Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ULTRASONIC PIPE INSPECTION BY FORWARD-REVERSE WAVEFIELD CROSS-CORRELATION

We present an imaging technique for pipework that executed by cross-correlating the source forward-propagated wavefield with the receiver back-propagated (reverse) wavefield. This imaging condition is also known as time-reverse migration, which has been greatly developed for seismic imaging. The imaging method requires solving the full elastic wave equation two times: one for simulating the forward wavefield and the other one for reconstructing the reverse wavefield. The two resulting wavefields are then subjected to a cross-correlation through which the time axis is collapsed and an image of the defects is obtained.
GABAergic inhibition influences auditory motion-direction sensitivity in barn owls.

Many neurons in the barn owl's inferior colliculus (IC) exhibit auditory motion-direction sensitivity (MDS), i.e., they respond more to motion of a sound source in one direction than to motion in the opposite direction. We investigated the cellular mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of auditory MDS by microiontophoretically applying gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) or the GABA-antagonist bicuculline methiodide (BMI) while recording from neurons in the owl's midbrain. In most cases GABA reduced the overall firing rate, whereas BMI increased it. In addition, 29% of the motion-direction-sensitive cells completely lost their selectivity for the direction of auditory movement during administration of BMI. It had been proposed that auditory MDS in the owl is due to inhibition. The present results show that GABAergic inhibition plays a role in the strengthening of MDS. We discuss the data within the framework of the acoustic motion detector and with respect to microiontophoretic studies on visual motion detection and on inhibitory mechanisms in the inferior colliculus.
Psychological Variables and Reality Judgment in Virtual Environments: The Roles of Absorption and Dissociation

Literature on virtual reality (VR) and psychology has focused on the influence that some basic psychological processes have on VR. Although psychological processes may be defined as common to all humans, there are individual differences that might make it difficult to provide the same VR experience for everyone. Of the several personality and psychological variables that might be relevant to the VR field, this study focuses on two: absorption and dissociation. Both psychological dimensions are deeply interrelated and might play an important role in the immersion of subjects in virtual environments and in the reality attributions they make. Thus, the purpose of this study was to ascertain personality correlates on differences regarding the VR experience. The subjects were 39 psychology undergraduate students who were immersed in a VR environment for 15 minutes. Our data suggest that both absorption and dissociation influenced central issues regarding reality judgment in VR.
Markerless full body tracking by integrating multiple cues

This work proposes a novel markerless solution to full body pose tracking by integrating multiple cues such as edges, color information and volumetric reconstruction. A model built from superellipsoids is fitted to a colored volumetric reconstruction by using Stochastic Meta Descent (SMD) while taking advantage of the color information to overcome ambiguities caused by limbs touching each other. As the volumetric reconstruction is inaccurate at times, the tracking is refined by matching model contours against image edges. The model consists of a set of superellipsoids. For the matching, we introduce a way to efficiently render the contours of superellipsoids, incl. self-occlusions. The integration of edge information is demonstrated to increase the robustness and accuracy of the tracking. Several challenging body tracking sequences, showing complex movements and full articulation, illustrate this.
An MRI-visible non-viral vector for targeted Bcl-2 siRNA delivery to neuroblastoma

Polyethylene glycol-grafted polyethylenimine (PEG-g-PEI) which was functionalized with a neuroblastoma cell-specific ligand, the GD2 single chain antibody (scAbGD2), was synthesized in order to effectively deliver Bcl-2 siRNA into neuroblastoma cells. This polymer was complexed first with superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticle (SPION) to get a MRI-visible targeted non-viral vector (scAbGD2-PEG-g-PEI-SPION) and then with Bcl-2 siRNA to form nanoparticles showing low cytotoxicity. The targeting capacity of scAbGD2-PEG-g-PEI-SPION was successfully verified in vivo and in vitro by magnetic resonance imaging. The single chain antibody encoded targeted polyplex was more effective in transferring Bcl-2 siRNA than the nontargeting one in SK-N-SH cells, a human neuroblastoma cell line, resulting in a 46.34% inhibition in the expression of Bcl-2 mRNA. Consequently, a high level of cell apoptosis up to 50.76% and a significant suppression of tumor growth were achieved, which indicates that scAbGD2-PEG-g-PEI-SPION is a promising magnetic resonance imaging-visible non-viral vector for targeted neuroblastoma siRNA therapy and diagnosis.
Unsupervised Learning of Morphology by using Syntactic Categories

