Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of local RF-induced heating of AIMDs during MR exposure

Patients with active implantable medical devices (AIMDs) are generally excluded from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) diagnostics because the interaction of the AIMD with MRI-induced radiofrequency (RF) electromagnetic fields (EMFs) can lead to hazardous localized heating in surrounding tissues. In this work, two safety assessment methods, based on Tiers 3 and 4 of the Technical Specification ISO/IEC 10974, for a generic AIMD, for which a cardio application is assumed, are implemented, and the results from the assessments are illustrated.
The relationships between pre-competition anxiety, self-efficacy, and fear of injury in elite teamgym athletes

The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between state anxiety, self-efficacy and fear of injury in national and European TeamGym competitions. A cross-sectional study design was employed using measures of anxiety, self-efficacy and fear of injury. Fourteen (seven men and seven women) Italian TeamGym athletes (age 26±3 years) filled in the Self-efficacy for Physical Abilities Scale and the Gymnastics Fear Inventory during their pre-competitive period and the State Anxiety Inventory immediately before every competition. The competition level showed a positive effect on state anxiety, with the highest values emerging during the European Championship. Fear of injury and self-efficacy explained 43% and 68% of the variance in an athlete’s anxiety, respectively. The present findings indicate that self-efficacy dampens the anxiety level of TeamGym athletes and mediates the effects of fear of injury on anxiety prior to their competition, with athletes who experience less fear of being injured and are more confident in their technical abilities and therefore show a lesser degree of pre-competitive anxiety.
The Age-Related Decrease in CNS Remyelination Efficiency Is Attributable to an Impairment of Both Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Recruitment and Differentiation

The age-associated decrease in the efficiency of CNS remyelination has clear implications for recovery from demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) that may last for several decades. Developing strategies to reverse the age-associated decline requires the identification of how the regenerative process is impaired. We addressed whether remyelination becomes slower because of an impairment of recruitment of oligodendrocyte progenitors (OPs) or, as is the case in some MS lesions, an impairment of OP differentiation into remyelinating oligodendrocytes. The OP response during remyelination of focal, toxin-induced CNS demyelination in young and old rats was compared by in situ hybridization using probes to two OP-expressed mRNA species: platelet-derived growth factor-α receptor and the OP transcription factor myelin transcription factor 1 (MyT1). We found that the expression patterns for the two OP markers are very similar and reveal a delay in the colonization of the demyelinated focus with OPs in the old animals compared with the young animals. By comparing the mRNA expression pattern of MyT1 with that of the myelin proteins myelin basic protein and Gtx, we found that in the old animals there is also a delay in OP differentiation that increases with longer survival times. These results indicate that the age-associated decrease in remyelination efficiency occurs because of an impairment of OP recruitment and the subsequent differentiation of the OPs into remyelinating oligodendrocytes, and that strategies aimed at ameliorating the age-associated decline in remyelination efficiency will therefore need to promote both components of the regenerative process.
Categorisation of panic disorder by time-frequency methods

Anxiety patients that are presented with neutral and panic disorder triggering stimuli show different event-related brain potentials (ERP) within the electroencephalogram (EEG). In this paper, we investigate this difference by time-frequency (TF) revealing transforms leading to an identification of a small number of significant parameterising coefficients to be able to differentiate between the presented stimulus categories.
Evaluation of the quality of ultrasound image compression for a robotic tele-echographic system

The subject of this paper is to propose a method for the evaluation of ultrasound image compression. Compression techniques are used for image transmission in the frame of two tele-operated robotic chains dedicated to tele-echography: OTELO and TERESA. Our objective is to define a statistical criterion to measure the image quality with the same reliability than the one provided by a medical assessment. An initial psychovisual experiment is proposed to medical experts, and represents our reference value for the comparison of statistical evaluation criteria. We propose to fusion different some statistical criteria and to exploit the medical expert judgments during a training phase. Two methods are tested for this approach: linear combination of the criteria with a genetic algorithm and learning the experts judgment by a support vector machine. We show the benefit of this methodology through some experimental results
High-Level Chord Features Extracted from Audio Can Predict Perceived Musical Expression

We investigated the relationship between high-level chord features and the perceived semantic and emotional expression of musical pieces in the context of music branding. Therefore, we first developed high-level chord features based on musicological considerations and novel MIR technologies. Inter alia, these features represent the number of chords, the proportion of major/minor chords, and the frequency of certain cadences and turnarounds. The validity of these features for predicting listeners' perceived musical expression beyond genre information was subsequently tested by means of data from two online listening experiments, where musical expression of 549 music titles had been rated on four factors, Easy-going, Joyful, Authentic , and Progressive. Results show that in all four models chord features significantly improved prediction results. Most important features turned out to be those representing the number of (unique) chords and the proportion of minor chords. Implications of results are discussed, and future work is outlined.
Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor Magnet Designs with Skewing for Torque Ripple and Cogging Torque Reduction

