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Context-aware applications generally need to retrieve various kinds of dynamic context data from a large number of context sources. A middleware managing context sources must provide an efficient context lookup mechanism to ease application development. In this paper, we categorize the context sources as operating spaces and propose semantic peer-to-peer overlays over these spaces to accelerate dy
Medical decision-making is critical and the decisions are made under uncertain, complex, and dynamic conditions. In this regard, practitioners’ experiences and perceptions may provide a bottom-up knowledge of the issues, as well as a corresponding support system that assists them in learning to make decisions in critical situations. The current study aimed to examine these experiences in the Pakis
Abstract: Birds have evolved morphological, physiological and behavioural adaptations, encoded in their migratory programs, to enable successful migration. Sometimes, even closely related species, such as the Eurasian reed warbler and the sedge warbler, may adopt different migration strategies to reach their wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa. To study them in detail, we aimed to compare the
This work explores the use of reinforcement learning to design a proactive cloud resource auto-scaler that is able to predict usage across a distributed microservice application. The focus is on serving time-sensitive workloads, e.g., industrial automation, connected XR/VR (eXtended Reality/Virtual Reality), etc., where each job has a deadline and there is some cost associated with missing a deadl
Early detection of breast cancer is important to reduce morbidity and mortality. Access to breast imaging is limited in low- and middle-income countries compared to high-income countries. This contributes to advance-stage breast cancer presentation with poor survival. Pocket-sized portable ultrasound device, also known as point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS), aided by decision support using deep learn
We provide necessary and sufficient structural conditions for multistationarity and oscillations in aggregate monotone systems, defined as the interconnection of stable monotone components. Our classification is based on the presence of exclusively positive or exclusively negative cycles in the system aggregate graph, whose nodes are the monotone subsystems. The results presented here scale up the
We consider the problem of tuning the output of a static plant whose model is unknown, under the only information that the input-output function is monotonic in each component or, more in general, that its Jacobian belongs to a known polytope of matrices. As a main result, we show that, if the polytope is robustly non-singular (or has full rank, in the non-square case), then a suitable tuning sche
Structural properties, independent of specific parameter values, can explain the robustness of biochemical systems. In this paper we consider the framework previously proposed by the authors to assess structural stability of biochemical reaction networks with monotone reaction rates, which considers systems in concentration coordinates, and we show that the results can be applied to systems in rea
We design a new negative feedback molecular oscillator and study its properties analytically and numerically. This oscillator is composed of two synthetic genes interconnected through their RNA outputs. Regulation of the genes activity is achieved by controlling the activity of the enzymes rather than the activity of the promoters. We show that a simple model of this system has the potential to os
A property for a class of systems is said to be structural if it is met by any system in the class regardless of the adopted parameters. In this paper we investigate the structural nature of oscillatory behaviors, adaptation and monotonicity in a class of sign-invariant systems, capturing a wide variety of biological models. We employ standard robustness analysis tools, suitably tailored to the ca
Finding new therapies for Parkinson's disease (PD) is a slow process. We assembled an international committee of experts to examine drugs potentially suitable for repurposing to modify PD progression. This committee evaluated multiple drugs currently used, or being developed, in other therapeutic areas, as well as considering several natural, non-pharmaceutical compounds. The committee prioritized
Bosonic strings can be discretized in terms of dynamically triangulatedrandom surfaces. We investigate the possibility of introducing fermionicdegrees of freedom on the surface in terms of Ising spins, which in twodimensions correspond to Majorana fermions. Critical properties of themodel are estimated using finite-size scaling methods.
Choice blindness is a cognitive phenomenon describing that when people receive false feedback about a choice they just made, they often accept the outcome as their own. Little is known about what predisposes people to correct manipulations they are subjected to in choice blindness studies. In this study, 118 participants answered a political attitude survey and were then asked to explain some of t
The Antarctic temperature changes over the past millennia remain more uncertain than in many other continental regions. This has several origins: (1) the number of high-resolution ice cores is small, in particular on the East Antarctic plateau and in some coastal areas in East Antarctica; (2) the short and spatially sparse instrumental records limit the calibration period for reconstructions and
