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Featured Application: A complete review of information and communication technology (ICT) strategies to manage intimate partner violence (IPV) and protect IPV survivors is provided. A holistic ICT solution which would overcome the limitations of previous works is presented, promoting symmetry in society. Intimate partner violence (IPV) remains a scourge that compromises the rights of many women around the world, shaping an asymmetry in civil rights. Fighting gender-based violence, especially when it is committed by an intimate partner, is an important responsibility that needs to be addressed from all angles. It is also remarkable that our society is clearly conditioned by information and communication technology (ICT), which involves many aspects of our daily life. Unfortunately, violence that is performed in the real world is also replicated in this 'virtual' existence, by offenders in ICT contexts. On the other hand, the same technologies also provide a plethora of opportunities to fight IPV, which are enhanced by the innovative paradigm of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). In this work, we first present a thorough compilation of ICT proposals already published—based on either hardware or software—aimed at protecting IPV survivors, and which can be applied in real life situations but also within social networks. The challenges that still lie ahead are highlighted and, a complete ICT-based platform for IPV management, within an IoT framework, that overcomes the limitations of previous works is proposed, and then promoting a symmetry between individuals in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a complex disease influenced by well-established environmental exposures (most notably, cigarette smoking) and incompletely defined genetic factors. The chromosome 4q region harbors multiple genetic risk loci for COPD, including signals near HHIP, FAM13A, GSTCD, TET2, and BTC. Leveraging RNA-Seq data from lung tissue in COPD cases and controls, we estimated the co-expression network for genes in the 4q region bounded by HHIP and BTC (~70MB), through partial correlations informed by protein-protein interactions. We identified several co-expressed gene pairs based on partial correlations, including NPNT-HHIP, BTC-NPNT and FAM13A-TET2, which were replicated in independent lung tissue cohorts. Upon clustering the co-expression network, we observed that four genes previously associated to COPD: BTC, HHIP, NPNT and PPM1K appeared in the same network community. Finally, we discovered a sub-network of genes differentially co-expressed between COPD vs controls (including FAM13A, PPA2, PPM1K and TET2). Many of these genes were previously implicated in cell-based knock-out experiments, including the knocking out of SPP1 which belongs to the same genomic region and could be a potential local key regulatory gene. These analyses identify chromosome 4q as a region enriched for COPD genetic susceptibility and differential co-expression., Competing Interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: EKS has received grant support from Bayer and Northpond Laboratories. PJC has received grant support from Sanofi and Bayer and consulting fees from Verona Pharma. CPH has received grant support from Bayer, Boehringer-Ingelheim, and Vertex, and consulting fees from Chiesi, Ono, Sanofi, and Takeda. MHC has received grant support from Bayer., (Copyright: © 2024 Gentili et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)