Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gut Microflora of the Larva of Silkworm, Bombyx mori

The quantitative and qualitative changes of bacterial flora associated with the silkworm (Bombyx mori) at different stages of its life cycle were studied. Larvae reared on mulberry leaves were dissected and their bacterial populations counted after a 3-day incubation period at 28 ± 2°C. The results showed a higher heterotrophic bacterial population in the fourth and the fifth instars, which coincide with the active feeding stage of the larvae. The similarity of the genera observed in the digestive tract and that observed on the leaves fed to the larvae suggests colonisation of food microflora in the gut following ingestion. The bacteria inhabiting the gut of silkworm were found to be elaborating amylase, caseinase, gelatinase, lipase and urease. The highest percentage of isolates were protease producers followed by lipid and polysaccharide splitters. The results indicate that the bacterial flora play an important role in the digestion of ingested food material. RésuméDes changements quantitatifs et qualitatifs de la flore bactérienne associée au ver-à-soie ont été étudiés à différents stades de son cycle de vie. Des larves elevées sur des feuilles du mûrier ont été disséquées et leur flore bactérienne a été comptée après 3 jours d’incubation à 28 ± 2°C. Les résultats montrent une population bactérienne hautement hétérotrophique chez les 4ème et Sème stades qui coïncident aux stades nourriciers de la larve. La similarité des genres observés au niveau du tractus digestif et sur les feuilles suggére la colonisation de la microflore de la nourriture au niveau des intestins par suite de l’ingestion. On a trouvé que les bactéries peuplant les intestins du ver-à-soie élaborent 1’amylase, la caséinase, la gélatinase, la lipase et l’uréase. Un plus grand pourcentage des isolats ont été des producteurs de protease, suivis de séquenceurs de lipides et de polysaccharides. Les résultats indiquent que la flore bactérienne joue un rôle important dans la digestion de la nourriture ingérée.
Integrated lithium niobate photonics

Abstract Lithium niobate (LiNbO3) on insulator (LNOI) is a promising material platform for integrated photonics due to single crystal LiNbO3 film’s wide transparent window, high refractive index, and high second-order nonlinearity. Based on LNOI, the fast-developing ridge-waveguide fabrication techniques enabled various structures, devices, systems, and applications. We review the basic structures including waveguides, cavities, periodically poled LiNbO3, and couplers, along with their fabrication methods and optical properties. Treating those basic structures as building blocks, we review several integrated devices including electro-optic modulators, nonlinear optical devices, and optical frequency combs with each device’s operating mechanism, design principle and methodology, and performance metrics. Starting from these integrated devices, we review how integrated LNOI devices boost the performance of LiNbO3’s traditional applications in optical communications and data center, integrated microwave photonics, and quantum optics. Beyond those traditional applications, we also review integrated LNOI devices’ novel applications in metrology including ranging system and frequency comb spectroscopy. Finally, we envision integrated LNOI photonics’ potential in revolutionizing nonlinear and quantum optics, optical computing and signal processing, and devices in ultraviolet, visible, and mid-infrared regimes. Beyond this outlook, we discuss the challenges in integrated LNOI photonics and the potential solutions.
UCB with An Optimal Inequality

Upper confidence bound multi-armed bandit algorithms (UCB) typically rely on concentration inequalities (such as Hoeffding’s inequality) for the creation of the upper confidence bound. Intuitively, the tighter the bound is, the more likely the respective arm is or isn’t judged appropriately for selection. Hence we derive and utilise an optimal inequality. Usually the sample mean (and sometimes the sample variance) of previous rewards are the information which are used in the bounds which drive the algorithm, but intuitively the more information that taken from the previous rewards, the tighter the bound could be. Hence our inequality explicitly considers the values of each and every past reward into the upper bound expression which drives the method. We show how this UCB method fits into the broader scope of other information theoretic UCB algorithms, but unlike them is free from assumptions about the distribution of the data, We conclude by reporting some already established regret information, and give some numerical simulations to demonstrate the method’s effectiveness.
Interactive machine teaching: a human-centered approach to building machine-learned models

ABSTRACT Modern systems can augment people’s capabilities by using machine-learned models to surface intelligent behaviors. Unfortunately, building these models remains challenging and beyond the reach of non-machine learning experts. We describe interactive machine teaching (IMT) and its potential to simplify the creation of machine-learned models. One of the key characteristics of IMT is its iterative process in which the human-in-the-loop takes the role of a teacher teaching a machine how to perform a task. We explore alternative learning theories as potential theoretical foundations for IMT, the intrinsic human capabilities related to teaching, and how IMT systems might leverage them. We argue that IMT processes that enable people to leverage these capabilities have a variety of benefits, including making machine learning methods accessible to subject-matter experts and the creation of semantic and debuggable machine learning (ML) models. We present an integrated teaching environment (ITE) that embodies principles from IMT, and use it as a design probe to observe how non-ML experts do IMT and as the basis of a system that helps us study how to guide teachers. We explore and highlight the benefits and challenges of IMT systems. We conclude by outlining six research challenges to advance the field of IMT.
Inulin metabolism in dicots: chicory as a model system

