Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Validation of the revised myeloma comorbidity index and other comorbidity scores in a multicenter German study group multiple myeloma trial.

In the past decade, the survival of patients with multiple myeloma (MM) has improved significantly. This encouraging progress has been driven by deeper biological insights, implementation of more sensitive diagnostic tests leading to earlier diagnosis, access to more effective therapies and better supportive care. MM typically affects elderly patients, who are less likely to endure treatment and who have a less favorable long-term prognosis. Moreover, accompanying diseases may complicate anti-myeloma treatment. In general, comorbidities have been shown to influence cancer patients' general health status, limit their physical condition, and worsen their progression-free and overall survival. Therefore, with the growing number of elderly (and frail) MM patients, reliable tools to assess patients' vulnerability, as expressed by chronic conditions and limitations in daily activities, are wanted to guide us through today’s multiple possible therapeutic options. Historically, treatment decisions for symptomatic MM patients were age-based. Ideally nowadays disease biology and fitness, including patients' Karnofsky Performance Status (KPS) or Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group Performance Status (ECOG-PS), are considered when assessing therapeutic options. However, KPS and ECOG-PS are often overestimated and may not reflect patients’ entire functional status. We and others have learnt from re-scoring cancer patients that initially estimated KPS and ECOG-PS scores, measured by physicians and health staff, are often claimed to be much better than those determined by objective definition and the patients’ actual fitness status. In a prior analysis, we rescored the KPS in approximately 500 MM patients who had appeared, according to the physicians' initial estimate, almost uncompromised with a median score of 90%, but on re-scoring had scores 30% lower than initially presumed. More objective parameters to assess patients' PS and fitness are therefore warranted. Moreover, since elderly MM patients are often excluded from clinical trials due to strict inclusion criteria, trial results typically reflect <10% of 'real-world patients' and are less well transferable to elderly patients. In this context, the International Myeloma Working Group (IMWG), European Myeloma Network (EMN) and
High Performance Simulation of Spiking Neural Network on GPGPUs

Spiking neural network (SNN) is the most commonly used computational model for neuroscience and neuromorphic computing communities. It provides more biological reality and possesses the potential to achieve high computational power and energy efficiency. Because existing SNN simulation frameworks on general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) do not fully consider the biological oriented properties of SNNs, like spike-driven, activity sparsity, etc., they suffer from insufficient parallelism exploration, irregular memory access, and load imbalance. In this article, we propose specific optimization methods to speed up the SNN simulation on GPGPU. First, we propose a fine-grained network representation as a flexible and compact intermediate representation (IR) for SNNs. Second, we propose the cross-population/-projection parallelism exploration to make full use of GPGPU resources. Third, sparsity aware load balance is proposed to deal with the activity sparsity. Finally, we further provide dedicated optimization to support multiple GPGPUs. Accordingly, BSim, a code generation framework for high-performance simulation of SNN on GPGPUs is also proposed. Tests show that, compared to a state-of-the-art GPU-based SNN simulator GeNN, BSim achieves <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.41\times \sim 9.33\times$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:mn>1</mml:mn><mml:mo>. </mml:mo><mml:mn>41</mml:mn><mml:mo>×</mml:mo><mml:mo>∼</mml:mo><mml:mn>9</mml:mn><mml:mo>. </mml:mo><mml:mn>33</mml:mn><mml:mo>×</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="qu-ieq1-2994123.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> speedup for SNNs with different configurations; it outperforms other simulators much more.
LONGLIVE THE DIFFERENCE: RESTRUCTURING AND PRIVATIZATION IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

The Central and Eastern European Countries, including Romania, have faced similar challenges in the process of restructuring and privatization. Thus, the last two decades have been marked by a difficult transition from a centrally planned economy to a free market model, and experienced very different phases of development . Most CEEC s economies have registered, in the early years of the first decade, suboptimal economic performances characterized by severe declines in the GDP, huge losses of the SOE and substantial inter✁enterprise arrears. The core objective for all CEEC was to restore efficient employment of industrial assets; both capital and labor, solving the debt overhang of enterprises and the portfolio quality problem in banks. The privatization process was started in most of the countries in the same period, but there is a clear evidence that privatization was achieved more rapidly in some countries due to influx of significant foreign investment. As countries used mass privatization programs, the actual change to ownership restructuring was made directly through privatization or IPOs. This shift to a new paradigm, underpinns the second wave of restructuring that can be noticed in the case of Romania and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Given the circumstances, in a first phase the dominant place among the economic policies used was to encourage restructuring of SOE and its ultimate phase: the privatization, both aiming at speeding up the transition to a mature market economy. At this stage time was of the essence and it was imperative that immediate steps are to be taken to prevent further deterioration of SOE s operations and to preserve value that can ultimately be privatized. Most analysts criticized the reforms made in some of CEEC s economies based on ✂pre✁ privatization restructuring✄, ignoring the need and vocation of SOE s restructuring process that paved the way of further successful large✁scale privatizations. The large✁scale privatization has emphasized a serie of challenges, that states the purpose of this article which is to create the framework for analysing restructuring and privatization as methods of high✁impact on macroeconomic indicators. Our study aims at analyzing the differences between these two processes within the territory of CEEC over the last two decades (1992✁2013) in terms of: goals, patterns, institutions, methods used, outcomes etc. Results of these processes have been analyzed in correlation with the evolution of CEEC s macro✁indicators (FDI, GDP, Inflation Ratio, Exports) or micro ones (Stock Exchange). Our findings underlie the necessity of further research in the field of restructuring and privatization and the necessity of assessing the important effects on post✁crisis macroeconomic indicators. 10 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF ASECU 184
Orientation Attentive Robot Grasp Synthesis

