Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hippocratic Data Streams-Concepts, Architectures and Issues

The goal of an Hippocratic DBMS is to preserve the privacy of data without much sacrificing performance. In this paper, we address problem of developing privacypreserving systems into the more challenging context of data streams. We contrast data streams to traditional databases and identify the new challenges posed by data streams. We discuss examples of streaming applications in which privacy and security issues are crucial. We propose a visionary architectural design of how a Hippocratic Data StreamManagement System (HDSMS) may look like. We identify several open research directions where privacy preserving issues meet the data streaming paradigm.
Adaptive Motion Data Representation with Repeated Motion Analysis

In this paper, we present a representation method for motion capture data by exploiting the nearly repeated characteristics and spatiotemporal coherence in human motion. We extract similar motion clips of variable lengths or speeds across the database. Since the coding costs between these matched clips are small, we propose the repeated motion analysis to extract the referred and repeated clip pairs with maximum compression gains. For further utilization of motion coherence, we approximate the subspace-projected clip motions or residuals by interpolated functions with range-aware adaptive quantization. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed feature-aware method is of high computational efficiency. Furthermore, it also provides substantial compression gains with comparable reconstruction and perceptual errors.
Design of a Drone with a Robotic End-Effector

The concept presented involves a combination of a quadcopter drone and an end-effector arm, which is designed with the capability of lifting and picking fruits from an elevated position. The inspiration for this concept was obtained from the swarm robots which have an effector arm to pick small cubes, cans to even collecting experimental samples as in case of space exploration. The system as per preliminary analysis would contain two physically separate components, but linked with a common algorithm which includes controlling of the drone’s positions along with the movement of the arm.
Exercise, appetite and weight management: understanding the compensatory responses in eating behaviour and how they contribute to variability in exercise-induced weight loss

Does exercise promote weight loss? One of the key problems with studies assessing the efficacy of exercise as a method of weight management and obesityis that mean data are presented and the individual variability in response is overlooked. Recent data have highlighted the need to demonstrate and characterise the individual variability in response to exercise. Do people who exercise compensate for the increase in energy expenditure via compensatory increases in hunger and food intake? The authors address the physiological, psychological and behavioural factors potentially involved in the relationship between exercise and appetite, and identify the research questions that remain unanswered. A negative consequence of the phenomena of individual variability and compensatory responses has been the focus on those who lose little weight in response to exercise; this has been used unreasonably as evidence to suggest that exercise is a futile method of controlling weight and managing obesity. Most of the evidence suggests that exercise is useful for improving body composition and health. For example, when exercise-induced mean weight loss is <1.0 kg, significant improvements in aerobic capacity (+6.3 ml/kg/min), systolic (−6.00 mm Hg) and diastolic (−3.9 mm Hg) blood pressure, waist circumference (−3.7 cm) and positive mood still occur. However, people will vary in their responses to exercise; understanding and characterising this variability will help tailor weight loss strategies to suit individuals.
OPM Model-Driven Animated Simulation with Computational Interface to Matlab

Modeling plays an increasingly important role in the life-cycle of systems, starting from the design stage, as well as important in the process of studying an unfamiliar, existing system. Complex systems are difficult to model, making it harder for users to deeply understand their intricate behavior. Moreover, in many cases the system may exhibit complex computational and stochastic behavior, critical to truly representing the system. Despite existing modeling methodologies contain behavioral diagrams aimed to describe the systems' changes over time, they are still static and majority of them do not fully reflect the behavior of systems in spatio-temporal space in a manner that is close to conceived reality. Similarly, these methodologies do not offer an ability to fully model the quantitative aspects of the system, or offer such ability at the expense of simplicity or generality of the methodology. We offer two complementing concepts, Vivid OPM and OPM Matlab Layer, which address the dynamic display and quantitative aspects by enhancing Object Process Methodology (OPM) to better reflect these aspects while keeping the holism and simplicity of OPM.
A Modified Rectifier Stage Topology of Hybrid Wind-Solar Energy System

Environmentally friendly solutions are becoming more prominent than ever as a result of concern regarding the state of our deteriorating planet. This paper presents a new system configuration of the front-end rectifier stage for a hybrid wind/photovoltaic energy system. This configuration allows the two sources to supply the load separately or simultaneously depending on the availability of the energy sources. The inherent nature of this Cuk-SEPIC fused converter, additional input filters are not necessary to filter out high frequency harmonics. Harmonic content is detrimental for the generator lifespan, heating issues, and efficiency. The fused multiinput rectifier stage also allows Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) to be used to extract maximum power from the wind and sun when it is available. An adaptive MPPT algorithm will be used for the wind system and a standard perturb and observe method will be used for the PV system. Operational analysis of the proposed system will be discussed in this paper. Simulation results are given to highlight the merits of the proposed
Identification of Quantitative Trait Loci That Determine Plasma Total-Cholesterol and Triglyceride Concentrations in DDD/Sgn and C57BL/6J Inbred Mice

