Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating the complex impact of policy changes on tourism development: The case of Surakarta, Indonesia

ABSTRACT This paper discusses a recent political transition which led to changes in tourism development of the Indonesian city of Surakarta, and shifted the focus from preserving cultural uniqueness to boosting mainstream tourism infrastructure. The paper investigates impacts of such a fundamental change in tourism development policy and explores how its actions- and results-related impacts are evaluated by stakeholders. In this context, the paper adopts a relativistic stakeholder approach to impact evaluation. Findings reveal that the stark policy shift generated relatively balanced outcome assessments by interviewed stakeholders, although they criticised a lack of involvement in the decision-making process. Overall, this research contributes to impact assessment research by lending support to a relativistic and activity/process-based view. Stakeholder involvement into decision-making not only supports a continuous and critical evaluation due to the presence of a multitude of voices, but seemingly provides a counter-balance to sudden ruptures which characterize political dynamics.
In-network defense against AR-DDoS attacks

The prevalence of the disruptive amplified reflection DDoS (AR-DDoS) attacks is one of the biggest concerns of all network operators today. The increasing magnitude of new attacks are rendering existing measures (e.g., scrubbing services) inefficient. This work demonstrates DIDA, an efficient, topology independent, in-line AR-DDoS detection and mitigation architecture that operates entirely in the data plane.
The limits of convergence: the roles of phylogeny and dietary ecology in shaping non-avian amniote crania

Cranial morphology is remarkably varied in living amniotes and the diversity of shapes is thought to correspond with feeding ecology, a relationship repeatedly demonstrated at smaller phylogenetic scales, but one that remains untested across amniote phylogeny. Using a combination of morphometric methods, we investigate the links between phylogenetic relationships, diet and skull shape in an expansive dataset of extant toothed amniotes: mammals, lepidosaurs and crocodylians. We find that both phylogeny and dietary ecology have statistically significant effects on cranial shape. The three major clades largely partition morphospace with limited overlap. Dietary generalists often occupy clade-specific central regions of morphospace. Some parallel changes in cranial shape occur in clades with distinct evolutionary histories but similar diets. However, members of a given clade often present distinct cranial shape solutions for a given diet, and the vast majority of species retain the unique aspects of their ancestral skull plan, underscoring the limits of morphological convergence due to ecology in amniotes. These data demonstrate that certain cranial shapes may provide functional advantages suited to particular dietary ecologies, but accounting for both phylogenetic history and ecology can provide a more nuanced approach to inferring the ecology and functional morphology of cryptic or extinct amniotes.
YouCare: A Cross-Platform Telehealth App for COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused disruption across the globe and put pressure on healthcare systems. In order to limit the use of hospital resources, the use of home care and telehealth has been very important to minimize direct human intervention in monitoring patients. The purpose of this work is to present YouCare: a cross-platform application that allows the collection of medical data on the health status of the user in order to allow physicians to eﬃciently monitor the status of the patient. As an important feature, it includes functions to monitor the general situation through statistics and interactions with the other users of the application. This might make the isolation period less stressful while exchanging current COVID experiences. The use of the application has been experimented with a usability test, obtaining positive feedback from the users. We also report other similar applications that have been developed and used in diﬀerent parts of the world.
Twinfilin regulates actin assembly and Hexagonal peroxisome 1 (Hex1) localization in the pathogenesis of rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae

Abstract Actin assembly at the hyphal tip is key for polar growth and pathogenesis of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae. The mechanism of its precise assemblies and biological functions is not understood. Here, we characterized the role of M. oryzae Twinfilin (MoTwf) in M. oryzae infection through organizing the actin cables that connect to Spitzenkörper (Spk) at the hyphal tip. MoTwf could bind and bundle the actin filaments. It formed a complex with Myosin2 (MoMyo2) and the Woronin body protein Hexagonal peroxisome 1 (MoHex1). Enrichment of MoMyo2 and MoHex1 in the hyphal apical region was disrupted in a ΔMotwf loss‐of‐function mutant, which also showed a decrease in the number and width of actin cables. These findings indicate that MoTwf participates in the virulence of M. oryzae by organizing Spk‐connected actin filaments and regulating MoHex1 distribution at the hyphal tip.
High dimensional geometry of fitness landscapes identifies master regulators of evolution and the microbiome

