3,222 research outputs found
The edge cloud: A holistic view of communication, computation and caching
The evolution of communication networks shows a clear shift of focus from
just improving the communications aspects to enabling new important services,
from Industry 4.0 to automated driving, virtual/augmented reality, Internet of
Things (IoT), and so on. This trend is evident in the roadmap planned for the
deployment of the fifth generation (5G) communication networks. This ambitious
goal requires a paradigm shift towards a vision that looks at communication,
computation and caching (3C) resources as three components of a single holistic
system. The further step is to bring these 3C resources closer to the mobile
user, at the edge of the network, to enable very low latency and high
reliability services. The scope of this chapter is to show that signal
processing techniques can play a key role in this new vision. In particular, we
motivate the joint optimization of 3C resources. Then we show how graph-based
representations can play a key role in building effective learning methods and
devising innovative resource allocation techniques.Comment: to appear in the book "Cooperative and Graph Signal Pocessing:
Principles and Applications", P. Djuric and C. Richard Eds., Academic Press,
Elsevier, 201
Analysis of Hydrogeological Risks Related to Climate Change: Testing the ClimeApp Assessment Tool on the Torino Nord Homogenous Zone
The current changes in temperatures and precipitations can lead to increased frequency and magnitude of natural hazards such as floods, resulting in forthcoming losses of life and damages to private and public properties. This paper presents an applied hydrogeological risk assessment methodology developed as part of an interdisciplinary European project between France and Italy (Interreg Alcotra ARTACLIM). A practical framework is proposed to assess the risk for urban settle-ments and infrastructural assets at a sub-regional level, within one of the 11 homoge-neous zones of the Turin Metropolitan City, the “Torino Nord” Homogeneous Area of Pinerolo (ZOP). Based on the most reliable guidelines of institutions and organi-zations such as IPCC, United Nations, Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy EUROPE, the methodology here presented identifies risks related to climate change as a function of hazard (H), exposure (E) and vulnerability (V) factors, the latter one being in turn a function of sensitivity (S) and adaptive capacity (AC). Each factor is operationalized through specific indicators. The results of the analysis generate a geo-localized risk score that can be used to support urban planners and local policy-makers to prioritize the adaptation measures required for reducing hydrogeological damages related to climate change
Oregonin from Alnus incana bark affects DNA methyltransferases expression and mitochondrial DNA copies in mouse embryonic fibroblasts
Oregonin is an open-chain diarylheptanoid isolated from Alnus incana bark that possesses remarkable antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, inhibits adipogenesis, and can be used in the prevention of obesity and related metabolic disorders. Here, we aimed to investigate the effects of oregonin on the epigenetic regulation in cells as well as its ability to modulate DNA methylating enzymes expression and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) copies. Our results show that oregonin altered the expression of DNA methyltransferases and mtDNA copy numbers in dependency on concentration and specificity of cells genotype. A close correlation between mtDNA copy numbers and mRNA expression of the mtDnmt1 and Dnmt3b was established. Moreover, molecular modeling suggested that oregonin fits the catalytic site of DNMT1 and partially overlaps with binding of the cofactor. These findings further extend the knowledge on oregonin, and elucidate for the first time its potential to affect the key players of the DNA methylation process, namely DNMTs transcripts and mtDNA
Effect of "wooden breast" appearance on poultry meat quality, histological traits, and lesions characterization
The purposes of the study were to investigate the effects of Wooden Breast (WB) myodegeneration on poultry meat quality and to give a contribution in typing lesions morphology. At a poultry meat cutting facility, 474 carcasses of a high-breast-yield hybrid chickens were inspected for WB condition, and 30 normal (N) and 30 affected (WB) breast fillets (Pectoralis major) were randomly selected. The WB condition represented 53.2% of the examined carcasses. Weight, cross sectional area (CSA), pH, L*, a*, b* colour values, water-holding capacity, and Warner-Bratzler shear force were determined. Samples were also visually and histologically evaluated. Affected samples were heavier, thicker, paler (P < 0.001), and characterized by palpatory hardness and lower water holding capacity (P < 0.05). Macroscopically, abnormalities were primarily localized in the cranial portion of the fillet and defined by the presence of bulges, petechiae, fluid and clear exudate, and higher pH. Microscopically, the WB condition was characterized by muscle fibres with greater CSA (P < 0.001) and higher giant fibres prevalence (P < 0.01). Data suggest a relationship between breast weight and WB condition
Neem oil nanoemulsions: characterisation and antioxidant activity
The aim of the present work is to develop nanoemulsions (NEs), nanosized emulsions, manufactured for
improving the delivery of active pharmaceutical ingredients. In particular, nanoemulsions composed of
Neem seed oil, contain rich bioactive components, and Tween 20 as nonionic surfactant were prepared.
