Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Heuristics for vehicle routing problems: Current challenges and future prospects

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) involve designing least-cost delivery routes to visit a geographically-dispersed set of customers. Over the past 60 years, this class of problems has been the subject of considerable work, summing up to thousands of articles. In 2017, we can reasonably say that the classical capacitated VRP (with only capacity constraints) is fairly well solved by metaheuristic techniques. Yet, the research on VRPs keeps on expanding even further, as a consequence of the increasing diversity of applications, which bring forth new difficult constraints, objectives, and combined decisions to account for customers needs, vehicle and network restrictions, and to better integrate VRP optimization in the decision chains. Moreover, with the advent of collaborative logistics, green initiatives, smart cities, multi-modal transport, in contexts where multiples stakeholders and conflicting objectives have to be considered jointly, or in the presence of dynamic problems with a short response time, the efficient resolution of these problems becomes even more critical. In this talk, we will review some of the most challenging and recent VRP variants, and examine the heuristic solution techniques which are developed to tackle them. We will study the close connections between the structure of the problem decision sets, and the associated solution methods, showing how modern heuristics can effectively perform a search in a reduced space, defined by fewer groups of decision variables. Finally, a key challenge is to progress towards unified solution methods, which are not tailored for one single problem, but instead designed to solve a wide collection of problem variants with different constraints and objectives. For this purpose, we expose some of the main principles of the Unified Hybrid Genetic Search (UHGS), which has been recently extended to obtain state-of-the-art results --in a single code base-- for more than 50 difficult variants of vehicle routing and arc routing problems.
Sodium intake, angiotensin II receptor blockade, and baroreflex function in conscious rats.

The hypothesis that endogenous angiotensin II (Ang II) chronically supports baroreflex control of lumbar sympathetic nerve activity (LSNA) and heart rate (HR) via AT1 but not AT2 receptors was tested in conscious, normotensive rats. Rats were fed either a sodium deficient diet (LS) to increase circulating Ang II or a high-sodium diet (HS) for 2 to 3 weeks. One to two days after surgery to implant catheters and nerve electrodes, baroreflex curves were produced before and 40 minutes after intravenous administration of the AT1 antagonist losartan (10 mg/kg) or the AT2 antagonist PD123319 (500 micrograms/kg + 50 micrograms.kg-1.min-1). Mean arterial pressure (MAP) after losartan was maintained at basal levels with methoxamine. Forty minutes after losartan in LS rats, LSNA (46 +/- 5 to 22 +/- 1% max) and HR (414 +/- 7 to 387 +/- 8 bpm) were decreased (P < .05). Losartan decreased reflex control of LSNA more in LS than in HS rats (P < .05), as indicated by reductions in maximum LSNA (98 +/- 2 to 78 +/- 3% max) and minimum LSNA (42 +/- 5 to 21 +/- 5% max). Losartan also shifted reflex control of LSNA to a lower pressure in both groups, but the effect was larger in LS rats (-21 +/- 3 [LS] versus -9 +/- 2 [HS] mm Hg at basal LSNA; P < .05). Maximum gain was unaltered in either group. Similarly, losartan reduced maximum HR (534 +/- 6 to 495 +/- 9 bpm) and shifted the HR curve leftward (114 +/- 5 to 105 +/- 4 mm Hg) in LS but not in HS rats. In general, no changes were observed in MAP or baroreflex control of LSNA and HR after PD123319 in LS rats. These results suggest that in conscious, normotensive LS rats, endogenous Ang II supports LSNA and HR over a wide MAP range via AT1 but not AT2 receptors.
Implementation of binary masking technique for hearing aid application

As the current speech enhancement algorithms can give results for improved speech audibility only. So, our main motivation is to develop speech enhancement algorithm that would improve performance in speech for hearing impaired persons. In this paper, an algorithm is presented for improving speech intelligibility. Various speech enhancement algorithms were developed but only some of them can be used for real time hearing aid applications. This proposed algorithm can be used for practical hearing prosthetic devices. Implementation of the binary masking algorithm uses a bank of band-pass filters to perform mapping of signals. Also, classification is performed with a signal-to-noise (SNR) estimate and a comparator. This includes spatial filtering method, classification of signals such as original and noisy signal. After this based on SNR threshold level signals are recombined to obtain reduced noise level in speech signal. In this, matlab implementation of binary mask algorithm is provided which shows better results for speech intelligibility as compared to other algorithms.
Machine perfusion for cardiac allograft preservation

