Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Research on Motion Vector Accuracy in Overcomplete Wavelet-Domain Scalable Video Coding Based on Human Visual System Characteristics

This paper proposes an accuracy-distortion model for overcomplete wavelet-based scalable motion estimation by exploiting the theory of stationary random process. We first estimate the motion compensation errors in spatial domain due to inaccurate motion vectors, then extend the results to overcomplete wavelet domain, and further derive the errors caused by fraction-pixel motion vectors. Finally, combining with a visibility model of wavelet coefficient errors, this paper proposes a novel algorithm to estimate the motion vector accuracy with which the motion compensation errors will be invisible. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective in estimating the visually lossless accuracy threshold of motion vectors. The proposed algorithm can be used in scalable coding of motion vectors. Also it can accelerate the motion estimation speed by stopping halfway at the accuracy that will not cause any visible errors.
Mobile App Rating Scale: A New Tool for Assessing the Quality of Health Mobile Apps

Background The use of mobile apps for health and well being promotion has grown exponentially in recent years. Yet, there is currently no app-quality assessment tool beyond “star”-ratings. Objective The objective of this study was to develop a reliable, multidimensional measure for trialling, classifying, and rating the quality of mobile health apps. Methods A literature search was conducted to identify articles containing explicit Web or app quality rating criteria published between January 2000 and January 2013. Existing criteria for the assessment of app quality were categorized by an expert panel to develop the new Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS) subscales, items, descriptors, and anchors. There were sixty well being apps that were randomly selected using an iTunes search for MARS rating. There were ten that were used to pilot the rating procedure, and the remaining 50 provided data on interrater reliability. Results There were 372 explicit criteria for assessing Web or app quality that were extracted from 25 published papers, conference proceedings, and Internet resources. There were five broad categories of criteria that were identified including four objective quality scales: engagement, functionality, aesthetics, and information quality; and one subjective quality scale; which were refined into the 23-item MARS. The MARS demonstrated excellent internal consistency (alpha = .90) and interrater reliability intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC = .79). Conclusions The MARS is a simple, objective, and reliable tool for classifying and assessing the quality of mobile health apps. It can also be used to provide a checklist for the design and development of new high quality health apps.
Software pipelining

Utilizing parallelism at the instruction level is an important way to improve performance. Because the time spent in loop execution dominates total execution time, a large body of optimizations focuses on decreasing the time to execute each iteration. Software pipelining is a technique that reforms the loop so that a faster execution rate is realized. Iterations are executed in overlapped fashion to increase parallelism. Let {<italic>ABC</italic>}<supscrpt><italic>n</italic></supscrpt> represent a loop containing operations <italic>A, B, C</italic> that is executed <italic>n</italic> times. Although the operations of a single iteration can be parallelized, more parallelism may be achieved if the entire loop is considered rather than a single iteration. The software pipelining transformation utilizes the fact that a loop {<italic>ABC</italic>}<supscrpt><italic>n</italic></supscrpt> is equivalent to <italic>A</italic>{<italic>BCA</italic>}<supscrpt><italic>n</italic>−1</supscrpt><italic>BC</italic>. Although the operations contained in the loop do not change, the operations are from different iterations of the original loop. Various algorithms for software pipelining exist. A comparison of the alternative methods for software pipelining is presented. The relationships between the methods are explored and possibilities for improvement highlighted.
The near-field imaging method based on the spatio-temporal gradient analysis

Ultrasonic guided waves, because of their long range inspection ability, are now being used more and more as a very efficient and economical NDE method for large area inspection. The use of Lamb-waves has recently been interested in the nondestructive evaluations for thin-plate-like structures. The conventional time-of-flight technique is not reliable for locating the defects even in isotropic plates because of the dispersiveness in the Lamb-wave propagation. Avoiding difficulties caused by the dispersiveness, this paper proposes a novel spatio-temporal gradient imaging method which has an ability to localize cracks and to reconstruct the near-field images of cracks. The proposed method utilizes the determinant of the covariance matrix defined over the shear strain field over the surface. The determinant denotes the Distributions of Correlated Intensity Modulation (DCIM) of the incident and scattered wave fronts. The DCIM increases significantly in the near-field of the point-like defects. In this study, the computational process in wave field near-the defects is discussed and their physical meanings are investigated through FDTD-simulations.
A Pilot Study of the Impacts of Menopause on the Anogenital Distance

