A hybrid Constraint Programming/Mixed Integer Programming framework for the preventive signaling maintenance crew scheduling problem

This research has been carried out as part of the PhD research project funded by Technical University of Denmark and Banedanmark company which is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the Danish railway network. This work has been partially funded by the DAASE project, EPSRC programme grant EP/J017515/1

Optimal schedule of home care visits for a health care center

The provision of home health care services is becoming an important research area, mainly because in Portugal the population is ageing. Home care visits are organized taking into account the medical treatments and general support that elder/sick people need at home. This health service can be provided by nurse teams from Health Care Centers. Usually, the visits are manually planned and without computer support. The main goal of this work is to carry out the automatic schedule of home care visits, of one Portuguese Health Care Center, in order to minimize the time spent in all home care visits and, consequently, reduce the costs involved. The developed algorithms were coded in MatLab Software and the problem was efficiently solved, obtaining several schedule solutions of home care visits for the presented data. Solutions found by genetic and particle swarm algorithms lead to significant time reductions for both nurse teams and patients.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145- FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundru;ao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Improving Performance Estimation for FPGA-based Accelerators for Convolutional Neural Networks

Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based accelerators are being widely used for acceleration of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) due to their potential in improving the performance and reconfigurability for specific application instances. To determine the optimal configuration of an FPGA-based accelerator, it is necessary to explore the design space and an accurate performance prediction plays an important role during the exploration. This work introduces a novel method for fast and accurate estimation of latency based on a Gaussian process parametrised by an analytic approximation and coupled with runtime data. The experiments conducted on three different CNNs on an FPGA-based accelerator on Intel Arria 10 GX 1150 demonstrated a 30.7% improvement in accuracy with respect to the mean absolute error in comparison to a standard analytic method in leave-one-out cross-validation.Comment: This article is accepted for publication at ARC'202

A generative model for natural sounds based on latent force modelling

Generative models based on subband amplitude envelopes of natural sounds have resulted in convincing synthesis, showing subband amplitude modulation to be a crucial component of auditory perception. Probabilistic latent variable analysis can be particularly insightful, but existing approaches don’t incorporate prior knowledge about the physical behaviour of amplitude envelopes, such as exponential decay or feedback. We use latent force modelling, a probabilistic learning paradigm that encodes physical knowledge into Gaussian process regression, to model correlation across spectral subband envelopes. We augment the standard latent force model approach by explicitly modelling dependencies across multiple time steps. Incorporating this prior knowledge strengthens the interpretation of the latent functions as the source that generated the signal. We examine this interpretation via an experiment showing that sounds generated by sampling from our probabilistic model are perceived to be more realistic than those generated by comparative models based on nonnegative matrix factorisation, even in cases where our model is outperformed from a reconstruction error perspective

Scheduling of home health care services based on multi-agent systems

Home Health Care (HHC) services are growing worldwide and, usually, the home care visits are manually planned, being a time and effort consuming task that leads to a non optimized solution. The use of some optimization techniques can significantly improve the quality of the scheduling solutions, but lacks the achievement of solutions that face the fast reaction to condition changes. In such stochastic and very volatile environments, the fast re-scheduling is crucial to maintain the system in operation. Taking advantage of the inherent distributed and intelligent characteristics of Multi-agent Systems (MAS), this paper introduces a methodology that combines the optimization features provided by centralized scheduling algorithms, e.g. genetic algorithms, with the responsiveness features provided by MAS solutions. The proposed approach was codified in Matlab and NetLogo and applied to a real-world HHC case study. The experimental results showed a significant improvement in the quality of scheduling solutions, as well as in the responsiveness to achieve those solutions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Why Do African Elephants (Loxodonta africana) Simulate Oestrus? An Analysis of Longitudinal Data

Female African elephants signal oestrus via chemicals in their urine, but they also exhibit characteristic changes to their posture, gait and behaviour when sexually receptive. Free-ranging females visually signal receptivity by holding their heads and tails high, walking with an exaggerated gait, and displaying increased tactile behaviour towards males. Parous females occasionally exhibit these visual signals at times when they are thought not to be cycling and without attracting interest from musth males. Using demographic and behavioural records spanning a continuous 28-year period, we investigated the occurrence of this “simulated” oestrus behaviour. We show that parous females in the Amboseli elephant population do simulate receptive oestrus behaviours, and this false oestrus occurs disproportionately in the presence of naïve female kin who are observed coming into oestrus for the first time. We compare several alternative hypotheses for the occurrence of this simulation: 1) false oestrus has no functional purpose (e.g., it merely results from abnormal hormonal changes); 2) false oestrus increases the reproductive success of the simulating female, by inducing sexual receptivity; and 3) false oestrus increases the inclusive fitness of the simulating female, either by increasing the access of related females to suitable males, or by encouraging appropriate oestrus behaviours from female relatives who are not responding correctly to males. Although the observed data do not fully conform to the predictions of any of these hypotheses, we rule out the first two, and tentatively suggest that parous females most likely exhibit false oestrus behaviours in order to demonstrate to naïve relatives at whom to direct their behaviour

A Phase I Double Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Randomized Study of the Safety and Immunogenicity of Electroporated HIV DNA with or without Interleukin 12 in Prime-Boost Combinations with an Ad35 HIV Vaccine in Healthy HIV-Seronegative African Adults.

