102 research outputs found
Differentiating muscle damage from myocardial injury by meaans of the serum creatinine kinase (CK) isoenzyme MB mass measurement/total CK activity ratio
We immunoenzymometrically measured creatine kinase (CK) isoenzyme MB in extracts of myocardium and in homogenates of five different skeletal muscles. CK-MB concentrations in the former averaged 80.9 micrograms/g wet tissue; in the skeletal muscles it varied widely, being (e.g.) 25-fold greater in diaphragm than in psoas. CK-MB in skeletal muscles ranged from 0.9 to 44 ng/U of total CK; the mean for myocardium was 202 ng/U. In sera from 10 trauma and 36 burn patients without myocardial involvement, maximum ratios for CK-MB mass/total CK activity averaged 7 (SEM 1) ng/U and 18 (SEM 6) ng/U, respectively. Except for an infant (220 ng/U), the highest ratio we found for serum after muscular damage was 38 ng/U. In contrast, the mean maximum ratio determined in 23 cases of acute myocardial infarction exceeded 200 ng/U. Among seven determinations performed 8 to 32 h after onset of symptoms, each infarct patient demonstrated at least one ratio greater than or equal to 110 ng/U. Ratios observed after infarct were unrelated to treatment received during the acute phase. We propose a CK-MB/total CK ratio of 80 ng/U as the cutoff value for differentiating myocardial necrosis from muscular injury
Temporal Stream Logic: Synthesis beyond the Bools
Reactive systems that operate in environments with complex data, such as
mobile apps or embedded controllers with many sensors, are difficult to
synthesize. Synthesis tools usually fail for such systems because the state
space resulting from the discretization of the data is too large. We introduce
TSL, a new temporal logic that separates control and data. We provide a
CEGAR-based synthesis approach for the construction of implementations that are
guaranteed to satisfy a TSL specification for all possible instantiations of
the data processing functions. TSL provides an attractive trade-off for
synthesis. On the one hand, synthesis from TSL, unlike synthesis from standard
temporal logics, is undecidable in general. On the other hand, however,
synthesis from TSL is scalable, because it is independent of the complexity of
the handled data. Among other benchmarks, we have successfully synthesized a
music player Android app and a controller for an autonomous vehicle in the Open
Race Car Simulator (TORCS.
Labour Market and Social Policy in Italy: Challenges and Changes. Bertelsmann Policy Brief #2016/02
vEight years after the outbreak of the financial crisis, Italy has still to cope with and
overcome a plethora of economic and social challenges. On top of this, it faces an
unfavourable demographic structure and severe disparities between its northern and
southern regions. Some promising reforms have recently been enacted, specifically
targeting poverty and social exclusion. However, much more remains to be done on
the way towards greater economic stability and widely shared prosperity
QRAT+: Generalizing QRAT by a More Powerful QBF Redundancy Property
The QRAT (quantified resolution asymmetric tautology) proof system simulates
virtually all inference rules applied in state of the art quantified Boolean
formula (QBF) reasoning tools. It consists of rules to rewrite a QBF by adding
and deleting clauses and universal literals that have a certain redundancy
property. To check for this redundancy property in QRAT, propositional unit
propagation (UP) is applied to the quantifier free, i.e., propositional part of
the QBF. We generalize the redundancy property in the QRAT system by QBF
specific UP (QUP). QUP extends UP by the universal reduction operation to
eliminate universal literals from clauses. We apply QUP to an abstraction of
the QBF where certain universal quantifiers are converted into existential
ones. This way, we obtain a generalization of QRAT we call QRAT+. The
redundancy property in QRAT+ based on QUP is more powerful than the one in QRAT
based on UP. We report on proof theoretical improvements and experimental
results to illustrate the benefits of QRAT+ for QBF preprocessing.Comment: preprint of a paper to be published at IJCAR 2018, LNCS, Springer,
including appendi
Bounded Synthesis of Reactive Programs
Most algorithms for the synthesis of reactive systems focus on the
construction of finite-state machines rather than actual programs. This often
leads to badly structured, unreadable code. In this paper, we present a bounded
synthesis approach that automatically constructs, from a given specification in
linear-time temporal logic (LTL), a program in Madhusudan's simple imperative
language for reactive programs. We develop and compare two principal approaches
for the reduction of the synthesis problem to a Boolean constraint satisfaction
problem. The first reduction is based on a generalization of bounded synthesis
to two-way alternating automata, the second reduction is based on a direct
encoding of the program syntax in the constraint system. We report on
