Swedish Defence Research Agency

About: Swedish Defence Research Agency is a government organization based out in Stockholm, Sweden. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Radar & Laser. The organization has 1413 authors who have published 2731 publications receiving 56083 citations. The organization is also known as: Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut.

Detection of Sindbis and Inkoo Virus RNA in Genetically Typed Mosquito Larvae Sampled in Northern Sweden

Abstract: Introduction: Mosquito-borne viruses have a widespread distribution across the globe and are known to pose serious threats to human and animal health. The maintenance and dissemination of these vir ...

Mode of Action of Disinfection Chemicals on the Bacterial Spore Structure and Their Raman Spectra

Abstract: Contamination of toxic spore-forming bacteria is problematic since spores can survive a plethora of disinfection chemicals and it is hard to rapidly detect if the disinfection chemical has inactivated the spores. Thus, robust decontamination strategies and reliable detection methods to identify dead from viable spores are critical. In this work, we investigate the chemical changes of Bacillus thuringiensis spores treated with sporicidal agents such as chlorine dioxide, peracetic acid, and sodium hypochlorite using laser tweezers Raman spectroscopy. We also image treated spores using SEM and TEM to verify if we can correlate structural changes in the spores with changes to their Raman spectra. We found that over 30 min, chlorine dioxide did not change the Raman spectrum or the spore structure, peracetic acid showed a time-dependent decrease in the characteristic DNA/DPA peaks and ∼20% of the spores were degraded and collapsed, and spores treated with sodium hypochlorite showed an abrupt drop in DNA and DPA peaks within 20 min and some structural damage to the exosporium. Structural changes appeared in spores after 10 min, compared to the inactivation time of the spores, which is less than a minute. We conclude that vibrational spectroscopy provides powerful means to detect changes in spores but it might be problematic to identify if spores are live or dead after a decontamination procedure.

A generic model of tactical plan recognition for threat assessment

Abstract: Plan recognition has to be performed in a statistically robust manner concerning a possibly infinite number of tactical situations and different types of units. We need a generic model for tactical plan recognition where we combine observations and a priori knowledge in a flexible manner by using suitable methodologies and by having a large hypothesis space taken into account. Threat and therefore observed agent’s plans should be put into a context. Here, we propose Multi-Entity Bayesian Networks (MEBN), introduced in [2], which enable the composition of Bayesian Networks from the network pieces, as the key methodology when designing flexible plan recognition models. However, Bayesian network pieces (fragments) must be compatible and therefore we propose ontology for generic plan recognition using Bayesian network fragments. Additionally, we claim that by using multi-entity network fragments we expand the hypothesis space and using this approach various multi-agents structures can be expressed. Our final contribution is that we incorporate the use of explicit utilities in our plan recognition model.