Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of a VNA-based material characterization kit at frequencies from 0.75 THz to 1.1 THz

This paper describes an initial assessment of a commercially available THz material characterization kit (MCK). The assessment is based on the measurement of several material samples. The MCK comprises two conical waveguide horn transitions and two sections of low-loss corrugated waveguide. A gap between the two corrugated waveguides allows the material samples to be inserted into the system during measurement. The MCK is attached to a THz Vector Network Analyzer (VNA), which measures S-parameters, in the frequency domain, of a material under test (MUT). A computer-based algorithm employing an iterative calculation derives values for material parameters (e.g. permittivity) from the measured S-parameters of the MUT. A MCK has been evaluated over the frequency range 0.75 THz to 1.1 THz, to assess the plausibility of results that can be obtained using such a technique. Two VNAs utilizing frequency extender heads were used for the investigation, with measurements being made with reference to a range of different calibration techniques and different calibration standards. Whilst some of the results obtained look reasonable, a significant proportion of the results were either difficult to interpret or showed inexplicable (i.e. non-physical) behavior. This indicates that much work is still needed before this technique can be used routinely for the measurement of material parameters at these very high frequencies.
Mining Compatible/Incompatible Entities from Question and Answering via Yes/No Answer Classification using Distant Label Expansion

Product Community Question Answering (PCQA) provides useful information about products and their features (aspects) that may not be well addressed by product descriptions and reviews. We observe that a product's compatibility issues with other products are frequently discussed in PCQA and such issues are more frequently addressed in accessories, i.e., via a yes/no question "Does this mouse work with windows 10? ". In this paper, we address the problem of extracting compatible and incompatible products from yes/no questions in PCQA. This problem can naturally have a two-stage framework: first, we perform Complementary Entity (product) Recognition (CER) on yes/no questions; second, we identify the polarities of yes/no answers to assign the complementary entities a compatibility label (compatible, incompatible or unknown). We leverage an existing unsupervised method for the first stage and a 3-class classifier by combining a distant PU-learning method (learning from positive and unlabeled examples) together with a binary classifier for the second stage. The benefit of using distant PU-learning is that it can help to expand more implicit yes/no answers without using any human annotated data. We conduct experiments on 4 products to show that the proposed method is effective.
Self-contained, low-cost Body-on-a-Chip systems for drug development

Integrated multi-organ microphysiological systems are an evolving tool for preclinical evaluation of the potential toxicity and efficacy of drug candidates. Such systems, also known as Body-on-a-Chip devices, have a great potential to increase the successful conversion of drug candidates entering clinical trials into approved drugs. Systems, to be attractive for commercial adoption, need to be inexpensive, easy to operate, and give reproducible results. Further, the ability to measure functional responses, such as electrical activity, force generation, and barrier integrity of organ surrogates, enhances the ability to monitor response to drugs. The ability to operate a system for significant periods of time (up to 28 d) will provide potential to estimate chronic as well as acute responses of the human body. Here we review progress towards a self-contained low-cost microphysiological system with functional measurements of physiological responses. Impact statement Multi-organ microphysiological systems are promising devices to improve the drug development process. The development of a pumpless system represents the ability to build multi-organ systems that are of low cost, high reliability, and self-contained. These features, coupled with the ability to measure electrical and mechanical response in addition to chemical or metabolic changes, provides an attractive system for incorporation into the drug development process. This will be the most complete review of the pumpless platform with recirculation yet written.
End2You - The Imperial Toolkit for Multimodal Profiling by End-to-End Learning

We introduce End2You -- the Imperial College London toolkit for multimodal profiling by end-to-end deep learning. End2You is an open-source toolkit implemented in Python and is based on Tensorflow. It provides capabilities to train and evaluate models in an end-to-end manner, i.e., using raw input. It supports input from raw audio, visual, physiological or other types of information or combination of those, and the output can be of an arbitrary representation, for either classification or regression tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first toolkit that provides generic end-to-end learning for profiling capabilities in either unimodal or multimodal cases. To test our toolkit, we utilise the RECOLA database as was used in the AVEC 2016 challenge. Experimental results indicate that End2You can provide comparable results to state-of-the-art methods despite no need of expert-alike feature representations, but self-learning these from the data "end to end".
Clinical Bioequivalence of OT329 SOLIS and ADVAIR DISKUS in Adults with Asthma

