Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
VIVR: Presence of Immersive Interaction for Visual Impairment Virtual Reality

The immersive virtual reality (VR) to provide a realistic walking experience for the visually impaired is proposed in this study. To achieve this, a novel immersive interaction using a walking aid, i.e., a white cane, is designed. The key structure of the proposed interaction consists of a walking process that enables users with visual impairments to process the ground recognition and inference processes realistically by connecting the white cane to the VR controller. Additionally, a decision-making model using deep learning is proposed to design interactions that can be applied to real-life situations instead of being limited to virtual environment experiences. A learning model is designed that can accurately and efficiently process sensing of braille block, which is an important process in the walking of visually impaired people using a white cane assistance tool. The goal is to implement a white cane walking system that can be used in the real world in addition to a virtual environment. Finally, a survey is conducted to confirm that the proposed immersive interaction provides a walking experience with high presence in virtual reality when compared with the real-world experience. The applicability of the proposed deep-learning-based decision-making model in the real world is verified by its high accuracy in recognition of braille block.
Interleukin‐33 alleviates diabetic cardiomyopathy through regulation of endoplasmic reticulum stress and autophagy via insulin‐like growth factor‐binding protein 3

Prolonged endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress is the key driving force behind diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM). Autophagy is extensively implicated in adaptive mechanisms for cell survival. Interleukin‐33 (IL‐33) is known to be a potent cardiac protector, but its roles in DCM, ER stress, and autophagy are currently unknown. We aimed to explore the effects of IL‐33 on DCM and characterize the roles that ER stress and autophagy play in DCM. The effects of IL‐33 on DCM, ER stress, and autophagy were characterized both in db/db mice and in palmitic acid (PA)‐treated cardiomyocytes. The manipulators of ER stress and autophagy were used to clarify their roles in DCM remittance conferred by IL‐33. Gene expression analysis was used to identify IL‐33‐dependent regulators of ER stress and autophagy. Both db/db mice and PA‐treated cells presented with enhanced levels of ER stress, apoptosis, and lipid deposition, as well as impaired autophagy, all of which could be reversed by IL‐33. Treatment with IL‐33 improved the cardiac diastolic function of diabetic mice. Nonselective autophagy inhibitors, such as 3‐methyladenine (3‐MA) or wortmannin, abolished the protective effects of IL‐33, resulting in an increase in both ER stress and apoptosis. Strikingly, insulin‐like growth factor‐binding protein 3 (IGFBP3) was identified as the gene most significantly differentially expressed between IL‐33 and control groups. Knockdown of IGFBP3 expression, similar to the effect of nonselective autophagy inhibitors, resulted in high levels of ER stress, impaired autophagy, and apoptosis that were not rescued upon treatment with IL‐33. IL‐33 abates DCM by alleviating ER stress and promoting autophagy. IGFBP3 is essential for IL‐33‐induced ER stress resolution and autophagic enhancement during DCM.
Long‐Term Effectiveness and Safety of Initiating Statin Therapy After Index Revascularization In Patients With Peripheral Arterial Occlusive Disease

Background An increasing number of patients with a peripheral arterial occlusive disease were put on statins during the past years. This study assessed whether statin therapy was effective and safe for these new users. Methods and Results Using health insurance claims data from Germany’s second‐largest insurance fund, BARMER, we identified patients with peripheral arterial occlusive disease who had index revascularization between 2008 and 2018 without prior statin therapy. We compared patients with and without statin therapy in addition to antithrombotics during the first quarter after discharge (new users versus nonusers). Outcomes were all‐cause mortality, cardiovascular events, and incident major amputation for effectiveness and incident diabetes mellitus and incident myopathy for safety. Propensity score matching was used to balance the study groups. All analyses were stratified into patients with chronic limb‐threatening ischemia and intermittent claudication. A total of 22 208 patients (mean age 71.1 years and 50.3% women) were included in the study. In 10 922 matched patients, statin initiation was associated with lower all‐cause mortality (chronic limb‐threatening ischemia: hazard ratio [HR], 0.75 [95% CI, 0.68–0.84]; intermittent claudication: HR, 0.80 [95% CI, 0.70–0.92]), lower risk of major amputation in patients with chronic limb‐threatening ischemia (HR, 0.73; 95% CI, 0.58–0.93) and lower risk of cardiovascular events (hazard ratio, 0.80; 95% CI, 0.70–0.92) in patients with intermittent claudication during 5 years of follow‐up. Safety outcomes did not differ among the study groups. Conclusions Initiating statin therapy in patients with peripheral arterial occlusive disease after index revascularization is efficient and safe with an effect size comparable to earlier studies. Awareness campaigns for evidence‐based optimal pharmacological treatment among patients are recommended.
Scavenger Receptors as Biomarkers and Therapeutic Targets in Cardiovascular Disease

