Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Follow-up on Assessment of Student Outcomes by Senior-Year Design Project and Continuing to Improve by Performance Indicator Breakdown-Based Assessment

The study is a follow-up on rubric-based assessment of level of attainment of Student Outcomes (SOs) in Environmental Engineering undergraduate education by the senior-year Graduation Design Project (GDP): the focal points are the process of and results from incorporation of additional assessment tools and implementation of “Performance Indicator (PI)-breakdown” approach to continue improving the SO Assessment and Evaluation (A&E) process. For several consecutive cycles, A&E to define attainment level of total of seven SOs by the GDP gave results below the set thresholds for some of them (SO1,5,8), which indicated a discrepancy and a need for improvement not only in the assessment tools, but also in the A&E processes. Accordingly, two remedial actions were undertaken to meet those needs and the SOs were re-assessed. As the first remedial action, alternative assessment tools were incorporated to the SO A&E process. Assessment results revealed a clear progress in SO attainment, from 2014-15 to 2015-16. However, those lump-sum results still gave a general sense of students’ performance at SO-level. Therefore, some additional assessment tools were added and the “PI-breakdown”-based approach was implemented as the second remedial action. Those implementations enabled obtaining more realistic, detailed, and in-formative results and facilitated further fine tuning of the SO A&E process.
simpleCache: R caching for reproducible, distributed, large-scale projects

simpleCache is an R(R Core Team 2016) package that provides functions for caching R objects. Its purpose is to encourage writing reusable, restartable, and reproducible analysis for projects with large data and computational requirements. Like its name indicates, simpleCache is intended to be simple. Users specify a location to store caches, and then provide nothing more than a cache name and instructions (R code) for how to produce an R object. simpleCache either creates and saves or simply loads the result as necessary with just a single function call.
Association of 18F-FDG PET or PET/CT results with spontaneous remission in classic fever of unknown origin

Background: Spontaneous remission is common in patients with undiagnosed classic fever of unknown origin (FUO). Although identifying reliable predictors of spontaneous remission in such diagnostically challenging cases could improve their management strategies, few studies have assessed such clinical factors. Recently, studies have reported that 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (18F-FDG PET) alone and integrated with computed tomography (PET/CT) were useful in localizing the source of FUO. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we assessed the association of results of these imaging modalities with spontaneous remission in patients with classic FUO. Methods: We searched PubMed and Scopus from inception until June 30, 2018, and studies that evaluated the PET or PET/CT results of ≥10 adult or adolescent patients with classic FUO who were followed up for at least 3 months were included. At least 2 investigators extracted data and rated quality using the QUIPS-2 tool. We used a random-effects meta-analysis to calculate summary risk ratios (RRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results: Nine studies of PET/CT results (418 patients) and 4 studies of standalone PET results (128 patients) were eligible. None explicitly specified the incidence of spontaneous remission as the primary or secondary outcomes of interest. The risk of bias was considered high in all studies because patients received subsequent diagnostic workup based on imaging results. Patients with negative PET/CT results were significantly more likely to present with spontaneous regression than those with positive results (summary RR = 5.6; 95% CI: 3.4–9.2; P < .001; I2 = 0%). In contrast, no significant association was found between standalone PET results and spontaneous remission. The random-effects study-level meta-regression found that PET/CT results [relative RR (rRR) = 7.4; 95% CI: 2.5–21.3; P = . 002], compared with standalone PET results, and publication year (rRR = 1.2 per 1 year; 95% CI: 1.0–1.3; P = .013) were significantly associated with spontaneous remission. Conclusion: Limited data suggest that undiagnosed classic FUO patients with negative PET/CT results had a high likelihood of spontaneous remission after a series of unsuccessful investigations for fever workup. Prospective studies should validate these results.
Benzodiazepine and z-hypnotic prescribing from acute psychiatric inpatient discharge to long-term care in the community

