Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Temporal Trends in the Characteristics of Children at Antiretroviral Therapy Initiation in Southern Africa: The IeDEA-SA Collaboration

Background Since 2005, increasing numbers of children have started antiretroviral therapy (ART) in sub-Saharan Africa and, in recent years, WHO and country treatment guidelines have recommended ART initiation for all infants and very young children, and at higher CD4 thresholds for older children. We examined temporal changes in patient and regimen characteristics at ART start using data from 12 cohorts in 4 countries participating in the IeDEA-SA collaboration. Methodology/Principal Findings Data from 30,300 ART-naïve children aged <16 years at ART initiation who started therapy between 2005 and 2010 were analysed. We examined changes in median values for continuous variables using the Cuzick's test for trend over time. We also examined changes in the proportions of patients with particular disease severity characteristics (expressed as a binary variable e.g. WHO Stage III/IV vs I/II) using logistic regression. Between 2005 and 2010 the number of children starting ART each year increased and median age declined from 63 months (2006) to 56 months (2010). Both the proportion of children <1 year and ≥10 years of age increased from 12 to 19% and 18 to 22% respectively. Children had less severe disease at ART initiation in later years with significant declines in the percentage with severe immunosuppression (81 to 63%), WHO Stage III/IV disease (75 to 62%), severe anemia (12 to 7%) and weight-for-age z-score<−3 (31 to 28%). Similar results were seen when restricting to infants with significant declines in the proportion with severe immunodeficiency (98 to 82%) and Stage III/IV disease (81 to 63%). First-line regimen use followed country guidelines. Conclusions/Significance Between 2005 and 2010 increasing numbers of children have initiated ART with a decline in disease severity at start of therapy. However, even in 2010, a substantial number of infants and children started ART with advanced disease. These results highlight the importance of efforts to improve access to HIV diagnostic testing and ART in children.
An insight into the security issues and their solutions for android phones

Use of mobile commerce for conducting commercial transactions online is increasing rapidly. A wide range of wireless devices which includes mobile phones, tablets provide an easier way for mobile payments and M-commerce. Risk associated with such devices such as loss of private information is also increasing. The basic requirement for using secure M-Commerce application is a secure mobile operating system. Without a security feature or secure application on the device, it is not possible to have secure Mobile-transaction. Among many operating system used for mobile devices, android operating systems are widely used. Though android Systems are good in memory management they are also vulnerable to security attacks. Such security attacks make the phone unusable, cause unwanted SMS/MMS (short message service/multimedia messaging service) billing, or expose private information. There are two doors for attacker to attack a smart phone. The first is to get users to download, install, and run software that contain unethical codes such as virus, worms etc. and the other is to attack device directly by using software vulnerabilities. This paper presents security assessment for android with an overview of security architecture for android. The Paper also list various threats to android devices and there countermeasures.
Performance Benchmarking of Fast Multipole Methods

Performance Benchmarking of Fast Multipole Methods Noha Ahmed Al-Harthi The current trends in computer architecture are shifting towards smaller byte/flop ratios, while available parallelism is increasing at all levels of granularity – vector length, core count, and MPI process. Intel’s Xeon Phi coprocessor, NVIDIA’s Kepler GPU, and IBM’s BlueGene/Q all have a Byte/flop ratio close to 0.2, which makes it very difficult for most algorithms to extract a high percentage of the theoretical peak flop/s from these architectures. Popular algorithms in scientific computing such as FFT are continuously evolving to keep up with this trend in hardware. In the meantime it is also necessary to invest in novel algorithms that are more suitable for computer architectures of the future. The fast multipole method (FMM) was originally developed as a fast algorithm for approximating the N-body interactions that appear in astrophysics, molecular dynamics, and vortex based fluid dynamics simulations. The FMM possesses have a unique combination of being an efficient O(N) algorithm, while having an operational intensity that is higher than a matrix-matrix multiplication. In fact, the FMM can reduce the requirement of Byte/flop to around 0.01, which means that it will remain compute bound until 2020 even if the current trend in microprocessors continues. Despite these advantages, there have not been any benchmarks of FMM codes on modern architectures such as Xeon Phi, Kepler, and BlueGene/Q. This study aims to provide a comprehensive benchmark of a state of the art FMM code “exaFMM” on the latest architectures, in hopes of providing a useful reference for deciding when the FMM will become useful as the computational engine in a given application code. It
Multiarmed Bandit Problems with Delayed Feedback

