Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-Objective Optimization of Wire Antennas: Genetic Algorithms Versus Particle Swarm Optimization

The paper is aimed to the multi-objective optimization of wire multi-band antennas. Antennas are numerically modeled using time-domain integral-equation method. That way, the designed antennas can be characterized in a wide band of frequencies within a single run of the analysis. Antennas are optimized to reach the prescribed matching, to exhibit the omni-directional constant gain and to have the satisfactory polarization purity. Results of the design are experimentally verified. The multi-objective cost function is minimized by the genetic algorithm and by the particle swarm optimization. Results of the optimization by both the multi-objective methods are in detail compared. The combination of the time domain analysis and global optimization methods for the broadband antenna design and the detailed comparison of the multi-objective particle swarm optimization with the multi-objective genetic algorithm are the original contributions of the paper.
Synthesis of fibronectin by cultured human endothelial cells

Plasma fibronectin is probably the major nonimmune particulate opsonin in blood and is cross-linked to fibrin during the final stage of blood coagulation. Fibronectin also occurs in an insoluble form in basement membranes especially those underlying endothelial cells and in loose connective tissue. Fibronectin was demonstrated in cultured human endothelial cells and in the surrounding extracellular matrix by immunofluorescence microscopy by using antibody to human plasma fibronectin. Cultured human endothelial cells released fibronectin into the culture medium which was immunologically identical to the fibronectin in human plasma. Cultured human endothelial cells were labeled with [3H] leucine. The radioactive fibronectin present in the endothelial postculture medium and in urea extracts of cellular monolayers was isolated with either anti-fibronectin coupled to Protein A-Sepharose or double antibody immunoprecipitation and characterized by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. When reduced, the [3H] fibronectin synthesized by cultured endothelial cells had the same mol wt (approximately 200,000) as plasma fibronectin. Unreduced, the [3H] fibronectin synthesized by endothelial cells migrated as a dimer, as did plasma fibronectin. Fibronectin accounted for approximately 15% of the protein synthesized and released by endothelial cells into the culture medium. Thus, cultured endothelial cells synthesize fibronectin, secrete it into the culture medium, and incorporate it into extracellular matrix. The results suggest that the endothelial cell is potentially a major site of synthesis of circulating plasma fibronectin. In addition, fibronectin derived from endothelial cells may be an important structural component of the subendothelium.
Hygrothermal Properties of Highly Toughened Epoxy Adhesives

The absorption and desorption of water in two different rubber-toughened epoxy adhesives was measured gravimetrically over a relatively wide range of temperature and relative humidity (RH). The data were fitted to a new diffusion model in which Fick's law was assumed to act in two sequential stages, each with its own diffusion coefficient and saturated water concentration. This “sequential dual Fickian” (SDF) model and a Langmuir-type diffusion model were both able to model the absorption behaviour. The dependence of the five SDF model parameters on temperature and RH was investigated in detail. The two diffusion coefficients were found to be largely independent of RH, while the fractional mass uptake values for each stage increased with RH. The absorption temperature only had a significant effect on the diffusion coefficient of the first stage and the fractional mass uptake of the second stage. Water desorption from the two epoxies was modeled accurately using Fick's law. A significant difference was observed between the amounts of retained water in the two adhesives after drying. The results can be used to predict the water concentration distribution in adhesive joints exposed to environments of changing temperature and RH.
Cache System for Parallel I / O

One of the largest challenges in client-side caching in extremely large-scale environments is consistency and coherency. By handling a user-space cache, we can offer applications much closer control over our client-side cache and scale the cache with the size of the compute resources (i.e. compute nodes). Cache data is shared among each compute node analagous to a traditional shared memory machine. Our approach to maintaining the integrity of the distributed cache turns out to be quite scalable and offers potentially sizable performance gains.
An Experimental Security Analysis of an Industrial Robot Controller

