Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Representing and Comparing Competences Using Agents

Modeling competences is a real challenge for the people working in a lot of domains like human resource (HR), companies, e-Learning related activities, universities and not only. Universities and e-Learning organizations define the prerequisites that must be satisfied before joining the university and define also the competences that will be acquired after successful completion. After, the curricula or training programs are stated. The future students and companies mainly HR departments try to define their own competences and these are compared with those offered by the applicants and universities respectively. The proposed model will be included in the project Cex 05-D8-66/2005. Based on a multi-agent system, it will offers to the universities, companies and students the capabilities for defining and presenting the competencies, making comparisons between them with appropriate scores and evaluations in order to use them in an efficient way.
Transgenic and gene-targeted mice as models for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Animal models play an important role in the understanding of the pathogenesis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The applicability of findings to human COPD depends upon several factors, including the disease model, and similarities in mouse structure and function between species. There are many examples in the literature of transgenic mice that have contributed to the understanding of COPD. Several studies demonstrate the complexity of inflammatory networks and how unexpected findings in animal models have led to the search for new potential mediators in human disease. Gene-targeting studies into α1-antitrypsin (α1-AT) and emphysema in mice have demonstrated that the genetic locus for α1-AT in mice is very complex and that the loss of one gene is lethal in embryo lung development. This underlines the differences between mice and humans that limit the ability to translate between systems in some instances. Gene targeting has also highlighted complex roles for transforming growth factor-β in COPD and has been used to determine important molecules and pathways in COPD. Both transgenic and gene-targeted models suffer limitations and their applicability to human chronic obstructive pulmonary disease may be dependant on several factors, some of which are still being learnt. The more that is known about similarities and differences, the better the knowledge will be that is gained to develop for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Screening for refractive error among primary school children in Bayelsa state, Nigeria

Introduction Vision screening study in primary school children has not been done in Bayelsa State. This study aims to screen for refractive error among primary school children in Bayelsa State and use the data to plan for school Eye Health Program. Methods A cross sectional study on screening for refractive error in school children was carried out in Yenagoa Local Government Area of Bayelsa State in June 2009. A multistage sampling technique was used to select the study population (pupils aged between 5-15 years). Visual acuity (VA) for each eye, was assessed outside the classroom at a distance of 6 meters. Those with VA ≤6/9 were presented with a pinhole and the test repeated. Funduscopy was done inside a poorly lit classroom. An improvement of the VA with pinhole was considered refractive error. Data was analyzed with EPI INFO version 6. Results A total of 1,242 school children consisting of 658 females and 584 males were examined.About 97.7% of pupils had normal VA (VA of 6/6) while 56 eyes had VAs ≤ 6/9. Of these 56 eyes, the visual acuity in 49 eyes (87.5%) improved with pinhole. Twenty seven pupils had refractive error, giving a prevalence of 2.2%. Refractive error involved both eyes in 22 pupils (81.5%) and the 8-10 years age range had the highest proportion (40.7%) of cases of refractive error followed by the 9-13 year-old age range (37%). Conclusion The prevalence of refractive error was 2.2% and most eyes (97.7%) had normal vision.
Injury-Induced Accumulation of Glial Cell Line-Derived Neurotrophic Factor in the Rostral Part of the Injured Rat Spinal Cord

The spinal cord of a 7-week-old female Wistar rat was hemi-transected at thoracic position 10 with a razor blade, and changes in glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) protein and mRNA expression levels in the spinal cord were examined. GDNF protein and mRNA expression levels were evaluated by enzyme immunoassay and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, respectively. Although GDNF is distributed in the healthy spinal cord from 150 to 400 pg/g tissue in a regionally dependent manner, hemi-transection (left side) of the spinal cord caused a rapid increase in GDNF content in the ipsilateral rostral but not in the caudal part of the spinal cord. On the other hand, injury-induced GDNF mRNA was distributed limitedly in both rostral and caudal stumps. These observations suggest the possibility that increased GDNF in the rostral part is responsible for the accumulation of GDNF that may be constitutively transported from the rostral to caudal side within the spinal cord. Although such local increase of endogenous GDNF protein may not be sufficient for nerve regeneration and locomotor improvement, it may play a physiological role in supporting spinal neurons including motoneurons.
Some results on semi-total signed graphs