In this paper we initiate the study of optimization of bandit type problems in scenarios where the feedback of a play is not immediately known. This arises naturally in allocation problems which have been studied extensively in the literature, albeit in the absence of delays in the feedback. We study this problem in the Bayesian setting. In presence of delays, no solution with provable guarantees is known to exist with sub-exponential running time. We show that bandit problems with delayed feedback that arise in allocation settings can be forced to have significant structure, with a slight loss in optimality. This structure gives us the ability to reason about the relationship of single arm policies to the entangled optimum policy, and eventually leads to a O(1) approximation for a significantly general class of priors. The structural insights we develop are of key interest and carry over to the setting where the feedback of an action is available instantaneously, and we improve all previous results in this setting as well.
Mixed Reality Tabletop (MRT): A Low-Cost Teleconferencing Framework for Mixed-Reality Applications

Today’s technology enables a rich set of virtual and mixedreality applications and provides a degree of connectivity and interactivity beyond that of traditional teleconferencing scenarios. In this paper, we present the Mixed-Reality Tabletop (MRT), an example of a teleconferencing framework for networked mixed reality in which real and virtual worlds coexist and users can focus on the task instead of computer interaction. For example, students could use real-world objects to participate in physical simulations such as orbital motion, collisions, and fluid flow in a common virtual environment. Our framework isolates the lowlevel system details from the developer and provides a simple programming interface for developing novel applications in as little as a few minutes, using low-cost hardware. We discuss our implementation complete with methods of hand and object tracking, user interface, and example applications focused on remote teaching and learning.
Frequency Following Response: análise de tempo em crianças e adolescentes com histórico de otite média

Introduction: Otitis media (OM) has been considered a major cause of central auditory processing disorder and may have a negative effect on the whole auditory pathway as well as on the central auditory areas. Objectives: To evaluate the Frequency Following Responses in children with a history of otitis media in the first six years of life. Methods: Subjects were divided into three groups: control group (CG) formed by 40 children with no history of otitis media; bilateral study group (BSG) constituted by 50 children with documented history of otitis media who underwent surgery for bilateral insertion of ventilation tubes; and unilateral study group (USG) – formed by children with a documented history of otitis media who were submitted surgery for unilateral insertion of ventilation tubes. All children undergone complete audiological evaluation (audiometry, logoaudiometry and emittance measurement), Brainstem Auditory Evoked Potential with click stimulus – ABR and Frequency Following Response. Results: Both study groups (BSG and USG) presented a statistically lower performance (p <0.005) when compared to the CG for all the electrophysiological tests with the prolongation of the latency values and decrease of the amplitude values. ABR (BSG: latencies waves I, III e V, amplitude waves III e V/ USG: latencies and amplitude – wave III), FFR (BSG: latencies – V, A, C, D, E, F e O, amplitude DOI: 10.17648/sobrac-87109 – V e A (feminine)/USG: latencies – V,A,C,E e O, amplitude: V e A (feminine). Conclusion: The data found in this study demonstrated the negative effects of the otitis media with effusion in the period of childhood on maturation of the auditory pathways. The changes caused by the otitis media with effusion history could be observed throughout the auditory pathway through the Brainstem Auditory Evoked Potential with click stimulus and Frequency Following Responses.
Hydrostatic pressure dependence of FBG inscribed in perfluorinated GI-POF

