Radar nowcasting for the German air traffic control

Póster presentado en: 3rd European Nowcasting Conference, celebrada en la sede central de AEMET en Madrid del 24 al 26 de abril de 2019

Standardized Human Platelet Lysates as Adequate Substitute to Fetal Calf Serum in Endothelial Cell Culture for Tissue Engineering

Fetal calf serum (FCS) is used for in vitro cell culture, as it provides the cells with various growth-promoting compounds. For applications in humans, FCS does not meet the required safety standards and should be replaced by an appropriate substitute. This study analyzed the suitability of using human platelet lysate (hPL) as a substitute for FCS in endothelial cell cultures for in vitro and in vivo tissue engineering applications. The focus was placed on standardized, commercially available hPLs (MultiPL'30, MultiPL'100), which are approved for applications in humans, and compared to laboratory-prepared hPLs (lp-hLP). Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) were cultured with FCS or with different hPLs. Cell morphology, proliferation, viability, apoptosis, and necrosis, as well as the organization of vascular structures, were assessed. No morphological changes were noticed when FCS was replaced by standardized hPLs in concentrations of 1-10%. In contrast, the use of lp-hLPs led to irregular cell shape and increased vacuolization of the cytoplasm. HUVEC proliferation and viability were not compromised by using media supplemented with standardized hPLs or pl-hPLs in concentrations of 1-10%, compared to cells grown in media supplemented with 20% FCS. The apoptosis rate using lp-hPLs was higher compared to the use of standardized hPLs. The necrosis rate tended to be lower when FCS was replaced by hPLs. HUVEC formed more pronounced capillary-like structures when the media were supplemented with hPLs instead of supplementation with FCS. Thus, compared to the use of FCS, the use of hPLs was beneficial for the growth and optimal expression of functional endothelial cell characteristics during in vitro experiments. Commercially available hPLs proved to be particularly suitable, as they led to reproducible results during in vitro experiments, while meeting the safety requirements for in vivo use

Passenger car data – a new source of real-time weather information for nowcasting, forecasting, and road safety

Presentación realizada en la 3rd European Nowcasting Conference, celebrada en la sede central de AEMET en Madrid del 24 al 26 de abril de 2019

Are German patients burdened by the practice charge for physician visits ('Praxisgebuehr')? A cross sectional analysis of socio-economic and health related factors

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In 2004, a practice charge for physician visits ('Praxisgebuehr') was implemented in the German health care system, mainly in order to reduce expenditures of sickness funds by reducing outpatient physician visits. In the statutory sickness funds, all adults now have to pay € 10 at their first physician visit in each 3 month period, except for vaccinations and preventive services. This study looks at the effect of this new patient fee on delaying or avoiding physician visits, with a special emphasis on different income groups.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Six representative surveys (conducted between 2004 and 2006) of the Bertelsmann Healthcare Monitor were analysed, comprising 7,769 women and men aged 18 to 79 years. The analyses are based on stratified analyses and logistic regression models, including a focus on the subgroup having a chronic disease.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Two results can be highlighted. First, avoiding or delaying a physician visit due to this fee is seen most often among younger and healthier adults. Second, those in the lowest income group are much more affected in this way than the better of. The multivariate analysis in the subgroup of respondents having a chronic disease shows, for example, that this reaction is reported 2.45 times more often in the lowest income group than in the highest income group (95% CI: 1.90–3.15).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The analyses indicate that the effects of the practice charge differ by socio-economic group. It would be important to assess these effects in more detail, especially the effects on health care quality and health outcomes. It can be assumed, however, that avoiding or delaying physician visits jeopardizes both, and that health inequalities are increasing due to the practice charge.</p

Simulations of convectively-driven density currents in the Atlas region using a regional model: Impacts on dust emission and sensitivity to horizontal resolution and convection schemes

During the SAMUM field campaign in southern Morocco in May and June 2006 density currents generated by evaporative cooling after convective precipitation were frequently observed at the Sahara side of the Atlas Mountain chain. The associated strong surface cold-air outflow during such events has been observed to lead to dust mobilization in the foothills. Here a regional model system is used to simulate a density current case on 3 June 2006 and the subsequent dust emission. The model studies are performed with different parameterization schemes for convection, and with different horizontal model grid resolutions to examine to which extent the model system can be used for reproducing dust emissions in this region. The effect of increasing the horizontal model grid resolution from 14 km to 2.8 km on the strength on the density currents and thus on dust emission is smaller than the differences due to different convection parameterization schemes in this case study. While the results in reproducing the observed density current at the Atlas Mountain varied with different convection parameterizations, the most realistic representation of the density current is obtained at 2.8 km grid resolution at which no parameterization of deep convection is needed