This paper examines the torque ripple and cogging torque variation in surface mounted permanent magnet synchronous motors with skewed rotor. The effect of slot/pole combinations and magnet shapes on the magnitude and harmonic content of torque waveforms in a PMSM drive has been studied. Finite element analysis (FEA) and experimental results show that for certain magnet designs and configurations the skewing with steps does not necessarily reduce the ripple in the electromagnetic torque, but may cause it to increase. The electromagnetic torque waveforms including cogging torque have been analyzed for four different PMSM configurations having the same envelop dimensions and output characteristics.
The SLam calculus: programming with secrecy and integrity

The SLam calculus is a typed ¿-calculus that maintains security information as well as type information. The type system propagates security information for each object in four forms: the object's creators and readers, and the object's indirect creators and readers (i.e., those agents who, through flow-of-control or the actions of other agents, can influence or be influenced by the content of the object). We prove that the type system prevents security violations and give some examples of its power.
Towards a Deep Learning-based Activity Discovery System

Activity discovery is a challenging machine learning problem where we seek to uncover new or altered behavioural patterns in sensor data. In this paper we motivate and introduce a novel approach to activity discovery based on modern deep learning techniques. We hypothesise that our proposed approach can deal with interleaved datasets in a more intelligent manner than most existing AD methods. We also build upon prior work building hierarchies of activities that capture the inherent aggregate nature of complex activities and show how this could plausibly be adapted to work with the deep learning technique we present. Finally, we brieﬂy talk about the challenge of evaluating activity discovery systems in a fair way and outline our future plans for implementing this model.
Careful Seeding Method based on Independent Components Analysis for k-means Clustering

The k-means clustering method is a widely used clustering technique for the Web because of its simplicity and speed. However, the clustering result depends heavily on the chosen initial clustering centers, which are uniformly chosen at random from the data points. We propose a seeding method that is based on the independent component analysis for the k-means clustering method. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method and compare it with other seeding methods by using benchmark datasets. We also applied our proposed method to a Web corpus, which was provided by ODP, and the CLUTO datasets. The results from the experiments showed that the normalized mutual information of our proposed method is better than the normalized mutual information of the k-means clustering method, the KKZ method, and the k-means++ clustering method.
3D AAM based face alignment under wide angular variations using 2D and 3D data

Active Appearance Models (AAMs) are widely used to estimate the shape of the face together with its orientation, but AAM approaches tend to fail when the face is under wide angular variations. Although it is feasible to capture the overall 3D face structure using 3D data from range cameras, the locations of facial features are often estimated imprecisely or incorrectly due to depth measurement uncertainty. Face alignment using 2D and 3D images suffer from different issues and have varying reliability in different situations. The existing approaches introduce a weighting function to balance 2D and 3D alignments in which the weighting function is tuned manually and the sensor characteristics are not taken into account. In this paper, we propose to balance 3D face alignment using 2D and 3D data based on the observed data and the sensors characteristics. The feasibility of wide-angle face alignment is demonstrated using two different sets of depth and conventional cameras. The experimental results show that a stable alignment is achieved with a maximum improvement of 26% compared to 3D AAM using 2D image and 30% improvement over the state-of-the-art 3DMM methods in terms of 3D head pose estimation.
Two-point moments in cosmological large-scale structure – I. Theory and comparison with simulations

We present new perturbation theory (PT) predictions in the spherical collapse (SC) model for the two-point moments of the large-scale distribution of dark matter density in the Universe. We assume that these fluctuationsgrow under gravity from small Gaussian initial conditions. These predictions are compared with numerical simulations and with previous PT results to assess their domain of validity. We find that the SC model provides in practice a more accurate description of two-point moments than previous tree-level PT calculations. The agreement with simulations is excellent for a wide range of scales (5-50h - 1 Mpc) and fluctuation amplitudes (σ 2 ≃ 0.02-2). When normalized to unit variance these results are independent of the cosmological parameters and of the initial amplitude of fluctuations. The two-point moments provide a convenient tool for studying the statistical properties of gravitational clustering for fairly non-linear scales and complicated survey geometries, such as those probing the clustering of the Lya forest. In this context, the perturbative SC predictions presented here provide a simple and novel way of testing the gravitational instability paradigm.
Whole-genome microarray detects deletions and loss of heterozygosity of chromosome 3 occurring exclusively in metastasizing uveal melanoma.

