Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Percutaneous inner-ear access via an image-guided industrial robot system

Abstract Image-guided robots have been widely used for bone shaping and percutaneous access to interventional sites. However, due to high-accuracy requirements and proximity to sensitive nerves and brain tissues, the adoption of robots in inner-ear surgery has been slower. In this paper the authors present their recent work towards developing two image-guided industrial robot systems for accessing challenging inner-ear targets. Features of the systems include optical tracking of the robot base and tool relative to the patient and Kalman filter-based data fusion of redundant sensory information (from encoders and optical tracking systems) for enhanced patient safety. The approach enables control of differential robot positions rather than absolute positions, permitting simplified calibration procedures and reducing the reliance of the system on robot calibration in order to ensure overall accuracy. Lastly, the authors present the results of two phantom validation experiments simulating the use of image-guided robots in inner-ear surgeries such as cochlear implantation and petrous apex access.
Sickle cell knowledge, premarital screening and marital decisions among local government workers in Ile-Ife, Nigeria

ABSTRACT Background In Nigeria, as in the rest of equatorial Africa, sickle cell disease (SCD) has its highest incidence and continues to cause high morbidity and early death. The condition is a major public health problem among the black race. The aim of this survey is to determine the level of knowledge about SCD and the factors associated with its prevention among local government workers in Ile-Ife. Method This is a cross-sectional descriptive study of the knowledge about SCD, attitude towards premarital sickle cell screening and marital decisions among local government workers in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, using a self-administered questionnaire. Results 69% of study subjects had poor knowledge of SCD, while attitude towards premarital screening was favourable in 95% of the study subjects. Knowledge and attitude were significantly better among subjects with tertiary education. There was a strong positive association between attitude towards sickle cell screening and a history of undergoing screening or partner screening. Most (86.7%) of the respondents and 74.0% of their partners have had sickle cell screening. One-quarter of married and engaged respondents did not know their partner's sickle cell status. One-third to two-thirds of study subjects will continue the relationship with their partner when either or both have haemoglobinopathy. Conclusion This study showed poor knowledge of SCD among the studied subjects. There is a need for more emphasis on health education through programmes promoting sickle cell education. In addition, the development of multifaceted patient and public health education programmes, the intensification of screening for the control of SCD by heterozygote detection, particularly during routine preplacement and premarital medical examinations, and the provision of genetic counselling to all SCD patients and carriers are vital to the identification and care of the couples at risk. These will enhance the capacity of the intending couples to make informed decisions and be aware of the consequences of such decisions. Policies are needed to ensure easily accessible community-wide sickle cell screening and premarital and genetic counselling to achieve the desired decline in new births of children with SCD.
The Role of Inducible Nitric Oxide Synthase Following Spinal Cord Injury in Rat

Acute spinal cord injury (SCI) is two-step process that first involves the primary mechanical injury and then the secondary injury is induced by various biochemical reactions. Apoptosis is one of secondary SCI mechanisms and it is thought to play an important role for the delayed neuronal injury. The enhanced formation of nitric oxide (NO) via inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) has been implicated in the pathogenesis of apoptosis in SCI. The level of . iNOS mRNA peaked at 6 hr after SCI and it declined until 72 hr after SCI in a rat model. Double-immunofluorescence staining revealed that iNOS positive cells were stained for ED-1, synaptophysin, GFAP, and oligodendrocyte marker. The terminal deoxynucleotidyl-transferase-mediated dUDP-biotin nick end-labeling (TUNEL) positive cell count was higher for the 72 hr post-SCI group than for the 24 hr post-SCI group. This cell count was also higher going in the caudal direction than in the rostral direction from the epicenter, and especially for the 72 hr group. Treatment with a selective iNOS inhibitor resulted in the reduction of TUNEL-positive cells at the lesion site. These findings suggest that nitric oxide generated by the iNOS of macrophages, neurons, oligodentrocytes, and astrocytes plays an important role for the acute secondary SCI that results from apoptotic cell death.
A Maximum Entropy/Minimum Divergence Translation Model

