Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preventing PCM banks from seizing too much power

Widespread adoption of Phase Change Memory (PCM) requires solutions to several problems recently addressed in the literature, including limited endurance, increased write latencies, and system-level changes required to exploit non-volatility. One important difference between PCM and DRAM that has received less attention is the increased need for write power management. Writing to a PCM cell requires high current density over hundreds of nanoseconds, and hard limits on the number of simultaneous writes must be enforced to ensure correct operation, limiting write throughput and therefore overall performance. Because several wear reduction schemes only write those bits that need to be written, the amount of power required to write a cache line back to memory under such a system is now variable, which creates opportunity to reduce write power. This paper proposes policies that monitor the bits that have actually been changed over time, as opposed to simply those lines that are dirty. These polices can more effectively allocate power across the system to improve write concurrency. This method for allocating power across the memory subsystem is built on the idea of “power tokens,” a transferable, but time-specific, allocation of power. The results show that with a storage overhead of 4.3% in the last-level cache, a power-aware memory system can improve the performance of multiprogrammed workloads by up to 84%.
Percept-choice sequences driven by interrupted ambiguous stimuli: a low-level neural model.

Existing neural explanations of spontaneous percept switching under steady viewing of an ambiguous stimulus do not fit the fact that stimulus interruptions cause the same percept to reappear across many ON/OFF cycles. We present a simple neural model that explains the observed behavior and predicts several more complicated percept sequences, without invoking any "high-level" decision making or memory. Percept choice at stimulus onset, which differs fundamentally from standard percept switching, depends crucially on a hitherto neglected interaction between local "shunting" adaptation and a near-threshold neural baseline. Stimulus ON/OFF timing then controls the generation of repeating, alternating, or more complex choice sequences. Our model also explains "priming" versus "habituation" effects on percept choice, reinterprets recent neurophysiological data, and predicts the emergence of hysteresis at the level of percept sequences, with occasional noise-induced sequence "hopping. "
Efficiently Attribute-Based Access Control for Mobile Cloud Storage System

Similar with other outsourced services, cloud storage faces the serious issue of user data security. To keep data confidential against unauthorized cloud servers and users, Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) for access control is widely adopted. However, ABE-based access control schemes are being criticized for their high computation overhead, such as in key generation, decryption and revocation. Considering the mobile cloud storage environment where these computation tasks are executed by mobile devices or sensors, this drawback appears more serious. In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure attribute-based access control scheme for mobile cloud storage. Specifically, we construct the first Key-Policy ABE (KP-ABE) scheme with outsourced key generation and decryption, and propose an efficient revocation method for it. Moreover, we prove the proposed scheme is immune to the collusion attack and secure in the standard model. Extensive experiment demonstrates that the efficient key generation, decryption, and revocation are achieved with the help of the cloud servers.
PDGF signalling controls the migration of mesoderm cells during chick gastrulation by regulating N-cadherin expression

In the early chick embryo, Pdgfa is expressed in the epiblast, outlining the migration route that mesoderm cells expressing the receptor, Pdgfrα, follow to form somites. Both expression of a dominant-negative PDGFRα and depletion of endogenous PDGFRα ligands through injection of PDGFRα-Fc fragments, inhibit the migration of mesoderm cells after their ingression through the primitive streak. siRNA-mediated downregulation of Pdgfa expression in the epiblast on one side of the streak strongly blocks the migration of mesoderm cells into that side. Beads soaked in PDGFA elicit a directional attractive movement response in mesoderm cells, showing that PDGFA can provide directional information. Surprisingly, however, PDGF signalling is also required for directional movement towards other attractants, such as FGF4. PDGF signalling controls N-cadherin expression on mesoderm cells, which is required for efficient migration. PDGF signalling activates the PI3 kinase signalling pathway in vivo and activation of this pathway is required for proper N-cadherin expression.
MicroRNA Classifier and Nomogram for Metastasis Prediction in Colon Cancer

