Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Editorial for the Special Issue on Business Development and Marketing in Construction

Business development and marketing are two important business functions. Business development is a concept that relates closely to strategy and is part of the business model. It is the function of growing a business through a range of activities from mergers and acquisitions, financial and performance management, and their associated revenue and profit streams. Business development includes marketing and sales as a distinct activity (Sørensen, 2012). Marketing and sales or ‘business development management’, the name given by practitioners, is an integral part of project-based firms or project businesses in general and hence for construction firms in particular. There are a number of important interfaces:
Features in Abstract and Concrete Syntax

The division of grammars into abstract and concrete syntax is universally used in compilers. In linguistics, Curry’s distinction between tectogrammar and phenogrammar is a similar idea. This architecture has become popular in recent years, exemplified by formalisms such as GF, ACG, and HOG. These formalisms give a perspective on language that is very different from the perspective in feature-based formalisms. The topic of this paper is how to “put the features back” into an abstract-syntax based formalism. After discussing a number of possibilities, we end up with the customary solution in GF, which uses records and record types and is thereby in many ways similar to typed feature structures. The viability of this approach is demonstrated by the GF Resource Grammar Library, which covers comprehensive fragments of 15 languages with a shared abstract syntax.
Consensus Recommendations for the Clinical Application of Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) in the Treatment of Depression.

OBJECTIVE To provide expert recommendations for the safe and effective application of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD). PARTICIPANTS Participants included a group of 17 expert clinicians and researchers with expertise in the clinical application of rTMS, representing both the National Network of Depression Centers (NNDC) rTMS Task Group and the American Psychiatric Association Council on Research (APA CoR) Task Force on Novel Biomarkers and Treatments. EVIDENCE The consensus statement is based on a review of extensive literature from 2 databases (OvidSP MEDLINE and PsycINFO) searched from 1990 through 2016. The search terms included variants of major depressive disorder and transcranial magnetic stimulation. The results were limited to articles written in English that focused on adult populations. Of the approximately 1,500 retrieved studies, a total of 118 publications were included in the consensus statement and were supplemented with expert opinion to achieve consensus recommendations on key issues surrounding the administration of rTMS for MDD in clinical practice settings. CONSENSUS PROCESS In cases in which the research evidence was equivocal or unclear, a consensus decision on how rTMS should be administered was reached by the authors of this article and is denoted in the article as "expert opinion. " CONCLUSIONS Multiple randomized controlled trials and published literature have supported the safety and efficacy of rTMS antidepressant therapy. These consensus recommendations, developed by the NNDC rTMS Task Group and APA CoR Task Force on Novel Biomarkers and Treatments, provide comprehensive information for the safe and effective clinical application of rTMS in the treatment of MDD.
Chapter 2 Diagnosing and Monitoring Seizures in the ICU : The Role of Continuous EEG for Detection and Management of Seizures in Critically Ill Patients

Abstract Recent advances in computer technology have made it possible to perform prolonged digital continuous video EEG monitoring of many critically ill patients simultaneously. Recent studies using continuous EEG monitoring (cEEG) have found that these patients, especially those with coma, acute brain injury, or prior clinical seizures, often have nonconvulsive seizures (NCSz), and that these may contribute to secondary brain injury. The majority of seizures in the critically ill are nonconvulsive and can only be identified with EEG recording. Rapidly improving quantitative EEG (qEEG) software speeds data review to allow screening of multiple prolonged recordings to detect NCSz and has the potential to provide continuous information about changes in brain function in real time at the bedside. Optimal sensitivity and specificity of qEEG tools are obtained with full electrode montages and careful maintenance of scalp electrodes. New electrode technologies, such as MRI-compatible electrodes, help reduce the burden on EEG technologists while limiting interruptions in recordings. In addition to detecting NCSz, cEEG can also be used for dynamic detection of other changes in brain function such as ischemia, and can be coupled with other modalities of monitoring brain physiology such as microdialysis, tissue oximetry, and intracranial electrophysiology. Together, these tools can allow early detection of brain at risk for injury and alert the physician to intervene before the damage becomes irreversible.
Data-driven and physical model-based designs of probabilistic spatial dictionary for online meeting diarization and adaptive beamforming

