Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimization of PID Controller Parameters for Automated Ground Vehicle Control on Dynamic Terrain

— Within the ground vehicle domain, there are a variety of contexts in which automated control schemes are necessary, from control of robotic and other semi-autonomous platforms to the automated performance of speciﬁed vehicle maneuvers within computer simulations. For basic automated control of speed and steering, particularly within the modeling and simulation arena, proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers are commonly used, as these controllers have been extensively studied and are well-understood. However, the performance of these types of controllers is often highly sensitive to the three parameters necessary for their use. In this paper, we explore the use of optimization algorithms for optimal parameter selection for a PID ground vehicle speed controller. In particular, we examine three optimization algorithms – a evolutionary optimization, simulated annealing, and Nelder-Mead simplex optimization – and compare the results of these algorithms on parameter selection for the vehicle controller in a simulation environment.
Microneedles and Nanopatches-Based Delivery Devices in Dentistry

Needle-based devices are evolving as a promising diagnostic and therapeutic tool in the field of medicine. They can be used for drug delivery, as well as extraction of fluids, for systemic and local effects. The conventional methods of drug delivery require repeated dosing in the oral cavity due to the presence of saliva. Hence delivery systems, such as needle-based devices that could provide sustained release of the drug in the oral cavity, are required. These devices could also be a useful adjunct in diagnosis and therapy of oral cancers, delivering anti-cariogenic and antiplaque agents, for remote monitoring of oral health, and for administering painless and fearless local anesthesia. Since they offer many advantages, such as increased compliance, absence of needle phobia, they are painless, safe, self-applicable and are minimally invasive, they will have a major impact in the field of dentistry. This paper summarizes the various types of needle-based devices and their manufacturing technologies. The manuscript aims to serve as a foundational review that highlights and proposes several current and prospective impactful applications of these devices in various fields of dentistry.
A Review and Analysis of Privacy Preserving Detection Techniques of Sensitive Data Exposure

- Statistics from the different security firms, research institutions and government organizations show that there is a rapid growth in the numbers of data-leak instances in recent years. Among different data-leak cases, human mistakes are one of the main causes of data loss. There exist alternate solutions in detecting inadvertent sensitive data leaks caused by human mistakes and to provide alerts for organizations. One of the common approaches is to screen content in storage and transmission for exposed sensitive information. Such an approach usually requires secrecy in conducting the detection operation. However, this secrecy requirement is challenging to satisfy in practice, as detection servers may be compromised or outsourced. In this proposed research work, we present a privacy preserving data-leak detection (DLD) solution to solve the issue where a special set of sensitive data digests is used in detection. The advantage of this method is that, it enables the data owner to safely delegate the detection operation to a semi honest provider without revealing the sensitive data to the provider. It is also possible, how Internet service providers can offer their customers DLD as an add-on service with strong privacy guarantees. This proposal will help to support accurate detection with very less number of false alarms under different data-leak scenarios.
EVALUATING THE DETERMINANTS OF PESTICIDE RESIDUES IN VEGETABLES: A CASE OF LEMON MARKET IN PAKISTAN

In developing countries, vegetable markets are inefficient in terms of information exchanges between producers and consumers on food safety attributes. This study attempts to investigate the determinants of pesticide residues and estimates information efficiency of vegetable market, using socioeconomic and biophysical data collected from a representative sample of 360 farmers in Pakistani Punjab. Chromatography technique is employed to quantify pesticide residues in okra, brinjal, spinach and cauliflower. A large proportion of spinach samples (83%), followed by okra (72%), brinjal (60%) and cauliflower (50%) have surpassed the maximum residue limits of pesticides, implying that they are lemons. Results of pesticide residue model show that magnitudes of pesticide residues in vegetables vary with pesticide quantity and spray interval at the farm level. Results of information efficiency model reveal that vegetable prices are negatively but insignificantly correlated with pesticides residues, implying that vegetable market is a lemon market in Pakistan. Proper implementation of food safety standards and product labeling may help to provide safe vegetables to consumers.
Inhibition of miRNA-29a regulates intestinal barrier function in diarrhea-predominant irritable bowel syndrome by upregulating ZO-1 and CLDN1