DDD/Sgn mice have significantly higher plasma lipid concentrations than C57BL/6J mice. In the present study, we performed quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping for plasma total-cholesterol (CHO) and triglyceride (TG) concentrations in reciprocal F2 male intercross populations between the two strains. By single-QTL scans, we identified four significant QTL on chromosomes (Chrs) 1, 5, 17, and 19 for CHO and two significant QTL on Chrs 1 and 12 for TG. By including cross direction as an interactive covariate, we identified separate significant QTL on Chr 17 for CHO but none for TG. When the large phenotypic effect of QTL on Chr 1 was controlled by composite interval mapping, we identified three additional significant QTL on Chrs 3, 4, and 9 for CHO but none for TG. QTL on Chr 19 was a novel QTL for CHO and the allelic effect of this QTL significantly differed between males and females. Whole-exome sequence analysis in DDD/Sgn mice suggested that Apoa2 and Acads were the plausible candidate genes underlying CHO QTL on Chrs 1 and 5, respectively. Thus, we identified a multifactorial basis for plasma lipid concentrations in male mice. These findings will provide insight into the genetic mechanisms of plasma lipid metabolism.
On the Geometry of Holmsen's Combinatorial Version of the Colorful Carath\'eodory.

Carath\'eodorys Theorem of convex hulls plays an important role in convex geometry. In 1982, B\'ar\'any formulated and proved a more general version, called the Colorful Carath\'eodory. This colorful version was even more generalized by Holmsen in 2016. He formulated a combinatorial extension and found a topological proof. Taking a dual point of view we gain an equivalent formulation of Holmsen's result that has a more geometric meaning.
Flexible Exclusion Control for Composite Objects

We present a simple approach for implementing flexible locking strategies in a system of components, which may themselves be composite objects. The approach is flexible in that a developer can defer the distribution of locks in the system until deployment: the choice of lock type and granularity may therefore depend on the operating environment. We only consider exclusion control; this includes mutexes, read-write locks and read-write sets, but does not cover state-dependent locking or transaction-based approaches. In general we express exclusion requirements as sets of conflict pairs on component interfaces; elsewhere (Potter, Shanneb and Yu 2004) we have demonstrated the effectiveness of a general-purpose exclusion lock that can provide any required exclusion. We presume knowledge of the dependency between the interface of a composite object and its internal components.This work extends and simplifies the work on exclusion algebra for composite objects (Noble, Holmes and Potter 2000). Our major contribution is to distinguish between the control required internally and that provided externally. This clarifies the role of the so-called upward and downward mappings of the earlier work. We also offer a succinct mathematical basis for our model.
Unifying Part Detection and Association for Recurrent Multi-Person Pose Estimation

We propose a joint model of human joint detection and association for 2D multi-person pose estimation (MPPE). The approach unifies training of joint detection and association without a need for further processing or sophisticated heuristics in order to associate the joints with people individually. The approach consists of two stages, where in the first stage joint detection heatmaps and association features are extracted, and in the second stage, whose input are the extracted features of the first stage, we introduce a recurrent neural network (RNN) which predicts the heatmaps of a single person's joints in each iteration. In addition, the network learns a stopping criterion in order to halt once it has identified all individuals in the image. This approach allowed us to eliminate several heuristic assumptions and parameters needed for association which do not necessarily hold true. Additionally, such an end-to-end approach allows the final objective to be known and directly optimized over during training. We evaluated our model on the challenging MSCOCO dataset and obtained an improvement over the baseline, particularly in challenging scenes with occlusions.
Touch Gesture-Based Active User Authentication Using Dictionaries

Screen touch gesture has been shown to be a promising modality for touch-based active authentication of users of mobile devices. In this paper, we present an approach for active user authentication using screen touch gestures by building linear and kernelized dictionaries based on sparse representations and associated classifiers. Experiments using a new dataset collected by us as well as two other publicly available screen touch datasets show that the dictionary-based classification method compares favorably to those published in the literature. Experiments done using data collected in three different sessions corresponding to different environmental conditions show a drop in performance when the training and test data come from different sessions. This suggests a need for applying domain adaptation methods to further improve the performance of the classifiers.
Long-range Dependent Self-similar Network Traffic: A Simulation Study to Compare Some New Estimators

