Europe in the shadow of financial crisis: Policy Making via Stance Classification

Since 2009, the European Union (EU) is phasing a multi–year financial crisis affecting the stability of its involved countries. Our goal is to gain useful insights on the societal impact of such a strong political issue through the exploitation of topic modeling and stance classification techniques. \ \ To perform this, we unravel public’s stance towards this event and empower citizens’ participation in the decision making process, taking policy’s life cycle as a baseline. The paper introduces and evaluates a bilingual stance classification architecture, enabling a deeper understanding of how citizens’ sentiment polarity changes based on the critical political decisions taken among European countries. \ \ Through three novel empirical studies, we aim to explore and answer whether stance classification can be used to: i) determine citizens’ sentiment polarity for a series of political events by observing the diversity of opinion among European citizens, ii) predict political decisions outcome made by citizens such as a referendum call, ii) examine whether citizens’ sentiments agree with governmental decisions during each stage of a policy life cycle.

Cabbage and fermented vegetables : From death rate heterogeneity in countries to candidates for mitigation strategies of severe COVID-19

Large differences in COVID-19 death rates exist between countries and between regions of the same country. Some very low death rate countries such as Eastern Asia, Central Europe, or the Balkans have a common feature of eating large quantities of fermented foods. Although biases exist when examining ecological studies, fermented vegetables or cabbage have been associated with low death rates in European countries. SARS-CoV-2 binds to its receptor, the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). As a result of SARS-CoV-2 binding, ACE2 downregulation enhances the angiotensin II receptor type 1 (AT(1)R) axis associated with oxidative stress. This leads to insulin resistance as well as lung and endothelial damage, two severe outcomes of COVID-19. The nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2 (Nrf2) is the most potent antioxidant in humans and can block in particular the AT(1)R axis. Cabbage contains precursors of sulforaphane, the most active natural activator of Nrf2. Fermented vegetables contain many lactobacilli, which are also potent Nrf2 activators. Three examples are: kimchi in Korea, westernized foods, and the slum paradox. It is proposed that fermented cabbage is a proof-of-concept of dietary manipulations that may enhance Nrf2-associated antioxidant effects, helpful in mitigating COVID-19 severity.Peer reviewe

Nrf2-interacting nutrients and COVID-19 : time for research to develop adaptation strategies

There are large between- and within-country variations in COVID-19 death rates. Some very low death rate settings such as Eastern Asia, Central Europe, the Balkans and Africa have a common feature of eating large quantities of fermented foods whose intake is associated with the activation of the Nrf2 (Nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2) anti-oxidant transcription factor. There are many Nrf2-interacting nutrients (berberine, curcumin, epigallocatechin gallate, genistein, quercetin, resveratrol, sulforaphane) that all act similarly to reduce insulin resistance, endothelial damage, lung injury and cytokine storm. They also act on the same mechanisms (mTOR: Mammalian target of rapamycin, PPAR gamma:Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor, NF kappa B: Nuclear factor kappa B, ERK: Extracellular signal-regulated kinases and eIF2 alpha:Elongation initiation factor 2 alpha). They may as a result be important in mitigating the severity of COVID-19, acting through the endoplasmic reticulum stress or ACE-Angiotensin-II-AT(1)R axis (AT(1)R) pathway. Many Nrf2-interacting nutrients are also interacting with TRPA1 and/or TRPV1. Interestingly, geographical areas with very low COVID-19 mortality are those with the lowest prevalence of obesity (Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia). It is tempting to propose that Nrf2-interacting foods and nutrients can re-balance insulin resistance and have a significant effect on COVID-19 severity. It is therefore possible that the intake of these foods may restore an optimal natural balance for the Nrf2 pathway and may be of interest in the mitigation of COVID-19 severity

Data Analysis, Simulation and Visualization for Environmentally Safe Maritime Data