Diarrhea-predominant irritable bowel syndrome (IBS-D) is a common chronic functional gastrointestinal disorder. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been identified to be involved in different physiological and pathological processes. In this study, the role of miRNA-29a in the potential mechanism underlying the function of the intestinal mucosal barrier in IBS-D was analyzed. Human intestinal mucosal epithelia from patients with IBS-D (diagnosed as meeting the Rome IV criteria) and healthy volunteers were collected. An IBS-D mouse model was established via induction with trinitro-benzene-sulfonic acid (TNBS), and the mice were injected with miRNA-29a inhibitor. Using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), the epithelial ultrastructure of the human intestinal mucosa was examined. Using reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) analysis, the expression level of miRNA-29a was assessed. ELISA was used to analyze the activity of D-lactate (D-LA) and diamine oxidase (DAO). Through immunohistochemistry, RT-qPCR and western blotting, the expression of tight junction protein ZO-1 (ZO-1) and claudin-1 (CLDN1) was examined. In the human intestinal mucosal epithelia from patients with IBS-D, miRNA-29a was upregulated, ZO-1 and CLDN1 were downregulated, and the junctional complex (JC) was faint and discontinuous. In the IBS-D mouse model, treatment with miRNA-29a inhibitor downregulated D-LA and DAO activity, and increased the expression of ZO-1 and CLDN1 in the intestinal mucosal epithelium. In conclusion, the present study revealed that miRNA-29a is involved in the pathogenesis of IBS-D, probably by downregulating ZO-1 and CLDN1 expression, suggesting that miRNA-29a is likely to be an important regulator of intestinal barrier function and could be a possible therapeutic target for IBS-D.
Modeling Human Need for Attention and Interruptibility in Restaurant Scenarios

The goal of this work is to train a model to quantify mental states such as neediness and interruptibil-ity from human action patterns in restaurant scenarios. Our long-term vision is to develop robot waiters that can intelligently respond to customers. Our key insight is that human behaviors can both actively and passively communicate customers’ underlying mental states. To interpret behaviors indicating neediness and interruptibility, we automatically label key moments of human service patterns in restaurants based on waiter location and objects, as well as human behavior patterns in terms of pose, facial expression, and facial action units. Our effort to build a model is complicated by a lack of ground truth information, unreliability in waiter actions, and the effect of distractions and non-service social interactions on customer signals, and we pro-pose solutions to each of these issues. We plan to compare the performance of several machine learning methods in predicting moments when waiters attend to customer needs based on this model.
In vivo MRS of Muscle, Liver, Heart and Other Organs: A Review of Techniques and Applications

As MRI has been used in biomedical research and medicine since the 1970s, Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) has been employed to study biochemical alterations in living animals and humans. By taking advantage of its noninvasive nature, 1H, 13C and 31P MRS are being actively utilized in clinical and biomedical studies to detect lipids, metabolites, and/or kinetic information, such as acetyl carnitine content and ATP synthesis rates in vivo. These data would be quite difficult to assess by other modalities. Furthermore, many studies have indicated that in vivo values obtained by MRS show a close correlation with important metabolic parameters (e.g., hepatic and intramyocellular lipid content by 1H-MRS correlated with insulin sensitivity), which adds value of MRS. Moreover, hepatic glycogen synthesis and breakdown can be directly detected by 13C-MRS, whereas in vivo ATP synthesis rates in mitochondria can be assessed by 31P-MRS as well. These in vivo data offer critical metabolic information in animals and humans, and often serve as useful biomarkers for the pathophysiology and state of a disease. Thus, in this review, important and frequently used modalities and applications of MRS in muscle, liver, and other organs are described.
Dimitri Renard1 · Laurent Collombier2 · Sabine Laurent‐Chabalier3 · Thibault Mura3 · Anne Le Floch1 · Hassan El Fertit4 · Eric Thouvenot1,5 · Jean Sebastien Guillamo1