I present empirical comparisons between a linear combination of standard statistical language and translation models and an equivalent Maximum Entropy/Minimum Divergence (MEMD) model, using several different methods for automatic feature selection. The MEMD model significantly outperforms the standard model in test corpus perplexity, even though it has far fewer parameters.
Scalable Streaming-Array of Simple Soft-Processors for Stencil Computations with Constant Memory-Bandwidth

Stencil computation is one of the important kernels in scientific computations, however, the sustained performance is limited by memory bandwidth especially on multi-core microprocessors and GPGPUs due to its small operationalintensity. In this paper, we propose a scalable streaming-array (SSA) of simple soft-processors for high-performance stencil computation on multiple FPGAs. The SSA architecture allows a multi-device system to have linear scalability of computing performance by deeply pipelining with a constant bandwidth of an external-memory. We present an array-structure of programmable cores optimized for stencil computations and formulate a performance model of pipelined execution on the array. For Jacobi computations, SSA implemented on nine Stratix III FPGAs with the memory bandwidth of only 2 GB/s achieves 260 GFlop/s, corresponding to 87.4 % of its peak performance, at 1.3 GFlop/sW. We demonstrate that SSA provides almost linear speedup for larger than medium-sized computation as expected by the performance model. These high utilization and scalability show a big potential of custom computing on reconfigurable devices as a power-efficient and high-performance computing platform.
Single-carrier time-interleaved space-time code for frequency-selective fading channels

A novel single-carrier-based space-time code design to exploit the advantages of frequency-selective channel is proposed in this paper. The new design is based on multiplexing independent streams of space-time codes in a time-interleaved fashion followed by symbol-wise phase rotations. The advantage of such design is that it guarantees full space-time-multipath diversity by using the traditional space-time codes originally designed for flat fading channels as the constituent codes. Another advantage is that this approach incurs no loss in bandwidth-efficiency and it alleviates the problem of high PAPR in OFDM-based space-time code. The design is potentially suitable for any number of transmit antennas or multipaths. The simulations results indicate that full space-time-multipath diversity is attained using this new approach, and comparisons with some existing space-time codes designed for frequency-selective channel are made to show its performance advantage.
On the Benefit of Merging Suffix Array Intervals for Parallel Pattern Matching

We present parallel algorithms for exact and approximate pattern matching with suffix arrays, using a CREW-PRAM with $p$ processors. Given a static text of length $n$, we first show how to compute the suffix array interval of a given pattern of length $m$ in $O(\frac{m}{p}+ \lg p + \lg\lg p\cdot\lg\lg n)$ time for $p \le m$. For approximate pattern matching with $k$ differences or mismatches, we show how to compute all occurrences of a given pattern in $O(\frac{m^k\sigma^k}{p}\max\left(k,\lg\lg n\right)\! +\! (1+\frac{m}{p}) \lg p\cdot \lg\lg n + \text{occ})$ time, where $\sigma$ is the size of the alphabet and $p \le \sigma^k m^k$. The workhorse of our algorithms is a data structure for merging suffix array intervals quickly: Given the suffix array intervals for two patterns $P$ and $P'$, we present a data structure for computing the interval of $PP'$ in $O(\lg\lg n)$ sequential time, or in $O(1+\lg_p\lg n)$ parallel time. All our data structures are of size $O(n)$ bits (in addition to the suffix array).
Finite horizon optimal control and communication co-design for uncertain networked control system with transmit power constraint

