Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Traditional Dance Improves the Physical Fitness and Well-Being of the Elderly

Regular physical activity is considered one of the most important factors for lifestyle, for maintaining good health in older ages and increasing life expectancy. Dance is considered an activity that involves coordinating movements with music, as well as brain activation because it is constantly necessary to learn and remember new steps. Dance as a musical-kinetics skill, requires the coordination of body movements with rhythmic stimuli, developing the adaptability of the movement. One-hundred-thirty (130) elderly people aged 60 years and over (mean age 67 years old) with an average of 8 years of education, attended Greek traditional dance sessions for 32 weeks. The frequency was 2 times per week, for 75 min per session. Dances were selected from all over Greece with moderate intensity initially. During the program, they had the opportunity to try with greater intensity dances. At the beginning and after the end of intervention all the participants were evaluated by the Fullerton Senior Fitness Test for their physical fitness, the Single Leg Balance and the Handgrip Strength Test. The results showed a significant improvement in their physical fitness (Chair Stand: T = −5.459, p < 0.001; Arm Curl: T = −5.750, p < 0.001; Back Scratch: T = −4.648, p < 0.001; Sit and Reach: T = −4.759, p < 0.001; 2 min Step: T = −5.567, p < 0.001; Foot Up and Go: T = −8.599, p < 0.001) and at their static balance with eyes open (Balance 1 leg: T = −4.996, p < 0.001) and Handgrip Strength (Handgrip: T = −3.490, p < 0.001). Elderly seem to enjoy dancing as an activity while maintaining their functionality. Probably the elderly in traditional dance cause prosperity in their lives by promoting active aging.
Exploring the Performance-Energy Optimization Space of a Bridge Between 3D-Stacked Electronic and Optical Networks-on-Chip

The relentless improvement of silicon photonics is making optical interconnects and networks appealing for use in miniaturized systems, where electrical interconnects cannot keep up with the growing levels of core integration due to bandwidth density and power efficiency limitations. At the same time, solutions such as 3D stacking or 2.5D integration open the door to a fully dedicated process optimization for the photonic die. However, an architecture-level integration challenge arises between the electronic network and the optical one in such tightly-integrated parallel systems. It consists of adapting signaling rates, matching the different levels of communication parallelism, handling cross-domain flow control, addressing re-synchronization concerns, and avoiding protocol-dependent deadlock. The associated energy and performance overhead may offset the inherent benefits of the emerging technology itself. This paper explores a hybrid CMOS-ECL bridge architecture between 3D-stacked technology-heterogeneous networks-on-chip (NoCs). The different ways of overcoming the serialization challenge (i.e., through an improvement of the signaling rate and/or through space-/wavelength-division multiplexing options) give rise to a configuration space that the paper explores, in search for the most energy-efficient configuration for high-performance.
Complete Capsular Repair Restores Native Kinematics After Interportal and T-Capsulotomy

