Designing exploratory partnerships in Southeast Asia: The challenge of building a sustainable ecosystem to address chronic malnutrition

International audienceMalnutrition linked to under nutrition is a cause of 3.1 million child deaths annually. Stakeholders from all over the word, gathered within various organizations, from public to private sector, tend to work together to fight against this disease that affects very vulnerable people. However, these stakeholders are generally highly dependent on numerous geopolitical issues and form together a highly fragmented ecosystem, which appears to be not efficient enough to provide nutrition solutions to all affected children. At the same time, researchers have identified for decades that other forms of malnutrition, such as chronic malnutrition, could also result from dietary habits that are linked to specific sociocultural contexts, which require a radically different approach: instead of treating an easily diagnosable patient, the aim is to prevent and change nutritional habits, and the mass of affected children is much larger. Thus, innovative partnerships beyond NGOs, local actors and public agencies need to be explored, for instance with private actors, to consider new ways to structure such a sustainable ecosystem. And the shift in the understanding of how to treat the disease entails necessarily deep changes in the structuration of an appropriate ecosystem to deal with it, which also highlights the need for a collective capability for innovation.In this paper, we tackle the organizational issue of building a sustainable ecosystem, both robust and innovative, to prevent chronic malnutrition in Southeast Asia. In particular, we study the building of innovative partnerships that contribute to long-term nutrition transition in this area where there international funds alone are not sufficient to support the stunting prevention, and thus private and public actors must work to develop hybrids models

The essentiality of arachidonic acid in infant development

Arachidonic acid (ARA, 20:4n-6) is an n-6 polyunsaturated 20-carbon fatty acid formed by the biosynthesis from linoleic acid (LA, 18:2n-6). This review considers the essential role that ARA plays in infant development. ARA is always present in human milk at a relatively fixed level and is accumulated in tissues throughout the body where it serves several important functions. Without the provision of preformed ARA in human milk or infant formula the growing infant cannot maintain ARA levels from synthetic pathways alone that are sufficient to meet metabolic demand. During late infancy and early childhood the amount of dietary ARA provided by solid foods is low. ARA serves as a precursor to leukotrienes, prostaglandins, and thromboxanes, collectively known as eicosanoids which are important for immunity and immune response. There is strong evidence based on animal and human studies that ARA is critical for infant growth, brain development, and health. These studies also demonstrate the importance of balancing the amounts of ARA and DHA as too much DHA may suppress the benefits provided by ARA. Both ARA and DHA have been added to infant formulas and follow-on formulas for more than two decades. The amounts and ratios of ARA and DHA needed in infant formula are discussed based on an in depth review of the available scientific evidence

Accurate Power Consumption Evaluation forPeripherals in Ultra Low-Power embedded systems

International audienceWe propose a methodology to measure, model and simulate power consumption of peripheral devices of a lowpower embedded micro-controller, while keeping a reasonable development cost. This methodology is experimented against the low-power MSP-EXP430FR5739 platform that includes nonvolatile RAM for intermittent computing purposes and a handful of peripherals. The experimental measurements enable the characterization of the consumption of the peripherals, while many existing comparable studies do not provide power consumption for peripherals. These measurements are integrated into a simulator that targets low-power peripheral-intensive applications, as are most of IoT embedded programs. The accuracy of the power consumption estimation is within a 5% error on intermittent embedded computing using peripherals

MPU-based incremental checkpointing for transiently-powered systems

International audienc

Peripheral State Persistence For Transiently Powered Systems

Our society relies increasingly on digital technologies to communicate, seek medical information, travel, or have fun. These often-invisible technologies simplify our tasks and enrich our daily lives, while also developing the economy. Recently has emerged the concept of powered by harvesting and being able to retain information between power failures using non-volatile RAM. This report presents a software layer called that permits the use of non-trivial peripherals such as timers, serial interface or radio devices in transiently powered systems

Peripheral State Persistence and Interrupt Management For Transiently Powered Systems

International audienceRecently has emerged the concept of transiently powered systems powered by harvesting power and being able to retain information between power failures using non-volatile RAM. While existing solutions focus on purely computing systems, this article presents Sytare, a software layer designed to allow the use of non-trivial peripherals such as timers, serial interface or radio devices in transiently powered systems

