Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Endoscope-Assisted and Controlled Argus II Epiretinal Prosthesis Implantation in Late-Stage Retinitis Pigmentosa: A Report of 2 Cases

Several different approaches for restoring sight in subjects who are blind due to outer retinal degeneration are currently under investigation, including stem cell therapy, gene therapy, and visual prostheses. Although many different types of visual prostheses have shown promise, to date, the Argus II Epiretinal Prosthesis System, developed in a clinical setting over the course of 10 years, is the world’s first and only retinal prosthesis that has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and has been given the CE-Mark for sale within the European Economic Area (EEA). The incidence of serious adverse events from Argus II implantation decreased over time after minor changes in the implant design and improvements in the surgical steps used for the procedure had been made. In order to further decrease the scleral incision-related complications and enhance the assessment of the tack position and the contact between the array and the inner macular surface, we used an ophthalmic endoscope during the regular course of Argus II implantation surgery in 2 patients with late-stage retinitis pigmentosa in an attempt to improve the anatomical and functional outcomes.
Predictive data mining model for software bug estimation using average weighted similarity

Software bug estimation is a very essential activity for effective and proper software project planning. All the software bug related data are kept in software bug repositories. Software bug (defect) repositories contains lot of useful informaton related to the development of a project. Data mining techniques can be applied on these repositories to discover useful intersting patterns. In this paper a prediction data mining technique is proposed to predict the software bug estimation from a software bug repository. A two step prediction model is proposed In the first step bug for which estimation is required, its summary and description is matched against the summary and description of bugs available in bug repositories. A weighted similarity model is suggested to match the summary and description for a pair of software bugs. In the second step the fix duration of all the similar bugs are calculated and stored and its average is calculated, which indicates the precicted estimation of a bug. The proposed model is implemented using open source technologies and is exaplained with the help of illustrative example.
Joint bilateral upsampling

Image analysis and enhancement tasks such as tone mapping, colorization, stereo depth, and photomontage, often require computing a solution (e.g., for exposure, chromaticity, disparity, labels) over the pixel grid. Computational and memory costs often require that a smaller solution be run over a downsampled image. Although general purpose upsampling methods can be used to interpolate the low resolution solution to the full resolution, these methods generally assume a smoothness prior for the interpolation. We demonstrate that in cases, such as those above, the available high resolution input image may be leveraged as a prior in the context of a joint bilateral upsampling procedure to produce a better high resolution solution. We show results for each of the applications above and compare them to traditional upsampling methods.
Automatic Processing of Diabetic Patients’ Hospital Documentation

The paper presents a rule-based information extraction (IE) system for Polish medical texts. We select the most important information from diabetic patients' records. Most data being processed are free-form texts, only a part is in table form. The work has three goals: to test classical IE methods on texts in Polish, to create relational database containing the extracted data, and to prepare annotated data for further IE experiments.
Flopping-mode electric dipole spin resonance

Traditional approaches to controlling single spins in quantum dots require the generation of large electromagnetic fields to drive many Rabi oscillations within the spin coherence time. We demonstrate "flopping-mode" electric dipole spin resonance, where an electron is electrically driven in a Si/SiGe double quantum dot in the presence of a large magnetic field gradient. At zero detuning, charge delocalization across the double quantum dot enhances coupling to the drive field and enables low power electric dipole spin resonance. Through dispersive measurements of the single electron spin state, we demonstrate a nearly three order of magnitude improvement in driving efficiency using flopping-mode resonance, which should facilitate low power spin control in quantum dot arrays.
Network Traffic Load Balancing in Hierarchical Peer-to-Peer Systems

The management of huge amounts of data distributed across multiple sites has become a necessity more and more demanding. Peer-to-peer systems (P2P) can afford the requirements of managing, indexing, searching and analyzing data with scalability and self-organization. Until now, most efforts have focused primarily on improving the number of hops and structure maintenance messages. However, the non-uniform distribution of data and the hierarchical structures, together with heavy load, can cause unbalanced traffic load. In this paper we improve our previous work on the overlay structure G-Grid, merging it with a Small World network. The Small World networks make a compromise between order and randomness, they are derived from social networks and show an almost uniform traffic distribution. Experiments show how this new hybrid structure obtains the best performance in traffic distribution.
JadR*‐mediated feed‐forward regulation of cofactor supply in jadomycin biosynthesis