Physical neighborhoods of grasping points in common objects may offer a wide variety of plausible grasping configurations. For a fixed center of a simple spherical object, for example, there is an infinite number of valid grasping orientations. Such structures create ambiguous and discontinuous grasp maps that confuse neural regressors. We perform a thorough investigation of the challenging Jacquard dataset to show that the existing pixel-wise learning approaches are prone to box overlaps of drastically different orientations. We then introduce a novel augmented map representation that partitions the angle space into bins to allow for the co-occurrence of such orientations and observe larger accuracy margins on the ground truth grasp map reconstructions. On top of that, we build the ORientation AtteNtive Grasp synthEsis (ORANGE) framework that jointly solves a bin classification problem and a real-value regression. The grasp synthesis is attentively supervised by combining discrete and continuous estimations into a single map. We provide experimental evidence by appending ORANGE to two existing unimodal architectures and boost their performance to state-of-the-art levels on Jacquard, specifically 94.71\%, over all related works, even multimodal. Code is available at \url{this https URL}.
Growth and induction in food consumption of Helicoverpa armigera Hbn. (Lep., Noctuidae) larvae on chickpea, soybean, and maize diets

Laboratory studies were conducted to determine the effect of different artificial diets made of powdered seed materials of chickpea (Cicer arietinum), soybean (Glycine max), and maize (Zea mays) on the growth, consumption, and feeding preferences of Helicoverpa armigera larvae. Food consumption and growth of ultimate instar gram pod borer larvae were minimal on maize diet. The nutritive value of the soybean diet was higher, but the consumption rate of larvae was highest on chickpea diet compared with the other test diets. The growth of larvae was statistically equal on chickpea and soybean diets, in spite of differences in the consumption rate of these diets and their nutritive value. There appears to be a direct correlation between the quantity of the diets consumed and their nutritive value for growth of the larvae on chickpea and soybean diets. The lower nutritive value of chickpea diet is correlated with its higher intake by the larvae. Similarly, the lower consumption rate of larvae on soybean diet is correlated with its higher nutritive value. The diet on which the larvae were fed during earlier instars did not induce any feeding preference for that particular diet in the ultimate larval instar. The larvae consumed similar quantities of each of the three diets in their ultimate instar, irrespective of having fed on any of these diets during any preceding instars. However, induction in the quantitative consumption of food by the larvae was evident. The higher or lower consumption rate of diet by the larvae in the ultimate instar was influenced by their food during earlier instars. Hence the food consumption rate of larvae in the last instar appears to be set while feeding on a diet in the preceding instars.
Creating Benefits from Omega-3 Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals

Foods currently eaten by Americans have abundant amounts of essential omega-6 (n-6) nutrients and relatively few omega-3 (n-3) nutrients. The average omega 3 - 6 balance score of typical US foods is about –6. This imbalance causes the average American to accumulate tissue proportions of n-3 and n-6 highly unsaturated fatty acids (HUFA) with about 77% n-6 in HUFA. This HUFA balance links to many chronic health conditions that are made worse by overabundant actions of food-based omega-6 HUFA. Americans currently spend more on treating food-based health conditions than they spend on food. Less medication is needed to treat signs and symptoms when a key dietary cause of the signs and symptoms is prevented. Informed food producers can readily prepare and market new food products with more n-3 and less n-6 nutrients to reverse the current national nutrient imbalance and help people attain and maintain a healthy HUFA balance. New functional foods and nutraceuticals will help consumers shift their financial resources from treating signs and symptoms caused by HUFA imbalance to preventing the nutrient imbalance that causes the need to treat.
A Theory of Rectangularly Dualizable Graphs

