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Quantum-enhanced DRL optimization for DoA estimation and task offloading in ISAC systems
No full textThis work proposes a quantum-aided deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework designed to enhance the accuracy of direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation and the efficiency of computational task offloading in integrated sensing and communication systems. Traditional DRL approaches face challenges in handling high-dimensional state spaces and ensuring convergence to optimal policies within complex operational environments. The proposed quantum-aided DRL framework that operates in a military surveillance system exploits quantum computing’s parallel processing capabilities to encode operational states and actions into quantum states, significantly reducing the dimensionality of the decision space. For the very first time in literature, we propose a quantum-enhanced actor-critic method, utilizing quantum circuits for policy representation and optimization. Through comprehensive simulations, we demonstrate that our framework improves DoA estimation accuracy by 91.66% and 82.61% over existing DRL algorithms with faster convergence rate, and effectively manages the trade-off between sensing and communication and optimizing task offloading decisions under stringent ultra-reliable low-latency communication requirements. Comparative analysis also reveals that our approach reduces the overall task offloading latency by 43.09% and 32.35% compared to the DRL-based deep deterministic policy gradient and proximal policy optimization algorithms, respectively stringent ultra-reliable low-latency communication requirements. Comparative analysis also reveals that our approach reduces the overall task offloading latency by 43.09% and 32.35% compared to the DRL-based deep deterministic policy gradient and proximal policy optimization algorithms, respectively
Detection of sugar syrup adulteration in UK honey using DNA barcoding
No full textHoney is a valuable and nutritious food product, but it is at risk to fraudulent practices such as the addition of cheaper syrups including corn, rice, and sugar beet syrup. Honey authentication is of the utmost importance, but current methods are faced with challenges due to the large variations in natural honey composition (influenced by climate, seasons and bee foraging), or the incapability to detect certain types of plant syrups to confirm the adulterant used. Molecular methods such as DNA barcoding have shown great promise in identifying plant DNA sources in honey and could be applied to detect plant-based sugars used as adulterants. In this work DNA barcoding was successfully used to detect corn and rice syrup adulteration in spiked UK honey with novel DNA markers. Different levels of adulteration were simulated (1 – 30%) with a range of different syrup and honey types, where adulterated honey was clearly separated from natural honey even at 1% adulteration level. Moreover, the test was successful for multiple syrup types and effective on honeys with different compositions. These results demonstrated that DNA barcoding could be used as a sensitive and robust method to detect common sugar adulterants and confirm syrup species origin in honey, which can be applied alongside current screening methods to improve existing honey authentication tests.<br/
Conference report: Symposium on Peacebuilding, the Arts and the Participation of Children and Young People, Queen’s University Belfast, 2024
No full textIn March 2024 the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace,Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast hosted a symposium on ‘Peacebuilding, the Arts and the Participation of Children and Young People’. The event, which ran in conjunction with Young at Art’s Belfast Children’s Festival, brought together practitioners and researchers to explore the role of the arts in facilitating the expression of children and young people and the contribution this can make to peacebuilding, historically, now and in the future. This review outlines the key themes that emerged during the symposium, which include the rights of children and young people, the significance of the creative arts as a mode of expression, the conditions for children and young people’s contribution to peacebuilding and the challenges for collaboration: both intergenerational and inter-sectoral.<br/
Feed additives for methane mitigation: A guideline to uncover the mode of action of antimethanogenic feed additives for ruminants
No full textThis publication aims to provide guidelines of the knowledge required and the potential research to be conducted in order to understand the mode of action of antimethanogenic feed additives (AMFA). In the first part of the paper, we classify AMFA into 4 categories according to their mode of action: (1) lowering dihydrogen (H2) production; (2) inhibiting methanogens; (3) promoting alternative H2-incorporating pathways; and (4) oxidizing methane (CH4). The second part of the paper presents questions that guide the research to identify the mode of action of an AMFA on the rumen CH4 production from 5 different perspectives: (1) microbiology; (2) cell and molecular biochemistry; (3) microbial ecology; (4) animal metabolism; and (5) cross-cutting aspects. Recommendations are provided to address various research questions within each perspective, along with examples of how aspects of the mode of action of AMFA have been elucidated before. In summary, this paper offers timely and comprehensive guidelines to better understand and reveal the mode of action of current and emerging AMFA.</p
Promoting prevention and targeting remission of asthma A EUFOREA consensus statement on raising the bar in asthma care
No full textAsthma is a common, multifaceted respiratory disease with a major impact on quality of life. Despite increased insights into mechanisms underlying various asthma phenotypes and endotypes and the availability of targeted biologic treatment options, the disease remains uncontrolled in a substantial proportion of patients with risk of exacerbations, requiring systemic corticosteroids, and with progressive disease. Current international guidelines advocate for a personalized management approach to patients with uncontrolled severe asthma. The European Forum for Research and Education in Allergy and Airway Diseases (EUFOREA) asthma expert panel was convened to discuss strategies to optimize asthma care and to prevent systemic corticosteroid overuse and disease progression. In this meeting report, we summarize current concepts and recommendations and provide a rationale to implement personalized asthma management at earlier stages of the disease. The ultimate goal is to move away from the current one-size-fits-most concept, which focuses on a symptom-driven treatment strategy, and shift toward a phenotype- and endotype-targeted approach aimed at curbing the disease course by improving clinical outcomes and preserving health-related quality of life. Herein, we provide a consensus view on asthma care that advocates a holistic approach and highlight some unmet needs to be addressed in future clinical trials and population studies