Industrial robots, automated manufacturing, and efficient logistics processes are at the heart of the upcoming fourth industrial revolution. While there are seminal studies on the vulnerabilities of cyber-physical systems in the industry, as of today there has been no systematic analysis of the security of industrial robot controllers. We examine the standard architecture of an industrial robot and analyze a concrete deployment from a systems security standpoint. Then, we propose an attacker model and confront it with the minimal set of requirements that industrial robots should honor: precision in sensing the environment, correctness in execution of control logic, and safety for human operators. Following an experimental and practical approach, we then show how our modeled attacker can subvert such requirements through the exploitation of software vulnerabilities, leading to severe consequences that are unique to the robotics domain. We conclude by discussing safety standards and security challenges in industrial robotics.
Optimal Controller Synthesis for Second Order LTI Plants with Switched Output Feedback

We derive a switched output feedback control law for the class of second order linear systems of relative degree two which maximizes a quantity that measures the rate of convergence of the state trajectories to the origin. After providing a formal definition for the rate of convergence and formulating an infinite horizon optimization problem, we explore a corresponding finite horizon problem for the specific case where the plant is a double integrator (P(s)=1/s2) and use qualitative information about the behavior of the optimal state trajectories to derive a control law for the corresponding infinite horizon problem. We then derive an optimal controller for a general second order plant of relative degree two by relating it to the double integrator case study through appropriate transformations. We conclude with a design example
A formal model of knowledge, action, and communication in distributed systems: preliminary report

A b s t r a c t : We present a formal model that captures the subtle interaction between knowledge, action, and communicat ion in distributed systems. We extend the standard not ion of protocol by defining knowledge-based protocols, ones in which a processor's action may explicitly depend on its knowledge. We also consider what it means for a processor to follow an honest protocol, one where, intuitively, it only sends messages that it knows to be true. Defining these notions turns out to be surprisingly delicate.
Optimal frequency/time combination of whole body vibration training for developing physical performance of people with sarcopenia: a randomized controlled trial

Objective: To determine whether frequency and exposure time to whole body vibration influenced its effects on physical performance in seniors with sarcopenia. Design: Randomized controlled trial Setting: A university sports training laboratory. Subjects: Eighty community dwelling seniors with sarcopenia were recruited. Interventions: Participants were randomly divided into 4 groups, namely, low-frequency (LG: 20Hz x 720s), medium-frequency (MG: 40Hz x 360s), high-frequency (HG: 60Hz x 240s) and control (CG: no extra training) for 12 weeks of whole body vibration training and 12 weeks of follow-up. Main measures: Assessments were done at baseline, mid-intervention, post-intervention, mid-follow-up, and final follow-up for five-repetition sit-to-stand, 10-meter walking test with self-preferred speed and timed-up-and-go test. Results: There was significant time × group interaction effect in timed-up-and-go test (F12, 304 = 3.333, effect size = 0.116, p < 0.001). Between-group differences in percentage change from baseline were significant between medium-frequency group and control group on all outcome variables after 12-week whole body vibration training (Five-repetition sit-to-stand test: 10.46 ± 2.28 (–16.12%), p = 0.008; 10-meter walking test: 1.05 ± 0.16 (11.18%), p = 0.04; Timed-up-and-go test: 11.32 ± 1.72 (–15.08%), p = 0.001). Conclusion: With the total number of vibrations controlled, the combination of 40Hz and 360s of whole body vibration has the best outcome on physical performance of people with sarcopenia.
Ciliates learn to diagnose and correct classical error syndromes in mating strategies

