Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of the Microstructure of the Corrosion Performance of DP Steels

Weight reduction of car bodies can be achieved by application of steel components with a lower thickness; however mechanical properties (for constructive and safety reasons) must be maintained, which can be achieved by using (U)HSS steels. These steels have been designed and optimized for improved mechanical behavior and therefore normally have a poorer or at least not well documented and understood corrosion resistance. One of these HSS steels are the so called Dual Phase steels, or DP steels. The aim of this work is to investigate the effect of the individual and combined ferrite and martensite phases in model DP steels on the corrosion performance and electrochemical behavior. For this, the first part of this work consisted in the development of a range of dual phase microstructures with different ferrite-martensite ratios ranging from virtually fully ferritic to fully martensitic. Controlled heat treatments were developed with the CASIM (Continuous Annealing SIMulator) and the dilatometer in order to obtain the desired microstructures. After the microstructures were developed, standard 3 electrode electrochemical setups were used to perform open circuit potential and potentiodynamic polarization measurements, approach which was then complemented by the use of Micro-Capillary cell. The use of the localized technique was focused on the possibility to perform single phase measurements which are not possible with the standard setups. The influence of the individual and relative amounts of ferrite and martensite on the electrochemical response of model DP steels was discussed. The first conclusions that were drawn from the electrochemical work was that due to the absence of a stable passive layer, performing measurements on standard setupsproved to be a challenge because crevice was a dominating factor in the system. Modifications to standard cell and Avesta cell were done in the attempt to avoid the presence of crevice. With the Micro-Capillary setup, even though crevice can also be an issue, reliable and reproducible polarization curves were obtained. A clear effect of sodium chloride concentration and the presence of a carbonate buffer on the electrochemical response of the model DP steels was observed. However, it was also found that the differences in the electrochemical behavior induced by the amount of martensite present are not significant enough to be distinguished from the reproducibility of the polarization curves. This was also the case for the base material sample, which even though composed of a highly deformed ferritic matrix with cementite-carbides islands, showed a similar response in the polarizations. The influence of the polarization system (setup, electrolyte, and microstructure) was discussed, as well as the importance of acknowledging the influence of crevice and reproducibility while performing electrochemical measurements.
Evaluating Automated and Manual Acquisition of Anaphora Resolution Strategies

We describe one approach to build an automatically trainable anaphora resolution system. In this approach, we use Japanese newspaper articles tagged with discourse information as training examples for a machine learning algorithm which employs the C4.5 decision tree algorithm by Quinlan (Quinlan, 1993). Then, we evaluate and compare the results of several variants of the machine learning-based approach with those of our existing anaphora resolution system which uses manually-designed knowledge sources. Finally, we compare our algorithms with existing theories of anaphora, in particular, Japanese zero pronouns.
Personalizing Search via Automated Analysis of Interests and Activities

We formulate and study search algorithms that consider a user's prior interactions with a wide variety of content to personalize that user's current Web search. Rather than relying on the unrealistic assumption that people will precisely specify their intent when searching, we pursue techniques that leverage implicit information about the user's interests. This information is used to re-rank Web search results within a relevance feedback framework. We explore rich models of user interests, built from both search-related information, such as previously issued queries and previously visited Web pages, and other information about the user such as documents and email the user has read and created. Our research suggests that rich representations of the user and the corpus are important for personalization, but that it is possible to approximate these representations and provide efficient client-side algorithms for personalizing search. We show that such personalization algorithms can significantly improve on current Web search.
RESIDUAL SOIL FERTILITY AND PRODUCTIVITY OF RICE (ORYZA SATIVA L.) AS INFLUENCED BY DIFFERENT ORGANIC SOURCES OF NITROGEN

A field experiment was conducted at the Agricultural College Farm, Bapatla, during kharif 2012- 13 to find out the residual soil fertility and productivity of rice as influenced by different organic sources of nutrients viz., poultry manure, FYM, neemcake and vermicompost. The experimental results indicated that maximum yield of rice was recorded with recommended dose of fertilizers which was on a par with 50% RDN as basal +50% at 10 days before PI stage through poultry manure. Among different organic manure treatments, application of 100% RDN through FYM recorded highest amount of NPK in soil after harvest, followed by application of 50% RDN as basal +50% at 10 days before PI stage through FYM which were however, on a par with each other. The lowest amount of NPK in soil after harvest was recorded with the application of recommended dose of chemical fertilizers followed by 100% RDN through poultry manure.
Heterogeneous system coherence for integrated CPU-GPU systems

