Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Head First into Serious Health Gaming - a2e2 as a New Approach of Digital Exercise Coaching for Seniors

With the development of an Adaptive Ambient Empowerment tool for the Elderly (a2e2) a group of technicians and media psychologists confront the challenge to change habituated unhealthy life styles. The main goal is to increase physical activity in seniors who are at risk of acquiring or are already suffering from chronic diseases. The a2e2 system incorporates exergames and applies a daily structure by using a digital coach. Several psychological processes must be taken into account if the system wants to stand a chance to achieve the behavioral change it wishes to mould into a healthier lifestyle. From the perspective of Self-Determination Theory, competence, autonomy and relatedness need to be addressed in order to achieve well-being. Intentional modes of self-regulation to achieve well-being often fail. However, implicit self-regulation offers new opportunities that are especially suited to apply in a gaming environment. Research has already shown that a virtual coach and a virtual environment can support positive results concerning interaction with the system and physical activities. Since the available research is still sparse elaborate pilot studies are required. This paper presents a short overview of the core psychological concepts guiding the development of a2e2. Adaptive Ambient Empowerment of the Elderly (a2e2), Media Psychology, exergames, behavioral change, self-regulation This paper provides a concise overview of the psychological theories and assumptions we believe should be guiding the development of a serious health game and its virtual environment. We exemplify our approach in introducing a2e2, an ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) solution for the adaptive ambient empowerment of the elderly (www.a2e2.eu). which is currently being developed with funding from the AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) Joint Program. The system is build around a virtual coach who guides through life style changes in order to prevent and manage chronic diseases in individuals who are at least 55 years old.
Impact of pramlintide on glucose fluctuations and postprandial glucose, glucagon, and triglyceride excursions among patients with type 1 diabetes intensively treated with insulin pumps.

OBJECTIVE To assess the effects of adjunctive treatment with pramlintide, an analog of the beta-cell hormone amylin, on 24-h glucose fluctuations and postprandial glucose, glucagon, and triglyceride excursions in patients with type 1 diabetes intensively treated with continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS In this study, 18 patients (16 of whom could be evaluated) with type 1 diabetes (age 44 +/- 11 years, HbA(1c) 8.2 +/- 1.3% [mean +/- SD]) were given mealtime injections of 30 micro g pramlintide t.i. d. for 4 weeks in addition to their preexisting CSII regimen (16 lispro, 2 regular insulin). Mealtime insulin boluses were reduced by a minimum of 10% during the first 3 days, and re-adjusted thereafter based on clinical judgment. At weeks 0 (baseline), 4 (on treatment), and 6 (2 weeks off treatment), 24-h interstitial glucose concentrations were measured using a continuous glucose monitoring system (CGMS), and postprandial plasma glucose, glucagon, and triglyceride concentrations were measured in response to a standardized test meal. RESULTS At baseline, patients had excessive 24-h glucose fluctuations, with 59% of the CGMS measurements >140 mg/dl, 13% <80 mg/dl, and only 28% in the euglycemic range (80-140 mg/dl). After 4 weeks on pramlintide, measurements in the hyperglycemic range declined to 48% and measurements within the euglycemic range increased to 37%. This shift from the hyperglycemic to the euglycemic range occurred with a concomitant 17% reduction in mealtime insulin dosages and without relevant increases in measurements below the euglycemic range (15%) or any severe hypoglycemic events. After 4 weeks on pramlintide, postprandial glucose, glucagon, and triglyceride excursions were reduced by approximately 86, approximately 87, and approximately 72%, respectively (incremental areas under the curve, all P < 0.05 vs. baseline). At week 6 (off treatment), the 24-h glucose profile and postprandial glucose, glucagon, and triglyceride excursions approached pretreatment values. CONCLUSIONS In this study, the addition of pramlintide to insulin therapy reduced excessive 24-h glucose fluctuations as well as postprandial glucose, glucagon, and triglyceride excursions in patients with type 1 diabetes intensively treated with insulin pumps.
Performance Analysis of QOS-aware Resource Scheduling Strategies in LTE Femtocell Networks

