Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the portuguese version of the Newest Vital Sign

Theoretical framework: The Newest Vital Sign (NVS) test was designed for simple, easy administration on Health literacy (HL) measurement. Objectives: To make available an instrument in Portuguese to assess the HL level of the Portuguese population. Methodology: Translation and cross-cultural adaptation of the original English version of the NVS into the Portuguese language. The validation process included the factor analysis and the establishment of its psychometric proprieties and the study of the association with other individual factors, such as the self-efficacy, Body Mass Index (BMI), age and lifestyles. Results: Reliability was acceptable with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient between . 67 and . 83. Using factor analysis with varimax rotation, two subscales explained 60.97% of the variance. Construct validity was also supported by the confirmation of predefined hypotheses involving expected correlations between the Portuguese version (NVS-PT), BMI, age and SES (convergent-divergent validity). An additional predefined hypothesis was also confirmed with the older subjects obtaining a lower score in the NVS-PT (p = .001). Conclusion: The NVS-PT evidenced acceptable psychometric characteristics.
Antioxidant capacity of hydroalcoholic extracts of Grewia serrulata DC and Grewia nervosa (Lour.) Panigrahi

The current investigation is intended to evaluate the content of phytochemical constituents and antioxidant potential of hydroalcoholic extracts of stem and root of Grewia serrulata DC (HAESGS & HAERGS) and leaf and bark of Grewia Nervosa (Lour.) panigrahi (HAELGN & HAEBGN). Initially, all the extracts at different concentrations were estimated for their total phenolic content and total flavonoid content. The study was further extended for their antioxidant potential evaluation using various in vitro methods such as 1, 1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical, hydroxyl radical and superoxide radical scavenging assays. The total phenolic content (mg gallic acid equivalent per gram of extract) was high in HAELGN (170.82±0.19) and HAERGS (123.00±0.48) than HAESGS (111.2±0.26) and HAEBGN (119.60±0.23). The total flavonoid content (mg quercetin equivalent per gram) is greater in HAERGS (71.24±0.50) and HAESGS (65.68±0.27) than HAELGN (55.82±0.35) and HAEBGN (62.38±0.45). The IC50 values (µg/ml) of different plant extracts inferred that DPPH radical scavenging activity is greater in HAELGN (42.91±0.88) and HAEBGN (53.87±0.35) than HAESGS (126.73±1.20) and HAERGS (88.87±1.25). However, hydroxyl and superoxide radical scavenging activity is more in HAERGS (135.41±1.19 & 88.00±1.42) and HAELGN (172.28±1.91 & 108.163±1.09) than HAESGS (237.3±1.65 & 110.074±0.87) and HAEBGN (204.7±1.04 & 125.54±1.07). The results of present comprehensive analysis demonstrated that both the plants Grewia serrulata DC and Grewia Nervosa (Lour.) panigrahi possess high phenolic, flavonoid contents and potential antioxidant activity, and could be used as a valid source of natural antioxidants and might be utilized for pharmacological screening of various therapeutic activities. Keywords: Grewia serrulata; Grewia Nervosa; Total Phenolic content; Total flavonoid content; Antioxidant potential
Macrobenthos characteristics and distribution, following intensive sand extraction from a subtidal sandbank

The investigation of the ecological impact of sand extraction has a long history (ICES, 1992, 2001). This observation applies also to the Kwinte Bank in the Belgian sector of the North Sea, where the first impact assessment of sand extraction was undertaken in the late 1970s (Vanosmael et al., 1979; Vanosmael et al., 1982). In spite of the fact that sand extraction from sandbanks in Belgian marine waters has been monitored for more than 30 years, the effect on macrobenthic communities has not been detected, before the present investigation. The spatial variation in extraction intensity was not analysed in detail before 2000, as an essential prerequisite to characterising the environmental impact. Bonne (2003) attempted to relate benthic copepod communities of different areas at the Kwinte Bank to sand extraction intensity, for each sampling station, from the “black-box” records of the extraction vessels. The benthic copepod communities identified in 1997, in high 1 AZTI Foundation Marine Research Division Herrera Kaia, Portualdea s/n 20110, Pasaia, Spain * Present address: Marine Environment Service, Directorate General Environment, Federal Public Service Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment, Belgian Federal Government Victor Hortaplein 40 box 1
Compressed sensing techniques for accelerated magnetic resonance imaging

