Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular Epidemiology and Genetic Diversity of Orthohantaviruses in Small Mammals in Western Poland.

Orthohantaviruses are negative-sense, single-stranded RNA viruses harbored by multiple small mammals. Dobrava-Belgrade virus (DOBV) and Puumala virus (PUUV) cause hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) in Europe. In Poland, serological surveys have demonstrated antibodies against DOBV and PUUV in patients with HFRS. Molecular evidence of DOBV and PUUV has been found in Apodemus flavicollis and Myodes glareolus, respectively, in southeastern Poland, and Seewis virus (SWSV) has been reported in Sorex araneus in central Poland. However, data on the geographic distribution and phylogeny of orthohantaviruses are unavailable for other regions in Poland. To ascertain the prevalence and genetic diversity of orthohantaviruses in western and northern Poland, lung tissues from 106 small mammals were analyzed for the presence of orthohantavirus RNA. Dobrava-Belgrade virus and SWSV were detected in two of 42 (4.8%) Apodemus agrarius and in three of 10 (30%) S. araneus, respectively. Phylogenetic analyses of partial L- and S-segment sequences of DOBV indicated a shared genetic lineage with the Kurkino genotype from Slovakia, Russia, and Hungary, whereas the partial M segment of DOBV clustered with the Kurkino genotype from Germany. Phylogenetic relationships of the SWSV L and S segments showed a geographic lineage with SWSV strains from central Poland, Czech Republic, and Germany. In conclusion, the study provides an insight into the molecular prevalence, phylogenetic diversity, and evolutionary relationship of DOBV in A. agrarius and SWSV in S. araneus. This report increases awareness among physicians for HFRS outbreaks in western Poland.
Alternative approaches in molecular characterization of foodborne pathogens: Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli and Salmonella serotypes

Title of Document: ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES IN MOLECULAR CHARACTERIZATION OF FOODBORNE PATHOGENS: SHIGA TOXINPRODUCING Escherichia coli AND Salmonella SEROTYPES. Magaly Alejandra Toro Ibaceta, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Professor Jianghong Meng, Department of Nutrition and Food Science Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) and Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica (S. enterica) are two major foodborne pathogens. They cause almost 1.5 million of cases of disease each year in the US. Due to their public health impact, development of new methods for their detection and identification are top priority. This research focused on identifying alternative molecular methods and markers for the identification of STEC and Salmonella. First, a suspension array was developed to simultaneously identify the seven most prevalent STEC (O26, O45, O103, O111, O121, O145, and O157) in the US. The panel targeted genes wzx or wzy and Shigatoxin genes. Testing and optimization employed four to eleven isolates of each serotype in the panel. STEC fluorescence values were 30 to >270 times greater than those of negative controls, demonstrating the method’s effectiveness for the molecular serotyping of STEC. STEC strains (n=194) of 43 serotypes were examined for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) arrays to study relatedness among serotypes. A subset of strains (n=81) was analyzed for cas and virulence genes to determine a possible relationship. CRISPR spacer content correlated well with serotypes, although some strains with different serogroup but the same H type shared identical arrays (O26:H11, O103:H11, and O111:H11). cas and virulence genes were not associated, but strains with greater probability of causing outbreaks and disease showed fewer spacers than those less likely to cause them (p<0.05). Therefore, CRISPR array content correlated well with STEC serotype, and CRISPR-cas systems were inversely related to strain virulence potential. Finally, the CRISPR arrays of 221 S. enterica of 53 serotypes were analyzed to define their relationship. CRISPR-cas systems of 50 S. enterica serotype Bareilly (S. Bareilly) were analyzed to resolve intra-serotype variations. CRISPR arrays correlated well with serotypes, although some serotypes displayed more than one type of array (e.g. S. Bareilly). Additionally, CRISPR-cas system elements reflected S. Bareilly phylogeny, but the array content was not linked to food vehicle or isolate’s geographical origin. In conclusion, CRISPR array are useful for designing molecular serotyping assays, but a range of strains should be included to account for variation in S. enterica. ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES IN MOLECULAR CHARACTERIZATION OF FOODBORNE PATHOGENS: SHIGA TOXIN-PRODUCING Escherichia coli AND Salmonella SEROTYPES.
Preparation, Physicochemical Characterisation and DoE Optimisation of a Spray-Dried Dry Emulsion Platform for Delivery of a Poorly Soluble Drug, Simvastatin

