Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of Growth Hormone Therapy on Pituitary and Lumbar Spine Astrocytomas

We report on a male patient with an inactive pituitary and lumbar astrocytoma. He presented with panhypopituitarism at the age of 16 and received growth hormone replacement therapy for one year. During this period the pituitary mass increased substantially and showed subsequently a consistent shrinkage once treatment was stopped. The lumbar lesion stayed stable for the whole period of observation. The presumable rGH related change of the pituitary astrocytoma underlines the importance of careful follow-up of children with growth hormone deficiency secondary to treatment for brain tumors. Substitution therapy with rGH requires further and longer studies before it can be recommended with absolute reassurance in children with subtotal resection of a pituitary astrocytoma.
A theory for stethoscope acoustics

Maximising the signal to noise ratio while considering ergonomics and aesthetics is the key design challenge for modern stethoscopes. In order to optimise the design, there is a need for a well-validated model for the transfer function from a source within the chest to the output signal obtained. Most variants of the stethoscope are aircoupled sensors. Here we propose a new theory for the acoustics of this type of sensor, which takes into account the coupling between the sensor and the human chest. We have conducted rigorous experiments to characterise the transfer function of the chest-stethoscope system and have investigated the effects of key design parameters. Our data confirms traditional findings on the effects of bell geometry and diaphragm usage, but also highlights the importance of the coupling between the sensor and the chest, and reveals features of the transfer function that are not captured by existing models. Our model employs a transmission matrix formulation and discretises the system into lumped element components. It can be used to inform design choices for acoustic, electronic and dual-mode stethoscopes, opening up the possibility of an optimum design that maximises the signal to noise ratio for a desired application.
THE NEPHELOMETER:AN INSTRUMENT FOR ESTIMATING THE NUMBER OF BACTERIA IN SUSPENSIONS USED FOR CALCULATING THE OPSONIC INDEX AND FOR VACCINES.

Those who have used the method of Leishman or the later method of Wright for estimating the phagocytic or opsonic indexes of the blood well know that it is essential to use bacterial suspensions containing uniform numbers of bacteria in order to secure uniformity of results. If the suspension used for one estimation contains twice as many bacteria as that used at another the results will vary, though not mathematically, according to the density of suspension. The method recommended by Wright is ingenious though cumbersome and depends on the actual enumeration of the bacteria contained in the suspension, and is accomplished by mixing a given volume of the bacterial suspension with an equal volume of blood, dropping a diaphragm with a small aperture into the eyepiece of the microscope, and then counting the number of blood corpuscles and bacteria in each of a number of microscopic fields. The computation that
Correlation between Student Entrance Exam Results and Academic Performance : Case of a College in a Philippine University

This preliminary study was conducted to determine a possible correlation between the entrance exam results of students under the College of Computing and Information Technologies (CCIT) – National University, Manila, Philippines, and their accumulated GWA and the number of units earned. A total of 213 student entrance exam results from 2012 to 2015 were used as data. The entrance exam results were divided into two sections as there was the old and new instrument used. The old instrument consisted of three areas namely, General Information, Mental Alertness, and Comprehension, whereas, the new instrument which was implemented in 2015 includes four areas namely, English, Math, Science, and Aptitude. Simple linear regression and Pearson Correlation using Stata were used to predict whether the academic performance of the students can be predicted through the entrance exam results and whether an association exists between the two variables. The test revealed that both instruments could statistically significantly predict the GWA and units earned by the examinees. The Pearson’s Correlation, however, showed that the new instrument of the entrance exam had a higher correlation about the GWA of the examinees as opposed to the old instrument. It was also observed that in the new instrument, English and Science could statistically significantly predict the GWA of the examinees. Though it is thought that computing is heavy in math and that requires logic, the results showed that math is not a significant predictor for their GWA. Other results and recommendations are discussed in the paper.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Spatial planning on the semantic web

