Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Weighing In: Psychological outcomes associated with weight changes among women treated for breast cancer

This mixed-methods program of research consisted of three inter-related studies to examine how changes in weight contribute to women’s psychological health in the post-treatment phase of breast cancer. Study 1 employed a qualitative design and purposeful sample of weightpreoccupied women (n = 11), to explore experiences of weight-related changes post-treatment, and examines perceptions of weight throughout the cancer trajectory. In a prospective longitudinal design spanning the first-year post-treatment for breast cancer (n = 173), Study 2 examines how pre-cancer and post-treatment weight patterns impact indices of psychological health (i.e., weight-related guilt, shame, and depressive symptoms). Study 3 utilized a daily diary design of women with comorbid breast cancer and obesity (n = 52) to assess the acute emotional outcomes associated with daily self-weighing in the context of weight management. Collectively, this body of work underscored the distressing nature of both weight changes and weight management efforts, in the context of reducing risk for breast cancer. Women reported experiencing more negative emotional consequences when their weight was higher than usual, both acutely after self-weighing and chronically over time in the first-year post-treatment. It was further suggested that a history of pre-cancer weight cycling served as an additional risk factor predicting worsened psychological experiences after treatment. These findings are important given that the well-documented impact of excess weight and psychological distress on worsened
Quality Assurance in Software Design Patterns

Design patterns are widely used to make the process of development easier as they greatly help the developers to develop the software. Different design patterns have been introduced till now but the behavior of same design pattern may differ in different domains that can lead to the wrong selection of the design pattern. The paper aims to discover the design patterns that suits best with respect to their domain thereby helping the developers to choose an effective design pattern. It presents the comprehensive analysis of design patterns based on different methodologies that include simulation, case study and comparison of various algorithms. Due to the difference of the domain the methodology used in one domain may be inapplicable to the other domain. The paper draws a conclusion based on strength and limitation of each design pattern in their respective domain.
Design and modelling of axially-laminated interior permanent magnet motor drives for field-weakening applications

This thesis is concerned with the design of AC motors to operate at constant shaft power over the widest possible speed range from an inverter of fixed volt-ampere rating. In particular, it examines and validates the reputation of the interior permanent magnet motor drive of having a wide speed range at constant power (field-weakening range). The design and construction of a 7.5kW axially-laminated interior permanent magnet motor showing a constant-power speed range exceeding 7.5:1 is described. This result cannot be matched by any other motor type. Vector-controlled induction motor drives are widely used for field-weakening applications. They offer a constant-power speed range of up to about 4:1. Higher values can be obtained only by oversizing the drive or by using a winding changeover technique. Combined with improvements in low-speed dynamic performance, the inherently wider constant-power speed range makes the interior permanent magnet motor drive a serious contender for applications such as machine tool main spindle drives and traction. The thesis consists of two parts. The first part examines the theoretical and practical limitations to the field-weakening performance of the three types of brushless synchronous AC motor : the surface permanent magnet, the synchronous reluctance and the interior permanent magnet motor. It is shown that high-saliency interior permanent magnet motor drives should offer the best practical field-weakening performance. The axially-laminated (as opposed to the conventional radially-laminated) construction offer the highest saliency ratios. The second part describes the modelling and design of an axially-laminated interior permanent magnet motor drive for optimal field-weakening performance. The effect of varying the design parameters on the drive's field-weakening performance is analysed. A 7.5kW axially-laminated synchronous reluctance and a 7.5kW axially-laminated interior permanent magnet motor were built. The interior permanent magnet motor drive shows an extremely wide constant-power speed range which exceeds 7.5:1.
Investigation of a Self-powered Fontan Concept Using a Multiscale Computational Fluid-Structure Interaction Model

Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) occurs in about 1% (40,000) of newborn babies each year in the United States alone. About 10.9% (960) of whom suffer from Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome (HLHS) a subset of CHD where children are born with a single-ventricle (SV). A series of three surgeries are carried out to correct HLHS culminating in the Fontan procedure where venous flow returns passively to the lungs. The current configuration for the Fontan results in elevated Central Venous Pressure (CVP), inadequate ventricular preload, and elevated Pulmonary Vascular Resistance (PVR) leading to a barrage of disease. To alleviate these complications, a ‘self-powered’ Fontan is suggested where an Injection Jet Shunt (IJS) emanating from the aorta is anastomosed to each pulmonary artery. The IJS attempts to reduce the central venous pressure, increase preload, and aid in pulmonary arterial growth by entraining the flow with a high energy source provided by the aorta. Previous computational studies on this concept with rigid vessel walls show mild success, but not enough to be clinically relevant. It is hypothesized that vessel wall deformation may play an important role in enhancing the jet effect to provide a larger exit area for the flow to diffuse while also being more physiologically accurate. A multiscale 0D-3D tightly coupled Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) model is developed to investigate the efficacy of the proposed ‘self-powered’ Fontan modification. Several runs are made varying the PVR to investigate the sensitivity of IVC pressure on PVR. IVC pressure decreased by 2.41 mmHg while the rigid wall study decreased the IVC pressure by 2.88 mmHg. It is shown that IVC pressure is highly sensitive to changes in PVR and modifications to the Fontan procedure should target aiding pulmonary arterial growth as it is the main indicator of Fontan success.
Changing an iconic species by biotechnology: the case of Norwegian salmon