Many future heterogeneous systems will integrate CPUs and GPUs physically on a single chip and logically connect them via shared memory to avoid explicit data copying. Making this shared memory coherent facilitates programming and fine-grained sharing, but throughput-oriented GPUs can overwhelm CPUs with coherence requests not well-filtered by caches. Meanwhile, region coherence has been proposed for CPU-only systems to reduce snoop bandwidth by obtaining coherence permissions for large regions. This paper develops Heterogeneous System Coherence (HSC) for CPU-GPU systems to mitigate the coherence bandwidth effects of GPU memory requests. HSC replaces a standard directory with a region directory and adds a region buffer to the L2 cache. These structures allow the system to move bandwidth from the coherence network to the high-bandwidth direct-access bus without sacrificing coherence. Evaluation results with a subset of Rodinia benchmarks and the AMD APP SDK show that HSC can improve performance compared to a conventional directory protocol by an average of more than 2× and a maximum of more than 4.5×. Additionally, HSC reduces the bandwidth to the directory by an average of 94% and by more than 99% for four of the analyzed benchmarks.
The Reflection Map with Discontinuities

We study the multidimensional reflection map on the spacesD([0,T],R k) andD([0, 8),R k ) of right-continuous R k-valued functions on [0,T] or [0, 8) with left limits, endowed with variants of the Skorohod (1956)M1 topology. The reflection map was used with the continuous mapping theorem by Harrison and Reiman (1981) and Reiman (1984) to establish heavy-traffic limit theorems with reflected Brownian motion limit processes for vector-valued queue length, waiting time, and workload stochastic processes in single-class open queueing networks. Since Brownian motion and reflected Brownian motion have continuous sample paths, the topology of uniform convergence over bounded intervals could be used for those results. Variants of theM1 topologies are needed to obtain alternative discontinuous limits approached gradually by the converging processes, as occurs in stochastic fluid networks with bursty exogenous input processes, e.g., with on-off sources having heavy-tailed on periods or off periods (having infinite variance). We show that the reflection map is continuous at limits without simultaneous jumps of opposite sign in the coordinate functions, provided that the productM1 topology is used. As a consequence, the reflection map is continuous with the productM1 topology at all functions that have discontinuities in only one coordinate at a time. That continuity property also holds for more general reflection maps and is sufficient to support limit theorems for stochastic processes in most applications. We apply the continuity of the reflection map to obtain limits for buffer-content stochastic processes in stochastic fluid networks.
Towards interdependencies of aging mechanisms

With technology in deep nano scale, the susceptibility of transistors to various aging mechanisms such as Negative/ Positive Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI/PBTI) and Hot Carrier Induced Degradation (HCID) etc. is increasing. As a matter of fact, different aging mechanisms simultaneously occur in the gate dielectric of a transistor. In addition, scaling in conjunction with high-K materials has made aging mechanisms, that have often been assumed to be negligible (e.g., PBTI in NMOS and HCID in PMOS), become noticeable. Therefore, in this paper we investigate the key challenge of providing designers with an abstracted, yet accurate reliability estimation that combines, from the physical to system level, the effects of multiple simultaneous aging mechanisms and their interdependencies. We show that the overall aging can be modeled as a superposition of the interdependent aging effects. Our presented model deviates by around 6% from recent industrial physical measurements. We conclude from our experiments that an isolated treatment of individual aging mechanisms is insufficient to devise effective mitigation strategies in current and upcoming technology nodes. We also demonstrate that estimating reliability due to an individual dominant aging mechanism together with solely considering a single kind of failures, as currently is a main focus of state-of-the-art (e.g., [28], [22]), can result in 75% underestimation on average.
Sialidase and Sialoglycoproteases Can Modulate Virulence in Porphyromonas gingivalis

