Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reasoning with Link Keys

Contexte et atouts du poste Working environment: The candidate will join the mOeX team, a team of the Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble (LIG), and a joint research team between the Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) and Inria. The student will also collaborate closely with the Laboratoire d’Informatique Avancée de Saint-Denis (LIASD). Work place: The position will be held at Inria Grenoble RhôneAlpes (Montbonnot-Saint-Martin, France). Grenoble is the capital of the Alps in France with excellent train connections to Lyon (1h), Geneva (2h) and Paris (3h). Grenoble is a top skiing destination in Europe. The candidate is also expected to travel to Paris often during the PhD. Funding: This PhD will be funded by the ELKER ANR French project (grant number: ANR-17-CE23-0007-01). The partners of this project are LIG, Inria and Université Paris 8. The selected candidate is expected to be very involved in this project.
Algebraic Algorithms to Separate Overlapping Secondary Surveillance Radar Replies

The secondary surveillance radar (SSR) is a transponder system used in air-traffic control (ATC). Due to growing traffic densities, it is increasingly likely that a ground station receives a mixture of responses of various aircraft, partly overlapping in frequency and time. Currently such "collisions" are disregarded, at a loss of system performance and reliability. In this paper, we propose to equip the ground station with an antenna array, and investigate techniques to blindly separate such a mixture based on source waveform properties. At baseband, a received SSR signal consists of a binary sequence with alphabet {0,1}, modulated by a complex exponential due to the residual carrier frequency. We present three algebraic algorithms to compute the separating beamformers by taking into account the particular modulation format of the received signal. The Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) is derived, extensive simulations are presented, and an experimental platform has been built to collect measurement data and demonstrate the algorithms.
Integrating Patient-Generated Health Data Into Clinical Care Settings or Clinical Decision-Making: Lessons Learned From Project HealthDesign

Background Patient-generated health data (PGHD) are health-related data created or recorded by patients to inform their self-care and understanding about their own health. PGHD is different from other patient-reported outcome data because the collection of data is patient-driven, not practice- or research-driven. Technical applications for assisting patients to collect PGHD supports self-management activities such as healthy eating and exercise and can be important for preventing and managing disease. Technological innovations (eg, activity trackers) are making it more common for people to collect PGHD, but little is known about how PGHD might be used in outpatient clinics. Objective The objective of our study was to examine the experiences of health care professionals who use PGHD in outpatient clinics. Methods We conducted an evaluation of Project HealthDesign Round 2 to synthesize findings from 5 studies funded to test tools designed to help patients collect PGHD and share these data with members of their health care team. We conducted semistructured interviews with 13 Project HealthDesign study team members and 12 health care professionals that participated in these studies. We used an immersion-crystallization approach to analyze data. Our findings provide important information related to health care professionals’ attitudes toward and experiences with using PGHD in a clinical setting. Results Health care professionals identified 3 main benefits of PGHD accessibility in clinical settings: (1) deeper insight into a patient’s condition; (2) more accurate patient information, particularly when of clinical relevance; and (3) insight into a patient’s health between clinic visits, enabling revision of care plans for improved health goal achievement, while avoiding unnecessary clinic visits. Study participants also identified 3 areas of consideration when implementing collection and use of PGHD data in clinics: (1) developing practice workflows and protocols related to PGHD collection and use; (2) data storage, accessibility at the point of care, and privacy concerns; and (3) ease of using PGHD data. Conclusions PGHD provides value to both patients and health care professionals. However, more research is needed to understand the benefit of using PGHD in clinical care and to identify the strategies and clinic workflow needs for optimizing these tools.
Social sources of women's emotional difficulty after abortion: lessons from women's abortion narratives.

CONTEXT The experiences of women who have negative emotional outcomes, including regret, following an abortion have received little research attention. Qualitative research can elucidate these women's experiences and ways their needs can be met and emotional distress reduced. METHODS Twenty-one women who had emotional difficulties related to an abortion participated in semi-structured, in-depth telephone interviews in 2009. Of these, 14 women were recruited from abortion support talklines; seven were recruited from a separate research project on women's experience of abortion. Transcripts were analyzed using the principles of grounded theory to identify key themes. RESULTS Two social aspects of the abortion experience produced, exacerbated or mitigated respondents' negative emotional experience. Negative outcomes were experienced when the woman did not feel that the abortion was primarily her decision (e.g., because her partner abdicated responsibility for the pregnancy, leaving her feeling as though she had no other choice) or did not feel that she had clear emotional support after the abortion. Evidence also points to a division of labor between women and men regarding pregnancy prevention, abortion and childrearing; as a result, the majority of abortion-related emotional burdens fall on women. Experiencing decisional autonomy or social support reduced respondents' emotional distress. CONCLUSIONS Supporting a woman's abortion decision-making process, addressing the division of labor between women and men regarding pregnancy prevention, abortion and childrearing, and offering nonjudgmental support may guide interventions designed to reduce emotional distress after abortion.
Submodular Functions and Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problems over Infinite Domains

Valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) are a large class of combinatorial optimisation problems. It is desirable to classify the computational complexity of VCSPs depending on a fixed set of allowed cost functions in the input. Recently, the computational complexity of all VCSPs for finite sets of cost functions over finite domains has been classified in this sense. Many natural optimisation problems, however, cannot be formulated as VCSPs over a finite domain. We initiate the systematic investigation of infinite-domain VCSPs by studying the complexity of VCSPs for piecewise linear homogeneous cost functions. We show that such VCSPs can be solved in polynomial time when the cost functions are additionally submodular, and that this is indeed a maximally tractable class: adding any cost function that is not submodular leads to an NP-hard VCSP.
Mixing Time and Cutoff for a Random Walk on the Ring of Integers mod $n$

We analyse a random walk on the ring of integers mod $n$, which at each time point can make an additive `step' or a multiplicative `jump'. When the probability of making a jump tends to zero as an appropriate power of $n$ we prove the existence of a total variation pre-cutoff for this walk. In addition, we show that the process obtained by subsampling our walk at jump times exhibits a true cutoff, with mixing time dependent on whether the step distribution has zero mean.
Countermovement Jump Performance Changes over the Course of Collegiate Basketball Pre-Season Associated with Block Periodization Model of Strength and Conditioning Program

INTRODUCTION: Athlete monitoring is a critical component of the training program for sports scientists and strength coaches. It is used to optimize the performance enhancement of the athlete (Stone, Stone, & Sands, 2007). The vertical jump, specifically countermovement jump (CMJ), is widely used as a measurement of performance and fatigue state, especially neuromuscular fatigue (Taylor, Chapman, Cronin, Newton, & Gill, 2012). Also, a recent study by Balsalobre-Fernandez, Tejero-Gonzalez, and del Campo-Vecino (2014) has shown that CMJ height (JH) was significantly correlated with salivary cortisol (r = -0.777) and training load variables, such as perceived exertion (r = -0.489), total distance covered (r = -0.593), and training zone (r = 0.437), of mid& long-distance athletes. However, controversial reports also exist with regard to changes in CMJ performance depending on the competition or training phase (Freitas, Nakamura, Miloski, Samulski, & Bara-Filho, 2014). The block periodization model of resistance exercise training has been shown to produce superior performance by systematically manipulating the amount of work performed (volume load: VL) (Painter et al., 2012). While strength training VL is considered a measure of external training load, rating of perceived exertion training-load (RPETL) has been used to quantify internal training load. To the knowledge of the authors, a limited number of studies have investigated basketball athletes’ CMJ JH changes associated with the different types of training load using a block periodization model. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the CMJ JH changes over the course of the pre-season with respect to block periodization training program of the collegiate level basketball athletes.
Insights from the predicted epitope similarity between Mycobacterium tuberculosis virulent factors and its human homologs

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is known to be associated with several autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematous, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. This is attributed to sequence similarity between virulent factors and human proteins. Therefore, it is of interest to identify such regions in the virulent factors to assess potential autoimmune related information. M. tb specific virulent factors were downloaded from the VFDB database and its human homologs were identified using the sequence comparison search tool BLASTP. Both virulent proteins and their corresponding human homologs were further scanned for epitopes (B cell and HLA class I and II allele specific) using prediction programs (BCPRED and NETMHC). Data shows the presence of matching 22 B-cell, 79 HLA class II and 16 HLA class I specific predicted epitopes in these virulent factors having human homologs. A known peptide (HAFYLQYKNVKVDFA) associated with autoimmune atopic dermatitis is shown in the superoxide dismutase homolog structures of the bacterium (PDB ID: 1IDS) and human (PDB ID: 2QKC). This data provides insight into the understanding of infection-associated auto-immunity
Impact of Antarctic polar vortex occurrences on total ozone and UVB radiation at southern Argentinean and Antarctic stations during 1997–2003 period

