nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Flo v: Low Overhead Network Monitoring Framework in Virtualized Software Defined Networks
Venue: CFI

Network virtualization involves creating multiple virtual networks within a physical network, based on the flexible network environment of software defined networking (SDN) In a virtualized SDN (vSDN) a network hypervisor plays a key role in translating physical network resources into virtual network resources. However, this translation in vSDN incurs considerable overhead in network monitoring that is critical for network management. In this paper, we propose Flo v to provide network monitoring in a vSDN. Flo v provides accurate monitoring information to a vSDN and, by applying selective and adaptive approaches, it monitors traffic in a network hypervisor with lower overhead than existing schemes. We compare the proposed Flo v with existing schemes, and demonstrate that Flo v provides accurate network information with reduced resource usage in terms of both the network and CPU, with approximately 50% less overhead than existing schemes.
Development and Property Evaluation of Poly Lactic Acid and Cellulose Nanocrystals Based Films with Either Silver or Peptide Antimicrobial Agents Morphological Permeability Thermal and Mechanical Characterization

The main aim of this paper is to report the impact of the addition of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) on the thermal, mechanical, and permeability properties of poly (lactic acid) The thin films were prepared using a modified solvent casting method. The films were fortified with either of two antimicrobial agents: silver (Ag) nanopowder or a peptide. The microstructure, morphology, oxygen and water vapour permeability, mechanical, and thermal behaviour were investigated.It was found that thepresence of the antimicrobial agents does not adversely affect the thermal properties investigated. But, addition of greater than 0.75 (wt. peptide into the thin films resulted in a reduction of the mechanical properties. In all cases, there were significant reductions in oxygen and water vapour permeability. For example, for the PLA+CNC+Ag systems, there were reductions up to 50 and 40 respectively. The holistic interaction of the Ag nanopowder and CNC resulted in significantly better reduction in the above values. The permeability values of the studied plastics are comparable to those of commercial plastics currently on the market used for packaging.
Short Antimicrobial Peptides and Peptide Scaffolds as Promising Antibacterial Agents.
Venue: Current topics in medicinal chemistry

Antimicrobial peptides have recently garnered significant attention as an emerging source of potential antibiotics, due to the swift emergence of multidrug resistant bacteria and a dwindling antibiotic pipeline. The vast majority of antimicrobial peptides are long, comprised of more than 10 amino acids, resulting in significant production costs for their synthesis while simultaneously displaying metabolic instability and relatively poor pharmacological profiles. To counter these problems, efforts have been shifted to shorter molecules and the development of new peptidomimetic approaches. In this paper, we review promising short, naturally isolated or synthetic, antimicrobial peptides, along with their mimics, and discuss their merits as potential antibacterial agents.
Evaluation of the Antifungal Activity of Sulfur and Chitosan Nanocomposites with Active Ingredients of Ruta graveolens, Thymus vulgaris and Eucalyptus melliodora on the Growth of Botrytis fabae and Fusarium oxysporum

The purpose of this research was to determine the inhibitor effects of nanocomposites over two pathogenic fungi: Botrytis fabae Sard and Fusarium oxysporum isolated from bean crops. These nanocomposites were prepared with elemental sulfur nanoparticles coated with essential oils (four levels, three oils) and further stabilized with chitosan. The research was conducted in the microbiology laboratory of CENCINAT. We evaluated 12 nanocomposites at room temperature and PDA plates at pH 4 for 10 days and compared to controls with no nanocomposites additions. Data for statistical analysis were gathered starting from the seventh growth day because of the fungi efficient growth without treatment is between the fourth and fifth day, respectively. Statistical experimental analysis were carried out through a complete randomized block design using each Petri dish, with spots with 4 nacomposites in each spot. A total of 12 final different nanocomposites were used for all assayed plates giving five repetitions, four replicates and two fungi to carry out ANOVA analysis. Significant differences measures on fungal growth in each treatment, were compared according to Docimo Dunca's multiple range for p <0.05 using the statistical package InfoStat Professional. The independent analyzed variables were Fusarium oxysporum, Botrytis fabae Sard and different essential oils produced by Ruta graveolens, Eucalyptus melliodora, Thymus vulgaris and concentrations of each oil (20% 40% 60% 80% The results indicate that the nanocomposites application over the fungi in vitro could be effective according to the fungi species. F. oxysporum is the most inhibited by applying the nanocomposite with common rue or thyme oil 40% (optimum concentration) while 60% and 80% did not show any statistical difference. However, B. fabae inhibition was shown at these 60 and 80% concentrations. The nanocomposites with 20% eucalyptus displayed smaller inhibition halos against both fungi.
Atopic dermatitis
Venue: The Lancet

