Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vernacular Languages for Mechatronic Making

This paper proposes a way of thinking about physical making, from the perspective of end-user programming. It addresses current interest arising from the Maker/Hackerspace movement, which aims to democratise the means of creating new mechanical and electronic (mechatronic) devices. By applying insights from the domain of end-user programming, it proposes ways that mechatronic making can be made more accessible to a wider audience, just as programming has been made more accessible to a wider audience through end-user programming.
Mobile Technology Application for Improved Urine Concentration Measurement Pilot Study

Objectives: Low hydration has a deleterious effect on many conditions. In the absence of a urine concentrating defect, urine concentration is a marker of hydration status. However, markers to evaluate hydration status have not been well studied in children. The objectives of this paper are to compare measures of thirst and urine concentration in children and to develop a novel mobile technology application to measure urine concentration. Study Design: Children age 12–17 years were selected (n = 21) for this pilot study. Thirst perception, specific gravity (automated dipstick analysis and refractometer), and urine color scale results were correlated to urine osmolality. The technology department developed a mobile technology camera application to measure light penetrance into urine which was tested on 25 random anonymized urine samples. Results: The patients' thirst perception and color scale as well as two researchers color scale did not significantly correlate with osmolality. Correlation between osmolality and hydration markers resulted in the following Pearson coefficients: SG automated dipstick, 0.61 (P 0.003); SG refractometer, 0.98 (P < 0.0001); urine color scale (patient), 0.37 (P 0.10), and light penetrance, −0.77 (P < 0.0001). The correlation of light penetrance with osmolality was stronger than all measures except SG by refractometer and osmolality. Conclusion: The mobile technology application may be a more accurate tool for urine concentration measurement than specific gravity by automated dipstick, subjective thirst, and urine color scale, but lags behind specific gravity measured by refractometer. The mobile technology application is a step toward patient oriented hydration strategies.
Code as Art - Art as Code: On the Use of Poetry and Paintings in Programming Education

rogramming is often taught by having students do practical programming exercises. From simple string reversal to search tree, the examples and methods of teaching mimic the life of a professional programmer in a sense. This leads to young children developing an idea of what programming is. We found that children under 12 already have clear preconceptions of what programming is for. Can we design educational materials to battle this notion? Can we teach programming by using less traditional forms or viewing programming? In this paper we describe a four part course called Code as Art - Art as Code. It uses poems and paintings to teach novices and experienced programmers to see source code differently. In the first two lessons, participants practice viewing source code as a poem or as a painting (Code as Art). In the other two, they use source code to generate poems and paintings (Art as Code). We describe the scientific and creative rationale behind both and describe our experiences in teaching each of the four parts.
Cellular immunotherapy on primary multiple myeloma expanded in a 3D bone marrow niche model

ABSTRACT Bone marrow niches support multiple myeloma, providing signals and cell-cell interactions essential for disease progression. A 3D bone marrow niche model was developed, in which supportive multipotent mesenchymal stromal cells and their osteogenic derivatives were co-cultured with endothelial progenitor cells. These co-cultured cells formed networks within the 3D culture, facilitating the survival and proliferation of primary CD138+ myeloma cells for up to 28 days. During this culture, no genetic drift was observed within the genomic profile of the primary myeloma cells, indicating a stable outgrowth of the cultured CD138+ population. The 3D bone marrow niche model enabled testing of a novel class of engineered immune cells, so called TEGs (αβT cells engineered to express a defined γδTCR) on primary myeloma cells. TEGs were engineered and tested from both healthy donors and myeloma patients. The added TEGs were capable of migrating through the 3D culture, exerting a killing response towards the primary myeloma cells in 6 out of 8 donor samples after both 24 and 48 hours. Such a killing response was not observed when adding mock transduced T cells. No differences were observed comparing allogeneic and autologous therapy. The supporting stromal microenvironment was unaffected in all conditions after 48 hours. When adding TEG therapy, the 3D model surpassed 2D models in many aspects by enabling analyses of specific homing, and both on- and off-target effects, preparing the ground for the clinical testing of TEGs. The model allows studying novel immunotherapies, therapy resistance mechanisms and possible side-effects for this incurable disease.
L ] 1 0 A pr 2 01 9 AdaGrad-Norm convergence over nonconvex landscapes AdaGrad stepsizes : sharp convergence over nonconvex landscapes , from any initialization