COMPRESSED SENSING TECHNIQUES FOR ACCELERATED MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING Efe Ilıcak M.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Advisor: Tolga Çukur July 2017 Magnetic resonance imaging has seen a growing interest in the recent years due to its non-invasive and non-ionizing nature. However, imaging speed remains a major concern. Recently, compressed sensing theory has opened new doors for accelerated imaging applications. This dissertation studies compressed sensing based reconstruction strategies for accelerated magnetic resonance imaging, specifically for angiography and multiple-acquisition methods. For magnetic resonance angiography, we propose a novel approach that improves scan time efficiency while suppressing background signals. In this study, we attain high-contrast angiograms from undersampled data by utilizing a two-stage reconstruction strategy. Simulations and in vivo experiments demonstrate that the developed strategy is able to relax trade-offs between image contrast and scan efficiency without compromising vessel depiction. For multiple-acquisition balanced steady state free precession imaging, we develop a framework that jointly reconstructs undersampled phasecycled images. This approach is able to improve banding artifact suppression while maintaining scan efficiency. Results show that the proposed method is able to attain high-quality reconstructions even at high acceleration factors. Overall, the findings presented in this thesis indicate that compressed sensing reconstructions represent a promising future for rapid magnetic resonance imaging. Consequently, compressed sensing reconstruction techniques hold a great potential to change the time-consuming clinical imaging practices.
Growth Enhancement of Shrimp and Reduction of Shrimp Infection by Vibrio parahaemolyticus and White Spot Syndrome Virus with Dietary Administration of Bacillus sp. Mk22

The black tiger shrimp Penaeus monodon is the most widely cultured shrimp species in Asian countries. However, the shrimp culture industry has recently been badly affected by the outbreak of diseases caused by both pathogenic (virus, bacteria, fungi, and parasites) and non-pathogenic agents (nutritional deficiency, algal toxins, and fluctuating environmental parameters), where the pathogenic forms are responsible for most of the major economic losses. Among the bacterial pathogens, Vibrio species cause vibriosis in penaeid shrimp [21], which is mainly caused by Vibrio parahaemolyticus, a Gram-negative halophilic, non-spore forming, curved rod-shaped bacterium that naturally lives in estuarine and marine environments worldwide [26]. Meanwhile, the most problematic virus for shrimp cultures around The present study examined the effect of the dietary administration of a halophilic bacterium Bacillus sp. Mk22 on the growth improvement of black tiger shrimp, Penaeus monodon, and reduced shrimp infection by Vibrio parahaemolyticus and white spot syndrome virus (WSSV). The shrimp were fed 45 days using three experimental diets: no addition (control), commercial probiotic, and Bacillus sp. Mk22. The shrimp treated with the halophilic bacterium Mk22 showed a significant improvement of growth (7.1 ± 0.21 g), survival (94.3 ± 0.58%), weight gain (178 ± 4.93 g), and reduced feed conversion rate (0.8 ± 0.03 g) compared with the shrimp in the other groups. The shrimp treated with Bacillus sp. Mk22 also showed a lower Vibrio count (0.02 ± 0.01 × 10 CFU/ml) in the shrimp culture water compared with the other groups. The shrimp in the three groups were challenged with either Vibrio or WSSV. For the Vibrio infection, no mortality was observed from water infection or oral feeding infection in the commercial probiotic group and Mk 22 group. For the WSSV infection, a 68% survival rate from water infection and 20% survival rate from oral feeding infection was observed on day 45 in the Mk22 group, while 100% mortalities were recorded at a much earlier time in both the control and commercial probiotic groups. The antioxidant enzyme activities, indicators of oxidative stress, such as catalase and superoxide dismutase, significantly decreased in both the Vibrio and WSSV-infected Mk22 groups compared with the other groups, indicating that Bacillus sp. Mk22 was effective in reducing oxidative stress, possibly due to the reduced infection.
Knowledge Bridging by Biotechnology Start-Ups

We empirically investigate a type of technological boundary spanning-oriented search in which firms apply knowledge from one technical domain to innovate in another, a phenomenon we term knowledge bridging. In an analysis of a novel dataset of all the biotechnology firms founded to commercialize recombinant DNA technology, we examine the consequences of knowledge bridging at the patent-firm level of analysis, as well as the determinants of this search behavior at the firm-year level of analysis. The empirical setting allows us to establish a common technological starting point and examine knowledge bridging-oriented technological search behavior over time. At the patent-firm level of analysis, we find that knowledge bridging is significantly associated with measures of patent value. In an analysis of antecedents to knowledge bridging search at the firm-year level of analysis, we find that such search behavior is correlated with firms' initial search direction and receipt of venture capital funding.
Applications and theory of large scale image retrieval and large scale mining