Jadomycin production is under complex regulation in Streptomyces venezuelae. Here, another cluster‐situated regulator, JadR*, was shown to negatively regulate jadomycin biosynthesis by binding to four upstream regions of jadY, jadR1, jadI and jadE in jad gene cluster respectively. The transcriptional levels of four target genes of JadR* increased significantly in ΔjadR*, confirming that these genes were directly repressed by JadR*. Jadomycin B (JdB) and its biosynthetic intermediates 2,3‐dehydro‐UWM6 (DHU), dehydrorabelomycin (DHR) and jadomycin A (JdA) modulated the DNA‐binding activities of JadR* on the jadY promoter, with DHR giving the strongest dissociation effects. Direct interactions between JadR* and these ligands were further demonstrated by surface plasmon resonance, which showed that DHR has the highest affinity for JadR*. However, only DHU and DHR could induce the expression of jadY and jadR* in vivo. JadY is the FMN/FAD reductase supplying cofactors FMNH2/FADH2 for JadG, an oxygenase, that catalyses the conversion of DHR to JdA. Therefore, our results revealed that JadR* and early pathway intermediates, particularly DHR, regulate cofactor supply by a convincing case of a feed‐forward mechanism. Such delicate regulation of expression of jadY could ensure a timely supply of cofactors FMNH2/FADH2 for jadomycin biosynthesis, and avoid unnecessary consumption of NAD(P)H.
Finding Multiple Nash Equilibria in Pool-Based Markets: A Stochastic EPEC Approach

We present a compact formulation to find all pure Nash equilibria in a pool-based electricity market with stochastic demands. The equilibrium model is formulated as a stochastic equilibrium problem subject to equilibrium constraints (EPEC). The problem is based on a Stackelberg game where the generating companies (GENCOs) optimize their strategic bids anticipating the solution of the independent system operator (ISO) market clearing. A finite strategy approach both in prices and quantities is applied to transform the nonlinear and nonconvex set of Nash inequalities into a mixed integer linear problem (MILP). A procedure to find all Nash equilibria is developed by generating “holes” that are added as linear constraints to the feasibility region. The result of the problem is the set of all pure Nash equilibria and the market clearing prices and assigned energies by the ISO. A case study illustrates the methodology and proper conclusions are reached.
High dynamic GPS/INS integrated navigation fusion algorithm assisted by neural network

The phenomena of the disconvergency of Kalman filter occurs in case of lock-lose or absence in GPS (global positioning system) navigation based on carrier phases in the high dynamic environment. We propose a new method to enhance the performance of GPS/INS (intertial navigation system) integrated navigation system during the GPS signal loss. The method is based on using a ANN (artificial neural netwok) to intelligently aid the GPS/INS integrated navigation system in the absence of GPS signal. The ANN is trained in every filter period during the GPS signal on; When the GPS is off, The output of the previously trained ANN is as the input of the same Kalman filter.The proposed enhanced GPS/INS can be used in the high dynamic environment of a autonomous carrier. A simulation indicates that the method is valid.
Theories of fascism: a study of some interpretations of the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany

A selection of texts analysing the structural sources of the success of the NSDAP in Weimar Germany is reviewed critically. A general approach to the selected texts is implicit, and an attempt is made to develop a framework, essentially Weberian, for analysis of the success of the Nazi Party in Germany. Lipset’s analysis of the relation between the middle class and fascism is found insufficient to explain the success of the NSDAP and is discussed in the light of his own voting data evidence. A weberian analysis of the middle class relationships involved is tentatively developed. This is followed by a consideration of Kornhuser’s claims for the explanatory capacity of mass society theory. It is found that pluralist values are taken for granted, and mass analysis is not found to supersede class analysis, though it may be of value on the level of individual motivation. Parsons’ analysis, similar to Kornhauser’s of the consequences of fundamentalist reaction to social change, in conjunction with particular aspects of German social structure, is found to be conducted on the level of normative integration, basically not related to class conflict and capitalist development. Dahrendorf makes the contribution of Parsons historically more concrete in suggesting which classes were served by National Socialist ideology; he singles out the role and position of the state in German society, but fails to consider the general consequences of capitalist development. The force of Sweezy’s contribution is placing class conflict between the working class, industrialists, and the middle class in exactly this context. However, it is suggested that this theory of the relationship between state and society gives his argument of a situation of class equilibrium leading to eventual fascist takeover of the state, a certain deterministic tenor. Weber’s concept of Legitimacy, with respect to relationships of authority is introduced here. Thalhiemer’s model of a particular totality of class relationships, leading to the executive becoming independent of the bourgeoisie is found to need elaboration with respect to historical content, but points to the extra-capitalist sources of fascism. Finally a consideration of the contribution of ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ is attempted, though no clear assessment of the contribution of psychology to sociology in understanding social action is reached.
Measuring taxonomic consistency of ontologies using lexical semantic relatedness

Existing evaluation methods either investigate whether ontologies are “fit for purpose”, or focus on evaluating consistencies of the data in regard to the axioms defined in the ontologies. In this paper, we focus on how to evaluate the consistency of ontology with respect to taxonomic relationships, and we suggest a new measure to evaluate the taxonomic consistency of an ontology. As the semantic relatedness measure between concepts in ontologies is the key part of ontology consistency measure, we firstly propose a new approach to measure the semantic rela-tedness for pairs of words. Several experiments demonstrate that the proposed ontology measure identifing the consistency with respect to taxonomic relationships is better than existing approaches.
Predictor Surfaces for Lip Synchronization Animation of Voiced Input