Purpose of reviewThe current cardiac preservation strategy for cardiac transplantation involves arresting hearts with a crystalloid preservation solution and storing them in this solution in an ice chest. This technique has allowed good results in heart transplantation, but has limited the transport interval, and has not encouraged major efforts to expand the donor pool. Machine perfusion of explanted organs, a technique used clinically in kidney transplantation, is now under active investigation in the cardiac arena. This review examines the current status of this technology. Recent findingsRecent experimental studies in animals have tested machine perfusion for cardiac preservation. This technique appears to reduce the allograft ischemic burden, may permit longer preservation times, and improves early ventricular function upon reperfusion of the donor heart. The metabolic profile of the stored heart appears better preserved with machine perfusion; however, investigators have noted a risk of edema development in perfused cardiac grafts. SummaryEarly experimental results are encouraging and suggest that machine perfusion may offer superior cardiac performance after transplantation. In the future, this technology may lead to an expansion of the donor pool through greater use of expanded-criteria donors, resuscitation of ischemically injured hearts, or procurement of hearts that are donated after cardiac death.
High Glucose Induces Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Retinal Müller Cells: Implications for Diabetic Retinopathy

Purpose To investigate whether high glucose (HG) induces mitochondrial dysfunction and promotes apoptosis in retinal Müller cells. Methods Rat retinal Müller cells (rMC-1) grown in normal (N) or HG (30 mM glucose) medium for 7 days were subjected to MitoTracker Red staining to identify the mitochondrial network. Digital images of mitochondria were captured in live cells under confocal microscopy and analyzed for mitochondrial morphology changes based on form factor (FF) and aspect ratio (AR) values. Mitochondrial metabolic function was assessed by measuring oxygen consumption rate (OCR) and extracellular acidification rate (ECAR) using a bioenergetic analyzer. Cells undergoing apoptosis were identified by differential dye staining and TUNEL assay, and cytochrome c levels were assessed by Western blot analysis. Results Cells grown in HG exhibited significantly increased mitochondrial fragmentation compared to those grown in N medium (FF = 1.7 ± 0.1 vs. 2.3 ± 0.1; AR = 2.1 ± 0.1 vs. 2.5 ± 0.2; P < 0.01). OCR and ECAR were significantly reduced in cells grown in HG medium compared to those grown in N medium (steady state: 75% ± 20% of control, P < 0.02; 64% ± 22% of control, P < 0.02, respectively). These cells also exhibited a significant increase (∼2-fold) in the number of apoptotic cells compared to those grown in N medium (P < 0.01), with a concomitant increase in cytochrome c levels (247% ± 94% of control, P < 0.05). Conclusions Findings indicate that HG-induced mitochondrial morphology changes and subsequent mitochondrial dysfunction may contribute to retinal Müller cell loss associated with diabetic retinopathy.
Inverted Simulations Demonstrating Strong Ecological Fallacies in Cohort Studies

: We start with a description of the statistical inferential framework and the duality between observed data and the true state of nature that underlies it. We demonstrate here that the usual testing of dueling hypotheses and the acceptance of one and the rejection of the other is a framework which can often be faulty when such inferences are applied to individual subjects. This follows from noting that the statistical inferential framework is predominantly based on conclusions drawn for aggregates and noting that what is true in the aggregate frequently does not hold for individuals, an ecological fallacy. Such a fallacy is usually seen as problematic when each data record represents aggregate statistics for counties or districts and not data for individuals. Here we demonstrate strong ecological fallacies even when using subject data. Inverted simulations, of trials rightly sized to detect meaningful differences, yielding a statistically significant p-value of 0.000001 (1 in a million) and associated with clinically meaningful differences between a hypothetical new therapy and a standard therapy, had a proportion of instances of subjects with standard therapy effect better than new therapy effects close to 30%. A ―winner take all‖ choice between two hypotheses may not be supported by statistically significant differences based on stochastic data. We also argue the incorrectness across many individuals of other summaries such as correlations, density estimates, standard deviations and predictions based on machine learning models. Despite artifacts we support the use of prospective clinical trials and careful unbiased model building as necessary first steps. In health care, high touch personalized care based on patient level data will remain relevant even as we adopt more high tech data-intensive personalized therapeutic strategies based on aggregates.
Butterfly diversity at Guindy National Park in Metropolitan City of Chennai Tamil Nadu South India

