Going beyond persistent homology using persistent homology

Representational limits of message-passing graph neural networks (MP-GNNs), e.g., in terms of the Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) test for isomorphism, are well understood. Augmenting these graph models with topological features via persistent homology (PH) has gained prominence, but identifying the class of attributed graphs that PH can recognize remains open. We introduce a novel concept of color-separating sets to provide a complete resolution to this important problem. Specifically, we establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing graphs based on the persistence of their connected components, obtained from filter functions on vertex and edge colors. Our constructions expose the limits of vertex- and edge-level PH, proving that neither category subsumes the other. Leveraging these theoretical insights, we propose RePHINE for learning topological features on graphs. RePHINE efficiently combines vertex- and edge-level PH, achieving a scheme that is provably more powerful than both. Integrating RePHINE into MP-GNNs boosts their expressive power, resulting in gains over standard PH on several benchmarks for graph classification.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 202

The role of dextran and maltosyl-isomalto-oligosaccharides on the structure of bread enriched with surplus bread

Occurrence of surplus bread (SB) is common in the baking industry. Edible surplus bread can be utilized as a new bread dough ingredient; however, it creates technological challenges that affect the quality of the new bread. In this study, the interactions of SB with dough macromolecules were studied in a gluten-starch model dough system and subsequent model bread. Moreover, dextran or maltosyl-isomalto-oligosaccharides (MIMO) were produced by dextransucrase preparation, incorporated into the dough containing SB, and their individual in-fluence on dough rheology and bread structure was investigated. Compared to control model dough/bread, the addition of SB at 10% level significantly decreased extensibility of the dough, dough level, and specific volume (SV) of bread, despite standardized gluten content and optimized water absorption (WA). This confirms that SB constituents (especially gelatinized starch) deteriorate the dough structure-forming by interactions with gluten network. Dextran addition at appropriate level (0.7%) with optimized WA, shielded the gluten network from the interactions of SB, thus, increasing dough extensibility and softness. Furthermore, dextran-enrichment signifi-cantly reduced the hardness and staling of breads and increased the SV to the control model bread level. MIMOs, especially at low concentration, induced stronger interactions with gluten proteins than dextran. However, the addition of MIMOs reduced the SV of breads containing SB and did not reduce the overall crumb hardness despite partially preventing starch retrogradation in the early phase of storage. The protective interactions of dextran with dough macromolecules showed that in vitro dextran could be utilized to enable recycling of edible SB.Peer reviewe

Wooden Breast Myodegeneration of Pectoralis Major Muscle Over the Growth Period in Broilers

Wooden breast (WB) myopathy of broiler chickens is a myodegenerative disease of an unknown etiology and is macroscopically characterized by a hardened consistency of the pectoralis major muscle. Our aim was to describe the development and morphology of WB over the growth period in broilers. Additionally, the effect of restricted dietary selenium on the occurrence of WB was examined by allocating the birds in 2 dietary groups: restricted and conventional level of selenium. The experiment included 240 male broilers that were euthanized at ages of 10, 18, 24, 35, 38, or 42 days and evaluated for WB based on abnormal hardness of the pectoralis major muscle. The severity and the distribution of the lesion and presence of white striping were recorded. The first WB cases were seen at 18 days; 13/47 birds (28%) were affected and the majority exhibited a mild focal lesion. In subsequent age groups the WB prevalence varied between 48% and 73% and the lesion was usually diffuse and markedly firm. White striping often coexisted with WB. Histological evaluation performed on 111 cases revealed a significant association of myodegeneration and lymphocytic vasculitis with WB. Vasculitis and perivascular cell infiltration were restricted to the veins. Restricted dietary selenium did not affect the occurrence of WB (P = .44). Our results indicate that WB starts focally and spreads to form a diffuse and more severe lesion.Peer reviewe

A Bibliometric Study on Authorship Trends and Research Themes in Knowledge Management Literature

