Addressing the Node Discovery Problem in Fog Computing

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a lot of attention due to connecting various sensor devices with the cloud, in order to enable smart applications such as: smart traffic management, smart houses, and smart grids, among others. Due to the growing popularity of the IoT, the number of Internet-connected devices has increased significantly. As a result, these devices generate a huge amount of network traffic which may lead to bottlenecks, and eventually increase the communication latency with the cloud. To cope with such issues, a new computing paradigm has emerged, namely: fog computing. Fog computing enables computing that spans from the cloud to the edge of the network in order to distribute the computations of the IoT data, and to reduce the communication latency. However, fog computing is still in its infancy, and there are still related open problems. In this paper, we focus on the node discovery problem, i.e., how to add new compute nodes to a fog computing system. Moreover, we discuss how addressing this problem can have a positive impact on various aspects of fog computing, such as fault tolerance, resource heterogeneity, proximity awareness, and scalability. Finally, based on the experimental results that we produce by simulating various distributed compute nodes, we show how addressing the node discovery problem can improve the fault tolerance of a fog computing system

EgoTV: Egocentric Task Verification from Natural Language Task Descriptions

To enable progress towards egocentric agents capable of understanding everyday tasks specified in natural language, we propose a benchmark and a synthetic dataset called Egocentric Task Verification (EgoTV). EgoTV contains multi-step tasks with multiple sub-task decompositions, state changes, object interactions, and sub-task ordering constraints, in addition to abstracted task descriptions that contain only partial details about ways to accomplish a task. We also propose a novel Neuro-Symbolic Grounding (NSG) approach to enable the causal, temporal, and compositional reasoning of such tasks. We demonstrate NSG's capability towards task tracking and verification on our EgoTV dataset and a real-world dataset derived from CrossTask (CTV). Our contributions include the release of the EgoTV and CTV datasets, and the NSG model for future research on egocentric assistive agents

Identification of Proteins and Complex Carbohydrates in Some Commercial Low-Fat Dairy Products by Means of Immunolocalization Techniques

Macromolecular assemblies of proteins and hydrocolloids in low-fat dairy products contribute to the structure and texture of these foods. Immunolocalization techniques were used to identify B-lactoglobulin, casein, bovine whey proteins, and egg albumin in low-fat frozen desserts, reduced fat process cheese, and salad dressings. SimpJesse18 I 00 protein particles were examined and characterized by these methods and compared to naturally occurring protein structures in the low-fat foods. Hydrocolloid identification in low-fat salad dressing was accomplished by complexing cellulase and hemicellulase with colloidal gold and applying the probe as a pre-embedding step, on sections of embedded specimens or on material dried on grids. This enzyme-gold method may be generally applied for identification of cellulose and hemicellulose in complex food systems. Immunolocalization techniques employed in this study should prove useful in probing the fundamental structure-texture relationship in foods

Nano-curcumin: A Potent Enhancer of Body Antioxidant System in Diabetic Mice.

Nano preparation of drug to be helpful in targeted delivery, which avoids any unwanted damage of adjacent healthy tissues. Antidiabetic compounds from natural and synthetic sources have been found to successful management of diabetes. Antioxidants are compound that protect cell against the damaging effects of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Curcumin has many beneficial effects against health problems; it has limited use due to its poor bioavailability as concluded by number of its pharmacokinetic studies. Since the aim of this study was to investigate the effects of curcumin nanoparticles (Nano-curcumin) on antioxidative enzymes i.e Glutathione peroxidase (GPx), Superoxide dismutase (SOD) and Catalase (CAT) in pancreas of diabetic mice. For the present investigation mice (Mus musculus) used as experimental animal. Mice were divided into four groups viz, a) Control group b) Diabetic group c) Recovery group I- Diabetic mice treated with curcumin d) Recovery group II - Diabetic mice treated with curcumin and nano-curcumin. The activity of antioxidative enzymes in the pancreas was recorded at the end of experiment. There was decrease in antioxidative enzymes in pancreas of diabetic mice compared to control. After the treatment of curcumin and curcumin nanoparticles significant increase in levels of antioxidative enzymes in recovery group I and II was observed. Moreover as compare to free curcumin nano-curcumin showed better results in enhancement of antioxidative enzymes. Thus it proves that nano-curcumin found to be potent antioxidative compound to reduced oxidative stress induced during the diabetes.

Pretrained Language Models as Visual Planners for Human Assistance

To make progress towards multi-modal AI assistants which can guide users to achieve complex multi-step goals, we propose the task of Visual Planning for Assistance (VPA). Given a goal briefly described in natural language, e.g., "make a shelf", and a video of the user's progress so far, the aim of VPA is to obtain a plan, i.e., a sequence of actions such as "sand shelf", "paint shelf", etc., to achieve the goal. This requires assessing the user's progress from the untrimmed video, and relating it to the requirements of underlying goal, i.e., relevance of actions and ordering dependencies amongst them. Consequently, this requires handling long video history, and arbitrarily complex action dependencies. To address these challenges, we decompose VPA into video action segmentation and forecasting. We formulate the forecasting step as a multi-modal sequence modeling problem and present Visual Language Model based Planner (VLaMP), which leverages pre-trained LMs as the sequence model. We demonstrate that VLaMP performs significantly better than baselines w.r.t all metrics that evaluate the generated plan. Moreover, through extensive ablations, we also isolate the value of language pre-training, visual observations, and goal information on the performance. We will release our data, model, and code to enable future research on visual planning for assistance

