Hepatitis B Surface Antigen and Hepatitis C Virus Antibodies among Drug Users in Burkina Faso

Introduction: The epidemiology of both hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections among drug users (DUs) is little known in West Africa. The study aimed to assess the prevalence of hepatitis B and C viruses among drug users in Burkina Faso. Methodology: This was a cross-sectional biological and behavioral survey conducted between June and August 2022, among drug users in Ouagadougou and Bobo Dioulasso, the two main cities of Burkina Faso. A respondent-driven sampling (RDS) was used to recruit drug users. Hepatitis B surface antigen was determined using lateral flow rapid test kits and antibodies to hepatitis C virus in serum determined using an Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay. Data were entered and analyzed using Stata 17 software. Weighted binary logistic regression was used to identify the associated factors of hepatitis B and C infections and a p-value Results: A total of 323 drug users were recruited with 97.5% males. The mean age was 32.7 years old. The inhaled or smoked mode was the most used by drug users. The adjusted hepatitis B and hepatitis C prevalence among study participants were 11.1% and 2.3% respectively. The marital status (p = 0.001), and the nationality (p = 0.011) were significantly associated with hepatitis B infection. The type of drug used was not significantly associated with hepatitis B infection or hepatitis C infection. Conclusion: The prevalence of HBsAg and anti-HCV antibodies among DUs are comparable to those reported in the general population in Burkina Faso. This result suggests that the main routes of contamination by HBV and HCV among DUs are similar to those in the population, and could be explained by the low use of the injectable route by DUs in Burkina Faso.

Evaluation of an Autonomous Vehicle User Interface for Sensory Impaired Users

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) hold immense promises in revolutionizing transportation, and their potential benefits extend to individuals with impairments, particularly those with vision and hearing impairments. However, the accommodation of these individuals in AVs requires developing advanced user interfaces. This paper describes an explorative study of a multimodal user interface for autonomous vehicles, specifically developed for passengers with sensory (vision and/or hearing) impairments. In a driving simulator, 32 volunteers with simulated sensory impairments, were exposed to multiple drives in an autonomous vehicle while freely interacting with standard and inclusive variants of the infotainment and navigation system interface. The two user interfaces differed in graphical layout and voice messages, which adopted inclusive design principles for the inclusive variant. Questionnaires and structured interviews were conducted to collect participants’ impressions. The data analysis reports positive user experiences, but also identifies technical challenges. Verified guidelines are provided for further development of inclusive user interface solutions.

Reform of the Irrigation Sector and Creation of Functional and Sustainable Irrigation Water Users Associations (AUEI) in Niger: Capitalization of the Experience of the Konni AHA

During the 1980s, as part of a policy of liberalization, following budgetary cuts linked to the implementation of structural adjustment programs, management responsibilities for AHAs were transferred from ONAHA to cooperatives concerned. Due to lack of financial resources, but also because of poor management, everywhere in Niger we are witnessing an accelerated deterioration of the irrigation infrastructure of hydro-agricultural developments. Institutional studies carried out on this situation led the State of Niger to initiate a reform of the governance of hydro-agricultural developments, by streng-thening the status of ONAHA, by creating an Association of Irrigation Water Users (AUEI) and by restructuring the old cooperatives. Indeed, this research aims to analyze the creation of functional and sustainable Irrigation Water User Associations (AUEI) in Niger in a context of reform of the irrigation sector, and based on the experience of the Konni AHA. It is based on a methodological approach which takes into account documentary research and the collection of data from 115 farmers, selected by reasoned choice and directly concerned by the management of the irrigated area. The data collected was analyzed and the results were analyzed using the systemic approach and the diagnostic process. The results show that the main mission of the AUEI is to ensure better management of water, hydraulic equipment and infrastructure on the hydro-agricultural developments of Konni. The creation of the Konni AUEI was possible thanks to massive support from the populations and authorities in the implementation process. After its establishment, the AUEI experienced a certain lethargy for some time due to the rehabilitation work of the AHA but currently it is functional and operational in terms of associative life and governance. Thus, the constraints linked to the legal system, the delay in the completion of the work, the uncertainties of access to irrigation water but also the problems linked to the change in mentality of certain ONAHA agents constitute the challenges that must be resolved in the short term for the operationalization of the Konni AUEI.