A longstanding goal of biology is to identify the key genes and species that critically impact evolution, ecology, and health. Yet biological interactions between genes (1, 2), species (3–6), and different environmental contexts (7–9) change the individual effects due to non-additive interactions, known as epistasis. In the fitness landscape concept, each gene/organism/environment is modeled as a separate biological dimension (10), yielding a high dimensional landscape, with epistasis adding local peaks and valleys to the landscape. Massive efforts have defined dense epistasis networks on a genome-wide scale (2), but these have mostly been limited to pairwise, or two-dimensional, interactions (11). Here we develop a new mathematical formalism that allows us to quantify interactions at high dimensionality in genetics and the microbiome. We then generate and also reanalyze combinatorically complete datasets (two genetic, two microbiome). In higher dimensions, we find that key genes (e.g. pykF) and species (e.g. Lactobacillus plantarum) distort the fitness landscape, changing the interactions for many other genes/species. These distortions can fracture a “smooth” landscape with one optimal fitness peak into a landscape with many local optima, regulating evolutionary or ecological diversification (12), which may explain how a probiotic bacterium can stabilize the gut microbiome.
Attribution Classification Method of APT Malware in IoT Using Machine Learning Techniques

In recent years, the popularity of IoT (Internet of Things) applications and services has brought great convenience to people's lives, but ubiquitous IoT has also brought many security problems. Among them, advanced persistent threat (APT) is one of the most representative attacks, and its continuous outbreak has brought unprecedented security challenges for the large-scale deployment of the IoT. However, important research on analyzing the attribution of APT malware samples is still relatively few. Therefore, we propose a classification method for attribution organizations with APT malware in IoT using machine learning. It aims to mark the real attacking organization entities to better identify APT attack activity and protect the security of IoT. This method performs feature representation and feature selection based on APT behavior data obtained from devices in the Internet of Things and selects the features with a high degree of differentiation among organizations. Then, it trains a multiclass model named SMOTE-RF that can better deal with imbalance and multiclassification problems. Our experiments on real dynamic behavior data are combined to verify the effectiveness of the method proposed in this paper for attribution analysis of APT malware samples and achieve good performance. Our method could identify the organization behind complex APT attacks in IoT devices and services.
Diffusion Kurtosis-Based Brain Image Segmentation for the Structural Remodeling of White Matter in Patients with Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy

The aim was to explore the application value of brain image segmentation algorithm based on diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) in the structural remodeling of white matter (WM) in patients with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE). 120 patients with leukoencephalopathy and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy were selected as the research objects. Their heads were scanned by conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and DKI sequence. Besides, DKI based on the image segmentation algorithm was applied to process DKI images, DKE software was employed to obtain the values of fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean kurtosis (MK), and the differences in FA and MK were compared between acute and chronic phases. The results showed that the proposed algorithm could realize the best values of Jaccard similarity (JS) and Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) in WM, gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and the segmentation accuracy was better than other algorithms. FA values at the acute and chronic phases were compared in the area around lesions (0.421 ± 0.065 vs. 0.454 ± 0.052), the posterior limb of internal capsule on the affected side (0.498 ± 0.027 vs. 0.504 ± 0.046), and the pedunculus cerebri on the affected side (0.558 ± 0.038 vs. 0.568 ± 0.042), and the differences were statistically substantial ( P < 0.05 ). Moreover, MK values at the acute and chronic phases were also compared in the area around lesions (1.362 ± 0.098 vs. 1.407 ± 0.077), the centrum semiovale on the affected side (1.305 ± 0.102 vs. 1.343 ± 0.076), the posterior limb of internal capsule on the affected side (1.338 ± 0.543 vs. 1.382 ± 0.076), and the pedunculus cerebri on the affected side (1.329 ± 0.089 vs. 1.398 ± 0.099), showing a statistical meaning ( P < 0.05 ). The results indicated that the changes of FA and MK were related to the structural remodeling of WM. The DKI image segmentation algorithm could be applied in the diagnosis of leukoencephalopathy in patients with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, and DKI technology was of great significance for the research of structural remodeling of WM.
CardiacWave

