A tool for knowledge-oriented physics-based motion planning and simulation

The book covers a variety of topics in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and their impact on innovation and business. The authors discuss various innovations, business and industrial motivations, and impact on humans and the interplay between those factors in terms of finance, demand, and competition. Topics discussed include the convergence of Machine to Machine (M2M), Internet of Things (IoT), Social, and Big Data. They also discuss AI and its integration into technologies from machine learning, predictive analytics, security software, to intelligent agents, and many more. Contributions come from academics and professionals around the world. Covers the most recent practices in ICT related topics pertaining to technological growth, innovation, and business; Presents a survey on the most recent technological areas revolutionizing how humans communicate and interact; Features four sections: IoT, Wireless Ad Hoc & Sensor Networks, Fog Computing, and Big Data Analytics.(Chapter) The recent advancements in robotic systems set new challenges for robotic simulation software, particularly for planning. It requires the realistic behavior of the robots and the objects in the simulation environment by incorporating their dynamics. Furthermore, it requires the capability of reasoning about the action effects. To cope with these challenges, this study proposes an open-source simulation tool for knowledge-oriented physics-based motion planning by extending The Kautham Project, a C++ based open-source simulation tool for motion planning. The proposed simulation tool provides a flexible way to incorporate the physics, knowledge and reasoning in planning process. Moreover, it provides ROS-based interface to handle the manipulation actions (such as push/pull) and an easy way to communicate with the real robotsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Knowledge, attitude and practices towards eye care, among primary health care workers in District Ckakwal.

Introduction: Despite the fact, that an estimated 80% of worldwide blindness is preventable or treatable, the number of individuals living with blindness or impaired vision is on a rise. According to epidemiological data, worldwide over 2.2 billion people are blind or have impaired vision and 90% of them live in underdeveloped countries. A large number of people consult primary health care workers for their health issues, whether it is general illness or eye problems. Objectives: To assess the Knowledge, Attitude, and Practices (KAP) of Primary Health Care workers with regard to Primary Eye Care (PEC) in District Chakwal, Pakistan. Methodology: A Quantitative Cross-sectional study design, using a Random Sampling technique was employed. Participants in the study were given a standardized semi-structured questionnaire to fill out. The questionnaire included questions on primary health care providers’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices about PEC. The data were analyzed by using the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version 26. Results: Among the total of 232 Primary Health Care workers 73.7% were below 40 years of age. The majority of primary health care workers were female (60.8%). About 40.9% were having diplomas. The majority of workers (58.6%) had less than 5 years of experience as a Primary Health Care worker. Most of them (60%) had sufficient knowledge about the causes of eye diseases or injuries and (40.8%) had knowledge about conditions that may result in eye illnesses or injuries. The attitude toward referral of patients to medical doctors was 51.2%. The practices regarding method and approach for the treatment of eye diseases, of the majority of workers (58.9%) were not satisfactory. Conclusion: Knowledge regarding causes of eye diseases, diagnosis, and methods of treatment were not satisfactory amongst the primary health care workers. A positive attitude was noted for the will to improve the knowledge of eye care. The research revealed, the requirement for a training program for primary health care workers regarding modern primary eye care

OS2: Oblivious similarity based searching for encrypted data outsourced to an untrusted domain

© 2017 Pervez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Public cloud storage services are becoming prevalent and myriad data sharing, archiving and collaborative services have emerged which harness the pay-as-you-go business model of public cloud. To ensure privacy and confidentiality often encrypted data is outsourced to such services, which further complicates the process of accessing relevant data by using search queries. Search over encrypted data schemes solve this problem by exploiting cryptographic primitives and secure indexing to identify outsourced data that satisfy the search criteria. Almost all of these schemes rely on exact matching between the encrypted data and search criteria. A few schemes which extend the notion of exact matching to similarity based search, lack realism as those schemes rely on trusted third parties or due to increase storage and computational complexity. In this paper we propose Oblivious Similarity based Search (OS2) for encrypted data. It enables authorized users to model their own encrypted search queries which are resilient to typographical errors. Unlike conventional methodologies, OS2 ranks the search results by using similarity measure offering a better search experience than exact matching. It utilizes encrypted bloom filter and probabilistic homomorphic encryption to enable authorized users to access relevant data without revealing results of search query evaluation process to the untrusted cloud service provider. Encrypted bloom filter based search enables OS2 to reduce search space to potentially relevant encrypted data avoiding unnecessary computation on public cloud. The efficacy of OS2 is evaluated on Google App Engine for various bloom filter lengths on different cloud configurations

An Aspartic Protease of the Scabies Mite Sarcoptes scabiei Is Involved in the Digestion of Host Skin and Blood Macromolecules

BackgroundScabies is a disease of worldwide significance, causing considerable morbidity in both humans and other animals. The scabies mite Sarcoptes scabiei burrows into the skin of its host, obtaining nutrition from host skin and blood. Aspartic proteases mediate a range of diverse and essential physiological functions such as tissue invasion and migration, digestion, moulting and reproduction in a number of parasitic organisms. We investigated whether aspartic proteases may play role in scabies mite digestive processes.Methodology/Principle FindingsWe demonstrated the presence of aspartic protease activity in whole scabies mite extract. We then identified a scabies mite aspartic protease gene sequence and produced recombinant active enzyme. The recombinant scabies mite aspartic protease was capable of digesting human haemoglobin, serum albumin, fibrinogen and fibronectin, but not collagen III or laminin. This is consistent with the location of the scabies mites in the upper epidermis of human skin.Conclusions/SignificanceThe development of novel therapeutics for scabies is of increasing importance given the evidence of emerging resistance to current treatments. We have shown that a scabies mite aspartic protease plays a role in the digestion of host skin and serum molecules, raising the possibility that interference with the function of the enzyme may impact on mite survival

Comparative bioavailability analysis of oral alendronate sodium formulations in Pakistan

Alendronate sodium, a bisphosphonate drug, it is used to treat osteoporosis and other bone diseases. The present study was designed to conduct comparative bioavailability analysis of oral formulations of alendronate sodium through an open-label, randomized, 2-sequence, 2-period crossover study. Healthy adult male Pakistani volunteers received a single 70 mg dose of the test or reference formulation of alendronate sodium followed by a 7 day washout period. Plasma drug concentrations were determined using a validated HPLC post column fluorescence derivatization method. AUC0-t, AUC0-8, Cmax and Tmax were determined by non-compartmental analysis and were found within the permitted range of 80% to 125% set by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Results show that both in vitro and in vivo assays of all test brands were within the specification of the US Pharmacopoeial limits and were statistically bioequivalent. No adverse events were reported in this study

Novel hydroquinone derivatives alleviate algesia, inflammation and pyrexia in the absence of gastric ulcerogenicity

Purpose: To synthesize and characterize novel hydroquinone compounds that exhibit an aspirin-like pharmacological profile devoid of ulcerogenic side effects.Methods: Two novel hydroquinone derivatives, viz, 2,5-bis(piperidinomethyl)hydroquinone and 2,5- bis(pyrrolidinomet hyl)hydroquinone, were synthesized by refluxing hydroquinone, paraformaldehyde and secondary amines (piperidine or pyrrolidine) in ethanol. The structures were authenticated by infrared (IR) spectroscopy, elemental analysis, mass spectrometry (MS) and 1H and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopic techniques. The synthesized derivatives were evaluated for antinociceptive, anti-inflammatory and antipyretic activities along with gastric-ulcerogenicity using wellknown testing paradigms. Aspirin served as reference standard.Results: The newly synthesized hydroquinone derivatives, significantly attenuated tonic visceral chemically-induced nociception at 10 mg/kg (p < 0.01, p < 0.001), 20 and 40 mg/kg (p < 0.001), inhibited the temporal-inflammatory reaction at 50 mg/kg (2 - 5 h, p < 0.05, p < 0.001), 100 and 150 mg/kg (1 - 5 h, p < 0.05, p < 0.01, p < 0.001) in addition to alleviating the febrile-response at test doses during 0.5 h (p < 0.05, p < 0.01, p < 0.001), 1 and 1.5 h (p < 0.001) of the study period. The synthesized compounds exhibited improved gastric tolerability profile since they were devoid of aspirin-associated biochemical and ulcerative changes. The in silico studies predicted high binding affinity of the hydroquinone derivatives to the active site of the cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) enzyme.Conclusion: The synthesized hydroquinone compounds possess analgesic, antipyretic and antiinflammatory properties with low gastric-ulcerogenic potential. This may be credited to preferential inhibition of the COX-2 enzyme and the beneficial basic rather than acidic chemical nature of the compounds. However, further molecular studies are required to substantiate these findings.Keywords: 2,5-Bis(piperidinomethyl)hydroquinone], 2,5- is(pyrrolidinomethyl)hydroquinone, Antiinflammatory, Antinociceptive, Antipyretic, Gastric-ulcerogenicity, Algesi

Thymoquinone inhibition of acquisition and expression of alcohol-induced behavioral sensitization

Repeated low doses of alcohol have been shown to progressively enhance locomotor activity in mice, and this phenomenon is designated as behavioral sensitization. Thymoquinone, a major active component of Nigella sativa oil has been investigated in a number of studies for its neuroprotective effects against a variety of ailments. This study was conducted to explore the therapeutic potential of thymoquinone on the acquisition and expression of alcohol-induced behavioral sensitization. Mice treated with alcohol (2.2 g/kg/day) or saline for 13 days and subsequently challenged with an acute alcohol dose (2.2 g/kg) 5 days later were orally administered acute doses of thymoquinone (10, 20 and 30 mg/kg). Thymoquinone subacute treatment with all doses throughout alcohol exposure significantly inhibited both the development and expression phases of alcohol behavioral sensitization in a dose-dependent manner. However, acute treatment with thymoquinone (30 mg/kg) only reversed the expression phase of sensitization. These findings are explained in terms of the known GABA promoting action of thymoquinone in relation to the motive circuit within the limbic component of the basal ganglia. It is concluded that thymoquinone may be a potential therapeutic option for the treatment and prevention of alcohol induced behavioral sensitization

