Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The FOUNDATION study “Follow-Up for NeuroDevelopmentally AT risk Infants Of Neonatal care”- a qualitative study on the views of parents and caregivers

Introduction: Infants born prematurely or who have had neurological complications are at increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. Early identification of infants with signs of neurodevelopmental delay is crucial to achieve their full developmental potentials. Currently, there is variable guidance on the follow up and referral process for such children. Little information is available on the needs of patients, families and health care of professionals regarding current practice and experience of follow-up. Aims: To understand the present situation, the perceptions, and the views of parents and professionals who look after high-risk infants discharged from the NICU in relation to neurodevelopmental follow-up. Methods: We undertook a qualitative study within the Mersey region using in-depth interviews with 23 parents of children, aged 0 to 3, born prematurely or with hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy. We also undertook 11 in-depth interviews with doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals involved in the follow-up of at-risk infants. Results: Five themes were identified: (1) What, (2) How, (3) Who, (4) When and (5) Capacity of the health care system. Most parents wanted preparation for a diagnosis and the future, and they appreciated a realistic and honest approach by professionals. Parents perceived that neonatologists tended to focus on short-term management and were reluctant to discuss long-term developmental outcomes with parents to avoid reducing the joy of having a baby. Long-term parental emotional support was felt to be neglected and many parents wanted to be offered counselling services. The lack of a standard referral process and variable care pathways frustrated both parents and professionals. Conclusion: The quantity, content and quality of information given to parents at the hospital as well as in the community should be revised. More information on the risks of having developmental problems in high-risk children should be given. Many parents felt anxious and depressed and some mothers had mental health problems such as panic attacks and post traumatic disorders. Professionals should provide increased emotional support on the NICU and throughout follow-ups.
A rectangular CSRR based microstrip UHF reader patch antenna for RFID applications

This paper presents a compact microstrip ultra-high frequency (UHF) reader patch antenna with complementary split ring resonator (CSRR) for radio frequency identification (RFID). The total size of the antenna is 208 × 208 × 1.6 mm 3 . The proposed antenna is designed, fabricated and measured in order to verify the proposed concept. The characterization for radiation parameters, like return loss, radiation pattern and antenna gain have been done experimentally. The proposed antenna is operated at 921 MHz for and achieved a gain of 8.285 dBi. All simulations in this work have been carried out by means of the commercial computer simulation technology (CST) software. In compare to the simulated results, the measured outcomes are promised.
Experimental study of the Seismic Performance of Different Earth Walls and Their Seismic Retrofitting with Externally Bonded Fibers

ABSTRACT This study investigates the seismic performance of various earth walls and their applicability to a seismic retrofitting method that utilizes externally bonded fibers. The failure modes, hysteresis characteristics and load–displacement response of in-plane cyclic loading tests were recorded and analyzed. The experimental results show that the soil property significantly influences the seismic performance of earth walls as well as the effectiveness of the proposed retrofitting technique. The more clayey the soil is, the higher the seismic performance and the better reinforcement effect. However, for sandy clayey wall, the applicability of the proposed retrofitting technique for sandy clayey wall is not promising.
Silver Chloride/Ferricyanide-Based Quasi-Reference Electrode for Potentiometric Sensing Applications

Processes’ occurring at the Ag/AgCl/Cl–, ([Fe(CN)6]3–/4–) ions interface study results are presented. Conditions are selected for the mixed salts’ precipitate formation on the silver surface. It has been shown that the potential of a silver screen-printed electrode (AgSPE) coated with a mixed precipitate containing silver chloride/ferricyanide is stable in the presence of [Fe(CN)6]3–/4–. The electrode can serve as a quasi-reference electrode (QRE) in electrochemical measurements in media containing ions [Fe(CN)6]3−/4−. The electrode is formed during polarization of AgSPE (0.325 V vs. Ag/AgCl/KCl, 3.5 M) in a solution containing chloride- and ferri/ferrocyanides ions. The results of the obtained QRE study by potentiometry, scanning electron microscopy and cyclic voltammetry are presented. The proposed QRE was used in a sensor system to evaluate the antioxidant activity (AOA) of solutions by hybrid potentiometric method (HPM). The results of AOA assessment of fruit juices and biofluids obtained using new QRE and commercial Ag/AgCl RE with separated spaces do not differ.
Management of a Broken PRECICE Femoral Nail at an Ununited Distraction Osteogenesis Site: A Case Report.