Design Method for Optimizing the Interactive Interface of Live Broadcasting Platform for the Elderly Users

In the era of network live broadcasting for everyone,the development of live broadcasting platforms is also more intelligent and diversified.However,in the face of a large group of elderly users,the interface interaction design mode used is still mainly based on the interaction mode for young groups,and is not designed for elderly users.Therefore,a design method for optimizing the interaction interface of live broadcasting platform for elderly users was proposed in this study.Firstly,the case study method and Delphi expert survey method were used to determine the design needs of elderly users and the design mode was analysed.Secondly,the orthogonal design principle was used to design a test sample of the interactive interface of live broadcasting platform applicable for the elderly users,and then a user evaluation system was established to calculate the weights of the design elements using hierarchical analysis,and then the predictive relationship between the design mode of the interactive interface of live broadcasting platform and the elderly users was established by Quantitative Theory I.Finally,Genetic Algorithm was applied to generate the optimized design scheme.The results showed that the design method based on the Genetic Algorithm and the combination of Quantitative Theory can scientifically and effectively optimize the design of the interactive interface of the live broadcasting platform for the elderly users,and improve the experience of the elderly users.

The Intersection of Privacy by Design and Behavioral Economics: Nudging Users towards Privacy-Friendly Choices

This paper conducts a comprehensive review of existing research on Privacy by Design (PbD) and behavioral economics, explores the intersection of Privacy by Design (PbD) and behavioral economics, and how designers can leverage “nudges” to encourage users towards privacy-friendly choices. We analyze the limitations of rational choice in the context of privacy decision-making and identify key opportunities for integrating behavioral economics into PbD. We propose a user-centered design framework for integrating behavioral economics into PbD, which includes strategies for simplifying complex choices, making privacy visible, providing feedback and control, and testing and iterating. Our analysis highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of user behavior and decision-making in the context of privacy, and demonstrates the potential of behavioral economics to inform the design of more effective PbD solutions.

Enable Excel-Based Basic Cybersecurity Features for End Users by Using Python-Excel Integration

In the digital age, the global character of the Internet has significantly improved our daily lives by providing access to large amounts of knowledge and allowing for seamless connections. However, this enormously interconnected world is not without its risks. Malicious URLs are a powerful menace, masquerading as legitimate links while holding the intent to hack computer systems or steal sensitive personal information. As the sophistication and frequency of cyberattacks increase, identifying bad URLs has emerged as a critical aspect of cybersecurity. This study presents a new approach that enables the average end-user to check URL safety using Microsoft Excel. Using the powerful VirusTotal API for URL inspections, this study creates an Excel add-in that integrates Python and Excel to deliver a seamless, user-friendly interface. Furthermore, the study improves Excel’s capabilities by allowing users to encrypt and decrypt text communications directly in the spreadsheet. Users may easily encrypt their conversations by simply typing a key and the required text into predefined cells, enhancing their personal cybersecurity with a layer of cryptographic secrecy. This strategy democratizes access to advanced cybersecurity solutions, making attentive digital integrity a feature rather than a daunting burden.

