Dragon09/odtu_chatbot huggingface dataset:
preventing and delaying the development of diabetes in africa a randomised placebo controlled doubleblind phase iii trial of metformin in hivinfected persons with prediabetes

diabetes is a common comorbidity among people living with hiv since oct 2021 we have been conducting a phase iii randomised placebocontrolled trial of metformin among people living with hiv and prediabetes in dar es salaam tanzania edctp ria2018co2513 the aim is to test whether metformin can prevent progression to diabetes among people living with hiv the primary endpoint is the time to diabeteswe had planned to enrol 2100 participants followup for 3 years and finish at the end of dec 2024 covid19 resulted in severe delays to regulatory review hiv care was decentralised away from health facilities to community posts to reduce covid19 risk which led to much slower recruitment we have now enrolled 1550 participants over the last 20 months less than 1 have been lost to followup we will reach our target recruitment in dec 2023 and will continue followup until dec 2025 this will provide an average followup of 3 years per participant analyses of aggregated data to date show that glucose levels and weight have fallen over first 12 months among the trial cohort thus we believe that trial will answer the research question by continuing followup until dec 2025 in 2026 we will disseminate the findings to stakeholders and to the international bodies we are collecting clinical health economics and qualitative data the trial is being done as an equitable partnership between european and african researchers and in partnership with ministry of health policymakers and african patient representative bodies we have good links with the african centres for disease control world health organisation whoafro and geneva offices and global fund in order to inform policy considerations merck pharma has provided medicinal products including the placebo
on southeast asian terms tracing the ideas of local sultans in the paper archives of colonial empires

this project in global diplomatic and colonial history aims to explain how southeast asian sultans ideas and perspectives influenced colonial relations in c 17501920 the projects comparative method focuses on three courts in maritime southeast asia sulu johor and mataram that offer compelling parallels and divergences in their interaction with european colonial powers the project analyses specific key terms and phrases in manuscripts written and collected at the courts that reflect on crucial aspects of rulers political priorities ideas and motivationsbuilding on the applicants prior research experience the research innovatively then uses recent advancements in archival digitization and automatic handwritten text recognition technology which is applied to trace variations and translations of the key terms and phrases in colonial archival records primarily the rulers correspondence and treaties with colonial powers by automatically identifying and comparing how southeast asian terminology reverberated in the archives and knowledge production of the british dutch and spanish colonial empires in southeast asia the project uncovers the potential influences of local ideas on processes and practices of diplomatic interaction treatymaking and thus on the vocabulary and legal frameworks of european colonial empiresin doing so the project challenges established paradigms that prioritize european colonial frameworks as the sources of political organization in colonial and postcolonial southeast asia it contributes to growing strands of global history that reveal the influence of noneuropean actors practices and knowledge within global frameworks this encourages more polyvocal and less eurocentric perspectives in public debate and history writing to clarify the longterm consequences of colonialism and its impact on international relations and current sociopolitical fabrics identities and conflicts in and beyond southeast asia
getting symmetric cryptography out of its comfort zone

our lives are profoundly affected by the digitization of data and the amount of sensitive data that is shared on cloud storage grows considerably every daywhenever sensitive data is collected manipulated exchanged analyzed and retained symmetric cryptography is usedthe most commonly used and famous symmetric cryptography algorithms are aes and keccaksha3due to their importance the entire research community focuses its attention on such schemes with the result that the great majority of the symmetric primitives recently published resemble themwhile positive at first glance the limits of this approach and of the current state of the art are appearing in several contextsfirst the similarity of such schemes caused a performance flatness with no substantial improvement recently achievednext our understanding of their security has not fundamentally improved in the course of the last years since their security arguments are still based on unverified and often false assumptionsfinally and more importantly the current bitoriented schemes are not suitable for rising applications of practical importance such as format preserving encryption multiparty computation fully homomorphic encryption and zeroknowledge which naturally operate over prime fields andor integer ringsthe only way we can overcome these fundamental problems is by considering nonstandard innovative approaches for designing secure and efficient symmetric primitiveswithin the sympzon project i plan to reshape the whole process of designing symmetric primitives by developing design strategies for defeating attacks against symmetric primitives that mainly operate over integer rings constructing new cryptographic components over integer rings that admit an efficient bitrepresentationthis will lead to revolutionary symmetric primitives dedicated to targeting the rising number of applications operating over rings with unprecedent security arguments and performances
simple minds competition of parallel neural filters in behaviour selection of drosophila

