Task-Oriented Active Sensing via Action Entropy Minimization

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.In active sensing, sensing actions are typically chosen to minimize the uncertainty of the state according to some information-theoretic measure such as entropy, conditional entropy, mutual information, etc. This is reasonable for applications where the goal is to obtain information. However, when the information about the state is used to perform a task, minimizing state uncertainty may not lead to sensing actions that provide the information that is most useful to the task. This is because the uncertainty in some subspace of the state space could have more impact on the performance of the task than others, and this dependence can vary at different stages of the task. One way to combine task, uncertainty, and sensing, is to model the problem as a sequential decision making problem under uncertainty. Unfortunately, the solutions to these problems are computationally expensive. This paper presents a new task-oriented active sensing scheme, where the task is taken into account in sensing action selection by choosing sensing actions that minimize the uncertainty in future task-related actions instead of state uncertainty. The proposed method is validated via simulations

A secured message transmission protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) become a very crucial addition in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). It is challenging for a VANET system to provide security services and parallelly maintain high throughput by utilizing limited resources. To overcome these challenges, we propose a blockchain-based Secured Cluster-based MAC (SCB-MAC) protocol. The nearby vehicles heading towards the same direction will form a cluster and each of the clusters has its blockchain to store and distribute the safety messages. The message which contains emergency information and requires Strict Delay Requirement (SDR) for transmission are called safety messages (SM). Cluster Members (CMs) sign SMs with their private keys while sending them to the blockchain to confirm authentication, integrity, and confidentiality of the message. A Certificate Authority (CA) is responsible for physical verification, key generation, and privacy preservation of the vehicles. We implemented a test scenario as proof of concept and tested the safety message transmission (SMT) protocol in a real-world platform. Computational and storage overhead analysis shows that the proposed protocol for SMT implements security, authentication, integrity, robustness, non-repudiation, etc. while maintaining the SDR. Messages that are less important compared to the SMs are called non-safety messages (NSM) and vehicles use RTS/CTS mechanism for NSM transmission. Numerical studies show that the proposed NSM transmission method maintains 6 times more throughput, 2 times less delay and 125% less Packet Dropping Rate (PDR) than traditional MAC protocols. These results prove that the proposed protocol outperforms the traditionalMAC protocols

Sodium–glucose co‐transporter 2 inhibitors in heart failure: beyond glycaemic control. The position paper of the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology

Heart failure (HF) is common and associated with a poor prognosis, despite advances in treatment. Over the last decade cardiovascular outcome trials with sodium–glucose co‐transporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus have demonstrated beneficial effects for three SGLT2 inhibitors (empagliflozin, canagliflozin and dapagliflozin) in reducing hospitalisations for HF. More recently, dapagliflozin reduced the risk of worsening HF or death from cardiovascular causes in patients with chronic HF with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, with or without type 2 diabetes mellitus. A number of additional trials in HF patients with reduced and/or preserved left ventricular ejection fraction are ongoing and/or about to be reported. The present position paper summarises recent clinical trial evidence and discusses the role of SGLT2 inhibitors in the treatment of HF, pending the results of ongoing trials in different populations of patients with HF

The genetic history of the Southern Arc: a bridge between West Asia and Europe

By sequencing 727 ancient individuals from the Southern Arc (Anatolia and its neighbors in Southeastern Europe and West Asia) over 10,000 years, we contextualize its Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age (about 5000 to 1000 BCE), when extensive gene flow entangled it with the Eurasian steppe. Two streams of migration transmitted Caucasus and Anatolian/Levantine ancestry northward, and the Yamnaya pastoralists, formed on the steppe, then spread southward into the Balkans and across the Caucasus into Armenia, where they left numerous patrilineal descendants. Anatolia was transformed by intra–West Asian gene flow, with negligible impact of the later Yamnaya migrations. This contrasts with all other regions where Indo-European languages were spoken, suggesting that the homeland of the Indo-Anatolian language family was in West Asia, with only secondary dispersals of non-Anatolian Indo-Europeans from the steppe

A morphological study on the venom apparatus of spider Larinioides cornustus (Araneae, Araneidae)

The morphological structure of the venom apparatus of Larinioides cornutus was studied using a scanning electron microscope(SEM). The Venom glands are situated in the anterior cephalic part of the prosoma, and each gland consists of a long cylindrical part and an adjoining duct, which terminates at the tip of the cheliceral fang. Each chelicera consists of 2 parts: a stout basal part covered by hair, and a movable fang. There are parallel grooves on the dorsal surface of the fang. The ventral surface has hollows like saw teeth. A venom pore is situated on the subterminal part of the fang. Below the fang, there is a cheliceral groove between the teeth. Each side of the groove is armed with cuticular teeth. Venom glands are small and similar to an aurbergine in shape. Each gland is surrounded by completely striated muscular fibers. The venom produced in the venom glands is ejected into the fang through the duct by contraction of these muscular fibers. © TÜBİTAK

Cerebral blood flow measurements using arterial spin labeling

Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method to map the cerebral blood flow (CBF). ASL present a non-invasive alternative to the contrast agent techniques used typically to study vascular and neuronal diseases such as stroke, arteriostenosis, schizophrenia, alzheimer, epilepsy …. ASL techniques are capable of providing quantitative information about local tissue blood flow by tracking the inflow of magnetically labeled arterial blood into an imaging slice. The delivery of the tagged water to each image voxel is measured. Because ASL is completely noninvasive, the tagging can be repeated many times to obtain a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). ASL produces perfusion maps of human brain with higher spatial and temporal resolution than any other existing technique. Furthermore, ASL has extensively been used to study brain function mostly simultaneously with the blood oxygenated level dependent (BOLD) signal. BOLD signal provide a high functional contrast to noise ratio, but the analysis and interpretation of BOLD contrast functional data is complicated by the fact that the MRI signal change is related to the underlying neuronal activation through CBF, CBV and oxidative metabolism (CMRO2). In contrast to baseline BOLD signal, baseline CBF measured using ASL provides valuable information of the brain’s respective state. In addition, ASL techniques are an important tool to study the physiological basis of functional neuroimaging techniques such as BOLD signal. In the study presented at the conference, we evaluated critically three different ASL sequences and compared established methods to determine absolute values of CBF from ASL data

Yeni İngiliz kolonyalizmi: Çekilme sonrası İngiltere’nin Basra Körfezi’ndeki nüfuz politikası (1971-1991)

WOS:000519545100004This paper aims to analyze Britain's relations with the former colonies in the Gulf after the termination of the British protectorate in the Persian Gulf and discuss how the British colonial ties influenced the post-colonial relations with the Arab Gulf States. Archive documents, official papers and secondary sources were used in order to determine and compare the relations in pre/post withdrawal periods and the results were analyzed in frame of the Post-colonial theory. The main argument of this study is that the British colonial relations and ties, which had been constructed in political, military, economic and institutional spheres in the colonial era, were significant determinants in reshaping the new British foreign policy towards the Arab Gulf States. Britain, who successfully adopted the colonial relations in the new term, managed to preserve its interests after the withdrawal and even extended some of them in certain fields such as the oil sector