Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterizing the Expression of Cytochrome P450s in Breast Cancer Cells

Several types of cancer cells have shown an innate or accute resistance to anti-cancer agents which in turn causes a failure in treatment. This resistance has been suggested to be caused by the expression of membrane transporters in cancer cells, as well as inter-individual variability in metabolism. Our interest was to evaluate the implication of CYP450 enzymes in the local metabolism of cancer cells. Our first objective was to screen the expression level of six housekeeping genes (HKG) using 23 different cell lines to determine which gene was the most stable. We found that NUP-214 was the most stable HKG across the panel of cell lines tested, with a standard deviation of only 0.55 Ct. Our second objective was to determine the expression level of 19 CYP450 mRNA isoforms in various breast cancer cell lines by RT-PCR. The CYP450 mRNAs showed a large variability between the different cell lines analyzed, where CYP1B1 and 2J2 were strongly expressed in most cell lines. Our third objective was to determine if measurable metabolic activity was present and correlates with mRNA expression in these same breast cancer cell lines using the specific substrates 7-ethoxyresorufin and ebastine for CYP1B1 and 2J2 activities, respectively. The metabolism of 7-ethoxyresorufin showed an excellent correlation of 0.98 with CYP1B1 expression while ebastine demonstrates a strong correlation (r=0.99) with 2J2 expression. Overall, these results suggest that local metabolism of anti-cancer agents could significantly affect drug disposition and be a source of chemoresistance.
Fast 3D Post Estimation of Human Based on Optical Flow and Particle Filter

Aiming at the high computational complexity of the 3D pose estimation algorithm in the deep learning field, we propose a fast human pose estimation algorithm based on optical flow and particle filter. The temporal correlation between video frames is applied to the algorithm. The first frame of the video is defined as a keyframe, which will serve as the output of the 3D pose estimate. Then the next frame is determined by the key frame algorithm whether it is a key frame. The key frame is estimated by the 3D human pose estimation algorithm, and the output result of the key frame is propagated to the non-key frame through the optical flow mechanism. Non-key frames are subjected to pose estimation through particle filter. In the 3D human pose estimation problem, we propose a unified equation for 3D human pose estimation from the RGB image, combining 2D joint estimation and 3D pose reconstruction. The proposed approach outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on Human3.6m achieving a relative error reduction greater than 30% on average. Our method significantly improves detection performance compared to the original algorithm, and the detection speed can be increased by an average of 43.75%.
Improve P300 Speller Performance by Changing Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) Without Retraining the Subject-Independent Model

P300 speller is a famous brain–computer interface (BCI) method, which translates mental attention by identifying the event-related potentials evoked by target stimulus. To improve its efficiency, subject-independent classification models and dynamical stopping strategies have been introduced into P300 speller. However, it has still not been determined whether these methods remain effective when the configurations of visual stimuli are changed. This study investigates whether subject-independent dynamical stopping model (SIDSM) can maintain high efficiency in the case of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) change. The SIDSM was built on a 55-subject database, and the classification efficiency was tested online with 14 new subjects. During the online experiment, four SOA conditions were tested, one of which had the same SOA as the modeling data, while the other three had different SOA settings. The SIDSM obtained comparable classification accuracy under different SOA settings. Thus, the efficiency of information transmission can be significantly improved by changing SOA only, without retraining the model. These results suggest that SIDSM has good robustness to changes in stimulus settings and can provide P300 speller with good flexibility for individual optimization.
A Low-Cost and High-Throughput FPGA Implementation of the Retinex Algorithm for Real-Time Video Enhancement

For video applications in a special environment such as medical imaging, space exploration, and underwater exploration, the video captured by an image sensor is often deteriorated because of low lighting conditions. Therefore, it is necessary to enhance the part of the image that is too dark to distinguish details while maintaining the remaining part with the same brightness. The retinex algorithm is widely used to restore naturalness of a video, especially exhibiting outstanding performance in the enhancement of a dark area. However, it demands large computational complexity because of its intricate structure, such as the Gaussian filter and exponentiation operations, and consequently, it is difficult to process in real time. This article presents a low-cost and high-throughput design of the retinex video enhancement algorithm. The hardware (HW) design is implemented using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), and it supports a throughput of 60 frames/s for a $1920 \times 1080$ image with negligible latency. The proposed FPGA design minimizes HW resources while maintaining the quality and the performance by using a small line buffer instead of a frame buffer, by applying the concept of approximate computing for the complex Gaussian filter, and by designing a new and nontrivial exponentiation operation. The proposed design makes it possible to significantly reduce HW resources (up to 79.22% of total resources) compared to existing systems and is compatible with commercialized devices through the standard HDMI/DVI video ports.
Two-Way Massive MIMO Relaying Systems With Non-Ideal Transceivers: Joint Power and Hardware Scaling

