Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Controllable graded cerebral ischaemia in the gerbil: Studies of cerebral blood flow and energy metabolism by hydrogen clearance and 31P NMR spectroscopy

A technique for remotely controlling the degree of carotid artery occlusion in the gerbil model of cerebral ischaemia has been developed. The technique relies on manually adjustable nylon snares around the carotid arteries, in conjunction with a computer‐based monitoring system, to control the degree of occlusion. This has allowed us to determine the dependence of energy metabolism (as assessed by 31P NMR spectroscopy) on blood flow in greater detail than was possible in our previous studies. Data obtained show that energy changes first appear at flows of 25–30 mL/100 g/min, while at flows below 20 mL/100 g/min there is a major derangement of energy metabolism. The model was used to determine the sensitivity of cerebral energy metabolism to reduced cerebral blood flow under normothermic conditions and in mild hypothermia (30°C). Hypothermia had a protective effect in that energy metabolites were maintained at flows significantly below the normothermic threshold.
Cause and magnitude of the error induced by oral CT contrast agent in CT-based attenuation correction of PET emission studies.

UNLABELLED CT images represent essentially noiseless maps of photon attenuation at a range of 40-140 keV. Current dual-modality PET/CT scanners transform them into attenuation coefficients at 511 keV and use these for PET attenuation correction. The proportional scaling algorithms hereby used account for the different properties of soft tissue and bone but are not prepared to handle material with other attenuation characteristics, such as oral CT contrast agents. As a consequence, CT-based attenuation correction in the presence of an oral contrast agent results in erroneous PET standardized uptake values (SUVs). The present study assessed these errors with phantom measurements and patient data. METHODS Two oral CT contrast agents were imaged at 3 different concentrations in dual-modality CT and PET transmission studies to investigate their attenuation properties. The SUV error due to the presence of contrast agent in CT-based attenuation correction was estimated in 10 patients with gastrointestinal tumors as follows. The PET data were attenuation corrected on the basis of the original contrast-enhanced CT images, resulting in PET images with distorted SUVs. A second reconstruction used modified CT images wherein the CT numbers representing contrast agent had been replaced by CT values producing approximately the right PET attenuation coefficients. These CT values had been derived from the data of 10 patients imaged without a CT contrast agent. The SUV error, defined as the difference between both sets of SUV images, was evaluated in regions with oral CT contrast agent, in tumor, and in reference tissue. RESULTS The oral CT contrast agents studied increased the attenuation for 511-keV photons minimally, even at the highest concentrations found in the patients. For a CT value of 500 Hounsfield units, the proportional scaling algorithm therefore overestimated the PET attenuation coefficient by 26.2%. The resulting SUV error in the patient studies was highest in regions containing CT contrast agent (4.4% +/- 2.8%; maximum, 11.3%), whereas 1.2% +/- 1.1% (maximum, 4.1%) was found in tumors, and 0.6% +/- 0.7% was found in the reference. CONCLUSION The use of oral contrast agents in CT has only a small effect on the SUV, and this small effect does not appear to be medically significant.
A Review of Medical Image Segmentation: Methods and Available Software

Automatic medical image segmentation is an unsolved problem that has captured the attention of many researchers. The purpose of this survey is to identify a representative set of methods that have been used for automatic medical image segmentation over the past 35 years and to provide an opportunity to view the transitions that have occurred as this research area has developed. To facilitate this, the existing research is divided into three generations, each generation adding an additional level of algorithmic complexity. These generations indicate progress towards accurate, fully-automatic, medical image segmentation and their identification provides a framework for classifying the wide variety of methods that have been devised. The first generation is composed of the simplest forms of image analysis such as the application of intensity thresholds and region growing. The second generation is characterized by the application of uncertainty models and optimization methods, and the third generation incorporates knowledge into the segmentation process. The progress toward accurate, fully-automatic segmentation is discussed and sources of segmentation software from industry and academia are identified, along with databases for segmentation validation.
Rebuilding synthesized design hierarchy based on instances path names of flattened netlist

Hierarchical representation can greatly simplify many FPGA Computer-Aided Design (CAD) operations such as: design verification, partitioning and placement. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical synthesis environment for Mesh-based FPGA architectures. Our proposed approach uses the flattened netlist resulting from ODIN II tool and reconstructs the hierarchy of the initial Verilog design according to instances names. Results show that reconstructing design hierarchy enables to reduce the number of external nets compared with flattened netlist.
RELink: A Research Framework and Test Collection for Entity-Relationship Retrieval