This paper presents a method for unsupervised learning of morphology that exploits the syntactic categories of words. Previous research [4][12] on learning of morphology and syntax has shown that both kinds of knowledge affect each other making it possible to use one type of knowledge to help the other. In this work, we make use of syntactic information i.e. Part-of-Speech (PoS) tags of words to aid morphological analysis. We employ an existing unsupervised PoS tagging algorithm for inducing the PoS categories. A distributional clustering algorithm is developed for inducing morphological paradigms.
INVESTIGATION OF THE DEFORMATION MECHANICS IN CARBON NANOTUBES-POLYMER COMPOSITES AT MICROSCOPIC AND ATOMISTIC LEVEL

Multi-walled carbon nanotubes were dispersed throughout a thermoplastic polymer, poly ether ether ketone. The results of tensile testes showed an increase in the elastic modulus and the yield strength, and decrease in the failure strain. Scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope images showed that the MWNTs were well dispersed in the polymer matrix. At room temperature, the addition of 15 wt% MWNTs increased the tensile modulus (at 0.1~ 0.3% strain) by 89% and the yield stress by 19%. Above the glass transition temperature, they increased by 163% and 42%, respectively.The tensile tests were also done inside transmission electron microscopy for observation of the atomistic level of the deformation in the interface.
Approximated Summarization of Data Provenance

Many modern applications involve collecting large amounts of data from multiple sources, and then aggregating and manipulating it in intricate ways. The complexity of such applications, combined with the size of the collected data, makes it difficult to understand how the resulting information was derived. Data provenance has proven helpful in this respect, however, maintaining and presenting the full and exact provenance information may be infeasible due to its size and complexity. We therefore introduce the notion of approximated summarized provenance, which provides a compact representation of the provenance at the possible cost of information loss. Based on this notion, we present a novel provenance summarization algorithm which, based on the semantics of the underlying data and the intended use of provenance, outputs a summary of the input provenance. Experiments measure the conciseness and accuracy of the resulting provenance summaries, and improvement in provenance usage time.
Adaptive Bidirectional Platoon Control Using a Coupled Sliding Mode Control Method

This paper proposes an adaptive bidirectional platoon-control method for an interconnected vehicular system using a coupled sliding mode control (CSMC) to improve the performance and stability of the bidirectional platoon control and to guarantee string stability. The previous work in the field of platoon control is based on two strategies, i.e., the leader-predecessor and bidirectional strategies. In the case of the leader-predecessor strategy, all vehicles should use the information of all the leading and preceding vehicles. On the other hand, the bidirectional strategy uses the information of its neighboring preceding and following vehicles. Due to the drawbacks of the bidirectional strategy, most previous work has preferred to employ the leader-predecessor strategy, which can guarantee stability and improved performance. The bidirectional strategy is, however, advantageous in that its implementation of the actual system becomes much more feasible than that of the leader-predecessor strategy. Thus, to employ the platoon-control law to an actual system, we propose the platoon-control law using a CSMC method for an interconnected vehicular system based on the bidirectional strategy such that the problems arising from communication devices in the previous work can be overcome. In particular, unlike the previous work using the bidirectional strategy, the proposed adaptive platoon-control law can lead to improved control performance of the whole system and can guarantee string stability. The stability analysis and simulation results of the proposed method in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances are included to demonstrate the practical application of the proposed algorithm.
LCASE: Lightweight Cellular Automata-based Symmetric-key Encryption

We propose a lightweight block cipher that supports 128bit block size with 128-, 192- and 256-bit keys, to conflrm with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) speciflcation. All components of LCASE are chosen to be cellular automata-based so as to achieve higher parallelism and simplify the implementation. Apart from that, the other virtues of LCASE are its high speed and cheap cost along with being resistant against timing analysis attacks.
Handover Call Admission Control for Mobile Femtocells with Free-Space Optical and Macrocellular Backbone Networks

We propose a structure for a multiple input multiple output antenna which has no space for isolation. The antenna operates in a frequency range of 2.4-2.48 GHz and can achieve a high channel capability as a Bluetooth antenna. The MIMO antenna consists of two planar inverted F antennas with symmetric structure. We designed the proposed antenna using HFSS simulator, and we designed the fabricated antenna using PCB fabricator. The MIMO antenna`s isolation and reflection coefficient . The proposed antenna`s specification satisfies Bluetooth antenna`s criteria and has more space than the existing MIMO antennas, which have space for isolation.
An automatic portscan detection system with adaptive threshold setting