Two-way massive MIMO amplify-and-forward relaying systems with non-ideal transceivers are investigated in this paper. To be general, multiple-antenna nodes and antenna correlation at both the user equipments (UEs) and the relay are considered, which differentiates the analysis from the prior ones. The achievable rate is analyzed and derived deterministically in closed-form. Joint scaling of the transmission powers and hardware impairments is then particularly investigated. Feasible scaling speeds for the transmission powers and hardware impairments are discovered when the number of relay antennas grows large. It is shown that down scaling of the transmission powers at the UEs and the relay and up scaling of the hardware impairment at the relay with the number of relay antennas are tolerable without reducing the expected rate. However, UE hardware impairment is a key limiting factor to the achievable rate and is not allowed to scale up with the number of relay antennas in order to achieve a non-vanishing rate. Moreover, ceiling effect on the achievable rate is still observable and the ceiling rate varies among different scaling cases. More interestingly, scalings of the UEs transmission power and the relay hardware impairment are found to be offsettable, which means that the relay hardware cost and the UE transmission power are tradable. It is found that the best tradeoff is achieved in the medium scalings of both the relay hardware impairment and UE transmission power. Numerical results are provided to verify the analysis and the tradability between the relay hardware cost and the UE transmission power. The analytical results thus provide solid foundation for flexible system designs under various cost and energy constraints.
Nursing Students' Experiences on Pediatric Nursing Simulation Practice

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify the simulation experiences of nursing baccalaureate students in their pediatric rotation. Methods: Fifty-three students responded to open-ended questions after three sessions of pediatric simulation experiences. The practice reflection notes of the students were also analyzed to identify educational outcomes coming from nursing simulation experiences. Results: The open-ended questions and practice reflection notes showed that simulated pediatric practice provided a virtual experience within safe environment. It also increased learning motivation, clinical decision making, and overall self-confidence of the nursing students. Conclusion: The findings of this study suggest that simulation can enhance the quality of nursing education through positive clinical experiences.
Determinants of Variation in Household Energy Choice and Consumption: Case from Mahabad City, Iran

This study seeks to find a method to identify the dominant pattern of energy choice and consumption in households, centering on demographic factors affecting the use of home appliances. To this aim, this study dealt with a variety of energy sources widely used by households, namely, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), electricity, and kerosene for cooking, heating and cooling, lighting, and home appliances. Additionally, significant associations for the household energy choice and consumption were identified for demographic variables including household size, gender, head-of-household age, educational level, and income group. A logistic regression analysis was performed to obtain quantitative data provided by a survey from 821 households across residential districts of urban and rural areas in Mahabad city, northwest Iran. Obtained data were analyzed within a proposed three-energy dimension model (3-ED). The results showed that, in the case of other variables remaining constant, income may lead to variation in LPG and electricity consumption. Unlike other independent variables, the head-of-household age failed to have a significant impact. The findings can contribute to a better understanding of effective factors got household energy choice and consumption in other cities, and they can be useful for the support of policy-makers in their consumption patterns.
The Role of Asymmetry and Uncertainties in the Capital Flows- Economic Growth Nexus

This study examines the asymmetry between capital flows and economic growth in 42 countries for the period 1990-2017. It further argues that uncertainty is an important channel through which asymmetry operates. As such, the three measures of uncertainty are macroeconomic, fiscal and institutional. The Generalised Method of Moments is used as an empirical strategy. The existence of an asymmetry is confirmed by the findings as capital flows are more reactive to economic drag when compared to economic growth. Furthermore, the channels through which asymmetry operate are heterogeneous to measures of capital flows and proxies for uncertainty.
Review of Social Determinants and the Health Divide in the WHO European Region: Final Report

The WHO European Region has seen remarkable health gains in populations that have experienced progressive improvements in the conditions in which people are born, grow, live and work. Inequities persist, however, both between and within countries. This review of inequities in health between and within countries across the 53 Member States of the Region was commissioned to support the development of the new European policy framework for health and well-being, Health 2020. Much more is understood now about the extent and social causes of these inequities. The European review builds on the global evidence and recommends policies to ensure that progress can be made in reducing health inequities and the health divide across all countries, including those with low incomes. Action is needed on the social determinants of health, across the life-course and in wider social and economic spheres to achieve greater health equity and protect future generations.
USING TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE MODEL TO PROMOTE STUDENTS ADOPTION AND USE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN THE SUNYANI TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been extensively used to determine the extent of adoption and use of digital technologies in research. The model addresses the technical shortfalls of users by confronting some undesirable behavioural and perceptual traits which discourage the acceptance and usage of digital technologies. This study, therefore, sought to students’ acceptance and use of digital technologies for the purpose of enhancing their learning. Inquiring from students how they use their digital devices and further rate their level of digital competencies (skills and knowledge) spurred the researcher to adopt an instructional delivery system through the application of the TAM to enable students adopt, accept and incorporate these technologies into their learning in order to make learning flexible and self-paced. The quantitative method was used to answer the research questions that guided this study. This study aimed at applying the TAM to provide a descriptive analysis on how students adopt and use digital technologies in their remote locations. The study also sought to use the model to address students’ perceptions and attitudes toward the use of digital technologies. The study revealed that respondents had developed positive attitudes and right perceptions toward the use of digital technologies during lessons because they gained more understanding and insight through the lively course content they offer. Respondents now have the belief that the intervention has helped them to develop the zeal to adopt and use digital technologies to enhance their learning.
The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century

Part of the difficulty in mitigating gender issues lies in the complexity that scholars face when connecting social, cultural, and historical specificity to universal global structures and processes. This collection of essays examines the dialectics between gender and violence specifically in reference to the globalizing social, political, and economic forces of the last twenty years. Through an emphasis on intersectionality and interdisciplinarity, the collection aims to bridge the particular with the universal by revealing the inherent connections between global processes and violence against women. The preface by Charlotte Bunch, and the introduction by Sanja Bahun-Radunović and V.G. Julie Rajan highlight the advancements made in both policy and research regarding violence against women, but emphasize the challenges that remain in both identifying the particulars of violence and their relation to broader social processes. The remaining four parts of the collection take up the major components of this issue. In Part I, ‘‘Revealing the Gaps,’’ essays on indigenous voices in Nicaragua and Kenya, faith-rights feminists in Malaysia, and the effects of micro-credit in India reveal how existing theory is limited in its ability to address fully the issue of violence against women, and encourage feminists to reach beyond the confines of gender theory. Part II, ‘‘Enclosures and Exposures,’’ examines the role of gender and violence in postconflict spaces. In particular, Svetlana Slapšak’s piece on the former Yugoslavia is useful in understanding how conflict affects representations of women. In Part III, ‘‘Bordered Subjectivities, Global Connections,’’ misogyny, trafficking, and race are explored through the context of spatial marginalization and political borders in the United States, Europe, and South Korea. Lastly, Part IV, ‘‘Aesthetics and Gendered Transformations,’’ discusses the potential for artistic representations simultaneously to bring attention to violence against women and change perspectives on the feminine. This collection of essays negotiates issues of gender diversity and universality, and is a useful resource for anyone interested in understanding how the forces of globalization and the discourses of gender and violence are mutually constituted.
ExTENDS: Efficient Data Placement and Management for Next Generation PCM-Based Storage Systems

Although flash memory solid state drives (FSSDs) outperform traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), their performance still fails to cope up with the perennial doubling speeds of microprocessors, regardless of the available high bandwidth. To alleviate this bottleneck, many semiconductor companies, such as Intel, Micron, Samsung, and Hynix have already recently manufactured faster and more scalable non-volatile memory (NVM) technology as main memory but none so far have publicly announced their implementation or production of a full NVM Phase Change Memory SSD (PCM-SSD). Considering implementing NVM-PCM as secondary memory, we can build a future PCM-SSD (PSSD) to replace the slow traditional FSSD. However, a careful design, especially for the controller is essential to hide and manage PCM endurance constraints, in-place-updates ability, bit-addressability and enabling it to appear as a block device to the host as their predecessors (HDD and FSSD) do. In this paper, we propose implementing ExTENDS, a hardware assumption of NVM-PCM instead of the NVM-flash memory as our future secondary/persistent memory in storage systems. We further present a PCM file translation layer (PhaseFTL) that can efficiently manage address translations from a host file system to PCM while hiding PCM constrains and allowing the PCM blocks to wear down evenly. Moreover, PhaseFTL can efficiently manipulate the bit-addressability and in-place-update feature of PCM. Our experimental results shows that our proposed PSSD can improve overall SSD performance throughput by an average of 69% compared to traditional FSSDs.
A review of smartphone point‐of‐care adapter design

