Stavros Mallios

This paper presents a formal generalized stochastic Petri net (GSPN)–based modeling of a virtual doctor (VDr) dialogue system. The interaction model between the VDr dialogue system and the human patient is a modified version of the Wickens model. The purpose of this model is to provide a better understanding of the interaction between the VDr dialogue system and the patient, as well as the integration of other components in the system, such as the patient’s medical history and emotions. Initially, the formal definition of the GSPN model of the VDr dialogue system is presented by incorporating the token color concept, which is a feature of Color GSPNs. Then, the GSPN formal modeling is described. Note that, the GSPN model presented here is at the simulation level and not a product. Furthermore, some examples are provided with the intention of facilitating the understanding of the token color utilization and the different GSPN markings.

Dialogue systems are computer systems that communicate with a human in spoken or written form. Their popularity has increased in recent years and they attract a large research and development interest. In this paper, a survey on dialogue systems is presented. A classification scheme is proposed and then the reviewed methodologies are evaluated based on a number of features, in order to obtain a maturity score for each methodology.

The increase of luminosity expected by LHC during Phase1 will impose tighter constraints for rate reduction in order to maintain high efficiency in the CMS Level1 trigger system. The TwinMux system is the early layer of the muon barrel region that concentrates the information from different subdetectors: Drift Tubes, Resistive Plate Chambers and Outer Hadron Calorimeter. It arranges the slow optical trigger links from the detector chambers into faster links (10 Gbps) that are sent in multiple copies to the track finders. Results from collision runs, that confirm the satisfactory operation of the trigger system up to the output of the barrel track finder, will be shown.

A search for exclusive two-photon production via photon exchange in proton-proton collisions, pp $\to$ p$γγ$p with intact protons, is presented. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 9.4 fb$^{-1}$ collected in 2016 using the CMS and TOTEM detectors at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV at the LHC. Events are selected with a diphoton invariant mass above 350 GeV and with both protons intact in the final state, to reduce backgrounds from strong interactions. The events of interest are those where the invariant mass and rapidity calculated from the momentum losses of the forward-moving protons matches the mass and rapidity of the central, two-photon system. No events are found that satisfy this condition. Interpreting this result in an effective dimension-8 extension of the standard model, the first limits are set on the two anomalous four-photon coupling parameters. If the other parameter is constrained to its standard model value, the limits at 95% CL are $\lvertζ_1\rvert$ $\lt$ 2.9 $\times$ 10$^{-13}$ GeV$^{-4}$ and $\lvertζ_2\rvert$ $\lt$ 6.0 $\times$ 10$^{-13}$ GeV$^{-4}$.

Modern telecommunication systems need to be equipped with antennas that are precisely tuned to more than one frequency in order to allow operation in several bands.Antenna precise tuning to the desired frequency is very important for system performance.In this paper the operating frequency of a PIFA antenna is adjusted using a varactor.This configuration has the advantage of continuous tuning, thus correcting any frequency deviation due to environmental or other changes.The PIFA antenna's tuning ranges from 860 MHz to 1025 MHz.Also, the geometry of the antenna is studied through simulations and the effect of the varactor is tested experimentally.

The general field of health monitoring and health information exchange has garnered a keen research and market interest for the past few decades. This is indicated by the development of a plethora of wearable health monitoring systems, as well as research efforts and projects concerning the security issues in health information exchange. In this paper, a virtual doctor prototype for quick diagnosis and secure health information exchange is presented. The measured physiological data that are acquired by a wearable health monitoring system are modeled as words of a fuzzy formal language and are used by a trained and personalized neural network to diagnose the patient's health status. Moreover, we present a secure architectural scheme, which secures the transmitted data and uses the medical doctors' biometrics to authorize them and give them access to these data.

The current incremental need for immediate responses (real-time) on many medical emergencies is necessity for an advanced society. In many cases, people who are living in rural areas need a critical, for their healthy, commuting time to a Medical Center (Hospital). In addition, human physicians have limited capability for offering their services to large number of emergencies or medical cases. Thus, there is a need for the medical technologies to take the advantage of the advanced IT and Engineering for the design and development of Virtual Doctor Diagnoses Systems to facilitate such needs. This paper presents the components needed for the development of such an intelligent system, called e-IATROS, and its Virtual Doctor (VDr) dialogue systems. The e-IATROS system has the potential to simultaneously talk to a large number of human patients without humans to detect that they are talking to a computer based system. This is a necessary feature for convincing human patients to trust the machine and express their issues. To do so, the e-IATROS has to use the voice of the actual human doctor for each human patient. Each VDr dialogue system mainly interacts with a patient extracting non-measurable and measurable symptoms to contribute to the generation of possible prognosis. The e-IATROS system is presented with its capabilities recognizing the patient emotion and learning through the process.