Fructans are fructose-based oligo- and polymers that serve as reserve carbohydrates in many plant species. The original Edelman and Jefford model for GFn inulin type fructan biosynthesis was confirmed by the de novo synthesis of fructans in vitro as well as by heterologous expression of the respective cDNAs in non-fructan plants. Now the model can be extended for the biosynthesis of Fn inulin type fructans. Recent progress has now succeeded in elucidating the biochemistry and molecular biology of fructan biodegradation in chicory, an economically important species used for commercial inulin extraction. Unlike fructan biosynthetic genes that originated from vacuolar type invertase, plant fructan exohydrolases seem to have evolved from a cell wall invertase ancestor gene that later obtained a low iso-electric point and a vacuolar targeting signal. Using chicory as a model system, expression analysis revealed that fructan enzymes are mainly controlled at the transcriptional level.
Cost Impact Model of a Novel Multi-mRNA Host Response Assay for Diagnosis and Risk Assessment of Acute Respiratory Tract Infections and Sepsis in the Emergency Department

Background Early identification of acute infections and sepsis remains an unmet medical need. While early detection and initiation of treatment reduces mortality, inappropriate treatment leads to adverse events and the development of antimicrobial resistance. Current diagnostic and prognostic solutions, including procalcitonin, lack required accuracy. A novel blood-based host response test, HostDx™ Sepsis by Inflammatix, Inc., assesses the likelihood of a bacterial infection, the likelihood of a viral infection, and the severity of the condition. Objectives We estimated the economic impact of adopting HostDx Sepsis testing among patients with suspected acute respiratory tract infection (ARTI) in the emergency department (ED). Methods Our cost impact model estimated costs for adult ED patients with suspected ARTI under the standard of care versus with the adoption of HostDx Sepsis from the perspective of US payers. Included costs were those assumed to be associated with an episode of sepsis diagnosis, management, and treatment. Projected accuracies for test predictions, disease prevalence, and clinical parameters was derived from patient-level meta-analysis data of randomized trials, supplemented with published performance data for HostDx Sepsis. One-way sensitivity analysis was performed on key input parameters. Results Compared to standard of care including procalcitonin, the superior test characteristics of HostDx Sepsis resulted in an average cost savings of approximately US$1974 per patient (−31.3%) exclusive of the cost of HostDx Sepsis. Reductions in hospital days (−0.80 days, −36.7%), antibiotic days (−1.49 days, −29.5%), and percent 30-day mortality (−1.67%, −13.64%) were driven by HostDx Sepsis providing fewer “noninformative” moderate risk predictions and more “certain” low- or high-risk predictions compared to standard of care, especially for patients who were not severely ill. These results were robust to changes in key parameters, including disease prevalence. Conclusions Our model shows substantial savings associated with introduction of HostDx Sepsis among patients with ARTIs in EDs. These results need confirmation in interventional trials.
Microbiological quality of traditional market cured fish in Tanzania

The microbiological quality of six varieties of retail market traditionally cured fish in Morogoro, Tanzania was investigated over a five-month period. The fish were contaminated with bacteria and molds at levels of: total aerobes, 106 - 1.7 × 107 c.f. u/g; faecal coliforms, 1.1 × 101 - 2.5 × 103 MPN/g; faecal streptococci, 1.4 × 101 - 1.3 × 103 MPN/g; Staphylococcus aureus, 1.3 × 103 - 8.6 × 103 c.f. u/g; Aspergillus flavus group, 2.1 × 101 - 2 × 102 c.f. u/g of fish. Of faecal coliform, 45% of the isolates were Escherichia coli. Twenty-five percent of the S. aureus isolates were coagulase positive. Sixteen percent of A. flavus isolates were aflatoxigenic. Aflatoxin contamination ranged from O to 18.5 μg/kg of fish. Insect infestation by Dermestes spp. and mites was observed. The results of this preliminary study emphasize the importance of proper processing and handling offish in the tropics in order to safeguard public health.
Generation of Head Movements of a Robot Using Multimodal Features of Peer Participants in Group Discussion Conversation