OFDMA based-Long-term evolution (LTE) femtocells represent a very promising answer to the ever rising bandwidth demand of mobile applications. Femtocells, standardised as HeNBs, are end user deployed network nodes for indoor environment with a network backhaul provided by the digital subscriber line (DSL) or cable modem. The base station called as Femtocell Access Point can be easily deployed in adhoc manner. Femtocells improve the coverage in indoor scenarios and provide better user experience, thereby increasing the network capacity. Resource allocation strategies play a key role in distributing radio resources among different stations, with fine time and frequency resolutions by taking into consideration the channel conditions as well as QoS requirements. The present paper provides performance comparisons of radio resource scheduling strategies such as Proportional-Fair (PF), Modified Largest Weighted Delay First (MLWDF), Exponential Rule, Exponential/PF (EXP/PF), LOG Rule and Frame Level Scheduler (FLS) with stress on QoS provisioning capabilities in the context of heterogeneous urban scenario with both macro and femtocells. Keywords— LTE, OFDMA, Femtocells, Heterogeneous Networks, QOS, Downlink Scheduling, Radio-Resource Management
Introduction of local memory elements in instruction set extensions

Automatic generation of Instruction Set Extensions (ISEs), to be executed on a custom processing unit or a coprocessor is an important step towards processor customization. A typical goal of a manual designer is to combine a large number of atomic instructions into an ISE satisfying microarchitectural constraints. However, memory operations pose a challenge for previous ISE approaches by limiting the size of the resulting instruction. In this paper, we introduce memory elements into custom units which result in ISEs closer to those sought after by the designers. We consider two kinds of memory elements for mapping to the specialized hardware: small hardware tables and architecturally-visible state registers. We devised a genetic algorithm to specifically exploit opportunities of introducing memory elements during ISE generation. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by a detailed study of the variation in performance, area and energy in the presence of the generated ISEs, on a number of MediaBench, EEMBC and cryptographic applications. With the introduction of memory, the average speedup varied from 2.7X to 5X depending on the architectural configuration with a nominal area overhead. Moreover, we obtained an average energy reduction of 26% with respect to a 32-KB cache.
Fixed Binning Schemes for Channel and Source Coding Problems : An Operational Duality

We explore the connection between channel and source coding problems. Our study centers on the class of binning schemes that characterize the largest known achievable rates for channel and source coding problems with partial side information and multiterminal scenarios. The binning scheme can be viewed as a set of bins with each bin forming a channel code (with error probability 22) and set of all the codewords in the bins forms an overall channel code (with error probability 21). Our main result is a characterization of the performance of deterministic binning schemes for the channel and source coding problems solely as a function of the error probabilities 21, 22. This characterization shows the role of the two error probabilities to be reversed for the channel and source coding problems and suggests an operational duality between the two problems with respect to binning schemes. The algorithmic implications on constructing binning schemes are also discussed.
Time-Dependent Theory of the Rate of Photo-induced Electron Transfer

A novel approach based on constrained real-time time-dependent density functional theory (C-RT-TDDFT) is introduced to accurately evaluate the electronic Hamiltonian coupling associated with photoinduced electron transfer (PIET) using diabatic states that are defined using constrained DFT (C-DFT). In combination with the semiclassical Marcus theory, the photoexcited ET rate for coherently coupled photoexcitation and electron transfer is determined for a given incident wavelength by combining this Hamiltonian coupling with free energy changes and ground state reorganization energies that are obtained using an implicit solvation model. As an application of this method, we consider PIET for the (Ag20–Ag)+ complex as a model of a plasmon-enhanced electron transfer process. Using solar radiation intensity, the fastest PIET rate is found to be induced by an incident wavelength that is distinct (blue-shifted) from the wavelength of strongest plasmon-like excitation associated with the Ag20+ cluster, particularly.
Schema-driven facilitation of new hierarchy learning in the transitive inference paradigm

