Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
COVID-19 Burden on HIV Patients Attending Antiretroviral Therapy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: A Multicenter Cross-Sectional Study

Background There has been promising progress towards screening, testing, and retaining HIV patients in care in Ethiopia. Concern exists that possible disruptions in HIV programs due to COVID-19 could result in more HIV-related mortality and new HIV infections. This study aimed to investigate the real-time burden of COVID-19 on HIV patients attending antiretroviral therapy. Methods We conducted a facility-based, multicentre, cross-sectional study among HIV patients attending antiretroviral therapy in 10 healthcare facilities in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in the COVID-19 pandemic period. Data was collected using adapted, interviewer-based questionnaires, and entered into Epi Info version 7 and exported to SPSS version 26 for analysis. Result A total of 212 patients with HIV were included. Participants who missed visits for refill were 58 (27.4%). When the effects of other independent variables on appointments/visits for refill were controlled, the following characteristics were found to be the most important pridictors of missed appointments (P < 0.05): age ≥ 55 [AOR = 6.73, 95% CI (1.495–30.310)], fear of COVID-19 [AOR = 24.93, 95% CI (2.798-222.279)], transport disruption [AOR = 4.90, 95% CI (1.031–23.174)], reduced income for traveling to health facility [AOR = 5.64, 95% CI (1.234–25.812)], and limited access to mask [AOR = 7.67, 95% CI (1.303–45.174)], sanitizer [AOR = 0.07, 95% CI (0.007–0.729)] and non-medical support [AOR = 2.32, 95% CI (1.547–12.596)]. The participants were well aware of the COVID-19 preventive measures. The most costly COVID-19 preventive measures that cause financial burden to the patients were costs for buying facemasks (63.7%), disinfectants (55.2) and sops for handwashing (22.2). Participants who missed follow-up diagnostic tests were 56 (26.4%). Variables which were found to be statistically significant include the following: age ≥ 55 [AOR = 0.22, 95% CI (0.076–0.621)], partial lockdown [AOR = 0.10, 95% CI (0.011–0.833)], limited access to health services [AOR = 0.15, 95% CI (0.045–0.475)], reduced income for traveling to health facility [AOR = 0.18, 95% CI (0.039–0.784)], and unable to get mask [AOR = 0.12, 95% CI (0.026–0.543)]. Participants who missed counseling services were 55 (25.9%). In multivariate logistic regression the following were statisticaly significant: age ≥ 55 [AOR = 0.21, 95% CI (0.078–0.570)], fear of COVID-19 [AOR = 0.11, 95% CI (0.013–0.912)], reduced income [AOR = 0.17, 95% CI (0.041–0.699)], unable to get face mask [AOR = 0.19, 95%CI (0.039–0.959)], and partial lockdown [AOR = 0.08, 95% CI (0.008–0.790)]. Conclusions COVID-19 had a significant burden on HIV patients to attend their routine clinical care and treatment, which may lead to treatment failure and drug resistance. The impact was on their appointments for medication refills and clinical and laboratory follow-ups. Targeted initiatives are needed to sustain HIV clinical care and treatment services and improve the wellbeing of people living with HIV.
The association between epicardial adipose tissue and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: A systematic review of existing human studies

The prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has significantly risen all around the world. Although visceral fat mass has been identified as an independent risk factor for NAFLD, the association of other ectopic fat depots, such as Epicardial adipose tissue (EAT), with the disease has not been fully elucidated. The aim of the current study was to systematically review all available human studies conducted on the associations between EAT and NAFLD. All human studies published in English, which examined the association between the thickness or the volume of EAT and the incidence of NAFLD were systematically searched on PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar search engines, from inception up to April 2021. Eighteen studies that met inclusion criteria were included in the final review. A total of 86 studies were found through searching the databases. After excluding duplicates, seventy six remained studies were scanned by title and abstract, out of which, 58 were excluded. Finally, eighteen articles (thirteen cross-sectional studies and five case-control studies) published between 2008 and 2021, were included in the review. According to the results of the reviewed articles, EAT was associated with the presence and progression of NAFLD. Furthermore, NAFLD patients with thicker EAT may need a more intensive hepatic follow-up. However, we suggest further investigation to find out the underlying mechanisms describing the observed association.
Defining Familial Interactions and Networks: An Exploratory Qualitative Study on Family Networks and Surrogate Decision-Making