A signed graph (or sigraph in short) is an ordered pair S = (Su, σ), where Su is a graph G = (V,E), called the underlying graph of S and σ : E → {+,−} is a function from the edge set E of Su into the set {+,−}, called the signature of S. The ×-line sigraph of S denoted by L×(S) is a sigraph defined on the line graph L(S u) of the graph Su by assigning to each edge ef of L(Su), the product of signs of the adjacent edges e and f in S. In this paper, first we define semi-total line sigraph and semi-total point sigraph of a given sigraph and then characterize balance and consistency of semi-total line sigraph and semi-total point sigraph.
Oral paracetamol vs. oral ibuprofen in the treatment of symptomatic patent ductus arteriosus in premature infants: A randomized controlled trial

The aim of the present study was to analyze the changes of plasma and urinary prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) levels in preterm infants with symptomatic patent ductus arteriosus (sPDA) treated with oral ibuprofen and acetaminophen. A total of 87 preterm infants with sPDA admitted to the Neonatal Ward of the Affiliated Xuzhou Hospital of Medical College of Southeast University from October, 2012 to June, 2015 were selected and randomly divided into the ibuprofen group (n=43, 10 mg/kg ibuprofen administered orally as initial dose, followed by 5 mg/kg during the first 24 and 48 h later) and acetaminophen group (n=44, 15 mg/kg acetaminophen administered orally once every 6 h for three days). The levels of plasma and urinary PGE2 in the two groups were estimated before and after treatment. The treatment of sPDA infants with ibuprofen (ibuprofen group) or acetaminophen (acetaminophen group) caused a significant decrease in the plasma and urinary PGE2 levels in comparison with plasma and urinary PGE2 levels before treatment (P<0.05). Furthermore, plasma and urinary PGE2 levels in the acetaminophen group (45.0±36.9 ng/l) were significantly lower than those in the ibuprofen group (73.5±44.8 ng/l, P=0.002). The arterial duct closure rate was similar between the acetaminophen [31 (70.5%)] and ibuprofen groups [33 (76.7%), P=0.506]. The incidence of oliguria was less among sPDA infants of the acetaminophen group [1 (2.3%)] than observed among the sPDA infants of the ibuprofen group [6 (14.0%)]; however, this difference was not statistically significant (P=0.108). Additionally, the incidences of fecal occult blood positive rate, intraventricular hemorrhage, neonatal necrotizing enterocolitis and bronchopulmonary dysplasia were distributed similarly in the ibuprofen and acetaminophen groups (P>0.05). The levels of platelet, serum creatinine and alanine transaminase showed no significant changes between the ibuprofen and acetaminophen groups (P>0.05). Following treatment with ibuprofen or acetaminophen, the extent of decrease of plasma and urinary PGE2 was significantly higher among sPDA infants with oliguria (135.0±38.0 ng/l) than that observed in sPDA infants without oliguria (52.5±37.0 ng/l) (P=0.01). The study also found a significant correlation between plasma and urinary PGE2 levels (r=0.648, P=0.01) and the coefficient of variation of urinary PGE2 (0.427) was less than that of plasma PGE2 (0.539). The clinical efficacy of oral ibuprofen and acetaminophen in the treatment of preterm infants with sPDA was similar with low adverse events, whereas acetaminophen-induced PGE2 levels were less than the levels observed in the ibuprofen-treated group. The incidence of oliguria was also lower in the acetaminophen group compared to the ibuprofen group. In addition, monitoring urinary PGE2 levels was more suitable because of its non-invasiveness in the clinical setting than monitoring of plasma PGE2 in preterm infants with sPDA.
A kernelised fuzzy-Support Vector Machine CAD system for the diagnosis of lung cancer from tissue images