The authors are producing two-dimensional animated human faces with lip motion synchronized to a given speech sound file. The process is called lip synchronization. We assume the only input is the sound file; no text is used to disambiguate mouth shapes. We restrict our discussion to voiced input. (Figures and the Table are at the end of the text.)
Immune Neglect: A Source of Durability

People are generally unaware of the operation of the system of cognitive mechanisms that ameliorate their experience of negative affect (the psychological immune system), and thus they tend to overestimate the duration of their affective reactions to negative events. This tendency was demonstrated in 6 studies in which participants overestimated the duration of their affective reactions to the dissolution of a romantic relationship, the failure to achieve tenure, an electoral defeat, negative personality feedback, an account of a child's death, and rejection by a prospective employer. Participants failed to distinguish between situations in which their psychological immune systems would and would not be likely to operate and mistakenly predicted overly and equally enduring affective reactions in both instances. The present experiments suggest that people neglect the psychological immune system when making affective forecasts.
Diagnostic Value of Subjective Memory Complaints Assessed with a Single Item in Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer's Disease: Results of the DIAN Study

Objective. We examined the diagnostic value of subjective memory complaints (SMCs) assessed with a single item in a large cross-sectional cohort consisting of families with autosomal dominant Alzheimer's disease (ADAD) participating in the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN). Methods. The baseline sample of 183 mutation carriers (MCs) and 117 noncarriers (NCs) was divided according to Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) scale into preclinical (CDR 0; MCs: n = 107; NCs: n = 109), early symptomatic (CDR 0.5; MCs: n = 48; NCs: n = 8), and dementia stage (CDR ≥ 1; MCs: n = 28; NCs: n = 0). These groups were subdivided by the presence or absence of SMCs. Results. At CDR 0, SMCs were present in 12.1% of MCs and 9.2% of NCs (P = 0.6). At CDR 0.5, SMCs were present in 66.7% of MCs and 62.5% of NCs (P = 1.0). At CDR ≥ 1, SMCs were present in 96.4% of MCs. SMCs in MCs were significantly associated with CDR, logical memory scores, Geriatric Depression Scale, education, and estimated years to onset. Conclusions. The present study shows that SMCs assessed by a single-item scale have no diagnostic value to identify preclinical ADAD in asymptomatic individuals. These results demonstrate the need of further improvement of SMC measures that should be examined in large clinical trials.
A simple smart time-to-digital convertor based on vernier method for a high resolution LYSO MicroPET

We proposed a new and low cost design of time-to-digital converter (TDC) based on Vernier method using only one FPGA EPF10K30ATI144-3 with 1.3 ns timing resolution performance. Neither ECL (emitter-coupled logic) circuit nor high frequency clock was used in this design, which greatly reduced the complication and the power supply. We used two oscillators with slightly different frequencies to measure small time interval. All the time-to-digital converter functions were implemented on only one low-cost Altera FLEX II Family device. Our preliminary results showed: 1) Vernier TDC had a less than 1.3 ns timing resolution that met the demand for coincidence measurement for LYSO MicroPET. 2) No inacceptable degradation was observed in time resolution as of the number of the sliding jaw clock circulations was increased before coincidence. 3) Vernier TDC accomplished on FPGA had good stability with temperature. In a sum, we made a sufficient proof of high resolution and good stability of the proposed Vernier TDC design. Now, we are planning to achieve higher time resolution and higher stability by high-performance FPGA using this smart Vernier TDC method. And such simple design is being applied to our animal PET.
Frequency of expression and generation of T-cell responses against antigens on multiple myeloma cells in patients included in the GMMG-MM5 trial