Preconjugal ciliates learn classical repetition error-correction codes to safeguard mating messages and replies from corruption by “rivals” and local ambient noise. Because individual cells behave as memory channels with Szilárd engine attributes, these coding schemes also might be used to limit, diagnose, and correct mating-signal errors due to noisy intracellular information processing. The present study, therefore, assessed whether heterotrich ciliates effect fault-tolerant signal planning and execution by modifying engine performance, and consequently entropy content of codes, during mock cell–cell communication. Socially meaningful serial vibrations emitted from an ambiguous artificial source initiated ciliate behavioral signaling performances known to advertise mating fitness with varying courtship strategies. Microbes, employing calcium-dependent Hebbian-like decision making, learned to diagnose then correct error syndromes by recursively matching Boltzmann entropies between signal planning and execution stages via “power” or “refrigeration” cycles. All eight serial contraction and reversal strategies incurred errors in entropy magnitude by the execution stage of processing. Absolute errors, however, subtended expected threshold values for single bit-flip errors in three-bit replies, indicating coding schemes protected information content throughout signal production. Ciliate preparedness for vibrations selectively and significantly affected the magnitude and valence of Szilárd engine performance during modal and non-modal strategy corrective cycles. But entropy fidelity for all replies mainly improved across learning trials as refinements in engine efficiency. Fidelity neared maximum levels for only modal signals coded in resilient three-bit repetition error-correction sequences. Together, these findings demonstrate microbes can elevate survival/reproductive success by learning to implement classical fault-tolerant information processing in social contexts.
Distributed data placement to minimize communication costs via graph partitioning

With the widespread use of shared-nothing clusters of servers, there has been a proliferation of distributed object stores that offer high availability, reliability and enhanced performance for MapReduce-style workloads. However, data-intensive scientific workflows and join-intensive queries cannot always be evaluated efficiently using MapReduce-style processing without extensive data migrations, which cause network congestion and reduced query throughput. In this paper, we study the problem of computing data placement strategies that minimize the data communication costs incurred by such workloads in a distributed setting. Our main contribution is a reduction of the data placement problem to the well-studied problem of Graph Partitioning, which is NP-Hard but for which efficient approximation algorithms exist. The novelty and significance of this result lie in representing the communication cost exactly and using standard graphs instead of hypergraphs, which were used in prior work on data placement that optimized for different objectives. We study several practical extensions of the problem: with load balancing, with replication, and with complex workflows consisting of multiple steps that may be computed on different servers. We provide integer linear programs (IPs) that may be used with any IP solver to find an optimal data placement. For the no-replication case, we use publicly available graph partitioning libraries (e.g., METIS) to efficiently compute nearly-optimal solutions. For the versions with replication, we introduce two heuristics that utilize the Graph Partitioning solution of the no-replication case. Using a workload based on TPC-DS, it may take an IP solver weeks to compute an optimal data placement, whereas our reduction produces nearly-optimal solutions in seconds.
Sequential treatment of tyrosine kinase inhibitor and platinum-based doublet chemotherapy on EGFR mutant non-small cell lung cancer: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled clinical trials

There is debate surrounding which treatment is superior in overall survival (OS) rates in patients with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutant non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC); first-line tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) followed by second-line platinum-based doublet chemotherapy (PCT), or the reverse sequence. Cross treatment of first- and second-line TKI and PCT makes it difficult to deduce which sequence (TKI-PCT or PCT-TKI) is better for OS. Using the keywords “lung cancer” and “EGFR” we identified clinical trials within the PubMed database which were published between January 2006 and November 2016. Basic characteristics and OS with hazard ratio and 95% confidence intervals were searched and analyzed. In total, 457 articles were reviewed and nine clinical trials with 1,876 patients were of sufficient quality for further analysis. Fixed effects models were performed to pool the data in this meta-analysis. All nine studies were open-labeled, multicenter, Phase III randomized controlled clinical trials. The pooled hazard ratio was 0.96 (95% confidence interval: 0.84–1.10) for OS between first-line TKI followed by second-line PCT compared to the reverse sequence. No statistically significant heterogeneity (I2=0, P=0.553) nor publication bias (Egger’s P=0.991) was observed among these studies. In conclusion, there was no OS benefit between first-line TKI followed by second-line PCT compared to the reverse sequence in EGFR mutant NSCLC patients. Chemotherapy was still useful and irreplaceable for the treatment of NSCLC, especially for those patients with EGFR unavailable for testing.
Serum IL-21 levels associated with chronic hepatitis B and hepatitis B-related liver failure

