Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive and formal memetic frameworks

Over the recent years, there has been increasing research activities made on improving the efficacy of Memetic Algorithm (MA) for solving complex optimization problems. Particularly, these efforts have revealed the success of MA on a wide range of real world problems. MAs not only converge to high quality solutions, but also search more efficiently than their conventional counterparts. Despite the success and surge in interests on MAs, only restricted theoretical knowledge is available in the field of MA and limited progress has been made on formal memetic frameworks. The key design issue of MA lies in the successful promotion of competition and cooperation between the forces of evolution and individual learning through appropriate configuration of the algorithmic parameters. This can be achieved by 1) applying different parameter configurations to find the most suitable setting or 2) adapting the algorithmic parameters of MAwhile the search progresses. While the former is straightforward, it could only produce reasonable configurations that are suitable for solving a given problem at hand. Further, such an option may not be feasible due to the high computational cost involved. The latter, on the other hand, may be applied to a wide range of problems more efficiently, but would require suitable online adaptation schemes and frameworks. This thesis provides some insights into the success of MAs and summarizes investigation on the study of effective memetic frameworks. It addresses several important design issues of MAs in the context of continuous optimization problems and proposes two adaptive approaches to efficiently and effectively configure the MA design parameters during the search process. Subsequently, a formal probabilistic memetic framework is presented to highlight the interrelationship among the MA design issues. Finally, the thesis presents a complexity analysis on the numerical methods as individual learning in MAs. i ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library
Capacity Loss Reduction using Smart-Battery Management System for Li-ion Battery Energy Storage Systems

Compared to conventional empirical or equivalent circuit-based Battery Management Systems (BMS), Advanced Battery Management Systems (ABMS) incorporate sophisticated electrochemical battery models that estimate health-related states with improved accuracy to achieve the desired outcomes. Equivalent Circuit Models based on electrochemical principles are used to reduce the complexity of the sophisticated electrochemical battery models while ensuring the required accuracy. Side reaction induced battery capacity loss is one of the crucial aspects to be addressed in ABMS. This paper proposes a control strategy to minimize the side reaction induced capacity loss by changing the cell series-parallel configuration dynamically inside the battery pack. Reduced-order equivalent circuit model based on electrochemical theory is adopted to model the internal kinetics of Li-ion battery. The cells which have a better State of Health (SOH) condition given the higher priority to contribute to the output voltage and connect in series than the cells with lower SOH. Simulation results show a considerable amount of capacity loss reduction after introducing the proposed method.
Application of Differential Evolution to Mono-objective Tuning of Vibration Spectrum Analyzers based on Microelectromechanical Systems

The vibration spectrum is a frequency-domain characteristic used to monitor many systems and can be calculated using twin-microaccelerometers with nonlinear electromechanical positive feedback. This strategy has its greatest limitation on the accelerometers parameters differences due to the manufacturing process, such that the spectrum distortion may be considerably high. To overcome these differences, in this work a meta-heuristic algorithm to tune the spectrum analyzer microdevice is proposed by adjusting the accelerometers actuation voltages amplitudes. To perform the tuning, the Differential Evolution (DE) is used to solve the mono-objective optimization problem related to the sensitivity maximization constrained by a maximum distortion level. The objective and constraint functions are based on the components of the spectrum analyzer system closed-loop gain Fourier series – which depends on the actuation voltages. The results – specially the distortion-sensitivity compromise – are demonstrated and discussed. The proposed tuning strategy is able to determine the voltage amplitudes to be applied to the micro spectrum analyzer to attend the distortion level and sensitivity requirements.
Distributed Learning Control for Economic Power Dispatch: A Privacy Preserved Approach*

We present a privacy-preserving distributed reinforcement learning-based control scheme to address the problem of frequency control and economic dispatch in power generation systems. The proposed control approach requires neither a priori system model knowledge nor the mathematical formulation of the generation cost functions. Due to not requiring the generation cost models, the control scheme is capable of dealing with scenarios in which the cost functions are hard to formulate and/or non-convex. Furthermore, it is privacy-preserving, i.e. none of the units in the network needs to communicate its cost function and/or control policy to its neighbors. To realize this, we propose an actor-critic algorithm with function approximation in which the actor step is performed individually by each unit with no need to infer the policies of others. Moreover, in the critic step each generation unit shares its estimate of the local measurements and the estimate of its cost function with the neighbors, and via performing a consensus algorithm, a consensual estimate is achieved. The performance of our proposed control scheme, in terms of minimizing the overall cost while persistently fulfilling the demand and fast reaction and convergence of our distributed algorithm, is demonstrated on a benchmark case study.
Insights into the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) as a discrimination measure in species distribution modelling

