Abstract

: Herbal medicine and nutritional supplements are suggested to treat premenstrual somatic and psycho‐behavioural symptoms in clinical guidelines; nonetheless, this is at present based on poor‐quality trial evidence. Hence, we aimed to design a systematic review and meta‐analysis for their effectiveness in alleviating premenstrual symptoms. The published randomized controlled tri‐ als (RCTs) were extracted from Google scholar, PubMed, Scopus and PROSPERO databases. The risk of bias in randomized trials was assessed by Cochrane risk‐of‐bias tool. The main outcome pa‐ rameters were analysed separately based on the Premenstrual Symptom Screening Tool and PMTS and DRSP scores. Secondary parameters of somatic, psychological, and behavioural subscale symp‐ toms of PSST were also analysed. Data synthesis was performed assuming a random‐effects model, and standardized mean difference (SMDs) was analysed using SPSS version 28.0.0 (IBM, Armonk, NY, USA). A total of 754 articles were screened, and 15 RCTs were included (n = 1211 patients). Primary results for participants randomized to an intervention reported reduced PSST (n = 9), PMTS (n = 2), and DSR (n = 4) scores with (SMD = −1.44; 95% CI: −1.72 to −1.17), (SMD = −1.69; 95% CI: −3.80 to 0.42) and (SMD = 2.86; 95% CI: 1.02 to 4.69) verses comparator with substantial heterogeneity. Physical (SMD = −1.61; 95% CI = −2.56 to −0.66), behavioural (SMD = −0.60; 95% CI = −1.55 to0.35) and mood (SMD = 0.57; 95% CI = −0.96 to 2.11) subscale symptom groupings of PSST displayed similar findings. Fifty‐three studies (n = 8) were considered at low risk of bias with high quality. Mild adverse events were reported by four RCTs. Based on the existing evidence, herbal medicine and nutritional supplements may be effective and safe for PMS

Abstract

Efforts have been devoted for the discovery and development of positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) of 5-HT2CR because of their potential advantages over the orthosteric agonist like Lorcaserin that was withdrawn from the market. On the other hand, pursuing a positive ago-allosteric modulator (PAAM) is considered as beneficial particularly when an agonist is not capable of affecting the potency of the endogenous agonist sufficiently. In search of a suitable PAAM of 5-HT2CR we adopted an in silico based approach that indicated the potential of the 3-(1-hydroxycycloalkyl) substituted isoquinolin-1-one derivatives against the 5-HT2CR as majority of these molecules interacted with the site other than that of Lorcaserin with superior docking scores. These compounds along with the regioisomeric 3-methyleneisoindolin-1-one derivatives were prepared via the Cu(OAc)2 catalyzed coupling of 2-iodobenzamide with 1-ethynylcycloalkanol under ultrasound irradiation. According to the in vitro studies, most of these compounds were not only found to be potent and selective agonists but also emerged as PAAM of 5-HT2CR whereas Lorcaserin did not show PAAM activities. According to the SAR study the isoquinolin-1(2H)-ones appeared as better PAAM than isoindolin-1-ones whereas the presence of hydroxyl group appeared to be crucial for the activity. With the potent PAAM activity for 5-HT2CR (EC50 = 1 nM) and 107 and 86-fold selectivity towards 5-HT2C over 5-HT2A and 5-HT2B the compound 4i was identified as a hit molecule. The compound showed good stability in male BALB/c mice brain homogenate (∼85 % remaining after 2 h), moderate stability in the presence of rat liver microsomes (42 % remaining after 1 h) and acceptable PK properties with fast reaching in the brain maintaining ∼ 1:1 brain/plasma concentration ratio. The compound at a dose of 50 mg/kg exhibited decreased trend in the food intake starting from day 3 in S.D. rats, which reached significant by 5th day, and the effect was comparable to Lorcaserin (10 mg/kg) on day 5. Thus, being the first example of PAAM of 5-HT2CR the compound 4i is of further medicinal interest.