The state-of-the art in visual object retrieval from large databases allows for searching millions of images on the object level. Complementary works have proposed systems to crawl large object databases from community photo collections on the Internet in order to generate large labeled object datatbases. The dissertation presents applications that are made possible from the combination of said methods and investigates novel ways in which state-of-the art in image retrieval can be advanced. There are four main contributions. As a first contribution we combine image retrieval with large scale mining methods to create an auto-annotation system for holiday snaps. The resulting method allows for automatic labeling of objects such as landmark buildings, scenes, pieces of art etc. at the object level in a fully automatic manner. We demonstrate the scalability and precision of the proposed method by conducting experiments on millions of images downloaded from community photo collections on the Internet. As second contribution we present a method to automatically improve the quality of a reference database, which, as we will show, significantly affects recognition performance. The third contribution presents a system for mobile augmented reality based visual recognition using a hybrid client-server approach. The capabilities of the system are demonstrated with a prototype application on the Android platform, which is able to augment both stationary (landmarks) and non stationary (media covers) objects. The fourth contribution introduces method based on k-reciprocal nearest neighbors to improve image retrieval. The method operates on the bag-of-words level alone. While it involves offline processing, it only adds minimal computational overhead at runtime. The approach is evaluated on common image retrieval benchmarks and a significant improvement over standard bag-of-words methods is shown.
Comprehensive Evaluation of Utilization of Organic Wastes as Resources Based on Cognitive Behavioral Science

Based on the theory of cognitive behavior, this article designs a brain evoked potential experiment and selects 30 livestock husbandry farmers from six provinces in East China as objects to verify the influence of cognitive attitude, subjective behavior and code of conduct on their willingness to utilize organic wastes as resources, and to draw the portraits of those farmers who utilize organic wastes as resources, which can provide theoretical basis and scientific reference for the government to formulate relevant policies on utilization of rural organic wastes as resources in later period. The results are as follows: (1) The farmer's cognition attitude, subjective behavior and code of conduct all have positive effect on their willingness to utilize organic wastes as resources, in which their cognitive attitude shows the strongest influence. The three influencing factors, including farmers' cognitive attitude, subjective behavior, and code of conduct, are the most closely related to each other. (2) Farmers' willingness to use organic wastes as resources has a significant effect on their behavior of utilizing organic wastes as resources, and there is a positive correlation between them. (3) Farmers' leisure time, household income, and technical skills also have a significant impact on the farmers' behavior in utilizing organic wastes as resources.
Triple Patterns Extraction for Accessing Data on Ontology

Some web applications use the ontology to integrate multiple data sources because ontology-based data integration is the ideal solution to handle the semantic conflict. For accessing the data on ontology, ontology understanding query such as SPARQL is needed. However, end users enter the unstructured sentence (words, statements, etc.) as an input when they wanted to search the required information on the web. So, it is needed to extract the triplets (i.e. subjects, predicates and objects) from the input query to build the ontology browsing query SPARQL. Although there are many triplet extraction algorithms, either they can't fully define all triple patterns from the incoming query or they are time consuming process. The proposed algorithm presented in this paper can handle this triplet's incompleteness problem and the aim of this system is to extract the specific triplets from incoming query and to add the necessary information for supporting SPARQL query generating process in a time-saving manner. triple patterns from the user input query. Then the mediator automatically generates the SPARQL query to browse the ontology by using the triplets obtained from the triplet extraction algorithm. After the SPARQL query has been generated, the data included in the ontology can be retrieved and returned to the user. There are three main processing phases in ontology based data integration system such as ontology creation, ontology mapping and query service. Extracting the triplets from the user query is one of the most important roles of query service as describe in above. When the user query is submitted to the system, this query is needed to translate to the ontology understanding query SPARQL. The query language SPARQL has a graph-based structure and can be built by combining triple patterns extracted from the user input query (2). If the user input query is unstructured query, it will be more difficult to define whether which words are subjects or objects. The proposed algorithm is able to identify the subjects, predicates and objects in the unstructured query exactly. Currently there are many triplets extraction algorithm for supporting the triple patterns to assist the necessary application. They implement the triplet extraction process based on the parse tree generated by the parser. In this proposed algorithm, triple patterns included in the user input query are extracted with the help of domain specific ontology and machine readable dictionary WorldNet instead of using the parser. So, the processing time of this algorithm is lesser than other parser-based approaches. This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, this paper presents the related work. The system design detail is presented in Section III. It gives in Section IV the description of proposed triplet extraction algorithm. Section V demonstrates the sample query testing and results of proposed algorithm by comparing the result of other competitive algorithms. Section VI concludes with some remarks.
Comments on Chemical Analysis of Limestone and Dolomite UsingCapillary Electrophoresis

