Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimization/simulation-based framework for the evaluation of supply chain management policies in the forest product industry

This work describes a framework for the elaboration and evaluation of management policies for production and transportation supply chains in the forest product industry. The approach deals with the issue of coordination between the tactical and operational decision levels. First, we introduce LogiLab, a software system allowing to model the network and to optimize product flows in the supply chain. We than show how one can use this tactical aggregated plan to identify management policies that will guide day to day operations at the operational level. Finally, a discrete event simulation model allows assessing with more details what would be the impact of implementing these policies at the operational/execution level.
MiR-30a-3p Negatively Regulates BAFF Synthesis in Systemic Sclerosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis Fibroblasts

We evaluated micro (mi) RNA-mediated regulation of BAFF expression in fibroblasts using two concomitant models: (i) synovial fibroblasts (FLS) isolated from healthy controls (N) or Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) patients; (ii) human dermal fibroblasts (HDF) isolated from healthy controls (N) or Systemic Sclerosis (SSc) patients. Using RT-qPCR and ELISA, we first showed that SScHDF synthesized and released BAFF in response to Poly(I:C) or IFN-γ treatment, as previously observed in RAFLS, whereas NHDF released BAFF preferentially in response to IFN-γ. Next, we demonstrated that miR-30a-3p expression was down regulated in RAFLS and SScHDF stimulated with Poly(I:C) or IFN-γ. Moreover, we demonstrated that transfecting miR-30a-3p mimic in Poly(I:C)- and IFN-γ-activated RAFLS and SScHDF showed a strong decrease on BAFF synthesis and release and thus B cells survival in our model. Interestingly, FLS and HDF isolated from healthy subjects express higher levels of miR-30a-3p and lower levels of BAFF than RAFLS and SScHDF. Transfection of miR-30a-3p antisense in Poly(I:C)- and IFN-γ-activated NFLS and NHDF upregulated BAFF secretion, confirming that this microRNA is a basal repressors of BAFF expression in cells from healthy donors. Our data suggest a critical role of miR-30a-3p in the regulation of BAFF expression, which could have a major impact in the regulation of the autoimmune responses occurring in RA and SSc.
A Bayesian Network-based approach for discovering oral cancer candidate biomarkers

Oral cancer can arise in the head and neck region. Due to the aggressive nature of the disease, which often leads to poor prognosis, Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC) constitutes the 8th most common neoplasms in humans. In the present work we formulate gene interaction network from oral cancer genomic data using Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs). Four modules were extracted after applying a clustering technique to the network. We consequently explore them by applying topological and functional analysis methods in order to identify significant network nodes. Our analysis revealed that these important nodes may correspond to candidate biomarkers of the disease.
Analyses of High Grade Strength Steel Bars in the Design of a Five-Storey Reinforced Concrete Structure with Comparison of Energy Consumption and CO2 Emission

Energy consumption and CO2 emissions in buildings is becoming an increasingly important issue. Steel is a major building material with high energy cost. In a reinforced concrete (RC) structure, it accounts for the maximum energy consumption. There is a need to quantify the steel amount in RC for various situations so that reduction or optimization in steel usage can be analyzed. In this paper two different calculations (Calculation-I and Calculation-II) are conducted by using two groups of steel in designing beams, columns and plates for a 20000 m2 five-storeyed frame RC structure. In Calculation-I, or Cal-I in abbreviation, the steel used for beams, columns and plates is HRB335, HRB400 and HPB235 respectively. In Calculation-II, or Cal-II in abbreviation, the steel used for beams, columns and plates is HRB400, HRB500 and CRB550 respectively. The strength of steel used in Cal-II is higher than that in Cal-I. The calculation is carried out by following the standardized concrete structural design code, and the steps involved in calculation are given in certain details as seen necessary. The corresponding energy for producing the steel used in beams, columns and plates is also computed and normalized on per square meter basis. The results show that Cal-II saves 101.76 tons of steel than Cal-I, or 5.09kg/m2, which means a saving of about 64.11 t of standard coal or 1.6×102 t CO2 for the whole structure, or 3.2 kg of standard coal or 7.98kg CO2 for per square meter.
Validation of SenseWear Armband and ActiHeart monitors for assessments of daily energy expenditure in free-living women with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

