#forward-looking

[mona-the-monkey]

ARK II IN THE 25TH CENTURY.  Okay, so it’s actual title was simply ARK II, but it did take place during the 25th century.  It centered around three young scientists and a chimpanzee who traveled around the wastelands of our planet (after its near destruction from war and pollution) studying, helping and introducing beneficial ideas to troubled, struggling souls and groups of souls.

The show offered a small yet diverse cast and starred Terry Lester as commander Jonah, Jean Marie Hon as Ruth and Jose Flores as Samuel (all of the main character’s names were intentionally taken from the Hebrew Bible).

It was definitely a forward-looking series in its concept and intent, but it only aired for one season--and 15 episodes--in 1976.  I caught up with it during its rerun period from 1978 through 1979.  One didn’t see too many Asians on TV at the time, and admittedly, I was rather smitten with Ruth (Jean Marie Hon).  She was half the reason I never missed an episode.

[codebyced]

Scaling Healthcare with Autonomous AI: Sentinel and the Future of Remote Patient Monitoring

Scaling Healthcare with Autonomous AI: Sentinel and the Future of Remote Patient Monitoring

In the realm of remote patient monitoring (RPM), the prospect of an autonomous AI agent handling triage represents a meaningful shift in how clinicians manage rising data streams and resource constraints. This article explains how Sentinel—an autonomous AI agent for remote patient monitoring triage—addresses RPM challenges with a focus on safety, efficiency, and scalability. It also highlights the technical framework, performance implications, and practical considerations for deployment in real-world healthcare settings.

Designed for healthcare and technology stakeholders, the discussion centers on how AI in healthcare can augment clinical decision-making without compromising patient safety. By examining Sentinel’s capabilities, architecture, and governance, readers gain a clear picture of what scalable, reliable AI looks like in RPM and why it matters for both patients and providers.

Overview of Sentinel and RPM challenges

Remote patient monitoring generates continuous streams of vital signs, alerts, and device data that must be interpreted quickly and accurately. RPM challenges include handling data volume, reducing clinician burden without increasing risk, ensuring timely escalation when patient conditions change, and maintaining cost efficiency. Sentinel aims to address these challenges by acting as an autonomous AI agent for triage, capable of interpreting data, prioritizing alerts, and guiding subsequent clinician actions with high sensitivity and specificity.

At its core, Sentinel is built to operate within the RPM workflow as a decisions-supporting agent that can autonomously assess incoming data, determine severity, and route appropriate responses. Its design emphasizes AI reliability, transparent reasoning, and safety controls—essentials for scaling RPM services while preserving clinician trust and patient safety.

What Sentinel achieves: sensitivity, specificity, and cost

Sentinel’s triage behavior centers on achieving high sensitivity to detect potential deterioration while maintaining specificity to minimize false alarms. This balance is critical in RPM contexts where unnecessary escalations can overwhelm clinicians and waste resources, yet missed deteriorations carry patient risk. By optimizing sensitivity and specificity in its triage decisions, Sentinel aims to reduce alert fatigue, improve response times, and lower overall care costs without compromising safety. The resulting efficiency supports broader RPM adoption and scalability across care settings.

Additionally, Sentinel is designed with cost considerations in mind. Autonomous triage can lower labor intensity by automating routine assessments and prioritization tasks, freeing clinicians to focus on high-value patient interactions. This approach aligns with the overarching goal of scalable, safe healthcare AI that complements clinical expertise rather than replaces it.

Technical Architecture

The technical backbone of Sentinel centers on modular, interoperable components that enable robust decision-making, traceability, and governance. This architecture supports reliable performance in diverse RPM environments and accommodates evolving clinical tools and data streams.

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a principled framework for how Sentinel interprets data, reason, and justify its triage decisions. MCP defines the context, constraints, and expected behaviors that guide the autonomous agent’s actions, ensuring consistency across different data inputs and scenarios. By formalizing context management, MCP enhances transparency and auditability, which are essential for clinician trust and regulatory alignment in healthcare AI.

Through MCP, Sentinel can maintain a coherent model of patient context, incorporate relevant signals, and apply predefined safety checks before delivering a triage recommendation. This protocol is a cornerstone of reliable AI performance in RPM, helping to curb errors and improve interpretability for clinicians reviewing autonomous decisions.