Comments on the determination of calcium and magnesium in limestone, dolomite and other related materials using capillary electrophoresis is presented. As stated and discussed, the use of highly sensitive capillary electrophoresis technique for the chemical analysis of major concentration of calcium and magnesium content in limestone and dolomite samples is never justified in comparison with the well established EDTA complexometric titration methods. Complexometric titration methods satisfy all the essential requirements of: Reliability (accurate and precise, comparable, traceable) Applicability (applicable to diverse sample matrices) and Practicability (simple, rapid, cost-effective, no requirement of standards and calibration of instrument, no expensive instrumentation and are widely recommended for the determination of calcium and magnesium at percentage level for such matrices. Surprising, there is no comment or discussion by the authors in their manuscript on complexometric titration methods. There are contradictory and highly misleading statements.
Improving Evolutionary Strategies with Generative Neural Networks

Evolutionary Strategies (ES) are a popular family of black-box zeroth-order optimization algorithms which rely on search distributions to efficiently optimize a large variety of objective functions. This paper investigates the potential benefits of using highly flexible search distributions in classical ES algorithms, in contrast to standard ones (typically Gaussians). We model such distributions with Generative Neural Networks (GNNs) and introduce a new training algorithm that leverages their expressiveness to accelerate the ES procedure. We show that this tailored algorithm can readily incorporate existing ES algorithms, and outperforms the state-of-the-art on diverse objective functions.
Optimal Transport for structured data with application on graphs

This work considers the problem of computing distances between structured objects such as undirected graphs, seen as probability distributions in a specific metric space. We consider a new transportation distance (i.e. that minimizes a total cost of transporting probability masses) that unveils the geometric nature of the structured objects space. Unlike Wasserstein or Gromov-Wasserstein metrics that focus solely and respectively on features (by considering a metric in the feature space) or structure (by seeing structure as a metric space), our new distance exploits jointly both information, and is consequently called Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW). After discussing its properties and computational aspects, we show results on a graph classification task, where our method outperforms both graph kernels and deep graph convolutional networks. Exploiting further on the metric properties of FGW, interesting geometric objects such as Frechet means or barycenters of graphs are illustrated and discussed in a clustering context.
A Tractable Framework for Coverage Analysis of Cellular-Connected UAV Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently found abundant applications in the public and civil domains. To ensure reliable control and navigation, connecting UAVs to controllers via existing cellular network infrastructure, i.e., ground base stations (GBSs), has been proposed as a promising solution. Nevertheless, it is highly challenging to characterize the communication performance of cellular-connected UAVs, due to their unique propagation conditions. This paper proposes a tractable framework for the coverage analysis of cellular-connected UAV networks, which consists of a new blockage model and an effective approach to handle general fading channels. In particular, a line-of-sight (LoS) ball model is proposed to capture the probabilistic propagation in UAV communication systems, and a tractable expression is derived for the Laplace transform of the aggregate interference with general Nakagami fading. This framework leads to a tractable expression for the coverage probability, which in turn helps to investigate the impact of the GBS density. Specifically, a tight lower bound on the optimal density that maximizes the coverage probability is derived. Numerical results show that the proposed LoS ball model is accurate, and the optimal GBS density decreases when the UAV altitude increases.
The Secure Link Prediction Problem

Link Prediction is an important and well-studied problem for social networks. Given a snapshot of a graph, the link prediction problem predicts which new interactions between members are most likely to occur in the near future. As networks grow in size, data owners are forced to store the data in remote cloud servers which reveals sensitive information about the network. The graphs are therefore stored in encrypted form. We study the link prediction problem on encrypted graphs. To the best of our knowledge, this secure link prediction problem has not been studied before. We use the number of common neighbors for prediction. We present three algorithms for the secure link prediction problem. We design prototypes of the schemes and formally prove their security. We execute our algorithms in real-life datasets.
PERFIL SENSORIAL E FÍSICO-QUÍMICO DO DOCE DE LEITE COM PEQUI (Caryocar brasiliense Camb)

A populacao da regiao Centro-Oeste do Brasil e grande consumidora dos frutos do pequizeiro, arvore nativa do Cerrado, entretanto, a aceitabilidade deste fruto em formulacoes alimenticias e pouco estudada, principalmente, a incorporacao ao doce de leite. Diante do exposto, objetivou-se avaliar a aceitabilidade e propriedades fisico-quimicas do doce de leite saborizado com pequi ( Caryocar brasiliense Camb). Foram avaliadas quatro formulacoes de doce de leite: doce de leite sem adicao de pequi (controle) e doces de leite com adicao de 1%, 2% e 3% de polpa de pequi, constituindo-se os Tratamentos 1, 2, 3 e 4. Foram realizadas analises de cinzas, umidade, dureza, adesividade, pH, acidez titulavel, solidos soluveis totais, parâmetros instrumentais de cor e analises sensoriais. A adicao do pequi ao doce de leite e uma alternativa de agregar valor sensorial e apresentar um novo produto ao mercado que esta em busca constante de novidades.