In this paper, we comparatively study alternative dictionary designs for recently proposed meeting diarization and adaptive beamforming based on a probabilistic spatial dictionary. This dictionary models the feature distribution for each possible direction of arrival (DOA) of speech signals and the feature distribution for background noise. The dictionary enables online DOA detection, which in turn enables online diarization. Here we describe data-driven and physical model-based designs of the dictionary. Experiments on a meeting dataset showed that a physical model-based dictionary gave a word error rate (WER) of 24.9 %, which is close to that for the best-performing data-driven dictionary (24.1%). Therefore, the former has a significant advantage over the latter that it allows us to bypass the cumbersome measurement of training data without much degrading the performance of the automatic speech recognition (ASR).
Securely Solving the Distributed Graph Coloring Problem

Combinatorial optimization is a fundamental problem found in many fields. In many real life situations, the constraints and the objective function forming the optimization problem are naturally distributed amongst different sites in some fashion. A typical approach for solving such problem is to collect all of this information together and centrally solve the problem. However, this requires all parties to completely share their information, which may lead to serious privacy issues. Thus, it is desirable to propose a privacy preserving technique that can securely solve specific combinatorial optimization problems. A further complicating factor is that combinatorial optimization problems are typically NP-hard, requiring approximation algorithms or heuristics to provide a practical solution. In this paper, we focus on a very well-known hard problem -- the distributed graph coloring problem, which has been utilized to model many real world problems in scheduling and resource allocation. We propose efficient protocols to securely solve such fundamental problem. We analyze the security of our approach and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Water-mediated intermolecular interactions in 1,2-O-cyclohexylidene-myo-inositol: a quantitative analysis.

The syntheses of new myo-inositol derivatives have received much attention due to their important biological activities. 1,2-O-Cyclohexylidene-myo-inositol is an important intermediate formed during the syntheses of certain myo-inositol derivatives. We report herein the crystal structure of 1,2-O-cyclohexylidene-myo-inositol dihydrate, C12H20O6·2H2O, which is an intermediate formed during the syntheses of myo-inositol phosphate derivatives, to demonstrate the participation of water molecules and hydroxy groups in the formation of several intermolecular O-H.O interactions, and to determine a low-energy conformation. The title myo-inositol derivative crystallizes with two water molecules in the asymmetric unit in the space group C2/c, with Z = 8. The water molecules facilitate the formation of an extensive O-H.O hydrogen-bonding network that assists in the formation of a dense crystal packing. Furthermore, geometrical optimization and frequency analysis was carried out using density functional theory (DFT) calculations with B3LYP hybrid functionals and 6-31G(d), 6-31G(d,p) and 6-311G(d,p) basis sets. The theoretical and experimental structures were found to be very similar, with only slight deviations. The intermolecular interactions were quantitatively analysed using Hirshfeld surface analysis and 2D (two-dimensional) fingerplot plots, and the total lattice energy was calculated.
Inference Based on Conditional Moment Inequalities

In this paper, we propose an instrumental variable approach to constructing confidence sets (CS's) for the true parameter in models defined by conditional moment inequalities/equalities. We show that by properly choosing instrument functions, one can transform conditional moment inequalities/equalities into unconditional ones without losing identification power. Based on the unconditional moment inequalities/equalities, we construct CS's by inverting Cramer�von Mises-type or Kolmogorov�Smirnov-type tests. Critical values are obtained using generalized moment selection (GMS) procedures. We show that the proposed CS's have correct uniform asymptotic coverage probabilities. New methods are required to establish these results because an infinite-dimensional nuisance parameter affects the asymptotic distributions. We show that the tests considered are consistent against all fixed alternatives and typically have power against n-1/2-local alternatives to some, but not all, sequences of distributions in the null hypothesis. Monte Carlo simulations for five different models show that the methods perform well in finite samples.
A study on pattern of antimicrobial resistance in clinical isolates of acinetobacter spp at a tertiary care hospital

Background and Objective: Acinetobacter has emerged as an important nosocomial pathogen,and can cause a wide spectrum of clinical infections in the ICU.In recent years the incidence of Acinetobacter infection is a great concern due to its ability to develop multiple resistance mechanisms against major antibiotic classes including cephalosporins, aminoglycosides, carbapenems, and quinolones.Hence this study was undertaken to determine the antibiotic resistant pattern of Acinetobacter isolates from clinical samples . Materials and Methods:A total of 63 isolates of Acinetobacter spp collected from various clinical samples during the six month period (January2014-June2014) were included in this study. Isolates were subjected to antibiotic susceptibility testing by Kirby Bauer disk diffusion method and the results were interpreted as per recommended by the CLSI.Results: Among 63 isolates studied,,47(74.6%) were identified as A.baumannii, 16 were A. lwoffii (25.4%). Urine was the most common source of Acinetobacter (36.51%) followed by respiratory specimens(26.98%). About 39(61.90 %) isolates were found to be multidrug resistant by disc diffusion method.The most active drug against MDR Acinetobacter was found to be Polymyxin B (93.65%). Conclusion:To prevent the occurrence and transmission of MDR Acinetobacter in the ICU, antibiotic control strategies and infection control measures are essential
Fusion of intraoperative force sensoring, surface reconstruction and biomechanical modeling

