The bacterium, Xenorhabdus nematophila (Poinar and Thomas), is an obligate symbiont of nematodes in the genus Steinernema and a lethal insect pathogen. We investigated the hypothesis that one aspect of the bacterial virulence is the ability of X. nematophila to severely impair host insect cellular immune reactions to infection by inhibiting eicosanoid biosynthesis in the adult male cricket, Gry...

Insects, like all invertebrates, express robust innate, but not adaptive, immune reactions to infection and invasion. Insect immunity is usually resolved into three major components. The integument serves as a physical barrier to infections. Within the hemocoel, the circulating hemocytes are the temporal first line of defense, responsible for clearing the majority of infecting bacterial cells f...

Being able to release and exploit open data gathered in information systems is crucial for researchers, enterprises and the overall society. Yet, these data must be anonymized before release to protect the privacy of the subjects to whom the records relate. Differential privacy is a privacy model for anonymization that offers more robust privacy guarantees than previous models, such as k-anonym...

Frequent pattern mining has been widely employed to analyze transaction datasets, but the question of how sensitive information contained in a dataset should be protected remains remains relatively unanswered. The differential privacy model provides a robust privacy guarantee, but the k-anonymity model provides better dataset utility. In this paper, a synergetic approach is proposed to simultan...

Differential privacy is a privacy model for anonymization that offers more robust privacy guarantees than previous models, such as k-anonymity and its extensions. However, it is often disregarded that the utility of differentially private outputs is quite limited, either because of the amount of noise that needs to be added to obtain them or because utility is only preserved for a restricted ty...

Movement data, that is, trajectories of mobile objects, are automatically collected in huge quantities by technologies such as GPS, GSM or RFID, among others. Publishing and exploiting such data is essential to improve transportation, to understand the dynamics of the economy in a region, etc. However, there are obvious threats to the privacy of individuals if their trajectories are published i...

Defuzzification is one of the fundamental steps in the development of fuzzy knowledge based systems. Given a fuzzy set μ over the reference set X, defuzzification applied to μ returns an element of X. While a large number of methods exists for the case of X being a numerical scale, only few methods are applicable when X corresponds to a categorical scale. Aggregation procedures have been extens...