Aim The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) is a widely used statistic for assessing the discriminatory capacity of species distribution models. Here, I used simulated data to examine the interdependence of the AUC and classical discrimination measures (sensitivity and specificity) derived for the application of a threshold. I shall further exemplify with simulated data the implications of using the AUC to evaluate potential versus realized distribution models. Innovation After applying the threshold that makes sensitivity and specificity equal, a strong relationship between the AUC and these two measures was found. This result is corroborated with real data. On the other hand, the AUC penalizes the models that estimate potential distributions (the regions where the species could survive and reproduce due to the existence of suitable environmental conditions), and favours those that estimate realized distributions (the regions where the species actually lives). Main conclusions Firstly, the independence of the AUC from the threshold selection may be irrelevant in practice. This result also emphasizes the fact that the AUC assumes nothing about the relative costs of errors of omission and commission. However, in most real situations this premise may not be optimal. Measures derived from a contingency table for different cost ratio scenarios, together with the ROC curve, may be more informative than reporting just a single AUC value. Secondly, the AUC is only truly informative when there are true instances of absence available and the objective is the estimation of the realized distribution. When the potential distribution is the goal of the research, the AUC is not an appropriate performance measure because the weight of commission errors is much lower than that of omission errors.
An Enhanced System for Smart Home in IPv6-Based Wireless Home Network

The development of IPv6-based wireless local area networks is becoming increasingly mature, and it has defined no less than different standards to meet the needs of different applications. Wireless home networks are widely used because they can be seamlessly connected to daily life, especially smart home devices linked to it. There are certain security issues with smart home devices deployed in wireless home networks, such as data tampering and leakage of sensitive information. This paper proposes a smart home management system based on IPv6 wireless home network, and develops a prototype system deployed on mobile portable devices. Through this system, different roles in the wireless home network can be dynamically authorized and smart home resources can be allocated to achieve the purpose of access control and management.
The Use of Polypeptide Probes Selected From Artificial Peptide Libraries for the Recognition and Differentiation of DNA Sequences

In the novel approach suggested here, we examined the use of polypeptide probes selected from artificial peptide libraries for the identification of the differences in dsDNA sequences which are potential targets for the genetic diseases. As a model system two target DNAs which are the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) products of the two phage-display vector multiple cloning sites (MCS) differing at 18 base pair long has been used. In the production of the target sequences biotinylated primers were used in PCR. The polypeptide probes obtained from artificial peptide library by the selection of phage-display techniques. Identified clones bearing the candidate polypeptide probe specific to the target sequences was tested by phage-ELISA. For the comparison and selection assays, magnetic separation technique was used. One clone selected from artificial peptide library specifically recognized the 18 nucleotide difference, which encodes (His)6, in between two model PCR products and showed no cross reaction determined by phage-ELISA. These findings may be interpreted to the usage of the polypeptides for the detection of the anomalies at specific target DNA sequences and be used for the manipulation of the gene expression in different disease models.
Selecting Optimal Completion to Partial Matrix via Self-Validation

In many applications such as film recommendation, one often encounters the problem of estimating the unseen entries in a partially observed matrix, formally known as matrix completion. Over the past several decades, lots of effective methods have been established in the literature, and each method may contain several hyper-parameters. For a partial matrix, one can use those methods with certain parametric settings to obtain a large number of completions. Now, a critical question is, how to select the optimal completion from a number of candidates? This question is indeed a hard to answer, because in practice the true values of the missing entries are unknown. Thus far, the only approach for dealing with the issue is through data-validation, which is to first split the observations into two subsets, a training set and a validation set, and then choose the model that performs best on the validation set as the winner to produce the final results. Though straightforward, this approach might fall in a non-optimal model that overfits the validation set. In this work, we shall suggest a different approach called self-validation, which accounts on a special metric that can evaluate the “goodness” of a completion without using any validation data. The metric is derived from the recently established isomeric condition, measuring the identifiable degree of the completion itself. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our self-validation approach is better than the commonly used data-validation.
Pregnancy health literacy among teenagers in Kaysone district, Savannakhet Province, Lao PDR