The intensity of long-range dependence (LRD) of the communications network traffic can be measured using the Hurst parameter. There are various estimators of Hurst parameter which differ in reliability of their results. Getting reliable estimator can help to improve traffic characterization, performance modelling, planning and engineering of the real networks. This paper deals with the comparison of a few Hurst parameter estimators in standardized simulation experiment generating synthetic data sequences that exhibit long-range dependent features corresponding to observed data. The two best known classes of stationary processes with slowly decaying correlations (i.e., having long-range dependence) have been studied: fractional Gaussian noise (fGN) and fractional autoregressive integrated moving- average (FARIMA). Earlier authors introduced the estimator called "Hurst exponent from the autocorrelation function" (HEAF) and in this work it is compared with an estimator based on the FARIMA process (FARIMA-H). Approximately unbiased versions are constructed and compared by simulation.
Predicting Student Performance in an Educational Game Using a Hidden Markov Model

<italic>Contributions:</italic> Prior studies on education have mostly followed the model of the cross-sectional study, namely, examining the pretest and the posttest scores. This article shows that students’ knowledge throughout the intervention can be estimated by time-series analysis using a hidden Markov model (HMM). <italic>Background:</italic> Analyzing time series and the interaction between the students and the game data can result in valuable information that cannot be gained by only cross-sectional studies of the exams. <italic>Research Questions:</italic> Can an HMM be used to analyze the educational games? Can an HMM be used to make a prediction of the students’ performance? <italic>Methodology:</italic> The study was conducted on (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N=854$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) students who played the Save Patch game. Students were divided into class 1 and class 2. Class 1 students are those who scored lower in the posttest than class 2 students. The analysis is done by choosing various features of the game as the observations. <italic>Findings:</italic> The state trajectories can predict the students’ performance accurately for both classes 1 and 2.
Metal Binding Specificity of the MntABC Permease of Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Its Influence on Bacterial Growth and Interaction with Cervical Epithelial Cells

ABSTRACT mntABC from Neisseria gonorrhoeae encodes an ABC permease which includes a periplasmic divalent cation binding receptor protein of the cluster IX family, encoded by mntC. Analysis of an mntC mutant showed that growth of N. gonorrhoeae could be stimulated by addition of either manganese(II) or zinc(II) ions, suggesting that the MntABC system could transport both ions. In contrast, growth of the mntAB mutant in liquid culture was possible only when the medium was supplemented with an antioxidant such as mannitol, consistent with the view that ion transport via MntABC is essential for protection of N. gonorrhoeae against oxidative stress. Using recombinant MntC, we determined that MntC binds Zn2+ and Mn2+ with almost equal affinity (dissociation constant of ∼0.1 μM). Competition assays with the metallochromic zinc indicator 4-(2-pyridylazo)resorcinol showed that MntC binds Mn2+ and Zn2+ at the same binding site. Analysis of the N. gonorrhoeae genome showed that MntC is the only Mn/Zn metal binding receptor protein cluster IX in this bacterium, in contrast to the situation in many other bacteria which have systems with dedicated Mn and Zn binding proteins as part of distinctive ABC cassette permeases. Both the mntC and mntAB mutants had reduced intracellular survival in a human cervical epithelial cell model and showed reduced ability to form a biofilm. These data suggest that the MntABC transporter is of importance for survival of Neisseria gonorrhoeae in the human host.
Insulin release at the molecular level: Metabolic-electrophysiological modeling of the pancreatic beta-cells

The role of pancreatic /spl beta/-cells is fundamental in the control endocrine system, maintaining the blood glucose homeostasis in a physiological regime, via the glucose-induced release of insulin. An increasing amount of detailed experimental evidences at the cellular and molecular biology levels have been collected on the key factors determining the insulin release by the pancreatic /spl beta/-cells. The direct transposition of such experimental data into accurate mathematical descriptions might contribute to considerably clarify the impact of each cellular component on the global glucose metabolism. Under these perspectives, we model and computer-simulate the stimulus-secretion coupling in /spl beta/-cells by describing four interacting cellular subsystems, consisting in the glucose transport and metabolism, the excitable electrophysiological behavior, the dynamics of the intracellular calcium ions, and the exocytosis of granules containing insulin. We explicit the molecular nature of each subsystem, expressing the mutual relationships and the feedbacks that determine the metabolic-electrophysiological behavior of an isolated /spl beta/-cell. Finally, we discuss the simulation results of the behavior of isolated /spl beta/-cells as well as of population of electrically coupled /spl beta/-cells in Langerhans islets, under physiological and pathological conditions, including noninsulin dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM) and hyperinsulinemic hypoglycaemia (PHHI).
Distribution of killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptor genes in population of Vojvodina, Serbia

