Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Application Layer Packet Merging to Improve Call Capacity in a 802.11 Based Intercom

We propose to use an 802.11 WLAN for a wireless intercom kind of scenario for enterprises. Replicating ordinary VoIP schemes leads to exceedingly low capacity. A scheme involving application layer merging of consecutive VoIP packets in the same host has been investigated to improve the capacity of VoIP over 802.11 WLANs. A simple analysis has been performed and simulated results have been presented to validate the idea. It has been shown through analysis and simulations that transmitting VoIP packets less often will reduce the packet congestion at the AP and hence lead to greater capacity for the VoIP calls. We use this fact to merge several of the VoIP packets at the application layer of the hosts themselves. At the destination, these super-packets can then be dissected to recover the original packets
Concurrent Chemoradiation with Low-Dose Weekly Cisplatin in Locally Advanced Stage IV Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Purpose Concurrent chemoradiation (CRT) with 3-weekly doses of cisplatin is a standard treatment for loco-regionally advanced head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). However, treatment with 3-weekly doses of cisplatin is often associated with several adverse events. Therefore, we conducted this retrospective analysis to determine the efficacy and tolerance of CRT with a low weekly dose of cisplatin in stage IV HNSCC patients. Materials and Methods Medical records of patients who were diagnosed with stage IV HNSCC and received concurrent CRT were analyzed. All patients were treated weekly with cisplatin at 20-30 mg/m2 until radiotherapy was completed. Results A total of 35 patients were reviewed. Median follow up was 10.7 months (range, 1.7 to 90.5 months), the median radiation dose was 7,040 cGy, and the median dose of cisplatin received was 157 mg/m2. Eleven patients received docetaxel combination chemotherapy. Overall, 25 patients (71.4%) achieved complete response (CR), eight (22.9%) showed partial response. The median overall survival was 42.7 months, the 3-year survival rate was 51.2% and the 3 year disease-free survival rate was 72.8%. Overall survival was improved in patients who achieved CR relative to others (59.7 months vs. 13.4 months; p=0.008). There were significant differences in survival between patients who received docetaxel combination and cisplatin alone (51.8 months vs. 7.9 months; p=0.009). Grade 3-4 adverse events included stomatitis (82.9%), dermatitis (22.9%), infection (11.4%), dysphagia (8.6%), and neutropenia (5.7%). Conclusion CRT with low dose weekly cisplatin is likely effective and tolerable, even in patients with locally advanced-stage IV HNSCC.
A Primary Assembly of a Bovine Haplotype Block Map Based on a 15,036-Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism Panel Genotyped in Holstein–Friesian Cattle

Analysis of data on 1000 Holstein–Friesian bulls genotyped for 15,036 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) has enabled genomewide identification of haplotype blocks and tag SNPs. A final subset of 9195 SNPs in Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium and mapped on autosomes on the bovine sequence assembly (release Btau 3.1) was used in this study. The average intermarker spacing was 251.8 kb. The average minor allele frequency (MAF) was 0.29 (0.05–0.5). Following recent precedents in human HapMap studies, a haplotype block was defined where 95% of combinations of SNPs within a region are in very high linkage disequilibrium. A total of 727 haplotype blocks consisting of ≥3 SNPs were identified. The average block length was 69.7 ± 7.7 kb, which is ∼5–10 times larger than in humans. These blocks comprised a total of 2964 SNPs and covered 50,638 kb of the sequence map, which constitutes 2.18% of the length of all autosomes. A set of tag SNPs, which will be useful for further fine-mapping studies, has been identified. Overall, the results suggest that as many as 75,000–100,000 tag SNPs would be needed to track all important haplotype blocks in the bovine genome. This would require ∼250,000 SNPs in the discovery phase.
SCU at TREC 2014 Knowledge Base Acceleration Track