To provide individually adapted nutritional support to patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), objective and reliable methods must be used to assess patient energy requirements. The aim of this study was to validate the use of SenseWear Armband (SWA) and ActiHeart (AH) monitors for assessing total daily energy expenditure (TEE) and activity energy expenditure (AEE) and compare these techniques with the doubly labeled water (DLW) method in free‐living women with COPD. TEE and AEE were measured in 19 women with COPD for 14 days using SWAs with software version 5.1 (TEESWA5, AEESWA5) or 6.1 (TEESWA6, AEESWA6) and AH monitors (TEEAH, AEEAH), using DLW (TEEDLW) as the criterion method. The three methods were compared using intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and Bland–Altman analyses. The mean TEE did not significantly differ between the DLW and SWA5.1 methods (−21 ± 726 kJ/day; P = 0.9), but it did significantly differ between the DLW and SWA6.1 (709 ± 667 kJ/day) (P < 0.001) and the DLW and AH methods (709 ± 786 kJ/day) (P < 0.001). Strong agreement was observed between the DLW and TEESWA5 methods (ICC = 0.76; 95% CI 0.47–0.90), with moderate agreements between the DLW and TEESWA6 (ICC = 0.66; 95% CI 0.02–0.88) and the DLW and TEEAH methods (ICC = 0.61; 95% CI 0.05–0.85). Compared with the DLW method, the SWA5.1 underestimated AEE by 12% (P = 0.03), whereas the SWA6.1 and AH monitors underestimated AEE by 35% (P < 0.001). Bland–Altman plots revealed no systematic bias for TEE or AEE. The SWA5.1 can reliably assess TEE in women with COPD. However, the SWA6.1 and AH monitors underestimate TEE. The SWA and AH monitors underestimate AEE.
Towards Cognitive Robots: Building Hierarchical Task Representations of Manipulations from Human Demonstration

This paper deals with building up a knowledge base of manipulation tasks by extracting relevant knowledge from demonstrations of manipulation problems. Hereby the focus of the paper is on modeling and representing manipulation tasks enabling the system to reason and reorganize the gathered knowledge in terms of reusability, scalability and explainability of learned skills and tasks. The goal is to compare the newly acquired skill or task with already existing task knowledge and decide whether to add a new task representation or to expand the existing representation with an alternative. Furthermore, a constraint for the representation is that at execution time the built knowledge base can be integrated and used in a symbolic planner.
Granulysin expressed in a humanized mouse model induces apoptotic cell death and suppresses tumorigenicity

Granulysin (GNLY) is a cytolytic and proinflammatory protein expressed in activated human cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) and natural killer (NK) cells. Conventional mouse models cannot adequately address the triggering mechanism and immunopathological pathways in GNLY-associated diseases due to lack of the GNLY gene in the mouse genome. Therefore, we generated a humanized immune system (HIS) mouse model by transplanting human umbilical cord blood mononuclear cells into NOD.Cg-Prkdcscid Il2rgtm1Wjl/SzJ (NSG) mice after sublethally irradiation. We examined the GNLY expression and its effects on tumor growth using this system. Our HIS mice expressed human CD45+, CD4+, CD8+ and CD56+ cells in the peripheral blood and spleen. A high expression level of human Th1/Th2 and NK cytokines was detected, indicating the activation of both T and NK cells. Importantly, we found an elevated level of GNLY in the serum and it was produced by human CTLs and NK cells obtained from the peripheral blood mononuclear cells and spleen cells in the HIS mice. The serum level of GNLY was negatively correlated with the proliferation of transplanted tumor cells in HIS mice. Collectively, our findings strongly supported that HIS mouse as a valuable model for studying human cancer under an intact immune system and the role of GNLY in tumorigenesis.
Towards Automating Analysis of Large-Scale Honeynet Events Paper ID 343

