Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Too close for comfort?: adapting to the user's cultural background

The cultural context of the user is a largely neglected aspect of human centered computing. This is because culture is a very fuzzy concept and even with a computational model of culture it remains difficult to derive the necessary information to recognize the user's cultural background. Such information is only indirectly available and has to be derived from the observable multimodal behavior of the user. We propose the usage of a dimensional model of culture that allows applying computational methods to derive a user's cultural background and to adjust the system's behavior accordingly. To this end, a Bayesian network is applied to allow for the necessary inferences despite the fact that the given knowledge about the user's behavior is incomplete and unreliable.
Experimental studies on the mechanisms and treatments of chronic pain

Chronic pain is a major concern for physical and mental health of a large patient population today while casting a significant economical burden on society. Work presented in this thesis deal with aspects of mechanisms and treatments of chronic pain using experimental models. A common characteristic for many chronic pain conditions, particularly those after nerve injury, is hypersensitivity to cold stimulation. In the first part of the thesis, I presented a new method using a Peltier thermode to examine the responses of rats to quantitative thermal stimulation (heating and cooling). Using this method with temperature as end points, I showed that we can reliably detect cold hypersensitivity in spinally injured rats as well as study quantitatively the effects of analgesics again cold pain. Sinomenine is a morphinan derivative alkaloid originally isolated from the root of the climbing plant Sinomenium Acutum that is native to Japan and China. The root of Sinomenium Acutum has long been used in East Asia as a remedy for disease conditions similar to rheumatism and sinomenine is currently used in China as an anti-rheumatic agent. In the second part of the thesis, we characterized the analgesic effect of sinomenine in a variety of experimental pain models. We showed that while sinomenine has modest effects on acute pain in normal rats, it produces marked analgesic effects in a wide-spectrum of models, including neuropathic pain in rats and mice after injury to the peripheral and central nervous system, acute inflammatory pain by carrageenan in mice as well as arthritic pain in mice using the collagen antibody-induced arthritis model (CAIA). We further showed that under chronic administration, sinomenine maintained its analgesic effect in neuropathic and arthritic pain models without producing tolerance or dependence. Our results thus suggested that sinomenine may be considered as a novel analgesic in treating neuropathic and arthritic pain. One of the main clinical features of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is sex difference in its prevalence and symptoms, including pain. The underlying mechanisms of sex differences in RA are still largely unknown. In the last part of the thesis, we studied sex differences in the development arthritis and pain-like behaviors in mice using the CAIA model. We observed a significant sex difference (females > males) in the development of joint inflammation and localized mechanical allodynia in the paws after CAIA in CBA strain of mice. Similarly, female CAIA mice also developed more persistent spread mechanical allodynia in their neck and flank areas. Following CAIA, the greater mechanical hypersensitivity in females was correlated to a higher expression of ionized calcium-binding adapter molecule 1, but lower expressions of activating transcription factor 3 and galanin, in dorsal root ganglion (DRG) compared with males. We conclude that sex differences in the CAIA model in CBA mice are similar to the clinical condition and sex dependent phenotypic changes in the DRG may be keys for the sex differences in RA and pain.
Convergence Speed of Nonlinear Luenberger Observers

It is shown that under a weak observability assumption, the nonlinear Luenberger observer exists and ensures an exponential convergence rate of the estimate towards the state of the system. Moreover, it is shown that under the complete observability assumption, this class of observers is tunable. More specifically, it is shown that the estimate reaches a predetermined neighborhood of the state after a parameterizable time.
User Acceptance of Computerized Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression: Systematic Review

Background Computerized cognitive behavioral therapy (cCBT) has been proven to be effective in depression care. Moreover, cCBT packages are becoming increasingly popular. A central aspect concerning the take-up and success of any treatment is its user acceptance. Objective The aim of this study was to update and expand on earlier work on user acceptance of cCBT for depression. Methods This paper systematically reviewed quantitative and qualitative studies regarding the user acceptance of cCBT for depression. The initial search was conducted in January 2016 and involved the following databases: Web of Science, PubMed, the Cochrane Library, and PsycINFO. Studies were retained if they described the explicit examination of the user acceptance, experiences, or satisfaction related to a cCBT intervention, if they reported depression as a primary outcome, and if they were published in German or English from July 2007 onward. Results A total of 1736 studies were identified, of which 29 studies were eligible for review. User acceptance was operationalized and analyzed very heterogeneously. Eight studies reported a very high level of acceptance, 17 indicated a high level of acceptance, and one study showed a moderate level of acceptance. Two qualitative studies considered the positive and negative aspects concerning the user acceptance of cCBT. However, a substantial proportion of reviewed studies revealed several methodical shortcomings. Conclusions In general, people experience cCBT for depression as predominantly positive, which supports the potential role of these innovative treatments. However, methodological challenges do exist in terms of defining user acceptance, clear operationalization of concepts, and measurement.
Relationship Between the Severity of Malocclusion and Oral Health Related Quality of Life: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.

