Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive stated choice experiment for access and egress mode choice to train stations

This paper presents an analysis of an adaptive stated choice experiment in the Netherlands to quantify the influence of different factors in the access and egress mode choice to railway stations. For this purpose a sample of 1524 respondents was collected. Mixed logit choice models are estimated which include cost and time factors and variables factors describing the quality of stations and station environments. The main findings indicate that bicycle parking costs in the Netherlands play an important role in access mode choice. Furthermore, improvements in route quality are more important for cyclists than pedestrians as a determinant for access and egress mode choice. Costs and time of access modes are highly important in relation to the main mode choice. Particularly for the bicycle as feeder mode, the ratio of cost to time is a significant reason for dropping the train as main mode.
Efficacy of hepatoprotector jamu formula (combination of Curcuma longa, Curcuma xanthorrhiza, and Taraxacum officinale) compared to Fructus schizandrae extract in mild liver injury: a randomized controlled trial

The prevalence of impaired liver function in developing countries is increasing. Indonesia has several traditional medicines that can be used as alternative treatments for liver dysfunction. The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of hepatoprotector jamu formula (combination of Curcuma longa, Curcuma xanthorrhiza, and Taraxacum officinale) compared to Fructus schizandrae fruit extract for treating mild liver injury. This study was a RCT using parallel open label design which involved 60 subjects for 42 days of intervention. The parameters used to evaluate efficacy were Serum Glutamic Pyruvic Transaminase (SGPT) and Serum Glutamic Oxaloacetic Transaminase (SGOT). There was a significant difference of average SGPT levels on day 21 and day 42 compared to day 0 in both hepatoprotector jamu group and Fructus Schizandrae extract group (p < 0.001). Compared to the baseline, there were a significant difference of average SGOT levels on the follow up days in hepatoprotector jamu group (p=0.023 on day 21; p=0.003 on day 42) as well as Fructus Schizandrae extract group (p=0.028 on day 21; p=0.042 on day 42. The efficacy of hepatoprotector jamu formula was comparable to Fructus schizandrae extract in improving mild liver injury.
Policy-based monocular vision autonomous quadrotor obstacle avoidance method

Aiming at the obstacle avoidance control problem of small quadrotor, a method of quadrotor obstacle avoidance based on reinforcement learning is proposed. The proposed method can make training converge quickly and has good environmental robustness. The proposed methods include: (1) a framework adopts perception module and decision module to improve the generalization ability of the obstacle avoidance model; (2) An Actor-Critic framework-based Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm to provide quadrotor with policy-based decision-making capabilities; The experimental simulation results show that the strategy-based framework converges quickly and has a high success rate, the training time is much lower than that of the value-based framework. The monocular vision observation ability is limited, which leads to deviations between local observation and global state, So LSTM layer is usually added to increase model performance. Policy -based decision can have a good obstacle avoidance effect without adding the LSTM layer, and have good generalization ability after short relearning after changing.
Lower leg muscle force prediction in gait transition

Walking and running, the two most basic and functional gait modes, have been often addressed through EMG, kinematics and biomechanical modelling, however, there is no consensus in the literature on which factors trigger the transition from walking to running. Ankle plantarflexors and dorsiflexor were found to play an important role in gait transition due to higher muscular activation to propel the body forward to run. We tested these muscles activation during walking and running at the same speeds, through a musculoskeletal model derived from subjects’ kinematic and kinetic data. Compared to EMG data frequently reported in the literature, the results yielded similar activation patterns for all muscles analyzed. Besides, across speeds, dorsiflexor activation kept increasing in walking, especially after PTS (preferred transition speed), which may indicate its contribution to gait transition, as an effort to bring the foot forward to keep up with the unnatural condition of walking at high speeds.
The fourth generation of urban projects to tackle climate change: a typological proposal

Climate change is the major challenge of our humanity and the relationship between climate change and cities has received increasing scholarly attention from governance, urban planning and infrastructure perspectives. However, the scale of the urban project, understood as the operationalization of climate change actions, has been neglected. The current three generations of urban projects are revisited (modern city, morphologic articulation, large urban projects) and a fourth-generation within the context of climate change is identified as missing; it combines adaptation and mitigation strategies for urban projects. While adaptation strategies are oriented to minimizing the negative impact of climate change on rising sea-levels, floods and rivers’ changes through green and blue infrastructures, mitigation strategies are twofold: one oriented to minimizing CO2 gas emissions and the other to reducing the risks of deterioration of natural systems due to human intervention or natural causes. Integrating the four generations, a typology of a 2x2 matrix of urban projects is drawn up. The four quadrants of types of urban projects are explained and accompanied by examples. Potential and desirable shifts between the quadrants are discussed to understand how changes are needed to advance to develop this new generation of urban projects. The paper contributes to expanding our understanding of urban projects in the context of climate change with heuristics purposes for researchers, practitioners and academia, and to prepare public policy makers to encourage the debate of climate change actions of adaptation and mitigation that should be materialized on an urban project scale. Future research may empirically test the typology in different contexts of development.
On the non-Gaussian noise in erbium-doped fiber amplifiers