Introduction 3,4-Dihydroxy-6-[18F]-fluoro-l-phenylalanine (FDOPA) positron emission tomography (PET) is sensitive for identifying primary brain tumors. However, increased FDOPA uptake has been reported in pseudotumoral brain lesions. Our aim was to analyse FDOPA-PET in patients with pseudotumoral brain lesions and to compare them with patients with brain tumors. Methods We retrospectively analysed consecutively recruited patients with suspected primary brain tumor (based on clinical and magnetic resonance imaging findings) referred for FDOPA-PET in our centre between November 2013 and June 2019 (n = 74). FDOPA-PET parameters (maximum and mean lesion standardised uptake values [SUV] and ratios comparing lesion with different background uptake SUV) and thresholds were evaluated to determine which offered optimal discrimination between pseudotumoral and tumoral lesions. Results Overlapping PET values were observed between pseudotumoral (n = 26) and tumoral (n = 48) lesion, particularly for low-grade tumors. Based on receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses, the optimal PET parameters to discriminate pseudotumoral from tumoral lesions were SUVmax lesion/basal ganglia, SUVmax lesion/grey matter, SUVmean lesion/grey matter, and SUVmax lesion/mirror area in contralateral hemisphere (all ratios showing area under the curve [AUC] 0.85, 95% CI). The narrowest 95% sensitivity–95% specificity window was observed for SUVmax lesion/basal ganglia ratio, with ratio values of 0.79 and 1.35 corresponding to 95% sensitivity and 95% specificity, respectively. Conclusion FDOPA-PET uptake should be interpreted with caution in patients with suspected primary brain tumor, especially in patients showing low or intermediate SUV values and ratios. Clinical Trial Registration‐URL https ://www.clini caltr ials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT04306484
Amplification dynamics of primate retrotransposons

vi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION. 1 CHAPTER TWO: DIFFERENTIAL ALU MOBILIZATION AND POLYMORPHISM AMONG HUMAN AND CHIMPANZEE LINEAGES. 7 CHAPTER THREE: A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF ALU ASSOCIATED DIVERSITY ON THE HUMAN SEX CHROMOSOMES. 37 CHAPTER FOUR: A MOBILE ELEMENT BASED ASSAY FOR HUMAN GENDER DETERMINATION. 57 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION . 64 APPENDIX A: SUPPLEMENTARY DATA. 95 APPENDIX B: LETTERS OF PERMISSION. 105 VITA. 108
Children’s sense-making through exploration Grasping physical and virtual materialities

A child’s sense-making is grounded in his or her bodily interactions with the environment and tied to the body’s sensory experience. Digital technologies are being introduced into children’s learning environments and they experience virtual materialities to a greater extent now ever before. This study aimed to uncover how young children make sense of the world through explorative touch interactions with physical and virtual materialities. Children’s sense-making was studied through an explorative inquiry that was supported by video documentation. This article discusses how the combination of materials, digital technologies and experiences of different materialities offers new opportunities for explorative interaction, transforming and shaping children’s experience of the world through joint sense-making. It also identifies how children’s past experience of material touch is important for them in their process of grasping virtual materiality.
The Antidepressant-like Effect of Mitragyna

Mitragyna Speciosa Korth (MS) was used as an opium substitute in Southeast Asia. It has been shown to have addictive properties and to produce tolerance and dependence. The methanolic leaf extract of Mitragyna Speciosais Known to contain several alkaloids including mitragynine which structurally has an indole moiety. This moiety is also a feature of serotonin which is an important neurotransmitter in depression. This would tend to suggest some activities of MS at the brain serotonergic system. On the other hand, current strategy in designing antidepressants in the form of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), this study has investigated whether the methanolic leaf extract of MS possesses antidepressant-like effect. The Porsolt swim test method (PST) for screening antidepressants had been used. Female mice were forced to swim for 6 minutes. This was followed 24h later with a second swim session of 6 min. Drugs were administered (n=10) orally1, 5 and 24h after the first swim session to record chronic effect. The oral administration of MS methanolic leaf extract at doses 100, 200, 400 mg/kg, significantly reduced the immobility time.
Clothes Perception and Manipulation D 1 . 2 Demonstrator Procedures and Results , Annotated Data Specification

