Different Aspects Of Testing Research Articles

The SCCS Notes of Guidance for the testing of cosmetic ingredients and their safety evaluation, 11th revision, 30–31 March 2021, SCCS/1628/21

The “SCCS Notes of Guidance for the Testing of Cosmetic Ingredients and Their Safety Evaluation, 11 th Revision” (SCCS/1628/21) contains relevant and updated information on the different aspects of testing and safety evaluation of cosmetic substances in Europe. The emphasis is on cosmetic ingredients for which a concern has been expressed for human health. Indirectly, the Guidance also provides some advice on the safety of finished products. A general aim is to improve harmonised compliance with the current cosmetic EU legislation, Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, for which animal testing and marketing bans fully apply from 2013 onwards. This means that no in vivo testing of ingredients or finished products is allowed in Europe for the purpose of cosmetics. For this reason, the SCCS has closely followed the progress made in regard to the development and validation of alternative replacement methods, also referred to as new approach methodology (NAM). The “SCCS Notes of Guidance” are regularly revised and updated in order to incorporate progress made and experience gained over time, in particular on the use of NAMs, and the new methods and data that became available since previous revision (SCCS/1602/18) formed the basis of the current (11 th) Revision.

Testing integrated circuits

Prof. Dr. Bernd Becker This special issue is dedicated to Prof. Dr. Bernd Becker, who celebrated his 60th birthday on July 19, 2014. He is a worldwide known expert in the field of circuit designwith a special focus on testing. Since the mid-90s, he has been a professor at the Albert-LudwigsUniversity in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he has a chair for Computer Architecture and built up a group of high international visibility. His career started in Saarbrucken, where he was working as a researcher in the group of Prof. Gunter Hotz before becoming a professor himself at the JohannWolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. There, he was the head of the group KEA – Complexity Theory and Efficient Algorithms before joining the university in Freiburg. During his career, he studied various topics in the context of circuit and system design covering design, verification, and testing on different levels of abstraction from high-level descriptions down to the physical level. Hismajor contributions are the unique combination of a solid mathematicalmodeling and, at the same time, linking this to problems of high practical relevance. In his early papers, he studied the testability of structured circuits, like adders andmultipliers, and extended this to restricted circuit forms, like decision diagrams. Finally, he considered various problem formulations for large scalemulti-million gate designs. Bernd Becker published more than 300 scientific papers including contributions to the most prestigious journals and conferences in the field – like DATE, DAC, ASP-DAC, ICCAD, ICCD, or TCAD to only name a few. Beside his research contributions, he served the scientific community in various different roles. He has been involved in the technical program committee of many of the abovementioned conferences and actively contributes as an organizer, e. g. as a member of the Steering Committee of ETS. Furthermore, he has been the Dean at the university in Freiburg and is part of the collaborative research center on Automatic Verification and Analysis of Complex Systems (AVACS). Especially remarkable is his continuous support for young researchers. In the meantime, more than 20 PhD students successfully graduated under his supervision. In this special issue, the reader finds contributions to the domain of testing integrated circuits. After a circuit has been produced, the resulting device has to be checked for correctness. Since each component has to pass this test, there are various – partially contradicting – constraints for finding an optimal test. Of course, the test stimuli that are applied should cover all of the occurring errors, while simultaneously, the test time should be as short as possible. Even though very efficient techniques are known, test costs are still very high and account for a significant portion of the overall production costs. The contributions contained in the special issue are co-authoredbyworld-leadingexperts from theareawhich, through this, show their recognition of the achievements by Bernd Becker. These experts include some of the people with whom Bernd Becker collaborated in the past and published joined papers. They – who over many years became close friends – report on different aspects of testing. The first paper in the special issue is authored by SudhakarM. Reddy and Zhuo Zhang and presents a technique for finding minimal test sets. A similar goal is addressed by the work of Stephan Eggersgluẞ and Rolf Drechsler, where Boolean proof techniques are applied for dynamic test compaction. The recent approaches of Boolean satisfiability are used in the contribution by Sybille Hellebrand and Hans-Joachim Wunderlich to extend the application domain to fault tolerance. The paper by Jean-Marc Galliere, Florence Azais, Mariane Comte and Michel Renovell studies the detection of a special type of faults in a circuit, namely Gate Oxide Short Defects. The analysis of stochas-

Quality in genetic counselling for presymptomatic testing--clinical guidelines for practice across the range of genetic conditions.

Presymptomatic testing (PST) is the performance of a genetic test on an asymptomatic individual at risk of a condition to determine whether the person has inherited the disease-causing mutation. Although relevant guidelines exist for specific diseases, there is no overarching protocol that can be adapted to any disorder or clinical setting in which such testing is offered. The objective of this European project was to develop a set of coherent guidelines for PST (for adult-onset monogenic conditions) for use by health professionals working in a range of disciplines, countries or contexts. To ensure the guidelines were appropriate and practice based, we organised a workshop attended by an expert group of practitioners with relevant health professional backgrounds from 11 countries. Models of service for offering PST were presented, the group then discussed different aspects of testing and the standard of care required to ensure that patients were prepared to make decisions and deal with results and consequences. After the workshop, several rounds of consultation were used with a wider group of professionals to refine the guidelines. The guidelines include general principles governing the offer of testing (eg, autonomous choice of the patient), objectives of genetic counselling in this context (eg, facilitation of decision making), logistical considerations (eg, use of trained staff) and topics to be included during counselling discussion with the patient (eg, consequences of both positive and negative outcomes). We recommend the adoption of these guidelines to provide an equitable structure for those seeking PST in any country.