A bidirectional neurohumoral communication system known as the gut–brain axis integrates the activities of the intestine and the brain. In this Progress article, Collins, Surette and Bercik describe recent evidence suggesting that the intestinal microbiota is intimately connected with the gut–brain axis and can influence animal behaviour, development and health. The intestinal microbiota consists of a vast bacterial community that resides primarily in the lower gut and lives in a symbiotic relationship with the host. A bidirectional neurohumoral communication system, known as the gut–brain axis, integrates the host gut and brain activities. Here, we describe the recent advances in our understanding of how the intestinal microbiota communicates with the brain via this axis to influence brain development and behaviour. We also review how this extended communication system might influence a broad spectrum of diseases, including irritable bowel syndrome, psychiatric disorders and demyelinating conditions such as multiple sclerosis.

The interplay between the intestinal microbiota and the brain

The extent to which member states transpose EU directives in a timely fashion is often argued to be strongly associated with the general effectiveness of national bureaucracies. But what kind of institutional solutions ensure better performance? This paper examines the patterns and effects of departmental oversight across 28 ministries in Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. In mapping the strength of oversight, it relies on around 90 structured interviews regarding the rules-in-use on transposition planning, legal review and monitoring of deadlines. The analysis of the impact of departmental oversight is based on an original dataset of over 300 directives with transposition deadlines between January 2005 and December 2008.

On the european union

Anthocyanins belong to the flavonoid group of polyphenolic compounds, which are responsible for the red and blue colors of plant organs such as fruits, flowers, and leaves Due to their frequent presence in plants, particularly berry fruits, vegetables, and grapes, they are key components of the human diet Interest in anthocyanins has increased widely during the past decade Numerous studies have suggested that anthocyanins have a wide range of health-promoting properties These compounds are therefore considered to be a functional food factor, which may have important implications in the prevention of chronic diseases The aim of this body of work is to investigate and review the current literature on anthocyanins, and particularly their pharmacokinetics and any health-promoting properties, in order to summarize existing knowledge and highlight any aspects that require further study and analysis

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1541-4337.12024

The Case for Anthocyanin Consumption to Promote Human Health: A Review

The title of this technical report says almost everything: this is indeed \"a short bibliography on AI and the arts\". It is presented in four sections: General Arguments, Proposals, and Approaches (31 references); Artificial Intelligence in Music (124 references); Artificial Intelligence in Literature and the Performing Arts (13 references), and Artificial Intelligence and Visual Art (57 references). About a quarter of these have short abstracts. Creating a bibliography can be a monumental task, and this bibliography should be viewed as a good and useful start, though it is by no means complete. For comparison, consider the 4,585-entry bibliography Computer Applications in Music by Deta Davis (A-REditions). No direct comparison is intended (or possible), but my point is that many more papers are likely to exist. As a rough check, I looked for several pre-1990 AI and Music articles and books (including my own, of course) in the bibliography. Out of five papers from well-known sources, only one was listed. On the other hand, I discovered a number of papers in this report that were unknown to me, so I am grateful to have a new source of references. In their introduction, the authors acknowledge the need for more references and even offer.a cup of coffee in reward for each new one. I will be sending a number of contributions, so the next time anyone is in Vienna, the coffee is on me. I hope the authors will continue to collect abstracts and publish an updated report in the future.

Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound by Albert Bregman (review)

Anthocyanins are naturally occurring molecules belonging to the flavonoid class characterized by the presence of chromophores. Apart from their well-known antioxidant activity, they show a wide variety of health-promoting properties for human health, ranging from cytoprotective, antimicrobial and antitumour activities to neuroprotective, anti-obesity and lipidomic potential, properties for which anthocyanins have been prescribed as medicines in several countries for thousands of years. Despite this, these phytochemicals have received less attention than other flavonoids, and there is still a gap in the literature, particularly regarding pharmacological and toxicological aspects. Moreover, epidemiological evidence suggests a direct correlation between anthocyanin intake and a lower incidence of chronic and degenerative diseases. In light of this, the aim of this review is to cover the current literature on anthocyanins, their biological in vitro and in vivo effects and their potential therapeutic applications, as well as their bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, all of which are essential to gain a better understanding of their biological effectiveness and potential toxicity. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Chemistry, Pharmacology and Health Benefits of Anthocyanins.

Independent navigation in unfamiliar and complex environments is a major challenge for blind people. This challenge motivates a multi-disciplinary effort in the CHI community aimed at developing assistive technologies to support the orientation and mobility of blind people, including related disciplines such as accessible computing, cognitive sciences, computer vision, and ubiquitous computing. This workshop intends to bring these communities together to increase awareness on recent advances in blind navigation assistive technologies, benefit from diverse perspectives and expertises, discuss open research challenges, and explore avenues for multi-disciplinary collaborations. Interactions are fostered through a panel on Open Challenges and Avenues for Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Minute-Madness presentations, and a Hands-On Session where workshop participants can hack (design or prototype) new solutions to tackle open research challenges. An expected outcome is the emergence of new collaborations and research directions that can result in novel assistive technologies to support independent blind navigation.

