Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Test performance comparison of inform HPV and hybrid capture 2 high-risk HPV DNA tests using the SurePath liquid-based Pap test as the collection method.

No US Food and Drug Administration-approved method is available to test for human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA in the SurePath liquid-based Papanicolaou (Pap) test (TriPath Care Technologies, Burlington, NC). We compared the performance characteristics of Inform HPV (Ventana Medical Systems, Tucson, AZ) and Hybrid Capture 2 (HC2; Digene, Gaithersburg, MD) using SurePath for collection. The study included samples from 102 women, aged 18 to 60 years, who underwent a SurePath Pap test immediately before colposcopy and cervical biopsy. Each SurePath specimen was processed additionally for Inform HPV and HC2. Performance characteristics were determined by using the cervical biopsy as the "gold standard. " The SurePath, Inform HPV, and HC2 correctly identified high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSILs) in 15 (94%) of 16, 6 (38%) of 16, and 14 (93%) of 15 cases, respectively. When only SurePath samples with a diagnosis of atypical glandular and/or squamous cells were examined, Inform HPV and HC2 correctly identified HSIL in 19 (43%) of 44 and 45 (100%) of 45 cases, respectively. When SurePath is used for collection, Inform HPV lacks sufficient sensitivity to detect HSIL reliably.
Outsourcing secure two-party computation as a black box

Secure multiparty computation (SMC) offers a technique to preserve functionality and data privacy in mobile applications. Current protocols that make this costly cryptographic construction feasible on mobile devices securely outsource the bulk of the computation to a Cloud provider. However, these outsourcing techniques are built on specific secure computation assumptions and tools, and applying new SMC ideas to the outsourced setting requires the protocols to be completely rebuilt and proven secure. In this work, we develop a generic technique for lifting any secure two-party computation protocol into an outsourced two-party SMC protocol. By augmenting the function being evaluated with auxiliary consistency checks, we can create an outsourced protocol with low overhead cost. Our implementation and evaluation show that in the best case, our outsourcing additions execute within the confidence intervals of two servers running the same computation, and incur approximately the same communication cost. In addition, the mobile device itself requires minimal communication exchanged over a single round. This work demonstrates that efficient outsourcing is possible with any underlying SMC scheme, and implements an outsourcing protocol that is efficient and directly applicable to current and future SMC techniques.
Unsupervised learning in cross-corpus acoustic emotion recognition

One of the ever-present bottlenecks in Automatic Emotion Recognition is data sparseness. We therefore investigate the suitability of unsupervised learning in cross-corpus acoustic emotion recognition through a large-scale study with six commonly used databases, including acted and natural emotion speech, and covering a variety of application scenarios and acoustic conditions. We show that adding unlabeled emotional speech to agglomerated multi-corpus training sets can enhance recognition performance even in a challenging cross-corpus setting; furthermore, we show that the expected gain by adding unlabeled data on average is approximately half the one achieved by additional manually labeled data in leave-one-corpus-out validation.
What Designers Talk About When They Talk About Context

Context has long been considered an important component of design, but as technology becomes more capable of inferring the user's behavior and environment, what constitutes context has become an increasingly pressing concern to designers. Although design frameworks and models have been proposed for context-aware computing systems, there has not yet been research that focuses on understanding context empirically from the perspective of the designer. To address this, we present an analysis of 11 in-depth interviews we conducted with designers of a variety of context-aware systems. Our analysis of the artifacts and interviews reveal five concerns designers address in their work. Furthermore, we present a process model that illustrates how context-aware system designers address these concerns. Our findings demonstrate the central role that designers' views of context plays in (a) framing a design space, (b) encoding the relevant features of context, (c) unifying possible solutions within that design space, and (d) evaluating designs. These findings suggest that context is a dynamic concept that evolves over the course of a design project, generally from a more phenomenological perspective toward a positivist interpretation. This, and the process by which it occurs, contributes insight into context-aware design with implications for both academics and practitioners.
Asymptotic bit error probability of LDPC codes for the binary erasure channel with finite number of iterations

We consider communication over the binary erasure channel (BEC) using low-density parity-check (LDPC) code and belief propagation (BP) decoding. Furthermore, a gap between the bit error probability after finite number of iterations for finite block length n and that for infinite block length is asymptotically alpha/n, where alpha denotes a speci.c constant determined by a degree distribution, a number of iterations and erasure probability. Our main result is to derive an ef.cient algorithm for calculating alpha for regular ensembles.
On Rigorous Drought Assessment Using Daily Time Scale: Non-Stationary Frequency Analyses, Revisited Concepts, and a New Method to Yield Non-Parametric Indices

Some of the problems in drought assessments are that: analyses tend to focus on coarse temporal scales, many of the methods yield skewed indices, a few terminologies are ambiguously used, and analyses comprise an implicit assumption that the observations come from a stationary process. To solve these problems, this paper introduces non-stationary frequency analyses of quantiles. How to use non-parametric rescaling to obtain robust indices that are not (or minimally) skewed is also introduced. To avoid ambiguity, some concepts on, e.g., incidence, extremity, etc., were revisited through shift from monthly to daily time scale. Demonstrations on the introduced methods were made using daily flow and precipitation insufficiency (precipitation minus potential evapotranspiration) from the Blue Nile basin in Africa. Results show that, when a significant trend exists in extreme events, stationarity-based quantiles can be far different from those when non-stationarity is considered. The introduced non-parametric indices were found to closely agree with the well-known standardized precipitation evapotranspiration indices in many aspects but skewness. Apart from revisiting some concepts, the advantages of the use of fine instead of coarse time scales in drought assessment were given. The links for obtaining freely downloadable tools on how to implement the introduced methods were provided.
A Low-Power Cellular/PCS/WCDMA Direct-Conversion Transmitter with Enhanced VCO Remodulation Rejection

This paper presents a fully integrated low-power direct-conversion transmitter for cellular/PCS/WCDMA applications. Low-power consumption is achieved with the architecture of a simplified local-oscillator network, though the harmonics of large output signal could cause interference to the VCO. This inherent problem is effectively alleviated with a wide bandwidth fractional-N frequency synthesizer and an enhanced harmonic rejection technique. The transmitter, which consists of signal-processing blocks and a Sigma-Delta fractional-N frequency synthesizer with an integrated VCO, is fabricated using a 0.35 mum SiGe BiCMOS process. The total current consumption at minimum power is only 23 mA for the cellular and 27 mA for the PCS/WCDMA; the error vector magnitude is 3.91%, 6.98% and 8.56%, respectively.
Liver function assessment with three 13C breath tests by two-point measurements

In this study, we performed three breath tests – l-[1-13C ]phenylalanine breath test (PBT), l-[1-13C ] methionine breath test, and [13C]methacetin breath test (MethaBT) – in patients with chronic liver disease to determine the optimal timing of expired air collection for diagnosing chronic liver disease and evaluating the grade of fibrosis. The subjects were 61 adults with normal livers, 98 chronic hepatitis patients, and 91 liver cirrhosis patients. We investigated the relationships of breath test results with routine biochemical tests and the Child–Pugh score, as well as the diagnostic capacities of the breath tests for liver dysfunction/cirrhosis and grade of liver fibrosis. For the diagnosis of liver cirrhosis and correlations with liver fibrosis, the accuracy of the PBT at 30 min (PBT30) was similar to that of the MethaBT at 15 min (Metha15). For liver function assessment by two-point measurement with 13C breath tests, we recommend the PBT30 and the Metha15.
Robust Radiomics Feature Quantification Using Semiautomatic Volumetric Segmentation

Due to advances in the acquisition and analysis of medical imaging, it is currently possible to quantify the tumor phenotype. The emerging field of Radiomics addresses this issue by converting medical images into minable data by extracting a large number of quantitative imaging features. One of the main challenges of Radiomics is tumor segmentation. Where manual delineation is time consuming and prone to inter-observer variability, it has been shown that semi-automated approaches are fast and reduce inter-observer variability. In this study, a semiautomatic region growing volumetric segmentation algorithm, implemented in the free and publicly available 3D-Slicer platform, was investigated in terms of its robustness for quantitative imaging feature extraction. Fifty-six 3D-radiomic features, quantifying phenotypic differences based on tumor intensity, shape and texture, were extracted from the computed tomography images of twenty lung cancer patients. These radiomic features were derived from the 3D-tumor volumes defined by three independent observers twice using 3D-Slicer, and compared to manual slice-by-slice delineations of five independent physicians in terms of intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) and feature range. Radiomic features extracted from 3D-Slicer segmentations had significantly higher reproducibility (ICC = 0.85±0.15, p = 0.0009) compared to the features extracted from the manual segmentations (ICC = 0.77±0.17). Furthermore, we found that features extracted from 3D-Slicer segmentations were more robust, as the range was significantly smaller across observers (p = 3.819e-07), and overlapping with the feature ranges extracted from manual contouring (boundary lower: p = 0.007, higher: p = 5.863e-06). Our results show that 3D-Slicer segmented tumor volumes provide a better alternative to the manual delineation for feature quantification, as they yield more reproducible imaging descriptors. Therefore, 3D-Slicer can be employed for quantitative image feature extraction and image data mining research in large patient cohorts.
Effect of microinjection of a low-Mr human placenta protein tyrosine phosphatase on induction of meiotic cell division in Xenopus oocytes

Homogeneous preparations of a protein phosphatase that is specific for phosphotyrosyl residues (protein tyrosine phosphatase [PTPase] 1B) were isolated from human placenta and microinjected into Xenopus oocytes. This resulted in an increase in activity of up to 10-fold over control levels, as measured in homogenates with use of an artificial substrate (reduced carboxamidomethylated and maleylated lysozyme). Microinjected PTPase was stable for at least 18 h. It is distributed within the oocyte in a manner similar to the endogenous activity and is suggestive of an interaction with cellular structures or molecules located predominantly in the animal hemisphere. The phosphatase markedly retarded (by up to 5 h) maturation induced by insulin. This, in conjunction with the demonstration that PTPase 1B abolished insulin stimulation of an S6 peptide (RRLSSLRA) kinase concomitant with a decrease in the phosphorylation of tyrosyl residues in a protein with the same apparent Mr as the beta subunit of the insulin and insulinlike growth factor 1 receptors (M. F. Cicirelli, N. K. Tonks, C. D. Diltz, E. H. Fischer, and E. G. Krebs, submitted for publication), provides further support for an essential role of protein tyrosine phosphorylation in insulin action. Furthermore, maturation was significantly retarded even when the PTPase was injected 2 to 4 h after exposure of the cells to insulin. PTPase 1B also retarded maturation induced by progesterone and maturation-promoting factor, which presumably do not act through the insulin receptor. These data point to a second site of action of the PTPase in the pathway of meiotic cell division, downstream of the insulin receptor and following the appearance of active maturation-promoting factor.
Isolates of Piscirickettsia salmonis from Scotland and Ireland Show Evidence of Clonal Diversity

ABSTRACT Salmonid rickettsial septicemia, caused by Piscirickettsia salmonis, causes major mortalities in Chilean salmonid aquaculture and is an increasing problem in Atlantic salmon in Ireland and Scotland. Analysis of 16S-to-23S internal transcribed sequences and 16S ribosomal DNA (rDNA) shows that Irish isolates of P. salmonis form two new groups of the organism while Scottish isolates cluster together with Norwegian and Canadian isolates from Atlantic salmon.
REQUEST: Seamless Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP for Multi-Homed Smartphone under Resource Constraints

Exploiting both LTE and Wi-Fi links simultaneously enhances the performance of video streaming services in a smartphone. However, it is challenging to achieve seamless and high quality video while saving battery energy and LTE data usage to prolong the usage time of a smartphone. In this paper, we propose REQUEST, a video chunk request policy for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) in a smartphone, which can utilize both LTE and Wi-Fi. REQUEST enables seamless DASH video streaming with near optimal video quality under given budgets of battery energy and LTE data usage. Through extensive simulation and measurement in a real environment, we demonstrate that REQUEST significantly outperforms other existing schemes in terms of average video bitrate, rebuffering, and resource waste.
An Adaptive Framework for Managing Heterogeneous Many-Core Clusters

The computing needs and the input and result datasets of modern scientific and enterprise applications are growing exponentially. To support such applications, High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems need to employ thousands of cores and innovative data management. At the same time, an emerging trend in designing HPC systems is to leverage specialized asymmetric multicores, such as IBM Cell and AMD Fusion APUs, and commodity computational accelerators, such as programmable GPUs, which exhibit excellent price to performance ratio as well as the much needed high energy efficiency. While such accelerators have been studied in detail as stand-alone computational engines, integrating the accelerators into large-scale distributed systems with heterogeneous computing resources for data-intensive computing presents unique challenges and trade-offs. Traditional programming and resource management techniques cannot be directly applied to many-core accelerators in heterogeneous distributed settings, given the complex and custom instruction sets architectures, memory hierarchies and I/O characteristics of different accelerators. In this dissertation, we explore the design space of using commodity accelerators, specifically IBM Cell and programmable GPUs, in distributed settings for data-intensive computing and propose an adaptive framework for programming and managing heterogeneous clusters. The proposed framework provides a MapReduce-based extended programming model for heterogeneous clusters, which distributes tasks between asymmetric compute nodes by considering workload characteristics and capabilities of individual compute nodes. The framework provides efficient data prefetching techniques that leverage general-purpose cores to stage the input data in the private memories of the specialized cores. We also explore the use of an advanced layered-architecture based software engineering approach and provide mixin-layers based reusable software components to enable easy and quick deployment of heterogeneous clusters. The framework also provides multiple resource management and scheduling policies under different constraints, e.g., energy-aware and QoS-aware, to support executing concurrent applications on multi-tenant heterogeneous clusters. When applied
Exercise Capacity Impairment Can Predict Postoperative Pulmonary Complications after Liver Transplantation

Background: Postoperative respiratory complications (PRCs) are common after liver transplantation (LT) and contribute significantly to the related morbidity and mortality. Objective: The aim of this paper was to determine the incidence of PRCs after LT and the value of simple exercise capacity measures as independent predictors of PRCs. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of consecutive adults submitted to LT at a University Hospital in Fortaleza Brazil from March 2013 to March 2015. At baseline, exercise capacity was assessed with the 6-minute walk test (6MWT) and the 6-minute step test (6MST), lung function was tested by spirometry, and respiratory muscle strength was measured by maximal respiratory pressure. Additional relevant pre- and intraoperative data were collected through interview and chart review, and their association with the incidence of PRCs was evaluated. Results: The study included 100 subjects, 44% of whom presented at least 1 of the PRCs. In the univariate analysis, poor 6MST and 6MWT results and a longer preoperative cold ischemia time were associated with PRCs. The logistic regression analysis showed that PRCs were less likely to occur when preoperative walking distances were longer: the odds ratio (95% CI) was reduced to 0.589 (0.357-0.971) for each 50 m walked (p = 0.03). Likewise, PRCs were more likely to occur in patients with longer preoperative cold ischemia times: the odds ratio (95% CI) increased to 1.008 (1.002-1.015) for each minute (p = 0.01). Conclusion: The incidence of PRCs is high in LT patients. A prolonged cold ischemia time and preoperative 6MWT results were independent predictors of PRCs in this patient population.
Progression of naive intraepithelial neoplasia genome to aggressive squamous cell carcinoma genome of uterine cervix

Although cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) is considered a neoplasia, its genomic alterations remain unknown. For this, we performed whole-exome sequencing and copy number profiling of three CINs, a microinvasive carcinoma (MIC) and four cervical squamous cell carcinomas (CSCC). Both total mutation and driver mutation numbers of the CINs were significantly fewer than those of the MIC/CSCCs (P = 0.036 and P = 0.018, respectively). Importantly, PIK3CA was altered in all MIC/CSCCs by either mutation or amplification, but not in CINs. The CINs harbored significantly lower numbers of copy number alterations (CNAs) than the MIC/CSCCs as well (P = 0.036). Pathway analysis predicted that the MIC/CSCCs were enriched with cancer-related signalings such as cell adhesion, mTOR signaling pathway and cell migration that were depleted in the CINs. The mutation-based estimation of evolutionary ages identified that CIN genomes were younger than MIC/CSCC genomes. The data indicate that CIN genomes harbor unfixed mutations in addition to human papilloma virus infection but require additional driver hits such as PIK3CA, TP53, STK11 and MAPK1 mutations for CSCC progression. Taken together, our data may explain the long latency from CIN to CSCC progression and provide useful information for molecular diagnosis of CIN and CSCC.
A Water-Use Model For The Tourism Industry In The Asia-Pacific Region: The Impact Of Water-Saving Measures On Water Use

The Asia-Pacific region is a hot spot for population and tourism growth, both key drivers of water demand. Already, more than 75% of countries in this region are experiencing water stress. The management of water is becoming increasingly pressing, including for the tourism industry. Yet there has been little research into the predictors of water use in tourism in the Asia-Pacific region and opportunities for water saving. Therefore, this article develops both total and per guest night water-use models to determine the drivers of water use in accommodation in the Asia-Pacific region, delves into the differences between regions, and assesses the effectiveness of different water-saving measures. The results suggest geographical differences in water use that are influenced by climate zone and pool facilities. Importantly, the per guest night water-use model indicates that there are economies of scale to water use and that low/dual-flush toilets can significantly conserve water.
The Featsynth Framework for Feature-Based synthesis: Design and Applications

This paper describes the FeatSynth framework, a set of open-source C++ classes intended to make it as easy as possible to integrate feature-based synthesis techniques into audio software. We briefly review the key ideas behind feature-based synthesis, and then discuss the framework’s architecture. We emphasize design choices meant to make the framework more flexible and straightforward to use. A number of illustrative examples of applications and tools developed using FeatSynth are presented to highlight different ways in which the API can be used. These examples include a command-line system for performing (among other things) offline non-phonorealistic analysis-synthesis transformations, a system allowing users to interactively manipulate the feature values used to control synthesis, and a ChucK FeatSynth plugin making use of the new “Chugin” ChucK plugin framework. The framework can be downloaded from http://featsynth.cs. princeton.edu.
Cislunar Navigation Constellation by Displaced Solar Sails

Increasing lunar exploration activities are giving rise to higher demands for a navigation constellation system in cislunar space. A novel constellation of solar sails around the Sun-Earth Artificial Lagrangian Points (ALPs) is proposed for cislunar navigation in this paper, which benefits from the numberless and out-of-plane advantages of ALPs compared with the classical Lagrangian points. To relieve the technical pressure on sail equipment, a two-layer optimisation strategy including the navigation constellation architecture and trajectory design is developed to reduce the desired lightness number of the sail's motion. The constellation architecture is constructed in the shape of a regular tetrahedron, whose size and orientation are derived from the realisable lightness number at the ALPs. The powerful Hamiltonian structure-preserving controller and differential evolution algorithm are adopted to propagate the bounded quasi-periodic trajectory with minimum lightness number variation. With the premise of the sail's high feasibility in the mechanism, the numerical navigation simulations for a typical trans-lunar weak stability boundary trajectory indicate that the proposed navigation constellation has a low geometric dilution of precision factor and a good navigation performance.