306 research outputs found
Self Care Among Filipino Immigrants in the United States Who Have Hypertension
Hypertension (HTN) is a leading risk factor in the development of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and stroke—two major causes of mortality and morbidity in the United States (US)—across all racial and ethnic groups, including Filipino immigrants. The results of early and recent studies that explored HTN among Filipinos in the US have consistently revealed a prevalence rate that is highest among Asian Americans. There is also evidence in the literature that indicates this population’s sub-optimal control and management of HTN when compared with other Asian American subgroups. Despite this reported alarming information about HTN for this population, there is a noticeable lack of studies on HTN among Filipinos in the US, especially those that explore the unique factors that might influence how this group experience and manage this chronic illness. The purpose of this study was to explore self-care among Filipino immigrants (n=163) who have HTN, and its relationship to acculturation, acculturative stress, HTN self-efficacy, and patient activation using the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping (TMSC) as a theoretical framework. The study results revealed that HTN self-efficacy (=0.27, t(116)=3.045, p=0.003) and patient activation (=0.21, t(116)=2.292, p=.024) significantly contributed to the regression model that accounted for 29.5% of the variance in HTN self-care for this sample. Further, a test of mediation on the role of patient activation in the relationship between HTN self-care and patient activation was conducted. The results of the bias corrected estimate of the indirect effect revealed that patient activation had a mediating role between HTN self efficacy and HTN self care (B=.15; CI95% = .0356, .3239) for this sample. Findings from this study highlight the importance of addressing HTN self efficacy and patient activation in improving HTN self care that would not only improve individual health outcomes but could also potentially reduce health inequity for this population
Parameterized Verification of Systems with Global Synchronization and Guards
Inspired by distributed applications that use consensus or other agreement
protocols for global coordination, we define a new computational model for
parameterized systems that is based on a general global synchronization
primitive and allows for global transition guards. Our model generalizes many
existing models in the literature, including broadcast protocols and guarded
protocols. We show that reachability properties are decidable for systems
without guards, and give sufficient conditions under which they remain
decidable in the presence of guards. Furthermore, we investigate cutoffs for
reachability properties and provide sufficient conditions for small cutoffs in
a number of cases that are inspired by our target applications.Comment: Accepted at CAV 202
Complexity and Expressivity of Branching- and Alternating-Time Temporal Logics with Finitely Many Variables
We show that Branching-time temporal logics CTL and CTL*, as well as
Alternating-time temporal logics ATL and ATL*, are as semantically expressive
in the language with a single propositional variable as they are in the full
language, i.e., with an unlimited supply of propositional variables. It follows
that satisfiability for CTL, as well as for ATL, with a single variable is
EXPTIME-complete, while satisfiability for CTL*, as well as for ATL*, with a
single variable is 2EXPTIME-complete,--i.e., for these logics, the
satisfiability for formulas with only one variable is as hard as satisfiability
for arbitrary formulas.Comment: Prefinal version of the published pape
Computer aided synthesis: a game theoretic approach
In this invited contribution, we propose a comprehensive introduction to game
theory applied in computer aided synthesis. In this context, we give some
classical results on two-player zero-sum games and then on multi-player non
zero-sum games. The simple case of one-player games is strongly related to
automata theory on infinite words. All along the article, we focus on general
approaches to solve the studied problems, and we provide several illustrative
examples as well as intuitions on the proofs.Comment: Invitation contribution for conference "Developments in Language
Theory" (DLT 2017
Tight Cutoffs for Guarded Protocols with Fairness
Guarded protocols were introduced in a seminal paper by Emerson and Kahlon
(2000), and describe systems of processes whose transitions are enabled or
disabled depending on the existence of other processes in certain local states.
We study parameterized model checking and synthesis of guarded protocols, both
aiming at formal correctness arguments for systems with any number of
processes. Cutoff results reduce reasoning about systems with an arbitrary
number of processes to systems of a determined, fixed size. Our work stems from
the observation that existing cutoff results for guarded protocols i) are
restricted to closed systems, and ii) are of limited use for liveness
properties because reductions do not preserve fairness. We close these gaps and
obtain new cutoff results for open systems with liveness properties under
fairness assumptions. Furthermore, we obtain cutoffs for the detection of
global and local deadlocks, which are of paramount importance in synthesis.
Finally, we prove tightness or asymptotic tightness for the new cutoffs.Comment: Accepted for publication at VMCAI 2016. Extended version, revised
after conference review
Promptness and Bounded Fairness in Concurrent and Parameterized Systems
We investigate the satisfaction of specifications in Prompt
Linear Temporal Logic (Prompt-LTL) by concurrent systems. Prompt-LTL is an extension of LTL that allows to specify parametric bounds onthe satisfaction of eventualities, thus adding a quantitative aspect to the specification language. We establish a connection between bounded fairness, bounded stutter equivalence, and the satisfaction of Prompt-LTL\X
formulas. Based on this connection, we prove the first cutoff results for different classes of systems with a parametric number of components and quantitative specifications, thereby identifying previously unknown
decidable fragments of the parameterized model checking problem
Interrupt Timed Automata: verification and expressiveness
We introduce the class of Interrupt Timed Automata (ITA), a subclass of
hybrid automata well suited to the description of timed multi-task systems with
interruptions in a single processor environment. While the reachability problem
is undecidable for hybrid automata we show that it is decidable for ITA. More
precisely we prove that the untimed language of an ITA is regular, by building
a finite automaton as a generalized class graph. We then establish that the
reachability problem for ITA is in NEXPTIME and in PTIME when the number of
clocks is fixed. To prove the first result, we define a subclass ITA- of ITA,
and show that (1) any ITA can be reduced to a language-equivalent automaton in
ITA- and (2) the reachability problem in this subclass is in NEXPTIME (without
any class graph). In the next step, we investigate the verification of real
time properties over ITA. We prove that model checking SCL, a fragment of a
timed linear time logic, is undecidable. On the other hand, we give model
checking procedures for two fragments of timed branching time logic. We also
compare the expressive power of classical timed automata and ITA and prove that
the corresponding families of accepted languages are incomparable. The result
also holds for languages accepted by controlled real-time automata (CRTA), that
extend timed automata. We finally combine ITA with CRTA, in a model which
encompasses both classes and show that the reachability problem is still
decidable. Additionally we show that the languages of ITA are neither closed
under complementation nor under intersection
- …