Rationale: OT329 SOLIS is a generic candidate for the branded asthma treatment, ADVAIR DISKUS (fluticasone propionate/salmeterol xinafoate), and, as such, the manufacturer is required to provide evidence of clinical “bioequivalence” as a condition for regulatory approval. Objectives: The objective of the current study was to determine if SOLIS and DISKUS provided bioequivalent improvements in lung function at two time points: Day 1 and Week 4. Methods: This study was a randomized, multiple‐dose, placebo‐controlled, parallel‐group design conducted in the United States (NCT02260492) with a 2‐week run‐in followed by a 4‐week treatment period. Consenting patients were randomized to treatment with OT329 SOLIS 100/50, ADVAIR DISKUS 100/50, or placebo. Lung function was measured predose and 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 hours after the first dose to test equivalence of the &bgr;‐agonist salmeterol component based on FEV1 area under the curve (0‐12 h). After 4 weeks of twice‐daily dosing, trough (predose) FEV1 was measured to evaluate equivalence of the fluticasone propionate corticosteroid component. Bioequivalence was concluded if the 90% confidence interval (CI) for the ratio of the products fell within 80‐125%. Measurements and Main Results: Of the 1,524 screened, 879 patients with asthma were randomized to treatment (n = 418 SOLIS, 419 DISKUS, 42 placebo). OT329 SOLIS and ADVAIR DISKUS were bioequivalent at Day 1, with an FEV1 area under the curve (0‐12 h) test/reference ratio of 108% (90% CI = 94‐122%). Likewise, the products were bioequivalent at Week 4 with a trough FEV1 test/reference ratio of 105% (90% CI = 90‐119). Both active treatments were superior to placebo (P < 0.05) at both time points. Conclusions: The data support a conclusion of clinical bioequivalence of OT329 SOLIS to ADVAIR DISKUS. Clinical trial registered with www.clinicaltrials. gov (NCT02260492).
Bridging the Gap Between Value and Policy Based Reinforcement Learning

We establish a new connection between value and policy based reinforcement learning (RL) based on a relationship between softmax temporal value consistency and policy optimality under entropy regularization. Specifically, we show that softmax consistent action values correspond to optimal entropy regularized policy probabilities along any action sequence, regardless of provenance. From this observation, we develop a new RL algorithm, Path Consistency Learning (PCL), that minimizes a notion of soft consistency error along multi-step action sequences extracted from both on- and off-policy traces. We examine the behavior of PCL in different scenarios and show that PCL can be interpreted as generalizing both actor-critic and Q-learning algorithms. We subsequently deepen the relationship by showing how a single model can be used to represent both a policy and the corresponding softmax state values, eliminating the need for a separate critic. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that PCL significantly outperforms strong actor-critic and Q-learning baselines across several benchmarks.
Thermophoretically driven water droplets on graphene and boron nitride surfaces

We investigate thermally driven water droplet transport on graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) surfaces using molecular dynamics simulations. The two surfaces considered here have different wettabilities with a significant difference in the mode of droplet transport. The water droplet travels along a straighter path on the h-BN sheet than on graphene. The h-BN surface produced a higher driving force on the droplet than the graphene surface. The water droplet is found to move faster on h-BN surface compared to graphene surface. The instantaneous contact angle was monitored as a measure of droplet deformation during thermal transport. The characteristics of the droplet motion on both surfaces is determined through the moment scaling spectrum. The water droplet on h-BN surface showed the attributes of the super-diffusive process, whereas it was sub-diffusive on the graphene surface.
Transcriptomic profiling of platelet senescence and platelet extracellular vesicles

Platelets (PLTs) are derived from megakaryocytes during PLT shedding. Senescent or activated PLTs are expanded in vascular and neurological diseases and release PLT extracellular vesicles (PL‐EVs). A systematic analysis of regular messenger RNA (mRNA) and small RNA composition in PLTs and PL‐EVs during in vitro PLT senescence has not yet been published.
As you like it: Localization via paired comparisons

Suppose that we wish to estimate a vector $\mathbf{x}$ from a set of binary paired comparisons of the form "$\mathbf{x}$ is closer to $\mathbf{p}$ than to $\mathbf{q}$" for various choices of vectors $\mathbf{p}$ and $\mathbf{q}$. The problem of estimating $\mathbf{x}$ from this type of observation arises in a variety of contexts, including nonmetric multidimensional scaling, "unfolding," and ranking problems, often because it provides a powerful and flexible model of preference. We describe theoretical bounds for how well we can expect to estimate $\mathbf{x}$ under a randomized model for $\mathbf{p}$ and $\mathbf{q}$. We also present results for the case where the comparisons are noisy and subject to some degree of error. Additionally, we show that under a randomized model for $\mathbf{p}$ and $\mathbf{q}$, a suitable number of binary paired comparisons yield a stable embedding of the space of target vectors. Finally, we also that we can achieve significant gains by adaptively changing the distribution for choosing $\mathbf{p}$ and $\mathbf{q}$.
Quality of maternity care and its determinants along the continuum in Kenya: A structural equation modeling analysis