A plane graph is called a rectangular graph if each of its edges can be oriented either horizontally or vertically, each of its interior regions is a four-sided region and all interior regions can be fitted in a rectangular enclosure. Only planar graphs can be dualized. If the dual of a plane graph is a rectangular graph, then the plane graph is a rectangularly dualizable graph. In 1985, Ko\'zmi\'nski and Kinnen presented a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a rectangularly dualizable graph for a separable connected plane graph. In this paper, we present a counter example for which the conditions given by them for separable connected plane graphs fail and hence, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for a plane graph to be a rectangularly dualizable graph.
Towards Precision Agriculture: IoT-Enabled Intelligent Irrigation Systems Using Deep Learning Neural Network

Recently, precision agriculture has gained substantial attention due to the ever-growing world population demands for food and water. Consequently, farmers will need water and arable land to meet this demand. Due to the limited availability of both resources, farmers need a solution that changes the way they operate. Precision irrigation is the solution to deliver bigger, better, and more profitable yields with fewer resources. Several machine learning-based irrigation models have been proposed to use water more efficiently. Due to the limited learning ability of these models, they are not well suited to unpredictable climates. In this context, this paper proposes a deep learning neural network-based Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled intelligent irrigation system for precision agriculture (DLiSA). This is a feedback integrated system that keeps its functionality better in the weather of any region for any period of time. DLiSA utilizes a long short-term memory network (LSTM) to predict the volumetric soil moisture content for one day ahead, irrigation period, and spatial distribution of water required to feed the arable land. It is evident from the simulation results that DLiSA uses water more wisely than state-of-the-art models in the experimental farming area.
On 4-lacunary sequences generated by ergodic toral endomorphisms

It is proved that if (o is an ergodic endomorphism of Tk and f is a sufficiently regular complex-valued function on Tk with the Haar integral zero, then (f o (#n) is a 4-lacunary sequence. Within the class of ergodic toral endomorphisms and sufficiently regular complex-valued functions, applications are given to the convergence of series, a generalization of the ergodic theorem, the existence of solutions of a generalized cohomology equation, and the convergence of moments in the central limit theorem. Throughout the paper (a is a continuous surjective endomorphism of the k-dimensional torus Tk = Rk/Zk. There exists a unique invertible matrix A over Z of degree k such that (a(x) = Ax (mod Zk). Let ,u be the probability Haar measure on Tk that may be identified with the Lebesgue measure on [0, l[k. Then (0 preserves ,u. We will assume all the time that (a is ergodic with respect to ,u. Ergodicity of (0 is equivalent to no eigenvalue of A being a root of unity. Throughout the paper (X, v) is a probability measure space and the LP(v)norm is denoted by I II p,, where 1 0, where f on the right-hand side is the corresponding function on Rk Received by the editors February 5, 1991 and, in revised form, September 24, 1991. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 42C1 5; Secondary 28D05. Research supported by Polish scientific grant RP.I. 10. 1993 American Mathematical Society 0002-9939/93 $1.00+$. 25 per page
Keep Hot or Go Cold: A Randomized Online Migration Algorithm for Cost Optimization in STaaS Clouds

Storage-as-a-Service clouds generally offer both hot and cold storage tiers with different pricing options. Hot tiers provide a higher storage price but a lower access price, and vice versa for cold tiers. Many studies show that those user-generated data generally receive relatively high access frequency in the early period of their lifetimes while the overall trend of accesses is downward. Thus, when such kinds of data are hosted in clouds, they can be stored in hot tiers initially and then migrated to cold tiers for optimizing costs. However, the cost of migration is non-negligible, and the number of accesses may then unexpectedly increase after migration, which indicates that a rash migration will incur more costs instead of cost-savings. For making optimal migration decisions, future data access curves are needed, but it is generally very hard to predict them precisely. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a randomized online algorithm to optimize costs for those user-generated data stored in clouds, without requiring any future information. We show theoretically that the proposed algorithm can achieve a guaranteed competitive ratio of $1 + \frac {2(1-\lambda)}{e - 3 + 2\lambda + \lambda /\alpha }$ , and it can be easily extended with prediction windows when short-term predictions are reliable. Eventually, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms through simulations driven by real-world video-visiting traces collected from a well-known video-sharing website.
Application of an improved vegetation index based on the visible spectrum in the diagnosis of degraded pastures: Implications for development

