Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Case Report: Immune Dysregulation Due to Toxoplasma gondii Reactivation After Allogeneic Hematopoietic Cell Transplant

Disseminated toxoplasmosis is an uncommon but highly lethal cause of hyperferritinemic sepsis after hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT). We report two cases of disseminated toxoplasmosis from two centers in critically ill adolescents after HCT: a 19-year-old who developed fever and altered mental status on day +19 after HCT and a 20-year-old who developed fever and diarrhea on day +52 after HCT. Both patients developed hyperferritinemia with multiple organ dysfunction syndrome and profound immune dysregulation, which progressed to death despite maximal medical therapies. Because disseminated toxoplasmosis is both treatable and challenging to diagnose, it is imperative that intensivists maintain a high index of suspicion for Toxoplasma gondii infection when managing immunocompromised children, particularly in those with known positive T. gondii serologies.
Dietary Control of Inflammation and Resolution

The healing of any injury requires a dynamic balance of initiation and resolution of inflammation. This hypothesis-generating review presents an overview of the various nutrients that can act as signaling agents to modify the metabolic responses essential for the optimal healing of injury-induced inflammation. In this hypothesis-generating review, we describe a defined nutritional program consisting of an integrated interaction of a calorie-restricted anti-inflammatory diet coupled with adequate levels of omega-3 fatty acids and sufficient levels of dietary polyphenols that can be used in clinical trials to treat conditions associated with insulin resistance. Each dietary intervention works in an orchestrated systems-based approach to reduce, resolve, and repair the tissue damage caused by any inflammation-inducing injury. The orchestration of these specific nutrients and their signaling metabolites to facilitate healing is termed the Resolution Response. The final stage of the Resolution Response is the activation of intracellular 5' adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK), which is necessary to repair tissue damaged by the initial injury-induced inflammation. The dietary optimization of the Resolution Response can be personalized to the individual by using standard blood markers. Once each of those markers is in their appropriate ranges, activation of intracellular AMPK will be facilitated. Finally, we outline how the resulting activation of AMPK will affect a diverse number of other intercellular signaling systems leading to an extended healthspan.
Stem Cell-Derived Exosomes Potential Therapeutic Roles in Cardiovascular Diseases

Owing to myocardial abnormalities, cardiac ailments are considered to be the major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. According to a recent study, membranous vesicles that are produced naturally, termed as “exosomes”, have emerged as the potential candidate in the field of cardiac regenerative medicine. A wide spectrum of stem cells has also been investigated in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Exosomes obtained from the stem cells are found to be cardioprotective and offer great hope in the treatment of CVD. The basic nature of exosomes is to deal with the intracellular delivery of both proteins and nucleic acids. This activity of exosomes helps us to rely on them as the attractive pharmaceutical delivery agents. Most importantly, exosomes derived from microRNAs (miRNAs) hold great promise in assessing the risk of CVD, as they serve as notable biomarkers of the disease. Exosomes are small, less immunogenic, and lack toxicity. These nanovesicles harbor immense potential as a therapeutic entity and would provide fruitful benefits if consequential research were focused on their upbringing and development as a useful diagnostic and therapeutic tool in the field of medicine.
Effects of halide addition to arsenic-doped perovskite photovoltaic devices

Effects of CsI or SnBr2 addition to perovskite CH3NH3Pb0.95As0. 05I3-xClx precursor solutions on photovoltaic properties were investigated. (CH3NH3)0.95Cs0. 05Pb0.95As0. 05I3.05lC0. 15 and CH3NH3Pb0.9As0. 05Sn0.05I2. 95Br0.1Cl0. 15 photovoltaic devices were fabricated by a spin-coating technique, and the microstructures of the devices were investigated by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. Current density-voltage characteristics and incident photon-to-current conversion efficiencies were improved by adding a small amount of CsI to the CH3NH3Pb0.95As0. 05I3.05Cl0. 15 perovskite structure.Effects of CsI or SnBr2 addition to perovskite CH3NH3Pb0.95As0. 05I3-xClx precursor solutions on photovoltaic properties were investigated. (CH3NH3)0.95Cs0. 05Pb0.95As0. 05I3.05lC0. 15 and CH3NH3Pb0.9As0. 05Sn0.05I2. 95Br0.1Cl0. 15 photovoltaic devices were fabricated by a spin-coating technique, and the microstructures of the devices were investigated by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. Current density-voltage characteristics and incident photon-to-current conversion efficiencies were improved by adding a small amount of CsI to the CH3NH3Pb0.95As0. 05I3.05Cl0. 15 perovskite structure.
PUM1 Is Overexpressed in Colon Cancer Cells With Acquired Resistance to Cetuximab