Background Improving access to delivery services does not guarantee access to quality obstetric care and better survival, and therefore, concerns for quality of maternal and newborn care in low- and middle-income countries have been raised. Our study explored characteristics associated with the quality of initial assessment, intrapartum, and immediate postpartum and newborn care, and further assessed the relationships along the continuum of care. Methods The 2010 Service Provision Assessment data of Kenya for 627 routine deliveries of women aged 15–49 were used. Quality of care measures were assessed using recently validated quality of care measures during initial assessment, intrapartum, and postpartum periods. Data were analyzed with negative binomial regression and structural equation modeling technique. Results The negative binomial regression results identified a number of determinants of quality, such as the level of health facilities, managing authority, presence of delivery fee, central electricity supply and clinical guideline for maternal and neonatal care. Our structural equation modeling (SEM) further demonstrated that facility characteristics were important determinants of quality for initial assessment and postpartum care, while characteristics at the provider level became more important in shaping the quality of intrapartum care. Furthermore we also noted that quality of initial assessment had a positive association with quality of intrapartum care (β = 0.71, p < 0.001), which in turn was positively associated with the quality of newborn and immediate postpartum care (β = 1.29, p = 0.004). Conclusions A continued focus on quality of care along the continuum of maternity care is important not only to mothers but also their newborns. Policymakers should therefore ensure that required resources, as well as adequate supervision and emphasis on the quality of obstetric care, are available.
Long-Term Effect of Erythritol on Dental Caries Development during Childhood: A Posttreatment Survival Analysis

Objective: To assess the effect of daily consumption of erythritol, xylitol, and sorbitol candies on caries development in mixed dentition during a 3-year intervention and 3 years after the intervention. Methods: 485 Estonian first- and second-grade primary school children participated. Children were randomly allocated to an erythritol, xylitol, or sorbitol (control) group. Polyol-containing candies were administered on school days with a daily polyol consumption of 3 × 2.5 g. Yearly, caries development was assessed by calibrated dentists using the ICDAS criteria. Six years after initiation of the study and 3 years after cessation of daily polyol consumption, 420 participants were re-examined to identify potential long-term effects of polyol consumption. Survival curves were generated at the end of the intervention period and 3 years after intervention. The model included age of the subjects, schools, tooth surface ages and years of surface exposure to intervention. ICDAS scoring system-based events included enamel/dentin caries development, dentin caries development, increase in caries score, and dentist intervention. Results: At the end of the intervention, time to enamel/dentin caries development, dentin caries development, increase in caries score, and dentist intervention were significantly longer in the erythritol group as compared to the sorbitol group. Except for increase in caries score, all effects persisted 3 years after cessation of daily polyol consumption. Conclusions: A caries-preventive effect of 3-year erythritol consumption as compared to sorbitol was established in children with mixed dentition. The effect persisted up to 3 years after the end of the intervention.
The two-variable guarded fragment with transitive relations

We consider the restriction of the guarded fragment to the two-variable case where, in addition, binary relations may be specified as transitive. We show that (i) this very restricted form of the guarded fragment without equality is undecidable and that (ii) when allowing non-unary relations to occur only in guards, the logic becomes decidable. The latter subclass of the guarded fragments the one that occurs naturally when translating multi-modal logics of the type Kg/sub 4/ S/sub 4/ or S5 into first-order logic. We also show that the loosely guarded fragment without equality and with a single transitive relation is undecidable.
Crowd Flow Prediction by Deep Spatio-Temporal Transfer Learning

Crowd flow prediction is a fundamental urban computing problem. Recently, deep learning has been successfully applied to solve this problem, but it relies on rich historical data. In reality, many cities may suffer from data scarcity issue when their targeted service or infrastructure is new. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a novel deep spatio-temporal transfer learning framework, called RegionTrans, which can predict future crowd flow in a data-scarce (target) city by transferring knowledge from a data-rich (source) city. Leveraging social network check-ins, RegionTrans first links a region in the target city to certain regions in the source city, expecting that these inter-city region pairs will share similar crowd flow dynamics. Then, we propose a deep spatio-temporal neural network structure, in which a hidden layer is dedicated to keeping the region representation. A source city model is then trained on its rich historical data with this network structure. Finally, we propose a region-based cross-city transfer learning algorithm to learn the target city model from the source city model by minimizing the hidden representation discrepancy between the inter-city region pairs previously linked by check-ins. With experiments on real crowd flow, RegionTrans can outperform state-of-the-arts by reducing up to 10.7% prediction error.
Engineered aglycosylated full-length IgG Fc variants exhibiting improved FcγRIIIa binding and tumor cell clearance

ABSTRACT FcγRIIIa, which is predominantly expressed on the surface of natural killer cells, plays a key role in antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC), a major effector function of therapeutic IgG antibodies that results in the death of aberrant cells. Despite the potential uses of aglycosylated IgG antibodies, which can be easily produced in bacteria and do not have complicated glycan heterogeneity issues, they show negligible binding to FcγRIIIa and abolish the activation of immune leukocytes for tumor cell clearance, in sharp contrast to most glycosylated IgG antibodies used in the clinical setting. For directed evolution of aglycosylated Fc variants that bind to FcγRIIIa and, in turn, exert potent ADCC effector function, we randomized the aglycosylated Fc region of full-length IgG expressed on the inner membrane of Escherichia coli. Multiple rounds of high-throughput screening using flow cytometry facilitated the isolation of aglycosylated IgG Fc variants that exhibited higher binding affinity to FcγRIIIa-158V and FcγRIIIa-158F compared with clinical-grade trastuzumab (Herceptin®). The resulting aglycosylated trastuzumab IgG antibody Fc variants could elicit strong peripheral blood mononuclear cell-mediated ADCC without glycosylation in the Fc region.
Paradigm shift in the global IP regime: The agency of academics

ABSTRACT The global intellectual property (IP) regime is in the midst of a paradigm shift in favour of greater access to protected work. Current explanations of this paradigm shift emphasize the agency of transnational advocacy networks, but ignore the role of academics. Scholars interested in global IP politics have failed to engage in reflexive thinking. Building on the results from a survey of 1679 IP experts, this article argues that a community of academics successfully broke the policy monopoly of practitioners over IP expertise. They instilled some scepticism concerning the social and economic impacts of IP among their students as well as in the broader community of IP experts. They also provided expert knowledge that was widely amplified by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and some intergovernmental organizations, acting as echo chambers to reach national decision makers. By making these claims, this article illustrates how epistemic communities actively collaborate with other transnational networks, rather than competing with them, and how they can promote a paradigm change by generating, rather than reducing, uncertainty.
Bioavailability of manganese sulfate and manganese monoxide in chicks as measured by tissue uptake of manganese from conventional dietary levels.

The biological availability of reagent grade manganese sulfate and manganese monoxide was determined in broiler chicks fed conventional dietary Mn levels. A basal corn-soybean meal diet (35 ppm Mn) was supplemented with 40, 80, or 120 ppm Mn from the two sources and fed ad libitum for 21 days. There were no differences in average daily feed intake, daily gain, or feed conversion among treatments. There was a linear (P less than .001) increase in bone, kidney, and liver Mn as dietary Mn increased. Manganese monoxide averaged 66% of the availability of manganese sulfate as determined by a combination of linear regression, multiple linear regression and tissue Mn increase. Bioavailability was similar to that obtained when sources were fed at high dietary levels in a previous study.
Comparative selenium retention by chicks fed sodium selenite, selenomethionine, fish meal and fish solubles.

Abstract Two experiments were conducted to assay the retention of Se from varying levels of fish meal and solubles and in the second experiment to compare also the retention with that from comparable levels of sodium selenite and selenomethionine. The basal diet contained crystalline amino acid diets and high levels of α-tocopherol acetate (200 and 300 p.p.m.). In the first experiment day-old chicks were found to contain 11 μg. Se whereas chicks fed the basal diet for 21 days without any Se supplements contained 37% less. In the second experiment the day-old chicks started with a body reserve of 13 μg. Se, of which 35% was lost when fed the basal diet for 18 days. A Se balance in the chick was maintained by a dietary level of 0.05 p.p.m. from any of the sources studied. This quantity of Se was supplied by a dietary level of 2.5% fish meal or solubles. A level of 5% fish meal or solubles in the diet supplied about 0.1 p.p.m. total Se of which 16–29% was retained in the chick body in the first experiment and 15% in the second experiment. The retention value obtained in the second experiment, by supplying 0.1 p.p.m. Se from sodium selenite, was 35% and, therefore, in comparison the same levels of Se in fish meal or solubles was about 43% as effective as the standard. Compared to selenomethionine at the same level of Se, the fishery products were 31% as effective.
Effect of Elastic Modulus of Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Strands on the Behavior of Posttensioned Segmental Bridges

AbstractSegmental bridges are widely used for accelerated construction and lower costs and environmental impact. The major concern with such bridges is in the corrosion protection of posttensioning steel strands. Noncorrosive carbon fiber strands can serve as viable alternatives to help reduce maintenance costs. A novel carbon fiber strand was tested for posttensioning of a 3.5∶1 scaled model of the Long Key segmental box girder bridge, and its performance was compared with prior test data for steel strands and another type of carbon fiber. The most important distinction between the two types of carbon fibers is their elastic moduli, which are 77 and 93% of that of steel strands. Numerical simulation was also conducted and the effect of different elastic moduli of the tendons on the structural performance was investigated with a parametric study. While the study confirms the feasibility of both types of carbon fiber strands for segmental bridge applications and their similar serviceability behavior, stran.