Channel Correlation Based User Grouping Algorithm for Nonlinear Precoding Satellite Communication System

Low Earth Orbit(LEO)multibeam satellites will be widely used in the next generation of satellite communication systems,whose inter-beam interference will inevitably limit the performance of the whole system.Nonlinear precoding such as Tomlinson-Harashima precoding(THP)algorithm has been proved to be a promising technology to solve this problem,which has smaller noise amplification effect compared with linear precoding.However,the similarity of different user channels(defined as channel correlation)will degrade the performance of THP algorithm.In this paper,we qualitatively analyze the inter-beam interference in the whole process of LEO satellite over a specific coverage area,and the impact of channel correlation on Signal-to-Noise Ratio(SNR)of receivers when THP is applied.One user grouping algorithm is proposed based on the analysis of channel correlation,which could decrease the number of users with high channel correlation in each precoding group,thus improve the performance of THP.Furthermore,our algorithm is designed under the premise of co-frequency deployment and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM),which leads to more users under severe inter-beam interference compared to the existing research on geostationary orbit satellites broadcasting systems.Simulation results show that the proposed user grouping algorithm possesses higher channel capacity and better bit error rate(BER)performance in high SNR conditions relative to existing works.

Leveraging User-Generated Comments and Fused BiLSTM Models to Detect and Predict Issues with Mobile Apps

In the last decade, technical advancements and faster Internet speeds have also led to an increasing number ofmobile devices and users. Thus, all contributors to society, whether young or old members, can use these mobileapps. The use of these apps eases our daily lives, and all customers who need any type of service can accessit easily, comfortably, and efficiently through mobile apps. Particularly, Saudi Arabia greatly depends on digitalservices to assist people and visitors. Such mobile devices are used in organizing daily work schedules and services,particularly during two large occasions, Umrah and Hajj. However, pilgrims encounter mobile app issues such asslowness, conflict, unreliability, or user-unfriendliness. Pilgrims comment on these issues on mobile app platformsthrough reviews of their experiences with these digital services. Scholars have made several attempts to solve suchmobile issues by reporting bugs or non-functional requirements by utilizing user comments.However, solving suchissues is a great challenge, and the issues still exist. Therefore, this study aims to propose a hybrid deep learningmodel to classify and predict mobile app software issues encountered by millions of pilgrims during the Hajj andUmrah periods from the user perspective. Firstly, a dataset was constructed using user-generated comments fromrelevant mobile apps using natural language processing methods, including information extraction, the annotationprocess, and pre-processing steps, considering a multi-class classification problem. Then, several experimentswere conducted using common machine learning classifiers, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Long Short-TermMemory (LSTM), and Convolutional Neural Network Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) architectures, toexamine the performance of the proposed model. Results show 96% in F1-score and accuracy, and the proposedmodel outperformed the mentioned models.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Adaptive Technology for Multinode Users of Seawater Channel Based on Inductively Coupled Mooring Chain

As an important part of buoy-type ocean monitoring systems,the inductively coupled mooring chain solves the problem of data cotransmission through the multinode sensors that it carries,which is significant for the rapid acquisition of fish,hydrology,and other information.This paper is based on a seawater channel transmission model with a depth of 300 m and a bandwidth of 2 MHz.An orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM)technology is used to overcome the multipath effect of signal transmission on a seawater medium.The adaptive technology is integrated into the OFDM,and an improved joint subcarrier and bit power allocation algorithm is proposed.This algorithm solves the problem of dynamic subcarrier allocation during the cotransmission of underwater multinode user data in seawater channels.The results show that the algorithm complexity can be reduced by 0.18126×10^(-2)s during one complete OFDM system data transmission by the improved greedy algorithm,and a total of 216 bits are transmitted by the OFDM.The normalized channel capacity can be improved by 0.012 bit s^(-1)Hz^(-1).At the bit error ratio(BER)of 10^(-3),the BER performance can be improved by approximately 6 d B.When the numbers of users are 4 and 8,the improved algorithm increases the channel capacity,and the higher the number of users,the more evident the channel capacity improvement effect is.The results of this paper have an important reference value for enhancing the transmission performance of inductively coupled mooring chain underwater multinode data.

