Personal information prediction from written texts

La détection de la paternité textuelle est un domaine de recherche qui existe depuis les années 1960. Il consiste à prédire l’auteur d’un texte en se basant sur d’autres textes dont les auteurs sont connus. Pour faire cela, plusieurs traits sur le style d’écriture et le contenu sont extraits. Pour ce mémoire, deux sous-problèmes de détection de la paternité textuelle ont été traités : la prédiction du genre et de l’âge de l’auteur. Des données collectées de blogs en ligne ont été utilisées pour faire cela. Dans ce travail, plusieurs traits (features) textuels ont été comparé en utilisant des méthodes d’apprentissage automatique. De même, des méthodes d’apprentissage profond ont été appliqués. Pour la tâche de classification du genre, les meilleurs résultats ont été obtenus en appliquant un système de vote majoritaire sur la prédiction d’autres modèles. Pour la classification d’âge, les meilleurs résultats ont été obtenu en utilisant un classificateur entrainé sur TF-IDF.Authorship Attribution (AA) is a field of research that exists since the 60s. It consists of identifying the author of a certain text based on texts with known authors. This is done by extracting features about the writing style and the content of the text. In this master thesis, two sub problems of AA were treated: gender and age classification using a corpus collected from online blogs. In this work, several features were compared using several feature-based algorithms. As well as deep learning methods. For the gender classification task, the best results are the ones obtained by a majority vote system over the outputs of several classifiers. For the age classification task, the best result was obtained using classifier trained over TFIDF

Comparison of Surgical Outcome of Open versus Laparoscopic Nephrectomy

Introduction: Removal of a kidney is a common surgical procedure for a longtime. The procedure was traditionally done by open surgery. Since the advent of laparoscopic surgery, nephrectomy is being done increasingly laparoscopically. The laparoscopic approach has obvious advantages. Better cosmetics, less operative time, lesser need for blood transfusions, feweranalgesia requirements, early mobility,and oral feed, early return to work,and fewerintraoperative and post-operative major complications all contribute to thesuperiority of laparoscopic nephrectomy. Objective:To compare surgical outcomesof open versus laparoscopic nephrectomy. Materials and Methods:This Retrospectives study was conducted in the Department of Urology, Institute of kidney disease, Hayatabad, Peshawar over a period of 2 years from January 2018to January 2020. Results:Our study included a total of 78 cases, 48.7% males and 51.3% females. The patient means the age of 42.69 years. 39.7% had hypertension and 19.2% had diabetes mellitus. Open nephrectomy was done in 40 patients and laparoscopic nephrectomy in 38 patients. The average operating time for open nephrectomy was 160.5 minutes and 130.9minutes for laparoscopic nephrectomy. The average blood loss during open and laparoscopic nephrectomywas 361.25ml and 59.86ml. Blood transfusion rate in open and laparoscopic nephrectomy was 55% and 10.5% (p=0.001). Overall, the post-operative complication rate was 52.5% and 21.5% for an open and laparoscopic approach. Post-operative pain was noted in 7.9% of patients in laparoscopic and 97.5% for an open approach. Fever was noted postoperatively in 26.3% and 62.5% of patients in laparoscopic and open approaches (p=0.001). The average hospital stay in the laparoscopic approach was 2.8days and 4.5days in the open approach. The mean tumor size was 5.65cm in laparoscopic while 8.1cm in the open approach. Catheter and drain removal was on average 1.18 days and 1.32days post-op day in the laparoscopic group while it was 2.35days and 2.3days post-op day in an open group, respectively. There were no per-op complications in the laparoscopic approach as compared to 2 Cases of minor IVC injury in open. Conclusion:In our study,we conclude that the laparoscopic approach for nephrectomy is far superior as compared tothe open approach and it is recommended that Laparoscopic simple and radical nephrectomy shouldbe considered a gold standard treatment. Keywords:Open nephrectomy, laparoscopic nephrectomy, tumor, HTN, D