Norwegian fish farming is currently world leading both in quantity and in employing new technologies. Within Norway, aquaculture has become a large industry and represents a new way of income along the coast. However, the growth of aquaculture in Norway has been accompanied by controversy related both to potentially harmful internal effects on the fish themselves, namely animal welfare and health of the farmed salmon, and potentially harmful impacts on wild salmon by escapees from the farms and by transmission of parasites and diseases from farms to wild salmon. The introduction of salmon farming is also perceived as a threat to the wild salmon and its attached traditional cultural practices. Wild salmon plays a significant cultural role in Norway, connected to traditional ways of life on the Norwegian coast, as well as more recent practices such as recreational river angling. Public and environmental NGOs has also raised concerns about land-use change in coastal areas and the extensive use of marine resources for producing fish feed, environmental pollution from the farms, and socio-economic distributional effects by developments in the aquaculture sector. We will here explore the cultural significance of the Norwegian wild salmon, as well as its importance in a biodiversity perspective. On this background, we will discuss in what ways technological interventions as introduction of vaccines developed by biotechnologies as well as using new initiatives for breeding as marker assisted selection and genetic modification have significance for the salmon’s iconic status. Does such introduction change the nature of the species and to what extent does this represent a threat to the value of the wild salmon? The technological interventions are altering the salmon and even if one can argue that there are positive aspects to the domestication of the salmon, these technological interventions may also cause adverse consequences for the salmon, e.g. welfare issues and impacts on wild salmon. Furthermore, both traditional salmon fisheries and modern recreational river angling are negatively affected by the consequences of the industry. We will explore whether the ionic status of the animal is important for the nature of the controversies and to what extent such interventions may alter the iconic value of the Norwegian salmon.
A Study on an Image Stabilization in Moving Vehicle

In the image captured by the camera in a moving vehicle, there exist various motions due to the change of background, motion of objects in the image that make difficult to extract a pure vibrational motion by the camera. In this paper, we suggest an image stabilization with the elimination of various motion components based on the classification of motions in the image by their characteristics. After the elimination of various local motions, images are compensated and stabilized with the global motion caused by the camera. Also, we suggest an accurate and fast image stabilization by excluding regions of little information based on block differences and edge densities.
Controllable compression of motion descriptions

In video coding, temporal redundancy can be reduced by predicting subsequent frames from a reference frame. In many practical video codecs this is carried out using block matching techniques to generate a motion description (usually a mo­ tion vector field) from a pair of frames which is used to form a prediction of the current frame. As the predicted frame is only an approximation of the true current frame and to improve its similarity a residual or error image is generated and en­ coded. While the number of bits used for the residual image is made scalable by using a lossy compression scheme, the bit allocation for the motion description is fixed. As a consequence, the optimal bit allocation between the motion descrip­ tion and the residual image cannot be achieved. This thesis investigates methods for controlling the bandwidth allocated to the motion description in order to more closely achieve the optimal allocation of bits between the description and the re­ sidual. Several new techniques are introduced in order to attempt to control the bandwidth. The Extended Block Algorithm produces a smoother field with the higher correlation leading to greater compression. The Embedded Quad-tree Mo­ tion Estimation technique describes the motion field using an embedded stream that can be truncated depending on the desired quality/cost criteria. Building on the observation that motion vector fields offer better compression when there are fewer unique vectors in the field, a number of strategies for controlling the number of unique vectors are proposed and evaluated. The List/Mapping Motion Descrip­ tion (LMMD) is an alternative representation of the vectors generated by these techniques. Combinations of the vector selection and encoding methods are then evaluated within an H.263 based codec and compared to the standard encoder. At a higher bit-rate (128 kbits/s) the vector selection strategies show an improvement in PSNR when compared with the standard codec. At the lower bit-rates (32 kbits/s and 64 kbits/s) an improvement is shown when the motion description generated by the vector selection strategies is encoded using the LMMD.
Integrated Aerial and Terrestrial Wireless Access Architecture for Beyond-5G Networks

