Temporal expression normalisation in natural language texts

Automatic annotation of temporal expressions is a research challenge of great interest in the field of information extraction. In this report, I describe a novel rule-based architecture, built on top of a pre-existing system, which is able to normalise temporal expressions detected in English texts. Gold standard temporally-annotated resources are limited in size and this makes research difficult. The proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art systems with respect to TempEval-2 Shared Task (value attribute) and achieves substantially better results with respect to the pre-existing system on top of which it has been developed. I will also introduce a new free corpus consisting of 2822 unique annotated temporal expressions. Both the corpus and the system are freely available on-line.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 5 table

Informed Participation and Patient Empowerment: A Patient- Centered Approach to Improve Pediatric Clinical Research

Over the last years, a Europe-wide trend toward a patient-focused approach is developing and is influencing the decision-making process related to the clinical research. This new vision aims to draw on patient knowledge and experience in order to deliver benefits for all stakeholders of the drug development process, optimizing the clinical study design. In this context, the “patient empowerment” concept has been developed as an approach encouraging the active participation and self-determination of the patients in the caring procedure. For this reason, in 2016, European Patients’ Academy (EUPATI) launched a public consultation that ended in September 2016 with the release of the EUPATI guidance for patient involvement in the medicine research and development process. Likewise, the recommendations on the “Summaries of Clinical Trial Results for Laypersons” for the Implementation of Regulation (EU) No 536/2014 recommended a clear and comprehensible communication of the clinical trial results to the patients. However, rarely, all these attempts for the patient involvement pay attention to the pediatric population needs. An innovative approach for the patients’ involvement in pediatric clinical research is represented by the Young Persons Advisory Groups, an organization composed of youths, patients, and carers, actively participating in clinical research and advising researchers and their teams

Navigational maps in homing pigeons: GPS-tracking experiments on the role of the stimuli involved in pigeons’ navigation

This projects aims at investigating the nature of the stimuli used in homing pigeons’ navigation over both unfamiliar and familiar areas by using GPS technology. The novel approach of this research project consisted in the investigation of old open questions by means of the use of the satellite technology. While the classical methods of investigation consisted in recording the initial orientation of birds at the release site and their homing time and success, the use of GPS loggers enabled the collection of detailed information on the behaviour of the pigeon during the entire homing journey. The analysis of the whole homing flight of birds subjected to experimental manipulations has highlighted behaviours and phenomena otherwise undetectable with traditional experiments. As concerning the true navigation behaviour, three investigations have been conducted: the olfactory lateralization in homing pigeons, the role of environmental odours on the navigational map and the role of geomagnetic information in a position finding mechanism. As regarding the analysis of the homing flight path of experienced pigeons receiving a unilateral olfactory input, the use of GPS-technique has allowed to highlight some of the effects of the right nostril occlusion, which remained undetected when observing only the initial orientation of the birds at vanishing. We have analysed the tracks of birds released with the left or the right nostril occluded and we have highlighted an important functional asymmetry in favour of the right nostril. In fact the birds processing the environmental olfactory information with the left nostril only, displayed a higher level of tortuosity in their flight path and stopped more frequently than both the unmanipulated controls and the birds using the right nostril. A further progress in the analysis of the birds navigational capabilities from unfamiliar places has been possible thanks to a newly developed GPS data loggers, that allows for a remote readout of the stored data, enabling therefore the acquisition of data of birds that do not home. With this specific technology we achieved a major advance in the understanding of the role of olfactory stimuli in pigeon navigation as we could test the performances of birds made anosmic by nasal anaesthesia. By using this kind of GPS we could test the olfactory activation hypothesis that predicts that olfactory stimuli prime the navigational capabilities of birds, and that the environmental odours are solely needed to activate a navigational system that, in turn, is based on non-olfactory cues. This hypothesis challenges the olfactory navigation hypothesis, which predicts that environmental odours constitute a specific component of the navigational map in homing pigeons. Therefore, we have analysed the GPS tracks of three groups of pigeons subjected to different olfactory conditions during transportation and at the release site and subjected to nasal anaesthesia prior release: controls birds exposed to environmental odours, birds transported in pure air and pigeons transported in pure air but stimulated with artificial odour of plant origin, before the release. The analysis of the tracks revealed that the birds exposed to the artificial odours displayed significantly poorer navigational performances than controls, suggesting a specific role of environmental olfactory information in pigeon navigation. Anatomical studies and conditioning experiments provided evidence that pigeons detect geomagnetic field intensity through the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve. Despite the fact that magnetic treatments and trigeminal nerve section do not disrupt the abilities of pigeons to home back to the colony, it has been proposed that pigeons tend to fly parallel or perpendicular to the steepest magnetic slope. We have analysed tracks of both intact and trigeminal sectioned pigeons in order to test if the pattern of the local magnetic gradient affect the birds’ flight paths. The analysis did not reveal a consistent effect of the local geomagnetic field in the birds’ homing trajectories. As concerning the navigation from familiar locations, we have conducted an investigation about the role of the topography in the landmark based navigation over familiar areas. It is known that pigeons are able to memorise landscape features of the over-flown areas. These features can be associated to a specific compass direction leading the bird home (site specific compass orientation). Alternatively the bird can learn the spatial relationships among the single landmarks so to build a familiar landmark based map used in a piloting strategy. The two different strategies can be put in conflict by shifting the birds’ internal clock, in order to asses which of the two strategies is preferentially adopted by the subject. This protocol has been used to assess which factors are determining the strategy preferentially used by an individual pigeon and the kind of landscape feature which are likely to be memorised as landmarks during piloting. The analysis of the tracks suggested that the characteristic features of the release site affect the level of reorientation after clock shift, and, in particular, it emerged that the sea might represent an important topographical feature, probably due to its strong chromatic component, that facilitates the ability of the birds to re-orient after a phase shift treatment. Therefore, the vicinity of the sea seems to determine a preference for the piloting strategy

