Background The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Zambian Ministry of Health set out new guidelines on combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) in 2013 expanding the eligibility criteria for patients with HIV. Objectives The primary objective were to determine when cART was initiated in HIV-positive outpatients according to clinical and immunological criteria, and to identify what propo...

The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMAES) is suggested for solving problems described by Markov decision processes. The algorithm is compared with a state-of-the-art policy gradient method and stochastic search on the double cart-pole balancing task using linear policies. The CMA-ES proves to be much more robust than the gradient-based approach in this scenario.

Subphonetic discovery through segmental clustering is a central step in building a corpus-based synthesizer. To help decide what clustering algorithm to use we employed mergeand-split tests on English fricatives. Compared to reference of 2%, Gaussian EM achieved a misclassification rate of 6%, Kmeans 10%, while predictive CART trees performed poorly.

BACKGROUND We explored the impact of transient cART started during the primary HIV-infection (PHI) on the long-term immunologic and virologic response on cART resumption, by comparison with treatment initiation during the chronic phase of HIV infection (CHI). METHODS We analyzed data on 1450 patients enrolled during PHI in the ANRS PRIMO cohort between 1996 and 2013. "Treatment resumption" wa...

The increase in the variety of websites, ranging from information-intensive portal, through social media, to shopping website, has afforded consumers unprecedented opportunity to make informed purchase decisions. Anecdotal evidence indicates that consumers do spend considerable amount of effort visiting various online outlets, such as the social media websites, prior to committing to a purchase...

BACKGROUND The benefits of continuing antiretroviral therapy are questionable in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type 1-infected patients with profound immunodeficiency and multiple treatment failure due to viral resistance. METHODS From the French Hospital Database on HIV, we selected 12,765 patients with a CD4(+) cell count <200 cells/mm(3) who received a combination antiretroviral thera...

Cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) is a new anorectic peptide found in the brain and periphery. It is closely associated with leptin, an anorectic agent saturably transported across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Using multiple time-regression analysis, we found that CART has a rapid rate of entry into brain from blood. However, there was no self-inhibition with CART, even whe...

Non linear predictive control may require signiicant oo-line and on-line computations. This paper gives a nonlinear predictive control algorithm based on successive oo-equilibrium linearisation which requires less computation whilst accounting for nonlinear system behaviour. A nonlinear example (the pendulum and cart system) is used to show that the method provides a practical tradeoo between c...

We have recently shown that intracerebroventricular (i.c.v.) administration of the hypothalamic neuropeptide cocaine-amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) inhibits food intake and induces the expression of c-fos in several nuclei involved in the regulation of food intake. A high number of CART-induced c-Fos-positive nuclei in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus prompted us to exam...

One of the most important applications of multi-objective optimization is adjusting parameters ofpractical engineering problems in order to produce a more desirable outcome. In this paper, the decoupled sliding mode control technique (DSMC) is employed to stabilize an inverted pendulum which is a classic example of inherently unstable systems. Furthermore, a new Multi-Objective Particle Swarm O...