Marine transportation in Aegean Sea, a part of the Mediterranean Sea that serves as gateway between three continents has recently seen a significant increase. Despite the commercial benefits to the region, there are certain issues related to the preservation of the local ecosystem and safety. This danger is further deteriorated by the absence of regulations on allowed waterways. Marine accidents could cause a major ecological disaster in the area and pose big socio-economic impacts in Greece. Monitoring marine traffic data is of major importance and one of the primary goals of the current research. Real-time monitoring and alerting can be extremely useful to local authorities, companies, NGO’s and the public in general. Apart from real-time applications, the knowledge discovery from historical data is also significant. Towards this direction, a data analysis and simulation framework for maritime data has been designed and developed. The framework analyzes historical data about ships and area conditions, of varying time and space granularity, measures critical parameters that could influence the levels of hazard in certain regions and clusters such data according to their similarity. Upon this unsupervised step, the degree of hazard is estimated and along with other important parameters is fed into a special type of Bayesian network, in order to infer on future situations, thus, simulating future data based on past conditions. Another innovative aspect of this work is the modeling of shipping traffic as a social network, whose analysis could provide useful and informative visualizations. The use of such a system is particularly beneficial for multiple stakeholders, such as the port authorities, the ministry of Mercantile Marine, etc. mainly due to the fact that specific policy options can be evaluated and re-designed based on feedback from our framework

De Novo Drug Design Using Artificial Intelligence Applied on SARS-CoV-2 Viral Proteins ASYNT-GAN

Computer-assisted de novo design of natural product mimetics offers a viable strategy to reduce synthetic efforts and obtain natural-product-inspired bioactive small molecules, but suffers from several limitations. Deep learning techniques can help address these shortcomings. We propose the generation of synthetic molecule structures that optimizes the binding affinity to a target. To achieve this, we leverage important advancements in deep learning. Our approach generalizes to systems beyond the source system and achieves the generation of complete structures that optimize the binding to a target unseen during training. Translating the input sub-systems into the latent space permits the ability to search for similar structures, and the sampling from the latent space for generation

Breast Cancer Detection in Mammogram Medical Images with Data Mining Techniques

Part 8: Third Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Applications in Biomedicine (AIAB 2013)International audienceA domain of interest for data mining applications is the study of biomedical data which, in combination with the field of image processing, provide thorough analysis in order to discover hidden patterns or behavior. Towards this direction, the present paper deals with the detection of breast cancer within digital mammography images. Identification of breast cancer poses several challenges to traditional data mining applications, particularly due to the high dimensionality and class imbalance of training data. In the current approach, genetic algorithms are utilized in an attempt to reduce the feature set to the informative ones and class imbalance issues were also dealt by incorporating a hybrid boosting and genetic sub-sampling approach. As regards to the feature extraction approach, the idea of trainable segmentation is borrowed, using Decision Trees as the base learner. Results show that the best precision and recall rates are achieved by using a combination of Adaboost and k-Nearest Neighbor

Dealing with High Dimensional Sentiment Data Using Gradient Boosting Machines

Part 10: Mining Humanistic Data Workshop (MHDW)International audienceOne of the most common classification tasks that applies on textual information is sentiment analysis, i.e. the prediction of the sentiment of a given document. With the vast use of social media and internet applications such as e-commerce, e-tourism and e-government, numerous comments and opinions are broadcasted per day, thus an automatic way of analyzing them is of great importance. The present paper focuses on sentiment analysis for Greek texts, obtained from Web 2.0 platforms. Greek is a language that lacks an in-depth availability of natural language processing tools in the sense that most of them are not publicly available. The novelty of the article is that instead of utilizing preprocessing tools such as Part-of-Speech taggers, text stemmers and polar-word lexica, it incorporates the translation of the Greek token as provided by the Google Translator® API. Since automatic translation of Greek sentences often results in poor translations where the meaning of the original sentence is severely deteriorated, the translation of each token individually is almost 100 % correct. However, taking the translation of every Greek token poses a significant issue to the outcome of the classification process for practically any classifier, therefore, we introduce the use of a powerful ensemble algorithm that is highly customizable to the particular needs of the application, such as being learned with respect to different loss functions and thus dealing with a large number of dimensions. This algorithm is called Gradient Boosting Machines and experimental results support our claim that it surpasses other, well-known machine learning techniques with a significant improvement for our task