Atopic dermatitis (also known as atopic eczema) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease that is characterised by intense itching and recurrent eczematous lesions. Although it most often starts in infancy and affects two of ten children, it is also highly prevalent in adults. It is the leading non fatal health burden attributable to skin diseases, inflicts a substantial psychosocial burden on patients and their relatives, and increases the risk of food allergy, asthma, allergic rhinitis, other immune mediated inflammatory diseases, and mental health disorders. Originally regarded as a childhood disorder mediated by an imbalance towards a T helper 2 response and exaggerated IgE responses to allergens, it is now recognised as a lifelong disposition with variable clinical manifestations and expressivity, in which defects of the epidermal barrier are central. Present prevention and treatment focus on restoration of epidermal barrier function, which is best achieved through the use of emollients. Topical corticosteroids are still the first line therapy for acute flares, but they are also used proactively along with topical calcineurin inhibitors to maintain remission. Non specific immunosuppressive drugs are used in severe refractory cases, but targeted disease modifying drugs are being developed. We need to improve understanding of the heterogeneity of the disease and its subtypes, the role of atopy and autoimmunity, the mechanisms behind disease associated itch, and the comparative effectiveness and safety of therapies.
Efficacy and safety of dupilumab in adults with moderate to severe atopic dermatitis inadequately controlled by topical treatments: a randomised, placebo controlled, dose ranging phase 2b trial
Venue: The Lancet

Data from early stage studies suggested that interleukin (IL) 4 and IL 13 are requisite drivers of atopic dermatitis, evidenced by marked improvement after treatment with dupilumab, a fully human monoclonal antibody that blocks both pathways. We aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of several dose regimens of dupilumab in adults with moderate to severe atopic dermatitis inadequately controlled by topical treatments.  In this randomised, placebo controlled, double blind study, we enrolled patients aged 18 years or older who had an Eczema Area and Severity Index (EASI) score of 12 or higher at screening =16 at baseline) and inadequate response to topical treatments from 91 study centres, including hospitals, clinics, and academic institutions, in Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland, and the USA. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1:1:1:1:1) stratified by severity (moderate or severe, as assessed by Investigator's Global Assessment) and region (Japan vs rest of world) to receive subcutaneous dupilumab: 300 mg once a week, 300 mg every 2 weeks, 200 mg every 2 weeks, 300 mg every 4 weeks, 100 mg every 4 weeks, or placebo once a week for 16 weeks. We used a central randomisation scheme, provided by an interactive voice response system. Drug kits were coded, providing masking to treatment assignment, and allocation was concealed. Patients on treatment every 2 weeks and every 4 weeks received volume matched placebo every week when dupilumab was not given to ensure double blinding. The primary outcome was efficacy of dupilumab dose regimens based on EASI score least squares mean percentage change (SE) from baseline to week 16. Analyses included all randomly assigned patients who received one or more doses of study drug.  Between May 15, 2013, and Jan 27, 2014, 452 patients were assessed for eligibility, and 380 patients were randomly assigned. 379 patients received one or more doses of study drug (300 mg once a week [n=63] 300 mg every 2 weeks [n=64] 200 mg every 2 weeks [n=61] 300 mg every 4 weeks [n=65] 100 mg every 4 weeks [n=65] placebo [n=61] EASI score improvements favoured all dupilumab regimens versus placebo (p<0*0001) 300 mg once a week 74% [SE 5*16] 300 mg every 2 weeks 68% [5*12] 200 mg every 2 weeks 65% [5*19] 300 mg every 4 weeks 64% [4*94] 100 mg every 4 weeks 45% [4*99] placebo 18% [5*20] 258 (81% of 318 patients given dupilumab and 49 (80% of 61 patients given placebo reported treatment emergent adverse events; nasopharyngitis was the most frequent (28% and 26% respectively) INTERPRETATION Dupilumab improved clinical responses in adults with moderate to severe atopic dermatitis in a dose dependent manner, without significant safety concerns. Our findings show that IL 4 and IL 13 are key drivers of atopic dermatitis.
Cellular and molecular immunologic mechanisms in patients with atopic dermatitis.
Venue: The Journal of allergy and clinical immunology