Inadequate pasture management causes land degradation through reduction of grass, increased presence of invasive plants or pests, compaction, erosion, and nutrient deficiency. The recognition of pasture degradation is therefore essential. Remote sensing satellite systems allow us to do so at regional‐to global scales. A struggle is in progress nowadays is to improve detection accuracy and implement high‐resolution surveys at farm scales using low‐cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The pasture imagery can be translated into maps of degraded pasture using the popular NDVI as diagnostic parameter, but their generation using a UAV requires a high‐cost NIR sensor, while the struggle is to use low‐cost UAVs equipped with RGB cameras. The first step to recognize degraded pastures using RGB cameras is to define a suitable vegetation index. Thus, the purpose of this study was to present the total brightness quotient of red (TBQR), green (TBQG), and blue (TBQB) bands. The test to the index resorted to LANDSAT‐8 satellite images captured over the environmental protection area of Uberaba River basin (Minas Gerais, Brazil) in the 2017–2019 period. The images were not captured by a UAV because the equipment was not then available. The results were promising given the large detection accuracy (88.63%) of the TBQG and the high (0.965) correlation between TBQG and NDVI. Besides, the TBQ‐based areas of degraded pasture (17,486.3–25,180.1 hectares) were larger than the NDVI counterparts (12,066.9 hectares). This is an additional reason to oversight degraded pastures based on the TBQs, as they seek for improved environmental compliance and economic development.
Malaria: It’s Gynecological and Obstretic Effects on Humans – A Short Note

In article [2] we emphasized “uncomplicated malaria entails a series of recurring episodes of chills, intense fever, and sweating and often includes other symptoms such as headache, malaise, fatigue, body aches, nauseas, and vomiting. In some cases, and especially in groups, such as children and pregnant women, the disease can progress to “severe malaria,” including complications, such as cerebral malaria/coma, seizures, severe anaemia, respiratory distress, kidney and liver failure, cardiovascular collapse, and shock”.
INTEGRATION OF A SYSTEM FOR CONTINUOUS MEASUREMENT OF DYNAMIC FOOT PRESSURE DURING TREADMILL WALKING

/ / > . S / / \ . K 7 ' Instrumented gctit analysis has beeome a » < / / / / < / / > / ( · tool for supporting clinical deeision making < / / / < / tor rchahilitation Monitoring in various neur'ologi< · < / / ^ait pathologics. ßesides other variables like joint < / / / < ; / ( · . xronnd rcaction forces and EMC, the dynamic /»/es.stuv distribution under the foot is among the most important t/udtifificx for assessing human movement. l\picLil insolc syxtcmx are designed for mobile applicaimn (inJ <illo\\' for asscssment ofafew single Steps only. / ' / /< · \zro\ving intcrcxt in treadmill walking in rehabilitatmn ( / / / , / hasu rescarch reqitires long term measureiih-nt s\stcms to coinprchenxively investigate the nature <>t i-onrinuoifx /ocomotion. Thus. the limitations of existing h'chnical Solutions are not acceptable for such iipplicutionx \vhere analysis of multiple consecutive stridcs ix <>t spccial interest. / '//<' ctirrcnt paper deseribes the Implementation of a systcm for continuoux measurement of dynamic foot prcxxun: The siiggested solution is based on a commer(7t///v availahle svstem originally designed for short tcrm nwasurcments in mobile applications. The technical cnhancements of the original System are described and first measurement daia from a long term trial on a treadmill are presented.
Transmission Electron Microscopy Study of Two Peak Hardened Al-Mg-Si-Cu Alloys

In this thesis, a variety of techniques within the field of transmission electron microscopy have been applied in the study of two dense 6xxx series aluminium alloys, at their peak hardness. This is a class of age-hardenable alloys with magnesium (Mg) and silicon (Si) as main alloying elements. When subjected to elevated temperatures, these alloys experience a high increase in mechanical strength, which is credited to the precipitation of numerous metastable, nanometer-sized, needleand lath-shaped particles, from a solid solution of Mg, Si and other added elements. The morphology and distribution of these particles are of utmost importance for the alloy’s macroscopic properties, and by connecting these properties to the nano-scale characteristics, alloys can be tailor-made for specific applications. The studied alloys are similar in composition, and both are alloyed with significant amounts of copper (Cu). It is demonstrated that at T6 the precipitate micro-structure consists of a high density of very fine needle-shaped precipitates, coexisting with a lower density of lath-shaped, Cu-containing, disordered, L-phase precipitates. In one of the alloys a small amount of Si is substituted by germanium (Ge), in order to further investigate the element’s effect on precipitation. Ge was found to refine the precipitate morphologies, resulting in a high increase of the number densities of both precipitate types. The alloy retained a similar needle volume fraction, but exhibited a doubling of the L-phase volume fraction. Both alloys exhibit good thermal stability, retaining a hardness over 95 HV5 after one week artificial ageing at 473K (200◦C). The Gecontaining alloy exhibit an improved thermal stability compared to the Ge-free alloy, believed to correlate with the increased volume fraction of the L-phase precipitate. High-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy showed that both needles and laths were disordered, containing fragments of multiple known phases. The needles commonly had Cu-enriched interfaces. It is demonstrated that in the needles in the Gecontaining alloy, Ge is incorporated in the Si-network, rotating it along a 〈100〉Al direction, and that these needles contain a lower amount of Cu as compared to the needles in the Ge-free alloy.