Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of Microvascular Complications and Effect of Concurrent Risk Factors in Type 1 Diabetes: A Multistate Model From an Observational Clinical Cohort Study

OBJECTIVE Type 1 diabetes is a complex disease, and development of multiple complications over time can be analyzed only with advanced statistical methods. This study describes the development of microvascular complications and explores the effect of complication burden and important concurrent risk factors by applying a multistate model. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We used a clinical cohort at the Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen to study the development of diabetic kidney disease, retinopathy, and neuropathy. We extracted information from electronic patient records and estimated incidence rates of complications by concurrent complication burden. We explored the extent to which concurrent complications modify the effect of selected risk factors on the development of microvascular complications. RESULTS We included 3,586 individuals. Incidence rate ratios in individuals with two previous complications were 3.2 (95% CI 2.3–4.5) for diabetic kidney disease, 2.1 (1.5–3.1) for retinopathy, and 1.7 (1.2–2.4) for neuropathy compared with individuals without complications. The models included diabetes duration; calendar time and age as timescales; and sex, HbA1c, lipid-lowering and antihypertensive treatment, systolic blood pressure, BMI, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), cardiovascular disease (CVD), LDL cholesterol, insulin dose (units/kg/day), and smoking status as covariates. Effects of HbA1c, diabetes duration, systolic blood pressure, BMI, eGFR, and LDL cholesterol where not modified by concurrent complication burden, whereas the effect of sex and CVD were. CONCLUSIONS The risk of microvascular complications highly depends on the concurrent complication burden and risk factor profile in individuals with type 1 diabetes. The results emphasize attention to risk factors, regardless of existing number of complications, to prevent development of further microvascular complications.
A Load-Balanced Approach to Time Efficient Resource Scheduling in SDN-Enabled Data Center

Nowadays it is common for applications to run on data centers and deliver services to users. With the increase of tasks of multiple applications, it is a challenge for data center providers to make full use of the available resources, and improve task response time without too much computational cost. This paper focuses on load-balance based time efficient resource scheduling. A resource allocation architecture for SDN-enabled data center and a load-balance based resource allocation approach(LBA) are proposed. LBA is mainly used to maintain the the whole resource in a balancing state and assign appropriate resources to tasks, majorly consisting of three parts: Load-balance, VM-selection and Path-selection. Comprehensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of LBA. Experiment results show that LBA can take full advantage of the available resources and improve task response time on the basis of load-balance, making both SLA violation rate and average cost as small as possible.
A Framework for Real Time Emotion Recognition Based on Human ANS Using Pervasive Device

The concept of connected things by involving emotional aspects has been raised as a new research issue which is known as "emotional IoT". The deeper interaction between object and human shows an importance to develop a system with either cognitive or affective capabilities such as emotion. While the existing works on real time emotion recognition mostly rely on facial data, there are a few works dealing with real time emotion recognition based on physiological data using pervasive devices. In this work, we propose a framework to recognize emotion based on human physiological signals using the pervasive wearable device. This framework opposed most of the works which employed sensors which are expensive and complex in arrangement. The challenge on using pervasive devices is the low accuracy due to the low sampling rate. The approach is implemented in an end-to-end soft real time emotion recognition system using smartphone and smartwatch devices. The performance of our system was evaluated under a common environment and proved the system applicability throughout everyday life.
« L’association El Arca outil de développement local à Mendoza : un regard à travers une approche systémique »,pp 241-253

