Pressure sensor placement for leak localization using simulated annealing with hyperparameter optimization

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThis paper presents a machine learning method for optimal pressure sensor placement in water distribution networks. The proposed approach considers annealing meta-heuristics, and it is focused on the optimal placement of the sensors to perform leak localization. Unlike other works, this method considers a limited number of sensors to be placed and some restrictions on critical nodes that can be excluded or preselected. The approach is based on minimizing a cost function; this cost function is assigned as the leak location error, which varies depending on the subset of nodes where the sensors are assigned and the configuration of the leak location method. A leak localization technique based on k-NN classifiers was used, and during the minimization of the cost function, classifier hyperparameters were simultaneously optimized. The proposed method was tested on the Hanoi water distribution network programmed in MATLAB.Postprint (author's final draft

First results of the ROSEBUD Dark Matter experiment

Rare Objects SEarch with Bolometers UndergrounD) is an experiment which attempts to detect low mass Weak Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) through their elastic scattering off Al and O nuclei. It consists of three small sapphire bolometers (of a total mass of 100 g) with NTD-Ge sensors in a dilution refrigerator operating at 20 mK in the Canfranc Underground Laboratory. We report in this paper the results of several runs (of about 10 days each) with successively improved energy thresholds, and the progressive background reduction obtained by improvement of the radiopurity of the components and subsequent modifications in the experimental assembly, including the addition of old lead shields. Mid-term plans and perspectives of the experiment are also presented.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Astroparticle Physic

Expresión de ICAM-1 en el Endotelio de Arterias Humanas Mediante Inmunohistoquímica

Moore-Carrasco, R (reprint author), Univ Talca, Fac Ciencias Salud, Dept Bioquim Clin & Inmunohematol, Programa Invest Factores Riesgo Enfermedades Card, POB 747, Talca, Chile.Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death in the world. Among them the ischemic type are of great importance. where the development of atherosclerotic plaques is the central pathophysiological process. The study of atherosclerosis is critical to understand how this disease process begins and factors influencing its development. Various laboratory methods, including immunohistochemistry, allow the recognition of cells and molecules involved in the atheromatous process that are interacting according to the progression of the lesion. A marker of endothelial dysfunction is the increased expression of intercellular adhesion molecule ICAM-1. In this paper, an immunohistochemistry method was standardized for the adhesion molecule ICAM-1, and its expression was studied in healthy human arteries with atheromatous plaque. In samples of human arteries with atherosclerotic disease, the expression of ICAM-1 was observed lobe increased, but was hardly recognizable. This mainly because the tissue used as a control for standardization was a tonsil with an inflammatory process and hyperplasia, which significantly increases the expression of ICAM-1. The implementation of the immunohistochemistry method for ICAM-1 in human arteries will reveal endothelial dysfunction states that will enable a future design and implementation of methods of diagnosis in atherosclerotic processes in the early stages

Recent results from the canfranc dark matter search with germanium detectors

Two germanium detectors are currently operating in the Canfranc Underground Laboratory at 2450 m.w.e looking for WIMP dark matter. One is a 2 kg 76Ge IGEX detector (RG-2) which has an energy threshold of 4 keV and a low-energy background rate of about 0.3 c/keV/kg/day. The other is a small (234 g) natural abundance Ge detector (COSME), of low energy threshold (2.5 keV) and an energy resolution of 0.4 keV at 10 keV which is looking for WIMPs and for solar axions. The analysis of 73 kg-days of data taken by COSME in a search for solar axions via their photon Primakoff conversion and Bragg scattering in the Ge crystal yields a 95% C.L. limit for the axion-photon coupling g < 2.8 10^-9 GeV^-1. These data, analyzed for WIMP searches provide an exclusion plot for WIMP-nucleon spin-independent interaction which improves previous plots in the low mass region. On the other hand, the exclusion plot derived from the 60 kg-days of data from the RG-2 IGEX detector improves the exclusion limits derived from other ionization (non thermal) germanium detector experiments in the region of WIMP masses from 30 to 100 GeV recently singled out by the reported DAMA annual modulation effect.Comment: 6 pages, talk given at IDM2000, York, September 200

Enteric fever: a slow response to an old plague

Man is irremediably embedded in nature with complex interactions with all living organisms. Historically, the establishment of contemporary human societies has been influenced by our coexistence with other microorganisms living in highly interconnected habitats and ecologies. As a result, with the progression from unicellular to multicellular life, bacteria have coexisted with humans. In this biological journey, while there are important benefits provided by bacterial guests to the human host living in complex relationships and becoming part of their microbiome, some organisms are able to cause a wide spectrum of diseases. Among the large Enterobacteriaceae family, the genus Salmonella, a pathotype of Escherichia coli, is one example. Salmonella is further classified into S. enterica and S. bongori serotypes based on its lipopolysaccharide cell wall (somatic O antigen), its flagellar (H antigen), and its surface Vi antigen (present only in S. typhi, S. Paratyphi C, Citrobacter freundii, and S. Dublin) [1]. S. enterica subspecies I, one of the six subspecies of S. enterica, is a major contributor to human disease (Fig 1) [2]. This group of pathogens includes those frequently causing gastroenteritis, such as S. Typhimurium, those causing invasive disease in the forms of bacteremia, such as S. Choleraesius, or the typhoidal Salmonella species causing enteric fever, including S. typhi (typhoid fever) and S. Paratyphi A, B, and C (paratyphoid fever) [1,2]

Detection of a putative TetR-like gene related to Mycobacterium bovis BCG growth in cholesterol using a gfp-transposon mutagenesis system

In vitro transposition is a powerful genetic tool for identifying mycobacterial virulence genes and studying virulence factors in relation to the host. Transposon shuttle mutagenesis is a method for constructing stable insertions in the genome of different microorganisms including mycobacteria. Using an IS1096 derivative, we have constructed the Tngfp, a transposon containing a promoterless green fluorescent protein (gfp) gene. This transposon was able to transpose randomly in Mycobacterium bovis BCG. Bacteria with a single copy of the gfp gene per chromosome from an M. bovis BCG::Tngfp library were analyzed and cells exhibiting high levels of fluorescence were detected by flow cytometry. Application of this approach allowed for the selection of a mutant, BCG_2177c::Tngfp (BCG-Tn), on the basis of high level of long-standing fluorescence at stationary phase. This BCG-Tn mutant showed some particular phenotypic features compared to the wild type strain, mainly during stationary phase, when cholesterol was used as a sole carbon source, thus supporting the relationships of the targeted gene with the regulation of cholesterol metabolism in this bacteria. This approach showed that Tngfp is a potentially useful tool for studying the involvement of the targeted loci in metabolic pathways of mycobacteria