The evolution of total ozone and surface UV radiation over some stations in the southern region of South America and in Antarctica in relationship with polar vortex occurrences is analyzed using Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer total ozone measurements and local surface UV data for the 1997–2003 period. The data are classified as a function of the position of the stations with respect to the polar vortex using equivalent latitude at 550 K isentropic level. The study of vortex occurrences showed that Ushuaia station (54.9°S) was located A`40% of the cases in the edge of the vortex and 5% inside the vortex core during the winter-spring period. Concerning the Marambio (62.2°S) and Dumont d'Urville (66.4°S) stations, located on the shore of the Antarctic continent, the analysis shows a zonal asymmetry with respect to the center of the vortex. Marambio is located around 60% of the time inside the vortex, while Dumont d'Urville is predominantly at the edge of or outside the vortex. The evolution of the equivalent latitude of the stations in the anomalous 2002 winter presents a different behavior with respect to other years in the 1997–2003 period. The persistence of the vortex core above the stations is in average 1.8 days over Ushuaia and 7.1 days over Marambio in October during the 1997–2003 period with corresponding mean total ozone columns of 208.2 and 181.4 Dobson units, respectively. When the stations are inside the vortex, the total ozone columns are generally larger at Ushuaia than at Marambio in October during the 1997–2003 period. Finally, the impact of ozone-depleted air mass occurrences on ultraviolet radiation is evaluated by relating total ozone and UV erythemal dose measured at the stations. Twofold or threefold UV dose increases were reached in the 55°–65° southern latitude region during vortex overpasses, reaching maximum UV dose around 5 kJ/m2. The average increase of UV dose could be computed at the stations considered in the study when the measurement sampling and the number of vortex occurrences was sufficient. An average increase of 67.6% of the erythemal UV dose was found in October at Ushuaia over the years 1997, 1998, and 2000. This value is strongly weighted by vortex occurrences over the station in 2000. At Marambio an average UV increase of 47.4% was found over the years 1999 and 2000. Midlatitude stations like Comodoro Rivadavia (45.8°S) are generally little affected by vortex intrusions. Nevertheless, the maximum UV dose can increase by more than 50% when the vortex passes over the station.
A Portable Natural Language Interface to Arabic Ontologies

With the growing expansion of the semantic web and its applications, providing natural language interfaces (NLI) to end-users becomes essential to querying RDF stores and ontologies, using simple questions expressed in natural language. Existing NLIs work mostly with the English language. There are very few attempts to develop systems supporting the Arabic language. In this paper, we propose a portable NLI to Arabic ontologies; it will transform the user’s query expressed in Arabic into formal language query. The proposed system starts by a preparation phase that creates a gazetteer from the given ontology. The issued query is then processed using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract keywords. These keywords are mapped to the ontology entities, then a valid SPARQL query is generated based on the ontology definition and the reasoning capabilities of the Web Ontology Language (OWL). To evaluate our tool we used two different Arabic ontologies: a Qur’anic ontology and an Arabic sample of Mooney Geography dataset. The proposed system achieved 64% recall and 76% precision.
Priming of the Cells: Hypoxic Preconditioning for Stem Cell Therapy

Objective: Stem cell-based therapies are promising in regenerative medicine for protecting and repairing damaged brain tissues after injury or in the context of chronic diseases. Hypoxia can induce physiological and pathological responses. A hypoxic insult might act as a double-edged sword, it induces cell death and brain damage, but on the other hand, sublethal hypoxia can trigger an adaptation response called hypoxic preconditioning or hypoxic tolerance that is of immense importance for the survival of cells and tissues. Data Sources: This review was based on articles published in PubMed databases up to August 16, 2017, with the following keywords: “stem cells,” “hypoxic preconditioning,” “ischemic preconditioning,” and “cell transplantation. ” Study Selection: Original articles and critical reviews on the topics were selected. Results: Hypoxic preconditioning has been investigated as a primary endogenous protective mechanism and possible treatment against ischemic injuries. Many cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the protective effects of hypoxic preconditioning have been identified. Conclusions: In cell transplantation therapy, hypoxic pretreatment of stem cells and neural progenitors markedly increases the survival and regenerative capabilities of these cells in the host environment, leading to enhanced therapeutic effects in various disease models. Regenerative treatments can mobilize endogenous stem cells for neurogenesis and angiogenesis in the adult brain. Furthermore, transplantation of stem cells/neural progenitors achieves therapeutic benefits via cell replacement and/or increased trophic support. Combinatorial approaches of cell-based therapy with additional strategies such as neuroprotective protocols, anti-inflammatory treatment, and rehabilitation therapy can significantly improve therapeutic benefits. In this review, we will discuss the recent progress regarding cell types and applications in regenerative medicine as well as future applications.
Influence of Graphite Filler on Physicochemical Characteristics of Polymer/Graphite Composites: A Review