In the presented study, insight into the development and optimisation of the dry emulsion formulation and spray drying process is provided. The aim was to facilitate the dissolution of the poorly soluble, highly lipophilic drug, simvastatin, by forming spray-dried dry emulsion particles having adequate powder flow properties, while assuring sufficient drug content. Simvastatin and a mixture of caprylic, capric triglyceride and 1-oleoyl-rac-glycerol were employed as a model drug and solubilising oils, respectively. A matrix of the dry emulsions was composed at a fixed ratio mixture of mannitol and HPMC. Tween 20 was used in low amounts as the primary emulsion stabiliser. To facilitate process optimisation, a DoE surface response design was used to study the influence of formulation and process parameters on the particle size distribution, powder bulk properties, emulsion reconstitution ability, drug stability and process yield of spray-dried products. Two-fluid nozzle geometry was identified, studied and confirmed to be important for most product critical quality attributes. Models obtained after the study showed acceptable coefficients of determination and provided good insight in the relationship governing the process and product characteristics. Five model optimised products showed adequate process yield, suitable particle size distribution, good reconstitution ability and improved dissolution profile, when compared to a non-lipid-based tablet and the pure drug. However, the obtained dry emulsion powders exhibited poor flow character according to the Carr index. The optimised product was further analysed with NMR during lipolysis to gain insight into the species formed during digestion and the kinetics of their formation.
Power line route optimisation in a finite spatial grid

Power lines are integral to one of our most important infrastructure systems: the power supply network. They are run all over the world, across all kinds of landscape. While they are vital to our day-to-day life, they also have some negative influence on the environment, the view, and on other man-made structures. Building cost-effective power lines with limited environmental and social impact is a critical task. This paper considers a problem introduced by the British company NM Group, which specialises in surveying and planning for power line infrastructure. The main question which NM Group posed and which we address in our report is the following.
Secured Authentication Systems for Internet of Things

INTRODUCTION: In these days, an enormous extent of contraptions are interconnected with the remote advances which gave the principal light to the front line development of Internet of Things (IoT). Different quick contraptions and machines are by and by watched and controlled using IoT conventions. The developments of IoT are by and by spread to the entire sphere by which there is superb system in the devices related using IoT. From the assessment reports of Statista.com, The closeout of splendid home contraptions raised from 1.2 billion dollars to 4.4 billion dollars from year 2015 to year 2019 in the United States. As indicated by the report from Economics Times, there will connect with more than 2 billion units of ESIM based contraptions by year 2024. With the use of ESIM, the endorsers can use the progressed SIM card for the astute contraptions and the organizations can be activated without need of the physical SIM card. It is one of the progressing and confirmed employments of Internet of Things (IoT). OBJECTIVES: The presented research manuscript is presenting an outline of the present state of IoT security. METHODS: Past the standard applications, IoT is under research for the earth watching and prior notification to the coordinating workplaces so the fitting moves can be made. As per the news report by Grand View Research Inc., the overall IoT marketplace size is shown to contact more than 5,000 million dollars by year 2025. The presented IoT suggests the radio advancement standard with LPWAN so the enormous consideration of sharp devices should be conceivable with more significant level of execution in the system. RESULTS: The key positive of the paper integrates the evaluation of Internet of Things with the assorted dimensions in addition to the cavernous analytics with the implementation aspects towards the security mechanism. The paper is having the focus and goals towards the association of security aware mechanism for the cumulative performance of IoT based environment. CONCLUSION: With the gigantic utilization of IoT, there is have to incorporate the higher level of security and honesty for the protection mindful system condition.
When, how, and why developers (do not) test in their IDEs

The research community in Software Engineering and Software Testing in particular builds many of its contributions on a set of mutually shared expectations. Despite the fact that they form the basis of many publications as well as open-source and commercial testing applications, these common expectations and beliefs are rarely ever questioned. For example, Frederic Brooks’ statement that testing takes half of the development time seems to have manifested itself within the community since he first made it in the “Mythical Man Month” in 1975. With this paper, we report on the surprising results of a large-scale field study with 416 software engineers whose development activity we closely monitored over the course of five months, resulting in over 13 years of recorded work time in their integrated development environments (IDEs). Our findings question several commonly shared assumptions and beliefs about testing and might be contributing factors to the observed bug proneness of software in practice: the majority of developers in our study does not test; developers rarely run their tests in the IDE; Test-Driven Development (TDD) is not widely practiced; and, last but not least, software developers only spend a quarter of their work time engineering tests, whereas they think they test half of their time.
Patient-Reported Fatigue Is Associated with Poor Energy Intake and Readmission to Hospital

Objective: To investigate patient-reported factors those promote or inhibit food intake in older people after discharge from hospital. Background: Disease-related malnutrition leads to poor appetite, decreased food intake and affects convalescence negatively. Design: Secondary analysis of two intervention groups from an RCT. Methods: 111 older adults received nutritional follow-up one, two and four weeks after discharge. Self-reported food intake was classified as adequate (AQ) or inadequate (IAQ) energy intake two weeks after discharge. Data on inhibitory and promoting factors, body weight, ADL-function, readmission and mortality were analysed and comparison made between AQ and IAQ groups. Results: More IAQ participants reported fatigue and eating all meals alone. All participants lost body weight, but more IAQ participants lost body weight. More IAQ participants were readmitted to hospital 30 days after discharge. Conclusion: “Fatigue” and “eating all meals alone” affect food intake negatively, leading to loss of body weight and readmission to hospital.
Challenging software developers: dialectic as a foundation for security assurance techniques

