Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Designing biomaterials for controlled cardiac stem cell differentiation and enhanced cell therapy in the treatment of congestive heart failure

Cell therapy is a promising strategy to help regenerate the damaged heart. Recent studies have placed a lot of hopes in embryonic stem cells and our lab had previously found a way to differentiate them into cardiac progenitors, cells that can only differentiate into cardiomyocyte, endothelial cells or smooth muscle cells. This early commitment decreases their proliferative capabilities, yet maintains their plasticity for better integration inside the host tissue. However, clinical and pre-clinical injection studies did not really meet the expectations. Even though slight improvements in cardiac function were demonstrated, very low cell viability has been observed, as well as a very low retention of the cells inside the myocardium. To address this problem, my PhD projects not only focus on the design of new biomaterials to act as a vehicle for cell delivery and retention in the infarcted area, but also on the design of biomaterials that control the cellular environment during the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells into cardiomyocytes. Going back and forth between the labs and the clinics, we first developed new techniques for the fabrication and the characterization of a cell-laden fibrin patch that is now undergoing phase I clinical trial. From the approved clinical formulation, we then propose new blends of clinical materials that will eventually improve the maturation of the cardiac progenitors once grafted onto the failing heart. In this perspective, we developed an in vitro model to investigate the combined influence of matrix elasticity and topographical confinement on stem cell differentiation into cardiomyocytes. By using microfabrication techniques to pattern pluripotent stem cells on substrates of controlled stiffness, we demonstrate that even using a widely recognized chemical-based protocol to modulate signaling cascades during differentiation, much heterogeneity emerges depending on the cellular physical environment. We thus extracted the main features that led to controlled and reproducible cardiac differentiation and applied it to the fabrication of next generation of multi-layered anisotropic cardiac patches in compliances with clinical requirements. This work opens new routes to high-scale production of cardiomyocytes and the fabrication of cell-laden or cell-free clinical patches.
Influence of Service Quality on Customer Engagement with Customer Emotions as an Intervening Variable in Aman Cepat Company

Aman Cepat is a family business that runs in the shipping service sector. Aman Cepat has problems in sales which have not reached the sales target. Moreover, Aman Cepat has customer complaints regarding its ser- vice quality dimensions (personnel, outcome, and social quality), and cur- rently, competition in the expedition service sector is getting tougher. This research aims to test and analyze the influence of service quality dimen- sions towards customer emotions and the effect of customer emotions on customer engagement of Aman Cepat. The benefit of this research is that it is expected that the Aman Cepat Company can provide better quality in service. This research has novelty in the field of the industry being studied. The population of this research is the active B2B customer of the company, and the samples are 78 respondents, who were chosen using the saturated sampling method. This research uses the Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling. The results show those service quality dimensions have a significant influence on customer emotions, and the customer emotions variable also has a considerable influence on the customer engagement of Aman Cepat.
Relationship Between Placental Weight and Placental Pathology With MRI Findings in Mild to Moderate Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy

Introduction The placenta plays a critical role in fetal growth and development. Examination of the placenta may provide information on the timing and extent of adverse prenatal and perinatal events. Multiple studies demonstrate an association between placental changes and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), but there are limited data on the association between placental pathology and MRI changes in HIE. This study assesses the relationship between placental pathology and MRI abnormalities in infants with HIE after receiving therapeutic hypothermia. Methods A retrospective study of 138 full-term infants who underwent therapeutic hypothermia for HIE at a single delivery center. Using logistic regression models, placental pathology and MRI results were analyzed to determine if placental abnormalities are associated with more significant MRI abnormalities. Placentas matched by gestational age and birthweight from a sample of convenience were included for comparison. Results Of the 138 infants who underwent therapeutic hypothermia for HIE, 84 had placental pathology and MRIs available. Of these, 30 had normal, and 54 had abnormal MRIs. Placental changes are not observed more frequently in the HIE cohort with abnormal MRI. Increased placenta weight: birthweight ratio is independently associated with increased odds of moderate-severe HIE compared to a convenient sample. Conclusion In a study sample of babies with HIE, placental pathology was not associated with subsequent abnormal MRI findings. Compared to matched controls, babies with HIE had an elevation in placental weight/birthweight.
Enhanced Sensitivity for the Determination of Lithium by Miniaturized Liquid Cathode Glow Discharge (LCGD) Atomic Emission Spectrometry (AES) with the Addition of Surfactants

