Product Development within Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Legal Risk

This open-access-book synthesizes a supportive developer checklist considering sustainable Team and agile Project Management in the challenge of Artificial Intelligence and limits of image recognition. The study bases on technical, ethical, and legal requirements with examples concerning autonomous vehicles. As the first of its kind, it analyzes all reported car accidents state wide (1.28 million) over a 10-year period. Integrating of highly sensitive international court rulings and growing consumer expectations make this book a helpful guide for product and team development from initial concept until market launch

Product Development within Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Legal Risk

This open-access-book synthesizes a supportive developer checklist considering sustainable Team and agile Project Management in the challenge of Artificial Intelligence and limits of image recognition. The study bases on technical, ethical, and legal requirements with examples concerning autonomous vehicles. As the first of its kind, it analyzes all reported car accidents state wide (1.28 million) over a 10-year period. Integrating of highly sensitive international court rulings and growing consumer expectations make this book a helpful guide for product and team development from initial concept until market launch

Area-wide real-world test scenarios of poor visibility for safe development of automated vehicles

Introduction Automated vehicles in everyday real-world traffic are predicted to be developed soon (Gasser et al., Rechtsfolgen zunehmender Fahrzeugautomatisierung, Wirtschaftsverlag NW, Berichte der Bundesanstalt für Straßenwesen F83, 2012). New technologies such as advanced object detection and artificial intelligence (AI) that use machine or deep-learning algorithms will support meeting all the maneuvering challenges involved in different degrees of automation (Society of Automotive Engineers - SAE international, Levels of driving automation for on road vehicles, Warrendale, PA., 2014; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – NHTSA, Preliminary statement of policy concerning automated vehicles, Washington, DC, 2018). For automated series production, these vehicles of course must be safe in real-world traffic under all weather conditions. Therefore, system validation, ethical aspects and testing of automated vehicle functions are fundamental basics for successfully developing, market launching, ethical and social acceptance. Method In order to test and validate critical poor visibility detection challenges of automated vehicles with reasonable expenditure, a first area-wide analysis has been conducted. Because poor visibility restricts human perception similar corresponding to machine perception it was based on a text analysis of 1.28 million area-wide police accident reports – followed by an in-depth case-by-case analysis of 374 identified cases concerning bad weather conditions (see chap. 1.3). For this purpose the first time ever a nationwide analysis included all police reports in the whole area within the state of Saxony from the year 2004 until 2014. Results Within this large database, 374 accidents were found due to perception limitations – caused by “rain”, “fog”, “snow”, “glare”/“blinding” and “visual obstruction” – for the detailed case-by-case investigation. All those challenging traffic scenarios are relevant for automated driving. They will form a key aspect for safe development, validation and testing of machine perception within automated driving functions. Conclusions This first area-wide analysis does not only rely on samples as in previous in-depth analyses. It provides relevant real-world traffic scenarios for testing of automated vehicles. For the first time this analysis is carried out knowing the place, time and context of each accident over the total investigated area of an entire federal state. Thus, the accidents that have been analyzed include all kinds of representative situations that can occur on motorways, highways, main roads, side streets or urban traffic. The scenarios can be extrapolated to include similar road networks worldwide. These results additionally will be taken into account for developing standards regarding early simulations as well as for the subsequent real-life testing. In the future, vehicle operation data and traffic simulations could be included as well. Based on these relevant real-world accidents culled from the federal accident database for Saxony, the authors recommend further development of internationally valid guidelines based on ethical, legal requirements and social acceptance. Document type: Articl

Numerical Study of Structural Phase Transitions in a Vertically Confined Plasma Crystal

Dusty plasmas consists of an ionized gas containing small (usually negatively charged) particles. Dusty plasmas are of interest in both astrophysics and space physics as well as in research in plasma processing and nanofabrication. In this work, the formation of plasma crystals confined in an external one-dimensional parabolic potential well is simulated for a normal experimental environment employing a computer code called BOX_TREE. Such crystals are layered systems, with each layer a two dimensional lattice composed of grain particles. The number of layers is dependent upon the external potential parameter. For constant layer number, the intralayer structure transits from a square lattice to a hexagonal (triangular) lattice as the confining potential decreases. For hexagonal lattices, both hcp and fcc characteristics were found but hcp structures dominate. The relative thickness of the system was also examined. The results were compared with previous experimental and theoretical results and found to agree

Incidence of Lead System Malfunction Detected During Implantable Defibrillator Generator Replacement

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/71565/1/j.1540-8159.1996.tb04183.x.pd

Blindness Due to Polymicrogyria and Asymmetrical Dilation of the Lateral Ventricles in Standard Poodles

Polymicrogyria and asymmetric dilation of the lateral ventricles were seen in related Standard poodles that had cortical blindness. Three of the affected dogs also had gait and postural abnormalities, and one of these had seizures.Two of the affected dogs were littermates. Thorough ophthalmologic and neurologic examinations (including electroretinography, electromyography, cerebrospinal fluid analysis, plain radiographs, and computerized tomography scans) revealed no significant abnormalities outside of the brain that would account for the blindness. Computerized tomography scans in three dogs demonstrated bilateral dilation of the lateral ventricles which was more severe in the right. All dogs were necropsied between 5 and 9 months of age and had strikingly similar brain abnormalities. Numerous small irregular gyri with shallow sulci covered the middle and caudal dorsal and lateral cerebral cortex. The bony ridges of the inner calvaria in this area conformed to the underlying microgyral pattern. The lateral ventricles were asymmetrically dilated with the right more severely affected, particularly in the occipital area, and the cortical grey and white matter, including the corpus callosum, were thinned in these areas. The third and fourth ventricles and mesencephalic aqueduct were normal. Histologically, there was thinning and simplification of the cortical grey matter with an increased density of medium to large neurons. The corona radiata and subcortical white matter were also thinner than normal with no evidence of demyelination of astrocytic scarring. This congenital anomaly of the visual cortex causing blindness in the Standard Poodle appears to be inherited as an autosomal recessive trait

