Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring Sentiment on Campus. A Twitter Sentiment Analysis on University Tweets

We report in this work the results of our analysis of accuracy of 5 sentiment analysis methods (TextBlob, VADER, logistic regression, support vector machine, CNN on encodings based on BERT tokenization,) for a dataset consisting of tweets from the academia domain, that we API-scraped for 32 universities during the year 2022. We show some results for the volume and sentiment polarity trends exhibited by this dataset. We connect peak and low sentiment averages to concrete events that explain the respective sentiment trend; this proves that observing the social media trends allows to detect real events that need attention and possible action.
Qualitative Model of the Causal Interactions between Phytoplankton, Zooplankton, and Environmental Factors in the Romanian Black Sea

In order to analyze how environmental factors affect planktonic organisms along the Romanian Black Sea coast, this study created semi-quantitative models of the causal relationships between phytoplankton, zooplankton, and physicochemical parameters by utilizing user-friendly modeling tools. Eleven years of time-series data (March–September 2008–2018) were used to investigate the relationships between phytoplankton, zooplankton, and environmental factors (such as temperature, salinity, and nutrients). Variables such as marine reporting units and phytoplankton species and classes were used to identify developmental patterns, utilizing the Mental Modeler platform to consider interactions between the physicochemical parameters and phytoplankton, phytoplankton and zooplankton, and zooplankton and physicochemical parameters. Although the increase in the overall number of elements and linkages was uncertain in waters with variable salinity compared to marine ones, the semi-quantitative models created for the three marine reporting units along the Romanian Black Sea coast were comparable in terms of complexity. Across the typical and examined types of phytoplankton proliferation (normal, abundant, and blooms), the number of components and connections in the case of phytoplankton blooms substantially decreased as species- and growth-promoting variables increased.
A survey on techniques for improving the energy efficiency of large-scale distributed systems

The great amounts of energy consumed by large-scale computing and network systems, such as data centers and supercomputers, have been a major source of concern in a society increasingly reliant on information technology. Trying to tackle this issue, the research community and industry have proposed myriad techniques to curb the energy consumed by IT systems. This article surveys techniques and solutions that aim to improve the energy efficiency of computing and network resources. It discusses methods to evaluate and model the energy consumed by these resources, and describes techniques that operate at a distributed system level, trying to improve aspects such as resource allocation, scheduling, and network traffic management. This work aims to review the state of the art on energy efficiency and to foster research on schemes to make network and computing resources more efficient.
SPINAL: scalable protein interaction network alignment

MOTIVATION Given protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks of a pair of species, a pairwise global alignment corresponds to a one-to-one mapping between their proteins. Based on the presupposition that such a mapping provides pairs of functionally orthologous proteins accurately, the results of the alignment may then be used in comparative systems biology problems such as function prediction/verification or construction of evolutionary relationships. RESULTS We show that the problem is NP-hard even for the case where the pair of networks are simply paths. We next provide a polynomial time heuristic algorithm, SPINAL, which consists of two main phases. In the first coarse-grained alignment phase, we construct all pairwise initial similarity scores based on pairwise local neighborhood matchings. Using the produced similarity scores, the fine-grained alignment phase produces the final one-to-one mapping by iteratively growing a locally improved solution subset. Both phases make use of the construction of neighborhood bipartite graphs and the contributors as a common primitive. We assess the performance of our algorithm on the PPI networks of yeast, fly, human and worm. We show that based on the accuracy measures used in relevant work, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, our algorithm does not suffer from scalability issues, as such accurate results are achieved in reasonable running times as compared with the benchmark algorithms. AVAILABILITY Supplementary Document, open source codes, useful scripts, all the experimental data and the results are freely available at http://code.google. com/p/spinal/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Roots of the European Cenozoic ecosystems: lizards from the Paleocene (~MP 5) of Walbeck in Germany

We studied at least part of Kuhnʼs original material of lizards from the Paleocene (~MP 5) of the Walbeck locality in Germany. The collection was considered to be lost but is consistently discussed in the literature due to its importance. We restudied the type material of aff. Parasauromalus paleocenicus and aff. Glyptosaurus walbeckensis described by Kuhn in 1940. The former was originally allocated to Iguania, the latter to Anguimorpha, though later on these identifications were questioned by several authors. We show such a classification of both cannot be upheld. P. paleocenicus resembles the morphology of lacertids showing their presence in Europe already around MP 5. We consider the name P. paleocenicus as a nomen dubium. The material of aff. G. walbeckensis was later suggested to belong to Lacertidae and also considered as a potential amphisbaenian. Although it differs from modern amphisbaenians, it shares features with one supposed polyodontobaenid – Camptognathosaurus parisiensis. The Walbeck form is identical to this species. Since the Walbeck taxon was described in 1940, the principle of priority makes Camptognathosaurus parisiensis a junior synonym of the species erected by Kuhn. We propose a new combined name for this form, Camptognathosaurus walbeckensis comb. nov. The specimen figured by Kuhn is currently lost, thus we designate a neotype from Walbeck. However, this taxon differs significantly from Polyodontobaena and new data doubt the attribution of Camptognathosaurus to Amphisbaenia. This taxon is tentatively assigned here to Lacertidae, as further confirmed by phylogenetic analyses. Material of Scincoidea is also described.
Management of Nontraumatic Spontaneous Renal Hemorrhage (Wünderlich Syndrome) through Robotic-Assisted Laparoscopic Nephrectomy: A Case Series

