Recurrent Neural-Linear Posterior Sampling for Nonstationary Contextual Bandits

An agent in a nonstationary contextual bandit problem should balance between exploration and the exploitation of (periodic or structured) patterns present in its previous experiences. Handcrafting an appropriate historical context is an attractive alternative to transform a nonstationary problem into a stationary problem that can be solved efficiently. However, even a carefully designed historical context may introduce spurious relationships or lack a convenient representation of crucial information. In order to address these issues, we propose an approach that learns to represent the relevant context for a decision based solely on the raw history of interactions between the agent and the environment. This approach relies on a combination of features extracted by recurrent neural networks with a contextual linear bandit algorithm based on posterior sampling. Our experiments on a diverse selection of contextual and noncontextual nonstationary problems show that our recurrent approach consistently outperforms its feedforward counterpart, which requires handcrafted historical contexts, while being more widely applicable than conventional nonstationary bandit algorithms. Although it is very difficult to provide theoretical performance guarantees for our new approach, we also prove a novel regret bound for linear posterior sampling with measurement error that may serve as a foundation for future theoretical work

In vitro and in vivo evaluation of 99mTc-polymyxin B for specific targeting of gram-bacteria

Background: Infectious diseases are one of the main causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Nuclear molecular imaging would be of great help to non-invasively discriminate between septic and sterile inflammation through available radiopharmaceuticals, as none is currently available for clinical practice. Here, we describe the radiolabeling procedure and in vitro and in vivo studies of99mTc-polymyxin B sulfate (PMB) as a new single photon emission imaging agent for the characterization of infections due to Gram-negative bacteria. Results: Labeling efficiency was 97 ± 2% with an average molar activity of 29.5 ± 0.6 MBq/nmol. The product was highly stable in saline and serum up to 6 h. In vitro binding assay showed significant displaceable binding to Gram-negative bacteria but not to Gram-positive controls. In mice,99mTc-HYNIC-PMB was mainly taken up by liver and kidneys. Targeting studies confirmed the specificity of99mTc-HYNIC-PMB obtained in vitro, showing significantly higher T/B ratios for Gram-negative bacteria than Gram-positive controls. Conclusions: In vitro and in vivo results suggest that99mTc-HYNIC-PMB has a potential for in vivo identification of Gram-negative bacteria in patients with infections of unknown etiology. However, further investigations are needed to deeply understand the mechanism of action and behavior of99mTc-HYNIC-PMB in other animal models and in humans

Titanium Surface Properties Influence the Biological Activity and FasL Expression of Craniofacial Stromal Cells.

Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) can be easily isolated form craniofacial bones during routine dentistry procedures. Due to their embryological origin from neural crest, they represent a suitable cell population to study cell-biomaterial interaction in the craniofacial field, including osteoinductive/osteointegrative processes. The biological and immunomodulatory properties of MSCs may be influenced by chemistry and topography of implant surfaces. We investigated if and how three different titanium surfaces, machined (MCH), sandblasted with resorbable blasting medium (RBM), and Ca++-nanostructured (NCA), may affect biological activity, osseointegration, and immunomodulatory properties of craniofacial MSCs. Cell proliferation, morphology, osteogenic markers, and FasL were evaluated on MSCs isolated from the mandibular bone after seeding on these three different surfaces. No statistically significant differences in cell proliferation were observed whereas different morphologies and growth patterns were detected for each type of surface. No difference in the expression of osteogenic markers was revealed. Interestingly, FasL expression, involved in the immunomodulatory activity of stem cells, was influenced by surface properties. Particularly, immunofluorescence analysis indicated that FasL expression increased on MCH surface compared to the others confirming the suggested role of FasL in promoting osteogenic differentiation. Titanium surface treatments and topography might reflect different biological behaviours of craniofacial MSCs and influence their osseointegration/immunomodulation properties