Improvements of entity-relationship (E-R) search techniques have been hampered by a lack of test collections, particularly for complex queries involving multiple entities and relationships. In this paper we describe a method for generating E-R test queries to support comprehensive E-R search experiments. Queries and relevance judgments are created from content that exists in a tabular form where columns represent entity types and the table structure implies one or more relationships among the entities. Editorial work involves creating natural language queries based on relationships represented by the entries in the table. We have publicly released the RELink test collection comprising 600 queries and relevance judgments obtained from a sample of Wikipedia List-of-lists-of-lists tables. The latter comprise tuples of entities that are extracted from columns and labelled by corresponding entity types and relationships they represent. In order to facilitate research in complex E-R retrieval, we have created and released as open source the RELink Framework that includes Apache Lucene indexing and search specifically tailored to E-R retrieval. RELink includes entity and relationship indexing based on the ClueWeb-09-B Web collection with FACC1 text span annotations linked to Wikipedia entities. With ready to use search resources and a comprehensive test collection, we support community in pursuing E-R research at scale.
Reducing Speech Contention in Web Conferences

In Web conferences, we sometimes cannot recognize when other participants begin speaking. This depresses the participants' motivation and wastes time. We can take turns smoothly in face-to-face communication through the use of non-verbal messages, but this back channel is not available in existing web conference systems. We overcome this problem by proposing a method that senses actions that indicate the desire to speak and alerts the other participants accordingly. An evaluation of a prototype indicates that it realizes smoother turn-taking than is possible in regular web conference systems.
The communicative view on organizational memory: power and ambiguity in knowledge creation systems

Presents a new approach to conceptualizing organizational memory and memory-support systems. Organizational power structures are shown to have implications for semantic ambiguity in memory-support systems, and it is claimed that a communicative view on organizational memory is needed to support organizational learning and innovation processes that create new knowledge. The paper discusses organizational interactions that sustain organizational memory, and the role of computer-mediated communication in building organizational memory support. A simple model of knowledge flows is described and used to generate propositions about design requirements for memory-support systems.
Validation of Acoustical Simulations in the ”Bell Labs Box”

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Validation of Acoustical Simulations in the ”Bell Labs Box” Nicolas Tsingos, Ingrid Carlbom, Gary Elko, Thomas Funkhouser, Robert Kubli
Wireless Multi-hop Networks: Current Research and Future Challenges

Wireless multi-hop networks, in various forms and under various names, are being increasingly used in military and civilian applications. Studying connectivity and capacity of these networks is an important problem. The scaling behavior of connectivity and capacity when the network becomes sufficiently large is of particular interest. In this paper, we briefly overview recent development and discuss research challenges and opportunities in the area, with a focus on the network connectivity. We demonstrate some intrinsic connections between the connectivity analysis and capacity analysis and point out the fundamental pa- rameters determining the capacity of a wireless multi-hop network.
Verifiable symmetric searchable encryption for semi-honest-but-curious cloud servers

Outsourcing data to cloud servers, while increasing service availability and reducing users' burden of managing data, inevitably brings in new concerns such as data privacy, since the server may be honest-but-curious. To mediate the conflicts between data usability and data privacy in such a scenario, research of searchable encryption is of increasing interest. Motivated by the fact that a cloud server, besides its curiosity, may be selfish in order to save its computation and/or download bandwidth, in this paper, we investigate the searchable encryption problem in the presence of a semi-honest-but-curious server, which may execute only a fraction of search operations honestly and return a fraction of search outcome honestly. To fight against this strongest adversary ever, a verifiable SSE (VSSE) scheme is proposed to offer verifiable searchability in additional to the data privacy, both of which are further confirmed by our rigorous security analysis. Besides, we treat the practicality/efficiency as a central requirement of a searchable encryption scheme. To demonstrate the lightweightness of our scheme, we implemented and tested the proposed VSSE on a laptop (serving as the server) and a mobile phone running Android 2.3. 4 (serving as the end user). The experimental results optimistically suggest that the proposed scheme satisfies all of our design goals.
OntoNotes: Corpus Cleanup of Mistaken Agreement Using Word Sense Disambiguation

Annotated corpora are only useful if their annotations are consistent. Most large-scale annotation efforts take special measures to reconcile inter-annotator disagreement. To date, however, no-one has investigated how to automatically determine exemplars in which the annotators agree but are wrong. In this paper, we use OntoNotes, a large-scale corpus of semantic annotations, including word senses, predicate-argument structure, ontology linking, and coreference. To determine the mistaken agreements in word sense annotation, we employ word sense disambiguation (WSD) to select a set of suspicious candidates for human evaluation. Experiments are conducted from three aspects (precision, cost-effectiveness ratio, and entropy) to examine the performance of WSD. The experimental results show that WSD is most effective on identifying erroneous annotations for highly-ambiguous words, while a baseline is better for other cases. The two methods can be combined to improve the cleanup process. This procedure allows us to find approximately 2% remaining erroneous agreements in the OntoNotes corpus. A similar procedure can be easily defined to check other annotated corpora.
FL3, a Synthetic Flavagline and Ligand of Prohibitins, Protects Cardiomyocytes via STAT3 from Doxorubicin Toxicity

