Adaptation of the difficulty level in an infant-robot movement contingency study

19th International Workshop of Physical Agents (WAF). Madrid (22-23 Noviembre 2018)ABSTRACT: This paper presents a personalized contingency feedback adaptation system that aims to encourage infants aged 6 to 8 months to gradually increase the peak acceleration of their leg movements. The ultimate challenge is to determine if a socially assistive humanoid robot can guide infant learning using contingent rewards, where the reward threshold is personalized for each infant using a reinforcement learning algorithm. The model learned from the data captured by wearable inertial sensors measuring infant leg movement accelerations in an earlier study. Each infant generated a unique model that determined the behavior of the robot. The presented results were obtained from the distributions of the participants' acceleration peaks and demonstrate that the resulting model is sensitive to the degree of differentiation among the participants; each participant (infant) should have his/her own learned policy.This work was supported by NSF award 1706964 (PI: Smith, Co-PI: Matarić). In addition, this work was developed during an international mobility program at the University of Southern California being also partially funded by the European Union ECHORD++ project (FP7-ICT-601116), the LifeBots project (TIN2015-65686-C5) and THERAPIST project (TIN2012-38079)

Early childhood feeding practices and dental caries in preschool children: a multi-centre birth cohort study

Extent: 7p.Background Dental caries (decay) is an international public health challenge, especially amongst young children. Early Childhood Caries is a rapidly progressing disease leading to severe pain, anxiety, sepsis and sleep loss, and is a major health problem particularly for disadvantaged populations. There is currently a lack of research exploring the interactions between risk and protective factors in the development of early childhood caries, in particular the effects of infant feeding practises. Methods/Design This is an observational cohort study and involves the recruitment of a birth cohort from disadvantaged communities in South Western Sydney. Mothers will be invited to join the study soon after the birth of their child at the time of the first home visit by Child and Family Health Nurses. Data on feeding practices and dental health behaviours will be gathered utilizing a telephone interview at 4, 8 and 12 months, and thereafter at 6 monthly intervals until the child is aged 5 years. Information collected will include a) initiation and duration of breastfeeding, b) introduction of solid food, c) intake of cariogenic and non-cariogenic foods, d) fluoride exposure, and e) oral hygiene practices. Children will have a dental and anthropometric examination at 2 and 5 years of age and the main outcome measures will be oral health quality of life, caries prevalence and caries incidence. Discussion This study will provide evidence of the association of early childhood feeding practices and the oral health of preschool children. In addition, information will be collected on breastfeeding practices and the oral health concerns of mothers living in disadvantaged areas in South Western Sydney.Amit Arora, Jane A Scott, Sameer Bhole, Loc Do, Eli Schwarz and Anthony S Blinkhor

Nature-Inspired Chemical Engineering for Process Intensification

A nature-inspired solution (NIS) methodology is proposed as a systematic platform for innovation and to inform transformative technology required to address Grand Challenges, including sustainable development. Scalability, efficiency, and resilience are essential to nature, as they are to engineering processes. They are achieved through underpinning fundamental mechanisms, which are grouped as recurring themes in the NIS approach: hierarchical transport networks, force balancing, dynamic self-organization, and ecosystem properties. To leverage these universal mechanisms, and incorporate them effectively into engineering design, adaptations may be needed to accommodate the different contexts of nature and engineering applications. Nature-inspired chemical engineering takes advantage of the NIS methodology for process intensification, as demonstrated here in fluidization, catalysis, fuel cell engineering, and membrane separations, where much higher performance is achieved by rigorously employing concepts optimized in nature. The same approach lends itself to other applications, from biomedical engineering to information technology and architecture

Sedentary behaviour and psychosocial health across the life course

Psychosocial health is broadly defined to include psychological and social-psychological outcomes, interlinked with socioeconomic factors. Psychosocial health has been shown to be strongly associated with self-rated health, longevity, and heart disease. This chapter will summarise and explain the literature on sedentary behavior and psychosocial health across the life course, with a focus on the psychosocial domains bullying/ victimization, self-esteem, pro-social behavior, and mental disorders (bipolar disorder, anxiety, stress). In summary, the majority of literature is in young people and has focused on concepts such as self-esteem and pro-social behavior, suggesting an inverse relationship with sedentary behavior. Limited research has focused on these concepts in adults. The existing literature should be interpreted in light of limited gold standard experimental data

Long-term adaptation of the influenza A virus by escaping cytotoxic T-cell recognition

The evolutionary adaptation of the influenza A virus (IAV) to human antibodies is well characterised. Much less is known about the long-term evolution of cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) epitopes, which are important antigens for clearance of infection. We construct an antigenic map of IAVs of all human subtypes using a compendium of 142 confirmed CTL epitopes, and show that IAV evolved gradually in the period 1932–2015, with infrequent antigenic jumps in the H3N2 subtype. Intriguingly, the number of CTL epitopes per virus decreases with more than one epitope per three years in the H3N2 subtype (from 84 epitopes per virus in 1968 to 64 in 2015), mostly attributed to the loss of HLA-B epitopes. We confirm these observations with epitope predictions. Our findings indicate that selection pressures imposed by CTL immunity shape the long-term evolution of IAV