This research describes a non-interactive process that applies several forms of computational intelligence to classifying biopsy lung tissue samples. Three types of lung cancer evaluated (squamous cell carcinoma, adenocarcinoma, and bronchioalveolar carcinoma) together account for 65? 70% of diagnoses. Accuracy achieved supports hypothesis that an accurate predictive model is generated from training images, and performance achieved is an accurate baseline for the process's potential scaling to larger datasets. Feature vector performance is good or better than Thiran and Macq's in every case. Except bronchioalveolar carcinomas, each individual cancer classification task experienced improvement, with two groupings showing nearly 20% classification accuracy.
Blockbusters and Wallflowers: Accurate, Diverse, and Scalable Recommendations with Random Walks

User satisfaction is often dependent on providing accurate and diverse recommendations. In this paper, we explore scalable algorithms that exploit random walks as a sampling technique to obtain diverse recommendations without compromising on accuracy. Specifically, we present a novel graph vertex ranking recommendation algorithm called RP^3_beta that re-ranks items based on 3-hop random walk transition probabilities. We show empirically, that RP^3_beta provides accurate recommendations with high long-tail item frequency at the top of the recommendation list. We also present scalable approximate versions of RP^3_beta and the two most accurate previously published vertex ranking algorithms based on random walk transition probabilities and show that these approximations converge with increasing number of samples.
Increasing Cluster Recall of Cross-modal Image Retrieval

We describe our approach to the ImageCLEF Photo and WikiMediaMM 2008 tasks. The novelty of our method consists of combining image segment based image retrieval with our text based approach. We rank text hits by our own Okapi BM25 based information retrieval system and image similarities by using a feature vector describing the visual content of image segments. Images were segmented by a home developed segmenter. We use automatic query expansion by adding new terms from the top ranked documents. Queries were generated automatically from the title and the downweighted description words.
Automotive Driveline Modelling, Inverse-Simulation and Compensation

A nonlinear automotive driveline model and its inverse simulation are developed. The model contains four inertias comprising engine, clutch, transmission, coupling, and wheels. In this paper both nonlinear effects arising from the clutch and backlash are considered. The backlash in the proposed model is sandwiched between the compliance of the clutch and the compliance of the drive shafts. A basic simulation approach is outlined for obtaining the Horowitz linear time-invariant equivalent (LTIE) of the automotive driveline model by a nonparametric identification using a Windowed Fourier Transformation (WFT) method. The inverse simulation model is used as a compensator and is shown to achieve calibrated uncertainty reductions over the crossover frequency range. The reduction in the equivalent linear uncertainty of the nonlinearity available from the inverse compensation is demonstrated by the WFT analysis.
Architecture design of a virtualized embedded system

- Nowadays, embedded systems have become a major driver of technological developments particularly in the industrial sector. In an embedded system, the hardware and software components are so intertwined that evolution is often a big issue. Thanks to the contributions of virtualization it is possible to design more flexible and scalable embedded systems. In fact, virtualization adds an abstraction layer between the hardware and the software to make it less intimately dependent. In this paper we propose system architecture based on embedded virtualization that will be modeled by the multi-agent systems. In the first part, we will discuss the state of the art with respect to embedded systems, multi-agent systems and the concept of virtualization. In the second part, we explain the issues related to traditional embedded systems and the constraints associated with their architecture. Subsequently, we propose a virtualization based architecture for embedded systems. In the last part we will showcase this architecture through a prototype.
An application software for protein secondary structure prediction based on peptide triplet units and artificial neural networks: Protein secondary structure prediction from amino acid sequences