Multi-tool integration (21 clinical tools)

Sentinel is designed to integrate with a broad set of clinical tools—21 in this implementation—so it can synthesize data from diverse sources, validate findings, and enrich its assessments. This multi-tool integration enables Sentinel to cross-check signals, access historical records, interpret sensor data, and align its triage decisions with established clinical workflows. The result is a more accurate, context-aware autonomous triage process that respects the realities of RPM operations and clinician needs.

Performance and Implications

Performance considerations for Sentinel focus on clinician workload, scalability, and cost benefits, as well as ethical and safety implications. The objective is to deliver triage that enhances patient care while sustaining clinician confidence and ensuring responsible AI use in healthcare.

Clinician workload, scalability, and cost benefits

By autonomously triaging RPM data, Sentinel can reduce routine review time for clinicians, enabling them to prioritize high-risk cases and streamline workflow. The scalability of autonomous triage supports expanding RPM programs to more patients or settings without a linear increase in clinical labor. Financially, the efficiency gains from reduced manual triage and more precise escalation pathways can translate into lower operating costs and improved resource utilization, helping health systems scale RPM offerings to meet growing demand.

Ethical and safety considerations

Ethics and safety are foundational to the deployment of autonomous AI in healthcare. Sentinel’s design emphasizes risk awareness, fail-safes, and transparent decision-making. Ethical considerations include ensuring equitable performance across patient populations, protecting privacy, and maintaining patient autonomy and consent in AI-driven care. Safety measures, including ongoing monitoring, governance, and escalation protocols, are integral to maintaining trust and preventing harm as RPM programs scale.

Implementation Considerations

Implementation examines practical deployment scenarios, integration points, monitoring, and governance structures necessary to realize Sentinel’s benefits in real-world settings. The goal is to enable reliable, safe integration into existing RPM workflows while providing ongoing oversight to sustain performance and trust.

Deployment scenarios and integration points

Sentinel can be deployed across a range of RPM contexts, from hospital-at-home programs to chronic disease management clinics. Integration points include data streams from wearable sensors, home monitoring devices, electronic health records, and clinical decision support systems. The autonomy of Sentinel enables real-time triage decisions to be delivered to clinicians or to trigger appropriate automated responses within the care pathway. Seamless integration reduces friction for care teams and supports scalable RPM deployments.

Key considerations in deployment include ensuring data interoperability, maintaining consistent triage criteria, and aligning with local clinical workflows and regulatory requirements. A thoughtful integration plan helps maximize benefits while preserving patient safety and clinician buy-in.

Monitoring and governance

Ongoing monitoring and governance are essential for maintaining performance, safety, and accountability. Governance structures should define responsible parties, set performance benchmarks, and establish procedures for auditing decisions, updating MCP guidelines, and addressing any drift in model behavior. Continuous monitoring helps detect issues early and supports iterative improvements to the autonomous triage system.

Brand and Expert Perspectives

Industry perspectives emphasize the importance of transparency, safety, and scalability when deploying autonomous AI in RPM. Experts point to the role of MCP and robust tool integration as critical enablers of trustworthy AI that can augment clinical capabilities without compromising patient safety. Case studies from early pilots illustrate how autonomous agents like Sentinel can reduce clinician burden, improve responsiveness to patient needs, and support scalable RPM programs in diverse healthcare settings.

Expert quotes and case studies

Experts note that the combination of context-aware reasoning, tool-assisted triage, and rigorous governance can transform RPM workflows. Early case studies show measurable reductions in unnecessary alerts, improved response times, and favorable cost dynamics when autonomous triage is implemented with strong safety nets and continuous oversight.

Conclusion

Sentinel represents a forward-looking approach to scaling healthcare through autonomous AI in remote patient monitoring triage. By combining Model Context Protocol, multi-tool integration, and a disciplined focus on safety, reliability, and efficiency, Sentinel aims to deliver high-sensitivity, high-specificity triage that reduces clinician workload while maintaining patient safety. Health systems exploring RPM expansion can expect a scalable path that preserves clinical judgment and supports sustainable growth.

Subscribe for updates on AI in healthcare and download the Sentinel briefing for technical stakeholders.