The present investigation conducted to study the Butterfly Diversity at Guindy National Park in Metropolitan City of Chennai, Tamil Nadu, South India from February 2016 to July 2016. A total 90 species of butterflies were identified belonging to 5 families and 16 sub families were recorded with eleven species of host plants. The highest numbers of species were documented in family Lycaenidae (27 species), followed by Nymphalidae (26 species), Pieridae (17 species), Hesperiidae (10 species) and Papilioniae (10 species). The butterfly’s status was categorized as Common (C), Occasional (O), Rare (R) and Very rare (VR). Month wise diversity of butterflies was estimated using Shannon Weiner Index (3.054), Simpson Index (9.9637) and Species Richness (73) which showed maximum diversity in the month of July. Among the 90 species observed seven species of butterflies are listed as scheduled species under Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.
Gabor Cube Selection Based Multitask Joint Sparse Representation for Hyperspectral Image Classification

The large amount of spectral and spatial information contained in hyperspectral imagery has provided great opportunity to effectively characterize and identify the surface materials of interest. As a novel feature extraction technique, a series of Gabor wavelet filters with different scales and frequencies was applied on hyperspectral data to extract spectral-spatial-combined features, which produced impressive performance on pixel-oriented classification. However, the incredibly large number of Gabor features could cause too much burden for onboard computation, limiting the efficiency of the method. To make matters worse, due to the nonhomogeneous spatial distribution of materials as well as the different characteristics of the constructed Gabor filters, some Gabor features could have a smaller or even negative impact on material representation, deteriorating the classification accuracy eventually. In this paper, a Gabor cube selection based multitask joint sparse representation approach, abbreviated as GS-MTJSRC, was proposed for hyperspectral image classification. First, based on the Fisher discrimination criterion, the most representative Gabor cubes for each class were picked out. Next, under multitask joint sparse representation framework, a coefficient vector could be obtained for each test sample with the selected Gabor cube features, which could be directly used for the following residual-based classification. Experimental results on three real hyperspectral data sets with different characteristics and spatial resolutions demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.
Thermal-sustainable power budgeting for dynamic threading

As technology scales, thermal management for multi-core architectures becomes a critical challenge due to increased power density and higher integration density. Existing power budgeting techniques focus on maximizing performance under a given power budget by optimizing the core dynamics. However, in multi-core era, a chip-wide power budget is not sufficient to ensure thermal constraints because the thermal sustainable power capacity varies with different threading strategies and core configurations. In this paper, we propose a model which estimates the thermal sustainable power capacity considering these two run-time factors. The model converts the thermal effect of threading strategies and core configurations into power capacity, which provides a context-based power budget for the power budgeting. Based on this model, we introduce a power budgeting framework aiming to optimize the performance within thermal constraints, named as TSocket. Compared to the chip-wide power budgeting solution, TSocket shows 19% of performance improvement for the PARSEC benchmarks by reducing thermal violations and providing extra power budget for performance improvement.
An information theoretic approach for using word cluster information in natural language call routing

In this paper, an information theoretic approach for using word clusters in natural language call routing (NLCR) is proposed. This approach utilizes an automatic word class clustering algorithm to generate word classes from the word based training corpus. In our approach, the information gain (IG) based term selection is used to combine both word term and word class information in NLCR. A joint latent semantic indexing natural language understanding algorithm is derived and studied in NLCR tasks. Comparing with word term based approach, an average performance gain of 10.7% to 14.5% is observed averaged over various training and testing conditions.
Evaluation of a rapid antigen detection test for the diagnosis of group-A beta-hemolytic Streptococcus in pharyngotonsillitis

