NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Évolution de l’auto-efficacité, des émotions et du concept de soi chez des adolescents hospitalisés en Hémato-oncologie pendant une intervention de musicothérapie interactive : une étude pilote

Objectives: The present research aims to: (1) Evaluate the extent to which four individual music therapy sessions are associated with changes in the self-efficacy, emotions and self-concept of adolescents hospitalized in Hematology-Oncology; (2) Document the adolescents' experience of music therapy. Method: Seven adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 participated in interactive music therapy sessions, which involved learning how to play a song on the classical guitar. The research plan included seven measurement times. Following the last session of the intervention, each adolescent answered three open-ended questions about their overall experience in music therapy. Non-parametric and thematic statistical analyses were carried out on the results we obtained in order to identify the improvements associated with the intervention. Results: The results obtained at the group level did not show systematic changes although important individual differences were found. Positive developments were observed in 2/7 participants in self-efficacy, in 3/7 on positive emotions, 2/7 on negative emotions, and 3/7 regarding their self-concept. The adolescents' comments highlighted an overall positive experience marked by physical and/or psychological well-being. Conclusion: These results promote the implementation of new research on the effects of interactive music therapy interventions with adolescents who are hospitalized in Hematology-Oncology by considering the individual trajectories in the groups concerned.  Keywords: Adolescents, Paediatric cancer, Music therapy, Hospitalization, Psychosocial oncology

Keyphrases: Adolescents, Hospitalization, Paediatric cancer, Music therapy, Psychosocial oncology
Attitudes de la mère en situation de lecture partagée au préscolaire et engagement scolaire comportemental au début du primaire : comparaison de deux modèles

Background. Academic achievement is largely determined by early learning and difficulties associated are often rooted in the early years of life. Considering the high prevalence of school dropout in Quebec (16%) and the many consequences associated with it, it is important to consider the mechanisms that support school engagement from the start of schooling, because it is one of the best predictors of dropping out of school. Objective. The main aim of this study was to explore the unique contribution of emergent literacy skills and maternal attitudes in shared reading situations to the prediction of the initial level of behavioral engagement in kindergarten and its evolution up to Grade 3. A second aim was to examine the role of emergent literacy skills as a mediator of the relationship between maternal attitudes and behavioral engagement. Method. To assess the quality of mothers’ attitudes, 196 mother-child dyads were observed in the laboratory during the resolution of two joint-reading activities. A year later, children's knowledge of letters and writing was measured using the Lollipop. Behavioral engagement was assessed by kindergarten, grade 1, grade 2 and grade 3 teachers. Multiple regressions on growth curves were performed. Results. The results indicate that emergent literacy skills are directly associated with the initial level of child behavioral engagement (iEC: 0.24, p < 0.01). Although maternal attitudes did not contribute significantly to the explanation of behavioral engagement (iEC: b=0.11, p=0.16; sEC: b=-0.04, p=0.87), the analyses indicated a significant indirect effect of maternal attitudes on the initial level of behavioral engagement, mediated by emergent literacy skills (iEC: b=0.16, p < 0.05). Conclusion. These findings provide a better understanding of the mechanisms leading to low levels of school engagement. Consequently, these results will allow early childhood workers, including psychoeducators, to identify at an early age the children at risk of low school engagement at the beginning of their educational pathway, and to propose their families preventive measures supporting early literacy skills.

Keyphrases: Maternal attitudes, Family literacy, Emergent literacy skills, School engagement, Longitudinal study
Associations entre la dépression et le décrochage scolaire en fonction du sexe : une étude longitudinale

Studies examining potential links between depressive symptoms and dropout have yielded inconsistent results. These inconsistencies could be explained by potential moderating effects of key individual characteristics, such as gender or age. This study has two main objectives: 1) to measure the association between depressive symptoms as measured at different grades during high school and dropout, and 2) to examine the possible impact of gender as a moderator variable. We used self-reported data to assess depressive symptoms in 7th, 8th and 9th grade and official administrative data to determine dropout status among a cohort of 6,272 high-school students. Results indicate that after controlling for a variety of potentially confounding variables, the association between depression and dropout was no longer significant. Furthermore, the analysis indicate that gender does not play a moderating role, meaning that there is no link between depression and dropping out among girls, nor boys. These results suggest that the conflicting results observed in the literature may reflect a difference in the variety and, more importantly, the number of variables used to control for confounding effect. Furthermore, the results reiterate the importance of known dropout risk factors for dropout and suggest that preventive interventions focusing on depressive symptoms should be part of larger programs also aiming at other factors more closely related to school dropout.