Background: Colon cancer prognosis and treatment are currently based on a classification system still showing large heterogeneity in clinical outcome, especially in TNM stages II and III. Prognostic biomarkers for metastasis risk are warranted as development of distant recurrent disease mainly accounts for the high lethality rates of colon cancer. miRNAs have been proposed as potential biomarkers for cancer. Furthermore, a verified standard for normalization of the amount of input material in PCR-based relative quantification of miRNA expression is lacking. Methods: A selection of frozen tumor specimens from two independent patient cohorts with TNM stage II–III microsatellite stable primary adenocarcinomas was used for laser capture microdissection. Next-generation sequencing was performed on small RNAs isolated from colorectal tumors from the Dutch cohort (N = 50). Differential expression analysis, comparing in metastasized and nonmetastasized tumors, identified prognostic miRNAs. Validation was performed on colon tumors from the German cohort (N = 43) using quantitative PCR (qPCR). Results: miR25-3p and miR339-5p were identified and validated as independent prognostic markers and used to construct a multivariate nomogram for metastasis risk prediction. The nomogram showed good probability prediction in validation. In addition, we recommend combination of miR16-5p and miR26a-5p as standard for normalization in qPCR of colon cancer tissue–derived miRNA expression. Conclusions: In this international study, we identified and validated a miRNA classifier in primary cancers, and propose a nomogram capable of predicting metastasis risk in microsatellite stable TNM stage II–III colon cancer. Impact: In conjunction with TNM staging, by means of a nomogram, this miRNA classifier may allow for personalized treatment decisions based on individual tumor characteristics. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 24(1); 187–97. ©2014 AACR.
The Impact of Religiosity on Interpersonal Trust in B2C Context: a Cross-Culture Analysis

Religion has long been playing a significant role in influencing human behavior. However, its business value as a predictor of buyer behavior has not been sufficiently examined in e-commerce context. The main contribution of this paper is to show the connection between the degree of religiosity and interpersonal trust (cognitive and affect-based trust) in Business to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce. The study uses responses obtained from a convenient sample from Muslims and Christians in two different societies, Pakistan and Australia respectively. The data of the survey were analyzed using Partial Least Square (PLS) approach. The results indicate that interpersonal trust related to religiosity in a web-based retailer can vary with culture, at least as represented by affiliation to a religion. It is suggested that religiosity should be considered as possible determinant of trust in online shopping in the future.
Distribution of miRNA expression across human tissues

We present a human miRNA tissue atlas by determining the abundance of 1997 miRNAs in 61 tissue biopsies of different organs from two individuals collected post-mortem. One thousand three hundred sixty-four miRNAs were discovered in at least one tissue, 143 were present in each tissue. To define the distribution of miRNAs, we utilized a tissue specificity index (TSI). The majority of miRNAs (82.9%) fell in a middle TSI range i.e. were neither specific for single tissues (TSI > 0.85) nor housekeeping miRNAs (TSI < 0.5). Nonetheless, we observed many different miRNAs and miRNA families that were predominantly expressed in certain tissues. Clustering of miRNA abundances revealed that tissues like several areas of the brain clustered together. Considering -3p and -5p mature forms we observed miR-150 with different tissue specificity. Analysis of additional lung and prostate biopsies indicated that inter-organism variability was significantly lower than inter-organ variability. Tissue-specific differences between the miRNA patterns appeared not to be significantly altered by storage as shown for heart and lung tissue. MiRNAs TSI values of human tissues were significantly (P = 10−8) correlated with those of rats; miRNAs that were highly abundant in certain human tissues were likewise abundant in according rat tissues. We implemented a web-based repository enabling scientists to access and browse the data (https://ccb-web.cs.uni-saarland.de/tissueatlas).
Pack Sizing and Reconfiguration for Management of Large-Scale Batteries

Battery systems for electric vehicles (EVs) or un-interruptible micro-grids-prototypical cyber-physical systems (CPSs)-are usually built with several hundreds/thousands of battery cells. How to deal with the inevitable failure of cells quickly and cost-effectively for vehicle warranty or uninterruptible service, for instance, is key to the development of large-scale battery systems. Use of extra (redundant/backup) cells to cope with cell failures must be minimized so as to make the target systems cheaper and lighter, while meeting the reliability requirement that is directly related to, for example, the vehicle warranty. Existing reconfigurable battery systems do not scale well because they incur a long delay in properly setting a large number of switches to bypass faulty cells or adapting to dynamically changing power demands in large battery systems for such applications as EVs. In this paper, we propose a scalable solution, not only to reduce the required number of backup cells and the total cost of a battery system, but also to facilitate recovery from cell failures and adapt to changing power demands while increasing battery utilization. Specifically, we optimize the pack-size by striking a balance between various types of cost in order to reduce the overall cost. We also configure battery packs and optimize their connection topology, reducing delays in failure recovery and power reallocation. Our in-depth evaluation has shown that the time to recover from cell failures remains constant irrespective of the number of cells involved, which is important to scalability. The proposed pack-sizing also reduces the cost and the size of battery systems. Moreover, fast power reallocation is achieved by utilizing prior knowledge of power usage patterns.
Regulatory sequences in the promoter of the Dictyostelium Actin 6 gene.