Dans la crise économique que traverse la planète les pays latino-américains constituent des laboratoires d’expériences d’économie sociale et solidaire d’une grande richesse et d’une grande diversité. De nombreuses initiatives collectives reposant sur les principes communs d’utilité sociale, de gestion démocratique et de coopération, apparaissent et donnent des réponses aux nouveaux besoins des populations touchées par le chômage et l’exclusion sociale. L’économie sociale et solidaire (ESS) trouve une reconnaissance institutionnelle et académique particulièrement forte en Amérique Latine avec des orientations et des degrés différents. Elle est présente dans des textes législatifs et constitutionnels de plusieurs pays, par exemple au Venezuela, en Colombie, en Uruguay, au Mexique. En Equateur, elle est inscrite dans la Constitution qui reconnaît une économie solidaire populaire. Au Brésil, il existe un secrétariat d'Etat à l'Economie solidaire, intégré au ministère de l'Economie. La Bolivie fait, elle, une place à l'économie sociale et communautaire, au sein d'une économie plurielle. Ainsi, les gouvernements de plusieurs Etats ont déjà mis en œuvre des programmes d’action visant au développement de modèles de production alternatifs. (Coraggio, 2007 ; Guerra, 2012, Muñoz, 2014, Vaillancourt, 2013)
ACP: An Efficient User Location Privacy Preserving Protocol for Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks

Users face location-privacy risks when accessing Location-Based Services (LBSs) in an Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks (OMSNs). In order to protect the original requester's identity and location, we propose a location privacy obfuscation protocols, called Appointment Card Protocol (ACP), utilizing social ties between users. To facilitate the obfuscation operations of queries, we introduce the concept called Appointment Card (AC). The original requesters can send their queries to the LBS directly using the information in the AC, ensuring that the original requester is not detected by the LBS. Also, a path for reply message is kept when the query is sent, to help reduce the time for replying queries. Simulation results show that our protocol preserves location privacy and has a higher query success ratio than its counterparts.
Correlates of rate heterogeneity in avian ecomorphological traits

Abstract Heterogeneity in rates of trait evolution is widespread, but it remains unclear which processes drive fast and slow character divergence across global radiations. Here, we test multiple hypotheses for explaining rate variation in an ecomorphological trait (beak shape) across a globally distributed group (birds). We find low support that variation in evolutionary rates of species is correlated with life history, environmental mutagenic factors, range size, number of competitors, or living on islands. Indeed, after controlling for the negative effect of species' age, 80% of variation in species‐specific evolutionary rates remains unexplained. At the clade level, high evolutionary rates are associated with unusual phenotypes or high species richness. Taken together, these results imply that macroevolutionary rates of ecomorphological traits are governed by both ecological opportunity in distinct adaptive zones and niche differentiation among closely related species.
Full-Reference Stability Assessment of Digital Video Stabilization Based on Riemannian Metric

Assessing the quality of the motion stability is important to evaluating the performance of video stabilization algorithms. This paper presents a novel quality assessment scheme for the video motion stability in a full-reference (FR) manner. Given ideally stable videos and their corresponding shaky videos, our method measures the geodesic distance between motion paths of the stable and the stabilized videos. Due to the use of the Riemannian metric defined on the manifold of spatial transformations, our method enables the intrinsic and faithful measurement on pairwise motion disparities. To facilitate the FR assessment, a data set of stable and shaky videos is constructed by directly capturing realistic stable/shaky videos with a customized device. Then, digital video stabilization algorithms can be run on shaky videos to obtain the stabilized sequence of frames, whereupon their performances are evaluated by using our stability assessment. The experiments demonstrate that our stability assessment gains good concordance with the subjective assessment.
Comparison of uptake transporter functions in hepatocytes in different species to determine the optimal model for evaluating drug transporter activities in humans