For the purpose of compromising hosts, attackers including infected hosts initially perform a portscan using IP addresses in order to find vulnerable hosts. Considerable research related to portscan detection has been done and many algorithms have been proposed and implemented in the network intrusion detection system (NIDS). In order to distinguish portscanners from remote hosts, most portscan detection algorithms use a fixed threshold that is manually managed by the network manager. Because the threshold is a constant, even though the network environment or the characteristics of traffic can change, many false positives and false negatives are generated by NIDS. This reduces the efficiency of NIDS and imposes a high processing burden on a network management system (NMS). In this paper, in order to address this problem, we propose an automatic portscan detection system using an fast increase slow decrease (FISD) scheme, that will automatically and adaptively set the threshold based on statistical data for traffic during prior time periods. In particular, we focus on reducing false positives rather than false negatives, while the threshold is adaptively set within a range between minimum and maximum values. We also propose a new portscan detection algorithm, rate of increase in the number of failed connection request (RINF), which is much more suitable for our system and shows better performance than other existing algorithms. In terms of the implementation, we compare our scheme with other two simple threshold estimation methods for an adaptive threshold setting scheme. Also, we compare our detection algorithm with other three existing approaches for portscan detection using a real traffic trace. In summary, we show that FISD results in less false positives than other schemes and RINF can fast and accurately detect portscanners. We also show that the proposed system, including our scheme and algorithm, provides good performance in terms of the rate of false positives.
The Glycated Albumin to Glycated Hemoglobin Ratio Might Not Be Associated with Carotid Atherosclerosis in Patients with Type 1 Diabetes

Background The ratio of glycated albumin to glycated hemoglobin (GA/A1c) is known to be elevated in subjects with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) who had decreased insulin secretion. Additionally, the carotid intima media thickness (IMT) is greater in T2DM patients with higher GA/A1c ratios. We investigated whether increased GA/A1c ratio and IMT are also associated in type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), which is characterized by lack of insulin secretory capacity. Methods In this cross-sectional study, we recruited 81 T1DM patients (33 men, 48 women; mean age 44.1±13.0 years) who underwent carotid IMT, GA, and HbA1c measurements. Results The mean GA/A1c ratio was 2.90. Based on these results, we classified the subjects into two groups: group I (GA/A1c ratio <2.90, n=36) and group II (GA/A1c ratio ≥2.90, n=45). Compared with group I, the body mass indexes (BMIs), waist circumferences, and IMTs were lower in group II. GA/A1c ratio was negatively correlated with BMI, urine albumin to creatinine ratio (P<0.001 for both), and both the mean and maximal IMT (P=0.001, both). However, after adjusting the confounding factors, we observed that IMT was no longer associated with GA/A1c ratio. Conclusion In contrast to T2DM, IMT was not significantly related to GA/A1c ratio in the subjects with T1DM. This suggests that the correlations between GA/A1c ratio and the parameters known to be associated with atherosclerosis in T2DM could be manifested differently in T1DM. Further studies are needed to investigate these relationships in T1DM.
Self-Managing Associative Memory for Dynamic Acquisition of Expertise in High-Level Domains

Self-organizing maps can be used to implement an associative memory for an intelligent system that dynamically learns about new high-level domains over time. SOMs are an attractive option for implementing associative memory: they are fast, easily parallelized, and digest a stream of incoming data into a topographically organized collection of models where more frequent classes of data are represented by higher-resolution collections of models. Typically, the distribution of models in an SOM, once developed, remains fairly stable, but developing expertise in a new high-level domain requires altering the allocation of models. We use a mixture of analysis and empirical studies to characterize the behavior of SOMs for high-level associative memory, finding that new high-resolution collections of models develop quickly. High-resolution areas of the SOM decay rapidly unless actively refreshed, but in a large SOM, the ratio between growth rate and decay rate may be high enough to support both fast learning and long-term memory.
Alcohol consumption and the risk of colon cancer by family history of colorectal cancer 1 – 4

Background: Individuals with a family history of colorectal cancer may be more susceptible to adverse effects of alcohol consumption. Objective: We investigated whether the association between alcohol consumption and colon cancer risk differed by family history of colorectal cancer. Design:We conducted prospective studies in women and men in the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, respectively. Alcohol consumption was first assessed in 1980 in women and in 1986 in men. Results: During a follow-up of 26 y among 87,861 women and 20 y among 47,290 men, we documented 1801 cases of colon cancer (1094 women and 707 men). Higher alcohol consumption was associated with an elevated risk of colon cancer, although the association was significant only for the highest intake category of 30 g/d, with no significant linear trend. The association between alcohol consumption and colon cancer risk differed by family history of colorectal cancer; in comparison with nondrinkers, the pooled multivariate RRs for alcohol consumption of 30 g/d were 1.23 (95% CI: 0.96, 1.57; NS) among those with no family history and 2.02 (95% CI: 1.30, 3.13) among those with a family history of colorectal cancer (P value test for difference = 0.05). In comparison with nondrinkers with no family history, the RR for colon cancer was 2.80 (95% CI: 2.00, 3.91) for individuals who consumed 30 g/d and who had a family history of colorectal cancer. Conclusion: Reducing alcohol consumption may decrease the incidence of colon cancer, especially among those with a family history of colorectal cancer. Am J Clin Nutr 2012;95:413–9.
Understanding the promoter e ff ect of Cu and Cs over highly e ff ective β-Mo 2 C catalysts for the reverse water-gas shift reaction