We investigate the hydrostatic pressure dependence of the Bragg wavelength of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) inscribed in a perfluorinated POF at 1550 nm. At 0.5 MPa, the Bragg wavelength increased with time and became almost constant ~150 min later. The pressure-dependence coefficient without considering the time constant was calculated to be 1.3 nm/MPa, which is over 5 times the values of other types of POF-FBGs. The pressure-dependence coefficient was then measured to be –0.13 nm/MPa, the absolute value of which was comparable to those of other POF-FBGs, but the sign was opposite.
Efficient Algorithms for Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Networks

Neighbor discovery is an important first step in the initialization of a wireless ad hoc network. In this paper, we design and analyze several algorithms for neighbor discovery in wireless networks. Starting with a single-hop wireless network of n nodes, we propose a Θ(nlnn) ALOHA-like neighbor discovery algorithm when nodes cannot detect collisions, and an order-optimal Θ(n) receiver feedback-based algorithm when nodes can detect collisions. Our algorithms neither require nodes to have a priori estimates of the number of neighbors nor synchronization between nodes. Our algorithms allow nodes to begin execution at different time instants and to terminate neighbor discovery upon discovering all their neighbors. We finally show that receiver feedback can be used to achieve a Θ(n) running time, even when nodes cannot detect collisions. We then analyze neighbor discovery in a general multihop setting. We establish an upper bound of O(Δlnn) on the running time of the ALOHA-like algorithm, where Δ denotes the maximum node degree in the network and n the total number of nodes. We also establish a lower bound of Ω(Δ+lnn) on the running time of any randomized neighbor discovery algorithm. Our result thus implies that the ALOHA-like algorithm is at most a factor min(Δ,lnn) worse than optimal.
The shiverer mutation affects the persistence of Theiler's virus in the central nervous system

Theiler's virus persists in the white matter of the spinal cord of genetically susceptible mice and causes primary demyelination. The virus persists in macrophages/microglial cells, but also in oligodendrocytes, the myelin-forming cells. Susceptibility/resistance to this chronic infection has been mapped to several loci including one tentatively located in the telomeric region of chromosome 18, close to the myelin basic protein locus (Mbp locus). To determine if the MBP gene influences viral persistence, we inoculated C3H mice bearing the shiverer mutation, a 20-kb deletion in the gene. Whereas control C3H mice were of intermediate susceptibility, C3H mice heterozygous for the mutation were very susceptible, and those homozygous for the mutation were completely resistant. This resistance was not immune mediated. Furthermore, C3H/101H mice homozygous for a point mutation in the gene coding for the proteolipid protein of myelin, the rumpshaker mutation, were resistant. These results strongly support the view that oligodendrocytes are a necessary viral target for the establishment of a persistent infection by Theiler's virus.
An Objective Evaluation Methodology for Document Image Binarization Techniques

Evaluation of document image binarization techniques is a tedious task that is mainly performedby a human expert or by involving an OCR engine. This paper presents an objective evaluation methodology for document image binarization techniques that aims to reduce the human involvement in the ground truth construction and consecutive testing. A skeletonized ground truth image is produced by the user following a semi-automatic procedure. The estimated ground truth image can aid in evaluating the binarization result in terms of recall and precision as well as to further analyze the result by calculating broken and missing text, deformations and false alarms. A detailed description of the methodology along with a benchmarking of the six (6) most promising state-of-the-art binarization algorithms based on the proposed methodology is presented.
Progenitor Cells in Liver Development, Regeneration and Repair

During organogenesis, the liver develops from the foregut endoderm and grows into the adjacent septum transversum resulting in the formation of the liver bud. Growth factors released from the septum transversum and the cardiac mesenchyme induce endodermal differentiation and proliferation, thus, forming the primordial liver and extrahepatic biliary structures. Endodermal precursor cells within the liver bud comprise bi-potential liver progenitor cells called hepatoblasts, which differentiates into hepatocytes and cholangiocytes. While the postnatal liver has remarkable capacity to regenerate via the proliferation of mature hepatocytes, this compensatory mechanism may be overwhelmed during states of chronic injury. Under these conditions, resident stem/progenitor cells proliferate to replace lost liver parenchyma. Significant progress has been made recently in elucidating the role of various signaling pathways and progenitor cells in liver development and regeneration. In this review, we summarize our recent understanding of progenitor cells in liver development, regeneration and repair.
Power efficient implementation of MVA-SI on speech controlled IoT systems

