Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hot mix asphalt (HMA) properties using natural rubber latex (NRL)-modified bitumen

Hot mix asphalt (HMA) is one of the common flexible pavement used in Malaysia. Due to the increasing in the volume of traffic nowa-days, unmodified HMA has begun to be insufficient in providing the strength to resist the increased traffic load. Therefore, many research have been done to improve HMA by modifying the bitumen. This study aims to investigate the properties of the HMA using natural rubber latex (NRL) modified bitumen. The optimum bitumen content (OBC) of the NRL-Modified HMA was determined by using Marshall mix design method and the properties of the NRL-Modified HMA was investigated based on the strength and volumetric properties. Besides that, a few tests were conducted in order to determine the properties of the bitumen and aggregates used. The properties of bitumen determined based on its softening point, ductility and penetration while the properties of the aggregated were determined based on its apparent specific gravity, aggregate impact value and shape (flakiness index and elongation index). From the result, it was found that the addition 9% of NRL by the total weight of modified bitumen had altered the volumetric properties and decrease the strength properties of the HMA.
INCREASED FREQUENCY OF URINARY TRACT INFECTIONS IS SEEN IN CHILDREN WITH CEREBRAL PALSY

: Introduction: Cerebral palsy is a common cause of childhood morbidity. This morbidity comprised seizure disorders, mental retardation, abnormalities of vision, problems with respiratory muscle, and lower urinary tract dysfunctions. The lower urinary tract dysfunctions are manifested symptomatically as urinary incontinence, urgency, frequency, hesitancy, and urinary tract infection. Objective: The objective of my study was to determine frequency of urinary tract infections (UTI) in children with cerebral palsy presented to department of Paediatric, General Hospital, Lahore. Study design: It was a cross sectional study. Materials and Methods: The study was conducted in department of Paediatric Lahore General Hospital, Lahore. The study was completed in the duration of 6 months from June 2016 to December 2016. A total of 115 patients fulfilling the inclusion criteria were taken from the Pediatric department of Lahore General Hospital, Lahore. After taking a written informed consent from the parents or attendants their basic demographic information like name, age and sex was obtained. For final diagnosis of UTI (as per operational definition) urine sample for complete urinalysis and culture/ sensitivity was taken in aseptic measures and then was sent to hospital laboratory. All data was collected by me on Performa (attached). All collected data was entered in SPSS version 20 and was analyzed by same software. Results: The mean age of patients was 8±3.7 years with minimum and maximum age of 2 and 14 years. There were 76(66.09%) male and 39(33.91%) female cases with male to female ratio of 1.94:1. According to operational definition frequency of UTI was seen in 68(59.13%) of the cases. Conclusion: Hence, our study found higher frequency of UTI in children with cerebral palsy. This problem may get worse with restricted mobility. Therefore, special efforts should be made for improving quality of life of patients by physiotherapy and effective treatment.
Inﬂuence of malaria transmission intensity and the 581G mutation on the efﬁcacy of intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy: systematic review and meta-analysis

objectives To estimate where intermittent preventive treatment (IPTp) using sulphadoxine – pyrimethamine (SP) could be withdrawn as an intervention due to declining malaria transmission intensity, or due to increasing prevalence of the Plasmodium falciparum dihydropteroate synthetase resistance mutation at codon 581G. methods We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of protection against the incidence of low birth weight (LBW) conferred by ≥ 2 doses of IPTp-SP. We matched these outcomes to a proxy measure of malaria incidence in women of the same studies, applied meta-regression models to these data and conducted sensitivity analysis of the 581G mutation. results Variation in the protective effect of IPTp-SP against LBW could not be explained by malaria transmission intensity. Among primi- and secundigravidae, IPTp-SP protected against LBW where 581G was ≤ 10.1% [odds ratio (OR): 0.49; 95% conﬁdence intervals (CI): 0.29, 0.81; P = < 0.01] and 581G was > 10.1% (OR = 0.73; 95% CI: 0.29, 1.81; P = 0.03). Random-effects models among multigravidae showed that IPTp-SP protects against LBW where 581G was ≤ 10.1% (OR = 0.56; 95% CI: 0.37, 0.86; P = 0.07), a ﬁnding of borderline statistical signiﬁcance. No evidence of protection against LBW was observed where 581G was > 10.1% (OR = 0.96; 95% CI: 0.70, 1.34; P = 0.47). to be a prevalence of 581G above which IPTp-SP no longer protects against LBW. Pregnancy studies are urgently needed where 581G is > 10.1% to deﬁne the speciﬁc prevalence threshold where new strategies should be deployed.
Fuzzy Inferencing Using single-antecedent Fuzzy Rules

