Ethical implications of COVID-19 surveillance in Karnataka using Nancy Kass Framework

Numerous public health hurdles, including pandemics such as COVID-19, have led to concerns about community health practices in relation, necessitating the application of an ethical perspective. International research ethics guidelines are only used in a restricted range of contexts of public health. As a result, a variety of frameworks have been established to assist ethical analysis of public health concerns. In this study, we have used the Nancy Kass framework for analyzing COVID-19 surveillance in Karnataka state of India, which is a six-step approach that can assist public health practitioners in evaluating the ethical consequences of interventions, policy initiatives, services, and so on. In order to supervise the compliance of home quarantine, the government of Karnataka mandated uploading selfies as a digital tracking surveillance measure for the COVID-19 outbreak. However, these measures raised several ethical questions, especially related to an individual’s privacy, confidentiality, autonomy, and liberty. An established state surveillance mechanism with includes enforced measures for data security along with the moral duty of an individual to protect the health of the community can probably balance the principles of ethics

Adversarial Perturbations Fool Deepfake Detectors

This work uses adversarial perturbations to enhance deepfake images and fool common deepfake detectors. We created adversarial perturbations using the Fast Gradient Sign Method and the Carlini and Wagner L2 norm attack in both blackbox and whitebox settings. Detectors achieved over 95% accuracy on unperturbed deepfakes, but less than 27% accuracy on perturbed deepfakes. We also explore two improvements to deepfake detectors: (i) Lipschitz regularization, and (ii) Deep Image Prior (DIP). Lipschitz regularization constrains the gradient of the detector with respect to the input in order to increase robustness to input perturbations. The DIP defense removes perturbations using generative convolutional neural networks in an unsupervised manner. Regularization improved the detection of perturbed deepfakes on average, including a 10% accuracy boost in the blackbox case. The DIP defense achieved 95% accuracy on perturbed deepfakes that fooled the original detector, while retaining 98% accuracy in other cases on a 100 image subsample.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2020

Dynamic Modeling and Validation of micro-CHP systems

Micro-Combined Heat and Power (micro-CHP) units locally generate electricity to simultaneously provide power and heat for residential buildings. Apart from the potential benefits of reducing carbon emissions and increasing robustness to brownouts and blackouts, micro-CHP systems can be controlled to meet energy demands. Micro-CHP systems consist of a prime mover that generates electricity, such as a fuel cell, an internal combustion engine, or a Stirling engine, and a waste heat recovery system that enables utilization of heat generated as a byproduct of electricity generation. Often, a thermal energy storage system is integrated with micro-CHP systems, thereby decoupling, in time, the recovery of the thermal energy from its utilization to meet demand. However, in order to effectively meet time-varying electricity and thermal demand through coordinated use of the prime mover and thermal energy storage system, the dynamics of each of these subsystems, and their interactions, need to be modeled. A low order dynamic model is derived for a micro-CHP system with a PEM (proton exchange membrane) fuel cell as the prime mover and a hot water tank as the thermal energy storage unit. Both steady-state and transient data is collected from an experimental micro-CHP testbed to validate the fuel cell and hot water tank models. Validation of the thermal energy storage model is performed for four distinct modes of operation: charging, discharging, simultaneous charging/discharging, and idling. Future work will include validation of the combined fuel cell and thermal energy storage models, as well as model-based control design for micro-CHP systems

Evaluation of the changes in pre-extraction blood pressure and pulse rate values with post-extraction blood pressure and pulse rate values

Background: Aim and objectives were to compare the differences in blood pressure and pulse rate readings before and after extraction of a tooth. Methods: A total of 250 patients were selected for the study, out of which, 124 were males and 126 were females. All the patients were in an age group from 20 till beyond 73 years of age. Blood pressure and pulse rate readings were measured before the start of the procedure. Extraction procedure was performed and post extraction blood pressure and pulse rate values were recorded. Both the values were compared and evaluated. Results: There was an obvious increase in systolic blood pressure and pulse rate values after a tooth extraction. Conclusions: Blood pressure and pulse rate values showed changes before and after tooth extraction but were within normal limits