, and patients 2 and 3 had renal clear cell carcinoma. At the 9-month follow-up, renal function was good and no evidence of recurrence or metastasis has been detected. Conclusions: These cases have highlighted the importance of the clinical history and imaging findings in the diagnosis of Wünderlich syndrome, and show that rapid management can be achieved using robot-assisted laparoscopic nephrectomy. However, it is crucial to have a skilled surgical team and adequate preoperative preparation.
Edge-Triggered Three-Dimensional Object Detection Using a LiDAR Ring

Autonomous driving recognition technology that can quickly and accurately recognize even small objects must be developed in high-speed situations. This study proposes an object point extraction method using rule-based LiDAR ring data and edge triggers to increase both speed and performance. The LiDAR’s ring information is interpreted as a digital pulse to remove the ground, and object points are extracted by detecting discontinuous edges of the z value aligned with the ring ID and azimuth. A bounding box was simply created using DBSCAN and PCA to check recognition performance from the extracted object points. Verification of the results of removing the ground and extracting points through Ring Edge was conducted using SemanticKITTI and Waymo Open Dataset, and it was confirmed that both F1 scores were superior to RANSAC. In addition, extracting bounding boxes of objects also showed higher PDR index performance when verified in open datasets, virtual driving environments, and actual driving environments.
Scouting Logic: A Novel Memristor-Based Logic Design for Resistive Computing

Memristor technology is a promising alternative to CMOS due to its high integration density, near-zero standby power, and ability to implement novel resistive computing. One of the major limitations of these architectures is the limited endurance of memristor devices, especially when a logic gate requires multiple steps/switching to execute the logic operations. To alleviate the endurance requirement and improve the performance, we present a novel logic design style, called scouting logic that executes any logic gate by only reading the memristor devices and without changing their states. Hence, no impact on the memristors' endurance. The proposed design is implemented using two styles (current and voltage based). To illustrate the performance of scouting logic based designs, the area, delay, and power consumption are analyzed and compared with state-ofthe- art. The results show that scouting logic improves the delay and power consumption by at least a factor of 2.3, while having similar or less area overhead. Finally, we discuss the potential applications and challenges of scouting logic.
Authenticated Quality-of-Service Signaling for Virtual Networks

While virtual networks have been subjected to detailed analysis, prototypes are usually constructed and instantiated manually or by means of dedicated control protocols that mostly neglect security considerations. As the instantiation and maintenance of virtual networks requires virtual network operators to gain access to existing network resources, a proper sender authentication builds an important aspect for control protocols. In this work, we present a Virtual Link Setup Protocol (VLSP) that is designed as a modular extension to a standardized state-of-the-art signaling protocol suite. We use these signaling protocols to combine an authenticated and on-demand setup of virtual links with the establishment of Quality-of-Service guarantees in the underlying substrate. The solution presented in this paper is not limited to a specific set of virtualization techniques or tunneling mechanisms. We describe the design and implementation of VLSP and evaluate its signaling performance, as well as the overhead that is associated with the instantiation of the virtual links and the authenticity checks.
A Japanese translation of the Swedish Universities Scales of Personality

Background: The Swedish Universities Scales of Personality (SSP) is a personality measurement tool with a short test battery of high psychometric quality, previously not availiable in Japanese. Methods: We translated the SSP into Japanese and administered it to 103 Japanese nationals. For 11 of the 13 SSP scales in the Japanese version of the SSP (SSP-J11), the Cronbach’s alpha ranged from 0.50 to 0.82 with good internal scale reliability. Results: A principal factor analysis replicated the previous work by identifying the same three principal dimensions of Neuroticism, Aggression, and Extraversion factors. Conclusion: The resulting three-factor SSP-J11 shows acceptable reliability and should provide informative insights about personality traits in research and clinical practice in a Japanese context.
Feedback-based Scheduling for Back-end Databases in Shared Dynamic Content Server Clusters