how we and other animals make up our minds is an everlasting question that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries sensoryevoked activity patterns memory engrams and internally generated brain activity conveying the animals internal state are meant to integrate to promote an appropriate behaviour still direct evidence for how integration works on the network the neurophysiological and the molecular level remains limited exemplifying internal needs with tiredness and hunger and focusing on the numerically simple brain of drosophila we here test a parallel filter hypothesis to explain how sensory and internal states are integrated across the relevant centres of the fly brain we posit that parallel neural filters will have changed permeability for sensory stimuli and to compete eg if hungry neural networks promoting food approach behaviour will change their permeability for sensory cues relative to those promoting sleep our approach will visualise neural activity while recording online fly behaviour related to hunger sleep and experience on a treadmill it will tackle the physiological basis shaping filters including oscillatory cell and network activities as well as synaptic gating while recording whole brain activity we capitalise on our expertise in functional imaging and previous discoveries of hunger and sleep gates as well as their synaptic and network substrates we will investigate and interfere with key molecular factors underlying filtering to directly challenge network integration and behavioural outcome finally we will remote control competing parallel filters to test whether sensory permeability can switch the animals state between an ego and an allocentriclike world view and whether depressionlike states related to learnt helplessness will favour an egocentric filter setting understanding neural filter properties should allow further insights to the physiological basis of depressed states
bioremediation systems exploiting synergies for improved removal of mixed pollutants

biosysmo is a 48month action that will develop a computationallyassisted framework for designing and optimizing synergistic biosystems combining the required pathways and traits to achieve the most efficient degradation and sequestration of pollutant mixtures these biosystems will comprise combinations of bacteria fungi and plants containing the natural or engineered pathways required for pollutants degradation and identified based on a computationallyassisted analysis biosysmo will take advantage of the high natural microbial diversity by screening samples from polluted sites and locations affected by diffuse pollution to identify natural microorganisms already present and able to metabolize the target pollutants the search will be expanded to microorganisms previously identified and characterized by applying data mining tools to genomic and metagenomic data available in public repositoriesthe construction and optimization of synergistic biosystems will combine approaches based on 1 enhancing plantmicrobe bacteria fungi interactions to achieving combinations with improved pollutant uptake andor degradation 2 engineering bacteria for improved degradation and bioaugmentation and plants poplar tree for improved microbial colonization and pollutant uptake 3 constructing artificial microstructured consortia into aggregates and biofilms containing all the required pathways for pollutant removal and 4 applying bioelectrochemical systems bes as standalone or in hybrid systems the different key players will be identified and combined to formulate innovative biosystems with the assistance of genomescale metabolic gem models for elucidating and simulating the key metabolic pathways the constructed biosystems will be applied in conventional phytoremediation biopile bioaugmentation and innovative bes hybrid besphytoremediation bioremediation approaches optimized for the treatment of mixtures of pollutants in soil sediments and water
lossless electron beam monochromator for enhanced resolution in electron microscopy

lossless electron beam monochromator for enhanced resolution in electron microscopythe performance of advanced highresolution electronmicroscopes em is severely limited by the energy spread of the electron beam which limits both spatial and spectral resolutions by causing chromatic aberrations to mitigate this limitation monochromators are used common monochromators have mechanical slits as a narrow bandpass filter inherently introducing high loss to the electron beam they are very complex and thus highly expensive here we propose to develop a novel electron monochromator technology that is lossless relatively simple and thus costeffective and modular so it can potentially be installed as an upgrade in a wide range of existing em systems the proposed monochromator compresses the electron energy rather than filtering it and thus the resulting electron beam suffers no losses we use a single crystal located inside the microscope column close to the incoming electron beam infrared laser pulses are used to generate thz radiation in the crystal which interacts with the electron beam such that the energy of the electron beam is compressed without introducing electron losses we aim to achieve this through three main goals 1 demonstrate the ability to get strong energy compression in pulsed electron mode with the advantage of low losses 2 demonstrate that our idea can also upgrade the performance of traditional lowcost cw operating em such as lowvoltage scanning em lvsem 3 commercialize our ip and penetrate the market we developed new ip aiming to commercialize the technology at the end of the project we are in contact with microscope manufacturers expressing interest in our innovation our lossless electron beam monochromator is expected to be a gamechanger in all em applications in particular the semiconductor inspection and medicine development markets where highresolution sems are becoming increasingly popular
postural influence on the evolutioncoevolution of the craniocervical complex in the neandertal lineage