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text. OBJECTIVES: To characterize patient preferences for medical surrogate decision-makers in the ICU to capture the complexity of decision-making preferences and highlight potential conflicts between patients’ preferences and clinicians’ surrogate decision-maker identification in usual clinical practice. DESIGN: Prospective qualitative cross-sectional study. SETTING: Two ICUs in a quaternary referral center in the eastern United States. PATIENTS: Convenience sample of patients admitted to the ICU and their family members. INTERVENTION: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Twenty-six patient-family-clinician units were interviewed. Men were three times more likely than women to have a legally appointed decision-maker that matched their preferred decision-maker as expressed in the interview. Patients who were married or in a long-term relationship were the most consistent group of respondents, with 94% of them selecting their spouse or partner as the preferred decision-maker. The most common reasons for selecting a surrogate decision-maker were intangible themes such as feeling “known” by that person rather than having prior discussions about specific wishes or advance directives. CONCLUSIONS: Asking about a patient’s familial network and qualities they value in a surrogate decision-maker may aid ICU teams in honoring patients’ wishes for surrogate decision-making. This may be an important supplement to accepted legal hierarchies for proxy decision-makers and advance directive documents. Further studies with larger sample sizes could be used to shed light on the nuances of familial and relationship networks of a more diverse population of respondents.
Evaluation of NLRP3 (rs10754558) and PTPN22 (1858C/T) (rs2476601) Functional Polymorphisms in Psoriasis Susceptibility in Egypt

Background Psoriasis is a complex autoimmune multifactorial disease induced by interaction of environmental and genetic factors. This research aimed to clarify the association of NLRP3 (rs10754558) and PTPN22 (1858C/T) (rs2476601) polymorphisms with susceptibility to psoriasis. Methods This case–control study involved 150 patients diagnosed with psoriasis and 100 age- and gender-matched apparently healthy individuals. NLRP3 (rs10754558) polymorphism was done by real time PCR and PTPN22 1858C/T (rs2476601) genotype was identified by tetra-primer amplification refractory mutation system-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method. Results The genotypes distribution of NLRP3 (rs10754558) were significantly associated with psoriasis (p<0.0001). Whereas for PTPN22 (1858C/T) (rs2476601), no significance was found (p=0.09). NLRP3 (rs10754558) GC genotype revealed a significant association with psoriasis (p<0.0001), mainly among male (p=0.004) patients with mild psoriasis (p=0.001) and affected extremities (p=0.0001). Conclusion We can conclude that the NLRP3 (rs10754558) GC genotype may play a role in psoriasis susceptibility among male Egyptian populations with affected extremities. Future studies must evaluate its role in the prevention or the treatment of psoriasis.
Neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, Factor VIII and Antithrombin III: inflammatory-clotting biomarkers in glioma

