Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Smoking prevalence among tuberculosis patients: A crosssectional study in Bangladesh and Pakistan

INTRODUCTION Smoking has a negative impact on TB outcomes. We estimated the proportion of TB patients who smoke and are willing to quit in two high TB burden countries, Bangladesh and Pakistan. METHODS A cross-sectional survey was conducted among TB patients to assess their eligibility and recruit them to a smoking cessation randomized controlled trial. Adults diagnosed with TB were recruited from 32 health facilities in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Data on smoking behaviour and willingness to quit were collected and analysed. RESULTS In total, 13934 TB patients completed the survey between June 2017 and April 2018. The prevalence of smoking in these TB patients was estimated to be 22.5% (95% CI: 21.8, 23.2). Moreover, the prevalence of smoking in TB patient population was 8% (RR=1.49; 95% CI: 7.1–8.9; p<0.01) and 8.3% (RR=1.24; 95% CI: 7.3–9.4; p<0.01) higher than smoking prevalence in the general population in Bangladesh and Pakistan, respectively. Among TB patients who smoke, 97.7% (95% CI: 97.2–98.2) were willing to quit. CONCLUSIONS The estimated prevalence of smoking was higher in TB patients than the general population; however, a vast majority of TB patients who smoke were willing to quit.
DIVISION OF MECHATRONICS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES GRADUATE PROGRAMS DESIGN CONCEPT VALIDATION OF A SELF-ASSEMBLED MEMS FORCE SENSOR FOR MINIMALLY INVASIVE SURGERY

This thesis describes the design and Finite Element Method (FEM) simulation of an integrated force microsensor which introduces a self-assembled tactile structure with potential application to Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). The sensor is designed to be compatible with Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor-Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (CMOS-MEMS) technology under monolithic microfabrication processes, and allows force measurements up to the micronewton scale. Mechanical analysis of the structure, which integrates crab-leg beams and concentric frames, along with the simulation of the design demonstrates the out of plane directional displacement due to residual stress effect. The proposed structure consists of a three level array; where each level is compose by four crab-leg beams supporting a concentric frame. The total displacement achieved of the three level microsensor during simulation is 1.5 along the normal z-axis. Given the topology design, the sensitivity for each of the levels differs according to the dimensions of each level, for the overall microstructure the equivalent sensitivity is . 795 / . List of Figures . vii List of Tables . vii Chapter
First Record of Melanospora chionea as a Possible Cause of Pink Root Rot Disease on Tomato Plants in Egypt

Tomato is one of the most important vegetable crops in the world. It is infected with several disease through the growth season, but new disease appeared as a new challenge to tomato productivity, causing pink root rot. Symptoms of pink root rot were observed on tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) grown in Beni Sweif Governorate (Nasser, Sumosta, Beba and El-Wasta Counties) in summer 2013 as poor growth, chlorosis and then necrosis of the tip branches, by maturity. Typical symptoms on the infected root especially, epidermis were picked areas and both of cortex and vascular bundles were colored with pink along the infected tissues consistent with both those that were observed in the field. Based on morphological characteristics of the isolated fungus, disease symptoms and a pathogenicity test, Melanospora chionea was identified as the causal agent of pink root rot of tomato. Identification of this species was confirmed by sequencing of internal transcribed space (ITS region) of ribosomal RNA gene. M. chionea has not previously been reported on tomato. The host range of this disease was defined between numerous hosts belonging to Fabaceae, Malvaceae, Cucurbitaceae and Solanaceae. The aim of this work to determine and description of the disease and identification of the pathogen morphologicaly and genetically. More work is required to find appropriate methods for controlling this new disease.
Effects of Extrusion Conditions on Physicochemical Properties of Finger Millet (Gramineae Setaria)

In this study, the effects of different extrusion parameters (extrusion temperature: 100, 130, and 160 °C; moisture content: 22%, 26%, and 30%; screw speed: 180 rpm, 270 rpm, and 360 rpm) on physicochemical properties of finger millet were reviewed. High extrusion temperature produced extrudates with high radial expansion index (REI) and starch digestibility and low bulk density (BD). High moisture content and low screw speed increased BD and total starch content (TSC) while decreasing REI and water solubility index (WSI). WSI and starch digestibility first increased and then decreased with increase in extrusion temperature and moisture content, which reached a maximum at 130 °C nd 26%, respectively. However, water absorption index (WAI) was affected by the interactions among various conditions. The extrudates were darker and yellower than native millet. Based on these extrusion conditions, various millet and millet-based products can be produced.
Safe Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Lane Changing Using Set-Based Prediction