Background Raising T-cell response against antigens either expressed on normal and malignant plasma cells (e.g. HM1.24) or aberrantly on myeloma cells only (e.g. cancer testis antigens, CTA) by vaccination is a potential treatment approach for multiple myeloma. Results Expression by GEP is found for HM1.24 in all, HMMR in 318/458 (69.4%), MAGE-A3 in 209/458 (45.6%), NY-ESO-1/2 in 40/458 (8.7%), and WT-1 in 4/458 (0.8%) of samples with the pattern being confirmed by RNA-sequencing. T-cell-activation is found in 9/26 (34.6%) of patient samples, i.e. against HM1.24 (4/24), RHAMM-R3 (3/26), RHAMM1-8 (2/14), WT-1 (1/11), NY-ESO-1/2 (1/9), and MAGE-A3 (2/8). In 7/19 T-cell activation responses, myeloma cells lack respective antigen-expression. Expression of MAGE-A3, HMMR and NY-ESO-1/2 is associated with adverse survival. Experimental design We assessed expression of HM1.24 and the CTAs MAGE-A3, NY-ESO-1/2, WT-1 and HMMR in CD138-purified myeloma cell samples of previously untreated myeloma patients in the GMMG-MM5 multicenter-trial by gene expression profiling (GEP; n = 458) and RNA-sequencing (n = 152) as potential population regarding vaccination trials. We then validated the feasibility to generate T-cell responses (n = 72) against these antigens by IFN-γ EliSpot-assay (n = 26) related to antigen expression (n = 22). Lastly, we assessed survival impact of antigen expression in an independent cohort of 247 patients treated by high-dose therapy and autologous stem cell transplantation. Conclusions As T-cell responses can only be raised in a subfraction of patients despite antigen expression, and the number of responses increases with more antigens used, vaccination strategies should assess patients’ antigen expression and use a “cocktail” of peptide vaccines.
Retrotranslocation of the Chaperone Calreticulin from the Endoplasmic Reticulum Lumen to the Cytosol

ABSTRACT Polypeptide folding and quality control in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) are mediated by protein chaperones, including calreticulin (CRT). ER localization of CRT is specified by two types of targeting signals, an N-terminal hydrophobic signal sequence that directs insertion into the ER and a C-terminal KDEL sequence that is responsible for retention in the ER. CRT has been implicated in a number of cytoplasmic and nuclear processes, suggesting that there may be a pathway for generating cytosolic CRT. Here we show that CRT is fully inserted into the ER, undergoes processing by signal peptidase, and subsequently undergoes retrotranslocation to the cytoplasm. A transcription-based reporter assay revealed an important role for the C-terminal Ca2+ binding domain in CRT retrotranslocation. Neither ubiquitylation nor proteasome activity was necessary for retrotranslocation, which indicates that the pathway is different from that used by unfolded proteins targeted for destruction. Forced expression of cytosolic CRT is sufficient to rescue a cell adhesion defect observed in mouse embryo fibroblasts from crt −/− mice. The ability of CRT to retrotranslocate from the ER lumen to the cytosol explains how CRT can change compartments and modulate cell adhesion, transcription, and translation.
Omnivore: Integration of Grid Meta-Scheduling and Peer-to-Peer Technologies

Dedicated servers remain to be a common constituent of Grid job scheduling architectures, forcing site administrators to make compromises between administrative expenses and system reliability. Apart from requiring administrative attention, dedicated servers create single points of failure and should not be subjected to network churn. This paper presents the design and implementation of Omnivore, a fully decentralized job scheduling system, built on a peer-to-peer based meta-scheduler. Omnivore is able to cope both with node failures and network churn, eliminating the need for central administration and continuous resource availability. It is integrated into the Grid landscape (especially the Globus Toolkit 4) by means of the GridWay meta- scheduler to provide scalable distributed scheduling, replicated storage and system monitoring capabilities. Results obtained from an experimental evaluation of our implementation show that Omnivore is both scalable and resilient in the presence of node failures and network churn.
Robust Fuzzy Clustering Methods to Support Web Mining

The evolution of the Internet into the Global Information Infrastructure has lead to an explosion in the amount of available information. The Web, then, is becoming the apocryphal Vox Populi, and represents an instance of a semi-structured Distributed Knowledge Environment [27]. Realizing the vision of distributed knowledge access in this scenario and its future evolution will need tools to “personalize” the information space. If one were to look at the Web as a distributed, heterogeneous information base, Web personalization amounts to creating a system which responds to user queries in a manner which is dependent on who the user is. As a trivial example a biologist querying on cricket in all likelihood wants something other than a sports enthusiast would.
Activism in the Public Sphere: Exploring the Discourse of Political Participation

Drawing upon fieldwork conducted with Amnesty International, the Labour Party, Tenants' Association and the Exodus collective, this work examines the nature of political activism. The author combines Habermasian theory and empirical fieldwork to critically analyze the nature of the political public sphere. While adopting a Habermasian approach, Clark recognizes the problems and limitations associated with notions of civil society and communicative action. An empirically formed critical stance is maintained throughout the work. Three main themes are drawn from this research: an analysis of structures of political participation; presentation of a typology of political "activism"; and analysis of the public process of participation.
A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians

In this paper, we develop a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue. This vector has been found to have applications in fields such as graph partitioning and graph drawing. The algorithm is a purely algebraic approach based on a heavy edge coarsening scheme and pointwise smoothing for refinement. To gain theoretical insight, we also consider the related cascadic multigrid method in the geometric setting for elliptic eigenvalue problems and show its uniform convergence under certain assumptions. Numerical tests are presented for computing the Fiedler vector of several practical graphs, and numerical results show the efficiency and optimality of our proposed cascadic multigrid algorithm.