Using wireless signals to monitor human vital signs, especially heartbeat information, has been intensively studied in the past decade. This non-contact sensing modality can drive various applications from cardiac health, sleep, and emotion management. Under the circumstance of the COVID-19 pandemic, non-contact heart monitoring receives increasingly market demands. However, existing wireless heart monitoring schemes can only detect limited heart activities, such as heart rate, fiducial points, and Seismocardiography (SCG)-like information. In this paper, we present CardiacWave to enable a non-contact high-definition heart monitoring. CardiacWave can provide a full spectrum of Electrocardiogram (ECG)-like heart activities, including the details of P-wave, T-wave, and QRS complex. Specifically, CardiacWave is built upon the Cardiac-mmWave scattering effect (CaSE), which is a variable frequency response of the cardiac electromagnetic field under the mmWave interrogation. The CardiacWave design consists of a noise-resistant sensing scheme to interrogate CaSE and a cardiac activity profiling module for extracting cardiac electrical activities from the interrogation response. Our experiments show that the CardiacWave-induced ECG measures have a high positive correlation with the heart activity ground truth (i.e., measurements from a medical-grade instrument). The timing difference of P-waves, T-waves, and QRS complex is 0.67%, 0.71%, and 0.49%, respectively, and a mean cardiac event difference is within a delay of 5.3 milliseconds. These results indicate that CaridacWave offers high-fidelity and integral heart clinical characteristics. Furthermore, we evaluate the CardiacWave system with participants under various conditions, including heart and breath rates, ages, and heart habits (e.g., tobacco use).
ALWAES

For an online delivery platform, accurate physical locations of merchants are essential for delivery scheduling. It is challenging to maintain tens of thousands of merchant locations accurately because of potential errors introduced by merchants for profits (e.g., potential fraud). In practice, a platform periodically sends a dedicated crew to survey limited locations due to high workforce costs, leaving many potential location errors. In this paper, we design and implement ALWAES, a system that automatically identifies and corrects location errors based on fundamental tradeoffs of five measurement strategies from manual, physical, and virtual data collection infrastructures for online delivery platforms. ALWAES explores delivery data already collected by platform infrastructures to measure the travel time of couriers between merchants and verify all merchants' locations by cross-validation automatically. We explore tradeoffs between performance and cost of different measurement approaches. By comparing with the manually-collected ground truth, the experimental results show that ALWAES outperforms three other baselines by 32.2%, 41.8%, and 47.2%, respectively. More importantly, ALWAES saves 3,846 hours of the delivery time of 35,005 orders in a month and finds new erroneous locations that initially were not in the ground truth but are verified by our field study later, accounting for 3% of all merchants with erroneous locations.
Mesenchymal stem cell conditioned medium attenuates oxidative stress injury in hepatocytes partly by regulating the miR-486-5p/PIM1 axis and the TGF-β/Smad pathway