The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of interleukin (IL)-21 in chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. IL-21 stimulates T and B cell responses and plays a role in the control of chronic viral infections. Serum IL-21 levels were measured by enzyme immunoassay in 109 patients with chronic HBV infection at various clinical stages, as well as in 19 healthy controls (HCs). The proportion of T cells producing IL-21 in the peripheral blood was assessed by intracellular cytokine staining and flow cytometry. Mean serum IL-21 levels in patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) and the HCs were 303.54±152.77 pg/ml and 68.24±9.06 pg/ml, respectively (P=0.003). In addition, the mean serum IL-21 level in patients with hepatitis B-related acute-on-chronic liver failure (HB-ACLF) was 455.38±412.38 pg/ml, which exhibited a statistically significant difference when compared with the HCs (P=0.000). Serum IL-21 levels were highest in the patients with HB-ACLF (455.38±412.38 pg/ml) and exhibited a significant difference when compared with the CHB patients (P=0.04). The mean serum IL-21 levels in patients with cirrhosis also increased, but there was no statistically significant difference when compared with the HCs (P=0.82). The frequency of IL-21+CD4+ cells also increased compared with the HCs and correlated with the number and percentage of lymphocytes in the peripheral blood. Serum IL-21 levels increased in CHB and HB-ACLF patients. Relatively low serum IL-21 levels in CHB may have a causal role in the persistence of HBV infection. Higher serum levels in HB-ACLF may activate T and B cells to eliminate the virus or injure the liver via the release of inflammatory cytokines.
The Formin Homology 1 Domain Modulates the Actin Nucleation and Bundling Activity of Arabidopsis FORMIN1w⃞

The organization of actin filaments into large ordered structures is a tightly controlled feature of many cellular processes. However, the mechanisms by which actin filament polymerization is initiated from the available pool of profilin-bound actin monomers remain unknown in plants. Because the spontaneous polymerization of actin monomers bound to profilin is inhibited, the intervention of an actin promoting factor is required for efficient actin polymerization. Two such factors have been characterized from yeasts and metazoans: the Arp2/3 complex, a complex of seven highly conserved subunits including two actin-related proteins (ARP2 and ARP3), and the FORMIN family of proteins. The recent finding that Arabidopsis thaliana plants lacking a functional Arp2/3 complex exhibit rather modest morphological defects leads us to consider whether the large FORMIN family plays a central role in the regulation of actin polymerization. Here, we have characterized the mechanism of action of Arabidopsis FORMIN1 (AFH1). Overexpression of AFH1 in pollen tubes has been shown previously to induce abnormal actin cable formation. We demonstrate that AFH1 has a unique behavior when compared with nonplant formins. The activity of the formin homology domain 2 (FH2), containing the actin binding activity, is modulated by the formin homology domain 1 (FH1). Indeed, the presence of the FH1 domain switches the FH2 domain from a tight capper (Kd ∼3.7 nM) able to nucleate actin filaments that grow only in the pointed-end direction to a leaky capper that allows barbed-end elongation and efficient nucleation of actin filaments from actin monomers bound to profilin. Another exciting feature of AFH1 is its ability to bind to the side and bundle actin filaments. We have identified an actin nucleator that is able to organize actin filaments directly into unbranched actin filament bundles. We suggest that AFH1 plays a central role in the initiation and organization of actin cables from the pool of actin monomers bound to profilin.
SHB1/HY1 Alleviates Excess Boron Stress by Increasing BOR4 Expression Level and Maintaining Boron Homeostasis in Arabidopsis Roots