Speech processing is implemented based on application specific accuracy requirements and regardless of the implementation scheme the ultimate goal remains the same, to enhance speech processing engines up to an extent where natural language can be interpreted accurately in case of word or phoneme recognition and context prediction. ASR training and adaption is always application specific and in the considered application the ASR engine is trained for a power efficient IoT application. The nodes communicate via 802.15. 4 6LoWPAN which makes wireless sound transmission very lightweight and power efficient. MVA-SI is a customized version of i-vector speaker identification algorithm which identifies the speaker with system wake up call. In this paper, the logic and implementation of MVA-SI are discussed in detail along with elaboration of prototype system architecture.
Regulatory roles of benzyl adenine and sucrose during wound response of the ribosomal protein gene, rpL34

We previously reported that a large subunit ribosomal protein gene, rpL34, was wound-inducible in tobacco leaves, and that benzyl adenine (BA) enhanced the wound-inducible expression of the gene. Here we report that the wound-inducible expression of the rpL34 gene is enhanced by sucrose. The regulatory roles of BA and sucrose in wound-signalling pathways were investigated using transgenic plants expressing a fusion molecule between the rpL34 promoter and the chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (cat) gene. Wounding caused a progressive increase in CAT activity; BA and sucrose enhanced the response. This indicates that regulation occurs at the transcriptional level. Diethyldithiocarbamic acid (DIECA) and other potent inhibitors of the octadecanoid pathway inhibited the rpL34 promoter, and also reduced BA inducibility of that wound response. However, inhibitors of the octadecanoid pathway did not affect the sucrose response. Protein kinase inhibitors increased BA enhancement while decreasing the sucrose effect, suggesting that protein kinases differentially regulate BA- and sucrose-signalling in the promoter's wound response. Taken together, BA and sucrose enhanced the wound response of the rpL34 promoter via different signalling pathways, although they exerted overlapping effects on wound-induction of the promoter.
Determining the Feasibility of Forearm Mounted Vibrotactile Displays

At first glance, multi-element forearm mounted vibrotactile displays would appear to have considerable potential as an output device for mobile computing. The devices are small, robust and discrete, and the body site both easily accessible and socially acceptable for such a purpose. However, due to the absence of a thorough account of vibrotactile perception, it is hard to determine their feasibility, or even what might form an appropriate arrangement of vibrating elements or tactors. We describe two studies intended to shed light on these issues. The first extends the localization literature relating to the forearm, and its results indicate that different spatial arrangements of tactors can result in substantially different levels of performance. The second study examines the influence of adjusting the size of the area of the skin experiencing a vibration with its perceived intensity. The results indicate a positive relationship between increased size and increased perceived intensity. Finally, the implications of these studies for the design of vibrotactile arrays are discussed.
Coining a new term-Urovesicology: advancing towards a mechanistic understanding of bladder symptoms

When patients present with lower urinary tract symptoms (urgency, frequency, nocturia, slow stream, hesitancy, sense of incomplete emptying, post-void dribbling), urinary incontinence (stress and urge), urinary retention, dysuria, and/or bladder pain, the urologist would be the most appropriate specialist to evaluate and treat these patients. These symptoms will be collectively labeled as "urovesicologic" symptoms, the reason which will become apparent. Because these symptoms usually have no known cause, empiric (trial-and-error) treatments directed at ameliorating symptoms, but not at the underlying pathophysiology, are the usual recourse.
On Automating Basic Data Curation Tasks

