Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficient mobility prediction scheme for pervasive networks

This paper aims towards probabilistic reasoning and Bayesian‐based recommendations to predict the next movement of a person. The proposed model in this work observes the behavior and movement patterns of humans for a day both at home and at their office to predict their future activities. To achieve this, an efficient model has been designed that provides the probable context‐based location of a person and predicts his next movement based on his behavior on some particular day at a particular time. The proposed model allows ubiquitous services to adapt to uncertain situations in today's world using different mechanisms such as monitoring the human behavior patterns and evaluating the user preferences and profiles. A case study of the office activity chart has been provided, and based on the experimentation performed on the related events, the probability in evaluating some “N”chained events of a person in a consecutive order using the proposed model has been found to be 0.002, which infers that there are fewer chances that the person will perform the same particular sequence of events.
Modelling of high-energy radiation damage in materials relevant to nuclear and fusion energy

The objective through my PhD has been to investigate radiation damage effects in materials related to fusion and to safe encapsulation of nuclear waste, using Molecular Dynamics (MD) methods. Particularly, using MD, we acquire essential information about the multi-scale phenomena that take place during irradiation of materials, and gain access at length and time-scales not possible to access experimentally. Computer simulations provide information at the microscopic level, acting as a bridge to the experimental observations and giving insights into processes that take place at small time and length-scales. The increasing computer capabilities in combination with recently developed scalable codes, and the availability of realistic potentials set the stage to perform large scale simulations, approaching phenomena that take place at the atomistic and mesoscopic scale (fractions of μm for the first time) in a more realistic way. High-energy radiation damage effects have not been studied previously, yet it is important to simulate and reveal information about the properties of the materials under extreme irradiation conditions. Large scale MD simulations provide a detailed description of microstructural changes. Understanding of the primary stage of damage and short term annealing (scale of tens of picoseconds) will lead to better understanding of the materials properties, best possible long-term use of the materials and, importantly, new routes of optimization of their use. Systems of interest in my research are candidate fusion reactor structural materials (iron and tungsten) and materials related to the radioactive waste management (zirconia). High-energy events require large simulation box length in order for the damage to be contained in the system. This was a limitation for previous simulations, which was recently shifted with my radiation damage MD simulations. For the first time high-energy radiation damage effects were simulated, approaching new energy and length scales, giving a more realistic view of processes related to fusion and to high-energy ion irradiation of materials.
Longitudinal Neuroimaging Analysis in Mild-Moderate Alzheimer’s Disease Patients Treated with Plasma Exchange with 5% Human Albumin

Background: Recently, modifications of Aβ1-42 levels in CSF and plasma associated with improvement in memory and language functions have been observed in patients with mild-moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) treated with plasma exchange (PE) with albumin replacement. Objective: To detect structural and functional brain changes in PE-treated AD patients as part of a Phase II clinical trial. Methods: Patients received between 3 and 18 PE with albumin (Albutein® 5%, Grifols) or sham-PE (controls) for 21 weeks (divided in one intensive and two maintenance periods) followed by 6-month follow-up. Brain perfusion assessed by SPECT scans using an automated software (NeuroGam®) and brain structural changes assessed by MRI were performed at weeks 0 (baseline), 21, and 44 (with additional SPECT at weeks 9 and 33). Statistical parametric mapping (voxel-based analysis, SPM) and Z-scores calculations were applied to investigate changes to baseline. Results: 42 patients were recruited (39 evaluable; 37 analyzed: 18 PE-treated; 19 controls). There was a trend toward decreasing hippocampi and total intracranial volume for both patient groups during the study (p < 0.05). After six months, PE-treated patients had less cerebral perfusion loss than controls in frontal, temporal, and parietal areas, and perfusion stabilization in Brodmann area BA38-R during the PE-treatment period (p < 0.05). SPM analysis showed stabilization or absence of progression of perfusion loss in PE-treated patients until week 21, not observed in controls. Conclusions: Mild-moderate AD patients showed decreased brain volume and impairment of brain perfusion as expected for the progression of the disease. PE-treatment with albumin replacement favored the stabilization of perfusion.
Smart Households and Home Energy Management Systems with Innovative Sizing of Distributed Generation and Storage for Customers

As a recently increasing trend among different applications of smart grid vision, smart households as a new implementation area of demand response (DR) strategies have drawn more attention both in research and in engineering practice. On the other hand, optimum sizing of renewable energy based small scale hybrid systems is also a topic that is widely covered by the existing literature. In this study, the sizing of additional distributed generation and energy storage systems to be applied in smart households, which due to DR activities have a different daily demand profile compared with normal household profiles, is investigated. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first attempt in the literature to consider the impact of DR on sizing. The study is conducted using a mixed-integer linear programming framework for home energy management system modeling and techno-economical sizing. Also, different sensitivity analyses considering the impacts of variation of economic inputs on the provided model are realized.
Enhanced Transgene Expression in Sugarcane by Co-Expression of Virus-Encoded RNA Silencing Suppressors

