Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plant pathogens, insect pests and weeds in a changing global climate: a review of approaches, challenges, research gaps, key studies and concepts

SUMMARY Climate change biology is witnessing a significant quantity of new publications each year, which compromises efforts to keep up-to-date on the rapidly growing body of climate change biology literature. The present paper provides an overview on research approaches and challenges in climate change biology with respect to plant pathogens, insect pests and weeds (collectively termed ‘pests’ here). It also summarizes the suggestions of researchers about how to conceptualize and prioritize future research strategies. Recently published key studies demonstrate that climate change research is qualitatively advancing and that the interactions among environmental and biotic factors which have been found are complex. This complexity hinders attempts to generalize responses of pests to changes in climate. The challenge remains to identify the most significant causal relationships and to separate them from other factors such as crop management practices, which may also influence the observed changes in pest distribution and prevalence in managed ecosystems. In addition, the present overview shows that there are still gaps in many research areas, while other fields have been intensively investigated. For example, the identification of potential benefits in plant protection that may emerge from future climate change has not been explored as extensively as the potential threats. However, encouraging developments can be observed in recent climate change research, for instance the increased number of studies performed under subtropical and tropical climatic conditions, the increased availability of results from multi-factorial field experiments and modelling studies do consider increasingly pest–crop–climate interactions. Further progress can be expected, provided that researchers, sponsors and other stakeholders maintain their interest in climate change biology research.
Clinical impact of coronal-STIR sequence in a routine lumbar spine MR imaging protocol to investigate low back pain

Abstract Aim of this study is to assess the clinical impact of coronal short tau inversion recovery (STIR)-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) sequence, when acquired in a lumbar spine MR imaging protocol, in detecting significant extraspinal imaging findings in patients with low back pain (LBP). We retrospectively evaluated 931 lumbar spine MR examinations of patients with LBP. Extraspinal MR imaging findings were categorized as: probably related to LBP (Category 1), not related to LBP but with relevant implications on patient's care (Category 2), and not related to LBP without significant implications on patient's care (Category 3). For each MR imaging finding was also assessed if it was detectable or not on the conventional sagittal and axial acquisition planes. Of the 931 evaluated MR examinations, 60 (6.4%) showed additional extraspinal MR imaging findings, categorized as follows: 55% (33/60) probably related to LBP (Category 1), 22% (13/60) not related to LBP but with relevant implications on patient's care (Category 2), and 23% (14/60) not related to LBP and without significant implications on patient's care (Category 3). Among categories 1 and 2 (n = 46), the 72% (33/46) of imaging findings were detected only on coronal plane. Coronal-STIR sequence significantly changed patients’ diagnostic work-flow in 3.5% (33/931) of cases. Coronal STIR sequence, acquired in a lumbar spine MR imaging protocol to investigate LBP, may aid radiologists in detecting additional extraspinal MR imaging findings that could be related to LBP, addressing to the most appropriate clinical management.
Iron Promotes Intestinal Development in Neonatal Piglets

Early nutrition is key to promoting gut growth and education of the immune system. Although iron deficiency anemia has long been recognized as a serious iron disorder, the effects of iron supplementation on gut development are less clear. Therefore, using suckling piglets as the model for iron deficiency, we assessed the impacts of iron supplementation on hematological status, gut development, and immunity improvement. Piglets were parenterally supplied with iron dextran (FeDex, 60 mg Fe/kg) by intramuscular administration on the third day after birth and slaughtered at the age of two days, five days, 10 days, and 20 days. It was expected that iron supplementation with FeDex improved the iron status with higher levels of serum iron, ferritin, transferrin, and iron loading in the liver by regulating the interaction of hepcidin and ferroportin (FPN). FeDex supplementation increased villus length and crypt depth, attenuated the pathological status of the duodenum, and was beneficial to intestinal mucosa. FeDex also influenced the intestinal immune development by stimulating the cytokines’ production of the intestine and enhancing the phagocytotic capacity of monocytes. Overall, the present study suggested that iron supplementation helped promote the development of the intestine by improving its morphology, which maintains its mucosal integrity and enhances the expression of immuno-associated factors.
Dobutamine and Nitroglycerin Versus Milrinone for Perioperative Management of Pulmonary Hypertension in Mitral Valve Surgery. A Randomized Controlled Study.