[codebyced]

AgentOS and the Next Frontier of Computing: NUIs, Skills, and the Agent Kernel

AgentOS and the Next Frontier of Computing: NUIs, Skills, and the Agent Kernel

Introduction AgentOS represents a bold reimagination of how humans interact with computers, shifting away from traditional desktops toward natural user interfaces that leverage AI-driven agents. As the field evolves, researchers and developers glimpse a future where operating systems respond to intent rather than mere commands, where complex workflows are orchestrated by modular AI components, and where security models adapt to new forms of autonomy. This post provides an informational overview of AgentOS, its NUIs, and the architectural concepts that underpin its potential, focusing on how natural-language activation, intent mining, and a modular “Skills-as-Modules” approach could reshape everyday computing. In exploring these ideas, the emphasis remains on practical implications for developers and end users alike. The discussion considers how NUIs could unlock productivity gains, what the Agent Kernel enables in terms of orchestration, and how permission management and shadow AI phenomena intersect with modern operating-system design. The goal is to inform readers about what lies ahead, without overpromising, and to illuminate how AI agents might redefine user experiences, software architecture, and governance practices in computing. Body Sections

What is AgentOS? The shift from GUIs to Natural User Interfaces (NUIs)

Rationale for NUIs and potential productivity gains

AgentOS is built around the premise that natural user interfaces—where users interact through speech, gestures, and contextual cues—can reduce the friction between intention and action. By interpreting user goals expressed in natural language, the platform can route tasks to the most appropriate AI agents, domain modules, or native OS services. This shift aims to streamline complex activities, from multi-step document preparation to system configuration, by allowing users to describe what they want rather than how to do it. The rationale hinges on intent recognition, contextual awareness, and ongoing learning so that responses become more precise over time. When NUIs are fused with capable AI agents, the workflow becomes less about navigating a menu structure and more about expressing outcomes, with the system coordinating the necessary steps automatically. Beyond convenience, NUIs promise consistency across tasks and applications. A user might ask, “Set up a project workspace with dependencies and documentation scaffolding,” and AgentOS would interpret the request, decompose it into discrete actions, and orchestrate the sequence across tools, libraries, and local services. The potential productivity gains come from reducing cognitive load, decreasing context-switching, and enabling faster iteration cycles—especially for knowledge workers, developers, and researchers who routinely perform layered tasks that span multiple applications and platforms. The shift also introduces new considerations for accessibility, since natural-language interactions can adapt to different user needs while preserving precision through explicit confirmation and fallbacks where ambiguity arises.

The Agent Kernel and Skills-as-Modules

How intent mining and task decomposition power orchestration

At the heart of AgentOS lies the Agent Kernel, a central orchestration layer that coordinates AI agents and modular capabilities. The Kernel consumes user intent—gleaned from natural language prompts, contextual metadata, and ongoing interaction history—and decomposes tasks into executable steps. This process, often described as intent mining and task decomposition, maps high-level goals to a sequence of smaller actions that can be distributed across specialized agents, microservices, and OS components. By understanding dependencies, priorities, and constraints, the Kernel can parallelize work where possible, manage retries, and handle contingencies when a single agent cannot complete a required action. Skills-as-Modules is the design philosophy that powers this architecture. Instead of monolithic software packages, AgentOS organizes capabilities as discrete, composable modules with well-defined interfaces. Each module encapsulates a specific capability—such as document drafting, data analysis, or environment configuration—and can be plugged into the orchestration flow as needed. This modularity supports rapid experimentation, safer deployments, and easier governance, as developers can add, update, or remove components without destabilizing the entire system. For users, Skills-as-Modules translate to a more flexible, adaptable OS that can evolve alongside new AI agents and services without requiring a complete OS rewrite.

Implications for software architecture and developer workflows

The shift to an Agent Kernel and Skills-as-Modules has broad implications for software architecture. Systems must expose clean, interoperable interfaces that enable seamless handoffs between modules and agents, with clear contract definitions for inputs, outputs, and failure modes. Developers are encouraged to design components that are stateless where possible, with idempotent operations and explicit goal-driven behavior. Orchestration concerns—such as dependency resolution, sequencing, and fault tolerance—become core engineering concerns, not afterthoughts. For developer workflows, this paradigm emphasizes modular design, observability, and secure integration points. Versioned module interfaces and sandboxed execution environments help manage risk when new AI-driven components are introduced. Documentation and governance tooling become essential to track module provenance, capability limits, and data handling practices. In practice, teams would iterate on modules in isolation, verify interoperability within the Kernel’s orchestration framework, and monitor performance and security outcomes as the system autonomously composes more complex tasks.

