Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DUET: Joint Deployment of Trucks and Drones for Object Monitoring

The limitation on the flight range motivates a hybrid monitoring system, wherein trucks carrying drones drive to pre-planned positions and then free drones for task execution. While the flight range limitation is mitigated, it is challenging to determine the destination of trucks and drones and set airborne cameras. This paper optimizes the joint Deployment of trUcks and dronEs for objecT monitoring (DUET), that is, deploy a set of trucks where each truck carries drones, and each drone is equipped with a varifocal camera such that the overall monitoring utility for target objects is maximized. To tackle the DUET problem, we first model the hybrid system and monitoring utility; then, discretize the solution space of DUET with performance bound. In this way, the problem is transformed into a two-level combinatorial optimization problem satisfying submodularity. To address it, a two-level greedy algorithm with $\frac{{{{(e - 1)}^2}}}{{e(2e - 1)}} \cdot (1 - \varepsilon )$ approximation ratio is proposed to select deployment strategies. After the strategy selection, an optimal method is devised to carefully adjust the strategy for energy saving and communication improvement without loss of monitoring utility. Both simulations and field experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed framework, which outperforms baseline algorithms on monitoring utility by at least 28.4% and 40%, respectively.
A Microstrip Quasi-Yagi Antenna based on Optimised Waning Crescent Elements for WSN

In this paper, a novel microstrip Quasi-Yagi antenna based on Waning Crescent elements, is presented. The proposed antenna employs a microstrip dipole as the radiating element and, optimised waning crescent shaped elements as reflector and directors. The antenna is designed and optimised to operate in the 2.4 GHz ISM band, attending the integration in a multi-sector base station antenna configuration for a Wireless Sensing Network (WSN) for environmental monitoring. In particular, specific project requirements, such as: resonating frequency, gain, half power beam-width (HPBW) are taken into consideration when dimensioning the antenna. Simulation results ensure a realized gain of 9.4 dBi, a HPBW of 63° and a back-to-front ratio of 20.2 dB, at a resonating frequency of 2.45 GHz.
Metal Oxide (ZnO, TiO2) Layer Affects Sensitivity of Multisample Colorimetric Detection in Microfluidic Paper-based Biosensor

In this work, a measurement setup for glucose level quantification was developed using the colorimetric method on paper-based microfluidic analytical device (µPAD) platform. Separation of blood glucose was assisted with ZnO and TiO2 layer in the hydrophilic zone while the quantification of glucose concentration employed image processing technique by evaluating the intensity of different color spaces including RGB, HSV, and the gray scale. The analysis was carried out by measuring the color intensity at various glucose concentrations to assess the color space that exhibits the best sensitivity and accuracy for measuring glucose levels and the effect of metal oxide layer to the sensitivity of colorimetric measurement. The validation results show that the TiO2-modified µPAD exhibits an average error of 13.4% which is in accordance with the standard. The addition of TiO2 layer leads to a significant change in the average correlation which increased by 34.5% whilst the addition of ZnO decreases the sensitivity by 56.9%.
Educational Status of Dental Basic Science Course and its Correlation with Students' Educational Background in Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences

Introduction: Basic science course plays a pivotal role in the academic achievement of the students. The scientific background and educational performance of the students are also influential in this period. The aim of the present study was to investigate the educational status of dental basic science course in the first three admissions (2009-2011) and its association with students’ educational background in Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences (KUMS). Methods: In this descriptive cross-sectional study, all dental students admitted to school of dentistry in 2009-2011 years were included. The students’ academic background (scores, grade point average, score of comprehensive basic sciences examination (CBSE) were recorded. Data were analyzed by SPSS 16 using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent t-test. Results: Kermanshah dental students admitted to university in 2009-2011 were mostly female (59.2%), belonged to regions 2 and 3 (81.6%) of university entrance exam, had sciences diploma (89.8%) and their grade point average of diploma was nearly 18. There was a significant difference between the three groups of students admitted to university in Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Arabic, English language and Theology lessones of entrane exam (P<0.05). The students’ failure rate was 1.5% in university coureses. They all (100%) passed CBSE and were ranked second nationally in the year. There was no significant difference between male and female students in terms of age, diploma grade point average, grade point average of basic sciences and score of CBSE. Conclusion: Basic science courses of dentistry in Kermanshah enjoyed a rather constant status and students had a good academic level in these courses.
A 2-Local Classification of Symmetric Multiplicative 2-Cocycles