Boron is an essential mineral nutrient for higher plant growth and development. However, excessive amounts of boron can be toxic. Here, we report on the characterization of an Arabidopsis mutant, shb1 (sensitive to high-level of boron 1), which exhibits hypersensitivity to excessive boron in roots. Positional cloning demonstrated that the shb1 mutant bears a point mutation in a gene encoding a heme oxygenase 1 (HO1) corresponding to the HY1 gene involved in photomorphogenesis. The transcription level of the SHB1/HY1 gene in roots is up-regulated under excessive boron stimulation. Either overexpressing SHB1/HY1 or applying the HO1 inducer hematin reduces boron accumulation in roots and confers high boron tolerance. Furthermore, carbon monoxide and bilirubin, catalytic products of HO1, partially rescue the boron toxicity-induced inhibition of primary root growth in shb1. Additionally, the mRNA level of BOR4, a boron efflux transporter, is reduced in shb1 roots with high levels of boron supplementation, and hematin cannot relieve the boron toxicity-induced root inhibition in bor4 mutants. Taken together, our study reveals that HO1 acts via its catalytic by-products to promote tolerance of excessive boron by up-regulating the transcription of the BOR4 gene and therefore promoting the exclusion of excessive boron in root cells.
Feasibility and Efficacy of Transjugular Intrahepatic Portosystemic Shunt (TIPS) in Children

Objectives: Transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) is a valuable tool in managing complications of severe portal hypertension (PH) in adults. In children, TIPS is regarded as a temporary and technically demanding procedure. We report the first paediatric series of TIPS and review its feasibility and efficacy in children. Methods: Children with severe PH that is unresponsive to nonselective &bgr;-blockers and endoscopic treatment were considered candidates for TIPS placement with an expanded polytetrafluoroethylene-covered Viatorr stent graft. Indications were cirrhotic PH, noncirrhotic PH, and portal vein thrombosis, in both native and transplanted livers. Results: Thirteen children were selected for TIPS between 2005 and 2010. The indications were bleeding in 8 (61.5%) and ascites in 5 (38.5%). TIPS was successfully placed in 11 children, median age 9.8 years (range 2.2–18) and median weight 30 kg (11.5–96). Two patients had a portal cavernoma and 3 had received split liver transplantation. Following TIPS, the portosystemic gradient decreased to 10 mmHg (5–15 mmHg) (P < 0.00001); PH complications resolved in 10 of 11 patients (91%); no patient developed clinical encephalopathy; and 3 patients required a TIPS revision. All of the shunts were patent at last follow-up (20.4 months, range 0.2–67) in 7 or liver transplantation (6 months, 1.5–33) in 4. Conclusions: Our results suggest that TIPS is feasible and effective in children with ascites or gastrointestinal bleeding unresponsive to medical and endoscopic treatment. TIPS should become part of the armamentarium that is used to manage PH complications in children, both in native livers and in transplanted grafts, as a bridge to transplantation and for long-term management.
Event-Related Alpha Suppression in Response to Facial Motion

While biological motion refers to both face and body movements, little is known about the visual perception of facial motion. We therefore examined alpha wave suppression as a reduction in power is thought to reflect visual activity, in addition to attentional reorienting and memory processes. Nineteen neurologically healthy adults were tested on their ability to discriminate between successive facial motion captures. These animations exhibited both rigid and non-rigid facial motion, as well as speech expressions. The structural and surface appearance of these facial animations did not differ, thus participants decisions were based solely on differences in facial movements. Upright, orientation-inverted and luminance-inverted facial stimuli were compared. At occipital and parieto-occipital regions, upright facial motion evoked a transient increase in alpha which was then followed by a significant reduction. This finding is discussed in terms of neural efficiency, gating mechanisms and neural synchronization. Moreover, there was no difference in the amount of alpha suppression evoked by each facial stimulus at occipital regions, suggesting early visual processing remains unaffected by manipulation paradigms. However, upright facial motion evoked greater suppression at parieto-occipital sites, and did so in the shortest latency. Increased activity within this region may reflect higher attentional reorienting to natural facial motion but also involvement of areas associated with the visual control of body effectors.