Security, Privacy, and Permissions in AgentOS

Shadow AI risks and new permission models

As AI agents operate within a user’s environment, the risk landscape expands beyond traditional malware and misuse. Shadow AI—instances of AI components running in the background or within third-party modules without explicit user visibility—poses challenges for transparency and control. AgentOS must address this by implementing robust permission models that govern access to files, networks, devices, and other sensitive resources. Permissions should be granular, auditable, and reversible, with clear prompts and confirmations for high-stakes actions. Shadow AI risks can be mitigated through principled isolation, strict data-handling rules, and continuous monitoring that surfaces anomalous behavior to users or administrators. Concretely, new permission models may involve role-based access controls tailored to AI-driven workflows, context-aware consent prompts, and runtime guards that require explicit re-authorization for critical tasks. Logging and explainability features help users understand why an action occurred, which module or agent initiated it, and what data was used. This transparency supports accountability and trust, two essential ingredients as operating-system architectures become more autonomous and distributed across AI services.

Best practices for securing AI-driven OS environments

Security in AgentOS rests on a multi-layered approach. First, implement strict sandboxing for all modular components to minimize cross-module impact and isolate potential vulnerabilities. Second, enforce least-privilege permission policies, granting only what a module or agent needs to complete its task. Third, design for auditable decision-making by logging intent, actions, and outcomes in an immutable or tamper-evident record. Fourth, establish governance for module provenance, including verification of trusted sources and regular security assessments. Finally, incorporate privacy-preserving techniques—such as on-device processing, data minimization, and secure aggregation—to protect user information while enabling meaningful AI-driven orchestration. This security posture supports safer experimentation with AI-powered OS features while maintaining user confidence. As users adopt AgentOS, they benefit from sophisticated automation without sacrificing control or visibility, which is essential when NUIs begin to drive critical workflows across personal and professional contexts.

Developer and User Implications

Building modular, natural language-activated components

For developers, the modular approach encourages building reusable Skills-as-Modules that can be combined in various ways to satisfy user intents. Components should be designed to understand natural language prompts and translate them into precise actions while exposing clear hooks for orchestration by the Agent Kernel. Emphasis on interoperability means adopting common data formats, consistent error handling, and well-documented interfaces. The ability to slot new modules into the orchestration pipeline quickly accelerates innovation while maintaining system stability. In practice, this requires rigorous testing of module interactions, performance benchmarks, and security reviews to ensure that each addition strengthens the overall experience without introducing new risks. From the user perspective, modular components enable a personalized, scalable computing experience. As individuals interact with more capable AI agents, their environment can adapt to changing needs, workflows, and preferences. The result is a more intuitive interface where a single natural-language query can trigger a cascade of coordinated actions across applications, services, and devices. The emphasis remains on clarity and reliability—users should feel confident that the system understands their intent and executes it as intended, with visible progress and clear options if adjustments are needed.

Practical considerations for adoption and interoperability

Adoption hinges on practical considerations such as interoperability across platforms, data portability, and consistent developer experience. For organizations evaluating AgentOS-like systems, important questions include: How easily can existing applications integrate with Skills-as-Modules? What standards govern module communication and data formats? How are user preferences and privacy protections preserved when modules communicate across boundaries? Interoperability is enhanced when consortium-like standards emerge for module interfaces, permission models, and governance practices, enabling smoother migration and collaboration across teams and vendors. On the user side, practical considerations include the availability of robust, curated modules that cover common workflows, clear explanations of what the system intends to do, and straightforward controls for overseeing autonomous actions. As the ecosystem grows, users gain the benefit of a more capable, responsive OS that can learn and adapt, while retaining the ability to review, adjust, or revert decisions when needed. The balance between automation and user agency remains central to achieving a trustworthy and productive AgentOS experience. Conclusion AgentOS stands at the convergence of natural language interaction, modular AI-enabled capabilities, and a governance-forward approach to security and privacy. By shifting from GUIs to NUIs, and by organizing software as Skills-as-Modules orchestrated by the Agent Kernel, the next generation of operating systems could become more intuitive, flexible, and capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with minimal friction. The emphasis on intent mining, task decomposition, and modular integration suggests a future where software architectures are more adaptable, more transparent, and more resilient in the face of rapidly evolving AI capabilities. Follow for updates on AgentOS research and related topics. Join the discussion and subscribe for more insights on AI-enabled operating systems and NUIs. Share your thoughts on the future of software development in an AgentOS world to guide future content decisions and potential collaborations, including hands-on demos and case studies that highlight practical benefits and risks of AI-powered OS architectures and governance models. Please subscribe and engage to stay informed about the trajectory of AgentOS research and its practical implications for developers and end users alike, across platforms and industries, driving responsible innovation and collaboration for the future of computing.