The promoter region of the developmentally regulated Actin 6 gene of Dictyostelium has been dissected by a series of deletions. Functional analysis of the deletions in Dictyostelium transformants revealed two short regulatory sequences: a positive upstream element (PUE) between ‐599 and ‐572 which increases transcription by a factor of 10 but does not affect the developmental pattern of expression and an upstream activator sequence (UAS) between ‐249 and ‐215 which is essential for transcription and proper developmental regulation. The UAS partially coincides with a conserved sequence with dyad symmetry found upstream of several Dictyostelium actin genes (Romans and Firtel, 1985a).
Chemoselective Deprotection of Triethylsilyl Ethers

An efficient and selective method was developed for the deprotection of triethylsilyl (TES) ethers using formic acid in methanol (5–10%) or in methylene chloride 2–5%) with excellent yields. TES ethers are selectively deprotected to the corresponding alcohols in high yields using formic acid in methanol under mild reaction conditions. Other hydroxyl protecting groups like t-butyldimethylsilyl (TBDMS) remain unaffected.
An Algorithm of Cigarette Authentication Based on Morphological Processing and SVM

It is obvious that the characters are illegible and the printing is rough on the package of fake cigarettes compared to genuine ones. According to the differences of comparison, we can make a two-class classifier to conduct cigarette authentication. in this paper, we firstly both extract morphological features of fake and genuine cigarettes and then use them as training sample sets to train a two-class SVM classifier. This algorithm has been tested on five brands of cigarettes and it gives results with more than 95% accuracy.
Aberrant methylation patterns at the two‐cell stage as an indicator of early developmental failure

The fertilized mouse egg actively demethylates the paternal genome within a few hours after fertilization, whereas the maternal genome is only passively demethylated by a replication‐dependent mechanism after the two‐cell stage. This evolutionarily conserved assymetry in the early diploid mammalian embryo may have a role in methylation reprogramming of the two very different sets of sperm and egg chromatin for somatic development and formation of totipotent cells. Immunofluorescence staining with an antibody against 5‐methylcytosine (MeC) showed that the incidence of abnormal methylation patterns differs between mouse two‐cell embryos from superovulated females, nonsuperovulated matings, and in vitro fertilization (IVF). It also depends on embryo culture conditions and genetic background. In general, there was a good correlation with the number of embryos (from the same experiment) which did not develop in vitro up to the blastocyst stage. Thus, aberrant genome‐wide DNA methylation in early embryos may be an important mechanism contributing to the high incidence of developmental failure in mammals. Similar to the situation in abnormally methylated embryos from nuclear transfer, it may cause a high incidence of pregnancy loss and abnormal phenotypes. Mol. Reprod. Dev. 63: 329–334, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Toward a dynamic framework for security evaluation of voice verification systems

Research results have shown that spoof attacks pose severe security threats to biometric verification systems. Nevertheless the literature lacks a comprehensive, flexible and dynamic framework for security analysis of biometric and especially voice based verification systems when spoof attacks are taken into picture. This paper aims at highlighting the vulnerabilities, classifying the threats and clarifying requirements for such a dynamic framework which transfers the vulnerability evaluation results into legacy knowledge in the security domain. The proposed design and architecture facilitates comparison of two systems as well as definition of the threats in an independent and isolated way.
Fast A * Heuristics for Solving the Travelling Salesman Problem Team

Within the Artificial Intelligence community, there is a great need for fast and accurate graph traversal algorithms, specifically those that find a path from a start to goal with minimum cost. Real world applications include streamlining logistics for package delivery services and optimizing the layout of computer chips. Games such as chess and sudoku, and the Google AI Challenge are popular testbeds for new AI algorithms and the development of specialized heuristics. Some of these games are represented as graphs, with the optimal solution being the lowest cost path to a winning node. Finding the optimal solution to a game represented in a graph, such as Pac-Man, can be modeled as an instance of the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem because the protagonist must traverse every cell in a maze at least once. The Traveling Salesman based Pac-Man problem is very useful in real life for cities like New York where the entire city is made of rectangular blocks much like the world of PacMan. The Traveling Salesman Problem is NP-Complete and the best brute force solution is unrealistic in practice taking O(n! ) time. We will attempt to improve upon the state of the art approximation algorithms to produce a near-optimal solution while taking only polynomial time.
Targeted Radionuclide Therapy for Neuroendocrine Tumours: Principles and Application