One of the key difficulties in glioma treatment is our limited ability to consistently assess cancer response or progression either by neuroimaging or specific blood biomarkers. An ideal biomarker could be measured through non-invasive methods such as blood-based biomarkers, aiding both early diagnosis and monitoring disease evolution. This is a single-center, case-control, 10-year retrospective, longitudinal study. We evaluated routine coagulation factors in 138 glioma patients (45 Females/93 Males; median [range] age, 56.4 [27-82] years; 64 non-recurrent/74 recurrent) and, for comparison, in 56 relapsing-remitting MS patients (41 Females/15 Males; 40.8 [25-62] years, 35 stable/21 active) and 23 controls (16 Females/7 Males; 41.7 [24-62] years) as well as Neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) in subgroups of 127 glioma patients, 33 MS patients and 23 healthy controls. Secondly, we assessed whether these indicators could be predictive of overall (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) in glioma patients. NLR, d-dimer, Antithrombin III and Factor VIII were significantly higher in glioma patients compared to both MS patients and controls (p<0.0001 for all). ROC curves confirmed that either NLR, Antithrombin III or Factor VIII were moderately accurate biomarkers (0.7<AUC<0.9) for glioma patients compared to other two groups whereas d-dimer was a moderately accurate marker for glioma only when compared to controls. In multivariable analysis, NLR ≥ 4.3 (median) (HR 1.53 [95 % CI 1.04-2.26], p=0.03) together with the Karnofsky Performance Status (KPS) ≥ 80 (median) (0.46 [0.31-0.69], p<0.0001) and use of steroids (1.75 [1.19-2.57], p=0.004) resulted independent predictors of OS while only KPS was independently associated with PFS. Our study showed increased levels of either NLR, Antithrombin III, Factor VIII, or d-dimer in glioma patients compared to MS patients and controls, where the first three represented moderately accurate biomarkers for this cancer. Among these markers, only NLR was found to be predictive for OS along with severe disability and steroid therapy.
Characterization and phylogenetic analysis of the mitochondrial genome of Macdunnoughia hybrida (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae: Plusiinae)

Abstract Macdunnoughia hybrida is a polyphagous herbivorous moth within the family Noctuidae. In this study, we sequenced and analyzed the complete mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of M. hybrida. This mitogenome was 15,382 bp long and encoded 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 22 transfer RNA genes (tRNAs), and two ribosomal RNA unit genes (rRNAs). Except for cox1 started with CGA, all other PCGs started with the standard ATN codons. Most of the PCGs terminated with the stop codon TAA, whereas cox1, cox2 and nad4 end with the incomplete codon T−−. The whole mitogenome exhibited heavy AT nucleotide bias (80.7%). Gene order was conserved and identical to most other previously sequenced Noctuidae. Phylogenetic analysis positioned M. hybrida in a well-supported clade with Diachrysia nadeja and three Ctenoplusia species. The relationships (Catocalinae + (Plusiinae + (Acronictinae + (Heliothinae + (Amphipyrinae + (Hadeninae + Noctuinae)))))) were supported within Noctuidae.
Bridging the Gap between Protoplanetary and Debris Disks: Separate Evolution of Millimeter and Micrometer-sized Dust

The connection between the nature of a protoplanetary disk and that of a debris disk is not well understood. Dust evolution, planet formation, and disk dissipation likely play a role in the processes involved. We aim to reconcile both manifestations of dusty circumstellar disks through a study of optically thin Class III disks and how they correlate to younger and older disks. In this work, we collect literature and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array archival millimeter fluxes for 85 disks (8%) of all Class III disks across nearby star-forming regions. We derive millimeter-dust masses M dust and compare these with Class II and debris disk samples in the context of excess infrared luminosity, accretion rate, and age. The mean M dust of Class III disks is 0.29 ± 0.19 M ⊕. We propose a new evolutionary scenario wherein radial drift is very efficient for nonstructured disks during the Class II phase resulting in a rapid M dust decrease. In addition, we find possible evidence for long infrared protoplanetary disk timescales, ∼8 Myr, consistent with overall slow disk evolution. In structured disks, the presence of dust traps allows for the formation of planetesimal belts at large radii, such as those observed in debris disks. We propose therefore that the planetesimal belts in debris disks are the result of dust traps in structured disks, whereas protoplanetary disks without dust traps decrease in dust mass through radial drift and are therefore undetectable as debris disks after the gas dissipation. These results provide a hypothesis for a novel view of disk evolution.
SPoTKD: A Protocol for Symmetric Key Distribution Over Public Channels Using Self-Powered Timekeeping Devices

In this paper, we propose a novel class of symmetric key distribution protocol that leverages basic security primitives offered by low-cost, hardware chipsets containing millions of synchronized self-powered timers. The keys are derived from the temporal dynamics of a physical, micro-scale time-keeping device which makes the keys immune to any potential side-channel attacks, malicious tampering, or snooping. Using the behavioral model of the self-powered timers, we first show that the derived key-strings can pass the randomness test as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) suite. The key-strings are then used in two SPoTKD (Self-Powered Timer Key Distribution) protocols that exploit the timer’s dynamics as one-way functions: (a) protocol 1 facilitates secure communications between a user and a remote Server; and (b) protocol 2 facilitates secure communications between two users. In this paper, we investigate the security of these protocols under standard model and against different adversarial attacks. Using Monte-Carlo simulations, we also investigate the robustness of these protocols in the presence of real-world operating conditions and propose error-correcting SPoTKD protocols to mitigate these noise-related artifacts.
Lifshitz cosmology: quantum vacuum and Hubble tension