In this paper, finite horizon optimal control and communication co-design problem has been investigated for uncertain networked control system (NCS) with limited transmit power. Firstly, the mathematical relation between network imperfections (e.g. network-induced delays and packet dropouts) and practical wireless communication channel quality has been studied. Then, a novel networked control system model has been represented that includes both physical system dynamics and network dynamics. Next, adopting the emerging neuro dynamics programming (NDP) technique and actor-critic-identifier (ACI) architecture, a novel time-based finite horizon optimal control and communication co-design has been proposed. The proposed scheme cannot only learn the optimal co-design within fixed final time, but also relax the requirement of NCS dynamics and satisfy the practical transmit power constraint. The Lyapunov Theorem is used to validate the effectiveness of proposed scheme. With the proper NN weight update law, proposed scheme can ensure all closed-loop signals and NN weights are uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB). Moreover, simulation results are also included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Screaming at a Wall. Societal accountability from below in Bulgaria and Hungary

The article investigates engagement in anti-corruption activism in Bulgaria and Hungary. Since the late 2000s, protest events occurred in greater numbers in the two post-communist countries, addressing questions either directly or indirectly related to high-level or political corruption. Bulgarian and Hungarian collective anti-corruption actors share a common framing of the issue ('state corruption' or 'state capture'), though their struggles vary in their modes and strategies ('civic self-organisation' versus the dominant role of 'transactional activism'). The article crucially reconstructs the context within which anticorruption activism took place, the different forms of mobilisation, and the specific framing of the issue by means of original interviews with prominent Bulgarian and Hungarian activists. Finally, attention is devoted to the subaltern fortunes of these struggles in attaining the aspired goal of societal accountability.
DOMAIN INFORMATION BASED BLACKLISTING METHOD FOR THE DETECTION OF MALICIOUS WEBPAGES

Malicious web pages that host drive by download exploits have become a popular means by which an attacker delivers malicious contents to computers across the internet. The popularity of the attack has led to researchers developing systems to detect and stop such attacks. These methods include dynamic solutions, static solutions and the use of blacklisting and whitelisting methods. Blacklisting and in particular URL blacklisting is one of such detection methods. URL blacklisting analyzes the structure of a web page URL. URL blacklisting are however prone to evasion attacks when the lexical structure of the URL changes. In this paper, we propose the usage of domain related information for the detection of drive by download web pages. These domain features are used to model a scoring mechanism classification system. We show the effectiveness of detecting malicious web pages using domain based by obtaining a high detection rate and a relatively low false negative.
SIP application to multimedia telecontrol of power systems

At present, in our project we are researching about the viability of the enhancement of the basic telecontrol information supplied by SCADA systems by adding multimedia content. SIP is a simple and light protocol, with client-server architecture, which allows to achieve voice and video communications through a data IP network, in similar way as the well-known and widespread HTTP protocol works. So, we consider SIP it good choice to integrate multimedia in telecontrol operation.
Examining Neighborhood Opportunity and Locational Outcomes for Housing Choice Voucher Recipients: A Comparative Study between Duval County, Florida, and Bexar County, Texas

Recent attention has highlighted the importance of providing low–income households access to opportunity–rich neighborhoods. Using a neighborhood opportunity framework developed specifically for the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program, this study investigates whether low–income households participating in the program live in opportunity areas. The results indicate that with scarce high–opportunity neighborhoods, most HCV households reside in mixed opportunity areas and face tradeoffs when deciding where to live. Voucher holders reside in areas with moderate or poor accessibility and neighborhood conditions compared to other assisted and nonassisted low–income renters. Opportunity outcomes also vary among different household types of HCV recipients.
Adaptive Aggregation of Recommender Systems