Neuroendocrine tumours comprise a group of neoplasms with variable clinical behaviour. Their growth and spread is often very slow and initially asymptomatic, and thus they are often metastatic at the time of diagnosis and incurable by surgery. An exciting therapeutic strategy for cytoreduction, both for stabilisation of tumour growth and inhibition of hormone production, is the use of targeted radionuclide therapy. Evidence from large-scale, randomised, placebo-controlled trials is very difficult to obtain in these rare diseases, but current data appear promising. It is timely to review the principles underlying the use of these therapies, together with the clinical outcomes to date and potential directions for future research.
Reconstructing representations of dynamic visual objects in early visual cortex

Significance The visual system is often presented with degraded and partial visual information; thus, it must extensively fill in details not present in the physical input. Does the visual system fill in object-specific information as an object’s features change in motion? Here, we show that object-specific features (orientation) can be reconstructed from neural activity in early visual cortex (V1) while objects undergo dynamic transformations. Furthermore, our results suggest that this information is not generated by averaging the physically present stimuli or by mechanisms involved in visual imagery, which also requires internal reconstruction of information not physically present. Our study provides evidence that V1 plays a unique role in dynamic filling-in of integrated visual information during kinetic object transformations via feedback signals. As raw sensory data are partial, our visual system extensively fills in missing details, creating enriched percepts based on incomplete bottom-up information. Despite evidence for internally generated representations at early stages of cortical processing, it is not known whether these representations include missing information of dynamically transforming objects. Long-range apparent motion (AM) provides a unique test case because objects in AM can undergo changes both in position and in features. Using fMRI and encoding methods, we found that the “intermediate” orientation of an apparently rotating grating, never presented in the retinal input but interpolated during AM, is reconstructed in population-level, feature-selective tuning responses in the region of early visual cortex (V1) that corresponds to the retinotopic location of the AM path. This neural representation is absent when AM inducers are presented simultaneously and when AM is visually imagined. Our results demonstrate dynamic filling-in in V1 for object features that are interpolated during kinetic transformations.
Modeling with noises for inertial sensors

ARMA-modeling the inertial sensor's colored noise must determine the AR parameters, the MA parameters, as well as the variance of the measurement white noise when the order of the ARMA model is estimated. Due to the existence of the MA items, the Yule-Walker equation constructed by the colored noise's autocovariances starts from the order higher than the order of MA or AR model, which prevents from further improvement of the ARMA-modeling accuracy. In this paper, the ARMA model is approximated to a high-order AR model. Since there are no MA items in the approximated AR model, the Yule-Walker equation can be constructed from the 1st-order of the colored noise's autocovariances, which is beneficial to improving the estimation accuracy of the white noise variance. This method can also be used to estimate the AR parameters accurately. Simulations and experiment validate the effectiveness of the method. The length of the colored noise used in the ARMA modeling is also determined quantitatively.
An Intercomparison of Noah Model Skills With Benefits of Assimilating SMOPS Blended and Individual Soil Moisture Retrievals

Soil moisture (SM) data from Soil Moisture Operational Product System (SMOPS) have been available and used by users since 2013, and the latest version (3.0) has been operationally released since 2017. The version 3.0 provides a combination of currently all available daily global microwave SM retrievals including observations of ASCATA, ASCATB, SMAP, SMOS, and AMSR2 from 1 April 2015 to present. This study intercompares Noah model skills with benefits of assimilating the SMOPS blended (hereafter, SMOPS) and the five individual satellite SM retrievals. Results show that SMOPS SM product presents a significant advantage in data availability in comparison with the individual SM retrievals. Significant differences in data availability, climatology, and dynamic range of SM values between the bias‐corrected SMOPS and individual SM data lead to remarkable distinctions in Noah model SM simulations. Significant improvements of assimilating individual and blended satellite SM retrievals on model SM simulations versus the open loop in both surface and root zone soil layers are evident with reducing the Soil Climate Analysis Network measurements‐based root mean square errors and raising the correlations with respect to the enhanced vegetation index. Compared to the individual SM assimilations, model SM estimations with benefits of assimilating the SMOPS data provide the more remarkable improvements in surface soil layer.
Frequent Cross-Species Transmission of Parvoviruses among Diverse Carnivore Hosts

ABSTRACT Although parvoviruses are commonly described in domestic carnivores, little is known about their biodiversity in nondomestic species. A phylogenetic analysis of VP2 gene sequences from puma, coyote, gray wolf, bobcat, raccoon, and striped skunk revealed two major groups related to either feline panleukopenia virus (“FPV-like”) or canine parvovirus (“CPV-like”). Cross-species transmission was commonplace, with multiple introductions into each host species but, with the exception of raccoons, relatively little evidence for onward transmission in nondomestic species.