STUDIO DEI MOVIMENTI DI FORAGGIAMENTO DI TARTARUGHE COMUNI (CARETTA CARETTA)IN RELAZIONE A VARIABILI AMBIENTALI

RIASSUNTO: Durante il loro ciclo vitale, le tartarughe marine compiono vari spostamenti, sia su piccola che su ampia scala. Nelle tartarughe comuni il periodo che segue l’abbandono della spiaggia dove sono nate e prima del raggiungimento della maturità sessuale, è poco conosciuto. Dopo alcuni anni di vita pelagica, si ritiene che i giovani si spostino in ambiente neritico, dove foraggiano completando il loro sviluppo. Di recente, l’evoluzione delle tecniche di telemetria satellitare ha consentito di seguire, con buona accuratezza, anche i movimenti di questi giovani, permettendo così di ricostruire le rotte seguite da questi animali durante il loro prolungato soggiorno in ambiente neritico. Lo scopo di questo lavoro è stato quello di elaborare dati ottenuti tramite telemetria satellitare sul comportamento di giovani di tartaruga comune e di integrare gli stessi con informazioni su vari parametri ambientali ed oceanografici, per studiare la possibile relazione tra questi importanti fattori ed i movimenti delle tartarughe monitorate. A questo scopo, sono stati presi in considerazione cinque esemplari di tartaruga comune che erano stati catturati accidentalmente da pescherecci, riabilitati da appositi centri di recupero e rilasciati in varie zone dei mari italiani (a Lampedusa, a Livorno e Rimini). Trasmettitori satellitari connessi col Sistema Argos incollati sul loro carapace hanno permesso di seguire gli animali per 4-11 mesi dopo il rilascio. I dati di localizzazione giornalieri ottenuti dai satelliti Argos sono stati analizzati e filtrati sulla base di apposite procedure, fino ad ottenere un set di dati affidabile con cui ricostruire le rotte seguite da questi animali. In modo analogo, sono stati elaborati dati inviati dalle trasmittenti sulla temperatura dell’acqua in cui si trova la tartaruga e sul numero, la durata massima e media delle immersioni da essa compiute in un determinato lasso di tempo. Queste informazioni sono state analizzate e successivamente integrate con altri dati satellitari, ottenuti da database in rete, relativi a parametri ambientali ed oceanografici come la temperatura superficiale dell’acqua e la concentrazione di clorofilla

Surround suppression effects on working memory performance in the general population and in people with schizophrenia: behavioural and ERPs evidence