Development teams are increasingly expected to deliver secure code, but how can they best achieve this? Traditional security practice, which emphasizes ‘telling developers what to do’ using checklists, processes and errors to avoid, has proved difficult to introduce. From analysis of industry interviews with a dozen experts in app development security, we find that secure development requires ‘dialectic’: a challenging dialog between the developers and a range of counterparties, continued throughout the development cycle. Analysing a further survey of 16 industry developer security advocates, we identify the six assurance techniques that are most effective at achieving this dialectic in existing development teams, and conclude that the introduction of these techniques is best driven by the developers themselves. Concentrating on these six assurance techniques, and the dialectical interactions they involve, has the potential to increase the security of development activities and thus improve software security for everyone.
A Novel Approach to Speed Up MOEA Pareto Front Computation

Multi-ObjectiveEvolutionaryAlgorithms(MOEAs)offercompelling solutionstomanyrealworldproblems,includingsoftwareengineer-ingones.However,theirefficiencydecreaseswiththegrowingsize oftheproblemsathand,hinderingtheirapplicabilityinpractice. Inthispaperweproposeanovelmaster-workerapproachto distributethecomputationoftheParetoFront(PF)forMOEAs (dubbedMOEA-DPF)andempiricallyevaluateitonareal-world softwareprojectmanagementproblem.Withrespecttoprevious work,ourproposalcanbeusedwithanyMOEAtotacklemulti-objectiveproblemsregardlessoftheirformulation/representation. OurresultsshowthatMOEA-DPFrunssignificantlyfaster(upto 3.1xspeed-upusingtwoworkers)thanitssequentialcounterpart whilemaintaining(andevenimproving)thequalityofthePF.We concludethatMOEA-DPFprovidesaneffectiveandsimplesolu-tiontospeed-uptheexecutionofMOEAsbydistributingthePF computation,makingthemeffectiveforreal-worldproblems.
POLITECNICO DI TORINO Repository ISTITUZIONALE WHAT : A Big Data Approach for Accounting of Modern Web Services

HTTP(S) has become the main means to access the Internet. The web is a tangle, with (i) multiple services and applications co-located on the same infrastructure and (ii) several websites, services and applications embedding objects from CDN, ads and tracking platforms. Traditional solutions for traffic classification and metering fall short in providing visibility in users’ activities. Service providers and corporate network administrators are left with huge amounts of measurements, which cannot immediately reveal the real impact of each web service on the network. Such visibility is key to dimension the network, charge users and policy traffic. This paper introduces the Web Helper Accounting Tool (WHAT), a system to uncover the overall traffic produced by specific web services. WHAT combines big data and machine learning approaches to process large volumes of network flow measurements and learn how to group traffic due to pre-defined services of interest. Our evaluation demonstrates WHAT effectiveness in enabling accurate accounting of the traffic associated to each service. WHAT illustrates the power of machine learning when applied to large datasets of network measurements, and allows network administrators to regain the lost visibility on network usage.
A Classification Regression Tree Analysis to Reduce Balance Impairments and Falls in the Older population: Impact on Resource Utilization and Clinical Decision-Making in USA Rehabilitation Service Delivery

Background/Purpose: Over 1/3 of adults over age 65 experiences at least one fall each year. This pilot report uses a classification regression tree analysis (CART) to model the outcomes for balance/risk of falls from the Gentiva® Safe Strides® Program (SSP). Methods/Outcomes: SSP is a homebased balance/fall prevention program designed to treat root causes of a patient's balance problems. Analysis starts with the cohort of patients enrolled in SSP having a Berg Balance Assessment completed (n=165) and sequentially divides it into subgroups, creating a regression tree model. Descriptive statistics were calculated to summarize demographics, selfreported pain measure, foot sensation, and initial exam and discharge scores for tests of impaired balance/risk of falls. Results/Discussion: Average (+SD) age for fallers was 82.6 (+8.3) years with 39.8% (n=37) male and 60.2% (n=56) females, and 77.3 (+10.1) years for non-fallers with 43.5% (n=30) males and 56.5% (n=39) females, respectively. 43% of patients demonstrated improved balance on discharge from home health. The CART yielded a tree model after 12 partitions. The best discriminating variable was BBS score of < or > 33 on initial examination. Conclusion: This pilot case analysis enables Gentiva® and policy makers to improve efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery.
Privacy Enhanced Attribute based eSign