Abstract : In this paper, we present our system we developed at Santa Clara University to address the SSF task in TREC KBA 2014. We used the pattern matching method to extract slot values for interested entities from relevant passages. We improved the approach we used last year to enhance the performance. Our system consists of the following steps: processing filtered corpus, retrieving relevant passages, pattern matching, computing scores, and generate results.
The SIMCA algorithm for processing ground penetrating radar data and its use in landmine detection

The main challenge of ground penetrating radar (GPR) based land mine detection is to have an accurate image analysis method that is capable of reducing false alarms. However an accurate image relies on having sufficient spatial resolution in the received signal. But because the diameter of an AP mine can be as low as 2cm and many soils have very high attenuations at frequencies above 3GHz, the accurate detection of landmines is accomplished using advanced algorithms. Using image reconstruction and by carrying out the system level analysis of the issues involved with recognition of landmines allows the landmine detection problem to be solved. The SIMCA ('SIMulated Correlation Algorithm') is a novel and accurate landmine detection tool that carries out correlation between a simulated GPR trace and a clutter1 removed original GPR trace. This correlation is performed using the MATLAB® processing environment. The authors tried using convolution and correlation. But in this paper the correlated results are presented because they produced better results. Validation of the results from the algorithm was done by an expert GPR user and 4 other general users who predict the location of landmines. These predicted results are compared with the ground truth data.
Column-Oriented Databases, an Alternative for Analytical Environment

It is widely accepted that a data warehouse is the central place of a Business Intelligence system. It stores all data that is relevant for the company, data that is acquired both from internal and external sources. Such a repository stores data from more years than a transactional system can do, and offer valuable information to its users to make the best decisions, based on accurate and reliable data. As the volume of data stored in an enterprise data warehouse becomes larger and larger, new approaches are needed to make the analytical system more efficient. This paper presents column-oriented databases, which are considered an element of the new generation of DBMS technology. The paper emphasizes the need and the advantages of these databases for an analytical environment and make a short presentation of two of the DBMS built in a columnar approach.
Freecursive ORAM: [Nearly] Free Recursion and Integrity Verification for Position-based Oblivious RAM

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) is a cryptographic primitive that hides memory access patterns as seen by untrusted storage. Recently, ORAM has been architected into secure processors. A big challenge for hardware ORAM schemes is how to efficiently manage the Position Map (PosMap), a central component in modern ORAM algorithms. Implemented naively, the PosMap causes ORAM to be fundamentally unscalable in terms of on-chip area. On the other hand, a technique called Recursive ORAM fixes the area problem yet significantly increases ORAM's performance overhead. To address this challenge, we propose three new mechanisms. We propose a new ORAM structure called the PosMap Lookaside Buffer (PLB) and PosMap compression techniques to reduce the performance overhead from Recursive ORAM empirically (the latter also improves the construction asymptotically). Through simulation, we show that these techniques reduce the memory bandwidth overhead needed to support recursion by 95%, reduce overall ORAM bandwidth by 37% and improve overall SPEC benchmark performance by 1.27x. We then show how our PosMap compression techniques further facilitate an extremely efficient integrity verification scheme for ORAM which we call PosMap MAC (PMMAC). For a practical parameterization, PMMAC reduces the amount of hashing needed for integrity checking by >= 68x relative to prior schemes and introduces only 7% performance overhead. We prototype our mechanisms in hardware and report area and clock frequency for a complete ORAM design post-synthesis and post-layout using an ASIC flow in a 32~nm commercial process. With 2 DRAM channels, the design post-layout runs at 1~GHz and has a total area of . 47~mm2. Depending on PLB-specific parameters, the PLB accounts for 10% to 26% area. PMMAC costs 12% of total design area. Our work is the first to prototype Recursive ORAM or ORAM with any integrity scheme in hardware.
Rule Markov Models for Fast Tree-to-String Translation

Most statistical machine translation systems rely on composed rules (rules that can be formed out of smaller rules in the grammar). Though this practice improves translation by weakening independence assumptions in the translation model, it nevertheless results in huge, redundant grammars, making both training and decoding inefficient. Here, we take the opposite approach, where we only use minimal rules (those that cannot be formed out of other rules), and instead rely on a rule Markov model of the derivation history to capture dependencies between minimal rules. Large-scale experiments on a state-of-the-art tree-to-string translation system show that our approach leads to a slimmer model, a faster decoder, yet the same translation quality (measured using B) as composed rules.
Parallel detection of autoantibodies with microarrays in rheumatoid diseases.

