Efforts to treat chronic diseases are often obstructed by the complexity of the biological mechanisms supporting pathology. Here, we apply a novel method for discrete logical modeling of biological systems to the problem of infectious exacerbations in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), using data from human clinical studies to constrain the selection of decisional logic parameters. We obtained two candidate models satisfactorily adhering to the available data. A predicted resting state with no activation of inflammatory markers was supported natively in one model, and could be induced following onset of an exacerbation episode in either model by applying targeted suppression of IL-4 concurrently with at least one additional inflammatory marker including IL-IB. Recapitulating a failed clinical trial of anakinra, suppression of IL-IB alone was not predicted to be sufficient. Instead, these results suggest that the efficacy of IL-IB suppression in the treatment of COPD might be improved by the added concurrent suppression of IL-4 and CCL4 or IL-4 and IL-17A.

The lightweight protocols and low-power radio technologies open up many opportunities to facilitate Internet-of-Things (IoT) into our daily life, while their minimalist design also makes IoT devices vulnerable to many active attacks due to the lack of sophisticated security protocols. Recent advances advocate the use of an antenna array to extract fine-grained physical-layer signatures to mitigate these active attacks. However, it adds burdens in terms of energy consumption and hardware cost that IoT devices cannot afford. To overcome this predicament, we present ShieldScatter, a lightweight system that attaches battery-free backscatter tags to single-antenna devices to shield the system from active attacks. The key insight of ShieldScatter is to intentionally create multi-path propagation signatures with the careful deployment of backscatter tags. These signatures can be used to construct a sensitive profile to identify the location of the signals' arrival, and thus detect the threat. We prototype ShieldScatter with USRPs and ambient backscatter tags to evaluate our system in various environments. The experimental results show that even when the attacker is located only 15 cm away from the legitimate device, ShieldScatter with merely three backscatter tags can mitigate 97% of spoofing attack attempts while at the same time trigger false alarms on just 7% of legitimate traffic.

Goal: P300 spellers are among the most popular types of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and are extremely useful assistive devices that enable severely disabled patients to communicate. However, P300 speller performances should be further improved to translate laboratory designs into practical applications. We aimed to design a new speller paradigm that could evoke higher event-related potentials (ERPs) than traditional P300 spellers, thus improving the performance of BCI systems. Methods: We proposed a new P300 speller paradigm based on three-dimensional (3-D) stereo visual stimuli. In this paradigm, flashing buttons are presented in 3-D stereo form. We designed two experiments, one that tested a traditional two-dimensional (2-D) speller and another that tested the proposed 3-D speller. Twelve healthy volunteers participated in our experiments. We compared the ERPs elicited by the 2-D speller and the 3-D speller, and we also compared the classification accuracy, information transfer rate (ITR), and user workload between the two paradigms. Results: The 3-D P300 speller elicited higher amplitudes of P300 waveforms than the traditional 2-D P300 speller. The online experimental results showed that the classification accuracy and the ITR were significantly improved with the 3-D P300 speller. We also found that the user workload of the 3-D P300 speller was significantly lower than that of the 2-D P300 speller. Conclusion : The proposed 3-D P300 speller based on stereo visual stimuli outperformed a traditional 2-D P300 speller. This finding indicates that our 3-D paradigm offers a new method that will improve the performance of P300 BCI systems.