Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved Knee Function with Customized vs. Off-the-Shelf TKA Implants—Results of a Single-Surgeon, Single-Center, Single-Blinded Study

Background: Recent studies have been able to show certain benefits of Customized, Individually Made (CIM) compared to Off-the-Shelf (OTS) total knee arthroplasties (TKAs), but evidence is still lacking regarding the benefits of these implant systems. This study aimed to find differences in scores and functional outcome by comparing CIM and OTS implants, using Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and functional tests for activities of daily living in a single-surgeon setup. Methods: A total of 48 patients (16 CIM vs. 32 OTS) were consecutively enrolled and blindly examined. Functional testing was performed using four timed functional tests (TUG, WALK, TUDS, and BBS) and the VAS for pain. The Aggregated Locomotor Function (ALF) score was then calculated based on the addition of the average times of the three functional tests. Results: The CIM group showed significantly faster times in all functional tests and significantly better ALF scores. There were remarkable differences in the assessment of maximum pain sensation between the two groups, with superiority in the CIM group. The PROMs analysis revealed a higher proportion of excellent and good ratings for the items objective and function (KSS) in the CIM group. Conclusion: The study showed that time-limited activities of daily living (ADLs) can be completed significantly faster with a CIM prosthesis and that a significantly higher percentage in this group reports freedom from pain during certain loads. Partial aspects of the PROM scores are also better in this group; however, this superiority could not be shown with regard to most PROM scores collected in this study.
MTANet: Multi-band Time-frequency Attention Network for Singing Melody Extraction from Polyphonic Music

Singing melody extraction is an important task in music information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a multi-band time-frequency attention network (MTANet) for singing melody extraction from polyphonic music, which can generate the feature representation to characterize the fundamental frequency (F0) component. Moreover, a band partition scheme is proposed to fit the position distribution of the F0 component. Further, three hourglass sub-networks are used to capture various multi-band features. Then, a feature fusion module (FFM) is employed to fuse the multi-band features. Visualization analysis shows that the multi-band feature extraction branch can generate the feature representation for characterizing the F0 component effectively. Experimental results show that the MTANet outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods, while keeping with fewer network parameters. Visualized results intuitively show that the MTANet can reduce the octave and melody detection errors.
Analysis of Acoustic information in End-to-End Spoken Language Translation

End-to-End Transformer-based models are the most popular approach for Spoken Language Translation (SLT). While obtaining state-of-the-art results, we are still far from understanding how these models extract acoustic information from the data and how they are transformed into semantic representations. In this paper, we seek to provide a better understanding of the flow of acoustic information along speech-to-text translation models. By means of the Speaker Classification and Spectrogram Reconstruction tasks, this study (i) interprets the main role of the encoder with respect to the acoustic features, (ii) highlights the importance of the acoustic information throughout the model and its transfer between encoder and decoder, and (iii) reveals the significant effect of downsampling convolutional layers for learning acoustic features. (iv) Finally, we also observe the existence of a strong correlation between the semantic domain and the speakers’ labels in MuST-C.
NEST-MONITORING PLOTS: METHODS FOR LOCATING NESTS AND MONITORING SUCCESS

-Attention to long-term declines in populations of Neotropical migratory birds has generated increased interest in how to monitor and manage them. Measurement of nesting success provides information on trends in recruitment, and measurement of vegetation associated with nests may identify habitat influences on breeding productivity. Examination of nests also allows collection of life history data (e.g., clutch size, numbers of broods, numbers of nesting attempts, nesting success), which provide important insight into vulnerability of species to decimation or perturbations. Comparisons of nesting success and habitat use across the geographic range of a species can determine local habitat effects on population recruitment and historical constraints on habitat use and species distributions. In this paper, standardized methods and cues are described that aid in locating and monitoring nests to allow comparisons across studies in space and time. METODOS PARA LOCALIZAR NIDOS Y MONITOREAR EL EXITO DE ESTOS Sinopsis. -El decrecimiento progresivo de las poblaciones de aves que migran al neotropico ha generado gran interes en cbmo monitorear y manejar a estos. El medir el &xito de anidamiento provee informaci6n en relaci6n a las tendencias en el reclutamiento poblacional y las medidas de la vegetacion asociada a nidos puede ser importante en identificar aspectos de esta que influyan en la productividad. El examen de nidos tambien permite recopilar datos sobre ciclos de vida (ej. tamafio de la camada, numero de camadas por afio, numero de intentos de anidamiento, y exito de anidamiento) el cual provee informaci6n importate en referencia a la vulnerabilidad de la especie a perturbaciones. La comparaci6n del exito de anidamiento de una especie en diferentes habitats a lo largo de extensiones geogrificas puede determinar el efecto de habitats locales en el reclutamiento poblacional y restricciones hist6ricas en el uso de habitat y la distribuci6n de la especie. En este trabajo, se describen metodos estandarizados y pistas que pueden ayudar a localizar y monitorear nidos de tal manera que se puedan hacer comparaciones entre estudios y lapsos de espacio y/o tiempo. Habitat features that influence breeding productivity of birds are poorly known (Martin 1992). Measurement of nesting success and associated vegetation allows identification of such habitat features and also provides greater insight into evolution of habitat requirements and species coexistence than traditional metrics such as presence or abundance (Martin 1986, 1988a, 1992). Data on nest sites and mortality also improve understanding of ecological and evolutionary influences on life history traits ' Current address: Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana 59812 USA.
SEF-Net: Speaker Embedding Free Target Speaker Extraction Network

