Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Novel Concepts and Criteria for Design Optimization of Controlled Mechanical Systems

Controlled mechanical systems (CMS) are various robotic systems, vehicles/platforms with active suspension, and other engineering structures with active vibration/shape control. CMS have to be considered as functionally directed compositions of mutually influencing subsystems: control, actuator, structural, and sensor subsystems. Such systems have highly complex dynamics and an advanced conceptual framework is needed that considers at the same time the problems of full dynamic modelling, optimal system design, accurate parameter identification, and optimal robust control. There are various design tasks for controlled mechanical systems (CMS), where continuously increasing demands for higher speed, better motion accuracy, and reduced energy consumption are to be satisfied. In order to achieve such complicated performance optimization, it is very important to study their controllability and find efficient solutions for the control-related, design optimization problems. Our intention is to present novel concepts and criteria for design optimization of CMS with decentralized controllers at the lowest (joint) level. The first step is to find a dynamic model relating the control inputs and the controlled outputs which is suitable for both purposes: accurate parameter identification and robust control design. To do that, we can apply the so-called multibody system approach: the mechanical structure of CMS can be approximated by a composition of rigid bodies connected by joints, actuators, springs, and dampers. Then we find explicit necessary and sufficient conditions on the control transfer matrix that can guarantee robust controllability in the face of arbitrary, but bounded disturbances. Thus the design optimization process has to involve, besides the basic strength/load capacity criterion, additional design relations for optimal trade-off between the bounds of disturbances and the control force limits. The proposed approach enables decomposing the complex CMS design task into much simpler optimization problems for the CMS components: mechanical structure, actuators, sensors, and controllers. The new design concepts will be illustrated with several optimization examples of CMS concerning their shape, mass distribution, actuators' sizes and locations, and control functions.
An Essential Role of Caspase 1 in the Induction of Murine Lupus and Its Associated Vascular Damage

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a systemic autoimmune syndrome associated with organ damage and an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease resulting from activation of both innate and adaptive immune pathways. Recently, increased activation of the inflammasome machinery in SLE has been described. Using the mouse model of pristane‐induced lupus, we undertook this study to explore whether caspase 1, the central enzyme of the inflammasome, plays a role in the development of SLE and its associated vascular dysfunction.
Breast Cancer: Classification Based on Molecular Etiology Influencing Prognosis and Prediction

Cancer is a group of diseases that leads to uncontrolled cell division and eventually forms a lump or mass called a tumor. They are classified and named after the part of the body where the tumor originates. Breast cancer begins in breast tissue, which is made up of glands for milk production, called lobules, and the ducts that connect lobules to the nipple. The remainder of the breast is made up of fatty, connective, and lymphatic tissue. On the basis of origin, it is of two types (i) ductal and (ii) lobular. Ductal carcinoma constitutes 80-90% and lobular carcinoma constitutes 10-20% breast cancer cases. Breast cancer is one of the most frequently diagnosed cancers in women worldwide, comprising 16% of all female cancers cases. It is estimated that this disease will affect one in eight females in America during their lifetime. It is estimated that occurrence of female breast cancer is 28% of cancers from all sites in U.S.A, and the relative risk of ever developing breast cancer is 0.125 (1 in 8) (American Cancer Society, 2009). Although breast cancer is thought to be a disease of the developed world, a majority (69%) of all breast cancer deaths occurs in developing countries (WHO Global Burden of Disease, 2004) and relative survival is poor in underdeveloped and developing countries (Coleman et al., 2008). The relative risk of developing breast cancer in the lifetime of women in the developed and developing countries is 0.048 (1 in 21) and 0.018 (1 in 56) respectively. In India, breast cancer is the leading cancer among women (Fig. 1) and the relative risk is 0.033 (1 in 30) (NCRP, 2008).
Safe privatization in transactional memory

Transactional memory (TM) facilitates the development of concurrent applications by letting the programmer designate certain code blocks as atomic. Programmers using a TM often would like to access the same data both inside and outside transactions, e.g., to improve performance or to support legacy code. In this case, programmers would ideally like the TM to guarantee strong atomicity, where transactions can be viewed as executing atomically also with respect to non-transactional accesses. Since guaranteeing strong atomicity for arbitrary programs is prohibitively expensive, researchers have suggested guaranteeing it only for certain data-race free (DRF) programs, particularly those that follow the privatization idiom: from some point on, threads agree that a given object can be accessed non-transactionally. Supporting privatization safely in a TM is nontrivial, because this often requires correctly inserting transactional fences, which wait until all active transactions complete. Unfortunately, there is currently no consensus on a single definition of transactional DRF, in particular, because no existing notion of DRF takes into account transactional fences. In this paper we propose such a notion and prove that, if a TM satisfies a certain condition generalizing opacity and a program using it is DRF assuming strong atomicity, then the program indeed has strongly atomic semantics. We show that our DRF notion allows the programmer to use privatization idioms. We also propose a method for proving our generalization of opacity and apply it to the TL2 TM.
Vulnerability in the Perioperative Patient: A Concept Analysis