Background: Benzodiazepine and z-hypnotic prescribing has slowly decreased over the past 20 years, however long-term chronic prescribing still occurs and is at odds with prescribing guidance. Objectives: To identify the pattern of benzodiazepine and z-hypnotic prescribing in psychiatric inpatients at discharge and 12 months post-discharge. Methods: Retrospective observational longitudinal cohort study of patients admitted to two adult psychiatric wards between June and November 2012 (inclusive) who were discharged with a prescription for a benzodiazepine or z-hypnotic drug. Routinely collected prescription data available from NHS Scotland Prescribing Information System was used to identify and follow community prescribing of benzodiazepine and z-hypnotics for a 12 month period post-discharge. Data were entered in Excel® and further analysed using SPSS 23. Ethical approval was not required for this service evaluation however Caldicott Guardian approval was sought and granted. Results: Eighty patients were admitted during the study period however only those patients with a single admission were included for analysis (n=74). Thirty per cent (22/74) of patients were prescribed a benzodiazepine or z-hypnotics at discharge; 14 of whom received ‘long-term’ benzodiazepine and z-hypnotics i.e. continued use over the 12 month period. Seven patients received a combination of anxiolytics and hypnotics (e.g., diazepam plus temazepam or zopiclone). Long-term use was associated with a non-significant increase in median benzodiazepine or z-hypnotic dose, expressed as diazepam equivalents. Conclusions: One in three patients were prescribed a benzodiazepine or z-hypnotics at discharge with 1 in 5 receiving continuous long-term treatment (prescriptions) for 12 months post-discharge. As chronic long-term B-Z prescribing and use still remains an issue, future strategies using routine patient-level prescribing data may support prescribers to review and minimise inappropriate long-term prescribing.
Multi-Agent Planning for Automatic Geospatial Web Service Composition in Geoportals

Automatic composition of geospatial web services increases the possibility of taking full advantage of spatial data and processing capabilities that have been published over the internet. In this paper, a multi-agent artificial intelligence (AI) planning solution was proposed, which works within the geoportal architecture and enables the geoportal to compose semantically annotated Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Services based on users’ requirements. In this solution, the registered Catalogue Service for Web (CSW) services in the geoportal along with a composition coordinator component interact together to synthesize Open Geospatial Consortium Web Services (OWSs) and generate the composition workflow. A prototype geoportal was developed, a case study of evacuation sheltering was implemented to illustrate the functionality of the algorithm, and a simulation environment, including one hundred simulated OWSs and five CSW services, was used to test the performance of the solution in a more complex circumstance. The prototype geoportal was able to generate the composite web service, based on the requested goals of the user. Additionally, in the simulation environment, while the execution time of the composition with two CSW service nodes was 20 s, the addition of new CSW nodes reduced the composition time exponentially, so that with five CSW nodes the execution time reduced to 0.3 s. Results showed that due to the utilization of the computational power of CSW services, the solution was fast, horizontally scalable, and less vulnerable to the exponential growth in the search space of the AI planning problem.
Overcoming the limitations of statistical parametric speech synthesis