Abstract A miniature atomic emission spectrometry (AES) was developed using a liquid cathode glow discharge (LCGD) as an excitation source and optical fiber spectrometer as the detection system. The instrument was employed for the sensitive determination of lithium (Li). The addition of 0.15% cetyltrimethylammonium chloride (CTAC), 0.15% cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) and 3 critical micelle concentration (CMC) Triton X-405 enhanced the Li emission by 3.7-, 3.2-, and 1.8-fold, respectively. The presence of 50 mg L−1 Al3+ and SO4 2− inhibited the recovery of 0.5 mg L−1 Li about 73% and 75%, respectively. After adding CTAB, CTAC, and Triton X-405, the recovery of Li was from 98% to 108%, suggesting that the addition of surfactant eliminated the Al3+ and SO4 2− interferences. The sensitivity of Li was improved by adding the surfactants by factors of 2.3 for 0.15% CTAB, 2.0 for 0.15% CTAC, and 1.9 for 3 CMC Triton X-405. The limit of detection (LOD) with 0.15% CTAB for Li was 0.55 μg L−1 which was improved by 5.6-fold. In addition, the energy consumption was below 60 W and good precision was obtained. The accuracy, reliability, and repeatability of the proposed method were verified by analysis of water samples and satisfactory recoveries between 91% and 115% were obtained. The results demonstrate that LCGD-AES with surfactants can be used for highly sensitive determination of Li in complex samples because of its low cost, small size, and low power consumption.
Posttraumatic stress disorder service dogs and the wellbeing of veteran families

ABSTRACT Background Benefits and challenges associated with service dogs for veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may extend beyond veterans to their families. Objective The purpose of the current study is to evaluate the impact of veterans’ PTSD service dogs on spouses and families in a parallel-group, longitudinal design with assessments at baseline and three months follow-up. Method A total of 88 United States military veteran spouses completed a survey composed of multiple standardized measures at baseline and three months later. In the intervention group (n = 48), veterans received service dogs shortly after baseline while the waitlist control group (n = 40) did not. Results Linear regression analyses demonstrated significantly lower caregiver satisfaction, higher caregiver burden and higher participation in life activities among spouses who had service dogs in their homes compared to those on the waitlist. Though not significant, small effect sizes were present among additional measures. Conclusion Results suggest that although previous literature demonstrates service dogs may offer significant improvements for veterans, spouses and children may not experience those same benefits. Clinicians should consider how to prepare veteran spouses and families for integrating service dogs into their home. Future studies should explore family-focused approaches for service dog integration, defining an optimal strategy for the benefit of the entire family. HIGHLIGHTS Though service dogs may improve wellbeing for veterans with posttraumatic disorder, families of veterans may not experience those same benefits. Researchers and clinicians should consider how to best prepare veteran families for integrating service dogs into their homes. Though posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) service dogs are trained specifically for veterans, recent studies have demonstrated that their impact may go beyond veterans themselves (McCall, Rodriguez, Wadsworth, Meis, & O’Haire, 2020; Nieforth, Craig, Behmer, MacDermid Wadsworth, & O’Haire, 2021). PTSD service dogs may provide both benefits and challenges for veteran families.
BioTouch: Reliable Re-Authentication via Finger Bio-Capacitance and Touching Behavior

Re-authentication continuously checks to see if a user is authorized during a whole usage session, enhancing secrecy capabilities for computational devices, especially against insider attacks. However, it is challenging to design a reliable re-authentication scheme with accuracy, transparency and robustness. Specifically, the approaches of using biometric features (e.g., fingerprint, iris) are often accurate in identifying users but not transparent to them due to the need for user cooperation. On the other hand, while the approaches exploiting behavior features (e.g., touch-screen gesture, movement) are often transparent in use, their applications suffer from low accuracy and robustness as behavior information collected is subjective and may change frequently over different use situations and even user’s motion. In this paper, we propose BioTouch, a reliable re-authentication scheme that satisfies all the above requirements. First, BioTouch utilizes multiple features (finger capacitance and touching behavior) to identify the user for better accuracy. Second, BioTouch automatically works during user operation on capacitive-touch devices, achieving transparency without the need for manual assistance. Finally, by applying finger bio-capacitance, BioTouch is also robust to various conditions, as this feature is determined by the user’s physical characteristics and will not change by different user positions and motions. We implement BioTouch for proof-of-concept and conduct comprehensive evaluations. The results show that BioTouch can flag 98% of anomalous behaviors within ten touching operations and achieve up to 99.84% accuracy during usage.
Flying with Payloads