Comparison of Surgical Outcome of Open versus Laparoscopic Nephrectomy

Introduction: Removal of a kidney is a common surgical procedure for a longtime. The procedure was traditionally done by open surgery. Since the advent of laparoscopic surgery, nephrectomy is being done increasingly laparoscopically. The laparoscopic approach has obvious advantages. Better cosmetics, less operative time, lesser need for blood transfusions, feweranalgesia requirements, early mobility,and oral feed, early return to work,and fewerintraoperative and post-operative major complications all contribute to thesuperiority of laparoscopic nephrectomy. Objective:To compare surgical outcomesof open versus laparoscopic nephrectomy. Materials and Methods:This Retrospectives study was conducted in the Department of Urology, Institute of kidney disease, Hayatabad, Peshawar over a period of 2 years from January 2018to January 2020. Results:Our study included a total of 78 cases, 48.7% males and 51.3% females. The patient means the age of 42.69 years. 39.7% had hypertension and 19.2% had diabetes mellitus. Open nephrectomy was done in 40 patients and laparoscopic nephrectomy in 38 patients. The average operating time for open nephrectomy was 160.5 minutes and 130.9minutes for laparoscopic nephrectomy. The average blood loss during open and laparoscopic nephrectomywas 361.25ml and 59.86ml. Blood transfusion rate in open and laparoscopic nephrectomy was 55% and 10.5% (p=0.001). Overall, the post-operative complication rate was 52.5% and 21.5% for an open and laparoscopic approach. Post-operative pain was noted in 7.9% of patients in laparoscopic and 97.5% for an open approach. Fever was noted postoperatively in 26.3% and 62.5% of patients in laparoscopic and open approaches (p=0.001). The average hospital stay in the laparoscopic approach was 2.8days and 4.5days in the open approach. The mean tumor size was 5.65cm in laparoscopic while 8.1cm in the open approach. Catheter and drain removal was on average 1.18 days and 1.32days post-op day in the laparoscopic group while it was 2.35days and 2.3days post-op day in an open group, respectively. There were no per-op complications in the laparoscopic approach as compared to 2 Cases of minor IVC injury in open. Conclusion:In our study,we conclude that the laparoscopic approach for nephrectomy is far superior as compared tothe open approach and it is recommended that Laparoscopic simple and radical nephrectomy shouldbe considered a gold standard treatment. Keywords:Open nephrectomy, laparoscopic nephrectomy, tumor, HTN, D

Antidepressant effects of crocin and its effects on transcript and protein levels of CREB, BDNF, and VGF in rat hippocampus

BACKGROUND: Antidepressants have been shown to affect levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and VGF (non-acronymic) whose transcriptions are dependent on cAMP response element binding protein (CREB) in long term treatment. The aim of this study was to verify the subacute antidepressant effects of crocin, an active constituent of saffron (Crocus sativus L.), and its effects on CREB, BDNF, and VGF proteins, transcript levels and amount of active, phosphorylated CREB (P-CREB) protein in rat hippocampus. METHODS: Crocin (12.5, 25, and 50 mg/kg), imipramine (10 mg/kg; positive control) and saline (1 mL/kg; neutral control) were administered intraperitoneally (IP) to male Wistar rats for 21 days. The antidepressant effects were studied using the forced swimming test (FST) on day 21 after injection. Protein expression and transcript levels of genes in the rat hippocampus were evaluated using western blot and quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), respectively. RESULTS: Crocin significantly reduced the immobility time in the FST. Western blot analysis showed that 25 and 50 mg/kg of crocin increased the levels of CREB and BDNF significantly and dose dependently. All doses of crocin increased the VGF levels in a dose-dependent manner. Levels of p-CREB increased significantly by 50 mg/kg dose of crocin. Only 12.5 mg/kg crocin could significantly increase the transcript levels of BDNF. No changes in CREB and VGF transcript levels were observed in all groups. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that crocin has antidepressant-like action by increasing CREB, BDNF and VGF levels in hippocampus

Low-bit Shift Network for End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding

Deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved impressive success in multiple domains. Over the years, the accuracy of these models has increased with the proliferation of deeper and more complex architectures. Thus, state-of-the-art solutions are often computationally expensive, which makes them unfit to be deployed on edge computing platforms. In order to mitigate the high computation, memory, and power requirements of inferring convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we propose the use of power-of-two quantization, which quantizes continuous parameters into low-bit power-of-two values. This reduces computational complexity by removing expensive multiplication operations and with the use of low-bit weights. ResNet is adopted as the building block of our solution and the proposed model is evaluated on a spoken language understanding (SLU) task. Experimental results show improved performance for shift neural network architectures, with our low-bit quantization achieving 98.76 \% on the test set which is comparable performance to its full-precision counterpart and state-of-the-art solutions.Comment: Accepted at INTERSPEECH 202

THE FEDERATION OF STUDENT ISLAMIC SOCIETIES PROGRAMME TO CHALLENGE MENTAL HEALTH STIGMA IN MUSLIM COMMUNITIES IN ENGLAND: THE FOSIS BIRMINGHAM STUDY