At the time of beginning this thesis, statistical parametric speech synthesis (SPSS) using hidden Markov models (HMMs) was the dominant synthesis paradigm within the research community. SPSS systems are effective at generalising across the linguistic contexts present in training data to account for inevitable unseen linguistic contexts at synthesis-time, making these systems flexible and their performance stable. However HMM synthesis suffers from a ‘ceiling effect’ in the naturalness achieved, meaning that, despite great progress, the speech output is rarely confused for natural speech. There are many hypotheses for the causes of reduced synthesis quality, and subsequent required improvements, for HMM speech synthesis in literature. However, until this thesis, these hypothesised causes were rarely tested. This thesis makes two types of contributions to the field of speech synthesis; each of these appears in a separate part of the thesis. Part I introduces a methodology for testing hypothesised causes of limited quality within HMM speech synthesis systems. This investigation aims to identify what causes these systems to fall short of natural speech. Part II uses the findings from Part I of the thesis to make informed improvements to speech synthesis. The usual approach taken to improve synthesis systems is to attribute reduced synthesis quality to a hypothesised cause. A new system is then constructed with the aim of removing that hypothesised cause. However this is typically done without prior testing to verify the hypothesised cause of reduced quality. As such, even if improvements in synthesis quality are observed, there is no knowledge of whether a real underlying issue has been fixed or if a more minor issue has been fixed. In contrast, I perform a wide range of perceptual tests in Part I of the thesis to discover what the real underlying causes of reduced quality in HMM synthesis are and the level to which they contribute. Using the knowledge gained in Part I of the thesis, Part II then looks to make improvements to synthesis quality. Two well-motivated improvements to standard HMM synthesis are investigated. The first of these improvements follows on from averaging across differing linguistic contexts being identified as a major contributing factor to reduced synthesis quality. This is a practice typically performed during decision tree regression in HMM synthesis. Therefore a system which removes averaging across differing linguistic contexts and instead performs averaging only across matching linguistic contexts (called rich-context synthesis) is investigated. The second of the motivated improvements follows the finding that the parametrisation (i.e., vocoding) of speech, standard practice in SPSS, introduces a noticeable drop in quality before any
Bundling : une Technique de Réduction d'Occultation par Agrégation Visuelle et son Application à l'Étude de la Maladie d'Alzheimer. (Bundling, graph simplification with visual aggregation:and implementation for Alzheimer desease)

Le big data est un challenge majeur de la visualisation ; l'augmentation du nombre de donnees a visualiser augmente la densite et l'occultation des graphes et il devient difficile de distinguer les elements qui le compose. Pour resoudre ce challenge, plusieurs techniques de visualisation se focalisent sur la simplification visuelle ; parmi elles, l'agregation visuelle (bundling) permet l'agregation des liens pour creer des zones de fortes densites au profit d'espaces plus clairsemes faisant ainsi emerger des structures visuelles. Cette these s'efforce a faire le trait d'union entre la complexite technique des algorithmes de bundling et les utilisateurs finaux. Dans un premier temps, nous avons formalise l'espace de design des techniques de bundling afin d'ameliorer la comprehension des chercheurs et des utilisateurs. Notre formalisation se fonde sur une taxonomie centree utilisateur organisant l'ensemble des techniques d'agregation en fonction des donnees d'entree. Ensuite, a partir d'une definition formelle du bundling, nous proposons un modele generique decrivant l'ensemble des etapes usuelles des algorithmes de bundling et montrons comment les techniques existantes implementent chaque etape. Enfin, a travers une analyse des tâches, nous exposons des cas d'utilisation averes. Notre analyse de l'espace des techniques de bundling nous a montre les limites actuelles du bundling quant au traitement de grande quantite de donnees tant en terme de rapidite de calcul qu'en terme de taille des jeux de donnees. Ainsi, nous avons resolu ces limites en introduisant une nouvelle technique plus rapide et sans limitation de taille : FFTEB (Fast Fourier Transform Edge Bundling Technique). Notre technique deplace le processus d'agregation de l'espace pixelaire vers l'espace spectral. Enfin, grâce a un processus de transfert des donnees, FFTEB resout les problemes de taille de jeux de donnees. En dernier lieu, dans le cadre d'une application a la maladie d'Alzheimer, cette these demontre l'efficacite des techniques de bundling comme outil d'exploration visuelle. Dans le contexte d'une etude nationale sur la maladie d'Alzheimer, nous avons focalise notre recherche sur l'analyse de la representation mentale de l'espace geographique chez les personnes âgees. Nous montrons que l'utilisation du bundling pour comparer les cartes mentales des populations dementes et non-dementes a permis a des neuropsychologues de formuler de nouvelles hypotheses sur l'evolution de la maladie d'Alzheimer. Ces nouvelles hypotheses nous ont permis de montrer l'emergence d'un potentiel marqueur de la maladie pres de douze ans avant que les patients ne soient diagnostiques comme atteints de cette maladie.
The combination of strip meniscometry and dry eye–related quality-of-life score is useful for dry eye screening during health checkup