ABSTRACT The Porphyromonas gingivalis recombinant VimA can interact with the gingipains and several other proteins, including a sialidase. Sialylation can be involved in protein maturation; however, its role in virulence regulation in P. gingivalis is unknown. The three sialidase-related proteins in P. gingivalis showed the characteristic sialidase Asp signature motif (SXDXGXTW) and other unique domains. To evaluate the roles of the associated genes, randomly chosen P. gingivalis isogenic mutants created by allelic exchange and designated FLL401 (PG0778::ermF), FLL402 (PG1724::ermF), and FLL403 (PG0352::ermF-ermAM) were characterized. Similar to the wild-type strain, FLL402 and FLL403 displayed a black-pigmented phenotype in contrast to FLL401, which was not black pigmented. Sialidase activity in P. gingivalis FLL401 was reduced by approximately 70% in comparison to those in FLL402 and FLL403, which were reduced by approximately 42% and 5%, respectively. Although there were no changes in the expression of the gingipain genes, their activities were reduced by 60 to 90% in all the isogenic mutants compared to that for the wild type. Immunoreactive bands representing the catalytic domains for RgpA, RgpB, and Kgp were present in FLL402 and FLL403 but were missing in FLL401. While adhesion was decreased, the capacity for invasion of epithelial cells by the isogenic mutants was increased by 11 to 16% over that of the wild-type strain. Isogenic mutants defective in PG0778 and PG0352 were more sensitive to hydrogen peroxide than the wild type. Taken together, these results suggest that the P. gingivalis sialidase activity may be involved in regulating gingipain activity and other virulence factors and may be important in the pathogenesis of this organism.
Analyzing memory management methods on integrated CPU-GPU systems

Heterogeneous systems that integrate a multicore CPU and a GPU on the same die are ubiquitous. On these systems, both the CPU and GPU share the same physical memory as opposed to using separate memory dies. Although integration eliminates the need to copy data between the CPU and the GPU, arranging transparent memory sharing between the two devices can carry large overheads. Memory on CPU/GPU systems is typically managed by a software framework such as OpenCL or CUDA, which includes a runtime library, and communicates with a GPU driver. These frameworks offer a range of memory management methods that vary in ease of use, consistency guarantees and performance. In this study, we analyze some of the common memory management methods of the most widely used software frameworks for heterogeneous systems: CUDA, OpenCL 1.2, OpenCL 2.0, and HSA, on NVIDIA and AMD hardware. We focus on performance/functionality trade-offs, with the goal of exposing their performance impact and simplifying the choice of memory management methods for programmers.
E-TEX: Guidelines for Future TEX Extensions

With the announcement of TEX 3.0, Don Knuth acknowledged the need of the (ever growing) TEX community for an even better system. But at the same time, he made it clear, that he will not get involved in any further enhancements that would change the TEXbook. TEX started out originally as a system designed to typeset its author’s own publications. In the meantime it serves hundreds of thousands of users. Now it is time, after ten years’ experience, to step back and consider whether or not TEX 3.0 is an adequate answer to the typesetting requirements of the nineties. Output produced by TEX has higher standards than output generated automatically by most other typesetting systems. Therefore, in this paper we will focus on the quality standards set by typographers for hand-typeset documents and ask to what extent they are achieved by TEX. Limitations of TEX’s algorithms are analyzed; and missing features as well as new concepts are outlined. Published in TUGboat, Volume 11 (1990), No 3 — 1990 Conference Proceedings. Reprint MAPS#10 (93.1); May 1993 Dutch TEX Users Group (NTG), P.O. Box 394, 1740 AJ Schagen, The Netherlands 86 E-TEX: Guidelines for Future TEX Extensions Bijlage Q E-TEX: Guidelines for Future TEX Extensions
Effect of Hydrogen Sulfide and Methyl Mercaptan on the Permeability of Oral Mucosa