Inspired by the work of Yegneswaran and colleagues on “Inter net situational awareness” [30], we investigate ways to ana lyze data captured byhoneynets —unused address blocks on which we deploy honeypot responders in order to elicit information a bout incoming probes—to understand the significance of large-sc ale “events” seen by the honeynet. In such events, an entire coll ction of remote hosts together probes the address space monit ored by the honeynet in some sort of coordinated fashion. Our goal is to develop methodologies by which sites receiving such prob es can infer information about the probing activity: does it reflec t deliberate scanning, or a misconfiguration? If deliberate scanni ng, was the site itself specifically targeted, or only incidentally probed as part of a larger, indiscriminant scan? What can our analysis tell us about the scanning strategies employed by the botnets that d ominate today’s attack landscape? Our analysis draws upon extensive honeynet data to explore the prevalence of different types of scanning, including pr operties such as trend, uniformity, coordination, and use of pregene rated “hit lists. ” In addition, we work towards extrapolating a sc anning event’s global scope as inferred from the limited local view of a honeynet. Cross-validating our inferences with data from DShield shows that our inferences exhibit promising accuracy.
A slight excess of large-scale power from moments of the peculiar velocity field

ABSTRACT The peculiar motions of galaxies can be used to infer the distribution of matter in theUniverse.It has recently been shown that measurementsof the peculiar velocityﬁeld indicatesan anomalously high bulk ﬂow of galaxies in our local volume. In this paper we ﬁnd theimplications of the high bulk ﬂow for the power spectrum of de nsity ﬂuctuations. We ﬁndthat analyzing only the dipole moment of the velocity ﬁeld yi elds an average power spectrumamplitude which is indeed much higher than the ΛCDM value. However, by also includingshear and octupole moments of the velocity ﬁeld, and margina lizing over possible values forthe growth rate, an average power spectrum amplitude which is consistent with ΛCDM isrecovered. We attempt to infer the shape of the matter power spectrum from moments of thevelocity ﬁeld, and ﬁnd a slight excess of power on scales ∼1h −1 Gpc.Key words: cosmology: large scale structure of the universe – cosmology: observation –cosmology: theory – galaxies: kinematics and dynamics – gal axies: statistics
A dynamic view as a complementary perspective

Theory building is a dynamic process. Theories develop and grow, they are dependent on initial conditions, social interactions, variation, and they are stable for some time only to move on to the next phase. They can develop gradually, but a non-linear pattern is more common. Most importantly, theories develop over time. Theories are typically based on shared cognitions and they are situated. Written descriptions by definition reflect versions of the theory that are outdated the moment they are in print, though some of the core assumptions may be more stable than other, more peripheral ones. All of this very much applies to the present discussion of our paper on a DST approach to SLA. Inevitably, we, and probably most of the commentators, will already have moved on in our thinking about DST and SLA by the time this comes into print. In particular with new approaches, we will see a great deal of variability: wild ideas flourish and the links between grand theoretical notions and empirical database to support them tend to be out of balance. That may be seen as a weakness, but it probably is an inevitable developmental stage in building a new theory, or, as in this case, the application from a theory developed in other fields to SLA.
Active Corners: Collaborative In-Car Interaction Design

We present active corners, a novel interaction approach for in-car collaboration that maps the spatial arrangement of a car with up to four people (i.e., driver, front seat passenger, and two rear seat passengers) to the form factor of a tablet (i.e., having 4 corners). We use this mental model to allow the driver and passengers to collaborate with each other. Interaction is done by dragging-and-dropping items into the according corners of individual tablets. We present the basic interaction design concept along with three application scenarios. In order to evaluate active corners, we have implemented a multiplayer card game that exploits the proposed interaction concept and fosters collaboration. We report on four field studies in which we evaluated different aspects of the active corners concept. Results show that the interaction approach is intuitive and provides a high usability even in driving conditions.
Detection of Fast Fiber Recruitment by Multiresolution Analysis of Surface Electromyograms