[codebyced]

How CliqueFlowmer Accelerates Materials Discovery with Model-Based Optimization

How CliqueFlowmer Accelerates Materials Discovery with Model-Based Optimization

In the rapidly evolving field of materials science, CliqueFlowmer stands out as a purpose-built platform that combines model-based optimization with advanced generative capabilities. This approach aims to streamline discovery cycles, reduce experimental overhead, and open the door for researchers and industry to explore novel materials with greater speed and confidence. By integrating offline model-based optimization (MBO), transformers, and flow generation, CliqueFlowmer offers a practical, open-source path to accelerated materials discovery.

From academic labs to industrial R&D teams, stakeholders are increasingly seeking tools that translate theoretical insights into tangible results. The information landscape around AI in science has matured to emphasize reproducibility, accessibility, and collaboration. CliqueFlowmer answers this call by delivering a transparent, open-source framework designed for practical use, robust experimentation, and community-driven improvement. This post explores what CliqueFlowmer is, why optimization-integrated generation matters, how to get started, and what the future holds for open-source collaboration in materials discovery.

What is CliqueFlowmer?

Core Architecture: Transformers, Flow Generation, and MBO

CliqueFlowmer is built around three core components that work in concert to accelerate materials discovery. First, transformers provide scalable sequence modeling and the capacity to understand complex relationships in materials data. These models enable generation and evaluation of candidate materials representations while maintaining coherence with domain constraints.

Second, flow generation introduces principled, probabilistic control over the generation process. This enables targeted exploration of material spaces, guiding the search toward promising regions without sacrificing diversity. The flow-based approach supports conditioning on material properties and process parameters, helping researchers tailor outputs to specific design goals.

Finally, offline model-based optimization (MBO) serves as the decision engine. Rather than relying on continuous online exploration, CliqueFlowmer leverages offline optimization to propose high-potential candidates and Pareto-optimal trade-offs. This reduces costly lab experiments and accelerates iterations, while maintaining rigorous evaluation standards. The integration of these components yields a practical workflow where AI-assisted design informs tangible experimental plans.

Why Optimization-Integrated Generation Matters

Benefits for Researchers and Industry

The combination of optimization and generation aligns closely with real-world material design goals. Researchers gain access to a tool that can propose candidate compositions, structures, or processing routes that balance multiple objectives—stability, performance, manufacturability, and sustainability. The offline MBO layer helps prioritize experiments, enabling teams to allocate resources efficiently and pursue the most impactful directions first.

For industry, the value proposition centers on faster time-to-insight and more reliable downstream outcomes. Flow generation provides controllable creativity, ensuring that generated candidates remain within practical bounds and can be translated into experimental plans. The open-source ethos underpinning CliqueFlowmer further strengthens collaboration between academia and industry, accelerating knowledge transfer and collective innovation. In sum, optimization-integrated generation reduces waste, speeds discovery, and elevates the quality of data that informs decision-making in materials R&D.

Getting Started: Open-Source Access and Practical Use

Setup Guide Overview

Practitioners can begin with the open-source repository associated with CliqueFlowmer to explore the platform’s capabilities. The setup focuses on practical implementation, including environment configuration, data handling, and basic experiment workflows. Users typically start by aligning a materials problem with the platform’s design goals, then loading relevant datasets that capture the properties, processes, and constraints of interest. The offline MBO component can then be configured to generate candidate materials or processing conditions, followed by validation steps that verify feasibility before moving to experimentation.