Objectives It has been known that there is a difference in anogenital distance (AGD) in the animals and newborn depending on the exposure of androgenic hormones. The anatomical changes occur in the female genitalia in women after menopause. This was pilot study to find out whether the menopause affects AGD. Methods We evaluated a total of 50 women targeted for premenopausal and postmenopausal group in each 25 people. AGD was defined as a length between the posterior commissure of labia and anal center. AGD was measured in lithotomy position using sterile paper ruler. In order to control bias of the height and weight, which could influence the AGD, anogenital index (AGI) is defined as the weight divided by the AGD value. We used a Mann-Whitney U test to analyze the relationship between AGD and menopause for statistical analysis. Results AGD was significantly longer in premenopausal women compared to postmenopausal women (34.8 ± 6.4 vs. 30.3 ± 6.6, P = 0.019). AGI was significantly higher in premenopausal women than postmenopausal women (1.7 ± 0.4 vs. 1.3 ± 0.3, P ≤ 0.000). Conclusion The changes of AGD and AGI in postmenopausal women demonstrated to have potential to be used as on scale predicting the physical changes that may occur after menopause. This study could be used as the cornerstone of a large-scale studies in the future.
Web-GIS Based Visualization System of Predicted Ground Vibration Induced by Blasting in Urban Quarry Sites

Blasting is routinely carried out at various resource extraction sites, even in urban areas. As a consequence of this, residents around urban quarry sites are affected by ground vibration induced by blasting on a regular basis. In this study, a prediction and visualization system for ground vibrations is developed for the purpose of reducing the adverse psychological effects of blasting. The system consists of predicting ground vibration using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and visualizing it on an online map using Web-GIS. A prediction model using ANN that learned the optimum weight by taking 50 sets of data indicated a regression value of 0.859 and a Mean Square Error (MSE) of 0.0228. Compared with previous researches, these values are not bad results. Peak Particle Velocity (PPV) was used as a metric to measure ground vibration intensity. A color contour is generated using GIS tools based on the PPV value of each prediction point. The system is completed by overlaying the contour onto a basic map in a website. The basic map shows the surrounding area through the use of Google Maps data. This system can be used by anyone with access to the internet and a browser, requiring no special software or hardware. In addition, mining operations can utilize the data to modify blasting design and planning to minimize ground vibration. In conclusion, this system has the potential to alleviate the worries of surrounding residents caused by ground vibrations from blasting due to the fact that they can personally check the predicted vibration around their locale. Furthermore, since this data will be publicly available on the internet, it is also possible that this system can contribute to research in other fields.
Strong Mutation-Based Test Data Generation Using Hill Climbing

Mutation Testing is an effective test criterion for finding faults and assessing the quality of a test suite. Every test criterion requires the generation of test cases, which turns to be a manual and difficult task. In literature, search-based techniques are effective in generating structural-based test data. This fact motivates their use for mutation testing. Thus, if automatic test data generation can achieve an acceptable level of mutation score, it has the potential to greatly reduce the involved manual effort. This paper proposes an automated test generation approach, using hill climbing, for strong mutation. It incremental aims at strongly killing mutants, by focusing on mutants’ propagation, i.e., how to kill mutants that are weakly killed but not strongly. Furthermore, the paper reports empirical results regarding the cost and effectiveness of the proposed approach on a set of 18 C programs. Overall, for the majority of the studied programs, the proposed approach achieved a higher strong mutation score than random testing, by 19,02% on average, and the previously proposed test generation techniques that ignore mutants’ propagation, by 7,2% on average. Our results also demonstrate the improved efficiency of the proposed scheme over the previous methods.
Alterations in miRNA processing and expression in pleomorphic adenomas of the salivary gland

Genome‐wide microRNA (miRNA) expression profiling of salivary gland pleomorphic adenomas revealed a distinct expression signature consisting largely of upregulated miRNAs compared with matched normal tissue. Microarray data were confirmed by quantitative real time RT‐PCR (q‐RTPCR). Five miRNA genes upregulated in the tumours were found in close proximity to fragile sites and/or cancer associated genomic regions. Interestingly, q‐RTPCR revealed an increase in the expression of components of the miRNA processing machinery (Dicer, Drosha, DGCR8 and p68) in tumours suggesting that the deregulation of miRNA expression may result from increased miRNA biogenesis. Target gene prediction analysis of the altered miRNAs indicated that genes in a number of signalling pathways important in tumourigenesis including WNT, MAPK and JAK‐STAT were overrepresented. Significantly, the oncogene PLAG1 was overexpressed in our cohort and may be potentially regulated by these miRNAs. This is the first study to examine changes in the miRNA milieu in pleomorphic adenoma, the most common salivary gland tumour. This study has demonstrated an upregulation of both miRNAs genes and an upregulation of the miRNA processing machinery. These changes may be potential underlying mechanisms for the development of these benign tumours. © 2009 UICC
trans-Double Bond-Containing Liposomes as Potential Carriers for Drug Delivery