In today's digital world the information exchange has reached very large volumes per minute, assisting people in doing their business from long distances, without their presence being necessary. At the same time, Human Machine Interaction (HMI) devices are used in many places of service and interaction by removing humans from the loop. Although these devices have advanced recently, they are still far away from replacing the human from the interaction loop. Their major problem is that they cannot reliably and efficiently respond to human requests; they mainly behave as "answer" machines. In response to this problem we propose a new HMI scheme, capable of offering a better communication and interaction to human users, based on SPN dialogue rather than answers to questions.

A search for long-lived particles (LLPs) produced in association with a Z boson is presented. The study is performed using data from proton-proton collisions with a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV recorded by the CMS experiment during 2016-2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 117 fb$^{-1}$. The LLPs are assumed to decay to a pair of standard model quarks that are identified as displaced jets within the CMS tracker system. Triggers and selections based on Z boson decays to electron or muon pairs improve the sensitivity to light LLPs (down to 15 GeV). This search provides sensitivity to beyond the standard model scenarios which predict LLPs produced in association with a Z boson. In particular, the results are interpreted in the context of exotic decays of the Higgs boson to a pair of scalar LLPs (H $\to$ SS). The Higgs boson decay branching fraction is constrained to values less than 6% for proper decay lengths of 10-100 mm and for LLP masses between 40 and 55 GeV. In the case of low-mass ($\approx$15 GeV) scalar particles that subsequently decay to a pair of b quarks, the search is sensitive to branching fractions $\mathcal{B}$(H $\to$ SS) $\lt$ 20% for proper decay lengths of 10-50 mm. The use of associated production with a Z boson increases the sensitivity to low-mass LLPs of this analysis with respect to gluon fusion searches. In the case of 15 GeV scalar LLPs, the improvement corresponds to a factor of 2 at a proper decay length of 30 mm.

A measurement of inclusive four-jet production in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13\TeV is presented. The transverse momenta of jets within $\lvert\eta\rvert \lt$ 4.7 reach down to 35, 30, 25, and 20 GeV for the first-, second-, third-, and fourth-leading jet, respectively. Differential cross sections are measured as functions of the jet transverse momentum, jet pseudorapidity, and several other observables that describe the angular correlations between the jets. The measured distributions show sensitivity to different aspects of the underlying event, parton shower, and matrix element calculations. In particular, the interplay between angular correlations caused by parton shower and double-parton scattering contributions is shown to be important. The double-parton scattering contribution is extracted by means of a template fit to the data, using distributions for single-parton scattering obtained from Monte Carlo event generators and a double-parton scattering distribution constructed from inclusive single-jet events in data. The effective double-parton scattering cross section is calculated and discussed in view of previous measurements and of its dependence on the models used to describe the single-parton scattering background.

The increasing occurrence of chronic conditions among the ageing population and people at risk is one of the major challenges for our society and the high cost for its healthcare systems. Prevention, early detection and efficient management of chronic, long-term conditions contribute radically to the individual wellbeing and the economic sustainability of social and healthcare systems. In response to this need, this paper offers a human-machine interaction (HMI) model using Stochastic Petri Nets (SPNs). This HMI is based on a dialogue model between a virtual medical doctor and a patient for the efficient extraction of non-measurable pathological symptoms. Thus, the goal of such a model is the improvement of life critical situations and long delays (or appointments) for certain categories of people in need, like the elderly or people with disabilities.

To maintain the excellent performance of the LHC during its Run-1 also in Run-2, the Level-1 Trigger of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment underwent a significant upgrade.One part of this upgrade was the re-organisation of the muon trigger path from a subsystem-centric view in which hits in the drift tubes, the cathode strip chambers, and the resistive plate chambers were treated separately in dedicated track-finding systems, to one in which complementary detector systems for a given region (barrel, overlap, and endcap) are merged already at the track-finding level.This also required the development of a new system to sort as well as cancel-out the muon tracks found by each system.An overview will be given of the new track-finder system for the barrel region, the Barrel Muon Track Finder (BMTF) as well as the cancel-out and sorting layer, the upgraded Global Muon Trigger (µGMT).While the BMTF improves on the proven and well-tested algorithms used in the Drift Tube Track Finder during Run-1, the µGMT is an almost complete re-development due to the re-organisation of the underlying systems from complementary track finders to regional track finders.Additionally, the µGMT can calculate a muon isolation using energy information that will be received from the calorimeter trigger in the future.This information is added to the muon objects forwarded to the Global Trigger.Finally, first results of the muon trigger performance including the barrel region are shown.Both the trigger efficiency and the rate reduction show satisfactory performance, with improvements planned for the near future.

Abstract During the High-Luminosity phase of the Large Hadron Collider, the endcap calorimeter detectors of the compact muon solenoid experiment will be replaced by the high-granularity calorimeter. For reading out the new calorimeter, field programmable gate array firmware was developed targeting the off-detector hardware. The firmware is responsible not only for the readout of the detector but also for its slow control and timing. To facilitate system maintenance, the firmware is optimized to handle all the different front-end electronics configurations and data rates using a single — highly configurable — design. This manuscript presents the firmware architecture and the implementation.