PURPOSE To investigate the impact of untreated malocclusion on different aspects of oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL). MATERIALS AND METHODS All relevant literature published up to February 18, 2016 was collected from nine electronic databases. To make studies comparable, studies that used the dental aesthetic index (DAI), index of orthodontic treatment need (IOTN), or index of complexity, outcome and need (ICON) to measure malocclusion and oral health impact profile (OHIP) to measure OHRQoL were selected for systematic review. Meta-analysis, two independent-samples t-test and binary logistic regression were used to test whether different malocclusion severity groups had different OHIP scores. RESULTS A total of 564 non-duplicate publications were identified first. Of these, 13 studies were included in this review. All studies had a cross-sectional design and most of them used convenience samples. Eleven studies presented a significant result about the association of malocclusion and OHIP scores. Statistical analyses showed that malocclusion had an impact on all subscales scores, and more severe malocclusion indicated higher OHIP scores on the subscales of physical disability, physical pain, psychological discomfort, psychological disability, and social disability. CONCLUSION Untreated malocclusion was significantly associated with OHRQoL. The more severe the malocclusion, the worse was the impact on some physical domains and all psychosocial domains of OHRQoL. There was a lack of longitudinal population-based studies to confirm this result.
MicroRNA-92a-3p Regulates Aggrecanase-1 and Aggrecanase-2 Expression in Chondrogenesis and IL-1β-Induced Catabolism in Human Articular Chondrocytes

Background/Aims: Aggrecanase-1 (ADAMTS-4) and aggrecanase-2 (ADAMTS-5) are secreted enzymes belonging to the ADAMTS (a disintegrin and metalloproteinase with thrombospondin motifs) family that play significant roles in the progression of osteoarthritis (OA). Here, we aimed to determine whether the expression of ADAMTS-4/5 in chondrogenesis and inflammation is regulated by microRNA-92a-3p (miR-92a-3p). Methods: MiR-92a-3p and ADAMTS-4/5 expressions were determined by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR). To investigate the repressive effect of miR-92a-3p on ADAMTS-4/5 expression, chondrogenic human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) and human chondrocytes were transfected with mature miR-92a-3p or an antisense inhibitor (anti-miR-92a-3p), respectively. ADAMTS-4/5 protein production was quantified by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and miR-92a-3p involvement in IL-1β-mediated catabolic effects was examined by immunoblotting. The roles of activated MAP kinases (MAPK) and nuclear factor (NF)-κB were evaluated by using specific inhibitors. Interaction between miR-92a-3p and its putative binding site in the 3′-untranslated region (3′-UTR) of ADAMTS-4/5 mRNA was confirmed by luciferase reporter assay. Results: miR-92a-3p expression was elevated in chondrogenic hMSCs, with significantly lower expression in OA cartilage than in normal cartilage. Stimulation with IL-1β significantly reduced miR-92a-3p expression in primary human chondrocytes (PHCs). Transfection of chondrocytes with miR-92a-3p downregulated IL-1β-induced ADAMTS-4/5 expression, and the activity of a reporter construct containing the 3′-UTR of human ADAMTS-4/5 mRNA. MiR-92a-3p expression was suppressed upon IL-1β-induced activation of MAPK and NF-κB in chondrocytes. Conclusion: MiR-92a-3p is an important regulator of ADAMTS-4/5 in human chondrocytes and may contribute to the development of OA.
Review of the management of pneumocephalus

Background: Pneumocephalus (PNC) is the presence of air in the intracranial cavity. The most frequent cause is trauma, but there are many other etiological factors, such as surgical procedures. PNC with compression of frontal lobes and the widening of the interhemispheric space between the tips of the frontal lobes is a characteristic radiological finding of the “Mount Fuji sign. ” In addition to presenting our own case, we reviewed the most relevant clinical features, diagnostic methods, and conservative management for this condition. Case Description: A 74-year-old male was diagnosed with meningioma of olfactory groove several years ago. After no improvement, surgery of the left frontal craniotomy keyhole type was conducted. A computed tomography (CT) scan of the skull performed 24 h later showed a neuroimaging that it is described as the silhouette of Mount Fuji. The treatment was conservative and used continuous oxygen for 5 days. Control CT scan demonstrated reduction of the intracranial air with normal brain parenchyma. Conclusion: The review of the literature, we did not find any cases of tension pneumocephalus documented previously through a supraorbital keyhole approach. There are a few cases reported of patients with Mount Fuji signs that do not require surgical procedures. The conservative treatment in our report leads to clinical and radiological improvement as well as a reduction in hospitalization time.
Association of electrospinning with electrospraying: a strategy to produce 3D scaffolds with incorporated stem cells for use in tissue engineering

In tissue engineering, a uniform cell occupation of scaffolds is crucial to ensure the success of tissue regeneration. However, this point remains an unsolved problem in 3D scaffolds. In this study, a direct method to integrate cells into fiber scaffolds was investigated by combining the methods of electrospinning of fibers and bioelectrospraying of cells. With the associating of these methods, the cells were incorporated into the 3D scaffolds while the fibers were being produced. The scaffolds containing cells (SCCs) were produced using 20% poly(lactide-co-glycolide) solution for electrospinning and mesenchymal stem cells from deciduous teeth as a suspension for bioelectrospraying. After their production, the SCCs were cultivated for 15 days at 37°C with an atmosphere of 5% CO2. The 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol- 2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide test demonstrated that the cells remained viable and were able to grow between the fibers. Scanning electron microscopy showed the presence of a high number of cells in the structure of the scaffolds and confocal images demonstrated that the cells were able to adapt and spread between the fibers. Histological analysis of the SCCs after 1 day of cultivation showed that the cells were uniformly distributed throughout the thickness of the scaffolds. Some physicochemical properties of the scaffolds were also investigated. SCCs exhibited good mechanical properties, compatible with their handling and further implantation. The results obtained in the present study suggest that the association of electrospinning and bioelectrospraying provides an interesting tool for forming 3D cell-integrated scaffolds, making it a viable alternative for use in tissue engineering.
Scaling Distributed File Systems via Correlation-based Metadata

Distributed file systems (DFS) such as GFS[5], HDFS[14], Ceph[16] have become key data storage components to building scalable Internet services. The typical DFS architecture consists of three components, namely, metadata servers(MDS), object-based storage devices(OSD) and clients. Clients first send metadata requests directly to MDS and later on contact OSD for accessing raw data. The interaction with MDS may involve a sequence of operations to perform a lookup to locate the path info, obtain the metadata info (i.e., directory entry and inode) and require a lease to be able to manipulate the target file. A survey highlights that the number of IOs to MDS is significant and accounts for 50% in the overall IOs to the whole DFS [12]. As a result, the performance of the metadata server is crucial to scale DFS[17, 10, 18, 3, 15, 11, 1, 2, 13]. In web services, loading one web page may lead to loading multiple scripts and images, as that page contains various links referring to those required resources. For instance, we analyse the access log [19] of web servers and find out that 23% requests are correlated. The metadata server design does not respect the existences of correlations, and thus resulting in performance degradations: (a) too much traffic that could be grouped together flows to metadata server in a separating manner and may overwhelm it; (b) the sequential access also prolongs the page loading time, which is the primary concern of service providers. It is worth noting that these correlated access patterns also appear in scenarios other than web services, such as code browsing, scientific computations and so forth. To keep MDS away from being the bottleneck, in this paper, we propose a correlations-based metadata prefetching to significantly reduce IO traffic to MDS and consequently to scale distributed file systems. To achieve this, we must overcome the following challenges:(1) extracting correlations with low false negatives where a correlation we predict never exists; (2) fast adapting to real time changes of correlations as the system is running; (3) efficiently prefetching correlated files.
The association of donor and recipient age with graft survival in paediatric renal transplant recipients in a European Society for Paediatric Nephrology/European Renal Association–European Dialysis and Transplantation Association Registry study

Background The impact of donor age in paediatric kidney transplantation is unclear. We therefore examined the association of donor-recipient age combinations with graft survival in children. Methods Data for 4686 first kidney transplantations performed in 13 countries in 1990-2013 were extracted from the ESPN/ERA-EDTA Registry. The effect of donor and recipient age combinations on 5-year graft-failure risk, stratified by donor source, was estimated using Kaplan-Meier survival curves and Cox regression, while adjusting for sex, primary renal diseases with a high risk of recurrence, pre-emptive transplantation, year of transplantation and country. Results The risk of graft failure in older living donors (50-75 years old) was similar to that of younger living donors {adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 0.74 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.38-1.47]}. Deceased donor (DD) age was non-linearly associated with graft survival, with the highest risk of graft failure found in the youngest donor age group [0-5 years; compared with donor ages 12-19 years; aHR 1.69 (95% CI 1.26-2.26)], especially among the youngest recipients (0-11 years). DD age had little effect on graft failure in recipients' ages 12-19 years. Conclusions Our results suggest that donations from older living donors provide excellent graft outcomes in all paediatric recipients. For young recipients, the allocation of DDs over the age of 5 years should be prioritized.
Wide-Area Phase-Angle Measurements for Islanding Detection—An Adaptive Nonlinear Approach