BACKGROUND Clinical needs often dictate testing for several autoantibodies in a single patient with evidence of autoimmune disease. We developed a microarray containing 15 autoantigens for the detection of autoantibodies in rheumatoid autoimmune diseases. METHODS We synthesized recombinant centromere protein B, cytokeratin 19, SSA 52-kDa antigen, SSA 60-kDa antigen, SSB antigen, and Jo-1 antigen and prepared anti-nuclear antibody antigens. Cyclic citrullinated peptide, histone, goat IgG for detection of rheumatoid factor, double-stranded DNA, and single-stranded DNA were purchased, as were recombinant small nuclear ribonucleoprotein U1, topoisomerase I, and Smith antigen (Sm). All 15 antigens were of human origin except calf thymus Sm. Proteins were printed on polystyrene. The arrays were incubated with serum samples and then with horseradish peroxidase-conjugated secondary antibodies and chemiluminescent substrates, and light signals were captured by a charge-coupled device camera-based chip reader. Antibodies were quantified by use of calibration curves. Positive samples were confirmed by commercially available methods. RESULTS The detection limit of the microarray system was 20 pg of IgG printed on the polystyrene support. More than 85% of the confirmed positive sera were detected as positive with the microarray system based on cutoff values established with the microarray system. The imprecision (CV) of the microarrays was <15% for all 15 autoantibody assays, with the exception of single-stranded DNA (18% and 23%) within and between batches. Characteristic autoantibody patterns were seen in patients with clinical diagnoses of rheumatoid arthritis (n = 83), systemic lupus erythematosus (n = 71), systemic sclerosis (n = 36), polymyositis (n = 38), and Sjogren syndrome (n = 20). CONCLUSIONS This microarray system provides results similar to those by conventional methods. Assessment of the diagnostic accuracy of the system remains to be done.
Tachykinin-Related Peptides Share a G Protein-Coupled Receptor with Ion Transport Peptide-Like in the Silkworm Bombyx mori

Recently, we identified an orphan Bombyx mori neuropeptide G protein-coupled receptor (BNGR)-A24 as an ion transport peptide-like (ITPL) receptor. BNGR-A24 belongs to the same clade as BNGR-A32 and -A33, which were recently identified as natalisin receptors. Since these three BNGRs share high similarities with known receptors for tachykinin-related peptides (TRPs), we examined whether these BNGRs can function as physiological receptors for five endogenous B. mori TRPs (TK-1–5). In a heterologous expression system, BNGR-A24 acted as a receptor for all five TRPs. In contrast, BNGR-A32 responded only to TK-5, and BNGR-A33 did not respond to any of the TRPs. These findings are consistent with recent studies on the ligand preferences for B. mori natalisins. Furthermore, we evaluated whether the binding of ITPL and TRPs to BNGR-A24 is competitive by using a Ca2+ imaging assay. Concomitant addition of a TRP receptor antagonist, spantide I, reduced the responses of BNGR-A24 not only to TK-4 but also to ITPL. The results of a binding assay using fluorescent-labeled BNGR-A24 and ligands demonstrated that the binding of ITPL to BNGR-A24 was inhibited by TK-4 as well as by spantide I, and vice versa. In addition, the ITPL-induced increase in cGMP levels of BNGR-A24-expressing BmN cells was suppressed by the addition of excess TK-4 or spantide I. The intracellular levels of cAMP and cGMP, as second messenger candidates of the TRP signaling, were not altered by the five TRPs, suggesting that these peptides act via different signaling pathways from cAMP and cGMP signaling at least in BmN cells. Taken together, the present findings suggest that ITPL and TRPs are endogenous orthosteric ligands of BNGR-A24 that may activate discrete signaling pathways. This receptor, which shares orthosteric ligands, may constitute an important model for studying ligand-biased signaling.
A digital rights aware similarity measure for multimedia documents

