Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Zone-plate X-ray microscopy

The scope of this article is to describe a transmission X-ray microscope, possible biological applications of soft X-ray microscopy and preliminary results. For soft X-ray microscopy of biological specimens the wavelength range of 1–10 nm is best suited. Microscopy in this wavelength range requires intense X-ray sources as well as high-resolution X-ray lenses. Intense X-radiation is provided by the synchrotron radiation of electron and positron storage rings. Suited X-ray lenses are zone plates. A theoretical treatment of the contrast mechanism and the radiation damage as well as first experiments yield the following results. Firstly, relatively thick (1–10 μm) biological specimens can be investigated. This means that unsectioned dried and even wet cells and cell organelles in a natural state can be examined. Second, it will be possible to resolve cellular aggregates in live cells with a resolution in the region of ≤10nm.
How mobile phone handovers reflect urban mobility: A simulation study

We propose a novel way of estimating Macroscopic Fundamental Diagrams (MFD) (or often also called Network Fundamental Diagrams) from mobile phone signaling data under the assumption that vehicles can be identified from the data stream. We run a simulation study to identify whether MFDs can be constructed from this type of data. We co-simulate the road traffic in Luxembourg City and one mobile operator's LTE network user plane, and show that mobile network base station clusters cover road network partitions of coherent behavior. Our results indicate that the relationships between handovers (flow) and attached phones (accumulation) in these base station clusters constitute MFDs. We validate our results by comparing the road network MFDs to the ones obtained from the mobile network.
Multiple Roles of Integrin-Linked Kinase in Epidermal Development, Maturation and Pigmentation Revealed by Molecular Profiling

Integrin-linked kinase (ILK) is an important scaffold protein that mediates a variety of cellular responses to integrin stimulation by extracellular matrix proteins. Mice with epidermis-restricted inactivation of the Ilk gene exhibit pleiotropic phenotypic defects, including impaired hair follicle morphogenesis, reduced epidermal adhesion to the basement membrane, compromised epidermal integrity, as well as wasting and failure to thrive leading to perinatal death. To better understand the underlying molecular mechanisms that cause such a broad range of alterations, we investigated the impact of Ilk gene inactivation on the epidermis transcriptome. Microarray analysis showed over 700 differentially regulated mRNAs encoding proteins involved in multiple aspects of epidermal function, including keratinocyte differentiation and barrier formation, inflammation, regeneration after injury, and fundamental epidermal developmental pathways. These studies also revealed potential effects on genes not previously implicated in ILK functions, including those important for melanocyte and melanoblast development and function, regulation of cytoskeletal dynamics, and homeobox genes. This study shows that ILK is a critical regulator of multiple aspects of epidermal function and homeostasis, and reveals the previously unreported involvement of ILK not only in epidermal differentiation and barrier formation, but also in melanocyte genesis and function.
A comparison of five different multiprocessor SoC bus architectures

The performance of a system, especially multiprocessor system, heavily depends upon the efficiency of its bus architecture. In System-on-a-Chip (SoC), the bus architecture can be devised with advantages such as shorter propagation delay (resulting in a faster bus clock), larger bus width, and multiple buses. This paper presents five different SoC bus architectures for a multiprocessor system: Global Bus I Architecture (GBIA), Global Bus II Architecture (GBIIA), Bi-FIFO Bus Architecture (BFBA), Crossbar Switch Bus Architecture (CSBA), and CoreConnect Bus architecture (CCBA). The performance of these architectures is evaluated using applications from wireless communications-an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter-and from video processing-an MPEG2 decoder. To increase performance, these bus architectures employ a pipelined scheme, resulting in improved throughput. While all five bus architectures perform well, we find that BFBA and CSBA perform the best for the OFDM transmitter and the MPEG2 decoder, respectively.
Seismic responses of an isolated concrete rectangular liquid-storage structure

Abstract To study the seismic response of a liquid-solid coupling in an isolated concrete rectangular liquid-storage structure under small amplitude sloshing, a three-dimensional model of the isolated concrete rectangular liquid-storage structure was established based on the assumption that the concrete is considered to be a linear elastic material. The seismic responses of the isolated concrete rectangular liquid-storage structure with the same liquid sloshing height under different seismic intensities and different liquid heights under the same earthquake wave were studied. The results show that the seismic responses of the rectangular liquid-storage structure are different in the cases of small amplitude sloshing and linear elastic material with different seismic intensities due to the effects of the seismic wave frequency domain and time domain characteristics. At the same liquid height, the wall displacement, the liquid sloshing height and the equivalent stress of the isolated concrete rectangular liquid-storage structure are increased as the seismic intensity increases. The liquid height has a certain effect on the seismic responses of the liquid-storage structure, and when the liquid height is lower, the peak values of the liquid sloshing height, the wall displacement and equivalent stress are greater.
Interactive hierarchical dimension ordering, spacing and filtering for exploration of high dimensional datasets

