Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modulating Brain Connectivity by Simultaneous Dual-Mode Stimulation over Bilateral Primary Motor Cortices in Subacute Stroke Patients

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) or transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been used for the modulation of stroke patients' motor function. Recently, more challenging approaches have been studied. In this study, simultaneous stimulation using both rTMS and tDCS (dual-mode stimulation) over bilateral primary motor cortices (M1s) was investigated to compare its modulatory effects with single rTMS stimulation over the ipsilesional M1 in subacute stroke patients. Twenty-four patients participated; 12 participants were assigned to the dual-mode stimulation group while the other 12 participants were assigned to the rTMS-only group. We assessed each patient's motor function using the Fugl-Meyer assessment score and acquired their resting-state fMRI data at two times: prior to stimulation and 2 months after stimulation. Twelve healthy subjects were also recruited as the control group. The interhemispheric connectivity of the contralesional M1, interhemispheric connectivity between bilateral hemispheres, and global efficiency of the motor network noticeably increased in the dual-mode stimulation group compared to the rTMS-only group. Contrary to the dual-mode stimulation group, there was no significant change in the rTMS-only group. These data suggested that simultaneous dual-mode stimulation contributed to the recovery of interhemispheric interaction than rTMS only in subacute stroke patients. This trial is registered with NCT03279640.
Electroosmotic Flow Pump

Electroosmotic flow (EOF) pumping has been widely used to manipulate fluids such as liquid sample reagents in microfluidic systems. In this chapter, we will introduce the re‐ search progress on EOF pumps in the fields of microfluidic science and technology and briefly present their microfluidic applications in recent years. The chapter focuses on pump channel materials, electrodes, and their fabrication techniques in microfluidics.
Markerless Measurement System of Body Surface Deformation for Structure Determination of Wearable Robot

The authors aim to realize a wearable robot that supports the motion of entire torso. The first task to realize the robot is to determine its structure suitable for motion support. Focusing on the body surface where the robot makes direct contact, we examine the robot structure that can follow the deformation of the body surface. In order to clarify the robot structure, it is necessary to measure the deformation of the body surface. However, with the existing measurement method of body surface deformation using markers, the robot structure can not be clarified. Hence, we have studied a new system to measure the deformation of the body surface without using any markers. In this system, the body surface shape is obtained as time-series point cloud data. After that, the body surface (point cloud data) is divided into multiple local areas, and the time-series correspondence of each local area is clarified. Finally, the deformation is measured by tracking each local area. In this paper, the details of the system are described, and the measurement accuracy of the system is discussed. Furthermore, we quantitatively clarify how the body surface of the torso deforms at the time of forward bending by using the system.
Proceedings of the 28th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, CCCG 2016, August 3-5, 2016, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

A fundamental problem in Distributed Computing is the Pattern Formation problem, where some independent mobile entities, called robots, have to rearrange themselves in such a way as to form a given figure from every possible (non-degenerate) initial configuration. In the present paper, we consider robots that operate in the Euclidean plane and are dimensionless, anonymous, oblivious, silent, asynchronous, disoriented, nonchiral, and non-rigid. For this very elementary type of robots, the feasibility of the Pattern Formation problem has been settled, either in the positive or in the negative, for every possible pattern, except for one case: the Square Formation problem by a team of four robots. Here we solve this last case by giving a Square Formation algorithm and proving its correctness. Our contribution represents the concluding chapter in a long thread of research. Our results imply that in the context of the Pattern Formation problem for mobile robots, features such as synchronicity, chirality, and rigidity are computationally irrelevant.
Genetically enhanced T lymphocytes and the intensive care unit

Chimeric antigen receptor-modified T cells (CAR-T cells) and donor lymphocyte infusion (DLI) are important protocols in lymphocyte engineering. CAR-T cells have emerged as a new modality for cancer immunotherapy due to their potential efficacy against hematological malignancies. These genetically modified receptors contain an antigen-binding moiety, a hinge region, a transmembrane domain, and an intracellular costimulatory domain resulting in lymphocyte T cell activation subsequent to antigen binding. In present-day medicine, four generations of CAR-T cells are described depending on the intracellular signaling domain number of T cell receptors. DLI represents a form of adoptive therapy used after hematopoietic stem cell transplant for its anti-tumor and anti-infectious properties. This article covers the current status of CAR-T cells and DLI research in the intensive care unit (ICU) patient, including the efficacy, toxicity, side effects and treatment.
Atomic force stiffness imaging: capturing differences in mechanical properties to identify and localize areas of prostate cancer tissue