Dark energy is one of the greatest scientific mysteries of today. The idea that dark energy originates from quantum vacuum fluctuations has circulated since the late ’60s, but theoretical estimations of vacuum energy have disagreed with the measured value by many orders of magnitude, until recently. Lifshitz theory applied to cosmology has produced the correct order of magnitude for dark energy. Furthermore, the theory is based on well-established and experimentally well-tested grounds in atomic, molecular and optical physics. In this paper, we confront Lifshitz cosmology with astronomical data. We find that the dark–energy dynamics predicted by the theory is able to resolve the Hubble tension, the discrepancy between the observed and predicted Hubble constant within the standard cosmological model. The theory is consistent with supernovae data, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and the Cosmic Microwave Background. Our findings indicate that Lifshitz cosmology is a serious candidate for explaining dark energy.
Self-Supervised Learning of Context-Aware Pitch Prosody Representations

—In music and speech, meaning is derived at multiple levels of context. Affect, for example, can be inferred both by a short sound token and by sonic patterns over a longer temporal window such as an entire recording. In this letter, we focus on inferring meaning from this dichotomy of contexts. We show how contextual representations of short sung vocal lines can be implicitly learned from fundamental frequency ( F 0 ) and thus be used as a meaningful feature space for downstream Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks. We propose three self-supervised deep learning paradigms which leverage pseudotask learning of these two levels of context to produce latent representation spaces. We evaluate the usefulness of these representations by embedding unseen pitch contours into each space and conducting downstream classiﬁcation tasks. Our results show that contextual representation can enhance downstream classiﬁcation by as much as 15% as compared to using traditional statistical contour features.
Policy Regularization via Noisy Advantage Values for Cooperative Multi-agent Actor-Critic methods

Recent works have applied the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to the multi-agent cooperative tasks, such as Independent PPO (IPPO); and vanilla Multi-agent PPO (MAPPO) which has a centralized value function. However, previous literature shows that MAPPO may not perform as well as Independent PPO (IPPO) and the Fine-tuned QMIX on Starcraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC). MAPPO-Feature-Pruned (MAPPO-FP) improves the performance of MAPPO by the carefully designed agent-specific features, which may be not friendly to algorithmic utility. By contrast, we find that MAPPO may face the problem of \textit{The Policies Overfitting in Multi-agent Cooperation(POMAC)}, as they learn policies by the sampled advantage values. Then POMAC may lead to updating the multi-agent policies in a suboptimal direction and prevent the agents from exploring better trajectories. In this paper, to mitigate the multi-agent policies overfitting, we propose a novel policy regularization method, which disturbs the advantage values via random Gaussian noise. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the Fine-tuned QMIX, MAPPO-FP, and achieves SOTA on SMAC without agent-specific features. We open-source the code at \url{https://github.com/hijkzzz/noisy-mappo}.
AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++

We present AIST++, a new multi-modal dataset of 3D dance motion and music, along with FACT, a Full-Attention Cross-modal Transformer network for generating 3D dance motion conditioned on music. The proposed AIST++ dataset contains 5.2 hours of 3D dance motion in 1408 sequences, covering 10 dance genres with multi-view videos with known camera poses—the largest dataset of this kind to our knowledge. We show that naively applying sequence models such as transformers to this dataset for the task of music conditioned 3D motion generation does not produce satisfactory 3D motion that is well correlated with the input music. We overcome these shortcomings by introducing key changes in its architecture design and supervision: FACT model involves a deep cross-modal transformer block with full-attention that is trained to predict N future motions. We empirically show that these changes are key factors in generating long sequences of realistic dance motion that are well-attuned to the input music. We conduct extensive experiments on AIST++ with user studies, where our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. The code and the dataset can be found at: https://google.github. io/aichoreographer.
Value, Confidence, Deliberation: A Functional Partition of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Demonstrated across Rating and Choice Tasks