Studies on the antimicrobial activity and brine shrimp toxicity of Zeyheria tuberculosa (Vell.) Bur. (Bignoniaceae) extracts and their main constituents

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Due to the indiscriminate use of antimicrobial drugs, the emergence of human pathogenic microorganisms resistant to major classes of antibiotics has been increased and has caused many clinical problems in the treatment of infectious diseases. Thus, the aim of this study was to evaluate for the first time the <it>in vitro </it>antimicrobial activity and brine shrimp lethality of extracts and isolated compounds from <it>Zeyheria tuberculosa </it>(Vell.) Bur., a species used in Brazilian folk medicine for treatment of cancer and skin diseases.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Using the disc diffusion method, bioautography assay and brine shrimp toxicity test (<it>Artemia salina </it>Leach), we studied the antimicrobial activity and lethality of extracts and isolated compounds against three microorganisms strains, including Gram-positive (<it>Staphylococcus aureus</it>) and Gram-negative (<it>Pseudomonas aeruginosa</it>) bacteria and yeasts (<it>Candida albicans</it>).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this study, the extracts inhibited <it>S. aureus </it>(8.0 ± 0.0 to 14.0 ± 0.0 mm) and <it>C. albicans </it>(15.3 ± 0.68 to 25.6 ± 0.4 mm) growth. In the brine shrimp test, only two of them showed toxic effects (LC₅₀29.55 to 398.05 μg/mL) and some extracts were non-toxic or showed weak lethality (LC₅₀705.02 to > 1000 μg/mL). From these extracts, four flavones [5,6,7,8-tetramethoxyflavone (1), 5,6,7-trimethoxyflavone (2), 4'-hydroxy-5,6,7,8-tetramethoxyflavone (3), and 4'-hydroxy-5,6,7-trimethoxyflavone (4)] were isolated through bioassay-guided fractionation and identified based on the 1D and 2D NMR spectral data. By bioautography assays, compounds 1 [<it>S. aureus </it>(16.0 ± 0.0 mm) and <it>C. albicans </it>(20.0 ± 0.0 mm)] and 3 [<it>S. aureus </it>(10.3 ± 0.6 mm) and <it>C. albicans </it>(19.7 ± 0.6 mm)] inhibited both microorganisms while 2 inhibited only <it>S. aureus </it>(11.7 ± 0.6 mm). Compound 4 did not restrain the growth of any tested microorganism.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our results showed that extracts and isolated flavones from <it>Z. tuberculosa </it>may be particularly useful against two pathogenic microorganisms, <it>S. aureus </it>and <it>C. albicans</it>. These results may justify the popular use this species since some fractions tested had antimicrobial activity and others showed significant toxic effects on brine shrimps. However, in order to evaluate possible clinical application in therapy of infectious diseases, further studies about the safety and toxicity of isolated compounds are needed.</p