This report describes the demonstration procedures of the CloPeMa project. The demonstration procedures consist of two joint scenarios and a few separate presentations. The two joint scenarios are motivated by laundry process. We introduce sorting of garments before washing and folding of a garment. The report contents list annotated datasets with short descriptions. The annotated datasets are results of the project.
Magnetic ratchet effect in phosphorene

The magnetic ratchet effect has been studied in phosphorene by the use of the Boltzmann kinetic equation, which is a semiclassical approach. The Hamiltonian of phosphorene in a steady parallel magnetic field is derived using the tight-binding model. We consider the effect of the magnetic field on nonlinear dynamics in the presence of an ac laser field and spatial inversion asymmetry. We have shown that for anisotropic two-dimensional materials and phosphorene, the ratchet current has a response to three different light polarizations: linearly polarized light, circularly polarized light, and unpolarized light.
Convergence of a particle approximation for the quasi-stationary distribution of a diffusion process: uniform estimates in a compact soft case.


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We establish the convergences (with respect to the simulation time $t$; the number of particles $N$; the timestep $\gamma$) of a Moran/Fleming-Viot type particle scheme toward the quasi-stationary distribution of a diffusion on the $d$-dimensional torus, killed at a smooth rate. In these conditions, quantitative bounds are obtained that, for each parameter ($t\rightarrow \infty$, $N\rightarrow \infty$ or $\gamma\rightarrow 0$) are independent from the two others. p, li { white-space: pre-wrap; }
A NOVEL APPROACH FOR ANNOTATING IMAGES BY SEMANTIC SIMILARITY & KEYWORD BASED ASSOCIATION ANALYSIS

Tremendous growth of multimedia data has resulted in enhancing the number of images over the web. As a consequence of this, search engines face challenges in finding relevant images. Therefore, images must be properly annotated and effectively indexed for increasing relevancy. Image annotation has been a topic of ongoing research for more than a decade leading to several interesting techniques. However, retrieval results are not satisfactory because there is a semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level semantic concepts. This motivates our work. In this work, a novel approach for finding relevant annotation based on semantic similarity and subsequently enriching the annotation by using keyword based association analysis is proposed.
WIND POWER GENERATION PREDICTION BASED ON WEATHER FORECAST DATA USING DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS

Wind power generation is one of the most important renewable energy sources. Although predicting the amount of power generation is crucial for eﬃcient operations, it is not easy because of ﬂuctuating nature of wind speed. This paper applies a deep neural network method to predicting wind power generation based on weather forecast data. Wind power generation data were collected from a power plant located in Jeju, South Korea, and weather forecast data for the nearby weather stations were collected. The prediction performance of the model was evaluated with wind power generation data and weather forecast in terms of root mean square error, mean square error, mean absolute error, and R-squared.
Renewable Energy Consumption-Economic Growth Nexus in G7 Countries: New Evidence from a Nonlinear ARDL Approach

