Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimization of the Synthesis of Natural Polymeric Nanoparticles of Inulin Loaded with Quercetin: Characterization and Cytotoxicity Effect

Quercetin is a bioactive component that is capable of having therapeutic potential in the prevention of different noncommunicable chronic diseases (NCDs). However, it presents instability in the gastrointestinal tract in addition to low bioavailability. One way to overcome the limitations of quercetin lies in using nanotechnology for the development of nanoparticles, based on biopolymers, that are capable of being ingestible. Inulin, a fructan-type polysaccharide, acts as a delivery system for the release of quercetin in a target cell, guaranteeing the stability of the molecule. Inulin-coated quercetin nanoparticles were synthesized by the spray dryer method, and four variables were evaluated, namely inulin concentration (5–10% w/v), feed temperature (40–60 °C), inlet temperature (100–200 °C) and outlet temperature (60–100 °C). The optimal conditions were obtained at 10% w/v inulin concentration, with 45 °C feed temperature, 120 °C inlet temperature and 60 °C outlet temperature, and the nanoparticle size was 289.75 ± 16.3 nm in water. Fluorescence microscopy indicated quercetin loading in the inulin nanoparticles, with an encapsulation efficiency of approximately 73.33 ± 7.86%. Inulin-coated quercetin nanoparticles presented effects of inhibition in Caco-2 and HepG2 cells, but not in HDFa cells. The experimental data showed the potential of inulin nanoparticles as transport materials for unstable molecules, in oral administration systems, for the encapsulation, protection and release of quercetin.
Developing a Wireless Device for the Research of Practical Neuromodulation Techniques to Treat the Neurogenic Bladder

Neuromodulation of peripheral nerves has long been viewed as a viable alternative treatment modality for suppressing Neurogenic Detrusor Overactivity (NDO). Research has continued over decades yet translation into patient use remains elusive. Questions have been asked as to the long term efficacy of continuous stimulation and a viable system using conditional stimulation has so far not been realised. Herein lies an opportunity for the research and development of a practical, non-invasive, neuromodulation system to treat NDO. To do so, further investigation of practical stimulation triggers and regimes is necessary. This paper presents the design of a wireless device for flexible delivery and assessment of stimulation techniques outside of the laboratory.
Statistical Analysis to Identify Factor Related with Patients Satisfaction on General Service in Assosa General Hospital, Western Ethiopia

Patient satisfaction is the extent to which patients are happy with their healthcare provided from the hospital/health center. It is considered as one of the desired outcomes of health care and it is directly related with utilization of health services. The aim of the study was to identify the factor related with patient satisfaction on general service in Assosa General hospital. To reach the aim, the data have been collected through questionnaire from 735 patients, selected using simple random sample of total 2509 population, in October 1 to November 30, 2021. Frequency distribution Table and pie chart were used for data description; binary logistic regression was used to identify the factors that affect patients satisfaction, using R version 4.1. 3. The results of this study showed that 43.27% of patients were satisfied and the remaining 56.73% were not satisfied with the service they have received from the hospital. Patients’ satisfaction was associated with age, gender, health care quality of services, waiting time for treatment, fee-for-service, availability of drug, laboratory service, cleanness of hospital, doctor and nurse response. From the result of binary logistic regression it can be concluded that age, health care quality of services, waiting time for treatment, availability of drug, cleanness of hospital, doctor and nurse response has significant effect on the satisfaction of patients. Keywords: Satisfaction of patients, Binary logistic regression, the odds
A fast algorithm for personalized travel planning recommendation

With the pervasive use of recommender systems and web/mobile applications such as TripAdvisor and Booking.com, an emerging interest is to generate personalized tourist routes based on a tourist’s preferences and time budget constraints, often in real-time. The problem is generally known as the Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) which is a route-planning problem on multiple Points of Interest (POIs). TTDP can be considered as an extension of the classical problem of Team Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (TOPTW). The objective of the TOPTW is to determine a fixed number of routes that maximize the total collected score. The TOPTW also considers the time window constraints when the visit at a particular node has to start within a predefined time window. In the context of the TTDP, the utility score for a particular node can be treated as the user’s preference on a POI. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model for the TTDP that extends the TOPTW constraints by incorporating more real-world constraints, such as different total travel time budgets, different start and end nodes for routes. We then propose an Iterated Local Search (ILS) algorithm to solve both TTDP and TOPTW. We implement our ILS to provide tour guidance in the Singapore context. We show experimentally that ILS is able to solving real-world problem instances within a few seconds, and our ILS can improve 19 best known solution values on the benchmark TOPTW instances.
Pursuing Life-Cycle Sustainability for Bridges Subjected to Multiple Threats