Key steps commonly include selecting a target property or performance metric, curating a dataset that reflects the design space, and configuring the transformer and flow components to respect domain constraints. The aim is to create a repeatable, auditable workflow where optimization decisions are transparent and reproducible. For researchers and teams new to model-based optimization in materials science, the open-source nature of CliqueFlowmer provides access to not only the code but also community-driven best practices and documentation that evolve with the project.

Real-World Implications and Future Trends

Open-Source Collaboration and Adoption

Open-source collaboration is central to the long-term impact of CliqueFlowmer. By inviting researchers, engineers, and educators to contribute, the platform accelerates the refinement of models, the expansion of design spaces, and the validation of new workflows. Adoption across diverse applications—such as polymer design, ceramic composites, and semiconductor materials—benefits from shared benchmarks, standardized evaluation protocols, and cross-domain knowledge transfer.

As practitioners adopt optimization-integrated generation, several trends are likely to unfold. First, more materials problems will be framed as multi-objective optimization tasks, reflecting real-world trade-offs between performance, cost, and environmental impact. Second, the open-source model will encourage community-driven dataset curation, augmenting the quantity and quality of materials data available for training and evaluation. Third, there will be an emphasis on reproducibility and transparency, with tooling designed to document experimental runs, parameter settings, and outcomes for audits and academic scrutiny.

Beyond open-source collaboration, the platform is poised to influence how teams approach materials discovery at scale. By coupling transformer-based representations with controllable generation and offline optimization, CliqueFlowmer helps organizations build repeatable, auditable discovery pipelines—bridging the gap between conceptual ideas and practical, lab-tested results. As the ecosystem grows, the community can share success stories, benchmarks, and plug-and-play components that lower barriers to entry and accelerate collective progress in materials science.

Open-Source Accessibility and Practical Impact

The emphasis on open-source access ensures that researchers and practitioners are not locked into proprietary toolchains. Instead, they can inspect, modify, and extend the platform to fit their unique needs. This transparency fosters trust, invites collaboration, and opens possibilities for educational use in classrooms and research labs alike. The practical impact is measured not only by faster discovery cycles but also by the ability to replicate and validate results across different settings, reinforcing the integrity of the materials design process.

As CliqueFlowmer evolves, users can expect enhancements in modeling capabilities, more robust flow generation techniques, and richer offline optimization strategies. The ongoing community-driven development will continue to align the platform with the realities of materials research, enabling scientists to tackle increasingly complex problems with confidence and clarity.

Conclusion

CliqueFlowmer represents a purposeful fusion of transformers, flow generation, and offline model-based optimization to accelerate materials discovery. By addressing practical design goals through optimization-informed generation, the platform helps researchers and industry teams identify high-potential candidates while minimizing wasted experiments. The open-source model amplifies impact through collaboration, shared datasets, and community-driven improvements, making advanced materials design more accessible and reproducible than ever before.

Try CliqueFlowmer via the open-source repository and apply it to a sample materials optimization problem; join the community for support and collaboration.

[yorkcalling]

New Music: Sam Miller - Calla

New Music: Sam Miller – Calla

Sam Miller is an American pianist who Jane first discovered for us late in 2020 through his stunning piece Morning. His latest is taken from his forthcoming album Lillies and it’s called Calla. (more…)

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[eideard]

Sweden shuts down their last coal-fired power plant

Sweden shuts down their last coal-fired power plant

Just days after Austria shut its last coal power plant, Sweden has followed suit with the closure of Stockholm Exergi AB’s Värtaverket plant, two years ahead of schedule. Belgium shut down its last coal power station in 2016…

“The closure of KVV6 means that all planned use of coal will cease and thus Stockholm Exergi’s CO2 emissions will be reduced by about half…Our goal is for all our…

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[jeanninejordan-blog]

Becoming a Forward-Thinking Musician

Becoming a Forward-Thinking musician is a tall order for the busy and at times, overwhelmed forward-looking musician. Is it possible to integrate the two behaviors? Some thoughts and questions to ponder as we begin anew with fresh eyes, ears, and minds this year of 2020. As a church musician, am I thinking progressively? As a teacher, am I looking ahead with an eye to improving my teaching skills? A…

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