Identification of Influential Users in Online Social Network: A Brief Overview

Information networks where users join a network, publish their own content, and create links to other users are called Online Social Networks (OSNs). Nowadays, OSNs have become one of the major platforms to promote both new and viral applications as well as disseminate information. Social network analysis is the study of these information networks that leads to uncovering patterns of interaction among the entities. In this regard, finding influential users in OSNs is very important as they play a key role in the success above phenomena. Various approaches exist to detect influential users in OSNs, starting from simply counting the immediate neighbors to more complex machine-learning and message-passing techniques. In this paper, we review the recent existing research works that focused on identifying influential users in OSNs.

Effects of Emotion on Decision-Making ofMethamphetamine Users: Based on theEmotional Iowa Gambling Task

The relapse of methamphetamine (meth) is associated with decision-making dysfunction. The present study aims to investigate theimpact of different emotions on the decision-making behavior of meth users. We used 2 (gender: male, female) × 3 (emotion:positive, negative, neutral) × 5 (block: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) mixed experiment design. The study involved 168 meth users who weredivided into three groups: positive emotion, negative emotion and neutral emotion group, and tested by the emotional IowaGambling Task (IGT). The IGT performance of male users exhibited a decreasing trend from Block 1 to Block 3. Female methusers in positive emotion had the best performance in IGT than females in the other two groups. In positive emotion, the IGTperformance of female meth users was significantly better than that of men. Female meth users in positive emotion had betterdecision-making than those in negative or neutral emotion. Female meth users in positive emotion had better decision-makingperformance than males in positive emotion. In negative and neutral emotions, there was no significant gender difference indecision-making.

Trip Purposes of Automobile Users Inference Using Multi-day Traffic Monitoring Data

Determining trip purpose is an important link to explore travel rules. In this paper,we takea utomobile users in urban areas as the research object,combine unsupervised learning and supervised learningm ethods to analyze their travel characteristics,and focus on the classification and prediction of automobileu sers’trip purposes. However,previous studies on trip purposes mainly focused on questionnaires and GPSd ata,which cannot well reflect the characteristics of automobile travel. In order to avoid the multi-dayb ehavior variability and unobservable heterogeneity of individual characteristics ignored in traditional traffic questionnaires,traffic monitoring data from the Northern District of Qingdao are used,and the K-meansc lustering method is applied to estimate the trip purposes of automobile users. Then,Adaptive Boosting(AdaBoost)and Random Forest(RF)methods are used to classify and predict trip purposes. Finally,ther esult shows:(1)the purpose of automobile users can be mainly divided into four clusters,which includeC ommuting trips,Flexible life demand travel in daytime,Evening entertainment and leisure shopping,andT axi-based trips for the first three types of purposes,respectively;(2)the Random Forest method performss ignificantly better than AdaBoost in trip purpose prediction for higher accuracy;(3)the average predictiona ccuracy of Random Forest under hyper-parameters optimization reaches96.25%,which proves the feasibilitya nd rationality of the above clustering results.

Reliable and Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning with Anomalous Users

Recently,various privacy-preserving schemes have been proposed to resolve privacy issues in federated learning(FL).However,most of them ignore the fact that anomalous users holding low-quality data may reduce the accuracy of trained models.Although some existing works manage to solve this problem,they either lack privacy protection for users’sensitive information or introduce a two-cloud model that is difficult to find in reality.A reliable and privacy-preserving FL scheme named reliable and privacy-preserving federated learning(RPPFL)based on a single-cloud model is proposed.Specifically,inspired by the truth discovery technique,we design an approach to identify the user’s reliability and thereby decrease the impact of anomalous users.In addition,an additively homomorphic cryptosystem is utilized to provide comprehensive privacy preservation(user’s local gradient privacy and reliability privacy).We give rigorous theoretical analysis to show the security of RPPFL.Based on open datasets,we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that RPPEL compares favorably with existing works in terms of efficiency and accuracy.