We produce a spectral sequence and an isomorphism of higher cubical structures that, together with a previous calculation of the same authors, culminates in an obstruction theory that we use to calculate the 2-primary component of the group scheme of multiplicative 2-cocycles in an arbitrary number of variables. Low-order versions of this group scheme previously appeared in the work of Ando, Hopkins, and Strickland in connection to their sigma-orientation of elliptic ring spectra.
CloudSatNet-1: FPGA-Based Hardware-Accelerated Quantized CNN for Satellite On-Board Cloud Coverage Classification

CubeSats, the nanosatellites and microsatellites with a wet mass up to 60 kg, accompanied by the cost decrease of accessing the space, amplified the rapid development of the Earth Observation industry. Acquired image data serve as an essential source of information in various disciplines like environmental protection, geosciences, or the military. As the quantity of remote sensing data grows, the bandwidth resources for the data transmission (downlink) are exhausted. Therefore, new techniques that reduce the downlink utilization of the satellites must be investigated and developed. For that reason, we are presenting CloudSatNet-1: an FPGA-based hardware-accelerated quantized convolutional neural network (CNN) for satellite on-board cloud coverage classification. We aim to explore the effects of the quantization process on the proposed CNN architecture. Additionally, the performance of cloud coverage classification by biomes diversity is investigated, and the hardware architecture design space is explored to identify the optimal FPGA resource utilization. Results of this study showed that the weights and activations quantization adds a minor effect on the model performance. Nevertheless, the memory footprint reduction allows the model deployment on low-cost FPGA Xilinx Zynq-7020. Using the RGB bands only, up to 90% of accuracy was achieved, and when omitting the tiles with snow and ice, the performance increased up to 94.4% of accuracy with a low false-positive rate of 2.23% for the 4-bit width model. With the maximum parallelization settings, the hardware accelerator achieved 15 FPS with 2.5 W of average power consumption (0.2 W increase over the idle state).
Socially-Oriented Persuasive Game to Promote Disease Awareness and Prevention

Persuasive games are widely implemented in the health domain to promote desirable behaviour change. Previous research shows that using persuasive games employing various strategies results in increased motivation and awareness that led to a positive change in behaviour. This paper investigates the efficacy of a competition-based persuasive game at creating awareness and motivating people to adhere to COVID-19 precautionary measures. To achieve this goal, we developed and evaluated a competition-based persuasive game to promote the awareness and adoption of COVID-19 precautionary measures. The results of our pretest and posttest study ( N = 67 ) followed by a semistructured interview of 18 participants show the efficacy of the game with respect to promoting a positive change in attitude, intention, self-efficacy, knowledge, and promoting motivation and positive player experience among participants. The qualitative results provide insight into how and why persuasive games promote desirable behaviour. The paper contributes to the knowledge of how emerging technologies in the form of persuasive games can be designed and used to contribute to solving problems in our society.
Transcriptomic Profile of Genes Regulating the Structural Organization of Porcine Atrial Cardiomyocytes during Primary In Vitro Culture