Land use regulations are an important but often underrated legal domain. In densely populated regions such as the Netherlands, spatial plans have a profound impact on both (local) governments and citizens. This paper describes our work on a ‘Legal Atlas’. Using Semantic Web technology we combine distributed geospatial data, textual data and controlled vocabularies to support users in answering questions such as “What activity is allowed here? ”. Spatial norms are represented using OWL 2 in a way that enables intuitive visualisation of their effects: map based legal case assessment. Users can represent a (simple) case by selecting or drawing an area on the map. Given a designation for that area, the system can assess whether this is allowed or not. The same solution also enables the comparison of two or more sets of spatial norms that govern the same region.
Character Segmentation in Collector's Seal Images: An Attempt on Retrieval Based on Ancient Character Typeface

The collector’s seal is a stamp for the ownership of the book. There is many important information in the collector’s seals, which is the essential elements of ancient materials. It also shows the possession, the relation to the book, the identity of the collectors, the expression of the dignity, etc. Majority of people from many Asian countries usually use artistic ancient characters to make their own seals instead of modern characters. A system that automatically recognizes these characters can help enthusiasts and professionals better understand the background information of these seals more efficiently. However, there is a lack of training data of labeled images, and many images are noisy and difficult to be recognized. We propose a retrieval-based recognition system that focuses on single character to assist seal retrieval and matching.
Investigation into Groundwater Resources in Southern Part of the Red River’s Delta Plain, Vietnam by the Use of Isotopic Techniques

Groundwater in the Red River’s delta plain, North Vietnam, was found in Holocene, Pleistocene, Neogene and Triassic aquifers in fresh, brackish and saline types with a total dissolved solids (TDS) content ranging from less than 1 g L−1 to higher than 3 g L−1. Saline water exists inHolocene aquifer, but fresh and brackish water exist in Pleistocene, Neogene and Triassic aquifers. This study aims at the investigation into genesis and processes controlling quality of water resources in the region. For this isotopic, combined with geochemical techniques were applied. The techniques include: (i) measurement of water’s isotopic compositions (δ2H, δ18O) in water; (ii) determination of water’s age by the 3H- and 14C-dating method, and (iii) chemical analyses for main cations and anions in water. Results obtained revealed that saline water in Holocene aquifer was affected by seawater intrusion, fresh water in deeper aquifers originated from meteoric water but with old ages, up to 10,000–14,000 yr. The recharge area of fresh water is from the northwest highland at an altitude of 140–160m above sea level. The recharge water flows northwesterly towards southeasterly to the seacoast at a rate of 2.5m y−1. Chemistry of water resources in the study region is controlled by ferric, sulfate and nitrate reduction with organic matters as well as dissolution of inorganic carbonate minerals present in the sediment deposits. Results of isotopic signatures in water from Neogene, Triassic and Pleistocene aquifers suggested the three aquifers are connected to each other due to the existence of faults and fissures in Mesozoic basement across the delta region in combination with high rate of groundwater mining. Moreover, the high rate of freshwater abstraction from Pleistocene aquifer currently causes sea water to flow backwards to production well field located in the center of the region.
EFFECT OF CASSIA SPECTABILIS , COWDUNG AND THEIR COMBINATION ON GROWTH AND GRAIN YIELD OF MAIZE

Cassia spectabilis prunings and cowdung as soil amendments were used to improve soil chemical properties and increase maize yield. Treatments to supply 1, 2, 3, or 4 t ha-1 of cowdung alone, 2 t ha-1 Cassia spectabilis alone and 2 t ha-1 C. spectabilis in combination with 1, 2, 3, or 4 t ha-1 cowdung were applied to a Clayey Kaolinitic Typic Haplustox at Misamfu. A grass mound was used as a control. A randomized complete block design with 4 replications was used. Maize (MMV 400) was the test crop. Soil samples collected at the beginning and end of the study were analyzed for pH, organic C, total available P, exchangeable K, Ca, Mg and Na. Plant height, dry matter, grain yield and nutrient uptake were assessed. Results showed significant increases in plant height (65 %, 59% and 13 %) at 3 growth stages with 99% grain yield increase over the control due to increased N (126.6 %), K, Mg uptake in treatments receiving Cassia + cowdung. In these treatments, soil C/N ratios decreased by 5.5% while N and P concentrations increased by 33.3 % and 10.4 % respectively, across all treatments. The study suggests the need for using animal and plant manures together to improve maize nutrition.
Correction of Intensity Nonuniformity in Mammographic Images

Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers among women[1]. Mammography, as one of the primary studies, is used for diagnosis of breast disease. In addition MR images can depict most of the significant changes of breast during the time . For the first step of breast disease detection, the density measurement of the breast on MR Images may provide very useful information. MR images have some instinctive limitations like the strongly dependence of contrast upon the way the image is acquired, intensity inhomogeneities (Bias Field), etc. For these reasons, an effective normalization on breast MR Images is very important issue for detecting breast disease signs. The first important step for quantitative analysis of breast density on MRI is Bias Field Correction. In this study, N3 algorithm is used for correcting of field inhomogeneity in MR images.We used T1-weighted images, using a 1.5 T MRI scanner . The results demonstrate effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.
EFFECTS OF PERKINSUS MARINUS ON REPRODUCTION AND CONDITION OF THE EASTERN OYSTER , CRASSOSTREA VIRGINICA . DEPEND ON TIMING

The protistan parasite Perkinsus marinus has been responsible for high mortality of eastern oysters, Crassostrea virginica, along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast of the United States. It also causes sublethal effects, although an impact on reproduction has heretofore been difficult to demonstrate. We examined the effect of P. marinu.s infection on growth, reproduction (as measured by relative gonadal size, and the proportional representation of gametogenic tissue and gametes in the gonad), and condition index of eastern oysters. Oysters of known age and genetic history were exposed to P. marinus infection and sampled at24 week intervals over an 1l-month period during the 1990-1991 epizootic in Delaware Bay. During this time, 50 to l00%o of the oysters had detectable infections and nearly 55%o died. Shell growth rates were inhibited as infections intensified during initial exposure in autumn 1990, but resumed in the spring and remained high, even after infection became heavy. The effect on reproduction varied with the stage of the gametogenic cycle. The relative gonadal size and the proportion of gametogenic tissue in the gonad, as well as the condition index, were most strongly depressed during the spring gametogenic period; however, there was no significant effect of parasite burden when the oysters were reproductively mature and ready to spawn. Data suggested that infected oysters, recovered, produced gametes, and spawned in early summer. Other studies have found inconsistent evidence of sublethal deleterious effects of P. marinu.s on reproduction. By sampling throughout the year and employing oysters of known genetic background, of the same age, reared in a common environment, and for which the timing of initial infection was known, we were able to show that P. marinus does have significant negative effects on oyster reproduction, measurable primarily during gametogenesis, rather than at spawning.
On the Automatic Estimation of Fundamental Matrix

Accurate and robust estimation of the Fundamental matrix is very important for many computer vision applications, such as 3D reconstruction from 2D images. In this paper, a complete analysis and comparison of three important algorithms for estimating the Fundamental matrix when three views are given. The sixpoint algorithm originally used for three-view geometry is implemented for the automatic estimation of the Fundamental Matrix — the two-view geometry tensor, assuming that more than two views are available. An extensive comparison to other two popular methods: the seven-point and eight-point algorithms are made through carefully designed experiments with synthetic and real images, assuming three views are available. The comparisons show that the new-implemented six-point algorithm, which makes use of the three-view constraint, is more accurate and has higher ability to handle the outliers.
ADAPTIVE SOURCE ROUTING AND SPECULATIVE EXECUTION FOR MULTI-HOMED WIRELESS CLIENTS IN PRECLINICAL MEDICAL CARE

