Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Commentary: Bioceramics and Scaffolds: A Winning Combination for Tissue Engineering

We read with interest the review published by Baino et al. (2015) about bioceramics and scaffolds. We would like to add some information as we produce a porous alumina ceramic (CERAMIL ®) which present almost all the criteria that characterize an ideal scaffold as presented in table 1 of the article. Converse to the assertion that porous alumina is only used in the fabrication of orbital implants, our ceramic is widely implanted as vertebra cages and gap filling during opening wedge high tibial osteotomy. It has been recently implanted for the replacement of a tumor sternum. The ceramic used is an alumina porous one processed thanks to a patented process [Patent FR2823674 (2006)]. Our technic seems to be in accordance to every point listed by the authors: Geometry: several shapes are designed such as cubes, roof tiles, cylinders, trapezoidal parallelepi-ped, spheres, and complex one such as the sternum with holes for stitching. 3D complex shapes can be designed and small bones can easily be done (Figure 1). Bioactivity: the porous characteristic (see below) allows a rapid attachment of osteoblasts to the ceramic, and its integration has been studied by histopathology showing in-growth bone cell in pores. This characteristic leads to long-term bonding between ceramic and surrounding bone. Biocompatibility: more than 5,000 implantations have been performed with vertebra cages, and the long-term follow-up does not show any case of local or systemic toxic effect. Studies are ongoing to analyze activity of bone cell in contact with the ceramic. Furthermore, alumina ceramic are classified as inert with no interaction with the surrounding tissues (Patel and Gohil, 2012; Baino et al., 2015). Chemical and biological stability: as said by the authors, alumina has a very good bioinertness and good long-term mechanical properties without degradation (Baino et al., 2015). Porous structure: with the technic used to fabricate our ceramic, the size of the interconnected pores is ranging from 100 to 900 μm with a vast majority of pore of about 600 to 900 μm. Moreover, all the pores are interconnected, without dead-end. This structure allows colonization with bone cells and thus the stability of the ceramic in the bone (Bignon et al., 2003; Hing, 2005; Lew et al., 2012). Moreover, pore's size ranging from 600 to 1,250 μm seems to be the ones that allow the best colonization by bone cells (Bignon et al., 2003). Mechanical competence: the ceramic possess a mechanical compressive resistance …
Childhood asthma and fruit consumption

The present authors investigated whether wheezing is less common in children who consume more apples and other fruits. A population-based survey of 2,640 primary school children aged 5–10 yrs was carried out in Greenwich (South London, UK). Information about asthma symptoms and fruit consumption was obtained by means of a questionnaire. After controlling for potential confounding variables, eating bananas at least once a day (compared with less than once a month) was negatively associated with current wheeze (odds ratio 0.66; 95% confidence interval 0.44–1.00) and ever wheeze (0.69 (0.50–0.95)), but not with ever asthma (0.80 (0.56–1.14)). Drinking apple juice from concentrate at least once a day (compared with less than once a month) was also negatively associated with current wheeze (0.53 (0.34–0.83)), weakly associated with ever wheeze (0.74 (-0.54–1.02)), but not associated with ever asthma. Consumption of apples, other fruits and orange juice was not significantly associated with asthma symptoms. No association was found between eating fresh apples and asthma symptoms in the study population, but some evidence was found to suggest that a higher consumption of apple juice from concentrate and bananas may protect against wheezing in children.
Representation, Segmentation and Matching of 3D Visual Shapes using Graph Laplacian and Heat-Kernel. (Représentation, Segmentation et Appariement de Formes Visuelles 3D Utilisant le Laplacient et le Noyau de la Chaleur)

3D shape analysis is an extremely active research topic in both computer graphics and computer vision. In computer vision, 3D shape acquisition and modeling are generally the result of complex data processing and data analysis methods. There are many practical situations where a visual shape is modeled by a point cloud observed with a variety of 2D and 3D sensors. Unlike the graphical data, the sensory data are not, in the general case, uniformly distributed across the surfaces of the observed objects and they are often corrupted by sensor noise, outliers, surface properties (scattering, specularities, color, etc.), self occlusions, varying lighting conditions. Moreover, the same object that is observed by different sensors, from slightly different viewpoints, or at different time instances may yield completely different point distributions, noise levels and, most notably, topological differences, e.g., merging of hands. In this thesis we outline single and multi-scale representation of articulated 3D shapes and devise new shape analysis methods, keeping in mind the challenges posed by visual shape data. In particular, we discuss in detail the heat diffusion framework for multi-scale shape representation and propose solutions for shape segmentation and dense shape registration using the spectral graph methods and various other machine learning algorithms, namely, the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and the Expectation Maximization (EM). We first introduce the mathematical background on differential geometry and graph isomorphism followed by the introduction of pose-invariant spectral embedding representation of 3D articulated shapes. Next we present a novel unsupervised method for visual shape segmentation by analyzing the Laplacian eigenvectors. We then outline a semi-supervised solution for shape segmentation based upon a new learn, align and transfer paradigm. Next we extend the shape representation to a multi-scale setup by outlining the heat-kernel framework. Finally, we present a topologically-robust dense shape matching method using the multi-scale heat kernel representation and conclude with a detailed discussion and future direction of work.
Chip-interleaved WCDMA with parallel-interference-cancellation receiver in multipath Rayleigh fading channels

