Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A flexible architecture to enhance wearable robots: Integration of EMG-informed models

Research on wearable robotic devices is fostered by the need to assist and restore human locomotion, which is essential for most daily life activities. Despite a continuous technological advancement, many challenges are to be faced before establishing the use of these devices as part of the rehabilitation process. A main concern is how to actively engage the users and monitor how they are affected by the exoskeleton. Basic analyses, such as measuring walking speed, must be extended to include analysis on balance, brain activity, and evaluation of neuromechanical effects. This scenario requires the use of different distributed sensor devices that must be carefully synchronized. This work describes the architecture we implemented to extend the capabilities of the H2 exoskeleton. As a proof of the architecture validity, we show the online estimation of users' muscle forces through the acquisition of electromyographic signals, that drive neuromusculoskeletal models. The proposed framework, built upon the Robot Operating System (ROS), aims to be reusable for a wide range of setups, including different exoskeletons and sensors.
Factors That Affect Life Values "A Research on the Students of Suleyman Demirel University"

This study aims to determine the life values profiles of the students of Suleyman Demirel University according to demographic variables whether it changes. The theory part of the research about life values is consist of Maslow, Rokeach, Hofstede and Schwartz Value Theories. The domain of the research is 600 students from five different faculties of Suleyman Demirel University. Gungor’s Life Values scale was used for questionnaire of the research. First, the principal component analyses was applied to the scale. As a result, the life values could be collected in three factors. Later, these factors were tested with the demographic factors which were chosen. At the analyses, independent sample t test, One Way Anova and principal component analyses methods were used.
Context-Sensitive Service Discovery Meets Information Retrieval

With the emergence of mobile devices, Web services are made available for users in nearly all situations of every day life. While the WWW offers a multitude of Web services there is a lack of search engines which support the users in finding adequate services out of the bulk of available Web services. Within this paper, we will introduce a context-sensitive approach for effective Web service discovery. As a huge amount of context information could be gathered by the use of mobile devices, this approach is especially directed towards users of these mobile devices. Examples for context information are the actual visited place, the actual temperature, the recent illumination, etc. Also communities of users who share common contexts, interests and service needs arise. While existing systems for Web service discovery generally do not consider context and community information of their users, we will focus on these topics, taking advantage of an novel adaption of information retrieval techniques
Thoughts on Finding and Assisting Individuals in Forced Labor in the USA

This article draws from interviews with formerly trafficked persons who have resettled in the USA. It has not been easy finding trafficked persons in the USA. The author contends that this is due, in part, to a focus of most antitrafficking activities on one industry — the sex industry — to the exclusion of investigations into exploitation of migrant workers in other labor sectors. At the same time, undocumented workers stay quiet about workplace abuses because of a fear of deportation. ICE raids on workplaces where undocumented migrants may labor and the passage of local ordinances that empower local police officers to enforce immigration laws (287g agreements), have increased distrust between law enforcement and migrant communities. Forced underground, migrants working in vulnerable situations will be harder to find and to assist. This environment of threat shapes the resettlement of formerly trafficked persons since they typically enter the same low-wage, insecure and possibly exploitative work after being trafficked. More meaningful rights-based alliances with community-based organizations that focus on migrants’ rights is a critical step to preventing forced labor and to assisting formerly trafficked persons. The fight against trafficking is a fight for migrants’ rights.
A Proposed Function for Hippocampal Theta Rhythm: Separate Phases of Encoding and Retrieval Enhance Reversal of Prior Learning

The theta rhythm appears in the rat hippocampal electroencephalogram during exploration and shows phase locking to stimulus acquisition. Lesions that block theta rhythm impair performance in tasks requiring reversalofpriorlearning, includingreversalinaT-maze, whereassociations between one arm location and food reward need to be extinguished in favor of associations between the opposite arm location and food reward. Here, a hippocampal model shows how theta rhythm could be important for reversal in this task by providing separate functional phases during each 100-300 msec cycle, consistent with physiological data. In the model, effective encoding of new associations occurs in the phase when synaptic input from entorhinal cortex is strong and long-term potentiation (LTP) of excitatory connections arising from hippocampal region CA3 is strong, but synaptic currents arising from region CA3 input are weak (to prevent interference from prior learned associations). Retrieval of old associations occurs in the phase when entorhinal input is weak and synaptic input from region CA3 is strong, but when depotentiation occurs at synapses from CA3 (to allow extinction of prior learned associations that do not match current input). These phasic changes require that LTP at synapses arising from region CA3 should be strongest at the phase when synaptic transmission at these synapses is weakest. Consistent with these requirements, our recent data show that synaptic transmission in stratum radiatum is weakest at the positive peak of local theta, which is when previous data show that induction of LTP is strongest in this layer.
Inside Reflexive Management Learning in the Workplace: An Ethnographic Study

