The Toll-like receptor (TLR) family consists of phylogenetically conserved transmembrane proteins, which function as mediators of innate immunity for recognition of pathogen-derived ligands and subsequent cell activation via the Toll/IL-1R signal pathway. Here, we show that human TLR9 (hTLR9) expression in human immune cells correlates with responsiveness to bacterial deoxycytidylate-phosphate-...

This paper explores the traffic, land use and welfare impacts of road pricing in the Austin region, introducing planned toll roads, implementing marginal cost pricing (MCP) on main roads, applying tolls to existing bridges, and instituting a downtown tolled cordon. Different toll scenarios are examined, including fixed versus variable tolling, and tolls based on time of day, traffic, and travel...

We consider algorithms for finding the optimal location of a simple transportation device, that we call a moving walkway, consisting of a pair of points in the plane between which the travel speed is high. More specifically, one can travel from one endpoint of the walkway to the other at speed v > 1, but can only travel at unit speed between any other pair of points. The travel time between any...

This paper concerns tolling methodologies for traac networks which ensure that the resultant equilibrium ows are system optimal. A nonnegative vector is deened to be a valid toll vector, if the set of tolled user equilibrium solutions is a subset of the set of untolled system optimal solutions. The problem of characterizing the toll set T , which is the set of all valid toll vectors, is studied...

According to the standard model of urban traffic congestion and urban spatial structure, congestion tolling results in a more concentrated city. In recent years, a new model of rush hour urban auto congestion has been developed which incorporates trip-timing decisions — the bottleneck model. In the simplest bottleneck model, optimal congestion tolling without toll revenue redistribution has no ...

We study a novel location optimization problem, the Collective-k Optimal Location Selection (CkOLS) problem. This problem finds k regions such that setting up k service sites, one in each region, collectively attracts the maximum number of customers by proximity. The problem generalizes the traditional influence maximizing location selection problem from searching for one optimal region to k re...

compared to conventional chlorination methods which apply chlorine at water treatment plant, booster chlorination has almost solved the problems of high dosages of chlorine residuals near water sources and lack of chlorine residuals in the remote points of a water distribution system (wds). however, control of trihalomethane (thm) formation as a potentially carcinogenic disinfection by-product ...

This paper proposes a self-learning approach to determine optimal pricing strategies for high-occupancy/toll lane operations. The approach learns recursively motorists’ willingness to pay by mining the loop detector data, and then specifies toll rates to maximize the freeway’s throughput while ensuring a superior travel service to the users of the toll lanes. In determination of the tolls, a mu...

The problem of optimally locating web servers across the Internet is considered. Assuming that the user demand forecast is known, the objective is to minimize cost, subject to satisfying performance requirements of customers (that access the web servers) in terms of throughput and latency thresholds. To solve the optimization problem, three heuristics are considered: greedy heuristic, DEJAVU al...