Background: 1 in 4 people experience mental health problems at some point during their lives and Muslims are no exception. Exacerbating the morbidity and mortality associated with mental health problems in Muslims is Islamophobia. Stigma and shame are major barriers to accessing and using mental health services and many Muslims with mental health problems do not receive the treatment they need. The Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) United Kingdom branch organized a mental health conference to challenge the stigma attached to psychological problems in Muslims and to encourage care seeking in this group. Design: We conducted a single arm, pre-post comparison study on Muslims who attended the FOSIS mental health conference in Birmingham Medical School, England. Validated stigma scales measuring knowledge, attitudes and behavior were administered on participants before and immediately after exposure to the programme. Participants were also asked to respond to statements, the items of which were on a 5-point Likert scale, about the role that Islam plays in Muslim mental health, stigma as a barrier for Muslims with mental health problems to accessing and using mental health services and if they felt inspired to challenge stigma. Results: 50/250 (20%) of participants completed the study. There were statistically significant improvements in the \u27Reported and Intended Behavior\u27 score (p=0.0036), the \u27Inspired to Take Action\u27 Score (p=0.0202) and the \u27Incorporating Islamic Principles into Mental Health Treatment for Muslims is Beneficial\u27 score (p=0.0187). Discussion: The findings of our study suggest that a \u27bespoke\u27 Muslim mental health conference comprised of talks delivered by experts in Islam and mental health and a Muslim who has first-hand experience of psychological distress might be effective at reducing mental health stigma in the Muslim community. Our results should help to inform the design, development and delivery of future Muslim mental health conferences however more robust research in this area is needed

Design, synthesis and biological evaluation of novel coumarin-based benzamides as potent histone deacetylase inhibitors and anticancer agents

Histone deacetylases (HDACs) are attractive therapeutic targets for the treatment of cancer and other diseases. It has four classes (I-IV), among them especially class I isozyme are involved in promoting tumor cells proliferation, angiogenesis, differentiation, invasion and metastasis and also viable targets for cancer therapeutics. A novel series of coumarin-based benzamides was designed and synthesized as HDAC inhibitors. The cytotoxic activity of the synthesized compounds (8a-u) was evaluated against six human cancer cell lines including HCT116, A2780, MCF7, PC3, HL60 and A549 and a single normal cell line (Huvec). We evaluated their inhibitory activities against pan HDAC and HDAC1 isoform. Four compounds (8f, 8q, 8r and 8u) showed significant cytotoxicity with IC50 in the range of 0.53–57.59 μM on cancer cells and potent pan-HDAC inhibitory activity (consists of HDAC isoenzymes) (IC50 = 0.80–14.81 μM) and HDAC1 inhibitory activity (IC50 = 0.47–0.87 μM and also, had no effect on Huvec (human normal cell line) viability (IC50 > 100 μM). Among them, 8u displayed a higher potency for HDAC1 inhibition with IC50 value of 0.47 ± 0.02 μM near equal to the reference drug Entinostat (IC50 = 0.41 ± 0.06 μM). Molecular docking studies and Molecular dynamics simulation of compound 8a displayed possible mode of interaction between this compound and HDAC1enzym

Evaluation of Ethnopharmacological and Antioxidant Potential of Zanthoxylum armatum

Zanthoxylum armatum DC. (syn. Z. alatum Roxb.) is an important medicinal plant commonly called Timur or Indian prickly ash. The ethnopharmacological study of Z. armatum revealed the use of different plant parts for curing various ailments including cholera, chest infection, fever, indigestion, stomach disorders, gas problems, piles, toothache, gum problems, dyspepsia, as carminative, antipyretic, aromatic, tonic, and stomachic. Keeping in view the medicinal potential of the plant, the antioxidant activity was evaluated using 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging, reducing power, and phosphomolybdate assay using different concentrations (7.81 μg/mL–250 μg/mL). Ascorbic acid was taken as standard. The results indicated that the free radical scavenging activity ranged from 40.12% to 78.39%, and the reductive potential ranged from 0.265 nm to 1.411 nm while the total antioxidant activity ranged from 0.124 nm to 0.183 nm. The antioxidant potential evaluated by three assays increased in a concentration dependent manner and ascorbic acid showed better antioxidant activity than leaf extract. Results obtained through different tests confirmed redox protective activities of Zanthoxylum armatum. Further in vitro and in vivo research should be performed, so this plant can be further utilized in drug development