Aims The clinical use of doxorubicin for the treatment of cancer is limited by its cardiotoxicity. Flavaglines are natural products that have both potent anticancer and cardioprotective properties. A synthetic analog of flavaglines, FL3, efficiently protects mice from the cardiotoxicity of doxorubicin. The mechanism underlying this cardioprotective effect has yet to be elucidated. Methods and Results Here, we show that FL3 binds to the scaffold proteins prohibitins (PHBs) and thus promotes their translocation to mitochondria in the H9c2 cardiomyocytes. FL3 induces heterodimerization of PHB1 with STAT3, thereby ensuring cardioprotection from doxorubicin toxicity. This interaction is associated with phosphorylation of STAT3. A JAK2 inhibitor, WP1066, suppresses both the phosphorylation of STAT3 and the protective effect of FL3 in cardiomyocytes. The involvement of PHBs in the FL3-mediated cardioprotection was confirmed by means of small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) targeting PHB1 and PHB2. The siRNA knockdown of PHBs inhibits both phosphorylation of STAT3 and the cardioprotective effect of FL3. Conclusion Activation of mitochondrial STAT3/PHB1 complex by PHB ligands may be a new strategy against doxorubicin-induced cardiotoxicity and possibly other cardiac problems.
Adaptive resource management for flow-based IP/ATM hybrid switching systems

This paper proposes a novel approach for adaptive flow classification for flow-based hybrid switching systems to match the time varying traffic/resource characteristics. It minimizes the maximum of the system resource utilizations associated with packet processing power, signalling capacity and routing table size. After formulating the proposed flow adaptation as a min-max stochastic control problem, a heuristic algorithm is developed. The simulation study based on real traces shows the viability of the proposed flow adaptation for dynamic resource management in hybrid switching system design. The algorithm is simple to implement and only requires the adaptation of two global variables at time intervals of every few seconds based on the present usage of resources.
Fast solvers for models of ICEO microfluidic flows

We demonstrate the performance of a fast computational algorithm for modeling the design of a microfluidic mixing device. The device uses an electrokinetic process, induced charge electroosmosis (J. Fluid Mech. 2004; 509), by which a flow through the device is driven by a set of polarizable obstacles in it. Its design is realized by manipulating the shape and orientation of the obstacles in order to maximize the amount of fluid mixing within the device. The computation entails the solution of a constrained optimization problem in which function evaluations require the numerical solution of a set of partial differential equations: a potential equation, the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, and a mass‐transport equation. The most expensive component of the function evaluation (which must be performed at every step of an iteration for the optimization) is the solution of the Navier–Stokes equations. We show that by using some new robust algorithms for this task (SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 2002; 24:237–256; J. Comput. Appl. Math. 2001; 128:261–279), based on certain preconditioners that take advantage of the structure of the linearized problem, this computation can be done efficiently. Using this computational strategy, in conjunction with a derivative‐free pattern search algorithm for the optimization, applied to a finite element discretization of the problem, we are able to determine optimal configurations of microfluidic devices. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Impact of Selfishness in Device-to-Device Communication Underlying Cellular Networks

In a device-to-device (D2D) communication underlying cellular network, a user equipment is desired to operate cooperatively and unselfishly to transmit data as relays. However, most users more or less behave in a selfish way, which makes user selfishness a key factor that affects the performance of the whole communication system. We focus on the impact of user selfishness on D2D communications. First, we distinguish user selfishness into two types in accordance with D2D transmission modes, namely the connected transmission and opportunistic transmission modes. The user selfishness in these two types of transmissions are modeled separately. Then, we propose a time-varying graph model that characterizes the impacts of both individual and social selfishness on the D2D communications. Simulation results obtained under the realistic networking settings indicate that the interaction between connected and opportunistic selfishness worsens the impairment caused by individual selfishness. Additionally, when concerning social selfishness, inside-community selfishness can be ignored in some occasions, while otherwise its role is heavily influenced by community numbers.
Compression of illumination-adjustable images

The image-based modeling and rendering (IBMR) approaches allow the time complexity of synthesizing novel images to be independent of scene complexity. Unfortunately, illumination control (relighting) is no longer trivial under the image-based framework. To relight the image-based scenery, the scene must be captured under various illumination conditions. This drastically increases the data volume. Hence, data compression is a must. In this paper, we describe a compression algorithm for an illumination-adjustable image representation. We focus on compressing constant-viewpoint images. A divide-and-conquer approach is proposed. The compression algorithm consists of three parts which exploit the intrapixel, interpixel, and interchannel data correlations. Experimental result shows that the proposed method not just effectively compresses the data but also outperforms standard image and video coding methods.
Residential demand response scheduling with consideration of consumer preferences

