Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fabrication of Composite Microneedle Array Electrode for Temperature and Bio-Signal Monitoring

Body temperature and bio-signals are important health indicators that reflect the human health condition. However, monitoring these indexes is inconvenient and time-consuming, requires various instruments, and needs professional skill. In this study, a composite microneedle array electrode (CMAE) was designed and fabricated. It simultaneously detects body temperature and bio-signals. The CMAE consists of a 6 × 6 microneedles array with a height of 500 μm and a base diameter of 200 μm. Multiple insertion experiments indicate that the CMAE possesses excellent mechanical properties. The CMAE can pierce porcine skin 100 times without breaking or bending. A linear calibration relationship between temperature and voltage are experimentally obtained. Armpit temperature (35.8 °C) and forearm temperature (35.3 °C) are detected with the CMAE, and the measurements agree well with the data acquired with a clinical thermometer. Bio-signals including EII, ECG, and EMG are recorded and compared with those obtained by a commercial Ag/AgCl electrode. The CMAE continuously monitors bio-signals and is more convenient to apply because it does not require skin preparation and gel usage. The CMAE exhibits good potential for continuous and repetitive monitoring of body temperature and bio-signals.
Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol may palliate altered chemosensory perception in cancer patients: results of a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot trial.

BACKGROUND A pilot study (NCT00316563) to determine if delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) can improve taste and smell (chemosensory) perception as well as appetite, caloric intake, and quality of life (QOL) for cancer patients with chemosensory alterations. PATIENTS AND METHODS Adult advanced cancer patients, with poor appetite and chemosensory alterations, were recruited from two sites and randomized in a double-blinded manner to receive either THC (2.5 mg, Marinol(®); Solvay Pharma Inc., n = 24) or placebo oral capsules (n = 22) twice daily for 18 days. Twenty-one patients completed the trial. At baseline and posttreatment, patients completed a panel of patient-reported outcomes: Taste and Smell Survey, 3-day food record, appetite and macronutrient preference assessments, QOL questionnaire, and an interview. RESULTS THC and placebo groups were comparable at baseline. Compared with placebo, THC-treated patients reported improved (P = 0.026) and enhanced (P < 0.001) chemosensory perception and food 'tasted better' (P = 0.04). Premeal appetite (P = 0.05) and proportion of calories consumed as protein increased compared with placebo (P = 0.008). THC-treated patients reported increased quality of sleep (P = 0.025) and relaxation (P = 0.045). QOL scores and total caloric intake were improved in both THC and placebo groups. CONCLUSIONS THC may be useful in the palliation of chemosensory alterations and to improve food enjoyment for cancer patients.
Effects of geranylgeranylacetone upon cardiovascular diseases

Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are an important family of protective proteins. They are involved actively in an array of cellular processes, including protective effects on the cardiovascular system in response to various stimuli. Increasing evidence shows that pharmacologic interventions that induce expression of HSPs may be a novel approach for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, agents that induce expression of HSPs used previously are toxic or have harmful side effects, which limit their clinical application. Geranylgeranylacetone (GGA) is not only a widely used antiulcer agent in Asia, but also a nontoxic inducer of HSPs expression. It increases the expression of HSPs rapidly in the presence of ischemia, anoxia, oxidative stress, and toxicants, thereby having significant protective effects. The cardioprotective effects of GGA have been corroborated by experiments in vivo and in vitro. Importantly, several derivatives of GGA have been synthesized that have improved pharmaco-chemical and HSPs-boosting properties. In this review, the current knowledge and potential cardioprotective mechanisms of GGA are summarized comprehensively. We discuss the protective effects of GGA in cardiovascular diseases and myocardial injury induced by physical or chemical injury. Currently available information suggests that GGA could be employed as a novel pharmacologic intervention against cardiovascular disease.
FSCNMF: Fusing Structure and Content via Non-negative Matrix Factorization for Embedding Information Networks

Network embedding has been a central topic of information network mining in the last couple of years. Network embedding learns a compact lower dimensional vector representation for each node of the network, and uses this lower dimensional representation for different machine learning and mining applications. The existing methods for network embedding consider mainly the structure of the network. But many real world networks also contain rich textual or other type of content associated with each node, which can help to understand the underlying semantics of the network. It is not straightforward to integrate the content of each node in the state-of-the-art network embedding methods. In this work, we propose a nonnegative matrix factorization based optimization framework, namely FSCNMF which considers both the network structure and the content of the nodes while learning a lower dimensional vector representation of each node in the network. Our approach systematically exploits the consistency of the network structure and the content of the nodes. We further extend the basic FSCNMF to an advanced method, namely FSCNMF++ to capture the higher order proximities in the network. We conduct experiments on real world information networks for different types of machine learning applications such as node clustering, visualization, and multi-class classification. The results show that our method can represent the network significantly better than the state-of-the-art algorithms and improve the performance across all the applications that we consider.
Motif Counting Beyond Five Nodes