Large number of dimensions not only cause clutter in multi-dimensional visualizations, but also make it difficult for users to navigate the data space. Effective dimension management, such as dimension ordering, spacing and filtering, is critical for visual exploration of such datasets. Dimension ordering and spacing explicitly reveal dimension relationships in arrangement-sensitive multidimensional visualization techniques, such as parallel coordinates, star glyphs, and pixel-oriented techniques. They facilitate the visual discovery of patterns within the data. Dimension filtering hides some of the dimensions to reduce clutter while preserving the major information of the dataset. In this paper, we propose an interactive hierarchical dimension ordering, spacing and filtering approach, called DOSFA. DOSFA is based on dimension hierarchies derived from similarities among dimensions. It is scalable multi-resolution approach making dimensional management a tractable task. On the one hand, it automatically generates default settings for dimension ordering, spacing and filtering. On the other hand, it allows users to efficiently control all aspects of this dimension management process via visual interaction tools for dimension hierarchy manipulation. A case study visualizing a dataset containing over 200 dimensions reveals high dimensional visualization techniques.
A pathogenic non coding RNA that replicates and accumulates in chloroplasts traffics to this organelle through a nuclear-dependent step

Viroids belonging to the family Avsunviroidae are the only functional RNAs known to traffic selectively into chloroplasts. Subcellular targeting is a critical step in guaranteeing their access to the machineries involved in their replication. However, the host mechanisms exploited by these non coding pathogenic RNAs to be selectively imported into chloroplasts are poorly understood. Recently, we provide evidence supporting the idea that the Avsunviroidae have evolved to subvert a signaling mechanism between the nucleus and chloroplasts to regulate their differential compartmentalization into the chloroplast of infected cells. Here, we discuss our model and previous observations that provide biological relevance to our hypothesis.
Angela Woods*,1, Nev Jones2, Marco Bernini3, Felicity Callard4, Ben Alderson-Day5, Johanna C. Badcock6, Vaughan Bell7, Chris C. H. Cook8, Thomas Csordas9, Clara Humpston7, Joel Krueger10, Frank Larøi11, Simon McCarthy-Jones12, Peter Moseley5, Hilary Powell13, Andrea Raballo14, David Smailes5, and Ch

Woods, A. and Jones, N. and Bernini, M. and Callard, Felicity and AldersonDay, B. and Badcock, J. and Bell, V. and Cook, C. and Csordas, T. and Humpston, C. and Krueger, J. and Larøi, F. and McCarthy-Jones, S. and Moseley, P. and Powell, H. and Raballo, A. and Smailes, D. and Fernyhough, C. (2014) Interdisciplinary approaches to the phenomenology of auditory verbal hallucinations. Schizophrenia Bulletin 40 (S), S246-S254. ISSN 05867614.
Gait recognition using dynamic time warping

We propose a methodology for gait recognition based on dynamic time warping. The gait sequences are initially partitioned into gait cycles and then the test cycles are compared to reference cycles using dynamic time warping. The final distance between a test and a reference sequence is determined using a nonlinear rule. Experimental results are reported showing an improvement in recognition performance in comparison to the baseline algorithm on the "gait challenge" database.
Combination of pigment epithelium‐derived factor with radiotherapy enhances the antitumor effects on nasopharyngeal carcinoma by downregulating vascular endothelial growth factor expression and angiogenesis

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), which has the highest incidence in South China, is mainly treated by radiotherapy. However, the survival rate remains low. Angiogenesis is closely correlated with progress of NPC. Thus, the combination of anti‐angiogenesis with radiation is an attractive strategy for NPC treatment. A heterogenic xenografted human NPC nude mice model was established to investigate the effect of pigment epithelium‐derived factor (PEDF), a potent anti‐angiogenic factor, and the combined effect of PEDF and radiotherapy on nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Pigment epithelium‐derived factor remarkably suppressed the growth of NPC by 43.52% and decreased the tumor microvessel density (MVD). Pigment epithelium‐derived factor had no effects on the proliferation and apoptosis of NPC cell lines by MTT and flow cytometry assay. However, PEDF decreased vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in NPC cell lines by downregulation of hypoxia‐inducible factor 1α, a crucial transcriptional factor for VEGF expression, as demonstrated by western blotting and immunofluorescent staining assay. Interestingly, irradiation alone could also effectively downregulate VEGF and MVD of xenografted tumor, which indicates that irradiation suppresses NPC not only by killing tumor cells but also through anti‐angiogenesis. Furthermore, combined treatment of PEDF with irradiation enhanced the antitumor efficacy. The MVD and VEGF in the combined therapy were much less than in the treatment with PEDF or radiotherapy alone. Our observation demonstrated that the combination of PEDF with radiotherapy enhances the efficacy of the antitumor effect on NPC by the coordinated inhibition on angiogenesis, which implies the potential role of PEDF as an adjuvant agent for NPC treatment. (Cancer Sci 2011; 102: 1789–1798)
Autonomous object modeling based on affordances for spatial organization of behavior

We present an architecture for self-motivated agents to organize their behaviors in space according to possibilities of interactions afforded by initially unknown objects. The long-term goal is to design agents that construct their own knowledge of objects through experience, rather than exploiting pre-coded knowledge. Self-motivation is defined here as a tendency to experiment and to respond to behavioral opportunities afforded by the environment. Some interactions have predefined valences that specify inborn behavioral preferences. Over time, the agent learns the relation between its perception of objects and the interactions that they afford, in the form of data structures, called signatures of interaction, which encode the minimal spatial configurations that afford an interaction. The agent keeps track of enacted interactions in a topological spatial memory, to recognize and localize subsequent possibilities of interaction (through their signatures) afforded by surrounding objects. Experiments with a simulated agent and a robot show that they learn to navigate in their environment, taking into account multiple surrounding objects, reaching or avoiding objects according to the valence of the interactions that they afford.
Enhancement of visual cortex plasticity by dark exposure

Dark rearing is known to delay the time course of the critical period for ocular dominance plasticity in the visual cortex. Recent evidence suggests that a period of dark exposure (DE) may enhance or reinstate plasticity even after closure of the critical period, mediated through modification of the excitatory–inhibitory balance and/or removal of structural brakes on plasticity. Here, we investigated the effects of a week of DE on the recovery from a month of monocular deprivation (MD) in the primary visual cortex (V1) of juvenile mice. Optical imaging of intrinsic signals revealed that ocular dominance in V1 of mice that had received DE recovered slightly more quickly than of mice that had not, but the level of recovery after three weeks was similar in both groups. Two-photon calcium imaging showed no significant difference in the recovery of orientation selectivity of excitatory neurons between the two groups. Parvalbumin-positive (PV+) interneurons exhibited a smaller ocular dominance shift during MD but again no differences in subsequent recovery. The percentage of PV+ cells surrounded by perineuronal nets, a structural brake on plasticity, was lower in mice with than those without DE. Overall, DE causes a modest enhancement of mouse visual cortex plasticity. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Integrating Hebbian and homeostatic plasticity’.
Multi-view News Video Topic Tracking Approach

Existing researches on tracking topics of news videos require lots of labeled examples. However, video labeling is too time-consuming to generate a large number of labeled videos in real applications. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to track news video topics through using only a few labeled samples. The three main characters of proposed approach are: (1) Multi-view learning process is used for the lack of labeled training samples existing in the topic tracking processing. (2) Principal Component Analysis is used to simplify the feature vectors and speed up processing. And (3) a collaborative training process is proposed to track the related news videos with only one labeled sample. Experiment conducted on our collected Chinese news videos show that the proposed approach can get a good performance with 82.5% precision and 96.4% recall.
Distributed Power Allocation for Sink-Centric Clusters in Multiple Sink Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the battery resource constraints, saving energy is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks, particularly in large sensor networks. One possible solution is to deploy multiple sink nodes simultaneously. Another possible solution is to employ an adaptive clustering hierarchy routing scheme. In this paper, we propose a multiple sink cluster wireless sensor networks scheme which combines the two solutions, and propose an efficient transmission power control scheme for a sink-centric cluster routing protocol in multiple sink wireless sensor networks, denoted as MSCWSNs-PC. It is a distributed, scalable, self-organizing, adaptive system, and the sensor nodes do not require knowledge of the global network and their location. All sinks effectively work out a representative view of a monitored region, after which power control is employed to optimize network topology. The simulations demonstrate the advantages of our new protocol.
Part III: dynamic texture synthesis

While we have treated image texture synthesis until now, several dynamic phenomena can also be treated as texture. Ocean waves, waterfall, smoke from a chimney, fire burning in a fireplace, grass fields waving in the wind, etc. are all examples of dynamic textures. These dynamic phenomena exhibit locality and stationarity properties similar to those exhibited by static textures. Additionally, they also evolve in their appearance over time, governed by underlying physical processes such as motion, diffusion, turbulence, and other micro-scale phenomena.
Convergence improvement of active set support vector training