Background: Although the use of hip arthroscopy continues to increase, capsular management remains a controversial topic. Purpose: To investigate the biomechanical effect of capsulotomy and capsular repair techniques on hip joint kinematics in varying combinations of sagittal and coronal joint positions. Study Design: Controlled laboratory study. Methods: Eight fresh-frozen hemi-pelvises (78.3 ± 6.0 years of age; 4 left, 6 male) were dissected of all overlying soft tissue, with the exception of the hip joint capsule. The femur was potted and attached to a load cell, while the pelvis was secured to a custom-designed fixture allowing static alteration of the flexion-extension arc. Optotrak markers were rigidly attached to the femur and pelvis to track motion of the femoral head with respect to the acetabulum. After specimen preparation, 7 conditions were tested: (1) intact, (2) after portal placement (anterolateral and midanterior), (3) interportal capsulotomy (IPC) (35 mm in length), (4) IPC repair, (5) T-capsulotomy (IPC +15-mm longitudinal incision), (6) partial T-repair (repair of longitudinal incision with IPC left open), (7) full T-repair. All conditions were tested in 15° of extension (–15°), 0°, 30°, 60°, and 90° of flexion. Additionally, all flexion angles were tested in neutral, as well as in specimen-specific maximum abduction and adduction, resulting in 15 testing positions. Internal rotation (IR) and external rotation (ER) moments of 3 N·m were manually applied to the femur via the load cell at each position. Rotational range of motion and joint kinematics were recorded. Results: In the neutral coronal plane, T-capsulotomy significantly increased IR/ER rotational range of motion compared with intact state at −15° (55.96°± 6.11° vs 44.92°± 7.35°, P < .001), while IPC significantly increased rotation compared with the portal state at 0° (60.09°± 6.82° vs 51.68°± 10.35°, P = .004). No statistically significant increases were found in mediolateral joint translation after IPC or T-capsulotomy. Similarly, no statistically significant increases were noted in anteroposterior translation after IPC or T-capsulotomy. Complete capsular repair restored near native joint kinematics, with no significant differences in rotation or translation between any complete capsular repair groups and the intact state, regardless of joint position. Conclusion: Universally, across all conditions, complete capsular repair after interportal or T-capsulotomy restored rotational range of motion and joint translation to values observed in the native joint. Clinical Relevance: Where feasible, complete capsular closure should be performed, especially after T-capsulotomy. However, further clinical evaluation is required to determine whether adverse kinematic parameters of an unrepaired capsule are associated with reduced patient-reported outcomes.
Extensive Use of Morpheme Features in Korean Dependency Parsing

Dependency parsing is considered to be one of the most important tasks in natural language understanding. With the advance of deep learning based models, dependency parsing performances were improved. However, little attention was given to features specific to Korean. Morphemes play especially important role in Korean linguistics, and incorporating morpheme level information into the model can result in performance improvement. In this paper, we propose a way to use multiple morpheme features with their orders preserved in Korean dependency parsing. In our experiment, our proposed method gave a performance improvement in deep biaffine network and stack pointer network. We also report the state-of – the-art result of UAS 92.17 and LAS 90.07 on Sejong dependency parsing data with stack pointer network augmented with our proposed method.
Not so Intimate Instagram: Images of Swedish Political Party Leaders in the 2018 National Election Campaign

Abstract The visual components of political communication are closely related to the ongoing personalization of politics. Not only do the media focus their stories on candidates and leaders, but also the parties’ own work with the electoral campaigns and political propaganda have an increasing focus on the individual candidates and leaders. This study focuses on how political party leaders chose to use visual images in their self-presentation on Instagram during the 2018 general election in Sweden. This is done through a quantitative content analysis of party leaders’ posts during the last three weeks before Election Day. The results do not confirm an increasing level of personalization of politics. Party leaders were visually exposed in an innovative way, but still mainly within rather predictable campaign contexts. General social media standards have been developed by political parties also on this platform. When applying to these standards branding and long-term party strategy considerations seem to be more important than possible short-term effects of exposing surprising personal and emotional characteristics of the party leader.
Low Phase-Noise CMOS Quadrature Oscillator based on (N × 4)-stage Self-Timed Ring

Quadrature phases with high frequency and low-phase noise are crucial in many applications. This paper deals with a low phase-noise quadrature phase generation based on self-timed ring oscillator (STRO). Quadrature phases can be generated simply by implementing 4-stage STRO and 1/N (−10 log(N) dB) phase noise enhancement can be obtained simply by implementing (N × 4)-stage STRO, while keeping the same oscillation frequency and the quadrature phase generation, at the cost of a higher power consumption. A 5 GHz (N × 4)-stage STROs has been simulated and 4-stage STRO has been fabricated in STMicroelectonics CMOS 65 nm. The power consumption is 1 mW with a 1.2 V supply. The measured phase noise at 10 MHz offset is −110 dBc/Hz resulting a figure of merit (FoM) of −164.5 dBc/Hz.
A Survey on Wi-Fi Usability for Additional Safety Communications in Subway Environment