Post-transcriptional gene silencing is commonly observed in polyploid species and often poses a major limitation to plant improvement via biotechnology. Five plant viral suppressors of RNA silencing were evaluated for their ability to counteract gene silencing and enhance the expression of the Enhanced Yellow Fluorescent Protein (EYFP) or the β-glucuronidase (GUS) reporter gene in sugarcane, a major sugar and biomass producing polyploid. Functionality of these suppressors was first verified in Nicotiana benthamiana and onion epidermal cells, and later tested by transient expression in sugarcane young leaf segments and protoplasts. In young leaf segments co-expressing a suppressor, EYFP reached its maximum expression at 48–96 h post-DNA introduction and maintained its peak expression for a longer time compared with that in the absence of a suppressor. Among the five suppressors, Tomato bushy stunt virus-encoded P19 and Barley stripe mosaic virus-encoded γb were the most efficient. Co-expression with P19 and γb enhanced EYFP expression 4.6-fold and 3.6-fold in young leaf segments, and GUS activity 2.3-fold and 2.4-fold in protoplasts compared with those in the absence of a suppressor, respectively. In transgenic sugarcane, co-expression of GUS and P19 suppressor showed the highest accumulation of GUS levels with an average of 2.7-fold more than when GUS was expressed alone, with no detrimental phenotypic effects. The two established transient expression assays, based on young leaf segments and protoplasts, and confirmed by stable transgene expression, offer a rapid versatile system to verify the efficiency of RNA silencing suppressors that proved to be valuable in enhancing and stabilizing transgene expression in sugarcane.
Identification of Key Gene Modules of Neuropathic Pain by Co‐Expression Analysis

Neuropathic pain (NP) is a substantial clinical problem causing great injury to people word‐widely. Although gene expression analyses had been performed previously, the mechanisms underlying the etiology and development of NP are still poorly understood. To understand the function genes involved in the etiology and development of NP, we built the co‐expression modules and performed function enrichment analysis for neuropathic pain. In the present study, from a public microarray data set (GSE69901) from NCBI, gene co‐expression modules were contributed with the help of WGCNA for 12 neuropathic pain samples and 13 control samples, respectively. And functional enrichment analyses were followed by DAVID database. Firstly, we established 21 co‐expression modules and 19 co‐expression modules out of 5,000 high‐express genes in NP and control samples, respectively. Then, it showed great difference in interaction relationships of total genes and hub‐genes between pairwise modules, which indicated the high confidence of gene co‐expression modules. Finally, functional enrichment analysis of the top five co‐expression modules in NP exhibited great differences and significant enrichment in transcription regulation of RNA polymerase II promoter and ubiquitin mediated proteolysis pathway. RNA polymerase II promoter and ubiquitin‐mediated proteolysis pathway played important role in etiology and development of NP. Anyhow, our findings provided the framework of gene co‐expression modules of NP and furthered the understanding of these modules from functional aspect. J. Cell. Biochem. 118: 4436–4443, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Gene transfer of a soluble receptor of VEGF inhibits the growth of experimental eyelid malignant melanoma.

PURPOSE To determine the effect of adenovirus-mediated gene transfer of a soluble receptor of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) on the growth of experimental eyelid malignant melanoma. METHODS An adenovirus vector encoding a soluble VEGF receptor/flt-1 (Adflt-ExR) was constructed. The bovine retinal endothelial cells (ECs) were incubated in a culture medium of 293E1 cells infected by means of an adenovirus vector or uninfected (control), which contained human recombinant VEGF, and the [3H]thymidine uptake was tested. The experimental eyelid malignant melanoma was induced by the injection of B16 melanoma cells (4 x 10(6) cells) into the right upper eyelid of BALB/c nu/nu mice, and the size of the tumor was recorded for 3 weeks after tumor cell injection. The effect of Adflt-ExR was examined in three ways. Model 1: B16 cells were infected by Adflt-ExR beforehand (at a multiplicity of infection [MOI] of 10) and injected into the eyelid. Model 2: Adflt-ExR was injected into pre-established B16 cell-induced eyelid malignant melanoma. Model 3: Adflt-ExR was injected into the femoral muscle of mice before B16 cell injection into the eyelid, and the remote effect was evaluated. An adenovirus vector bearing the LacZ gene (AdLacZ) or phosphate-buffered saline was used as a control. The amount of VEGF and the flt-ExR protein was measured by sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Vascularization was evaluated by counting the number and the size of the vessels. RESULTS The supernatant of Adflt-ExR-transfected cells clearly inhibited VEGF-induced bovine retinal EC proliferation in vitro. In models 1 and 2, the tumor growth in Adflt-ExR-treated mice was significantly lower than that of controls (P < 0.05). In model 3, no significant difference was found (P = 0.14). The molar ratio of VEGF/flt-ExR protein was clearly low in the tumors of Adflt-ExR-treated mice in models 1 and 2 (P < 0.01) but not in model 3 (P > 0.05). In vessel density, the tumors in Adflt-ExR-treated mice had fewer vessels than tumors in control animals in models 1 and 2 (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Adenovirus-mediated gene transfer of a soluble form of VEGF receptor (flt-1) gene inhibited the growth of the experimental eyelid malignant melanoma. This method may be useful as an antiangiogenic therapy for eyelid malignant melanoma.
Ecological and Evolutionary Effects of Stickleback on Community Structure

