Impacts of pandemic outbreaks on Healthcare Supply Chains: Lessons from Covid-19 in developing nations

Extended abstract submitted for the Faculty of Business and Law Research Day 2022

HAP-SAP: Semantic Annotation in LBSNs using Latent Spatio-Temporal Hawkes Process

The prevalence of location-based social networks (LBSNs) has eased the understanding of human mobility patterns. Knowledge of human dynamics can aid in various ways like urban planning, managing traffic congestion, personalized recommendation etc. These dynamics are influenced by factors like social impact, periodicity in mobility, spatial proximity, influence among users and semantic categories etc., which makes location modelling a critical task. However, categories which act as semantic characterization of the location, might be missing for some check-ins and can adversely affect modelling the mobility dynamics of users. At the same time, mobility patterns provide a cue on the missing semantic category. In this paper, we simultaneously address the problem of semantic annotation of locations and location adoption dynamics of users. We propose our model HAP-SAP, a latent spatio-temporal multivariate Hawkes process, which considers latent semantic category influences, and temporal and spatial mobility patterns of users. The model parameters and latent semantic categories are inferred using expectation-maximization algorithm, which uses Gibbs sampling to obtain posterior distribution over latent semantic categories. The inferred semantic categories can supplement our model on predicting the next check-in events by users. Our experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for the semantic annotation and location adoption modelling tasks.Comment: 11 page

Model Reference Adaptive System (MRAS) Based Speed Sensorless Vector Control of Induction Motor Drive

No Abstrac

Event Uncertainty using Ensemble Neural Hawkes Process

Various real world applications in science and industry are often recorded over time as asynchronous event sequences. These event sequences comprise of the time of occurrence of events. Different applications including such event sequences are crime analysis, earthquake prediction, neural spiking train study, infectious disease prediction etc. A principled framework for modeling asynchronous event sequences is temporal point process. Recent works on neural temporal point process have combined the theoretical foundation of point process with universal approximation ability of neural networks. However, the predictions made by these models are uncertain due to incorrect model inference. Therefore, it is highly desirable to associate uncertainty with the predictions as well. In this paper, we propose a novel model, Ensemble Neural Hawkes Process, which is capable of predicting event occurrence time along with uncertainty, hence improving the generalization capability. We also propose evaluation metric which captures the uncertainty modelling capability for event prediction. The efficacy of proposed model is demonstrated using various simulated and real world datasets

Genome-wide characterization, molecular evolution and mexpression profiling of the metacaspases in potato (Solanum tuberosum L.)

Metacaspases are distant relatives of animal caspases found in plants, protozoa and fungi. Some recent studies have demonstrated that metacaspases are involved in regulating the developmental and environmentally induced programmed cell death in plants. In this study, we identified metacaspase gene family in potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) and analyzed their expression pattern in various developmental tissues and stress responses of plants. There were eight metacaspase genes identified in the Peptidase (Cysteine protease) C14 family and based upon sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis, a systematic nomenclature of potato metacaspases (SotubMCs) has been proposed. Three of the eight candidate genes showing homology with Arabidopsis thaliana type I metacaspase, AtMC1 were given name SotubMC1, SotubMC2 and SotubMC3 as per the degree of relatedness. Similarly, the next three being homologous to A. thaliana type I metacaspase, AtMC3 were named SotubMC4, SotubMC5, and SotubMC6. The remaining two were named SotubMC7 and SotubMC8, showing significant similarity with type II metacaspases of A. thaliana, AtMC4 and AtMC9, respectively. Evolutionary divergence analysis of SotubMCs from its orthologs in seven other members of Solanaceae family as well as with A. thaliana, Vitis vinifera and Oryza sativa was also carried out. The dN/dS ratios of the orthologous pairs suggested the SotubMCs were under purifying (negative) selection in course of plant evolution. Splicing patterns of potato metacaspases were also analyzed. Amongst all SotubMCs, SotubMC2, SotubMC4, SotubMC6 and SotubMC7 genes appeared to produce multiple alternative spliced variants of different lengths. Furthermore using protein modeling tools, we have predicted the protein structure of identified metacaspases. The cis-regulatory elements analysis was also performed exhibiting the presence of development, stress and hormones related cis-elements in the promoter regions of the SotubMCs. This indicates that potato metacaspases might be playing important roles in the development, stress and hormone responsive pathways. Moreover, relative expression analysis of identified genes was carried out using qRT-PCR in various developmental tissues that also include stolons and tubers. The eight metacaspases showed differential expression in different tissues. Some of the tissues such as leaf undergoing senescence among different leaf developmental stages (immature, mature and senescent) displayed higher relative expression of some of the metacaspases, implying their involvement in leaf senescence. The expression pattern of SotubMCs under various abiotic, biotic and hormonal stresses was also analysed. The results showed that many members of the potato metacaspase gene family displayed differential expression patterns under various stress conditions. Taken together, the study could provide crucial resources for further investigations to understand the functional roles of the identified metacaspases in potato