Visual Working memory (WM) is a cognitive ability that allows to retain and manipulate information for a short period of time. WM is fundamental for mental functions and it supports several everyday activities such as learning, reasoning and language comprehension. In fact, impairments in WM, which are established in clinical conditions such as schizophrenia, have been related to poor quality of life factors, such as work/education status. Despite a large number of studies investigating WM, its underlying mechanisms are still a matter of debate both in the general population and in schizophrenia. A number of landmark studies have shown that early visual areas are active during the maintenance of information in WM, which emphasizes the importance of low-level visual processes in higher-level cognition. However, few studies have examined the basic visual processes underlying encoding into WM. For example, surround suppression (SS), in which the perception of a target is altered by the context in which it is embedded, is a largely known basic perceptual mechanism. However, it has not been explored whether SS can also impact WM representations. In three experiments, this project investigated how individual variations in the SS sensitivity affect WM in typical participants (Experiment 1), in patients with schizophrenia (Experiment 2) and in interaction with attention (Experiment 3). Stimuli that differentially triggered the strength of SS activity in early visual areas were used in a contrast matching (CM) task, an orientation discrimination (OD) task and in a WM task. In the WM task, participants viewed 1 to 3 sequentially presented gratings with different orientations surrounded by either orthogonal or parallel circular regions. They then judged whether the orientation of a subsequent probe (without a surround) matched any of the targets. ERPs signals were also measured during the WM task. In Experiment 1, in the CM task, 18 participants confirmed that a central target grating appeared to have less contrast in the context of a co-oriented surround compared to an orthogonally-oriented surround. WM performance decreased with the increment of load. Moreover, it was also decreased in the parallel compared to the orthogonal surround but only for Load 1, but not throughout all WM loads. During WM encoding, posterior P2 amplitudes were significantly higher in the orthogonal compared to the parallel condition, suggesting that posterior P2 respond to SS mechanisms. Experiment 2 tested 19 patients with schizophrenia and 20 matched controls. Confirming previous studies, patients contrast perception was not affected by the SS. In addition, the OD threshold was significantly higher in patients compared to controls and it negatively correlated with WM performance, suggesting that basic visual skills can relate to higher cognitive processing. Overall WM accuracy was lower in patients compared to controls. However, in contrast to controls, patients’ WM accuracy was not affected by SS. During encoding, posterior P2 amplitudes were decreased with stronger SS only in controls but not in patients. However, both in Exp. 1 and Exp. 2, no direct correlations were found between P2 and WM performance. Experiment 3 tested 20 participants on a modified version of the WM task in order to test whether LI interferes with attention. Here, a cue highlighted which item had to be memorised, over a list of three. Only behavioural data were collected. For hit rate, the position of the item to remember influenced performance only for the parallel, but not for the orthogonal surround. Overall, Experiment 3 seems to suggest that the focus of attention might be subjective to perceptual interference triggered by SS. Overall, this project successfully confirmed SS effects on perceived contrast in typical participants and the lack of SS in patients with schizophrenia. In addition, the difference in surround conditions was reflected in P2 in typical participants (Exp 1) but not in patients (Exp 2), suggesting that encoding processes in schizophrenia might not occur in the same time window as controls. Moreover, these results showed that lower 29 basic perceptual skills (such as OD) in schizophrenia are associated with decreased WM performance. However, in this project a direct relationship between stronger SS and WM was not found both in healthy and in schizophrenia populations. Future studies will need to clarify whether overall SS mechanisms (regardless of the strength of the effect) have an influence on WM performance compared to conditions in which SS is absent by the use, for example, of a “no surround” condition

Towards productizing AI/ML Models: An industry perspective from data scientists

The transition from AI/ML models to production-ready AI-based systems is a challenge for both data scientists and software engineers. In this paper, we report the results of a workshop conducted in a consulting company to understand how this transition is perceived by practitioners. Starting from the need for making AI experiments reproducible, the main themes that emerged are related to the use of the Jupyter Notebook as the primary prototyping tool, and the lack of support for software engineering best practices as well as data science specific functionalities

Olfactory lateralization in homing pigeons: a GPS study on birds released with unilateral olfactory inputs

A large body of evidence has shown that pigeons rely on an olfactory-based navigational map when homing from unfamiliar locations. Previous studies on pigeons released with one nostril occluded highlighted an asymmetry in favour of the right nostril, particularly concerning the initial orientation performance of naïve birds. Nevertheless, all pigeons experiencing only unilateral olfactory input showed impaired homing, regardless of the side of the occluded nostril. So far this phenomenon has been documented only by observing the birds’ vanishing bearings. In the present work we recorded the flight tracks of pigeons with previous homing experience equipped with a GPS data logger and released from an unfamiliar location with the right or the left nostril occluded. The analysis of the tracks revealed that the flight path of the birds with the right nostril occluded was more tortuous than that of unmanipulated controls. Moreover, the pigeons smelling with the left nostril interrupted their journey significantly more frequently and displayed more exploratory activity than the control birds, e.g. during flights around a stopover site. These data suggest a more important involvement of the right olfactory system in processing the olfactory information needed for the operation of the navigational map

Functional Exploitation of Carob, Oat Flour, and Whey Permeate as Substrates for a Novel Kefir-Like Fermented Beverage: An Optimized Formulation

This study investigated the fortification of a carob-based kefir-like beverage (KLB) with whey permeate (WP) and oat flour (OF). The response surface method was used to show the effect of WP and OF concentrations on lactic acid bacteria and yeast cell densities, pH, total titratable acidity (TTA), total phenolics content (TCP), DPPH radical scavenging activity, and overall acceptability (OA) in KLB. The statistical design provided thirteen formulations where OF concentration varied from 3% to 5% and WP from 10% to 15%. The enrichment of carob pods decoction with WP and OF had a positive effect on biomass production. Overall fermentation was shown to increase TPC of KLB. Furthermore, OF supplementation led to the higher levels of TPC and antiradical activity. WP negatively affected OA at linear and quadratic levels, whereas no effect of OF was observed at the linear level. The optimum point was found by using WP at 11.51% and OF at 4.77%. Optimized KLB resulted in an enrichment of bioavailable phenolics derivatives and highly digestible proteins