ABSTRACT In this article, carbon nanofiller, in particular graphite, has been reviewed for the preparation of polymer-based composites. The dispersion of graphite relies on fabrication methods employed such as solution mixing, melt blending, and in situ polymerization. The consequences of surface modification on thermal, mechanical, and electrical characteristics were explored. Moreover, the properties and parameters involved in feature enhancement of graphite-based materials have been highlighted. Topical development in field of thermal, mechanical, and other physical properties of polymer/graphite composites was investigated. Furthermore, worth of materials regarding electrodes, resistors, dye-sensitized solar cells, electromagnetic interference shielding, packaging, and flame retardant applications has been discussed. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Prevalence and Characterization of Multi-Drug-Resistant Gram-Negative Bacilli Isolated From Lebanese Poultry: A Nationwide Study

Currently, antimicrobial resistance is one of the most prominent public health issues. In fact, there is increasing evidence that animals constitute a reservoir of antimicrobial resistance. In collaboration with the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture, the aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of intestinal carriage of multi-drug-resistant Gram-negative Bacilli in poultry farms at the national level. Between August and December 2015, 981 fecal swabs were obtained from 49 poultry farms distributed across Lebanon. The swabs were subcultured on MacConkey agar supplemented with cefotaxime (2 μg/ml). Isolated strains were identified using MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. Multilocus sequence typing analysis was performed for Escherichia coli. Phenotypic detection of extended spectrum β-lactamases (ESBL) and AmpC production was performed using double disk synergy and the ampC disk test, respectively. β-lactamase encoding genes blaCTX-M, blaTEM, blaSHV, blaFOX, blaMOX, blaEBC, blaACC, blaDHA, and blaCMY using PCR amplification. Out of 981 fecal swabs obtained, 203 (20.6%) showed bacterial growth on the selective medium. Of the 235 strains isolated, 217 were identified as E. coli (92%), eight as Klebsiella pneumoniae (3%), three as Proteus mirabilis (1%) and three as Enterobacter cloacae (1%). MLST analysis of E. coli isolates showed the presence of ST156, ST5470, ST354, ST155, and ST3224. The phenotypic tests revealed that 43.5, 28.5, and 20.5% of the strains were ampC, ESBL, and ampC/ESBL producers, respectively. The putative TEM gene was detected in 83% of the isolates, SHV in 20%, CTX-M in 53% and CMY ampC β-lactamase gene in 65%. Our study showed that chicken farms in Lebanon are reservoirs of ESBL and AmpC producing Gram-negative bacilli. The level of antibiotic consumption in the Lebanese veterinary medicine should be evaluated. Future studies should focus on the risk factors associated with the acquisition of multi-drug-resistant organisms in farm animals in Lebanon.
Landscape connectivity for bobcat (Lynx rufus) and lynx (Lynx canadensis) in the Northeastern United States

Landscape connectivity is integral to the persistence of metapopulations of wide ranging carnivores and other terrestrial species. The objectives of this research were to investigate the landscape characteristics essential to use of areas by lynx and bobcats in northern New England, map a habitat availability model for each species, and explore connectivity across areas of the region likely to experience future development pressure. A Mahalanobis distance analysis was conducted on location data collected between 2005 and 2010 from 16 bobcats in western Vermont and 31 lynx in northern Maine to determine which variables were most consistent across all locations for each species using three scales based on average 1) local (15 minute) movement, 2) linear distance between daily locations, and 3) female home range size. The bobcat model providing the widest separation between used locations and random study area locations suggests that they cue into landscape features such as edge, availability of cover, and development density at different scales. The lynx model with the widest separation between random and used locations contained five variables including natural habitat, cover, and elevation—all at different scales. Shrub scrub habitat—where lynx’s preferred prey is most abundant—was represented at the daily distance moved scale. Cross validation indicated that outliers had little effect on models for either species. A habitat suitability value was calculated for each 30 m2 pixel across Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine for each species and used to map connectivity between conserved lands within selected areas across the region. Projections of future landscape change illustrated potential impacts of anthropogenic development on areas lynx and bobcat may use, and indicated where connectivity for bobcats and lynx may be lost. These projections provided a guide for conservation of landscape permeability for lynx, bobcat, and species relying on similar habitats in the region.