Minimally invasive surgery is medically complex and can heavily benefit from computer assistance. One way to help the surgeon is to integrate preoperative planning data into the surgical workflow. This information can be represented as a customized preoperative model of the surgical site. To use it intraoperatively, it has to be updated during the intervention due to the constantly changing environment. Hence, intraoperative sensor data has to be acquired and registered with the preoperative model. Haptic information which could complement the visual sensor data is still not established. In addition, biomechanical modeling of the surgical site can help in reflecting the changes which cannot be captured by intraoperative sensors. We present a setting where a force sensor is integrated into a laparoscopic instrument. In a test scenario using a silicone liver phantom, we register the measured forces with a reconstructed surface model from stereo endoscopic images and a finite element model. The endoscope, the instrument and the liver phantom are tracked with a Polaris optical tracking system. By fusing this information, we can transfer the deformation onto the finite element model. The purpose of this setting is to demonstrate the principles needed and the methods developed for intraoperative sensor data fusion. One emphasis lies on the calibration of the force sensor with the instrument and first experiments with soft tissue. We also present our solution and first results concerning the integration of the force sensor as well as accuracy to the fusion of force measurements, surface reconstruction and biomechanical modeling.
A Unified View of TD Algorithms; Introducing Full-Gradient TD and Equi-Gradient Descent TD

This paper addresses the issue of policy evaluation in Markov Decision Processes, using linear function approximation. It provides a unified view of algorithms such as TD(lambda), LSTD(lambda), iLSTD, residual-gradient TD. It is asserted that they all consist in minimizing a gradient function and differ by the form of this function and their means of minimizing it. Two new schemes are introduced in that framework: Full-gradient TD which uses a generalization of the principle introduced in iLSTD, and EGD TD, which reduces the gradient by successive equi-gradient descents. These three algorithms form a new intermediate family with the interesting property of making much better use of the samples than TD while keeping a gradient descent scheme, which is useful for complexity issues and optimistic policy iteration.
Determination of Toxic Metals in Indian Smokeless Tobacco Products

This study targets the lesser-known ingredients of smokeless tobacco products, i.e., the toxic metals, in Indian brands. The metals selected in the study included lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd), arsenic (As), copper (Cu), mercury (Hg), and selenium (Se). The differential pulse anodic stripping voltammetry (DPASV) technique was used for estimating the metals Pb, Cd, and Cu; square wave voltammetry for As; and the cold vapor atomic absorption technique for Hg. The resulting levels of the metals were compared to the daily consumption of the smokeless tobacco products. It was observed that almost 30% of gutkha brand samples exceeded the permissible levels of metals Pb and Cu, when compared to the provisional tolerable intake limits determined by the FAO/WHO. The reliability of data was assured by analyzing standard reference materials.
FCRD Transmutation Fuels Handbook 2015

Transmutation of minor actinides such as Np, Am, and Cm in spent nuclear fuel is of international interest because of its potential for reducing the long-term health and safety hazards caused by the radioactivity of the spent fuel. One important approach to transmutation (currently being pursued by the DOE Fuel Cycle Research & Development Advanced Fuels Campaign) involves incorporating the minor actinides into U-Pu-Zr alloys, which can be used as fuel in fast reactors. It is, therefore, important to understand the properties of U-Pu-Zr alloys, both with and without minor actinide additions. In addition to requiring extensive safety precautions, alloys containing U and Pu are difficult to study for numerous reasons, including their complex phase transformations, characteristically sluggish phase-transformation kinetics, tendency to produce experimental results that vary depending on the histories of individual samples, and sensitivity to contaminants such as oxygen in concentrations below a hundred parts per million. Many of the experimental measurements were made before 1980, and the level of documentation for experimental methods and results varies widely. It is, therefore, not surprising that little is known with certainty about U-Pu-Zr alloys, and that general acceptance of results sometimes indicates that there is only a single measurement formore » a particular property. This handbook summarizes currently available information about U, Pu, Zr, and alloys of two or three of these elements. It contains information about phase diagrams and related information (including phases and phase transformations); heat capacity, entropy, and enthalpy; thermal expansion; and thermal conductivity and diffusivity. In addition to presenting information about materials properties, it attempts to provide information about how well the property is known and how much variation exists between measurements. Although the handbook includes some references to publications about modeling, its primary focus is experimental data. Most of the data has been published elsewhere (although scattered throughout numerous references, some quite obscure); however, some data is presented here for the first time. « less
Phylogenetic patterns of trait and trait plasticity evolution: Insights from amphibian embryos

