Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Matrix Production and Organization by Endothelial Colony Forming Cells in Mechanically Strained Engineered Tissue Constructs

Aims Tissue engineering is an innovative method to restore cardiovascular tissue function by implanting either an in vitro cultured tissue or a degradable, mechanically functional scaffold that gradually transforms into a living neo-tissue by recruiting tissue forming cells at the site of implantation. Circulating endothelial colony forming cells (ECFCs) are capable of differentiating into endothelial cells as well as a mesenchymal ECM-producing phenotype, undergoing Endothelial-to-Mesenchymal-transition (EndoMT). We investigated the potential of ECFCs to produce and organize ECM under the influence of static and cyclic mechanical strain, as well as stimulation with transforming growth factor β1 (TGFβ1). Methods and Results A fibrin-based 3D tissue model was used to simulate neo-tissue formation. Extracellular matrix organization was monitored using confocal laser-scanning microscopy. ECFCs produced collagen and also elastin, but did not form an organized matrix, except when cultured with TGFβ1 under static strain. Here, collagen was aligned more parallel to the strain direction, similar to Human Vena Saphena Cell-seeded controls. Priming ECFC with TGFβ1 before exposing them to strain led to more homogenous matrix production. Conclusions Biochemical and mechanical cues can induce extracellular matrix formation by ECFCs in tissue models that mimic early tissue formation. Our findings suggest that priming with bioactives may be required to optimize neo-tissue development with ECFCs and has important consequences for the timing of stimuli applied to scaffold designs for both in vitro and in situ cardiovascular tissue engineering. The results obtained with ECFCs differ from those obtained with other cell sources, such as vena saphena-derived myofibroblasts, underlining the need for experimental models like ours to test novel cell sources for cardiovascular tissue engineering.
Interacted QTL Mapping in Partial NCII Design Provides Evidences for Breeding by Design

The utilization of heterosis in rice, maize and rapeseed has revolutionized crop production. Although elite hybrid cultivars are mainly derived from the F1 crosses between two groups of parents, named NCII mating design, little has been known about the methodology of how interacted effects influence quantitative trait performance in the population. To bridge genetic analysis with hybrid breeding, here we integrated an interacted QTL mapping approach with breeding by design in partial NCII mating design. All the potential main and interacted effects were included in one full model. If the number of the effects is huge, bulked segregant analysis were used to test which effects were associated with the trait. All the selected effects were further shrunk by empirical Bayesian, so significant effects could be identified. A series of Monte Carlo simulations was performed to validate the new method. Furthermore, all the significant effects were used to calculate genotypic values of all the missing F1 hybrids, and all these F1 phenotypic or genotypic values were used to predict elite parents and parental combinations. Finally, the new method was adopted to dissect the genetic foundation of oil content in 441 rapeseed parents and 284 F1 hybrids. As a result, 8 main-effect QTL and 37 interacted QTL were found and used to predict 10 elite restorer lines, 10 elite sterile lines and 10 elite parental crosses. Similar results across various methods and in previous studies and a high correlation coefficient (0.76) between the predicted and observed phenotypes validated the proposed method in this study.
A Discrete RET Model for Millimeter-Wave Propagation in Isolated Tree Formations

In this paper, a method based on the Radiative Energy Transfer theory (RET) to estimate the scattered radio signals from isolated groups of trees is presented. The proposed method consists of measuring the re-radiation function of each tree in the group, parameterising the function and subsequently using these in a discrete algorithm to estimate the overall attenuation at any location within the forest scenario. The discrete algorithm (dRET) presented here has some major improvements over previously published ones, offering substantially enhanced applicability. These improvements allow the use of larger vegetation cells, the enhancement of angular resolution of predicted results and the consideration of the receiving antenna radiation pattern. The estimated received signals using the re-radiation function, on the one hand, and its parameterised counterpart, on the other hand, are compared with measurements performed inside an anechoic chamber on Ficus Benjamina indoor plants at 20 and 62.4 GHz. The overall model performance was assessed in terms of RMS error between measured and predicted results.
Multiobjective optimization and multiple constraint handling with evolutionary algorithms. II. Application example