Background Cetuximab is an effective antibody to treat colorectal cancer (CRC) by targeting the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). However, the mechanisms of acquired resistance to cetuximab therapy, especially in patients without identifiable gene mutations, are not fully understood. Methods Our study investigated the role of pumilio RNA-binding family member 1 (PUM1) in cetuximab resistance. We established cetuximab-resistant colon cancer cell lines SW480R and Caco-2R and knocked out PUM1 and DEAD-box helicase 5 (DDX5) with the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-caspase 9 (Cas9) system. To check cell proliferation, we used Cell Counting Kit-8. We performed qPCR and immunoblot to examine the levels of mRNAs and proteins for each cell line. Results Our data showed that PUM1 was upregulated in SW480R and Caco-2R cells with increased protein levels and cell proliferation, and PUM1 knockout reduced cell viability in the presence of cetuximab. We also found that PUM1 interacted with DDX5 in 3′ untranslated region (UTR) and positively regulated its mRNA expression. Furthermore, suppression of DDX5 also decreased the proliferation of SW480R and Caco-2R cells. Conclusion Our study suggests that PUM1 positively regulates DDX5 and acts as a promoter in cetuximab-resistant colon cancer cells.
Aging and CMV Infection Affect Pre-existing SARS-CoV-2-Reactive CD8+ T Cells in Unexposed Individuals

Age is a major risk factor for COVID-19 severity, and T cells play a central role in anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunity. Because SARS-CoV-2-cross-reactive T cells have been detected in unexposed individuals, we investigated the age-related differences in pre-existing SARS-CoV-2-reactive T cells. SARS-CoV-2-reactive CD4+ T cells from young and elderly individuals were mainly detected in the central memory fraction and exhibited similar functionalities and numbers. Naïve-phenotype SARS-CoV-2-reactive CD8+ T cell populations decreased markedly in the elderly, while those with terminally differentiated and senescent phenotypes increased. Furthermore, senescent SARS-CoV-2-reactive CD8+ T cell populations were higher in cytomegalovirus seropositive young individuals compared to seronegative ones. Our findings suggest that age-related differences in pre-existing SARS-CoV-2-reactive CD8+ T cells may explain the poor outcomes in elderly patients and that cytomegalovirus infection is a potential factor affecting CD8+ T cell immunity against SARS-CoV-2. Thus, this study provides insights for developing effective therapeutic and vaccination strategies for the elderly.
Rapid Detection and Typing of Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae Serovars Directly From Clinical Samples: Combining FTA® Card Technology With Multiplex PCR

Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae (APP), the causative agent of porcine pleuropneumonia, is highly contagious and responsible for high morbidity, mortality, and economic losses in the swine industry worldwide, but quick serotyping and diagnosis are still not widely available. In this study, we sought to validate the use of Whatman FTA® cards for collection and processing of A. pleuropneumoniae isolates, or porcine lung tissue samples, for direct use in diagnostic multiplex PCRs. We have optimized the processing of 3-mm discs punched from FTA® cards loaded with cultured A. pleuropneumoniae, or imprinted on lesioned regions of lung tissue, with only three distilled water washes before addition into our APP-multiplex PCR (mPCR) assay for rapid, low-cost identification and serotyping. DNA captured on FTA® cards generated the same diagnostic PCR results as DNA extracted using commercial kits for 85 A. pleuropneumoniae clinical isolate cultures and 22 lung samples. Additionally, bacterial DNA bound to FTA® cards was detectable by PCR after 6 months of storage at 37°C. This study provides simple, efficient, rapid, and practical sample processing for detection and molecular serotyping of A. pleuropneumoniae.
Strain-Dependent Inhibition of Erythrocyte Invasion by Monoclonal Antibodies Against Plasmodium falciparum CyRPA

The highly conserved Plasmodium falciparum cysteine-rich protective antigen (PfCyRPA) is a key target for next-generation vaccines against blood-stage malaria. PfCyRPA constitute the core of a ternary complex, including the reticulocyte binding-like homologous protein 5 (PfRh5) and the Rh5-interacting protein (PfRipr), and is fundamental for merozoite invasion of erythrocytes. In this study, we show that monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) specific to PfCyRPA neutralize the in vitro growth of Ghanaian field isolates as well as numerous laboratory-adapted parasite lines. We identified subsets of mAbs with neutralizing activity that bind to distinct sites on PfCyRPA and that in combination potentiate the neutralizing effect. As antibody responses against multiple merozoite invasion proteins are thought to improve the efficacy of blood-stage vaccines, we also demonstrated that combinations of PfCyRPA- and PfRh5 specific mAbs act synergistically to neutralize parasite growth. Yet, we identified prominent strain-dependent neutralization potencies, which our results suggest is independent of PfCyRPA expression level and polymorphism, demonstrating the importance of addressing functional converseness when evaluating blood-stage vaccine candidates. Finally, our results suggest that blood-stage vaccine efficacy can be improved by directing the antibody response towards defined protective epitopes on multiple parasite antigens.
Germline-Dependent Antibody Paratope States and Pairing Specific VH-VL Interface Dynamics

