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The COVID-19 pandemic started more than a year ago, but until today, we did not have a definitive cure for this disease. The SARS-CoV-2 virus constantly mutated over time, infecting more people and causing tremendous stress on the existing scarcity of healthcare resources all around the world. Here, the experts from ground zero will share their first-hand experience of clinical trials looking for a cure for COVID-19, like the WHO's Solidarity Trial and the role of palliative care in COVID-19 as part of humanitarian crisis management. To download this eBook in other formats, please go to https://books2read.com/u/3ya9rn or https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1103401

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This three volume set (CCIS 1237-1239) constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems, IPMU 2020, in June 2020. The conference was scheduled to take place in Lisbon, Portugal, at University of Lisbon, but due to COVID-19 pandemic it was held virtually. The 173 papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 213 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections: homage to Enrique Ruspini; invited talks; foundations and mathematics; decision making, preferences and votes; optimization and uncertainty; games; real world applications; knowledge processing and creation; machine learning I; machine learning II; XAI; image processing; temporal data processing; text analysis and processing; fuzzy interval analysis; theoretical and applied aspects of imprecise probabilities; similarities in artificial intelligence; belief function theory and its applications; aggregation: theory and practice; aggregation: pre-aggregation functions and other generalizations of monotonicity; aggregation: aggregation of different data structures; fuzzy methods in data mining and knowledge discovery; computational intelligence for logistics and transportation problems; fuzzy implication functions; soft methods in statistics and data analysis; image understanding and explainable AI; fuzzy and generalized quantifier theory; mathematical methods towards dealing with uncertainty in applied sciences; statistical image processing and analysis, with applications in neuroimaging; interval uncertainty; discrete models and computational intelligence; current techniques to model, process and describe time series; mathematical fuzzy logic and graded reasoning models; formal concept analysis, rough sets, general operators and related topics; computational intelligence methods in information modelling, representation and processing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Workshop on Monte Carlo Search, MCS 2020, organized in conjunction with IJCAI 2020. The event was supposed to take place in Yokohama, Japan, in July 2020, but due to the Covid-19 pandemic was held virtually on January 7, 2021. The 9 full papers of the specialized project were carefully reviewed and selected from 15 submissions. The following topics are covered in the contributions: discrete mathematics in computer science, games, optimization, search algorithms, Monte Carlo methods, neural networks, reinforcement learning, machine learning.

The publication covers scientific research in the field of biophysics, ecology, physiotherapy and the COVID-19 epidemic. Zbornik pokriva znanstveno raziskovanje s področja biofizike, ekologije, fizioterapije in epidemije COVID-19.

This rapid review summarises the economic impacts of the pandemic on ethnic minorities, focusing on the city of Manchester. It utilises multiple reporting sources to explore various dimensions of the economic shock in the UK, linking this to studies of pre-COVID-19 economic and ethnic composition in Manchester and in the combined authority area of Greater Manchester. We then make inferences about the pandemic’s impact specific to the city region. Greater Manchester has seen some of the highest rates of COVID-19 and as a result has faced particularly stringent 'lockdown' regulations.Manchester is the sixth most deprived Local Authority in England (according to 2019 English Indices of Multiple Deprivation). As a consequence, many neighbourhoods in the city were always going to be less resilient to the economic shock caused by the pandemic compared with other, less-deprived, areas. Particular challenges for Manchester include the prevalence of poor health, low-paid work, low qualifications, poor housing conditions and overcrowding. Ethnic minority groups also faced disparities long before the onset of the pandemic. Within the UK, ethnic minorities have been found to be most disadvantaged in terms of employment and housing – particularly in large urban areas containing traditional settlement areas for ethnic minorities. Further, all Black, Asian, and Minority ethnic (BAME) groups in Greater Manchester have been found to be less likely to be employed pre-pandemic compared with White people. For example, people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic backgrounds, especially women, have the lowest levels of employment in Greater Manchester. Finally, unprecedented cuts to public spending as a result of austerity have also disproportionately affected women of an ethnic minority background alongside women, disabled people, the young and those with no or low-level qualifications. This environment has created and sustained a multiplicative disadvantage for Manchester’s ethnic minority residents through the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On 23 March 2020, the UN Secretary General (UNSG) Antonio Guterres called for an immediate global ceasefire, to help tackle the threat of Covid-19 rather than compound the risk to those in fragile and conflict-affected areas. In response to this call, multiple states, international, regional, and local organisations declared their support for a global ceasefire, and since March 2020, conflict parties have declared 25 ceasefires, across 17 countries. In this report, we draw on the ‘Ceasefires in a Time of Covid-19’ tracker to analyse how ceasefires have unfolded throughout the pandemic, and to consider how the pandemic has affected moves towards ceasefires and peace processes. In Part I, we provide data on what types of ceasefires conflict parties have declared since March 2020, and the extent to which these ceasefires have held. In Part II, we put forward key analytical and practical concerns for understanding these ceasefires and considering what, if anything, ceasefires during the pandemic mean for wider peace processes. In Part III, we conclude that, although the Covid-19 pandemic has not been a ‘game-changer’ for ceasefire and peace process trajectories, it is now a crucial part of the context in which peace processes must take place. We make recommendations for how ceasefires, and peacemaking more generally, can be better supported during global health emergencies.