MIS for Contract Management in Large Research Programme

Contract management is an important task in any R&D establishment. Keeping track of various events linked with a contract would help management decision making. This paper briefly describes the application of a management, the features of the system and the various output reports which can be generated for usage by the management

Measuring ligand efficacy at the mu-opioid receptor using a conformational biosensor.

The intrinsic efficacy of orthosteric ligands acting at G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) reflects their ability to stabilize active receptor states (R*) and is a major determinant of their physiological effects. Here, we present a direct way to quantify the efficacy of ligands by measuring the binding of a R*-specific biosensor to purified receptor employing interferometry. As an example, we use the mu-opioid receptor (µ-OR), a prototypic class A GPCR, and its active state sensor, nanobody-39 (Nb39). We demonstrate that ligands vary in their ability to recruit Nb39 to µ-OR and describe methadone, loperamide, and PZM21 as ligands that support unique R* conformation(s) of µ-OR. We further show that positive allosteric modulators of µ-OR promote formation of R* in addition to enhancing promotion by orthosteric agonists. Finally, we demonstrate that the technique can be utilized with heterotrimeric G protein. The method is cell-free, signal transduction-independent and is generally applicable to GPCRs

Wanted: New Business Models for Profitable Expansion of Mobile Telephony in Rural India

Mobile network operators' agendas for profitable growth include expansion into rural areas of developing countries, especially India. However, capitalizing on that opportunity will not be easy. Our research suggests that operators have yet to create and implement business models capable of driving profitable growth through rural expansion. We found that mobile network operators hold some mistaken assumptions about rural consumers’ needs and desires regarding mobile services. To achieve profitable growth and high performance through rural expansion, operators must develop a more accurate understanding of the mobile value proposition in rural communities, as well as potential barriers to adoption. . Mobile operators in rural markets must also build business models that work in the short term as well as the long term. Sacrificing short-term revenues to expand market footprint may not be the best strategy, because stiffening competition in urban markets will likely prevent operators from cross-subsidizing their rural expansion strategies. This report serves as a “midpoint review” of some key presumptions, strategies and models companies have used to drive their rural strategies over recent years

Development of an antibody fragment that stabilizes GPCR/G-protein complexes.

Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has recently enabled high-resolution structure determination of numerous biological macromolecular complexes. Despite this progress, the application of high-resolution cryo-EM to G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) in complex with heterotrimeric G proteins remains challenging, owning to both the relative small size and the limited stability of these assemblies. Here we describe the development of antibody fragments that bind and stabilize GPCR-G protein complexes for the application of high-resolution cryo-EM. One antibody in particular, mAb16, stabilizes GPCR/G-protein complexes by recognizing an interface between Gα and Gβγ subunits in the heterotrimer, and confers resistance to GTPγS-triggered dissociation. The unique recognition mode of this antibody makes it possible to transfer its binding and stabilizing effect to other G-protein subtypes through minimal protein engineering. This antibody fragment is thus a broadly applicable tool for structural studies of GPCR/G-protein complexes

Explainable AI based Interventions for Pre-season Decision Making in Fashion Retail

Future of sustainable fashion lies in adoption of AI for a better understanding of consumer shopping behaviour and using this understanding to further optimize product design, development and sourcing to finally reduce the probability of overproducing inventory. Explainability and interpretability are highly effective in increasing the adoption of AI based tools in creative domains like fashion. In a fashion house, stakeholders like buyers, merchandisers and financial planners have a more quantitative approach towards decision making with primary goals of high sales and reduced dead inventory. Whereas, designers have a more intuitive approach based on observing market trends, social media and runways shows. Our goal is to build an explainable new product forecasting tool with capabilities of interventional analysis such that all the stakeholders (with competing goals) can participate in collaborative decision making process of new product design, development and launch

