Prevention of infectious diseases based on intelligent analysis in social networks and citizen participation

Este proyecto consiste en el desarrollo una plataforma inteligente de monitorización de enfermedades infecciosas a partir de la monitorización de redes sociales, fuentes de datos oficiales y la participación ciudadana. Esta información estará disponible para las autoridades sanitarias y gubernamentales a través de un panel de mandos personalizable para que puedan detectar zonas calientes en las que exista algún tipo de brote o focos de infección. También estará disponible un sistema de alertas para avisar a los ciudadanos cuándo se ha detectado cierto nivel de alarma en radio cercano a donde se encuentran. Este proyecto está siendo desarrollado por la empresa de Ecuador VIAMÁTICA, algunos docentes de la Universidad de Guayaquil, la empresa española DANTIA y las Universidades de Murcia y Carlos III de Madrid. La parte española del proyecto está financiada mediante una convocatoria de proyectos unilaterales del CDTI.This project consists in the development of an intelligent platform for the monitoring of infectious diseases based on: text written in natural language on social networks, official data sources and citizen participation. This information will be available to the health and governmental authorities through a customizable control panel so they can detect hot areas in which there is some type of outbreak. An alert system will also be available to notify citizens when a certain level of alarm is detected in a nearby radius of where they are. This project is being developed by VIAMÁTICA (Ecuador), the University of Guayaquil (Ecuador), DANTIA (Spain) and the Universities of Murcia and Carlos III of Madrid (Spain). The Spanish part of the project is financed through the unilateral CDTI projects call.Este trabajo está siendo financiado por el CDTI dentro del proyecto con referencia IDI-20180989 dentro de la convocatoria de proyectos unilaterales

Intelligent technologies for health self-management

El objetivo del proyecto “Tecnologías inteligentes para la autogestión de la salud” es desarrollar una plataforma inteligente para la autogestión de la salud de enfermedades crónicas como el asma y la obesidad. El sistema pone a disposición de los pacientes un servicio y control médico de primera mano, utilizando información que proporcione el mismo paciente y otra información textual proveniente de medios sociales como Twitter y otras fuentes oficiales que puedan ayudar a informar y apoyar a los usuarios según la enfermedad que padezcan. Esta información textual se procesará mediante tecnologías de análisis de sentimientos y clasificación para determinar si es una información relevante para cada paciente. Este proyecto está siendo desarrollado el grupo de investigación de informática médica de la Universidad de Guayaquil en colaboración con el grupo de investigación TECNOMOD de la Universidad de Murcia dentro del programa de ayudas propio de la Universidad de Guayaquil denominado FCI.The objective of "Intelligent technologies for health self-management" project is the development of an intelligent platform for the self-management of chronic diseases such as asthma and obesity. With this platform, patients can enhance their health management though information provided by themselves and by extracting textual information from Twitter and official sources to inform and help them in the treatment of the disease they suffer. This textual information will be processed through sentiment analysis and classification technologies to determine which information is relevant for each patient. This project is being developed by the medical informatics research group of the University of Guayaquil in collaboration with the TECNOMOD research group of the University of Murcia within the program of grants owned by the University of Guayaquil called FCI.Este trabajo ha sido financiado por la Universidad de Guayaquil dentro del proyecto “Tecnologías inteligentes para la autogestión de la salud” dentro de las ayudas FCI

Sentiment Analysis on Tweets about Diabetes: An Aspect-Level Approach

In recent years, some methods of sentiment analysis have been developed for the health domain; however, the diabetes domain has not been explored yet. In addition, there is a lack of approaches that analyze the positive or negative orientation of each aspect contained in a document (a review, a piece of news, and a tweet, among others). Based on this understanding, we propose an aspect-level sentiment analysis method based on ontologies in the diabetes domain. The sentiment of the aspects is calculated by considering the words around the aspect which are obtained through N-gram methods (N-gram after, N-gram before, and N-gram around). To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we obtained a corpus from Twitter, which has been manually labelled at aspect level as positive, negative, or neutral. The experimental results show that the best result was obtained through the N-gram around method with a precision of 81.93%, a recall of 81.13%, and an F-measure of 81.24%

Geographic Information Systems in Archaeology: A Systematic Review

GIS are an essential element in archaeology. Their use has become widespread for their potential to store, reference, analyse and visualise spatial information. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, a systematic review of academic peer-reviewed publications related to the use of GIS, as a framework, in archaeology has never been presented before. Our goal in this work is to identify what has been published so far in relation to using GIS in archaeology within a small selected sample. We used the PRISMA guideline to perform a systematic review of 671 publications that we identified using the SCOPUS database and the keywords ‘GIS’ and ‘archaeology’. The collected publications were screened, analysed, and categorized into different relevant categories. Our analysis shows that GIS, in our selected sample, are mostly used for visualization and information management tasks. Moreover, spatial analysis studies were more common than other studies, and theoretical publications are scarce. The lack of a theoretical background in GIS may be the cause of some of the problems related to GIS applications in archaeology

Resultados Preliminares da Verificação de Limiares de Precipitação Deflagradores de Escorregamentos de Terras em Salvador/Ba