Multiple access interference (MAI) is a major limiting factor of DS-CDMA system capacity. Parallel interference cancellation (PIC) is an effective means to mitigate MAI. However, if the initial decisions on which the PIC is based have high error probabilities, then PIC cannot perform well. To improve the performance of PIC, we propose chip-interleaving to provide intra-bit diversity. Then the initial decisions can be more accurate so as to enhance the PIC's performance. We design a chip-interleaving scheme based on some 3GPP WCDMA system features, such as the use of the Q-branch to transmit control bits and the I-branch to transmit data bits in a QPSK-like modulation scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed chip-interleaved WCDMA (CI-WCDMA) transmission can have significant performance advantage compared to simple WCDMA in transmission over fading multipath channels with MAI.
Evaluation of human vision models for predicting human observer performance

We demonstrate that human-vision-model-based image quality metrics not only correlate strongly with subjective evaluations of image quality but also with human observer performance on visual recognition tasks. By varying amorphous silicon image system design parameters, the performance of human observers in target identification using the resulting test images was measured, and compared with the target weighted just-noticeable-difference produced by a human vision model applied to the same set of images. The detectability of model observer with the human observer was highly correlated for a wide range of image system design parameters. These results demonstrate that the human vision model can be used to produce human observer performance optimized imaging systems without the need for extensive human trials. The human vision based tumor detectors represent a generalization of channelized Hotelling models to non-linear, perceptually based models.
Statistical Machine Transliteration with Multi-to-Multi Joint Source Channel Model

This paper describes DFKI’s participation in the NEWS2011 shared task on machine transliteration. Our primary system participated in the evaluation for English-Chinese and Chinese-English language pairs. We extended the joint sourcechannel model on the transliteration task into a multi-to-multi joint source-channel model, which allows alignments between substrings of arbitrary lengths in both source and target strings. When the model is integrated into a modified phrasebased statistical machine translation system, around 20% of improvement is observed. The primary system achieved 0.320 on English-Chinese and 0.133 on Chinese-English in terms of top-1 accuracy.
Neuroimaging Findings in Dementia with Lewy Body: A Review

1.1 Dementia with Lewy bodies: An overview Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the core clinical features of fluctuating consciousness, visual hallucinations and parkinsonism. The term DLB and the clinical criteria were first introduced and proposed by Mc Keith and colleagues in 1996 during the First International Workshop of the Consortium on Dementia with Lewy Bodies (McKeith et al., 1996) and were revised in 2005 to improve the sensitivity for diagnosis (McKeith et al., 2005). Interestingly, in these revised criteria, imaging with Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) or Positron Emission Tomography (PET) played an important role for the first time in the clinical diagnostic criteria of a dementia and was included as a suggestive feature supporting the diagnosis. After Alzheimer's disease (AD), DLB is now considered the second most common type of degenerative dementia in elderly people (Aarsland et al., 2008; McKeith et al., 2004) observed in 15 to 25% of autopsy series (Heidebrink, 2002; McKeith et al., 1996; Perry et al., 1990). These percentages are consistent with the few available epidemiological populationbased studies (de Silva et al., 2003; Herrera et al., 2002; Rahkonen et al., 2003; Stevens et al., 2002; Yamada et al., 2001; Yamada et al., 2002), which have reported the prevalence of DLB ranging from 0 to 30.5% of all dementia cases in individuals older than 65 years and from 0 to 5% in the general population (Zaccai et al., 2005). However, DLB is a regularly misdiagnosed clinical condition, with autopsy reports indicating a higher frequency than that detected in clinical settings (Farina et al., 2009; Mollenhauer et al., 2010). The pathological background of DLB has been a matter of controversy and is a complex issue (see Fig. 1). The core neuropathological finding is the presence of α-synuclein aggregates which form neuronal inclusions called Lewy bodies (LBs). According to the consensus pathological guidelines, based on a semiquantitative scoring of α-synuclein pathology (LBs density and distribution) in specific brain regions, DLB is distinguished into three different phenotypes (brainstem, transitional/limbic, and diffuse neocortical). Moreover, DLB pathological features are often associated to various degrees of AD pathology (i.e. limbic and neocortical spread of LB lesions with or without concomitant AD amyloid plaque pathology).
Throughput, bit-cost, network state information: Tradeoffs in cooperative CSMA protocols