AMachine Learning Approach to User Profiling for Data Annotation of Online Behavior

The user’s intent to seek online information has been an active area of research in user profiling.User profiling considers user characteristics,behaviors,activities,and preferences to sketch user intentions,interests,and motivations.Determining user characteristics can help capture implicit and explicit preferences and intentions for effective user-centric and customized content presentation.The user’s complete online experience in seeking information is a blend of activities such as searching,verifying,and sharing it on social platforms.However,a combination of multiple behaviors in profiling users has yet to be considered.This research takes a novel approach and explores user intent types based on multidimensional online behavior in information acquisition.This research explores information search,verification,and dissemination behavior and identifies diverse types of users based on their online engagement using machine learning.The research proposes a generic user profile template that explains the user characteristics based on the internet experience and uses it as ground truth for data annotation.User feedback is based on online behavior and practices collected by using a survey method.The participants include both males and females from different occupation sectors and different ages.The data collected is subject to feature engineering,and the significant features are presented to unsupervised machine learning methods to identify user intent classes or profiles and their characteristics.Different techniques are evaluated,and the K-Mean clustering method successfully generates five user groups observing different user characteristics with an average silhouette of 0.36 and a distortion score of 1136.Feature average is computed to identify user intent type characteristics.The user intent classes are then further generalized to create a user intent template with an Inter-Rater Reliability of 75%.This research successfully extracts different user types based on their preferences in online content,platforms,criteria,and frequency.The study also validates the proposed template on user feedback data through Inter-Rater Agreement process using an external human rater.

Defining the We-map Reference Frames and Providing Mathematical Expressions for Transformation Relations

We-map is an interactive mobile map that can be easily communicated and applied on personal electronic devices,such as personal computers and mobile phones.Therefore,the study of direction systems and coordinate systems is critical,and exploring reference frames is essential in direction and coordinate systems.Despite its significance,existing research on We-map lacks specific solutions for the exploration of reference frames is indispensable for the establishment of accurate direction and coordinate systems.In this paper,we endeavor to address this gap by elucidating the significance of We-map reference frames,defining them with mathematical constraints,summarizing their nature and characteristics,deriving their transformation relationships and representing them through mathematical formulars and equations.Our work contributes to the fundamental theory of We-map and provides valuable systems and support for the mathematical foundation of We-map,map production,and platform development.Ultimately,this research serves to advance the development of We-map.

User Profile & Attitude Analysis Based on Unstructured Social Media and Online Activity

As social media and online activity continue to pervade all age groups, it serves as a crucial platform for sharing personal experiences and opinions as well as information about attitudes and preferences for certain interests or purchases. This generates a wealth of behavioral data, which, while invaluable to businesses, researchers, policymakers, and the cybersecurity sector, presents significant challenges due to its unstructured nature. Existing tools for analyzing this data often lack the capability to effectively retrieve and process it comprehensively. This paper addresses the need for an advanced analytical tool that ethically and legally collects and analyzes social media data and online activity logs, constructing detailed and structured user profiles. It reviews current solutions, highlights their limitations, and introduces a new approach, the Advanced Social Analyzer (ASAN), that bridges these gaps. The proposed solutions technical aspects, implementation, and evaluation are discussed, with results compared to existing methodologies. The paper concludes by suggesting future research directions to further enhance the utility and effectiveness of social media data analysis.

Learning Dual-Layer User Representation for Enhanced Item Recommendation

User representation learning is crucial for capturing different user preferences,but it is also critical challenging because user intentions are latent and dispersed in complex and different patterns of user-generated data,and thus cannot be measured directly.Text-based data models can learn user representations by mining latent semantics,which is beneficial to enhancing the semantic function of user representations.However,these technologies only extract common features in historical records and cannot represent changes in user intentions.However,sequential feature can express the user’s interests and intentions that change time by time.But the sequential recommendation results based on the user representation of the item lack the interpretability of preference factors.To address these issues,we propose in this paper a novel model with Dual-Layer User Representation,named DLUR,where the user’s intention is learned based on two different layer representations.Specifically,the latent semantic layer adds an interactive layer based on Transformer to extract keywords and key sentences in the text and serve as a basis for interpretation.The sequence layer uses the Transformer model to encode the user’s preference intention to clarify changes in the user’s intention.Therefore,this dual-layer user mode is more comprehensive than a single text mode or sequence mode and can effectually improve the performance of recommendations.Our extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate DLUR’s performance over state-of-the-art recommendation models.In addition,DLUR’s ability to explain recommendation results is also demonstrated through some specific cases.

