Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performance analysis of energy-detection-based massive SIMO

Recently, communications systems that are both energy efficient and reliable are under investigation. In this paper, we concentrate on an energy-detection-based transmission scheme where a communication scenario between a transmitter with one antenna and a receiver with significantly many antennas is considered. We assume that the receiver initially calculates the average energy across all antennas, and then decodes the transmitted data by exploiting the average energy level. Then, we calculate the average symbol error probability by means of a maximum a-posteriori probability detector at the receiver. Following that, we provide the optimal decision regions. Furthermore, we develop an iterative algorithm that reaches the optimal constellation diagram under a given average transmit power constraint. Through numerical analysis, we explore the system performance.
Optimal Approximation Parameters of Temperature Sensor Transfer Characteristic for Implementation in Low Cost Microcontroller Systems

This paper describes one method to determine the optimal approximation parameters of the sensor transfer characteristics given in table form. The main topic of this work is the parameter optimization related to the minimization of the microcontroller memory and computing the resources, while keeping the approximation error within the allowed boundaries. The work suggests the optimal algorithms, the data structures and the program modules to calculate the sensors temperature. The approximation process is performed by using a custom tool developed in Matlab. Its purpose is to research the possibility of the memory needs reduction. The parameters provided by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) were being used as the reference on computing resources and memory needs. The new parameters are established as the results with memory demands reduced significantly related to demands provided by the NIST while keeping approximation error negligible
Position prediction in crossing behaviors

Due to the anticipated future, extensive use of robots, human beings will probably share common spaces with them. The relationships between robots and humans will be conducted at close distances. Predicting people's future positions helps robots understand human behavior and react safely and naturally. In this paper, we propose a method for predicting people's positions in crossing behaviors, i.e. different trajectories people follow when they are crossing each other. We conducted a field experiment to gather various crossing behaviors of pedestrians in a shopping mall environment and analyzed them by focusing on “hot areas” spaces where people modify their trajectories for crossing. We clustered typical crossing behaviors in hot areas and modeled them using Hidden Markov Models for predictions. Our algorithm more accurately predicts the future positions of pedestrians by considering moving direction and speed.
Persistence of Coxiella burnetii, the Agent of Q Fever, in Murine Adipose Tissue

Coxiella burnetii, the agent of Q fever, is known to persist in humans and rodents but its cellular reservoir in hosts remains undetermined. We hypothesized that adipose tissue serves as a C. burnetii reservoir during bacterial latency. BALB/c and C57BL/6 mice were infected with C. burnetii by the intraperitoneal route or the intracheal route. Adipose tissue was tested for the presence of C. burnetii several months after infection. C. burnetii was detected in abdominal, inguinal and dorsal adipose tissue 4 months post-infection, when no bacteria were detected in blood, liver, lungs and spleen, regardless of the inoculation route and independently of mouse strain. The transfer of abdominal adipose tissue from convalescent BALB/c mice to naïve immunodeficient mice resulted in the infection of the recipient animals. It is likely that C. burnetii infects adipocytes in vivo because bacteria were found in adipocytes within adipose tissue and replicated within in vitro-differentiated adipocytes. In addition, C. burnetii induced a specific transcriptional program in in-vivo and in vitro-differentiated adipocytes, which was enriched in categories associated with inflammatory response, hormone response and cytoskeleton. These changes may account for bacterial replication in in-vitro and chronic infection in-vivo. Adipose tissue may be the reservoir in which C. burnetii persists for prolonged periods after apparent clinical cure. The mouse model of C. burnetii infection may be used to understand the relapses of Q fever and provide new perspectives to the follow-up of patients.
Fragment-similarity-based QSAR (FS-QSAR) algorithm for ligand biological activity predictions

Quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) studies are useful computational tools often used in drug discovery research and in many scientific disciplines. In this study, a robust fragment-similarity-based QSAR (FS-QSAR) algorithm was developed to correlate structures with biological activities by integrating fragment-based drug design concept and a multiple linear regression method. Similarity between any pair of training and testing fragments was determined by calculating the difference of lowest or highest eigenvalues of the chemistry space BCUT matrices of corresponding fragments. In addition to the BCUT-similarity function, molecular fingerprint Tanimoto coefficient (Tc) similarity function was also used as an alternative for comparison. For validation studies, the FS-QSAR algorithm was applied to several case studies, including a dataset of COX2 inhibitors and a dataset of cannabinoid CB2 triaryl bis-sulfone antagonist analogues, to build predictive models achieving average coefficient of determination (r 2) of 0.62 and 0.68, respectively. The developed FS-QSAR method is proved to give more accurate predictions than the traditional and one-nearest-neighbour QSAR methods and can be a useful tool in the fragment-based drug discovery for ligand activity prediction.
Electrical Stimulation and Language

Electrical stimulation has been used for over half a century in clinical settings to facilitate the surgical treatment of patients with intractable seizures and cortical structural lesions. It should be employed as the final result of a stepwise process in patient management but, when called for, can be very accurate in localizing critical functional areas. We discuss the use of this technique in patient evaluation, with an emphasis on the evaluation of patients with seizure disorders.
Trends in Oral Health by Poverty Status as Measured by Healthy People 2010 Objectives

Objective. Poverty is a significant social determinant for oral health, yet Healthy People 2010 (HP 2010) does not monitor changes in oral health status by poverty. We assessed recent trends for six HP 2010 oral health objectives by poverty status. Methods. We used data from the 1988–1994 and 1999–2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys to analyze trends for HP 2010 age-specific objectives relating to caries experience, untreated tooth decay, dental sealants, periodontal disease, tooth retention, and complete tooth loss by poverty status. Results. Dental caries significantly increased from 19% to 24% for children aged 2–4 years, but when stratified by poverty, caries only increased significantly for non-poor 2- to 4-year-old children (10% to 15%) (Objective 21–1a). The largest percentage point increase in dental caries was for non-poor boys (9% to 18%). The use of dental sealants continues to grow in the U.S. The largest percentage point increase in sealant use (Objective 21–8) between the two survey periods was for all poor children aged 8 years (3% to 21%). Among adults aged 35–44 years, periodontal disease significantly declined in the U.S. from 22% to 16% (Objective 21–5b) and more adults retained all of their natural teeth (30% to 38%) (Objective 21–3). However, the increase in tooth retention was significant only for non-poor adults, particularly non-poor men (34% to 48%). Conclusions. Overall, the oral health status of Americans as measured by HP 2010 objectives mostly showed improvement or remained unchanged between 1998–1994 and 1999–2004. However, some changes in oral health status for some traditionally low-risk groups, such as non-poor children, may be reversing improvements in oral health that have consistently been observed in previous decades. These results suggest that poverty status is an important factor for planning and monitoring future national oral health goals.
Kazhdan’s Property (T) via Semidefinite Optimization

Following an idea of Ozawa, we give a new proof of Kazhdan’s property (T) for by showing that Δ2 − Δ/6 is a Hermitian sum of squares in the group algebra, where Δ is the unnormalized Laplace operator with respect to the natural generating set. This corresponds to a spectral gap of 1/72 ≈ 0.014 for the associated random-walk operator. The sum-of-squares representation was found numerically by a semidefinite programming algorithm and then turned into an exact symbolic representation, provided in an attached Mathematica file.
Word Sense Disambiguation vs. Statistical Machine Translation

We directly investigate a subject of much recent debate: do word sense disambiguation models help statistical machine translation quality? We present empirical results casting doubt on this common, but unproved, assumption. Using a state-of-the-art Chinese word sense disambiguation model to choose translation candidates for a typical IBM statistical MT system, we find that word sense disambiguation does not yield significantly better translation quality than the statistical machine translation system alone. Error analysis suggests several key factors behind this surprising finding, including inherent limitations of current statistical MT architectures.
Renal pelvic pacemaker control of ureteral peristaltic rate.

CONSTANTINOU, c. E. Renal pelvic pacemaker control of ureteral peristaltic rate. Am. J. Physiol. 226(6): 1413-1419. l974. -To gain insight into the mechanism responsible for the generation of ureteral peristalsis, a canine experimental model was constructed using manometric methods in the evaluation of the fundamental renal pelvic rhythm and the electrophysiological methods for the characterization of ureteral peristalsis. The ultimate aim of this study is to introduce experimental evidence to the phenomenological existence of a renal pelvic pacemaker responsible for urine transport in the upper urinary tract. The fundamental frequency of the renal pelvis was compared to that of the ureter and also with respect to the phase and frequency of the respiratory rhythm. The results of this study generally indicate that the characteristics of ureteral peristalic contraction rate are frequency divisions of the fundamental renal pelvic pacemaker and are independent of urine flow and respiration. It is also indicated that with increasing urine flow rate the peristaltic rate reaches that of the pacemaker frequency. Any further increases in urine production are accommodated by bclus volume increase.
Mining Frequent Sequential Patterns under Regular Expressions: A Highly Adaptive Strategy for Pushing Contraints

This paper introduces a new framework for the extraction of frequent sequences satisfying a given regular expression (RE) constraint. Contrary to previous work (SPIRIT algorithms), we represent REs by tree structures and our algorithm can choose dynamically an extraction method according to the local selectivity of the sub-REs. Interestingly, pruning can rely not only on the anti-monotonic minimal frequency constraint but also to the RE constraint that is generally not anti-monotonic. Preliminary experiments on synthetic data have shown that our algorithm takes the shape of the best algorithm from the SPIRIT family and even surpasses it.
Virtual Machine Based Energy-Efficient Data Center Architecture for Cloud Computing: A Performance Perspective

Virtual machine technology is widely applied to modern data center for cloud computing as a key technology to realize energy-efficient operation of servers. Server consolidation achieves energy efficiency by enabling multiple instantiations of operating systems (OSes) to run simultaneously on a single physical machine. While, live migration of virtual machine can transfer the virtual machine workload from one physical machine to another without interrupting service. However, both the two technologies have their own performance overheads. There is a tradeoff between the performance and energy efficiency. In this paper, we study the energy efficiency from the performance perspective. Firstly, we present a virtual machine based energy-efficient data center architecture for cloud computing. Then we investigate the potential performance overheads caused by server consolidation and live migration of virtual machine technology. Experimental results show that both the two technologies can effectively implement energy-saving goals with little performance overheads. Efficient consolidation and migration strategies can improve the energy efficiency.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) A Hierarchical Representation for Human Activity Recognition with Noisy Labels

Human activity recognition is an essential task for robots to effectively and efficiently interact with the end users. Many machine learning approaches for activity recognition systems have been proposed recently. Most of these methods are built upon a strong assumption that the labels in the training data are noise-free, which is often not realistic. In this paper, we incorporate the uncertainty of labels into a maxmargin learning algorithm, and the algorithm allows the labels to deviate over iterations in order to find a better solution. This is incorporated with a hierarchical approach where we jointly estimate activities at two different levels of granularity. The model is tested on two datasets, i.e., the CAD-120 dataset and the Accompany dataset, and the proposed model shows outperforming results over the state-of-the-art methods.
Self-aware cyber-physical systems and applications in smart buildings and cities