The process of atherosclerosis leads to the formation of plaques in the arterial wall, resulting in a decreased blood supply to tissues and organs and its sequelae: morbidity and mortality. A class of membrane-bound proteins termed scavenger receptors (SRs) are closely linked to the initiation and progression of atherosclerosis. Increasing interest in understanding SR structure and function has led to the idea that these proteins could provide new routes for cardiovascular disease diagnosis, management, and treatment. In this review, we consider the main classes of SRs that are implicated in arterial disease. We consider how our understanding of SR-mediated recognition of diverse ligands, including modified lipid particles, lipids, and carbohydrates, has enabled us to better target SR-linked functionality in disease. We also link clinical studies on vascular disease to our current understanding of SR biology and highlight potential areas that are relevant to cardiovascular disease management and therapy.
Small-signal Modeling of CLLC Bidirectional Resonant Converters

CLLC bidirectional resonant converter inherits the advantages of high efficiency and high power density of LLC resonant converter, and has a symmetrical bidirectional voltage gain, which is suitable for applications where power flows in both directions. Based on the extended description function method, a small-signal model was established for the CLLC bidirectional resonant converter. The Bode plot was drawn by MATLAB based on the derived small-signal model. The validity of the model was verified by comparing the Bode plot obtained by analyzing the dynamic characteristics of the simulated circuit.
National Forest Biomass Mapping Using the Two-Level Model

This article uses the two-level model (TLM) to predict above-ground biomass (AGB) from TanDEM-X synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data for Sweden. The SAR data were acquired between October 2015 and January 2016 and consisted of 420 scenes. The AGB was estimated from forest height and canopy density estimates obtained from TLM inversion with a power law model. The model parameters were estimated separately for each satellite scene. The prediction accuracy at stand-level was evaluated using field inventoried references from entire Sweden 2017, provided by a forestry company. AGB estimation performance varied throughout the country, with smaller errors in the north and larger in the south, but when the errors were expressed in relative terms, this pattern vanished. The error in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) was 45.6 and 27.2 t/ha at the plot- and stand-level, respectively, and the corresponding biases were −8.80 and 11.2 t/ha. When the random errors related to using sampled field references were removed, the RMSE decreased about 24% to 20.7 t/ha at the stand-level. Overall, the RMSE was of similar order to that obtained in a previous study (27–30 t/ha), where one linear regression model was used for all scenes in Sweden. It is concluded that, using the power law model with parameters estimated for each scene, the scene-wise variations decreased.
34 dBm GaN Doherty Power Amplifier for Ka-band satellite downlink

This paper presents the design and experimental characterization of a Doherty power amplifier cell targeting the satellite Ka-band downlink. The foreseen application is in a combined power amplifier, where two Doherty cells are combined in parallel to achieve power levels of the order of 6 W. The measured performance of the DPA cell well compares with the present state-of-the-art for the application, with output power in excess of 34 dBm in the 17.3-20.3 GHz band, gain around 12 dB, and efficiency higher than 25% and 20%, at saturation and 6 dB output power back-off, respectively.
Effect of surfactants on the solubility and intrinsic dissolution rate of sparfloxacin.

The effect of surfactants on the solubility and intrinsic dissolution rate of sparfloxacin was investigated at room temperature. The surfactants used in the study were anionic sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) and nonionic polysorbate 80 (Tween 80). Sodium lauryl sulfate showed very significant increase in solubility Tween 80 at the highest concentration studied. The intrinsic dissolution rates were determined compared to at the same surfactant concentrations used in the solubility study by rotating disk method. Diffusion coefficient (D) of sparfloxacin was evaluated to be 7.19 x 10- 6 cm 2 s -1 and the apparent mean diffusion coefficient for sparfloxacin-loaded micelle was estimated to 3.98 x 10 -6 and 2.21 x 10 -6 cm 2 s -1 in Tween 80 and SLS respectively.
Failure management strategies for IoT-based railways systems

Railways monitoring and control are currently performed by different heterogeneous vertical systems working in isolation without or with limited cooperation among them. Such configuration, widely adopted in practical deployments today, is in contrast with the integrated vision of systems that are at the foundation of the smart-city concept. In order to overcome the current fractured ecosystem that monitors and controls railways functionalities, the adoption of a novel integrated approach is mandatory to create an all-in-one railway system. To this aim, new IoT-based communication technologies, like wireless or Power Line Communication technologies, are considered the main enablers to integrate in a very rapid and easy manner existing vertical systems. In this work, we analyse the architecture of future railways systems based on a mix of wireless and Power Line Communication technologies. In our analysis, we aim at studying possible failure management strategies on rail-road switches to improve the level of reliability, crucial requirement for systems that demand maximum resiliency as they manage a critical function of the infrastructure. In particular, we propose a set of solutions aimed at detecting and handling network and sensor failures to ensure continuity in the execution of the basic control functions. The proposed approach is evaluated by means of simulations and demonstrated to be effective in ensuring a good level of performance even when failures occur.
Soil Chemistry