In the field of artificial intelligence, recommender systems are methods for predicting the relevance items to a users. The items can be just about anything, for example documents, articles, movies, music, events or other users. Recommender systems examine data such as ratings, query logs, user behavior and social connections to predict what each user will think of each item. Modern recommender systems combine multiple standard recommenders in order to leverage disjoint patterns in available data. By combining different methods, complex predictions that rely on much evidence can be made. These aggregations can for example be done by estimating weights that result in an optimal combination. However, we posit these systems have an important weakness. There exists an underlying, misplaced subjectivity to relevance prediction. Each chosen recommender system reflects one view of how users and items should be modeled. We believe the selection of recommender methods should be automatically chosen based on their predicted accuracy for each user and item. After all, a system that insists on being adaptive in one particular way is not really adaptive at all. This thesis presents a novel method for prediction aggregation that we call adaptive recommenders. Multiple recommender systems are combined on a per-user and per-item basis by estimating their individual accuracy in the current context. This is done by creating a secondary set of error estimating recommenders. The core insight is that standard recommenders can be used to estimate the accuracy of other recommenders. As far as we know, this type of adaptive prediction aggregation has not been done before. Prediction aggregation (combining scores) is tested in a recommendation scenario. Rank aggregation (sorting results lists) is tested in a personalized search scenario. Our initial results are promising and show that adaptive recommenders can outperform both standard recommenders and simple aggregation methods. We will also discuss the implications and limitations of our results.
SIOC in action representing the dynamics of online communities

SIOC --- Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities --- provides the Semantic Web with a vocabulary for representing activities and contributions of online communities. However, it focuses on the state of online communities at a given time, while a number of Web application put a strong emphasis on the dynamics of their components and users, including microblogging, status and geolocation notification, etc. and as also testified by recent efforts on modelling activity streams. This work proposes a new module for the SIOC vocabulary designed to represent the dynamics of actions within online communities. Hence, we provide an action-centric view of online communities, while previous work focused on a document-centric or user-centric one. Furthermore, we align our work with related vocabularies and Web technologies --- both in use and emerging --- inside and outside the field of Semantic Web technologies.
Increased pregnancy-associated plasma protein-A as a marker for peripheral atherosclerosis: results from the Linz Peripheral Arterial Disease Study.

BACKGROUND The aim of the present investigation was to test the hypothesis that pregnancy-associated plasma protein-A (PAPP-A), a zinc-binding metalloproteinase implicated in acute coronary syndrome, is associated with atherosclerotic peripheral arterial disease (PAD). METHODS The study comprised 433 patients with symptomatic atherosclerotic PAD (i.e., chronic limb ischemia) and 433 controls matched to the patients with PAD in a 1:1 design by sex, age (+/-2 years), and diabetes mellitus status. Serum PAPP-A concentrations were measured with an enzymatically amplified 2-step sandwich-type immunoassay. RESULTS The entire study sample included 612 male and 254 female patients with a median age of 68 years. The median PAPP-A value was higher in the patients with PAD than in the referents (0.81 vs 0.64 mU/L; P <0.001). After we adjusted for several possible confounding variables with multivariable logistic regression, odds ratios for PAD were 1.59 (95% confidence interval, 1.00-2.52; P = 0.049), 2.28 (1.45-3.61; P <0.001), and 2.86 (1.78-4.59; P <0.001) in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quartiles of serum PAPP-A concentrations compared with the first quartile. In the present study, PAPP-A added to the predictive value of other markers commonly in use. CONCLUSIONS PAPP-A was associated with atherosclerotic PAD in the elderly sample studied. Because atherosclerotic PAD is considered an indicator of systemic atherosclerotic disease in elderly patients, the present results indicate that circulating PAPP-A may be a marker for systemic atherosclerotic disease.
Bandwidth Efficient Distant Vector Routing for Ad Hoc Networks

An ad hoc network is a collection of mobile nodes forming a tem porary network without using any existing infrastructure. Limited tr ansmission range, limited bandwidth, and a highly dynamic network topology due to continuo usly moving nodes require the use of sophisticated non-standard routing protocols. W e propose a new routing protocol which extends the well-known distance vector routing o calculate routes by using minimum spanning trees. This approach prevents the count to infinity problemand reduces the number of required messages. An additional option is the limitation of path optimisation, which allows further decrease of routing messages. Si mulation experiments show that this approach is an efficient solution to routing in an ad hoc e nvironment.
Providing Data Group Anonymity Using Concentration Differences

