Professor Philippe Rasoanaivo Unveiling the ethnopharmacological potential of the flora of Madagascar: in memory of Philippe Rasoanaivo

Professor Philippe Rasoanaivo, University of Antananarivo, Madagascar, died on Wednesday, 13 July 2016 from a heart attack, at the age of 70. Professor Rasoanaivo was well known as one of the most distinguished African phytochemists, as also recognised by several international prizes. He won the 2015 Olusegun Obasanjo Prize for using traditional medicine to improve the efficacy of existing drugs for brain disorders and also treating sexual dysfunction among men. He had just been awarded the Prize at the last General Assembly meeting in Kasane, Botswana, in June 2016. Professor Rasoanaivo authored several books and more than 150 international research articles, including some recently published in Natural Product Research. Professor Rasoanaivo developed a unique mixture of scientific knowledge dedicated to the utilisation of endemic plants for ethnobotanical, economic, medicinal and social uses. He wanted to learn everything that was necessary to understand and study the extraordinary flora of his country, obtaining this information to help its people. Throughout his life, countless examples of his remarkableness can easily be found. He was an excellent botanist and, living in a country well known for an exceptional endemic flora, he was able to find and collect many species, and show the world their importance. He was a great ethnopharmacologist, learning the popular uses of plants from the people of his country, and using this information to start a scientific validation of their efficacy. He was a modern researcher: in times of fragmented research, he was able to perform the full range of research on natural products, from chemistry to applied pharmacology. He was successful and organised director of the Institut Malgache de Recherches Appliquées, promoting the cultivation of crops of economic importance. In this obituary, we have provided a synthesis of his important scientific achievements and human qualities, since we had the privilege of working with him and he was able to teach us what modern ethnopharmacology is

Plan S - FAQ's

A report on Plan S and the cOAlition S collaboration, with particular focus on the role of repositories and green OA

Open Science - Challenges and best practices: a view from research institutes in Italy

Talk given by Stefano Bianco at MINERVA Study Visit 2021.05. organised online by Universita' Marconi Roma

Open Science for Fair and Sustainable Access to Knowledge

Talk given at SISSA Trieste

Robotic Process Mining: Vision and Challenges

Robotic process automation (RPA) is an emerging technology that allows organizations automating repetitive clerical tasks by executing scripts that encode sequences of fine-grained interactions with Web and desktop applications. Examples of clerical tasks include opening a file, selecting a field in a Web form or a cell in a spreadsheet, and copy-pasting data across fields or cells. Given that RPA can automate a wide range of routines, this raises the question of which routines should be automated in the first place. This paper presents a vision towards a family of techniques, termed robotic process mining (RPM), aimed at filling this gap. The core idea of RPM is that repetitive routines amenable for automation can be discovered from logs of interactions between workers and Web and desktop applications, also known as user interactions (UI) logs. The paper defines a set of basic concepts underpinning RPM and presents a pipeline of processing steps that would allow an RPM tool to generate RPA scripts from UI logs. The paper also discusses research challenges to realize the envisioned pipeline

Two-particle azimuthal correlations in e+e−e^+e^- collisions at 91--209 GeV with archived ALEPH data at LEP-2

We present the first measurement of two-particle angular correlations of charged particles produced in $e^+e^-$ annihilation up to $\sqrt{s}=$ 209 GeV. This analysis utilized the archived hadronic $e^+e^-$ data at center-of-mass energy between 91 and 209 GeV collected with the ALEPH detector at LEP between 1992 and 2000. The angular correlation functions are measured over a broad range of pseudorapidity and full azimuth as a function of charged particle multiplicity for the first time with LEP-2 data. At 91 GeV, no significant long-range correlation is observed in either the beam coordinate analysis or the thrust coordinate analysis, where the latter is sensitive to a medium expanding transverse to the color string between the outgoing $q\bar{q}$ pair from the Z boson decays. Results with $e^+e^-$ data at higher collision energy than 91 GeV, providing higher event multiplicity reach up to around 50, are presented for the first time. The thrust axis analysis shows a long-range near-side excess in the two-particle correlation function. We performed Fourier series decomposition of the two-particle correlation functions. In high multiplicity events with more than 50 particles, the extracted Fourier coefficients $v_2$ and $v_3$ magnitudes in data are larger than the MC reference.Comment: ICHEP2022 Proceeding

Data Preservation at LEP

The four LEP experiments ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL successfully recorded e+e- collision data during the years 1989 to 2000. As part of the ordinary evolution in High Energy Physics, these experiments can not be repeated and their data is therefore unique. This article briefly reviews the data preservation efforts undertaken by the four experiments beyond the end of data taking. The current status of the preserved data and associated tools is summarised.Comment: 7 pages, contribution to proceedings of the "First Workshop on Data Preservation and Long Term Analysis in HEP