In recent years, companies have been seeking communication skills from their employees. Increasingly more companies have adopted group discussions during their recruitment process to evaluate the applicants’ communication skills. However, the opportunity to improve communication skills in group discussions is limited because of the lack of partners. To solve this issue as a long-term goal, the aim of this study is to build an autonomous robot that can participate in group discussions, so that its users can repeatedly practice with it. This robot, therefore, has to perform humanlike behaviors with which the users can interact. In this study, the focus was on the generation of two of these behaviors regarding the head of the robot. One is directing its attention to either of the following targets: the other participants or the materials placed on the table. The second is to determine the timings of the robot’s nods. These generation models are considered in three situations: when the robot is speaking, when the robot is listening, and when no participant including the robot is speaking. The research question is: whether these behaviors can be generated end-to-end from and only from the features of peer participants. This work is based on a data corpus containing 2.5 h of the discussion sessions of 10 four-person groups. Multimodal features, including the attention of other participants, voice prosody, head movements, and speech turns extracted from the corpus, were used to train support vector machine models for the generation of the two behaviors. The performances of the generation models of attentional focus were in an F-measure range between 0.4 and 0.6. The nodding model had an accuracy of approximately 0.65. Both experiments were conducted in the setting of leave-one-subject-out cross validation. To measure the perceived naturalness of the generated behaviors, a subject experiment was conducted. In the experiment, the proposed models were compared. They were based on a data-driven method with two baselines: (1) a simple statistical model based on behavior frequency and (2) raw experimental data. The evaluation was based on the observation of video clips, in which one of the subjects was replaced by a robot performing head movements in the above-mentioned three conditions. The experimental results showed that there was no significant difference from original human behaviors in the data corpus and proved the effectiveness of the proposed models.
Timing Predictability and Security in Safety-Critical Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems: A Position Paper

Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) are systems that are developed by seamlessly integrating computational algorithms and physical components, and they are a result of the technological advancement in the embedded systems and distributed systems domains, as well as the availability of sophisticated networking technology. Many industrial CPSs are subject to timing predictability, security and functional safety requirements, due to which the developers of these systems are required to verify these requirements during the their development. This position paper starts by exploring the state of the art with respect to developing timing predictable and secure embedded systems. Thereafter, the paper extends the discussion to time-critical and secure CPSs and highlights the key issues that are faced when verifying the timing predictability requirements during the development of these systems. In this context, the paper takes the position to advocate paramount importance of security as a prerequisite for timing predictability, as well as both security and timing predictability as prerequisites for functional safety. Moreover, the paper identifies the gaps in the existing frameworks and techniques for the development of time- and safety-critical CPSs and describes our viewpoint on ensuring timing predictability and security in these systems. Finally, the paper emphasises the opportunities that artificial intelligence can provide in the development of these systems.
Adaptations for Symbiont-Mediated External Digestion in Sirex noctilio (Hymenoptera: Siricidae)

ABSTRACT Wood-feeding insects face a host of physical, chemical, and nutritional barriers in their food resource. Wood-boring Hymenoptera in the family Siricidae are associated with mutualistic basidiomycete wood-rot fungi, which assist colonization and provide nutrition for their insect partner, though functional properties of this symbiosis are poorly described. In this study, we document the behavioral and morphological adaptations of the globally invasive woodwasp, Sirex noctilio F. , for foraging using its fungal symbiont Amylostereum areolatum (Chaillet ex Fries) Boidin. Larvae concentrated foraging near the border of fungal symbiont growth in pine xylem. Foraging larvae do not ingest bulk xylem tissue, but rather use specialized asymmetric mandibles to press xylem shavings and extract liquid fractions. Fluids drain toward the oral cavity via a sulcus on the occlusal surface of the left mandible. Processed shavings are expelled from the oral cavity without ingestion and passed along the underside of the larvae via peristaltic undulation to the rear of the feeding gallery. Larval midguts lack elaborated chambers typical in insects reliant on microbial fermentation of cellulose, and no xylem tissue was recovered from gut dissections. Larval behavior and functional morphology indicate larval S. noctilio do not ingest xylem, but instead use the fungus as an external gut for digestion of recalcitrant lignocellulosic compounds.
EXISTENCE OF SOLUTIONS FOR A FRACTIONAL ADVECTION-DISPERSION EQUATION WITH IMPULSIVE EFFECTS VIA VARIATIONAL APPROACH

In this paper, based on the variational approach and iterative technique, the existence of nontrivial weak solutions is derived for a fractional advection-dispersion equation with impulsive effects, and the nonlinear term of fractional advection-dispersion equation contain the fractional order derivative. In addition, an example is presented as an application of the main result.
Incorporating Ethics in Software Engineering: Challenges and Opportunities

Ethics is recognised as an important concern in the development and operation of software systems. While there are codes of ethics and sets of ethical principles available to software professionals, there is a lack of tool and process support for systematic ethical deliberation at most stages of the software lifecycle. To create and deploy ethical software, it is vital that ethical concerns of software systems are reflected in their artefacts, such as requirements, software architecture, code and test suites, and that software professionals are supported in considering the ethical as well as technical consequences of their decisions. This paper reports on some early work in identifying the challenges of ethical decision making and opportunities for addressing these challenges in the context of software engineering.
Layer by Layer Silver Acetate based Coating on Glass and Cement Substrates to Tailor Reflectance and Conductance

