The Physics of the B Factories

This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C

Genetic determinants of telomere length from 109,122 ancestrally diverse whole-genome sequences in TOPMed

Genetic studies on telomere length are important for understanding age-related diseases. Prior GWASs for leukocyte TL have been limited to European and Asian populations. Here, we report the first sequencing-based association study for TL across ancestrally diverse individuals (European, African, Asian, and Hispanic/Latino) from the NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program. We used whole-genome sequencing (WGS) of whole blood for variant genotype calling and the bioinformatic estimation of telomere length in n = 109,122 individuals. We identified 59 sentinel variants (p < 5 × 10−9) in 36 loci associated with telomere length, including 20 newly associated loci (13 were replicated in external datasets). There was little evidence of effect size heterogeneity across populations. Fine-mapping at OBFC1 indicated that the independent signals colocalized with cell-type-specific eQTLs for OBFC1 (STN1). Using a multi-variant gene-based approach, we identified two genes newly implicated in telomere length, DCLRE1B (SNM1B) and PARN. In PheWAS, we demonstrated that our TL polygenic trait scores (PTSs) were associated with an increased risk of cancer-related phenotypes

Preliminary numerical investigations of conformal predictors based on fuzzy logic classifiers

A new family of techniques, called conformal predictors, have very recently been developed to hedge the estimates of machine learning methods, by providing two parameters, credibility and confidence, which can assess the level of trust that can be attributed to their outputs. In this paper, the main steps required to extend this approach to fuzzy logic classifiers are reported. The more delicate aspect is the definition of an appropriate nonconformity score, which has to be based on the fuzzy membership function to preserve the specificities of Fuzzy Logic. Various examples of increasing complexity are introduced, to describe the main properties of fuzzy logic based conformal predictors and to compare their performance with alternative approaches. The obtained results are quite promising, since conformal predictors based on fuzzy classifiers outperform solutions based on the nearest neighbour in terms of ambiguity, robustness and interpretability