Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Productivity of rose-scented geranium (Pelargonium graveolens L.) under different planting methods in ‘Tarai’ of Uttaranchal

Five different planting methods, viz. ridge, raised bed, raised compartment, raised circle and conventional flat bed, were assessed of their comparative efficiencies in ensuring the crop growth and essential oil yield and economic returns of rose-scented geranium involving, eight plant growth parameters including the major economic traits namely leaf: stem (L:S) ratio, oil content (%) and green herbage weight. The results revealed that of the five planting methods two, i.e. raised circle and conventional flat bed method are most efficient in ensuring higher oil yield and economic returns. The study on plant growth parameters vis-a-vis oil yields in the five planting methods led to a conclusion that yield advantage of a specific planting method is not necessarily dependent upon its high averages for the major growth parameters like L:S ratio and oil content.
An efficient method for in vitro plant regeneration in carnation

Micropropagation of carnation cv. Lipstick was tried using shoot-tip of greenhouse raised plants and nodal segment of in vitro raised shoots by culturing them on MS medium supplemented with various growth regulators. High rate of multiplication of shoot tip was recorded in the medium containing basal MS salts supplemented with 0.5 mg l−1 NAA, 1.5 mg l−1 kinetin and 0.5 mg l−1 GA3 while that of nodal segment on MS medium supplemented with 0.5 mg l−1 NAA, 0.5 mg l−1 kinetin and 0.5 mg l−1 GA3. The best rooting of the microshoots was obtained on MS medium with 0.5 mg l−1 IBA. The rooted plantlets were transferred to the ambient condition using different substrates. Vermiculite recorded a high survival percentage of 90% while the lowest was recorded in the substrate soil. The hardened plantlets were finally planted in beds inside greenhouse.
Mixed support for gene flow as a constraint to local adaptation and contributor to the limited geographic range of an endemic salamander

Understanding mechanisms that underlie species range limits is at the core of evolutionary ecology. Asymmetric gene flow between larger core populations and smaller edge populations can swamp local adaptation at the range edge and inhibit further range expansion. However, empirical tests of this theory are exceedingly rare. We tested the hypothesis that asymmetric gene flow can constrain local adaptation and thereby species’ range limits in an endemic US salamander (Ambystoma barbouri) by determining if gene flow is asymmetric between the core and peripheries of the species’ geographic distribution and testing whether local adaptation is swamped at range edges with a reciprocal transplant experiment. Using putatively neutral loci from populations across three core‐to‐edge transects that covered nearly the entire species’ geographic range, we found evidence for asymmetric, core‐to‐edge gene flow along western and northern transects, but not along a southern transect. Subsequently, the reciprocal transplant experiment suggested that northern and western edge populations are locally adapted despite experiencing asymmetric gene flow, yet have lower fitness in their respective home regions than those of centre population. Conversely, southern populations exhibit low deme quality, experiencing high mortality regardless of where they were reared, probably due to harsher edge habitat conditions. Consequently, we provide rare species‐wide evidence that local adaptation can occur despite asymmetric gene flow, though migration from the core may prohibit range expansion by reducing fitness in edge populations. Further, our multitransect study shows that multiple, nonmutually exclusive mechanisms can lead to range limits within a single species.
COVID-19 and Type 1 Diabetes: Concerns and Challenges

Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide population’s lifestyle has changed dramatically, causing psychosocial consequences. Patients presenting a preexisting chronic condition, as Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), are the ones suffering the most from this situation. Moreover, people affected by diabetes are the ones with the worst prognosis, if infected by SARS-CoV-2. We analyzed why patients with T1D were poorly represented between the subjects hospitalized for COVID-19 and why the cases of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) were fewer and more severe compared with the past years. Furthermore, literature has showed how patients of all ages with T1D did not experience a deterioration in their glucose control throughout the lockdown. Among other causes, this is also due to the surging use of telemedicine. Finally, we tried to understand how the coronavirus tropism for endocrine tissues could influence the future epidemiology of T1D, focusing on the effects they have on pancreatic β-cells.
The reproductive biology and feeding habits of yellow fin seabream, Acanthopagrus latus (Houttuyn, 1782), in the Northern Persian Gulf