OBJECTIVE To compare the effects of dobutamine and nitroglycerin to milrinone in young patients with severe pulmonary hypertension undergoing mitral valve replacement. DESIGN A prospective randomized, double-blinded, controlled study. SETTING Single university hospital. PARTICIPANTS Forty patients had systolic pulmonary arterial pressure ≥60 mmHg and were scheduled for elective mitral valve replacement. The patients were divided randomly into 2 equal groups according to the drugs given during the study. INTERVENTIONS The patients in group I received 5 to 20 µg/kg/min of dobutamine and 0.5 to 3 µg/kg/min of nitroglycerin, and patients in group II received a loading dose of milrinone, 50 µg/kg over 10 minutes, followed by a maintenance dose of 0.25 to 0.75 µg/kg/min. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS The primary outcome was the effects of interventional drugs on mean pulmonary artery pressure. The secondary outcomes were the effects of interventional drugs on systemic and pulmonary hemodynamic parameters measured from induction of anesthesia until the first 12 hours in the intensive care unit stay. There was a more significant decrease in mean pulmonary artery pressure, pulmonary capillary wedge pressure, and central venous pressure in group II than group I at all time points after cardiopulmonary bypass. There were more significant increases in heart rate, mean arterial pressure, cardiac output, and mixed venous oxygen tension in group I than group II, which became more obvious in time. In both groups, there was a significant decrease in systemic vascular resistance and pulmonary vascular resistance at all times. CONCLUSION Milrinone provides adequate cardiac performance, causing a greater reduction in pulmonary artery pressure and pulmonary capillary wedge pressure.
A Framework for Anchor Methods and an Iterative Forward Approach for DIF Detection

In differential item functioning (DIF) analysis, a common metric is necessary to compare item parameters between groups of test-takers. In the Rasch model, the same restriction is placed on the item parameters in each group to define a common metric. However, the question how the items in the restriction—termed anchor items—are selected appropriately is still a major challenge. This article proposes a conceptual framework for categorizing anchor methods: The anchor class to describe characteristics of the anchor methods and the anchor selection strategy to guide how the anchor items are determined. Furthermore, the new iterative forward anchor class is proposed. Several anchor classes are implemented with different anchor selection strategies and are compared in an extensive simulation study. The results show that the new anchor class combined with the single-anchor selection strategy is superior in situations where no prior knowledge about the direction of DIF is available.
Genetic, management, and nutritional factors affecting intramuscular fat deposition in beef cattle — A review

Intramuscular fat (IMF) content in skeletal muscle including the longissimus dorsi muscle (LM), also known as marbling fat, is one of the most important factors determining beef quality in several countries including Korea, Japan, Australia, and the United States. Genetics and breed, management, and nutrition affect IMF deposition. Japanese Black cattle breed has the highest IMF content in the world, and Korean cattle (also called Hanwoo) the second highest. Here, we review results of research on genetic factors (breed and sex differences and heritability) that affect IMF deposition. Cattle management factors are also important for IMF deposition. Castration of bulls increases IMF deposition in most cattle breeds. The effects of several management factors, including weaning age, castration, slaughter weight and age, and environmental conditions on IMF deposition are also reviewed. Nutritional factors, including fat metabolism, digestion and absorption of feed, glucose/starch availability, and vitamin A, D, and C levels are important for IMF deposition. Manipulating IMF deposition through developmental programming via metabolic imprinting is a recently proposed nutritional method to change potential IMF deposition during the fetal and neonatal periods in rodents and domestic animals. Application of fetal nutritional programming to increase IMF deposition of progeny in later life is reviewed. The coordination of several factors affects IMF deposition. Thus, a combination of several strategies may be needed to manipulate IMF deposition, depending on the consumer’s beef preference. In particular, stage-specific feeding programs with concentrate-based diets developed by Japan and Korea are described in this article.
Evaluation of replicas manufactured in a 3D-printed nanoimprint unit

Nanoimprint lithography has become a useful tool to prepare elements containing nanoscale features at quite reasonable cost, especially if the fabrication elements are created in the own laboratory. We have designed and fabricated a whole nanoimprint manufacturing system and analyzed the resulting surfaces using ad hoc packages developed on an open-software AFM image analysis suite. To complete the work, a number of polymers have been thoroughly studied in order to select the best material for this implementation. It turned out that the best alternative was not always the same, but depended on the application. A comparative study of the polymers, which takes into account the values and dispersion of numerous sample parameters, has been carried out. As a large number of samples was prepared, an automatized procedure for characterization of nanoimprint surfaces had to be set up. The procedure includes figures of merit for comparative purposes. Materials without the requirement of a solvent were found to be superior for most nanoimprint applications. A large dispersion of the samples was found.
wrJFS: A Write-Reduction Journaling File System for Byte-addressable NVRAM