This paper presents a novel approach to the retrieval of multimedia documents that considers Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) metadata as a multidimensional feature in a metric space. The approach allows us to perform similarity searches on the IPR attributes of digital items and to integrate these searches in a common query-by-example paradigm. We aim at managing the metadata related to the IPR in both centralized and Peer-to-Peer systems with metric indexing capabilities. Together with content-based similarity search, IPR similarity search can help the end user to deal with a huge amount of similar items with different licenses. Moreover, content providers may be able to detect fake copies or illegal uses. Two use cases, related to the retrieval of music and images respectively, are presented to describe the possible applications of the approach.
Indexing Semi-structured Data for Efficient Handling of Branching Path Expressions

One of the major challenges in development of indexing techniques for semi-structured data is related to how to index the data structural properties. The main issue is how to efficiently handle branching path expressions without suffering from undesired growth of query processing costs and index file sizes. Several proposals for indexing semi-structured data can be found in the literature. However, in order to reduce index file sizes, most of them do not index or handle branching path expressions. Considering those ones that do that, they usually suffer from high query processing costs and large index file sizes. In such a context, this paper proposes a path-based indexing technique for semi-structured data, which deals with a well-defined class of branching path expressions. As evinced by experimental evaluation, the adoption of the proposed technique results in excellent query processing time and generates index file sizes close to data input file sizes.
Real Time Traffic Density And Vehicle Count Using Image Processing Technique

Monitoring Indian trafic and calculation of peak hours and density count in a day helps to develop necessary travel and traffic volume estimates, required to satisfy the needs in the are of road planning, construction, maintenance and overall administration of the state. An algorithm for advance Traffic Surveillance by vehicle counting and classification, based on the image processing theory is proposed. Vehicle counting is done by Background subtraction and finding the centroid. Classification is done by thresholding method and the rush or peak hour implies the high time in which the traffic increases to maximum which would certainly lead to road blocks. Video sequences have been captured and tested with the proposed algorithm. The results can be used for planning of new roads or any other diversion of vehicles need to be taken during the peak time. An image-based technique differs from other roadway sensors, such as radar or inductive loops, which provide data only regarding traffic flow and density, and do not provide information about the type of vehicle in real time.
Novel Identified Receptors on Mast Cells

Mast cells (MC) are major participants in the allergic reaction. In addition they possess immunomodulatory roles in the innate and adaptive immune reactions. Their functions are modulated through a number of activating and inhibitory receptors expressed on their surface. This review deals with some of the most recently described receptors, their expression patterns, ligand(s), signal transduction mechanisms, possible cross-talk with other receptors and, last but not least, regulatory functions that the MC can perform based on their receptor expression in health or in disease. Where the receptor role on MC is still not clear, evidences from other hematopoietic cells expressing them is provided as a possible insight for their function on MC. Suggested strategies to modulate these receptors’ activity for the purpose of therapeutic intervention are also discussed.
The Relationship Between Demographic Variables and Life Satisfaction of College Students

This paper explains a research proposal on the relationship between demographic variables and life satisfaction of college students. The variables being measured are gender, race, socioeconomic class, and college majors. A literature review was conducted to examine previous research on these variables in relation to life satisfaction. A relationship between these variables was found throughout the research studies that were analyzed. The proposed methodology for this research is a survey distributed to students at Lindenwood University. The survey will consist of four demographic questions as well as the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale (Margolis et al., 2019) for participants to complete. A scale has been created to assess the results by labeling participants as having low, medium, or high satisfaction with life. There are many benefits of conducting this research that are discussed throughout this proposal. This research will contribute to a better understanding of possible factors that may contribute to one’s overall satisfaction with life.
Reconfigurable radio frontends for cooperative sensor networks: Tasks and challenges