Prostate cancer is now the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men in western countries. Due to the difficulty for early detection, there are an estimated 10000 deaths a year in the UK from prostate cancer alone; whereby the only curative option is interventional treatment that aims to excise all diseased cells while preserving the neurovascular bundle. To date, several studies have shown that the mechanical properties of cancer cells and tissues i.e. adhesion, stiffness, roughness and viscoelasticity are significantly different from benign cells and regions of tissue that are healthy. Building upon these results, we believe novel methods of imaging the mechanical properties of prostate cancer samples can provide new surgical intervention opportunities beyond what is possible through vision alone. In this paper, we used an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) to measure the stiffness and topography variations correlating to regions of prostate cancer at the surface of an excised sample at a cellular level. Preliminary results show that by using an AFM we can detect structural differences in non-homogeneous tissue samples, confirming previous results that cancerous tissues appear stiffer than benign areas. Through these results, we aim to develop a stiffness imaging protocol to aid the early detection of prostate cancer, in addition to force sensing surgical tools.
"Satisfaction with Failure" or "Unsatisfied Success": Investigating the Relationship between Search Success and User Satisfaction

User satisfaction has been paid much attention to in recent Web search evaluation studies. Although satisfaction is often considered as an important symbol of search success, it doesn»t guarantee success in many cases, especially for complex search task scenarios. In this study, we investigate the differences between user satisfaction and search success, and try to adopt the findings to predict search success in complex search tasks. To achieve these research goals, we conduct a laboratory study in which search success and user satisfaction are annotated by domain expert assessors and search users, respectively. We find that both "Satisfaction with Failure" and "Unsatisfied Success" cases happen in these search tasks and together they account for as many as 40.3% of all search sessions. The factors (e.g. document readability and credibility) that lead to the inconsistency of search success and user satisfaction are also investigated and adopted to predict whether one search task is successful. Experimental results show that our proposed prediction method is effective in predicting search success.
Challenges and approaches of performing canonical action research in software security: research paper

When studying work practices, it is important to obtain accurate and reliable information about how work is actually done. Action research is an interactive inquiry process that balances problem solving actions implemented in a collaborative context with data-driven collaborative analysis or research to understand underlying causes enabling future predictions about personal and organizational change. Our research team has been engaged in action research in software organizations in Norway for two years. In this paper we describe some of the challenges in performing canonical action research in software security. We have structured the discussion of the challenges based on the principles of canonical action research, and we draw some lessons learned and future work towards improving the adoption of action research in software security research.
Detecting Absurd Conversations from Intelligent Assistant Logs by Exploiting User Feedback Utterances

Intelligent assistants, such as Siri, are expected to converse comprehensibly with users. To facilitate improvement of their conversational ability, we have developed a method that detects absurd conversations recorded in intelligent assistant logs by identifying user feedback utterances that indicate users' favorable and unfavorable evaluations of intelligent assistant responses; e.g., "great! " is favorable, whereas "what are you talking about? " is unfavorable. Assuming that absurd/comprehensible conversations tend to be followed by unfavorable/favorable utterances, our method extracts some absurd/comprehensible conversations from the log to train a conversation classifier that sorts all the conversations recorded in the log as either absurd or not. The challenge is that user feedback utterances are often ambiguous; e.g., a user may give an unfavorable utterance (e.g., "don't be silly! ") to a comprehensible conversation in which the intelligent assistant was attempting to make a joke. An utterance classifier is thus used to score the feedback utterances in accordance with how unambiguously they indicate absurdity. Experiments showed that our method significantly outperformed methods that lacked a conversation and/or utterance classifier, indicating the effectiveness of the two classifiers. Our method only requires user feedback utterances, which would be independent of domains. Experiments focused on chitchat, web search, and weather domains indicated that our method is likely domain-independent.
Predictors of caesarean section in Northern Ghana: a case-control study