Abstract

Abstract Background: Automatic functional annotation of proteins is an open research problem in bioinformatics. The growing number of protein entries in public databases, for example in UniProtKB, poses challenges in manual functional annotation. Manual annotation requires expert human curators to search and read related research articles, interpret the results, and assign the annotations to the proteins. Thus, it is a time-con‑ suming and expensive process. Therefore, designing computational tools to perform automatic annotation leveraging the high quality manual annotations that already exist in UniProtKB/SwissProt is an important research problem Results: In this paper, we extend and adapt the GrAPFI (graph-based automatic protein function inference) (Sarker et al. in BMC Bioinform 21, 2020; Sarker et al., in: Pro‑ ceedings of 7th international conference on complex networks and their applications, Cambridge, 2018) method for automatic annotation of proteins with gene ontology (GO) terms renaming it as GrAPFI-GO. The original GrAPFI method uses label propaga‑ tion in a similarity graph where proteins are linked through the domains, families, and superfamilies that they share. Here, we also explore various types of similarity measures based on common neighbors in the graph. Moreover, GO terms are arranged in a hier‑ archical manner according to semantic parent–child relations. Therefore, we propose an efcient pruning and post-processing technique that integrates both semantic similarity and hierarchical relations between the GO terms. We produce experimental results comparing the GrAPFI-GO method with and without considering common neighbors similarity. We also test the performance of GrAPFI-GO and other annotation tools for GO annotation on a benchmark of proteins with and without the proposed pruning and post-processing procedure. Conclusion: Our results show that the proposed semantic hierarchical post-pro‑ cessing potentially improves the performance of GrAPFI-GO and of other annotation tools as well. Thus, GrAPFI-GO exposes an original efcient and reusable procedure, to exploit the semantic relations among the GO terms in order to improve the automatic annotation of protein functions

Abstract

Autonomous driving vehicles (ADVs) are sleeping giant intelligent machines that perceive their environment and make driving decisions. Most existing ADSs are built as hand-engineered perception-planning-control pipelines. However, designing generalized handcrafted rules for autonomous driving in an urban environment is complex. An alternative approach is imitation learning (IL) from human driving demonstrations. However, most previous studies on IL for autonomous driving face several critical challenges: (1) poor generalization ability toward the unseen environment due to distribution shift problems such as changes in driving views and weather conditions; (2) lack of interpretability; and (3) mostly trained to learn the single driving task. To address these challenges, we propose a view-invariant spatiotemporal attentive planning and control network for autonomous vehicles. The proposed method first extracts spatiotemporal representations from images of a front and top driving view sequence through attentive Siamese 3DResNet. Then, the maximum mean discrepancy loss (MMD) is employed to minimize spatiotemporal discrepancies between these driving views and produce an invariant spatiotemporal representation, which reduces domain shift due to view change. Finally, the multitasking learning (MTL) method is employed to jointly train trajectory planning and high-level control tasks based on learned representations and previous motions. Results of extensive experimental evaluations on a large autonomous driving dataset with various weather/lighting conditions verified that the proposed method is effective for feasible motion planning and control in autonomous vehicles.

Abstract

Posts on Twitter allow users to express ideas and opinions very dynamically. This high volume of data provides relevant clues about the public judgment on a specific product, event, service, etc. While traditional sentiment analysis primarily focuses on classifying the sentiment in general (positive or negative) or at an aspect level (very positive, low negative, and so on) and cannot exploit the intensity information. Recently, the problem of irony detection in social media has been proven to be pervasive among research enthusiasts, posing a challenge to sentiment analysis systems. Moreover, the figurative use of language has received scarce attention from the computational linguistic research point of view. This paper proposes an architecture, the Experts Model, inspired by the standard Mixture of Experts (MoE) model. The key idea here is that each expert learns different sets of features from the feature vector, which helps in better irony detection (Ironic vs. Non-ironic - SemEval-2018 subtask A) and ironic type detection (Verbal irony with vs. without polarity contrast vs. Situational irony vs. Non-irony - SemEval-2018 subtask B) from the tweet. We compared our Experts Model’s results with baseline results along with the top five performers of SemEval-2018 Task-3, Ironic detection. The experimental results show that our proposed approach deals with the ironic detection problem and stands at the top-3 results.

Abstract

The need for automated fact-checking is getting prominent with every passing day as the spread of misinformation is swelling over the ever-increasing stream of online content. We focus on fine-grained labelling of factual information in tweets to facilitate better fact-checking systems capable of providing improved justifications. In this paper, we present a token-level annotation of factual claims in tweets from Indian Twitter. To deal with the multilingual variety of the Indian diaspora, we deal with tweets in English, Bengali, Hindi, and their codemixed variants. To the best of our knowledge, this dataset is first of kind, both in terms of labelling scheme as well as data sources.

Abstract

Grading student work is critical for assessing their understanding and providing necessary feedback. However, answer grading can become monotonous for teachers. On the standard ASAG data set, our system shows substantial improvements in classification disparity of correct and incorrect answers from a reference answer compared to baseline methods. Our supervised model (1) utilizes recent advances in semantic word embeddings and (2) implements ideas from one-shot learning methods, which are proven to work with minimal. We present experimental results from a model based on different approaches and demonstrates decent performance on standard benchmark dataset.