In recent years, Government of India has introduced many Aadhaar based online services. Although these initiatives helped India compete in digital revolution across world and were acclaimed by many, they have also raised some concerns about security especially the privacy aspects. One of the initiative in this direction is eSign which provides an online electronic signature service to its subscribers. Although most of the security aspects are addressed by eSign, some of the privacy aspects are yet to be addressed. This paper presents a scheme to implement privacy enhanced eSign using Attribute based Signatures (ABS). For the practical and efﬁcient realization of the scheme, a token based approach is proposed.
Information support for organizational management of the training process for specialists

This article deals with an approach to the assessment of professional competences development among university graduates. The main attention is paid to the evaluation of academic achievements necessary for the successful fulfillment of tasks in any professional activity, taking into account the personality traits of the future professional. The model of a professional portrait of the graduate is created, including a set of competence formation assessments using types of control that are carried out within the framework of disciplinary evaluation, polydisciplinary and non-disciplinary. Polydisciplinary control allows to reveal the level of students' abilities and skills formation, nondisciplinary control includes the characteristic of student's personal qualities, which can be expressed through a portfolio. The obtained data are represented graphically in the form of vectors with the coordinates that characterize the level of competences development in various areas of production activity. The proximity of a vector to any area allows one to recommend it to a graduate for further employment, and it is assumed that in this area the graduate will be more successful.
Capturing Stylized Facts of Stock Market Volatility and Higher Order Cumulant Function

The aim of this paper is to explore how the stylized facts of a stock market (SM) return can be captured by using the Higher Order Cumulant (HOC) function. Two models are tested: GARCH and Realized Volatility (RV). ARMAGARCH and ARMA-RV produce forecasting errors which are not Gaussian. The ability of these models to whiten higher order cumulant function is tested empirically, by using: daily closing stock market indexes, from June 5, 2010 to February 5, 2013; high frequency exchange rates: EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD and USD/CHF during the period from June 3, 2012 to December 1, 2012, taken from Bloomberg; daily closing spot prices taken from the OANDA data base and daily closing indexes also from Bloomberg. In the first step of the analysis, GARCH models of different orders are empirically fitted, assuming the GAD distributed series of squared stock market and exchange rate returns, to see if they can capture all necessary information needed to forecast volatility. Similarly realized daily volatilities, defined as the average of intraday 30 min returns, are used to estimate RV -ARMA volatility model and to calculate innovations. Given the fact that residuals from both models are persistently non Gaussian, in the third step, higher order residual cumulants are calculated and compared with the empirical cumulants of the squared returns. It is further demonstrated that the ability to capture stylized facts of squared stock market and FX returns is significantly improved if ARMA parameter estimation is based on HOC function. It is concluded that the second, third and the fourth order cumulnat functions constitute a sufficient statistics for stock market volatility estimation.
Adaptive User Feedback for IR-Based Traceability Recovery

Trace ability recovery allows software engineers to understand the interconnections among software artefacts and, thus, it provides an important support to software maintenance activities. In the last decade, Information Retrieval (IR) has been widely adopted as core technology of semi-automatic tools to extract trace ability links between artefacts according to their textual information. However, a widely known problem of IR-based methods is that some artefacts may share more words with non-related artefacts than with related ones. To overcome this problem, enhancing strategies have been proposed in literature. One of these strategies is relevance feedback, which allows to modify the textual similarity according to information about links classified by the users. Even though this technique is widely used for natural language documents, previous work has demonstrated that relevance feedback is not always useful for software artefacts. In this paper, we propose an adaptive version of relevance feedback that, unlike the standard version, considers the characteristics of both (i) the software artefacts and (ii) the previously classified links for deciding whether and how to apply the feedback. An empirical evaluation conducted on three systems suggests that the adaptive relevance feedback outperforms both a pure IR-based method and the standard feedback.
Articulatory features for speech-driven head motion synthesis

This study investigates the use of articulatory features for speech-driven head motion synthesis as opposed to prosody features such as F0 and energy that have been mainly used in the literature. In the proposed approach, multi-stream HMMs are trained jointly on the synchronous streams of speech and head motion data. Articulatory features can be regarded as an intermediate parametrisation of speech that are expected to have a close link with head movement. Measured head and articulatory movements acquired by EMA were synchronously recorded with speech. Measured articulatory data was compared to those predicted from speech using an HMM-based inversion mapping system trained in a semi-supervised fashion. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) on a data set of free speech of 12 people shows that the articulatory features are more correlated with head rotation than prosodic and/or cepstral speech features. It is also shown that the synthesised head motion using articulatory features gave higher correlations with the original head motion than when only prosodic features are used. Index Terms: head motion synthesis, articulatory features, canonical correlation analysis, acoustic-to-articulatory mapping