This paper proposes a new demand response scheduling framework for an array of households, which are grouped into different categories based on socio-economic factors, such as the number of occupants, family decomposition and employment status. Each of the households is equipped with a variety of appliances. The model takes the preferences of participating households into account and aims to minimize the overall production cost and, in parallel, to lower the individual electricity bills. In the existing literature, customers submit binary values for each time period to indicate their operational preferences. However, turning the appliances "on" or "off" does not capture the associated discomfort levels, as each appliance provides a different service and leads to a different level of satisfaction. The proposed model employs integer values to indicate household preferences and models the scheduling problem as a multi-objective mixed integer programming. The main thrust of the framework is that the multi-level preference modeling of appliances increases their "flexibility"; hence, the job scheduling can be done at a lower cost. The model is evaluated by using the real data provided by the Department of Energy & Climate Change, UK. In the computational experiments, we examine the relation between the satisfaction of consumers based on the appliance usage preferences and the electricity costs by exploring the Pareto front of the related objective functions. The results show that the proposed model leads to significant savings in electricity cost, while maintaining a good level of customer satisfaction.
Differential Endothelial Transcriptomics Identifies Semaphorin 3G as a Vascular Class 3 Semaphorin

Objective—To characterize the role of a vascular-expressed class 3 semaphorin (semaphorin 3G [Sema3G]). Methods and Results—Semaphorins have been identified as axon guidance molecules. Yet, they have more recently also been characterized as attractive and repulsive regulators of angiogenesis. Through a transcriptomic screen, we identified Sema3G as a molecule of angiogenic endothelial cells. Sema3G-deficient mice are viable and exhibit no overt vascular phenotype. Yet, LacZ expression in the Sema3G locus revealed intense arterial vascular staining in the angiogenic vasculature, starting at E9.5, which was detectable throughout adolescence and downregulated in adult vasculature. Sema3G is expressed as a full-length 100-kDa secreted molecule that is processed by furin proteases to yield 95- and a 65-kDa Sema domain–containing subunits. Full-length Sema3G binds to NP2, whereas processed Sema3G binds to NP1 and NP2. Expression profiling and cellular experiments identified autocrine effects of Sema3G on endothelial cells and paracrine effects on smooth muscle cells. Conclusion—Although the mouse knockout phenotype suggests compensatory mechanisms, the experiments identify Sema3G as a primarily endothelial cell–expressed class 3 semaphorin that controls endothelial and smooth muscle cell functions in autocrine and paracrine manners, respectively.
Hetereogenous travel activity patterns in Japan: Accounting for interdependencies in mobility tool use

1 Using data from the Japanese 5 nationwide person trip survey, a joint model of trip 2 frequencies by mode (car, transit and non-motorized) is estimated using a generalized 3 heterogeneous data model to account for inter-dependencies stemming from unobserved 4 factors. The estimated model successfully captures the effect of common unobserved factors 5 on trip frequencies by mode underscoring the need to account for modal inter-dependencies 6 to avoid bias in parameter estimates. Consistent with findings from the literature, results 7 suggest the existence of substantial mode substitution effects between car and transit and 8 non-motorized modes given changes in accessibility levels. Furthermore, given common 9 unobserved factors, statistically significant and substantial substitution effects were observed 10 among all modes. 11 12
Real-time fixation, mosaic construction and moving object detection from a moving camera

We use Sarnoff's VFE-200 next-generation video processor to demonstrate real-time algorithms for camera fixation, mosaic construction, and moving object detection and tracking from a moving camera. The algorithms are all derived from our ability to perform real-time image alignment. These capabilities are currently being used in several unmanned aerial and ground surveillance programs.
Global and efficient self-similarity for object classification and detection

Self-similarity is an attractive image property which has recently found its way into object recognition in the form of local self-similarity descriptors [5, 6, 14, 18, 23, 27] In this paper we explore global self-similarity (GSS) and its advantages over local self-similarity (LSS). We make three contributions: (a) we propose computationally efficient algorithms to extract GSS descriptors for classification. These capture the spatial arrangements of self-similarities within the entire image; (b) we show how to use these descriptors efficiently for detection in a sliding-window framework and in a branch-and-bound framework; (c) we experimentally demonstrate on Pascal VOC 2007 and on ETHZ Shape Classes that GSS outperforms LSS for both classification and detection, and that GSS descriptors are complementary to conventional descriptors such as gradients or color.