Tailoring reflectance and conductance was achieved through layer by layer assembly of a silver acetate based multilayer coating. The coating was applied over glass and cement substrates by sol-gel spin coating and by brush painting, respectively. The structural, optical and electrical characteristics and the composition of the coating were studied. The diffraction peaks for all films revealed that the face-centered cubic lattice of the silver crystal structure and the films with more layers had a higher degree of crystallinity. The optical characteristics showed that having more layers leads to decreasing transmittance and increasing reflectance. The I-V characteristics of all samples showed typical ohmic contacts in a voltage range of -1 to 1 V. The conductance increased drastically as the coating developed into multiple layers. The eight-layer coated glass and cement based substrates had very low surface resistance, at 4 Ω and 2 Ω at 1 V, respectively. The study also revealed that the resistance behavior of a multilayered film generally is thermally stable for annealing up to 400 °C. The coating resistance was significantly increased by further increasing the post-annealing beyond 500 °C. The studied multilayered coating can be used to tailor the reflectance and conductance of dielectric substrate surfaces for various optoelectronics and sensor device applications.
Environmental variation and recruitment of Pacific herring (Clupea harengus pallasi) in the Strait of Georgia

We used an age-structured model to estimate recruitment for the Strait of Georgia Pacific herring (Clupea harengus pallasi) population. The model used for herring is a version of the model described in Fournier and Archibald (1982. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 39: 1195–1207), modified to include spawn survey information. Three structural assumptions are made to include the spawn data: (1) the form of the relationship between the actual spawn and the observed spawn, (2) the form of the relationship between escapement and actual spawn, and (3) the existence of a Ricker spawn–recruitment relationship, with a multiplicative environmental component. In order to determine which environmental factors had a significant effect on recruitment, we attempted to explain the residual variation from the Ricker curve with the environmental variables using exploratory correlations. Temperature, river discharge, sea level, and sunlight were examined. A multiplicative, environmental-dependent Ricker spawn–recruitment model was.
Avaliação nutricional do grão de ervilha forrageira (Pisum sativum) em dietas para suínos em crescimento

Corn and soybean meal based diets with increasing levels of ground peas, sub-species hortense cultivar Alfetta (0, 20 and 40%), were formulated to evaluate the nutritional value of this ingredient with 18 castrated male pigs of commercial hybrids averaging 40 kg. The study also aimed to determine the apparent digestible and metabolizable energy and nitrogen retentions of peas. A total period of four weeks was used in which body weight gain, feed intake, feed conversion and amount of feces and urine were evaluated. The results demonstrated an overall performance of animals fed diets with increasing levels of green peas similar to those fed the control diet without peas. These results were consistent with the outcome from the metabolism assay, which demonstrated digestibility and nitrogen retention similar to the control diet. Digestible and metabolizable energy values of 3,968 and 3,723 kcal/kg were calculated. Results clearly indicate the possibility of inclusion up to 40% ground peas in the growing pigs feeding, without any constraint on animal performance.
NEIGHBOR ROUTING CONTROL USING RELATIVE ROUTING PACKET FLOW ALGORITHM (NRC-RRPFA) TO IMPROVE THE DATA TRANSMISSION ROUTING IN VEHICULAR AD HOC NETWORK

Vehicle ad-hoc networks are highly mobile wireless networks for energy consumption. The Ad-Network in the routing environment become probable in traffic conditions. A VANET provides a vehicle-to-vehicle connection that can be used in communication as in the form of data flow information in energy constraint level. The data transmission of the wireless communication device a mounted on the vehicle network as well in the defined network. The relative transmission algorithm in each time slot is used to predict all users that are predictable to connect to the Routing relay nodes created mitigation. Therefore, try to find the nearest facility here from the specified location and the path between any two points of the service area destination defined factors dominate the average path loss and the propagation speed and time and the probability distribution of VANET vehicle infrastructure communication delays. To propose a Neighbor routing Control using Relative Routing packet Flow algorithm (NRC-RRPFA) to improve the data transmission routing in vehicular ad hoc network. To improve the Data speed, efficiency and determine the path, optimization problem. To address this, delay-tolerant communications also fly around. The protocol allows location based nodes to carry packets back to their anchor location from the point of relay nodes. where they periodically first separated to make easy communication medium. A unique feature of this protocol is that when it is moved away from the origin, the recorded geographic track is the improve the network communication to optimize the return path. the performance improvement will become even more by neighbor routing.