Scalable Robust Kidney Exchange

In barter exchanges, participants directly trade their endowed goods in a constrained economic setting without money. Transactions in barter exchanges are often facilitated via a central clearinghouse that must match participants even in the face of uncertainty---over participants, existence and quality of potential trades, and so on. Leveraging robust combinatorial optimization techniques, we address uncertainty in kidney exchange, a real-world barter market where patients swap (in)compatible paired donors. We provide two scalable robust methods to handle two distinct types of uncertainty in kidney exchange---over the quality and the existence of a potential match. The latter case directly addresses a weakness in all stochastic-optimization-based methods to the kidney exchange clearing problem, which all necessarily require explicit estimates of the probability of a transaction existing---a still-unsolved problem in this nascent market. We also propose a novel, scalable kidney exchange formulation that eliminates the need for an exponential-time constraint generation process in competing formulations, maintains provable optimality, and serves as a subsolver for our robust approach. For each type of uncertainty we demonstrate the benefits of robustness on real data from a large, fielded kidney exchange in the United States. We conclude by drawing parallels between robustness and notions of fairness in the kidney exchange setting.Comment: Presented at AAAI1

Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young Jr.

Winner of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists Outstanding Book Award During the turbulent 1960s, civil rights leader Whitney M. Young Jr. devised a new and effective strategy to achieve equality for African Americans. Young blended interracial mediation with direct protest, demonstrating that these methods pursued together were the best tactics for achieving social, economic, and political change. Militant Mediator is a powerful reassessment of this key and controversial figure in the civil rights movement. It is the first biography to explore in depth the influence Young\u27s father, a civil rights leader in Kentucky, had on his son. Dickerson traces Young\u27s swift rise to national prominence as a leader who could bridge the concerns of deprived blacks and powerful whites and mobilize the resources of the white America to battle the poverty and discrimination at the core of racial inequality. Alone among his civil rights colleagues—Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, John Lewis, and James Forman—Young built support from black and white constituencies. As a National Urban League official in the Midwest and as a dean of the School of Social Work at Atlanta University during the 1940s and 1950s, Young developed a strategy of mediation and put it to work on a national level upon becoming the executive director of the League in 1961. Though he worked with powerful whites, Young also drew support from middle-and working-class blacks from religious, fraternal, civil rights, and educational organizations. As he navigated this middle ground, though, Young came under fire from both black nationalists and white conservatives. Provides a detailed narrative, closely grounded in extensive research, that extends our understanding of Young\u27s life and career. -- American Historical Review A respectful but not hagiographic biography of an often undervalued civil rights leader. -- Booklist Dickerson\u27s excellent biography establishes that Young was similarly successful in building support among blacks. This book is very readable and well documented, with 42 pages of notes and citations from dozens of interviews the author conducted with critical players in the Civil Rights Movement. -- Choice Certainly an important addition to our understanding of the Civil Rights era. -- Independent Publisher A well-researched work. -- Journal of Southern History A thoughtful study of an often overlooked figure in the American civil-rights movement. -- Kirkus Reviews Young was just 49 when he drowned on a trip to Nigeria. Today, a younger generation might not be aware of his contributions, so the publication of Militant Mediator is welcome. -- Lexington Herald-Leader Dickerson\u27s portrait is carefully balanced, identifying Young\u27s undeniable success in attracting corporate and foundation support for the NUL and his rise to national prominence as a spokesman for black civil rights, as well as the limitations inherent in any position so heavily dependent on the generosity of wealthy whites. -- MultiCultural Review Not only does Dickerson find Young uncompromising in his advocacy of a civil rights agenda but he holds that the mediating role that Young played was vital to the lasting accomplishments of better-known figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer. -- New York Times Book Review A major revisionist interpretation of African American leader Whitney M. Young Jr. . . . will be the definitive work on Young for years to come. -- Register of the Kentucky Historical Society Winner of the annual prize for outstanding book given by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Winner of the Nelson Bushnell Prize, given by Williams College to a faculty member displaying excellence in publishing and teaching.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_african_american_studies/1004/thumbnail.jp