Machine learning approaches often lack safety guarantees, which are often a key requirement in real-world tasks. This paper addresses the lack of safety guarantees by extending reinforcement learning with a safety layer that restricts the action space to the subspace of safe actions. We demonstrate the proposed approach using lane changing in autonomous driving. To distinguish safe actions from unsafe ones, we compare planned motions with the set of possible occupancies of traffic participants generated by set-based predictions. In situations where no safe action exists, a verified failsafe controller is executed. We used real-world highway traffic data to train and test the proposed approach. The evaluation result shows that the proposed approach trains agents that do not cause collisions during training and deployment.
in Computer

— Secure data transmission is a critical issue for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Clustering is an effective and practical way to enhance the system performance of WSNs. Proposed a CRP for secure data transmission for cluster-based WSNs (CWSNs), where the clusters are formed dynamically and periodically. CRP uses digital signature (DSI) scheme and the identity-based online/offline digital signature (DSOO) scheme, for security. In DSI security relies on the hardness of the Diffie-Hellman problem in the pairing domain so that it uses the hashing technique for signing and verification. In DSOO it reduces the computational overhead for protocol security, which is crucial for WSNs, while its security relies on the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem. To improve the performance if the system Energy aware Rule based scheme was proposed.Simulation results shows that proposed system has better performance compared with the existing system in terms of security, efficiency, energy consumption.
A narrative review of current treatment strategies and emerging therapies in malignant pleural mesothelioma

Malignant pleural mesothelioma is a rare but extremely lethal disease for which there is no single curative therapy. Given this, a significant lack of consensus exists regarding optimal treatment strategies. Patients typically present late in the course of their disease, which has led many to advocate for palliative approaches to therapy, while others believe that macroscopic resection of disease in conjunction with multimodal therapy is preferable in highly selected individuals. Surgical strategies have recently evolved from the maximally invasive extrapleural pneumonectomy (EPP) to the more conservative extended pleurectomy and decortication. The addition of chemotherapy and radiotherapy to surgical interventions have allowed to extend progression-free survival, but this is still measured in months rather than years. Moreover, there is a lack of high-quality evidence to support all interventions, leading to variations in guidelines regarding trimodal therapy and a paucity of data demonstrating superiority of a single approach to care. Given this, new and promising treatment options are emerging which may allow to better control and treat malignant pleural mesothelioma. These include immunotherapy, virotherapy, T-cell therapies, and vaccines, among others. This paper therefore aims to give a comprehensive overview of current available treatments with a focus on surgical and trimodal therapies, as well as emerging treatment options for malignant pleural mesothelioma.
A Systematic Review of Lower Limb Asymmetry After Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction in Adolescent Athletes

Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) rupture is a common athletic injury in adolescents which typically requires surgery to repair the injured ACL. Despite considerable efforts to improve outcomes, secondary ACL injury is common in athletes who return to sport. One of the main risk factors for secondary ACL injury is asymmetry in landing mechanics. The aim of this systematic review was to identify the common biomechanical asymmetries after ACL reconstruction in adolescents during landing. Sources were identified through searching databases using relevant search terms. Study titles and abstracts were screened using inclusion criteria which resulted in 13 articles being selected for further analysis. The methodological quality of each study was assessed independently by three reviewers. Asymmetry was more commonly identified in kinetic variables than kinematic variables. The most common asymmetries identified were peak knee extension moment and peak vertical GRF, both of which were frequently shown to be significantly lower in the surgical limb compared to the uninjured limb. These findings suggest that return to sport criteria following ACL reconstruction should incorporate analysis of the asymmetry in loading experienced by each limb rather than examining movement patterns alone.
Understanding, Acceptance, and Disclosure of Status Among Patient with Hepatitis C Virus Infection: A Qualitative Analysis

Objective: Although the number of individuals contracted with hepatitis C virus infection is increasing, there is limited research locally on acceptance and disclosure of diagnosis among hepatitis C patient. This study aimed to explore views and experiences of patient following the diagnosis of hepatitis C infection at a tertiary centre in Kedah state, Malaysia. Method: Twenty participants with hepatitis C infection participated in semi-structured, face to face interviews on their views and experience of a recent hepatitis C diagnosis. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and translated before data analysis. Content analysis was performed on the translated interview, followed by a systematic classification of data by major themes. Results: Four main themes emerged (1) Understanding about hepatitis C infection, (2) First reaction to the diagnosis, (3) Accepting their diagnosis, and (4) Disclosing their disease status to others. Most participants had limited understanding of the disease due to the lack of information received. While some of them well accepted their diagnosis, many had expressed their unhappiness, distressed and regret following the diagnosis. Due to fear of negative response or stigma that follows with the diagnosis of hepatitis C, many participants were keeping the diagnosis to themselves. For those who had disclosed their hepatitis status to others, they experienced discrimination and rejection from family members and co-workers. Conclusion: Study findings indicate that those with hepatitis C infection often had a misunderstanding about the disease, hiding the diagnosis from others and facing stigma in their family relationships and work environments. ISSN: 2639-4391
A Survey of Machine Intelligence Heuristics in Modern Compiler Design

