A Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

A requirement of Smart Grids is the ability to predict the energy consumption patterns of their users. In the residential domain, this is usually not feasible due to the inability of the grid to dialog with (legacy) domestic appliances. To overcome this issue Non Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) was introduced, a task in which a predictor is used to disaggregate household power consumption. Many of the newer approaches make use of Neural Networks to accomplish this task, due to their superior ability to detect patterns in temporal (thus sequential) data. These models unfortunately require a huge amount of data to achieve good performance, and have the tendency to overfit the training data, making them difficult to predict future consumptions. For these reasons, adapting them to optimally predict a (future) house's consumption requires expensive and often prohibitive data collection phases. We propose a solution in the form of a neuro-symbolic framework that refines neural network predictions via a constrained optimization problem modelling the characteristics of the appliances of a house. This combined approach achieves superior performance with respect to the neural network alone over two out of five appliances and comparable results for the remaining ones, without requiring further training data

UBuild: Automated testing and performance evaluation of embedded linux systems

This paper describes uBuild, a novel tool designed to support the automated execution of repeatable and controlled tests of embedded Linux systems. This is useful for continuous integration purposes, and to evaluate the impact of various design and implementation options on the system's performance. uBuild allows the designer to build the embedded system image from scratch, by compiling all the needed software from the source code and by even building the needed cross-compilation toolchain if required. It provides deterministic control on the configuration options used to build the cross-compilation toolchain, the Linux kernel, the system libraries, and all the programs. In this way, the effects of each option can be tested and evaluated in isolation. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

Intraoperative double-J stent insertion in children with scintigraphic impaired renal function and obstructive urinary tract malformation.

Aim: Ureteral double-J (DJ) stents are frequently used in modern urologic practice. At present the role of stents in urological and surgical practice and their efficacy in paediatric age are not yet clear. The aim of this study is to evaluate advantages and efficacy of ureteral stents, correlating clinical and radiological data with the permanence of stent in situ. Methods: Between July 1999 and July 2004 surgery with ureteral stenting was performed on 24 consecutive patients aged between 2 and 13.5 months with scintigraphic impaired renal function due to an obstructive urinary tract malformation. During the study the performance and the efficacy of indwelling stent have been evaluated through clinical and radiological variables: pre-, intra-, and post stenting blood tests, ultrasonographic and scintigraphic parameters were also evaluated. Results: The stent insertion was useful to improve renal parenchymal thickness and renal growth. No correlation was found between improved blood tests and scintigraphic values. The improvements of clinical and radiological data were strictly correlated with the time of stenting (>3 months). Conclusion: The insertion of DJ stents as long-term internal urinary diversion is useful and safe. Late complications related to the use of stents are not frequent

Ductal carcinoma in situ in a 15-year-old boy with gynecomastia: a case report

The Authors describe a case of ductal carcinoma in a young boy affected by ginecomasti

Report preliminare sulla validità dell’estratto speciale di cranberry ad alta titolazione in polifenoli con vitamina c nella prevenzione delle IVU da Coli in bambini con severe uropatie

Gli Autori descrivono la loro esperienza relativa al trattamento conservativo del VUR in età pediatric

Ductal carcinomain situ in a 15-yrs-old boy with ginecomastia: a case report

Ductal carcinoma in situ (dcis) in a young man is rarely reported. Our patient, a 25-year-old man, presented with apparent symptomatic unilateral gynecomastia. He has a strong history of cancer on both the maternal and paternal sides of his family, including breast and lung (maternal) and melanoma, colon, and pancreatic (paternal). His mother tested negative for BRCA1 and BRCA2. There is no information on paternal genetic testing.The patient was treated with left subcutaneous mastectomy. Upon histologic review of the sample, concurrent gynecomastia and dcis were discovered. To date, only 4 cases of gynecomastia and dcis have been described in younger male patients. Because only 30%\u201350% of patients with dcis eventually develop invasive cancer in the subsequent 10\u201320 years, dcis prevalence in the general population may be higher than predicted. This case underscores the importance of family history in any patient presenting with a breast mass. Patients must be made aware of the risk, however small it may be, and physicians must remain cautious of cancer in young men with gynecomastia

Secondary omental torsion in children: a report of two cases and review of the literature.

The Authors describe a case of omental torsion in pediatric ag

Is Far-Red Light Photoacclimation (FaRLiP) activated in cyanobacteria exposed to M-dwarf starlight simulated spectra?

Rocky terrestrial exoplanets in the Habitable Zone of M-dwarf stars are ideal to potentially harbour life. However, such stars have different spectral characteristics respect to stars like our Sun, with almost no visible light available and major components in the far-red and infrared. This doesn\u2019t seem suitable for oxygenic photosynthetic organisms, that evolved on Earth to absorb only VIS light. Thanks to the newly developed Star Light Simulator, an instrument able to simulate the emission spectra of different kinds of stars (Sun and M-dwarfs included), we were able to perform growth and photosynthetic analyses on a few species of cyanobacteria irradiated with M-dwarf simulated lights. We selected two strains of cyanobacteria, Chlorogloeopsis fritschii PCC6912 and Synechocystis sp. PCC6803. The first can perform the so-called Far-Red Light Photoacclimation (FaRLiP), that allows it to survive and evolve oxygen in environments rich in far-red lights, thanks to the production of peculiar chlorophylls (chl d and f) and far-red absorbing forms of phycobiliproteins. This makes it a perfect candidate to test the possibility of oxygenic photosynthesis in exoplanets irradiated by M-dwarf spectra. The second cyanobacterium is a model organism for photosynthetic research and was used as a control unable to perform such acclimation. We compared the growth and photosynthetic performances of the cyanobacteria exposed to the M-dwarf simulated light spectra. The results were compared with those obtained from the cyanobacteria exposed to a solar simulated light and a far-red light (730 nm LED). The possibility of oxygenic photosynthesis in exoplanets orbiting the habitable zone of M-dwarfs as well as the activation of the FaRLiP response under these simulated spectra is discussed

Discovering candidates for gene network expansion by distributed volunteer computing

Our group has recently developed gene@home, a BOINC project that permits to search for candidate genes for the expansion of a gene regulatory network using gene expression data. The gene@home project adopts intensive variable-subsetting strategies enabled by the computational power provided by the volunteers who have joined the project by means of the BOINC client. Our project exploits the PC algorithm (Spirtes and Glymour, 1991) in an iterative way, for discovering putative causal relationships within each subset of variables. This paper presents our infrastructure, called TN-Grid, that is hosting the gene@home project. Gene@home implements a novel method for Network Expansion by Subsetting and Ranking Aggregation (NESRA), producing a list of genes that are candidates for the gene network expansion task. NESRA is an algorithm that has: 1) a ranking procedure that systematically subsets the variables; the subsetting is iterated several times and a ranked list of candidates is produced by counting the number of times a relationship is found; 2) several ranking steps are executed with different values of the dimension of the subsets and with different number of iterations producing several ranked lists; 3) the ranked lists are aggregated by using a state-of-the-art ranking aggregator. In our experimental results, we show that NESRA outperforms both the PC algorithm and its order-independent version called PC*. Evaluations and experiments are done by means of the gene@home project on a real gene regulatory network of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana