Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What is it like to be vegetative or minimally conscious?

Purpose of reviewPatients in a vegetative or minimally conscious state continue to pose problems in terms of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Despite recent waves of international media attention following Terri Schiavo's death and the ‘miracle recovery’ of Terry Wallis, research efforts aimed at increasing our knowledge about brain function in these conditions remain scarce and must address a series of difficulties, including financial and ethical barriers. Here we review current possibilities and limitations of clinical and para-clinical assessment of chronic disorders of consciousness. Recent findingsDuring the past year the field has witnessed publication of significant, yet isolated, case reports in top-ranking journals, including Science and Nature. Such milestone reports and other impressive recent technological advances in the study of vegetative and minimally conscious patients reveal enthralling areas of science that must find their way to clinical medical reality. SummaryConsciousness is a subjective experience whose study has remained within the purview of philosophy for millennia. That has finally changed, and empirical evidence from functional neuroimaging offers a genuine glimpse at a solution to the infamous mind–body conundrum. New technological and scientific advances offer the neurological community unique ways to improve our understanding and management of vegetative and minimally conscious patients.
Survey of computer vision in roadway transportation systems

There is a world-wide effort to apply 21st century intelligence to evolving our transportation networks. The goals of smart transportation networks are quite noble and manifold, including safety, efficiency, law enforcement, energy conservation, and emission reduction. Computer vision is playing a key role in this transportation evolution. Video imaging scientists are providing intelligent sensing and processing technologies for a wide variety of applications and services. There are many interesting technical challenges including imaging under a variety of environmental and illumination conditions, data overload, recognition and tracking of objects at high speed, distributed network sensing and processing, energy sources, as well as legal concerns. This conference presentation and publication is brief introduction to the field, and will be followed by an in-depth journal paper that provides more details on the imaging systems and algorithms.
Making information flow explicit in HiStar

HiStar is a new operating system designed to minimize the amount of code that must be trusted. HiStar provides strict information flow control, which allows users to specify precise data security policies without unduly limiting the structure of applications. HiStar's security features make it possible to implement a Unix-like environment with acceptable performance almost entirely in an untrusted user-level library. The system has no notion of superuser and no fully trusted code other than the kernel. HiStar's features permit several novel applications, including an entirely untrusted login process, separation of data between virtual private networks, and privacy-preserving, untrusted virus scanners.
Characterization of the alginate lyases from Vibrio 1 splendidus 12 B 01 2 3

18 Alginate lyases are enzymes that degrade alginate through β-elimination of the glycosidic bond 19 into smaller oligomers. We investigated the alginate lyases from Vibrio splendidus 12B01, a 20 marine bacterioplankton species that can grow on alginate as its sole carbon source. We 21 identified, purified, and characterized four polysaccharide lyase family 7 alginates lyases – 22 AlyA, AlyB, AlyD, and AlyE – from V. splendidus 12B01. The four lyases were found to have 23 optimal activity between pH 7.5-8.5 and at 20-25°C, consistent with their use in a marine 24 environment. AlyA, AlyB, AlyD, and AlyE were found to exhibit a turnover number (kcat) for 25 alginate of 0.60 ± 0.02 s -1 , 3.7 ± 0.3 s -1 , 4.5 ± 0.5 s -1 , and 7.1 ± 0.2 s -1 , respectively. The Km 26 values of AlyA, AlyB, AlyD, and AlyE toward alginate were 36 ± 7 μM, 22 ± 5 μM, 60 ± 2 μM, 27 and 123 ± 6 μM, respectively. AlyA and AlyB were found principally to cleave the β-1,4 bonds 28 between β-D-mannuronate and α-L-guluronate and subunits; AlyD and AlyE were found to 29 principally cleave the α-1,4 bonds involving α-L-guluronate subunits. The four alginate lyases 30 degrade alginate into longer chains of oligomers. 31
Consumer Trust towards an Online Vendor in High- vs. Low-Context Cultures

This study explores the effect of general disposition to trust on the perceived trustworthiness of an online vendor in high- and low-context cultures. A total sample of 616 responses from users of online bookstores was collected from China and Finland. The results show that the disposition to trust has a highly significant effect on the three dimensions of trustworthiness namely ability, integrity, and benevolence. However, the results of multigroup analysis indicate that these effects vary greatly between our country examples from high-and low-context cultures. We conclude that, while in China general disposition to trust has a highly significant effect on perceived trustworthiness of an online vendor, the effect is only marginal in Finland.
Electron microscopic observations of collagenolytic activity of basal cell epithelioma of the skin in vivo and in vitro.

Summary Electron microscopic examination of the stromal collagen surrounding the tumor mass of basal cell epitheliomas of the skin revealed severe degenerative changes that led to disappearance of the normal pattern of the dermal collagen. In most cases, a complete disappearance of the dermal collagen took place and resulted in the formation of a band-like clear space. Electron microscope examination showed this space to be filled with ill-defined, amorphous substances. Basal laminae delimiting the tumor islands were also abnormal. They were swollen in some areas, thinned out in others, and often interrupted or absent. Segment-long-spacing collagen crystallites reconstituted from tropocollagen treated with basal cell epithelioma homogenate (crude enzyme) were often cleaved at the β 2 2 locus, namely, 75% from the A end and 25% from the B end of the whole molecule. It is postulated that the clear space surrounding basal cell epithelioma parenchyma is produced by the degradation of dermal collagen, initially by specific collagenase and perhaps subsequently by other proteases.
DRAMSim2: A Cycle Accurate Memory System Simulator

In this paper we present DRAMSim2, a cycle accurate memory system simulator. The goal of DRAMSim2 is to be an accurate and publicly available DDR2/3 memory system model which can be used in both full system and trace-based simulations. We describe the process of validating DRAMSim2 timing against manufacturer Verilog models in an effort to prove the accuracy of simulation results. We outline the combination of DRAMSim2 with a cycle-accurate x86 simulator that can be used to perform full system simulations. Finally, we discuss DRAMVis, a visualization tool that can be used to graph and compare the results of DRAMSim2 simulations.
Multiscale CLEAN Deconvolution of Radio Synthesis Images

Radio synthesis imaging is dependent upon deconvolution algorithms to counteract the sparse sampling of the Fourier plane. These deconvolution algorithms find an estimate of the true sky brightness from the necessarily incomplete sampled visibility data. The most widely used radio synthesis deconvolution method is the CLEAN algorithm of Hogbom. This algorithm works extremely well for collections of point sources and surprisingly well for extended objects. However, the performance for extended objects can be improved by adopting a multiscale approach. We describe and demonstrate a conceptually simple and algorithmically straightforward extension to CLEAN that models the sky brightness by the summation of components of emission having different size scales. While previous multiscale algorithms work sequentially on decreasing scale sizes, our algorithm works simultaneously on a range of specified scales. Applications to both real and simulated data sets are given.
The tight junction protein ZO-1 is concentrated along slit diaphragms of the glomerular epithelium

The foot processes of glomerular epithelial cells of the mammalian kidney are firmly attached to one another by shallow intercellular junctions or slit diaphragms of unknown composition. We have investigated the molecular nature of these junctions using an antibody that recognizes ZO-1, a protein that is specific for the tight junction or zonula occludens. By immunoblotting the affinity purified anti-ZO-1 IgG recognizes a single 225-kD band in kidney cortex and in slit diaphragm-enriched fractions as in other tissues. When ZO-1 was localized by immunofluorescence in kidney tissue of adult rats, the protein was detected in epithelia of all segments of the nephron, but the glomerular epithelium was much more intensely stained than any other epithelium. Among tubule epithelia the signal for ZO-1 correlated with the known fibril content and physiologic tightness of the junctions, i.e., it was highest in distal and collecting tubules and lowest in the proximal tubule. By immunoelectron microscopy ZO-1 was found to be concentrated on the cytoplasmic surface of the tight junctional membrane. Within the glomerulus ZO-1 was localized predominantly in the epithelial foot processes where it was concentrated precisely at the points of insertion of the slit diaphragms into the lateral cell membrane. Its distribution appeared to be continuous along the continuous slit membrane junction. When ZO-1 was localized in differentiating glomeruli in the newborn rat kidney, it was present early in development when the apical junctional complexes between presumptive podocytes are composed of typical tight and adhering junctions. It remained associated with these junctions during the time they migrate down the lateral cell surface, disappear and are replaced by slit diaphragms. The distribution of ZO-1 and the close developmental relationship between the two junctions suggest that the slit diaphragm is a variant of the tight junction that shares with it at least one structural protein and the functional property of defining distinctive plasmalemmal domains. The glomerular epithelium is unique among renal epithelia in that ZO-1 is present, but the intercellular spaces are wide open and no fibrils are seen by freeze fracture. The presence of ZO-1 along slit membranes indicates that expression of ZO-1 alone does not lead to tight junction assembly.
Braid group actions on derived categories of coherent sheaves

This paper gives a construction of braid group actions on the derived category of coherent sheaves on a variety $X$. The motivation for this is Kontsevich's homological mirror conjecture, together with the occurrence of certain braid group actions in symplectic geometry. One of the main results is that when $\dim X \geq 2$, our braid group actions are always faithful. We describe conjectural mirror symmetries between smoothings and resolutions of singularities that lead us to find examples of braid group actions arising from crepant resolutions of various singularities. Relations with the McKay correspondence and with exceptional sheaves on Fano manifolds are given. Moreover, the case of an elliptic curve is worked out in some detail.
Accurate Collocation Extraction Using a Multilingual Parser

This paper focuses on the use of advanced techniques of text analysis as support for collocation extraction. A hybrid system is presented that combines statistical methods and multilingual parsing for detecting accurate collocational information from English, French, Spanish and Italian corpora. The advantage of relying on full parsing over using a traditional window method (which ignores the syntactic information) is first theoretically motivated, then empirically validated by a comparative evaluation experiment.
Fuzzy Description Logic Programs under the Answer Set Semantics for the Semantic Web

Vagueness and imprecision abound in multimedia information processing and retrieval. In this paper, towards dealing with vagueness and imprecision in the reasoning layers of the semantic Web, we present an approach to fuzzy description logic programs under the answer set semantics. We generalize normal description logic programs (dl-programs) under the answer set semantics by fuzzy vagueness and imprecision. We define a canonical semantics of positive and stratified fuzzy dl-programs in terms of a unique least model and iterative least models, respectively. We then define the answer set semantics of general fuzzy dl-programs, and show in particular that all answer sets of a fuzzy dl-program are minimal models, and that the answer set semantics of positive and stratified fuzzy dl-programs coincides with their canonical least model and iterative least model semantics, respectively. Furthermore, we also provide a characterization of the canonical semantics of positive and stratified fuzzy dl-programs in terms of a fixpoint and an iterative fixpoint semantics, respectively
Arabidopsis AtDGK7, the Smallest Member of Plant Diacylglycerol Kinases (DGKs), Displays Unique Biochemical Features and Saturates at Low Substrate Concentration

Diacylglycerol kinase (DGK) regulates the level of the second messenger diacylglycerol and produces phosphatidic acid (PA), another signaling molecule. The Arabidopsis thaliana genome encodes seven putative diacylglycerol kinase isozymes (named AtDGK1 to -7), structurally falling into three major clusters. So far, enzymatic activity has not been reported for any plant Cluster II DGK. Here, we demonstrate that a representative of this cluster, AtDGK7, is biochemically active when expressed as a recombinant protein in Escherichia coli. AtDGK7, encoded by gene locus At4g30340, contains 374 amino acids with an apparent molecular mass of 41.2 kDa. AtDGK7 harbors an N-terminal catalytic domain, but in contrast to various characterized DGKs (including AtDGK2), it lacks a cysteine-rich domain at its N terminus, and, importantly, its C-terminal DGK accessory domain is incomplete. Recombinant AtDGK7 expressed in E. coli exhibits Michaelis-Menten type kinetics with 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycerol as substrate. AtDGK7 activity was affected by pH, detergents, and the DGK inhibitor R59022. We demonstrate that both AtDGK2 and AtDGK7 phosphorylate diacylglycerol molecular species that are typically found in plants, indicating that both enzymes convert physiologically relevant substrates. AtDGK7 is expressed throughout the Arabidopsis plant, but expression is strongest in flowers and young seedlings. Expression of AtDGK2 is transiently induced by wounding. R59022 at ∼80 μm inhibits root elongation and lateral root formation and reduces plant growth, indicating that DGKs play an important role in plant development.
Resolving Conflict and Dependency in Refactoring to a Desired Design

Refactoring is performed to improve software quality while leaving the behaviour of the system unchanged. In practice there are many opportunities for refactoring, however, due to conicts and dependencies between refactorings, only certain orders of refactorings are applicable. Selecting and ordering an appropriate set of refactorings is a challenging task for a developer. We propose a novel automated approach to scheduling refactorings according to their conicts and dependencies as well as their contribution to design quality expressed by a desired design. The desired design is an improved version of the current program design, and is produced by the developer. Our approach is capable of detecting conicts and dependencies between refactorings, and uses a sequence alignment algorithm to identify the degree of similarity between two program designs expressed as sequence of characters, thereby measuring the contribution of a refactoring to achieving the desired design. We evaluated our approach on several sample programs and one non-trivial open source application. Our results demonstrate the ability of the approach to order the input refactorings so as to achieve the desired design even in the presence of intense inter-refactoring conict and dependency, and when applied to a medium-sized, real-world application.
Learning mixed acoustic/articulatory models for disabled speech

This paper argues that automatic speech recognition (ASR) should accommodate dysarthric speech by incorporating knowledge of the production characteristics of these speakers. We describe the acquisition of a new database of dysarthric speech that includes aligned acoustics and articulatory data obtained by electromagnetic articulography. This database is used to train theoretical and empirical models of the vocal tract within ASR which are compared against discriminative models such as neural networks, support vector machines, and conditional random fields. Results show significant improvements in accuracy over the baseline through the use of production knowledge.
Non-supervised discovering of user activities in visual sensor networks for ambient intelligence applications

Ambient Intelligence systems need to know what the users are doing. In this paper, An architecture for Human Activity Recognition using a Visual Sensor Network is proposed. The video sequence perceived by each camera is locally processed to obtain a local activity label. These activity labels are fused by an upper tier to obtain a global activity label. The activities recognized by the system are not specified a priori, they are discovered using automatic model selection techniques. Then, an expert has to label the discovered activities to give them a semantic meaning. Results of the application of the activity discovering procedure to a smart home dataset are shown.
An Extended Sliding Mode Observer for Speed, Position and Torque Sensorless Control for PMSM Drive Based Stator Resistance Estimator

This paper presents a robust sixth-order Discrete-time Extended Sliding Mode Observer (DESMO) for sensorless control of PMSM in order to estimate the currents, speed, rotor position, load torque and stator resistance. The satisfying simulation results on Simulink/Matlab environment for a 1.6 kW PMSM demonstrate the good performance and stability of the proposed ESMO algorithm against parameter variation, modeling uncertainty, measurement and system noises.
Black-Box Test Generation from Inferred Models

Automatically generating test inputs for components without source code (are 'black-box') and specification is challenging. One particularly interesting solution to this problem is to use Machine Learning algorithms to infer testable models from program executions in an iterative cycle. Although the idea has been around for over 30 years, there is little empirical information to inform the choice of suitable learning algorithms, or to show how good the resulting test sets are. This paper presents an openly available framework to facilitate experimentation in this area, and provides a proof-of-concept inference-driven testing framework, along with evidence of the efficacy of its test sets on three programs.
Further results on optimal signaling over secure MIMO channels

Optimal signalling over the wire-tap MIMO Gaussian channel is studied under the total transmit power constraint. The recent results are extended in several directions, including a rank-deficient solution for the optimal covariance, lower and upper capacity bounds for the general case, and characterization of optimality of the isotropic signaling. An isotropic eavesdropper model is studied, which provides (tight) upper and lower capacity bounds for the non-isotropic case and also serves as the worst-case scenario. The optimal signaling for this model is obtained in an explicit form and its properties are studied, including the high and low-SNR behavior, the conditions for the eavesdropper to be negligible and the capacity saturation effect.
River Bank Inducement Influence on a Shallow Groundwater Microbial Community and Its Effects on Aquifer Reactivity

II TABLE OF CONTENTS . VI LIST OF FIGURES . VIII LIST OF TABLES . XI LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS . XIII ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . XIV CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION . 1 1.2 – BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE . 3 1.2.1 GROUNDWATER USE IN THE UNITED STATES . 3 1.2.2 GROUNDWATER IN SOUTHEAST WISCONSIN . 3 1.2.3 RIVER BANK INDUCEMENT WELLS IN WAUKESHA, WI . 4 1.2. 4 MICROORGANISMS IN GROUNDWATER . 5 1.3 STUDY SYSTEM . 7 1.4 PREVIOUS RESEARCH . 8 CHAPTER 2 – RIVER INFILTRATION EFFECTS ON THE SHALLOW GROUNDWATER AQUIFER MICROBIAL COMMUNITY . 12 2.1 BACKGROUND . 12 2.2 METHODS . 15 2.2.1 SAMPLE COLLECTION . 15 2.2.2 LAB METHODS . 16 2.2.3 COMMUNITY COMPOSITION SEQUENCE DATA PROCESSING . 19 2.3 ANALYSIS, RESULTS & DISCUSSION . 21 2.3.1 CHEMICAL & THERMODYNAMIC RESULTS . 21 2.3.1 FOX RIVER AND GROUNDWATER MICROBIAL COMMUNITY COMPOSITIONS . 24 2.3.2 GROUNDWATER MICROBIAL COMMUNITY COMPARISON . 27 2.3.3 GROUNDWATER MICROBIAL COMMUNITY TAXA AFFILIATIONS . 32 UNCLASSIFIED ORGANISMS DOMINATE THE GROUNDWATER DATASET . 32 POTENTIAL PHYSIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF DOMINANT MICROBIAL AFFILIATIONS . 36 TAXA COMPARISONS BETWEEN SITES . 38 2.3.3 16S RIBOSOMAL RNA:DNA ACTIVITY . 46 CHAPTER 3 –NUTRIENT EFFECTS . 53 3.1 BACKGROUND . 53 3.2 METHODS . 55 3.3 RESULTS & DISCUSSION . 58 CONCLUSIONS . 63 CHAPTER 4 – FUTURE RECOMMENDATIONS . 66 4.1 RATIONALE . 66 4.2 RECOMMENDATIONS . 69
An SOC test integration platform and its industrial realization

One of the major costs in system-on-chip (SOC) development is test cost, especially the cost related to test integration. Although there have been plenty of research works on individual topics about SOC testing, few of them took into account the practical integration issues. In this paper, we stress the practical SOC test integration issues, including real problems found in test scheduling, test IO reduction, timing of functional test, scan IO sharing, etc. A test scheduling method is proposed based on our test architecture and test access mechanism (TAM), considering IO resource constraints. Detailed scheduling further reduces the overall test time of the system chip. We also present a test wrapper architecture that supports the coexistence of scan test and functional test. The test integration platform has been applied to an industrial SOC case. The chip has been designed and fabricated. The measurement results justify the approach-simple and efficient, i.e., short test integration cost, short test time, and small area overhead.
Exploiting Symmetries in POMDPs for Point-Based Algorithms

We extend the model minimization technique for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) to handle symmetries in the joint space of states, actions, and observations. The POMDP symmetry we define in this paper cannot be handled by the model minimization techniques previously published in the literature. We formulate the problem of finding the symmetries as a graph automorphism (GA) problem, and although not yet known to be tractable, we experimentally show that the sparseness of the graph representing the POMDP allows us to quickly find symmetries. We show how the symmetries in POMDPs can be exploited for speeding up point-based algorithms. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.