/pdf/hacking-blind-navigation-2chds97nj9.pdf

Hacking Blind Navigation

There are over 80 million stroke survivors globally, making it the main cause of long-term disability worldwide. Not only do the challenges associated with stroke affect the quality of life (QoL) of survivors, but also of their families. To explore these challenges and define design opportunities for technologies to improve the QoL of both stakeholders, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 survivors and one of their family members. We uncovered three major interlinked themes: strategies to cope with technological barriers, the (in)adequacy of assistive technologies, and limitations of the rehabilitation process. Findings highlight multiple design opportunities, including the need for meaningful patient-centered tools and methods to improve rehabilitation effectiveness, emotion-aware computing for family emotional support, and re-thinking the nature of assistive technologies to consider the perception of transitory stroke-related disabilities. We thus argue for a new class of dual-purpose technologies that fit survivors' abilities while promoting the regain of function.

Investigating the Opportunities for Technologies to Enhance QoL with Stroke Survivors and their Families

Social media represents a large part of the content available on the Web. While the accessibility of the UIs of existing social media platforms has been improving, the same cannot be said about the accessibility of the content authored by their users. Specifically, the accessibility of multimedia content that is increasingly available given the ease of access to mobile devices with cameras. User research has revealed that accessible authoring practices are a foreign concept to most social media users, but also that they are motivated to adopt inclusive practices. Our work focuses on promoting awareness to accessible social media authoring practices and in assisting the authoring process. We have prototyped a Google Chrome extension and an Android application that can identify when a Twitter or a Facebook user is authoring content with images and suggests a text alternative for the image. By suggesting the alternative, we raise awareness to the accessible authoring process and make it easier for the user to include it in the tweet or post. Text alternatives may be suggested from different sources: descriptions entered by other users for the same image, analysis of the main concepts present in the image, or text present in the image, for instance. Our prototypes can also provide text alternatives on demand for images on any web page or Android application, not just social media. In this paper, we highlight some of the challenges faced to offer this support in different technological platforms (web and mobile), but also ones that are raised by the domain characteristics (e.g. detecting the same image, supporting different languages) and that can be addressed through AI based technologies.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3462741.3466644

Nipping Inaccessibility in the Bud: Opportunities and Challenges of Accessible Media Content Authoring

ECM tridimensionality can be mimicked through the fabrication of nanofibrous scaffolds that can be used as a preliminary platform in skeletal muscle regeneration. This work aims at mimic the ECM structure through a comparative study between polycaprolactone (PCL), gelatin, PCL/gelatin and PCL/collagen electrospun nanofiber scaffolds for MSCs culture. The influence of different fiber alignments, diameters and scaffolds gelatin content on BM MSCs morphology and proliferation was investigated. AT and UCM MSCs morphology and proliferation were also assessed on nanofibrous scaffolds. In this study, the use of aligned scaffolds showed a significant effect on MSCs cells shape while gelatin presence in the scaffold resulted in a higher proliferation rate than in PCL (alone) scaffolds. PCL/gelatin and PCL/collagen scaffolds have demonstrate similar cellular proliferation which points out for possible collagen denaturation during polymer dissolution and electrospun. Moreover, MSCs showed to maintain their multilineage differentiation potential after culturing on the studied scaffolds.

Study of the effects of electrospun poly(epslon-caprolactone)/gelatin matrices on human mesenchymal stem cell culture

Searching for information about people in search engines is a common and straightforward task that is often hampered by name ambiguities. While users are interested in information about a single person, results pages usually comprise many persons with the same name. There are several approaches to tackle personal name disambiguation; however, it is still a challenge to understand the impact of each approach alone. In this paper, we present a plugin-based framework that aims to compare and to identify the most promising approaches for name disambiguation. This framework enabled us to merge different approaches to find good combinations for this task and to compare state-of-the-art solutions using a common dataset. Preliminary results support the greater impact of biographical information to aid in clustering, the use of comprehensive texts instead of only metadata and TF-IDF instead of more complex approaches.

http://www.inesc-id.pt/pt/indicadores/Ficheiros/9115.pdf

João Guerreiro

Papers

Hacking Blind Navigation

Investigating the Opportunities for Technologies to Enhance QoL with Stroke Survivors and their Families

Nipping Inaccessibility in the Bud: Opportunities and Challenges of Accessible Media Content Authoring

Study of the effects of electrospun poly(epslon-caprolactone)/gelatin matrices on human mesenchymal stem cell culture

Towards a fair comparison between name disambiguation approaches