The output of a fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) is the summation of the products of its individual input variables and their relative weights to each node. This additive nature is the main hindrance to the implementation of fuzzy theory in FCM, as conventional fuzzy rules rely on the mapping of the input spaces to the output space via the intersection configuration of fuzzy rules. On the other hand, fuzzy rules are well known for the combinatorial rule explosion problem. We present a methodology that allows the use of single-antecedent fuzzy rules instead of multiple-antecedent fuzzy rules. This methodology thus can be implemented in FCM and at the same time eliminate altogether the problem associated with the intersection of fuzzy rules. Our proposed method ensures transparency of the rules, unlike in conventional data-driven fuzzy systems where they can become ambiguous.
Clinical Course, Treatment Strategies, Social and Economic Impact of Ulcerative Colitis: An Overview

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the clinical course, predictive factors, and treatment strategies for ulcerative colitis (UC) as well as the social and economic impacts of the disease. Based on review of population-based and observational studies as well as drug trials we state: 1. Extensive colitis, a young at diagnosis, and the need for glucocorticosteroids at diagnosis are risk factors for requiring surgery. GCSs oral 5-ASA
Actions of compact connected Lie Groups with few orbit types.

Due to their topological simplicity and the existence of a rieh family of linear G-actions, the euclidean spaces are among the best testing spaces for the study of differentiable G-manifolds X. Here the problems most often center around relations between geometric (topological) properties of G, X, the fixed point set, the orbit types, and the orbit space X/G. It is fair to say that, since the difficulties and complexities increase rapidly with the number of orbit types, most classification results (regularity theorems, etc.) have been proved only when this number is rather small, or at least implicitly controlled by the given conditions. This area also includes fixed point results of various kinds, motivated by the classical P. A. Smith's theory of prime periodic maps. For example, the existence of fixed points when p-primary groups, or extensions of a torus by such groups, act on mod p acyclic spaces is well known, and it is also known that this property fails for compact Lie groups outside this class. However, s indicated by the first counter examples constructed, the orbit structure of acyclic G-manifolds without a fixed point cannot be too simple. In particular, the number of orbit types cannot be below a certain value, say ^(G). The first significant result in this direction is the following
The Thesis committee for Kevin Francis Doyle

iv Introduction. 1 Methods. 6 Analysis. 11 Results. 15 Discussion. 29 Appendices. 36 Appendix A. 37 Appendix B. 38 Appendix C. 39 Appendix D. 40 Appendix E. 41 Appendix F. 42 Appendix G. 43 Appendix H. 44 Appendix I. 45 Appendix J. 47 Appendix K. 49 Appendix L. 50
CMAR_A_272230 10521..10530

1Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Yangpu Hospital, Tongji University School of Medicine, Shanghai 200090, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province 210096, People’s Republic of China Purpose: The objective of this study was to detect the expression of the long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) colorectal cancer-associated lncRNA (CCAL) in osteosarcoma tissues and to investigate its role in angiogenesis and the potential molecular mechanisms associated with this effect in osteosarcoma. Materials and Methods: CCAL expression in 40 osteosarcoma tissues and 40 noncancerous tissues was measured by qRT-PCR (quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction). Tube formation assays were performed to explore the role of CCAL in angiogenesis in osteosarcoma. In addition, the regulatory interaction between CCAL, miR-29b, and ANGPTL4 was investigated via luciferase reporter assay and bioinformatics predictive analysis. Results: Compared with noncancerous tissues, the expression of CCAL was markedly upregulated in osteosarcoma tissues. Higher CCAL expression levels were closely related to shorter overall survival in patients with osteosarcoma. Additionally, functional analysis indicated that CCAL could facilitate tumour angiogenesis in vitro and in vivo in osteosarcoma. Mechanistically, CCAL upregulated ANGPTL4 expression in osteosarcoma cells, and ANGPTL4 mediated angiogenic induction by CCAL in osteosarcoma. Moreover, CCAL directly targeted miR-29b in osteosarcoma. More importantly, we demonstrated that CCAL upregulated the expression of ANGPTL4 by sponging miR-29b, which promoted angiogenesis in osteosarcoma. Conclusion: Our results show that CCAL promotes angiogenesis by regulating the miR29b/ANGPTL4 axis in osteosarcoma.
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Large Scale Structures of the Universe as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

This thesis describes the measurement of the baryon acoustic oscillations using Lyman-alpha forests and galaxies and its cosmological interpretation. From 2011 to 2014, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III telescope observed spectra of ~ 1.3 million galaxies and ~ 150 000 quasars in the context of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This project aimed the most accurate BAO measurement in the large scale distribution of matter. We describe the data analysis, the cosmological interpretation and tests using mock data. We present a new method to generate mock data, that was used to study systematic effects potentially affecting our measurement. No evidence for a systematic bias comming from these tests could be found. Using data available in 2014, the BAO peak is measured at 3% precision in the radial direction and 5% in the transverse direction, at z = 2.34. We compare our results with previous measurements, in particular those from the Planck satellite, and we find an agreement at 1.8sigma level.
A Piezoelectric Solid Shell Element Accounting for Material and Geometrical Nonlinea

This contribution is concerned with a piezoelectric solid shell finite element formulation. In recent years several new elements have been proposed. Some of these model a reference surface of the shell structure. Here, a surface oriented piezoelectric solid shell element is developed. With respect to the laminated structure of piezoelectric devices a more or less sophisticated laminate theory is necessary. The so-called solid shell elements circumvent laminate theories by modelling each ply with one element, see e.g. [3] and the references therein. The most piezoelectric shell formulations assume a geometrically linear theory. In [4] it is pointed out that nonlinear characteristics can significantly influence the performance of piezoelectric systems. In particular this holds for buckling of plates. A geometrically non-linear theory allows large deformations and includes stability problems. Typical materials for the utilization of the piezoelectric effect are ferroelectric ceramics like barium titanate (BaTiO3) and lead zirconate titanate (PbZrTiO3) abbreviated as PZT. Ferroelectric ceramics show a strongly nonlinear behavior, which is caused by socalled domain switching effects, see e.g. [2] and the references therein. The present shell formulation incorporates a material model accounting for the physical nonlinearities. The model is thermodynamically consistent and determined by two scalar valued functions: the Gibb’s free energy and a switching criterion. Usually the electric potential inside the piezoelectric model is assumed to be linear through the shell thickness. To fulfill the electric charge conservation law exactly a quadratic electric potential through the thickness is necessary. In this paper the finite element formulation is based on a variational principle including six independent fields: displacements, electric potential, strains, electric field, mechanical stresses and dielectric displacements. To obtain correct results in bending dominated situations a linear distribution through the thickness of the independent electric field is assumed. The element has 8 nodes; the nodal degrees of freedom are displacements and the electric potential. The presented finite shell element is able to model arbitrary curved shell structures and incorporates a 3D-material law.
Numerical analysis of viscoelastic problems