PURPOSE To detect deletions and loss of heterozygosity of chromosome 3 in a rare subset of fatal, disomy 3 uveal melanoma (UM), undetectable by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). METHODS Multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification (MLPA) with the P027 UM assay was performed on formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) whole tumor sections from 19 disomy 3 metastasizing UMs. Whole-genome microarray analyses using a single-nucleotide polymorphism microarray (aSNP) were performed on frozen tissue samples from four fatal disomy 3 metastasizing UMs and three disomy 3 tumors with >5 years' metastasis-free survival. RESULTS Two metastasizing UMs that had been classified as disomy 3 by FISH analysis of a small tumor sample were found on MLPA analysis to show monosomy 3. No ubiquitous gene deletions of chromosome 3 were seen in the remaining 17 metastasizing disomy 3 UMs by MLPA. aSNP analysis revealed 95 deleted genes and 16 genes with loss of heterozygosity (LOH) on chromosome 3 in the disomy 3 metastasizing UMs that were not deleted or showing LOH in the nonmetastatic tumors. CONCLUSIONS MLPA can detect monosomy 3 cell populations in FFPE whole tumor sections previously missed by FISH performed on small tumor samples. Consistent deletion and LOH of genes on chromosome 3 occur in metastasizing disomy 3 UM and are detectable by aSNP analysis. Ninety-five genes were found to be deleted, and 16 genes showed LOH exclusively in disomy 3 metastasizing UM, suggesting a potential role for these genes in UM metastasis.
HLA-E⁎01:03 Allele in Lung Transplant Recipients Correlates with Higher Chronic Lung Allograft Dysfunction Occurrence

Lung transplantation (LTx) is a valid therapeutic option for selected patients with end-stage lung disease. HLA-E seems to play a major role in the immune response to different viral infections and to affect transplantation outcome, in Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation, for example. Two nonsynonymous alleles, HLA-E⁎01:01 and HLA-E⁎01:03, have functional differences, involving relative peptide affinity, cell surface expression, and potential lytic activity of NK cells. The aim of this retrospective study was to determine the impact of these two alleles for LTx recipients on anti-HLA alloimmunization risk, overall survival, and chronic rejection (CLAD). HLA-E was genotyped in 119 recipients who underwent LTx from 1998 to 2010 in a single transplantation center. In univariate analysis, both HLA-E homozygous states were associated with impaired overall survival compared to heterozygous HLA-E alleles (p = 0.01). In multivariate analysis, HLA-E⁎01:03 allele showed increased CLAD occurrence when compared to homozygous HLA-E⁎01:01 status (HR: 3.563 (CI 95%, 1.016–12), p = 0.047). HLA-E allele did not affect pathogen infection or the production of de novo DSA. This retrospective study shows an uninvestigated, deleterious association of HLA-E alleles with LTx and requires verification using a larger cohort.
Mapping DSP applications on processor systems with coarse-grain reconfigurable hardware

In this paper, we present performance results from mapping five real-world DSP applications on an embedded system-on-chip that incorporates coarse-grain reconfigurable logic with an instruction-set processor. The reconfigurable logic is realized by a 2-dimensional array of processing elements. A mapping flow for improving application's performance by accelerating critical software parts, called kernels, on the coarse-grain reconfigurable array is proposed. Profiling is performed for detecting critical kernel code. For mapping the detected kernels on the reconfigurable logic a priority-based mapping algorithm has been developed. The experiments for three different instances of a generic system show that the speedup from executing kernels on the reconfigurable array ranges from 9.9 to 151.1, with an average value of 54.1, relative to the kernels' execution on the processor. Important overall application speedups, due to the kernels' acceleration, have been reported for the five applications. These overall performance improvements range from 1.3 to 3.7, with an average value of 2.3, relative to an all-software execution.
An exploratory study of teaching assistants’ motivation for inquiry-based teaching in an undergraduate laboratory context

Undergraduate science courses typically rely on teaching assistants (TAs) to teach introductory laboratory classes. However little research investigates how to support TAs to implement reform-based teaching in undergraduate settings, and in particular, what factors may influence TAs’ motivation to teach within reform-based instructional contexts. This qualitative study used an Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT) framework of motivation to explore: (1) TAs’ expectancy beliefs and subjective values of project-based inquiry laboratory contexts; (2) relationships among expectancy and subjective value of teaching and reported effort in teaching, and (3) factors (e.g., teaching beliefs, prior teaching and instructional experiences) that may relate to TAs’ motivation for teaching. Data sources included open-ended surveys and interviews of six purposefully selected TAs. Results revealed that TAs held varied views on their ability to be successful and their perceived value of teaching in an inquiry-based laboratory context. TAs’ beliefs and subjective value for teaching appeared to be informed by TAs’ prior experiences with inquiry and interactions with students. Results provide insight into what may motivate TAs to teach within inquiry-based undergraduate science settings. Results underscore the importance of reform-based instruction in undergraduate settings.
A GPU-Based Method for Weakly Compressible Fluids