This thesis generates new insights and understandings of the concept of reflexive management learning (RML). To date, most scholarship has taken the form of prescriptive theory suggesting what RML should be and should mean for managers and organisations. In the main, however, RML remains empirically under-theorised and as a result rather detached from real world contexts and from the practitioners that would constitute its intended learning audience. This thesis helps to rebalance the scholarly scales by presenting the results of a two-year reflexive insider’s ethnographic study of RML in the Irish subsidiary of a services industry MNC. This heretofore unavailable methodological vantage point provides a novel perspective on RML which elucidates its highly contextualised character. The concern here has been to make managerial voice in RML clearer and more pronounced. Doing this highlights the need for more political reflexivity in RML theorising: defined as the adequate recognition of the complex role of context in RML and the accompanying need to direct this learning approach towards practice-based concerns which matter to the managers involved, without allowing its inherently critical character to be unduly censored by contact with the organisational status quo. The key findings of this thesis report on how challenging RML is as told through the experiences of the managers involved. But these experiences also portray something which has been less prominent in previous empirical work: RML’s promise-laden potential and despite the difficulties and risks involved, paradoxically even because of them, its ability to translate into reflexive action attempted beyond the learning space. These findings led to, and are articulated in this thesis through, a new theoretical framework for RML which also draws from the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt. Titled the ‘Reflexive Space of Appearance’, this new spatial and political theoretical framework provides RML with a much needed theory of action, or praxis, which can make new contributions to scholarship and practice.
Incorporating Concomitant Medications into Genome-Wide Analyses for the Study of Complex Disease and Drug Response

Given the high costs of conducting a drug-response trial, researchers are now aiming to use retrospective analyses to conduct genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to identify underlying genetic contributions to drug-response variation. To prevent confounding results from a GWAS to investigate drug response, it is necessary to account for concomitant medications, defined as any medication taken concurrently with the primary medication being investigated. We use data from the Action to Control Cardiovascular Disease (ACCORD) trial in order to implement a novel scoring procedure for incorporating concomitant medication information into a linear regression model in preparation for GWAS. In order to accomplish this, two primary medications were selected: thiazolidinediones and metformin because of the wide-spread use of these medications and large sample sizes available within the ACCORD trial. A third medication, fenofibrate, along with a known confounding medication, statin, were chosen as a proof-of-principle for the scoring procedure. Previous studies have identified SNP rs7412 as being associated with statin response. Here we hypothesize that including the score for statin as a covariate in the GWAS model will correct for confounding of statin and yield a change in association at rs7412. The response of the confounded signal was successfully diminished from p = 3.19 × 10−7 to p = 1.76 × 10−5, by accounting for statin using the scoring procedure presented here. This approach provides the ability for researchers to account for concomitant medications in complex trial designs where monotherapy treatment regimens are not available.
Integration of an EEG biomarker with a clinician's ADHD evaluation

This study is the first to evaluate an assessment aid for attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) according to both Class‐I evidence standards of American Academy of Neurology and De Novo requirements of US Food and Drug Administration. The assessment aid involves a method to integrate an electroencephalographic (EEG) biomarker, theta/beta ratio (TBR), with a clinician's ADHD evaluation. The integration method is intended as a step to help improve certainty with criterion E (i.e., whether symptoms are better explained by another condition).
Spatial compounding and segmentation of volumetric ultrasound data sets for generating interactive anatomic models