preliminary experience with a prototype implementation, which indicates that
the direct encoding outperforms the automata approach
RTLola Cleared for Take-Off: Monitoring Autonomous Aircraft
The autonomous control of unmanned aircraft is a highly safety-critical
domain with great economic potential in a wide range of application areas,
including logistics, agriculture, civil engineering, and disaster recovery. We
report on the development of a dynamic monitoring framework for the DLR ARTIS
(Autonomous Rotorcraft Testbed for Intelligent Systems) family of unmanned
aircraft based on the formal specification language RTLola. RTLola is a
stream-based specification language for real-time properties. An RTLola
specification of hazardous situations and system failures is statically
analyzed in terms of consistency and resource usage and then automatically
translated into an FPGA-based monitor. Our approach leads to highly efficient,
parallelized monitors with formal guarantees on the noninterference of the
monitor with the normal operation of the autonomous system
Automatic Optimizations for Stream-based Monitoring Languages
Runtime monitors that are specified in a stream-based monitoring language
tend to be easier to understand, maintain, and reuse than those written in a
standard programming language. Because of their formal semantics, such
specification languages are also a natural choice for safety-critical
applications. Unlike for standard programming languages, there is, however, so
far very little support for automatic code optimization. In this paper, we
present the first collection of code transformations for the stream-based
monitoring language RTLola. We show that classic compiler optimizations, such
as Sparse Conditional Constant Propagation and Common Subexpression
Elimination, can be adapted to monitoring specifications. We also develop new
transformations -- Pacing Type Refinement and Filter Refinement -- which
exploit the specific modular structure of RTLola as well as the implementation
freedom afforded by a declarative specification language. We demonstrate the
significant impact of the code transformations on benchmarks from the
monitoring of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).Comment: 20th International Conference on Runtime Verification (2020
Explainable Reactive Synthesis
Reactive synthesis transforms a specification of a reactive system, given in a temporal logic, into an implementation. The main advantage of synthesis is that it is automatic. The main disadvantage is that the implementation is usually very difficult to understand. In this paper, we present a new synthesis process that explains the synthesized implementation to the user. The process starts with a simple version of the specification and a corresponding simple implementation. Then, desired properties are added one by one, and the corresponding transformations, repairing the implementation, are explained in terms of counterexample traces. We present SAT-based algorithms for the synthesis of repairs and explanations. The algorithms are evaluated on a range of examples including benchmarks taken from the SYNTCOMP competition
Hypnotic analgesia reduces brain responses to pain seen in others.
Brain responses to pain experienced by oneself or seen in other people show consistent overlap in the pain processing network, particularly anterior insula, supporting the view that pain empathy partly relies on neural processes engaged by self-nociception. However, it remains unresolved whether changes in one's own pain sensation may affect empathic responding to others' pain. Here we show that inducing analgesia through hypnosis leads to decreased responses to both self and vicarious experience of pain. Activations in the right anterior insula and amygdala were markedly reduced when participants received painful thermal stimuli following hypnotic analgesia on their own hand, but also when they viewed pictures of others' hand in pain. Functional connectivity analysis indicated that this hypnotic modulation of pain responses was associated with differential recruitment of right prefrontal regions implicated in selective attention and inhibitory control. Our results provide novel support to the view that self-nociception is involved during empathy for pain, and demonstrate the possibility to use hypnotic procedures to modulate higher-level emotional and social processes
Understanding and Extending Incremental Determinization for 2QBF
Incremental determinization is a recently proposed algorithm for solving
quantified Boolean formulas with one quantifier alternation. In this paper, we
formalize incremental determinization as a set of inference rules to help
understand the design space of similar algorithms. We then present additional
inference rules that extend incremental determinization in two ways. The first
extension integrates the popular CEGAR principle and the second extension
allows us to analyze different cases in isolation. The experimental evaluation
demonstrates that the extensions significantly improve the performance
- …