Evaluating Museum Virtual Tours: The Case Study of Italy

Virtual tours in museums are an ideal solution for those that are not able to visit a museum or those who want to have a small taste of what is presented in the museum before their visit. However, these tours often encounter severe problems while users interact with them. In order to check the status of virtual tours of museums, we present the implementation of an evaluation experiment that uses a combination of two multi-criteria decision making theories, namely the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). AHP has been used for the estimation of the weights of the heuristics and fuzzy TOPSIS has been used for the evaluation of virtual tours of museums. This paper presents the exact steps that have to be followed in order to implement such an experiment and run an example experiment for virtual tours of Italian museums

Curvature-Independent Last-Iterate Convergence for Games on Riemannian Manifolds

Numerous applications in machine learning and data analytics can be formulated as equilibrium computation over Riemannian manifolds. Despite the extensive investigation of their Euclidean counterparts, the performance of Riemannian gradient-based algorithms remain opaque and poorly understood. We revisit the original scheme of Riemannian gradient descent (RGD) and analyze it under a geodesic monotonicity assumption, which includes the well-studied geodesically convex-concave min-max optimization problem as a special case. Our main contribution is to show that, despite the phenomenon of distance distortion, the RGD scheme, with a step size that is agnostic to the manifold's curvature, achieves a curvature-independent and linear last-iterate convergence rate in the geodesically strongly monotone setting. To the best of our knowledge, the possibility of curvature-independent rates and/or last-iterate convergence in the Riemannian setting has not been considered before

A mobility-supporting MAC scheme for bursty traffic in IoT and WSNs

International audienceRecent boom of mobile applications has become an essential class of mobile Internet of Things (IoT), whereby large amounts of sensed data are collected and shared by mobile sensing devices for observing phenomena such as traffic or the environmental. Currently, most of the proposed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols mainly focus on static networks. However, mobile sensor nodes may pose many communication challenges during the design and development of a MAC protocol. These difficulties first require an efficient connection establishment between a mobile and static node, and then an efficient data packet transmissions. In this study, we propose MobIQ, an advanced mobility-handling MAC scheme for low-power MAC protocols, which achieves for efficient neighbour(hood) discovery and low-delay communication. Our thorough performance evaluation, conducted on top of Contiki OS, shows that MobIQ outperforms state-of-the-art solutions such as MoX-MAC, MOBINET and ME-ContikiMAC, in terms of significantly reducing delay, contention to the medium and energy consumption

Evaluation of admission chest X-ray findings in patients with respiratory infection during the COVID-19 pandemic

AIMS: To evaluate the prevalence of X-ray findings in hospitalized patients requiring hospitalization with suspected Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection and potential differences in the laboratory values and clinical outcomes related to the presence of abnormal chest X-ray (CXR) findings. METHODS: RESULTS: CONCLUSION: CXR is a routine examination in all patients with symptoms of lower respiratory tract disease and its findings relate to in-hospital mortality and Pa

IL-9 Integrates the Host-Candida Cross-Talk in Vulvovaginal Candidiasis to Balance Inflammation and Tolerance

Vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC) is a common fungal infection caused by Candida albicans. The antifungal therapy represents the standard of care but due to the high costs of treatment and to the inability to prevent recurrences, the development of alternative therapeutic approaches is much-awaited. Recently, we have shown that the pathogenesis of C. albicans in the gut is modulated by IL-9, a pleiotropic cytokine able to promote both inflammation and tolerance during C. albicans infection. Herein, by using a mouse model of VVC, we similarly demonstrated that IL-9 might exert a dual role in VVC by contributing to inflammation during the initial immune activation and promoting resolution thereafter. Specifically, IL-9 has a pro-inflammatory activity at the onset of VVC by promoting NLRP3 inflammasome activity and mucosal mast cells expansion but a tolerogenic role in the resolution phase by promoting IL-1Ra production and connective tissue mast cells activation. We further show that a timely IL-9 neutralization at the onset of the inflammatory response ameliorated symptoms and vaginal pathology. Given that vaginal fluids from patients with recurrent VVC had higher levels of IL-9, these findings, by providing novel insights into the pathogenesis of VVC, may pave the way for alternative therapeutic strategies based on IL-9 neutralization

Development of a New Tool for 3D Modeling for Regenerative Medicine

The effectiveness of therapeutic treatment based on regenerative medicine for degenerative diseases (i.e., neurodegenerative or cardiac diseases) requires tools allowing the visualization and analysis of the three-dimensional (3D) distribution of target drugs within the tissue. Here, we present a new computational procedure able to overcome the limitations of visual analysis emerging by the examination of a molecular signal within images of serial tissue/organ sections by using the conventional techniques. Together with the 3D anatomical reconstitution of the tissue/organ, our framework allows the detection of signals of different origins (e.g., marked generic molecules, colorimetric, or fluorimetric substrates for enzymes; microRNA; recombinant protein). Remarkably, the application does not require the employment of specific tracking reagents for the imaging analysis. We report two different representative applications: the first shows the reconstruction of a 3D model of mouse brain with the analysis of the distribution of the β-Galactosidase, the second shows the reconstruction of a 3D mouse heart with the measurement of the cardiac volume

A human STAT3 gain-of-function variant drives local Th17 dysregulation and skin inflammation in mice

Germline gain-of-function (GOF) variants in STAT3 cause an inborn error of immunity associated with early-onset poly-autoimmunity and immune dysregulation. To study tissue-specific immune dysregulation, we used a mouse model carrying a missense variant (p.G421R) that causes human disease. We observed spontaneous and imiquimod (IMQ)-induced skin inflammation associated with cell-intrinsic local Th17 responses in STAT3 GOF mice. CD4+ T cells were sufficient to drive skin inflammation and showed increased Il22 expression in expanded clones. Certain aspects of disease, including increased epidermal thickness, also required the presence of STAT3 GOF in epithelial cells. Treatment with a JAK inhibitor improved skin disease without affecting local Th17 recruitment and cytokine production. These findings collectively support the involvement of Th17 responses in the development of organ-specific immune dysregulation in STAT3 GOF and suggest that the presence of STAT3 GOF in tissues is important for disease and can be targeted with JAK inhibition