In wireless local area networks, spatially varying channel conditions result in a severe performance discrepancy between different nodes in the uplink, depending on their position. Both throughput and energy expense are affected. Cooperative protocols were proposed to mitigate these discrepancies. However, additional network state information (NSI) from other nodes is needed to enable cooperation. The aim of this work is to assess how NSI and the degree of cooperation affect throughput and energy expenses. To this end, a CSMA protocol called fairMAC is defined, which allows to adjust the amount of NSI at the nodes and the degree of cooperation among the nodes in a distributed manner. By analyzing the data obtained by Monte Carlo simulations with varying protocol parameters for fairMAC, two fundamental tradeoffs are identified: First, more cooperation leads to higher throughput, but also increases energy expenses. Second, using more than one helper increases throughput and decreases energy expenses, however, more NSI has to be acquired by the nodes in the network. The obtained insights are used to increase the lifetime of a network. While full cooperation shortens the lifetime compared to no cooperation at all, lifetime can be increased by over 25% with partial cooperation.
Promoting Citizenship Right through Street Law Projects

Citizens in any community who live in a particular area have (political, social and economic) rights in common that are determined by the way they play their parts in contribution to urban affairs. Citizen rights can be defined as a set of rights and responsibilities of the community versus their government. How these rights are exercised is determined by the international law. In this respect, the need is felt for the promotion and spreading of the citizenship culture, social capital and fulfillment of the advanced, progressive and well-developed community. The applied law education plan entitled ‘Street Law’ is an initiative within the framework of the program by collegiate law education Cliniques aiming at teaching law to the underprivileged and those who are ignorant of their rights and spreading law consciousness among the citizens. These rights are in direct association with the people’s rights in social, cultural and political terms and are written and taught in simple language. Education department can play a vital role in this process, and the training can be delivered directly at schools or universities or in an informal manner they can be given to the community through the mass media (radio, television, newspapers and promotional movies).
Change in trunk muscle activities with prone bridge exercise in patients with chronic low back pain

[Purpose] The aim of this study was to determine the effect of three different bridge exercises on internal oblique, external oblique, transverse abdominis, and erector spinae activities. [Subjects and Methods] Forty-five subjects with chronic low back pain participated in this study. The training outcome was evaluated with three different testing methods: supine bridge exercise, supine bridge on Swiss ball exercise, and prone bridge exercise. The activities of the transverse abdominis, internal oblique, external oblique, and erector spinae were measured using surface electromyography. [Results] There were significant differences in the internal oblique, external oblique, and erector spinae according to the three kinds of bridging exercises. The internal oblique, external oblique and transverse abdominis activities were highest in the prone bridge exercise, followed by those in the supine bridge on Swiss ball exercise, and supine bridge exercises. The activity of erector spine was highest in the supine bridge on Swiss ball exercise followed by the supine bridge exercise and prone bridge exercise. [Conclusion] These results suggest that prone bridge exercise is more effective than conventional supine bridge exercise and supine bridge on Swiss ball in increasing trunk muscle activity of chronic low back pain patients.
Distributed reinforcement learning for network intrusion response

The increasing adoption of technologies and the exponential growth of networks has made the area of information technology an integral part of our lives, where network security plays a vital role. One of the most serious threats in the current Internet is posed by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which target the availability of the victim system. Such an attack is designed to exhaust a server's resources or congest a network's infrastructure, and therefore renders the victim incapable of providing services to its legitimate users or customers. To tackle the distributed nature of these attacks, a distributed and coordinated defence mechanism is necessary, where many defensive nodes, across different locations cooperate in order to stop or reduce the flood. This thesis investigates the applicability of distributed reinforcement learning to intrusion response, specifically, DDoS response. We propose a novel approach to respond to DDoS attacks called Multiagent Router Throttling. Multiagent Router Throttling provides an agent-based distributed response to the DDoS problem, where multiple reinforcement learning agents are installed on a set of routers and learn to rate-limit or throttle traffic towards a victim server. One of the novel characteristics of the proposed approach is that it has a decentralised architecture and provides a decentralised coordinated response to the DDoS problem, thus being resilient to the attacks themselves. Scalability constitutes a critical aspect of a defence system since a non-scalable mechanism will never be considered, let alone adopted, for wide deployment by a company or organisation. We propose Coordinated Team Learning (CTL) which is a novel design to the original Multiagent Router Throttling approach based on the divide-and-conquer paradigm, that uses task decomposition and coordinated team rewards. To better scale-up CTL is combined with a form of reward shaping. The scalability of the proposed system is successfully demonstrated in experiments involving up to 1000 reinforcement learning agents. The significant improvements on scalability and learning speed lay the foundations for a potential real-world deployment.
Guided mode propagation in tunnels with non-circular cross section

