Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
META: Motion Excitation With Temporal Attention for Compressed Video Action Recognition

Compressed video action recognition has gained significant attention recently due to its ability to replace the raw video with I-frames and compressed motion clues, such as motion vectors and residuals. This results in substantial reductions in storage and computation costs. However, this task suffers from coarse and a lack of structures that can capture long-range spatiotemporal dependencies. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel module called Motion Excitation with Temporal Attention (META) and utilizes network structures that can capture long-range dependencies. The META module stimulates motion information between I-frames and enhances the motion representation of the motion vectors. It first assigns different weights to feature-level frames, and then calculates the feature-level temporal differences from spatiotemporal features. Finally, it utilizes these differences to excite the motion-sensitive channels of the features. In addition, for compressed video action recognition, we have introduced a new network structure that combines CNN and Transformer. It can seamlessly integrate the merits of convolution and self-attention in a concise transformer format. The proposed method is evaluated on the challenging HMDB-51 and UCF-101 datasets. The extensive comparison results and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness and strength of the proposed method.
AoI-Sensitive Relay-Assisted Data Collection via Multi-UAV in the Large-Scale Disaster Area

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been drawing significant attention as effective tools for observing disasters, especially in the context of large-scale disasters, where the establishment of seamless communication channels becomes imperative for verifying safety details and assessing the extent of the disaster. In most instances, insufficient UAV inventories make collaborative efforts among UAVs indispensable for enabling rapid and long-distance data transmission. This paper introduces a UAV data collection model designed for relay transmission of observed data through multi-hop relay communication. It also explores the freshness of data delivery, quantified using the recently developed Age of Information (AoI). Additionally, we derive the formula for calculating AoI and propose a UAV flight scheduling strategy aimed at enhancing the long-term average instantaneous AoI. We demonstrate the performance benefits of this strategy in terms of AoI, average duration, and energy consumption under the proposed framework through a comparison with traditional strategies.
BATFL: Battling Backdoor Attacks in Federated Learning

Deep learning models have been widely employed in a multitude of security-critical contexts due to their impressive performance across diverse tasks. In this paper, we examine a specific form of assault on the Federated Learning (FL) framework. The utilization of Federated Learning (FL) has gained significant traction as a distributed training approach due to its ability to facilitate the processing of extensive datasets without the need for data sharing among users. After the training process of the model has been completed using data stored on local devices, solely the modified model parameters are transmitted to the central server. The approach of FL is characterized by its distribution across several components or entities. Hence, it is plausible for an individual to initiate an assault with the intention of manipulating the behavior of the model. This work presents a study on the implementation of a Backdoor attack, wherein a small number of malicious instances were introduced to assess the behavior of the model throughout the testing phase. The poisoning could be applicable to either a singular class or numerous classes. A series of experiments were undertaken using the widely used CIFAR10 dataset in order to modify the behavior of the model. It was determined that the anticipated performance of the model might be undermined with minimal impact on training accuracy.
Active efflux kinetics of etoposide from rabbit small intestine and colon