Surgical procedures guided by non-optical imaging represent a growing proportion of medical interventions. The goal of this type of approach is to reduce the invasiveness of current procedures or to treat disease using new procedures which would not possible without the assistance of medical imaging. The field of cardiac surgery represents a medical subspecialty where image-guided interventions could markedly improve current treatment methods. In particular, all surgical procedures performed inside the heart require the use of cardiopulmonary bypass and cardiac arrest even when performing these procedures using "minimally invasive" techniques. Side effects of this bypass process range from a mild inflammatory response to multi-organ dysfunction. This thesis investigates the use of real time 3-D ultrasound (US) for possibly guiding surgical procedures inside the heart without using cardiopulmonary bypass. In a series of in vivo studies in an animal model and an in vitro tank study, the limitations of both 2-D US and 3-D US for guiding surgical tasks were systematically identified. These initial studies confirmed the inadequacy of 2-D US for guiding complicated surgical maneuvers and verified the utility of real time 3-D US for efficiently guiding both basic and more complex surgical tasks. However, several important problems with using US for guiding surgical procedures were identified. First, because the surgeon is entirely dependent upon the US image for instrument positioning, additional safety measures are required to prevent inadvertent injuries. In addressing this problem, a computationally efficient active contour segmentation model was applied to the volumetric US images. This algorithm (developed recently by Perrin at the University of Minnesota) proved sufficiently fast to keep pace with the volumetric US data stream with good accuracy. Thus, this approach can be applied to establish a "virtual fixture" inside the heart wall during these surgical procedures to prevent injuries. Another significant problem present during US guided procedures (2-D and 3-D) involves maintaining spatial orientation. With 3-D US-guided procedures, the image affords sufficient spatial cues to guide the procedure once the tools are within the imaging field of view. However, guiding the tools into view and keeping them there proves quite challenging. In addition, maintaining orientation relative to known anatomic landmarks during the procedure also proves challenging. To address these problems, a spatially compounded US image of the heart was produced and a graphical model was registered to this data set. Such a registered graphical model could be used as a navigational aid for the surgeon during image-guided procedures inside the beating heart. Thesis Supervisor: Derek Rowell Title: Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Part-of-Speech Tagging and Chunking in Text-to-Speech Synthesis for South African Languages

Presented in: Interspeech 2016, San Francisco, United States of America, 9 - 12 September 2016. 'For any article published in Interspeech proceedings, ISCA grants each author permission to use the article in that author's dissertation or in institutional repositories (paper and/or electronic versions), provided that the article is correctly referenced (including page numbers and/or paper number)'
Within-Die Gate Delay Variability Measurement Using Reconfigurable Ring Oscillator

We report the design and characterization of a circuit technique to measure the on-chip delay of an individual logic gate (both inverting and noninverting) in its unmodified form. The test circuit comprises of digitally reconfigurable ring oscillator (RO). The gate under test is embedded in each stage of the ring oscillator. A system of linear equations is then formed with different configuration settings of the RO, relating the individual gate delay to the measured period of the RO, whose solution gives the delay of the individual gates. Experimental results from a test chip in 65-nm process node show the feasibility of measuring the delay of an individual inverter to within 1 ps accuracy. Delay measurements of different nominally identical inverters in close physical proximity show variations of up to 28% indicating the large impact of local variations. As a demonstration of this technique, we have studied delay variation with poly-pitch, length of diffusion (LOD) and different orientations of layout in silicon. The proposed technique is quite suitable for early process characterization, monitoring mature process in manufacturing and correlating model-to-hardware.
Development and Perinatal Risk Factors of Very Low-Birthweight-Infants. Small Versus Appropriate for Gestational Age

371 long-term surviving very low-birth-weight (VLBW) infants born between July 1983 and June 1986 with a birthweight under 1501 g were followed-up. This sample amounted to 91% of such infants of six neonatal intensive care units in Hamburg (Germany). A neurological examination and a developmental evaluation using the Griffith Developmental Scale were carried out at the age of 18 to 20 months, corrected for gestational age. Ninety-six of the 371 infants were small for gestational age (SGA), 275 appropriate for gestational age (AGA). Striking differences between these two groups were found concerning perinatal risk factors and neurological outcome. Maternal risk factors associated with intrauterine growth retardation such as maternal toxemia and signs of fetal stress were found in a high percentage of the mothers of SGA-children, factors associated with premature labor and chorioamnionitis in mothers of AGA-children. Cerebral palsy was detected in only 7% of the SGA-children but 17.5% of the AGA-children. The difference in the development of cerebral palsy was attributed mainly to different postconceptual ages of the SGA- and AGA-children. In general, minor neurological abnormalities were detected in as many as 30% of SGA- and only 15.3% of AGA-children. None of the SGA-children over 33 weeks of gestational age developed cerebral palsy, but 25% minor neurological abnormalities. As to cerebral palsy the prognosis of SGA-infants with a very low birthweight is not different from AGA-infants with a similar gestational age. Regarding the development of minor neurological abnormalities, however, intrauterine growth retardation seems to be a risk factor independent from gestational age.
Hierarchical interface-based supervisory control-part II: parallel case