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and methyl mercaptan (CH3SH) are the volatile sulfur compounds (VSC) that were investigated for a possible role in the etiology of periodontal disease. The results show that the permeability of porcine non-keratinized sublingual mucosa is increased by up to 75% or 103% following exposure to H2S and CH3SH, respectively. The effect may be attributed to VSC reaction with tissue components resulting in alteration in the integrity of the tissue barrier. The increase in permeability of the mucosa to [35S]-Na2SO4 was dependent on both the time of exposure and concentration of VSC in the head-space. The [35S]-H2S was retained by the mucosal tissue and was able to penetrate the intact layers consisting of non-keratinized epithelium, basal membrane, and connective tissue. Treatment of the mucosa with 0.22% ZnCl2, either prior to or after exposure to CH3SH, nullified the effect of CH3SH and restored the permeability to a state similar to that observed in control 95% air/5% CO2 systems.
Wild Type and Mutant 2009 Pandemic Influenza A (H1N1) Viruses Cause More Severe Disease and Higher Mortality in Pregnant BALB/c Mice

Background Pregnant women infected by the pandemic influenza A (H1N1) 2009 virus had more severe disease and higher mortality but its pathogenesis is still unclear. Principal Findings We showed that higher mortality, more severe pneumonitis, higher pulmonary viral load, lower peripheral blood T lymphocytes and antibody responses, higher levels of proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines, and worse fetal development occurred in pregnant mice than non-pregnant controls infected by either wild type (clinical isolate) or mouse-adapted mutant virus with D222G substitution in hemagglutinin. These disease-associated changes and the lower respiratory tract involvement were worse in pregnant mice challenged by mutant virus. Though human placental origin JEG-3 cell line could be infected and proinflammatory cytokines or chemokines were elevated in amniotic fluid of some mice, no placental or fetal involvement by virus were detected by culture, real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction or histopathological changes. Dual immunofluorescent staining of viral nucleoprotein and type II alveolar cell marker SP-C protein suggested that the majority of infected alveolar epithelial cells were type II pneumocytes. Conclusion The adverse effect of this pandemic virus on maternal and fetal outcome is largely related to the severe pulmonary disease and the indirect effect of inflammatory cytokine spillover into the systemic circulation.
Nitrate Respiration Protects Hypoxic Mycobacterium tuberculosis Against Acid- and Reactive Nitrogen Species Stresses

There are strong evidences that Mycobacterium tuberculosis survives in a non-replicating state in the absence of oxygen in closed lesions and granuloma in vivo. In addition, M. tuberculosis is acid-resistant, allowing mycobacteria to survive in acidic, inflamed lesions. The ability of M. tuberculosis to resist to acid was recently shown to contribute to the bacillus virulence although the mechanisms involved have yet to be deciphered. In this study, we report that M. tuberculosis resistance to acid is oxygen-dependent; whereas aerobic mycobacteria were resistant to a mild acid challenge (pH 5.5) as previously reported, we found microaerophilic and hypoxic mycobacteria to be more sensitive to acid. In hypoxic conditions, mild-acidity promoted the dissipation of the protonmotive force, rapid ATP depletion and cell death. Exogenous nitrate, the most effective alternate terminal electron acceptor after molecular oxygen, protected hypoxic mycobacteria from acid stress. Nitrate-mediated resistance to acidity was not observed for a respiratory nitrate reductase NarGH knock-out mutant strain. Furthermore, we found that nitrate respiration was equally important in protecting hypoxic non-replicating mycobacteria from radical nitrogen species toxicity. Overall, these data shed light on a new role for nitrate respiration in protecting M. tuberculosis from acidity and reactive nitrogen species, two environmental stresses likely encountered by the pathogen during the course of infection.
SPARC Expression Did Not Predict Efficacy of nab-Paclitaxel plus Gemcitabine or Gemcitabine Alone for Metastatic Pancreatic Cancer in an Exploratory Analysis of the Phase III MPACT Trial

