STARTEC: Novel processing technologies in the development of a decision support tool to ensure safe and nutritious Ready-To-Eat foods

Ready-to-eat (RTE) foods can be readily consumed with minimum or without any further preparation; their processing is complex—involving thorough decontamination processes— due to their composition of mixed ingredients. Compared with conventional preservation technologies, novel processing technologies can enhance the safety and quality of these complex products by reducing the risk of pathogens and/ or by preserving related health-promoting compounds. These novel technologies can be divided into two categories: thermal and non-thermal. As a non-thermal treatment, High Pressure Processing is a very promising novel methodology that can be used even in the already packaged RTE foods. A new “volumetric” microwave heating technology is an interesting cooking and decontamination method directly applied to foods. Cold Plasma technology is a potential substitute of chlorine washing in fresh vegetable decontamination. Ohmic heating is a heating method applicable to viscous products but also to meat products. Producers of RTE foods have to deal with challenging decisions starting from the ingredients suppliers to the distribution chain. They have to take into account not only the cost factor but also the benefits and food products’ safety and quality. Novel processing technologies can be a valuable yet large investment for several SME food manufacturers, but they need support data to be able to make adequate decisions. Within the FP7 Cooperation funded by the European Commission, the STARTEC project aims to develop an IT decision supporting tool to help food business operators in their risk assessment and future decision making when producing RTE foods with or without novel preservation technologies.

Hybrid optomechanics for Quantum Technologies

We review the physics of hybrid optomechanical systems consisting of a mechanical oscillator interacting with both a radiation mode and an additional matterlike system. We concentrate on the cases embodied by either a single or a multi-atom system (a Bose-Einstein condensate, in particular) and discuss a wide range of physical effects, from passive mechanical cooling to the set-up of multipartite entanglement, from optomechanical nonlocality to the achievement of non-classical states of a single mechanical mode. The reviewed material showcases the viability of hybridised cavity optomechanical systems as basic building blocks for quantum communication networks and quantum state-engineering devices, possibly empowered by the use of quantum and optimal control techniques. The results that we discuss are instrumental to the promotion of hybrid optomechanical devices as promising experimental platforms for the study of nonclassicality at the genuine mesoscopic level.

Towards a general framework for information fusion

Depending on the representation setting, different combination rules have been proposed for fusing information from distinct sources. Moreover in each setting, different sets of axioms that combination rules should satisfy have been advocated, thus justifying the existence of alternative rules (usually motivated by situations where the behavior of other rules was found unsatisfactory). These sets of axioms are usually purely considered in their own settings, without in-depth analysis of common properties essential for all the settings. This paper introduces core properties that, once properly instantiated, are meaningful in different representation settings ranging from logic to imprecise probabilities. The following representation settings are especially considered: classical set representation, possibility theory, and evidence theory, the latter encompassing the two other ones as special cases. This unified discussion of combination rules across different settings is expected to provide a fresh look on some old but basic issues in information fusion.

Evidential Fusion for Gender Profiling

Gender profiling is a fundamental task that helps CCTV systems to
provide better service for intelligent surveillance. Since subjects being detected
by CCTVs are not always cooperative, a few profiling algorithms are proposed
to deal with situations when faces of subjects are not available, among which
the most common approach is to analyze subjects’ body shape information. In
addition, there are some drawbacks for normal profiling algorithms considered
in real applications. First, the profiling result is always uncertain. Second, for a
time-lasting gender profiling algorithm, the result is not stable. The degree of
certainty usually varies, sometimes even to the extent that a male is classified
as a female, and vice versa. These facets are studied in a recent paper [16] using
Dempster-Shafer theory. In particular, Denoeux’s cautious rule is applied for
fusion mass functions through time lines. However, this paper points out that if
severe mis-classification is happened at the beginning of the time line, the result
of applying Denoeux’s rule could be disastrous. To remedy this weakness,
in this paper, we propose two generalizations to the DS approach proposed in
[16] that incorporates time-window and time-attenuation, respectively, in applying
Denoeux’s rule along with time lines, for which the DS approach is a special
case. Experiments show that these two generalizations do provide better results
than their predecessor when mis-classifications happen.