Introduction Caesarean section rates have become a global public health. This study investigated obstetric and socio-demographic factors associated with caesarean section in northern Ghana. Methods This was a case-control study comparing 150 women who had caesarean section (cases) and 300 women who had vaginal delivery (controls). Data were collected retrospectively from delivery registers, postpartum and postnatal registers in the Bolgatanga Regional Hospital. Univariate and multivariate analysis of data were done using SPSS 22. Results The study revealed that women who had higher odds of having a caesarean section were women who; attended Antenatal care (ANC) ≥ 4 times (Adjusted OR= 2.99, 95% CI1.762-5.065), were referred from other health facilities (Adjusted OR = 1.19, 95% CI 1.108-1.337) and had a foetal weight of ≥ 4000 grams (Adjusted OR = 1.21, 95% CI 1.064-1.657). There was a slight increase in odds of having a caesarean section among women who had a gestational age > 40 weeks (Adjusted OR = 1.09, 95% CI 1.029-1.281). Women who had secondary/higher education (Adjusted OR = 0.55, 95% CI 0.320-0.941), gestational age < 37 weeks (Adjusted OR = 0.20, 95% CI: 0.100-0.412) and women who had a foetal weight of 1500 grams to 2499 grams (Adjusted OR = 0.17, 95% CI 0.086-0.339) were associated with a lower odds of having a caesarean section. Conclusion There was an increase in odds of having a caesarean section among pregnant women who had a foetal weight of ≥ 4000 grams and women who attended ANC ≥ 4 times. Pregnant women who were referred also had increase odds of having a caesarean section.
Barrier and Syntactic Features for Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) goal consists in retrieving all the documents in a collection that are relevant to a given query. A subtask of IR is Information Extraction (IE) which includes machine learning approaches automatically extract from the documents information about, for example, entities or relations or events etc. In this thesis a novel type of features, called barrier features, is introduced. They are based on PoS-tagging. We use these features to solve several IR and IE problems. In details we build several IR or IE systems and overcame both the state-of-art methods and baseline systems built without these features. Again exploiting syntactic information in the second part of this thesis we apply constituency and dependency parsing, to two different areas: to support Concept Location in Software Engineering and to study the influence of the constituent order on the data-driven parsing in Computational Linguistic. In the former we have evaluated the use of off-the-shelf and trained natural language analyzers to parse identifier names, extract an ontology and use it to support concept location; in the latter we use two state-of-the-art data-driven parsers to study influence of the constituent order on the data-driven parsing of Italian.
Fast indoor localization using WiFi channel state information: poster abstract

Indoor localization using radio signals is challenging. A recently proposed algorithm based on WiFi channel state information is an effective solution. However, it relies on a computationally expensive grid search. We propose a new algorithm based on a modified matrix pencil method that reduces the computational complexity by two orders of magnitude without any loss of accuracy.
Effects of high-power ultrasound on microflora, enzymes and some quality attributes of a strawberry drink.

BACKGROUND The objective of the present work was to study the effect of high-power ultrasound (HPU) on the microflora, enzymes and some quality attributes of a strawberry drink and to provide a theoretical basis for strawberry drink processing conducive to the development of more nutritious and healthier strawberry drinks. RESULTS Fresh strawberry drink was subjected to HPU treatment at 20 kHz (242, 605 and 968 W cm-2 ) for 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 min in an ice bath. Results showed that polyphenol oxidase (PPO), pectin methyl esterase (PME) and β-glucosidase activities were decreased by 44.90, 89.11 and 84.71% respectively at 968 W cm-2 for 10 min. Lower L*, a* and b* values and higher browning degree (BD) were observed in HPU-treated samples, resulting in a significant increase in ΔE value (P < 0.05). HPU treatment caused loss of viscosity and turbidity, while total soluble solids (TSS) and pH of the strawberry drink were stable. Total phenol content and antioxidant capacity increased while anthocyanin content decreased compared with untreated samples. Total aerobic bacteria (TAB) and molds and yeasts (M&Y) were reduced by 2.07 and 1.13 log10 cycles respectively at 968 W cm-2 for 10 min. CONCLUSIONS HPU can effectively achieve the effect of pasteurization and maintain the nutrients of strawberry drink. © 2018 Society of Chemical Industry.
Molecular phylogeny of an ancient rodent family (Aplodontiidae)

Abstract The family Aplodontiidae contains a single, monotypic extant genus, Aplodontia (mountain beaver), which was first described by Rafinesque in 1817. Phylogenetic studies have shown that it is the sister lineage to squirrels. Aplodontia rufa is endemic to the Pacific Northwest and ranges from central California to British Columbia, Canada. Currently, 7 described subspecies are recognized based on morphological taxonomic studies. In this study, mitochondrial and nuclear genes were sequenced to infer molecular phylogenies of A. rufa. One of the goals of this study was to use molecular data to test the current taxonomic hypothesis based on morphology. Another goal was to incorporate geographic information to elucidate distributions of major clades. Our results support the previously held subspecies designations based on morphological taxonomy, with 1 main exception: we determined that within A. rufa, the subspecies A. rufa rainieri and A. rufa rufa north of the Columbia River represent a single lineage and should revert to the name A. rufa olympica. Although we revised geographic boundaries for some groups (A. r. rufa, A. r. olympica, and A. r. pacifica), only the conservation status and management of A. r. olympica (previously 2 subspecies) in Canada may be affected. Our findings support the continued conservation efforts for the isolated and endangered lineages present in coastal California.
Enhanced level of anthocyanin leads to increased salt tolerance in arabidopsis PAP1-D plants upon sucrose treatment