Public access to digital data can turn out to be a cause of undesirable information disclosure. That's why it is vital to somehow protect the data before publishing. There are two main subclasses of such a task, namely, providing individual and group anonymity. In the paper, we introduce an original method of protecting the group patterns of data. Also, we provide a comprehensive illustrative example
Presenilin 1 Controls γ-Secretase Processing of Amyloid Precursor Protein in Pre-Golgi Compartments of Hippocampal Neurons

Mutations of presenilin 1 (PS1) causing Alzheimer's disease selectively increase the secretion of the amyloidogenic βA4(1-42), whereas knocking out the gene results in decreased production of both βA4(1-40) and (1-42) amyloid peptides (De Strooper et al. 1998). Therefore, PS1 function is closely linked to the γ-secretase processing of the amyloid precursor protein (APP). Given the ongoing controversy on the subcellular localization of PS1, it remains unclear at what level of the secretory and endocytic pathways PS1 exerts its activity on APP and on the APP carboxy-terminal fragments that are the direct substrates for γ-secretase. Therefore, we have reinvestigated the subcellular localization of endogenously expressed PS1 in neurons in vitro and in vivo using confocal microscopy and fine-tuned subcellular fractionation. We show that uncleaved PS1 holoprotein is recovered in the nuclear envelope fraction, whereas the cleaved PS fragments are found mainly in post-ER membranes including the intermediate compartment (IC). PS1 is concentrated in discrete sec23p- and p58/ERGIC-53–positive patches, suggesting its localization in subdomains involved in ER export. PS1 is not found to significant amounts beyond the cis-Golgi. Surprisingly, we found that APP carboxy-terminal fragments also coenrich in the pre-Golgi membrane fractions, consistent with the idea that these fragments are the real substrates for γ-secretase. Functional evidence that PS1 exerts its effects on γ-secretase processing of APP in the ER/IC was obtained using a series of APP trafficking mutants. These mutants were investigated in hippocampal neurons derived from transgenic mice expressing PS1wt or PS1 containing clinical mutations (PS1M146L and PS1L286V) at physiologically relevant levels. We demonstrate that the APP-London and PS1 mutations have additive effects on the increased secretion of βA4(1-42) relative to βA4(1-40), indicating that both mutations operate independently. Overall, our data clearly establish that PS1 controls γ42-secretase activity in pre-Golgi compartments. We discuss models that reconcile this conclusion with the effects of PS1 deficiency on the generation of βA4(1-40) peptide in the late biosynthetic and endocytic pathways.
ATTITUDES et comportements alimentaires inappropriés ET CARACTÉRISTIQUES PSYCHOSOCIALES DES SPORTIFS : COMPARAISON ENTRE DEUX NIVEAUX DE PRATIQUE SPORTIVE

L’objectif de cette etude est de comparer les attitudes et comportements alimentaires inappropries (ACAI) ainsi que les caracteristiques psychosociales - anxiete physique sociale, perceptions du soi physique, pression percue pour etre mince - entre deux niveaux de pratique sportive (intensive et de loisir). Cent quarante-six adolescents francais ont rempli un ensemble de questionnaires. Les resultats indiquent que, comparativement aux sportifs qui s’entrainent en loisir, les sportifs de niveau intensif sont plus nombreux a avoir recours a des ACAI, ils ressentent egalement plus d’insatisfaction corporelle et d’anxiete physique sociale, ils sont moins satisfaits de leur apparence physique et ressentent plus de pression pour mincir.
Dissipative Euler Flows and Onsager's Conjecture

For any \theta<1/10 we construct periodic weak solutions of the incompressible Euler equations which dissipate the total kinetic energy and are Holder-continuous with exponent \theta. A famous conjecture of Onsager states the existence of such dissipative solutions with any Holder exponent \theta<1/3. Our theorem is the first result in this direction.