This paper features a review of smart cities' needs established by Cooperative Sensor Networks. Based on the challenges due to emerging demands and rapid technological advance, the frontend of a radio frequency (RF) transceiver has to reorganize its typical architecture to achieve service convergence. A solution for the RF-frontend architecture of an Internet of Things sensor network oriented system is proposed. It has been identified that state-of-the-art technology has to improve in terms of spectrum allocation, driven bandwidth and energy consumption. Key strategies as Cognitive Radio/Software-Defined-Radio combined with high performance tunable RF components can satisfy these requirements, and thus, reconfigure and adapt the wireless transceiver for different environments and user needs. Furthermore, the frequency range of operation can also be greatly enhanced by using tunable components to enable agile and universal functionality, as well as significant improvement in the utilization of resources.
SHREC 2023: Detection of symmetries on 3D point clouds representing simple shapes

This paper presents the methods that participated in the SHREC 2023 track focused on detecting symmetries on 3D point clouds representing simple shapes. By simple shapes, we mean surfaces generated by different types of closed plane curves used as the directrix of a cylinder or a cone. This track aims to determine the reflective planes for each point cloud. The methods are evaluated in their capability of detecting the right number of symmetries and correctly identifying the reflective planes. To this end, we generated a dataset that contains point clouds representing simple shapes perturbed with different kinds of artefacts (such as noise and undersampling) to provide a thorough evaluation of the robustness of the algorithms
Plasmid transfer and expression of the transfer (tra) gene product of plasmid pIJ101 are temporally regulated during the Streptomyces lividans life cycle

We previously have shown that a chromosomally integrated copy of the tra gene of plasmid pIJ101 under the control of the KorA repressor protein, which regulates transcription of tra as well as its own synthesis, can promote the conjugal transfer of both chromosomal and plasmid genes in Streptomyces lividans. Using an antibody generated against a fusion protein containing the C‐terminal portion of Tra, we show here that this essential conjugation protein is present in membrane fractions of both surface‐grown S. lividans, which mate readily, and of cells grown in liquid culture, where mating has not been found. Expression of Tra during the S. lividans life cycle was temporally regulated and was reduced late during vegetative growth so that little or no Tra protein was detected in cells as they began to differentiate morphologically and produce secondary metabolites. Comparison of the membrane concentration of Tra protein with tra mRNA concentration during the S. lividans life cycle indicated that the disappearance of Tra is post‐transcriptionally controlled and thus is not mediated by KorA. The results of ‘interrupted mating’ experiments, together with the time of appearance of Tra in S. lividans membranes, indicate that the intermycelial transfer of pIJ101 in S. lividans is complete by the onset of cellular differentiation.
Dynamic range and sensitivity adaptation in a silicon spiking neuron

We here propose an adaptive procedure that enables a spiking neuron, whether artificial or biological, to make optimal use of its dynamic range and gain.We discuss an analog electronic circuit implementation of this algorithm using a biologically realistic artificial "silicon" neuron. The adaptation procedure adapts the neuron's firing threshold and the sensitivity (or gain) of its current-frequency relationship to match the dc offset (or mean) and the dynamic range (or variance) of the time-varying somatic input current. The neuron extracts the minimum and maximum levels of the reconstructed somatic current signals from the cell's own spike trains. These are used to regulate the somatic leak conductance in order to shift the somatic current-frequency relation and to adjust a calcium-activated potassium conductance to change the dynamic range of the cell's somatic current-frequency relationship. We report experimental data from a test neuron--built using analog subthreshold CMOS VLSI technology--that shows the expected behavior.