The world is facing several challenges that must be dealt within the coming years such as efficient energy management, need for economic growth, security and quality of life of its habitants. The increasing concentration of the world population into urban areas puts the cities in the center of the preoccupations and makes them important actors for the world's sustainable development strategy. ICT has a substantial potential to help cities to respond to the growing demands of more efficient, sustainable, and increased quality of life in the cities, thus to make them “smarter”. Smartness is directly proportional with the “awareness”. Cyber-physical systems can extract the awareness information from the physical world and process this information in the cyber-world. Thus, a holistic integrated approach, from the physical to the cyber-world is necessary for a successful and sustainable smart city outcome. This paper introduces important research challenges that we believe will be important in the coming years and provides guidelines and recommendations to achieve self-aware smart city objectives.
The Complex Role of Store Operated Calcium Entry Pathways and Related Proteins in the Function of Cardiac, Skeletal and Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells

Cardiac, skeletal, and smooth muscle cells shared the common feature of contraction in response to different stimuli. Agonist-induced muscle's contraction is triggered by a cytosolic free Ca2+ concentration increase due to a rapid Ca2+ release from intracellular stores and a transmembrane Ca2+ influx, mainly through L-type Ca2+ channels. Compelling evidences have demonstrated that Ca2+ might also enter through other cationic channels such as Store-Operated Ca2+ Channels (SOCCs), involved in several physiological functions and pathological conditions. The opening of SOCCs is regulated by the filling state of the intracellular Ca2+ store, the sarcoplasmic reticulum, which communicates to the plasma membrane channels through the Stromal Interaction Molecule 1/2 (STIM1/2) protein. In muscle cells, SOCCs can be mainly non-selective cation channels formed by Orai1 and other members of the Transient Receptor Potential-Canonical (TRPC) channels family, as well as highly selective Ca2+ Release-Activated Ca2+ (CRAC) channels, formed exclusively by subunits of Orai proteins likely organized in macromolecular complexes. This review summarizes the current knowledge of the complex role of Store Operated Calcium Entry (SOCE) pathways and related proteins in the function of cardiac, skeletal, and vascular smooth muscle cells.
Competition between Feedback Loops Underlies Normal and Pathological Dynamics in the Basal Ganglia

Experiments performed in normal animals suggest that the basal ganglia (BG) are crucial in motor program selection. BG are also involved in movement disorders. In particular, BG neuronal activity in parkinsonian animals and patients is more oscillatory and more synchronous than in normal individuals. We propose a new model for the function and dysfunction of the motor part of BG. We hypothesize that the striatum, the subthalamic nucleus, the internal pallidum (GPi), the thalamus, and the cortex are involved in closed feedback loops. The direct (cortex–striatum–GPi–thalamus–cortex) and the hyperdirect loops (cortex–subthalamic nucleus–GPi–thalamus–cortex), which have different polarities, play a key role in the model. We show that the competition between these two loops provides the BG–cortex system with the ability to perform motor program selection. Under the assumption that dopamine potentiates corticostriatal synaptic transmission, we demonstrate that, in our model, moderate dopamine depletion leads to a complete loss of action selection ability. High depletion can lead to synchronous oscillations. These modifications of the network dynamical state stem from an imbalance between the feedback in the direct and hyperdirect loops when dopamine is depleted. Our model predicts that the loss of selection ability occurs before the appearance of oscillations, suggesting that Parkinson's disease motor impairments are not directly related to abnormal oscillatory activity. Another major prediction of our model is that synchronous oscillations driven by the hyperdirect loop appear in BG after inactivation of the striatum.
Cancer patients with major depressive disorder: testing a biobehavioral/cognitive behavior intervention.

