Feminicide and counterdata production: Activist efforts to monitor and challenge gender-related violence.

Gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome, feminicide, are a serious problem throughout the world. Official government data on gender violence and feminicide are often absent, incomplete, infrequently updated, and contested. We draw on data feminism to situate feminicide data as missing data. Building on qualitative interviews, this study discusses the informatic work of ten activist and civil society organizations across six countries who combat missing data by producing counterdata. Activists enact alternative epistemological approaches to data science that center care, memory, and justice. Activists also face significant information challenges that increase monitoring labor and add emotional burden to reading about violent deaths. This work contributes to literature on data activism and critical data studies, proposing feminicide data practices as an important research subject. The empirical insights contribute to human-computer interaction (HCI) research, suggesting ways that the field may support and sustain the counterdata production practices of activists.

Humane Visual AI: Telling the Stories Behind a Medical Condition.

A biological understanding is key for managing medical conditions, yet psychological and social aspects matter too. The main problem is that these two aspects are hard to quantify and inherently difficult to communicate. To quantify psychological aspects, this work mined around half a million Reddit posts in the sub-communities specialised in 14 medical conditions, and it did so with a new deep-learning framework. In so doing, it was able to associate mentions of medical conditions with those of emotions. To then quantify social aspects, this work designed a probabilistic approach that mines open prescription data from the National Health Service in England to compute the prevalence of drug prescriptions, and to relate such a prevalence to census data. To finally visually communicate each medical condition's biological, psychological, and social aspects through storytelling, we designed a narrative-style layered Martini Glass visualization. In a user study involving 52 participants, after interacting with our visualization, a considerable number of them changed their mind on previously held opinions: 10% gave more importance to the psychological aspects of medical conditions, and 27% were more favourable to the use of social media data in healthcare, suggesting the importance of persuasive elements in interactive visualizations.

Cartographic Design of Cultural Maps.

Throughout history, maps have been used as a tool to explore cities. They visualize a city's urban fabric through its streets, buildings, and points of interest. Besides purely navigation purposes, street names also reflect a city's culture through its commemorative practices. Therefore, cultural maps that unveil socio-cultural characteristics encoded in street names could potentially raise citizens' historical awareness. But designing effective cultural maps is challenging, not only due to data scarcity but also due to the lack of effective approaches to engage citizens with data exploration. To address these challenges, we collected a dataset of 5000 streets across the cities of Paris, Vienna, London, and New York, and built their cultural maps grounded on cartographic storytelling techniques. Through data exploration scenarios, we demonstrated how cultural maps engage users and allow them to discover distinct patterns in the ways these cities are gender-biased, celebrate various professions, and embrace foreign cultures.

A novel 3,4-dihydropyrimidin-2(1H)-one: HIV-1 replication inhibitors with improved metabolic stability.

Following the previous SAR of a novel dihydropyrimidinone scaffold as HIV-1 replication inhibitors a detailed study directed towards optimizing the metabolic stability of the ester functional group in the dihydropyrimidinone (DHPM) scaffold is described. Replacement of the ester moiety by thiazole ring significantly improved the metabolic stability while retaining antiviral activity against HIV-1 replication. These novel and potent DHPMs with bioisosteres could serve as advanced leads for further optimization.

Discovery of 3,4-dihydropyrimidin-2(1H)-ones with inhibitory activity against HIV-1 replication.

3,4-Dihydropyrimidin-2(1H)-ones (DHPMs) were selected and derivatized through a HIV-1 replication assay based on GFP reporter cells. Compounds 14, 25, 31, and 36 exhibited significant inhibition of HIV-1 replication with a good safety profile. Chiral separation of each enantiomer by fractional crystallization showed that only the S enantiomer retained anti-HIV activity. Compound (S)-40, a novel and potent DHPM analog, could serve as an advanced lead for further development and the determination of the mechanism of action.

Discovery of Phenylaminopyridine Derivatives as Novel HIV-1 Non-nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors.

We identified a novel class of aryl-substituted triazine compounds as potent non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) during a high-throughput screening campaign that evaluated more than 200000 compounds for antihuman immunodeficiency virus (HIV) activity using a cell-based full replication assay. Herein, we disclose the optimization of the antiviral activity in a cell-based assay system leading to the discovery of compound 27, which possessed excellent potency against wild-type HIV-1 (EC50 = 0.2 nM) as well as viruses bearing Y181C and K103N resistance mutations in the reverse transcriptase gene. The X-ray crystal structure of compound 27 complexed with wild-type reverse transcriptase confirmed the mode of action of this novel class of NNRTIs. Introduction of a chloro functional group in the pyrazole moiety dramatically improved hERG and CYP inhibition profiles, yielding highly promising leads for further development.