Gender differentials in the evolution of cigarette smoking habits in a general European adult population from 1993–2003

BACKGROUND: Describe the recent evolution of cigarette smoking habits by gender in Geneva, where incidence rates of lung cancer have been declining in men but increasing in women. METHODS: Continuous cross-sectional surveillance of the general adult (35–74 yrs) population of Geneva, Switzerland for 11 years (1993–2003) using a locally-validated smoking questionnaire, yielding a representative random sample of 12,271 individuals (6,164 men, 6,107 women). RESULTS: In both genders, prevalence of current cigarette smoking was stable over the 11-year period, at about one third of men and one quarter of women, even though smoking began at an earlier age in more recent years. Older men were more likely to be former smokers than older women. Younger men, but not women, tended to quit smoking at an earlier age. CONCLUSION: This continuous (1993–2003) risk factor surveillance system, unique in Europe, shows stable prevalence of smoking in both genders. However, sharp contrasts in age-specific prevalence of never and former smoking and of ages at smoking initiation indicate that smoking continues a long-term decline in men but has still not reached its peak in women

Deteriorating health satisfaction among immigrants from Eastern Europe to Germany

BACKGROUND: Migrants from Eastern Europe constitute more than 5% of Germany's population. Since population health in their countries of origin is poor their health status upon arrival may be worse than that of the native-born German population (hypothesis H1). As a minority, they may be socio-economically disadvantaged (H2), and their health status may deteriorate quickly (H3). METHODS: We compared data from 1995 and 2000 for immigrants from Eastern Europe (n = 353) and a random sample of age-matched Germans (n = 2, 824) from the German Socioeconomic Panel. We tested H1-3 using health satisfaction, as a proxy for health status, and socioeconomic indicators. We compared changes over time within groups, and between immigrants and Germans. We assessed effects of socio-economic status and being a migrant on declining health satisfaction in a regression model. RESULTS: In 1995, immigrants under 55 years had a significantly higher health satisfaction than Germans. Above age 54, health satisfaction did not differ. By 2000, immigrants' health satisfaction had declined to German levels. Whereas in 1995 immigrants had a significantly lower SES, differences five years later had declined. In the regression model, immigrant status was much stronger associated with declining health satisfaction than low SES. CONCLUSION: In contrast to H1, younger immigrants had an initial health advantage. Immigrants were initially socio-economically disadvantaged (H2), but their SES improved over time. The decrease in health satisfaction was much steeper in immigrants and this was not associated with differences in SES (H3). Immigrants from Eastern Europe have a high risk of deteriorating health, in spite of socio-economic improvements

Deteriorating health satisfaction among immigrants from Eastern Europe to Germany

BACKGROUND: Migrants from Eastern Europe constitute more than 5% of Germany's population. Since population health in their countries of origin is poor their health status upon arrival may be worse than that of the native-born German population (hypothesis H1). As a minority, they may be socio-economically disadvantaged (H2), and their health status may deteriorate quickly (H3). METHODS: We compared data from 1995 and 2000 for immigrants from Eastern Europe (n = 353) and a random sample of age-matched Germans (n = 2, 824) from the German Socioeconomic Panel. We tested H1-3 using health satisfaction, as a proxy for health status, and socioeconomic indicators. We compared changes over time within groups, and between immigrants and Germans. We assessed effects of socio-economic status and being a migrant on declining health satisfaction in a regression model. RESULTS: In 1995, immigrants under 55 years had a significantly higher health satisfaction than Germans. Above age 54, health satisfaction did not differ. By 2000, immigrants' health satisfaction had declined to German levels. Whereas in 1995 immigrants had a significantly lower SES, differences five years later had declined. In the regression model, immigrant status was much stronger associated with declining health satisfaction than low SES. CONCLUSION: In contrast to H1, younger immigrants had an initial health advantage. Immigrants were initially socio-economically disadvantaged (H2), but their SES improved over time. The decrease in health satisfaction was much steeper in immigrants and this was not associated with differences in SES (H3). Immigrants from Eastern Europe have a high risk of deteriorating health, in spite of socio-economic improvements

A flexible coupling approach to multi-agent planning under incomplete information