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IFKAD via the link in this record.The aim of the study is to identify the contribution of authors in the domain of Knowledge Management (KM). The underlying data is from two leading KM journals, namely, the Journal of Knowledge Management (JKM) and the Journal of Intellectual Capital (JIC). We downloaded articles from Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS),with JKM and JIC-specific searches resulting in 508 and 73 citing articles respectively. The timeframe of analysis was 2009-2016. This dataset was used to create co-citation network visualisations to provide insights into the clusters of authors and research topics. Measures such as Betweenness centrality and hubs-authorities (HITS) were used to identify significant authors and their key themes of interest. More specifically, network analysis identified six dominant research themes, it revealed a total of 14,422 authors being cited (depicted as nodes in the visualisation) with a total of 1,023,123 citations (edges). Based on the findings of this study, the paper will explore the specific themes and the intellectual turning points in KM research and its evolution. Our bibliometric analysis has practical significance for researchers since it recognises the dominant research areas, and by extension, it identifies those that are still in their infancy; the latter having the potential of representing an interesting research gap. The limitation of the study is that the underlying data is only from two journals (albeit, from the top two journals in KM), which may lead to partially biased results. In future, the aim is to also leverage the analysis to more KM journals, e.g., the top ten journals within the Serenko & Bontis (2013) most updated list

Interdisciplinary team education promotes innovations in the home care of older people

This article describes a new type of team training that involves undergraduate students of medicine, students from the Aalto University (industrial engineering and management, architecture, information networks, collaborative and industrial design and bioinformation technology) and specialized home care nurses. During the course, the students learned interdisciplinary teamwork and created innovations in the care of older people. The 18 participants formed six microteams (three persons in each team: one specialized nurse, one medical student and one from Aalto University). The course consisted of two seminars and 3 full days of home visits to older people's homes. Participants were encouraged to make one innovation in each home visit that would improve the older person's well-being or streamline the processes of home care. During the course, the participants promptly formed tight teams. They valued the know-how of the other team members and learned openly from each other. They also created a number of practical innovations in home care which they presented to executives of older people's care in a final seminar. The course received very good feedback from the students. This course is an encouraging example of how gerontological interdisciplinary team training may be successfully applied. The article describes both the learning outcomes and the innovations the students produced during their home visits. It also discusses the learning theories behind effective interdisciplinary team learning.Peer reviewe

Researching Cultural Objects and Manuscripts in a Small Country: The Finnish Experience of Raising Awareness of Art Crime

In this article we shed light on the position of Finland in conversations on the movement of unprovenanced cultural objects, within the national, the Nordic and the global contexts. Finland's geopolitical position, as a hard border of the European Union neighbouring the Russian Federation, and its current legislative provisions, which do not include import regulations, mean that it has the potential to be significant in understanding the movement of cultural property at transnational levels. In particular, we outline a recent initiative started at the University of Helsinki to kick-start a national debate on ethical working with cultural objects and manuscripts. We analyse exploratory research on current awareness and opinion within Finland, and summarize our current work to produce robust research ethics to guide scholars working in Finland. Although Finland has a small population and is usually absent from international discussions on the illicit movement of cultural property (save a few exceptions), we argue that it is still possibleand importantfor scholars and others in Finland to affect policy and attitudes concerning art crime, provenance, and the role of stakeholders such as decision-makers, traders and the academy

Cognitively-inspired Agent-based Service Composition for Mobile & Pervasive Computing

Automatic service composition in mobile and pervasive computing faces many challenges due to the complex and highly dynamic nature of the environment. Common approaches consider service composition as a decision problem whose solution is usually addressed from optimization perspectives which are not feasible in practice due to the intractability of the problem, limited computational resources of smart devices, service host's mobility, and time constraints to tailor composition plans. Thus, our main contribution is the development of a cognitively-inspired agent-based service composition model focused on bounded rationality rather than optimality, which allows the system to compensate for limited resources by selectively filtering out continuous streams of data. Our approach exhibits features such as distributedness, modularity, emergent global functionality, and robustness, which endow it with capabilities to perform decentralized service composition by orchestrating manifold service providers and conflicting goals from multiple users. The evaluation of our approach shows promising results when compared against state-of-the-art service composition models.Comment: This paper will appear on AIMS'19 (International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Services) on June 2

