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Intercepting dementia: awareness and innovation as key tools
Get PDFDementia is a common feature of several age-related brain diseases, leading to a progressive cognitive decline. Due to a growing aging rate, dementia-related disorders currently affect around 50 million people worldwide and by 2050 this number is expected to reach 150 million. Additionally to patients, these neurodegenerative pathologies have a strong impact on family members, caretakers, and other health professionals, therefore representing a public health burden that in 2020 accounted for over 1 trillion USD and is projected to nearly double in the next decade. To overcome this devastating condition, many organizations and collaborative networks sustain that only a complete understanding of dementia in its different characteristics can drive the scientific community towards the development of effective therapeutic approaches aiming at preventing its onset and halting its progression.In this work, we discuss two topics that represent fundamental resources in fighting dementia: (i) the importance of raising awareness about this condition to avoid stigma and gauging investment; and (ii) the introduction of novel screening measures to prevent and potentially revert cognitive decline. Finally, we discern how knowledge-based advocacy will help the rollout of clinical trials and the development of novel and timely pharmacological interventions
AI and moral thinking: how can we live well with machines to enhance our moral agency?
No full textHumans should never relinquish moral agency to machines, and machines should be ‘aligned’ with human values; but we also need to consider how broad assumptions about our moral capacities and the capabilities of AI, impact on how we think about AI and ethics. Consideration of certain approaches, such as the idea that we might programme our ethics into machines, may rest upon a tacit assumption of our own moral progress. Here I consider how broad assumptions about morality act to suggest certain approaches in addressing the ethics of AI. Work in the ethics of AI would benefit from closer attention not just to what our moral judgements should be, but also to how we deliberate and act morally: the process of moral decision-making. We must guard against any erosion of our moral agency and responsibilities. Attention to the differences between humans and machines, alongside attention to ways in which humans fail ethically, could be useful in spotting specific, if limited, ways that AI assist us to advance our moral agency
Cyber supply chain threat analysis and prediction using machine learning and ontology
Get PDFCyber Supply Chain (CSC) security requires a secure integrated network among the sub-systems of the inbound and outbound chains. Adversaries are deploying various penetration and manipulation attacks on an CSC integrated network’s node. The different levels of integrations and inherent system complexities pose potential vulnerabilities and attacks that may cascade to other parts of the supply chain system. Thus, it has become imperative to implement systematic threats analyses and predication within the CSC domain to improve the overall security posture. This paper presents a unique approach that advances the current state of the art on CSC threat analysis and prediction by combining work from three areas: Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), Ontologies, and Machine Learning (ML). The outcome of our work shows that the conceptualization of cybersecurity using ontological theory provides clear mechanisms for understanding the correlation between the CSC security domain and enables the mapping of the ML prediction with 80% accuracy of potential cyberattacks and possible countermeasures
Forgotten edibles - a guarantee of future food security
Get PDFSustainability and food security have been troubling scientists for many years with more recent publications addressing “wild edibles” as the future of food during hunger and pandemics. From an ethnobotanical perspective, a wild edible is a source of food that grows locally and can only be obtained by the act of foraging. During the second World War they made up a large part of the diet due to the destruction of commercial food supply chains. Nowadays, with the establishment of global supply chains, the abundance of food from all over the planet has become a reality. Although the level of food security has improved, the agricultural sectors of most European countries have shrunk. The Diversification of food sources has the potential to elevate food security and improve sustainability by introducing locally obtained wild edibles
Monitoring of bridges by MT-InSAR and unsupervised machine learning clustering techniques
Get PDFContinuous monitoring of critical infrastructures is crucial to prevent catastrophic events such as collapse of viaducts and prioritising maintenance interventions. However, developing effective monitoring approaches must rely on the collection of numerous information, such as the time series of structural deformations. In this context, various ground-based non-destructive testing (NDT) methods have been used in monitoring the structural integrity of transport infrastructures. These require routine and systematic application at the network level over long periods of time to build up a solid database of information, involving many efforts from stakeholders and asset owners in the sector. To this effect, satellite-based remote sensing techniques, such as the Multi-temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (MT-InSAR), have gained momentum due to the provision of accurate cumulative structural displacements in bridges. Although the application of the InSAR monitoring technique is established, this is limited by the high amount of time required for the interpretation of data with high spatial and temporal density. This research aims to demonstrate the viability of MT-InSAR techniques for the structural assessment of bridges and the monitoring of damage by structural subsidence, using high-resolution SAR datasets, integrated with complementary Ground-Based (GB) information. To this purpose, high-resolution SAR dataset of the COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) mission provided by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), were acquired and processed in the framework of the ASI-Open Call approved Project “MoTiB” (ID 742). To elaborate, a Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) analysis is applied to identify and monitor the structural displacements at the Rochester Bridge, in Rochester, Kent, UK. To explore the viability of Machine Learning algorithms in detecting critical scenarios in the monitoring phases, an Unsupervised ML Clustering approach, which generates homogeneous and well-separated clusters, is implemented. Each PS data-point is allocated to specific cluster groups, based on individual deformation trend features and the values of displacements from the historical time-series. This research paves the way for the development of a novel interpretation approach relying on the integration between remote-sensing technologies and on-site surveys to improve upon current maintenance strategies for bridges and transport assets
Persona’s role in the design of future technologies by academics and practitioners
Get PDFAutomation and the introduction of Industry 4.0 interactive technologies have imposed novel challenges and burdens on academics and industrial practitioners. Developing systems for future workplaces need sufficient knowledge and understanding of the trends and technological developments and their viability from both industry and academic experts before introducing the general population. Utilizing co-design ideation workshops supported by various design tools can provide better ideation for designing future scenarios. We con-ducted a qualitative study to analyze academics’ and industrial practitioners’ points of view on persona as a design tool during a conference workshop. These participants empirically test the co-creation of personas and find conceptual differences between the groups in their tool use. We used pre and post-workshop surveys and workshop transcripts to code and clustered our findings. The conclusion is that the differences in academics’ and industrial practitioners’ perspectives and use of design tools for ideation are substantial but combined in a team can lead to designing positive experiences in future workplaces
Audience perception in experiential embodied music theatre: a practice-based case study
Get PDFA common feature of contemporary music theatre is that it is situated across various disciplinary boundaries, often leading to a complex layering of music with other artistic forms, such as theatre, text, film, and movement (Bonshek 2006; Rebstock & Roesner 2013; Lehmann 2006). In some cases, such interdisciplinarity has led creators to explore spaces beyond traditional theatrical settings, such that performance location becomes an important and intrinsic feature of a work’s multimodal fabric. A recent example of such work—I Only Know I Am (2019), composed by the authors—provides a case study here in which ideas of experientialism are explored with reference to a variety of extant approaches to theatre and music theatre. The authors propose understanding this work as ‘experiential embodied music theatre’, synthesising aspects of a variety of theatrical modes.
First, we consider the work’s use of space, place and history in the context of environmental and site-specific theatre in order to understand the means by which it attempts to engage the audience. Taking this idea further, we consider the sonic place that is generated through the architecture of the work’s form, supported by the narrative structure and ideas of silencing and stasis. From here, we consider the genre of immersive theatre, and draw a connection between this theatre practice, embodiment in music theatre, and embodied music cognition, so that we can understand the ways in which audience members may embody the music whilst maintaining a traditional audience-performer relationship. This journey from compositional conception, to context and examples, and through to audience perception outlines a reading of this work as experiential embodied music theatre from a variety of perspectives