A method to multi-attribute decision making with picture fuzzy information based on Muirhead mean

The recently proposed picture fuzzy set (PFS) is a powerful tool for handling fuzziness and uncertainty. PFS is character-ized by a positive membership degree, a neutral membership degree, and a negative membership degree, making it more suitable and useful than the intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) when dealing with multi-attribute decision making (MADM). The aim of this paper is to develop some aggregation operators for fusing picture fuzzy information. Considering the Muirhead mean (MM) is an aggregation technology which can consider the interrelationship among all aggregated ar-guments, we extend MM to picture fuzzy context and propose a family of picture fuzzy Muirhead mean operators. In addition, we investigate some properties and special cases of the proposed operators. Further, we develop a novel meth-od to MADM in which the attribute values take the form of picture fuzzy numbers (PFNs). Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the validity of the proposed method

Therapeutic DNA vaccine induces broad T cell responses in the gut and sustained protection from viral rebound and AIDS in SIV-infected rhesus macaques.

Immunotherapies that induce durable immune control of chronic HIV infection may eliminate the need for life-long dependence on drugs. We investigated a DNA vaccine formulated with a novel genetic adjuvant that stimulates immune responses in the blood and gut for the ability to improve therapy in rhesus macaques chronically infected with SIV. Using the SIV-macaque model for AIDS, we show that epidermal co-delivery of plasmids expressing SIV Gag, RT, Nef and Env, and the mucosal adjuvant, heat-labile E. coli enterotoxin (LT), during antiretroviral therapy (ART) induced a substantial 2-4-log fold reduction in mean virus burden in both the gut and blood when compared to unvaccinated controls and provided durable protection from viral rebound and disease progression after the drug was discontinued. This effect was associated with significant increases in IFN-γ T cell responses in both the blood and gut and SIV-specific CD8+ T cells with dual TNF-α and cytolytic effector functions in the blood. Importantly, a broader specificity in the T cell response seen in the gut, but not the blood, significantly correlated with a reduction in virus production in mucosal tissues and a lower virus burden in plasma. We conclude that immunizing with vaccines that induce immune responses in mucosal gut tissue could reduce residual viral reservoirs during drug therapy and improve long-term treatment of HIV infection in humans

Combination of similarity measures in ontology matching using the owa operator

In this paper, we provide a novel solution for ontology matching by using the ordered weighted average (OWA) operator to aggregate multiple values obtained from different similarity measures. We have implemented the solution in the ontology matching system FOAM. Using the base matchers in FOAM, we analyze the way to choose different OWA operators and compare our system with others.