This paper introduces a self-configuring architecture for scaling the database tier of dynamic content Web servers. We use a unified approach to load and fault management based on dynamic data replication and feedback-based scheduling. While replication provides scaling and high availability, feedback scheduling dynamically allocates tasks to commodity databases across workloads in response to peak loads or failure conditions thus providing quality of service. By augmenting the feedback loop with state awareness, we avoid oscillations in resource allocation. We investigate our transparent provisioning mechanisms in the database tier using the TPC-W e-commerce and the on-line auction Rubis benchmarks. We demonstrate that our techniques provide quality of service under load bursts and failure scenarios
Coercion-resistant electronic elections

We introduce a model for electronic election schemes that involves a more powerful adversary than previous work. In particular, we allow the adversary to demand of coerced voters that they vote in a particular manner, abstain from voting, or even disclose their secret keys. We define a scheme to be coercion-resistant if it is infeasible for the adversary to determine if a coerced voter complies with the demands.A first contribution of this paper is to describe and characterize a new and strengthened adversary for coercion in elections. (In doing so, we additionally present what we believe to be the first formal security definitions for electronic elections of any type.) A second contribution is to demonstrate a protocol that is secure against this adversary. While it is clear that a strengthening of attack models is of theoretical relevance, it is important to note that our results lie close to practicality. This is true both in that we model real-life threats (such as vote-buying and vote-canceling), and in that our proposed protocol combines a fair degree of efficiency with an unusual lack of structural complexity. Furthermore, previous schemes have required use of an untappable channel throughout. Ours only carries the much more practical requirement of an anonymous channel during the casting of ballots, and an untappable channel during registration (potentially using postal mail). This extended abstract is a heavily truncated version of the full paper available at http://eprint.iacr. org/2002/165.
Paléolithique final et Mésolithique dans le Bassin parisien et ses marges. Habitats, sociétés et environnements. Rapport 2016

We investigated the contribution of freshwater resources to the diet of seven Late Mesolithic hunter-gatherers (ca. 5300–7000 BC) from Northern France and Luxembourg using stable isotope ratios. In addition to the carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios (δC, δN), we explored the potential of the sulphur isotopic ratios (δS) to detect and quantify the proportion of protein derived from aquatic foodstuff. In only two sites, animal remains from an associated settlement were available and subsequently examined to decipher the isotopic differential between terrestrial and freshwater resources. The quantification of their relative contribution was simulated using a Bayesian mixing model. The measurements revealed a significant overlap in δC values between freshwater and terrestrial resources and a large range of δN values for each food category. The δS values of the aquatic and terrestrial animals were clearly distinct at the settlement in the Seine valley, while the results on fish from Belgium demonstrated a possible overlap in δS values between freshwater and terrestrial resources. Local freshwater ecosystem likely contributed to ca. 30–40 % of the protein in the diet of the individuals found in the Seine settlement. Out of this context, the isotopic signature and thus contribution of the available aquatic foods was difficult to assess. Another potential source of dietary protein is wild boar. Depending on the local context, collagen δS values may contribute to better assessment of the relative contribution of freshwater and terrestrial
Improving Predictions with User and Item Profiling

The value of Biased Matrix Factorization algorithms in recommender systems, based only on numeric ratings, has already been demonstrated. Improvements in predictions can be achieved adding more information, for example considering user generated textual reviews, although the lack of rules increases the level of difficulty in machine learning methodologies. The aim of the presented activity is to experiment the online Latent Dirichlet allocation to build user and item profiles in order to improve predictions obtained with a Biased Matrix Factorization algorithm. For the experimental analysis the Yelp data set was used, limited to the Restaurant category. Applying a 5-fold cross validation promising results were obtained in terms of Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE).
Haptic guidance of Light-Exoskeleton for arm-rehabilitation tasks

Fixed-Base Exoskeleton applications have increased rapidly in the last few years, evidently as part of promising rehabilitation robotic programs of the robotics worldwide community, where in particular Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) plays an important role in its design and control because they are tightly coupled to human-limbs. Exoskeletons embrace HRI as well as technological and theoretical challenges towards real and effective rehabilitation. In this realm, some questions arise, to name a few, what is the relationship between the exchanged energy between human and exoskeleton? How can we assess rehabilitation factors under HRI philosophy? This paper attempts to establish answers to these questions, which can be embodied into rehabilitation HRI using a Light-Exoskeleton. A compliant haptic guidance scheme for human arm subject to minimum-jerk-trajectories criterion is proposed. Preliminary experimental results provide further insight of a haptic guidance scheme taking into account decisive factors into the HRI such as human pose, haptic guidance control, reaching and tracking tasks, the complexity of the virtual environment, and muscles activity.
Coexistence under positive frequency dependence