In this paper, we present a hierarchical method that decomposes a discrete-event system (DES) into a high-level subsystem which communicates with n/spl ges/1 parallel low-level subsystems, through separate interfaces which restrict the interaction of the subsystems. It is a generalization of the serial case (n=1) described in Part I of this paper, where we define an interface and a set of interface consistency properties that can be used to verify if a DES is nonblocking and controllable. Each clause of the definition can be verified using a single subsystem; thus the complete system model never needs to be stored in memory, offering potentially significant savings in computational resources. We provide algorithms for verifying these new properties, and briefly discuss the computational complexity of the method. Finally, we present an application to a large manufacturing example with an estimated worst-case closed-loop state-space size of 2.9/spl times/10/sup 21/.
Sputum eosinophilia can predict responsiveness to inhaled corticosteroid treatment in patients with overlap syndrome of COPD and asthma

Background Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma may overlap and converge in older people (overlap syndrome). It was hypothesized that patients with overlap syndrome may have different clinical characteristics such as sputum eosinophilia, and better responsiveness to treatment with inhaled corticosteroid (ICS). Methods Sixty-three patients with stable COPD (forced expiratory volume in 1 second [FEV1] ≤80%) underwent pulmonary function tests, including reversibility of airflow limitation, arterial blood gas analysis, analysis of inflammatory cells in induced sputum, and chest high-resolution computed tomography. The inclusion criteria for COPD patients with asthmatic symptoms included having asthmatic symptoms such as episodic breathlessness, wheezing, cough, and chest tightness worsening at night or in the early morning (COPD with asthma group). The clinical features of COPD patients with asthmatic symptoms were compared with those of COPD patients without asthmatic symptoms (COPD without asthma group). Results The increases in FEV1 in response to treatment with ICS were significantly higher in the COPD with asthma group. The peripheral eosinophil counts and sputum eosinophil counts were significantly higher. The prevalence of patients with bronchial wall thickening on chest high-resolution computed tomography was significantly higher. A significant correlation was observed between the increases in FEV1 in response to treatment with ICS and sputum eosinophil counts, and between the increases in FEV1 in response to treatment with ICS and the grade of bronchial wall thickening. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis revealed 82.4% sensitivity and 84.8% specificity of sputum eosinophil count for detecting COPD with asthma, using 2.5% as the cutoff value. Conclusion COPD patients with asthmatic symptoms had some clinical features. ICS should be considered earlier as a potential treatment in such patients. High sputum eosinophil counts and bronchial wall thickening on chest high-resolution computed tomography might therefore be a good predictor of response to ICS.
Some MCMC Applications in Time Series Analysis

1 Markov chain simulation Consider an inference problem with parameter vector θ and data X, where θ ∈ Θ, the parameter space. To make inference, we need to know the distribution P (θ|X). The idea of Markov chain simulation is to simulate a Markov process on Θ, which converges to a stationary transition distribution that is P (θ|X). The key to Markov chain simulation is to create a Markov process whose stationary transition distribution is a specified P (θ|X) and run the simulation sufficiently long so that the distribution of the current values of the process is close enough to the stationary transition distribution. In other words, the values of the process can be regarded as random draws from the transition distribution. It turns out that, for a given P (θ|X), many Markov chains with the desired property can be constructed. We refer to methods that use Markov chain simulation to obtain the distribution P (θ|X) as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. The development of MCMC methods took place in various forms in the statistical literature. Consider the problem of " missing value " in data analysis. Most statistical methods discussed in this course were developed under the assumption of " complete data " (i.e., there is no missing value). For example, in forecasting U.S. quarterly unemployment rates, we assume that the unemployment rates are available for each quarter in the sample period What should we do if there is a missing value? Dempster, Laird, and Rubin (1977) suggest an iterative method called the EM algorithm to solve the problem. The method consists of two steps. First, if the missing value were available, then we could use methods of complete-data analysis to build a time series model for the unemployment rates. Second, given the available data and the fitted model, we can derive the statistical distribution of the missing value. A simple way to fill in the missing value is to use the conditional expectation of the derived distribution of the missing value. In practice, one can start the method with an arbitrary value for the missing value and iterate the procedure for many many times until convergence. The first step of the prior procedure involves performing the maximum likelihood estimation of a specified model and is called the M-step. The second step is to compute the conditional expectation of the missing value and is called the E-step. Tanner …
A hidden history of heartburn: The milk-alkali syndrome

Milk-alkali syndrome was once considered to be of historic interest and a rare cause of hypercalcemia. Currently, it should be an important consideration in the differential diagnosis of hypercalcemia, after malignancies and primary hyperparathyroidism. The resurgence is in part due to the easy availability of over the counter (OTC) calcium preparations. We describe a 50-year-old man who presented with severe hypercalcemia on two occasions associated with renal failure and metabolic alkalosis. Extensive investigations during the first admission failed to unravel a specific cause of hypercalcemia but a thorough history during his subsequent admission helped to confirm the diagnosis of milk-alkali syndrome.