Strategies for automatic planning: A collection of ideas

The main goal of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is to obtain science return from interplanetary probes. The uplink process is concerned with communicating commands to a spacecraft in order to achieve science objectives. There are two main parts to the development of the command file which is sent to a spacecraft. First, the activity planning process integrates the science requests for utilization of spacecraft time into a feasible sequence. Then the command generation process converts the sequence into a set of commands. The development of a feasible sequence plan is an expensive and labor intensive process requiring many months of effort. In order to save time and manpower in the uplink process, automation of parts of this process is desired. There is an ongoing effort to develop automatic planning systems. This has met with some success, but has also been informative about the nature of this effort. It is now clear that innovative techniques and state-of-the-art technology will be required in order to produce a system which can provide automatic sequence planning. As part of this effort to develop automatic planning systems, a survey of the literature, looking for known techniques which may be applicable to our work was conducted. Descriptions of and references for these methods are given, together with ideas for applying the techniques to automatic planning

Interview with George Bogs

In this interview with Julia Stringfellow, George Bogs, Lawrence class of 1947, discusses his time at Lawrence as a member of the Navy V-12 unit from 1944 to 1945.https://lux.lawrence.edu/oralhistories/1005/thumbnail.jp

Examining facilitators of trust in a pediatric collaborative care model: a qualitative study

Community-based participatory research is an equitable approach to research involving the community in all aspects of the research process to help promote the application of research findings directly to populations. The current study employed a community-based participatory research approach to help identify barriers and facilitators of trust in providers in a collaborative care model of integrated behavioral health at a Federally Qualified Health Center serving mostly Latine children and families called the psychiatry conference. 14 parents and six children were interviewed qualitatively about their experiences with the psychiatry conference and a thematic analysis approach was employed to identify themes related to facilitators of trust in providers. Results found that facilitators of trust included: the primary care provider serving as a bridge to help trusting relationships form between the psychiatrist and families, reciprocal respect between providers and families, and the psychiatrist taking an educational approach. Barriers to trust included: the quality and availability of interpreter services as well as lack of a tailored approach for patients depending on diagnosis. Other factors such as parent-child synchrony and optimism contributed to final reactions to the psychiatry conference as well as retention processes. This study helps to elucidate how to implement a CBPR study in an integrated care setting as well as ways to improve the acceptability of primary care behavioral health services for Latine children and families.Educational Psycholog

Accelerated epigenetic aging in Werner syndrome.

Individuals suffering from Werner syndrome (WS) exhibit many clinical signs of accelerated aging. While the underlying constitutional mutation leads to accelerated rates of DNA damage, it is not yet known whether WS is also associated with an increased epigenetic age according to a DNA methylation based biomarker of aging (the "Epigenetic Clock"). Using whole blood methylation data from 18 WS cases and 18 age matched controls, we find that WS is associated with increased extrinsic epigenetic age acceleration (p=0.0072) and intrinsic epigenetic age acceleration (p=0.04), the latter of which is independent of age-related changes in the composition of peripheral blood cells. A multivariate model analysis reveals that WS is associated with an increase in DNA methylation age (on average 6.4 years, p=0.011) even after adjusting for chronological age, gender, and blood cell counts. Further, WS might be associated with a reduction in naïve CD8+ T cells (p=0.025) according to imputed measures of blood cell counts. Overall, this study shows that WS is associated with an increased epigenetic age of blood cells which is independent of changes in blood cell composition. The extent to which this alteration is a cause or effect of WS disease phenotypes remains unknown