In dense urban environments, the subway transportation mode is very popular and efficient. However, in crowded periods, unfortunate accidents with persons falling from the platforms and being injured by trains have been recorded in some countries. Safety and interlocking systems provide control of track circuits and signaling processes, but not the detection of non-metallic objects on the rails and danger signaling onboard the trains. This paper presents a possible solution for additional safety communications in tunnels, such as early warning messaging for emergency braking, employing non-dedicated communications. A series of experimental tests have been performed in different conditions on M4 line in Bucharest subway mainline and comparative results are presented with perspectives for the future.
Adaptive Fuzzy Output Feedback Fault-Tolerant Compensation for Uncertain Nonlinear Systems With Infinite Number of Time-Varying Actuator Failures and Full-State Constraints

This paper focuses on the observer-based fuzzy adaptive fault-tolerant tracking control problem for uncertain nonlinear systems subject to unmeasured states and unmatched external disturbances. By designing a high gain state observer and a disturbance observer, unmeasured states and unmatched external disturbances are estimated and robust tracking performance is improved. Moreover, the barrier-type functions are introduced to the backstepping design procedure to address the problem that all states do not violate their constraint bounds. Finally, a novel fault-tolerant control scheme for output feedback is proposed by combining with the projection technique. By designing appropriate Lyapunov functions, it is concluded that all signals of the plant are bounded and the desired tracking error can be regulated to a small neighborhood around the origin. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the designed control scheme.
Enhancing Data Security in IoT Healthcare Services Using Fog Computing

Internet of Things (IoT) is the interconnection of physical objects or devices that can transmit and receive data through the internet without human involvement. With the advancement in IoT devices particularly in healthcare sector, huge amount of data is collected from different sensors and all this data are transferred and stored in cloud. It becomes difficult to handle such huge amount of data in cloud specially the healthcare data where it requires real time data computation and storage. Security of the data is also major challenge in cloud. Fog computing is the answer to overcome the challenges. Fog nodes works at the edge side and enhances data security, accuracy, consistency and reduces the latency rate which is an important factor for application like medical data. Implementation work is also described in the paper where a digital human temperature sensor device is built using DS18B20 temperature sensor. The data collected from it is being encrypted in fog node using Advance Encryption Standard(AES) algorithm and it is send to cloud. Therefore, the security of the health care data is enhanced using Fog computing.
Effects of African Bentonite on Feed Mycotoxigenic Fungi and Growth of African Catfish Clarias gariepinus

Feed and feed ingredients in the tropics are prone to attacks of mycotoxigenic fungi (myco-fungi) infestation during storage or from the field. The heat applied in feed production destroys only the myco-fungi leaving mycotoxins that eventually end up in the fish. Mycotoxins have negative effects on the growth of fish. It is plausible to reduce or totally eliminate the mycotoxins and myco-fungi by the inclusion of special African bentonite supplement called “Uro’. Five iso nitrogenous and iso energetic feed were made with soybean meal of 12% moisture stored at relative humidity of 78% and temperature 29.45±0.87oC for 30 days. The feed was labelled as F1 to F5 and varied in inclusion levels of bentonite supplement as follows, F1, 34%, F2, 25%, F3, 15%, F4, 5% and F5, 0%. The protein supplement and basal ingredients in the diets were same. Feed ingredients were weighed, mixed, conditioned and pelleted. The feed was dried at 40oC for 24 hours and subjected to mycological analysis. African catfish fingerlings of average weight 6.5±0.36 g were stocked at 15 fish per three replicate aquaria per feed type. Fish were fed to satiation twice daily for 140 days. The catfish fed with F1(35% bentonite) had the best food conversion ratio, 1.63±0.15, highest SGR 5.7±0.05% day1, weight gain 45.7±3.65g, protein efficiency ratio 1.19±0.10 and highest gut weight 3.46±0.45g. All growth and nutritional parameters were increasing with increasing inclusion of bentonite. Mycological analyses showed that three myco-fungi, namely Aspergilus flavus, Mucor mucedo and Cladosporium cladosporioides were prevalent in the feed. However, feed 1 to feed 3, were completely free from myco-fungi, while feed 4 had traces of M. mucedo and C. Cladosporioides but all myco-fungi were prevalent in F5. African bentonite is calcinated and sequestered feed ANF, myco-fungi and mycotoxins. Bentonite increased digesta viscosity which enabled better digestion of feed, lower FCR, enhanced alkaline intestine for protein and fatty acid absorption. Bentonite increased catfish total glycerides and cholesterol but reduced AST and ALT of the catfish
SpinPad: A Secured PIN Number Based User authentication Scheme