Pursuing Life-Cycle Sustainability for Bridges Subjected to Multiple Threats by Citlali Tapia Deteriorating bridges, particularly in regions most vulnerable to natural hazards, not only pose a threat to public safety, but also disturb many aspects of the surrounding region including the economy and environment. With increasing concern regarding sustainability, there is need to consider not only economic, but also environmental and social indicators of performance for bridges under natural hazards. This thesis presents two frameworks: a life-cycle sustainability analysis for quantifying risk-based sustainability indicators of bridge performance and a multiobjective optimization framework for selecting near optimal retrofit and repairs based on sustainability objectives. Resulting life-cycle values of sustainability and near optimal retrofit and repair combinations highlight the impacts retrofits have on reducing expected values of lifetime sustainability indicators and reveal relationships between lifetime environmental, economic, and social sustainability indicators for bridges subject to natural hazards. The frameworks are anticipated to help guide selection of retrofit and repair combinations by providing a set of near optimal solutions, which enhance sustainability while ensuring safety and mitigating damage from natural disasters.
Input filter interactions in current-mode controlled converters-a unified analysis approach

A unified analysis approach in assessing the effect of an input filter on the performance of a current-mode controlled converter is presented. The analysis method is based on the use of two-port unterminated modeling technique. The describing formulas to assess the input-filter effect are presented based on the transfer functions of direct-duty-ratio control with modifications caused by the effect of inductor-current feedback in peak-current control. The analysis shows that the behavior of input impedance explains the phenomena noticed earlier.
Assessing spatiotemporal variation in abundance: A flexible framework accounting for sampling bias with an application to common pochard (Aythya ferina)

Abstract Assessing trends in the relative abundance of populations is a key yet complex issue for management and conservation. This is a major aim of many large‐scale censusing schemes such as the International Waterbird Count (IWC). However, owing to the lack of sampling strategy and standardization, such schemes likely suffer from biases due to spatial heterogeneity in sampling effort. Despite huge improvements of the statistical tools that allow tackling these statistical issues (e.g., GLMM, Bayesian inference), many conservationists still prefer to rely on stand‐alone turn‐key statistical tools, often violating the prerequisites put forward by the developers of these tools. Here, we propose a straightforward and flexible approach to tackle the typical statistical issues one can encounter when analyzing count data of monitoring schemes such as the IWC. We rely on IWC counts of the declining common pochard populations of the Northwest European flyway as a case study (period 2002–2012). To standardize the size of sampling units and mitigate spatial autocorrelation, we grouped sampling sites using a 75 × 75 km grid cells overlaid over the flyway of interest. Then, we used a hierarchical modeling approach, assessing population trends with random effects at two spatial scales (grid cells, and sites within grid cells) in order to derive spatialized values and to compute the average population trend at the whole flyway scale. Our approach allowed to tackle many statistical issues inherent to this type of analysis but often neglected, including spatial autocorrelation. Concerning the case study, our main findings are that: (1) the northwestern population of common pochards experienced a steep decline (4.9% per year over the 2002–2012 period); (2) the decline was more pronounced at high than low latitude (11.6% and 0.5% per year at 60° and 46° of latitude, respectively); and, (3) the decline was independent of the initial number of individuals in a given site (random across sites). Beyond the case study of the common pochard, our study provides a conceptual statistical framework for estimating and assessing potential drivers of population trends at various spatial scales.
Down-regulatory effect of essential oils on fungal growth and Tri4 gene expression for some Fusarium oxysporum strains: GC-MS analysis of essential oils

Abstract The objectives of this work were to evaluate the efficacy of Eucalyptus camaldulensis green branches (GB) and Origanum majorana whole plant (WP) essential oils (EOs) on Tri4 gene expression and Fusarium oxysporum strains growth In vitro. Five strains of Fusarium oxysporum were identified molecularly through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification of the internal transcript spacer (ITS) region. The efficacy of the EOs from Eucalyptus camaldulensis GB and Origanum majorana WP on Tri4 gene expression and F. oxysporum strains growth were evaluated In vitro. GC-MS analysis of the EOs referred that 1,8-cineole, and spathulenol were presented in E. camaldulensis GB, while in O. majorana WP were tricyclene, and p-cymene as abundant compounds. E. camaldulensis and O. majorana EOs showed MIC of 32–64 µg/mL and 32 µg/mL, respectively. E. camaldulensis EO was more suppressive against all the F. oxysporum strains. Both EOs reduced Tri4 gene expression significantly compared with control. qRT-PCR results revealed a down-regulation in Tri4 gene expression of all of F. oxysporum strains exposed to both EOs at the MIC values. The results suggest that both EOs can be used as safe and green bio-pesticide.
QSYNC: CO-SCHEDULING CONSTRAINED VIRTUAL MACHINES IN THE XEN HYPERVISOR

