Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Embodiment and Presence in Virtual Reality After Stroke. A Comparative Study With Healthy Subjects

The ability of virtual reality (VR) to recreate controlled, immersive, and interactive environments that provide intensive and customized exercises has motivated its therapeutic use after stroke. Interaction and bodily presence in VR-based interventions is usually mediated through virtual selves, which synchronously represent body movements or responses to events on external input devices. Embodied self-representations in the virtual world not only provide an anchor for visuomotor tasks, but their morphologies can have behavioral implications. While research has focused on the underlying subjective mechanisms of exposure to VR on healthy individuals, the transference of these findings to individuals with stroke is not evident and remains unexplored, which could affect the experience and, ultimately, the clinical effectiveness of neurorehabilitation interventions. This study determined and compared the sense of embodiment and presence elicited by a virtual environment under different perspectives and levels of immersion in healthy subjects and individuals with stroke. Forty-six healthy subjects and 32 individuals with stroke embodied a gender-matched neutral avatar in a virtual environment that was displayed in a first-person perspective with a head-mounted display and in a third-person perspective with a screen, and the participants were asked to interact in a virtual task for 10 min under each condition in counterbalanced order, and to complete two questionnaires about the sense of embodiment and presence experienced during the interaction. The sense of body-ownership, self-location, and presence were more vividly experienced in a first-person than in a third-person perspective by both healthy subjects (p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.212; p = 0.005, ηp2 = 0.101; p = 0.001, ηp2 = 0.401, respectively) and individuals with stroke (p = 0.019, ηp2 = 0.070; p = 0.001, ηp2 = 0.135; p = 0.014, ηp2 = 0.077, respectively). In contrast, no agency perspective-related differences were found in any group. All measures were consistently higher for healthy controls than for individuals with stroke, but differences between groups only reached statistical significance in presence under the first-person condition (p < 0.010, ηp2 = 0.084). In spite of these differences, the participants experienced a vivid sense of embodiment and presence in almost all conditions. These results provide first evidence that, although less intensively, embodiment and presence are similarly experienced by individuals who have suffered a stroke and by healthy individuals, which could support the vividness of their experience and, consequently, the effectiveness of VR-based interventions.
Involvement of Ahr Pathway in Toxicity of Aflatoxins and Other Mycotoxins

The purpose of this review is to present information about the role of activation of aflatoxins and other mycotoxins, of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) pathway. Aflatoxins and other mycotoxins are a diverse group of secondary metabolites that can be contaminants in a broad range of agricultural products and feeds. Some species of Aspergillus, Alternaria, Penicilium, and Fusarium are major producers of mycotoxins, some of which are toxic and carcinogenic. Several aflatoxins are planar molecules that can activate the AhR. AhR participates in the detoxification of several xenobiotic substances and activates phase I and phase II detoxification pathways. But it is important to recognize that AhR activation also affects differentiation, cell adhesion, proliferation, and immune response among others. Any examination of the effects of aflatoxins and other toxins that act as activators to AhR must consider the potential of the disruption of several cellular functions in order to extend the perception thus far about the toxic and carcinogenic effects of these toxins. There have been no Reviews of existing data between the relation of AhR and aflatoxins and this one attempts to give information precisely about this dichotomy.
MENHIR: Mental health monitoring through interactive conversations

Resumen: La salud mental es un componente esencial de la salud, sin embargo la depresión y la ansiedad son desórdenes muy comunes en la Unión Europea. Muchas personas conviven con un problema de salud mental y gestionan sus propios śıntomas. Sin embargo, suelen estar inseguras acerca de cuál es el umbral para iniciar la búsqueda de tratamiento, cómo controlar su salud mental, cuáles son las mejores estrategias de afrontamiento o qué recursos están a su disposición. Los sistemas conversacionales pueden facilitar la monitorización de śıntomas o la “espera vigilante”, iniciando el contacto y comprobando los śıntomas en diversos momentos del d́ıa. El proyecto MENHIR propone investigar y desarrollar tecnoloǵıas conversacionales para promover la salud mental y asistir a personas con problemas de depresión o ansiedad para la gestión de sus śıntomas. Los participantes intercambiarán su experiencia para alcanzar este objetivo común, construyendo una red para el intercambio de ideas y conocimiento entre España, Alemania, Italia y Reino Unido, incluyendo universidades, organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro y empresas. Palabras clave: Salud mental, sistema de diálogo, chatbot, ansiedad, depresión, bienestar Abstract: Mental health is an essential component of health; however depression and anxiety are common disorders across the European Union. Many people may be described as “living with” a mental illness, and managing their own symptoms. However, they are often unsure of the thresholds for treatment, how to control their mental health, what are the best coping strategies or which resources are available to them. Conversational systems may facilitate watchful waiting and symptom monitoring, by initiating contact and symptom checking at various times of the day and night. The MENHIR project aims to research and develop conversational technologies to promote mental health and assist people with mental ill health (depression and anxiety) to manage their conditions. The participants will exchange and share their expertise toward this common objective, building a network for exchanging ideas and knowledge between Spain, Germany, Italy and United Kingdom, including academic, non-profit organisations and companies.
Altered Functional Connectivity and Brain Network Property in Pregnant Women With Cleft Fetuses