The aim of the present study was to investigate the directional transport kinetics of etoposide in rabbit intestinal tissues using side‐by‐side diffusion chambers. Etoposide is a routinely used mixed‐mechanism ‘efflux’ inhibitor; however, its absorptive and secretory transport kinetics in rabbit intestinal tissues, a commonly used animal model, have not yet been reported. Kinetic studies revealed that the apical (AP) to basolateral (BL) (i.e. absorptive) transport of etoposide was not apparently mediated by specialized transporters, whereas secretion (i.e. BL to AP transport) by intestinal tissues was concentration dependent and saturable. Half‐saturation constant values (Km, mean±standard deviation (S.D.)) ranged from 53.6±35.8 µM to 168.7±127.3 µM, consistent with previous results from our group in intestinal tissues from other species and Caco‐2 cell monolayers. Secretory permeability was greatest in the ileum, whereas values in the upper small intestine and colon were approximately equal, and represented only 50% of the value in the ileum. The ileal secretory transport of etoposide was temperature dependent, with the activation energy (Ea) >4 kCal/mole at 5 µM, suggesting the involvement of the active, energy dependent mechanism. Etoposide inhibition by verapamil and saquinavir, known inhibitors of intestinal secretion, was characterized as competitive with Ki's equal to 193.0±164.4 µM and 72.6±53.5 µM, respectively. The current results demonstrate that the absorptive transport of etoposide in rabbit tissue was not mediated by specialized carriers, and that secretory transport was regionally dependent, mediated by a transporter or transporters, the Km's were in the micromolar range, and involved the energy dependent mechanism(s). The relatively low km of etoposide compared with its aqueous solubility (0.25−0.34 mM, pH 5−6.5, 25°C) makes it the excellent mixed‐mechanism competitive inhibitor for determining the secretory transport properties of putative drug substrates. Understanding the in vitro secretory transport kinetics of etoposide provides a mechanistic basis for ongoing studies exploring the functional role of ‘efflux’ in vivo. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Estimation of Water Demand in Water Distribution Systems Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Demand estimation in a water distribution network provides crucial data for monitoring and controlling systems. Because of budgetary and physical constraints, there is a need to estimate water demand from a limited number of sensor measurements. The demand estimation problem is underdetermined because of the limited sensor data and the implicit relationships between nodal demands and pressure heads. A simulation optimization technique using the water distribution network hydraulic model and an evolutionary algorithm is a potential solution to the demand estimation problem. This paper presents a detailed process simulation model for water demand estimation using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Nodal water demands and pipe flows are estimated when the number of estimated parameters is more than the number of measured values. The water demand at each node is determined by using the PSO algorithm to identify a corresponding demand multiplier. The demand multipliers are encoded with varying step sizes and the optimization algorithm particles are also discretized in order to improve the computation time. The sensitivity of the estimated water demand to uncertainty in demand multiplier discrete values and uncertainty in measured parameters is investigated. The sensor placement locations are selected using an analysis of the sensitivity of measured nodal heads and pipe flows to the change in the water demand. The results show that nodal demands and pipe flows can be accurately determined from a limited number of sensors.
The Antiepileptic Drug Levetiracetam Stabilizes the Human Epileptic GABAA Receptors upon Repetitive Activation

Summary: Purpose: GABAA receptors from the brain of patients afflicted with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) become less efficient (run‐down) when repetitively activated by GABA. Experiments were designed to investigate whether the antiepileptic drug, levetiracetam (LEV), which is used as an adjunctive treatment for medically intractable MTLE, counteracts the GABAA receptor run‐down.
PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF UNDERUTILISED INDIGENOUS VEGETABLES (UIVs) AMONG MEN AND WOMEN FARMERS: EVIDENCE FROM SOUTHWEST NIGERIA