This semester thesis shows how carrying a payload affects the dynamics of the quadrocopter and trajectory feasibility. Moreover it shows that compensation for the payload’s inertial parameters can improve the tracking performance. First, recursive least square estimation algorithm with fading memory is presented to estimate the payload’s inertial parameters, and modification in the on board controller is introduced to compensate for the payload. The results are implemented and tested in the Flying Machine Arena in ETH Zurich. Finally we show how the feasible set of time-optimal trajectories can be influenced by the presence of a grasped object.
Built by epidemiologists for epidemiologists: an internal COVID-19 dashboard for real-time situational awareness in New York City

Abstract Objective New York City (NYC) experienced a large first wave of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the spring of 2020, but the Health Department lacked tools to easily visualize and analyze incoming surveillance data to inform response activities. To streamline ongoing surveillance, a group of infectious disease epidemiologists built an interactive dashboard using open-source software to monitor demographic, spatial, and temporal trends in COVID-19 epidemiology in NYC in near real-time for internal use by other surveillance and epidemiology experts. Materials and methods Existing surveillance databases and systems were leveraged to create daily analytic datasets of COVID-19 case and testing information, aggregated by week and key demographics. The dashboard was developed iteratively using R, and includes interactive graphs, tables, and maps summarizing recent COVID-19 epidemiologic trends. Additional data and interactive features were incorporated to provide further information on the spread of COVID-19 in NYC. Results The dashboard allows key staff to quickly review situational data, identify concerning trends, and easily maintain granular situational awareness of COVID-19 epidemiology in NYC. Discussion The dashboard is used to inform weekly surveillance summaries and alleviated the burden of manual report production on infectious disease epidemiologists. The system was built by and for epidemiologists, which is critical to its utility and functionality. Interactivity allows users to understand broad and granular data, and flexibility in dashboard development means new metrics and visualizations can be developed as needed. Conclusions Additional investment and development of public health informatics tools, along with standardized frameworks for local health jurisdictions to analyze and visualize data in emergencies, are warranted.
Moving Beyond Open-Source Modelling: Why Open Control and Protection Software in Real Converters Will Be Useful

Software plays an essential role in the design and maintenance of the electric power system. To understand the studied phenomena and the underlying modelling tool, a certain degree of openness is needed. For that reason, open-source modelling has been gaining momentum regarding open (i.e., non-black-boxed) models and actual open-source modelling tools. However, the actual electric power system is also becoming more software-defined, in particular, due to the emergence of more and more power electronic converters. The control and protection software of power electronic converters can cause unwanted interactions in the power system. This paper provides an overview of such unwanted interactions and implemented solutions. Because of many unknowns in the changing power system, this paper argues that open control and protection software for power electronic converters can be a valuable complement to standardization.
Environmental decision-making using Bayesian networks: Creating an environmental report card

Environmental report cards are popular mechanisms for summarising the overall status of an environmental system of interest. This paper describes the development of such a report card in the context of a study for Gladstone Harbour in Queensland, Australia. The harbour is within the World Heritage-protected Great Barrier Reef and is the location of major industrial development, hence the interest in developing a way of reporting its health in a statistically valid, transparent and sustainable manner. A Bayesian network (BN) approach was used because of its ability to aggregate and integrate different sources of information, provide probabilistic estimates of interest and update these estimates in a natural manner as new information becomes available. BN modelling is an iterative process, and in the context of environmental reporting, this is appealing as model development can be initiated while quantitative knowledge is still under development, and subsequently refined as more knowledge becomes available. Moreover, the BN model helps build the maturity of the quantitative information needed and helps target investment in monitoring and/or process modelling activities to inform the approach taken. The model is able to incorporate spatial and temporal information and may be structured in such a way that new indicators of relevance to the underlying environmental gradient being monitored may replace less informative indicators or be added to the model with minimal effort. The model described here focuses on the environmental component, but has the capacity to also incorporate social, cultural and economic components of the Gladstone Harbour Report Card.
A Multi-label Propagation Algorithm for Community Detection Based on Average Mutual Information