The non-Gaussian character of the probability density functions (PDFs) of binary signals dominated by signal-spontaneous and spontaneous-spontaneous beat noise in erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) is experimentally verified and their impact on the operation of decision circuits in optically preamplified digital receivers discussed.
A Prediction of Stock Price Movements Using Support Vector Machines in Indonesia

Stock movement is difficult to predict because it has dynamic characteristics and is influenced by many factors. Even so, there are some approaches to predict stock price movements, namely technical analysis, fundamental analysis, and sentiment analysis. Many researches have tried to predict stock price movement by utilizing these analysis techniques. However, the results obtained are varied and inconsistent depending on the variables and object used. This is because stock price movement is influenced by a variety of factors, and it is likely that those studies did not cover all of them. One of which is that no research considers the use of fundamental analysis in terms of currency exchange rates and the use of foreign stock price index movement related to the technical analysis. This research aims to predict stock price movements in Indonesia based on sentiment analysis, technical analysis, and fundamental analysis using Support Vector Machine. The result obtained has a prediction accuracy rate of 65,33% on an average. The inclusion of currency exchange rate and foreign stock price index movement as a predictor in this research which can increase average prediction accuracy rate by 11.78% compared to the prediction without using these two variables which only results in average prediction accuracy rate of 53.55%.
The Effect of Learning Strategies and Linguistic Intelligence on the Results of English Texts Reading Comprehension for High School Students in Medan

The objectives of this research are: (1) the difference of results of students’ English text comprehension who are taught with the Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) strategies and student taught by using the Directed, Reading, Thinking, Activity (DRTA) strategy (2) the difference of results the students who have high linguistic intelligence is better than students who have low linguistic intelligence (3) the interaction between learning strategies and linguistic intelligence in influencing students’ learning outcomes of understanding English texts. This study is a quasiexperimental research. The population in this study all students of class XI MIPA SMA Negeri 2 Medan and XI MIPA SMA Negeri 5 Medan. The research instrument is an objective test of valid and reliable learning outcomes of students’ English text comprehension, and a linguistic intelligence questionnaire sheet. The data analysis technique used is Two Way Anova on data that has been normally distributed and homogeneous. The results obtained by testing hypotheses: (1) the average of the children achievement taught by Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) strategy is higher than students taught by Directed, Reading, Thinking, Activity (DRTA) strategy, which indicated by Fc = 8,65 > Ft = 3,98 at significance level α = 0,05 with df (1.68); (2) the average of the students who have the ability of high linguistic intelligence is higher than the students who have low linguistic intelligence, which is indicated by Fc= 9,38 > Ft= 3,98 at significance level α=0,05 with df (1.68); (3) there is interaction learning strategy and linguistic intelligence to the Understanding English text outcomes student, which is indicated by Fc = 5,58 > Ft =3,98 at significance level α = 0.05 with df (1,68). Based on the data analysis it can be concluded that Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) strategy is better than the Directed, Reading, Thinking, Activity (DRTA) strategy in improving students’ learning outcomes of understanding English texts. Students who have a high linguistic intelligence obtain higher English learning outocmes than the students who have low linguistic intelligence.
2D tissue strain tensor imaging in quasi-static ultrasound elastography*

Accurately estimating all strain components in quasi-static ultrasound elastography is crucial for the full analysis of biological media. In this paper, 2D strain tensor imaging is investigated, using a partial differential equation (PDE)-based regularization method. More specifically, this method employs the tissue property of incompressibility to smooth the displacement fields and reduce the noise in the strain components. The performance of the method is assessed with phantoms and in vivo breast tissues. For all the media examined, the results showed a significant improvement in both lateral displacement and strain but also, to a lesser extent, in the shear strain. Moreover, axial displacement and strain were only slightly modified by the regularization, as expected. Finally, the easier detectability of the inclusion/lesion in the final lateral strain images is associated with higher elastographic contrast-to-noise ratios (CNRs), with values in the range [0.68 - 9.40] vs [0.09 - 0.38] before regularization.
Reducing and Exploiting Data Augmentation Noise through Meta Reweighting Contrastive Learning for Text Classification