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a complex skin disease frequently associated with other diseases of the atopic diathesis. Recent evidence supports the concept that AD can also recognize other comorbidities, such as chronic inflammatory bowel or cardiovascular diseases. These comorbidities might result from chronic cutaneous inflammation or from a common, yet to be defined immunologic background leading to immune deviations. The activation of immune cells and their migration to the skin play an essential role in the pathogenesis of AD. In patients with AD, an underlying immune deviation might result in higher susceptibility of the skin to environmental factors. There is a high unmet medical need to define immunologic endotypes of AD because it has significant implications on upcoming stratification of the phenotype of AD and the resulting targeted therapies in the development of precision medicine. This review article emphasizes studies on environmental factors affecting AD development and novel biological agents used in the treatment of AD. Best evidence of the clinical efficacy of novel immunologic approaches using biological agents in patients with AD is available for the anti IL 4 receptor a chain antibody dupilumab, but a number of studies are currently ongoing with other specific antagonists to immune system players. These targeted molecules can be expressed on or drive the cellular players infiltrating the skin (eg, T lymphocytes, dendritic cells, or eosinophils) Such approaches can have immunomodulatory and thereby beneficial clinical effects on the overall skin condition, as well as on the underlying immune deviation that might play a role in comorbidities. An effect of these immunologic treatments on pruritus and the disturbed microbiome in patients with AD has other potential consequences for treatment.
Squeeze Film Damper Effect on Vibration of an Unbalanced Flexible Rotor Using Harmonic Balance Method

In this paper, an effective tool based on harmonic balance method to assess the forced response of these systems under parametric changes is developed. A flexible rotor with multiple masses supported on a squeeze film damper at one end is investigated and modeled using finite element method. The forced response of this asymmetrically supported system is calculated using the harmonic balance method with a predictor corrector procedure by changing unidirectional loads, stiffness of centering spring of the damper and the gyroscopic effects of the disks. It is observed that under large unbalance forces, jump phenomenon occurs due to the nonlinear forces of SFD which indicates the presence of multiple harmonics within the response of the SFD operating at high eccentricity ratios and shows the insensitivity of the damper to surrounding gyroscopic variation.
Vibration reduction in a tilting rotor using centrifugal pendulum vibration absorbers

This paper investigates vibration reduction in a rigid rotor with tilting, rotational, and translational motions using centrifugal pendulum vibration absorbers (CPVAs) A linearized vibration model is derived for the system consisting of the rotor and multiple sets of absorbers tuned to different orders. Each group of absorbers lies in a given plane perpendicular to the rotor rotation axis. Gyroscopic system modal analysis is applied to derive the steady state response of the absorbers and the rotor to external, rotor order, periodic forces and torques with frequency m O where O is the mean rotor speed and m is the engine order (rotor order) It is found that an absorber group with tuning order m is effective at reducing the rotor translational, tilting, and rotational vibrations, provided certain conditions are met. When the periodic force and torque are caused by N substructures that are equally spaced around the rotor, the rotor translational and tilting vibrations at order j are addressed by two absorber groups with tuning orders jN+ 1. In this case, the rotor rotational vibration at order j can be attenuated by an absorber group with tuning order jN. The results show how the response depends on the load amplitudes and order, the rotor speed, and design parameters associated with the sets of absorbers, most importantly, their tuning, mass, and plane of placement. In the ideal case with zero damping and exact tuning of the absorber sets, the vibrations can be eliminated for a range of loads over which the linearized model holds. The response for systems with detuned absorbers is also determined, which is relevant to applications where small detuning is employed due to robustness issues, and to allow for a larger range of operating loads over which the absorbers are effective. The system also exhibits undesirable resonances very close to these tuning conditions, an issue that is difficult to resolve and deserves further investigation.
A new algorithmic approach for the extraction of temporal associations from clinical narratives with an application to medical product safety surveillance reports
Venue: J. Biomed. Informatics

The sheer volume of textual information that needs to be reviewed and analyzed in many clinical settings requires the automated retrieval of key clinical and temporal information. The existing natural language processing systems are often challenged by the low quality of clinical texts and do not demonstrate the required performance. In this study, we focus on medical product safety report narratives and investigate the association of the clinical events with appropriate time information. We developed a novel algorithm for tagging and extracting temporal information from the narratives, and associating it with related events. The proposed algorithm minimizes the performance dependency on text quality by relying only on shallow syntactic information and primitive properties of the extracted event and time entities. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by evaluating its tagging and time assignment capabilities on 140 randomly selected reports from the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) We compared the performance of our tagger with the SUTime and HeidelTime taggers, and our algorithm's event time associations with the Temporal Awareness and Reasoning Systems for Question Interpretation (TARSQI) We further evaluated the ability of our algorithm to correctly identify the time information for the events in the 2012 Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) Challenge corpus. For the time tagging task, our algorithm performed better than the SUTime and the HeidelTime taggers (F measure in VAERS and FAERS: Our algorithm: 0.86 and 0.88, SUTime: 0.77 and 0.74, and HeidelTime 0.75 and 0.42, respectively) In the event time association task, our algorithm assigned an inappropriate timestamp for 25% of the events, while the TARSQI toolkit demonstrated a considerably lower performance, assigning inappropriate timestamps in 61.5% of the same events. Our algorithm also supported the correct calculation of 69% of the event relations to the section time in the i2b2 testing set.
Persistent AUV Operations Using a Robust Reactive Mission and Path Planning (RRMPP) Architecture