While telemedicine is becoming a decisive part of modern health-care, it is not yet widely deployed in preclinical care, such as emergency medical services (EMS). This is mainly due to deficient and constrained mobile connectivity. Since a high degree of reliability and resilience is mandatory in this field of application, there is a need for enhanced and more failure-resistant mobile connectivity. We propose a transparently usable system enhancing mobile data access by using multi-homed wireless clients. Dynamic path selection techniques are used to improve end-to-end performance compared to a single wireless connection. Additionally, packet duplication can dramatically decrease latency and improve connection stability with potentially low overhead. Using off-line trace analysis we investigate reasonable algorithms for dynamic path selection and using a prototype implementation we show how mobile connectivity can be enhanced in different traffic-scenarios while considering the special requirements in a health-care setting. Statement of Authenticity The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in whole or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. Oliver Michel, Vienna, November 2012
Lakhbir Singh Ferroelectricity in Memory Devices

Ferroelectrics are characterized by spontaneous polarization, the direction of which can be reversed by an external electric field. These two states of spontaneous polarization are used as the logic states of a memory device that does not require power backup to maintain the stored information. The basic physics, properties and the role of ferroelectric materials as nonvolatile memory devices is discussed.
Isolation and Structural Analysis In Vivo of Newly Synthesized Fructooligosaccharides in Onion Bulbs Tissues ( Allium cepa L . ) during Storage

Fructooligosaccharides are involved in physiological activities and quality attributes of onion bulbs. This work describes structures of newly synthesized oligosaccharides formed by fructose moieties in onion bulb tissues during storage. Onion bulbs were stored for four weeks at 10◦C. HPAEC-PAD analysis showed that saccharide 1 was eluted after 1-kestose while saccharide 2 was eluted after nystose (4a). Saccharides 1 and 2 have R-sucrose values of 1.55 and 2.15 by HPAEC, a reducing terminal, a reducing sugar-to-fructose ratio of 0.5 and 0.3, and a degree of polymerization of 2 and 3 by TOF-MS, respectively. GLC analysis of the methyl derivatives and NMR measurement of the saccharides confirmed the presence of two different structures: the structure of saccharide 1 is composed by two fructose moieties and linked by β(2 → 1) linkage and was identified as inulobiose [β-Dfructofuranosyl-(2 → 1)-β-D-fructopyranose]. The structure of saccharide 2 consists of three units of fructose linked by β(2 → 1) linkage and was identified as inulotriose [β-D-fructofuranosyl-(2 → 1)-β-D-fructofuranosyl-(2 → 1)-β-D-fructopyranose]. The spectra also showed that 70 to 80% of the terminal fructose residue of the two saccharides is of pyranosyl form, while 20 to 30% is of furanosyl form. This finding demonstrated that these newly produced saccharides, catalyzed by onion-purified 6G-FFT, were synthesized by the action of 1-FFT fructosyltransfer from 1-kestose to free fructopyranose yielding inulobiose and sucrose, while elongation of fructofuranosyl units occurs at this transferred fructofuranosyl residue to produce inulooligosaccharide having an additional unit of fructofuranose.
MLGCN: Multi-Laplacian Graph Convolutional Networks for Human Action Recognition

Convolutional neural networks are nowadays witnessing a major success in different pattern recognition problems. These learning models were basically designed to handle vectorial data such as images but their extension to non-vectorial and semi-structured data (namely graphs with variable sizes, topology, etc.) remains a major challenge, though a few interesting solutions are currently emerging. In this paper, we introduce MLGCN; a novel spectral Multi-Laplacian Graph Convolutional Network. The main contribution of this method resides in a new design principle that learns graph-laplacians as convex combinations of other elementary laplacians – each one dedicated to a particular topology of the input graphs. We also introduce a novel pooling operator, on graphs, that proceeds in two steps: context-dependent node expansion is achieved, followed by a global average pooling; the strength of this two-step process resides in its ability to preserve the discrimination power of nodes while achieving permutation invariance. Experiments conducted on SBU and UCF-101 datasets, show the validity of our method for the challenging task of action recognition.
GOTEN: GPU-OUTSOURCING TRUSTED EXECUTION