The problem of computing the deformations of viscoelastic, viscoplastic or elastoplastic bodies is of great relevance to practical problems eg in the numerical modelling of viscoelastic structures of hot metal forming or of polymer melt flows. This text shows how such practical engineering problems may be written as standard problems of functional analysis and how this mathematical framework is used for their analysis and numerical solution. The author looks at the mechanical and the mathematical problem in a unified context, especially for the case of nonlinear Maxwell problems, and gives a mixed discrete formulation for viscoelastic flow problems. Some classical numerical strategies are described as extensions of the mathematical theory. The treatment is restricted to small strain situations (with an introduction to the large strain problem at the end) and to constitute laws of differential type, and will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in mechanical engineering, computer science and applied mathematics.
A 56.32 Gb/s 16-QAM D-band Wireless Link using RX-TX Systems- in-Package with Integrated Multi-LO Generators in 45nm RFSOI

This paper presents an energy-efficient wideband D- band wireless link using receiver (RX) and transmitter (TX) modules based on a channel-bonding scheme. The modules include RX and TX integrated circuits (ICs) fabricated in 45nm CMOS RFSOI technology. They are mounted on low-cost multi-layer printed circuit boards (PCBs) and connected to patch antennas. The RX and TX ICs are composed of two down-conversion and up-conversion chains, respectively, operating over contiguous sub- bands around 147.96 GHz. The required multiple millimeter-wave local oscillator signals (LOs)are generated on-chip. The presented wireless system achieves a data rate of 56.32 Gb/s by using 16 QAM modulation over 8 radiofrequency (RF) channels, with a competitive energy consumption (RX+TX) of 18 pJ/bit, including the LOs generation circuitry.
The sensitivity research of multiparameter biosensors based on HEMT by the mathematic modeling method

The numerical impact modeling of some external effects on the CVC of biosensors based on AlGaN/GaN heterostructures (HEMT) was carried out. The mathematical model was created that allowed to predict the behavior of the drain current depending on condition changes on the heterostructure surface in the gate region and to start the process of directed construction optimization of the biosensors based on AlGaN/GaN HEMT with the aim of improving their performance. The calculation of the drain current of the biosensor construction was carried out to confirm the reliability of the developed mathematical model and obtained results.
Urban Navigation with LTE using a Large Antenna Array and Machine Learning

Channel fingerprinting entails associating a point in space with measured properties of a received wireless signal. If the propagation environment for that point in space remains reasonably static with time, then a receiver with no knowledge of its own position experiencing a similar channel in the future might reasonably infer proximity to the original surveyed point. In this article, measurements of downlink LTE Common Reference Symbols from one sector of an eNodeB are used to generate channel fingerprints for a passenger vehicle driving through a dense urban environment without line-of-sight to the transmitter. Channel estimates in the global azimuthal-delay domain are used to create a navigation solution with meter-level accuracy around a city block.
Power Flow Analysis of Power Distribution System Integrated with Solar Photovoltaic Based Distributed Generation

In this paper, a Power Flow (PF) algorithm for a Power Distribution System (DS) derived from the conventional backward-forward sweep method is simulated with the integration of Solar Photovoltaic (SPV) based distributed generation. This integration algorithm is based on the load current injection, where the SPV generation is modeled as a negative load injection at one of the nodes of the DS. In this method, the PF solution is obtained by executing both the sweeps in a single step through a Load Current to Bus Voltage (LCBV) matrix. The SPV system is integrated considering an additional inverter node connected to one of the nodes of DS through the SPV interfacing elements. Based on the control specification at the inverter node, it may operate either in PV or PQ mode. The SPV inverter node voltage is computed using an alternate-iterative method in a separate algorithm. The effectiveness of the modified PF algorithm is verified on the balanced DS, considering diverse test systems (IEEE-33 node, IEEE-69 node DS). The qualitative aspects of the algorithm are analyzed and compared with the existing conventional technique.
STEM-Based Interactive Learning Media to Improve Student's Critical Thinking Skills on Number System Materials