Species’ ecology and evolution can have strong effects on communities. Both may change concurrently when species colonize a new ecosystem. We know little, however, about the combined effects of ecological and evolutionary change on community structure. We simultaneously examined the effects of top-predator ecology and evolution on freshwater community parameters using recently evolved generalist and specialist ecotypes of three-spine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus). We used a mesocosm experiment to directly examine the effects of ecological (fish presence and density) and evolutionary (phenotypic diversity and specialization) factors on community structure at lower trophic levels. We evaluated zooplankton biomass and composition, periphyton and phytoplankton chlorophyll-a concentration, and net primary production among treatments containing different densities and diversities of stickleback. Our results showed that both ecological and evolutionary differences in the top-predator affect different aspects of community structure and composition. Community structure, specifically the abundance of organisms at each trophic level, was affected by stickleback presence and density, whereas composition of zooplankton was influenced by stickleback diversity and specialization. Primary productivity, in terms of chlorophyll-a concentration and net primary production was affected by ecological but not evolutionary factors. Our results stress the importance of concurrently evaluating both changes in density and phenotypic diversity on the structure and composition of communities.
Domain Adaptation Meets Disentangled Representation Learning and Style Transfer

In this paper, we face the challenges of un-supervised domain adaptation and propose a novel threein-one framework where three tasks domain adaptation, disentangled representation, and style transfer are considered simultaneously. Firstly, the learned features are disentangled into common parts and specific parts. The common parts represent the transferrable features, which are suitable for domain adaptation with less negative transfer. Conversely, the specific parts characterize the unique style of each individual domain. Based on this, the new concept of feature exchange across domains, which can not only enhance the transferability of common features but also be useful for image style transfer, is introduced. These designs allow us to introduce five types of training objectives to realize the three challenging tasks at the same time. The experimental results show that our architecture can be adaptive well to full transfer learning and partial transfer learning upon a well-learned disentangled representation. Besides, the trained network also demonstrates high potential to generate style-transferred images.
ABCA7 rare variants and Alzheimer disease risk

Objective: To study the association between ABCA7 rare coding variants and Alzheimer disease (AD) in a case-control setting. Methods: We conducted a whole exome analysis among 484 French patients with early-onset AD and 590 ethnically matched controls. Results: After collapsing rare variants (minor allele frequency ≤1%), we detected an enrichment of ABCA7 loss of function (LOF) and predicted damaging missense variants in cases (odds ratio [OR] 3.40, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.68–7.35, p = 0.0002). Performing a meta-analysis with previously published data, we found that in a combined sample of 1,256 patients and 1,347 controls from France and Belgium, the OR was 2.81 (95% CI 1.89–4.20, p = 3.60 × 10−7). Conclusions: These results confirm that ABCA7 LOF variants are enriched in patients with AD and extend this finding to predicted damaging missense variants.
ORSIM: Integrating Existing Software Components to Detect Similar Natural Language Requirements

Requirements Engineering (RE) is considered as one of the most critical phases in software development. Inside RE, interdependency detection and requirements reuse are areas that could be improved and that have been of interest for the research community. [Problem] Similarity detection is an activity that emerges in the context of natural language requirements. This activity can be used for interdependency detection and requirements reuse. Although there exist several software components to detect similar texts in English, creating the setup to test them is time-consuming and difficult. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we present ORSIM (OpenReq-Similarity), a tool which integrates different existing similarity detection components in the same platform. These components are: Cortical, Gensim, ParallelDots, and Semilar. [Contribution] ORSIM enables requirements engineers to concentrate on evaluating and choosing the similarity detection component that best suits their user's data rather than worrying about the technical setup of these components.
Vibro-acoustic behavior of functionally graded carbon nanotube reinforced polymer nanocomposite plates