Prior knowledge, in the form of a mental schema or framework, is viewed to facilitate the learning of new information in a range of experimental and everyday scenarios. Despite rising interest in the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying schema-driven facilitation of new learning, few paradigms have been developed to examine this issue in humans. Here we develop a multiphase experimental scenario aimed at characterizing schema-based effects in the context of a paradigm that has been very widely used across species, the transitive inference task. We show that an associative schema, comprised of prior knowledge of the rank positions of familiar items in the hierarchy, has a marked effect on transitivity performance and the development of relational knowledge of the hierarchy that cannot be accounted for by more general changes in task strategy. Further, we show that participants are capable of deploying prior knowledge to successful effect under surprising conditions (i.e., when corrective feedback is totally absent), but only when the associative schema is robust. Finally, our results provide insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying such schema-driven effects, and suggest that new hierarchy learning in the transitive inference task can occur through a contextual transfer mechanism that exploits the structure of associative experiences.
Recent Observations on Australian Bat Lyssavirus Tropism and Viral Entry

Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV) is a recently emerged rhabdovirus of the genus lyssavirus considered endemic in Australian bat populations that causes a neurological disease in people indistinguishable from clinical rabies. There are two distinct variants of ABLV, one that circulates in frugivorous bats (genus Pteropus) and the other in insectivorous microbats (genus Saccolaimus). Three fatal human cases of ABLV infection have been reported, the most recent in 2013, and each manifested as acute encephalitis but with variable incubation periods. Importantly, two equine cases also arose recently in 2013, the first occurrence of ABLV in a species other than bats or humans. Similar to other rhabdoviruses, ABLV infects host cells through receptor-mediated endocytosis and subsequent pH-dependent fusion facilitated by its single fusogenic envelope glycoprotein (G). Recent studies have revealed that proposed rabies virus (RABV) receptors are not sufficient to permit ABLV entry into host cells and that the unknown receptor is broadly conserved among mammalian species. However, despite clear tropism differences between ABLV and RABV, the two viruses appear to utilize similar endocytic entry pathways. The recent human and horse infections highlight the importance of continued Australian public health awareness of this emerging pathogen.
An Energy-Saving Algorithm for Energy Expenditure Estimation with a Smartphone Sensor Based Approach: a Contribution to the Mobility Measurement in e-Health

Cet article presente une nouvelle fonction de prediction de la depense energetique totale (DET) a partir de donnees collectees par les accelerometres des smartphones. Notre ambition est de proposer une solution econome en batterie et independante de la position initiale du smartphone. Six volontaires âges de 25 ans en moyenne, hautement diplomes, ont porte un smartphone dans une poche avant du pantalon et un brassard Armband pendant une journee de travail au bureau. La qualite de la fonction a ete evaluee en comparant les ecarts de depense energetique totale entre la fonction et le Armband. En conditions habituelles de vie, l'ecart moyen est inferieur a 15%. Le travail realise ici est une premiere etape dans la definition d'une fonction de prediction qui soit adaptee a l'ensemble de la population Francaise. Nos travaux portent actuellement sur la generalisation de nos propositions a un echantillon plus large de la population.
Fractional frequency reuse for irregular geometry based heterogeneous cellular networks

Indoor coverage and capacity are the major limitations of the current cellular systems. In such perspective, femtocells deployment has attracted considerable interest. However, the random and co-channel deployment of femtocells poses severe interference management challenges, especially at the cell edges. Recently, Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) has emerged an attractive technique for co-tier and cross-tier interference in multi-tier cellular deployment. However, most of the previous work analyzes the performance of FFR for perfect cell geometry models. Applying regular resource of the standard FFR scheme to the realistic cellular networks with high irregularity in the cell geometry and channel conditions leads to sub-optimal performance. In this paper we investigate the performance of FFR for two-tier cellular network based on irregular cell geometry. To capture the realistic network scenario the position of Macro Base Stations (MBSs) and Femto Base Station (FBSs) are modeled with Hard Core Point Process (HCPP) and Poisson Point Process (PPP) respectively. Furthermore, Sectored-FFR scheme with optimal sub-band allocation is proposed in this paper and the capacity of the system is evaluated. Simulation results show that the proposed Sectored-FFR scheme outperforms the conventional FFR schemes in terms of throughput and capacity.
Zero-Forcing Precoding for the MIMO Broadcast Channel under Per-Antenna Power Constraints