Functional outcome of proximal 1/3rd, distal 1/3rd and diaphysial tibial fractures in adults operated with expert tibial nailing

Background: Fractures of the tibial shaft are increasing due to high velocity trauma and industrialisation. Not only they are common but also difficult to treat. Until recently surgeons had to rely on non-operative treatment, V nailing, plates and screws and external fixator but they had their drawbacks like prolonged immobilisation infection, delayed union and non-union. Numerous modifications in nail and screw design have led to development of the expert tibial nail. Multidirectional interlocking screws ensure that alignment can be well maintained and stability preserved in short proximal or distal tibial segments.Methods: 30 patients were admitted and operated during September 2014 to September 2016 in Mamata general hospital Khammam. All patients were evaluated with Klemm Borner’s criteria and complications following surgery.Results: 87% of patients achieved good or excellent results, fair results were obtained in 3 (10%) patient and poor result in one (3%) patient. 2 (6%) patients had malunion, 2 (6%) patients had delayed union, 1 (3%) patient had deep infection led to implant failure.Conclusions: Intramedullary nailing is a safe and effective technique for the treatment of tibial metaphyseal fractures. It avoids the additional soft-tissue dissection associated with traditional open procedures as well as the complications associated with external fixators. Expert tibial nail can give excellent functional and clinical results. Complications such as failure of the bone-implant construct or post-operative malallignment are avoidable if careful pre-operative planning is allied with meticulous surgical technique

Effect of Conventional and Microwave Tissue Processing Technique on DNA Integrity: A Comparative Molecular Analysis

BACKGROUND: Methods of diagnostic molecular biology are routinely applied on formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissues processed via conventional method. Recently, there has been a growing interest to use microwave technology in histopathology laboratories to overcome the deficiencies of the conventional processing method. Thefore, this study was aimed to compare and analyze the quality and quantity of DNA obtained from tissues processed by conventional and microwave tissue processing techniques and to further ascertain the applicability of the latter for PCR (polymerase chain reaction based research).METHODS: Thirty fresh tissues of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) were included, and each sample was cut into two equivalent halves. One tissue half was processed by conventional manual method whereas the other half was processed using a domestic microwave oven. DNA was obtained from all the tissues which were then subjected to Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to evaluate GAPDH (Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase) gene expression.RESULTS: The results revealed better DNA yield from microwave processed tissue while the quality of the DNA was alike from both the techniques.CONCLUSION: On the basis of the results obtained, it can be concluded that DNA produced by microwave processed tissues was similar to that obtained by conventional processing technique in terms of quantity and quality. Thus, microwave processed tissue samples can be successfully used for further molecular studies and researches

Absence of toll-like receptor 9 Pro99Leu polymorphism in cervical cancer [version 2; referees: 2 approved, 1 not approved]

Background: Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) plays a key role in the elimination of viral pathogens by recognising their CpG DNA. Polymorphisms in the TLR9 gene may influence their recognition and subsequent elimination. Therefore, the present study was designed to elucidate the role of a rare unexplored TLR9 gene polymorphism C296T/ Pro99Leu (rs5743844) in cervical cancer susceptibility among Indian women. Methods: The genotyping of TLR9 Pro99Leu polymorphism in 110 cervical cancer patients and 141 healthy controls was performed by polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP). Results: The genotype frequency detected in both cervical cancer and control populations was 1.0 (CC), 0.0 (CT) and 0.0 (TT); while the allele frequency was found to be 1.0 (C) and 0.0 (T). Conclusions: The present study demonstrates no involvement of TLR9 C296T/ Pro99Leu polymorphism in cervical cancer susceptibility and supports minor allele frequency (MAF) (0.0002) status of the same as no nucleotide variation was detected in any of the study subjects

A QSPR Study of Sweetness Potency Using the CODESSA Program

A total of 397 natural and artificial comprehensively referenced sweeteners were classified by their structures into nine sets. The sweetness potencies were correlated with quantum Chemical and other molecular descriptors using the heuristic and the best multi-linear regression methods of the CODESSA software package. QSPR models (two-parameter unless otherwise indicated) emerged for each subclass of sweeteners with R2 values of 0.835 for 47 aldoximes, 0.959 for 8 acesulfamates, 0.919 for 9 sulfamates, 0.941 for 10 α-arylsulfonylalkanoic acids, 0.715 for 27 guanidines (0.802 in a three-parameter correlation), 0.769 for 30 ureas/thioureas (0.888 in a three-parameter correlation), 0.905 for 20 natural sweeteners, 0.957 for 7 miscellaneous sweeteners (one-parameter correlation), 0.688 for 87 peptides (five-parameter correlation). A significant global five-parameter QSPR theoretical model with R2 of 0.686 for the entire set of sweeteners is presented and discussed with reference to the possible existence of single or multiple sweetness receptors