Late-time radio brightening and emergence of a radio jet in the changing-look AGN 1ES 1927+654
No full textWe present multifrequency (5–345 GHz) and multiresolution radio observations of 1ES 1927+654, widely considered one of the most unusual and extreme changing-look active galactic nuclei (CL-AGNs). The source was first designated a CL-AGN after an optical outburst in late 2017 and has since displayed considerable changes in X-ray emission, including the destruction and rebuilding of the X-ray corona in 2019–2020. Radio observations prior to 2023 show a faint and compact radio source typical of a radio-quiet AGN. Starting in 2023 February, 1ES 1927+654 began exhibiting a radio flare with a steep exponential rise, reaching a peak 60 times previous flux levels, and has maintained this higher level of radio emission for over a year to date. The 5–23 GHz spectrum is broadly similar to gigahertz-peaked radio sources, which are understood to be young radio jets less than ∼1000 yr old. Recent high-resolution Very Long Baseline Array observations at 23.5 GHz now show resolved extensions on either side of the core, with a separation of ∼0.15 pc, consistent with a new and mildly relativistic bipolar outflow. A steady increase in the soft X-ray band (0.3–2 keV) concurrent with the radio may be consistent with jet-driven shocked gas, though further observations are needed to test alternate scenarios. This source joins a growing number of CL-AGNs and tidal disruption events that show late-time radio activity, years after the initial outburst
Kaale belongings and Evangelical becomings: an ethnography of Finnish Roma
No full textBy looking at the national Roma community in Finland, the Finnish Kaale, this book explores the impact of Evangelical Christianity on social and political mobilisation, and the ways in which religious identity becomes entangled with community identity. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out over the course of a decade, and coupled with archival research into the social mobilisation of Roma in Finland since the 20th century, this book presents an ethnographic picture of the ways in which members of the national Roma community in Finland live with, engage with and embody their religious outlook, offering a unique perspective on the role of Christianity within the lives of Roma communities in Europe.<br/
Streaming the transmedial and transcultural: contemporary African cinemas and the Netflix viewing environment
No full textIn recent years, Netflix has played a key role in the international distribution of African cinema, not only streaming titles from the continent, but also investing in their production. As a result, numerous Africa films have joined the melting pot of content offered by the platform, rubbing shoulders with mainstream and niche content from across the world. In this way, African films form a component of Netflix’s viewing environment, which might be characterised as ‘transmedial’ in that it represents a convergence of film, video, and new media, and ‘transcultural’ in that it challenges distinctions between the global and the local. Concentrating on three African crime films, this study contends that the films’ self-reflexive uses of genre (especially through intertext, irony, and pastiche) might be seen as embodying the characteristics of this viewing environment, paralleling the viewing patterns and taste formations that have come to define the Netflix ‘viewing experience’
zk-DASTARK: a quantum-resistant, data authentication and zero-knowledge proof scheme for protecting data feed to smart contracts
No full textThe emergence of blockchain technology and smart contracts revolutionize traditional digital applications such as identity management, supply chain management, banking and financial services with Decentralized Applications (DApps). When DApps are integrated with blockchain technology, blockchain validators can access user-sensitive off-chain data to execute a smart contract. On the one hand, DApps need authentic off-chain input user data to execute a given business scenario properly. On the other hand, users are more concerned about their privacy and are reluctant to share their sensitive data on the blockchain. For instance, healthcare insurance DApp requires sensitive user health data as input. DApp must ensure the privacy and authenticity of the user data given to the smart contract so that blockchain validators can perform operations on the user’s data without disclosing the user’s personal information. However, there is no complete solution to achieve both user privacy and data authenticity at the same time. To address this problem, we propose a highly efficient authenticated zero-knowledge proof scheme named zk-DASTARK by enhancing the standard zk-STARK scheme with a quantum attack-resistant data authentication scheme (CRYSTALS Dilithium digital signature scheme, now FIPS-204 or ML-DSA by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST in the USA). Based on zk-DASTARK, we design a zk-STARKFeed, a zero-knowledge authenticated off-chain data feed mechanism that provides user data privacy and authentication for blockchain-based DApps. The blockchain validators’ computation costs can be significantly reduced using zk-STARKFeed with the integration of the ”compute off-chain and verify on-chain” approach. We have implemented zk-STARKFeed on the IOTA blockchain and performed extensive testing on the healthcare insurance DApp. Our proposed zk-STARKFeed is highly efficient on the IOTA blockchain in such a way that its proof generation takes less than 60 ms (ms) and its proof verification takes less than 10 ms.<br/
Software-defined number formats for high-speed belief propagation
No full textThis paper presents the design and implementation of Software-Defined Floating-Point (SDF) number formats for high-speed implementation of the Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm. SDF formats are designed specifically to meet the numeric needs of the computation and are more compact representations of the data. They reduce memory footprint and memory bandwidth requirements without sacrificing accuracy, given that BP for loopy graphs inherently involves algorithmic errors. This paper designs several SDF formats for sum-product BP applications by careful analysis of the computation. Our theoretical analysis leads to the design of 16-bit (half-precision) and 8-bit (mini-precision) widths. We moreover present highly efficient software implementation of the proposed SDF formats which is centered around conversion to hardware-supported single-precision arithmetic hardware. Our solution demonstrates negligible conversion overhead on commercially available CPUs. For Ising grids with sizes from 100×100 to 500×500, the 16- and 8-bit SDF formats along with our conversion module produce equivalent accuracy to double-precision floating-point format but with 4.14× speedups on average on an Intel Xeon processor. Particularly, increasing the grid size results in higher speed-up. For example, the proposed half-precision format with 3-bit exponent and 13-bit mantissa achieved the minimum and maximum speedups of 1.25× and 2.59× over single-precision, and 2.51× and 6.15× over double-precision, by increasing grid size from 100×100 to 500×500