Nos últimos anos no Brasil, os prejuízos associados a desastres naturais vêm intensificandose, devido principalmente ao mau planejamento urbano e ao adensamento populacional, uma vez que a população urbana representa mais de 84% da população do país BRITO et al. (2016). A cidade de Salvador apresenta áreas com encostas íngremes e baixadas, situação que faz com que esta capital brasileira enfrente a cada evento de chuva forte impactos negativos, IMPACTOS, RISCOS E DESASTRES NATURAIS principalmente relacionados a escorregamentos de terras. Este trabalho objetiva verificar à ocorrência de precipitação na deflagração de escorregamentos de terras em Salvador. Tal objetivo será atingido por meio da análise de diferentes limiares de precipitação, que servirá como uma importante ferramenta de auxílio aos órgãos tomadores de decisões e, assim, consequentemente mitigar os impactos negativos à sociedade em geral diante dos episódios de precipitação que anualmente atingem esta importante cidade brasileir

Altimetry for the future: Building on 25 years of progress

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the ‘‘Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion

Canagliflozin and renal outcomes in type 2 diabetes and nephropathy

BACKGROUND Type 2 diabetes mellitus is the leading cause of kidney failure worldwide, but few effective long-term treatments are available. In cardiovascular trials of inhibitors of sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2), exploratory results have suggested that such drugs may improve renal outcomes in patients with type 2 diabetes. METHODS In this double-blind, randomized trial, we assigned patients with type 2 diabetes and albuminuric chronic kidney disease to receive canagliflozin, an oral SGLT2 inhibitor, at a dose of 100 mg daily or placebo. All the patients had an estimated glomerular filtration rate (GFR) of 30 to <90 ml per minute per 1.73 m2 of body-surface area and albuminuria (ratio of albumin [mg] to creatinine [g], >300 to 5000) and were treated with renin–angiotensin system blockade. The primary outcome was a composite of end-stage kidney disease (dialysis, transplantation, or a sustained estimated GFR of <15 ml per minute per 1.73 m2), a doubling of the serum creatinine level, or death from renal or cardiovascular causes. Prespecified secondary outcomes were tested hierarchically. RESULTS The trial was stopped early after a planned interim analysis on the recommendation of the data and safety monitoring committee. At that time, 4401 patients had undergone randomization, with a median follow-up of 2.62 years. The relative risk of the primary outcome was 30% lower in the canagliflozin group than in the placebo group, with event rates of 43.2 and 61.2 per 1000 patient-years, respectively (hazard ratio, 0.70; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.59 to 0.82; P=0.00001). The relative risk of the renal-specific composite of end-stage kidney disease, a doubling of the creatinine level, or death from renal causes was lower by 34% (hazard ratio, 0.66; 95% CI, 0.53 to 0.81; P<0.001), and the relative risk of end-stage kidney disease was lower by 32% (hazard ratio, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.54 to 0.86; P=0.002). The canagliflozin group also had a lower risk of cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, or stroke (hazard ratio, 0.80; 95% CI, 0.67 to 0.95; P=0.01) and hospitalization for heart failure (hazard ratio, 0.61; 95% CI, 0.47 to 0.80; P<0.001). There were no significant differences in rates of amputation or fracture. CONCLUSIONS In patients with type 2 diabetes and kidney disease, the risk of kidney failure and cardiovascular events was lower in the canagliflozin group than in the placebo group at a median follow-up of 2.62 years

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (3rd edition)

In 2008 we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, research on this topic has continued to accelerate, and many new scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Accordingly, it is important to update these guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Various reviews have described the range of assays that have been used for this purpose. Nevertheless, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to measure autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. For example, a key point that needs to be emphasized is that there is a difference between measurements that monitor the numbers or volume of autophagic elements (e.g., autophagosomes or autolysosomes) at any stage of the autophagic process versus those that measure fl ux through the autophagy pathway (i.e., the complete process including the amount and rate of cargo sequestered and degraded). In particular, a block in macroautophagy that results in autophagosome accumulation must be differentiated from stimuli that increase autophagic activity, defi ned as increased autophagy induction coupled with increased delivery to, and degradation within, lysosomes (inmost higher eukaryotes and some protists such as Dictyostelium ) or the vacuole (in plants and fungi). In other words, it is especially important that investigators new to the fi eld understand that the appearance of more autophagosomes does not necessarily equate with more autophagy. In fact, in many cases, autophagosomes accumulate because of a block in trafficking to lysosomes without a concomitant change in autophagosome biogenesis, whereas an increase in autolysosomes may reflect a reduction in degradative activity. It is worth emphasizing here that lysosomal digestion is a stage of autophagy and evaluating its competence is a crucial part of the evaluation of autophagic flux, or complete autophagy. Here, we present a set of guidelines for the selection and interpretation of methods for use by investigators who aim to examine macroautophagy and related processes, as well as for reviewers who need to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of papers that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a formulaic set of rules, because the appropriate assays depend in part on the question being asked and the system being used. In addition, we emphasize that no individual assay is guaranteed to be the most appropriate one in every situation, and we strongly recommend the use of multiple assays to monitor autophagy. Along these lines, because of the potential for pleiotropic effects due to blocking autophagy through genetic manipulation it is imperative to delete or knock down more than one autophagy-related gene. In addition, some individual Atg proteins, or groups of proteins, are involved in other cellular pathways so not all Atg proteins can be used as a specific marker for an autophagic process. In these guidelines, we consider these various methods of assessing autophagy and what information can, or cannot, be obtained from them. Finally, by discussing the merits and limits of particular autophagy assays, we hope to encourage technical innovation in the field