Most target speaker extraction methods use the target speaker embedding as reference information. However, the speaker embedding extracted by a speaker recognition module may not be optimal for the target speaker extraction tasks. In this paper, we proposes Speaker Embedding Free target speaker extraction Network (SEF-Net), a novel target speaker extraction model without relying on speaker embedding. SEF-Net uses cross multi-head attention in the transformer decoder to implicitly utilize the speaker information in the reference speech’s conformer encoding outputs. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves comparable performance to other target speaker extraction models. SEF-Net provides a feasible new solution to perform target speaker extraction without using a speaker embedding extractor or speaker recognition loss function.
Robust Automatic Motorcycle Helmet Violation Detection for an Intelligent Transportation System

Video surveillance-based automatic detection of motorcycle helmet usage can enhance the effectiveness of educational and enforcement initiatives aimed at boosting road safety. Current detection methods, however, have room for enhancement, such as the inability to pinpoint individual motorcycles or differentiate between drivers and passengers in terms of helmet usage. This paper introduces a framework designed to detect and identify individual motorcycles while recording specific helmet usage for riders. The proposed classification approach for helmet usage demonstrates increased efficiency in comparison to previous research. Our findings highlight the exceptional accuracy of deep learning, with our method achieving a score of 0.7754 on the AI City 2023 Challenge Track 5 public leaderboard.
Leadership Style, Motivation, and Work Environment on Job Satisfaction and Employee Performance at the Environment and Hygiene Department of Pekanbaru City

This study aims to analyze the influence of leadership style, motivation, and work environment on job satisfaction and employee performance at the Pekanbaru City Environment and Hygiene Service. This research is quantitative research by distributing questionnaires to respondents. The sample selection method in this study used the census method so the sample in this study amounted to 58 respondents. Data analysis using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) using the SmartPLS 3 application. The results of this study indicate that leadership style has no significant effect on job satisfaction, leadership style has no significant effect on performance, the work environment has a positive and significant effect on job satisfaction, and the work environment has no significant effect on job satisfaction. significant effect on performance, motivation has no significant effect on job satisfaction, motivation has a positive and significant effect on performance, and job satisfaction has a positive and significant effect on employee performance.
Achieving A Secure Cloud Storage Mechanism Using Blockchain Technology

—Storage requirements are increasing rapidly with fast-growing Cloud computing technology. The more data storage and transaction processing requirements, the more chances of malicious activities. Storage security is a vital concern nowadays. To deal with this problem, in this research, we propose a system that provides an efficient security mechanism for data storage on the Cloud with enhanced access control policies by using Blockchain technology, which is immutable in nature. The usage of smart contracts improves transparency and creates a trust model that eliminates the requirement of a trusted third party. The system manages the log trails of all transactions and accomplishes all access policies. The proposed model is transparent, traceable, and secure. Data owners hold all rights to their data and any activity pertaining to accessing the data illegitimately shall not be accepted by the network and shall be notified to all the concerns. We demonstrate our proposed mechanism with details about all concerned stakeholders. The Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) scheme is used with multiple authorities to manage the user attributes that avoid the use of the central authority. The smart contract avoids the computational burden on the user side and reduces communication costs. We analyze security and compare the performance of our proposed model.
Adapting to change during the pandemic: The impact of COVID-19 on people living with HIV, and their coping strategies

Background: COVID-19 lockdowns led to people living with HIV experiencing lack of social connectedness, social isolation, difficulties with using technology and accessing health care and support services easily. The presented study sought to understand the challenges caused by COVID-19 and coping strategies. Methods: The study was conducted using focus groups with nineteen participants. Participants lost social connectedness, struggled to learn technology, and felt isolated in the absence of face to face peer support activities provided by HIV community support services. Participants employed a range of positive coping strategies including appreciation of the outdoors and volunteering. Conclusion: People living with value social contact and face-face support offered through HIV voluntary sector organisations. The absence of this led to compromised social and emotional wellbeing. This focus group-based research with provision of communal lunch however, played a part in addressing isolation, appreciation of social contact and limiting the psychological impact caused by COVID-19 lockdowns.
Novel Out-of-Band mmWave Layer 2 Protocol for 5G Network-Based Downlink IAB SDR Platform

