Serum BPIFB4 levels classify health status in long-living individuals

People that reach extreme ages (Long-Living Individuals, LLIs) are object of intense investigation for increase/decrease of genetic variant frequencies, genetic methylation levels, protein abundance in serum and tissues. The aim of these studies is the discovery of the mechanisms behind LLIs extreme longevity and the identification of markers of well-being. We have recently associated a BPIFB4 haplotype (LAV) with exceptional longevity under a homozygous genetic model, and identified that CD34(+) of LLIs subjects express higher BPIFB4 transcript as compared to CD34(+) of control population. It would be of interest to correlate serum BPIFB4 protein levels with exceptional longevity and health status of LLIs

GT4Py: High Performance Stencils for Weather and Climate Applications using Python

All major weather and climate applications are currently developed using languages such as Fortran or C++. This is typical in the domain of high performance computing (HPC), where efficient execution is an important concern. Unfortunately, this approach leads to implementations that intermix optimizations for specific hardware architectures with the high-level numerical methods that are typical for the domain. This leads to code that is verbose, difficult to extend and maintain, and difficult to port to different hardware architectures. Here, we propose a different strategy based on GT4Py (GridTools for Python). GT4Py is a Python framework to write weather and climate applications that includes a high-level embedded domain specific language (DSL) to write stencil computations. The toolchain integrated in GT4Py enables automatic code-generation,to obtain the performance of state-of-the-art C++ and CUDA implementations. The separation of concerns between the mathematical definitions and the actual implementations allows for performance portability of the computations on a wide range of computing architectures, while being embedded in Python allows easy access to the tools of the Python ecosystem to enhance the productivity of the scientists and facilitate integration in complex workflows. Here, the initial release of GT4Py is described, providing an overview of the current state of the framework and performance results showing how GT4Py can outperform pure Python implementations by orders of magnitude.Comment: 12 page

ASTRI SST-2M archive system: a prototype for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

The ASTRI project of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) is developing, in the framework of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), an end-to-end prototype system based on a dual-mirror small-sized Cherenkov telescope. Data preservation and accessibility are guaranteed by means of the ASTRI Archive System (AAS) that is responsible for both the on-site and off-site archiving of all data produced by the different sub- systems of the so-called ASTRI SST-2M prototype. Science, calibration, and Monte Carlo data together with the dedicated Instrument Response Functions (IRFs) (and corresponding metadata) will be properly stored and organized in different branches of the archive. A dedicated technical data archive (TECH archive) will store the engineering and auxiliary data and will be organized under a parallel database system. Through the use of a physical system archive and a few logical user archives that reflect the different archive use-cases, the AAS has been designed to be independent from any specific data model and storage technology. A dedicated framework to access, browse and download the telescope data has been identified within the proposal handling utility that stores and arranges the information of the observational proposals. The development of the whole archive system follows the requirements of the CTA data archive and is currently carried out by the INAF-OAR & ASI-Science Data Center (ASDC) team. The AAS is fully adaptable and ready for the ASTRI mini-array that, formed of at least nine ASTRI SST-2M telescopes, is proposed to be installed at the CTA southern site

Genetic Analysis Reveals a Longevity-Associated Protein Modulating Endothelial Function and Angiogenesis

Long living individuals show delay of aging, which is characterized by the progressive loss of cardiovascular homeostasis, along with reduced endothelial nitric oxide synthase activity, endothelial dysfunction, and impairment of tissue repair after ischemic injury

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it)

Sviluppo di un modulo software per la simulazione su GPU della dinamica del plasma per propulsione spaziale elettrica

Questa tesi affronta la sintesi teorica e la realizzazione pratica di moduli software che implementino una simulazione della dinamica del plasma su un processore parallelo come la GPU. Si formula un nuovo algoritmo di simulazione, complementare al codice originale, ma con la possibilita` di tempi di calcolo oltre 8 volte inferiori. Si delineano gli sviluppi possibili e la valenza multidisciplinare dei concetti introdott