Counting graphlets is a well-studied problem in graph mining and social network analysis. Recently, several papers explored very simple and natural algorithms based on Monte Carlo sampling of Markov Chains (MC), and reported encouraging results. We show, perhaps surprisingly, that such algorithms are outperformed by color coding (CC) [2], a sophisticated algorithmic technique that we extend to the case of graphlet sampling and for which we prove strong statistical guarantees. Our computational experiments on graphs with millions of nodes show CC to be more accurate than MC; furthermore, we formally show that the mixing time of the MC approach is too high in general, even when the input graph has high conductance. All this comes at a price however. While MC is very efficient in terms of space, CC’s memory requirements become demanding when the size of the input graph and that of the graphlets grow. And yet, our experiments show that CC can push the limits of the state-of-the-art, both in terms of the size of the input graph and of that of the graphlets.
Anxiety and Depression in Patients with Permanent Atrial Fibrillation: Prevalence and Associated Factors

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is an important public health problem that is increasing at an alarming rate, worldwide. The most common type is permanent AF followed by the paroxysmal and persistent AF. Purpose. This study was aimed at exploring anxiety and depression and the associated factors in patients with permanent AF. Materials and Methods. The sample of the study included 170 AF patients. Data collection was performed by the method of interview using the “Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale” (HADS) to assess anxiety and depression and a questionnaire including patients' characteristics. Results. 70% of the participants were men, and 32.4% were above 70 years old. Furthermore, 34.9% of the patients had high levels of anxiety, and 20.2% had high levels of depression. Anxiety levels were statistically significantly associated with gender (p=0.022), age (p=0.022), educational level (p=0.025), years having the disease (p=0.005), and relations with nursing staff (p=0.040). Depression levels were statistically significantly associated with age (p=0.037), degree of information of the state of health (p < 0.001), years having the disease (p < 0.001), and relations with medical staff (p=0.041). Conclusions. Patients' characteristics are associated with anxiety and depression and need to be evaluated when treating this frequently encountered arrhythmia.
Antioxidative and Cholesterol-Lowering Effects of Lemon Essential Oil in Hypercholesterolemia-Induced Rabbits

The cholesterol-lowering and anti-atherogenic effects of lemon essential oil (LEO) were investigated and compared with the effects of limonene. Owing to their volatility, both LEO and limonene were microencapsulated before preparation of the diet (20%, w/w). Hypercholesterolemia-induced rabbits were divided into 3 groups based on plasma total cholesterol (TC) levels and fed coating matrix (control group), LEO (LEO group), or limonene (Limonene group) for 8 weeks. LEO dose-dependently inhibited low-density lipoprotein oxidation in vitro. Plasma TC levels were the lowest in the LEO group (P<0.05). Erythrocytes in the LEO group had a normal disc shape, whereas the erythrocytes in the limonene and control groups were aggregated and star-shaped, respectively. The aortic intima thickness was thinnest in the LEO group followed by the control and limonene groups. Plasma TC lowering and anti-atherogenic effects of LEO were greater than limonene, suggesting that other bioactive compounds besides limonene in LEO might contribute to these effects. The bioactive compounds in LEO were limonene (67.57%), β-pinene (10.00%), and γ-terpinene (9.95%). In addition, sabinene, α-pinene, myrcene, and geranial were also present but the amount was in the range of 1~2%. Several bioactive compounds were also detected. In conclusion, LEO had beneficial effects on hypercholesterolemia due to its antioxidative and cholesterol lowering effects.
Cannabinoids in health and disease

Cannabis sativa L. preparations have been used in medicine for millenia. However, concern over the dangers of abuse led to the banning of the medicinal use of marijuana in most countries in the 1930s. Only recently, marijuana and individual natural and synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists and antagonists, as well as chemically related compounds, whose mechanism of action is still obscure, have come back to being considered of therapeutic value. However, their use is highly restricted. Despite the mild addiction to cannabis and the possible enhancement of addiction to other substances of abuse, when combined with cannabis, the therapeutic value of cannabinoids is too high to be put aside. Numerous diseases, such as anorexia, emesis, pain, inflammation, multiple sclerosis, neurodegenerative disorders (Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, Tourette's syndrome, Alzheimer's disease), epilepsy, glaucoma, osteoporosis, schizophrenia, cardiovascular disorders, cancer, obesity, and metabolic syndrome-related disorders, to name just a few, are being treated or have the potential to be treated by cannabinoid agonists/antagonists/cannabinoid-related compounds. In view of the very low toxicity and the generally benign side effects of this group of compounds, neglecting or denying their clinical potential is unacceptable - instead, we need to work on the development of more selective cannabinoid receptor agonists/antagonists and related compounds, as well as on novel drugs of this family with better selectivity, distribution patterns, and pharmacokinetics, and - in cases where it is impossible to separate the desired clinical action and the psychoactivity - just to monitor these side effects carefully.
ndocannabinoid concentrations in hair are associated with PTSD ymptom severity

The endocannabinoid system has been implicated in the regulation of the stress response, fear memory formation, and inflammatory processes. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can result from exposure to extreme stress and is characterized by strong, associative memories for the traumatic events experienced. Furthermore, an elevated physical disease risk has been observed in PTSD, likely to be mediated by inflammatory processes. Therefore, altered endocannabinoid regulation can be expected in individuals with PTSD. However, attempts to assess PTSD-associated differences in the endocannabinoid system from human blood samples have provided inconsistent results, possibly due to fluctuating levels of endocannabinoids. In hair, these neuromodulators are accumulated over time and thus give access to a more stable and reliable assessment. We therefore investigated PTSD-associated differences in hair concentrations of endocannabinoids (Nacyl-ethanolamides palmitoylethanolamide [PEA], oleoylethanolamide [OEA] and stearoylethanolamide [SEA]) in 38 rebel war survivors from Northern Uganda suffering from PTSD and N = 38 healthy rebel war survivors without current and lifetime PTSD. PTSD diagnosis and symptom severity were assessed in structured clinical interviews employing the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (PDS). A significant group difference was observed for OEA, with PTSD patients showing reduced hair concentrations. Regression analyses further revealed strong negative relationships between all investigated N-acyl-ethanolamides and symptom severity of PTSD. The observed reductions in endocannabinoids might account for the increased inflammatory state as well as for the failure to extinguish fear memories observed in PTSD. Our findings add to the accumulating evidence suggesting the endocannabinoid system as a target for pharmacological enhancement of exposure-based psychotherapy for PTSD.
(How) Does Initial Self-Control Undermine Later Self-Control in Daily Life?

Past research suggests that self-control lapses occur more frequently following demanding experiences in daily life. However, the reason for these effects is debated. Three studies were therefore conducted to better understand self-control lapses. Exploratory analyses were conducted in Study 1 to identify possible effects. Studies 2 and 3 evaluated these effects’ reliability. Two patterns were identified. First, initial desire–goal conflict predicted later increases in subjective fatigue. This was in turn related to less effective self-control attempts. Second, initial self-control attempts also led participants to enact desires more frequently. This latter effect occurred even when (and perhaps especially when) those later desires were not resisted. In contrast, the strength model of self-control did not receive support, as initial self-control attempts did not affect the success of subsequent self-control attempts. These studies therefore suggest initial self-control does play an important role in producing later self-control lapses—just a different role than predicted by the strength model.
Stay Focused ! Auto Focusing Lenses for Correcting Presbyopia

Development of active glasses for mitigating presbyopia has become an active area of research, facilitated by the miniaturization of focus-tunable lenses as well as the increased processing power of modern computers. However, current systems are still not very user friendly, or are limited in ability to solve the issue completely. In our project, we implement a full system to correct for presbyopia based on where the user is looking. We first create an improved housing in order to mount to the user’s head more optimally, and subsequently devise a novel method of calibration-free eyetracking for better ease of use. We show in our results that the headset we produce does indeed fit better on user’s heads and creates a better user experience, and that our model, while not optimal, does indeed predict a gaze position that, with fine tuning, may be able to replace the current eye tracking software.
User Modeling for the Social Semantic Web

How can we make use of the personal information a single user is spreading all over the Social Web every day? In this paper we investigate what is needed from a user model point of view to support user data sharing and aggregation to enhance personalization and recommendation services. We present a study of 17 social applications to define requirements and attributes for a common user model that allows sharing of user data and analyze what is needed to enhance user model aggregation approaches. As a result, we present a comprehensive user model especially fitted to the needs of the Social Web. Furthermore, we present a Word Net for the user modeling domain as part of the user model to support user model aggregation.
Ordering and Absolute Energies of the L6c and X6c Conduction Band Minima in GaAs

Resolved critical point structures in Schottky-barrier electroreflectance spectra of Ga3dV-sp3 conduction band transitions in the 20-22-eV range provide a direct proof that the L6C equivalent minima lie approximately 170±30 meVbelow the X6C minima in GaAs. This ordering, opposite to that assumed and apparently supported by previous experiments, is in fact consistent with these experiments and provides natural explanations for many formerly puzzling features of GaAs.
Are Stress Eaters at Risk for the Metabolic Syndrome?

Abstract: Stress eating is a health behavior that has been overlooked in much of health psychology research. It is largely unknown why some tend to eat during or after stressful periods, whereas others tend to lose their appetite and lose weight. Furthermore, it is unknown if such transient changes in food intake or macronutrient composition during stress have clinically significant consequences in terms of weight and metabolic health. The Brown University Medical Student Study examined students during a baseline control period as well as during two examination periods. This design enabled an examination of weight changes in self‐proclaimed stress eaters vs stress‐less eaters over time. Stress eaters tended to gain more weight and demonstrated increases in nocturnal levels of insulin, cortisol, and blood levels of total/HDL cholesterol ratio, during exam periods, controlling for the baseline control period. These data show prospectively that stress eating may indeed have short‐term consequences on metabolic health. Future research will need to determine whether this confers a greater risk of disease over time.
HighLife: Higher-arity Fact Harvesting

Text-based knowledge extraction methods for populating knowledge bases have focused on binary facts: relationships between two entities. However, in advanced domains such as health, it is often crucial to consider ternary and higher-arity relations. An example is to capture which drug is used for which disease at which dosage (e.g. 2.5 mg/day) for which kinds of patients (e.g., children vs. adults). In this work, we present an approach to harvest higher-arity facts from textual sources. Our method is distantly supervised by seed facts, and uses the fact-pattern duality principle to gather fact candidates with high recall. For high precision, we devise a constraint-based reasoning method to eliminate false candidates. A major novelty is in coping with the difficulty that higher-arity facts are often expressed only partially in texts and strewn across multiple sources. For example, one sentence may refer to a drug, a disease and a group of patients, whereas another sentence talks about the drug, its dosage and the target group without mentioning the disease. Our methods cope well with such partially observed facts, at both pattern-learning and constraint-reasoning stages. Experiments with health-related documents and with news articles demonstrate the viability of our method.
A Scalable Permission Management System With Support of Conditional and Customized Attributes

Along with the classical problem of managing multiple identities, actions, devices, APIs etc. in different businesses, there has been an escalating need for having the capability of flexible attribute based access control~(ABAC) mechanisms. In order to fill this gap, several variations of ABAC model have been proposed such as \textit{Amazon's AWS IAM}, which uses JSON as their underlying storage data structure and adds policies/constraints as fields over the regular ABAC. However, these systems still do not provide the capability to have customized permissions and to perform various operations (such as comparison/aggregation) on them. In this paper, we introduce a string based resource naming strategy that supports the customized and conditional permissions for resource access. Further, we propose the basic architecture of our system which, along with our naming scheme, makes the system scalable, secure, efficient, flexible and customizable. Finally, we present the proof of concept for our algorithm as well as the experimental set up and the future trajectory for this work.
Fortification of Neural Morphological Segmentation Models for Polysynthetic Minimal-Resource Languages

Morphological segmentation for polysynthetic languages is challenging, because a word may consist of many individual morphemes and training data can be extremely scarce. Since neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models define the state of the art for morphological segmentation in high-resource settings and for (mostly) European languages, we first show that they also obtain competitive performance for Mexican polysynthetic languages in minimal-resource settings. We then propose two novel multi-task training approaches—one with, one without need for external unlabeled resources—, and two corresponding data augmentation methods, improving over the neural baseline for all languages. Finally, we explore cross-lingual transfer as a third way to fortify our neural model and show that we can train one single multi-lingual model for related languages while maintaining comparable or even improved performance, thus reducing the amount of parameters by close to 75%. We provide our morphological segmentation datasets for Mexicanero, Nahuatl, Wixarika and Yorem Nokki for future research.