Monthly samples of Acanthopagrus latus (Hottuyn, 1782) were used to determine (1) feeding habits and (2) reproduction characteristics of the species in relation to its size, spawning season and sex in the Northern part of the Persian Gulf from January to December 2013. The smaller length classes of all samples were dominated by male fish. All gonads examined, were ovotestis during the spawning period from February till May. Male and female ovotestes were dimorphic in structure which represented a transitional stage in a protandrous sex change. Length at first sexual maturity of female A. latus was 24.40 cm. A. latus fed predominantly on bivalves, gastropods, cephalopods, stomatopods, fish and decapods which showed changes according to the season and body size. According to our results, it appears that A. latus feeds throughout the year; the highest value of gastrosomatic index (GaSI) for both sexes was recorded in February, which was significantly different from that in other months. The results of this study also indicate that feeding in yellowfin seabream is very intense before reproduction (during January and February). It decreases gradually after February to June during the spawning season.
WHO EMRO | Leveraging the COVID-19 response to improve emergency care systems in the Eastern Mediterranean Region

The COVID-19 pandemic began as a cluster of reported cases of acute respiratory illness in China on 31 December 2019 and went on to spread with exponential growth across the globe. By the time it was characterized as a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 (1), 17 of 22 countries in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) had reports of infected persons (2,3). EMR countries are particularly susceptible to such outbreaks due to the presence of globally interconnected markets; complex emergencies in more than half of the countries; religious mass gatherings that draw tens of millions of pilgrims annually; and variation in emergency care systems capacity and health systems performance within and between countries (4).
Multidisciplinary approach for improving aesthetics in a cleft lip and palate patient

A 27-year-old woman with a right-sided cleft lip and palate and a left sided cleft lip and congenitally missing teeth #s12 and 11. After primary treatment of the cleft during childhood and adolescence, the teeth were still missing and a large defect in the alveolar crest remained. Patient’s chief complaint was poor aesthetics in the upper anterior region. This case presentation describes how, with a multidiscipline approach by means of orthodontics, soft tissue grafting and a tooth-supported fixed partial denture the conditions were treated to achieve as good aesthetical result as possible.
University of Birmingham Interoception and disordered eating

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Reduced Chatter Sliding Mode Control for Hydraulic Manipulators based on Continuous-Time State Dependent Parameter Models

Sliding Mode Control (SMC) systems are developed for a hydraulic manipulator. The control model is obtained via state-dependent parameter (SDP) system identification. In contrast to previous research using discrete-time SDP models, in which the model coefficients are functions of the sampling interval, the present work develops a new continuous-time approach. It is well known that for conventional SMC there is a trade-off between chattering and robust performance. Hence, a recently developed approach to address this problem is investigated, in which the controller is designed via a fractional exponent of the sliding surface. The approach is developed for both conventional and Nonsingular Terminal SMC (NTSMC). The new continuous version of the NTSMC algorithm successfully reduces chattering and provides the best overall performance of various SMC designs. However, for the preliminary experiments reported in this article, a PID lead-lag controller yields the lowest absolute errors, albeit at the cost of a higher control effort. Hence, given that dead-zone and other uncertainties provide the main motivation for use of SMC in this application, further research into the robustness of the new algorithm is required.
On Control Strategies for BTB Converters for Enhancement of Interface Flow Margins

This paper presents a method to determine parameters of BTB (back-to-back) converters in terms of the enhancement of interface flow margins. Interface flow margin is by definition a measure of how much active power can be transferred from the external areas to the study area with the fixed load demand, and it is mainly constrained by system voltage stability. BTB converters are controllable equipments with the active power flow through them, and its DC link in fact can divide the AC systems at the location and hence can reduce the fault current level. This paper first cals margin sensitivities at the nose point of F-V curves and formulates an optimization problem to update the BTB parameters to improve the margins. This procedure is repeated performed until the required margin enhancement is achieved.
Optimizing Long-term Social Welfare in Recommender Systems

A. Algorithms and Proofs A.1. Greedy Optimization and Theorem 2 A.1. 1. PRELIMINARIES Before we begin the proof, we make a few notational modifications to significantly simplify it. Let C be a set of content providers (hereinafter providers), U a set of users, and A ∈ R|U|×|C| a utility matrix. Furthermore, let D : U → N be a user demand function (specifying how many queries a user u submits to the system) and νc for c ∈ C be the provider survival threshold, indicating how many queries the provider needs to receive in order to be viable. For this section, we will make the following simplifying assumptions:
Zebrafish as a Model Organism for Ovarian Specific Expression of Transgenes