Pharmacokinetic properties of remimazolam in subjects with hepatic or renal impairment

BACKGROUND: Remimazolam is a new benzodiazepine for procedural sedation and general anaesthesia. The aim of this study was to characterise its pharmacokinetic properties and safety in renally and hepatically impaired subjects. METHODS: Two separate trials were conducted in patients with hepatic (n=11) or renal impairment (n=11) compared with matched healthy subjects (n=9 and n=12, respectively). The hepatic impairment trial was an open-label adaptive 'Reduced Design' trial, using a single bolus of remimazolam 0.1 mg kg-1 i.v., whereas the renal impairment trial was an open-label trial of a single bolus dose of remimazolam 1.5 mg i.v. Remimazolam plasma concentrations over time were analysed by population pharmacokinetic modelling. RESULTS: Remimazolam pharmacokinetic properties were adequately described by a three-compartment, recirculatory model. Exposure in subjects with severe hepatic impairment was 38.1% higher (i.e. clearance was 38.1% lower) compared with healthy volunteers. This increase caused a slightly delayed recovery (8.0 min for healthy, 12.1 min for moderate, and 16.7 min for severe hepatic impairment). With renal impairment, plasma clearance was comparable with that measured in healthy subjects. Simulations of Cmax after a bolus dose of 10 mg showed no relevant impact of hepatic or renal impairment. The overall incidence of adverse events was low, and all adverse events were mild. CONCLUSIONS: As Cmax after a remimazolam bolus i.v. was not affected by hepatic or renal impairment, no dose adjustments are required. No unexpected adverse events related to remimazolam were seen in subjects with renal or hepatic impairment. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: Hepatic impairment trial: ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT01790607 (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01790607). Renal impairment trial: EudraCT Number: 2014-004575-23

Improving STEM Education in Research: Preliminary Report on the Development of a Computer-Assisted Student-Mentor Research Community

Research education in STEM disciplines currently suffers from 1) The inability to feasibly collect highly detailed data on both the student’s and mentor’s activities; 2) The lack of tools to assist students and mentors in organizing and managing their research activities and environments; and 3) The inability to correlate a student’s assessment results with their actual research activities. Together these three problems act to impede both the improvement and educational quality of student research experiences. We propose a computer-assisted student-mentor research community as a solution to these problems. Within this community setting, students and their mentors are provided tools to make their work easier, much like a word processor makes writing a letter easier. Through their use of these tools, details of student-mentor activities are automatically recorded in a relational database, without burdening users with the responsibility of archiving data. Equally important, student assessments of outcome can be directly related to student activity, allowing educators to identify practices resulting in successful research experiences. Community tools also facilitate the use of labor-intensive teaching laboratories involving real inquiry-based research. The community structure has the added benefit of allowing students to see, communicate and interact more freely with other students and their projects, thus enriching the student’s research experience. We provide herein a preliminary report on the development and testing of a prototype, student-mentor research community, and present its tools, an assessment of student interest in participating in the community, and discuss its further development into a nationally-available student-mentor research community

Targeting of mutant hogg1 in mammalian mitochondria and nucleus: effect on cellular survival upon oxidative stress

BACKGROUND: Oxidative damage to mitochondrial DNA has been implicated as a causative factor in a wide variety of degenerative diseases, aging and cancer. The modified guanine, 7,8-dihydro-8-oxoguanine (also known as 8-hydroxyguanine) is one of the major oxidized bases generated in DNA by reactive oxygen species and has gained most of the attention in recent years as a marker of oxidative DNA injury and its suspected role in the initiation of carcinogenesis. 8-hydroxyguanine is removed by hOgg1, a DNA glycosylase/AP lyase involved in the base excision repair pathway. METHODS: We over-expressed wild type and R229Q mutant hOGG1 in the nucleus and mitochondria of cells lacking mitochondrial hOGG1 expression through an expression vector containing nuclear and mitochondrial targeting sequence respectively. We used quantitative real time PCR to analyze mtDNA integrity after exposure to oxidative damaging agents, in cells transfected with or without mitochondrially-targeted mutant hogg1. RESULT: Over-expression of wild type hOgg1 in both nucleus and mitochondria resulted in increased cellular survival when compared to vector or mutant over-expression of hOGG1. Interestingly, mitochondrially-targeted mutant hogg1 resulted in more cell death than nuclear targeted mutant hogg1 upon exposure of cells to oxidative damage. Additional we examined mitochondrial DNA integrity after oxidative damage exposure using real-time quantitative PCR. The presence of mutant hogg1 in the mitochondria resulted in reduced mitochondrial DNA integrity when compared to the wild type. Our work indicates that the R229Q hOGG1 mutation failed to protect cells from oxidative damage and that such mutations in cancer may be more detrimental to cellular survival when present in the mitochondria than in the nucleus. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that deficiencies in hOGG1, especially in the mitochondria may lead to reduced mitochondrial DNA integrity, consequently resulting in decreased cell viability