Omineca Herald, December, 28, 1977

EoE is an increasingly recognized disorder, characterized by symptoms of esophageal dysfunction and eosinophilic infiltration of the esophagus. The incidence increased from 0.01 in 1996 to 2.07 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015, these rates outpaces the expanding endoscopy rates. The natural course of EoE is characterized by a progression from atypical symptoms and the inflammatory endoscopic phenotype in childhood, towards symptoms of dysphagia and food impaction accompanied with the fibrostenotic phenotype in adults. If EoE is left untreated, the risk for stricture formation increased significantly. We have demonstrated that the mucosal integrity in EoE patients with active disease is impaired compared with patients in remission and controls and that it is a promising predictor of disease activity which can be used to follow up EoE patients after treatment. In contrary to other atopic diseases the duodenal mucosal integrity is not affected in EoE. Treatments include topical corticosteroids and dietary elimination of food allergens. In this thesis we have demonstrated that an elemental diet can induce quick histologic and clinical disease remission with improved patients’ adherence. Furthermore complete absence of food allergens restored the impaired mucosal integrity. However, diets remain cumbersome since standard allergy tests perform poorly as tools to guide elimination diets. We have demonstrated that an esophageal prick test (EPT), in which the esophageal mucosa was challenged by local allergen injections could identify sensitization patterns in EoE patients and not in controls. The EPT deserves further exploration because it may guide elimination diets. In conclusion, the studies described in this thesis have provided interesting new observations on the epidemiology, pathophysiology, diagnostics and treatment of EoE

Generalized Totalizer Encoding for Pseudo-Boolean Constraints

Pseudo-Boolean constraints, also known as 0-1 Integer Linear Constraints, are used to model many real-world problems. A common approach to solve these constraints is to encode them into a SAT formula. The runtime of the SAT solver on such formula is sensitive to the manner in which the given pseudo-Boolean constraints are encoded. In this paper, we propose generalized Totalizer encoding (GTE), which is an arc-consistency preserving extension of the Totalizer encoding to pseudo-Boolean constraints. Unlike some other encodings, the number of auxiliary variables required for GTE does not depend on the magnitudes of the coefficients. Instead, it depends on the number of distinct combinations of these coefficients. We show the superiority of GTE with respect to other encodings when large pseudo-Boolean constraints have low number of distinct coefficients. Our experimental results also show that GTE remains competitive even when the pseudo-Boolean constraints do not have this characteristic.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables. To be published in 21st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming 201

Plaster Creek Stewards – Urban Habitat Restoration with Green Team

We worked alongside the high school students of the Green Team with our mentor Rachel Warners on various Plaster Creek Projects. We joined PCS in restoring our watershed through native landscaping, meeting community leaders, learning about environmental injustice, hearing about careers in the environmental field, and learning in the classroom about watershed ecology and reconciliation. A key focus of our work is to develop personal relationships with the students and to be an open and relatable resource of what college life is like and our vocational journeys to get there. During our days together we learned about each other’s diverse backgrounds, cultural variations, passions, preferences, dreams, and plans for the future. Days were split between classroom learning, field application, and practical implementation of knowledge. To conclude each session, photos and stories articulating the experience and the importance of our work were presented at a finale celebration for the students and their friends and families. Students received fun plate awards and plants highlighting and affirming their unique personal characteristics

Patents 254 Miles Up: Jurisdictional Issues Onboard the International Space Station, 19 UIC REV. INTELL. PROP. L. 365 (2020)

Over the past few decades, the emergence of private companies pursuing space exploration proves that venturing into the final frontier is no longer exclusive to government-run operations. From satellites to rocket boosters, billions of dollars worth of private property flies into space every year. However, the expansion of these private companies creates unique jurisdictional challenges for patenting private inventions and processes in outer space. This comment examines what jurisdictional claims and remedies arise when a private third-party commits patent infringement in an outer space jurisdiction that did not issue the patent

A linear-time transformation of linear inequalities into conjunctive normal form

We present a technique that transforms any binary programming problem with integral coefficients to a satisfiability problem of propositional logic in linear time. Preliminary computational experience using this transformation, shows that a pure logical solver can be a valuable tool for solving binary programming problems. In a number of cases it competes favourably with well known techniques from operations research, especially for hard unsatisfiable problems

Nonconvex continuous models for combinatorial optimization problems with application to satisfiability and node packing problems

We show how a large class of combinatorial optimization problems can be reformulated as a nonconvex minimization problem over the unit hyper cube with continuous variables. No additional constraints are required; all constraints are incorporated in the n onconvex objective function, which is a polynomial function. The application of the general transform to satisfiability and node packing problems is discussed, and various approximation algorithms are briefly reviewed. To give an indication of the strength of the proposed approaches, we conclude with some computational results on instances of the graph coloring problem