We consider the downlink transmission of a wireless communication system where M antennas transmit independent information to a subset of K users, each equipped with a single antenna. The Shannon capacity of this MIMO broadcast channel (MIMO-BC) can be achieved using a non-linear preceding technique known as dirty paper coding (DPC) which is difficult to implement in practice. Motivated to study simpler transmission techniques, we focus on a linear precoding technique based on the zero-forcing (ZF) algorithm. In contrast to the typical sum power constraint (SPC), we consider a per-antenna power constraint (PAPC) motivated both by current antenna array designs where each antenna is powered by a separate amplifier and by future wireless networks where spatially separated antennas transmit cooperatively to users. We show that the problem of power allocation for maximizing the weighted sum rate under ZF with PAPC is a constrained convex optimization problem that can be solved using conventional numerical optimization techniques. For the special case of two users, we find an analytic solution based on waterfilling techniques. For the case where the number of users increases without bound, we show that ZF with PAPC is asymptotically optimal in the sense that the ratio of the expected sum-rate capacities between ZF with PAPC and DPC with SPC approaches one. We also show how the results can be generalized for multiple frequency bands and for a hybrid power constraint. Finally, we provide numerical results that show ZF with PAPC achieves a significant fraction of the optimum DPC sum-rate capacity in practical cases where K is bounded
Barcelona Economics Working Paper Series the Return of the Wage Phillips Curve the Return of the Wage Phillips Curve

The standard New Keynesian model with staggered wage setting is shown to imply a simple dynamic relation between wage in ‡ation and unemployment. Under some assumptions, that relation takes a form similar to that found in empirical wage equations–starting from Phillips' (1958) original work–and may thus be viewed as providing some theoretical foundations to the latter. The structural wage equation derived here is shown to account reasonably well for the comove-ment of wage in ‡ation and the unemployment rate in the U.S. economy , even under the strong assumption of a constant natural rate of unemployment.
Implementation of a clothoid based trajectory into the ROS framework

In order to achieve a continous lateral acceleration profile for moving objects - like robots - clothoids as a part of the pathplanning are important. This paper describes the implementation of a local planning algorithm for a partly autonomnous wheelchair with clothoids as integral part. Further the integration into the ROS framework as main aspects of the development and limitations of the algorithm are detailed. Finally, simulation results of a comparison between the developed algorithm and the default algorithm provided by the ROS framework are shown.
In vivo deletion analysis of the herpes simplex virus type 1 latency-associated transcript promoter

During herpes simplex virus latency, transcripts accumulate from a single transcription unit of the viral genome. The promoter for these latency-associated transcripts (LAT) has been located, and a number of studies have documented the specific regions of this promoter which are important in transient assays of neuronal cells in culture. To examine the regulation of this promoter from the viral genome, both in vitro and in vivo, a series of seven promoter deletion viruses which drive the expression of the reporter gene beta-galactosidase was constructed. Rabbit skin cells were infected in cell culture with viruses bearing each promoter mutation, and the LAT promoter activity was compared with that obtained by infecting two neuronal cell lines, ND7 cells and C1300 neuroblastoma cells. Mouse dorsal root ganglia were also infected with these recombinant viruses by footpad inoculations, and beta-galactosidase activity was measured. Infected neuronal cells lines and dorsal root ganglia exhibit much more LAT promoter activity than infected rabbit skin cells, suggesting that the region upstream of -250 may contain one or several neuronal specific DNA-binding sites. However, a comparison of LAT promoter activities within the deletion series revealed many differences between neurons of the dorsal root ganglia infected in vivo and the two neuronal cell lines infected in vitro. These results suggest that neurons may vary extensively in the quantity or kind of transcription factors they contain.
Minimum audible movement angles as a function of sound source trajectory.