Adaptive gradient methods such as AdaGrad and its variants update the stepsize in stochastic gradient descent on the fly according to the gradients received along the way; such methods have gained widespread use in large-scale optimization for their ability to converge robustly, without the need to fine-tune the stepsize schedule. Yet, the theoretical guarantees to date for AdaGrad are for online and convex optimization. We bridge this gap by providing theoretical guarantees for the convergence of AdaGrad for smooth, nonconvex functions. We show that the norm version of AdaGrad (AdaGrad-Norm) converges to a stationary point at the O(log(N)/ √ N) rate in the stochastic setting, and at the optimal O(1/N) rate in the batch (non-stochastic) setting – in this sense, our convergence guarantees are “sharp”. In particular, the convergence of AdaGrad-Norm is robust to the choice of all hyper-parameters of the algorithm, in contrast to stochastic gradient descent whose convergence depends crucially on tuning the step-size to the (generally unknown) Lipschitz smoothness constant and level of stochastic noise on the gradient. Extensive numerical experiments are provided to corroborate our theory; moreover, the experiments suggest that the robustness of AdaGrad-Norm extends to state-of-the-art models in deep learning, without sacrificing generalization.
The Effect of Planning Shape on Dyna-style Planning in High-dimensional State Spaces

Dyna is a fundamental approach to model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) that interleaves planning, acting, and learning in an online setting. In the most typical application of Dyna, the dynamics model is used to generate one-step transitions from selected start states from the agent's history, which are used to update the agent's value function or policy as if they were real experiences. In this work, one-step Dyna was applied to several games from the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE). We found that the model-based updates offered surprisingly little benefit over simply performing more updates with the agent's existing experience, even when using a perfect model. We hypothesize that to get the most from planning, the model must be used to generate unfamiliar experience. To test this, we experimented with the "shape" of planning in multiple different concrete instantiations of Dyna, performing fewer, longer rollouts, rather than many short rollouts. We found that planning shape has a profound impact on the efficacy of Dyna for both perfect and learned models. In addition to these findings regarding Dyna in general, our results represent, to our knowledge, the first time that a learned dynamics model has been successfully used for planning in the ALE, suggesting that Dyna may be a viable approach to MBRL in the ALE and other high-dimensional problems.
Modification of Polyamide-Urethane (PAUt) Thin Film Composite Membrane for Improving the Reverse Osmosis Performance

In the current study, the poly (amide-urethane) (PAUt) membranes were successfully fabricated by interfacial polymerization of m-phenylenediamine (MPD) and 5-choroformyloxyisophaloyl chloride (CFIC) on the polysulfone substrates. Two modification methods based on layer-by-layer assembly were applied to modify the PAUt membrane surface to achieve antifouling property: 1. Chitosan (CS) was directly self-assembled on the PAUt membrane (i.e., PAUt-CS); and 2. polydimethyl diallyl ammonium chloride (PDDA), polystyrene sulfonate (PSS), and CS were successively self-assembled on the membrane surface (i.e., PAUt-PDDA/PSS/CS). The resultant membranes were symmetrically characterized by Attenuated Total Reflection Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR), X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Contact Angle Meter (CAM), respectively. The results indicated that the modified membranes had much smoother and more hydrophilic surfaces as compared to the nascent PAUt membrane. Meanwhile, the modified membranes exhibited better reverse osmosis performance in terms of water permeability and salt rejection. After the modified membranes were fouled by lake water, the PAUt-PDDA/PSS/CS membrane presented the best antifouling performance among the three types of membranes. Combining the reverse osmosis performance with the anti-fouling property obviously, the PAUt-PDDA/PSS/CS membrane behaved as a promising candidate to be used in real applications.
Domain Swap Approach Reveals the Critical Roles of Different Domains of SYMRK in Root Nodule Symbiosis in Lotus japonicus