This paper suggests possibility for detecting recruitment of fast muscle fiber on increasing load tests by multiresolution analysis of surface electromyograms (sEMGs). Recruitment of the muscle fiber can be guessed from a graph of power ratio vs. % maximum voluntary contraction concerning the detail at each level, RPD(j). RPD(j)s are extracted parameters from multiresolution analysis of sEMGs. The sEMGs were recorded from the biceps brachii in five healthy males
Discriminative Log-Euclidean Feature Learning for Sparse Representation-Based Recognition of Faces from Videos

With the abundance of video data, the interest in more effective methods for recognizing faces from unconstrained videos has grown. State-of-the-art algorithms for describing an image set use descriptors that are either very high-dimensional and/or sensitive to outliers and image misalignment. In this paper, we represent image sets as dictionaries of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices that are more robust to local deformations and outliers. We then learn a tangent map for transforming the SPD matrix logarithms into a lower-dimensional Log-Euclidean space such that the transformed gallery atoms adhere to a more discriminative subspace structure. A query image set is then classified by first mapping its SPD descriptors into the computed Log-Euclidean tangent space and using the sparse representation over the tangent space to decide a label for the image set. Experiments on three public video datasets show that the proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art methods.
Linear Spreading Space-Time Block Codes: System Model and Optimization Criterion

We present a model of linear space-time block coded multiple input multiple output wireless systems for quasi-static frequency nonselective fading channels. The code is described by its set of spreading matrices. We give a condition on the spreading matrices in order not to degrade the mutual information compared to the uncoded case. The knowledge of the channel impulse response and the spreading matrices at the receiver defines the relationship between the received and transmitted symbol vectors via a positive semidefinite matrix R (k). We present a new criterion for optimizing linear space-time block codes based on the fact that all the entries of R (k) are sums of quadratic forms and that the intersubchannel interference is represented by the off-diagonal entries. This criterion aims at minimizing the peak value of the intersubchannel interference
Perceptive feedback for natural language control of robotic operations

A new planning and control scheme for natural language control of robotic operations using the perceptive feedback is presented. Different from the traditional open-loop natural language control, the scheme incorporates the high-level planning and low-level control of the robotic systems and makes the high-level planning become a closed-loop process such that it is able to handle some unexpected events in the robotics system and the environment. The experimental results on a natural language controlled mobile manipulator clearly demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.
An exact Laplace transform formulation for a point source above a ground surface

An exact analysis is given for a point source in air above a ground surface. By representing the plane‐wave reflection coefficient as the Laplace transform of an image source distribution, a well‐behaved image integral, instead of the usual Sommerfeld integral, is obtained. The approach is valid for both locally and extended reacting surfaces. For a locally reacting ground surface, the image integral is an especially simple, rapidly convergent integral. The integral for local reaction is investigated analytically for a number of limiting cases. The resulting analytic solutions are compared with analytic solutions obtained from more standard approaches. Finally, the image integral for local reaction is analyzed numerically, and an upper limit on the numerical integration is given. It is shown that with realistic values of ground impedance, the prescribed integration limit allows the image integral to be easily and accurately computed numerically.
Religiotherapy: A Panacea for Incorporating Religion and Spirituality in Counselling Relationship

For majority of individuals, religion and spirituality are very important issues and guides all of their decisions throughout their lives. However, most counselling psychologists find it difficult to provide counselling to clients who comes with issues they consider religiously and spiritually unethical. Such issues often require integration of religious and psychological resources as part of the counselling process. Due to the ethical issues and challenges facing counsellors with respect to their religion and spirituality and that of clients', a proactive approach is what is needed at this time. Therefore, religiotherapy stands out to bridge the gap that has overtime created a lot of incredible heartache to all concerned in the counselling profession. Religiotherapy integrates client's faith and psychology to assist the genuinely motivated client(s) willing and ready to resolve their worries. The skills and conditions for the practice of religiotherapy were examined in this article. The article also demonstrates how researches and intervention programmes that incorporates religious resources and psychological techniques in therapy to assist individual(s) serves as theoretical and empirical evidence on the effectiveness of religiotherapy. Religiotherapy make the counselling process meaningful, flexible and respectful of diverse spiritual cum religious backgrounds of clients.
Recruitment of Bacillus subtilis RecN to DNA Double-Strand Breaks in the Absence of DNA End Processing