Mo2C is an effective catalyst for chemical CO2 upgrading via reverse water-gas shift (RWGS). In this work, we demonstrate that the activity and selectivity of this system can be boosted by the addition of promoters such as Cu and Cs. The addition of Cu incorporates extra active sites such as Cu and Cu° which are essential for the reaction. Cs is an underexplored dopant whose marked electropositive character generates electronic perturbations on the catalyst’s surface leading to enhanced catalytic performance. Also, the Cs-doped catalyst seems to be in-situ activated due to a re-carburization phenomenon which results in fairly stable catalysts for continuous operations. Overall, this work showcases a strategy to design highly efficient catalysts based on promoted βMo2C for CO2 recycling via RWGS.
Integrating Activity-Based Costing and Economic Value Added in Manufacturing

AbstractThis article presents a cost and perfonnance measurement system that integrates activity-based costing (ABC) with the economic value added financial perfonnance measure. This proposed ABC-and-EVA system is a management support tool for managing costs and capital. The integrated ABC-and-EVA system includes the rate of resource consumption (like traditional ABC), but it also includes capital demand. Implementation steps are illustrated. A traditional ABC system is compared with an ABC-and-EVA system by examining the cost for each activity at the first stage. A firm's capital information is then transformed into transparent capital charges using a newly developed method called activity-capital dependence (ACD) analysis. Changes to the end-product costs and possible changes to corporate strategies and business perfonnance in the proposed ABC-and-EVA system are discussed.
Effect of Vitamin C Supplementation in an Untreated Periodontitis Population. An observational study

Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva. nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.
Modeling and Reasoning about Semantic Web Services Contract Using Description Logic

Currently, the natural expectation of contracting a set of Web services by virtue of their semantics is becoming more and more feasible and popular. Meanwhile, it is generally accepted that a formalism with a well-defined model-theoretic semantics (i.e. some sort of logics) should be considered as the underpinning of Semantic Web Services [1]. In this paper, concrete domain and action theory are incorporated into a very expressive DL, called ALCQO. Notably, this extension can significantly augment the expressive power for modeling and reasoning about dynamic aspects of services contracting. At the same time, the original nature and advantages of classical DLs, particularly the ability to describe "static" aspects of Web services, are also preserved to the extent possible.
Exploring the association between interleukin-1β and its interacting proteins in Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an age-associated progressive neurodegenerative disorder which is of clinical concern. The association between the nervous and immune system is defined as an neuroimmunological theory that supports a model of pathology or treatment for AD. Interleukin (IL)-1β has a pro-inflammatory function in AD; however, the mechanism of its dysregulation in AD remains unknown. It is therefore of significance to understand the molecular mechanisms of IL-1β and how it may regulate AD. Proteins, which have been previously reported to be associated with IL-1β in AD, have been used in the present study as nodes to illustrate a net of protein interaction in Cytoscape. The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes was used to further analyze the association of these proteins with the pathology of AD. The present study identified and subsequently compared two AD and six IL-1β pathways with the network produced in Cytoscape. The present study identified important mechanisms in the pathology of AD and constructed two novel networks using Cytoscape.
PhIN: A Protein Pharmacology Interaction Network Database

Network pharmacology is a new and hot concept in drug discovery for its ability to investigate the complexity of polypharmacology, and becomes more and more important in drug development. Here we report a protein pharmacology interaction network database (PhIN), aiming to assist multitarget drug discovery by providing comprehensive and flexible network pharmacology analysis. Overall, PhIN contains 1,126,060 target–target interaction pairs in terms of shared compounds and 3,428,020 pairs in terms of shared scaffolds, which involve 12,419,700 activity data, 9,414 targets, 314 viral targets, 652 pathways, 1,359,400 compounds, and 309,556 scaffolds. Using PhIN, users can obtain interacting target networks within or across human pathways, between human and virus, by defining the number of shared compounds or scaffolds under an activity cutoff. We expect PhIN to be a useful tool for multitarget drug development. PhIN is freely available at http://cadd.pharmacy. nankai.edu. cn/phin/.
Matcher neural networks

In contrast to the prevailing ideas or bias regarding neural networks, the author takes a biologically conservative view that stresses efficiency and modularity. In this view individual neurons are efficient modules capable of biologically meaningful function. A group of neurons can form a larger module, which is also biologically meaningful and repeatable. Since modules are repeatable, the organization of the brain need not be as random as previously thought. With this new bias and the aim of discovering the modules, the author studies the physiology of neurons. He presents a powerful new class of neural networks, called matcher neural networks, based on the above ideas, which he believes are in many ways physiologically and psychologically better models for the brain than current connectionist models. <<ETX>>