Nowcasting of Earthquake Consequences Using Big Social Data

Messages posted to social media in the aftermath of a natural disaster have value beyond detecting the event itself. Mining such deliberately dropped digital traces allows a precise situational awareness, to help provide a timely estimate of the disaster’s consequences on the population and infrastructures. Yet, to date, the automatic assessment of damage has received little attention. Here, the authors explore feeding predictive models by tweets conveying on-the-ground social sensors’ observations, to nowcast the perceived intensity of earthquakes

Conceivable security risks and authentication techniques for smart devices

With the rapidly escalating use of smart devices and fraudulent transaction of users’ data from their devices, efficient and reliable techniques for authentication of the smart devices have become an obligatory issue. This paper reviews the security risks for mobile devices and studies several authentication techniques available for smart devices. The results from field studies enable a comparative evaluation of user-preferred authentication mechanisms and their opinions about reliability, biometric authentication and visual authentication techniques

Control of daughter centriole formation by the pericentriolar material

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2008. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Nature Publishing Group for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Nature Cell Biology 10 (2008): 322-328, doi:10.1038/ncb1694.Controlling the number of its centrioles is vital for the cell as supernumerary centrioles result in multipolar mitosis and genomic instability. Normally, just one daughter centriole forms on each mature (mother) centriole; however, a mother centriole can produce multiple daughters within a single cell cycle. The mechanisms that prevent centriole ‘overduplication’ are poorly understood. Here we use laser microsurgery to test the hypothesis that attachment of the daughter centriole to the wall of the mother inhibits formation of additional daughters. We show that physical removal of the daughter induces reduplication of the mother in Sarrested cells. Under conditions when multiple daughters simultaneously form on a single mother, all of these daughters must be removed to induce reduplication. Intriguingly, the number of daughter centrioles that form during reduplication does not always match the number of ablated daughter centrioles. We also find that exaggeration of the pericentriolar material (PCM) via overexpression of the PCM protein pericentrin in S-arrested CHO cells induces formation of numerous daughter centrioles. We propose that that the size of the PCM cloud associated with the mother centriole restricts the number of daughters that can form simultaneously.This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (GM GM59363) and the Human Frontiers Science Program (RGP0064). Construction of our laser microsurgery workstation was supported in part by a fellowship from Nikon/Marine Biological Laboratory (A.K.)

Homozygous Missense Variants in NTNG2, Encoding a Presynaptic Netrin-G2 Adhesion Protein, Lead to a Distinct Neurodevelopmental Disorder.

NTNG2 encodes netrin-G2, a membrane-anchored protein implicated in the molecular organization of neuronal circuitry and synaptic organization and diversification in vertebrates. In this study, through a combination of exome sequencing and autozygosity mapping, we have identified 16 individuals (from seven unrelated families) with ultra-rare homozygous missense variants in NTNG2; these individuals present with shared features of a neurodevelopmental disorder consisting of global developmental delay, severe to profound intellectual disability, muscle weakness and abnormal tone, autistic features, behavioral abnormalities, and variable dysmorphisms. The variants disrupt highly conserved residues across the protein. Functional experiments, including in silico analysis of the protein structure, in vitro assessment of cell surface expression, and in vitro knockdown, revealed potential mechanisms of pathogenicity of the variants, including loss of protein function and decreased neurite outgrowth. Our data indicate that appropriate expression of NTNG2 plays an important role in neurotypical development

Earthquake emergency management by Social Sensing

Social Sensing is based on the idea that communities or groups of people provide a set of information similar to those obtainable from a single sensor; this amount of information generate a complex and adequate knowledge of one or more specific issues. A possible field of application for Social Sensing is Emergency Management. By using the Social Media it is possible to gather updated information about emerging situations of danger, in order to gain greater situational awareness and to alert interested parties promptly or verify information obtained through other channels. A system able to timely detect events that are of social concern can be referred to as an Early Warning system. In this work we propose a novel and general architecture for an early warning system and, as a proof-of-concept, we describe an implementation of this architecture for a real scenario. We use Twitter as source of information for the detection of earthquakes on the Italian territory. We compare our results with official data provided by the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), the authority responsible for the monitoring of seismic events in Italy. Results show an high ability of the system in the timely detection of events with magnitude equal or greater than 3.5 degrees on the Richter scale with only 10% of False Positives

Hybrid Crowdsensing: A Novel Paradigm to Combine the Strengths of Opportunistic and Participatory Crowdsensing

Crowdsensing systems can be either participatory or oppor- tunistic, depending on whether the user intentionally con- tributes data, or she simply acts as the bearer of a sens- ing device from which data is transparently collected. In this paper, we propose hybrid crowdsensing, a social media- based paradigm which aims at combining the strengths of both participatory and opportunistic crowdsensing. With hybrid crowdsensing, possibly relevant data is collected via an opportunistic approach. Then, users that spontaneously contributed are directly contacted and asked to provide ad- ditional information following a participatory approach. To demonstrate its feasibility and usefulness, we experimented the proposed paradigm for involving Twitter users in an emergency relief scenario. For each of the two real-world experiments we analyze the answer ratio to our questions, their time distribution, and responders’ willingness to col- laborate. Results support the adoption of hybrid crowdsens- ing, especially in those practical scenarios where users are emotionally involved