ABSTRACT Background Pregnancy health literacy (PHL) among teenagers is considered a major protective factor for teenage pregnancy. In Lao PDR, 18% of girls aged 15–19 have begun childbearing and 15% of maternal deaths occur to teenage girls, particularly in rural areas. Objective The aim of this study was to describe PHL and its related factors among teenagers in Kaysone district. Method This was a cross-sectional study conducted at Oudomvilay and Kheuakhaokat in Kaysone district in January 2019. The Teenage Pregnancy Health Literacy (TPHL) score was collected via face to face interviews covering 33 items with 262 adolescents. Calculation of the TPHL index score was based on the European Health Literacy Survey (HLS-EU) index formula. The TPHL index was also based on the HLS-EU standard level and descriptive statistics were used to explain the score and levels. Descriptive analyses were performed to analyse the individual, family, peer and school variables and to investigate level of TPHL and linear regression was used to identify factors related to TPHL. Results The overall score for TPHL was a mean of 27/50. Most (60%) of the adolescents had problematic TPHL levels and only 0.4% had excellent TPHL levels. TPHL was positively and significantly associated with living in urban areas (β = 2.42; p = 0.002), higher education (β = 2.93; p = 0.004), schooling (β = 0.96; p = 0.018), being single (β = 2.9; p = 0.029) and attending classes where sex education content was included (β = 4.72; p < 0.001). Conclusion Low TPHL scores show the importance of improving sex education for adolescents as a means of increasing TPHL for better health outcomes in Lao PDR.
Methadone’s Effect on Cardiac Repolarization: Safety in the PICU

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text. Objectives: Opioids are routinely used in the PICU. Methadone is an effective method of preventing and treating iatrogenic opioid withdrawal; however, it carries an Food and Drug Administration Boxed Warning due to the potential to prolong the corrected QT interval and potentially lead to life-threatening arrhythmias. Guidelines on the safe use of methadone have limited applicability to children since their cardiac intervals differ from those of adults. There is little data on the electrophysiologic effects in the pediatric population. We set out to describe the safety of methadone use in the PICU, hypothesizing that methadone does not cause a significant change in corrected QT interval from baseline. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI. Patients: Fifty-one patients, age less than or equal to 18 years old, initiated on methadone during PICU admission, over an 11-month period, for the prevention or treatment of opioid withdrawal. Interventions: Retrospective data queried from the electronic health record and stored telemetry waveforms obtained from an automated real-time patient data acquisition software system (BedMasterEx; Anandic Medical Systems AG, Feuerthalen, Switzerland). Measurements and Main Results: Corrected QT intervals were not significantly different at 12 hours, 96 hours, or PICU discharge (p values: 0.57, 0.54, and 0.34) when compared to baseline. The median change in corrected QT from baseline to 12 hours after the first dose of methadone was 5 ms (interquartile range, –12 to 11 ms), 0 ms to steady state (interquartile range, –18 to 18 ms), and 5 ms from baseline to 12 hours after the highest dose of methadone (interquartile range, –14 to 16 ms). The most common primary diagnosis was structural heart disease (29% of subjects) in our cohort and every subject that experienced an increase in corrected QT interval greater than or equal to 40 ms had some form of structural heart disease. Conclusions: Methadone did not significantly prolong the corrected QT interval in a population of critically ill children, suggesting that it can be safely used in this population, although patients with structural heart disease may warrant closer monitoring.
Salivary gland cancer in the era of immunotherapy: can we exploit tumor microenvironment?

ABSTRACT Introduction Salivary gland cancers (SGCs) consist of a rare family of neoplasms with varying histology and biological behavior. Therapeutic regimens have been relatively unchanged for decades. The recent successes of immunotherapy have raised hopes for the development of more effective strategies in SGC, thus emphasizing the role of tumor microenvironment (TME) in the design for more effective therapies. Areas covered This review presents an overview of the current knowledge on the pathobiology of SGC TME and discusses the potential of immunotherapeutic targeting. Expert opinion Most data on the role of TME in SGC carcinogenesis are derived from preclinical studies. Signaling cascades of immunotherapeutic interest, PD-1/PD-L1 and PD-1/PD-L2, are active in many SGCs and might be associated with biological behavior and prognosis. Immunotherapeutic attempts are very limited, but recent findings in other tumors on the role of exosomes and PD-L2 signaling suggest that TME of SGCs warrants further research, emphasizing larger cohorts, histology-based stratification, and standardized evaluation of immunomodulatory molecules, to explore the potential of targeting tumor stroma and its signaling cascades. Furthermore, combination of immunotherapies or immunotherapies with the antineoplastic agents targeting AR, HER2, and tyrosine kinases, recently introduced in SGC treatment, constitutes a promising approach for the future.
Use of Fire-Extinguishing Balls for a Conceptual System of Drone-Assisted Wildfire Fighting