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) high-granularity calorimeter (HGCAL) upgrade for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) high-luminosity phase is a detector with more than 6 million channels that will provide precise sensing and measurement of position, timing, and energy of the particles produced in the collisions of the beams. The HGCAL electronics are a large and complex set of processing systems split into front-end and back-end. The front-end, located in the experimental cavern, consists of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\boldsymbol{\approx 150}$</tex> thousand radiation tolerant ASICs. The high-density FPGA-based back-end is housed away from the radiation area in a set of Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) boards and crates hosting <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\boldsymbol{\approx 100}$</tex> FPGAs. Each ATCA back-end board will comprise one (or two) FPGAs, managing up to <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\boldsymbol{\approx 120}$</tex> optical links, each providing a transmission rate of 10.24 Gb/s between the back-end and the front-end electronics. Each back-end FPGA is responsible for configuring and monitoring up to <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\boldsymbol{\approx 3500}$</tex> front-end ASICs and will be controlled by software running on a back-end MPSoC that provides the entry point for the whole control procedure. This paper presents the design and implementation of the prototyping infrastructure deployed to test and validate the slow-control block of the HGCAL back-end electronics, together with the related interfaces with the controller MPSoC and the front-end transceiver ASICs. The required functionalities have been validated with a ZCU102 Xilinx Ultrascale+ development board, which emulated the back-end elements that are still under development and not yet available for this comprehensive test. This development board was connected to other custom ASIC development boards via optical links, emulating the front-end side of the system, also still under development. Besides providing reliable testing and validation of the operation of the whole infrastructure, the prototyping platform also allowed to attain the required software/hardware portability that ensures easy integration/replacement of all the (still) emulated components with their final implementations.

A measurement of the top quark mass is performed using a data sample enriched with single top quark events produced in the $t$ channel. The study is based on proton-proton collision data, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb$^{-1}$, recorded at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2016.Candidate events are selected by requiring an isolated high-momentum lepton (muon or electron) and exactly two jets, of which one is identified as originating from a bottom quark. Multivariate discriminants are designed to separate the signal from the background. Optimized thresholds are placed on the discriminant outputs to obtain an event sample with high signal purity. The top quark mass is found to be 172.13$^{+0.76}_{-0.77}$ GeV, where the uncertainty includes both the statistical and systematic components, reaching sub-GeV precision for the first time in this event topology. The masses of the top quark and antiquark are also determined separately using the lepton charge in the final state, from which the mass ratio and difference are determined to be 0.9952$^{+0.0079}_{-0.0104}$ and 0.83$^{+1.79}_{-1.35}$ GeV, respectively. The results are consistent with $CPT$ invariance.

The associated production of a W and a Z boson is studied in final states with multiple leptons produced in proton-proton (pp) collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV using 137 fb$^{-1}$ of data collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. A measurement of the total inclusive production cross section yields $\sigma_{\text{tot}}$(pp $\to$ WZ) = 50.6 $\pm$ 0.8 (stat) $\pm$ 1.5 (syst) $\pm$ 1.1 (lum) $\pm$ 0.5 (thy) pb. Measurements of the fiducial and differential cross sections for several key observables are also performed in all the final-state lepton flavour and charge compositions with a total of three charged leptons, which can be electrons or muons. All results are compared with theoretical predictions computed up to next-to-next-to-leading order in quantum chromodynamics plus next-to-leading order in electroweak theory and for various sets of parton distribution functions. The results include direct measurements of the charge asymmetry and the W and Z vector boson polarization. The first observation of longitudinally polarized W bosons in WZ production is reported. Anomalous gauge couplings are searched for, leading to new constraints on beyond-the-standard-model contributions to the WZ triple gauge coupling.

Measurements of differential and double-differential cross sections of top quark pair ($\text{t}\overline{\text{t}}$) production are presented in the lepton+jets channels with a single electron or muon and jets in the final state. The analysis combines for the first time signatures of top quarks with low transverse momentum $p_\text{T}$, where the top quark decay products can be identified as separated jets and isolated leptons, and with high $p_\text{T}$, where the decay products are collimated and overlap. The measurements are based on proton-proton collision data at $\sqrt{s} = $ 13 TeV collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb$^{-1}$. The cross sections are presented at the parton and particle levels, where the latter minimizes extrapolations based on theoretical assumptions. Most of the measured differential cross sections are well described by standard model predictions with the exception of some double-differential distributions. The inclusive $\text{t}\overline{\text{t}}$ production cross section is measured to be $\sigma_{\text{t}\overline{\text{t}}} = $ 791 $\pm$ 25 pb, which constitutes the most precise measurement in the lepton+jets channel to date.