CASE A 20-year-old man with a history of right lower extremity fibular hemimelia previously treated with PRECICE femoral nail lengthening presented with a broken magnetic nail and a displaced fracture through an ununited distraction osteogenesis site. Using a combination of techniques, we removed the broken implant while maintaining the achieved limb length and preserving the native biology without bone grafting. CONCLUSION The unique challenges associated with the removal of a broken PRECICE femoral nail are described, with a technique for implant removal that preserves the achieved length, the innate biology of the distraction osteogenesis site, and promoting union without bone grafting.
CNN-LSTM Based Approach for Analyzing and Detecting Stereotypical Motor Movements of Autistic Children in Pre-Meltdown Crisis

Computer Vision besides Deep Learning techniques has served many human activity recognition applications, especially those related to safety, and security purposes. However, autistic children's security has not gotten the high interest of many Computer Vision researchers, despite the autistic children are often exposed to danger regarding their behaviors. High-grade autistic children often get involved in the Meltdown Crisis state where their behaviors in this state turn aggressive, and the children become out of control. In this research, we aim to present a monitoring system able to predict the Meltdown Crisis state early and alert the children's parents or caregivers before getting into more challenging scenarios. Towards this end, the proposed system was built upon a CNN-LSTM structure to learn spatial and temporal characteristics of stereotypical movements of autistic children at the Meltdown Crisis state onset, which is known as a Pre-Meltdown Crisis state. The vision part of the proposed architecture was constructed based on a VGG16 network pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset. The final choices regarding data preparation, model configuration, and training settings were tuned and set empirically to end with a 98% recall and F1 Score, while the best loss value achieved was 0.034. For evaluation, we used the MeltdownCrisis dataset that contains realistic scenarios of autistic children's activities in the Pre-Meltdown Crisis state and Normal state, where the data of the Normal state was used as a negative class.
Water Quality Monitoring by Implementing ZigBee Network Wireless Sensors

---Water quality is an extremely valuable condition to all forms of life. Due to the technological development and industrialization during last decades the water quality is drastically dropped down and additional issue as water pollution was raised up. However, the same technology has high capability to resolve the problem with water pollution, manual monitoring and make water quality research efficient by providing more accurate results. Hence, the technology I want to propose in this research paper is the ZigBee based wireless sensor network. ZigBee technology has capacity to measure temperature and water turbidity in real time by sending data to a laboratory station. By implementing Zigbee, it enables to collect water quality monitoring results in remote areas and pass that data wirelessly to laboratory or research centre. The application of wireless system will widely help to reduce the monitoring system expenses and give adjustability in terms of location and distance. And one of the main strength features of ZigBee wireless system is in low cost, reliable data transmission, efficient data collection and ease of use. Water quality monitoring includes analyzing river and marine water resources.
Invariance of K-Frames in Hilbert Spaces

Frame theory as a further development of wavelet theory, and K-frames are a further expansion of the general concept of frames. This article focuses on the property that K-frames remain invariant under the action of some specific linear operators. Moreover, a perturbation analysis of K-frames with the help of some mathematical tools gives frame-bound estimates for K-frames.
Smart Walker: an IMU-Based Device for Patient Activity Logging and Fall Detection

Hip fractures are common in the geriatric population and represent a growing social and economic burden [1]. They are associated with decreased mobility, and the recovery period can be prolonged. Early mobilization is a critical component of the recovery process. Few studies have quantitatively measured activity levels in patients after hip fracture surgery, resulting in a lack of objective data about mobility status after hospital discharge. Furthermore, each year about 1.5 million elderly people are injured falling, and about 47,300 people aged ≥65 years suffer injuries from falls using walking aids that require an emergency room visit [2]. Patients using walkers are seven times more likely to fall than those that use canes. The risk of repeat falls has been shown to be especially high in patients who have already sustained a hip fracture.
Safe and robust reinforcement learning with neural network policies

Autonomous vehicles operate in safety-critical environments, but heavily rely on seemingly black-box predictions from Deep Neural Networks. The danger of this reliance arises from the vulnerability of neural networks. Neural networks can fail overconfidently on novel data, i.e. test points that are far from the collection of training points. In addition, neural networks will also fail on test points that are close to training points, but crafted to fool the network, also called adversarial examples. The first framework developed in this thesis samples predictions from an ensemble of stochastic neural networks and detects novel data via high sample variance at test time. The gained sensitivity to novel data is embedded in a Safe Reinforcement Learning framework to achieve robustness to novelties in a particularly challenging safety-critical task, navigating a robot in pedestrian crowds. The resulting policy detects pedestrians that exhibit novel behavior at test time and avoids them cautiously. The second framework in this thesis is concerned with the failure of neural networks on adversarial examples, that have even been crafted to fool real-world autonomous vehicle perception algorithms. Only few existing algorithms for defending against adverseries provide formal guarantees. These methods are embedded as an add-on verification toll for existing Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms to ensure robustness against sensor noise or adversarial examples during test time. The resulting policy is evaluated in a pedestrian navigation scenario on the robustness to sensor noise and is shown to reduce the number of collisions between agents compared to a non-robust policy. Finally, the thesis presents work on optimizing the sensor field of view of autonomous vehicle testbeds that operates in pedestrian environments. Thesis Supervisor: Jonathan P. How Title: Richard C. Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Ruptured heterotopic pregnancy: a case report