Abstract A thorough understanding of species-dependent differences in hepatic uptake transporters is critical for predicting human pharmacokinetics (PKs) from preclinical data. In this study, the activities of organic anion transporting polypeptide (OATP/Oatp), organic cation transporter 1 (OCT1/Oct1), and sodium-taurocholate cotransporting polypeptide (NTCP/Ntcp) in cultured rat, dog, monkey and human hepatocytes were compared. The activities of hepatic uptake transporters were evaluated with respect to culture duration, substrate and species-dependent differences in hepatocytes. Longer culture duration reduced hepatic uptake transporter activities across species except for Oatp and Ntcp in rats. Comparable apparent Michaelis–Menten constant (Km,app) values in hepatocytes were observed across species for atorvastatin, estradiol-17β-glucuronide and metformin. The Km,app values for rosuvastatin and taurocholate were significantly different across species. Rat hepatocytes exhibited the highest Oatp percentage of uptake transporter-mediated permeation clearance (PSinf,act) while no difference in %PSinf,act of probe substrates were observed across species. The in vitro hepatocyte inhibition data in rats, monkeys and humans provided reasonable predictions of in vivo drug–drug interaction (DDIs) between atorvastatin/rosuvastatin and rifampin. These findings suggested that using human hepatocytes with a short culture time is the most robust preclinical model for predicting DDIs for compounds exhibiting active hepatic uptake in humans.
Enterprise Microblogging to Augment the Subinternship Clinical Learning Experience: A Proof-of-Concept Quality Improvement Study

Background Although the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine (CDIM) has created a core subinternship curriculum, the traditional experiential subinternship may not expose students to all topics. Furthermore, academic institutions often use multiple clinical training sites for the student clerkship experience. Objective The objective of this study was to sustain a Web-based learning community across geographically disparate sites via enterprise microblogging to increase subintern exposure to the CDIM curriculum. Methods Internal medicine subinterns used Yammer, a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)–secure enterprise microblogging platform, to post questions, images, and index conversations for searching. The subinterns were asked to submit 4 posts and participate in 4 discussions during their rotation. Faculty reinforced key points, answered questions, and monitored HIPAA compliance. Results In total, 56 medical students rotated on an internal medicine subinternship from July 2014 to June 2016. Of them, 84% returned the postrotation survey. Over the first 3 months, 100% of CDIM curriculum topics were covered. Compared with the pilot year, the scale-up year demonstrated a significant increase in the number of students with >10 posts (scale-up year 49% vs pilot year 19%; P=.03) and perceived educational experience (58% scale-up year vs 14% pilot year; P=.006). Few students (6%) noted privacy concerns, but fewer students in the scale-up year found Yammer to be a safe learning environment. Conclusions Supplementing the subinternship clinical experience with an enterprise microblogging platform increased subinternship exposure to required curricular topics and was well received. Future work should address concerns about safe learning environment.
Developing a Three- to Six-State EEG-Based Brain–Computer Interface for a Virtual Robotic Manipulator Control

Objective: We develop an electroencephalography (EEG)-based noninvasive brain–computer interface (BCI) system having short training time (15 min) that can be applied for high-performance control of robotic prosthetic systems. Methods: A signal processing system for detecting user's mental intent from EEG data based on up to six-state BCI paradigm is developed and used. Results: We examine the performance of the developed system on experimental data collected from 12 healthy participants and analyzed offline. Out of 12 participants 3 achieve an accuracy of six-state communication in 80%–90% range, while 2 participants do not achieve a satisfactory accuracy. We further implement an online BCI system for control of a virtual 3 degree-of-freedom (dof) prosthetic manipulator and test it with our three best participants. Two participants are able to successfully complete 100% of the test tasks, demonstrating on average the accuracy rate of 80% and requiring 5–10 s to execute a manipulator move. One participant failed to demonstrate a satisfactory performance in online trials. Conclusion: We show that our offline EEG BCI system can correctly identify different motor imageries in EEG data with high accuracy and our online BCI system can be used for control of a virtual 3 dof prosthetic manipulator. Significance: Our results prepare foundation for further development of higher performance EEG BCI-based robotic assistive systems and demonstrate that EEG-based BCI may be feasible for robotic control by paralyzed and immobilized individuals.
The onset of treatment with the antidepressant desipramine is critical for the emotional consequences of neuropathic pain