Abstract Strip meniscometry (SM) is a new method for quantification of tear volume using meniscometry strips inserted into the tear meniscus for 5 seconds. The dry eye (DE)-related quality-of-life score (DEQS) questionnaire comprises 15 questions regarding bothersome ocular symptoms and their impact on daily life. These 2 examinations require a relatively short time and are appropriate as screening tests. We evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of SM and DEQS for screening for DE syndrome during general health checkup. This study included 333 right eyes from 333 soldiers (331 men, 2 women; mean age, 42.8 ± 8.8 years) who underwent health checkups at the Yokosuka Medical Squadron between November and December 2013. We administered the DEQS questionnaire to the subjects. The fluorescein tear film break-up time and fluorescein and rose bengal staining scores were evaluated. A positive outcome was considered when DEQS >15 and SM scores <5 mm. We compared DEQS and SM between a DE group, suspected-DE group and normal group. Thirty-four (11%) soldiers were diagnosed with definite DE based on the Japanese DE diagnostic criteria. The sensitivities of SM, DEQS, and SM combined with DEQS for definite DE were 71%, 79%, and 59%, respectively, whereas the corresponding specificities were 85%, 91%, and 97%, respectively. None of the enrolled subjects experienced complications such as eye pain or discomfort, except for 1 soldier (0.003%) with conjunctivochalasis, who experienced irritation upon SM. The results of our study indicate that the combination of SM and DEQS is useful for the detection of DE with high sensitivity and specificity during routine health check-up.
TD-LSTM: Temporal Dependence-Based LSTM Networks for Marine Temperature Prediction

Changes in ocean temperature over time have important implications for marine ecosystems and global climate change. Marine temperature changes with time and has the features of closeness, period, and trend. This paper analyzes the temporal dependence of marine temperature variation at multiple depths and proposes a new ocean-temperature time-series prediction method based on the temporal dependence parameter matrix fusion of historical observation data. The Temporal Dependence-Based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Networks for Marine Temperature Prediction (TD-LSTM) proves better than other methods while predicting sea-surface temperature (SST) by using Argo data. The performances were good at various depths and different regions.
Screening for hepatic fibrosis and steatosis in Turkish patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus: A transient elastography study.

BACKGROUND/AIMS Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is highly prevalent in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). The aim of the present study was to investigate the potential usefulness of transient elastography (TE), which is a technique that allows measuring both fibrosis and liver fat content simultaneously, as a screening tool for hepatic involvement in Turkish patients with T2DM. MATERIALS AND METHODS We obtained liver stiffness measurements (LSMs, as a measure of fibrosis) and controlled attenuation parameter (CAP, as a marker of steatosis) in 124 (46 males and 78 females; mean body mass index (BMI): 33.2±6.6 kg/m2) Turkish patients with T2DM. The prevalence rates of overweight, obesity, and metabolic syndrome in our sample were 28.2%, 64.5%, and 77.4%, respectively. Probe-specific LSM cut-off values were used to define advanced fibrosis (>F3) and cirrhosis (F4) (M probe: F3=9.6-11.4 kPa, F4 >11.5 kPa and XL probe: F3=9.3-10.9 kPa, F4 >11.0 kPa). Mild, moderate, and severe steatosis were defined as CAP 222-232 dB/m, CAP 233-289 dB/m, and CAP >290 dB/m, respectively. RESULTS Advanced fibrosis and cirrhosis were identified in 21 (16.9%) and 10 (8.0%) patients, respectively. TE-defined hepatic steatosis (CAP>222 dB/m) was detected in 117 (94.3%) patients. Mild, moderate, and severe steatosis were identified in 0, 29, and 88 patients, respectively. CONCLUSION TE is a useful non-invasive imaging modality to screen for liver involvement in Turkish patients with T2DM. High rates of TE-defined fibrosis and steatosis in our sample reflect the presence of an elevated mean BMI.
Optimal radius for connectivity in duty-cycled wireless sensor networks