Infertility is a public health issue that affects a large portion of the human population. According to epidemiological studies, 20% of couples worldwide were infertile in 2015 (Turchi, 2015). To understand how to treat infertility and other reproductive disorders in humans, first the mechanism in which vertebrate reproduction occurs must be investigated in a model organism. The zebrafish, Danio reiro is a popular model for reproductive studies (Hill, 2005). For this reason, a transgenic zebrafish was generated with a plasmid that carried 1823 bp of the aromatase (CYP19a) promoter and the Enhanced Green Fluorescent Protein (EGFP) gene. The EGFP gene was used as a reporter to map the expression of the aromatase promoter in the female zebrafish. This promoter originated from the aromatase enzyme that converts androgens to estrogen in the ovaries of most vertebrates. In our studies, two different western blots were performed to detect levels of green fluorescence in different organs and in follicles of different sizes. Our findings suggest that that the aromatase promoter is expressed in the granulosa cells that surround the ovarian follicles during the pre-vitellogenic (PV), earlyvitellogenic(EV) and mid-vitellogenic (MV) stages of folliculogenesis. This transgenic model could be used in future research to study proteins that are expressed at these specific stages of folliculogenesis and provide insight into their effects on ovulation.
H2Pack

Dense kernel matrices represented in H2 matrix format typically require less storage and have faster matrix-vector multiplications than when these matrices are represented in the standard dense format. In this article, we present H2Pack, a high-performance, shared-memory library for constructing and operating with H2 matrix representations for kernel matrices defined by non-oscillatory, translationally invariant kernel functions. Using a hybrid analytic-algebraic compression method called the proxy point method, H2Pack can efficiently construct an H2 matrix representation with linear computational complexity. Storage and matrix-vector multiplication also have linear complexity. H2Pack also introduces the concept of “partially admissible blocks” for H2 matrices to make H2 matrix-vector multiplication mathematically identical to the fast multipole method (FMM) if analytic expansions are used. We optimize H2Pack from both the algorithm and software perspectives. Compared to existing FMM libraries, H2Pack generally has much faster H2 matrix-vector multiplications, since the proxy point method is more effective at producing block low-rank approximations than the analytic methods used in FMM. As a tradeoff, H2 matrix construction in H2Pack is typically more expensive than the setup cost in FMM libraries. Thus, H2Pack is ideal for applications that need a large number of matrix-vector multiplications for a given configuration of data points.
Exact distribution-free two-sample tests applicable to high dimensional data

Multivariate two-sample testing problem is extensively studied in the literature, and both parametric and nonparametric tests are available for it. However, most of these tests perform poorly for high dimensional data, and they are usually not applicable when the dimension is larger than the sample size. In this article, we propose a procedure for multivariate generalization of well-known univariate distribution-free tests for two-sample problems involving independent as well as matched pair samples. This proposed procedure is based on ranks of real valued linear functions of multivariate observations. The linear function used to rank the observations is obtained by solving a classification problem that aims at finding an optimal discriminating hyperplane between the two multivariate distributions from which the observations are generated. Our tests perform well for high dimensional data even when the dimension exceeds the sample size. Besides, our tests are distribution-free under very general conditions. Asymptotic results on the powers of the proposed tests are derived when the sample sizes are fixed and the dimension of the data grows to infinity as well as for situations when the sample sizes grow while the dimension of the data remains fixed. We investigate the finite sample performance of our proposed tests by applying it to several high dimensional simulated and real data sets and compare them with several other tests available in the literature.
SuVashantor: English to Bangla Machine Translation Systems

This paper presents the system description of Machine Translation (MT) systems for English-Bangla language pair. Our goal was to create two benchmark MT systems that produce a better quality translation and comparatively higher evaluation score than existing MT systems for English to Bangla. In our experiments, we implemented two baseline MT systems using both statistical and neural methods for the said language pair. Our phrase-based statistical model and 2-layer LSTM neural model were trained and evaluated with a large dataset that is carefully pre-processed and contains unique training data to avoid biases from the cross-validation and test data. We achieved the highest scoring BLEU for our experiments with these setups. Furthermore, we improved the performance of the neural model using pre-trained embedding and synthetic monolingual data which are cutting-edge technology for neural models.
Outward FDI Motives of Indian Firms: A Multi-level Examination

In the light of sizeable growth in outward FDI by Indian firms in recent years, we examine the motives behind such investments in different host countries during 2008-09 and 2011-12. Several standard motives (resource-seeking, technology-seeking, efficiency-seekig, marketseeking, among others) have been examined for disaggregated sample, i.e. by age, size and sector of the outward investing firm, using panel data econometric method. Apart from observing multiple motives, there exists variation in motives of overseas investment by age, size and sector of the outward investing firm. For older firms, the resource-seeking, efficiency-seeking and market seeking motives are found to be significant. Larger firms are found to look for resource, technology and efficiency while investing abroad. Similarly, the manufacturing sectors firms are attracted by availability of resource, technology and efficiency in the host countries. Overall, the older, bigger and manufacturing sector firms are found to invest abroad with standard motives. However, there these standard motives are not found to be significant determinant of outward investment in the case of younger, smaller and service sector firms. The results are robust to the use of alternative measure of outward investment.
Multilevel Image Thresholding Using the Complement Feature

