Combining hunting and intensive carcass removal to eradicate African swine fever from wild boar populations

African Swine Fever (ASF) is a highly lethal viral disease, which affects different species of wild and domestic suids. After its human-caused introduction in Georgia in 2007, the ASF virus has found a new ecological reservoir in the large and continuous wild boar (Sus scrofa) populations of Eurasia, spreading both eastward and westward. ASF has also breached into the intensive pork meat production system. Although the disease has no zoonotic potential, its consequences on wild boar populations and the economic losses for the pig industry have been dramatic. As no vaccine or effective medical treatment is available to reliably protect wild boar or domestic pigs against ASF, eradication efforts are mainly based on intensive wild boar hunting and on removing a significant portion of the infected wild boar carcasses, which are the main environmental virus reservoir. Both strategies have produced poor results, so far, and ASF is becoming endemic. We compared wild boar hunting and carcass removal as alternative and combined strategies for the eradication of ASF in its endemic state, using a spatially explicit individual-based model, which incorporated the demography and spatial dynamics of a wild boar population, the spatial epidemiology of ASF in its endemic phase, and a management system acting for the eradication of the disease from the population. When no eradication effort was simulated, ASF exhibited a clear and strong tendency to persist and remain endemic in the wild boar population. Both hunting and carcass removal, when used alone, provided either a low power to remove the virus from the population, or required unrealistic field effort. The best performing scenario corresponded to the combined use of a 30% annual hunting rate and of an intensive carcass removal, during a 2-month period in late winter (February-March). Eradicating ASF from wild boar populations remains a hard task. Managers should promote a drastic increase in the effort dedicated to systematically identify and remove as many infected wild boar carcasses as possible from the affected areas, with at least 5–15 carcasses removed for each 100 hunted wild boar

ELICA: An Automated Tool for Dynamic Extraction of Requirements Relevant Information

Requirements elicitation requires extensive knowledge and deep understanding of the problem domain where the final system will be situated. However, in many software development projects, analysts are required to elicit the requirements from an unfamiliar domain, which often causes communication barriers between analysts and stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a requirements ELICitation Aid tool (ELICA) to help analysts better understand the target application domain by dynamic extraction and labeling of requirements-relevant knowledge. To extract the relevant terms, we leverage the flexibility and power of Weighted Finite State Transducers (WFSTs) in dynamic modeling of natural language processing tasks. In addition to the information conveyed through text, ELICA captures and processes non-linguistic information about the intention of speakers such as their confidence level, analytical tone, and emotions. The extracted information is made available to the analysts as a set of labeled snippets with highlighted relevant terms which can also be exported as an artifact of the Requirements Engineering (RE) process. The application and usefulness of ELICA are demonstrated through a case study. This study shows how pre-existing relevant information about the application domain and the information captured during an elicitation meeting, such as the conversation and stakeholders' intentions, can be captured and used to support analysts achieving their tasks.Comment: 2018 IEEE 26th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshop

LOL: An Investigation into Cybernetic Humor, or: Can Machines Laugh?

The mechanisms of humour have been the subject of much study and investigation, starting with and up to our days. Much of this work is based on literary theories, put forward by some of the most eminent philosophers and thinkers of all times, or medical theories, investigating the impact of humor on brain activity or behaviour. Recent functional neuroimaging studies, for instance, have investigated the process of comprehending and appreciating humor by examining functional activity in distinctive regions of brains stimulated by joke corpora. Yet, there is precious little work on the computational side, possibly due to the less hilarious nature of computer scientists as compared to men of letters and sawbones. In this paper, we set to investigate whether literary theories of humour can stand the test of algorithmic laughter. Or, in other words, we ask ourselves the vexed question: Can machines laugh? We attempt to answer that question by testing whether an algorithm - namely, a neural network - can "understand" humour, and in particular whether it is possible to automatically identify abstractions that are predicted to be relevant by established literary theories about the mechanisms of humor. Notice that we do not focus here on distinguishing humorous from serious statements - a feat that is clearly way beyond the capabilities of the average human voter, not to mention the average machine - but rather on identifying the underlying mechanisms and triggers that are postulated to exist by literary theories, by verifying if similar mechanisms can be learned by machines

Welcome to the 8th International Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering (EmpiRE 2023)

A message from the workshop chairs of the 8th International Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering, co-located with the 31st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2023) Hannover, Germany, September 4–8, 2023

Report of the 8th Workshop on Empirical RequirementsEngineering (EmpiRE 2023)

The Eighth International Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering (EmpiRE 2023), co-located with the 31st IEEE International Requirements Engineering conference (RE 2023), was held on September 5, 2023 in Hannover, Germany. This report presents the workshop structure, the keynote speech, the themes of the presented papers, and the panel discussion