We investigate the condition on transmission radius needed to achieve connectivity in duty-cycled wireless sensor networks (briefly, DC-WSN). First, we settle a conjecture of Das et. al. (2012) and prove that the connectivity condition on Random Geometric Graphs (RGG), given by Gupta and Kumar (1989), can be used to derive a weak sufficient condition to achieve connectivity in DC-WSN. We also present a stronger result which gives a necessary and sufficient condition for connectivity and is hence optimal. The optimality of such a radius is also tested via simulation for two specific duty-cycle schemes, called the contiguous and the random selection duty-cycle scheme.
IND-Enabling Studies for a Clinical Trial to Genetically Program a Persistent Cancer-Targeted Immune System

Purpose: To improve persistence of adoptively transferred T-cell receptor (TCR)–engineered T cells and durable clinical responses, we designed a clinical trial to transplant genetically-modified hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) together with adoptive cell transfer of T cells both engineered to express an NY-ESO-1 TCR. Here, we report the preclinical studies performed to enable an investigational new drug (IND) application. Experimental Design: HSCs transduced with a lentiviral vector expressing NY-ESO-1 TCR and the PET reporter/suicide gene HSV1-sr39TK and T cells transduced with a retroviral vector expressing NY-ESO-1 TCR were coadministered to myelodepleted HLA-A2/Kb mice within a formal Good Laboratory Practice (GLP)–compliant study to demonstrate safety, persistence, and HSC differentiation into all blood lineages. Non-GLP experiments included assessment of transgene immunogenicity and in vitro viral insertion safety studies. Furthermore, Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP)–compliant cell production qualification runs were performed to establish the manufacturing protocols for clinical use. Results: TCR genetically modified and ex vivo–cultured HSCs differentiated into all blood subsets in vivo after HSC transplantation, and coadministration of TCR-transduced T cells did not result in increased toxicity. The expression of NY-ESO-1 TCR and sr39TK transgenes did not have a detrimental effect on gene-modified HSC's differentiation to all blood cell lineages. There was no evidence of genotoxicity induced by the lentiviral vector. GMP batches of clinical-grade transgenic cells produced during qualification runs had adequate stability and functionality. Conclusions: Coadministration of HSCs and T cells expressing an NY-ESO-1 TCR is safe in preclinical models. The results presented in this article led to the FDA approval of IND 17471.
Key-Insulated and Privacy-Preserving Signature Scheme with Publicly Derived Public Key

Since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2008, cryptocurrency has been undergoing a quick and explosive development. At the same time, privacy protection, one of the key merits of cryptocurrency, has attracted much attention by the community. A deterministic wallet algorithm and a stealth address algorithm have been widely adopted in the community, due to their virtues on functionality and privacy protection, which come from a key derivation mechanism that an arbitrary number of derived keys can be generated from a master key. However, these algorithms suffer a vulnerability. In particular, when a minor fault happens (say, one derived key is compromised somehow), the damage is not limited to the leaked derived key only, instead, it spreads to the master key and all derived keys are compromised. In this paper, to provide a formal treatment for the problem, we introduce and formalize a new signature variant, called Key-Insulated and Privacy-Preserving Signature Scheme with Publicly Derived Public Key (PDPKS), which forms a convenient and robust cryptographic tool for offering the virtues of deterministic wallet and stealth address, while eliminating the security vulnerabilities. Specifically, PDPKS allows anyone to derive new signature verification keys for a user, say Alice, based on her long-term public key, while only Alice can derive the signing keys corresponding to those verification keys. In terms of privacy, given a derived verification key and valid signatures with respect to it, an adversary is not able to tell which long-term public key, out of a set of known long-term public keys, is the one from which the verification key was derived. A distinguishing security feature of PDPKS, with the above functionality and privacy features, is that the derived keys are independent/insulated from each other, namely, compromising the signing key associated with a verification key does not allow an adversary to forge a valid signature for another verification key, even if both verification keys are derived from the same long-term public key. We formalize the notion of PDPKS and propose a practical and proven secure construction, which could be a convenient and secure cryptographic tool for building privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies and supporting promising use cases in practice, as it can be used to implement secure stealth addresses, and can be used to implement deterministic wallets and the related appealing use cases, without security concerns.