Before we saw worldwide collaborative efforts in training machine-learning models or widespread deployments of prediction-as-a-service, we need to devise an efficient privacy-preserving mechanism which guarantees the privacy of all stakeholders (data contributors, model owner, and queriers). Slalom (ICLR ’19) preserves privacy only for prediction by leveraging both trusted environment (e.g., Intel SGX) and untrusted GPU. The challenges for enabling private training are explicitly left open – its pre-computation technique does not hide the model weights and fails to support dynamic quantization corresponding to the large changes in weight magnitudes during training. Moreover, it is not a truly outsourcing solution since (offline) pre-computation for a job takes as much time as computing the job locally by SGX, i.e., it only works before all pre-computations are exhausted. We propose Goten, a privacy-preserving framework supporting both training and prediction. We tackle all the above challenges by proposing a secure outsourcing protocol which 1) supports dynamic quantization, 2) hides the model weight from GPU, and 3) performs better than a pure-SGX solution even if we perform the precomputation online. Our solution leverages a non-colluding assumption which is often employed by cryptographic solutions aiming for practical efficiency (IEEE SP ’13, Usenix Security ’17, PoPETs ’19). We use three servers, which can be reduced to two if the pre-computation is done offline. Furthermore, we implement our tailor-made memory-aware measures for minimizing the overhead when the SGX memory limit is exceeded (cf., EuroSys ’17, Usenix ATC ’19). Compared to a pure-SGX solution, our experiments show that Goten can speed up linear-layer computations in VGG up to 40×, and overall speed up by 8.64× on VGG11.
Micromechanical modeling of the cyclic softening of EUROFER 97 steel

The quenched and tempered reduced-activation ferritic/martensitic steel EUROFER 97 is one of the candidates for structural components of fusion reactors. The cyclic behaviour of this steel during isothermal plastic strain-controlled tests is investigated at room temperature. Under Low-Cycle Fatigue (LCF) tests this steel shows, after the first few cycles, a pronounced cyclic softening accompanied by microstructural changes such as the decrease of the dislocation density inside the subgrain and the vanishing of low-angle boundaries. Based on the identified mechanisms of softening a mean-field polycrystalline model is proposed.
Visualizing Item Spaces to Increase Transparency and Control in Recommender Systems

Recommender systems (RS) are very common tools designed to help users choose items from a large number of alternatives. While research in RS has been mainly focusing on algorithmic precision, it slowly starts to take user-centric aspects into account as well. In this paper we present two demonstrative applications that target at increasing transparency and control in RS. Both prototypes follow the same method. As a baseline, the entire item space of a domain is visualized using a maplike interface. Inside this depiction users can express their preferences to which the RS reacts with matching recommendations. To change recommendations, users can alter their preferences expressed, which creates a continuous feedback loop between user and RS.
JOINT PRIORITY RANDOM EARLY DETECTION AND IEEE 802 . 11 E EDCF TO SUPPORT QOS IN WLAN

During the past few years the widespread use of the wireless local area networks (WLANs) communication technique is one of the most popular technologies in data telecommunications and networking. With the increasing variety of multimedia applications, such as voice, video and web traffic, it is needed to develop a mechanism for the quality of service (QoS) to support different types of traffic in WLAN. IEEE 802.11e EDCF is a new wireless technology to support QoS. However, EDCF never discusses the queuing issue in a station (STA) with multiple services. In this paper, we propose priority random early detection (PRED) algorithm which integrated Random Early Detection (RED) with IEEE 802.11e EDCF to support QoS in WLANs. Simulation results show that PRED algorithm can provide better performance of access categories (ACs) with high priority than that EDCF with traditional queuing (FIFO) strategy. Besides, we performed the parameters tuning according to the traffic load. By dynamically tuning the parameters, we can prevent throughput decreasing due to the large number of collisions under heavy traffic load condition.