On the basis of a bank of tendentious factors of tripeptide units, a protein secondary structure prediction system (PSSP) was built. Our research results revealed that PSSP represents a higher prediction accuracy of alpha-helix up to 89.45% on average, even the mean correct rate of alpha-helix also achieved 67.78% for all-beta proteins. PSSP only achieved a whole prediction accuracy of 59.46% for total proteins on average, higher than Chou-Fasman method. This system gave a whole accuracy of 72.64% for all-alpha folding proteins but 39.44% for all-beta proteins due to the limited data of extended conformation in train set, the absence of long-range effect, the neglect of hydrogen bridges, and losing sight of specific pairing of complementary charges and the constructive periodicity, whereas only considers conformation biases of tripeptide based on statistics analysis. However, the improved PSSP method availably advances the prediction accuracy, especially all-beta proteins up to 57.92% but all-alpha folding proteins down to 65.30%. PSSP method will play an important role in protein folding, folding codons, molecular design, and structural proteomics.
Sparse Polynomial Pseudo Division Using a Heap

We present a new algorithm for pseudo-division of sparse multivariate polynomials with integer coefficients. It uses a heap of pointers to simultaneously merge the dividend and partial products, sorting the terms efficiently and delaying all coefficient arithmetic to produce good complexity. The algorithm uses very little memory and we expect it to run in the processor cache. We give benchmarks comparing our implementation to existing computer algebra systems.
Is Cinderella Back Among the Cinders? A Review of Early Childhood Education in the Early 1990s

The nineties started out as a time of optimism for the early childhood education sector: the Before Five policies, including phased implementation of higher funding, had just come on stream; policies were put in place in the late 1980s to improve the quality of early childhood education and were coming to fruition. The 1991 budget dampened this optimism: early childhood funding was capped at 1990 levels and a period of retrenchment set in. This paper discusses early childhood education policies over the last three years and some of the issues that arise from these.
Mutagenesis and more: umuDC and the Escherichia coli SOS response.

The cellular response to DNA damage that has been most extensively studied is the SOS response of Escherichia coli. Analyses of the SOS response have led to new insights into the transcriptional and post-translational regulation of processes that increase cell survival after DNA damage as well as insights into DNA-damage-induced mutagenesis, i.e., SOS mutagenesis. SOS mutagenesis requires the recA and umuDC gene products and has as its mechanistic basis the alteration of DNA polymerase III such that it becomes capable of replicating DNA containing miscoding and noncoding lesions. Ongoing investigations of the mechanisms underlying SOS mutagenesis, as well as recent observations suggesting that the umuDC operon may have a role in the regulation of the E. coli cell cycle after DNA damage has occurred, are discussed.
AVEC ’ 04 Steer-by-Wire for Vehicle State Estimation and Control

In order to implement electronically variable dynamics for vehicle handling, the control system requires an accurate knowledge of the vehicle states as well as a means of actuation to precisely influence the vehicle’s motion. Steer-by-wire capability conveniently addresses both of these requirements. This paper first presents an approach to estimating vehicle sideslip angle using steering torque information. This method is especially suited to vehicles equipped with steer-by-wire since the steering torque can easily be determined from the current applied to the steering motor. By combining a linear vehicle model with the steering system model, a simple observer may be devised to estimate sideslip when yaw rate and steering angle are measured. Based on this estimate of sideslip angle, a type of state feedback control has been developed to effectively alter the handling characteristics of a vehicle through active steering intervention. Both the observer and its application to vehicle handling modification are demonstrated on an experimental vehicle equipped with steer-by-wire capability.
NKG2C+CD57+ Natural Killer Cell Expansion Parallels Cytomegalovirus-Specific CD8+ T Cell Evolution towards Senescence