Composite hunting technologies from the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene, Niah Cave, Borneo

Renewed archaeological investigation of the West Mouth of Niah Cave, Borneo has demonstrated that even within lowland equatorial environments depositional conditions do exist where organic remains of late glacial and early post-glacial age can be preserved. Excavations by the Niah Cave Research Project (NCP) (2000-2003) towards the rear of the archaeological reserve produced several bone points and worked stingray spines, which exhibit evidence of hafting mastic and fibrous binding still adhering to their shafts. The position of both gives strong indication of how these cartilaginous points were hafted and gives insight into their potential function. These artefacts were recovered from secure and (14)C dated stratigraphic horizons. The results of this study have implications for our understanding the function of the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene bone tools recovered from other regions of Island Southeast Asia. They demonstrate that by the end the Pleistocene rainforest foragers in Borneo were producing composite technologies that probably included fishing leisters and potentially the bow and arrow. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The emergence of bone technologies at the end of the pleistocene in Southeast Asia:Regional and evolutionary implications

For many decades Palaeolithic research viewed the development of early modern human behaviour as largely one of progress down a path towards the modernity of the present. The European Palaeolithic sequence the most extensively studied was for a long time the yard-stick against which records from other regions were judged. Recent work undertaken in Africa and increasingly Asia, however, now suggests that the European evidence may tell a story that is more parochial and less universal than previously thought. While tracking developments at the large scale (the grand narrative) remains important, there is growing appreciation that to achieve a comprehensive understanding of human behavioural evolution requires an archaeologically regional perspective to balance this. One of the apparent markers of human modernity that has been sought in the global Palaeolithic record, prompted by finds in the European sequence, is innovation in bonebased technologies. As one step in the process of re-evaluating and contextualizing such innovations, in this article we explore the role of prehistoric bone technologies within the Southeast Asian sequence, where they have at least comparable antiquity to Europe and other parts of Asia. We observe a shift in the technological usage of bone from a minor component to a medium of choice during the second half of the Last Termination and into the Holocene. We suggest that this is consistent with it becoming a focus of the kinds of inventive behaviour demanded of foraging communities as they adapted to the far-reaching environmental and demographic changes that were reshaping this region at that time. This record represents one small element of a much wider, much longerterm adaptive process, which we would argue is not confined to the earliest instances of a particular technology or behaviour, but which forms part of an on-going story of our behavioural evolution. © 2012 The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

The impact of next generation sequencing technologies on haematological research - A review

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies have begun to revolutionize the field of haematological malignancies through the assessment of a patient's genetic makeup with a minimal cost. Significant discoveries have already provided a unique insight into disease initiation, risk stratification and therapeutic intervention. Sequencing analysis will likely form part of the routine diagnostic testing in the future. However, a number of important issues need to be addressed for that to become a reality with regard to result interpretation, laboratory workflow, data storage and ethical issues. In this review we summarize the contribution that NGS has already made to the field of haematological malignancies. Finally, we discuss the challenges that NGS technologies will bring in relation to data storage, ethical and legal issues and laboratory validation. Despite these challenges, we predict that high-throughput DNA sequencing will redefine haematological malignancies based on individualized genomic analysis.

Fusion of Static and Temporal Information for Threat Evaluation in Sensor Networks

In many CCTV and sensor network based intelligent surveillance systems, a number of attributes or criteria are used to individually evaluate the degree of potential threat of a suspect. The outcomes for these attributes are in general from analytical algorithms where data are often pervaded with uncertainty and incompleteness. As a result, such individual threat evaluations are often inconsistent, and individual evaluations can change as time elapses. Therefore, integrating heterogeneous threat evaluations with temporal influence to obtain a better overall evaluation is a challenging issue. So far, this issue has rarely be considered by existing event reasoning frameworks under uncertainty in sensor network based surveillance. In this paper, we first propose a weighted aggregation operator based on a set of principles that constraints the fusion of individual threat evaluations. Then, we propose a method to integrate the temporal influence on threat evaluation changes. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of our system with a decision support event modeling framework using an airport security surveillance scenario.