Numerous cardiovascular diseases (CVD) eventually lead to severe myocardial dysfunction, which is the most common cause of death worldwide. A better understanding of underlying molecular mechanisms of cardiovascular pathologies seems to be crucial to develop effective therapeutic options. Therefore, a worthwhile endeavor is a detailed molecular characterization of cells extracted from the myocardium. A transcriptomic profile of atrial cardiomyocytes during long-term primary cell culture revealed the expression patterns depending on the duration of the culture and the heart segment of origin (right atrial appendage and right atrium). Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were classified as involved in ontological groups such as: “cellular component assembly”, “cellular component organization”, “cellular component biogenesis”, and “cytoskeleton organization”. Transcriptomic profiling allowed us to indicate the increased expression of COL5A2, COL8A1, and COL12A1, encoding different collagen subunits, pivotal in cardiac extracellular matrix (ECM) structure. Conversely, genes important for cellular architecture, such as ABLIM1, TMOD1, XIRP1, and PHACTR1, were downregulated during in vitro culture. The culture conditions may create a favorable environment for reconstruction of the ECM structures, whereas they may be suboptimal for expression of some pivotal transcripts responsible for the formation of intracellular structures.
Fisherian Inference in Likelihood and Prequential Frames of Reference

SUMMARY In celebration of the centenary of the birth of Sir Ronald Fisher, this paper explores Fisher's conception of statistical inference, with special attention to the importance he placed on choosing an appropriate frame of reference to define the inferential model. In particular, we investigate inferential models which respect the likelihood principle or the prequential principle, and argue that these will typically have an asymptotic sampling theory justification.
Integrated multi-omics characterization of KRAS mutant colorectal cancer

KRAS mutation is the most frequent oncogenic aberration in colorectal cancer (CRC). The molecular mechanism and clinical implications of KRAS mutation in CRC remain unclear and show high heterogeneity within these tumors. Methods: We harnessed the multi-omics data (genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and phosphoproteomic etc.) of KRAS-mutant CRC tumors and performed unsupervised clustering to identify proteomics-based subgroups and molecular characterization. Results: In-depth analysis of the tumor microenvironment by single-cell transcriptomic revealed the cellular landscape of KRAS-mutant CRC tumors and identified the specific cell subsets with KRAS mutation. Integrated multi-omics analyses separated the KRAS-mutant tumors into two distinct molecular subtypes, termed KRAS-M1 (KM1) and KRAS-M2 (KM2). The two subtypes had a similar distribution of mutated residues in KRAS (G12D/V/C etc.) but were characterized by distinct features in terms of prognosis, genetic alterations, microenvironment dysregulation, biological phenotype, and potential therapeutic approaches. Proteogenomic analyses revealed that the EMT, TGF-β and angiogenesis pathways were enriched in the KM2 subtype and that the KM2 subtype was associated with the mesenchymal phenotype-related CMS4 subtype, which indicated stromal invasion and worse prognosis. The KM1 subtype was characterized predominantly by activation of the cell cycle, E2F and RNA transcription and was associated with the chromosomal instability (CIN)-related ProS-E proteomic subtype, which suggested cyclin-dependent features and better survival outcomes. Moreover, drug sensitivity analyses based on three compound databases revealed subgroup-specific agents for KM1 and KM2 tumors. Conclusions: This study clarifies the molecular heterogeneity of KRAS-mutant CRC and reveals new biological subtypes and therapeutic possibilities for these tumors.
The COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on the TV Commercials Content in European Countries

The outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic has strongly affected different issues of everyday life. The pandemic has changed consumer attitudes and behavior. Consequently, during COVID-19, businesses had to decide how to organize the advertising campaigns and what content should be addressed to consumers. Considering the limited number of articles concerning these issues, it seems important to evaluate the impact of the global health crisis on advertising messages in different countries. The main objective of this paper is to assess TV commercial campaigns implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the specific epidemic situation in the selected countries. The research methodology was based on the observation, a qualitative method of collecting data obtained through monitoring the content of TV commercials aired during the afternoon, before or after the main news service. The research was conducted in May 2020 and in May 2021 in five selected European countries affected to varying degrees by the coronavirus pandemic. The research results allowed evaluation of the advertising messages in terms of their content and values exposed. The findings indicate that the number of COVID-related TV commercials is not correlated with the number of patients and deaths from COVID-19. The themes appearing the most often in the TV commercials in the studied period were the #StayAtHome idea, family and friends, the aspect of safety during the crisis, and brands' special offers. The tone of the advertisements was usually uplifting and hopeful, trying to cheer the stressed societies. From a theoretical perspective, the research results show the advertising strategy issues in specific conditions in different European countries. These findings concerning TV commercial strategy during a pandemic crisis could provide references for other countries, especially in Europe. The research results could be useful for marketing managers in developing strategies concerning the successful planning of TV commercials in crisis periods in European countries.
ATTITUDE AND WILLINGNESS TO WORK WITH ELDERLY PEOPLE AMONG SOCIAL WORK AND COUNSELING STUDENTS IN A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY IN MALAYSIA

Counseling and social work students have higher chances to work with elderly people once they complete their studies. Purpose: Therefore, the current study aimed to measure the attitude towards and willingness to work with the elderly among counseling and social work students in Malaysia. Methods: The study utilized 283 undergraduate students (60 males and 213 females with mean age of 24.5) from the counseling and social work programs as study participants. The Kogan’s Attitudes Toward Older People Scale (KAOP) and the Willingness to Work with Elderly Scale (WWES) were employed as the study’s instruments to measure the participants’ attitude towards and willingness to work with the elderly respectively. Result: The study findings indicated that 75.2 percent of the participants exhibited a positive attitude towards working with the elderly. The study also established that there was a positive correlation between attitude towards and willingness to work with the elderly, with a more positive attitude being associated with willingness to work with the elderly. Furthermore, the study results indicated that the higher the age, the more positive attitude to work with the elderly, as older participants (above 25 years) showed more willingness to work with the elderly than younger participants (below 25 years). Conclusions: The study concludes that a positive attitude towards the elderly plays a significant role in students' lives, as they may work with the elderly upon completion of their studies, and a positive attitude towards the elderly can be developed in the social work and counseling students through their study curriculums.
Antifungal Activity of Nanoemulsion of Iranian Tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus L.) Essential Oil

Background: Despite the considerable activity of herbal Essential Oils (EOs) as safe food preservatives, problems such as high volatility, low water solubility, and low stability in adverse environmental conditions restrict their use in food products. This work aimed to investigate in vitro antifungal activity of oil-in-water nanoemulsion of Iranian Artemisia dracunculus L. (tarragon) EO. Methods: Nanoemulsion of tarragon EO was formed by ultrasound method through blending 10 wt% of tarragon EO, 85 wt% water, and the mixture of 5 wt% surfactants (Tween® 80/Span® 80). The droplet size and zeta potential were measured. The antifungal activity was evaluated against four different fungi, Aspergillus niger, Penicillium spp. , Fusarium spp. , and Saccharomyces cerevisiae through determining Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC), Minimum Fungicidal Concentration (MFC), and mycelial growth test. Data were statistically analyzed by the software of SPSS 22.0. Results: Main fragments of tarragon EO found to be beta-cis-ocimene, estragole, and beta-trans-ocimene. Nanodroplets had a zeta potential of -30 mV and an average diameter of 50 nm. For A. niger, Penicillium spp. , Fusarium spp. , and S. cerevisiae, the MIC and MFC values of nanoemulsion were identical and obtained at 1.50, 2.05, 1.61, and 1.14 µg/ml, respectively, while these values of free EO were higher and as follows: 2.81, 4.52, 3.75, and 2.40 µg/ml, respectively. Mycelial growth showed that encapsulated EO had the most fungitoxic potential against A. niger (inhibition 41%) and S. cerevisiae (inhibition 68%). Also, Penicillium spp. was the most resistant against both EO and nanoemulsion. Conclusion: The growth inhibitory activity of tarragon was significantly enhanced when encapsulated as nanoemulsion.
Molecular Characterization of Enterobacter cloacae Isolated from Urinary Tract Infections