A mean droplet size ranging from 10 to 100nm was obtained by modulating the oil/surfactant ratio.
Physicochemical characterisation was carried out evaluating size, f-potential, microviscosity, polarity and
turbidity of the external shell and morphology, along with stability in simulated cerebrospinal fluid (CSF),
activity of Neem oil alone and in NEs, HEp-2 cell interaction and cytotoxicity studies. This study confirms
the formation of NEs by Tween 20 and Neem oil at different weight ratios with small and homogenous
dimensions. The antioxidant activity of Neem oil alone and in NEs was comparable, whereas its cytotoxicity
was strongly reduced when loaded in NEs after interaction with HEp-2 cells
Scaling of a large-scale simulation of synchronous slow-wave and asynchronous awake-like activity of a cortical model with long-range interconnections
Cortical synapse organization supports a range of dynamic states on multiple
spatial and temporal scales, from synchronous slow wave activity (SWA),
characteristic of deep sleep or anesthesia, to fluctuating, asynchronous
activity during wakefulness (AW). Such dynamic diversity poses a challenge for
producing efficient large-scale simulations that embody realistic metaphors of
short- and long-range synaptic connectivity. In fact, during SWA and AW
different spatial extents of the cortical tissue are active in a given timespan
and at different firing rates, which implies a wide variety of loads of local
computation and communication. A balanced evaluation of simulation performance
and robustness should therefore include tests of a variety of cortical dynamic
states. Here, we demonstrate performance scaling of our proprietary Distributed
and Plastic Spiking Neural Networks (DPSNN) simulation engine in both SWA and
AW for bidimensional grids of neural populations, which reflects the modular
organization of the cortex. We explored networks up to 192x192 modules, each
composed of 1250 integrate-and-fire neurons with spike-frequency adaptation,
and exponentially decaying inter-modular synaptic connectivity with varying
spatial decay constant. For the largest networks the total number of synapses
was over 70 billion. The execution platform included up to 64 dual-socket
nodes, each socket mounting 8 Intel Xeon Haswell processor cores @ 2.40GHz
clock rates. Network initialization time, memory usage, and execution time
showed good scaling performances from 1 to 1024 processes, implemented using
the standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) protocol. We achieved simulation
speeds of between 2.3x10^9 and 4.1x10^9 synaptic events per second for both
cortical states in the explored range of inter-modular interconnections.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, 4 table
PLIERS: a Popularity-Based Recommender System for Content Dissemination in Online Social Networks
In this paper, we propose a novel tag-based recommender system called PLIERS,
which relies on the assumption that users are mainly interested in items and
tags with similar popularity to those they already own. PLIERS is aimed at
reaching a good tradeoff between algorithmic complexity and the level of
personalization of recommended items. To evaluate PLIERS, we performed a set of
experiments on real OSN datasets, demonstrating that it outperforms
state-of-the-art solutions in terms of personalization, relevance, and novelty
of recommendations.Comment: Published in SAC '16: Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on
Applied Computin
A study of super-luminous stars with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
The -ray emission from stars is induced by the interaction of cosmic
rays with stellar atmospheres and photon fields. This emission is expected to
come in two components: a stellar disk emission, where -rays are mainly
produced in atmospheric showers generated by hadronic cosmic rays, and an
extended halo emission, where the high density of soft photons in the
surroundings of stars create a suitable environment for -ray production
via inverse Compton (IC) scattering by cosmic-ray electrons. Besides the Sun,
no other disk or halo from single stars has ever been detected in
-rays. However, by assuming a cosmic-ray spectrum similar to that
observed on Earth, the predicted -ray emission of super-luminous stars,
like e.g. Betelgeuse and Rigel, could be high enough to be detected by the
Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) after its first decade of operations. In this
work, we use 12 years of Fermi-LAT observations along with IC models to study 9
super-luminous nearby stars, both individually and via stacking analysis. Our
results show no significant -ray emission, but allow us to restrict the
stellar -ray fluxes to be on average ph
cm s at a 3 confidence level, which translates to an
average local density of electrons in the surroundings of our targets to be
less than twice of that observed for the Solar System.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
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