Data augmentation has shown its effectiveness in resolving the data-hungry problem and improving model's generalization ability. However, the quality of augmented data can be varied, especially compared with the raw/original data. To boost deep learning models' performance given augmented data/samples in text classification tasks, we propose a novel framework, which leverages both meta learning and contrastive learning techniques as parts of our design for reweighting the augmented samples and refining their feature representations based on their quality. As part of the framework, we propose novel weight-dependent enqueue and dequeue algorithms to utilize augmented samples' weight/quality information effectively. Through experiments, we show that our framework can reasonably cooperate with existing deep learning models (e.g., RoBERTa-base and Text-CNN) and augmentation techniques (e.g., Wordnet and Easydata) for specific supervised learning tasks. Experiment results show that our framework achieves an average of 1.6%, up to 4.3% absolute improvement on Text-CNN encoders and an average of 1.4%, up to 4.4% absolute improvement on RoBERTa-base encoders on seven GLUE benchmark datasets compared with the best baseline. We present an indepth analysis of our framework design, revealing the non-trivial contributions of our network components. Our code is publicly available for better reproducibility.1
Research Statement: Climbing the Generality Ladder in NLP

I am broadly interested in the computational foundations of intelligent behavior through the lens of natural language. The overarching theme of my research is centered around developing algorithms and theories that make natural language processing (NLP) systems more general and generalizable, i.e., enabling them to adapt and handle a broader space of challenges or situations. Humans have seamless generalizability – one moment we’re playing chess, the next moment we are responding to an emergent situation. Within AI, however, our successes have been mostly limited to narrowly-defined tasks (narrow vs extreme generalization; Fig.1). While AlphaGo, for example, has aced the game of Go [1], it is unable to solve other related problems (such as, explaining the moves that it makes or solving another similar puzzle). The progress toward the ambitious goal of generalizable models requires rethinking different stages of the AI pipeline. In particular, during my past research, I have pursued this vision on three complementary axes:
The Outcome after Repair of radial tears lateral meniscus by second look scope

Radial tears of the lateral meniscus significantly impair the ability of the meniscus to withstand the tibiofemoral load, requiring meniscal repair. However, healing status after meniscal repair has not been fully elucidated. This study aimed to evaluate arthroscopic findings after all inside suture repair for radial tears of lateral meniscus. Methods: From June 2018 to May 2020, sixteen patients with radial tears of the lateral meniscus underwent arthroscopic all inside in repair technique. All patients were evaluated by second-look arthroscopy after three months postoperatively. To analyze factors associated with healing rates, age, side, gender and time from injury to initial surgery were compared. Results: 13 patients (81.3%) showed excellent healing and 3 patients (18.8%) showed good healing. Conclusions: Arthroscopic evaluation revealed that all inside-in repair with Fast-Fix suture technique for radial tear of the lateral meniscus achieved complete or partial healing in 100% of patients. KEYWORD: Lateral Meniscus, Radial Tears, Oblique tears, Repair, Arthroscopy, Second, Look.
Paper 10: An Experimental Investigation into the Performance of Sleeve Bearings Subjected to a Range of Alternating Loads:

Two dynamically loaded testing machines are described. These testing machines utilize a balanced pressure piston for the detection of tensile stresses in the oil film, and a test bearing housing mounted in an externally pressurized bearing for the measurement of bearing friction.Oil film pressure surveys indicate areas of general cavitation preceded by troughs of subcavity pressures in which the oil film sustains tensile stresses during periods of increasing dynamic load.Typical journal centre paths and summary curves of eccentricity ratio versus Sommerfeld number are presented for a range of alternating loads and load/journal speed ratios. None of the speed ratios examined displayed zero load capacity.Greater cyclic variations of bearing friction than those previously reported for journal friction were measured under alternating loads.Thin film operation occurred within the range of alternating loads examined, and in all cases the mean friction force was greater than that measured under static loads.
Writing Anxiety in Academic Writing Practice: Insights from EFL Learners’ Perspectives

As an essential part of EFL academic practices, writing is the most required skill in higher-education context. Subsequently, the requirement of having a high command of English writing skill emerges as one of the most important criteria for qualified EFL graduates. In reality, many students are still struggling to write academically in proper way, especially in undergraduate level since they are novices to academic writing practices. As a result, writing anxiety hinders the process of academic writing that affects the quality as well as perception of writing among students. Thus, the present study aims to investigate five EFL undergraduate students' perspectives on their academic writing practices in relation to the challenges of writing anxiety. The study was conducted through the lens of qualitative case study. Two primary data sources were collected and triangulated, i.e., semi-structured interview, and document analysis. Participants' experiences in dealing with anxiety during the learning and writing process were inquired through a semi-structured individual interview, which subsequent responses are clarified through an analysis of learners’ academic essays to cross-check the whole data. The findings showed that the least anxious learner showed better writing performance then those who showed higher levels of anxiety. While the most prominent aspects that learners felt anxious about were lack of English writing practices, poor understanding of grammar rules, insufficient vocabulary, and fear of negative evaluation.
OPTH_A_333903 4475..4484

1Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, John A. Moran Eye Center, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, 84132, USA; 2University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT, 84132, USA Purpose: We assessed the effect of two lens cube sizes, three tip sizes, and two ultrasound (US) approaches on phacoemulsification efficiency and chatter. Methods: After porcine lens nuclei were soaked in formalin, we divided them into cubes measuring 2.0 mm or 3.0 mm. We collected efficiency and chatter data for 30-degree bent 19 G, 20 G, and 21 G tips with a continuous torsional US system; and for straight 19 G, 20 G, and 21 G tips with a micropulse longitudinal US system. Results: The average time needed for removal was always higher for the 3.0 mm lens cube than for the 2.0 mm lens cube. Statistically significant differences were observed between the 19 G and 21 G tips with micropulse longitudinal US using a 2.0 mm cube and a 3.0 mm cube, and with continuous transversal US using a 2.0 mm lens cube and a 3.0 mm cube. We did not observe significant differences between 19 G and 20 G tips with either cube size in either US system. However, we noted identical trends for both cube sizes with both US approaches; 19 G tips performed better than 20 G and 21 G tips. Conclusion: Regardless of the lens size, 19 G needles were the most efficient, and had both the fewest outliers and the smallest standard deviations.
Evaluation and Comparison of MRI Findings in Children with Global Developmental Delay and Isolated Neurodevelopmental Delay: A Cross-sectional Study

Background and objectives: Neurodevelopmental delay (NDD) is a chronic neurologic problem that adversely affects the quality of life of affected individuals. The aim of this study was to evaluate diagnostic efficacy of MRI for children with NDD by comparing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings of patients with global developmental delay (GDD) and isolated NDD. Methods: A cross-sectional study was designed to enroll all patients with static developmental delay who had been referred to outpatient neurology clinic at Bahrami hospital (Tehran, Iran) between February 2012 and February 2013. The Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development 4th edition, Denver Developmental Screening test, and a self-made questionnaire were used to detect GDD, isolated NDD, and record all necessary information of neurologic examination. Brain MRI was performed based on the guidelines for the selected patients. All abnormal MRI findings were identified and confirmed by a neuro-radiologist. Results: Overall, 140 patients with developmental delay were enrolled in the study. The prevalence of both GDD and isolated NDD was 50%. In addition, abnormal associated neurological symptoms were present in 67.9% of patients. Abnormal MRI findings were significantly more common among patients with GDD compare to patients with isolated NDD (P<0.001). However, positive MRI findings were more common among patients with isolated motor NDD (P=0.007). Microcephaly was the most common abnormal neurologic finding in patients with GDD (P=0.04). Movement disorders were also more frequently seen in patients with GDD than in patietns with isolated NDD (P=0.03). Conclusion: Based on the findings, brain MRI can be considered as a suitable diagnostic modality for GDD but not isolated NDD.
Physical modelling of multiple-input multiple-output antennas and channels by means of the spherical vector wave expansion

The authors propose a new physically motivated model that allows the study of the interaction between the antennas and the propagation channel for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The key tools employed in the model are the expansion coefficients of the electromagnetic field in spherical vector waves and the scattering matrix representation of the properties of the antenna. The authors derive the expansion of the MIMO channel matrix, H , in spherical vector wave modes of the electromagnetic field of the antennas as well as the propagation channel. The authors also introduce the channel scattering dyadic, C, with a corresponding correlation model for co-polarised and cross-polarised elements and introduce the concept of mode-to-mode channel mapping, the M -matrix, between the receive and transmit antenna modes. The M -matrix maps the modes excited by the transmitting antenna to the modes exciting the receive antennas and vice versa. The covariance statistics of this M -matrix are expressed as a function of the double-directional power-angular spectrum (PAS) of co-polarised and cross-polarised components of the electromagnetic field. Their approach aims at gaining insights into the physics governing the interaction between antennas and channels and it is useful for studying the performance of different antenna designs in a specified propagation channel as well as for modelling the propagation channel. It can furthermore be used to quantify the optimal properties of antennas in a given propagation channel. The authors illustrate the developed methodology by analysing the interaction of a 2 × 2 system of slant polarised half-wavelength dipole antennas with some basic propagation channel models.