This paper examines the potential use of fire extinguishing balls as part of a proposed system, where drone and remote-sensing technologies are utilized cooperatively as a supplement to traditional firefighting methods. The proposed system consists of (1) scouting unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to detect spot fires and monitor the risk of wildfire approaching a building, fence, and/or firefighting crew via remote sensing, (2) communication UAS to establish and extend the communication channel between scouting UAS and fire-fighting UAS, and (3) a fire-fighting UAS autonomously traveling to the waypoints to drop fire extinguishing balls (environmental friendly, heat activated suppressants). This concept is under development through a transdisciplinary multi-institutional project. The scope of this paper encloses general illustration of this design, and the experiments conducted so far to evaluate fire extinguishing balls. The results of the experiments show that smaller size fire extinguishing balls available in the global marketplace attached to drones might not be effective in aiding in building fires (unless there are open windows in the buildings already). On the contrary, results show that even the smaller size fire extinguishing balls might be effective in extinguishing short grass fires (around 0.5 kg size ball extinguished a circle of 1-meter of short grass). This finding guided the authors towards wildfire fighting rather than building fires. The paper also demonstrates building of heavy payload drones (around 15 kg payload), and the progress of development of an apparatus carrying fire-extinguishing balls attachable to drones.
A novel male-specific DNA sequence for river buffaloes

In this paper, we report identification of a novel male-specific DNA marker in Iranian river buffalo presenting the possibility of river buffalo gender determination using Random amplified polymorphic DNA-PCR (RAPD-PCR). Twenty eight random primers used for RAPD fingerprinting in order to isolation and characterization of microsatellite sequences using PIMA (PCR-based isolation of microsatellite array). All sharp bands related to different primers were isolated from the gel and inserted to a cloning vector and transformed to competent cells for nucleotide sequencing. Sequences were used as queries for BLAST tool. BLAST results showed that a sequence had high similarity with a part sequence of cattle Y chromosome sequences deposited in GenBank. A pair of primers (IRBMS-F and -R) was designed based on the sequence for amplifying the male-specific band by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for Iranian river buffalo gender detection. Gender-specific bands in the gel were observed in all males but not in females. This showed that the gender of Iranian river buffalo could be easily and effectively identified by PCR technique using these primers.
Changes in Right Ventricular Function After Off-Pump Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting.

OBJECTIVE Right ventricular (RV) dysfunction is associated with poor outcomes after cardiac surgery. The aim of this study was to assess RV systolic and diastolic function in the perioperative period after off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (OPCAB). DESIGN Prospective observational study. SETTINGS Tertiary care hospital. PARTICIPANTS Thirty adult patients undergoing OPCAB. INTERVENTIONS None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS Transthoracic echocardiography was performed twice: first preoperatively and second postoperatively, when patients were moved to wards. The following five parameters of RV systolic function were used: tricuspid annular plane systolic excursion (TAPSE), systolic tissue Doppler imaging of lateral tricuspid annulus (S'), fractional area change (FAC), RV myocardial performance index (RIMP), and isovolumic acceleration (IVA). Grading of RV diastolic function (RVDD) was done as per guidelines. Paired t test was used for comparing means and χ2 test was used for categorical and ordinal data. The parameters of RV longitudinal function (TAPSE and S') reduced significantly (preoperative 21.93 ± 2.80 mm and 13.24 ± 2.24 cm/s to postoperative 11.67 ± 1.91 mm and 10.31 ± 1.56 cm/s, respectively, p < 0.001), whereas parameters of RV global function (FAC, RIMP, and IVA) remained preserved (preoperative 46.75 ± 6.80%, 0.34 ± 0.06, and 4.66 ± 0.87 m/s2 to postoperative 46.21 ± 6.44%, 0.36 ± 0.06, and 4.37 ± 0.83 m/s2; p values of 0.76, 0.13, and 0.11, respectively). The median grade of RVDD worsened from normal in the preoperative period to pseudo-normal in the postoperative period (p < 0.001). The changes in both RV systolic and diastolic function were similar in patients with normal and reduced left ventricular systolic function. CONCLUSIONS RV function can be assessed in perioperative settings with two-dimensional and tissue Doppler imaging. For systolic function assessment, exclusive measurement of longitudinal parameters might be inadequate; use of complementary global parameters like FAC, RIMP, and IVA is essential to complete the RV assessment after OPCAB. RVDD worsened significantly after OPCABG.