancy. METHODS Thirty-six C57BL/6J mice were tested in a DID procedure. In 2-day cycles, animals experienced one baseline, injection-free session, and one test session when they received two injections, one of test drug and one placebo. All animals received GSK1521498 (0, 0.1, 1 and 3 mg/kg, i.p., 30 min pre-treatment) and naltrexone (0, 0.1, 1 and 3 mg/kg, s.c. 10 min pre-treatment) in a cross-over design. Receptor occupancies following the same doses were determined ex vivo in separate groups by autoradiography, using [3H]DAMGO. Binding in the region of interest was measured integrally by computer-assisted microdensitometry and corrected for non-specific binding. RESULTS Both GSK1521498 and naltrexone dose-dependently decreased ethanol consumption. When drug doses were matched for 70-75 % receptor occupancy, GSK1521498 3 mg/kg, i.p., caused a 2.5-fold greater reduction in alcohol consumption than naltrexone 0.1 mg/kg, s.c. Both GSK1521498 and naltrexone significantly reduced sucrose consumption at a dose of 1 mg/kg but not 0.1 mg/kg. In a test of conditioned taste aversion, GSK1521498 (3 mg/kg) reduced sucrose consumption 24 h following exposure to a conditioning injection. CONCLUSIONS Both opioid receptor antagonists reduced alcohol consumption but GK1521498 has higher intrinsic efficacy than naltrexone

A review of fMRI simulation studies

Simulation studies that validate statistical techniques for fMRI data are challenging due to the complexity of the data. Therefore, it is not surprising that no common data generating process is available (i.e. several models can be found to model BOLD activation and noise). Based on a literature search, a database of simulation studies was compiled. The information in this database was analysed and critically evaluated focusing on the parameters in the simulation design, the adopted model to generate fMRI data, and on how the simulation studies are reported. Our literature analysis demonstrates that many fMRI simulation studies do not report a thorough experimental design and almost consistently ignore crucial knowledge on how fMRI data are acquired. Advice is provided on how the quality of fMRI simulation studies can be improved

Hierarchical approach for deriving a reproducible unblocked LU factorization

[EN] We propose a reproducible variant of the unblocked LU factorization for graphics processor units (GPUs). For this purpose, we build upon Level-1/2 BLAS kernels that deliver correctly-rounded and reproducible results for the dot (inner) product, vector scaling, and the matrix-vector product. In addition, we draw a strategy to enhance the accuracy of the triangular solve via iterative refinement. Following a bottom-up approach, we finally construct a reproducible unblocked implementation of the LU factorization for GPUs, which accommodates partial pivoting for stability and can be eventually integrated in a high performance and stable algorithm for the (blocked) LU factorization.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The simulations were performed on resources provided by the Swed-ish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at PDC Centre for High Performance Computing (PDC-HPC). This work was also granted access to the HPC resources of The Institute for Scientific Computing and Simulation financed by Region Ile-de-France and the project Equip@Meso (reference ANR-10-EQPX-29-01) overseen by the French National Agency for Research (ANR) as part of the Investissements d Avenir pro-gram. This work was also partly supported by the FastRelax (ANR-14-CE25-0018-01) project of ANR.Iakymchuk, R.; Graillat, S.; Defour, D.; Quintana-Orti, ES. (2019). Hierarchical approach for deriving a reproducible unblocked LU factorization. International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. 33(5):791-803. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094342019832968S791803335Arteaga, A., Fuhrer, O., & Hoefler, T. (2014). Designing Bit-Reproducible Portable High-Performance Applications. 2014 IEEE 28th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. doi:10.1109/ipdps.2014.127Bientinesi, P., Quintana-Ortí, E. S., & Geijn, R. A. van de. (2005). 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ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 16(1), 1-17. doi:10.1145/77626.79170Dongarra, J., Hittinger, J., Bell, J., Chacon, L., Falgout, R., Heroux, M., … Wild, S. (2014). Applied Mathematics Research for Exascale Computing. doi:10.2172/1149042Fousse, L., Hanrot, G., Lefèvre, V., Pélissier, P., & Zimmermann, P. (2007). MPFR. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 33(2), 13. doi:10.1145/1236463.1236468Haidar, A., Dong, T., Luszczek, P., Tomov, S., & Dongarra, J. (2015). Batched matrix computations on hardware accelerators based on GPUs. The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, 29(2), 193-208. doi:10.1177/1094342014567546Hida, Y., Li, X. S., & Bailey, D. H. (s. f.). Algorithms for quad-double precision floating point arithmetic. Proceedings 15th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic. ARITH-15 2001. doi:10.1109/arith.2001.930115Higham, N. J. (2002). Accuracy and Stability of Numerical Algorithms. doi:10.1137/1.9780898718027Iakymchuk, R., Defour, D., Collange, S., & Graillat, S. (2015). Reproducible Triangular Solvers for High-Performance Computing. 2015 12th International Conference on Information Technology - New Generations. doi:10.1109/itng.2015.63Iakymchuk, R., Defour, D., Collange, S., & Graillat, S. (2016). Reproducible and Accurate Matrix Multiplication. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 126-137. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-31769-4_11Kulisch, U., & Snyder, V. (2010). The exact dot product as basic tool for long interval arithmetic. Computing, 91(3), 307-313. doi:10.1007/s00607-010-0127-7Li, X. S., Demmel, J. W., Bailey, D. H., Henry, G., Hida, Y., Iskandar, J., … Yoo, D. J. (2002). Design, implementation and testing of extended and mixed precision BLAS. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 28(2), 152-205. doi:10.1145/567806.567808Muller, J.-M., Brisebarre, N., de Dinechin, F., Jeannerod, C.-P., Lefèvre, V., Melquiond, G., … Torres, S. (2010). Handbook of Floating-Point Arithmetic. doi:10.1007/978-0-8176-4705-6Ogita, T., Rump, S. M., & Oishi, S. (2005). Accurate Sum and Dot Product. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 26(6), 1955-1988. doi:10.1137/030601818Ortega, J. . (1988). The ijk forms of factorization methods I. Vector computers. Parallel Computing, 7(2), 135-147. doi:10.1016/0167-8191(88)90035-xRump, S. M. (2009). Ultimately Fast Accurate Summation. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 31(5), 3466-3502. doi:10.1137/080738490Skeel, R. D. (1979). Scaling for Numerical Stability in Gaussian Elimination. Journal of the ACM, 26(3), 494-526. doi:10.1145/322139.322148Zhu, Y.-K., & Hayes, W. B. (2010). Algorithm 908. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 37(3), 1-13. doi:10.1145/1824801.182481

Time-Optimal Control for a Model of Bacterial Growth

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryJoint Services Electronics Program / DAAB-07-67-C-0199AFOSR 68-1579