ABSTRACT The recognition and processing of double-strand breaks (DSBs) to a 3′ single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) overhang structure in Bacillus subtilis is poorly understood. Mutations in addA and addB or null mutations in recJ (ΔrecJ), recQ (ΔrecQ), or recS (ΔrecS) genes, when present in otherwise-Rec+ cells, render cells moderately sensitive to the killing action of different DNA-damaging agents. Inactivation of a RecQ-like helicase (ΔrecQ or ΔrecS) in addAB cells showed an additive effect; however, when ΔrecJ was combined with addAB, a strong synergistic effect was observed with a survival rate similar to that of ΔrecA cells. RecF was nonepistatic with RecJ or AddAB. After induction of DSBs, RecN-yellow fluorescent protein (YFP) foci were formed in addAB ΔrecJ cells. AddAB and RecJ were required for the formation of a single RecN focus, because in their absence multiple RecN-YFP foci accumulated within the cells. Green fluorescent protein-RecA failed to form filamentous structures (termed threads) in addAB ΔrecJ cells. We propose that RecN is one of the first recombination proteins detected as a discrete focus in live cells in response to DSBs and that either AddAB or RecQ(S)-RecJ are required for the generation of a duplex with a 3′-ssDNA tail needed for filament formation of RecA.
Finding Structure in Unstructured Processes: The Case for Process Mining

Today there are many process mining techniques that allow for the automatic construction of process models based on event logs. Unlike synthesis techniques (e.g., based on regions), process mining aims at the discovery of models (e.g., Petri nets) from incomplete information (i.e., only example behavior is given). The more mature process mining techniques perform well on structured processes. However, most of the existing techniques fail miserably when confronted with unstructured processes. This paper attempts to "bring structure to the unstructured" by using an integrated combination of abstraction and clustering techniques. The ultimate goal is to present process models that are understandable by analysts and that lead to improved system/process redesigns.
The Instructional Effect of Feedback in Test-Like Events

Feedback is an essential construct for many theories of learning and instruction, and an understanding of the conditions for effective feedback should facilitate both theoretical development and instructional practice. In an early review of feedback effects in written instruction, Kulhavy (1977) proposed that feedback’s chief instructional significance is to correct errors. This error-correcting action was thought to be a function of presentation timing, response certainty, and whether students could merely copy answers from feedback without having to generate their own. The present meta-analysis reviewed 58 effect sizes from 40 reports. Feedback effects were found to vary with control for presearch availability, type of feedback, use of pretests, and type of instruction and could be quite large under optimal conditions. Mediated intentional feedback for retrieval and application of specific knowledge appears to stimulate the correction of erroneous responses in situations where its mindful (Salomon & Globerson, 1987) reception is encouraged.
IoT and CPS applications based on wearable devices. A case study: Monitoring of elderly and infirm patients

After briefly discussing the loT and Cyber physical device main features, the application of wearable devices was examined. The constrains of this class of application are in the greatest interest of the researchers and enterprises for the interested in many possible uses of it. The Apulia Region has issued a call for proposals for “Innonetwork sostegno alle attività di R&S per lo sviluppo di nuove tecnologie sostenibili, di nuovi prodotti e servizi” by requesting innovative projects in the field of medical monitoring. The paper focuses on the defining of some guidelines for a possible application of a wearable devices, with sensor and internet connections suitable for monitoring of elderly and infirm peoples also in the remote follow-up phase. The issue of monitoring long-term care patients introduces an array of technical challenges in designing systems and algorithms.