Executable formal specifications of complex distributed systems with CoreASM

Formal specifications play a crucial role in the design of reliable complex software systems. Executable formal specifications allow the designer to attain early validation and verification of design using static analysis techniques and accurate simulation of the runtime behavior of the system-to-be. With increasing complexity of software-intensive computer-based systems and the challenges of validation and verification of abstract software models prior to coding, the need for interactive software tools supporting executable formal specifications is even more evident. In this paper, we discuss how CoreASM, an environment for writing and running executable specifications according to the ASM method, provides flexibility and manages the complexity by using an innovative extensible language architecture

Modeling web applications infrastructure with ASMs

We describe via Abstract State Machines the major ingredients of contemporary web applications: a web browser running JavaScript programs and a web server dispatching requests to one of several modules, each one representing a class of established web application frameworks. The web browser model comes in four levels, namely transport, stream, context and browser level, and is focussed on the interaction with possibly multiple servers (which requires a concurrent computation model) and on script execution (which requires a dynamic assignment of agents to programs). The server model is focussed on the Request–Reply pattern, and specifies a delegation strategy where the handling of a request is entrusted to a module. We show how several major frameworks for web applications can be described as progressive refinements of a number of basic modules. Three modules are further detailed: static file transfer, CGI and generic scripting modules

Cisplatin induced toxicity in rat tissues: The protective effect of Lisosan G

The protective effect of a powder of grain (Lisosan G) against cisplatin-induced toxicity in rats was studied. Male rats were fed with Lisosan G before injection of cisplatin and four days later they were killed and blood was collected along with hepatic, renal and testicular tissues. The results showed that cisplatin treatment increased plasma blood urea nitrogen, creatinine and hydrogen peroxide and decreased cytochrome P450 content in renal and hepatic tissues. It also reduced the plasmatic testosterone level and caused a depletion of testicular 17a-progesterone hydroxylase activity. In the group fed with Lisosan G and treated with cisplatin blood urea nitrogen and creatinine returned to the control level indicating a protective effect of Lisosan G. It was also observed that the ones fed with Lisosan G were able to attenuate the decrease in the P450-dependent activities and the activities of antioxidant enzymes as well. Lisosan G protected the testicular 17a-progesterone hydroxylase activity and increased the plasma testosterone level compared to animals treated only with cisplatin. Our results showed a protective effect of Lisosan G against the cisplatin induced toxicity. The protective effect of Lisosan G could be associated mainly with the attenuation of the oxidative stress and the preservation in antioxidant enzymes

Xenobiotic Metabolizing Cytocbrome P450 in Pig; a Promising Animai Model

Abstract: The pig has been used as an important animai model far human studies because of its similarity in size, physiology and disease development However, in contrast to the extensive data available on the cytochrome P450 (CYP) system far humans and rodents, the data related to pig afe limited because or, among others, the presence of intra-species differences (domestic pigs and minipigs) The knowledge of the CYP superfamily in a given experimental animaI is crucial far pharmacological and toxicological tests in developing drugs and far understanding the metaboli~ pathways of toxicants and carcinogens. In addition, information on the CYP system in pigs is Important smce Il plays a domlnant role m the metabolism of veterinary drugs, whose residues rernain in the porcine tissues which afe food far humans The aim of the present review is to examine -in the liver alId extrahepatic tissues of pig -our current knowledge of the xenobioticmetabolizing CYPs be!onging lO. famili.es 1-4, in terms of drug metabolism, substrate specificity, inhibition, gene expression and receptor- dnven regulatlon, m companson wlth human data It is hoped, furthermore, that this review may stimulate research on the porcine drug-metabollzmg enzymes morder to evaluate the hypothesis whereby pig data may better reflect human drug metabolism and toxicity than those obtained from the traditional non-rodent models. Keywords: Pig, minipig, cytochrome P450 (CYP), liver, extrahepatic tissues, animai model, xenobiotics, porcine nuclear receptors

AI for All: Operationalising Diversity and Inclusion Requirements for AI Systems

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) permeates many aspects of society, it brings numerous advantages while at the same time raising ethical concerns and potential risks, such as perpetuating inequalities through biased or discriminatory decision-making. To develop AI systems that cater for the needs of diverse users and uphold ethical values, it is essential to consider and integrate diversity and inclusion (D&I) principles throughout AI development and deployment. Requirements engineering (RE) is a fundamental process in developing software systems by eliciting and specifying relevant needs from diverse stakeholders. This research aims to address the lack of research and practice on how to elicit and capture D&I requirements for AI systems. We have conducted comprehensive data collection and synthesis from the literature review to extract requirements themes related to D&I in AI. We have proposed a tailored user story template to capture D&I requirements and conducted focus group exercises to use the themes and user story template in writing D&I requirements for two example AI systems. Additionally, we have investigated the capability of our solution by generating synthetic D&I requirements captured in user stories with the help of a Large Language Model.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure