Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Incorporating a Static Versus Supportive Mobile Phone App Into a Partial Meal Replacement Program With Face-to-Face Support: Randomized Controlled Trial

Background Mobile phone apps may be acceptable to users and could improve retention and adherence over more traditional methods, but there is mixed literature supporting their efficacy. In the weight management space, very little is known about how a mobile phone app integrating features beyond text messaging (short message service) can affect behavior, particularly when combined with face-to-face support. Objective The objective of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a mobile phone app when combined with a partial meal replacement program including face-to-face support. This paper compares a static versus supportive app over a 6-month randomized trial for effects on weight loss, weight-related biomarkers, and psychological outcomes. Methods Overweight and obese adults (71.2% female, 104/146; mean 48.11, SD 11.75 years) were recruited to participate in the weight loss study, and they were randomized on a 1:1 basis using a computer algorithm. The supportive app (n=75) provided information, food intake recording, rewards, prompts for regular interaction through reminders, and the opportunity to review personal compliance with the dietary program. The static app (n=71) included only recipes and weight loss information. Both groups recieved equal amounts of face-to-face support in addition to app. Results The overall reduction in app usage over 24 weeks was lower for the supportive app in comparison with the static app; approximately 39.0% (57/146) of the users were still using the app at week 24. Despite the promising results for app usage, there were no differences in weight loss between groups (F1,128.12=0.83, P=.36). However, it should be noted that almost 60% (49/84) of all participants lost 5% or more of body weight during the trial. No weight-related biomarkers were significantly different between groups. Both groups experienced an increase in positive mood, but this was significantly higher for those who received the static app (F1,118.12=4.93, P=.03). Conclusions Although the supportive app was well received by users, we found little evidence of the added benefit of this versus the static app in combination with face-to-face support in a community-delivered weight loss program. Future versions of the app may incorporate more unique behavioral techniques beyond those provided by the consultant to improve the potency of the app. Trial Registration Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12613000547741; https://www.anzctr. org.au/Trial/Registration/TrialReview.aspx? id=364187 (Archived by WebCite http://www.webcitation.org/6yivwfMI9)
Modeling Dynamic Hair as a Continuum

In this paper we address the difficult problem of hair dynamics, particularly hair‐hair and hair‐air interactions. To model these interactions, we propose to consider hair volume as a continuum. Subsequently, we treat the interaction dynamics to be fluid dynamics. This proves to be a strong as well as viable approach for an otherwise very complex phenomenon. However, we retain the individual character of hair, which is vital to visually realistic rendering of hair animation. For that, we develop an elaborate model for stiffness and inertial dynamics of individual hair strand. Being a reduced coordinate formulation, the stiffness dynamics is numerically stable and fast. We then unify the continuum interaction dynamics and the individual hair's stiffness dynamics.
An Approach for Assessing the Signature Quality of Various Chemical Assays when Predicting the Culture Media Used to Grow Microorganisms

We demonstrate an approach for assessing the quality of a signature system designed to predict the culture medium used to grow a microorganism. The system was comprised of four chemical assays designed to identify various ingredients that could be used to produce the culture medium. The analytical measurements resulting from any combination of these four assays can be used in a Bayesian network to predict the probabilities that the microorganism was grown using one of eleven culture media. We evaluated combinations of the signature system by removing one or more of the assays from the Bayes network. We measured and compared the quality of the various Bayes nets in terms of fidelity, cost, risk, and utility, a method we refer to as Signature Quality Metrics
Rhizobium meliloti nodD genes mediate host-specific activation of nodABC

To differentiate among the roles of the three nodD genes of Rhizobium meliloti 1021, we studied the activation of a nodC-lacZ fusion by each of the three nodD genes in response to root exudates from several R. meliloti host plants and in response to the flavone luteolin. We found (i) that the nodD1 and nodD2 products (NodD1 and NodD2) responded differently to root exudates from a variety of hosts, (ii) that NodD1 but not NodD2 responded to luteolin, (iii) that NodD2 functioned synergistically with NodD1 or NodD3, (iv) that NodD2 interfered with NodD1-mediated activation of nodC-lacZ in response to luteolin, and (v) that a region adjacent to and upstream of nodD2 was required for NodD2-mediated activation of nodC-lacZ. We also studied the ability of each of the three R. meliloti nodD genes to complement nodD mutations in R. trifolii and Rhizobium sp. strain NGR234. We found (i) that nodD1 complemented an R. trifolii nodD mutation but not a Rhizobium sp. strain NGR234 nodD1 mutation and (ii) that R. meliloti nodD2 or nodD3 plus R. meliloti syrM complemented the nodD mutations in both R. trifolii and Rhizobium sp. strain NGR234. Finally, we determined the nucleotide sequence of the R. meliloti nodD2 gene and found that R. meliloti NodD1 and NodD2 are highly homologous except in the C-terminal region. Our results support the hypothesis that R. meliloti utilizes the three copies of nodD to optimize the interaction with each of its legume hosts.
Nitrogen and Phosphorus in Bottom Sediments of Two Small Dam Reservoirs

Bottom sediments of two small shallow dam reservoirs, the Zalew Zemborzycki (ZZ) on the Bystrzyca River near Lublin and Brody Ilzeckie (BI) on the Kamienna River, were investigated. The sediment samples from both water reservoirs were collected at 17 sampling sites in the transects perpendicular to the shoreline, at the river inflow and at the frontal dam. The contents of total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) were measured and the research results analyzed statistically. A relationship between TP concentration in sediments and TN, Fe, and Al levels was determined. The maps of spatial distribution of TN and TP were drawn. Sediments of the BI showed greater differentiation of TN and TP contents than sediments in the ZZ, which resulted from a sediment dredging operation performed in most of its area. The dredged part of the BI reservoir had many times lower levels of both TN and TP as compared to sediments in the undredged part. In the ZZ reservoir sediments, longitudinal zonation of TN spatial distribution was observed: the lowest content in the sediments in left-bank part of the reservoir, medium along the middle part, the highest in the right-bank area. In this water reservoir, the zone of the highest TP accumulation occurred in sediments of the upper part and at the frontal dam. It is likely to be caused by the high external loads of P from the Bystrzyca River and by its sedimentation process along with silt and clay particles, respectively. The TN and TP distribution in sediments in the BI was similar and displayed transverse zonation (parallel to the dam). Our research established a strong linear relationship between TP content and Fe and Al concentrations in BI sediments. It implies that a high level of Fe and Al in sediments of this reservoir contributed to the TP accumulation there.
Evaluating the Effect of Operating Conditions on Temperature Variation Rate of Inner Walls and Inside Inflated Air of Pneumatic Tires

For rolling pneumatic tires, the thermal induced effects are mainly resulted from the visco-elastic behaviour of rubber parts and dissipation of stores strain energy during the cyclic deformations. It is noted that the operating conditions crucially contribute to the rubber hysteresis effect and temperature development in a rolling tire. In the current study, an elaborated 3D FE model is worked up for simulating the certain inflation pressure, loading and velocity conditions for a specified radial tire. Special emphasis is given to transient temperature distribution of interior walls and tire cavities as critical zones. Compared with the experimental tests, the current study gives satisfactory results for the time rate of change in the temperature of tire walls and inside inflated air.
Analysis of Binary Trading Patterns in Xetra

Maurer and Schäfer propose the Shannon entropy as an appropriate one-dimensional measure of behavioral trading patterns in financial markets. The concept is applied to the illustrative example of algorithmic versus non-algorithmic trading and empirical data from the Deutsche Börse electronic cash equity trading system, Xetra. The results reveal pronounced differences between algorithmic and non-algorithmic traders. In particular, trading patterns of algorithmic traders exhibit a medium degree of regularity, while nonalgorithmic trading tends towards either very regular or very irregular trading patterns.
Querying RDF Data Using A Multigraph-based Approach

RDF is a standard for the conceptual description of knowledge , and SPARQL is the query language conceived to query RDF data. The RDF data is cherished and exploited by various domains such as life sciences, Semantic Web, social network, etc. Further, its integration at Web-scale compels RDF management engines to deal with complex queries in terms of both size and structure. In this paper, we propose AMbER (Attributed Multigraph Based Engine for RDF querying), a novel RDF query engine specifically designed to optimize the computation of complex queries. AMbER leverages subgraph matching techniques and extends them to tackle the SPARQL query problem. First of all RDF data is represented as a multigraph, and then novel indexing structures are established to efficiently access the information from the multigraph. Finally a SPARQL query is represented as a multigraph, and the SPARQL querying problem is reduced to the subgraph homomorphism problem. AMbER exploits structural properties of the query multigraph as well as the proposed indexes, in order to tackle the problem of subgraph homomorphism. The performance of AMbER, in comparison with state-of-the-art systems, has been extensively evaluated over several RDF benchmarks. The advantages of employing AMbER for complex SPARQL queries have been experimentally validated.
QUERCETIN-LOADED LIPOSOMES: FORMULATION OPTIMIZATION THROUGH A D-OPTIMAL EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

This study aimed to investigate the influence of formulation factors on the physico-chemical properties of quercetin-loaded liposomes and optimize the preparation conditions. An experimental design with three factors and three levels was used. The variables were dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) concentration, DPPC:Cholesterol (CHOL) molar ratio and quercetin (QU) concentration. The responses were the mean diameter, polydispersity index (PdI) and drug encapsulation efficiency. All samples were prepared according to the experimental design matrix consisting of 17 experiments. Results showed that DPPC concentration and DPPC:CHOL molar ratio had a strong influence on liposome size and PdI. Higher DPPC concentrations led to larger particles and PdI values, but a further increase of DPPC concentration produced a reduction in size and lower PdI. Increasing the lipid ratio caused a decrease in size, but a somewhat higher PdI. QU concentration only slightly influenced particle size and PdI. The degree of QU loading depended on the factors assessed. Increasing DPPC concentration and lipid ratio significantly enhanced QU entrapment. However, higher QU concentrations had a negative effect on drug entrapment. Based on this, an optimized formulation was determined, prepared and analysed. The overall results showed that DPPC concentration and lipid ratio were the main factors influencing particle size, while entrapment efficiency was affected predominantly by QU concentration. Rezumat Acest studiu a urmărit influența factorilor de formulare asupra unei metode de preparare a lipozomilor și optimizarea condițiilor de preparare a lipozomilor cu cvercetină. A fost utilizat un plan experimental cu trei factori și trei niveluri. Factorii au fost concentrația de dipalmitoilfosfatidilcolină (DPPC), raportul molar DPPC:Colesterol (CHOL) și concentrația de cvercetină (QU). Răspunsurile au fost diametrul mediu, indicele de polidispersie (PdI) și eficiența incorporării. Probele au fost preparate conform matricei planului experimental ce a cuprins 17 experimente. Conform rezultatelor, concentrația DPPC și raportul molar DPPC:CHOL au influențat puternic diametrul și PdI. Creșterea concentrației DPPC a condus la dimensiuni și PdI mai mari, insă creșterea suplimentară a concentrației DPPC a determinat reducerea acestora. Prin creșterea raportului lipidelor s-a produs reducerea dimensiunii și creșterea ușoară a PdI. Concentrația QU nu a influențat semnificativ diametrul și PdI. Eficiența incorporării a fost influențată de factorii analizați. Prin creșterea concentrației DPPC și raportului lipidelor a fost imbunătățită eficiența incorporării. Totuși, creșterea concentrației QU a avut un efect negativ asupra incapsulării substanței. Pe baza acestora, a fost stabilită, preparată și analizată o formulare optimizată. Per ansamblu, rezultatele obținute au indicat că principalii factori ce au influențat dimensiunea particulelor au fost concentrația DPPC și raportul lipidelor, in timp ce eficiența incorporării a fost afectată in special de concentrația QU.
Virtualised e-Learning with real-time guarantees on the IRMOS platform

In this paper we focus on how Quality of Service guarantees are provided to virtualised applications in the Cloud Computing infrastructure that is being developed in the context of the IRMOS1 European Project. Provisioning of proper timeliness guarantees to distributed real-time applications involves the careful use of real-time scheduling mechanisms at the virtual-machine hypervisor level, of QoS-aware networking protocols and of proper design methodologies and tools for stochastic modelling of the application. The paper focuses on how we applied these techniques to a case-study involving a real e-Learning mobile content delivery application that has been integrated into the IRMOS platform and its achieved performance.
NeuralStory: an Interactive Multimedia System for Video Indexing and Re-use

In the last years video has been swamping the Internet: websites, social networks, and business multimedia systems are adopting video as the most important form of communication and information. Video are normally accessed as a whole and are not indexed in the visual content. Thus, they are often uploaded as short, manually cut clips with user-provided annotations, keywords and tags for retrieval. In this paper, we propose a prototype multimedia system which addresses these two limitations: it overcomes the need of human intervention in the video setting, thanks to fully deep learning-based solutions, and decomposes the storytelling structure of the video into coherent parts. These parts can be shots, key-frames, scenes and semantically related stories, and are exploited to provide an automatic annotation of the visual content, so that parts of video can be easily retrieved. This also allows a principled re-use of the video itself: users of the platform can indeed produce new storytelling by means of multi-modal presentations, add text and other media, and propose a different visual organization of the content. We present the overall solution, and some experiments on the re-use capability of our platform in edutainment by conducting an extensive user valuation
AUTOMATIC EVENT CLASSIFICATION USING FRONT END SINGLE CHANNEL NOISE REDUCTION, MFCC FEATURES AND A SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE CLASSIFIER

This submission to the sub-task scene event classiﬁcation Ofﬁce Live of the IEEE AASP Challenge: Detection and Classiﬁcation of Acoustic Scenes and Events uses ﬁrst a single channel noise reduction to clean stationary background noise, next mfccs are extracted and ﬁnally a support-vector machine classiﬁer is used to classify the events. In this short paper the usage of the implementation as well as a short description of the system is explained.
Statistical Cache Bypassing for Non-Volatile Memory

With the increasing data throughput requirement, non-volatile memories, such as STT-RAM, PCM and RRAM, have become very competitive designs as on-chip caches in chip-multi-processors (CMPs). Since the write operations are more expensive in an asymmetric-access cache, it is more valuable to justify the data allocation. However, the asymmetric-access property of non-volatile memory is not well addressed in prior bypassing approaches, which are not energy efficient and induce non-trivial operation overhead. In this paper, we propose cache-bypassing methods designed for non-volatile memory. The basic method, SBAC, is based on data locality statistics of the whole cache rather than a signature of each cache line. The multicore extensions, SBAC-C and SBAC-G, strengthen the SBAC by distinguishing data patterns in CMPs. We observe that the decision-making of SBAC and its multicore extensions is highly accurate. Experiments show that SBAC can reduce overall energy consumption by 22.3 percent, and reduce execution time by 8.3 percent on average. The energy consumption is reduced by 21.4 and 23.4 percent for SBAC-C and SBAC-G. And the performance is improved by 7.8 and 9.6 percent for SBAC-C and SBAC-G in multicore scenario. Compared to prior approaches, SBAC outperforms and induces trivial design overhead.
A Practical Implementation of GPU based Accelerator for Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural network (DNN) has been widely used in Internet applications like speech recognition, image classification, neural language processing, etc. DNN training process, however, is very computing intensive and is also difficult to be handled by distributed clusters without using algorithm approximation [6], which incurs recognition accuracy loss. As training data size increases for modern applications, e.g. large vocabulary conversational speech recognition, the training process becomes more and more time consuming. In order to accelerate the process, we implement a GPU based DNN accelerator in a X86 computing system, which is. The original DNN training algorithm is implemented on GPU without approximation. Our heterogeneous architecture with a single GPU accelerator can achieve 462X speedup compared to the homogeneous architecture with only one X86 CPU. In addition, we implement a heterogeneous system using multiple accelerators, which further gains 1.99X and 3.3X performance improvements with two and four GPUs, respectively.
Simultaneous Energy Harvesting and Sender-Node Authentication at a Receiver Node

We consider a system with three single-antenna nodes; Alice talks to Bob over a time-slotted AWGN channel, while Eve's objective is to impersonate Alice. We then consider a setting where, for every received packet, Bob needs to do simultaneous energy harvesting (EH) and sender-node authentication. To this end, Bob employs frequency offset as the decision metric for binary hypothesis testing based authentication framework. Then, assuming separate receive chains for energy harvesting and information decoding, Bob implements two deterministic energy harvesting schemes: i) time-switching (TS) based, ii) static power-splitting (SPS) based. For both EH schemes, we analyze the trade-off between detection performance of the authentication scheme and amount of energy harvested. Numerical results suggest that for the same detection performance, SPS scheme outperforms TS scheme in terms of amount of energy harvested. We also consider a random energy harvesting scheme, the so-called opportunistic EH scheme, whereby Bob utilizes Eve's packets (as labeled by authentication scheme) to harvest energy. There, it is straightforward to see that the normalized mean throughput of EH receive chain increases linearly with an increase in Eve's attack rate.
Multi-Scale modelling and hybrid atomistic continuum simulation for condensation of gas in a microschannel

A hybrid atomistic-continuum method devoted to the study of multi-scale problems is presented. The simulation domain is decomposed into three regions: the bulk where the continuous Navier-Stokes and energy equations are solved, the neighborhood of the wall simulated by the Molecular Dynamics and the overlap region which connects the macroscopic variables (velocity and temperature) between the two former regions. For the simulation of long micro/nanochannels, we adopt multiple molecular blocks along the flow direction to capture accurately the velocity and temperature variations from the inlet to the outlet. The validity of the hybrid method is shown by comparisons with a simplified analytical model in the molecular region. The method is then applied successfully to the study the hydrodynamic and thermal development of a liquid flow in a long micro/nanochannel without and with condensation.
Association of mesenchymal stem cells with platelet rich plasma on the repair of critical calvarial defects in mice.

PURPOSE To evaluate the effects of mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) from eight mice C57BL/6 gfp(+) bone marrows expanded in cultures associated with platelets rich plasma (PRP) deriving from another eight mice, in the repair of critical defects in calvarial bone produced in twenty-four adult isogenic mice C57BL/6. METHODS The animals were submitted to a cranial defect of 6.0mm in diameter and divided into two equal experimental groups. Control group did not receive treatment and the treated group received a MSC pellet containing 1.0 x 10(7) cells/mL associated with 50.0 µL of plasma gel containing 1.0 x 10(9) autologous platelets within the defect. RESULTS In the treated group was observed process of angiogenesis and bone repair better than control group. CONCLUSION Mesenchymal stem cells derived from bone marrow of C57BL/6 gfp(+) mice associated with PRP gel applied in bone critical defects produced in calvarial contributes positively to the process of bone repair.