Abstract Neuropathic pain is a chronic condition that is challenging to treat. It often produces considerable physical disability and emotional distress. Patients with neuropathic pain often experience depression and anxiety both of which are known to be temporally correlated with noradrenergic dysfunction in the locus coeruleus (LC) as pain becomes chronic. Antidepressants are the first-line drug therapy for neuropathic pain, and the LC represents a potential target for such therapy. In this study, we evaluated the efficacy of the tricyclic antidepressant desipramine (DMI, a noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor) in preventing or relieving the noradrenergic impairment induced by neuropathic pain. The treatment started before or after the onset of the anxiodepressive phenotype (“early or late treatment”) in adult rats subjected to chronic sciatic constriction. Electrophysiological and western blotting assays showed LC dysfunction (increased bursting activity, alpha2-adrenoceptor sensitivity, tyrosine hydroxylase, and noradrenaline transporter expression) in chronic constriction injury at long term. These noradrenergic changes were concomitant to the progression of anxiety and despair-like features. Desipramine induced efficient analgesia, and it counteracted the despair-like behavior in chronic constriction injury-DMI animals, reducing the burst rate and tyrosine hydroxylase expression. Surprisingly, “early” DMI treatment did not modify pain-induced anxiety, and it dampened pain aversion, although these phenomena were abolished when the treatment commenced after noradrenaline impairment had been established. Hence, DMI seems to produce different outcomes depending when the treatment commences, indicating that the balance between the benefits and adverse effects of DMI therapy may shift as neuropathy progresses.
ACOUSTIC SCORE FOLLOWING TO MUSICAL PERFORMANCE WITH ERRORS AND ARBITRARY REPEATS AND SKIPS FOR AUTOMATIC ACCOMPANIMENT

We discuss acoustic score-following algorithms for monophonic musical performances with arbitrary repeats and skips as well as performance errors, particularly focusing on reducing the computational complexity. Repeats/skips are often made arbitrarily during musical practice, and it is desirable to deal with arbitrary repeats/skips for wide application of score following. Allowing arbitrary repeats/skips in performance models demands reducing the computational complexity for score following. We show that for certain hidden Markov models which assume independence of transition probabilities from and to where repeats/skips are made, the computational complexity can be reduced from O(M2) down to O(M) for the number of notes M , and construct score-following algorithms based on the models. We experimentally show that the proposed algorithms work in real time with practical scores (up to about 10000 notes) and can catch up with the performances in around 3.8 s after repeats/skips.
Mapping Dynamic Urban Land Use Patterns with Crowdsourced Geo-Tagged Social Media (Sina-Weibo) and Commercial Points of Interest Collections in Beijing, China

In fast-growing cities, especially large cities in developing countries, land use types are changing rapidly, and different types of land use are mixed together. It is difficult to assess the land use types in these fast-growing cities in a timely and accurate way. To address this problem, this paper presents a multi-source data mining approach to study dynamic urban land use patterns. Spatiotemporal social media data reveal human activity patterns in different areas, social media text data reflects the topics discussed in different areas, and Points of Interest (POI) reflect the distribution of urban facilities in different regions. Human activity patterns, topics of discussion on social media, and the distribution of urban facilities in different regions were combined and analyzed to infer urban land use patterns. We collected 9.5 million geo-tagged Chinese social media (Sina-Weibo) messages from January 2014 to July 2014 in the urban core areas of Beijing and compared them with 385,792 commercial Points of Interest (POI) from Datatang (a Chinese digital data content provider). To estimate urban land use types and patterns in Beijing, a regular grid of 400 m × 400 m was created to divide the urban core areas into 18,492 cells. By analyzing the temporal frequency trends of social media messages within each cell using K-means clustering algorithm, we identified seven types of land use clusters in Beijing: residential areas, university dormitories, commercial areas, work areas, transportation hubs, and two types of mixed land use areas. Text mining, word clouds, and the distribution analysis of POI were used to verify the estimated land use types successfully. This study can help urban planners create up-to-date land use patterns in an economic way and help us better understand dynamic human activity patterns in a city.
Interactive 3D Visualization of a Large University Campus over the Web