: This survey paper aims to illustrate the evolution in techniques for optimization of compilers. Optimization of compilers is a crucial task, and is often the most time expensive criteria. With the plethora of different compilers available for the same applications, it is paramount to use the best trade off available to us. This trade off can be in terms of cost or compilation time. Compiler suites that are comprehensively optimized offer a nimiety of benefits to developers and consumers alike, producing code almost 20-30% faster than standard benchmarks. It is beneficial to the user as well, extending lower bandwidth and catering to multiple such users at a time. Loftier optimization heuristics allow cost reduction in terms of processing power required, and leverage the best out of the current hardware architectures available. To this end, it is imperative to employ modern advancements in Machine Intelligence for the same, and hence papers dealing with such developments have been discussed as well. Cache optimizations, Auto-tuning, Instruction Level Parallelism, Feature Mapping, etc. form the basis of cutting edge technology, being extended to various consumer fields. This paper sheds a light on such heuristics and how they have been employed to the area of compiler design and optimization.
AN EVALUATION OF THE PERFORMANCE OF VGTU PC CLUSTER

In this work we have tested the performance of VGTU PC cluster "Vilkas" in order to identify the main characteristics of the system and to (cid:12)nd for what type of computational jobs the cluster is well adopted. HPC Challenge suite of benchmarks was used for that purpose. The results of tests are presented and discussed. We analyze the in(cid:13)uence of di(cid:11)erent compilers and hyper-threading technology on the performance of the cluster. Some recommendations for future upgrade of the system are given.
Modeling of Hydrodynamics Processes with Phase Transition

—A new method of modeling for heterogeneous fluid dynamics processes with take of phase transitions like graphite-diamond will be presented. The method is based on a discretization of conservation laws for masses, momentums, and energies in integral and differential forms. The combination of Harlow's particle-in-cell method and Belotserkovskii's large particles method is used for computing by the method simulation.
THE ROLE OF SHOE SOLE DUROMETER ON JUMPING KINETICS

This study investigated the relationship between shoe heel density (HD), toe density (TD) and its effect on the peak ground reaction force (GRF) and rate of force development (RFD) during jumping. This study also assessed the reliability of the durometer to assess shoe soles. Subjects included 12 men. Shoe HD and TD were assessed via durometer and kinetics were determined during the countermovement jump on a force platform. A Pearson bivariate correlation analysis was performed. Results reveal that HD was not correlated with GRF (r = -.22, p = .50) or RFD (r = -.14, p = .67). Similarly, TD was not correlated with GRF (r = -.29, p = .37) or RFD (r = -.28, p = .37). Intraclass correlation coefficients for the heel and toe durometer were . 95 and . 92, respectively. Jumping kinetics were not mediated by shoe sole characteristics, though the durometer was reliable for assessing shoe soles.
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Teacher identity and professional identity tensions among primary student teachers

Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva. nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.
Mining Cross-Cultural Differences of Named Entities: A Preliminary Study

It is very common that people of different cultures hold different opinions on the same named entities. Knowledge about such cross-cultural differences of named entities in existing knowledge bases can benefit a lot of downstream applications, especially for Computational Social Science. However, research on mining such knowledge is almost missing from the literature. In this paper, we propose this novel research topic with a preliminary study on collecting datasets and proposing several approaches
An Edge IDS Based on Biological Immune Principles for Dynamic Threat Detection

Edge computing solves such questions as the massive multisource data and resource consuming computing tasks in edge devices. Some new security problems especially the data security and privacy issues have been introduced into the edge computing scenario. Through analyzing the biological immune principles, a novel idea for the problem of intrusion detection in edge computing is provided. Specifically, an edge intrusion detection system (Edge IDS) with a distributed structure, which has the characteristics of an imprecise model, self-learning, and strong interactivity, is constructed in a systematic way inspired by the biological immune principles. Moreover, a newly proposed gene immune detection algorithm (GIDA) is designed. In order that Edge IDS can deal with the dynamic data problem efficiently, the key functional components such as the remaining gene, niching strategy, and extracting vaccine are embedded into the GIDA algorithm. Furthermore, extensive simulation experiments are conducted, and the results show that the proposed Edge IDS can be adapted to the domain of edge computing with comparative performance advantages.
Data-Driven Optimal Tracking with Constrained Approximate Dynamic Programming for Servomotor Systems