Negative frequency dependence resulting from interspecific interactions is considered a driving force in allowing the coexistence of competitors. While interactions between species and genotypes can also result in positive frequency dependence, positive frequency dependence has usually been credited with hastening the extinction of rare types and is not thought to contribute to coexistence. In the present paper, we develop a stochastic cellular automata model that allows us to vary the scale of frequency dependence and the scale of dispersal. The results of this model indicate that positive frequency dependence will allow the coexistence of two species at a greater rate than would be expected from chance. This coexistence arises from the generation of banding patterns that will be stable over long time–periods. As a result, we found that positive frequency–dependent interactions over local spatial scales promote coexistence over neutral interactions. This result was robust to variation in boundary conditions within the simulation and to variation in levels of disturbance. Under all conditions, coexistence is enhanced as the strength of positive frequency–dependent interactions is increased.
Proteoform Analysis of the Human Olfactory System: A Window into Neurodegenerative Diseases

Background: Very little is known about the proteome of the human olfactory system and how diseases associated with olfactory dysfunctions can affect it. With this review, we try to summarize the existing literature on the use of this technique for a better understanding of the neurodegenerative disease process. Methods: We used the PubMed database and found different articles which were then selected independently by three authors. Results: We found 157 articles, of which, after careful selection, only 30 were analyzed in this review. We presented all the associations identified between the protein/pathway alterations neurodegenerative diseases and SARS-CoV-2 infection. Conclusions: We think that the proteome of the olfactory system through blood, saliva, and mucus analysis could be a new way to better understand, diagnose, and finally treat neurodegenerative diseases.
On feasibility of 5G-grade dedicated RF charging technology for wireless-powered wearables

For decades, wireless energy transfer and harvesting received focused attention in the research community, but with limited practical applications. Recently, with the development of fifth-generation (5G) mobile technology, the concept of dedicated radio-frequency (RF) charging promises to support the growing market of wearable devices. In this work we shed light on the potential of wireless RF power transfer by elaborating upon feasible system parameters and architecture, emphasizing the basic tradeoffs behind omni-directional and directional out-of-band energy transmission, providing system- level performance evaluation, and discussing open challenges on the way to sustainable wireless- powered wearables. The key aspects highlighted in this article include system operation choices, user mobility effects, impact of network and user densities, and regulatory issues. Ultimately, our research aims to facilitate the integration of wireless RF charging technology into the emerging 5G ecosystem.
Growth and Activation of Natural Killer Cells Ex Vivo from Children with Neuroblastoma for Adoptive Cell Therapy

Purpose: Adoptive transfer of natural killer (NK) cells combined with tumor-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAb) has therapeutic potential for malignancies. We determined if large numbers of activated NK (aNK) cells can be grown ex vivo from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) of children with high-risk neuroblastoma using artificial antigen-presenting cells (aAPC). Experimental Design: Irradiated K562-derived Clone 9.mbIL21 aAPC were cocultured with PBMC, and propagated NK cells were characterized with flow cytometry, cytotoxicity assays, Luminex multicytokine assays, and a nonobese diabetic/severe combined immunodeficient (NOD/SCID) mouse model of disseminated neuroblastoma. Results: Coculturing patient PBMC with aAPC for 14 days induced 2,363- ± 443-fold expansion of CD56+CD3−CD14− NK cells with 83% ± 3% purity (n = 10). Results were similar to PBMC from normal donors (n = 5). Expression of DNAM-1, NKG2D, FcγRIII/CD16, and CD56 increased 6- ± 3-, 10- ± 2-, 21- ± 20-, and 18- ± 3-fold, respectively, on day 14 compared with day 0, showing activation of NK cells. In vitro, aNK cells were highly cytotoxic against neuroblastoma cell lines and killing was enhanced with GD2-specific mAb ch14.18. When mediating cytotoxicity with ch14.18, release of TNF-α, granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor, IFN-γ, sCD40L, CCL2/MCP-1, CXCL9/MIG, and CXCL11/I-TAC by aNK cells increased 4-, 5-, 6-, 15-, 265-, 917-, and 363-fold (151–9,121 pg/mL), respectively, compared with aNK cells alone. Survival of NOD/SCID mice bearing disseminated neuroblastoma improved when treated with thawed and immediately intravenously infused cryopreserved aNK cells compared with untreated mice and was further improved when ch14.18 was added. Conclusion: Propagation of large numbers of aNK cells that maintain potent antineuroblastoma activities when cryopreserved supports clinical testing of adoptive cell therapy with ch14.18. Clin Cancer Res; 19(8); 2132–43. ©2013 AACR.