Non-volatile random-access memory (NVRAM) becomes a mainstream storage device in embedded systems due to its favorable features, such as small size, low power consumption, and short read/write latency. Unlike dynamic random access memory (DRAM), NVRAM has asymmetric performance and energy consumption on read/write operations. Generally, on NVRAM, a write operation consumes more energy and time than a read operation. Unfortunately, current mobile/embedded file systems, such as EXT2/3 and EXT4, are very unfriendly for NVRAM devices. The reason is that current mobile/embedded file systems employ a journaling mechanism for increasing its data reliability. Although a journaling mechanism raises the safety of data in a file system, it also repeatedly writes data to a data storage while data is committed and checkpointed. Though several related works have been proposed to reduce the amount of write traffic to NVRAM, they still cannot effectively minimize the write amplification of a journaling mechanism. Such observations motivate us to design a two-phase write reduction journaling file system called wrJFS. In the first phase, wrJFS classified data into two categories: Metadata and user data. As the size of metadata is usually very small (few bytes), byte-enabled journaling strategy will handle metadata during commit and checkpoint stages. In contrast, the size of user data is very large relative to metadata; thus, user data will be processed in the second phase. In the second phase, user data will be compressed by hardware encoder to reduce the write size and managed compressed-enabled journaling strategy to avoid the write amplification on NVRAM. Moreover, we analyze the overhead of wrJFS and show that the overhead is negligible. According to the experimental results, the proposed wrJFS outperforms other journaling file systems even though the experiments include the overhead of data compression.
Design of knowledge-based integrated software process improvement tools

The design of QUEST (software QUality Evaluation System and Technology) tools, and especially of its repository, is discussed. QUEST tools are composed of a software process assessment tool (QUEST-A), a software process improvement tool (QUEST-I) and a repository for software process information (QUEST-R). We place the emphasis of this paper on the design of QUEST-R, which acts as a process asset library (PAL) and a meta-process support tool. The meta-process knowledge can be accumulated from several cases of process improvement, which can be initiated by software process assessment and process metrics. The results or outputs of QUEST-A, QUEST-I or the other tools act as a driver of knowledge inference. To build QUEST-R, a knowledge-based software process model (KB-SPM), which incorporates meta-process objects and their relationships, is proposed. Several factors, including environmental changes and various process improvement strategies, are explicitly modeled as frames. QUEST-R (1) makes it possible to generate and customize project process models in various application domains; (2) makes it possible to reuse the software process objects; and (3) makes it easy to accumulate and enhance meta-process knowledge. Besides supporting the meta-process phase, to increase the effectiveness of the meta-process, the following facilities are proposed: (1) rules for control knowledge; (2) more affecting factors for the generation of software processes; (3) a dependency structure, for describing improvement items and their interdependence; and (4) a mechanism to automatically update the knowledge.
Modeling biomechanical responses of cells to external forces

For many cells, their biomechanical properties are important to their biofunctions. This thesis contains three computational studies of cellular dynamics under mechanical deformation. When infected by malaria, infected red blood cells (iRBCs) become less deformable and tend to block microcapillaries. Microfluidic channels have been used to investigate the deformability of iRBC at different infection stages. In my first project, I applied a discrete iRBC model to simulate the traverse of iRBCs through a microfluidic channel and investigated the progressive loss of the cell deformability due to three factors: the membrane stiffening, the cell surface-volume ratio reduction, and the parasite growing inside the cell. The results indicate that the growth of the parasite clusters play the most significant role in causing the channel blockage. Recent experiments have investigated the response of neutrophils after passing through microfluidic channels. The results indicate that neutrophils may be activated by mechanical deformation. Mechanical deformation causes disassembly of the cytoskeletal network of the neutrophils, which results in a sudden drop of the cell elastic modulus (termed fluidization). The fluidization is followed by either activation of the neutrophils with formation of pseudopods or uniform recovery of the cytoskeletal network without pseudopod formation. The former only occurs when the neutrophils’ transit rate is slow. I proposed a chemo-mechanical model for the fluidization and activation processes, based on the polarization of the Rac protein through a wave-pinning mechanism. The model captures the main features of the experimental observation. The third project investigates the response of smooth muscle cells to transient stretch-compress (SC) and compress-stretch (CS) maneuvers. Prior experimental results indicate that the transient SC maneuver causes a sudden fluidization of the cell while the CS maneuver does not. To understand this asymmetric behavior, I built a biomechanical model to probe the response of stress fibers to the two maneuvers. The model couples the cross-bridge cycle of myosin motors with a viscoelastic Kelvin-Voigt element. Simulation results point to the sensitivity of the myosin detachment rate to
Literature Survey of Arabic Speech Recognition