1. Angus DC, Linde-Zwirble WT, Lidicker J, Clermont G, Carcillo J, Pinsky MR. Epidemiology of severe sepsis in the United States: Analysis of incidence, outcome and associated costs of care. Crit Care Med 2001;29:1303-10. 2. Esteban A, Frutos-Vivar F, Ferguson ND, Peñuelas O, Lorente JA, Gordo F, et al. Sepsis incidence and outcome: Contrasting the intensive care unit with the hospital ward. Crit Care Med 2007;35:1284-9. 3. Martin CM, Priestap F, Fisher H, Fowler RA, Heyland DK, Keenan SP, et al.; STAR Registry Investigators. A prospective, obser vat ional reg is t r y of pat ients wi th severe seps is : The Canadian sepsis treatment and response registry. Crit Care Med 2009; 37:81-8. 4. Dellinger RP, Levy MM, Rhodes A, Annane D, Gerlach H, Opal SM, et al.; Surviving Sepsis Campaign Guidelines Committee including The Pediatric Subgroup. Surviving sepsis campaign: International guidelines for management of severe sepsis and septic shock, 2012. Intensive Care Med 2013;39:165-228. 5. Watkinson PJ, Barber VS, Price JD, Hann A, Tarassenko L, Young JD. A randomized controlled trial of the effect of continuous electronic physiological monitoring on the adverse event rate in high risk medical and surgical patients. Anaesthesia 2006;61:1031-9.
Cost Estimation

Kemerer, C.F. An Empirical Validation of Software Cost Estimation Models, Communications of the ACM, May 1987 , 30(5), 416-429. Question: Are software cost estimating models generalizable to environments in which they were not developed? Are non-SLOC-based models as accurate as SLOC-based models? Are nonproprietary models as accurate as proprietary models? Result: Select 4 models for comparison: SLIM (Proprietary, SLOC-based) COCOMO (Nonproprietary, SLOC-based) ESTIMACS (Proprietary, Non-SLOC-based) Function Points (Nonproprietary, Non-SLOC-based) Get datasets for 16 projects from data-processing applications company Function points model validated by data. No significant difference between proprietary and nonproprietary models. All models show need for calibration to be generalizable. Validation: Establish parameters for applying models to completed projects through interviews and surveys. Stage 3 (cont.)
Task-dependent activity of motor unit populations in feline ankle extensor muscles

SUMMARY Understanding the functional significance of the morphological diversity of mammalian skeletal muscles is limited by technical difficulties of estimating the contribution of motor units with different properties to unconstrained motor behaviours. Recently developed wavelet and principal components analysis of intramuscular myoelectric signals has linked signals with lower and higher frequency contents to the use of slower and faster motor unit populations. In this study we estimated the relative contributions of lower and higher frequency signals of cat ankle extensors (soleus, medial and lateral gastrocnemii, plantaris) during level, downslope and upslope walking and the paw-shake response. This was done using the first two myoelectric signal principal components (PCI, PCII), explaining over 90% of the signal, and an angle θ, a function of PCI/PCII, indicating the relative contribution of slower and faster motor unit populations. Mean myoelectric frequencies in all walking conditions were lowest for slow soleus (234 Hz) and highest for fast gastrocnemii (307 and 330 Hz) muscles. Motor unit populations within and across the studied muscles that demonstrated lower myoelectric frequency (suggesting slower populations) were recruited during tasks and movement phases with lower mechanical demands on the ankle extensors – during downslope and level walking and in early walking stance and paw-shake phases. With increasing mechanical demands (upslope walking, mid-phase of paw-shake cycles), motor unit populations generating higher frequency signals (suggesting faster populations) contributed progressively more. We conclude that the myoelectric frequency contents within and between feline ankle extensors vary across studied motor behaviours, with patterns that are generally consistent with muscle fibre-type composition.
Mutations within the P-Loop of Kir6.2 Modulate the Intraburst Kinetics of the Atp-Sensitive Potassium Channel