ABSTRACT This study investigated the role of microRNA (miRNA) miR-486-5p in oxidative stress injury in hepatocytes under the treatment of mesenchymal stem cell conditioned medium (MSC-CM). The oxidative stress injury in hepatocytes (L02) was induced by H2O2. Human umbilical cord blood MSC-CM (UCB-MSC-CM) was prepared. The effects of UCB-MSC-CM on the proliferation, apoptosis, and inflammatory response in L02 cells were detected by Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) assay, flow cytometry analysis, and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Subsequently, the target of miR-486-5p was predicted using bioinformatics analysis, and the possible signaling pathway addressed by miR-486-5p was explored using western blot. We found that miR-486-5p expression was elevated following oxidative stress injury and was reduced after UCB-MSC-CM treatment. UCB-MSC-CM protected L02 cells against H2O2-induced injury by downregulation of miR-486-5p. Proviral integration site for Moloney murine leukemia virus 1 (PIM1) was verified to be targeted by miR-486-5p. UCB-MSC-CM upregulated the expression of PIM1 reduced by H2O2 in L02 cells. Additionally, silencing PIM1 attenuated the protective effects of miR-486-5p downregulation against oxidative stress injury. We further demonstrated that UCB-MSC-CM inhibited the TGF-β/Smad signaling in H2O2-treated L02 cells by the miR-486-5p/PIM1 axis. Overall, UCB-MSC-CM attenuates oxidative stress injury in hepatocytes by downregulating miR-486-5p and upregulating PIM1, which may be related to the inhibition of TGF-β/Smad pathway.
The effects of curcumin as dietary supplement for patients with polycystic ovary syndrome: An updated systematic review and meta‐analysis of randomized clinical trials

This review aims to evaluate if there are clinical benefits of curcumin (CUR) in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Electronic databases (PubMed, EMBASE, Scopus, Web of Science, Cochrane Central, and Google Scholar) were systematically searched to identify only randomized clinical trials (RCTs) that assessed CUR in patients with PCOS from inception to May 5, 2021. Five RCTs were included with a total of 296 patients, with 148 among the CUR groups and 148 patients among the control group. Revised Cochrane risk‐of‐bias tool for randomized trials was used to assess the risk of bias, three RCTs provided a low risk of bias and two provided a high risk of bias. Compared with the control group, CUR was associated with a statistically significant improvement in the glycemic control including fasting blood glucose (MD = −3.67; 95% CI = [−5.25, −2.08], p < .00001), insulin level (MD = −1.91; 95% CI = [−2.97, −0.84], p = .0005), homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (MD = −0.55; 95% CI = [−0.83, −0.27], p = .0001), and quantitative insulin sensitivity check index (MD = 0.01; 95% CI = [0.00, 0.02], p = .0005). The mean difference in total cholesterol was also statistically significant (MD = −15.55; 95% CI = [−30.33, −0.76], p < .04). The rest of the secondary outcomes, including LDL, HDL, sex hormone, body weight, and CRP, were not statistically significant. This review concluded that among patients with PCOS, the use of CUR demonstrated a significant difference from the control group for glycemic control. Those findings suggest that CUR confers clinical benefits in patients with PCOS. However, due to the limited number of the included studies, further high‐quality studies are needed to establish the clinical efficacy of the CUR.
Usefulness of strain elastography in the differential diagnosis of ruptured epidermal cyst and superficial abscess

Purpose The aim of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of strain elastography (SE) in the differential diagnosis of ruptured epidermal cyst and superficial abscess. Methods This retrospective study included 34 patients with ruptured epidermal cysts and 17 patients with superficial abscesses who underwent ultrasonography (US) including SE. The SE characteristics were classified into four grades (1 to 4) according to elasticity. The largest length and height of the lesion and their ratio were evaluated on the US images. Involvement of more than half of the depth of the dermis and the presence of the submarine sign were assessed. Results The inter-reader agreement of US and SE findings showed excellent or almost perfect agreement. The height, length, ratio of height to length, and more-than-half-depth sign did not significantly differ between ruptured epidermal cysts and superficial abscesses for either reader (reader 1, P=0.071, P=0.129, P=0.806, and P=0.102, respectively; reader 2, P=0.173, P=0.053, P=0.669, and P=0.060, respectively). The submarine sign was significantly more frequent in ruptured epidermal cysts than in superficial abscesses (both readers, P<0.001). The difference in SE scores between ruptured epidermal cysts and superficial abscesses, which are harder than ruptured epidermal cysts, was statistically significant (reader 1, P=0.046; reader 2, P=0.028). Conclusion The SE score and submarine sign may be useful characteristics for distinguishing ruptured epidermal cyst from superficial abscess.
Antioxidant Activity and other Physicochemical Characteristics of Different Propolis Extracts