Heterotopic pregnancy is a rare condition when at least two pregnancies are present simultaneously at different implantation sites and only one is located in the uterine cavity. The majority of cases are diagnosed in the first trimester. Heterotopic gestation is very rare in natural conception. A high index of suspicion is required for timely diagnosis and appropriate intervention. We report a case of heterotopic pregnancy in a 26-year-old woman presented with hemoperitoneum from ruptured tubal pregnancy with live intrauterine gestation at 8 weeks of amenorrhea, diagnosed on ultrasound examination. She underwent exploratory laparotomy with right salpingectomy and post-operative period was uneventful.
Parents’ Attitude and Opinions towards Extracurricular Sport Activity

In this research, the attitude and opinions of parents towards high school students’ participaton in extracurricular sport activities were investigated. The research, fictionalized by explanatory sequential design amongst the mixed approach designs in which quantitative and qualitative approaches are used together, was applied on parents of high school students participating at different high schools in 2014-2015 academic years fall semester in Kirikkale. As a data collection tool, “Parent Attitude Scale towards Extracurricular Sport Activities” developed by Yilmaz & Guven (2015) and “Semi-structured Interview Form” created by researcher were used. In the analysis of survey data from the quantitative phase of the research, t-test, analysis of variance (ANOVA), Pearson correlation test was used as statistical methods. In qualitative data analysis, it was benefited from content analysis technique. According to research findings, it was figured out that significant difference were determined considering the state of parent’s education, income state of family, students’ grade level. In the part of qualitative part of research; it was determined that parents had positive opinions on extracurricular sport activities; they supported attendance of children to these activities.
Reminiscence Therapy for Depression in Dementia: An Observational Study with Matched Pairs

We investigated the efficacy of reminiscence therapy (RT) on symptoms of depression in patients with mild to moderate dementia. Out of 227 patients with mild to moderate dementia from a specialized physician’s office, 27 pairs (N = 54; mean age 79.04 ± 6.16 years) who had either received treatment as usual (TAU) or TAU combined with RT, were matched retrospectively according to age as well as cognitive and depressive symptom scores. After controlling for age and sex, symptoms of depression significantly decreased over time in the RT group compared to TAU (F1,52 = 4.36; p < .05). RT is a promising option for the treatment of depression in mild to moderate dementia. Larger randomized-controlled trials are needed.
The College Orientation Workshop as an Experiential, Positive Youth Development Program

Background: The 4-week-long College Orientation Workshop (COW) is an experiential education program that combines physical and mental challenges with classroom instruction to promote self-confidence, self-control, wellness, and life success in promising male youth facing challenges to reaching their full potential. Purpose: This was an exploratory study to assess whether young men who completed the program manifested psychological and/or physical changes. Methodology/Approach: Sixteen young men were assessed at the beginning and end of the program. Physical measures included fitness test scores (pull-ups, sit-ups, push-ups, 1.5 mile run time), resting blood pressure, and pulse rate. Psychological variables included positive and negative affect, life satisfaction, self-esteem, self-efficacy, perceived control, self-control, impulsivity, social support, and subjective socioeconomic status. Findings/Conclusions: From pre- to post-COW, there were significant increases in self-esteem, positive affect, and sit-ups completed as well as significant decreases in run times, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and heart rate. Several nonsignificant trends were also detected. Associations of psychological variables with fitness/health measures suggest that changes in the latter may be partly due to changes in the former. Implications: The COW Program may be an effective experiential education program. Follow-up studies with program participants are currently underway to determine longer term outcomes.
Life-History Plasticity and Water-Use Trade-Offs Associated with Drought Resistance in a Clade of California Jewelflowers

Water limitation is a primary driver of plant geographic distributions and individual plant fitness. Drought resistance is the ability to survive and reproduce despite limited water, and numerous studies have explored its physiological basis in plants. However, it is unclear how drought resistance and trade-offs associated with drought resistance evolve within plant clades. We quantified the relationship between water availability and fitness for 13 short-lived plant taxa in the Streptanthus clade that vary in their phenology and the availability of water in the environments where they occur. We derived two parameters from these relationships: plant fitness when water is not limiting and the water inflection point (WIF), the watering level at which additional water is most efficiently turned into fitness. We used phylogenetic comparative methods to explore trade-offs related to drought resistance and trait plasticity and the degree to which water relationship parameters are conserved. Taxa from drier climates produced fruits at the lowest water levels, had a lower WIF, flowered earlier, had shorter life spans, had greater plastic water-use efficiency (WUE), and had lower fitness at nonlimiting water. In contrast, later-flowering Streptanthus taxa from less xeric climates experienced high fitness at nonlimiting water but had no fitness at the lowest water levels. Across the clade, we found a trade-off between drought resistance and fitness at high water, though a single ruderal species was an outlier in this relationship. Our results suggest that drought escape trades off with maximal fitness under nonlimiting water, and both are tied to phenology. We also found that variation in trait plasticity determines how different plant species produce fitness over a water gradient.
Using Conversational Assistants and Connected Devices to Promote a Responsible Energy Consumption at Home