Abstract

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) play an important role in controlling local air pollution as well as climate change. In this study, we retrieved column-averaged dry-air ( X ) mole fractions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane (CH 4 ), and carbon monoxide (CO) using a ground-based EM27/SUN Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR). The EM27/SUN spectrometers are widely in use in the COllaborative Carbon Column Observing Network (COCCON). The PROFFAST software provided by COCCON has been used to analyze the measured atmospheric solar absorption spectra. In this letter, the diurnal variation and the time series of daily averaged X CO 2 , X CH 4 , and X CO covering the period from December 2020 to May 2021 are analyzed. The maximum values of X CO 2 , X CH 4 , and X CO are observed to be 420.57 ppm, 1.93 ppm, and 170.40 ppb, respectively. Less diurnal but clear seasonal changes are observed during the study period. X CH 4 and X CO from the Sentinel-5Precursor (S5P)/TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) are compared against the EM27/SUN retrievals. The correlation coefficient for the EM27/SUN retrieved X CH 4 and X CO, with the S5P/TROPOMI products, are 0.75 and 0.94, respectively.

Abstract

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF 339 MLD SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANT AT AMBERPET – HYDERABAD. Veerannapet Santhosh Vishal1, Shaik Rehana2, N. Munilakshmi3, L Partha Praveen4 1- Research Scholar, International Institute of Information Technology, Gachibowli, Hyderbad, Telangana-500032. 2- 2- Assistant Professor, International Institute of Information Technology, Gachibowli, Hyderbad, Telangana - 500032. 3- 3- Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Sri Venkateswara University College of Engineering, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh – 517502. 4- 4- Research Scholar, Department of Civil Engineering, Sri Venkateswara University College of Engineering, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh – 517502 * Corresponding author Email: santhoshvishal.v@research.iiit.ac.in Abstract Environmental and water resources have deteriorated due to rapid population growth, chemical industry effluents, agricultural practices, and climate changes. The primary cause of water contamination is due to sewage water pollution. Hence understanding and implementing an effective sewage treatment is necessary. Many cutting-edge techniques have been developed in recent years to increase the effectiveness of the removal of organic matter and nutrients by wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). To comprehend the effectiveness of wastewater treatment, the current study considered a sewage treatment plant (STP) located in Amberpet, Hyderabad. The capacity of the STP at Amberpet is 339 MLD (Million Litres per Day) and is evaluated by collecting 156 samples for 12 months (January 2018 – December 2018). An STP aims to minimize or remove organic debris, sediments, disease-causing organisms, and other pollutants in sewage water before disposing into the streams. The current study observed the removal efficiencies of the constituents Total Suspended Solids (TSS), Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD). This investigation assesses whether the effluents emitted into the river body are within the NRCD- set limitations (National River Conservative Directorate) as the treated sewage water is discharged into the Musi River (a tributary of Krishna Basin). The MSE values of different parameters like TSS, BOD, COD are 23.85, 28.54, 72.59. The RMSE values of TSS, BOD, COD are 4.88, 5.32, 8.52. The R2 values of TSS, BOD, COD are 0.95, 0.79, 0.90. Keywords: Wastewater Treatment Plant (WTTP), Biochemical Oxygen Demand, Chemical Oxygen Demand, Total suspended solids

Abstract

Background Depression is an all-too-common mood disorder that has been linked in various ways to the cognitive concept of attention. The Attention Network Test, based on the influential taxonomy of attention originally proposed by Posner, can be used to measure the efficacy of three components or networks of attention: Alerting, Orienting and Executive Control. Our focus here is to discover how depression might affect these networks. Methods Studies related to attention and depression were selected for this meta-analytic review using the online Attention Network Test (ANT) Database (Arora, Lawrence & Klein, 2020) resource. Based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 5 publications were analyzed with a Bayesian hierarchical model to compare participants with and without a diagnosis of depression. Results The posterior distribution of our model revealed no credible differences in the Alerting and Orienting networks but showed credible non-zero values for Executive Control. This suggests that Executive Control is less efficient in individuals suffering from depression. Limitations As literature using the ANT with depressed participants is limited, the methodological variability between studies in this meta-analysis should be considered when interpreting these results. Conclusion This meta-analysis review is the first quantitative review that aimed to address the ANT-depression literature. A consistent finding of no alerting and no orienting deficit but a deficit in the executive control suggests that some, but not all, components of attention are impaired in depression.