Advances in quantitative magnetic resonance imaging-based biomarkers for Alzheimer disease

A critical goal of Alzheimer disease research is to identify disease biomarkers that can be used in clinical trials to assist in the adjudication of treatment effects. While clinical validation remains a goal for many potential Alzheimer disease biomarkers, the rapid proliferation of markers has sparked comparative efforts as well. New data acquisition methods and sophisticated image-processing algorithms are poised to make a substantial impact on our ability to make precise measurements of the structure and function of regions within the living human brain and their connections and chemical composition. This commentary provides a perspective on a recently published paper and how it illustrates progress and challenges in the field

LLV - Lunar Logistic Vehicle Final report

Evaluation of systems design training institute for engineering facult

Transportation noise pollution - Control and abatement

Control and abatement of transportation noise pollutio

Biomarker-based prediction of progression in MCI: Comparison of AD signature and hippocampal volume with spinal fluid amyloid-β and tau

Objective: New diagnostic criteria for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been developed using biomarkers aiming to establish whether the clinical syndrome is likely due to underlying AD. We investigated the utility of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers in predicting progression from amnesic MCI to dementia, testing the hypotheses that (1) markers of amyloid and neurodegeneration provide distinct and complementary prognostic information over different time intervals, and that (2) evidence of neurodegeneration in amyloid-negative MCI individuals would be useful prognostically. Methods: Data were obtained from the ADNI-1 (Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative Phase 1) database on all individuals with a baseline diagnosis of MCI, baseline MRI and CSF data, and at least one follow-up visit. MRI data were processed using a published set of a priori regions of interest to derive a measure known as the ``AD signature,'' as well as hippocampal volume. The CSF biomarkers amyloid-β, total tau, and phospho tau were also examined. We performed logistic regression analyses to identify the best baseline biomarker predictors of progression to dementia over 1 or 3 years, and Cox regression models to test the utility of these markers for predicting time-to-dementia. Results: For prediction of dementia in MCI, the AD signature cortical thickness biomarker performed better than hippocampal volume. Although CSF tau measures were better than CSF amyloid-β at predicting dementia within 1 year, the AD signature was better than all CSF measures at prediction over this relatively short-term interval. CSF amyloid-β was superior to tau and AD signature at predicting dementia over 3 years. When CSF amyloid-β was dichotomized using previously published cutoff values and treated as a categorical variable, a multivariate stepwise Cox regression model indicated that both the AD signature MRI marker and the categorical CSF amyloid-β marker were useful in predicting time-to-event diagnosis of AD dementia. Conclusion: In amnesic MCI, short-term (1 year) prognosis of progression to dementia relates strongly to baseline markers of neurodegeneration, with the AD signature MRI biomarker of cortical thickness performing the best among MRI and CSF markers studied here. Longer-term (3 year) prognosis in these individuals was better predicted by a marker indicative of brain amyloid. Prediction of time-to-event in a survival model was predicted by the combination of these biomarkers. These results provide further support for emerging models of the temporal relationship of pathophysiologic events in AD and demonstrate the utility of these biomarkers at the prodromal stage of the illness

Elastic Correlations in Nucleosomal DNA Structure

The structure of DNA in the nucleosome core particle is studied using an elastic model that incorporates anisotropy in the bending energetics and twist-bend coupling. Using the experimentally determined structure of nucleosomal DNA [T.J. Richmond and C.A. Davey, Nature {\bf 423}, 145 (2003)], it is shown that elastic correlations exist between twist, roll, tilt, and stretching of DNA, as well as the distance between phosphate groups. The twist-bend coupling term is shown to be able to capture these correlations to a large extent, and a fit to the experimental data yields a new estimate of G=25 nm for the value of the twist-bend coupling constant