Hawkes Process Classification through Discriminative Modeling of Text

Social media such as Twitter has provided a platform for users to gather and share information and stay updated with the news. However, restriction on the length, informal grammar and vocabulary of the posts pose challenges to perform classification from textual content alone. We propose models based on the Hawkes process (HP) which can naturally incorporate additional cues such as the temporal features and past labels of the posts, along with the textual features for improving short text classification. In particular, we propose a discriminative approach to model text in HP, where the text features parameterize the base intensity and the triggering kernel of the intensity function. This allows textual content to determine influence from past posts and consequently determine the intensity function and class label. Another major contribution is to model the kernel as a neural network function of both time and text, permitting more complex influence functions for Hawkes process. This will maintain the interpretability of Hawkes process models along with the improved function learning capability of the neural networks. The proposed HP models can easily consider pretrained word embeddings to represent text for classification. Experiments on the rumour stance classification problems in social media demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HP models. © 2022 IEEE

Anaemia among men in India: a nationally representative cross-sectional study

Summary Background Population-based studies on anaemia in India have mostly focused on women and children, with men with anaemia receiving much less attention despite anaemia's adverse effect on health, wellbeing, and economic productivity. This study aimed to determine the national prevalence of anaemia among men in India; how the prevalence of anaemia in men varies across India among states and districts and by sociodemographic characteristics; and whether the geographical and sociodemographic variation in the prevalence of anaemia among men is similar to that among women to inform whether anaemia reduction efforts for men should be coupled with existing efforts for women. Methods In this cross-sectional study, we analysed data from a nationally representative household survey carried out from January, 2015, to December, 2016, among men aged 15–54 years and women aged 15–49 years in all 29 states and seven Union Territories of India. Haemoglobin concentration was measured using the portable HemoCue Hb 201+ (HemoCue AB, Angelholm, Sweden) and a capillary blood sample. In addition to disaggregating anaemia prevalence (separately in men and women) by state and age group, we used mixed-effects Poisson regression to determine individual-level and district-level predictors of anaemia. Findings 106 298 men and 633 305 women were included in our analysis. In men, the prevalence of any anaemia was 23·2% (95% CI 22·7–23·7), moderate or severe anaemia was 5·1% (4·9–5·4), and severe anaemia was 0·5% (0·5–0·6). An estimated 21·7% (20·9–22·5) of men with any degree of anaemia had moderate or severe anaemia compared with 53·2% (52·9–53·5) of women with any anaemia. Men aged 20–34 years had the lowest probability of having anaemia whereas anaemia prevalence among women was similar across age groups. State-level prevalence of any anaemia in men varied from 9·2% (7·7–10·9) in Manipur to 32·9% (31·0–34·7) in Bihar. The individual-level predictors of less household wealth, lower education, living in a rural area, smoking, consuming smokeless tobacco, and being underweight and the district-level predictors of living in a district with a lower rate of primary school completion, level of urbanisation, and household wealth were all associated with a higher probability of anaemia in men. Although some important exceptions were noted, district-level and state-level prevalence of anaemia among men correlated strongly with that among women. Interpretation Anaemia among men in India is an important public health problem. Because of the similarities in the patterns of geographical and sociodemographic variation of anaemia between men and women, future efforts to reduce anaemia among men could target similar population groups as those targeted in existing efforts to reduce anaemia among women. Funding Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

Global, regional, and national burden of epilepsy, 1990 - 2016 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

Background: Seizures and their consequences contribute to the burden of epilepsy because they can cause health loss (premature mortality and residual disability). Data on the burden of epilepsy are needed for health-care planning and resource allocation. The aim of this study was to quantify health loss due to epilepsy by age, sex, year, and location using data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study. Methods: We assessed the burden of epilepsy in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2016. Burden was measured as deaths, prevalence, and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs; a summary measure of health loss defined by the sum of years of life lost [YLLs] for premature mortality and years lived with disability), by age, sex, year, location, and Socio-demographic Index (SDI; a compound measure of income per capita, education, and fertility). Vital registrations and verbal autopsies provided information about deaths, and data on the prevalence and severity of epilepsy largely came from population representative surveys. All estimates were calculated with 95% uncertainty intervals (UIs). Interpretation: Despite the decrease in the disease burden from 1990 to 2016, epilepsy is still an important cause of disability and mortality. Standardised collection of data on epilepsy in population representative surveys will strengthen the estimates, particularly in countries for which we currently have no or sparse data and if additional data is collected on severity, causes, and treatment. Sizeable gains in reducing the burden of epilepsy might be expected from improved access to existing treatments in low-income countries and from the development of new effective drugs worldwide