Non-syndromic clefts of the lip and/or palate (NSCLP) is the most common congenital anomaly in the craniofacial region. NSCLP is a highly gene-associated malformation. We speculate that pregnant women with NSCLP fetuses (pregnancies with NSCLP) may have specific brain changes during pregnancy. To explore characteristic brain function changes of pregnancies with NSCLP, we analyzed resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) data of 42 pregnant women (21 pregnancies with NSCLP and 21 pregnancies with normal fetuses) to compare intergroup differences of (fractional) amplitude of low frequency fluctuations (fALFF/ALFF), regional homogeneity (Reho), functional connectivity (FC) and network topological properties. Compared with the control group, increased ALFF in the left hippocampus, the right fusiform and the left anterior cingulate (ACG), increased Reho in left middle occipital gyrus (MOG) and right medial frontal gyrus (MFG) were found for pregnancies with NSCLP. Meanwhile, FC between the left supramarginal gyrus (SMG) and bilateral olfactory cortex (OLF), FC between left precentral gyrus (PreCG) and right MFG, FC between right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and left inferior temporal gyrus (ITG) were enhanced in pregnancies with NSCLP. Besides, FC between left PreCG and left amygdala, bilateral para-hippocampal gyrus, FC between left amygdala and left MFG, right IFG were decreased. Graph theory-based analysis explored increased degree centrality (DC), betweenness centrality (BC) and nodal efficiency (Ne) in the left ITG and left SMG for pregnancies with NSCLP. Pregnancies with NSCLP has widespread decreased FC within neural networks of speech and language, which indicated that they were more likely to be associated with defects in speech and language skills. At the same time, increased topological indices showed that speech and language related regions played dominant role in their brain networks. These findings may provide clues for early detection of NSCLP fetuses.
Neuronal Cell-Intrinsic Defects in Mouse Models of Down Syndrome

Down Syndrome (DS) is the most common genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability (ID). Excitatory neurons of DS patients and mouse models show decreased size of dendritic field and reduction of spine density. Whether these defects are caused by cell autonomous alterations or by abnormal multicellular circuitry is still unknown. In this work, we explored this issue by culturing cortical neurons obtained from two mouse models of DS: the widely used Ts65Dn and the less characterized Ts2Cje. We observed that, in the in vitro conditions, axon specification and elongation, as well as dendritogenesis, take place without evident abnormalities, indicating that the initial phases of neuronal differentiation do not suffer from the presence of an imbalanced genetic dosage. Conversely, our analysis highlighted differences between trisomic and euploid neurons in terms of reduction of spine density, in accordance with in vivo data obtained by other groups, proposing the presence of a cell-intrinsic malfunction. This work suggests that the characteristic morphological defects of DS neurons are likely to be caused by the possible combination of cell-intrinsic defects together with cell-extrinsic cues. Additionally, our data support the possibility of using the more sustainable line Ts2Cje as a standard model for the study of DS.
Corpus Viewer: NLP and ML-based Platform for Public Policy Making and Implementation

Corpus Viewer is a production service developed by the State Secretary for Digital Advancement (SEAD) within the framework of the National Language Technologies Plan (Plan TL), promoted by the same State Secretary. Corpus Viewer relies on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML) and Machine Translation (MT) to analyze structured metadata and unstructured textual data in large document corpora. The platform allows the decision maker and the policy implementer the possibility of analyze R&D&i information space (mainly patents, scientific publications and public aids) for evidence and knowledge-based policy making and implementation. In this paper, we describe the main functionalities of the platform and enumerate the techniques it is based on, which include a variety of methods like document topic modeling and graph analysis.
Multimodal Sensory Stimulation of the Masseter Muscle Reduced Precision but Not Accuracy of Jaw-Opening Movements