Many lines of evidence indicate that the increased activity of enzymes involved in phenolic compound biosynthesis and the subsequent accumulation of these compounds correlate with plant resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses. The production of anthocyanin pigment gene (PAP1) was previously identified using an activation tagging approach in Arabidopsis thaliana. A. thaliana PAP1-Dominant (pap1-D) mutant was generated by activation tagging. Throughout development, the pap1-D plant exhibited massive and widespread activation of genes encoding enzymes involved in phenylpropanoid natural product biosynthesis. Due to increased anthocyanin levels, pap1-D showed enhanced tolerance to salt, an important abiotic stress imposed on plants. In pap1-D plants, PAP1 transcript accumulation increased significantly in response to salt stress and abscisic acid. Enhanced anthocyanin levels induced by sucrose treatment increased the chance of survival of pap1-D and wild-type plants exposed to a high salt medium. Taken together, results of the present study indicate that genetic engineering of the flavonoid biosynthetic pathway can be used for successful improvement of plant survival in arid areas.
Neural Attentional Rating Regression with Review-level Explanations

Reviews information is dominant for users to make online purchasing decisions in e-commerces. However, the usefulness of reviews is varied. We argue that less-useful reviews hurt model's performance, and are also less meaningful for user's reference. While some existing models utilize reviews for improving the performance of recommender systems, few of them consider the usefulness of reviews for recommendation quality. In this paper, we introduce a novel attention mechanism to explore the usefulness of reviews, and propose a Neural Attentional Regression model with Review-level Explanations (NARRE) for recommendation. Specifically, NARRE can not only predict precise ratings, but also learn the usefulness of each review simultaneously. Therefore, the highly-useful reviews are obtained which provide review-level explanations to help users make better and faster decisions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets of Amazon and Yelp on different domains show that the proposed NARRE model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation approaches, including PMF, NMF, SVD++, HFT, and DeepCoNN in terms of rating prediction, by the proposed attention model that takes review usefulness into consideration. Furthermore, the selected reviews are shown to be effective when taking existing review-usefulness ratings in the system as ground truth. Besides, crowd-sourcing based evaluations reveal that in most cases, NARRE achieves equal or even better performances than system's usefulness rating method in selecting reviews. And it is flexible to offer great help on the dominant cases in real e-commerce scenarios when the ratings on review-usefulness are not available in the system.
Imaging acoustic waves in microscopic wedges

Using an ultrafast optical technique we image near-gigahertz flexural acoustic waves propagating in a thin gold wedge deposited on an ultrathin silicon nitride slab. Temporal Fourier transforms of the imaged data in two dimensions allow individual frequencies to be accessed. The wave fronts associated with antisymmetric Lamb waves bend towards the thin end of the wedge. This behaviour is mimicked with an analytical model based on sections of a linear wedge. We also conduct numerical simulations which show good agreement with the experimental results.
Anti-CA15.3 and Anti-CA125 Antibodies and Ovarian Cancer Risk: Results from the EPIC Cohort

Background: Neoplastic and non-neoplastic events may raise levels of mucins, CA15.3, and CA125, and generate antibodies against them, but their impact on epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) risk has not been fully defined. Methods: CA15.3, CA125, and IgG1 antibodies against them were measured in 806 women who developed EOC and 1,927 matched controls from the European Prospective Investigation of Nutrition and Cancer. Associations between epidemiologic factors and anti-mucin antibodies were evaluated using generalized linear models; EOC risks associated with anti-mucin antibodies, by themselves or in combination with respective antigens, were evaluated using conditional logistic regression. Results: In controls, lower antibodies against both mucins were associated with current smoking; and, in postmenopausal women, higher levels with longer oral contraceptive use and later-age-at and shorter-interval-since last birth. Lower anti-CA15.3 antibodies were associated with higher body mass and, in premenopausal women, more ovulatory cycles. Higher anti-CA15.3 and anti-CA125 antibodies were associated with higher risk for mucinous EOC occurring ≥ 3 years from enrollment. Long-term risk for serous EOC was reduced in women with low CA125 and high anti-CA125 antibodies relative to women with low concentrations of both. Conclusions: We found general support for the hypothesis that anti-mucin antibody levels correlate with risk factors for EOC. Antibodies alone or in combinations with their antigen may predict longer term risk of specific EOC types. Impact: Anti-CA125 and anti-CA15.3 antibodies alone or in perspective of antigens may be informative in the pathogenesis of EOC subtypes, but less useful for informing risk for all EOC. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 27(7); 790–804. ©2018 AACR.
Ensemble Laser Diffraction for Online Measurement of Fiber Diameter Distribution during the Melt Blowing Process

Online measurements of the fiber diameter distribution during a melt blowing process were taken using a new laser diffraction technique. This technique measured both the attenuation of the fibers as well as entanglement of the fibers into bundles at large distances from the die. A pilot scale unit with a 20.3 cm (8 inch) slot die was used for the studies. Commercial polypropylene polymer was used. Both the spin-line attenuation and fiber bundling were measured as a function of position both below and across the die face.