Symbiosis receptor kinase (SYMRK) is a cell membrane-localized protein kinase containing extracellular malectin-like domain (MLD) and leucine-rich repeat (LRR) domains, which is critically required for both root nodule symbiosis (RNS) and arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis (AMS). SYMRK is widely distributed in the genomes of different plant species; however, the contribution of different domains of SYMRK and its homologs from other plant species to RNS is largely unclear. In this study, SYMRK and its homologs from three typical plant species including Medicago truncatula (for both RNS and AMS), Oryza sativa (for AMS but not RNS), and Arabidopsis thaliana (for neither RNS or AMS) were investigated using domain swap approach in response to rhizobia in Lotus japonicus. Full-length SYMRK from rice and Medicago but not from Arabidopsis could complement Lotus symrk-409 mutant plants to contribute RNS. The chimeric protein with the extracellular domain (ED) of LjSYMRK and cytoplasmic domains (CD) of SYMRK from both Medicago and rice but not Arabidopsis could contribute to RNS in Lotus, suggesting that the CD of SYMRK is required for symbiotic signaling. The chimeric receptors containing the CD of LjSYMRK (SYMRKCD) and the EDs of MtDMI2 (MtDMI2ED), OsSYMRK (OsSYMRKED), AtSYMRK (AtSYMRKED), NFR1 (NFR1ED), and NFR5 (NFR5ED) could complement Lotus symrk-409 mutant plants to develop nodules. However, MtDMI2 could partially complement Lotus symrk-409 mutants to form both effective nodules and ineffective bumps, which is similar to the complementation results from MtDMI2ED-LjSYMRKCD and LjSYMRKGDLC in Lotus symrk-409 mutants, suggesting that ED of SYMRK has a very fine-tune regulation for RNS in Lotus. The deletion of either MLD or LRR on SYMRKGDLC (a mutant version of SYMRK with GDPC motif replaced by GDLC) could contribute to RNS when overexpressed in Lotus symrk-409 mutants, suggesting that MLD and LRR domains might work together to be involved in symbiotic signaling and the LRR domain might play a negative role in LjSYMRKGDLC-mediated RNS. By mutagenizing the conserved amino acids on LRR domain, five serine residues were found to be required for the function of LjSYMRKGDLC in RNS. These finding precisely refine the molecular mechanisms of SYMRK function in symbiotic signaling in L. japonicus.
Comparing Approximate Relaxations of Envy-Freeness

In fair division problems with indivisible goods it is well known that one cannot have any guarantees for the classic fairness notions of envy-freeness and proportionality. As a result, several relaxations have been introduced, most of which in quite recent works. We focus on four such notions, namely envy-freeness up to one good (EF1), envy-freeness up to any good (EFX), maximin share fairness (MMS), and pairwise maximin share fairness (PMMS). Since obtaining these relaxations also turns out to be problematic in several scenarios, approximate versions of them have also been considered. In this work, we investigate further the connections between the four notions mentioned above and their approximate versions. We establish several tight or almost tight results concerning the approximation quality that any of these notions guarantees for the others, providing an almost complete picture of this landscape. Some of our findings reveal interesting and surprising consequences regarding the power of these notions, e.g., PMMS and EFX provide the same worst-case guarantee for MMS, despite PMMS being a strictly stronger notion than EFX. We believe such implications provide further insight on the quality of approximately fair solutions.
Quorum Sensing Interference and Structural Variation of Quorum Sensing Mimics in Australian Soft Coral