Probabilistic Verification at Runtime for Self-Adaptive Systems

An effective design of effective and efficient self-adaptive systems may rely on several existing approaches. Software models and model checking techniques at run time represent one of them since they support automatic reasoning about such changes, detect harmful configurations, and potentially enable appropriate (self-)reactions. However, traditional model checking techniques and tools may not be applied as they are at run time, since they hardly meet the constraints imposed by on-the-fly analysis, in terms of execution time and memory occupation. For this reason, efficient run-time model checking represents a crucial research challenge. This paper precisely addresses this issue and focuses on probabilistic run-time model checking in which reliability models are given in terms of Discrete Time Markov Chains which are verified at run-time against a set of requirements expressed as logical formulae. In particular, the paper discusses the use of probabilistic model checking at run-time for self-adaptive systems by surveying and comparing the existing approaches divided in two categories: state-elimination algorithms and algebra-based algorithms. The discussion is supported by a realistic example and by empirical experiments

Wooden breast myopathy links with poorer gait in broiler chickens

Wooden breast myopathy, a condition where broiler breast muscles show a hardened consistency post-mortem, has been described recently. However, it is not known how wooden breast myopathy affects the bird activity or welfare. Altogether, over 340 birds of five commonly used commercial hybrids were housed in 25 pens, and sample birds killed at ages of 22, 32, 36, 39 and 43 days. Their breast muscle condition was assessed post-mortem by palpation. The birds were gait scored and their latency to lie was measured before killing. For further behavior observations, one affected and healthy bird in 12 pens were followed on 5 days for 20 minutes using video recordings. The connection of myopathy to gait score and activity was analyzed with mixed models. A higher gait score of wooden-breast-affected birds than that of unaffected birds (2.9 +/- 0.1 v. 2.6 +/- 0.1, P <0.05) indicated a higher level of locomotor difficulties over all age groups. The wooden-breast-affected birds had fewer crawling or movement bouts while lying down compared with unaffected (P <0.05). Wooden breast myopathy-affected birds were heavier (2774 +/- 91 v. 2620 +/- 91 g; P <0.05) and had higher breast muscle yield (21 +/- 1 v. 19 +/- 1%; P <0.05) than unaffected birds overall. Older birds had longer lying bouts, longer total lying time, fewer walking bouts, more difficulties to walk and to stand compared with younger birds (P <0.05). Birds with poorer gait had longer total lying time and fewer walking bouts (P <0.05). Birds with greatest breast muscle yield had the largest number of lying bouts (P <0.05). It was concluded that wooden breast myopathy was associated with an impairment of gait scores, and may thus be partly linked to the common walking abnormalities in broilers.Peer reviewe

Alterations of Cardiac Protein Kinases in Cyclic Nucleotide-Dependent Signaling Pathways in Human Ischemic Heart Failure

ObjectivesImpaired protein kinase signaling is a hallmark of ischemic heart disease (IHD). Inadequate understanding of the pathological mechanisms limits the development of therapeutic approaches. We aimed to identify the key cardiac kinases and signaling pathways in patients with IHD with an effort to discover potential therapeutic strategies.MethodsCardiac kinase activity in IHD left ventricle (LV) and the related signaling pathways were investigated by kinomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and integrated multi-omics approach.ResultsProtein kinase A (PKA) and protein kinase G (PKG) ranked on top in the activity shift among the cardiac kinases. In the IHD LVs, PKA activity decreased markedly compared with that of controls (62% reduction, p = 0.0034), whereas PKG activity remained stable, although the amount of PKG protein increased remarkably (65%, p = 0.003). mRNA levels of adenylate cyclases (ADCY 1, 3, 5, 9) and cAMP-hydrolysing phosphodiesterases (PDE4A, PDE4D) decreased significantly, although no statistically significant alterations were observed in that of PKGs (PRKG1 and PRKG2) and guanylate cyclases (GUCYs). The gene expression of natriuretic peptide CNP decreased remarkably, whereas those of BNP, ANP, and neprilysin increased significantly in the IHD LVs. Proteomics analysis revealed a significant reduction in protein levels of “Energy metabolism” and “Muscle contraction” in the patients. Multi-omics integration highlighted intracellular signaling by second messengers as the top enriched Reactome pathway.ConclusionThe deficiency in cAMP/PKA signaling pathway is strongly implicated in the pathogenesis of IHD. Natriuretic peptide CNP could be a potential therapeutic target for the modulation of cGMP/PKG signaling.Peer reviewe