Computer hardware advancements are generating excess computation resources resulting in increased system under-utilization. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) corporations are capitalizing on this phenomenon by providing virtualization solutions expeditiously, effectively, and reliably to companies across a spectrum of industries. As these datacenters become ubiquitous, software applications are increasing being hosted on virtualized systems. As utilization of these virtualized systems increases, hypervisors are necessarily reducing the available resources which introduces latency and variability to the applications. Communication-intensive applications in particular suffer substantial performance degradation and non-deterministic behavior operating under these conditions. Latency-sensitive applications demand strict a requirement for response time and variability which are not being met. This thesis discusses qsync, a light-weight synchronization algorithm for a cluster of guest virtual machines on the Xen 4.5 hypervisor without requiring synchronization of the host system. The data shows the qsync synchronization algorithm reduces latency and variability, increasing the reliability of the environment even under strict CPU utilization limits.
Adaptive Tests for Bandedness of High-dimensional Covariance Matrices

: Estimation of the high-dimensional banded covariance matrix is widely used in multivariate statistical analysis. To ensure the validity of estimation, we aim to test the hypothesis that the covariance matrix is banded with a certain bandwidth under the high-dimensional framework. Though several testing methods have been proposed in the literature, the existing tests are only powerful for some alternatives with certain sparsity levels, whereas they may not be powerful for alternatives with other sparsity structures. The goal of this paper is to propose a new test for the bandedness of high-dimensional covariance matrix, which is powerful for alternatives with various sparsity levels. The proposed new test also be used for testing the banded structure of covariance matrices of error vectors in high-dimensional factor models. Based on these statistics, a consistent bandwidth estimator is also introduced for a banded high dimensional covariance matrix. Extensive simulation studies and an application to a prostate cancer dataset from protein mass spectroscopy are conducted for evaluating the eﬀectiveness of the proposed adaptive tests blue and bandwidth estimator for the
Design of Processing-in-Memory With Triple Computational Path and Sparsity Handling for Energy-Efficient DNN Training

As machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) have become mainstream technologies, many accelerators have been proposed to cope with their computation kernels. However, they access the external memory frequently due to the large size of deep neural network model, suffering from the von Neumann bottleneck. Moreover, as privacy issue is becoming more critical, on-device training is emerging as its solution. However, on-device training is challenging because it should perform the training under a limited power budget, which requires a lot more computations and memory accesses than the inference. In this paper, we present an energy-efficient processing-in-memory (PIM) architecture supporting end-to-end on-device training named T-PIM. Its macro design includes an 8T-SRAM cell-based PIM block to compute in-memory AND operation and three computational datapaths for end-to-end training. Each of three computational paths integrates arithmetic units for forward propagation, backward propagation, and gradient calculation and weight update, respectively, allowing the weight data stored in the memory stationary. T-PIM also supports variable bit precision to cover various ML scenarios. It can use fully variable input bit precision and 2-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit, and 16-bit weight bit precision for the forward propagation and the same input bit precision and 16-bit weight bit precision for the backward propagation. In addition, T-PIM implements sparsity handling schemes that skip the computation for input data and turn off the arithmetic units for weight data to reduce both unnecessary computations and leakage power. Finally, we fabricate the T-PIM chip on a 5.04mm2 die in a 28-nm CMOS logic process. It operates at 50–280MHz with the supply voltage of 0.75–1.05V, dissipating 5.25–51.23mW power in inference and 6.10–37.75mW in training. As a result, it achieves 17.90–161.08TOPS/W energy efficiency for the inference of 1-bit activation and 2-bit weight data, and 0.84–7.59TOPS/W for the training of 8-bit activation/error and 16-bit weight data. In conclusion, T-PIM is the first PIM chip that supports end-to-end training, demonstrating 2.02 times performance improvement over the latest PIM that partially supports training.
Mobile communication security

Security of the mobile network Fabian van den Broek We looked at the security of the wireless connection between mobile phone and cell towers and suggested possible improvements. The security was analysed on a design level, by looking at the protocols and encryption techniques, but also on an implementation level by looking at the security of the software that handles the mobile communication. Furthermore, we examined systems that rely on the security of the mobile network, such as transaction codes transmitted using SMS. The most important improvement we suggest, makes it impossible to track a user's location based on his permanent identity in the mobile network. This improvement also allows GSM phones to verify whether they are communicating with an authentic cell tower, thereby fixing the biggest security flaw in GSM. This improvement can be introduced by individual providers without the rest of the network needing any changes or even noticing the change. We are currently working with the GSM Association (GSMA) to get this improvement into the mobile specifications.
RNA Microarray-Based Comparison of Innate Immune Phenotypes between Human THP-1 Macrophages Stimulated with Two BCG Strains