Purpose: nab-Paclitaxel plus gemcitabine was superior to gemcitabine alone for patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer (MPC) in the phase III MPACT trial. This study evaluated the association of secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteine (SPARC) levels with efficacy as an exploratory endpoint. Experimental Design: Patients with previously untreated MPC (N = 861) received nab-paclitaxel plus gemcitabine or gemcitabine alone. Baseline SPARC level was measured in the tumor stroma and epithelia (archival biopsies) and plasma. Experiments were performed in pancreatic cancer mouse models in which SPARC was intact or deleted. Results: SPARC was measured in the tumor stroma of 256 patients (30%), the tumor epithelia of 301 patients (35%), and plasma of 343 patients (40%). Stroma-evaluable samples were from metastases (71%), from the pancreas (11%), or of unidentifiable origin (insufficient tissue to determine; 17%). For all patients, stromal SPARC level [high (n = 71) vs. low (n = 185)] was not associated with overall survival (OS; HR, 1.019; P = 0.903); multivariate analysis confirmed this lack of association. There was no association between stromal SPARC level and OS in either treatment arm. Neither tumor epithelial SPARC nor plasma SPARC was associated with OS. Results from a SPARC knockout mouse model treated with nab-paclitaxel plus gemcitabine revealed no correlation between SPARC expression and tumor progression or treatment efficacy. Conclusions: SPARC levels were not associated with efficacy in patients with MPC. This exploratory analysis does not support making treatment decisions regarding nab-paclitaxel plus gemcitabine or gemcitabine alone in MPC based on SPARC expression. Clin Cancer Res; 21(21); 4811–8. ©2015 AACR.
In situ expansion of engineered human liver tissue in a mouse model of chronic liver disease

An engineered microenvironment supports expansion of adult human engineered liver tissue after implantation in a mouse model of liver injury. Tissue seeds blossom after transplant There is an enormous clinical need for liver transplant tissue. Bioengineered livers might ultimately be used as a bridge to or alternative for whole organ transplantation. In new work, Stevens et al. fabricated human artificial liver “seeds” in biomaterials that were able to grow and expand after implantation into mice in response to liver injury. After growth, the human artificial liver seeds were able to carry out normal liver functions such as production of human proteins like transferrin and albumin. This study suggests that implanted engineered tissue seeds should be able to expand in response to the body’s own repair signals. Control of both tissue architecture and scale is a fundamental translational roadblock in tissue engineering. An experimental framework that enables investigation into how architecture and scaling may be coupled is needed. We fabricated a structurally organized engineered tissue unit that expanded in response to regenerative cues after implantation into mice with liver injury. Specifically, we found that tissues containing patterned human primary hepatocytes, endothelial cells, and stromal cells in a degradable hydrogel expanded more than 50-fold over the course of 11 weeks in mice with injured livers. There was a concomitant increase in graft function as indicated by the production of multiple human liver proteins. Histologically, we observed the emergence of characteristic liver stereotypical microstructures mediated by coordinated growth of hepatocytes in close juxtaposition with a perfused vasculature. We demonstrated the utility of this system for probing the impact of multicellular geometric architecture on tissue expansion in response to liver injury. This approach is a hybrid strategy that harnesses both biology and engineering to more efficiently deploy a limited cell mass after implantation.
Effect of IL-7 Therapy on Phospho-Ribosomal Protein S6 and TRAF1 Expression in HIV-Specific CD8 T Cells in Patients Receiving Antiretroviral Therapy

IL-7 therapy has been evaluated in patients who do not regain normal CD4 T cell counts after virologically successful antiretroviral therapy. IL-7 increases total circulating CD4 and CD8 T cell counts; however, its effect on HIV-specific CD8 T cells has not been fully examined. TRAF1, a prosurvival signaling adaptor required for 4-1BB–mediated costimulation, is lost from chronically stimulated virus-specific CD8 T cells with progression of HIV infection in humans and during chronic lymphocytic choriomeningitis infection in mice. Previous results showed that IL-7 can restore TRAF1 expression in virus-specific CD8 T cells in mice, rendering them sensitive to anti–4-1BB agonist therapy. In this article, we show that IL-7 therapy in humans increases the number of circulating HIV-specific CD8 T cells. For a subset of patients, we also observed an increased frequency of TRAF1+ HIV-specific CD8 T cells 10 wk after completion of IL-7 treatment. IL-7 treatment increased levels of phospho-ribosomal protein S6 in HIV-specific CD8 T cells, suggesting increased activation of the metabolic checkpoint kinase mTORC1. Thus, IL-7 therapy in antiretroviral therapy–treated patients induces sustained changes in the number and phenotype of HIV-specific T cells.