Providing a higher level of decision autonomy and accompanying prompt changes of an uncertain environment is a true challenge of AUVs autonomous operations. The proceeding approach introduces a robust reactive structure that accommodates an AUV's mission planning, task time management in a top level and incorporates environmental changes by a synchronic motion planning in a lower level. The proposed architecture is developed in a hierarchal modular format and a bunch of evolutionary algorithms are employed by each module to investigate the efficiency and robustness of the structure in different mission scenarios while water current data, uncertain static mobile/motile obstacles, and vehicles Kino dynamic constraints are taken into account. The motion planner is facilitated with online re planning capability to refine the vehicle's trajectory based on local variations of the environment. A small computational load is devoted for re planning procedure since the upper layer mission planner renders an efficient overview of the operation area that AUV should fly thru. Numerical simulations are carried out to investigate robustness and performance of the architecture in different situations of a real world underwater environment. Analysis of the simulation results claims the remarkable capability of the proposed model in accurate mission task time threat management while guarantying a secure deployment during the mission.
PET/CT evaluation of 18F FDG uptake in pericoronary adipose tissue in patients with stable coronary artery disease: Independent predictor of atherosclerotic lesions' formation?
Venue: Journal of Nuclear Cardiology

BackgroundInflammatory infiltrations in EAT which releases inflammatory cytokines correspond anatomically to the atheromatous plaques in underlying coronary vessels. However, it is unknown whether inflammatory activity of pericoronary adipose tissue (PCAT) promotes coronary atherosclerosis. CAD controls matched for age and BMI underwent 18F FDG PET/CT. Maximal SUV normalized by LA blood activity was measured on the sections corresponding to the respective coronaries (RCA, LCX, LAD) as well, as in subcutaneous fat, visceral fat, and epicardial fat. Extent of CAD was determined by stenosis in segments corresponding to 18F FDG PET/CT sections in coronarography using quantitative coronary analysis. PCAT SUV was significantly greater than SUV in other fat locations, as well as PCAT SUV in the controls. In CAD patients with BMI >25, PCAT SUV was positively related to stenosis of a respective coronary artery (RCA: 0.43; P .05; LCX 0.58; P .05; LAD 0.65; P .05) PCAT SUV was the only independent predictor of coronary stenosis of LAD and RCA.ConclusionsInflammatory activity of PCAT is greater than in other fat locations, in CAD is greater than in non CAD controls, and is independently associated with coronary stenosis. In overweight patients, PCAT SUV correlates with the extent of CAD.
Haptic rendering of contact between rigid and deformable objects based on penalty method with implicit time integration
Venue: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO)

The handling of contacts between virtual objects is a fundamental problem of 6 DOF haptic rendering in virtual environments. Especially, the haptic rendering of the contact between rigid and deformable objects is challenging because the physics simulation with high computational burden must be calculated in real time with good stability. In this paper, we introduce a fast and stable contact handling method that can be used for 6 DOF haptic rendering. The two way contact response is formulated based on a penalty method. To enhance the numerical stability in large time step, the penalty based contact force is integrated using implicit time integration. The method was evaluated by experiments using a haptic device combined with a physics simulator based on finite element method.
Seismic assessment of cold formed steel stud bracing wall panels using direct displacement based design approach
Venue: Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering

An important advancement in structural engineering in recent years has been the development of performance based design (PBD) However, its application to cold formed steel framed buildings remains largely unexplored. This paper presents the assessment of the bracing capacity of cold formed steel stud bracing wall panels using a direct displacement based design (DDBD) approach. The fundamentals of DDBD using equivalent damping, and inelastic displacement response spectra approaches are presented. These wall parameters needed for each approach are evaluated from experimental load deflection response behaviour under quasi static cyclic loading. Results obtained from the DDBD approach are compared with results from conventional non linear time history analyses (NLTHA) to confirm the validity of the adopted approach. It is found that results estimated from DDBD method using inelastic displacement response spectra approach correlated much better with NLTHA results than the equivalent damping method.