Design Paper on Petrol Pump Theft Security System

Automobiles have become an integral part of modern life. The increase in the number of vehicles has led to the rise in the consumption of petroleum fuel and the cheating happening in this business. There are numerous ways in which the consumer can be cheated, and this kind of fraud can harm the consumer as well as the company's reputation. So, there is a need for a system that can reduce such type of malpractices and give the right to the customers to check if they are being cheated or not. The system in which not the operator at dispenser nor the manager of respective petrol pump but the customer has the power to check whether he or she has been wronged or not. The CCTV camera surveillance provides a way to monitor any place 24x7 but it requires manpower to scan the footages captured by the camera, and there is a possibility that such malpractices can remain uncaught in this type of monitoring. So, there is a need for a smarter system at such places which aims at identifying all such malpractices and which do not depend on manpower for their identification. This design paper gives the design of a security system at a petrol pump which can overcome almost all malpractices that can happen in its surroundings. The system identifies the malpractice and notifies the consumer and the manager by itself without depending on manpower at the petrol pump

Review Paper on Smart Security System

These days, CCTV cameras are a boon to many agencies in order to keep them safe and keep an eye on any sort of malpractices. But they largely require manpower in cases of live streaming. Hence, to reduce manpower and to assure efficiency a smarter system with the camera is required. A smart security system has a lot of uses these days in order to detect any sort of malfunctioning in the companies, detecting hazards in work places, homes etc. or to control any sorts of misconducts. This review paper contains the reviews of existing applications of such cameras for detecting an intruder in the house and smoke in case of fire. The other applications involve using such system in order to detect vehicles and count them to see if they reach the traffic congestion rate. They have also been used for indoor parking purposes using an MAV (Micro Air Vehicle) to detect if a parking spot is available for a car and also find the car for a driver in case he forgets where he has parked it. The paper has also laid a proposal of such system using Raspberry Pi as to show how various conditions can be programmed into that camera in order to deal with the malpractices and misconducts happening in various workplaces and organizations today and why it will be more useful to do so

Primary Vaginal Myeloid Sarcoma: A Rare Case Report and Review of the Literature

Myeloid sarcoma (chloroma, granulocytic sarcoma, or extramedullary myeloid tumour) is an extramedullary mass forming neoplasm composed of myeloid precursor cells. It is usually associated with myeloproliferative disorders but very rarely may precede the onset of leukemia. Here, we are presenting a rare case of primary vaginal myeloid sarcoma in a geriatric female patient without initial presentation of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). A 68-year-old female patient with ECOG Performance Score of 1 presented with pervaginal bleeding for 20 days. On colposcopic examination, she was found to have mass in the anterior fornix of vagina. A punch biopsy specimen revealed chloromatous infiltration of the vagina. LCA (leukocyte common antigen), MPO (myeloperoxidase), and c-kit were strongly positive on IHC (immunohistochemistry). The patient’s routine blood investigations were normal including peripheral smear, lactose dehydrogenase, uric acid, 2D echocardiography, conventional cytogenetics, bone marrow aspiration, and biopsy. The patient was given 4 cycles of decitabine (Decitex, manufactured by Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Limited, India), 20 mg/m2 for 5 days at an interval of 28 days. There was a partial response to decitabine according to RECIST criteria. As decitabine therapy was well tolerated, we are continuing in the same way until disease progression without any complications. The patient is undergoing regular follow-up at our centre

Random Addition Concatenation Analysis: A Novel Approach to the Exploration of Phylogenomic Signal Reveals Strong Agreement between Core and Shell Genomic Partitions in the Cyanobacteria

Recent whole-genome approaches to microbial phylogeny have emphasized partitioning genes into functional classes, often focusing on differences between a stable core of genes and a variable shell. To rigorously address the effects of partitioning and combining genes in genome-level analyses, we developed a novel technique called Random Addition Concatenation Analysis (RADICAL). RADICAL operates by sequentially concatenating randomly chosen gene partitions starting with a single-gene partition and ending with the entire genomic data set. A phylogenetic tree is built for every successive addition, and the entire process is repeated creating multiple random concatenation paths. The result is a library of trees representing a large variety of differently sized random gene partitions. This library can then be mined to identify unique topologies, assess overall agreement, and measure support for different trees. To evaluate RADICAL, we used 682 orthologous genes across 13 cyanobacterial genomes. Despite previous assertions of substantial differences between a core and a shell set of genes for this data set, RADICAL reveals the two partitions contain congruent phylogenetic signal. Substantial disagreement within the data set is limited to a few nodes and genes involved in metabolism, a functional group that is distributed evenly between the core and the shell partitions. We highlight numerous examples where RADICAL reveals aspects of phylogenetic behavior not evident by examining individual gene trees or a “‘total evidence” tree. Our method also demonstrates that most emergent phylogenetic signal appears early in the concatenation process. The software is freely available at http://desalle.amnh.org