Sytare: Persistence de l'état des périphériques pour les systèmes à alimentation intermittente

National audienceLes systèmes dits à alimentation intermittente sont de petits systèmes embarqués récupérant l'énergie dans leur environnement. À cause de contraintes de taille et de coût, ils subissent de fréquentes coupures de courant, mais sont néanmoins capables d'exécuter un programme logiciel, en sauvegardant les données nécessaires au calcul dans une mémoire non-volatile. Cet article présente une technique permettant à ces systèmes d'utiliser des périphériques non triviaux tels qu'un convertisseur analogique-numérique, une interface série ou une radio

Sytare: a Lightweight Kernel for NVRAM-Based Transiently-Powered Systems

International audienceIn a near future, energy harvesting is expected to replace batteries in ultra-low-power embedded systems. Research prototypes of such systems have recently been proposed. As the power harvested in the environment is very low, such systems need to cope with frequent power outages. They are referred to as transiently-powered systems (TPS). In order to execute non-trivial applications, TPS need to retain information between power losses. To achieve this goal, emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies are a key enabler: they provide a lightweight solution to retain, between power outages, the state of an application and of its peripheral devices. These include sensors, serial interface or radio devices for instance. Existing works have described various checkpointing mechanisms to adapt embedded applications to TPS but the use of peripherals was not yet handled. in these works. This paper proposes a solution for embedded applications using any peripheral device to run despite transient power. We follow a kernel-oriented approach resulting in minimal impact on the programming model of the application. We implement the new concepts in our lightweight kernel called Sytare, running on an MSP430FR5739 micro-controller and we analyze the cost of the proposed solution

Planet Hunters: Assessing the Kepler Inventory of Short Period Planets

We present the results from a search of data from the first 33.5 days of the Kepler science mission (Quarter 1) for exoplanet transits by the Planet Hunters citizen science project. Planet Hunters enlists members of the general public to visually identify transits in the publicly released Kepler light curves via the World Wide Web. Over 24,000 volunteers reviewed the Kepler Quarter 1 data set. We examine the abundance of \geq 2 R\oplus planets on short period (< 15 days) orbits based on Planet Hunters detections. We present these results along with an analysis of the detection efficiency of human classifiers to identify planetary transits including a comparison to the Kepler inventory of planet candidates. Although performance drops rapidly for smaller radii, \geq 4 R\oplus Planet Hunters \geq 85% efficient at identifying transit signals for planets with periods less than 15 days for the Kepler sample of target stars. Our high efficiency rate for simulated transits along with recovery of the majority of Kepler \geq 4 R\oplus planets suggest suggests the Kepler inventory of \geq 4 R\oplus short period planets is nearly complete.Comment: 41 pages,13 figures, 8 tables, accepted to Ap

Characterizing CO Fourth Positive Emission in Young Circumstellar Disks

Carbon Monoxide is a commonly used IR/sub-mm tracer of gas in protoplanetary disks. We present an analysis of ultraviolet CO emission in {HST}-COS spectra for 12 Classical T Tauri stars. Several ro-vibrational bands of the CO A^1\Pi - X^1\Sigma^+ (Fourth Positive) electronic transition system are spectrally resolved from emission of other atoms and H_2. The CO A^1\Pi v'=14 state is populated by absorption of Ly\alpha photons, created at the accretion column on the stellar surface. For targets with strong CO emission, we model the Ly\alpha radiation field as an input for a simple fluorescence model to estimate CO rotational excitation temperatures and column densities. Typical column densities range from N_{CO} = 10^{18} - 10^{19} cm^{-2}. Our measured excitation temperatures are mostly below T_{CO} = 600 K, cooler than typical M-band CO emission. These temperatures and the emission line widths imply that the UV emission originates in a different population of CO than that which is IR-emitting. We also find a significant correlation between CO emission and the disk accretion rate M_{acc} and age. Our analysis shows that ultraviolet CO emission can be a useful diagnostic of CTTS disk gas