On smart gaze based annotation of histopathology images for training of deep convolutional neural networks

Unavailability of large training datasets is a bottleneck that needs to be overcome to realize the true potential of deep learning in histopathology applications. Although slide digitization via whole slide imaging scanners has increased the speed of data acquisition, labeling of virtual slides requires a substantial time investment from pathologists. Eye gaze annotations have the potential to speed up the slide labeling process. This work explores the viability and timing comparisons of eye gaze labeling compared to conventional manual labeling for training object detectors. Challenges associated with gaze based labeling and methods to refine the coarse data annotations for subsequent object detection are also discussed. Results demonstrate that gaze tracking based labeling can save valuable pathologist time and delivers good performance when employed for training a deep object detector. Using the task of localization of Keratin Pearls in cases of oral squamous cell carcinoma as a test case, we compare the performance gap between deep object detectors trained using hand-labelled and gaze-labelled data. On average, compared to 'Bounding-box' based hand-labeling, gaze-labeling required 57.6% less time per label and compared to 'Freehand' labeling, gaze-labeling required on average 85% less time per label

Effects of a high-dose 24-h infusion of tranexamic acid on death and thromboembolic events in patients with acute gastrointestinal bleeding (HALT-IT): an international randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Background: Tranexamic acid reduces surgical bleeding and reduces death due to bleeding in patients with trauma. Meta-analyses of small trials show that tranexamic acid might decrease deaths from gastrointestinal bleeding. We aimed to assess the effects of tranexamic acid in patients with gastrointestinal bleeding. Methods: We did an international, multicentre, randomised, placebo-controlled trial in 164 hospitals in 15 countries. Patients were enrolled if the responsible clinician was uncertain whether to use tranexamic acid, were aged above the minimum age considered an adult in their country (either aged 16 years and older or aged 18 years and older), and had significant (defined as at risk of bleeding to death) upper or lower gastrointestinal bleeding. Patients were randomly assigned by selection of a numbered treatment pack from a box containing eight packs that were identical apart from the pack number. Patients received either a loading dose of 1 g tranexamic acid, which was added to 100 mL infusion bag of 0·9% sodium chloride and infused by slow intravenous injection over 10 min, followed by a maintenance dose of 3 g tranexamic acid added to 1 L of any isotonic intravenous solution and infused at 125 mg/h for 24 h, or placebo (sodium chloride 0·9%). Patients, caregivers, and those assessing outcomes were masked to allocation. The primary outcome was death due to bleeding within 5 days of randomisation; analysis excluded patients who received neither dose of the allocated treatment and those for whom outcome data on death were unavailable. This trial was registered with Current Controlled Trials, ISRCTN11225767, and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT01658124. Findings: Between July 4, 2013, and June 21, 2019, we randomly allocated 12 009 patients to receive tranexamic acid (5994, 49·9%) or matching placebo (6015, 50·1%), of whom 11 952 (99·5%) received the first dose of the allocated treatment. Death due to bleeding within 5 days of randomisation occurred in 222 (4%) of 5956 patients in the tranexamic acid group and in 226 (4%) of 5981 patients in the placebo group (risk ratio [RR] 0·99, 95% CI 0·82–1·18). Arterial thromboembolic events (myocardial infarction or stroke) were similar in the tranexamic acid group and placebo group (42 [0·7%] of 5952 vs 46 [0·8%] of 5977; 0·92; 0·60 to 1·39). Venous thromboembolic events (deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism) were higher in tranexamic acid group than in the placebo group (48 [0·8%] of 5952 vs 26 [0·4%] of 5977; RR 1·85; 95% CI 1·15 to 2·98). Interpretation: We found that tranexamic acid did not reduce death from gastrointestinal bleeding. On the basis of our results, tranexamic acid should not be used for the treatment of gastrointestinal bleeding outside the context of a randomised trial

Artificial Subjectivity: Personal Semantic Memory Model for Cognitive Agents

Personal semantic memory is a way of inducing subjectivity in intelligent agents. Personal semantic memory has knowledge related to personal beliefs, self-knowledge, preferences, and perspectives in humans. Modeling this cognitive feature in the intelligent agent can help them in perception, learning, reasoning, and judgments. This paper presents a methodology for the development of personal semantic memory in response to external information. The main contribution of the work is to propose and implement the computational version of personal semantic memory. The proposed model has modules for perception, learning, sentiment analysis, knowledge representation, and personal semantic construction. These modules work in synergy for personal semantic knowledge formulation, learning, and storage. Personal semantics are added to the existing body of knowledge qualitatively and quantitatively. We performed multiple experiments where the agent had conversations with the humans. Results show an increase in personal semantic knowledge in the agent’s memory during conversations with an F1 score of 0.86. These personal semantics evolved qualitatively and quantitatively with time during experiments. Results demonstrated that agents with the given personal semantics architecture possessed personal semantics that can help the agent to produce some sort of subjectivity in the future