ANGELAH: A Framework for Assisting Elders At Home

The ever growing percentage of elderly people within modern societies poses welfare systems under relevant stress. In fact, partial and progressive loss of motor, sensorial, and/or cognitive skills renders elders unable to live autonomously, eventually leading to their hospitalization. This results in both relevant emotional and economic costs. Ubiquitous computing technologies can offer interesting opportunities for in-house safety and autonomy. However, existing systems partially address in-house safety requirements and typically focus on only elder monitoring and emergency detection. The paper presents ANGELAH, a middleware-level solution integrating both ”elder monitoring and emergency detection” solutions and networking solutions. ANGELAH has two main features: i) it enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and ii) provides a solid framework for creating and managing rescue teams composed of individuals willing to promptly assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of ANGELAH, designed for a case study for helping elders with vision impairments, is developed and interesting results are obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed

Fermat, Leibniz, Euler, and the gang: The true history of the concepts of limit and shadow

Fermat, Leibniz, Euler, and Cauchy all used one or another form of approximate equality, or the idea of discarding "negligible" terms, so as to obtain a correct analytic answer. Their inferential moves find suitable proxies in the context of modern theories of infinitesimals, and specifically the concept of shadow. We give an application to decreasing rearrangements of real functions.Comment: 35 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Notices of the American Mathematical Society 61 (2014), no.

Mediterranean diet vegetable foods protect meat lipids from oxidation during in vitro gastro-intestinal digestion

Meat lipids oxidation during digestion gives rise to a post-prandial oxidative stress condition, which negatively affects human health. Mediterranean Diet vegetables contain high amount of phenolic compounds, which potentially may reduce the oxidative phenomena during digestion. In vitro co-digestion of turkey meat with a typical Mediterranean Diet salad containing tomato, onion, black olives, extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) and basil, dose-dependently reduced lipid peroxidation. Onion and EVOO were more effective in limiting oxidation than the other foods, resulting in negligible concentrations of lipid hydroperoxides after digestion. Specific phenolic classes dominated the phenolic profile of the different foods, such as flavonols and anthocyanins in onion, phenolic acids in tomato and basil, and tyrosol-derivatives in black olives and EVOO. The correlation between lipid peroxidation inhibition, phenolic constituents and antioxidant properties was evaluated by principal component analysis (PCA). Flavonols and anthocyanin were the major contributors to the bioactive response of vegetable foods

Pentraxin 3 in cardiovascular disease

The long pentraxin PTX3 is a member of the pentraxin family produced locally by stromal and myeloid cells in response to proinflammatory signals and microbial moieties. The prototype of the pentraxin family is C reactive protein (CRP), a widely-used biomarker in human pathologies with an inflammatory or infectious origin. Data so far describe PTX3 as a multifunctional protein acting as a functional ancestor of antibodies and playing a regulatory role in inflammation. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of mortality worldwide, and inflammation is crucial in promoting it. Data from animal models indicate that PTX3 can have cardioprotective and atheroprotective roles regulating inflammation. PTX3 has been investigated in several clinical settings as possible biomarker of CVD. Data collected so far indicate that PTX3 plasma levels rise rapidly in acute myocardial infarction, heart failure and cardiac arrest, reflecting the extent of tissue damage and predicting the risk of mortality

Black swans or dragon kings? A simple test for deviations from the power law

We develop a simple test for deviations from power law tails, which is based on the asymptotic properties of the empirical distribution function. We use this test to answer the question whether great natural disasters, financial crashes or electricity price spikes should be classified as dragon kings or 'only' as black swans

Estimate of a spatially variable reservoir compressibility by assimilation of ground surface displacement data

Abstract. Fluid extraction from producing hydrocarbon reservoirs can cause anthropogenic land subsidence. In this work, a 3-D finite-element (FE) geomechanical model is used to predict the land surface displacements above a gas field where displacement observations are available. An ensemble-based data assimilation (DA) algorithm is implemented that incorporates these observations into the response of the FE geomechanical model, thus re- ducing the uncertainty on the geomechanical parameters of the sedimentary basin embedding the reservoir. The calibration focuses on the uniaxial vertical compressibility c M , which is often the geomechanical parameter to which the model response is most sensitive. The partition of the reservoir into blocks delimited by faults moti- vates the assumption of a heterogeneous spatial distribution of c M within the reservoir. A preliminary synthetic test case is here used to evaluate the effectiveness of the DA algorithm in reducing the parameter uncertainty associated with a heterogeneous c M distribution. A significant improvement in matching the observed data is obtained with respect to the case in which a homogeneous c M is hypothesized. These preliminary results are quite encouraging and call for the application of the procedure to real gas fields

Towards a Conceptualization of Sociomaterial Entanglement

In knowledge representation, socio-technical systems can be modeled as multiagent systems in which the local knowledge of each individual agent can be seen as a context. In this paper we propose formal ontologies as a means to describe the assumptions driving the construction of contexts as local theories and to enable interoperability among them. In particular, we present two alternative conceptualizations of the notion of sociomateriality (and entanglement), which is central in the recent debates on socio-technical systems in the social sciences, namely critical and agential realism. We thus start by providing a model of entanglement according to the critical realist view, representing it as a property of objects that are essentially dependent on different modules of an already given ontology. We refine then our treatment by proposing a taxonomy of sociomaterial entanglements that distinguishes between ontological and epistemological entanglement. In the final section, we discuss the second perspective, which is more challenging form the point of view of knowledge representation, and we show that the very distinction of information into modules can be at least in principle built out of the assumption of an entangled reality

Characterization of potential biomarkers of reactogenicity of licensed antiviral vaccines: randomized controlled clinical trials conducted by the BIOVACSAFE consortium

Funding text The authors are grateful for the vital contributions of the participating study volunteers, clinicians, nurses, and laboratory technicians at the Surrey study site. The work by Roberto Leone, laboratory technician at Humanitas Clinical and Research Center, is gratefully acknowledged. Finally, they thank Ellen Oe (GSK) for scientific writing assistance. The research leading to these results has received support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n°115308, resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) and EFPIA companies’ in-kind contribution. The contribution of the European Commission to the Advanced Immunization Technologies (ADITEC) project (grant agreement n° 280873) is also gratefully acknowledged. Publisher Copyright: © 2019, The Author(s).Biomarkers predictive of inflammatory events post-vaccination could accelerate vaccine development. Within the BIOVACSAFE framework, we conducted three identically designed, placebo-controlled inpatient/outpatient clinical studies (NCT01765413/NCT01771354/NCT01771367). Six antiviral vaccination strategies were evaluated to generate training data-sets of pre-/post-vaccination vital signs, blood changes and whole-blood gene transcripts, and to identify putative biomarkers of early inflammation/reactogenicity that could guide the design of subsequent focused confirmatory studies. Healthy adults (N = 123; 20–21/group) received one immunization at Day (D)0. Alum-adjuvanted hepatitis B vaccine elicited vital signs and inflammatory (CRP/innate cells) responses that were similar between primed/naive vaccinees, and low-level gene responses. MF59-adjuvanted trivalent influenza vaccine (ATIV) induced distinct physiological (temperature/heart rate/reactogenicity) response-patterns not seen with non-adjuvanted TIV or with the other vaccines. ATIV also elicited robust early (D1) activation of IFN-related genes (associated with serum IP-10 levels) and innate-cell-related genes, and changes in monocyte/neutrophil/lymphocyte counts, while TIV elicited similar but lower responses. Due to viral replication kinetics, innate gene activation by live yellow-fever or varicella-zoster virus (YFV/VZV) vaccines was more suspended, with early IFN-associated responses in naïve YFV-vaccine recipients but not in primed VZV-vaccine recipients. Inflammatory responses (physiological/serum markers, innate-signaling transcripts) are therefore a function of the vaccine type/composition and presence/absence of immune memory. The data reported here have guided the design of confirmatory Phase IV trials using ATIV to provide tools to identify inflammatory or reactogenicity biomarkers.Peer reviewe

The unintegrated gluon distribution from the CCFM equation

The gluon distribution f(x, k_t^2,mu^2), unintegrated over the transverse momentum k_t of the gluon, satisfies the angular-ordered CCFM equation which interlocks the dependence on the scale k_t with the scale \mu of the probe. We show how, to leading logarithmic accuracy, the equation can be simplified to a single scale problem. In particular we demonstrate how to determine the two-scale unintegrated distribution f(x,k_t^2,mu^2) from knowledge of the integrated gluon obtained from a unified scheme embodying both BFKL and DGLAP evolution.Comment: 16 pages LaTeX, 3 eps figure