Keyphrases: Prévention, School dropout, Dropout, Depressive symptoms, Gender differences, risk factors, Predictive capacity, School perseverance, Special education
Hostility, Social Support and Nighttime Blood Pressure Dipping

Background: Individuals whose blood pressure (BP) does not drop by 10-20% when asleep are at increased risk for future cardiovascular events and mortality. Psychosocial variables may contribute to non-dipping of BP. Purpose: To investigate the concurrent and three-year prospective associations of hostility and social support with BP dipping status in healthy, working adult men and women. Whether sex or age moderated these relations was also examined. Methods: 191 participants at Time 1 and 128 at Time 2 underwent 24-hour ambulatory BP monitoring after completing psychosocial questionnaires and Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) over a 3-week period.  Results: Hostility was negatively correlated with systolic BP dipping at both time points in univariate associations only.  A Sex by Social Support interaction emerged (β = -.152, p = .037) in the concurrent analyses at Time 1, while an Age by Social Support interaction emerged in the prospective analyses at Time 2 (β = .181, p = .047). Conclusion: The current results suggest that hostility and social support may influence BP dipping, though the effects appear modest. The impact of social support on BP dipping was particularly dependent on sex and age, such that at Time 1, men appeared to benefit most from social support, while at Time 2, older individuals did.  The implications of these findings are unclear at this time and require replication.

Keyphrases: Pression artérielle, Rumination, Hostility, Social support, Blood pressure dipping, Nondipping, Anger, Quarrelsome behaviour, Rumination, Ecological Momentary Assessments, Prospective, Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitors/cuffs, Sex differences
Développement d’une méthode de production de vésicules membranaires permettant l’étude du mode d’action des toxines insecticides de Bacillus thuringiensis

Most Bacillus thuringiensis toxins permeabilize the intestinal membrane of susceptible insects by forming pores that abolish transmembrane electrical potentials and ionic gradients. Several toxins have been studied using brush border membrane vesicles purified from the insect midgut. Unfortunately, the intestinal membrane from many insects does not form vesicles that are tight enough to be used in permeabilisation experiments. A new technique using giant liposomes and a membrane permeability probe was developed to evaluate the pore-forming ability of two particularly promising toxins for the biocontrol of a major corn pest, the Western corn rootworm (Diabrotica virgifera virgifera LeConte), Cry6Aa1 and the binary toxin DS10/DS11. Both toxins permeabilized the liposomes efficiently. However, analysis of the permeabilisation rates under different experimental conditions indicates that these toxins differ in their biophysical properties. The binary toxin forms pores which are slightly selective for cations, like most B. thuringiensis toxins. On the other hand, although the results suggest that Cry6Aa1 could form anion-selective pores, they could also indicate that, in contrast with other toxins produced by this bacterium, it could form pores only under high ionic strength conditions. Pore formation by both toxins appears to be sensitive to membrane curvature since it is much more efficient in giant liposomes than in liposomes with identical composition, but smaller in size. This study sets the bases for the development of a technique that would allow the toxins to be studied in giant liposomes enriched with proteins and lipids from the intestinal membrane of target insects.

Keyphrases: Cry6Aa1, Bacillus thuringiensis, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera leConte, pore formation, giant liposomes, carboxyfluorescein, Western corn rootworm
Développement et optimisation des potentiels OPEP et simulations numériques de la protéine Huntingtine

Proteins are the vital machinery of the cell and therefore are fundamental to life. They play a wide variety of roles from the transcription/translation of DNA to membrane transport to energy metabolism and many more. In terms of structure, proteins are macromolecules composed by the combination of 20 basic amino acids. Under the fundamental laws of physic, this chain will fold itself locally (secondary structure) and then globally (tertiary). This three dimensional structure gives rise to the protein’s function thus making the prediction of three dimensional structure a crucial aspect of protein study. Numerical techniques provide an essential tool to complement experiments in the study of proteins. The following thesis is divided into two main research axes. The first one is the study, via numerical techniques, of the N-terminal of the Huntingtin protein. The second one is the optimization and the development of the coarse grained forcefield family OPEP. First, we present our study of Huntingtin’s N-terminal. The Huntingtin protein is associated with the Huntington disease and its N-terminal is crucial for the protein aggregation and anchoring inside the membrane. Following the proposition of a first experimental model of the N-terminal, we determined its structural ensemble in aqueous solution and membrane environment. To do so, we used powerful sampling techniques in the all-atom regime. Our discoveries are linked to Huntingtin’s aggregation and membrane association models. Finally, the last chapter discusses the optimization of the sOPEP and aaOPEP forcefield. The coarse grained OPEP forcefields were successfully applied to multiple studies, most notably for the simulation of amyloid peptides and the tertiary structure prediction using the PEPFOLD methodology. Vast protein ensemble were generated and used in the optimization of sOPEP resulting in 25% of improvement compared to the previous version on our decoys set. The parametrization is also validated by short molecular dynamic simulations on nine proteins. In parallel, we develop the new aaOPEP, a forcefield that will use the OPEP philosophy but in the all-atom regime. Those potential are included in a flexible molecular dynamic code that will be available to everyone when completed.