Bacterial Quorum Sensing (QS), the indirect regulation of gene expression through production and detection of small diffusible molecules, has emerged as a point of interaction between eukaryotic host organisms and their associated microbial communities. The extracellular nature of QS molecules enables interference in QS systems, in many cases via mimicry. This study targeted QS induction and inhibition in soft coral holobionts, as many soft coral species commonly contain compounds with structural similarities to the well-studied bacterial QS molecules acyl homoserine lactones. Screening with two bacterial biosensors, Agrobacterium tumefaciens A136 and Chromobacterium violaceum CV026, demonstrated that QS interference differed between the two biosensor strains and extended across the soft coral families Alcyoniidae, Clavulariidae, Nephtheidae, and Xeniidae. Bioassay-guided fractionation revealed chemical activity patterns, particularly in the induction of QS. Cembranoid diterpenes from active fractions were purified and tested for QS interference activity. Interestingly, the type of QS activity (induction or inhibition) in A. tumefaciens A136 correlated with structural variability of the secondary oxygen ring; cembranoid diterpeneswith a furan ring or five-membered lactone induced QS, while compounds with larger (six or seven membered) lactone rings inhibited QS. Addition of the dominant cembranoid diterpene in the soft coral Lobophytum compactum, isolobophytolide, to bacterial culture media increased the number and morphological diversity of bacteria recovered from the mucosal layer of this soft coral, demonstrating a selective effect on certain members of the soft coral bacterial community. The identity and QS activity of recovered isolates differed between the mucosal layers of L. compactum and Sinularia flexibilis. In conclusion, this study provides information on the complexity of the interaction between soft corals and their associated bacteria, as well as, a structural understanding of how QS mimic compounds are able to interfere with a bacterial communication system.
Document Chunking and Learning Objective Generation for Instruction Design

Instructional Systems Design is the practice of creating of instructional experiences that make the acquisition of knowledge and skill more efficient, effective, and appealing. Specifically in designing courses, an hour of training material can require between 30 to 500 hours of effort in sourcing and organizing reference data for use in just the preparation of course material. In this paper, we present the first system of its kind that helps reduce the effort associated with sourcing reference material and course creation. We present algorithms for document chunking and automatic generation of learning objectives from content, creating descriptive content metadata to improve content-discoverability. Unlike existing methods, the learning objectives generated by our system incorporate pedagogically motivated Bloom's verbs. We demonstrate the usefulness of our methods using real world data from the banking industry and through a live deployment at a large pharmaceutical company.
B-glucans from Grifola frondosa and Ganoderma lucidum in breast cancer: an example of complementary and integrative medicine

Culinary and medicinal mushrooms are widely used in Asian countries, both as dietary supplements and as nutraceutical foods. They have recently become popular in Europe, as well, for their nutritional and health benefits. In particular, epidemiological studies conducted in Asia suggest that mushroom intake, together with other phytotherapy substances, protects against cancer, specifically gastrointestinal (GI) and breast cancers. Most of the data come from in vitro studies and in vivo experimental animal models. Therefore, in order to translate the updated knowledge to clinical research (i.e., from bench to bedside) a systematic translational research program should be initiated. Future randomized controlled trials comparing the effects of G. frondosa and G. lucidum on conventional treatment outcomes are warranted. The purpose of this review was to describe the emerging mechanisms of action of the mushrooms’ anticancer functions which makes their use in clinical practice so promising. Clinical effects of mycotherapy (specifically, the use of Ganoderma lucidum and Grifola frondosa) on long-term survival, tumor response, host immune functions, inflammation, and QoL in cancer patients were also addressed. Adverse events associated with mycotherapy were also investigated. Emerging data point to a potential role of G. lucidum for modulating the carcinogenic potential of GI microbiota, which suggests a new complementary and integrated approach to breast cancer treatment.
Potent Neutralization Ability of a Human Monoclonal Antibody Against Serotype 1 Dengue Virus

