Homo Datumicus : correcting the market for identity data

Effective digital identity systems offer great economic and civic potential. However, unlocking this potential requires dealing with social, behavioural, and structural challenges to efficient market formation. We propose that a marketplace for identity data can be more efficiently formed with an infrastructure that provides a more adequate representation of individuals online. This paper therefore introduces the ontological concept of Homo Datumicus: individuals as data subjects transformed by HAT Microservers, with the axiomatic computational capabilities to transact with their own data at scale. Adoption of this paradigm would lower the social risks of identity orientation, enable privacy preserving transactions by default and mitigate the risks of power imbalances in digital identity systems and markets

Automation and hypermedia technology applications

This paper represents a progress report on HyLite (Hypermedia Library technology): a research and development activity to produce a versatile system as part of NASA's technology thrusts in automation, information sciences, and communications. HyLite can be used as a system or tool to facilitate the creation and maintenance of large distributed electronic libraries. The contents of such a library may be software components, hardware parts or designs, scientific data sets or databases, configuration management information, etc. Proliferation of computer use has made the diversity and quantity of information too large for any single user to sort, process, and utilize effectively. In response to this information deluge, we have created HyLite to enable the user to process relevant information into a more efficient organization for presentation, retrieval, and readability. To accomplish this end, we have incorporated various AI techniques into the HyLite hypermedia engine to facilitate parameters and properties of the system. The proposed techniques include intelligent searching tools for the libraries, intelligent retrievals, and navigational assistance based on user histories. HyLite itself is based on an earlier project, the Encyclopedia of Software Components (ESC) which used hypermedia to facilitate and encourage software reuse

The Use of Medicinal Mushroom or Herb as Effective Immunomodulatory Agent

Background: Medicinal mushrooms are mushrooms used with the aim for health enhancement. They have been used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for thousands of years. These mushrooms and some herbal medicines have gain in popularity in recent times, largely due to a growing number of scientific studies that suggest their potential medical benefits. They are found to exert immunomodulatory effects through changes in the quantity of some specific cytokines in blood; as well as numbers and activities of distinct immune cell subsets. This article summarizes the immunomodulatory effects of two commonly consumed medicinal mushrooms (Coriolus versicolor and Ganoderma lucidum) and also three herbal medicines that have been categorized as immunomodulatory in function (Cordyceps sinensis, Astragalus membranaceus and Eleutherococcus senticosus). Methods: A systematic search of published articles of clinical trial studies between 1985 and August 2015 was conducted in four electronic databases (EMBASE, PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science). The outcome measures included changes in the serum cytokines secretion and the number and functional activity of different immune cell populations. Results: After a thorough literature searching of 237 relevant articles, 15 were included. Coriolus versicolor and Ganoderma lucidum showed immunomodulatory effects in both innate and adaptive immunity arms. There are only very few studies in each mushroom or herb, and unequivocal conclusions cannot be drawn. Future larger trials of randomized and placebo controlled clinical studies with laboratory investigation of changes of multiple immune populations and their subsets are needed in consistent with an evidence-based medicine approach

Performance of a 62Zn/62Cu microgenerator in kit-based synthesis and delivery of [62Cu]Cu–ETS for PET perfusion imaging

The performance of a commercially produced 62Zn/62Cu microgenerator system, and an associated kit-based radiopharmaceutical synthesis method, was evaluated for clinical site production of [62Cu]Cu-ETS (ethylglyoxal bis(thiosemicarbazonato)copper(II)), an investigational agent for PET perfusion imaging. Using 37 generators, containing 1.84 ± 0.23 GBq 62Zn at 9:00 AM on the day of clinical use, a total of 45 patient doses of [62Cu]Cu-ETS (672 ± 172 MBq) were delivered without difficulty. 62Cu elution yields were high (approximately 90%), accompanied by extremely low 62Zn breakthrough (<0.001%). Radiopharmaceutical preparation, from the start-of-elution to time-of-injection, consumed less than five minutes. The 62Zn/62Cu microgenerator was a dependable source of short-lived positron-emitting 62Cu, and the kit-based synthesis proved to be rapid, robust, and highly reliable for “on-demand” delivery of [62Cu]Cu-ETS for PET perfusion imaging

Norm-Explicit Quantization: Improving Vector Quantization for Maximum Inner Product Search

Vector quantization (VQ) techniques are widely used in similarity search for data compression, fast metric computation and etc. Originally designed for Euclidean distance, existing VQ techniques (e.g., PQ, AQ) explicitly or implicitly minimize the quantization error. In this paper, we present a new angle to analyze the quantization error, which decomposes the quantization error into norm error and direction error. We show that quantization errors in norm have much higher influence on inner products than quantization errors in direction, and small quantization error does not necessarily lead to good performance in maximum inner product search (MIPS). Based on this observation, we propose norm-explicit quantization (NEQ) --- a general paradigm that improves existing VQ techniques for MIPS. NEQ quantizes the norms of items in a dataset explicitly to reduce errors in norm, which is crucial for MIPS. For the direction vectors, NEQ can simply reuse an existing VQ technique to quantize them without modification. We conducted extensive experiments on a variety of datasets and parameter configurations. The experimental results show that NEQ improves the performance of various VQ techniques for MIPS, including PQ, OPQ, RQ and AQ

Antibodies to Enteroviruses in Cerebrospinal Fluid of Patients with Acute Flaccid Myelitis.

Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) has caused motor paralysis in &gt;560 children in the United States since 2014. The temporal association of enterovirus (EV) outbreaks with increases in AFM cases and reports of fever, respiratory, or gastrointestinal illness prior to AFM in &gt;90% of cases suggest a role for infectious agents. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from 14 AFM and 5 non-AFM patients with central nervous system (CNS) diseases in 2018 were investigated by viral-capture high-throughput sequencing (VirCapSeq-VERT system). These CSF and serum samples, as well as multiple controls, were tested for antibodies to human EVs using peptide microarrays. EV RNA was confirmed in CSF from only 1 adult AFM case and 1 non-AFM case. In contrast, antibodies to EV peptides were present in CSF of 11 of 14 AFM patients (79%), significantly higher than controls, including non-AFM patients (1/5 [20%]), children with Kawasaki disease (0/10), and adults with non-AFM CNS diseases (2/11 [18%]) (P = 0.023, 0.0001, and 0.0028, respectively). Six of 14 CSF samples (43%) and 8 of 11 sera (73%) from AFM patients were immunoreactive to an EV-D68-specific peptide, whereas the three control groups were not immunoreactive in either CSF (0/5, 0/10, and 0/11; P = 0.008, 0.0003, and 0.035, respectively) or sera (0/2, 0/8, and 0/5; P = 0.139, 0.002, and 0.009, respectively).IMPORTANCE The presence in cerebrospinal fluid of antibodies to EV peptides at higher levels than non-AFM controls supports the plausibility of a link between EV infection and AFM that warrants further investigation and has the potential to lead to strategies for diagnosis and prevention of disease