Environmental variation favors the evolution of phenotypic plasticity. For many species, we understand the costs and benefits of different phenotypes, but we lack a broad understanding of how plastic traits evolve across large clades. Using identical experiments conducted across North America, we examined prey responses to predator cues. We quantified five life‐history traits and the magnitude of their plasticity for 23 amphibian species/populations (spanning three families and five genera) when exposed to no cues, crushed‐egg cues, and predatory crayfish cues. Embryonic responses varied considerably among species and phylogenetic signal was common among the traits, whereas phylogenetic signal was rare for trait plasticities. Among trait‐evolution models, the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) model provided the best fit or was essentially tied with Brownian motion. Using the best fitting model, evolutionary rates for plasticities were higher than traits for three life‐history traits and lower for two. These data suggest that the evolution of life‐history traits in amphibian embryos is more constrained by a species’ position in the phylogeny than is the evolution of life history plasticities. The fact that an OU model of trait evolution was often a good fit to patterns of trait variation may indicate adaptive optima for traits and their plasticities.
Computational Tool for Fast in silico Evaluation of hERG K+ Channel Affinity

The development of a novel comprehensive approach for the prediction of hERG activity is herein presented. Software Phase has been used to derive a 3D-QSAR model, employing as alignment rule a common pharmacophore built on a subset of 22 highly active compounds (threshold Ki: 50 nM) against hERG K+ channel. Five features comprised the pharmacophore: two aromatic rings (R1 and R2), one hydrogen-bond acceptor (A), one hydrophobic site (H), and one positive ionizable function (P). The sequential 3D-QSAR model developed with a set of 421 compounds (randomly divided in training and test set) yielded a test set (Q2) = 0.802 and proved to be predictive with respect to an external test set of 309 compounds that were not used to generate the model (rext_ts2 = 0.860). Furthermore, the model was submitted to an in silico validation for assessing the reliability of the approach, by applying a decoys set, evaluating the Güner and Henry score (GH) and the Enrichment Factor (EF), and by using the ROC curve analysis. The outcome demonstrated the high predictive power of the inclusive 3D-QSAR model developed for the hERG K+ channel blockers, confirming the fundamental validity of the chosen approach for obtaining a fast proprietary cardiotoxicity predictive tool to be employed for rationally designing compounds with reduced hERG K+ channel activity at the early steps of the drug discovery trajectory.
Optimality Analysis of Sensor-Target Geometries in Passive Localization: Part 1 - Bearing-Only Localization

In this paper we characterize the relative sensor-target geometry for bearing-only localization in R2. We analyze the geometry in terms of the Cramer-Rao inequality and the corresponding Fisher information matrix, aiming to characterize and state explicit results in terms of the potential localization performance. In particular, a number of interesting results are rigorously derived which highlight erroneous assumptions often made in the existing literature.
On the Giant Component of Wireless Multihop Networks in the Presence of Shadowing

In this paper, we study transmission power to secure the connectivity of a network. Instead of requiring all nodes to be connected, we require that only a large fraction (e.g., 95%) be connected, which is called the giant component. We show that, with this slightly relaxed requirement on connectivity, significant energy savings can be achieved for a large-scale network. In particular, we assume that a total of n nodes are randomly independently uniformly distributed in a unit square in Rfr2, that each node has uniform transmission power, and that any two nodes are directly connected if and only if the power that was received by one node from the other node, as determined by the log-normal shadowing model, is larger than or equal to a given threshold. First, we derive an upper bound on the minimum transmission power at which the probability of having a giant component of order above qn for any fixed q isin (0, 1) tends to one as n rarr infin . Second, we derive a lower bound on the minimum transmission power at which the probability of having a connected network tends to one as n rarr infin. We then show that the ratio of the aforementioned transmission power that was required for a giant component to the transmission power that was required for a connected network tends to zero as n rarr infin. This result implies significant energy savings if we require that only most nodes (e.g., 95%) be connected rather than requiring all nodes to be connected. This result is also applicable for any other arbitrary channel model that satisfies certain intuitively reasonable conditions.