Strategies to enhance the immunogenicity of DNA vaccines in humans include i) co-administration of molecular adjuvants, ii) intramuscular administration followed by in vivo electroporation (IM/EP) and/or iii) boosting with a different vaccine. Combining these strategies provided protection of macaques challenged with SIV; this clinical trial was designed to mimic the vaccine regimen in the SIV study.Seventy five healthy, HIV-seronegative adults were enrolled into a phase 1, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Multi-antigenic HIV (HIVMAG) plasmid DNA (pDNA) vaccine alone or co-administered with pDNA encoding human Interleukin 12 (IL-12) (GENEVAX IL-12) given by IM/EP using the TriGrid Delivery System was tested in different prime-boost regimens with recombinant Ad35 HIV vaccine given IM.All local reactions but one were mild or moderate. Systemic reactions and unsolicited adverse events including laboratory abnormalities did not differ between vaccine and placebo recipients. No serious adverse events (SAEs) were reported. T cell and antibody response rates after HIVMAG (x3) prime-Ad35 (x1) boost were independent of IL-12, while the magnitude of interferon gamma (IFN-γ) ELISPOT responses was highest after HIVMAG (x3) without IL-12. The quality and phenotype of T cell responses shown by intracellular cytokine staining (ICS) were similar between groups. Inhibition of HIV replication by autologous T cells was demonstrated after HIVMAG (x3) prime and was boosted after Ad35. HIV specific antibodies were detected only after Ad35 boost, although there was a priming effect with 3 doses of HIVMAG with or without IL-12. No anti-IL-12 antibodies were detected.The vaccines were safe, well tolerated and moderately immunogenic. Repeated administration IM/EP was well accepted. An adjuvant effect of co-administered plasmid IL-12 was not detected.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01496989

Associations between childhood victimization, inflammatory biomarkers and psychotic phenomena in adolescence: A longitudinal cohort study.

Exposure to victimization in childhood has been linked to the development of psychosis. However, little is known about how childhood victimization is translated into biological risk for psychosis. One possibility is via increased inflammation. This study aimed to investigate the association between childhood victimization, psychotic experiences (PEs) in adolescence and inflammatory markers using data from a general population cohort. Participants were 1,419 British-born children followed from birth to age 18 years as part of the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study. Childhood victimization was measured prospectively using multiple sources from birth to age 12 years. PEs were assessed during private interviews with participants at age 18 years for the period since age 12. Plasma C-reactive protein (CRP), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and soluble urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (suPAR) levels were measured from plasma samples collected from participants at 18 years. Young people with both PEs and childhood victimization were more likely to belong to a group with elevated suPAR, CRP and IL-6 levels at 18 years of age (OR = 3.34, 95% CI 1.69-6.59, p = 0.001) than those with no childhood victimization and without PEs. However, this association was attenuated when adjusted for other risk factors for elevated inflammation at age 18 (OR = 1.94, 95% CI 0.94-4.04, p = 0.075). In contrast, presence of PEs without childhood victimization was not significantly associated with age-18 inflammatory markers and neither was childhood victimization without PEs (all p's greater than 0.05). The current study highlights that inflammatory dysregulation is mostly present in adolescents reporting PEs who also experienced childhood victimization, though this seemed to be largely due to concurrent inflammation-related risk factors

Status of Pandemic Influenza Vaccination and Factors Affecting It in Pregnant Women in Kahramanmaras, an Eastern Mediterranean City of Turkey

BACKGROUND: Pregnant women are a target group for receipt of influenza vaccine because there appears to be an elevated mortality and morbidity rate associated with influenza virus infection in pregnant women. The goal of this study is to determine the factors affecting the decisions of pregnant women in Turkey to be vaccinated or not for 2009 H1N1 influenza. METHODOLOGY: We enrolled 314 of 522 (60.2%) pregnant women who attended to the antenatal clinics of the Medical Faculty of Kahramanmaras Sutcuimam University's Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics between December 23, 2009, and February 1, 2010. We developed a 48-question survey which was completed in a face-to-face interview at the clinic with each pregnant woman. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Of the 314 pregnant women, 27.4% were in the first trimester, 33.8% were in the second trimester, and 38.8% were in the third trimester. Twenty-eight pregnant women (8.9%) got vaccinated. Of all the women interviewed, 68.5% stated that they were comfortable with their decisions about the vaccine, 7.3% stated they were not comfortable, and 24.2% stated that they were hesitant about their decisions. The probability of receiving the 2009 H1N1 vaccine was 3.46 times higher among working women than housewives, 1.85 times higher among women who have a child than those who do not, and 1.29 times higher among women with a high-school education or higher than those with only a secondary-school education and below. Correct knowledge about the minimal risks associated with receipt of influenza vaccine were associated with a significant increase in the probability of receiving the 2009 H1N1 vaccine. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The number of pregnant women in the study group who received the 2009 H1N1 vaccine was very low (8.9%) and two-thirds of them stated that they were comfortable with their decisions concerning the vaccine. Our results may have implications for public health measures to increase the currently low vaccination rate among pregnant women. Further studies are required to confirm whether our findings generalize to other influenza seasons and other settings