In this paper, we develop a 3GPP-inspired hardware implementation for the out-of-band Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) network, which promises to be a solution to both coverage extension and capacity boosting in 5G and beyond networks. The emulated gNodeB transmits an FR1 5G downlink signal as standardized by the 3GPP, which has been tested by means of commercial equipment. By employing Ettus x310 SDR board, Pasternack’s 60 GHz Transmitter (Tx) waveguide module, and MatlabTM software, we design and develop an easy-to-use out-of-band mmWave Layer 2 (D&F) protocol. The proposed protocol decodes an FR1 5G signal as input at 3.5 GHz, which is retransmitted to the UE as an FR2 5G signal. In the Layer 2 protocol, the least square (LS) estimator implemented considers the channel state information reference signal (CSI-RS). We review and evaluate the key performance indicators (KPIs) of the proposed Layer 2 protocol in real non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments and a comparison between the gNode-to-UE link has been carried out. Our results indicate that the performance of the proposed Layer 2 protocol is similar to the obtained with the Anritsu equipment demonstrating the right functionality of the developed algorithms. Experimental results evidence the superiority of the proposed D&F protocol over the gNodeB-to-UE link (direct link communication).
Probing nonperturbative third and fifth harmonic generation on silicon without and with thermal oxide layer

We examine Si with and without additional SiO2 thin film coating as a candidate for producing powerful 3rd and 5th harmonics of Ti:sapphire laser pulses for future spectroscopic application. Polarization rotation experiments have been performed at different incident angles to determine the origin of the generated harmonics and a strong polarization-dependency of the harmonic signals was observed. A simplified tensor formalism is introduced to reproduce the measurements with high accuracy. Comparing the measurements with the Oh symmetry of the bulk crystal, the C2v structural symmetry for the uncoated Si sample and a C4v symmetry for the SiO2 coated sample, we conclude that the polarization anisotropies are determined by the surface/interface symmetries.
Observation of the Tropospheric Aerosol by Using a Mie Lidar: Observation at the Arid Region in China

Dust particles into the atmosphere are actively injected in the arid regions of inland China, with a steady presence of high-concentration dust layers within the lowest layer (2 to 3 km) of the mixing layer. Disturbances transport dust particles into the free atmosphere, and once injected into the free atmosphere, the dust is transported over long distances and widely dispersed. These dust particles from the arid regions of inland China are referred to as the “Kosa” in Japan, and are prevalent in the spring [Murayama et al., 2001]. The Kosa is sometimes carried over extremely long distances, and may even cross the Northern Pacific Ocean [Shaw, 1980; Merrill et al., 1989]. It is believed to strongly affect the climate over a wide region extending from the Asia-Pacific region to North America, particularly in terms of the radiative forcing of the atmosphere. Furthermore, since most of the Kosa particles precipitate and settle in the ocean, they are considered to have a substantial effect on the marine biosphere, as a source of minerals entering into the seawater. Accordingly, the importance of dust particles in the atmosphere has been discussed from various perspectives, but its effects have yet to be quantitatively estimated, and to date there is little basic data for such studies. The results of a survey on radiative forcing by atmospheric particles have been documented in an IPCC report [IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Third Assessment Report 2001], but quantitative evaluations of the effects of dust particles (mineral dust) or of the indirect effects of clouds have yet to be performed, and many uncertainties remain. Some of the factors inhibiting the estimation of the effects of dust particles include (i) a lack of basic information on seasonal varia-
Dietary Fruit By-Products Improve the Physiological Status of Nile Tilapias (Oreochromis niloticus) and the Quality of Their Meat

By-products from fruit industrialization retain nutritional and functional components; thus, they may find use in animal feeding. This study aimed to assess the effects of dietary fruit industrial by-products on the tilapias blood biochemical and oxidative parameters and on the composition and lipid peroxidation of their fillets. Four diets were supplied to the tilapias: a C-control diet, with no fruit meal, and three diets containing 5% of either acerola (ACM), apple (APM) or grape (GRM) meal. The phenolic compounds and the carotenoids in the meals and their antioxidant capacities were measured. Fish were weighed and measured for the calculation of the growth performance data, their blood was analyzed for health and oxidative status biomarkers and their fillets were analyzed for proximal composition and lipid peroxidation. Grape meal had the highest concentration of phenolics and carotenoids and the highest antioxidant activity, followed by acerola and apple meals. The productive performance was similar among the treatments. The fruit by-product diets either maintained or improved the biochemical biomarkers of health and improved the oxidative status of the fish. The fruit by-product diets increased the concentration of lipids in the fillets and slowed down the onset of the lipid peroxidation during frozen storage.
Sensing Resources Reduction for Vehicle Detection with Integrated Sensing and Communications

Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) aims at incorporating radar and communications functionalities into a single system, achieving higher spectral efficiency through their joint operation. This paper proposes a methodology for reducing resource elements and scanning beams used in the target detection stage of ISAC. Building upon the well-known symbol domain Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) ISAC processing algorithm, its relevant characteristics and limits are considered to minimize the periodicity of sensing resource elements. Moreover, a methodology for finding the required beams to sense a scenario using the radar range equation in a link-budget analysis is proposed and later illustrated via simulations. The simulations show that it is possible to cover a road scenario using a limited number of beams and resource elements from a New Radio (NR) OFDM frame.
Domain Knowledge-Based Neural Network Architecture for End-to-End Multiuser Precoding in Massive MIMO System

This paper investigates an end-to-end multiuser precoding in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. We propose a novel neural network architecture which exploits an appropriate human expert knowledge in wireless communication domain. The employed domain knowledge addresses the inter-user interference. In particular, the concept of a leakage is adopted to decouple the sum-rate maximization problem by transforming the input to the decoder neural network (NN) at base station (BS). In contrast with the existing NN architecture, the proposed architecture is proven to be scalable to the number of user equipments (UEs) as the common NN model (parameter set) can be employed for the different numbers of UEs. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scalable decoder NN architecture can learn the distribution of the inter-user interference effectively.
BRAND IMAGE, EDUCATIONAL COST, AND FACILITY ON STUDENT SATISFACTION AND LOYALTY AT STIE PELITA INDONESIA PEKANBARU

This study aims to analyze the influence of brand image, educational cost, and facility on student satisfaction and loyalty at Pelita Indonesia School of Economic Sciences in Pekanbaru. This study was conducted using a quantitative approach. This study took a sample of 183 respondents at Pelita Indonesia School of Economic Sciences in Pekanbaru. The sampling technique was done using proportionate stratified sampling. The data were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling with AMOS Version 21. The results showed that brand image had a positive and significant influence on student satisfaction. Educational cost had a positive and significant influence on student satisfaction. Facility had a positive and significant influence on student satisfaction. Brand image had a positive and significant influence on student loyalty. Educational cost had a positive and significant influence on student loyalty. Facility did not have a significant influence on student loyalty. Student satisfaction had a positive and significant influence on student loyalty.
A Visco-Hyperelastic Constitutive Model to Characterize the Stress-Softening Behavior of Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer Rubber

Uniaxial and biaxial cyclic tensile tests and stress relaxation tests were performed on the ethylene propylene diene monomer (EPDM) material to investigate its stress-softening effect. The experimental results reveal that the EPDM material presents a significant Mullins effect during the cyclic stretching processes. Furthermore, it is found that the deformation of the EPDM material does not return to zero simultaneously with the stress, due to the viscoelasticity of the EPDM material. Therefore, this study combines pseudo-elasticity theory and viscoelastic theory to propose a visco-hyperelastic constitutive model. The proposed model is used to fit and analyze the uniaxial and biaxial cyclic test results of EPDM and a comparison is conducted with the corresponding hyper-elastic constitutive model. The results show that the proposed model is in good agreement with the experimental data and superior to the hyper-elastic constitutive model, especially when it comes to the stress-softening unloading process. This work is conducive to accurately characterizing the stress-softening behavior of rubber-like materials at large deformation and can provide some theoretical guidance for their widespread application in industry.
Antifreeze Evaluation of Two Dehydrin Proteins from Pseudotsuga menziesii and Larix principis-rupprechtii Mayr

Dehydrins exist widely in plants and play an important role in abiotic stress resistance. Two low-temperature-induced dehydrin-like genes, PmCAP and LpCAP, from the pine species Pseudotsuga menziesii and Larix principis-rupprechtii Mayr were cloned and found to contain 576 bp and 687 bp, encoding 191 and 228 amino acids, respectively. Both genes were individually assembled into prokaryotic expression vectors and transferred into E. coli cells. When transgenic stains were cultured at −5 °C, the lethal time 50% (LT50) was 50 h and 54 h for PmCAP and LpCAP, respectively, compared with 32 h for the control. When cultured at −20 °C, the LT50 was 38 h, 41 h, and 25 h for PmCAP, LpCAP, and the control. Thermal hysteresis (TH) testing of PmCAP and LpCAP proteins revealed TH values of 0.27 °C and 0.72 °C, respectively, relative to 0.05 °C for the BSA control. These results indicate that the two pine dehydrin proteins have antifreeze characteristics and that their antifreeze levels were well in relation to the environmental conditions of pine growth (Larix principis-rupprechtii Mayr mostly grows in cold and high-altitude zones, while Pseudotsuga menziesii grows in temperate and low-altitude zones). LpCAP, especially, could be a better gene resource for the molecular breeding of plant cold resistance.