Nowadays, with the rise and generalized use of web applications and graphical hardware evolution, one of the most interesting problems deals with realistic real-time visualization of virtual environments on web browsers. This paper shows an on-line application to dynamically visualize a large campus on the World Wide Web. The application focuses on a smooth walk through a large 3D environment in real-time as an alternative way to index geographically related information. This way, contents are continuously filtered based on viewpoint’s position. This can be made thanks to the availability of different models corresponding to different levels of detail (LOD) for each modeled building. A server storage model has been purposed including all models, compound of meshes, textures and information. The technique is based on an algorithm that performs a progressive refining of the models, according to the distance from the viewpoint.
Intermediaries in Trust: An Experimental Study on Incentives and Norms

Trust situations involve a certain amount of risk for trustors that trustees can abuse. Knowing this, rational individuals might not place trust in others. In many real situations, intermediaries exist that play a crucial role helping trustors and trustees to cooperate. The question is how intermediaries can be motivated to accomplish this important task. We have investigated this by performing various experimental tests on a modified version of the investment game, where we introduced intermediaries who rated the behavior of trustees for the benefit of trustors. We manipulated incentive schemes and tested various role structures. We found that intrinsic motivations can increase the positive impact of the intermediaries on cooperation between trustors and trustees, even more than any material incentive, provided that there is room for indirect reciprocity strategies. Our results show the importance of intrinsic motivations of individuals and circumscribe the power and generalizability of material incentives for cooperation.
Hub Feature Extraction of Tumor Proteins Using Similarity

This paper presents a method to extract the hub features of tumor proteins using Similarity Measurements such as Jaccard, Cosine, Dice and Overlap. Through this paper we are not trying to predict the class of a protein as hub proteins or tumor proteins but to prove that a good majority of tumor proteins are hubs. Hydrophobicity, one of the important physio-chemical characteristics of the amino acid along with 28 other physio-chemical characteristics are used for this purpose. Two databases such as Human Protein Reference Database (HPRD) and P53 interaction database are used for testing the method. The application of the proposed method on the random samples of both databases has revealed 72% correctness.
Effect of Bisphenol A on the Feeding Behavior of Caenorhabditis elegans

We observed and evaluated the feeding behavior of the free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) after exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) and nonylphenol (NP). Exposed organisms were transferred to chemical-free culture medium and their attainment levels (the number of worms reaching the food source divided by the total number of worms on the Petri plate) were recorded after 2, 4, 6, 8, and 24 hr. Results showed a significant decrease in the attainment level of worms exposed to 10 μM and 0.1 μM BPA. However, there was a slight increase in the attainment level of nematodes treated with 1 μM NP. These results differ from previous studies showing NP as being more lethal to nematodes than BPA.
Cryptanalysis of Iterated Hash and Its Variants

Cryptanalysis of Iterated Hash and Its Variants by Ashwin Jha The subject of this thesis is the cryptanalysis of iterated hash function and its variants. In particular, we analyse these designs on three security properties of hash functions, namely, preimage resistance, second preimage resistance and herding attack resistance. The iterated hash design is the most popular hash function design. Naturally, it is the most studied design as well. In this thesis, we try to do a comprehensive survey of attacks under random oracle model, on the aforementioned security goals of the iterated hash design and its variants. Structures play a major role in constructing attacks on the iterated hash functions. Here, we are proposing three new structures, viz., chain, multi-pipe expandable message set and rho structure. The chain structure is used to reduce the complexity of herding attack on iterated hash from O(22n/3) to O(2n/2). The multi-pipe expandable message set and rho structure are used in our analysis of the zipper hash. We also analyse the security of concatenated hash under cetain weakness assumptions on the underlying compression functions.