OBJECTIVE In this Phase II trial, we evaluated a novel psychological treatment for depressed patients coping with the stresses of cancer. Effectiveness of a combined biobehavioral intervention (BBI) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) was studied. METHOD Participants were 36 cancer survivors (mean age = 49 years; 88% Caucasian; 92% female) diagnosed with major depressive disorder. A single group pre-post design was used. Treatment consisted of up to 20 individual 75-min combined BBI/CBT sessions. Outcomes were change in interviewer (Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression; Williams, 1988) and self-rated depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory-Second Edition; Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) as well as change in cancer relevant symptoms (Fatigue Symptom Inventory [Hann et al., 1998] and Brief Pain Questionnaire [Daut, Cleeland, & Flanery, 1983]) and quality of life (Medical Outcomes Study Short Form-36; Ware et al., 1995). Mixed-effects modeling, a reliability change index, and generalized linear models were used. All analyses were intent-to-treat. RESULTS Depressive symptoms significantly improved. In addition, 19 of 21 study completers met criteria for remission. Significant improvements were also noted in fatigue and mental health quality of life. Both concurrent anxiety disorders and high levels of cancer stress (Impact of Events Scale; Horowitz, Wilner, & Alvarez, 1979) were each associated with beginning and concluding treatment with greater depressive symptoms. CONCLUSIONS CBT components were successfully incorporated into a previously efficacious intervention for reducing cancer stress. The BBI/CBT intervention warrants further research in evaluating its efficacy compared with well-established treatments for depression.
Increased autophagy signaling but not proteasome activity in human skeletal muscle after prolonged low‐intensity exercise with negative energy balance

Little is known about the molecular regulation of skeletal muscle protein turnover during exercise in field conditions where energy is intake inadequate. Here, 17 male and 7 female soldiers performed an 8 days long field‐based military operation. Vastus lateralis muscle biopsies, in which autophagy, the ubiquitin–proteasome system, and the mTORC1 signaling pathway were studied, were collected before and after the operation. The 187 h long operation resulted in a 15% and 29% negative energy balance as well as a 4.1% and 4.6% loss of body mass in women and men, respectively. After the operation protein levels of ULK1 as well as the phosphorylation of ULK1Ser317 and ULK1Ser555 had increased by 11%, 39%, and 13%, respectively, and this was supported by a 17% increased phosphorylation of AMPKThr172 (P < 0.05). The LC3b‐I/II ratio was threefold higher after compared to before the operation (P < 0.05), whereas protein levels of p62/SQSTM1 were unchanged. The β1, β2, and β5 activity of the proteasome and protein levels of MAFbx did not change, whereas levels of MuRF‐1 were slightly reduced (6%, P < 0.05). Protein levels and phosphorylation status of key components in the mTORC1 signaling pathway remained at basal levels after the operation. Muscle levels of glycogen decreased from 269 ± 12 to 181 ± 9 mmol·kg dry·muscle−1 after the exercise period (P < 0.05). In conclusion, the 8 days of field‐based exercise resulted in induction of autophagy without any increase in proteasome activity or protein ubiquitination. Simultaneously, the regulation of protein synthesis through the mTORC1 signaling pathway was maintained.
Sensor Localization via Diversely Polarized Antennas

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are currently employed in a vast number of different applications ranging from home automation and health care to military systems. Although their application may vary greatly, WSNs share a common set of characteristics such as a limited energy supply and simple hardware. A common issue related with the application of WSNs is sensor localization, for some types of applications it is important that the sensors know the relative or absolute position of other sensors in the network, such as surveillance of monitoring networks. If sensors are randomly placed they may resort a wide range of methods such as Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) or received signal strength indicators (RSSI). In this work we present an alternative to relative sensor localization by employed a crossed dipole antenna in the reception and a known polarization in the transmission. The accuracy of the proposed methods is measured trough numerical simulations and results are presented.
Impaired aldosterone responsiveness in corticosteroid binding globulin deficient mice

Aim: Corticosteroid binding globulin (CBG) is the high affinity plasma carrier protein for cortisol. It keeps the steroids inactive, prevents them from degradation and defines the amount of free hormone acting on target tissues. Previous findings have shown insufficient responsiveness of corticosterone in peripheral tissues in CBG−/− mice despite elevated free plasma corticosterone. In the large intestine, glucocorticoids synergistically enhance the pro‐absorptive effects of aldosterone. We therefore hypothesized that CBG−/− mice have reduced responsiveness to aldosterone.