Keyphrases: OPEP, Coarse-Grained Potential, OPEP, Amyloid Protein, Huntingtin Protein
Le problème du thumos et de l’engagement politique dans la République de Platon

Political commitment is a problem in Plato’s attempt in the Republic to paint a picture of the ideal ruler.  Identifying the motivations underlying the psychological bond between the ruling class (particularly the auxiliary class) and the city’s common good will be the object of this research. The key to this issue is the concept of thumoeides, the intermediary part of the soul in Plato’s psychological theory of tripartition. The thumoeides is the seat of a type of emotion, like awe (aidos) and anger, which commit the individual’s soul to a specific relation with both the appetites inside and the social world outside. This study will thus approach the following topics: the definition of thumoeides as a special motivation toward honor, the regulative role of anger and aidos regarding appetites and the social world, and finally the influence of music and education on the thumoeides development. Through this work, we wish to show the close link in Plato’s work between thumoeides, appetite’s control and the love for one’s own city as they all play a constitutive role for the political task of the auxiliary.

Keyphrases: thumos, thumoeides, aidos, psychologie morale, anger, appetite, emotion, Republic (the), moral psychology, political philosophy
Une exigence de réalité en perception

According to Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, perception is a reliable path to reality. Confronted with various problems challenging perception’s reliability, they argue toward similar solutions. By comparing their solutions for two problems, namely the possibility of illusion and object transcendence, this Master’s thesis argues that, in spite of their apparent agreement on how to solve the above issues, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty defend fundamentally incompatible views concerning perception. Notably, according to Husserl, genuine and illusory perceptions are fundamentally (intrinsically) indistinguishable. Il follows that only a contextual difference allows the subject to distinguish them. We will argue that, in admitting only a contextual difference between illusion and genuine perception, Husserl revokes perception’s ontological privilege : perception is not a reliable path to reality, since it is always potentially illusory. By way of contrast, Merleau-Ponty avoids such a conclusion, since his account admits a fundamental difference between illusion and genuine perception. Merleau-Ponty can then argue for the ontological primacy of perception, which, in turn, allows him to demonstrate better than Husserl why and how perception is a reliable path to reality.

Keyphrases: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Perception, Illusion, Philosophy, Phenomenology
Modélisation pharmacocinétique du rythme circadien

Humans are organised according to an internal clock with a period of approximatively 24 hours. The pharmacokinetic of several classes of drugs are then influenced by circadian rhythms. Indeed, the area under the curve (of the drug concentration as a function of time), the maximal concentration and the time to maximal concentration can change according to the time at which the drug is taken. The objective of this present work is to find a model to represent the variations in the maximal drug concentration according to the absorption’s time. We first study a model presented by Godfrey. It allows to find the drug concentration as a function of time while taking into account circadian rhythms. Unfortunately, this model could not represent the variations in the maximal concentration according to the time at which the drug is taken. We developed a new two-compartmental model for the three ways of absorption (oral, intravenous and intravenous bolus). The resulting systems of ordinary differential equations will be studied. The effect of the phase parameters on the maximal concen- tration will also be studied. Finally, the proof of well-poseness of the model will be developed in the Annex.

Keyphrases: Modelling, Ordinary differential equations, Pharmacokinetics, Circadian rhythms, Compartmental models
Speech synthesis using recurrent neural networks