Big data analytics is firmly recognized as a strategic priority for modern enterprises. At the heart of big data analytics lies the data curation process, consists of tasks that transform raw data (unstructured, semi-structured and structured data sources) into curated data, i.e. contextualized data and knowledge that is maintained and made available for use by end-users and applications. To achieve this, the data curation process may involve techniques and algorithms for extracting, classifying, linking, merging, enriching, sampling, and the summarization of data and knowledge. To facilitate the data curation process and enhance the productivity of researchers and developers, we identify and implement a set of basic data curation APIs and make them available as services to researchers and developers to assist them in transforming their raw data into curated data. The curation APIs enable developers to easily add features - such as extracting keyword, part of speech, and named entities such as Persons, Locations, Organizations, Companies, Products, Diseases, Drugs, etc.; providing synonyms and stems for extracted information items leveraging lexical knowledge bases for the English language such as WordNet; linking extracted entities to external knowledge bases such as Google Knowledge Graph and Wikidata; discovering similarity among the extracted information items, such as calculating similarity between string and numbers; classifying, sorting and categorizing data into various types, forms or any other distinct class; and indexing structured and unstructured data - into their data applications. These services can be accessed via a REST API, and the data is returned as a JSON file that can be integrated into data applications. The curation APIs are available as an open source project on GitHub.
Measuring exhaled nitric oxide: not only a matter of how--but also why--should we do it?

The biological functions of nitric oxide are so diverseand complex that it is now becoming increasingly difficultto delineate briefly the physiological roles and pathophys-iological implications of this seemingly simple messengermolecule [1]. In respiratory medicine, NO can either beviewed as a paracrine factor (derived from endothelium,epithelium, nerves, inflammatory cells,
Discovery of Novel Serum Biomarkers for Prenatal Down Syndrome Screening by Integrative Data Mining

Background To facilitate the experimental search for novel maternal serum biomarkers in prenatal Down Syndrome screening, we aimed to create a set of candidate biomarkers using a data mining approach. Methodology/Principal Findings Because current screening markers are derived from either fetal liver or placental trophoblasts, we reasoned that new biomarkers can primarily be found to be derived from these two tissues. By applying a three-stage filtering strategy on publicly available data from different sources, we identified 49 potential blood-detectable protein biomarkers. Our set contains three biomarkers that are currently widely used in either first- or second-trimester screening (AFP, PAPP-A and fβ-hCG), as well as ten other proteins that are or have been examined as prenatal serum markers. This supports the effectiveness of our strategy and indicates the set contains other markers potentially applicable for screening. Conclusions/Significance We anticipate the set will help support further experimental studies for the identification of new Down Syndrome screening markers in maternal blood.
The η-μ Joint Phase-Envelope Distribution

This paper derives a simple and closed-form expression for the phase-envelope joint distribution of the η-μ distribution, a general fading model that includes the Hoyt and the Nakagami-m models as special cases. In the same way, the marginal distribution of the phase is also obtained. These analytical expressions reduce in an exact manner to those of the particular cases comprised by the η-μ distribution. Some plots illustrate the behavior of the phase for several fading conditions.
DISCOVERY OF FULMINIC ACID, HCNO, IN DARK CLOUDS

We report on the first detection in space of fulminic acid, HCNO. This isomer of HNCO has been observed in three starless cores, B1, L1544, and L183, and in the low-mass star-forming region L1527 with a measured abundance ratio of HNCO/HCNO between 40 and 70. However, HCNO was not detected toward the direction of the cyanopolyyne peak of TMC-1 or toward the Orion Hot Core region. The derived HNCO/HCNO abundance ratio in these cases is greater than 350 and 1000 in TMC-1 and Orion, respectively. We find that CH2 + NO → HCNO + H is a key reaction for the formation of fulminic acid. A value of 5.5 × 10−12 cm3 s−1 of the corresponding reaction rate coefficient, as given by Miller et al., allows us to reproduce the observed abundances of fulminic acid in both the observed dark clouds and low-mass star-forming core, where the determined abundance of HNCO in these regions with respect to molecular hydrogen is 1–5 × 10−10.