Objective. Measuring NKG2C+CD57+ natural killer (NK) cell expansion to investigate NK responses against human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) and assessing relationships with adaptive immunity against HCMV. Methods. Expansion of NKG2C+CD57+ NK was measured in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from groups distinguished by HCMV and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection status. Anti-HCMV antibody levels against HCMV-infected MRC-5 cell lysate were assessed by ELISA and HCMV-specific CD8+ T cell responses characterized by intracellular flow cytometry following PBMC stimulation with immunodominant HCMV peptides. Results. Median NK, antibody, and CD8+ T cell responses against HCMV were significantly greater in the HCMV/HIV coinfected group than the group infected with CMV alone. The fraction of CMV-specific CD8+ T cells expressing CD28 correlated inversely with NKG2C+CD57+ NK expansion in HIV infection. Conclusion. Our data reveal no significant direct relationships between NK and adaptive immunity against HCMV. However, stronger NK and adaptive immune responses against HCMV and an inverse correlation between NKG2C+CD57+ NK expansion and proliferative reserve of HCMV-specific CD8+ T cells, as signified by CD28 expression, indicate parallel evolution of NK and T cell responses against HCMV in HIV infection. Similar aspects of chronic HCMV infection may drive both NK and CD8+ T cell memory inflation.
Asac 2007 Novel-knowledge Discovery – Challenges and Design Theory Novel Knowledge – a Case Example

Novel knowledge, defined as knowledge that is not currently known to the organization, interesting, related, but indirectly connected to what the organization currently knows and therefore difficult to find, can be very beneficial to the organization. Despite the potential benefits, organizations face a number of challenges discovering novel knowledge. Tools for the discovery of highly novel knowledge are rare. Accordingly, a design theory for novel-knowledge discovery (NKD) tools is proposed. An initial prototype, Athens, is evaluated against the NKD design theory. This design theory combines data-mining techniques with learning theories to support organizations in the discovery of novel knowledge.
Goodpasture's Syndrome and Silica: A Case Report and Literature Review

We report a case of Goodpasture's syndrome following chronic low level and an acute, high level of exposure to crystalline silica. A 38-year-old male tilesetter was admitted to the emergency room with dyspnea and respiratory failure. He reported that his symptoms had developed over the previous week after inhaling a large amount of dust while dry-sanding and sweeping a silica-based product used to fill cracks in a cement floor. Over the following days, his pulmonary function declined and he developed acute renal failure. Tests of antiglomerular basement membrane antibody were positive and renal biopsy revealed global glomerulonephritis. He was diagnosed with Goodpasture's syndrome and treated with steroids, plasmapheresis, and hemodialysis. This man had a history of childhood asthma and a remote, one pack-year history of cigarette use. He used the flooring product for seven years prior to the inciting event, however, previous jobs had utilized significantly smaller amounts. Goodpasture's syndrome and other autoimmune diseases have been reported in association with silica exposure. The acute onset following high level silica exposure in this previously healthy man, suggest that clinicians should investigate silica exposure as a causal factor in cases of Goodpasture's syndrome.
Spatio-temporal prediction of collision candidates for static and dynamic objects in monocular image sequences

This paper presents a novel approach for reactive obstacle avoidance for static and dynamic objects using monocular image sequences. A sparse motion field is calculated by tracking point features using the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi method. The rotational component of this sparse optical flow due to ego motion of the camera is compensated using motion parameters estimated directly from the images. A robust method for detection of static and dynamic objects in the scene is applied to identify collision candidates. The approach operates entirely in the image space of a monocular camera and does not require any extrinsic information about the configuration of the sensor or speed of the camera. The system prioritizes the detected collision candidates by their time to collision. Additionally, the spatial distribution of the candidates is calculated for non-degenerated conditions. We present the mathematical framework and the experimental validation of the suggested approach on simulated and real-world data.
Chord Detection Using Deep Learning

In this paper, we utilize deep learning to learn high-level features for audio chord detection. The learned features, obtained by a deep network in bottleneck architecture, give promising results and outperform state-of-the-art systems. We present and evaluate the results for various methods and conﬁgurations, including input pre-processing, a bottleneck architecture, and SVMs vs. HMMs for chord classiﬁcation.
Research on the Identity in Heterogeneous Wireless Integrated Networks

Through analyzing the factors affecting software trustworthy, established the index system of trustworthy software estimation. Apply Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the relative importance of factors and indicator items affecting software trustworthy, and then determine the score of estimation index system through fuzzy estimation model, use the combination of both to measure software trustworthy. Finally, this paper presents an example to validate the validity and objectivity of this model.