A Critical Appraisal of Digitalization in City Administration

The improvement in technology infrastructure has paved way for creating web-portals, social media portals and space for suggestions within. This facility is well utilized by public to provide observations on development activities. For city administration, where development activities can take the help of technology to resolve social issues, it has given options in expressing opinions on different hash tags created by stakeholders for making structural decisions. The opinions posted are often random and at times critical to the issues in discussion. This paper brings out those observations posted in social media portals like twitter on urban development activities, analyzing statements to capture topics in discussion, the degree of relationship within the topics, and human emotions expressed as sentiments in the observations made for resolving social issues and innovative measures undertaken. The results indicate utmost positive sentiments expressed by public for measures and resolutions undertaken to deploy technology infrastructure in citie

Trajectory Aware Macro-cell Planning for Mobile Users

We design and evaluate algorithms for efficient user-mobility driven macro-cell planning in cellular networks. As cellular networks embrace heterogeneous technologies (including long range 3G/4G and short range WiFi, Femto-cells, etc.), most traffic generated by static users gets absorbed by the short-range technologies, thereby increasingly leaving mobile user traffic to macro-cells. To this end, we consider a novel approach that factors in the trajectories of mobile users as well as the impact of city geographies and their associated road networks for macro-cell planning. Given a budget k of base-stations that can be upgraded, our approach selects a deployment that impacts the most number of user trajectories. The generic formulation incorporates the notion of quality of service of a user trajectory as a parameter to allow different application-specific requirements, and operator choices.We show that the proposed trajectory utility maximization problem is NP-hard, and design multiple heuristics. We evaluate our algorithms with real and synthetic data sets emulating different city geographies to demonstrate their efficacy. For instance, with an upgrade budget k of 20%, our algorithms perform 3-8 times better in improving the user quality of service on trajectories in different city geographies when compared to greedy location-based base-station upgrades.Comment: Published in INFOCOM 201

Meteoric effect of meropenem: an unrevealed case report on Jarisch Herxheimer reaction

Jarisch Herxheimer Reaction is an immune mediated, self- limited reaction that releases endotoxins from the spirochetes. It occurs due to an acute inflammatory response when lipoproteins, owing to their entry into the patient's bloodstream, cause an increase in inflammatory cytokines during the period of exacerbation, resulting in body aches, fevers, rashes, nausea and vomiting, and flushing, along with other symptoms. These symptoms usually begin within 2 hours after the administration of the antibiotics. We represent a 76-year-old male patient who has had a known case of recurrent urinary tract infections since 2017 and was recently diagnosed with urosepsis and syphilis after being administered an injection of Meropenem, wherein he developed a Jarisch Herxheimer Reaction. The causality assessment revealed a Naranjo score of 7, indicating a probable adverse drug reaction. This patient was treated with intravenous antihistamines and corticosteroids for its management. Benzathine penicillin was avoided owing to the previous suspected Jarisch Herxheimer Reaction. None of the studies reported that Meropenem could contribute to such a reaction. All healthcare professionals should maintain a high alert of suspicion and be aware of antibiotic induced Jarisch Herxheimer Reaction symptoms and their management to avoid life threatening conditions

SECURITY AND OTHER VULNERABILITY PREDICTION USING NOVEL DEEP REPRESENTATION OF SOURCE CODE WITH ACTIVE FEEDBACK LOOP

Since the cost of fixing vulnerabilities can be thirty times greater after an application has been deployed, it is recognized that properly-written code can yield potentially large savings. Accordingly, approaches presented herein apply machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to improve developer experience by enabling developers to avoid introducing potential bugs and/or vulnerabilities while coding. Billions of lines of source code, which have already been written, are utilized as examples of how to write functional and secure code that is easy to read and to debug. By leveraging this wealth of available data, which is complemented with state-of-art machine learning models, enterprise-level software solutions can be developed that have a high standard of coding and are potentially bug-free

N-methylisatin-beta-thiosemicarbazone derivative (SCH 16) is an inhibitor of Japanese encephalitis virus infection in vitro and in vivo

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>During the early and mid part of 20^thcentury, several reports described the therapeutic effects of N-methylisatin-β-Thiosemicarbazone (MIBT) against pox viruses, Maloney leukemia viruses and recently against HIV. However, their ability to inhibit flavivirus replication has not been investigated. Hence the present study was designed to evaluate the antiviral activity of 14 MIBT derivatives against Flaviviruses that are prevalent in India such as Japanese Encephalitis Virus (JEV), Dengue-2 (Den-2) and West Nile viruses (WNV).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Amongst the fourteen Mannich bases of MIBT derivatives tested one compound – SCH 16 was able to completely inhibit <it>in vitro </it>Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) and West Nile virus (WNV) replication. However no antiviral activity of SCH 16 was noted against Den-2 virus replication. This compound was able to inhibit 50% of the plaques (IC₅₀) produced by JEV and WNV at a concentration of 16 μgm/ml (0.000025 μM) and 4 μgm/ml (0.000006 μM) respectively. Furthermore, SCH 16 at a concentration of 500 mg/kg body weight administered by oral route twice daily was able to completely (100%) prevent mortality in mice challenged with 50LD₅₀JEV by the peripheral route. Our experiments to understand the mechanism of action suggest that SCH 16 inhibited JEV replication at the level of early protein translation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Only one of the 14 isatin derivatives -SCH 16 exhibited antiviral action on JEV and WNV virus infection <it>in vitro</it>. SCH 16 was also found to completely inhibit JEV replication <it>in vivo </it>in a mouse model challenged peripherally with 50LD₅₀of the virus. These results warrant further research and development on SCH 16 as a possible therapeutic agent.</p

Photometric Study of W UMa Type Binaries in the Old Open Cluster Berkeley 39

The study of W UMa binary systems give a wealth of information about its nature as well as about its parent body (if any), like clusters. In this paper, we present the I passband photometric solutions of four W UMa binaries in the open cluster Berkeley 39 using the latest version of WD program. The result shows that, two binary systems are W subtype W UMa binary systems and another two systems are H subtype W UMa binary systems. No third body is found in any of the four systems. We found a correlation between the period and mass-ratio as well as temperature and mass-ratio for the respective variables which is similar to the relationship between mass ratio and total mass of the contact binaries as shown by vant Veer (1996) and Li et al. (2008).Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, accepted for the publication in RA

The big pivot

To say that the COVID-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented global event is an understatement. It has affected all aspects of life in most countries. From a supply chain standpoint, it’s difficult to imagine an industry that was not disrupted, and that did not experience unanticipated changes in demand and supply patterns. Shortages of toilet paper may have been the most visible, and personal, but since then, business has experienced shortages of everything from computer chips to the elastic used to make face masks