Deciding about courses of action involves minimizing costs and maximizing benefits. Decision neuroscience studies have implicated both the ventral and dorsal medial PFC (vmPFC and dmPFC) in signaling goal value and action cost, but the precise functional role of these regions is still a matter of debate. Here, we suggest a more general functional partition that applies not only to decisions but also to judgments about goal value (expected reward) and action cost (expected effort). In this conceptual framework, cognitive representations related to options (reward value and effort cost) are dissociated from metacognitive representations (confidence and deliberation) related to solving the task (providing a judgment or making a choice). We used an original approach aimed at identifying consistencies across several preference tasks, from likeability ratings to binary decisions involving both attribute integration and option comparison. fMRI results in human male and female participants confirmed the vmPFC as a generic valuation system, its activity increasing with reward value and decreasing with effort cost. In contrast, more dorsal regions were not concerned with the valuation of options but with metacognitive variables, confidence being reflected in mPFC activity and deliberation time in dmPFC activity. Thus, there was a dissociation between the effort attached to choice options (represented in the vmPFC) and the effort invested in deliberation (represented in the dmPFC), the latter being expressed in pupil dilation. More generally, assessing commonalities across preference tasks might help in reaching a unified view of the neural mechanisms underlying the cost/benefit tradeoffs that drive human behavior. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Decision neuroscience studies have implicated the medial PFC in forming the cognitive representations that drive human choice behavior. However, different studies using different tasks have suggested somewhat inconsistent links between precise computational variables and specific brain regions. Here, we use fMRI to demonstrate a robust functional partition of the medial PFC that generalizes across tasks involving an estimation of goal value and/or action cost to provide a judgment or make a choice. This general functional partition makes a critical dissociation between neural representations of decisional factors (the expected costs and benefits attached to a given option) and metacognitive estimates (confidence in the judgment or choice, and effort invested in the deliberation process).
for 3DV 2018 paper ”Learning monocular depth estimation under unsupervised trinocular assumption”

This document provides additional details and experimental results concerned with 3DV 2018 paper ”Learning monocular depth estimation under unsupervised trinocular assumption”. The supplementary material is organized as follows: Section 1 reports detailed explanation of the loss functions used at training time, Section 2 describes how we obtain d with 3Net and how we post-process it, Section 3 comments additional experiments on the Eigen split [1] assuming as maximum depth 50 meters and Section 4 collects additional qualitative results, Finally, Section 5 reports run time analysis for 3Net and [3].
Growth Parameter and Yield Attributes of Rice ( Oryza Sativa ) as Influenced by Different Combination of Nitrogen Sources

The study was carried out in agronomy farm of Paklihawa Campus, IAAS, Rupandehi, Nepal. The objective of the study was to determine the response of rice as influenced by different combination of organic and inorganic nitrogen sources. The study consists of three nitrogen sources i.e. urea, farmyard manure and blue green algae at various levels comprising seven treatments in randomized complete block design with three replications. Rice seedling were raised in wet nursery bed and transplanted in experimental plots. Growth parameters, yield attributing traits and grain yield of rice were recorded. Result indicates that treatment combination of 75% of recommended dose of nitrogen (90 kg ha-1), farmyard manure (5 tons ha-1) and blue green algae (9 kg ha-1) contributes to higher plant height (96.13 cm), effective tiller per square meter (345.6), filled grain per panicle (180.9), grain yield (4.787 tons ha-1), and straw yield (9.07 ton ha-1) (p < 0.05). Also, there was a positive correlation between the grain yield and effective tillers per square meter (R2=0.254), grain yield and number of filled grains per panicle (R2=0.315). Hence, 75% of recommended dose of nitrogen (90 kg ha-1), farmyard manure (5 tons ha-1) and blue green algae (9 kg ha-1) were found to improve plant characteristics thus improving rice yield.