Background: Urinary tract infections represent a major expensive, common public health problem worldwide due to their high prevalence and the difficulties associated with their management. Objectives: This study aimed to characterize the Enterobacter cloacae strains isolated from urinary tract infections in the medical diagnostic laboratories of Shahrekord, Iran. Methods: Urine samples from patients with urinary tract infections from the Shahrekord medical diagnostic laboratories located in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province, Iran, were collected from June 2019 to February 2020. When the samples were cultured, the different isolates of E. cloacae were identified by biochemical tests. Biofilm production capacity was evaluated. Bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics was determined using the Kirby Bauer method, and antibiotic resistance genes were researched by the multiplex PCR technique. Results: In this study, 65 isolates of E. cloacae were obtained. The highest percentage of resistance was observed for co-trimoxazole (84.62%), ampicillin (76.93%), tetracycline (73.85%), and above half of the E. cloacae strain isolates (53,85%) were strongly involved in biofilm production. Some genes, including qnr A, qnr B, qnr S, tetA, tet B, sul1, bla CTXM, bla SHV, and(2)la, ant(3)la, and aac(3)IIa, were detected in the genome of these isolates. Conclusions: The strains are multi-resistant, and their resistance has already reached the carbapenem class. This requires further investigation, and urgent measures must be adopted.
Pentagalloyl Glucose and Cisplatin Combination Treatment Exhibits a Synergistic Anticancer Effect in 2D and 3D Models of Head and Neck Carcinoma

Although cisplatin is a first-line chemotherapy drug for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), its therapeutic efficacy is limited owing to serious side effects and acquired drug resistance. This study determined whether combining pentagalloyl glucose (PGG) and cisplatin enhanced their anti-tumor activities on HNSCC cell lines. We investigated the anticancer effect of PGG combined with cisplatin in 2D and 3D multicellular spheroid cell culture. The results revealed that PGG combined with cisplatin inhibited cell viability and produced synergistic effects. PGG potentiates the anticancer effect of cisplatin by promoting apoptosis and inhibiting cell migration. The western blot and molecular docking analysis revealed that the synergistic effect of the combination treatment may be related to the PGG-mediated reduced expression of phosphorylated STAT3 and phosphorylated Akt. Furthermore, we found that the combined treatment of PGG and cisplatin’s effect on 3D multicellular spheroid size was more potent than the monotherapies. Our findings indicated that the combination therapy of PGG and cisplatin synergistically inhibited HNSCC cancer cell viability and induced apoptosis in 2D and 3D models. The present results suggested that PGG may be a promising adjunct drug used with cisplatin for a practical therapeutic approach to head and neck cancer.
The explanatory power of social capital in determining knowledge sharing in higher education: A case from Saudi Arabia

Knowledge sharing strengthens individual creativity, critical thinking and innovation. It also improves research and development endeavors, performance and productivity at the organizational level. Knowledge sharing decreases the amount of red-tape faced by organizations, firms and individuals in achieving economic, as well as social improvements. Notwithstanding the plethora of empirical studies on knowledge sharing determinants, much confusion has been produced by differing conclusions. Using original data collected via questionnaires from a sample of 404 participants at a Saudi public university, this analysis tested the effect of social capital on knowledge sharing intentions and behaviors. Findings from the Structural Equation Model found support to the hypotheses claiming positive associations between social ties, trust, identification, reciprocity, shared language, and shared vision and knowledge sharing. This study proposes a practice-based strategy for higher learning institutions to improve knowledge sharing behaviors built on the two components of enhancing enabling environments and technical skills. On the theoretical level, this study argues that the effects of social capital constructs differ with respect to the context considered. In higher education, social capital is thought to have a weak significant positive explanatory power on knowledge sharing behaviors.