The ATP-sensitive potassium (KATP) channel exhibits spontaneous bursts of rapid openings, which are separated by long closed intervals. Previous studies have shown that mutations at the internal mouth of the pore-forming (Kir6.2) subunit of this channel affect the burst duration and the long interburst closings, but do not alter the fast intraburst kinetics. In this study, we have investigated the nature of the intraburst kinetics by using recombinant Kir6.2/SUR1 KATP channels heterologously expressed in Xenopus oocytes. Single-channel currents were studied in inside-out membrane patches. Mutations within the pore loop of Kir6.2 (V127T, G135F, and M137C) dramatically affected the mean open time (τo) and the short closed time (τC1) within a burst, and the number of openings per burst, but did not alter the burst duration, the interburst closed time, or the channel open probability. Thus, the V127T and M137C mutations produced longer τo, shorter τC1, and fewer openings per burst, whereas the G135F mutation had the opposite effect. All three mutations also reduced the single-channel conductance: from 70 pS for the wild-type channel to 62 pS (G135F), 50 pS (M137C), and 38 pS (V127T). These results are consistent with the idea that the KATP channel possesses a gate that governs the intraburst kinetics, which lies close to the selectivity filter. This gate appears to be able to operate independently of that which regulates the long interburst closings.
Safety considerations for statins

Purpose of review The hydroxymethyl glutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitors or statins offer important benefits for the large populations of individuals at high risk for coronary heart disease. These drugs have a good safety profile. Nevertheless, differences in physicochemical and pharmacokinetic properties between statins may translate into significant differences in long-term safety. This review focuses on long-term adverse effects related to statin use, namely hepatotoxicity and myopathy. Moreover, the most common drugs used in combination with statins in long-term therapies are analyzed in terms of possible drug/drug interactions affecting the safety of statins. Recent findings The withdrawal of cerivastatin from the global market in 2001, because of severe cases of rhabdomyolysis, highlighted concerns regarding the safety of the entire class. Afterwards, the role of statins and their interactions with other drugs in precipitating this condition have been carefully reviewed. In approximately 60% of the total number of cases, statin-related rhabdomyolysis was found to be related to drug/drug interactions. Recently, all cases of fatal rhabdomyolysis associated with statin use have been reported to the US Food and Drug Administration. This has shown that fatal rhabdomyolysis among statin users is a rare event, the reporting rates being much less than one death per million prescriptions in the case of all statins except cerivastatin. Summary The safety and tolerability of the available statins support their use as the first-line treatment of patients at high risk for coronary heart disease, since the clinical benefits greatly outweigh the small risk of myopathy. Nevertheless, clinicians should be aware of the adverse effects possibly related to statin therapy, particularly in patients at high risk for coronary heart disease and requiring long-term multiple-drug therapies.
Glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis

Corticosteroid-induced osteoporosis is the most common form of secondary osteoporosis and the first cause in young people. Bone loss and increased rate of fractures occur early after the initiation of corticosteroid therapy, and are then related to dosage and treatment duration. The increase in fracture risk is not fully assessed by bone mineral density measurements, as it is also related to alteration of bone quality and increased risk of falls. In patients with rheumatoid arthritis, a treat-to-target strategy focusing on low disease activity including through the use of low dose of prednisone, is a key determinant of bone loss prevention. Bone loss magnitude is variable and there is no clearly identified predictor of the individual risk of fracture. Prevention or treatment of osteoporosis should be considered in all patients who receive prednisone. Bisphosphonates and the anabolic agent parathyroid hormone (1–34) have shown their efficacy in the treatment of corticosteroid-induced osteoporosis. Recent international guidelines are available and should guide management of corticosteroid-induced osteoporosis, which remains under-diagnosed and under-treated. Duration of antiosteoporotic treatment should be discussed at the individual level, depending on the subject's characteristics and on the underlying inflammation evolution.