Revista Jurídica Digital UANDES
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Using deceased-donor kidneys to initiate chains of living donor kidney paired donations:Algorithm and experimentation
No full textWe design a flexible algorithm that exploits deceased donor kidneys to initiate chains of living donor kidney paired donations, combining deceased and living donor allocation mechanisms to improve the quantity and quality of kidney transplants. The advantages of this approach have been measured using retrospective data on the pool of donor/recipient incompatible and desensitized pairs at the Padua University Hospital, the largest center for living donor kidney transplants in Italy. The experiments show a remarkable improvement onthe number of patients with incompatible donor who could be transplanted, a decrease in the number of desensitization procedures, and an increase in the number of UT patients (that is, patients unlikely to be transplanted for immunological reasons) in the waiting list who could receive an organ
Coloured graphlet profiles as a predictor of career length in scientific co-authorship networks
No full textGraphlets, or induced motifs, have long been used to find important medium-scale structures in directed networks. We present a method using the composition of coloured graphlets in ego-networks to characterise nodes. We give an example application using our technique to predict the numbers of years researchers are active from their collaboration networks, and compare our success with simpler metrics; particularly, we find that the use of coloured graphlets improves predictiveperformance compared to colour-blind graphlets; that 4-star graphlets centred on an author are predictors of a long career, and that this effect is not degenerate to centralities
A Parametric Study of Open Rotor Noise
No full textIncreasing environmental pressures have driven a renewed interest in the open rotor concept. However, their large noise emissions have limited their integration to modern aircraft. Therefore, to ensure designs meet current and future noise emission targets, the effects of various design choices must be understood from the preliminary design stage. As a result, this research performs a parametric study of the effect of blade count and tip speed on open rotor noise. Considering a large number of design combinations of both tip speed and blade count, low-order models are used to demonstrate the strong coupling between open rotor noise and these design features. It is shown that generally, the noise reduces for increasing blade count and decreasing tip speed. However, due to the strong interactions between blade rows, this is not a simple relation. A number of optimisations of the open rotor configuration are also presented. These further highlight the complex relationship between the noise and the open rotor configuration. The optimisations also demonstrate the ability to reduce open rotor noise at the terminal areas under additional constraints
Low-Precision Neural Network Decoding of Polar Codes
No full textNeural Network (NN) polar decoders have been getting much attention as a viable replacement for conventional decoders in 5G New Radio (NR). Despite scalability issues, the NN-based decoder is a promising technology as it can improve the latency of the standard Successive Cancellation (SC) decoder. It was shown that the Neural Successive Cancellation (NSC) decoder has an improved theoretical latency compared to the standard SC decoder. However, in contrast to SC, the NSC decoder uses large floating-point weight matrices which do not fit in CPU caches, leading to higher energy usage and lower computational performance due to the increased memory traffic. Additionally such higher memory requirement would be expensive to implement in hardware and require complex floating-point arithmetic. This paper presents a new low-precision NN decoder that can replace memory-heavy NN decoders inside the NSC decoder. We show that up to 54 times weights’ size reduction can be achieved with the wireless performance degradation varying between 0.1dB and 0.4dB compared to the floating-point implementation. Moreover, we show a reduction of up to respectively 438× and 555× in L1 and L2 data cache misses in our prototype software implementation
Placental Growth Factor Testing for Suspected Preeclampsia: a Cost-Minimisation Analysis
No full textObjective: to calculate the cost-savings associated with implementing Placental Growth Factor (PlGF) testing alongside a clinical management algorithm in maternity services in the United Kingdom, compared to current standard care.Design: cost minimisation analysis.Setting: 11 maternity units participating in the PARROT stepped wedge cluster randomised controlled trial.Population: women presenting with suspected pre-eclampsia between 20+0 and 36+6 weeks’ gestation.Methods: Monte Carlo simulation utilising resource use dataMain Outcome Measures: cost associated with PlGF implementation when compared to standard care.Results: there is a total cost saving of £219 per pregnancy, £149 when including the cost of the test. This represents a potential cost saving of £2,891,196 each year across the English NHS.Conclusions: PlGF testing is associated with the potential for cost savings per participant tested when compared to current practice. This economic analysis supports a role for implementation of PlGF testing into antenatal services for the assessment of women with suspected preeclampsia
Feature Pyramid Encoding Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation
No full textAlthough current deep learning methods have achieved impressive results for semantic segmentation, they incur high computational costs and have a huge number of parameters. For real-time applications, inference speed and memory usage are two important factors. To address the challenge, we propose a lightweight feature pyramid encoding network (FPENet) to make a good trade-off between accuracy and speed. Specifically, we use a feature pyramid encoding block to encode multi-scale contextual features with depthwise dilated convolutions in all stages of the encoder. A mutual embedding upsample module is introduced in the decoder to aggregate the high-level semantic features and low-level spatial details efficiently. The proposed network outperforms existing realtime methods with fewer parameters and improved inference speed on the Cityscapes and CamVid benchmark datasets. Specifically, FPENet achieves 68.0% mean IoU on the Cityscapes test set with only 0.4M parameters and 102 FPS speed on one NVIDIA TITAN V card
Does Foreign Direct Investment promote Institutional Development in Africa?