The study determined the variables influencing involvement of selected Nigeria-Canada Vegetable (NiCanVeg) project farmers in the production, processing and consumption of underutilised indigenous vegetables (UIVs) in Southwest Nigeria. Gender Equality Framework was used to draw a clear distinction and demonstrate inter-relationships among men and women farmers under the project. Seventy eight participating farmers in four purposively-selected sites (54 women and 24 men) under the Nigeriaâ€™s Obafemi Awolowo University coordinating team were interviewed for the study using a well structured interview schedule. The mean age of the male and female farmers were 41. 9Â±1.39 and 37. 17Â±11.03 years, respectively. The farmers were dominated by Christians; 74.4% of the total men population and 63.37% of the total women population, with mean annual income of N7,000 and N 5,800 from vegetable production for men and women farmers, respectively. Consumption of the various UIVs is high as majority (67.5% men and 85.7% women) of the farmers indicated that NiCanVeg project has increased awareness on the agronomic practices as well as the nutritional compositions of the various UIVs under study through the numerous expository programs of the project. Among the ten UIVs investigated, Igbagba/garden egg (Solanum macrocarpon) was the major vegetable grown by male farmers while Apiroko/Fluted pumpkin (Telfairia occidentalis) was the major vegetable grown by female farmers. Results of Pearsonâ€™s Correlation showed that farm size (r = 0.528; P â‰¤ 0.002) and previous experience(r = 0.671; P â‰¤ 0.000) were established as the correlates of the level of involvement in production and consumption of UIVs among men while farm size (r = 0.081; P â‰¤ 0.006); age (r = 0.813; P â‰¤ 0.048) and years of formal education (r = 0.053; P â‰¤ 0.05) correlated significantly with womenâ€™s level of involvement in production and consumption of UIVs. This is expected to increase the food security base of the people, in conformation with some studies that established that women play significant role in fighting hunger and food insecurity in developing countries as they are the â€˜heartâ€™ of agricultural activities in the region. It was therefore suggested that NiCanVeg should target more women involvement in production and encourage equal distribution of assets between gender with a view to increasing food production and reducing hunger in Nigeria.
Occurrence of the Red Sea Goatfish Parupeneus forsskali (Fourmanoir & Guézé, 1976) from the Western Mediterranean Coast of Turkey

Three specimens of the Red Sea goatfish Parupeneus forsskali were recorded from two locations at a depth of 12-18 m. One was observed during the SCUBA diving in Fethiye Bay on 15 June 2016 and the other two were collected via trawling during a bentic survey in Aydincik coast on 24 December 2016. P. forsskali was first recorded in the Mediterranean coast of Turkey twelve years ago. This lessepsian species appears to be continually spreading and easily establishing new populations in the Mediterranean Sea coast of Turkey. Our study indicated the westward expansion of P. forsskali along to Mediterranean coasts. The present study also investigated the way of introduction and possible depths of its spread in the Mediterranean Sea.
Odontogenic myxoma of the maxilla

Myxomas are mostly seen in the 2th and 3rd decades. They rarely occur in childhood and maxillofacial region is rarely involved. The recurrence incidence is high. We report this unusual case occurring in a 9-year-old girl in the maxillofacial region and recurrence four months after initial treatment.
SemSBA: Semantic-perturbed Stealthy Backdoor Attack on Federated Semi-supervised Learning

Federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) has been perceived as a promising approach that leverages semi-supervised learning and federated learning (FL) to provide powerful privacy preservation while reducing the burden on human supervision. However, due to the lack of strict participant identification and the significant proportion of unlabeled samples, FSSL is more susceptible to covert backdoor attacks than traditional machine learning. To validate this speculation, a novel semantic-perturbed stealthy backdoor attack (SemSBA) scheme is proposed for FSSL-based systems. In SemSBA, we select original natural semantic features in the unlabeled training samples as backdoor triggers and then generate poisoned samples by adding adversarial perturbations that move them across the model decision boundary. With SemSBA, the adversary can trigger the hidden backdoor in the victim model during the inference stage without any deliberate modifications on testing samples. To further improve the strength and robustness of the attack, a pseudo label steering enhancement strategy is also designed to perturb the weakly-augmented version of unlabeled samples to induce target pseudo label allocations. Additionally, to improve the attack success rate, we amplify the weight of the local backdoored model during FSSL’s model aggregation process to manipulate the game between benign clients and malicious clients. Extensive experiments based on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SemSBA scheme can achieve comparable stealthiness against existing attacks.
Collaborative Total Variation: A General Framework for Vectorial TV Models