User Preference Aware Hierarchical Edge-User Cooperative Caching Strategy

The emergence of various new services has posed a huge challenge to the existing network architecture.To improve the network delay and backhaul pressure,caching popular contents at the edge of network has been considered as a feasible scheme.However,how to efficiently utilize the limited caching resources to cache diverse contents has been confirmed as a tough problem in the past decade.In this paper,considering the time-varying user requests and the heterogeneous content sizes,a user preference aware hierarchical cooperative caching strategy in edge-user caching architecture is proposed.We divide the caching strategy into three phases,that is,the content placement,the content delivery and the content update.In the content placement phase,a cooperative content placement algorithm for local content popularity is designed to cache contents proactively.In the content delivery phase,a cooperative delivery algorithm is proposed to deliver the cached contents.In the content update phase,a content update algorithm is proposed according to the popularity of the contents.Finally,the proposed caching strategy is validated using the MovieLens dataset,and the results reveal that the proposed strategy improves the delay performance by at least 35.3%compared with the other three benchmark strategies.

Deep Learning Social Network Access Control Model Based on User Preferences

A deep learning access controlmodel based on user preferences is proposed to address the issue of personal privacy leakage in social networks.Firstly,socialusers andsocialdata entities are extractedfromthe social networkandused to construct homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs.Secondly,a graph neural networkmodel is designed based on user daily social behavior and daily social data to simulate the dissemination and changes of user social preferences and user personal preferences in the social network.Then,high-order neighbor nodes,hidden neighbor nodes,displayed neighbor nodes,and social data nodes are used to update user nodes to expand the depth and breadth of user preferences.Finally,a multi-layer attention network is used to classify user nodes in the homogeneous graph into two classes:allow access and deny access.The fine-grained access control problem in social networks is transformed into a node classification problem in a graph neural network.The model is validated using a dataset and compared with other methods without losing generality.The model improved accuracy by 2.18%compared to the baseline method GraphSAGE,and improved F1 score by 1.45%compared to the baseline method,verifying the effectiveness of the model.

Integrating Neighborhood Geographic Distribution and Social Structure Influence for Social Media User Geolocation

Geolocating social media users aims to discover the real geographical locations of users from their publicly available data,which can support online location-based applications such as disaster alerts and local content recommen-dations.Social relationship-based methods represent a classical approach for geolocating social media.However,geographically proximate relationships are sparse and challenging to discern within social networks,thereby affecting the accuracy of user geolocation.To address this challenge,we propose user geolocation methods that integrate neighborhood geographical distribution and social structure influence(NGSI)to improve geolocation accuracy.Firstly,we propose a method for evaluating the homophily of locations based on the k-order neighbor-hood geographic distribution(k-NGD)similarity among users.There are notable differences in the distribution of k-NGD similarity between location-proximate and non-location-proximate users.Exploiting this distinction,we filter out non-location-proximate social relationships to enhance location homophily in the social network.To better utilize the location-proximate relationships in social networks,we propose a graph neural network algorithm based on the social structure influence.The algorithm enables us to perform a weighted aggregation of the information of users’multi-hop neighborhood,thereby mitigating the over-smoothing problem of user features and improving user geolocation performance.Experimental results on real social media dataset demonstrate that the neighborhood geographical distribution similarity metric can effectively filter out non-location-proximate social relationships.Moreover,compared with 7 existing social relationship-based user positioning methods,our proposed method can achieve multi-granularity user geolocation and improve the accuracy by 4.84%to 13.28%.