In this review, we explore the potential of smartphone‐based applications based on their unique ability to support portable, easy‐to‐use, precise, and efficient functions, which, in turn, makes lab‐on‐hardware a trending area of novel research. Smartphones can assist surgeons, physicians, biologists, chemists, ophthalmologists, and laboratory technicians in maintaining an easy‐to‐use, cost‐effective, and integrated environment for treatment, diagnosis, and point‐of‐care (POC) applications. These POC applications can improve patients' quality of life, offering patients a precise diagnosis and the correct treatment. This is a noble goal that aims to reduce costs and to increase the accuracy of sample testing, treatment, and diagnosis. Recent innovations have made major advances in smartphone adapters, providing portability, robustness, self‐powered devices, small‐sized adapters, and ease of usage. Lab‐on‐hardware is a progressing field, and smartphone imaging applications are increasingly expanding, resulting in POC applications with the latest and most advanced image analysis, enhancement, recognition, and other image processing techniques. The most recent studies in the field are explored to provide a solid background to interested researchers against which they can choose of application and/or adapter design they aim to develop, with a discussion of the methods reviewed here.
Case report Pulmonary hypertension in connective tissue disease Report of three cases and review of the literature

Summary. Patients with connective tissue disease (CTD) who are prone to developed isolated pulmonary hypertension (PH) are primarily young females with a history of Raynaud's phenomenon associated with an exertional dyspnoea. From the start of the disease, pulmonary function tests show a decreased diffusing capacity for carbon monoxide, while X-ray examination shows no obvious abnormalities such as interstitial fibrosis. All patients show, on electrocardiogra phic examination, evidence of right axis deviation and right ventricular hypertrophy. It has been suggested that PH is found mostly in patients with systemic scerlosis characterized by the CREST syndrome. The histopathologica l findings are intimal proliferation, narrowing of the vessel lumen and medial fibrosis. These are not specific for CTD. One would expect more signs of vasculitis. Neither signs of lung fibrosis, nor signs of pulmonary emboli are described.
Performance Guarantees in Learning and Robust Control

Author(s): Boczar, Ross J | Advisor(s): Recht, Benjamin | Abstract: As the systems we control become more complex, first-principle modeling becomes either impossible or intractable, motivating the use of machine learning techniques for the control of systems with continuous action spaces. As impressive as the empirical success of these methods have been, strong theoretical guarantees of performance, safety, or robustness are few and far between. This manuscript takes a step towards such providing such guarantees by establishing finite-data performance guarantees for identifying and controlling fully- or partially-unknown dynamical systems.In this manuscript, we explore three different viewpoints that each provide different quantitative guarantees of performance. First, we present a generalization of the classical theory of integral quadratic constraints. This generalization leads to a tractable computational procedure for finding exponential stability certificates for partially-unknown feedback systems. Second, we present non-asymptotic lower and upper bounds for core problems in the field of system identification. Finally, using the recently developed system-level synthesis framework and tools from high-dimensional statistics, we establish finite-sample performance guarantees for robust output-feedback control of an unknown dynamical system.
Essays in Macroeconomics with Financial Frictions

This dissertation consists of two chapters on macroeconomics with financial frictions. The first chapter studies the role of firm heterogeneity in the transmission of financial shocks to the real economy. Evidence from the recent European debt crisis shows that firms responded differently to the severe credit tightening that occurred during this period, where smaller ones adjusted their balance sheets more aggressively and performed better in economies with a more skewed firm size distribution. A model of heterogeneous firms, that face financial frictions (defaultable debt and costly equity issuance), a financial intermediation sector, and a sovereign, is proposed to explain these facts. Financial frictions are key because they generate financing structures that depend on firm size, where small firms rely more on equity than debt, which is relatively more costly. Sufficiently large increases in public debt trigger a binding lending constraint for the intermediaries that cause a crowding out of private lending and leads smaller firms to adjust more than large firms. Quantitative results show that firm heterogeneity has aggregate effects and that the model, calibrated to match Spanish firm-level data, is consistent with the empirical facts during the crisis. The second chapter studies the positive and normative implications of "liability dollarization", the intermediation of capital inflows in units of tradables into domestic loans in units of aggregate consumption, on Sudden Stops models. Liability dollarization adds three important effects driven by real-exchange-rate fluctuations that alter standard models of Sudden Stops significantly: Changes on the debt repayment burden, on the price of new debt, and on a risktaking incentive. The optimal policy under commitment is time-inconsistent, follows a complex non-linear structure, and shows that when domestic credit or capital inflows taxes are present, capital controls are not justified. Quantitatively, an optimized pair of constant taxes on domestic debt and capital inflows makes crises slightly less likely and yields a small welfare gain, but other pairs reduce welfare sharply. For high effective debt taxes, capital controls and domestic debt taxes are equivalent, and for low ones welfare is higher with higher taxes on domestic debt than on capital inflows. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Economics First Advisor Enrique G. Mendoza