Securing the smart phones against user authentication attacks has been a major concern for the banks that offer mobile banking services. While the users enter their PIN numbers to get them authenticated by the banks, the entered values may be stolen by the attackers through shoulder surfing, keylogging or smudge attacks. In this paper, a new PIN entry scheme is proposed for smart phones. It allows users to enter their PIN numbers without pressing any keys on the keyboard. The PIN entry is done through an indirect entry process that resists any of these attacks. The scheme was implemented as a mobile app in Android and was thoroughly tested for its security and user friendliness.
Virulence Determinants Are Required for Brain Abscess Formation Through Staphylococcus aureus Infection and Are Potential Targets of Antivirulence Factor Therapy

Bacterial brain abscesses (BAs) are difficult to treat with conventional antibiotics. Thus, the development of alternative therapeutic strategies for BAs is of high priority. Identifying the virulence determinants that contribute to BA formation induced by Staphylococcus aureus would improve the effectiveness of interventions for this disease. In this study, RT-qPCR was performed to compare the expression levels of 42 putative virulence determinants of S. aureus strains Newman and XQ during murine BA formation, ear colonization, and bacteremia. The alterations in the expression levels of 23 genes were further confirmed through specific TaqMan RT-qPCR. Eleven S. aureus genes that persistently upregulated expression levels during BA infection were identified, and their functions in BA formation were confirmed through isogenic mutant experiments. Bacterial loads and BA volumes in mice infected with isdA, isdC, lgt, hla, or spa deletion mutants and the hla/spa double mutant strain were lower than those in mice infected with the wild-type Newman strain. The therapeutic application of monoclonal antibodies against Hla and SpA decreased bacterial loads and BA volume in mice infected with Newman. This study provides insights into the virulence determinants that contribute to staphylococcal BA formation and a paradigm for antivirulence factor therapy against S. aureus infections.
CMOS VCSEL driver dedicated for sub-nanosecond laser pulses generation in SPAD-based time-of-flight rangefinder

This brief describes a novel architecture for vertical-cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) array driver. It is designed in a 40 nm CMOS process and is dedicated for SPAD-based direct time-of-flight rangefinding. The architecture is based on charge transfer between an integrated capacitance and the VCSEL array with a voltage doubler implementation to ensure the generation of sub-nanosecond current pulses at high frequency. The results obtained from post-layout simulations shows an achievable peak current higher than 200 mA at 500 ps current pulse width and a 180 mA peak current at 250 ps pulse width. The proposed power architecture is operated up to 330 MHz at a supply voltage of 2.5 V. The circuit occupies a total area of 250×280 μm2.
Balanced Nearest Neighborhood Query in Spatial Database

In the spatial database, given a data set $P$ of points, a query point $q$, the Nearest Neighborhood Query (NNH) retrieves the nearest group of points (i.e, a cluster) from $P$, where the group is assigned with a fixed scale. NNH is an important query processing problem, and it can be applied to many applications such as point of interests (POI) and location-based services (LBS). However, we observe that NNH requires a fixed scale of candidate groups. It is an unrealistic setting that all candidate groups have the same size. Moreover, fixing the scale also leads to the cases that NNH returns an empty result, which certainly restricts its application. In this paper, to make a general and realistic neighborhood retrieval, we propose a novel query problem named Balanced Nearest Neighborhood query (BNNH). In BNNH, we allow the flexible scale of candidate groups hence guarantee a non-empty result. We also indicate that users' preferences should be taken into consideration as well when comparing clusters with different locations and scales. BNNH query carries out a balancing function to evaluate clusters with users' preferences, and returns a more appropriate neighborhood. We also proposed two solutions for efficient processing of BNNH query. We conduct sufficient experiments to confirm the superiorities of our proposed solutions.
Quantized Power Allocation Algorithms in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems

Cell-Free Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (M-MIMO) is a system where a large number of low-cost single antenna Access Points (APs) are distributed over a specific area. The APs are connected to a Network Controller (NC) and serve all the existing users simultaneously. This work proposes two power allocation algorithms for Conjugate Beamforming (CB) and Zero-Forcing (ZF) pre-coders in downlink scenario. They are based on quantizing the transmitted powers of APs to reduce the system complexity. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated under the most common practical scenarios such as channel errors, pilot contamination and correlated shadowing channel model. The results show that the proposed algorithms have closer solution to the optimal one for both pre-coders. Moreover, ZF pre-coder significantly outperforms CB pre-coder with and without pilot contamination effect under both correlated and uncorrelated shadowing channel models.
Design of Multi-Wavelength Loss-Coupled DFB Laser Array

In this paper, we report a $1.55\mu \text{m}$ four wavelengths loss-coupled distributed feedback (DFB) laser arrays with different ridge waveguide widths and tilt angles with respect to the gratings. A stable single-mode operation with side mode-suppression-ratio greater than 49 dB for all channels and an accurate channel spacing of 3.1 nm have been achieved with full considerations of the change of the effective index, confinement factor and coupling coefficient as well as the associated spatial hole burning effect along the laser cavity caused by varying ridge width and ridge tilt angle.
Rational Function Approximation of Parallel Coupled line Interconnects in RF Applications

This article presents the modeling of parallel coupled line interconnects in high speed RF applications. The modeling approach described in this paper generates a rational function representation of the coupled line interconnects. The model captures the significant electromagnetic effects between coupled line interconnects such as coupling and crosstalk which becomes prominent at higher frequencies. The model is also verified for different spacing between the coupled line interconnects. Further, the network equivalent of the model can be incorporated in any time domain system level simulations for more accurate studies and analysis.
Mining Medical Data

The paper focuses on identifying patterns in medical data that can bring economic advantage to medical facilities. The main objective is to determine which algorithm fits best on a medical data set in order to determine how likely a patient will return for a new consult. In order to achieve that a medical data set was used to evaluate the accuracy of each algorithm and what it could predict. The proposed software prototype is uses the data mining algorithm in order to offer real time insights to clinic employees about patients. Based on this information, clinic employees can offer vouchers in order to tempt patients into choosing the clinic again for their next consult. Using data mining techniques to gain economic advantage might play a decisive role in company's fight supremacy.
MIoT Applications for Wearable Technologies Used for Health Monitoring

In this paper we present some aspects regarding wearable devices (sensors) used for biomedical heart activity, temperature and humidity using cloud-computing services. The Internet of Things (IoT) has the objective to connect objects (electronic devices) in order to store and improve data accessibility in the worldwide. In the IoT industry, Google and Samsung dominate the market for connected objects and wearable devices. The cloud computing service used enables the linkage of the sensors (heart rate, pulse rate and moisture) data to the cloud and allows data delivery from machine-automated systems for storage, visualization, and analysis.
Unsupervised Method for Discovering Expert Traders on Social Trading Services

Social trading services are now becoming increasingly popular among people who are interested in investments. A notable feature of social trading services is that we can simply “copy” the trades of experts to achieve profits. However, identifying expert traders who achieve exceptional and consistent returns is a major challenge. In this study, we propose an unsupervised method for identifying expert traders by applying portfolio theory developed in financial engineering. Experimental results obtained with a real data set demonstrate the superior performance of our method.