Auditory resolution of moving sound sources was determined in a simulated motion paradigm for sources traveling along horizontal, vertical, or oblique orientations in the subjects's frontal plane. With motion restricted to the horizontal orientation, minimum audible movement angles (MAMA) ranged from about 1.7 degrees at the lowest velocity (1.8 degrees/s) to roughly 10 degrees at the highest velocity (320 degrees/s). With the sound moving along an oblique orientation (rotated 45 degrees relative to the horizontal) MAMAs generally matched those of the horizontal condition. When motion was restricted to the vertical, MAMAs were substantially larger at all velocities (often exceeding 8 degrees). Subsequent tests indicated that MAMAs are a U-shaped function of velocity, with optimum resolution obtained at about 2 degrees/s for the horizontal (and oblique) and 7-11 degrees/s for the vertical orientation. Additional tests conducted at a fixed velocity of 1.8 degrees/s along oblique orientations of 80 degrees and 87 degrees indicated that even a small deviation from the vertical had a significant impact on MAMAs. A displacement of 10 degrees from the vertical orientation (a slope of 80 degrees) was sufficient to reduce thresholds (obtained at a velocity of 1.8 degrees/s) from about 11 degrees to approximately 2 degrees (a fivefold increase in acuity). These results are in good agreement with our previous study of minimum audible angles long oblique planes [Perrott and Saberi, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 87, 1728-1731 (1990)]. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Effects of the players’ level and age group category on positional tactical behaviour during 7- and 8-a-side football youth games

ABSTRACT This study was designed to explore the effects of players’ level and age group on positional tactical behaviour during 7- and 8-a-side football games. A total of 280 youth players from 11 Spanish under 12 football teams participated in 22 games. The players’ positional data were gathered and several pitch position-derived variables were computed for the team in possession. The level of the players (i.e. regional vs. local), age group (under 11 vs. under 12) and game format were used as factors. The results showed that most skilled and older players were more efficient in covering the available space in both game scenarios while in the offensive phase, what may suggest higher tactical awareness. These findings show that players may face different tactical problems during 7- and 8-a-side formats promoting adaptations in their dynamical positioning. Overall, specific features of these factors need to be considered to better design football learning programmes.
Computation of Texture and Stereoscopic Depth in Humans

Abstract : The computation of texture and of stereoscopic depth is limited by the eyes and by the subsequent stage of visual system in humans, and by the quality of the optical 'front end' as well as by the computational hard- and software in machines. The quality of the optics and the resolution of the opto- electronic transducer (e.g. the retina) limit spatial resolution, and , consequently, the discrimination of textures. In stereoscopic depth, thresholds far below the grain of the input-device (in humans: the photoreceptor diameter) can be attained. This extreme accuracy in locating a stimulus, called hyperacuity, is due to interpolation between the positions of the input elements, such as the photoreceptors in humans. Interpolation is most likely a feat achieved by the visual cortex, depending on a good signal-to-noise ratio of the stimulus representation. Again, resolution and contrast modulation are critical factors.
Using TAM model to empirically examine students' attitudes towards e-services in college of business administration

Article history: Received: December 18, 2018 Received in revised format: February 12, 2019 Accepted: February 14, 2019 Available online: February 14, 2019 This study examines the relationships between Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness with actual use of E-Services among 189 students from College of Business Administration (CBA) at Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University (PSAU) for the academic year 2017/2018. Using a survey-based methodology based on TAM perceptive, the results show that Perceived Ease for Use (PEU) and Perceived Usefulness (PU) had positive associations with Actual Use (AU) of E-Services among CBA students. Thus, the result of this study supports the prediction of TAM theory. The results of this study should be useful to educational policy makers in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and elsewhere, as there is an opportunity of enhancing the E-Services in the academic context.