A functional integration between the trigeminal and craniocervical sensorimotor systems has been demonstrated, with simultaneous jaw and head–neck movements during jaw opening–closing. We previously showed that pain induction in the masseter muscle increased the relative contribution of the neck component of integrated jaw–neck movements. Induced pain or manipulation of proprioception by vibration did not affect accuracy during a jaw-opening task in men. It is not known how multimodal sensory stimulation, with a combination of pain induction and vibration, affects jaw-opening accuracy and precision. The aim was to investigate how jaw–neck movements, and specifically accuracy and precision of jaw-opening, are affected during concomitant nociceptive and proprioceptive stimulation of the masseter muscle. Twenty-one healthy men performed jaw-opening to a target position, defined as 75% of individual maximum jaw opening, during control (Ctr), vibration of masseter muscles (Vib), pain induction in the masseter (Pain), and concomitant vibration and pain induction in the masseter muscle (VibPain). Simultaneous jaw and head movements were recorded with an optoelectronic system and amplitudes calculated for each jaw opening–closing cycle. Accuracy of jaw movements was defined as the achievement of the target position. Precision of jaw movements was defined as the cycle-to-cycle variability from the mean of cycles 2–10 (coefficient of variation, CV). Differences between the trials were analyzed with Friedman’s test, Dunn’s test, and Benjamini–Hochberg correction. There were no significant differences between the trials for jaw movement amplitudes. For head movements, amplitudes for cycles 2–10 were larger during Pain compared to Ctr and Vib (both p = 0.034), and larger during VibPain compared to Ctr (p = 0.034) and Vib (p = 0.035). There were no differences in accuracy of jaw movements between the trials. For precision of jaw movements, the cycle-to-cycle variability was larger during VibPain compared to Ctr (p = 0.027) and Vib (p = 0.018). For integrated jaw–neck motor strategy, there was a difference between pain and non-pain trials, but no differences between unimodal and multimodal stimulation trials. For achievement of jaw-opening to a target position, the results show no effect on accuracy, but a reduced precision of jaw movements during combined proprioceptive and nociceptive multimodal stimulation.
Occupational Rehabilitation Is Associated With Improvements in Cognitive Functioning

Introduction Occupational rehabilitation may be offered to workers on long-term sick leave who often report problems with cognitive functioning, anxiety, depression, pain, and reduced work ability. The empirical knowledge is sparce on how occupational rehabilitation may influence cognitive and emotional functioning and patients have not previously been subjected to comprehensive objective testing. The main aim of this study was to assess possible changes in cognitive and emotional functioning such as memory, attention, executive function, and emotion recognition among patients in occupational rehabilitation. Methods A large sample of 280 sick-listed workers referred to inpatient and outpatient occupational rehabilitation was recruited. The rehabilitation programs had a mean duration of 28 days and comprised physical activity, cognitive behavior treatment components and collaboration with the workplace. A pre–post design was applied to investigate possible changes in cognitive and emotional functioning (primary outcomes) and work and health measures (secondary outcomes), comparing the rehabilitation group with a control group of 70 healthy workers. Individuals in the control group were tested at random time points with an approximately 28 day interval between pre- and post-test, thus coinciding with the duration of rehabilitation. Repeated measures analysis of variance was used for the main analyses. Results Compared to the control group, the rehabilitation group had greater gains from pre- to post-test in focused and sustained attention, as well as greater improvements in work ability and reduction in subjective health complaints (SHC), helplessness, pain, pain related to work, anxiety, and depression. In the rehabilitation group, exploratory correlational analysis indicated that improvements in focused and sustained attention were associated with improvements in return-to-work self-efficacy, work ability as well as a reduction in SHC. Conclusion The sick-listed workers improved in focused and sustained attention and work and health measures after participating in occupational rehabilitation. This study is one of the first to systematically investigate changes in cognitive and emotional functioning during occupational rehabilitation. Clinical practice should benefit from increased knowledge about all cognitive functions and should be specifically aware of the improvements in focused and sustained attention, while memory, executive function and emotion recognition remained unchanged. The results can be used as a motivation to tailor specific interventions to gain further improvements in all cognitive and emotional functions.
Performance Analysis of Deep Learning based on Recurrent Neural Networks for Channel Coding

