To what extent the traffic restriction policies can improve its air quality? An inspiration from COVID-19.

In hazy days, several local authorities always implemented the strict traffic-restriction measures to improve the air quality. However, owing to lack of data, the quantitative relationships between them are still not clear. Coincidentally, traffic restriction measures during the COVID-19 pandemic provided an experimental setup for revealing such relationships. Hence, the changes in air quality in response to traffic restrictions during COVID-19 in Spain and United States was explored in this study. In contrast to pre-lockdown, the private traffic volume as well as public traffic during the lockdown period decreased within a range of 60-90%. The NO2 concentration decreased by approximately 50%, while O3 concentration increased by approximately 40%. Additionally, changes in air quality in response to traffic reduction were explored to reveal the contribution of transportation to air pollution. As the traffic volume decreased linearly, NO2 concentration decreased exponentially, whereas O3 concentration increased exponentially. Air pollutants did not change evidently until the traffic volume was reduced by less than 40%. The recovery process of the traffic volume and air pollutants during the post-lockdown period was also explored. The traffic volume was confirmed to return to background levels within four months, but air pollutants were found to recover randomly. This study highlights the exponential impact of traffic volume on air quality changes, which is of great significance to air pollution control in terms of traffic restriction policy. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00477-022-02351-7.

[New progress in crystallization technology of membrane protein and introduction of pharamaceutical innovation value chain].

We have recently established a Pharamaceutical Innovation Value Chain in collaboration with the SOSHO project (http://www.so-sho.jp) and BioGrid Project (http://www.biogrid.jp/) to accelerate new drug development. The SOSHO project provides novel crystallization technology with laser-irradiation and stirring growth methods, and the BioGrid Project is developing the software necessary for the in silico screening of promising drugs and the simulation of biological responses to proteins. In this paper, we report the recent research work on the crystallization of membrane proteins and the development of a method for in silico drug discovery.

Architecture of authorization mechanism for medical data sharing on the grid.

Data security is becoming increasingly important as the Grid matures. The advances of the Grid have allowed scientists and researchers to build a data grid where they can share and exchange research-related data and information. In reality, however, these specialists do not benefit enough from this data grid. The reason is that the current Grid does not have sufficiently robust and flexible data security. We investigate a medical data-sharing environment where medical doctors and scientists can securely share clinical and medical research data. We show medical data sharing that takes advantage of PERMIS, or an RBAC-based authorization system that achieves XML element level access control. We also describe the lessons learnt in designing the environment as well as a comparison with other existing authorization mechanisms.

Scientific Grid activities and PKI deployment in the Cybermedia Center, Osaka University.

The Cybermedia Center (CMC), Osaka University, is a research institution that offers knowledge and technology resources obtained from advanced researches in the areas of large-scale computation, information and communication, multimedia content and education. Currently, CMC is involved in Japanese national Grid projects such as JGN II (Japan Gigabit Network), NAREGI and BioGrid. Not limited to Japan, CMC also actively takes part in international activities such as PRAGMA. In these projects and international collaborations, CMC has developed a Grid system that allows scientists to perform their analysis by remote-controlling the world's largest ultra-high voltage electron microscope located in Osaka University. In another undertaking, CMC has assumed a leadership role in BioGrid by sharing its experiences and knowledge on the system development for the area of biology. In this paper, we will give an overview of the BioGrid project and introduce the progress of the Telescience unit, which collaborates with the Telescience Project led by the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR). Furthermore, CMC collaborates with seven Computing Centers in Japan, NAREGI and National Institute of Informatics to deploy PKI base authentication infrastructure. The current status of this project and future collaboration with Grid Projects will be delineated in this paper.

Applying a grid technology to protein structure predictor "ROKKY".

This paper describes a sub-project of BioGrid project called "HTC (High Throughput Computing) group." Generally, a protein structure prediction which requires large amount of computational resources is done by trial-and-error method. HTC group have been developing a high throughput computing system with a flexible workflow handling mechanism for a protein structure prediction. In this paper, we show how to apply our high throughput computing system to the protein structure predictor called "ROKKY."

Architecture of a grid-enabled research platform with location-transparency for bioinformatics.

The recent advance in information technologies has bought about the borderlessness in every field of both science and business. The borderlessness has increasingly made activities in interdisciplinary field more important. This current situation produces a strong demand that people want to establish a virtual group, organization and society for their business and scientific purposes irrespective of the actual structure formed by organizations. Remarkably, bio sciences require a research platform that satisfies such demand for further development. In this paper, we present a research platform for bioinformatics in detail. The prominent feature of the research platform is the use of Grid and its location transparency, which means that bio scientists and researchers are able to utilize a large amount of computational power for their analysis and to access data of their interest without being aware of where data and computational resources are located. The usefulness and feasibility of the architecture of the research platform is shown as well as future issues to achieve toward the final goal of our research in this paper.

Landau-Kleffner Syndrome: Localization of Epileptogenic Lesion Using Wavelet- Cross-Correlation Analysis.

Magnetoencephalographic findings in a 6-year-old patient suffering from acquired aphasia with convulsive disorder (Landau-Kleffner Syndrome, LKS) are presented. The data were analyzed using wavelet-cross-correlation analysis, a nonstationary analysis method developed to analyze the localization of an epileptogenic lesion and the propagation of epileptiform discharges. The results indicate that LKS might be a disorder of the primary temporal cortex, and that the auditory neural network may function as the circuit for the epileptic discharge propagation.