The incidence of dengue virus (DENV) infections has been escalating in tropical and subtropical countries, but there are still no effective therapeutic options. In the present study, a DENV-1-specific human monoclonal antibody (HMAb), 1G5, isolated from single plasma cells obtained from the peripheral blood mononuclear cells of dengue patients was found to have potent neutralization activity against serotype 1 DENV (DENV-1). Its neutralization activity against DENV-2 was not as strong, and it was almost absent for DENV-3 and DENV-4. The results showed that HMAb 1G5 only binds to the envelop protein of intact DENV-1 or the envelop protein under unheated and non-reducing conditions, and that it does not bind to recombinant envelope protein. This could mean that the antibody recognizes a conformational epitope of the envelope protein. Further, the findings showed that HMAb 1G5 potently neutralizes DENV-1 in both the pre- and post-attachment phases of the virus at low concentrations. In vivo studies showed that HMAb 1G5 provides protection from DENV-1 infection in a murine model. In addition, antibody-dependent enhancement that occurs at lower doses of the antibody was completely abrogated by the introduction of Leu-to-Ala mutations (1G5-LALA) or deletion of nine amino acids (1G5-9del) in the Fc region. Therefore, HMAb 1G5 shows promise as a safe and effective agent for prophylactic and therapeutic treatment of DENV-1 infection.
Double JPEG Compression Detection by Exploring the Correlations in DCT Domain

In the field of digital image processing, JPEG image compression technique has been widely applied. And numerous image processing software suppose this. It is likely for the images undergoing double JPEG compression to be tampered. Therefore, double JPEG compression detection schemes can provide an important clue for image forgery detection. In this paper, we propose an effective algorithm to detect double JPEG compression with different quality factors. Firstly, the quantized DCT coefficients with same frequency are extracted to build the new data matrices. Then, considering the direction effect on the correlation between the adjacent positions in DCT domain, twelve kinds of high-pass filter templates with different directions are executed and the translation probability matrix is calculated for each filtered data. Furthermore, principal component analysis and support vector machine technique are applied to reduce the feature dimension and train a classifier, respectively. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method is effective and has comparable performance.
Smashing the Implementation Records of AES S-box

Canright S-box has been known as the most compact S-box design since its introduction back in CHES’05. Boyar-Peralta proposed logic-minimization heuristics that could reduce the gate count of Canright S-box from 120 gates to 113 gates, however synthesis results did not reflect much improvement. In CHES’15, Ueno et al. proposed an S-box that has a slightly higher area, but significantly faster than the previous designs, hence it was the most efficient (measured by area×delay) S-box implementation to date. In this paper, we propose two new designs for the AES S-box. One design has a smaller implementation area than both Canright and the 113-gate S-boxes. Hence, our first design is the smallest AES S-box to date, breaking the 13 years implementation record of Canright. The second design is faster and smaller than the Ueno S-box. Hence, our second design is both the fastest and the most efficient S-box design to date. While doing so, we also propose new logicminimization heuristics that outperform the previous algorithms of Boyar-Peralta. Finally, we conduct an exhaustive evaluation of each and every block in the S-box circuit, using both structural and behavioral HDL modeling, to reach the optimum synergy between theoretical algorithms and technology-supported optimization tools. We show that involving the technology-supported CAD tools in the analysis results in several counter-intuitive results.
Detecting and Clustering Students by their Gamification Behavior with Badges: A Case Study in Engineering Education

Engineering degrees are often regarded as complex and one usual issue is that students struggle and feel discouraged during the learning process. Gamification is starting to play an important role in education with the objective of providing engagement and improving the motivation of students. One specific example is the use of badges. The analysis of users' interactions and behaviors with the badge system can be used to improve the learning process, e.g., by adapting the learning materials and giving game-based activities to students depending on their interest toward badges. In this work, we propose some metrics that provide information regarding the behavior of students with badges, including if they are intentionally earning them, the concentration for achieving them and their time efficiency. We validate these metrics by providing an extensive analysis of 291 different students interacting with a local instance of Khan Academy within our courses for freshmen at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. This analysis includes relationship mining between badge indicators and others related to the learning process, the analysis of specific archetypal profiles of students that represent a broader population and also by clustering students by their badge indicators with the objective of customizing learning experiences. We finalize by discussing the implications of the results for engineering education, providing guidelines into how instructors can take advantage of the findings of the research and how researchers can replicate experiments similar to this one in other general contexts.