the modern human head and neck are very different from those of great apes both from a morphological and postural point of view however differences in the craniocervical complex are also observed compared with our closest extinct ancestors the neandertals but did morphological differences between modern humans and neandertals have a biomechanical impact on their posture understanding the relationship between the head and neck from a broad evolutionary form and function perspective is crucial to ultimately resolving this question crevol objective is to address the coevolution of the cranium and cervical spine in the neandertal lineage and determine to what extent biomechanical factors related to posture influenced this evolutionary process the curvature and morphology of the neck have changed during human evolution the sparse and incomplete fossil record suggests that differences in the cervical spine within the genus homo are related to differences in the cranial shape moreover it has been proposed that different hominin groups including those from the nea lineage solved the requirements of erect posture in different ways thus to directly test this question the er will receive trainingthroughresearch in key cuttingedge techniques and fundamental knowledge for his future as a researcher in palaeoanthropology phylogenetics beneficiary biomechanics secondment and hominin fossil record short visits also the er will be supervised and trained in broader aspects of academic activity knowledge transfer and career development enabling him to position himself as a potential research leader
tuning exciton diffusion through chargetransfer excitations in supramolecular assemblies

energy migration by which bound electronhole pairs ie singlet excitons travel through an organic semiconductor before decaying is at the heart of functioning optoelectronic devices such as solar cells designing materials with large singlet exciton diffusion lengths ld would strongly benefit the efficiency of such devices in this context recent reports in highly ordered polymeric fibers and nonfullerene acceptor thin films of ld largely exceeding the typical 1020nm values call for a detailed microscopic picture going beyond the usual hopping models among others a key missing ingredient in most modelling studies so far deals with the role of intermolecular chargetransfer ct excitations these have the potential to magnify the exciton dispersion at the band bottom or act as gateways for longrange energy migration but could equally be detrimental to transport due to the formation of lowlying energy traps in tectesa we aim at providing an indepth mechanistic analysis of singlet exciton diffusion in organic molecular semiconductors in presence of ct configurations highlighting namely their contrasting effects on the shape of the thermally accessible excitonic density of states and the coupling to the nuclear degrees of freedom to reach this ambitious goal we will i develop and implement a universal transport formalism based on mixed classicalquantum nonadiabatic molecular dynamic simulations that explicitly accounts for ct excitations ii explore how intermolecular ct configurations affect the nature and dynamics of singlet excitons in reduced models through a broad range of physical situations from superexchange to hybridization and trapping and iii apply our newly developed approach to study energy migration in realistic fully atomistic models for nheterotriangulene supramolecular fibers and nonfullerene y6 molecular acceptors where preliminary investigations seem to intimate the presence of lowlying ct pairs
precise xyz readout with a micromagnetometer invertedpyramid design

chipscale magnetometers come in several flavors the most common being silicon halleffect plates that integrate easily with electronics however these devices only detect 1d fields are asymmetric between xy and z directions and cannot work in extreme temperatures my goal is to leverage my expertise in micromachining and widebandgap semiconductor hallplates to realize magnetometers with a unique 3d microstructure that uses 10 of the space of existing 3x1d sensors and is 310x more accurate this enables new products for 3d navigation in autonomous microsystems such as biomedical implants power monitoring and nanosatellites this proposal will involve the development of the inverted pyramid device through crystallographic etching of 100 cmos silicon to expose the 111 crystal plane at 547 this enables higher angular accuracy and avoids fabrication misalignment or packaging errors the 111 also supports direct gan and other 3d material integration with cmos chips in parallel the host group the electronics instrumentationei laboratory at tu delft will develop the cmos integrated circuit for frontend amplification and switching scheme of the sensor to detect all three components of the field from a singular device the ei lab is topranked in circuits design and complements my sensor development activities seamlesslythe final year of the project will focus on testing these chips packaged together and development of a integrated single chip with both sensor and circuit to reveal improved performance with the use of graphene as the device layer this project will open up future work with ultra widebandgap material integration using gan andor diamond to enable extremeenvironment navigation sensors with exotic applications in high temperature environments the project will improve my career prospects as a tenuretrack professor with training in circuits teaching and tenuretrack professional development at tu delft
platform for analysis of resilient and secure software