The aim of the paper was to assess the role of forest litter and mineral soil layers (0-10 and 10-20 cm) as stocks of plant-available macronutrients in the forested zone of the Karkonosze Mountains National Park, an area of forest decline at the end of 20th century. Soil samples were collected in 529 monitoring sites arranged in a 200x300 m grid. Concentrations of plant-available nutrients were much higher in the organic layer (forest litter) than in mineral soil layers, but calculated pools of available nutrients in the organic layer contributed to a lesser extent to their total pools. Those pools of nutrients stored up in the upper forest zone (1 000-1 250 m a.s.l.) proved to be significantly larger than those in the lower forest zone (500-750 m a.s.l.). Forest decline, which in the 1970s affected spruce forests in the western and central European mountains, including the Sudetes and Karkonosze Mountains National Park, was one of the most serious ecological problems of that time [6, 23, 35]. Many theories were used to explain the phenomenon, and it became clear that there were several synergic factors acting simultaneously that made the trees less resistant to the combined effects of severe environmental conditions, anthropogenic pollution and pathogenic organisms, and which finally led to detrimental effects [23, 30, 31]. P O L I S H J O U R N A L O F S O I L S C I E N C E VOL. XLIII/2 2010 PL ISSN 0079-2985
A Study on the Impact of the Number of Devices on Communication Interference in Bluetooth Low Energy

In this paper, the impact of the number of devices on the communication interference in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is studied. The reliability of BLE communication in real life is partially revealed, by investigating the channel hopping features inside. The reliability drawbacks inside BLE are raised and they serve as the basis for future improvement. The reliability is analyzed in terms of the time of the first collision and total collision probability. The result shows that both channel selection algorithms (CSAs) from BLE are not able to deal with interference effectively.
The dynamics of Clostridium Difficile and commensal bacteria through the lens of evolutionary game theory from perspectives of artificial intelligence

Clostridium difficile (C. Diff) Infection (CDI) is one of the most severe hospital-acquired diseases, it is caused by the disturbance of intestinal commensal bacteria such as the antimicrobial treatment. It can result in several symptoms including diarrhea, pseudomembranous colitis and even death. CDI can hardly be treated with antibiotic agents due to its high resistance to antibiotics. The most commonly used treatment for C. diff infection is a faecal transplant, which aims to recover the normal population of the commensal bacteria. To improve the effectiveness of prevention and treatment, a simulation of the population dynamics between commensal bacteria and C. diff would be helpful. This project mainly focused on the establishment of such a model with the application of evolutionary game theory. The simulation was able to give the critical value of the population of commensal bacteria that shifts the population dynamic from healthy to disease state. It suggested that the CDI is not caused by the gradual decrease of commensal bacteria but by the population of commensal bacteria decreased to a certain level. Antibiotics were also involved in the simulation. The result showed the antibiotics could kill a large proportion of commensal bacteria thus resulting in the CDI. Increase in the antibiotic resistance of C. diff will increase the incidence of CDI. The high flexibility of this model also allowed other types of population dynamics to be simulated. However, this model is still of concept, there is a long way to go before its practical application.
Parallel PPDU Transmission Mechanism for Wideband Wireless LANs

When the preambles of a wideband 802.11n/ac frame transmission are affected by a collision with a 20MHz frame on one of the subchannels, a receiver might fail to decode the whole wideband frame. Experimental evaluations with off-the-shelf 802.11n hardware showed that the vulnerability of wideband frame transmission to a narrowband collision/interference is a real problem. To mitigate the severe impact of narrowband collision/interference on wideband transmission, we propose to transmit several 20MHz frames in parallel instead of a single wideband frame so that a narrowband collision on one of the subchannels affects only the parallel frame transmitted on that subchannel. Performance evaluations demonstrated that the proposed parallel frame transmission scheme significantly improves the throughput and delay performance of wideband transmissions under different traffic and channel conditions. While the throughput performance of the proposed scheme for saturated traffic conditions was analytically validated, extensive simulation-based evaluations showed that the proposed scheme achieves great performance improvement for unsaturated traffic conditions and hidden node environment.
Prospective Analysis of the effect of Silicon based and Silicon-Carbide based Converter on G3 Power Line Communication