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10115-012-0569-7Multi-agent planning (MAP) approaches are typically oriented at solving loosely coupled problems, being ineffective to deal with more complex, strongly related problems. In most cases, agents work under complete information, building complete knowledge bases. The present article introduces a general-purpose MAP framework designed to tackle problems of any coupling levels under incomplete information. Agents in our MAP model are partially unaware of the information managed by the rest of agents and share only the critical information that affects other agents, thus maintaining a distributed vision of the task. Agents solve MAP tasks through the adoption of an iterative refinement planning procedure that uses single-agent planning technology. In particular, agents will devise refinements through the partial-order planning paradigm, a flexible framework to build refinement plans leaving unsolved details that will be gradually completed by means of new refinements. Our proposal is supported with the implementation of a fully operative MAP system and we show various experiments when running our system over different types of MAP problems, from the most strongly related to the most loosely coupled.This work has been partly supported by the Spanish MICINN under projects Consolider Ingenio 2010 CSD2007-00022 and TIN2011-27652-C03-01, and the Valencian Prometeo project 2008/051.Torreño Lerma, A.; Onaindia De La Rivaherrera, E.; Sapena Vercher, O. (2014). A flexible coupling approach to multi-agent planning under incomplete information. Knowledge and Information Systems. 38:141-178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-012-0569-7S14117838Argente E, Botti V, Carrascosa C, Giret A, Julian V, Rebollo M (2011) An abstract architecture for virtual organizations: the THOMAS approach. Knowl Inf Syst 29(2):379–403Barrett A, Weld DS (1994) Partial-order planning: evaluating possible efficiency gains. Artif Intell 67(1):71–112Belesiotis A, Rovatsos M, Rahwan I (2010) Agreeing on plans through iterated disputes. In: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems. pp 765–772Bellifemine F, Poggi A, Rimassa G (2001) JADE: a FIPA2000 compliant agent development environment. In: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on autonomous agents (AAMAS). ACM, pp 216–217Blum A, Furst ML (1997) Fast planning through planning graph analysis. Artif Intell 90(1–2):281–300Boutilier C, Brafman R (2001) Partial-order planning with concurrent interacting actions. J Artif Intell Res 14(105):136Brafman R, Domshlak C (2008) From one to many: planning for loosely coupled multi-agent systems. In: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on automated planning and scheduling (ICAPS). pp 28–35Brenner M, Nebel B (2009) Continual planning and acting in dynamic multiagent environments. J Auton Agents Multiag Syst 19(3):297–331Coles A, Coles A, Fox M, Long D (2010) Forward-chaining partial-order planning. In: Proceedings of the 20th international conference on automated planning and scheduling (ICAPS). pp 42–49Coles A, Fox M, Long D, Smith A (2008) Teaching forward-chaining planning with JavaFF. In: Colloquium on AI education, 23rd AAAI conference on artificial intelligenceCox J, Durfee E, Bartold T (2005) A distributed framework for solving the multiagent plan coordination problem. In: Proceedings of the 4th international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS). ACM, pp 821–827de Weerdt M, Clement B (2009) Introduction to planning in multiagent systems. Multiag Grid Syst 5(4):345–355Decker K, Lesser VR (1992) Generalizing the partial global planning algorithm. Int J Coop Inf Syst 2(2):319–346desJardins M, Durfee E, Ortiz C, Wolverton M (1999) A survey of research in distributed continual planning. AI Mag 20(4):13–22Doshi P (2007) On the role of interactive epistemology in multiagent planning. In: Artificial intelligence and, pattern recognition. pp 208–213Dréo J, Savéant P, Schoenauer M, Vidal V (2011) Divide-and-evolve: the marriage of descartes and darwin. In: Proceedings of the 7th international planning competition (IPC). Freiburg, GermanyDurfee EH (2001) Distributed problem solving and planning. In: Multi-agents systems and applications: selected tutorial papers from the 9th ECCAI advanced course (ACAI) and agentLink’s third European agent systems summer school (EASSS), vol LNAI 2086. Springer, pp 118–149Durfee EH, Lesser V (1991) Partial global planning: a coordination framework for distributed hypothesis formation. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern Special Issue Distrib Sens Netw 21(5):1167–1183Ephrati E, Rosenschein JS (1996) Deriving consensus in multiagent systems. Artif Intell 87(1–2):21–74Fikes R, Nilsson N (1971) STRIPS: a new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving. Artif Intell 2(3):189–208Fogués R, Alberola J, Such J, Espinosa A, Garcia-Fornes A (2010) Towards dynamic agent interaction support in open multiagent systems. In: Proceedings of the 2010 conference on artificial intelligence research and development: proceedings of the 13th international conference of the Catalan association for artificial intelligence’. IOS Press, pp 89–98Gerevini A, Long D (2006) Preferences and soft constraints in PDDL3. In: ICAPS workshop on planning with preferences and soft constraints, vol 6. Citeseer, pp 46–53Ghallab M, Howe A, Knoblock C, McDermott D, Ram A, Veloso M, Weld D, Wilkins D (1998) PDDL-the Planning Domain Definition Language. In: AIPS-98 planning committeeGmytrasiewicz P, Doshi P (2005) A framework for sequential planning in multi-agent settings. J Artif Intell Res 24:49–79Haslum P, Jonsson P (1999) Some results on the complexity of planning with incomplete information. In: Proceedings of the 5th European conference on, planning (ECP). pp 308–318Helmert M (2006) The fast downward planning system. J Artif Intell Res 26(1):191–246Hoffmann J, Nebel B (2001) The FF planning system: fast planning generation through heuristic search. J Artif Intell Res 14:253–302Jonsson A, Rovatsos M (2011) Scaling up multiagent planning: a best-response approach. In: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on automated planning and scheduling (ICAPS). AAAI, pp 114–121Kambhampati S (1997) Refinement planning as a unifying framework for plan synthesis. AI Mag 18(2):67–97Kaminka GA, Pynadath DV, Tambe M (2002) Monitoring teams by overhearing: a multi-agent plan-recognition approach. J Artif Intell Res 17:83–135Kone M, Shimazu A, Nakajima T (2000) The state of the art in agent communication languages. Knowl Inf Syst 2(3):259–284Kovacs DL (2011) Complete BNF description of PDDL3.1. Technical reportKraus S (1997) Beliefs, time and incomplete information in multiple encounter negotiations among autonomous agents. Ann Math Artif Intell 20(1–4):111–159Kumar A, Zilberstein S, Toussaint M (2011) Scalable multiagent planning using probabilistic inference. In: Proceedings of the 22nd international joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI)’. Barcelona, Spain, pp 2140–2146Kvarnström J. (2011) Planning for loosely coupled agents using partial order forward-chaining. In: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on automated planning and scheduling (ICAPS). AAAI, pp 138–145Lesser V, Decker K, Wagner T, Carver N, Garvey A, Horling B, Neiman D, Podorozhny R, Prasad M, Raja A et al (2004) Evolution of the GPGP/TAEMS domain-independent coordination framework. Auton Agents Multi Agent Syst 9(1):87–143Lipovetzky N, Geffner H (2011) Searching for plans with carefully designed probes. In: Proceedings of the 21th international conference on automated planning and scheduling (ICAPS)Micacchi C, Cohen R (2008) A framework for simulating real-time multi-agent systems. Knowl Inf Syst 17(2):135–166Nguyen N, Katarzyniak R (2009) Actions and social interactions in multi-agent systems. Knowl Inf Syst 18(2):133–136Nguyen X, Kambhampati S (2001) Reviving partial order planning. In: Proceedings of the 17th international joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI). Morgan Kaufmann, pp 459–464Nissim R, Brafman R, Domshlak C (2010) A general, fully distributed multi-agent planning algorithm. In: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS). pp 1323–1330Pajares S, Onaindia E (2012) Defeasible argumentation for multi-agent planning in ambient intelligence applications. In: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS) pp 509–516Paolucci M, Shehory O, Sycara K, Kalp D, Pannu A (2000) A planning component for RETSINA agents. Intelligent Agents VI. Agent Theories Architectures, and Languages pp 147–161Parsons S, Sierra C, Jennings N (1998) Agents that reason and negotiate by arguing. J Logic Comput 8(3):261Penberthy J, Weld D (1992) UCPOP: a sound, complete, partial order planner for ADL. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on principles of knowledge representation and reasoning (KR). Morgan Kaufmann, pp 103–114Richter S, Westphal M (2010) The LAMA planner: guiding cost-based anytime planning with landmarks. J Artif Intell Res 39(1):127–177Sycara K, Pannu A (1998) The RETSINA multiagent system (video session): towards integrating planning, execution and information gathering. In: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on autonomous agents (Agents). ACM, pp 350–351Tambe M (1997) Towards flexible teamwork. J Artif Intell Res 7:83–124Tang Y, Norman T, Parsons S (2010) A model for integrating dialogue and the execution of joint plans. Argumentation in multi-agent systems, pp 60–78Tonino H, Bos A, de Weerdt M, Witteveen C (2002) Plan coordination by revision in collective agent based systems. Artif Intell 142(2):121–145Van Der Krogt R, De Weerdt M (2005), Plan repair as an extension of planning. In: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on automated planning and scheduling (ICAPS). pp 161–170Weld D (1994) An introduction to least commitment planning. AI Mag 15(4):27Weld D (1999) Recent advances in AI planning. AI Mag 20(2):93–123Wilkins D, Myers K (1998) A multiagent planning architecture. In: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on artificial intelligence planning systems (AIPS), pp 154–162Wu F, Zilberstein S, Chen X (2011) Online planning for multi-agent systems with bounded communication. Artif Intell 175(2):487–511Younes H, Simmons R (2003) VHPOP: versatile heuristic partial order planner. J Artif Intell Res 20: 405–430Zhang J, Nguyen X, Kowalczyk R (2007) Graph-based multi-agent replanning algorithm. In: Proceedings of the 6th conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS