Finding Data Should be Easier than Finding Oil

The competitiveness of modern enterprises heavily depends on their ability to make the right business decisions by relying on efficient and timely analysis of the right business critical data. In large and data intensive companies such as Equinor, a Norwegian multinational oil and gas company with more than 20,000 employees, gathering such data is not a trivial task due to the growing size and complexity of corporate information sources. As a result, the data gathering task is often the most time-consuming part of the decision making process, in particular when it comes to the work processes of Equinor's exploration geologists that should find in a timely manner new exploitable accumulations of oil or gas in given areas by analysing data about these areas. In this work we present our experience in addressing this data challenge tast at Equinor. We have developed and deployed at Equinor a semantic data access system that relies on the Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) approach. Our system is based on our solid theoretical contributions and has been extensively evaluated at Equinor

Prevalence of alcohol-related pathologies at autopsy: Estonian Forensic Study of Alcohol and Premature Death.

AIMS: Alcohol can induce diverse serious pathologies, yet this complexity may be obscured when alcohol-related deaths are classified according to a single underlying cause. We sought to quantify this issue and its implications for analysing mortality data. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Cross-sectional study included 554 men aged 25-54 in Estonia undergoing forensic autopsy in 2008-09. MEASUREMENTS: Potentially alcohol-related pathologies were identified following macroscopic and histological examination. Alcohol biomarkers levels were determined. For a subset (26%), drinking behaviour was provided by next-of-kin. The Estonian Statistics Office provided underlying cause of death. FINDINGS: Most deaths (75%) showed evidence of potentially alcohol-related pathologies, and 32% had pathologies in two or more organs. The liver was most commonly affected [60.5%, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 56.3-64.6] followed by the lungs (18.6%, 95% CI = 15.4-22.1), stomach (17.5%, 95% CI = 14.4-20.9), pancreas (14.1%, 95% CI = 11.3-17.3), heart (4.9%, 95% CI = 3.2-7.0) and oesophagus (1.4%, 95% CI = 0.6-2.8). Only a minority with liver pathology had a second pathology. The number of pathologies correlated with alcohol biomarkers (phosphatidylethanol, gamma-glytamyl transpeptidase in blood, ethylglucuronide, ethylsulphate in urine). Despite the high prevalence of liver pathology, few deaths had alcoholic liver disease specified as the underlying cause. CONCLUSION: The majority of 554 men aged 25-54 undergoing forensic autopsy in Estonia in 2008-09 showed evidence of alcohol-related pathology. However, the recording of deaths by underlying cause failed to capture the scale and nature of alcohol-induced pathologies found

Susceptibility to tuberculosis is associated with variants in the ASAP1 gene encoding a regulator of dendritic cell migration

Human genetic factors predispose to tuberculosis (TB). We studied 7.6 million genetic variants in 5,530 people with pulmonary TB and in 5,607 healthy controls. In the combined analysis of these subjects and the follow-up cohort (15,087 TB patients and controls altogether), we found an association between TB and variants located in introns of the ASAP1 gene on chromosome 8q24 (P = 2.6 × 10−11 for rs4733781; P = 1.0 × 10−10 for rs10956514). Dendritic cells (DCs) showed high ASAP1 expression that was reduced after Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection, and rs10956514 was associated with the level of reduction of ASAP1 expression. The ASAP1 protein is involved in actin and membrane remodeling and has been associated with podosomes. The ASAP1-depleted DCs showed impaired matrix degradation and migration. Therefore, genetically determined excessive reduction of ASAP1 expression in M. tuberculosis–infected DCs may lead to their impaired migration, suggesting a potential mechanism of predisposition to TB

Precision nanoscale domain engineering of lithium niobate via UV laser induced inhibition of poling

Continuous wave ultraviolet (UV) laser irradiation at lambda=244 nm on the +z face of undoped and MgO doped congruent lithium niobate single crystals has been observed to inhibit ferroelectric domain inversion. The inhibition occurs directly beneath the illuminated regions, in a depth greater than 100 nm during subsequent electric field poling of the crystal. Domain inhibition was confirmed by both differential domain etching and piezoresponse force microscopy. This effect allows the formation of arbitrarily shaped domains in lithium niobate and forms the basis of a high spatial resolution micro-structuring approach when followed by chemical etching

SPECTRAL RESPONSE IN LASER SYNTHESIZED WxMo(1-x)S2 ALLOYS

We report the spectral response of 2D WxMo1-xS2 alloys based photoconductors fabricated by direct laser synthesis of single source precursors. A comparative study for the main figure of merits of these devices is presented

Oligodendroglial modulation of fast axonal transport in a mouse model of hereditary spastic paraplegia

Oligodendrocytes are critical for the development of the plasma membrane and cytoskeleton of the axon. In this paper, we show that fast axonal transport is also dependent on the oligodendrocyte. Using a mouse model of hereditary spastic paraplegia type 2 due to a null mutation of the myelin Plp gene, we find a progressive impairment in fast retrograde and anterograde transport. Increased levels of retrograde motor protein subunits are associated with accumulation of membranous organelles distal to nodal complexes. Using cell transplantation, we show categorically that the axonal phenotype is related to the presence of the overlying Plp null myelin. Our data demonstrate a novel role for oligodendrocytes in the local regulation of axonal function and have implications for the axonal loss associated with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis

Epitaxial lithium niobate thin films grown by chemical beam epitaxy on sapphire

Lithium Niobate (LiNbO3) is a versatile material with a number of remarkable qualities. It finds application in optical modulators because of its electro-optic properties. Nonlinearity opens its use in bio-physical applications where particles or wires of LiNbO3 can be used as highly localized optical probes. Optical frequency conversion is another possible use, as well. One of the current commercial applications of the material is in optical modulators in telecomunication devices. Nowadays bulk crystals of the material are used. However, in order to make devices more compact and affordable it is necessary to be able to produce LiNbO3 films on suitable substrates with sufficient crystalline and optical quality

Reduced Ordered Binary Decision Diagram with Implied Literals: A New knowledge Compilation Approach

Knowledge compilation is an approach to tackle the computational intractability of general reasoning problems. According to this approach, knowledge bases are converted off-line into a target compilation language which is tractable for on-line querying. Reduced ordered binary decision diagram (ROBDD) is one of the most influential target languages. We generalize ROBDD by associating some implied literals in each node and the new language is called reduced ordered binary decision diagram with implied literals (ROBDD-L). Then we discuss a kind of subsets of ROBDD-L called ROBDD-i with precisely i implied literals (0 \leq i \leq \infty). In particular, ROBDD-0 is isomorphic to ROBDD; ROBDD-\infty requires that each node should be associated by the implied literals as many as possible. We show that ROBDD-i has uniqueness over some specific variables order, and ROBDD-\infty is the most succinct subset in ROBDD-L and can meet most of the querying requirements involved in the knowledge compilation map. Finally, we propose an ROBDD-i compilation algorithm for any i and a ROBDD-\infty compilation algorithm. Based on them, we implement a ROBDD-L package called BDDjLu and then get some conclusions from preliminary experimental results: ROBDD-\infty is obviously smaller than ROBDD for all benchmarks; ROBDD-\infty is smaller than the d-DNNF the benchmarks whose compilation results are relatively small; it seems that it is better to transform ROBDDs-\infty into FBDDs and ROBDDs rather than straight compile the benchmarks.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figure

A novel therapeutic antibody screening method using bacterial high-content imaging reveals functional antibody binding phenotypes of Escherichia coli ST131

Funder: National Institute for Health Research; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000272Funder: MRC Proximity to Discovery: Industry Engagement Fund Biomedical Research Exchange ProgrammeAbstract: The increase of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and lack of new classes of licensed antimicrobials, have made alternative treatment options for AMR pathogens increasingly attractive. Recent studies have demonstrated anti-bacterial efficacy of a humanised monoclonal antibody (mAb) targeting the O25b O-antigen of Escherichia coli ST131. To evaluate the phenotypic effects of antibody binding to diverse clinical E. coli ST131 O25b bacterial isolates in high-throughput, we designed a novel mAb screening method using high-content imaging (HCI) and image-based morphological profiling to screen a mAb targeting the O25b O-antigen. Screening the antibody against a panel of 86 clinical E. coli ST131 O25:H4 isolates revealed 4 binding phenotypes: no binding (18.60%), weak binding (4.65%), strong binding (69.77%) and strong agglutinating binding (6.98%). Impaired antibody binding could be explained by the presence of insertion sequences or mutations in O-antigen or lipopolysaccharide core biosynthesis genes, affecting the amount, structure or chain length of the O-antigen. The agglutinating binding phenotype was linked with lower O-antigen density, enhanced antibody-mediated phagocytosis and increased serum susceptibly. This study highlights the need to screen candidate mAbs against large panels of clinically relevant isolates, and that HCI can be used to evaluate mAb binding affinity and potential functional efficacy against AMR bacteria