Speech recognition poses some interesting challenges such as varying acoustic conditions, dialects, and articulation at word's boundaries. Large vocabulary speaker-independent continuous speech recognition systems have recently received significant attention. In this paper, we present a survey of Arabic speech recognition that even has more challenges such as the optional diacritization of the Arabic script. Even though Arabic is a live language that is spreading widely throughout a large area, the research devoted to this technology still in the early stages compared to other languages such as English language. In this study, we highlight the progress made so far in Arabic speech recognition field that include corpora, phonemes, language models, acoustic models, and some promising research directions. This survey reveals that the shortage of freely available continuous speech corpora deserves more research attention in this domain. It also shows a need to compile large corpora or a benchmark, as it will be a key factor to promote the Arabic language research for effective human-computer interaction.
A Hybrid Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm for Energy-Aware Allocation and Scheduling Optimization of MPSoCs

MPSoCs are increasingly being adopted in the design of emerging complex embedded systems. Resource limitations require designers to find optimizations among various design considerations. Task mapping and scheduling become one of the key issues in designing such systems. To meet the requirements of makespan minimization and workload balance for energy-aware MPSoCs, the paper presents a unified formulation to find satisfied task mapping and scheduling solutions. The model considers both computation and communication cost, and enables applying dynamic power management (DPM) for energy optimization. To efficiently approximate the Pareto front of the optimization problem, we propose a multi-objective hybrid algorithm (MOHA) by integrating a Pareto local search into an evolutionary process, with a problem-specific initialization. Experimental results from realistic benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed techniques are able to generate high-quality solutions of realistic applications on the target architecture, compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Self-Reporting emotional experiences in computing lab sessions: an emotional regulation perspective

This paper reports on a study in which we compared two technologies for the self-reporting of emotional experience when learning to program: EmoSense and the Subtle Stones. Students used each technology concurrently during their computing lab sessions to report on the emotions that they experienced while programming, such as frustration, enjoyment, pride, etc. We found that the Subtle Stone, a tangible, hand-held device, was preferred by students, and offered a number of advantages over EmoSense, a desktop based widget. Most notably, it allowed students to become more aware of the emotions they were experiencing, and to change their behaviours and problem solving strategies as a result of this increased awareness. Because of its visibility, the Subtle Stone also allowed students to become more aware of each others’ emotional states, and to respond in helpful ways. We argue that the preference for the Subtle Stone can usefully be considered through the lens of emotional regulation, and the opportunities that the Subtle Stone provides for both self and mutual regulation.
Animal monitoring based on IoT technologies

The placement of grazing animals in vineyards requires additional support to the animal husbandry activities. Such support must include the monitoring and the conditioning of animal's location and behavior, specially their feeding posture. With such a system, it is possible to allow sheep to graze in cultivated areas (e.g. vineyards, orchards) without endangering them. This paper proposes an animal behavior monitoring platform, based on IoT technologies. It includes an IoT local network to gather data from animals and a cloud platform, with processing and storage capabilities, to autonomously shepherd ovine within vineyard areas. The cloud platform also incorporates machine learning features, allowing the extraction of relevant information from the data gathered by the IoT network. Thus, besides the platform description, some results are presented regarding the machine learning platform. Namely, this platform was evaluated for detecting and defining conditions respecting animal's posture, with preliminary promising results. Since several algorithms were tested, this paper includes a comparison of those algorithms.
Expedited Design Closure of Antennas by Means of Trust-Region-Based Adaptive Response Scaling

In this letter, a reliable procedure for the expedited design optimization of antenna structures by means of trust-region adaptive response scaling (TR-ARS) is proposed. The presented approach exploits two-level electromagnetic (EM) simulation models. A predicted high-fidelity model response is obtained by applying nonlinear frequency and amplitude correction to the low-fidelity model. The surrogate created this way is iteratively rebuilt and optimized within the trust region framework. The utilization of the correlations between the EM models of various fidelities allows for significant reduction of the design optimization cost. The main contributions of the work are twofold: 1) the application of an ARS for antenna optimization (in particular, making it work with coarse-discretization EM models as low-fidelity models); and 2) the integration of an ARS with a TR optimization framework. The operation and performance of the algorithm are demonstrated using two antenna designs optimized for several scenarios. A comparative study reveals computational benefits of the TR-ARS over direct optimization of the high-fidelity EM model. The reliability of the optimization process is further confirmed by an experimental validation of the fabricated antenna prototypes.