In our previous work we have developed an active set training method of L2 support vector machines (SVMs) using Newton's method. Because the method allows a solution to be infeasible during training, convergence of the method is not guaranteed. In this paper, we guarantee convergence of active set training by limiting the corrections under the constraints when slow convergence is detected. Namely, we start training the L2 SVM with a subset of training data, delete non-positive dual variables from the working set as well as the variables with margins larger than or equal to 1, add violating variables to the working set, and repeat training. We monitor the number of violation fluctuations and if it exceeds a specified value, we obtain a feasible solution prohibiting addition of violating variables. Then for a feasible solution, we start active set training limiting the corrections within a feasible solution. By computer experiments, we show that the proposed training method is faster and more stable than the previous method.
Characterization of carotid atherosclerosis based on motion and texture features and clustering using fuzzy c-means

Analysis of B-mode ultrasound images of the carotid atheromatous plaque includes the estimation of texture from static images and the estimation of motion from image sequences. The combination of these two types of information may be valuable for accurate diagnosis of vascular disease. The purpose of this paper was to study texture and motion patterns of carotid atherosclerosis and select the optimal combination of features that can characterize plaque. B-mode ultrasound images of 10 symptomatic and 9 asymptomatic plaques were interrogated. A total of 99 texture features were estimated using first-order statistics, second-order statistics, Laws texture energy and the fractal dimension. Only five texture features were significantly different between the two groups. In the same subjects, the motion of selected plaque regions was estimated using region tracking and block-matching and expressed through: a/maximal surface velocity (MSV), and b/maximal relative surface velocity (MRSV). MSV and MRSV were significantly lower in asymptomatic plaques suggesting more homogeneous motion patterns. Clustering using fuzzy c-means correctly classified 74% of plaques based on texture features only, and 79% of plaques based on motion features only. Classification performance reached 84% when a combination of motion and texture features was used.
Interaction Prediction Optimization in Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Problems

The distributed strategy of Collaborative Optimization (CO) is suitable for large-scale engineering systems. However, it is hard for CO to converge when there is a high level coupled dimension. Furthermore, the discipline objectives cannot be considered in each discipline optimization problem. In this paper, one large-scale systems control strategy, the interaction prediction method (IPM), is introduced to enhance CO. IPM is utilized for controlling subsystems and coordinating the produce process in large-scale systems originally. We combine the strategy of IPM with CO and propose the Interaction Prediction Optimization (IPO) method to solve MDO problems. As a hierarchical strategy, there are a system level and a subsystem level in IPO. The interaction design variables (including shared design variables and linking design variables) are operated at the system level and assigned to the subsystem level as design parameters. Each discipline objective is considered and optimized at the subsystem level simultaneously. The values of design variables are transported between system level and subsystem level. The compatibility constraints are replaced with the enhanced compatibility constraints to reduce the dimension of design variables in compatibility constraints. Two examples are presented to show the potential application of IPO for MDO.
Directable Weathering of Concave Rock Using Curvature Estimation

We address the problem of directable weathering of exposed concave rock for use in computer-generated animation or games. Previous weathering models that admit concave surfaces are computationally inefficient and difficult to control. In nature, the spheroidal and cavernous weathering rates depend on the surface curvature. Spheroidal weathering is fastest in areas with large positive mean curvature and cavernous weathering is fastest in areas with large negative mean curvature. We simulate both processes using an approximation of mean curvature on a voxel grid. Both weathering rates are also influenced by rock durability. The user controls rock durability by editing a durability graph before and during weathering simulation. Simulations of rockfall and colluvium deposition further improve realism. The profile of the final weathered rock matches the shape of the durability graph up to the effects of weathering and colluvium deposition. We demonstrate the top-down directability and visual plausibility of the resulting model through a series of screenshots and rendered images. The results include the weathering of a cube into a sphere and of a sheltered inside corner into a cavern as predicted by the underlying geomorphological models.
Adoption of Municipal e-Government Services - A Communication Problem?

Although, e-government offers citizens various advantages, the usage rates still lag behind their potentials. Many studies have analysed factors influencing the e-government adoption, however, neglecting the aspect of communication as one crucial antecedent for intention to use. This study tries to close this gap by investigating the role of communication in the acceptance of e-government. We conducted a survey with 103 citizens in a medium-sized municipality. Results reveal that both user and non-users of e-government services would like governments to provide more information especially on the existence of services, the benefits as well as privacy and data security. We found strong support for users having used egovernment services once to be very likely to use them again. We encourage governments to adjust their communication strategy to citizens’ needs and provide further information on e-government especially via the governments’ website.