We have presented a perturbation analysis for evaluating the characteristics of the dominant modes in uniform tunnels with cross sections that deviate from the circular shape. So, simple forms are thus obtained for the propagation parameters of the modes in these tunnels. The compact FDTD numerical method is used to assess the degree of accuracy of the proposed perturbation analysis.
FPGA Based Vibration Control of a Mass Varying Two-Degree of Freedom System

Abstract Controlling of vibration in any system is very challenging problem. In the present work design, fabrication and testing of a variable mass 2-DoF system was presented. The system has been designed to be used as tool to demonstrate the capability of mass variable tuned vibration damper for wide frequency application. All valves and pumps were controlled by a cRIO with onboard FPGA. cRIO with FPGA enable the designer to implement different control algorithms that can be used for real time wide spectrum vibration control. LabVIEW with real time suite was used for algorithm implementation and device control. To avoid sloshing in tanks at different water height a floating roof was used. Its effect on damping was also studied.
The cultural negotiations of Korean immigrant youth

The authors investigated the process of cultural adjustment among 13 Korean immigrant youths using consensual qualitative research (C. E. Hill, B. J. Thompson, & E. N. Williams, 1997). Results indicate that Korean youth are expected to negotiate and shift their identities to meet differing expectations across various interpersonal contexts. Participants also report struggling to balance “American” and “Korean” cultural values and norms and to use social support networks, such as family and friends, to deal with the stress of acculturation.
A Test of Fitts' Law with Moving Targets

Subjects used either a position or a velocity control system to capture stationary and moving targets. Fitts' Index of Difficulty was found to be a good predictor of capture time for the rate system. However, for the position control system, the Fitts measure failed to predict accurately the capture time for moving targets. An alternate Index of Difficulty measure is proposed which explicitly incorporates a velocity factor and which predicts the overall pattern of capture times for both systems with greater accuracy than Fitts' Index of Difficulty.
Implicit phoneme manipulation for the treatment of apraxia of speech and co‐occurring aphasia

Background: Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a disorder of expressive speech attributed to an impairment at the motor planning and programming phases of speech production. AOS is treated in different ways but the articulatory kinematic approach is usually followed. The intervention described in this study introduces a new approach toward treatment of AOS with aphasia through the use of implicit manipulation of phonemes via rhyming, deletion and alliteration tasks. Theoretical models propose that during lexical retrieval, associated areas responsible for motor planning and the preparation of the utterance are activated. In a similar way, our tasks require a phoneme manipulation that is hypothesised to activate motor planning. The repeated implicit practice of retrieving and internally monitoring sounds in various phonetic contexts may improve the efficiency of the transition between phonological plans and the initial phase of motor planning and the monitoring of that plan. Therefore, if AOS is due to a dysfunction of motor planning, an implicit intervention targeting this phase may improve speech production without the need for overt practice. Methods and Procedures: This single‐subject multiple baseline intervention used implicit phoneme manipulation tasks in a subject with AOS and mild aphasia. The therapist‐designed computerised program required the subject to perform the implicit practice of rhyming, deletion, and alliteration of phonemes in three sound classes: /ʃ/, /ʤ/, and /s/ clusters in various phonetic contexts. Stimuli were presented on computerised templates requiring the subject to select the target among 3 foils. No overt speech was required however probe word repetitions were necessary to monitor treatment effects. Outcomes and Results: The effect sizes for the trained words were: /ʃ/ probes d = 4.46, /ʤ/ probes d = 6.02, and /s/ clusters d = 2.54 which represents a small to medium effect for /ʃ/ and /ʤ/. T‐MAC results of 59/87 (68%) at pre‐testing improved to 75/87 (87%) at post‐test (z = 3.08, binomial p < .01, two‐tailed) which suggest generalisation to non‐treatment words. Patterns of change in three probe words over the course of treatment suggest an improvement in speech production. Distortions, disturbed prosody and phonological errors were resolved in these probes by the maintenance session as judged by 5 SLPs. Conclusions: We conclude that in this participant (1) implicit phoneme manipulation training improved overt speech production; (2) accuracy of trained words, specifically a reduction in sound distortions, phonological errors and improved prosody, were the result of this treatment; and (3) a significant generalisation to non‐treatment words was the result of the intervention.
Social-Psychological Processes That Perpetuate Racial Segregation

A few diverse studies show that racial segregation tends to be perpetuated over stages of the life cycle and across institutional settings (Braddock, 1980; Braddock and McPartland, 1982; Crain, 1970; McPartland and Crain, 1980; McPartland and Braddock, 1981; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1967: App. C5). Blacks who grow up in a largely segregated environment are more likely to lead their adult lives in segregated situations. And, at any given age, Blacks who are segregated in one institutional sphere-be it in education, residential location, employment, or informal social contacts-are also likely to have mostly segregated experiences in other institutional environments.