We design real-time optimal tracking controllers for servomotor systems engaged in single-axis point-to-point positioning tasks. The design is challenging due to the presence of unmodeled dynamics, along with speed and acceleration constraints. As model-based optimal control design methods cannot be applied directly to this uncertain system, we propose a data-driven approximate dynamic programming approach to learn an optimal tracking controller that is constraint-enforcing. The potential of our proposed method is illustrated on a servomotor that positions the head of a laser drilling machine.
Fair Covering of Points by Balls

We consider the problem of covering a multi-colored set of points in R using (at most) k disjoint unit-radius balls chosen from a candidate set of unit-radius balls so that each color class is covered fairly in proportion to its size. Specifically, we investigate the complexity of covering the maximum number of points in this setting. We show that the problem is NP-hard even in one dimension when the number of colors is large. On the other hand, for a constant number of colors, we present a polynomial time exact algorithm in one dimension, and a PTAS in any fixed dimension d > 2.
ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION FOR MAJORITY FUNCTION USED BY MICROCHIP FOR BRUSHLESS DIRECT CURRENT SENSORLESS MOTOR CONTROL

Nowadays, motors are more and more used in various fields where the number of electronics components tends to overcome mechanical components, e.g. automotive industry. The main targets in developing methods for motor control are to obtain a better control, smaller loss, increasing efficiency, low power use, reduced number of components and all of them must be integrated in a cost-effective design. At this moment, there is a vast field of techniques for controlling all kinds of machines in all manners we want.
Effects of Housing Environments on Exploiting Channel State Information for Human Activity Recognition

: Monitoring human activities in daily living (ADL) using fine-grained Wi-Fi signal signatures has the great potential to support an intelligent eldercare system in a home environment. Such an approach analyzes Channel State Information (CSI) extracted from a sequence of Wi-Fi packets and identifies its temporal variations as a fingerprint, caused by human activities. However, the performance of the Wi-Fi-based ADL recognition can be greatly affected by the surrounding physical environment due to the way the radio wave propagates as it penetrates through an obstacle or is reflected. In particular, building materials are expected to significantly affect its performance. In this context, this paper examines the effect of the physical housing environment on the performance of Wi-Fi-based ADL recognition. ADL recognition systems were implemented at two different housing environments: a wood-frame apartment and a reinforced concrete-frame apartment, which represent typical housing environments in United States and Korea, respectively. The experimental results indicate that structural building materials, combined with other environmental factors (i.e., housing density), create a significant difference in the accuracy rate of Wi-Fi-based ADL recognition and provide insight into how such systems should be configured for homes.
Survey on Homomorphic Encryption and Address of New Trend

Encryption is the process of disguising text to ensure the confidentiality of data transmitted from one party to another. Homomorphic encryption is one of the most important encryption-related processes which allows performing operation over encrypted data. Using different public key algorithms, homo-morphic encryption can be implemented in any scheme. There are many encryption algorithms to secure operations and data stor-age, which after calculations can obtain the same results. While there is a considerable contribution and enhancement in the field of homomorphic encryption for various performance metrics, there is still an necessity to clarify the applications dealing with this technology. Recently, many distinguished research papers have been filed to address the need for various applications of homomorphic encryption. Recently, many distinguished research papers have been filed to address the need for various applications of homomorphic encryption. Example of these applications but not limited to : Vehicle to Vehicle (v2v) secure communication, cloud security, Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET), Blockchain, E-Voting, Data mining with privacy preserving and healthcare sector. This article aims to introduce a literature survey to close the gap in homomorphic encryption systems and their applications in the protection of privacy. We focus on above-mentioned applications and present our recommendations for future work.
Maximal Average Fidelity in Quantum Teleportation of Single Qubit Mixed Information State by Using Two Qubits X-State as Resource

Quantum teleportation (QT) is based on the well-known concept of quantum entanglement. Entanglement plays a very important role in quantum information processing. Quantum entangled states have become the key ingredient in the rapidly expanding field of quantum information science, with remarkable prospective applications such as quantum computation [1], quantum teleportation [2-5], super dense coding [6], quantum cryptographic schemes [7-9], entanglement swapping [10-12], and remote states preparation [13-14]. Quantum teleportation, which describes the transmission of an unknown quantum state from a sender to a spatially distant receiver via classical information, is one of the most astonishing features in quantum information and communication. In 1993, Bennett et al. [2] investigated that it was possible to transmit one-qubit state via Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) state by sending two classical bits of information. Probabilistic teleportation [15-16] and probabilistic superdense coding [17-18] were also investigated via non-maximally entangled.