Antibodies have emerged as one of the fastest growing classes of biotherapeutic proteins. To improve the rational design of antibodies, we investigate the conformational diversity of 16 different germline combinations, which are composed of 4 different kappa light chains paired with 4 different heavy chains. In this study, we systematically show that different heavy and light chain pairings strongly influence the paratope, interdomain interaction patterns and the relative VH-VL interface orientations. We observe changes in conformational diversity and substantial population shifts of the complementarity determining region (CDR) loops, resulting in distinct dominant solution structures and differently favored canonical structures. Additionally, we identify conformational changes in the structural diversity of the CDR-H3 loop upon different heavy and light chain pairings, as well as upon changes in sequence and structure of the neighboring CDR loops, despite having an identical CDR-H3 loop amino acid sequence. These results can also be transferred to all CDR loops and to the relative VH-VL orientation, as certain paratope states favor distinct interface angle distributions. Furthermore, we directly compare the timescales of sidechain rearrangements with the well-described transition kinetics of conformational changes in the backbone of the CDR loops. We show that sidechain flexibilities are strongly affected by distinct heavy and light chain pairings and decipher germline-specific structural features co-determining stability. These findings reveal that all CDR loops are strongly correlated and that distinct heavy and light chain pairings can result in different paratope states in solution, defined by a characteristic combination of CDR loop conformations and VH-VL interface orientations. Thus, these results have broad implications in the field of antibody engineering, as they clearly show the importance of considering paired heavy and light chains to understand the antibody binding site, which is one of the key aspects in the design of therapeutics.
‘The role of users’ engagement in shaping financial reporting: should activists target accounting more?’ – a practitioner view

I want to try and focus my comments on three aspects. The first concerns the users of accounts, who they should be aimed at and who are they actually aimed at. The second considers how far should user experience or preferences really influence financial reporting. Last but not least, what is the core function of accounts? I want to start with the first, which is who accounts are aimed at, and they could include different constituents such as capital markets, labour, intermediaries, customers, suppliers, etc. I agree that all those people are interested in the contents of accounts, but as far as who the accounts are actually aimed at, the modern standard setters had one user in mind, which is the financial intermediary, or the person who is at the heart of the system of financial intermediation. This drives the function of accounts, which is to be ‘value-relevant’, and that means capturing outputs that inform the economic value of the firm. This is a new development, which has really taken hold in the United States from the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently in Europe with the introduction of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). It is a focus that has clearly shaped financial reporting. It is less hard-evidence-based, and there is more reliance on things like so-called faithful representation, fair values and so forth. I suppose I am on record as thinking that this has certain negative consequences, but I think it is indisputable that this new approach gives more power to managers to shape outcomes for them in terms of the profits companies declare and the bonuses they might consequentially pay those managers. These are understandably issues about which managers care very much, and it must be very tempting to influence the reporting of them. Remember that, increasingly, bonus payments are linked to accounting values, and one can look at various scandals in the recent past, such as the case of Carillion, a British construction and support services company, where the accounts were shown subsequently to probably have been rather aggressive, but the
An Adversarial Attacker for Neural Networks in Regression Problems

Adversarial attacks against neural networks and their defenses have been mostly investigated in classiﬁcation scenarios. However, adversarial attacks in a regression setting remain understudied, although they play a critical role in a large portion of safety-critical applications. In this work, we present an adversarial attacker for regression tasks, derived from the algebraic properties of the Jacobian of the network. We show that our attacker successfully fools the neural network, and we measure its effectiveness in reducing the estimation performance. We present a white-box adversarial attacker to support engineers in designing safety-critical regression machine learning models. We present our results on various open-source and real industrial tabular datasets. In particular, the proposed adversarial attacker outperforms attackers based on random perturbations of the inputs. Our analysis relies on the quantiﬁcation of the fooling error as well as various error metrics. A noteworthy feature of our attacker is that it allows us to optimally attack a subset of inputs, which may be helpful to analyse the sensitivity of some speciﬁc inputs.
Security Analysis Models for Multimedia Information Resources in Social Networks (short paper)

The paper presents a description of classical and modern multimedia information resources security threats in social networks. It also provides an overview of methods and models for analyzing social networks. Proposed an approach to the creation of a methodology for building security systems for the exchange of multimedia content in social networks through the development of conceptual foundations, methods, and technologies for detecting, assessing, and countering information security threats.
Students' Perception of Real-Time Quiz Kahoot! As a Review Tool in Higher Education: A Case of Study