MINIMIZING THE ADVERSE EFFECTS OF WORK ENVIRONMENT IN UPPER LIMB: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Introduction: Occupational problems are highly prevalent and act as impediments to effective labor. As per the statistics by WHO, in the year 2003, it was seen that back injuries shared the highest proportion in occupational disorders (60%), followed by neck and upper limb. Body: In the upper limb, any joint, be it the shoulder, elbow, wrist or hand, can be affected. Variable structures ranging from the tendon, ligament, nerve or muscle can be involved leading to problems effectuating in the form of pain, tenderness, swelling, and functional deficits. Common problems seen are carpal tunnel syndrome, muscle sprain-strain, and osteoarthritis in joints, etc. Management: ULMSDS can be prevented by incorporating activity in daily life awhile also keeping a check on posture. At workplace, architectural adjustments and changes in physical and social environment can help prevention exacerbation of upper limb conditions. Regular rest intervals can also be included to avoid prolonged fixation of joints in one position. Conclusion: This paper focuses on ULMSDS in an attempt to improve the quality of life through various intervention strategies within the work organization thus enhancing work quality and output of the companies. Article visualizations

Histological subclassification of cirrhosis based on histological-haemodynamic correlation

Background: Determining a relationship between specific histological parameters in cirrhosis and hepatic venous pressure gradient can be used to subclassify cirrhosis. Aim: To determine the relationship between hepatic venous pressure gradient and specific histological parameters in cirrhosis. Methods: Forty-seven patients (mean age: 46.2 ± 13.6 years; 36 male) with biopsy-proven cirrhosis and hepatic venous pressure gradient measurements within 1 month of biopsy were studied. The following histological parameters were scored semiquantitatively: nodule size, loss of portal tracts and central veins, portal inflammation, periportal inflammation, bile duct proliferation, lobular inflammation, ballooning, fatty change, cholestasis and septal thickness. Results: On multiple ordinal regression analysis, small nodule size (odds ratio: 21.0; 95% confidence interval: 2.1-208.2, P = 0.009) and thick septa (OR: 42.6; CI: 2.3-783.7, P = 0.011) were significantly associated with the presence of clinically significant portal hypertension. A score was assigned to each of the two parameters (nodule size: large = 1, medium = 2, small = 3 and septal thickness: thin = 1, medium = 2, thick = 3). Two subcategories were devised based on the composite score: category A (n = 12): score 1-3 and category B (n = 35): score 4-6. On ordinal regression, subcategory B (OR: 15.5; CI: 3.3-74.2, P = 0.001) was significantly associated with clinically significant portal hypertension. Conclusion: Small nodularity and thick septa are independent predictors of the presence of clinically significant portal hypertension

Accelerating Time Series Analysis via Processing using Non-Volatile Memories

Time Series Analysis (TSA) is a critical workload for consumer-facing devices. Accelerating TSA is vital for many domains as it enables the extraction of valuable information and predict future events. The state-of-the-art algorithm in TSA is the subsequence Dynamic Time Warping (sDTW) algorithm. However, sDTW's computation complexity increases quadratically with the time series' length, resulting in two performance implications. First, the amount of data parallelism available is significantly higher than the small number of processing units enabled by commodity systems (e.g., CPUs). Second, sDTW is bottlenecked by memory because it 1) has low arithmetic intensity and 2) incurs a large memory footprint. To tackle these two challenges, we leverage Processing-using-Memory (PuM) by performing in-situ computation where data resides, using the memory cells. PuM provides a promising solution to alleviate data movement bottlenecks and exposes immense parallelism. In this work, we present MATSA, the first MRAM-based Accelerator for Time Series Analysis. The key idea is to exploit magneto-resistive memory crossbars to enable energy-efficient and fast time series computation in memory. MATSA provides the following key benefits: 1) it leverages high levels of parallelism in the memory substrate by exploiting column-wise arithmetic operations, and 2) it significantly reduces the data movement costs performing computation using the memory cells. We evaluate three versions of MATSA to match the requirements of different environments (e.g., embedded, desktop, or HPC computing) based on MRAM technology trends. We perform a design space exploration and demonstrate that our HPC version of MATSA can improve performance by 7.35x/6.15x/6.31x and energy efficiency by 11.29x/4.21x/2.65x over server CPU, GPU and PNM architectures, respectively