Recurrent neural networks are useful tools to model data with sequential structure. In this work, we describe how to use them for speech synthesis. We start with an introduction to machine learning and neural networks in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, we develop an automatic stochastic gradient algorithm which reduces the burden of extensive hyper-parameter search for the optimizer. Our proposed algorithm exploits a lower variance estimator of curvature of the cost function and uses it to obtain an automatically tuned adaptive learning rate for each parameter. In Chapter 3, we propose a novel model for unconditional audio generation based on generating one audio sample at a time. We show that our model, which profits from combining memory-less modules, namely autoregressive multilayer perceptrons, and stateful recurrent neural networks in a hierarchical structure is able to capture underlying sources of variation in the temporal sequences over very long time spans, on three datasets of different nature. Human evaluation on the generated samples indicate that our model is preferred over competing models. We also show how each component of the model contributes to the exhibited performance. In Chapter 4, we present Char2Wav, an end-to-end model for speech synthesis. Char2Wav has two components: a reader and a neural vocoder. The reader is an encoder-decoder model with attention. The encoder is a bidirectional recurrent neural network (RNN) that accepts text or phonemes as inputs, while the decoder is a recurrent neural network with attention that produces vocoder acoustic features. Neural vocoder refers to a conditional extension of SampleRNN which generates raw waveform samples from intermediate representations. We show results in English and Spanish. Unlike traditional models for speech synthesis, Char2Wav learns to produce audio directly from text. Finally, we reflect on the results obtained in this work and propose future directions of research in the area.

Keyphrases: Neural networks, Machine learning, Deep learning, Representation learning, Speech synthesis, Signal processing, Optimization
Survey of Template-Based Code Generation

A critical step in model-driven engineering (MDE) is the automatic synthesis of a textual artifact from models. This is a very useful model transformation to generate application code, to serialize the model in persistent storage, generate documentation or reports. Among the various model-to-text transformation paradigms, Template-Based Code Generation (TBCG) is the most popular in MDE. TBCG is a synthesis technique that produces code from high-level specifications, called templates. It is a popular technique in MDE given that they both emphasize abstraction and automation. Given the diversity of tools and approaches, it is necessary to classify and compare existing TBCG techniques to provide appropriate support to developers. The goal of this thesis is to better understand the characteristics of TBCG techniques, identify research trends, and assess the importance of the role of MDE in this code synthesis approach. We also evaluate the expressiveness, performance and scalability of the associated tools based on a range of models that implement critical patterns. To this end, we conduct a systematic mapping study of the literature that paints an interesting overview of TBCG and a comparative study on TBCG tools to better guide developers in their choices. This study shows that model-based tools offer more expressiveness whereas code-based tools performed much faster. Xtend2 offers the best compromise between the expressiveness and the performance.

Keyphrases: Model-driven engineering, Code generation, Systematic mapping study, Comparative study, Étude comparative
Implémentation d'un langage fonctionnel orienté vers la méta programmation

This dissertation present the implementation of a new programming language named Typer Typer is a functional programming language oriented towards meta programming. It has been created to increase the programmer productivity and enable him to write safer programs thanks to his type system.   To achieve his goal, Typer use type inference and a powerful macro system. Type inference enable to user to elide some elements while the macro system enable us to complete the program during compilation.  Typer use dependent type which enable the user to create very expressive types which can even be used to represent formal proofs. Furthermore, dependent type's expressivity enable the compiler to perform a in-depth checks during compilation.  Those mechanics enable the source code to be less verbose, shorter and  easier to understand, making the writing of new programmes more enjoyable. Those functionalities are implemented during the step we call the elaboration in which numerous transformations occur. Those transformations include the removal of syntactic sugar, identifier resolution, macro expansion and the propagation and the inference of types.

Keyphrases: Scheme, proof assistant, Coq
Modélisation et maintien de l’engagement dans un environnement du jeu vidéo émotionnel

Recent studies in human-machine interactions have integrated the emotional dimension into the evaluation of the user’s experience. Indeed, a new current research has emerged, namely affective computing, which has given rise to a new generation of video games capable of interacting with the user taking into consideration his emotions, called affective video games. The main objective of the games is to keep the player engaged during the game session. To achieve this, the video game must measure and regulate the player’s emotional state by adjusting its different components accordingly. Although the large number of researches that aim to improve emotional detection processes, all the measures used up to now have shown some limitations, because of the complexity of the emotional concept interpretation. In this work, we add to these studies by formally proposing to measure and support the player’s mental engagement in a video game environment. First, we developed a first version of video game and we conducted a first experimental study to measure the player’s mental engagement from a mental engagement index extracted from the player’s brain activity data, and more precisely Electroencephalography (EEG). Second, we developed a second version of video game capable of capturing the player’s mental engagement state (engaged, disengaged) and triggering a set of engagement strategy. Finally, we carried out a second experimental study to verify the ability of these strategies to correct the engagement lack state (disengagement) and to increase and maintain the player engagement level during the game. Keywords: video games, mental engagement, emotions, electroencephalography, engagement strategy.

Keyphrases: Video games, Mental engagement, Electroencephalography, Engagement strategy