Community structure is one of the vital characteristics of complex networks. How to effectively detect communities is a hot issue. From the perspective of information theory, the community structure of complex networks can be detected and revealed more accurately. This research introduces the average mutual information (AMI) into the detection process of the multi-label propagation algorithm (MLPA) and proposes a new community detection algorithm AMI-MLPA. The algorithm initially determines the propagation order according to the influence of nodes in the network. By selecting the label with stronger propagation intensity and smaller conditional entropy in the process of label propagation, a more reasonable community partition can be obtained. Experiments on real-world datasets and synthetic datasets show that the algorithm is better than FastGN, GN, and other LPA-based algorithms in general, with high accuracy of results on large-scale synthetic networks, which verifies the effectiveness of the algorithm.
A Meta-Analysis of TPB Model in Predicting Green Energy Behavior: The Moderating Role of Cross-Cultural Factors

Abstract Ajzen’s “theory of planned behaviour” (TPB) is being widely used across different contexts in predicting consumers’ behavioral patterns toward green energy use for the last decade. However, previous empirical studies have presented inconsistent results with respect to the magnitude of associations among TPB constructs. Therefore, to synthesize the diverse findings of 35 sample studies comprising 148 correlations, we performed a random effect model of meta-analysis to summarize the effect sizes of pairwise relationships. The findings revealed the attitude as a most crucial antecedent of behavioral intention. The second most associated construct with intention was subjective norms followed by perceived behavior control. Subgroup analysis revealed that human development level and cultural factors significantly moderate some TPB linkages. This study provides valuable insights to the literature in two ways; first, it supports the utility of the TPB in the green energy domain. Second, it provides evidence on under what circumstances the consumers’ attitude, social norms and control beliefs toward green energy will affect their behavioral intentions. Accordingly, the study offers practical implications and recommendations for future research.
Full-Duplex mmWave MIMO with Finite-Resolution Phase Shifters

Enabling simultaneous transmission and reception on the same carrier frequency, i.e., full-duplex (FD) communication, critically requires that the self-interference (SI) be sufficiently suppressed. We investigate the design of precoders and combiners for an FD millimeter wave point-to-point bidirectional link, where dense antenna arrays provide an opportunity for SI suppression via beamforming cancellation. In practice the precoders and combiners are usually implemented in a hybrid digital/analog fashion with a reduced number of radio frequency (RF) chains, and it becomes necessary to overcome a number of limitations imposed by this structure. We focus on a hybrid architecture with a phase shifter-based fully-connected analog stage, assuming finite-resolution phase shifters. To avoid analog-to-digital converter saturation at the receiver, the proposed design aims at cancelling SI at the analog combiner output. Although accurate SI suppression is difficult with low-resolution phase shifters, our design is able to provide reasonable performance, significantly improving upon previous approaches, and allowing to efficiently exploit the availability of RF chains to partially compensate for coarse phase quantization effects.
Nonlinear Dynamic Process Monitoring Based on Two-Step Dynamic Local Kernel Principal Component Analysis

Nonlinearity may cause a model deviation problem, and hence, it is a challenging problem for process monitoring. To handle this issue, local kernel principal component analysis was proposed, and it achieved a satisfactory performance in static process monitoring. For a dynamic process, the expectation value of each variable changes over time, and hence, it cannot be replaced with a constant value. As such, the local data structure in the local kernel principal component analysis is wrong, which causes the model deviation problem. In this paper, we propose a new two-step dynamic local kernel principal component analysis, which extracts the static components in the process data and then analyzes them by local kernel principal component analysis. As such, the two-step dynamic local kernel principal component analysis can handle the nonlinearity and the dynamic features simultaneously.
Open-source project (OSPS) platform for outdoor quadcopter

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in quadcopter technology implementation in the real world; for instance in real estate photography, aerial surveying, periodic forest monitoring, and search/rescue missions. Gene rally, each quadcopter implementation required different sensors which are needed to attach and integrate into quadcopter system. However, the most critical part in almost cases is preparing the quad copter flight performance and capability to be suit ed in any outdoor applications. Because of that reason , this paper has proposed an implementation of Open-Source Project (OSPs) platform as autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) quadcopter development that can be fitted for any outdoor applications or even in research experimental purposes. We started out with an explanation about the genera l approach that has been used in the development of a quadcopter testbed, and then followed with detail explanations in the OSP platform approach. The OSP platform is the most popular approach. The main reason is because of their flexibility in both hardware and software. The basic quadcopter configuration for autonomous flight also presented and applied. This paper also provided several outdoor experiments results in uncontrolled environment that have been executed using our developed testbed to evaluate their performance, such as attitude and altitude stabilization, interference and vibration effect, and trajectory mapping generation. Finally, throughout this project, we realized that the OPSs quadcopter platform has offered almost complete frameworks in the development of quadcopter for any outdoor applications or even as a research testbed system.