Even after two decades, the total variation (TV) remains one of the most popular regularizations for image processing problems and has sparked a tremendous amount of research, particularly on moving from scalar to vector-valued functions. In this paper, we consider the gradient of a color image as a three-dimensional matrix or tensor with dimensions corresponding to the spatial extent, the intensity differences between neighboring pixels, and the spectral channels. The smoothness of this tensor is then measured by taking different norms along the different dimensions. Depending on the types of these norms, one obtains very different properties of the regularization, leading to novel models for color images. We call this class of regularizations collaborative total variation (CTV). On the theoretical side, we characterize the dual norm, the subdifferential, and the proximal mapping of the proposed regularizers. We further prove, with the help of the generalized concept of singular vectors, that an $\ell^{\.
Immunoglobulin G Antibodies to Merozoite Surface Antigens Are Associated with Recovery from Chloroquine-Resistant Plasmodium falciparum in Gambian Children

ABSTRACT We examined the hypothesis that recovery from uncomplicated malaria in patients carrying drug-resistant Plasmodium falciparum is a measure of acquired functional immunity and may therefore be associated with humoral responses to candidate vaccine antigens. Gambian children with malaria were treated with chloroquine in 28-day trials, and recovery was defined primarily as the absence of severe clinical malaria at any time and absence of parasitemia with fever after 3 days. Plasma samples from these children were assayed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for immunoglobulin G (IgG) to recombinant merozoite antigens: apical membrane antigen 1 (AMA-1) and the 19-kDa C-terminal region of merozoite surface protein 1 (MSP-119), including antigenic variants of MSP-119 with double and triple substitutions. Antigen-specific IgG was more frequent in children who recovered, particularly that for MSP-119 (age-adjusted odds ratios: 0.32 [95% confidence interval, 0.05, 1.87; P = 0.168] for AMA-1, 0.19 [0.03, 1.11; P = 0.019] for recombinant MSP-119, 0.24 [0.04, 1.31; P = 0.032] for the recombinant MSP-119 double variant, and 0.18 [0.03, 0.97; P = 0.013] for the triple variant). IgG titers to MSP-119 and to the triple variant were higher in plasma samples taken 7 days after chloroquine treatment from children who carried resistant parasites but recovered and remained parasite free. Moreover, in children who were parasitemic on day 14 or day 28, there was an age-independent relationship between parasite density and IgG to both MSP-119 and the triple variant (coefficients of −0.550 and −0.590 and P values of 0.002 and 0.001, respectively). The results validate the use of this approach to identify antigens that are associated with protection from malaria.
Molecular Modeling of Cell Adhesion Peptides on Hydroxyapatite and TiO 2 Surfaces: Implication in Biomedical Implant Devices

Molecular modeling as a tool in studying peptide-substrate interactions provides insight on peptide adsorption conformation, adsorption energy, and stability of the peptide-inorganic interface. This work investigates the hydration and interaction of cell-adhesion peptides, specifically RGD and YIGSR, with the hydroxyapatite surface and TiO2 surface in cluster and periodic boundary condition approaches. The comparison of adsorption energies of RGD and YIGSR on both Hydroxyapatite (HA) and TiO2 surfaces reveals the similarities in adsorption energy and orientation pattern of peptides on both surfaces. The models demonstrate that initial peptide orientation affects adsorption energy for both. YIGSR is consistently more strongly adsorbed to HA-(001) surfaces and steps than RGD for both the surfaces. In addition, RGD maintained its “hairpin”-like structure during adsorption on a flat HA-(001) surface, and a slightly “relaxed hairpin” structure on TiO2 (110) surface. Adsorption energies of RGD on TiO2 (110) surface are significantly more favorable compared to HA-(001) surface, suggesting potential role of TiO2 as biomedical implants when tissue regeneration occurs via cell signaling.
Tracking Groundwater Levels Using the Ambient Seismic Field