ReverCSP: Time-Travelling in CSP Computations

[EN] This paper presents reverCSP, a tool to animate both forward and backward CSP computations. This ability to reverse computations can be done step by step or backtracking to a given desired state of interest. reverCSP allows us to reverse computations exactly in the same order in which they happened, or also in a causally-consistent way. Therefore, reverCSP is a tool that can be especially useful to comprehend, analyze, and debug computations. reverCSP is an open-source project publicly available for the community. We describe the tool and its functionality, and we provide implementation details so that it can be reimplemented for other languages.This work has been partially supported by the EU (FEDER) and the Spanish MCI/AEI under grants TIN2016-76843-C4-1-R and PID2019- 104735RB-C41, and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant Prometeo/2019/098 (DeepTrust).Galindo-Jiménez, CS.; Nishida, N.; Silva, J.; Tamarit, S. (2020). ReverCSP: Time-Travelling in CSP Computations. Springer. 239-245. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52482-1_14S239245Bernadet, A., Lanese, I.: A modular formalization of reversibility for concurrent models and languages. In: Proceedings of ICE 2016, EPTCS (2016)Brown, G., Sabry, A.: Reversible communicating processes. Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci. 203, 45–59 (2016)Conserva Filhoa, M., Oliveira, M., Sampaio, A., Cavalcanti, A.: Compositional and local livelock analysis for CSP. Inf. Process. Lett 133, 21–25 (2018)Danos, V., Krivine, J.: Reversible communicating systems. In: Gardner, P., Yoshida, N. (eds.) CONCUR 2004. LNCS, vol. 3170, pp. 292–307. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-28644-8_19Elnozahy, E.N.M., Alvisi, L., Wang, Y.-M., Johnson, D.B.: A survey of rollback- recovery protocols in message-passing systems. ACM Comput. Surv. 34(3), 375–408 (2002)Fang, Y., Zhu, H., Zeyda, F., Fei, Y.: Modeling and analysis of the disruptor framework in csp. In: Proceedings of CCWC 2018. IEEE Computer Society (2018)Ladkin, P.B., Simons, B.B.: Static deadlock analysis for CSP-type communications. In: Fussell, D.S., Malek, M. (eds.) Responsive Computer Systems: Steps Toward Fault-Tolerant Real-Time Systems. The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol. 297, pp. 89–102. Springer, Boston (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2271-3_5Landauer, R.: Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process. IBM J. Res. Dev. 5, 183–191 (1961)Lanese, I., Antares Mezzina, C., Tiezzi, F.: Causal-consistent reversibility. Bull. EATCS 114, 17 (2014)Lanese, I., Nishida, N., Palacios, A., Vidal, G.: CauDEr: a causal-consistent reversible debugger for erlang. In: Gallagher, J.P., Sulzmann, M. (eds.) FLOPS 2018. LNCS, vol. 10818, pp. 247–263. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90686-7_16Lanese, I., Palacios, A., Vidal, G.: Causal-consistent replay debugging for message passing programs. In: Pérez, J.A., Yoshida, N. (eds.) FORTE 2019. LNCS, vol. 11535, pp. 167–184. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21759-4_10Llorens, M., Oliver, J., Silva, J., Tamarit, S.: Dynamic slicing of concurrent specification languages. Parallel Comput. 53, 1–22 (2016)Llorens, M., Oliver, J., Silva, J., Tamarit, S.: Tracking CSP computations. J. Log. Algebr. Meth. Program. 102, 138–175 (2019)Perera, R., Garg, D., Cheney, J.: Causally consistent dynamic slicing. In Proceedings of CONCUR 2016, LIPIcs, vol. 59, pp. 18:1–18:15 (2016)Phillips, I., Ulidowski, I., Yuen, S.: A reversible process calculus and the modelling of the ERK signalling pathway. In: Glück, R., Yokoyama, T. (eds.) RC 2012. LNCS, vol. 7581, pp. 218–232. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36315-3_18Roscoe, A.W.: The Theory and Practice of Concurrency. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River (1997)Zhao, H., Zhu, H., Yucheng, F., Xiao, L.: Modeling and verifying storm using CSP. In: Proceedings of HASE 2019. IEEE Computer Society (2019

What Are You Looking At? Team Fight Prediction Through Player Camera

Esport is a large and still growing industry with vast audiences. Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs), a sub-genre of esports, possess a very complex environment, which often leads to experts missing important coverage while broadcasting live competitions. One common game event that holds significant importance for broadcasting is referred to as a team fight engagement. Professional player's own knowledge and understanding of the game may provide a solution to this problem. This paper suggests a model that predicts and detects ongoing team fights in a live scenario. This approach outlines a novel technique of deriving representations of a complex game environment by relying on player knowledge. This is done by analysing the positions of the in-game characters and their associated cameras, utilising this data to train a neural network. The proposed model is able to both assist in the production of live esport coverage as well as provide a live, expert-derived, analysis of the game without the need of relying on outside sources