Navigating the Web in Search of Resources on Antimicrobial Stewardship in Health Care Institutions

Bacterial resistance to antimicrobials has become a public health threat for which coordinated action at the international, national, and local level is needed. Current recommendations for the control of antimicrobial overuse and resistance in hospitals recommend various strategies, including antimicrobial stewardship programs. Several of these integrated and multidisciplinary antimicrobial management programs provide detailed information and recommendations on the Web. We performed a search of the most relevant and authoritative Web sites in English that were available without need for special registration or cost. The search excluded community-based programs, and we present only established programs or those providing expert information useful for building a hospital-based antimicrobial stewardship program. The overview of these Web sites may be useful either for institutions or individuals planning to implement such programs in their own health care institution or for educational purposes targeted at different professionals involved in improving antimicrobial practic

Auto-FACE: An NMR Based Binding Site Mapping Program for Fast Chemical Exchange Protein-Ligand Systems

10.1371/journal.pone.0008943PLoS ONE52

Excited state properties of point defects in semiconductors and insulators investigated with time-dependent density functional theory

We present a formulation of spin-conserving and spin-flip, hybrid time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT), including the calculation of analytical forces, which allows for efficient calculations of excited state properties of solid-state systems with hundreds to thousands of atoms. We discuss an implementation on both GPU and CPU based architectures, along with several acceleration techniques. We then apply our formulation to the study of several point defects in semiconductors and insulators, specifically the negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy and neutral silicon-vacancy centers in diamond, the neutral divacancy center in 4H silicon carbide, and the neutral oxygen-vacancy center in magnesium oxide. Our results highlight the importance of taking into account structural relaxations in excited states, in order to interpret and predict optical absorption and emission mechanisms in spin-defects

A Survey of Adversarial CAPTCHAs on its History, Classification and Generation

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, short for CAPTCHA, is an essential and relatively easy way to defend against malicious attacks implemented by bots. The security and usability trade-off limits the use of massive geometric transformations to interfere deep model recognition and deep models even outperformed humans in complex CAPTCHAs. The discovery of adversarial examples provides an ideal solution to the security and usability trade-off by integrating adversarial examples and CAPTCHAs to generate adversarial CAPTCHAs that can fool the deep models. In this paper, we extend the definition of adversarial CAPTCHAs and propose a classification method for adversarial CAPTCHAs. Then we systematically review some commonly used methods to generate adversarial examples and methods that are successfully used to generate adversarial CAPTCHAs. Also, we analyze some defense methods that can be used to defend adversarial CAPTCHAs, indicating potential threats to adversarial CAPTCHAs. Finally, we discuss some possible future research directions for adversarial CAPTCHAs at the end of this paper.Comment: Submitted to ACM Computing Surveys (Under Review

Cooperative video transmission strategies via caching in small-cell networks

Small-cell network is a promising solution to the high video traffic. However, it has some fundamental problems, i.e., high backhaul cost, quality of experience (QoE) and interference. To address these issues, we propose a cooperative transmission strategy for video transmission in small-cell networks with caching. In the scheme, each video file is encoded into segments using a maximum distance separable rateless code. Then, a portion of each segment is cached at a certain small-cell base station (SBS), so that the SBSs can cooperatively transmit these segments to users without incurring high backhaul cost. When there is only one active user in the network, a greedy algorithm is utilized to deliver the video-file segment from the SBS with good channel state to the user watching videos in real time. This reduces video freezes and improves the QoE. When there exist several active users, interference will appear among them. To deal with interference, interference alignment (IA) is adopted. Based on the scheme for a single user, the greedy algorithm and IA are combined to transmit video-file segments to these users, and the performance of the system can be significantly improved. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme