Crowdsourcing for Top-K Query Processing over Uncertain Data

Querying uncertain data has become a prominent application due to the proliferation of user-generated content from social media and of data streams from sensors. When data ambiguity cannot be reduced algorithmically, crowdsourcing proves a viable approach, which consists of posting tasks to humans and harnessing their judgment for improving the confidence about data values or relationships. This paper tackles the problem of processing top- K queries over uncertain data with the help of crowdsourcing for quickly converging to the realordering of relevant results. Several offline and online approaches for addressing questions to a crowd are defined and contrasted on both synthetic and real data sets, with the aim of minimizing the crowd interactions necessary to find the realordering of the result set

Neutralizing antibodies to Omicron after the fourth SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine dose in immunocompromised patients highlight the need of additional boosters

IntroductionImmunocompromised patients have been shown to have an impaired immune response to COVID-19 vaccines.MethodsHere we compared the B-cell, T-cell and neutralizing antibody response to WT and Omicron BA.2 SARS-CoV-2 virus after the fourth dose of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in patients with hematological malignancies (HM, n=71), solid tumors (ST, n=39) and immune-rheumatological (IR, n=25) diseases. The humoral and T-cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination were analyzed by quantifying the anti-RBD antibodies, their neutralization activity and the IFN-γ released after spike specific stimulation.ResultsWe show that the T-cell response is similarly boosted by the fourth dose across the different subgroups, while the antibody response is improved only in patients not receiving B-cell targeted therapies, independent on the pathology. However, 9% of patients with anti-RBD antibodies did not have neutralizing antibodies to either virus variants, while an additional 5.7% did not have neutralizing antibodies to Omicron BA.2, making these patients particularly vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 infection. The increment of neutralizing antibodies was very similar towards Omicron BA.2 and WT virus after the third or fourth dose of vaccine, suggesting that there is no preferential skewing towards either virus variant with the booster dose. The only limited step is the amount of antibodies that are elicited after vaccination, thus increasing the probability of developing neutralizing antibodies to both variants of virus.DiscussionThese data support the recommendation of additional booster doses in frail patients to enhance the development of a B-cell response directed against Omicron and/or to enhance the T-cell response in patients treated with anti-CD20

Towards an unbiased approach for the evaluation of social data geolocation

We present a study that reveals a significant statistical bias in the distributions of geolocated and non-geolocated social data. We state that this bias affects the real performance of social geolocation algorithms and can impair the results of these algorithms, which are commonly trained and tested on datasets consisting of crawled geolocated data. At last, we propose the construction of an a-posteriori geolocated dataset for an unbiased estimation of new and state-of-the-art algorithms alike

The Space of Movement between Real and Virtual: The Purpose of a Pilot Project

To realize physical activities guidelines for ageing people, the promotion of walking groups seems to be an effective way. Walking groups, supported by wearable and portable technologies, seems to be a good opportunity to merge social, educational, and physical promotion in elderly. The SCC Innovation Hub & Living Lab Network project and the Walk&Talky service move in this direction, in order to better identify the effective outcome to ameliorate technology’s purpose and consequently ageing people participation. In particular, Walk&Talky is a service that supports walking leaders and walking groups participants by keeping track of the performed physical activity and monitoring their fatigue status while walking. Through this tool, we aim at easing the psychological burden of constantly checking the adequateness of physical exercise (which is left to the automatic tools, e.g., wearable sensors), allowing the elderly to enjoy the social aspects of the walking group activities. This should allow them to put sociability and relationships as the core of the activities

Motor Learning for Ageing: An Innovative Digital Approach

È ampiamente riconosciuto che l'attività fisica, intesa come combinazione di esercizi aerobici, di forza e di equilibrio, giochi un ruolo importante nel contrastare il fisiologico declino motorio e cognitivo nell’età adulta e anziana. Da anni ormai, in particolare in seguito alle restrizioni legate all’evento pandemico sa Sars-Cov2, la proposta di esercizi da poter compiere in autonomia, e a distanza, si è arricchita anche per la popolazione attiva anziana. dove la richiesta motoria non può prescindere da un approccio all’ apprendimento motorio che vada oltre la mera esecuzione segmentale ma che permetta, invece, una organizzazione del movimento del corpo nella sua globalità, con l'obiettivo di ri-apprendere le abilità motorie in una modalità adattata a questa fase della vita. È quindi necessario progettare un sistema educativo all’attività fisica che sia dedicato agli anziani, anche per l'esercizio a distanza. Su queste basi, il nostro lavoro si propone di costruire un sistema di esercizi che possa essere gestito in autonomia, tramite un'applicazione per smartphone, e che guidi gli anziani a costruire movimenti dal segmentale al globale, con una progressione crescente in difficoltà e con un monitoraggio continuo.It is widely accepted that physical activity, undertaken as a combination of aerobic, strength and balance exercise, has a key role in the reduction of overall age- related decline. For years now, also due to pandemic restrictions several distance exercises for elderly have been suggested. Elderly must face an inevitable physical decline and an increasing cognitive and learning limitation due to aging. This requires a global motor learning approach that goes beyond the mere segmental execution and lets the older senses the own body perception with the aim to learn motor skills in a renewed modality, adapted to ageing limitations. Thus, there is a need to design an educational system dedicated to older people for remote exercise by means of a smartphone application. On this basis, the proposed intervention aims to educate elderly to build global movements through an innovative perspective based on the segmentary perception of the body during exercise with the aid of a smartphone