Aquifers are vital groundwater reservoirs for residential, agricultural, and industrial activities worldwide. Tracking their state with high temporal and spatial resolution is critical for water resource management at the regional scale yet is rarely achieved from a single type of groundwater data. Here we show that variations in groundwater levels can be mapped using perturbations in seismic velocity (dv/v). We measure dv/v in the San Gabriel Valley, California, from cross correlation of the ambient seismic field. dv/v reproduces the groundwater level changes that are marked by the multiyear depletions and rapid recharges, typical of California's cycles of droughts and floods. dv/v correlates spatially with vertical surface displacements and deformation measured with the Global Positioning System (GPS). Our results successfully predict the volume of water lost in the San Gabriel Valley during the 2012–2016 drought and thus provide a new, complementary approach to monitor groundwater storage.
Towards transparent and efficient software distributed shared memory

Despite a large research effort, software distributed shared memory systems have not been widely used to run parallel applications across clusters of computers. The higher performance of hardware multiprocessors makes them the preferred platform for developing and executing applications. In addition, most applications are distributed only in binary format for a handful of popular hardware systems. Due to their limited functionality, software systems cannot directly execute the applications developed for hardware platforms. We have developed a system called Shasta that attempts to address the issues of efficiency and transparency that have hindered wider acceptance of software systems. Shasta is a distributed shared memory system that supports coherence at a fine granularity in software and can efficiently exploit small-scale SMP nodes by allowing processes on the same node to share data at hardware speeds. Thispaper focuses onourgoal oftappingintolarge classes of commercially available applications by transparently executing the same binaries that run on hardware platforms. We discuss the issues involved in achieving transparent execution of binaries, which include supportingthe full instruction set architecture, implementing an appropriate memory consistency model, and extending OS services across separate nodes. We also describe the techniques used in Shasta to solve the above problems. The Shasta system is fully functional on a prototype cluster of Alpha multiprocessors connected through Digital’s Memory Channel network and can transparentlyrunparallelapplicationsontheclusterthatwere compiled to run on a single shared-memory multiprocessor. As an example of Shasta’s flexibility, it can execute Oracle 7.3, a commercial database engine, across the cluster, includingworkloadsmodeled after theTPC-B and TPC-D database benchmarks. To characterize the performance of the system and the cost of providing complete transparency, we present performance results for microbenchmarks and applications runningon the cluster, include preliminary results for Oracle runs.
ETHNOBOTANICAL STUDY OF MEDICINAL PLANTS IN AĞRI PROVINCE, TÜRKİYE: EXPLORING TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND THERAPEUTIC POTENTIAL

Objective: This study was conducted to systematically document the use of plants, plant parts and preparation methods used by people in eight districts and sixty villages in Ağrı province. Material and Method: The medicinal plant species employed by the indigenous population for therapeutic purposes were systematically gathered and identified. Comprehensive data on traditionally utilized information were compiled, and herbarium materials were prepared. These materials have been deposited at the Iğdır National Wild Life Museum (INWM), affiliated with Iğdır University. Result and Discussion: This research identified a total of 58 taxa of medicinal plants belonging to 31 families. Among these, 50 species were found to grow naturally, while 8 species were cultivated. The predominant plant families included Asteraceae (8), Apiaceae (4), Lamiaceae (4), and Rosaceae (4). Infusion emerged as the most widely employed preparation method. The practice of traditional medicine remained prevalent among the population in Ağrı. Nevertheless, with the increasing availability of health services in the region, herbal medicine appeared to be more closely associated with healthcare and illness prevention than with curative purposes. The influx of new immigrants also contributed to the erosion of traditional knowledge. Notably, there is a discernible decline in traditional knowledge regarding the use of medicinal plants, both among younger generations and due to migration. Furthermore, this research serves as a foundational resource for prospective scientific inquiries aimed at the development of novel commercial drugs derived from plant sources.
CHEMISTRY AND MATERIALS SCIENCE

The article considers the processes leading to a change in the structure and properties as a result of thermal treatment followed by acid treatment of natural zeolites from the Rkoni plot of the Tedzami deposit, Georgia, containing up to 80% of heulandite and 10% of chabazite