Today, households worldwide are being increasingly connected. Mobile devices and embedded systems carry out many tasks supported by applications which are based on artificial intelligence algorithms with the aim of leading homes to be smarter. One of the purposes of these systems is to connect appliances to the power network, as well as to the internet to monitor consumption data among others. In addition, new interaction ways are emerging to manage all these systems. For example, conversational assistants which allow us to interact by voice with devices at home. In this work, we present GreenMoCA, a system to monitor energy consumption data from connected devices at home with the aim of improving sustainability aspects and reducing such energy consumption, supported by a conversational assistant. This system is able to interact with the user in a natural way, providing information of current energy use and feedback based on previous consumption measures in a Smart Home environment. Finally, we assessed GreenMoCA from a usability and user experience approach on a group of users with positive results.
Frequency Analysis of DAV Pulsators Using TESS Data

The work presented in this thesis is designed to demonstrate the value and capacities of TESS to contribute to asteroseismology of compact pulsators. I find that TESS data are able to reproduce some of the results obtained by the ground by collaborations like the Whole Earth Telescope (WET) given its ability to observe a star nearly continuously for approximately 27 days. I also address some of the weaknesses of the TESS observations for these purposes, such as the CCD pixel size on the TESS cameras, long integration times, and the bandpass of the telescope’s detector. I examined four white dwarf pulsators and found that the MCT 0145-2211 and HE 0532-5605 lack long lifetime modes of pulsation. I place upper limits on the amplitudes of any pulsations in the TESS bandpass. The hottest of the pulsators studied, ZZ Ceti, appeared as expected (after accounting for the TESS bandpass) based on the many ground-based observations of the star. Ultimately the results of this work demonstrate the value of TESS as the next step forward in the field of asteroseismology.
Mapping the Sounds of the Swahili coast and the Arab Mashriq: Music research at the intersection of computational analysis and cultural heritage preservation

This paper discusses an overview of an ongoing research that combines the preservation of musical heritage with ethnomusicological research driven by computational analysis. The two collections of non-Eurogenetic music under study are a curated collection of East African Swahili coast music and commercial recordings of Arab music. We explore the cross-cultural similarities, interactions and patterns of the music excerpts from the different regions and understand the similarities by employing computational audio analysis, machine learning and visualization techniques. We used a base-line model of representation by extracting Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features to model the spectral characteristics of the music excerpts in conjunction with t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) to create 2-D mappings of these features into a lower dimensional space of similarity. We compare this representation with more sophisticated approaches of acoustic feature representation. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used on the mel-scaled spectrograms of the music excerpts, and t-SNE was used to map the Principal Components to a 2-D space. The logarithmic short-time Fourier transform (STFT) of the music excerpts were extracted and a deep autoencoder neural network was trained to learn the relationships and structure of the excerpts by compressing the raw representation of the STFT. The results from the analysis show that PCA and the autoencoder model can reveal more interesting cluster representation than MFCCs by generating more complex clusters between the different styles of the corpus.
A Geospatial Analysis of Safety and Risk Perception in the Buffalo National River

In 1972, the Buffalo River in Arkansas became America’s First National River. Since then, the Buffalo National River has become a beloved recreational retreat for locals and visitors alike. The Buffalo National River is home to incredibly scenic views and host to many outdoor activities, among them hiking and floating. As with any confluence of nature and humans, there is great risk involved in all aspects of the park. Between 2011 and 2017, a total of 140 search and rescue missions were carried out. Some were resolved easily, but more serious accidents were not unheard of. Risk perception studies are a vital resource used by authority figures such as the National Park Service (NPS) to strategize public education efforts and begin to mitigate risk. This study of risk perception strove to shed light on how visitors perceive risk in the context of the Buffalo National River. A one-page survey was administered to 80 park visitors, the results of which were compared to NPS records on actual search and rescue events that took place in the park from 2011 to 2017. It was found that though survey participants as a whole largely marked areas of risk correctly, certain demographic groups were less aware of potential risk. Suggestions for targeted educational efforts and potential risk mitigation strategies were made using the results of this study.