The use of liposomes has been crucial for investigations in biomimetic chemical biology as a membrane model and in medicinal chemistry for drug delivery. Liposomes are made of phospholipids whose biophysical characteristics strongly depend on the type of fatty acid moiety, where natural unsaturated lipids always have the double bond geometry in the cis configuration. The influence of lipid double bond configuration had not been considered so far with respect to the competence of liposomes in delivery. We were interested in evaluating possible changes in the molecular properties induced by the conversion of the double bond from cis to trans geometry. Here we report on the effects of the addition of trans-phospholipids supplied in different amounts to other liposome constituents (cholesterol, neutral phospholipids and cationic surfactants), on the size, ζ-potential and stability of liposomal formulations and on their ability to encapsulate two dyes such as rhodamine B and fluorescein. From a biotechnological point of view, trans-containing liposomes proved to have different characteristics from those containing the cis analogues, and to influence the incorporation and release of the dyes. These results open new perspectives in the use of the unnatural lipid geometry, for the purpose of changing liposome behavior and/or of obtaining molecular interferences, also in view of synergic effects of cell toxicity, especially in antitumoral strategies.
Importance Sampling and Statistical Romberg method

The efficiency of Monte Carlo simulations is significantly improved when implemented with variance reduction methods. Among these methods we focus on the popular importance sampling technique based on producing a parametric transformation through a shift parameter θ. The optimal choice of θ is approximated using Robbins-Monro procedures, provided that a non explosion condition is satisfied. Otherwise, one can use either a constrained Robbins-Monro algorithm (see e.g. Arouna [2] and Lelong [17]) or a more astute procedure based on an unconstrained approach recently introduced by Lemaire and Pages in [18]. In this article, we develop a new algorithm based on a combination of the statistical Romberg method and the importance sampling technique. The statistical Romberg method introduced by Kebaier in [13] is known for reducing efficiently the complexity compared to the classical Monte Carlo one. In the setting of discritized diffusions, we prove the almost sure convergence of the constrained and unconstrained versions of the Robbins-Monro routine, towards the optimal shift θ^∗ that minimizes the variance associated to the statistical Romberg method. Then, we prove a central limit theorem for the new algorithm that we called adaptative statistical Romberg method. Finally, we illustrate by numerical simulation the efficiency of our method through applications in option pricing for the Heston model.
A Scalable Search Algorithm for Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks

Scalability in a peer-to-peer network is a challenging problem. Unstructured peer-to-peer networks inherently lack scalability, and structured networks are inefficient for a high churn rate. In this paper, we present a scalable search algorithm for a decentralized unstructured peer-to-peer network using a method to dynamically determine the number of nodes to forward a query to at once. The decision is based on the degree to which each neighbor has contributed to previous successful searches. The algorithm automatically creates a spanning graph of the high traffic links. Once a stable spanning graph is created, a query tends to travel along the edges of the spanning graph. This way, the number of hops required for a search is roughly bound by the diameter of the spanning graph. The simulation shows that our algorithm demonstrates significantly better performance in terms of the number of messages generated and hops required for a search over other popular algorithms.
The removal of extracellular calcium: a novel mechanism underlying the recruitment of N‐methyl‐d‐aspartate (NMDA) receptors in neurotoxicity

The involvement of NMDA‐type glutamate receptor in neuronal injury established in experimental stroke and neurotrauma models has been recently challenged by failures in treatment of stroke/neurotrauma patients with NMDA receptor antagonists. NMDA receptor activity is known to be essential for mediating a multitude of physiological functions. However, how NMDA receptors are recruited to cause neuronal injury remains unclear. Here we report that the time period during which initial NMDA receptor up‐regulation occurs is critical for the recruitment of NMDA receptors causing neuronal injury during extracellular calcium (Ca2+) reperfusion in cultured hippocampal neurons, and represents the key period for neuronal protection by NMDA receptor antagonists. Furthermore, we identified that via intracellular sodium (Na+), extracellular Ca2+ depletion induces the up‐regulation of NMDA receptor gating. Taken together, our study provides direct experimental evidence suggesting that determination of when and how NMDA receptors are recruited to cause neurotoxicity is essential for guiding treatment via antagonism of NMDA receptor functions.
A New Solution for Security in MANET with the RAODV protocol