Abstract Background: Killer cell immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIRs) are glycoproteins regulating the response of natural killer (NK) cells and a few sub-sets of T-cells. The KIR gene frequencies and genotype content vary considerably among different ethnic groups. Aim: The aim of this study was to analyse KIR gene polymorphism in the population of Vojvodina and to compare it with selected worldwide populations. Subjects and methods: The studied sample consists of 134 healthy unrelated individuals, residents of different geographical regions of Vojvodina. DNA samples isolated from peripheral blood leukocytes by the silica-based extraction method were used in reverse PCR-SSO and PCR-SSP technique to detect the presence and absence of KIR genes. Results: All 16 KIR genes, a total of 37 different KIR genotypes, were observed in the Vojvodina population with the presence of framework and pseudogenes in all individuals. The neighbour-joining phylogenetic tree shows that the Vojvodina population is in the same cluster with Croatians, Turkish, Russians, Czechs, Irish, Italians, French, Macedonians and Polish. The Vojvodina population shows polymorphism of the KIR gene family present in other European and European-derived populations studied previously. Conclusion: The present study may serve as a reference for comparisons in further anthropological and disease association studies and also provide more informative data valuable for donor search strategy in haematopoietic stem cell transplantation.
Sampling phased array: a new technique for signal processing and ultrasonic imaging

Different signal processing and image reconstruction techniques are applied in ultrasonic non-destructive material evaluation. In recent years, rapid development in the fields of microelectronics and computer engineering lead to wide application of phased array systems. A new phased array technique, called "Sampling Phased Array" has been developed in Fraunhofer Institute for nondestructive testing. It realizes unique approach of measurement and processing of ultrasonic signals. The sampling phased array principle make use of the measurement of elementary waves generated by individual elements of sensor array to reconstruct the composite phased array signal for any arbitrary angle or focus depth. The use of special signal processing and image reconstruction algorithms, allows generating A-Scans of several angles and / or Sector-Scan, which can be implemented in real time. With parallel computing structures, this principle is used for automatic testing systems at very high inspection speed. A comparative study was done with Conventional Phased Array system and Sampling Phased Array technique. The study shows that the signal characteristics in both techniques are equal. In addition, the Sampling Phased Array technique is significantly beneficial in the many aspects like quality of information in specific cases, inspection speeds and adaptability to specific inspection tasks in comparison to conventional Phased Array. The electronics was developed as a development platform for high speed automated ultrasonic inspection systems for process integrated testing and also for testing of critical components. The development results, including relevant test methodology and electro-technical/electronic aspects are presented in the current work.
Pregnancy outcome in patients with ankylosing spondylitis

Abstract Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate pregnancy outcomes in women with Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS), and the course of disease during pregnancy was also assessed. Methods: This case–control study included 60 pregnant women who delivered in our clinic between March 2007 and 2015. Twenty of them diagnosed with AS formed the study group and 40 women were chosen as the control group. These patients were chosen and reviewed by their hospital records and were evaluated retrospectively in terms of their clinical characteristics, pregnancy complications and perinatal outcomes. The Ankylosing Spondylitis Disease Activity Score (ASDAS), a new composite index to assess disease activity in AS, was used in the assessment of the patients. Result: No adverse pregnancy outcome was noted in pregnant patients with AS. Mean age of AS patients was significantly higher than the controls (p = 0.037). The proportion of female fetuses was higher in pregnancies with AS compared to pregnant patients with healthy controls (p = 0.041). Fourteen (70%) of 20 patients displayed decrement in ASDAS during pregnancy. Course of AS was unaltered in 6 (30%) of 20 patients during pregnancy. Otherwise, the stage of the disease during pregnancy remained unchanged in 15 (75%) of cases as postpartum exacerbation was observed in 6 (30%). The reported symptoms of patients with AS during pregnancy were arthritis and uveitis. Conclusions: Women with AS have a favorable pregnancy outcome, and pregnancy does not substantially aggravate disease activity or severity in these patients.