For part I see ibid., 26-37. The evolutionary approach to multiple function optimization formulated in the first part of the paper is applied to the optimization of the low-pressure spool speed governor of a Pegasus gas turbine engine. This study illustrates how a technique such as the multiobjective genetic algorithm can be applied, and exemplifies how design requirements can be refined as the algorithm runs. Several objective functions and associated goals express design concerns in direct form, i.e., as the designer would state them. While such a designer-oriented formulation is very attractive, its practical usefulness depends heavily on the ability to search and optimize cost surfaces in a class much broader than usual, as already provided to a large extent by the genetic algorithm (GA). The two instances of the problem studied demonstrate the need for preference articulation in cases where many and highly competing objectives lead to a nondominated set too large for a finite population to sample effectively. It is shown that only a very small portion of the nondominated set is of practical relevance, which further substantiates the need to supply preference information to the GA. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results.
Parallel Face Recognition Processing using Neocognitron Neural Network and GPU with CUDA High Performance Architecture

applications and area of biometric face computer science, security, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Various methods, approaches and algorithms for recognition of human faces the book, e.g. PCA, LDA, artificial neural networks, wavelets, curvelets, kernel methods, Gabor filters, active appearance models, 2D and 3D representations, optical correlation, hidden Markov models and others. Also a broad range of problems is covered: feature extraction and dimensionality reduction (chapters 1-4), 2D face recognition from the point of view of full system proposal (chapters 5-10), illumination and pose problems (chapters 11-13), eye movement 3D face recognition (chapters 15-19) and hardware issues (chapters
In Situ 2010: University of Pennsylvania Undergraduate Research Journal

The Smith Creek Archeological Project offered a perfect opportunity to study prehistoric Native Americans. This particular mound site is located in the Lower Mississippi River Valley, and what is known from preliminary excavations is that the site was primarily occupied during the Coles Creek period, roughly 700-1200 AD. It is also known that this was a time of great transformation in the prehistoric American South. According to scholar Ian Brown (1973), it is important to analyze undecorated sherds as well as decorated because, “the combination of the period and phase marker percentages tells the archeologist what was occurring in the overall period. ” Because this project endeavors to strengthen and extend current knowledge regarding this period I hope to add what knowledge and assistance I can. As a result, I have spent much time under the guidance of Dr. Meg Kassabaum, along with various finding aids and publications, analyzing the diagnostic or decorated pottery sherds retrieved during Smith Creek Archeological project’s most recent field season. After developing a simple analytical model, my preliminary findings support the prediction that cultural occupation was continuous despite its dynamic variation. Preface and Acknowledgements: During the summer of 2015 from late May to late June I participated in the Smith Creek Archeological project. Having mainly focused on Historical Native American ethnographic material from the Northeast I found myself particularly out of my depth during the expedition. However, I coveted field school experience, so I jumped at the opportunity to unearth prehistoric materials from the Lower Mississippi Valley. The abbreviated season was completed in 4 weeks, and although quite a bit of washing was done in the field the majority of the lab work was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Dr. Meg Kassabaum. Due the expert assistance of Sheridan Small, Ashely Terry, Arielle Person, Alex King, Zhenia Bemko and Dr. Kassabaum’s Intro to Archeology classes the lab work was completed in short order. Under the dedicated, careful and watchful eye of Dr. Kassabaum much of the ceramic analysis and rim drawing is currently being completed through the assistance of Zhenia Bemko, Alex King and Arielle Person.
'Not Waving But Drowning': Psychiatric Inpatient Services in East Lambeth 1990

This paper presents the results of the latest in a series of surveys of an inner-city public psychiatric inpatient service. Severe pressures on the service had led to the purchase of inpatient beds in the private hospital sector and intensive care facilities in a large psychiatric hospital. On a census day the nominal occupancy for the inpatient unit was 117%. Implications of the survey, trends over time and possible solutions to the difficulties of the inpatient unit are discussed.
Influence of the nature and number of ground control points to the quality of remote sensing geometric corrections

Georeferencing satellite images is an essential procedure to carry out most remote sensing applications. The quality of this process will affect all the ulterior procedures and products. Independent test ground control points (GCPs) are required to assess the quality of the correction. However, a representative number is hardly obtained when they are manually located. This work studies the effect of the number of GCPs in the geometric correction quality when they are manually located. The methodology has been applied to Landsat TM images in a region with complex relief (heights ranging from 0 to 3000+ m). The work presents a spatial representation of the error and discusses its role in the visualisation of the quality. Moreover, we critically discuss the usage of indicators as the RMS error without considering the number of GCPs or the method used in their placement in the realistic assessment of the geometric quality of the imagery. Indeed, it is shown that, for the studied scenes, a minimum of 25 GCPs is needed to achieve a test RMS smaller than a pixel and that not using independent GCPs leads to unrealistic quality indicators. Moreover, manual placement of GCPs gives clearly worst results than automatic procedures.
Asymmetries in the representation of categorical phonotactics