: Mobile Ad-hoc Networks are unplanned, self-organizing networks composed of mobile nodes that utilize mesh networking principles for interconnectivity. Routing in ad hoc networks is a very challenging issue due to nodes mobility, dynamic topology, frequent link breakage, limitation of nodes memory, battery, bandwidth, and processing power and lack of central point like base stations or servers. Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an autonomous system of mobile nodes. Each node operates not only as an end system, but also as a router to forward packets. The nodes are free to move about and organize themselves into a network. These cause extra challenges on security. In this paper, evaluation of prominent on-demand routing protocol i.e. AODV, MAODV, RAODV has been done by varying the network size. An effort has been carried out to do the performance evaluation of these protocols using random way point model. The simulator used is NS 2.34. The performance of either protocol has been studied by using a self created network scenario with respect to pause time.
Normal mode analysis of macromolecular motions in a database framework: Developing mode concentration as a useful classifying statistic

We investigated protein motions using normal modes within a database framework, determining on a large sample the degree to which normal modes anticipate the direction of the observed motion and were useful for motions classification. As a starting point for our analysis, we identified a large number of examples of protein flexibility from a comprehensive set of structural alignments of the proteins in the PDB. Each example consisted of a pair of proteins that were considerably different in structure given their sequence similarity. On each pair, we performed geometric comparisons and adiabatic‐mapping interpolations in a high‐throughput pipeline, arriving at a final list of 3,814 putative motions and standardized statistics for each. We then computed the normal modes of each motion in this list, determining the linear combination of modes that best approximated the direction of the observed motion. We integrated our new motions and normal mode calculations in the Macromolecular Motions Database, through a new ranking interface at http://molmovdb.org. Based on the normal mode calculations and the interpolations, we identified a new statistic, mode concentration, related to the mathematical concept of information content, which describes the degree to which the direction of the observed motion can be summarized by a few modes. Using this statistic, we were able to determine the fraction of the 3,814 motions where one could anticipate the direction of the actual motion from only a few modes. We also investigated mode concentration in comparison to related statistics on combinations of normal modes and correlated it with quantities characterizing protein flexibility (e.g., maximum backbone displacement or number of mobile atoms). Finally, we evaluated the ability of mode concentration to automatically classify motions into a variety of simple categories (e.g., whether or not they are “fragment‐like”), in comparison to motion statistics. This involved the application of decision trees and feature selection (particular machine‐learning techniques) to training and testing sets derived from merging the “list” of motions with manually classified ones. Proteins 2002;48:682–695. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The TITech Summarization System at TAC-2009

This paper presents the TITech summarization system participating in TAC2009. Specifically, we discuss our results for the Update track. We propose a new method for creating summaries by ordering sentences. After a draft summary is obtained, we conduct agglomerative hierarchical clustering on the sentences of the draft summary based on sentence associativity. Then we use a probabilistic method to adjust the order of these draft summaries. We submitted two runs: the results that sentence order is decided by utilizing chronological information, and the results of our proposed method.
Heat-Induced Expression and Chemically Induced Expression of the Escherichia coli Stress Protein HtpG Are Affected by the Growth Environment

ABSTRACT Differences in expression of the Escherichia colistress protein HtpG were found following exposure of exponentially growing cells to heat or chemical shock when cells were grown under different environmental conditions. With anhtpG::lacZ reporter system, htpGexpression increased in cells grown in a complex medium (Luria-Bertani [LB] broth) following a temperature shock at 45°C. In contrast, no HtpG overexpression was detected in cells grown in a glucose minimal medium, despite a decrease in the growth rate. Similarly, in pyruvate-grown cells there was no heat shock induction of HtpG expression, eliminating the possibility that repression of HtpG in glucose-grown E. coli was due to catabolite repression. When 5 mM phenol was used as a chemical stress agent for cells growing in LB broth, expression of HtpG increased. However, when LB-grown cells were subjected to stress with 10 mM phenol and when both 5 and 10 mM phenol were added to glucose-grown cultures, repression ofhtpG expression was observed. 2-Chlorophenol stress resulted in overexpression of HtpG when cells were grown in complex medium but repression of HtpG synthesis when cells were grown in glucose. No induction of htpG expression was seen with 2,4-dichlorophenol in cells grown with either complex medium or glucose. The results suggest that, when a large pool of amino acids and proteins is available, as in complex medium, a much stronger stress response is observed. In contrast, when cells are grown in a simple glucose mineral medium, htpG expression either is unaffected or is even repressed by imposition of a stress condition. The results demonstrate the importance of considering differences in growth environment in order to better understand the nature of the response to an imposed stress condition.