The paper investigates the nonlinear pass-through from economic growth to renewable energy consumptionby applying a Nonlinear Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag model (NARDL) for G7 countries. This study covers the period of 1995Q1-2015Q4. The recent approach allows for empirical tests of short-run and long-run asymmetric responses of renewable energy consumption to positive and negative shocks stemming from economic growth. The results reveal that renewable energy consumption responds asymmetrically to economic growth in the long-run for France, Japan, Italy and the UK. However, we find no evidence for a long-run equilibrium between renewable energy consumption and economic growth in Germany, Canada and the US.
Cytogenetic study of diploid and triploid marine medaka, Oryzias dancena

triploidy was induced in the marine medaka, Oryzias dancena by cold shock treatment (0°c) of fertilized eggs for 30, 45, or 60 min, applied two minutes after fertilization. the triploid genotype was induced by each of the thermal shock regimes tested. the best result was obtained when the eggs were treated for 45 min, which induced triploidy in all the resulting fish. triploidy was confirmed using chromosomal and flow cytometer analyses, and erythrocyte measurements. the surface areas and volumes of the erythrocytes of triploid fish were significantly larger than those of diploid fish, and their chromosome number (3n = 72) was 1.5 times greater that for the diploids (2n = 48). Based on a flow cytometer analysis, the triploid fish had approximately 1.5 times the cellular dnA content (2.40 pg/ cell) of the diploid specimens (1.61 pg/cell). data from this study provide the basis for the development of unique models for studying reproductive confinement in transgenic fish.
SYNTHETIC TEMPORAL GRAPH GENERATION

Generating a synthetic graph that is similar to a given real-world graph is a critical requirement for privacy preservation and benchmarking purposes. Various generative models attempt to generate static graphs similar to real-world graphs. However, generation of temporal graphs is still an open research area. We present a temporal-motif based approach to generate synthetic temporal graph datasets including the core algorithm, and results from two real-world use cases.
WINKLER PLATES BY THE BOUNDARY KNOT METHOD

This paper describes the application of the Boundary Knot Method (BKM) in the solution of problems regarding Kirchhoff plates resting on a Winkler foundation. This is the first time the BKM is applied to this kind of problems. The BKM is a boundary, meshless and integration-free method. To solve problems of plates resting on a Winkler foundation, the inhomogeneous term is approximated considering known particular solutions. The Kelvin and the modified Kelvin non-singular functions are used to approximate the homogenous term. Even though the approach of the BKM is similar to the Method of Fundamental Solutions (MFS), the BKM only uses non-singular general solutions, therefore, the artificial boundary used in MFS is not required. The BKM is validated through its application to solve several problems with different boundary conditions: clamped, simply supported and free edges were considered. Several cases are discussed and the solutions obtained with the BKM are compared to the solutions obtained using the Finite Element Method (FEM).
INCLUSIVE GROWTH IN MOZAMBIQUE – SCALING-UP RESEARCH AND CAPACITY Idai Damage Assessment From the Sentinel-1 Radar Satellite

For disaster emergency response, timely information is critical and satellite data is a potential source for such information.This paper shows, in the context of Cyclone Idai that hit Central Mozambique in March 2019, that Change Detection between pairs of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, combined with external data on the location of houses prior to the cyclone, provide an assessment of building damage. The free availability of SAR data from Sentinel-1, with further automated processing of it, means that this analysis is a cost-effective and quick potential first indication of cyclone destruction. Importantly, the first SAR data was available 12 hours after first impact, while the final analysis based on optical images was not available until 21 days later.
EVALUATION OF THE ERROR PERFORMANCE OF THE IEEE802.16 STANDARD BASED ON A HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL

IEEE802.16 (WiMAX) is a standard that supports high data rate in a wide area with multi-traffic communication, low implementation and the possibility of creating broadcast, multicast and mesh networks. In this paper the Hidden Markov Model as a Discrete Channel Model has been employed to model the burst errors generated from IEEE 802.16/WiMAX; moreover, the precise Hidden Markov Models using Baum-Welch Algorithm have been obtained by estimating the optimal order of these models with comparing statistics such as Average log-likelihood, Probability of Error, 𝑃(0 𝑚 |1) and Auto-Correlation function. Additionally, the parameters of the best models have been derived. The impacts of a number of Baum-Welch Algorithm iterations and the modulation order on the optimal order estimation with respect to different (𝑇 𝑠 ) were investigated using extensive simulations.