The rapid growth of renewable energy applications increases the complexity of the system, followed by the increase of using fast switching converters in the smart grid. Thus, the probability of electromagnetic interference between the system elements may cause a lot of communication problems between smart grid elements. On the other hand, the use of a SiC-based converter gets a great interest due to its fast switching capability and loss reduction. This paper focuses on studying the difference between the influence of dc Si-based transistor and SiC-based transistor on the performance of narrowband G3-PLC. The experimental setup was implemented to emulate a real situation, and tests were performed to show the results at different operating conditions.
Machine Learning Model for classification of IoT Network Traffic

In today's world, it becomes very important to improve network security as well as the quality of service (QoS). Internets of Things (IoT) with machine learning techniques are used to provide services to users with a classification of the network traffic. So it is very important to separate malicious traffic from normal traffic. After detecting malicious traffic it has to be blocked and forwarded the normal traffic to the specified nodes for serving the users requirements. Here, presents machine learning algorithms for classifying the network traffic, for controlling the congestion in the network.
Privacy-Aware Task Offloading via Two-Timescale Reinforcement Learning

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) enables low-latency computing services by by deploying the computing resources at the logical edge of the network and allowing mobile users to wirelessly offload their computation-intensive tasks. Meanwhile, as user privacy is receiving increasing attention in the modern society, mitigating the privacy leakage caused by task offloading in MEC becomes imperative. In this paper, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL) based privacy-aware task offloading scheme that can synthetically take into account the data privacy, the usage pattern privacy, and the location privacy of the mobile users. To find the optimal offloading strategy, a novel two-timescale RL algorithm, dubbed as statistic prediction-post decision state-virtual experience (SP-PDS-VE), is proposed. The proposed algorithm can construct the state transition model of the underlying problem via the fast timescale learning and, in the meantime, uses the learned model to create a set of virtual experience for the slow timescale learning, so as to speed up the convergence and allow the mobile device to learn the optimal privacy-aware offloading strategy much faster. In addition to the analysis, simulations results are presented to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Transferrin binding protein B structure, function, and export in Neisseria gonorrhoeae

TRANSFERRIN BINDING PROTEIN B STRUCTURE, FUNCTION, AND EXPORT IN NEISSERIA GONORRHOEAE By Meredith L. Weck A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University, 2012 Major Director: Cynthia Nau Cornelissen, Ph. D. Professor of Microbiology and Immunology Iron, an essential nutrient for most microorganisms, is sequestered in the host by ironbinding proteins, such as lactoferrin and transferrin. Neisseria gonorrhoeae utilizes transferrin as an iron source and its iron acquisition system is composed of two transferrin binding proteins: TbpA and TbpB. TbpA is a TonB-dependent, outer membrane transporter and TbpB is a bilobed, surface exposed lipoprotein. TbpB can distinguish between apoand holo-transferrin which is involved in increasing the efficiency of iron uptake through the Tbps. It is anchored in the outer leaflet of the outer membrane by its lipid moiety. We aimed to identify the mechanism of TbpB export to the cell surface. No conclusions could be made from our results but we identified a protein that could potentially be involved in lipoprotein transport. TbpB is a bilobed protein with controversy over which lobe is involved in transferrin binding. In this study, we
Adaptive Leaderless Consensus for a Class of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems with Intermittent Actuator Faults*

This paper investigates the leaderless consensus problem for high-order nonlinear systems with unmatched unknown parameters and intermittent actuator faults. Under directed topology condition, a novel adaptive fault tolerant leaderless consensus control scheme is proposed. In order to achieve the leaderless consensus under directed topology condition, an auxiliary system, which is related to the individual states and neighboring states, is introduced in each agent. On the other hand, to compensate the effect of intermittent actuator faults on the system stability of each agent, a local parameter estimator is introduced to estimate a lumped unknown parameter related to the lower bound of the effectiveness of actuator. It is shown that with the proposed adaptive fault tolerant leaderless consensus control scheme, all the closed-loop signals are globally uniformly bounded and all the agents’ outputs can reach a consensus.
Functions-focused Building Energy Management Systems: A Review

Building energy management systems (BEMSs) perform essential tasks to enhance energy-use performance. BEMSs play an important role in energy savings because it affects energy management related functions needed by a building. An efficiently designed BEMS would affect building energy efficiency and energy-use. There are several key functions each building might perform one or more than a function to contribute to energy-use depending on the purpose of BEMS embedded in that building. Some BEMSs might perform that a function to come up with a semi-optimal level in energy efficiency and energy-use. This review paper presents several function-purposed BEMSs. Monitoring of energy-use, measurement, analysis, estimation and optimization are some examples of functions BEMS performs. This review paper aims to give readers suggestions on which more suitable and adequate design of BEMS is preferable for a type of buildings than other systems to achieve a better energy management. In this review paper several top-tier researches' publishers e.g., Elsevier, IEEE, and ACM have been used from which papers are collected. This paper has considered papers published since 1982 to cover an extensive trend of research studies used for BEMS.