The use of gamification has spread in recent years, proving to be an effective tool to increase student motivation. Among them stands out Kahoot! , an online questionnaire in which students compete among themselves by counting both the number of correct answers and the response speed. Its effectiveness has been tested mainly in primary and secondary students, with much less available information at higher levels. This study evaluates the opinion of 48 students in Plant Science, a subject of 2nd course of Agricultural Engineering Grade, after carrying out three Kahoot! questionnaires with 12 questions with a single-answer, with two weeks between one and the next. To evaluate the contents fixation a reunified quiz was done, one week after the last Kahoot! , chosen randomly five questions from each questionnaire. The satisfaction of more than 90% of the students was positive or very positive, mainly because of creating a more positive and participatory learning environment. The use as a scoring tool produces a decrease in the acceptance in some students, producing anxiety in 25% of the students, due to the limited available time in about 27% of students. Furthermore Kahoot! has been found as a efficient tool for consolidating knowledge, as the number of questions that the students have consolidated is greater than 20% in the three questionnaires carried out, regardless of whether the period elapsed was 5, 3 or 1 week.
Deep Learning Enhanced with Graph Knowledge for Sentiment Analysis

The traditional way to address the problem of sentiment classification is based on Machine Learning techniques; however, these models are not able to grasp all the richness of the text that comes from different social media, personal web pages, blogs, etc., ignoring the semantic of the text. Knowledge Graphs give a way to extract structured knowledge from images and texts, in order to facilitate their semantic analysis. In this work, we propose a new hybrid approach for Sentiment Analysis based on Knowledge Graphs and Deep Learning techniques, to identify the sentiment polarity (positive or negative) in short documents, particularly in 3 tweets. We represent the tweets using graphs, then graph similarity metrics and a Deep Learning classification algorithm are applied to produce sentiment predictions. This approach facilitates the traceability and explainability of the classification results, since it is possible to visually inspect the graphs. We compare our proposal with character n-gram embeddings based Deep Learning models to perform Sentiment Analysis. Results show that our proposal is able to outperforms classical n-gram models, with a recall up to 89% and F1-score of 88%.
Heat transfer comparison of nanofluid filled transformer and traditional oil-immersed transformer

Dispersing nanoparticles with high thermal conductivity into transformer oil is an innovative approach to improve the thermal performance of traditional oil-immersed transformers. This mixture, also known as nanofluid, has shown the potential in practical application through experimental measurements. This paper presents the comparisons of nanofluid filled transformer and traditional oil-immersed transformer in terms of their computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solutions from the perspective of optimal design. Thermal performance of transformers with the same parameters except coolants is compared. A further comparison on heat transfer then is made after minimizing the oil volume and maximum temperature-rise of these two transformers. Adaptive multi-objective optimization method is employed to tackle this optimization problem.Dispersing nanoparticles with high thermal conductivity into transformer oil is an innovative approach to improve the thermal performance of traditional oil-immersed transformers. This mixture, also known as nanofluid, has shown the potential in practical application through experimental measurements. This paper presents the comparisons of nanofluid filled transformer and traditional oil-immersed transformer in terms of their computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solutions from the perspective of optimal design. Thermal performance of transformers with the same parameters except coolants is compared. A further comparison on heat transfer then is made after minimizing the oil volume and maximum temperature-rise of these two transformers. Adaptive multi-objective optimization method is employed to tackle this optimization problem.
Using Complementary Risk Acceptance Criteria to Structure Assurance Cases for Safety-Critical AI Components

Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly current Machine Learning approaches, promises new and innovative solutions also for realizing safety-critical functions. Assurance cases can support the potential certification of such AI applications by providing an assessable, structured argument explaining why safety is achieved. Existing proposals and patterns for structuring the safety argument help to structure safety measures, but guidance for explaining in a concrete use case why the safety measures are actually sufficient is limited. In this paper, we investigate this and other challenges and propose solutions. In particular, we propose considering two complementary types of risk acceptance criteria as assurance objectives and provide, for each objective, a structure for the supporting argument. We illustrate our proposal on an excerpt of an automated guided vehicle use case and close with questions triggering further discussions on how to best use assurance cases in the context of AI certification.
Artificial Intelligence for Future Skies: On-going Standardization Activities to Build the Next Certification/Approval Framework for Airborne and Ground Aeronautic Products

This position paper will describe the stakes of the new standard developed by EUROCAE and SAE on AI certification by detailing the main challenges, drawing the interfaces with existing standards, and proposing a new machine learning (ML) development lifecycle to support the future certification/approval objectives that will enable the use of ML techniques in the development of safety-critical applications for both airborne and ground aeronautical products.