In this paper we present an efficient GPU pipeline to perform high quality fluid simulation using CUDA. Our method extends standard weakly compressible smoothed particles hydrodynamics to realistically handle complex boundaries. We design a GPU pipeline of the proposed approach and map the entire components of the pipeline to CUDA kernels and data structures, fully exploiting the massive computational power of state-of-the-art GPUs. We describe the GPU pipeline and parallel techniques that can improve performance on latest GPUs. Furthermore, we make use of efficient parallel sorting algorithms for the time-consuming neighbor search process. On a high-end NVIDIA Geforce GTX 780, we observe up to 33× speedup as compared to a single-threaded CPU-based implementation.
Confidence Interval Estimation for Oscillometric Blood Pressure Measurements using Nonparametric Bootstrap Approach

Blood pressure is an important vital sign for determining the health of an individual. Although estimation of average arterial blood pressure is possible using oscillometric methods, there are no established methods in the literature for obtaining confidence interval (CI) for systolic pressure (SBP) and diastolic pressure (DBP) estimates obtained from such measurements. This paper presents a nonparametric bootstrap methodology to obtain CI with a small sample set of measurements. The proposed methodology uses pseudo measurements using bootstrap principles to derive the pseudo maximum amplitudes (PMA) and the pseudo envelopes (PE). Then the SBP and DBP are derived using the new relationships between PMA and PE and the confidence intervals for such estimates. Application of the proposed methodology on an experimental dataset of 85 patients with 5 sets of measurements for each patient has yielded a tighter Cl than the conventional student t-method.
“Toxic Masculinity” in the age of #MeToo: ritual, morality and gender archetypes across cultures

Purpose This paper aims to take the “toxic masculinity” (TM) trope as a starting point to examine recent cultural shifts in common assumptions about gender, morality and relations between the sexes. TM is a transculturally widespread archetype or moral trope about the kind of man one should not be. Design/methodology/approach The author revisits his earlier fieldwork on transnational sexualities against a broader analysis of the historical, ethnographic and evolutionary record. The author describes the broad cross-cultural recurrence of similar ideal types of men and women (good and bad) and the rituals through which they are culturally encouraged and avoided. Findings The author argues that the TM trope is normatively useful if and only if it is presented alongside a nuanced spectrum of other gender archetypes (positive and negative) and discussed in the context of human universality and evolved complementariness between the sexes. Social implications The author concludes by discussing stoic virtue models for the initiation of boys and argues that they are compatible with the normative commitments of inclusive societies that recognize gender fluidity along the biological sex spectrum. Originality/value The author makes a case for the importance of strong gender roles and the rites and rituals through which they are cultivated as an antidote to current moral panics about oppression and victimhood.
Tactile feedback as a sensory subtraction technique in haptics for needle insertion

—A sensory substitution technique is presented in which the kinesthetic and tactile feedback are substituted by tactile feedback only provided by two wearable devices able to apply forces to the index ﬁnger and thumb holding a handle during a needle insertion task. The force pattern fed back to the user while using the tactile device is similar, in terms of intensity and area of application, to that perceived while interacting with a haptic device providing both tactile and kinesthetic feedback and it can be thought as a subtraction between the complete haptic and kinesthetic feedback. For this reason we refer to this approach as sensory subtraction instead of sensory substitution. A needle insertion scenario is considered. The haptic device is connected to a virtual environment simulating a needle insertion task. Experiments show that the perception of inserting a needle using the tactile feedback only is nearly indistinguishable from the one felt by the user using both tactile and kinesthetic feedback. As most of the sensory substitution approaches, also this does not suffer from typical stability issues of teleoperation systems due for instance to delays. Moreover experiments show that the proposed sensory substitution technique outperforms sensory substitution with more conventional visual feedback.
Towards SDL Ontology

Web In this paper we have developed the ontology for Specification and Description Language (SDL), an object-oriented, formal language defined by ITUT as recommendation Z.100. The language is intended for the specification of realtime complex and concurrent applications that communicate using discrete signals. SDL formal model bridges the gap between ideas in our minds and the actual implementation of the system. It facilitates communication between the software developers and also non-experts without advanced engineering skills.We use SDL Markup Language, an XML-based language, as a medium for translating SDL model to SDL ontology.