Currently, the only available vaccine against tuberculosis is Mycobacterium bovis Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG). Pulmonary tuberculosis protection provided by the vaccine varies depending on the strain, the patient’s age and the evaluated population. Although the adaptive immune responses induced by different BCG strains have been widely studied, little conclusive data is available regarding innate immune responses, especially in macrophages. Here, we aimed to characterize the innate immune responses of human THP-1-derived macrophages at the transcriptional level following a challenge with either the BCG Mexico (M.BCG) or Phipps (P.BCG) strains. After a brief in vitro characterization of the bacterial strains and the innate immune responses, including nitric oxide production and cytokine profiles, we analyzed the mRNA expression patterns and performed pathway enrichment analysis using RNA microarrays. Our results showed that multiple biological processes were enriched, especially those associated with innate inflammatory and antimicrobial responses, including tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, type I interferon (IFN-I) and IFN-γ. However, four DEGs were identified in macrophages infected with M.BCG compared to P. BCG. These findings indicated the proinflammatory stimulation of macrophages induced by both BCG strains, at the cytokine level and in terms of gene expression, suggesting a differential expression pattern of innate immune transcripts depending on the mycobacterial strain.
Filamentous Thermosensitive Mutant Z: An Appealing Target for Emerging Pathogens and a Trek on Its Natural Inhibitors

Simple Summary Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a pressing issue worldwide that must be addressed swiftly. It is driven by spontaneous evolution, bacterial mutation, and the dissemination of resistant genes via horizontal gene transfer. Researchers are working on many novel targets, which can become a pathway to inhibit harmful bacteria. Filamentous Thermosensitive mutant-Z (Fts-Z) is one such bacterial target that has gained popularity amongst scientists due to its conserved nature in bacteria and absence in eukaryotes. The aim of this work was to review the Fts-Z mechanism of action along with current studies on natural inhibitors for Fts-Z. Abstract Antibiotic resistance is a major emerging issue in the health care sector, as highlighted by the WHO. Filamentous Thermosensitive mutant Z (Fts-Z) is gaining significant attention in the scientific community as a potential anti-bacterial target for fighting antibiotic resistance among several pathogenic bacteria. The Fts-Z plays a key role in bacterial cell division by allowing Z ring formation. Several in vitro and in silico experiments have demonstrated that inhibition of Fts-Z can lead to filamentous growth of the cells, and finally, cell death occurs. Many natural compounds that have successfully inhibited Fts-Z are also studied. This review article intended to highlight the structural–functional aspect of Fts-Z that leads to Z-ring formation and its contribution to the biochemistry and physiology of cells. The current trend of natural inhibitors of Fts-Z protein is also covered.
The effects of exercise on function and pain following total hip arthroplasty: a systematic literature review and meta-analysis

Abstract Background Previous reviews have reported the efficacy of exercise interventions following total hip arthroplasty (THA), but poor inter-study comparability of low-quality studies, and outcome measure heterogeneity predominate. Conclusions regarding exercise intervention efficacy following THA are lacking. Objectives Conduct a systematic literature review with meta-analysis to report the effects of exercise following THA, using self-reported outcome measures of function and pain, and clinical tests for gait capacity. Methods An electronic database search of CINAHL, Informit, Medline, Physiotherapy Evidence Database, Scopus, and SportDiscus was conducted. Included studies (1) reported exercise interventions in adult populations following THA; (2) reported outcomes either of physical function, pain intensity, or clinical gait capacity; (3) were randomised controlled trials published in English. Study appraisal was conducted using PEDro scale. A meta-analysis was conducted to report intervention effect size and statistical significance between experimental and control groups. Results Searches yielded 5,997 studies. Twenty-four studies underwent systematic review. Twelve were eligible for meta-analysis. Study quality ranged from fair to excellent (median = 7, range = 5–9/10). Exercise interventions included hydrotherapy, and progressive resistance, gait, task-based, upper-limb, and sports therapy training. Significant between-group differences in self-reported function, pain, and gait velocity were observed at short-term follow-up, favouring exercise intervention groups. At long-term follow-up, these improvements were not significant. Conclusions This review identified that exercise interventions significantly improved self-reported physical function, pain intensity and gait velocity following THA in the short term. Further research is required to clarify long-term exercise effects, and the most effective exercise intervention, in studies which detail the interventions explicitly.