Providing wireless services from the sky, using aerial networks (aerial platforms), has recently gained significant attention. Aerial platforms such as (UAVs, also referred to as drones), balloons, and high-altitude/medium-altitude/low-altitude platforms (HAPs/MAPs/LAPs) can play a key role in future wireless networks. For example, a base station (BS) mounted on an aerial platform can boost capacity and/or enhance coverage. This thesis aims to address the challenges accompanied with the use of aerial platforms in wireless communication networks. Specifically, we propose novel frameworks that address various issues related to backhauling/fronthauling a dense deployment of small cells and the recently-envisioned concept of aerial-BSs. This thesis starts with proposing a novel backhaul/fronthaul network capable of transporting the backhaul/fronthaul traffic between the terrestrial-BSs and the core network. In the proposed network, the aerial platforms act as aerial-hubs that collect/deliver traffic from/to small cells via free-space optics (FSO) links. We show the main limitations of the proposed network and identify proper ways to tackle these limitations. Aerial platforms can also act as aerial-BSs; therefore, we address the energy-efficient aerial-BS placement problem. The aim is to find the 3D location of the aerial-BS that maximizes the number of covered users using the minimum transmit power. We decouple the aerial-BS deployments in the horizontal and vertical dimensions without any loss of optimality. Next, we investigate the 3D aerial-BS placement that maximizes the number of covered users with different quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. This 3D placement problem is modeled as a multiple circles placement problem. We propose an optimal placement algorithm. A low-complexity algorithm, referred to as the maximal weighted algorithm, is also proposed. In the last part of the thesis, stochastic geometry-based frameworks are proposed to analyze coverage and rate in two deployment scenarios: (1) a network of aerial-BSs with no underlying terrestrial-BSs, (2) a network of aerial-BSs and terrestrial-BSs. We derive analytical expressions for the conditional Laplace transform of the interference power and the association probabilities. Exact and approximate analytical expressions for the coverage probability and average achievable rate are also derived.
Mind Mapping and Spreadsheets in Collaborative Design of Manufacturing Assembly Units' Knowledge Graphs

The paper proposes a method for creating a knowledge graph focused on visualization, usage of spreadsheets and group work. A knowledge graph is a set of typed entities (with attributes) related to each other by relationships. Entity, attribute and relationship types are determined by a scheme called ontology. The proposed method was created within the project with an automotive company, which needed systematization, integration and re-use of knowledge about the assembly units of various cars within the company. The created knowledge graph has a complex structure of properties associated with one class and its subclasses, while there is a little number of ontology classes. The need for active involvement of experts in the creation of the knowledge graph determines the scope of the method, since they and their colleagues will use the system in the future (internal customers). The proposed method helped to create a pilot knowledge graph, which includes more than 50 assembly units and about 400 properties.
Formal Modelling and Analysis of the role of Hexosamine Biosynthetic Pathway in Cancer: Exploiting Parallelism in Qualitative Biological Regulatory Networks

Background: Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. With advancements in high throughput technologies and availability of data on gene regulations, knowledge about progression of cancer has improved and it is now viewed as a complex multifaceted systems level disease. Despite heterogeneity of the malignancies, key functions in development of cancer are common. The alteration of glucose metabolism is considered as important hallmark of cancer and an essential factor towards cell growth and invasion. Increased flux of glucose through the Hexosamine Biosynthetic Pathway (HBP) drives increased cellular O-GlcNacylation and contributes to cancer progression. However, the role of HBP in activation of key oncogenes and progression of cancer is poorly characterized. In this study, a systems-biology approach based on qualitative modelling framework (proposed by René Thomas) is used to investigate the role of HBP in activation of oncogenes that lead to cancer progression. In qualitative modelling approach, dynamic behavior of the system under investigation is determined by model parameters which are not known in advance. The parameter estimation required for qualitative modelling is computationally intensive task and takes lot of processing time. By using parallel computing, we address computationally challenging aspects of qualitative modelling which involve parameters estimation and identification of important trajectories in the model. Methodology: The methodology used to investigate the role of HBP in progression of cancer is based on qualitative modelling, model-checking, network
Recognition of Coronary Atherosclerotic Plaque Tissue on Intravascular Ultrasound Images by Using Misclassification Sensitive Training of Discriminative Restricted Boltzmann Machine