A comparison of speakers’ treatment of two categorically unattested phonotactic structures in Cochabamba Quechua reveals a stronger grammatical prohibition on roots with pairs of ejectives, *[k’ap’u], than on roots with a plain stop followed by an ejective, *[kap’u]. While the distribution of ejectives can be stated as a single restriction on ejectives preceded by stops (ejective or plain), *[−cont, −son][cg], speakers show evidence of having learned an additional constraint that penalizes cooccurring ejectives more harshly, *[cg][cg]. An inductive learning bias in favor of constraints with the algebraic structure of *[cg][cg] is hypothesized (Marcus 2001, Berent et al. 2002, Berent et al. 2012), allowing such constraints to be preferred by learners over constraints like *[−cont, −son][+cg], which penalize sequences of unrelated feature matrices.
Towards efficient autonomous training on telerobotic simulators

In this paper, we present Roman Tutor, an intelligent tutoring simulator to train astronauts on manipulating the SSRMS, an articulated robot arm deployed on the International Space Station. Roman Tutor incorporates a model of the system operations curriculum, a kinematic simulation of the robotics equipment and the ISS, a high performance path planner and an automatic task demonstration generator. For each element of the curriculum that the student is supposed to master, Roman Tutor generates example tasks for the student to accomplish within the simulation environment and monitors its progression to provide relevant feedback when needed. Although motivated by the SSRMS application, Roman Tutor remains applicable to any telerobotics system application.
Analysis of Average Shortest-Path Length of Scale-Free Network

Computing the average shortest-path length of a large scale-free network needs much memory space and computation time. Hence, parallel computing must be applied. In order to solve the load-balancing problem for coarse-grained parallelization, the relationship between the computing time of a single-source shortest-path length of node and the features of node is studied. We present a dynamic programming model using the average outdegree of neighboring nodes of different levels as the variable and the minimum time difference as the target. The coefficients are determined on time measurable networks. A native array and multimap representation of network are presented to reduce the memory consumption of the network such that large networks can still be loaded into the memory of each computing core. The simplified load-balancing model is applied on a network of tens of millions of nodes. Our experiment shows that this model can solve the load-imbalance problem of large scale-free network very well. Also, the characteristic of this model can meet the requirements of networks with ever-increasing complexity and scale.
Algorithm = logic + control

The notion that computation = controlled deduction was first proposed by Pay Hayes [19] and more recently by Bibel [2] and Vaughn-Pratt [31]. A similar thesis that database systems should be regarded as consisting of a relational component, which defines the logic of the data, and a control component, which stores and retrieves it, has been successfully argued by Codd [10]. Hewitt's argument [20] for the programming language PLANNER, though generally regarded as an argument against logic, can also be regarded as an argument for the thesis that algorithms be regarded as consisting of both logic and control components. In this paper we shall explore some of the useful consequences of that thesis.
Voice Conversion Using Partial Least Squares Regression

Voice conversion can be formulated as finding a mapping function which transforms the features of the source speaker to those of the target speaker. Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based conversion is commonly used, but it is subject to overfitting. In this paper, we propose to use partial least squares (PLS)-based transforms in voice conversion. To prevent overfitting, the degrees of freedom in the mapping can be controlled by choosing a suitable number of components. We propose a technique to combine PLS with GMMs, enabling the use of multiple local linear mappings. To further improve the perceptual quality of the mapping where rapid transitions between GMM components produce audible artefacts, we propose to low-pass filter the component posterior probabilities. The conducted experiments show that the proposed technique results in better subjective and objective quality than the baseline joint density GMM approach. In speech quality conversion preference tests, the proposed method achieved 67% preference score against the smoothed joint density GMM method and 84% preference score against the unsmoothed joint density GMM method. In objective tests the proposed method produced a lower Mel-cepstral distortion than the reference methods.
Solution Space Analysis and Feasible Genetic Algorithm for Assembly Job-Shop Scheduling Problems

The classical job-shop scheduling problems (JSP) become assembly job-shop scheduling problems (AJSP) if assembly constraints are attached to them. The entire solution space size and the feasible one of AJSP are analyzed and obtained by utilizing combinational mathematics. It is proved that the feasible solution space takes extremely small portion of the entire one. To minimize the makespan of AJSP, genetic algorithm searching in feasible solution space (FGA) is proposed and designed, and the search range of FGA is limited to feasible solution space. Finally, benchmarks tests and results are given which demonstrate the advantage and efficiency of FGA.
Collision-free guidance control for multiple small helicopters