No full textFDI inflows into Africa have increased sharply since the turn of the millennium mainly due to the growth in OFDI from emerging economies. However, while African governments view this growth as a positive development for the continent, many governments in the West have raised concerns regarding the institutional impact of investments from emerging economies. This paper explores the impact of FDI inflows on institutional development in African countries and whether such effects are similar for investments from developed versus developing economies. Previous empirical analyses have found a significant relationship between FDI and institutional reform in African countries, but regard the relationship as MNEs rewarding African countries with institutional reform decisions. Very little attention has been paid to the fact that FDI can act a cause of institutional change in African countries. To address endogeneity problems, we use the real effective exchange rate movement as an instrument in an instrumental variable two-stage procedure. We find a positive effect of FDI on institutional quality through a cross- sectional analysis of greenfield FDI projects in 37 African countries for the period 2003-2015. However, we find that FDI from developing economies and China, in particular, have a negative effect on institutional quality and is robust to alternative measures of institutional quality
Beam Phase Retrieval based on Higher Order Modes in Cylindrical SRF Cavities
No full textThe control of beam phase relative to the accelerating RF field within a superconducting cavity is important in many accelerator applications and is of particular importance for a free electron laser facility. As standard practice, the phase is usually inferred from the beam-induced transient field with respect to a timing reference. We report here on an alternative and novel means of beam phase determination based on beam-excited higher order electromagnetic modes and the accelerating electromagnetic mode, which are conveniently available from the same coupler. The monopole modes are immune to the electron beam offset and therefore are best suited for the task. A coupled circuit model is used to assist the development and to rapidly assess the facility of the method. Simulations based on the circuit model indicate that the resolution of this system depends critically on the signal to noise ratio. Beam-based measurements with a test setup were carried out at the European XFEL, Germany. Based on this new method we have routinely obtained a resolution of 0.1°. The best resolution observed with the current setup was 0.03°. These results agree very well with the predictions from those predicted by a circuit model. The system investigated here can be used to provide diagnostic information for the current LLRF system employed in the European XFEL. To this end, the associated electronics are under development. This monitor is the first of its kind that can deliver direct and online measurements of the beam phase with respect to the RF field
Designing Affect into Security Practices:Shared Situational Awareness and the Habit of Emergency Response
No full textThe paper engages with and extends emergent debates regarding theenvelopment of affective life in practices of security through researchinto the design of Shared Situational Awareness (SSA) protocols. Craftedto address what are commonly called ‘multi-agency’ incidents, SSAprotocols aim to generate real time, dynamic understandings ofemergency situations that can be held consensually amongst differentemergency response authorities in order to facilitate coordinated modesof emergency intervention. I draw on recent conceptualisations incultural geography of the notion of habit in two ways to explore howsuch protocols enrol, regulate and mobilise the affective capacities ofresponder bodies to orchestrate emergency response. Habit firstly opensup to consideration the complex temporality that protocols may inscribeinto the embodied performance of emergency response. Read in relationto habit, protocols appear as security techniques that simultaneouslyformulate response into a sequence of actions in anticipation ofemergencies whilst enabling responders to adapt to emergencies asvolatile situations unfolding in an indeterminate, real-time present.Secondly, habit orients exploration towards the modes of affect-basedsense-making practices that protocols seek to integrate into thisperformance. On one hand, protocols have been designed with the goalof instilling into responder bodies what Brian Massumi refers to asaffective attunement as a means to render emergencies intelligible. Onthe other, protocol design seeks to inculcate into responder bodies thecapacity to execute what I call ‘empathic sense-making’ wherebyauthorities are able to coordinate with one another by operating with aperception of the emergency that traverses the confines of theirimmediate spatial and temporal embodied encounter with it.Synthesising protocol design with habit ultimately reveals much abouthow emergency planners consider bodily capacity an active agent thatboth guides the structure of intervention and instills particular modes ofcognition into emergency response and securit