Computational analysis of the LRRK2 interactome.

LRRK2 was identified in 2004 as the causative protein product of the Parkinson's disease locus designated PARK8. In the decade since then, genetic studies have revealed at least 6 dominant mutations in LRRK2 linked to Parkinson's disease, alongside one associated with cancer. It is now well established that coding changes in LRRK2 are one of the most common causes of Parkinson's. Genome-wide association studies (GWAs) have, more recently, reported single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) around the LRRK2 locus to be associated with risk of developing sporadic Parkinson's disease and inflammatory bowel disorder. The functional research that has followed these genetic breakthroughs has generated an extensive literature regarding LRRK2 pathophysiology; however, there is still no consensus as to the biological function of LRRK2. To provide insight into the aspects of cell biology that are consistently related to LRRK2 activity, we analysed the plethora of candidate LRRK2 interactors available through the BioGRID and IntAct data repositories. We then performed GO terms enrichment for the LRRK2 interactome. We found that, in two different enrichment portals, the LRRK2 interactome was associated with terms referring to transport, cellular organization, vesicles and the cytoskeleton. We also verified that 21 of the LRRK2 interactors are genetically linked to risk for Parkinson's disease or inflammatory bowel disorder. The implications of these findings are discussed, with particular regard to potential novel areas of investigation

Last minute policies and the incumbency advantage

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed about the state of the world. Due to the asymmetries in government responsibility between candidates, the incumbent's statements may convey information on the relevance of the issues to voters. In equilibrium, the incumbent sometimes strategically releases his statement early and thus signals the importance of his signature issue to the voters. This gives rise to the incumbency advantage. We find that, since the incumbent's positioning on the issue reveals private information which the challenger can use in later statements, the incumbent's incentives to distort the campaign are decreasing in the quality of the incumbent, as previously documented by the empirical literature. However, we show that this implies a non-monotonicity in the distortions that arise in equilibrium

Last minute policies and the incumbency advantage

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed about the state of the world. Due to the asymmetries in government responsibility between candidates, the incumbent's statement may convey information on the relevance of the issues to voters. In equilibrium, the incumbent sometimes strategically releases his statement early and thus signals the importance of his signature issue to the voters. We find that, since the incumbent's positioning on the issue reveals private information which the challenger can use in later statements, the incumbent's incentives to distort the campaign are decreasing in his quality, as previously documented by the empirical literature. The distortions arising in equilibrium are decreasing in the incumbent's effective ability; however, the distortions may be increasing in the incumbent's reputation of expertise on his signature issue

Adaptive real-time predictive collaborative content discovery and retrieval in mobile disconnection prone networks

Emerging mobile environments motivate the need for the development of new distributed technologies which are able to support dynamic peer to peer content sharing, decrease high operating costs, and handle intermittent disconnections. In this paper, we investigate complex challenges related to the mobile disconnection tolerant discovery of content that may be stored in mobile devices and its delivery to the requesting nodes in mobile resource-constrained heterogeneous environments. We propose a new adaptive real-time predictive multi-layer caching and forwarding approach, CafRepCache, which is collaborative, resource, latency, and content aware. CafRepCache comprises multiple multi-layer complementary real-time distributed predictive heuristics which allow it to respond and adapt to time-varying network topology, dynamically changing resources, and workloads while managing complex dynamic tradeoffs between them in real time. We extensively evaluate our work against three competitive protocols across a range of metrics over three heterogeneous real-world mobility traces in the face of vastly different workloads and content popularity patterns. We show that CafRepCache consistently maintains higher cache availability, efficiency and success ratios while keeping lower delays, packet loss rates, and caching footprint compared to the three competing protocols across three traces when dynamically varying content popularity and dynamic mobility of content publishers and subscribers. We also show that the computational cost and network overheads of CafRepCache are only marginally increased compared with the other competing protocols

IL PATRIMONIO NETTO BANCARIO

The aim of my dissertation is to investigate the function of the net worth - in particular capital and surplus - of the ordinary corporations and of the banks in order to demonstrate that the net worth fulfill a strategic role for creditors\u2019 protection increased in the banking sector by the regulatory capital requirements that have a direct and indirect impact on the banks\u2019 net worth and that function is not adversely impacted by the international accounting standards

Towards Collective Sentiment Analysis in IoT-Enabled Scenarios

An interesting and innovative activity in Collective Intelligence systems is Sentiment Analysis (SA) which, starting from users' feedback, aims to identify their opinion about a specific subject, for example in order to develop/improve/customize products and services. The feedback gathering, however, is complex, time-consuming, and often invasive, possibly resulting in decreased truthfulness and reliability for its outcome. Moreover, the subsequent feedback processing may suffer from scalability, cost, and privacy issues when the sample size is large or the data to be processed is sensitive. Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Intelligence (EI) can greatly help in both aspects by providing, respectively, a pervasive and transparent way to collect a huge amount of heterogeneous data from users (e.g., audio, images, video, etc.) and an efficient, low-cost, and privacy-preserving solution to locally analyze them without resorting to Cloud computing-based platforms. Therefore, in this paper we outline an innovative collective SA system which leverages on IoT and EI (specifically, TinyML techniques and the EdgeImpulse platform) to gather and immediately process audio in the proximity of entities-of-interest in order to determine whether audience' opinions are positive, negative, or neutral. The architecture of the proposed system, exemplified in a museum use case, is presented, and a preliminary, yet very promising, implementation is shown, reveling interesting insights towards its full development

The effect of diameter variability and medullation of wool on Fibre Fineness Distribution Analyser (FFDA) measurements.

No presente trabalho foram investigados os efeitos da medulação e da variabilidade de diâmetro da lã sobre as medidas de diâmetro no FFDA. Foram desenvolvidas equações para corrigir os resultados oriundos do FFDA, de acordo com o grau de medulação das amostras. Os resultados do trabalho indicaram que na calibração do FFDA deveria ser incluído um "top" de lã com maior diâmetro médio do que os usados correntemente. Isto melhoraria os resultados para as lãs mais grossas.The effect of medullation and variability of fibre diameter on FFDA measurements were investigated. For a FFDA fitted with the expanding (new) cell, medullated wools and more variable wools gave finer results than those obtained with the projection microscope. Equations correcting FFDA results for the degree of medullation are presented. It is suggested that calibration using a coarser top than those currently in use would improve measurements on coarse wool