In this study, we aim at realizing autonomous simultaneous flight of multiple small helicopters. In such situation, collision avoidance of the helicopters should be considered in guidance control system to improve safety and reliability of the flight system. In this paper, we construct a collision-free guidance control system for multiple small helicopters. The collision avoidance problem is regarded as a control problem with state restrictions, and the theory of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) is applied to the guidance control system. A simple nonlinear guidance model is used for design of NMPC to reduce the computational cost. A novel position constraint is proposed for optimizing the avoidance trajectory of each helicopter. The effectiveness of the designed control system and proposed constraints are verified by numerical simulation and flight experiment.
Phagocytosis of Bacteria by Human Leukocytes Measured by Flow Cytometry

Abstract A new method has been developed for the evaluation of the phagocytic activity of human leukocytes using fluorescently labeled bacteria and flow cytometry. By simultaneous measurement of cellular light scatter and fluorescence, extracellular bacteria, phagocytes, and nonphagocytes could be discriminated and quantified. All leukocytes assumed to be capable of phagocytosis were phagocytosing, and about 90% of these cells were polymorphonuclear neutrophilic granulocytes. Within 15 min 85% of the bacteria were phagocytosed and each phagocyte contained an average of 15–20 bacteria. The phagocytic capacity of the leukocytes from healthy individuals showed minor interindividual and day-to-day variations. This method facilitates a rapid and accurate in vitro evaluation of the phagocytic activity of human leukocytes.
Defining the beginning and end of KpnI family segments.

Comparison of the sequences at the ends of several newly cloned and full length members of the monkey KpnI family with one another and with previously described monkey and human segments defines the nucleotide sequence at the two termini. No terminal repeats either direct or inverted are noted within full length family members which may or may not be immediately flanked by direct repeats. At the 3′ terminus, several family members have polyadenylation signals followed by a d(A)‐rich stretch. The genomic frequency of segments within the full length element increases markedly from the 5′ to the 3′ terminus, consistent with the cloning of various truncated family members. One such truncated version joined to a low copy number DNA segment is inserted in monkey alpha‐satellite where the combination appears to have been amplified in conjunction with the satellite itself.
Observation of viscosity transition in α -pinene secondary organic aerosol

Under certain conditions, secondary organic aerosol (SOA) particles can exist in the atmosphere in an amorphous solid or semi-solid state. To determine their relevance to processes such as ice nucleation or chemistry occurring within particles requires knowledge of the temperature and relative humidity (RH) range for SOA to exist in these states. In the Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets (CLOUD) experiment at The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), we deployed a new in situ optical method to detect the viscous state of α-pinene SOA particles and measured their transition from the amorphous highly viscous state to states of lower viscosity. The method is based on the depolarising properties of laboratory-produced non-spherical SOA particles and their transformation to non-depolarising spherical particles at relative humidities near the deliquescence point. We found that particles formed and grown in the chamber developed an asymmetric shape through coagulation. A transition to a spherical shape was observed as the RH was increased to between 35 % at −10 °C and 80 % at −38 °C, confirming previous calculations of the viscosity-transition conditions. Consequently, α-pinene SOA particles exist in a viscous state over a wide range of ambient conditions, including the cirrus region of the free troposphere. This has implications for the physical, chemical, and ice-nucleation properties of SOA and SOA-coated particles in the atmosphere.
Evaluation of effective mechanical properties of nanocomposites reinforced with multiwalled carbon nanotube

Abstract Effective mechanical properties of nanocomposites reinforced with multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) have been determined using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). The effects of several parameters on nanocomposite effective mechanical properties are investigated. First, FEA models are created consisting of MWCNTs with different spring constants to investigate the effects of the interlayer van der Waals forces. Next, the reinforcing efficiency of MWCNTs in different matrices is investigated using models consisting of matrices with different moduli of elasticity. In addition, the effects of MWCNT volume fraction are investigated. Finally, models were created to determine effective mechanical properties of nanocomposites reinforced with Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes (SWCNTs). Comparison of the results suggests that SWCNTs are more efficient in strengthening the matrix than MWCNTs. Also, Young’s modulus prediction for multiwalled carbon nanotube in a propylene matrix is compared to experimental data investigated by Andrews et al. (2002), and good agreement is observed.