Exploration of new uracil-based compounds as novel inhibitors of Hepatitis C Virus replication

Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) is a major public health problem worldwide. While highly efficacious directly-acting antiviral agents have been developed in recent years, their high costs and relative inaccessibility make their use limited. In this thesis, new uracil-based compounds have been evaluated as potential antiviral drugs against HCV. Using several biochemical and virological assays to investigate virus infection and replication, it has been shown that these compounds are able to significantly reduce viral genomic replication with their IC50 values in the nanomolar range. Finally, these compounds have been shown to block the de novo RNA synthesis and that effect is dependent on a chemical structure of the compounds

Asset-based measurement of poverty

Poverty is generally defined as income or expenditure insufficiency, but the economic condition of a household also depends on its real and financial asset holdings. This paper investigates measures of poverty that rely on indicators of household net worth. We review and assess two main approaches followed in the literature: income-net worth measures and asset-poverty. We provide fresh cross-national evidence based on data from the Luxembourg Wealth Study.poverty indicators, income, wealth

Multiple structure recovery with T-linkage

reserved2noThis work addresses the problem of robust fitting of geometric structures to noisy data corrupted by outliers. An extension of J-linkage (called T-linkage) is presented and elaborated. T-linkage improves the preference analysis implemented by J-linkage in term of performances and robustness, considering both the representation and the segmentation steps. A strategy to reject outliers and to estimate the inlier threshold is proposed, resulting in a versatile tool, suitable for multi-model fitting “in the wild”. Experiments demonstrate that our methods perform better than J-linkage on simulated data, and compare favorably with state-of-the-art methods on public domain real datasets.mixedMagri L.; Fusiello A.Magri, L.; Fusiello, A

Multiple structure recovery with maximum coverage

We present a general framework for geometric model fitting based on a set coverage formulation that caters for intersecting structures and outliers in a simple and principled manner. The multi-model fitting problem is formulated in terms of the optimization of a consensus-based global cost function, which allows to sidestep the pitfalls of preference approaches based on clustering and to avoid the difficult trade-off between data fidelity and complexity of other optimization formulations. Two especially appealing characteristics of this method are the ease with which it can be implemented and its modularity with respect to the solver and to the sampling strategy. Few intelligible parameters need to be set and tuned, namely the inlier threshold and the number of desired models. The summary of the experiments is that our method compares favourably with its competitors overall, and it is always either the best performer or almost on par with the best performer in specific scenarios

Multiple structure recovery via robust preference analysis

2noThis paper address the extraction of multiple models from outlier-contaminated data by exploiting preference analysis and low rank approximation. First points are represented in the preference space, then Robust PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and Symmetric NMF (Non negative Matrix Factorization) are used to break the multi-model fitting problem into many single-model problems, which in turn are tackled with an approach inspired to MSAC (M-estimator SAmple Consensus) coupled with a model-specific scale estimate. Experimental validation on public, real data-sets demonstrates that our method compares favorably with the state of the art.openopenMagri, Luca; Fusiello, AndreaMagri, Luca; Fusiello, Andre

A robust adaptive algebraic multigrid linear solver for structural mechanics

The numerical simulation of structural mechanics applications via finite elements usually requires the solution of large-size and ill-conditioned linear systems, especially when accurate results are sought for derived variables interpolated with lower order functions, like stress or deformation fields. Such task represents the most time-consuming kernel in commercial simulators; thus, it is of significant interest the development of robust and efficient linear solvers for such applications. In this context, direct solvers, which are based on LU factorization techniques, are often used due to their robustness and easy setup; however, they can reach only superlinear complexity, in the best case, thus, have limited applicability depending on the problem size. On the other hand, iterative solvers based on algebraic multigrid (AMG) preconditioners can reach up to linear complexity for sufficiently regular problems but do not always converge and require more knowledge from the user for an efficient setup. In this work, we present an adaptive AMG method specifically designed to improve its usability and efficiency in the solution of structural problems. We show numerical results for several practical applications with millions of unknowns and compare our method with two state-of-the-art linear solvers proving its efficiency and robustness.Comment: 50 pages, 16 figures, submitted to CMAM

Inferring unknown unknowns: Regularized bias-aware ensemble Kalman filter

Because of physical assumptions and numerical approximations, low-order models are affected by uncertainties in the state and parameters, and by model biases. Model biases, also known as model errors or systematic errors, are difficult to infer because they are `unknown unknowns', i.e., we do not necessarily know their functional form a priori. With biased models, data assimilation methods may be ill-posed because either (i) they are 'bias-unaware' because the estimators are assumed unbiased, (ii) they rely on an a priori parametric model for the bias, or (iii) they can infer model biases that are not unique for the same model and data. First, we design a data assimilation framework to perform combined state, parameter, and bias estimation. Second, we propose a mathematical solution with a sequential method, i.e., the regularized bias-aware ensemble Kalman Filter (r-EnKF), which requires a model of the bias and its gradient (i.e., the Jacobian). Third, we propose an echo state network as the model bias estimator. We derive the Jacobian of the network, and design a robust training strategy with data augmentation to accurately infer the bias in different scenarios. Fourth, we apply the r-EnKF to nonlinearly coupled oscillators (with and without time-delay) affected by different forms of bias. The r-EnKF infers in real-time parameters and states, and a unique bias. The applications that we showcase are relevant to acoustics, thermoacoustics, and vibrations; however, the r-EnKF opens new opportunities for combined state, parameter and bias estimation for real-time and on-the-fly prediction in nonlinear systems.Comment: 22 Figure

A robust multilevel approximate inverse preconditioner for symmetric positive definite matrices

The use of factorized sparse approximate inverse (FSAI) preconditioners in a standard multilevel framework for symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices may pose a number of issues as to the definiteness of the Schur complement at each level. The present work introduces a robust multilevel approach for SPD problems based on FSAI preconditioning, which eliminates the chance of algorithmic breakdowns independently of the preconditioner sparsity. The multilevel FSAI algorithm is further enhanced by introducing descending and ascending low-rank corrections, thus giving rise to the multilevel FSAI with low-rank corrections (MFLR) preconditioner. The proposed algorithm is investigated in a number of test problems. The numerical results show that the MFLR preconditioner is a robust approach that can significantly accelerate the solver convergence rate preserving a good degree of parallelism. The possibly large set-up cost, mainly due to the computation of the eigenpairs needed by low-rank corrections, makes its use attractive in applications where the preconditioner can be recycled along a number of linear solves

Method for 3D modelling based on structure from motion processing of sparse 2D images

A method based on Structure from Motion for processing a plurality of sparse images acquired by one or more acquisition devices to generate a sparse 3D points cloud and of a plurality of internal and external parameters of the acquisition devices includes the steps of collecting the images; extracting keypoints therefrom and generating keypoint descriptors; organizing the images in a proximity graph; pairwise image matching and generating keypoints connecting tracks according maximum proximity between keypoints; performing an autocalibration between image clusters to extract internal and external parameters of the acquisition devices, wherein calibration groups are defined that contain a plurality of image clusters and wherein a clustering algorithm iteratively merges the clusters in a model expressed in a common local reference system starting from clusters belonging to the same calibration group; and performing a Euclidean reconstruction of the object as a sparse 3D point cloud based on the extracted parameters