This study was to investigate the antioxidant activity of three different extracts of propolis (Ethanolic 50%, methanolic 100% and aqueous extracts) with some of their physicochemical aspects. Ethanolic extract was analyzed by LC-MS, while the methanolic extract was analyzed by GC-MS in order to screen polyphenols and volatile compounds in the sample, the identity of these components were achieved by means of comparing their mass spectra with previous published studies. Forrier transformation infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) was conducted on the methanolic extract and crude propolis samples to gain an overview of some physical characteristics. The antioxidant activities of the three extracts were measured by DPPH scavenging ability and FRAP assay. LC-MS and GC-MS allowed the identification of 19 phenolic and 17 volatile compounds. The most abundant phenolics found in our sample correspond with p -Coumaric benzyl ester, Pinobanksin-3- O -acetate, Caffeic acid benzyl ester and pinocembrin, as they showed the highest peaks in the total ion chromatogram (TIC). In addition, the most abundant volatile compounds showed a high level of agreement with I´-Cadinene and I³- Terpinen. Furthermore, Ethanol 50% extract showed the strongest antioxidant activity, which has a significant correlation with its high polyphenolic content.
Energy-Saving D2D Wireless Networking Based on ACO and AIA Fusion Algorithm

Lower energy consumption and higher data rate have been becoming the key factors of modern wireless mobile communication for the improvement of user experiences. At present, the commercialization of 5G communications is gradually promoting the development of Internet of things (IoT) techniques. Due to the limited coverage capability of direct wireless communications, the indirect device-to-device (D2D) communications using information relay, in addition to the single 5G base station deployment, have been introduced. Along with the increase of information nodes, the relay devices have to undertake the nonnegligible extra data traffic. In order to adjust and optimize the information routing in D2D services, we present an algorithmic investigation referring to the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm and the artificial immune algorithm (AIA). By analyzing the characteristics of these algorithms, we propose a combined algorithm that enables the improved the iterative convergence speed and the calculation robustness of routing path determination. Meanwhile, the D2D optimization pursuing energy saving is numerically demonstrated to be improved than the original algorithms. Based on the simulation results under a typical architecture of 5G cellular network including various information nodes (devices), we show that the algorithmic optimization of D2D routing is potentially valid for the realization of primitive wireless IoT networks.
The optical and electronic properties of organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites

The primary focus of this thesis is the study of a novel family of materials known as organicinorganic hybrid Perovskites (OIHP), which have recently demonstrated to possess remarkable photovoltaic efficiency. The fundamental properties of these materials related to photovoltaic (PV) applications are studied to characterise electronic and optical behaviours. An all-electron implementation of the Quasi-particle Self-consistent GW (QSGW) is used to perform first principles calculations. The quasi-particle energy bands are analysed for a number of Perovskites, to identify trends and characteristics within this family of materials, and to understand the dielectric response. The dielectric function and refractive index were studied for 4 OIHP and compared to experimental work carried out collaboratively with Leguy et al. [1]. It is found that the relativistic effects are extremely important in characterisation of these materials. The presence of strong spin-orbit interaction combined with significant internal electric fields yields anomalously large Rashba splitting of both valence and conduction states near the band edges. This significantly perturbs the electronic and optical properties of these materials. Such effects have not been previously investigated in the context of photovoltaic materials. The effect of the Rashba splitting on the radiative recombination lifetime of charge carriers is investigated. A model for reciprocal space trapping mechanism of carriers was developed and implemented within the Questaal package. The slightly indirect gap induced by Rashba splitting results in a strongly suppressed photoluminescence when compared to conventional III-V direct-gap semiconductors with an otherwise approximately similar band structure. Such suppression of the radiative recombination enhances the diffusion length and can significantly increase the power conversion efficiency of a solar cell.