The goal of the study is to produce STEM-based interactive learning media that can enhance student’s critical thinking skills on number system materials. The research method used is the method of development or Research and Development (R&D) with addie design (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation). The instruments used in the study consisted of expert media validation sheets, materials, critical thinking tests, and student questionnaire sheets to determine student’s responses to interactive learning media. To find out the practicality and effectiveness of interactive learning media in improving the ability of critical thinking, a double choice test is grounded. The results show that 1) the results of media and material validation by 2 experts were 86% (very high) and the results of validation of tests of learning results by experts and teachers were 90.67% (very high), 2) interactive learning media can improve student’s critical thinking skills which is shown with average pretest results by 54.7%, average post-test by 91.9% and average %N-Gain by 68.48% (height), 3) Student’s responses to the use of interactive learning media earned 84% (excellent) grades.
Vote-Based Multi-Level Context Attention Network for 3D Point Cloud Object Detection

3D object detection is a challenging task because point clouds are characterized by sparsity and irregularity. Most state-of-the-art detectors recognize objects individually without considering the rich context relationships of objects at different levels. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end vote-based multi-level context attention network. Specifically, a Patch-Context-Module is designed to extract multi-level context features among point patches. Meanwhile, because low-level features contain fine location description information, a Spatial-Context-Module is adopted to combine low-level spatial and semantic features. Furthermore, a Fusion Sampling and Aggregation module is proposed to consider additional semantic information of each vote point, thereby increasing the ratio of positive points and improving detection performance. Finally, the Class-IoU-Guide NMS with an adaptive threshold is implemented to suppress false detection at the inference time. Experiments on the ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrated that our proposed method out-performs current state-of-the-art approaches.
Directed Mix Contrast for Lidar Point Cloud Segmentation

Comprehensive and real-time scene understanding are crucial for autonomous driving, where LiDAR semantic segmentation plays an indispensable role. However, existing segmentation algorithms are exposed with extremely imbalanced dataset. Besides, due to the sparseness of point cloud, some hard negative samples are intrinsically similar. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning framework named Directed Mix Contrast (DMC) for LiDAR point cloud segmentation. There are two key contributions in this framework. Firstly, a simple pre-processing step is proposed to maintain the balance between classes. In addition, to deal with the hard negative samples, contrastive learning strategy is introduced to facilitate feature learning. More specifically, we propose a directed mix-up training strategy to take control of the contrasting procedure. To demonstrate the effectiveness of DMC, we conduct experiments on two large-scale LiDAR Segmentation datasets and achieve mIoU of 71.0% on SemanticK-ITTI, which outperforms most existing methods. Furthermore, we extend our method to several backbone networks, and the results show good generalization ability of DMC.
Blended Scrum model for software development organizations

Software organizations have to develop software in a short time, and quickly respond to changing requirements. Recently, organizations have started to implement agile development models to reduce cost and increase productivity and quality. Scrum, one of the most widely used agile methodologies, is often implemented in various ways that depart in an uncontrolled fashion from the original model, resulting in development methods often called “ScrumBut. ” Some argue that such incomplete implementations violate Scrum's core practices and philosophy, while others propose that all methodologies should be adapted to organization's unique culture and integrated with their best practices.
Edge-assisted human-to-virtual twin connectivity scheme for human digital twin frameworks

The human digital twin (HDT) is a new paradigm that possesses the ability to revolutionize the current healthcare systems. With HDT, ensuring an efficient connectivity scheme between each human-virtual twin pair remains a significant problem. As the concept of HDT is new, conventional connectivity schemes cannot meet the unique requirements of HDT in terms of reliability, security and privacy. This paper thus proposes an edge-assisted connectivity scheme for HDT and adopts an integrated blockchain and federated learning techniques to ensure security and privacy. To minimize long-term average connectivity cost, we formulated the connectivity problem as a Markov decision process and adopted the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm to learn the optimal connectivity policy in terms of connectivity cost. The obtained results were then compared with the conventional deep Q-network-based solution. The results show that the proposed DDPG-based connectivity solution is feasible to perform the connectivity process better by optimally allocating system resources, thus reducing the overall connectivity cost, while ensuring data security and privacy.