Coronary atherosclerotic plaque has been extensively studied in pathological research. Improving the evaluation of vulnerable rupture is important to prevent acute heart failure. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) method is one of techniques to acquire information about atherosclerotic plaque, which is backscattered ultrasound signal sensed by IVUS transducer. The vessel structure and tissue components are then characterized in relation to the acquired signals. In this study, eight human coronary vessel sections are involved, and we use discriminative restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) to classify coronary tissues as a target classifier. The quantization domain of IVUS signals are used to extract binary features for adapting Gaussian model of RBM. In addition, we propose a misclassification sensitive training of disRBM to deal with the class imbalances. The results are compared to the conventional integrated backscattered IVUS method (IB-IVUS) and the cost sensitive neural network for the same tasks.
Parallel software system for counting finite models

AB: This dissertation is about the development of a parallel software system for representing and solving problems of finite model theory and its application. The theoretical foundation of the system is presented, as well as an in-depth explanation of the implementation in Python. In particular, a parallel method for computing Boolean expressions based on the properties of finite free Boolean algebras is developed. It is also shown how various finite combinatorial objects can be coded in the formalism of Boolean algebras and counted by this procedure. Specifically, using a translation of first order predicate formulas to propositional formulas, we developed a technique for constructing and counting finite models of first order theories. Finally, we have developed some general techniques that enable more effective use of our system. We illustrate these techniques on two examples. The first one deals with partial orders, while the other one is about random graphs. Accepted by the Scientific Board on, ASB: 13.04. 2017.
A study of allelic imbalance in human breast cancer

The analysis of loss of heterozygosity (LOH) in tumours can be used to map candidate sites of tumour-suppressor genes in the human genome. A panel of breast cancer patients was assembled as pairs of tumour and lymphocyte DNA samples and LOH studies carried out by Southern hybridization with polymorphic loci mapping to chromosomes 1 and X. Loci on other chromosomes were also studied as controls. Sequences on chromosome 1 were found to be subject to a variety of alterations creating very complex patterns of rearrangements, including LOH. Deletion mapping identified five independent regions of loss, three of which may correspond to regions identified in previous reports, although individually none occurred with high frequency to support the targeting of a specific locus. The short arm of chromosome 1 primarily underwent interstitial deletions whereas the long arm was subject to both whole arm events (gains and losses) and more localized events. Small deletions on chromosome 1 were found exclusively in patients with poorly-differentiated tumours (i.e. tumours of high grade, p<0.05). A similar study of the X chromosome revealed a high frequency of small regionalized deletions, primarily defining three small independent regions, one located in the distal portion of the pseudoautosomal region of Xp, another spanning the pseudoautosomal boundary into the sex-specific sequences of Xp and a possible third on distal Xq. No gains in copy number were identified at any locus on the X chromosome, in distinct contrast to chromosome 1. Small-scale deletions occurring on the X chromosome were found in patients with no spread of cancer to the lymph nodes, thus correlating with a favourable prognosis (p<0.005). Fluorescence in situ hybridization to formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tumour sections defined the actual copy number of chromosome 1 for nine tumours. The results obtained confirmed the changes established by Southern hybridization. "Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light. "
Exploring sensory perception, appraisal and concern: An approach to support design activity

The fundamental first stage of product interaction is through sensory perception, which generates cognitive and affective experiences. Product perception through sensory feedback is a major component in the end user product appraisal that precedes the elicitation of product emotion. Sensory evaluation is connected to a set of concepts including appraisal, concern and goal oriented objective. The interplay between stimulus (in this case from sensory feedback) and product concern, which forms the basis for product appraisal, is key to understanding how design effort can affect the end user's product perception. This research investigates the contribution that sensory information can make to the design process using a technique, Experience Continuum Sampling to explore the connection between sensory perception, appraisal and concern due to product interaction. This approach provides specific information related to product features experienced through sensory stimuli. The designer can weight sensory information and direct activity to optimise product design. (Less)
Vulnerabilidades nas conexões USB em dispositivos com o sistema Android

Vulnerabilities in USB Connections on Devices with the Android System In recent years, the amount of hacking attacks in Smartphones has increased rapidly, mainly because the complexity of maintaining modern operating systems managing these devices. The complexity of avoiding vulnerabilities in the modern mobile operating sys­ tems makes them vulnerable to many types of attacks. This dissertation presents preliminary work resulting from the use of the Android Debug Bridge tool to extract private data from smartphones. Three scenarios were already identified and a concept proof script was developed. When running in a computer, the script is able to extract private data when a smartphone is connected by USB. In two scenarios it was possible to extract the information in a totally surreptitious way, without the user knowledge. In the third scenario, using a newer version of the Android opera­ ting system, a user action is needed which makes the attack less likely to succeed, but still possible.