A novel Eigen formulation is proposed for image segmentation. Each pixel is represented by a unit vector having the x-component as the normalized gray value of the pixel. The axes of inertia are simply the Eigen vectors of the auto-correlation matrix. The largest Eigen vector is used as the point of split. Each sub-image is further split in the same way. The ratio of the smallest Eigen value to the sum of Eigen values represents the percentage of the minority and was used to control further splitting. The process continues until no sub-image is larger in size than this ratio. The results are very encouraging on a wide range of images.
Branchial Acid and Ammonia Fluxes in Response to Alkalosis and Acidosis in Two Marine Teleosts: Coho Salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) and Starry Flounder (Platichthys stellatus)

Metabolic acidosis, whether endogenous (exhaustive exercise) or exogenous (ammonium sulfate infusion), had qualitatively similar effects on net ammonia flux ($$J_{net}^{Am}$$) and net transfer of acid-base equivalents ($$J_{net}^{H^{+}}$$) in salmon and flounder. Intravascular infusion of $$^{35}S-labeled$$ ammonium sulfate resulted in a rapid and large increase in $$J_{net}^{Am}$$ in both ospecies, although $$J_{net}^{Am}$$ was about three times greater in salmon than in flounder. Rates of 35SO4 clearance in salmon were 50-60 times those in flounder, and 35SO4 was distributed in a much smaller space than in flounder. Exhaustive exercise also led to increases in both $$J_{net}^{Am}$$ and $$J_{net}^{H^{+}}$$ and again fluxes were 2-3 times greater in salmon than flounder. In both treatments the blood acid-base disturbance was corrected more rapidly in salmon than in flounder. Metabolic alkalosis (sodium lactate infusion) also elicited qualitatively different responses from salmon and flounder. In salmon, there was a net base excretion (i. e., a positive $$J_{net}^{H^{+}}$$), and, except for a slight, although significant, reduction 4-8 h after infusion, $$J_{net}^{Am}$$ was unchanged. In contrast, $$J_{net}^{H^{+}}$$ remained unchanged in flounder, despite a nearly 50% reduction in $$J_{net}^{Am}$$, which persisted for 8 h after infusion. As was the case for acidosis, the blood acid-base disturbance was corrected more rapidly in salmon than in flounder. The different responses may be related to differences in the morphology (e.g., surface area) and/or permeability characteristics of the gills.
Adaptive Discretization for Probabilistic Safety Cost Functions Evaluation

In many real-world planning applications, e.g. dynamic design of experiments, autonomous driving and robot manipulation, it is necessary to evaluate candidate movement paths with respect to a safety cost function. Here, the continuous candidate paths need to be discretized ﬁrst and, subsequently, evaluated on the discretization points. The resulting quality of planned paths, thus, highly depends on the deﬁnition of the safety cost functions, and the resolution of the discretization. In this paper, we propose an approach for evaluating continuous candidate paths by employing an adaptive discretization scheme, with a probabilistic cost function learned from observations. The obtained path is then guaranteed to be (cid:15) -safe, i.e. the remaining risk of still ﬁnding an unsafe point on the trajectory is smaller than (cid:15) . The proposed approach is investigated theoretically, as well as empirically validated on several robotic path planning scenarios.
Poster: An Analysis of Privacy Features in 'Expert-Approved' Kids' Apps

During the course of the past decade, children have become avid consumers of digital media through mobile devices. The industry for children's mobile applications is booming and marketplaces offer categories of apps aimed specifically at children. In this study, we perform a mixed-methods privacy analysis of 137 'expert-approved' children's apps from the Google Play Store. Our findings show that these apps do not sufficiently support children to exercise their privacy rights, whilst simultaneously making use of libraries and data trackers which may collect and share sensitive user data.
DQN: Does it scales? Harsh Satija

—Deep Reinforcement learning has recently emerged as a successful methodology for efﬁciently learning complex tasks and even succeeded in matching (and in some cases surpassing) human level performance in a variety of games [7] [17]. For our project we studied Deep Q-Networks (DQN) [7] which estimate the Q-values (or expected discounted returns for an action) for the current game state, where the game state is deﬁned only by the last four frames the agent has encountered. However, one major downside of DQN is its huge training time and computational cost, which is primarily due to its dependency on how it maintains the game state (it preserves past frames as well as the size of the frame). In this project we attempt to study the various methods that are employed to address these issues. In particular we looked at adding the ability to maintain the game state using individual frames, and focusing the agent’s attention on the most salient features of the input.