lazarus is a threeyear research and innovation project that aims to heal many of the security issues that befall modern software during its development lifecycle the recently introduced area of devsecops in medium to large companies unfortunately lacks automated security tools while most existing solutions are targeting only one narrow step of the sdlc process but miss a much needed holistic overview of the global security solution lazarus innovates by intervening in multiple steps of the sdlc performing targeted security checks and collecting valuable information and intelligence from each step and exploiting advanced ml and ai methods to convert this intelligence into actionable insights and recommendations the main innovations of lazarus are illustrated in the figure below moreover we provide advanced features for developers that employing our tools would be able to deploy more intelligent and distributed solutions through dedicated apis lazarus follows an opensource approach for the core functionality which is supported by a realistic and viable business model for the sustainability and further exploitation of the project after it reaches the end of this financing phase to validate the efficacy of the project outcomes we have secured two exciting realworld diverse pilots in two very different and demanding sectors
precise genome editing to correct cardiomyopathies in human cardiac organoids

inherited cardiomyopathies are a major cause of sudden cardiac death and are caused by mutations in genes encoding sarcomeric proteins with an incidence of 3 per 1000 adults within the european population inherited cardiomyopathies present a substantial burden to the healthcare services of all european nations although a few medications can slow the progression of the disease today there is no cure for cardiomyopathies the crisprcas9 precision genome editing technologies base and prime editing can permanently edit point mutations of genes making them ideal tools to treat cardiomyopathies to demonstrate the efficacies and therapeutic benefits of these editors in correcting cardiomyopathycausing mutations it is necessary to develop robust in vitro models of mature human cardiomyocytes that recapitulate the cellular complexity of the human heart in the edithcos project i will generate and characterize human cardiac organoids hcos harboring clinically relevant cardiomyopathycausing mutations in the flnc gene which encodes for the sarcomeric protein filamin c hcos will be generated as threedimensional scaffoldfree cardiac microtissues using tricellular combinations of human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes cardiac fibroblasts and cardiac endothelial cells then i will deploy base and prime editors to fix common flnc gene mutations in the hcos and i will characterize their molecular and functional improvements following correction in addition i will generate humanized mouse models harboring the same mutations as patients for future studies on delivery therapeutic safety and efficacy of the genome editing components in vivo completion of the edithcos project will allow me to establish a completely innovative and ambitious research line focused on the permanent treatment of cardiomyopathies this will establish a crucial and important preclinical step towards therapeutic genome editing of cardiovascular diseases
shifting the baseline and assessing its impact on the status and trends of biodiversity and its implication for decisionmaking in conservation

centuriesold data have challenged assumptions on the distribution and conservation status of biodiversity and yet most of the decisionmaking in conservation relies on spacefortime substitutions or relatively recent or modelled data with baseshift my goal is to quantify the impact of using different baselines to assess the trends and status of biodiversity and ecosystem services as well as its implication on the resulting conservation priorities and actions to do so i will compare the outputs of commonly used approaches and tools in conservation biology when using different reference points in time using data from spain in the 16th 19th and 21st centuries specifically i will focus on four key components of conservation practice that is 1 species conservation status 2 prioritization for areabased conservation 3 detection of change and 4 species environmental niches when appropriate the valuation of historical speciesderived ecosystem services will be integrated in the analysis beyond new fundamental knowledge in historical ecology and conservation biology the outputs of baseshift will contribute to improve biodiversity assessments target setting and progress monitoring and ultimately better policy and decisionmaking in biodiversity conservation
rylenediimidebistriazinyls synthesis characterization and magnetic properties

polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons pahs with stable openshell groundstates are needed for stateoftheart applications eg organic spintronics electronics energy storage etc herein we propose rylenediimides naphthalenediimide ndi perylenediimide pdi as promising pah scaffolds for building multifaceted blattertype diradical conjugates that are typically inherently stable but also readily prepared the introduction of ering fusion of the triazinyl moiety blattertype promotes planarization and rigidity of the rylenediimide core to allow spin delocalization which electronically stabilizes the rylenediimidesbistriazinyl conjugates dft calculations support the high spin delocalization across the ncnn tetrad triazinyl unit and the backbone ndipdis three rylenediimidemonotriazinyl and two rylenediimidebistriazinyl conjugates will be prepared and studied the latter were selected from dft computational studies of eleven possible ndipdibistriazinyl conjugates owing to low singlettriplet energy gaps 1 kcalmol that indicate potential singlet biradical behavior the triplet states of these conjugates could be accessible by heat or light which will open up the opportunity of having desirable switchable materials the selected five rylenediimidebistriazinyl conjugates will be synthesized via our previously optimized straightforward synthetic protocols after standard characterization magnetic and spintronic properties conductivity and film forming properties will be investigated single crystal xray crystallography epr and squid studies will validate spin states singlettriplet energy gaps and solidstate magnetic properties the project will advance the field of organic electronics