This paper presents the numerical investigation results carried out on vibro-acoustic behavior of functionally graded carbon nanotube reinforced polymer nanocomposite plate using combined finite element method and Rayleigh integral. Parameter studies are carried out to analyze the inﬂuence of nature of functional grading, loading of carbon nanotube, and structural boundary conditions on free and forced vibration and sound radiation characteristics in detail. It is found that natural frequencies are significantly inﬂuenced by the nature of functional grading while the mode shapes are insensitive. The resonant amplitude of vibration and acoustic response are significantly inﬂuenced with the nature of different functional grading. This reﬂects in the bandwise calculation of sound power also which recommends the carbon nanotube functional grading with X distribution along the thickness direction for lower frequency level. Similar variation in vibro-acoustic response has been observed with increase in the carbon nanotube loading also.
Complementary Evaluation of Iron Deficiency Root Responses to Assess the Effectiveness of Different Iron Foliar Applications for Chlorosis Remediation

Iron deficiency in plants is caused by a low availability of iron in the soil, and its main visual symptom is leaf yellowing due to a decrease in chlorophyll content, along with a reduction in plant growth and fruit quality. Foliar sprays with Fe compounds are an economic alternative to the treatment with expensive synthetic Fe-chelates applied to the soil, although the efficacy of foliar treatments is rather limited. Generally, plant response to Fe-foliar treatments is monitored by measuring chlorophyll content (or related parameters as SPAD index). However, different studies have shown that foliar Fe sprays cause a local regreening and that translocation of the applied Fe within the plant is quite low. In this context, the aim of this study was to assess the effects of foliar applications of different Fe compounds [FeSO4, Fe(III)-EDTA, and Fe(III)-heptagluconate] on Fe-deficient cucumber plants, by studying the main physiological plant root responses to Fe deficiency [root Fe(III) chelate reductase (FCR) activity; acidification of the nutrient solution; and expression of the Fe deficiency responsive genes encoding FCR, CsFRO1, Fe(II) root transporter CsIRT1, and two plasma membrane H+-ATPases, CsHA1 and CsHA2], along with SPAD index, plant growth and Fe content. The results showed that the overall assessment of Fe-deficiency root responses improved the evaluation of the efficacy of the Fe-foliar treatments compared to just monitoring SPAD indexes. Thus, FCR activity and expression of Fe-deficiency response genes, especially CsFRO1 and CsHA1, preceded the trend of SPAD index and acted as indicators of whether the plant was sensing or not metabolically active Fe due to the treatments. Principal component analysis of the data also provided a graphical tool to evaluate the evolution of plant responses to foliar Fe treatments with time.
Identifying Relevant Information Cues for Vulnerability Assessment Using CVSS

The assessment of new vulnerabilities is an activity that accounts for information from several data sources and produces a 'severity' score for the vulnerability. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is the reference standard for this assessment. Yet, no guidance currently exists on which information aids a correct assessment and should therefore be considered. In this paper we address this problem by evaluating which information cues increase (or decrease) assessment accuracy. We devise a block design experiment with 67 software engineering students with varying vulnerability information and measure scoring accuracy under different information sets. We find that baseline vulnerability descriptions provided by standard vulnerability sources provide only part of the information needed to achieve an accurate vulnerability assessment. Further, we find that additional information on assets, attacks, and vulnerability type contributes in increasing the accuracy of the assessment; conversely, information on known threats misleads the assessor and decreases assessment accuracy and should be avoided when assessing vulnerabilities. These results go in the direction of formalizing the vulnerability communication to, for example, fully automate security assessments.
A Capacity Perspective on E-mail Overload: How E-mail Use Contributes to Information Overload

Information overload caused by e-mails are a known issue in practice and academia. There is a lot of research on information overload and e-mail use and misuse. However studies on the phenomenon e-mail overload, describing how e-mail as technology contributes to information overload, are scarce or fragmented. We therefore investigate how e-mails lead to causes of information overload and are creating the phenomenon of e-mail overload. As a theoretical framework, we employ the theory-based model of factors affecting information overload. The resulting research model and measurement scales help to understand the induction of e-mail overload. The proposed scales are then tested for construct validity in a pretest assessment that is based on an item-sort task. The results show very high values for the substantive validities of the constructs, indicating good construct validity.
An Efficiency-Optimal Control Method for Mono-Inverter Dual-PMSM Systems

Current research and development programs in aviation are promoting new technological advances to make electrical systems cheaper, lighter, and more reliable. Mono-inverter dual-permanent magnet synchronous motor (MIDPMSM) systems tend to share the static converters in electro-mechanical systems by connecting motors in parallel. However several studies have shown that the efficiency of this configuration is lower than those with a traditional Mono-inverter mono-permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) configuration, especially when unequal load torques are applied. In this paper, we propose an efficiency-optimized control method for MIDPMSM systems, which has been designed using rigorous, mathematical calculations. The determinacy, stability, and optimal efficiency of the system, which are essential in an aviation application, are explained in detail. This new control structure is simply making current single PMSM systems easy to upgrade to support the MIDPMSM system. The experiment has demonstrated not only feasibility, but also significant improvements in performance.