Channel Coding has been one of the central disciplines driving the success stories of current generation LTE systems and beyond. In particular, turbo codes are mostly used for cellular and other applications where a reliable data transfer is required for latency-constrained communication in the presence of data-corrupting noise. However, the decoding algorithm for turbo codes is computationally intensive and thereby limiting its applicability in hand-held devices. In this paper, we study the feasibility of using Deep Learning (DL) architectures based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for encoding and decoding of turbo codes. In this regard, we simulate and use data from various stages of the transmission chain (turbo encoder output, Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel output, demodulator output) to train our proposed RNN architecture and compare its performance to the conventional turbo encoder/decoder algorithms. Simulation results show, that the proposed RNN model outperforms the decoding performance of a conventional turbo decoder at low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) regions.
Rating Based Sentimental prediction: A Six Gram Statistical Mean-Median Approach

Revolution in internet has opened a new platform for expressing the user opinions on various aspects openly in various Business domains. The expressed views include very useful information with which analysis of the user expectation and requirements can be done. Analyzing the user views and its prediction will help the business people to enhance their services to the customers as per user requirement. In this paper a novel approach is proposed based on the word corpus used by the customer to express their feelings. Six-Grams model is used as the base for predicting the user rating depending on the classified feedback given by the user. Statistical methods of mean and median are applied by using supervised learning approach for classifying the feedback. Process of classification is done on a rating scale of 1 to 5. The results of the system have shown a better normalized performance over the other statistical methods. This approach is experimented with the hotel reviews from the data set available in datafiniti’s hotel reviews.
International Contributions to the System of Scholarly Communication in Iran

abstract With an increasing number of Iranian journals indexed in global citation databases such as the Web of Science (WoS), it is important to identify to what extent these journals are “internationalized” and if the international composition of these journals influences their quality. To ascertain this, a total of 38 Iranian journals covered in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2013 was sampled. The internationalization of Iranian journals is considered in terms of: (a) direct contributions in terms of foreign authors’ articles published in Iran, (b) indirect contribution in terms of citations from foreign authors’ documents to articles published in Iranian journals, and (c) editorial board composition in the field drawn internationally from foreign institutions. Findings revealed that (a) foreign researchers contributed 34.8% of papers in Iranian WoS-indexed journals, (b) a total of 30.6% of citations to Iranian WoS-indexed journals were received from foreign papers or Iranian internationally collaborative papers, and (c) foreign researchers occupied 33.6% of the editorial board membership in Iranian journals. The study found that only two Iranian journals in environmental sciences and chemistry have Impact Factors (IFs) above the median of the journals in the disciplinary category areas in which they are classified in JCR (general medicine, applied mathematics, civil engineering, environmental sciences, chemistry, polymer science, agriculture, and agronomy). Additionally, eight Iranian journals have been placed in the first and second quartile (top 50%) of journals of the same field in the JCR. Results also show that some Iranian journals suffer from low international recognition depicted from foreign contributions.
Exploring biomedical literature using latent semantic indexing

The rapid increase in the amount of data available on the Internet, and the fact that this is mostly in the form of unstructured text, has brought successive challenges in information indexing and retrieval. Besides the Internet, specific literature databases are also faced with these problems. With the amount of information growing so rapidly, traditional methods for indexing and retrieving information become insufficient for the increasingly stringent requirements from users. These issues lead to the need of improving information retrieval systems using more powerful and efficient techniques. One of those methods is the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), which has been suggested as a good solution for modeling and analyzing unstructured text. LSI allows discovering the semantic structure in a corpus, by finding the relations between documents and terms. It is a robust solution for improving information retrieval systems, especially in the identification of relevant documents for a user's query. Besides this, LSI can be useful in other tasks such as document indexing and annotation of terms. The main goal of this project consisted in studying and exploring the LSI process for terms annotations and for structuring the retrieved documents from an information retrieval system. The performance results of these algorithms are presented and, in addition, several new forms of visualizing these results are proposed.
Multidivisible Online/Offline Cryptography and Its Application to Signcryptions

We introduce a general concept of multidivisible online/offline (MDO) cryptography, which covers the previous works including online/offline cryptographic schemes, divisible online/offline signatures, incrementally executable signcryptions, and multidivisible online/offline encryptions. We then present the notion of multidivisible online/offline signcryptions (MDOSCs) as novel application of MDO cryptography. We define several security notions for MDOSCs and show implications and separations between these security notions. We also present a generic construction of MDOSC that achieves the strongest security notions with regard to confidentiality and unforgeability. Using MDOSC schemes, the computationally restricted and/or bandwidth-restricted devices can transmit messages in both confidential and authenticated way with low computational overhead and/or low-bandwidth network.