The integration of an ever-growing proportion of large-scale distributed renewable generation has increased the probability of maloperation of the traditional RoCoF and vector shift relays. With reduced inertia due to nonsynchronous penetration in a power grid, system-wide disturbances have forced the utility industry to design advanced protection schemes to prevent system degradation and avoid cascading outages leading to widespread blackouts. This paper explores a novel adaptive nonlinear approach applied to islanding detection, based on wide-area phase-angle measurements. This is challenging since the voltage phase angles from different locations exhibit not only strong nonlinear but also time-varying characteristics. The adaptive nonlinear technique, called moving window kernel principal component analysis, is proposed to model the time-varying and nonlinear trends in the voltage-phase angle data. The effectiveness of the technique is exemplified using DigSilent simulated cases and real test cases recorded from the Great Britain and Ireland power systems by the OpenPMU project.
Demonstration of unobservable voice over IP

We describe UV: a two-node system for unobservable voice communication on the Internet. UV provides unobservability of communication by hiding the fact that there is a conversation taking place. To achieve this, the system uses techniques such as encryption, constant traffic generation, equal packet sizes, and a fixed packet sending schedule. We evaluate the influence of the constant traffic generation on the general performance of UV with experiments on the Internet and in a wireless setting simulated with network simulator NS2. We conclude that although the requirements for privacy protection and usability are often mutually exclusive, they can still be combined in a way that they offer both reasonable performance and good privacy protection.
Effect of reaction atmosphere on structural and optical properties of hexagonal molybdenum oxide (h-MoO3)

The present work aims to synthesize single phase h-MoO3 nanocrytals by chemical precipitation method exposed under different reaction atmospheres. The reaction atmosphere have been successfully tuned as air, nitrogen and argon and studied its effects on structural, functional, morphology and optical properties by using X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) measurements. The XRD result indicates that the sample exhibits characteristic hexagonal phase of MoO3. The crystallite size is estimated by well known Scherrer’s method. The crystallite size is relative small in the case of sample prepared at argon atmosphere. The functional groups such as Mo-O, N-H and O-H are identified from FT-IR spectroscopy. The particle exhibits rod like morphology with perfect hexagonal cross-section. The optical absorption observed at 420-450 nm corresponds to fundamental optical absorption by h-MoO3. The band gap v.
Incidence, patient satisfaction, and perceptions of post-surgical pain: results from a US national survey

Abstract Objective: During the past two decades, professional associations, accrediting bodies, and payors have made post-surgical pain treatment a high priority. In light of the disappointing findings in previous surveys, a survey was conducted to assess patient perceptions and characterize patient experiences/levels of satisfaction with post-surgical pain management. Research design and methods: Survey included a random sample of US adults who had undergone surgery within 5 years from the survey date. Participants were asked about their concerns before surgery, severity of perioperative pain, pain treatments, perceptions about post-surgical pain and pain medications, and satisfaction with treatments they received. Results: Of the 300 participants, ∼86% experienced pain after surgery; of these, 75% had moderate/extreme pain during the immediate post-surgical period, with 74% still experiencing these levels of pain after discharge. Post-surgical pain was the most prominent pre-surgical patient concern, and nearly half reported they had high/very high anxiety levels about pain before surgery. Approximately 88% received analgesic medications to manage pain; of these, 80% experienced adverse effects and 39% reported moderate/severe pain even after receiving their first dose. Study limitations: Key study limitations include the relatively small population size, potential for recall bias associated with the 14-month average time delay from surgery date to survey date, and the inability to account for influences of type of surgery and intraoperative anesthetic/analgesic use on survey results. Conclusions: Despite heightened awareness and clinical advancements in pain management, there has been little improvement in post-surgical analgesia as measured by this survey of post-surgical patients.
Energy-Efficient Power Delivery System Paradigms for Many-Core Processors

The design of power delivery system plays a crucial role in guaranteeing the proper functionality of many-core processor systems. The power loss suffered on power delivery has become a salient part of total power consumption, and the energy efficiency of a highly dynamic system has been significantly challenged. Being able to achieve a fast response time and multiple voltage domain control, on-chip voltage regulators (VRs) have become popular choices to enable fine-grain power management, which also enlarge the design space of power delivery systems. This paper analytically studies different power delivery system paradigms and power management schemes in terms of energy efficiency, area overhead, and power pin occupation. The analysis shows that compared to the conventional paradigm with off-chip VRs, hybrid paradigms with both on-chip and off-chip VRs are able to maintain high efficiency in a larger range of workloads, though they suffer from low efficiency at light workload. Employed with the quantized power management scheme, the hybrid paradigm can improve the system energy efficiency at light workload by a maximum of 136% compared to the traditional load balanced scheme. Besides this, the in-package (iP) hybrid paradigm further shows its advantage in reducing the physical overheads. The results reveal that at 120 W workload, it occupies only a 10.94% total footprint area or 39.07% power pins of that of the off-chip paradigm. We conclude that the iP hybrid paradigm achieves the best tradeoffs between efficiency, physical overhead, and realization of fine-grain power management.