This study aims to report the analysis of the concept of perioperative vulnerability. Literature searches were conducted in databases CINAHL, Medline, PsychINFO, OVID, InterNurse, as well as a manual library search from article reference lists. Search terms were restricted to ‘concept analysis’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘perioperative’, ‘patient’ and ‘perioperative patient’. Retrieved literature was analysed using the Walker & Advant (2005) concept analysis framework. Based on the concept analysis, vulnerability can be seen as having both physical and psychological elements and can be influenced by personal traits. Vulnerability is affected by previous experiences, perceptions of life, disease and ultimately the level of control an individual has over a given situation. The study concludes that inclusion of the concept of vulnerability within both pre- and post-registration training programmes would facilitate awareness of the issues surrounding perioperative vulnerability and the need to plan individualised care accordingly. It is hoped that this analysis will inspire further research and theoretical underpinning of perioperative practice, facilitating the development of new ways to manage vulnerability that will benefit individual patients, develop practice and promote positive patient outcomes.
Increased intrusion of warming Atlantic water leads to rapid expansion of temperate phytoplankton in the Arctic

The Arctic Ocean and its surrounding shelf seas are warming much faster than the global average, which potentially opens up new distribution areas for temperate‐origin marine phytoplankton. Using over three decades of continuous satellite observations, we show that increased inflow and temperature of Atlantic waters in the Barents Sea resulted in a striking poleward shift in the distribution of blooms of Emiliania huxleyi, a marine calcifying phytoplankton species. This species' blooms are typically associated with temperate waters and have expanded north to 76°N, five degrees further north of its first bloom occurrence in 1989. E. huxleyi's blooms keep pace with the changing climate of the Barents Sea, namely ocean warming and shifts in the position of the Polar Front, resulting in an exceptionally rapid range shift compared to what is generally detected in the marine realm. We propose that as the Eurasian Basin of the Arctic Ocean further atlantifies and ocean temperatures continue to rise, E. huxleyi and other temperate‐origin phytoplankton could well become resident bloom formers in the Arctic Ocean.
Changing the size of a mirror‐reflected hand does not affect pain perception: A repeated measures study on healthy human participants

Studies suggest that observing magnified and minified body parts using mirrors, lenses and virtual reality may affect pain perception. However, the direction of effect varies between studies. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of observing a normal‐sized, magnified and minified reflection of a hand on perceptual embodiment and contact‐heat stimuli.
Formal verification in Coq of program properties involving the global state effect

The syntax of an imperative language does not mention explicitly the state, while its denotational semantics has to mention it. In this paper we present a framework for the verification in Coq of properties of programs manipulating the global state effect. These properties are expressed in a proof system which is close to the syntax, as in effect systems, in the sense that the state does not appear explicitly in the type of expressions which manipulate it. Rather, the state appears via decorations added to terms and to equations. In this system, proofs of programs thus present two aspects: properties can be verified {\em up to effects} or the effects can be taken into account. The design of our Coq library consequently reflects these two aspects: our framework is centered around the construction of two inductive and dependent types, one for terms up to effects and one for the manipulation of decorations.
Relational graph data management on the edge: Grouping vertices' neighborhood with Edge-k

As the amount of data represented as graph grows, several frameworks are employing relational databases to manage them. However, the existing solutions store graphs creating a row for each edge in an edge table. In this paper, we propose Edge-k, a novel storage approach that combines additional columns in the edges table, allowing to tune the number of edges stored in a single row by taking into account the overall neighborhood of the vertices, thus providing a better table organization. Compared to the existing approaches in the literature, experiments reveal that our proposal was able to reach a speedup of 66% over a representative real dataset and up to 57% in synthetic datasets when processing Single Source Shortest Path queries. Hence, our solution advances the state of the art in the context of graph data management within relational databases systems.
Intra-articular Injection of Mesenchymal Stem Cells for the Treatment of Osteoarthritis of the Knee: A 2-Year Follow-up Study

Background: The intra-articular injection of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) into the knee has shown a potential for the treatment of generalized cartilage loss in osteoarthritis (OA). However, there have been few midterm reports with clinical and structural outcomes. Purpose: To assess the midterm safety and efficacy of an intra-articular injection of autologous adipose tissue–derived (AD) MSCs for knee OA at 2-year follow-up. Study Design: Cohort study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods: Eighteen patients with OA of the knee were enrolled (3 male, 15 female; mean age, 61.8 ± 6.6 years [range, 52-72 years]). Patients in the low-, medium-, and high-dose groups received an intra-articular injection of 1.0 × 107, 5.0 × 107, and 1.0 × 108 AD MSCs into the knee, respectively. Clinical and structural evaluations were performed with widely used methodologies including the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) and measurements of the size and depth of the cartilage defect, signal intensity of regenerated cartilage, and cartilage volume using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Results: There were no treatment-related adverse events during the 2-year period. An intra-articular injection of autologous AD MSCs improved knee function, as measured with the WOMAC, Knee Society clinical rating system (KSS), and Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS), and reduced knee pain, as measured with the visual analog scale (VAS), for up to 2 years regardless of the cell dosage. However, statistical significance was found mainly in the high-dose group. Clinical outcomes tended to deteriorate after 1 year in the low- and medium-dose groups, whereas those in the high-dose group plateaued until 2 years. The structural outcomes evaluated with MRI also showed similar trends. Conclusion: This study identified the safety and efficacy of an intra-articular injection of AD MSCs into the OA knee over 2 years, encouraging a larger randomized clinical trial. However, this study also showed potential concerns about the durability of clinical and structural outcomes, suggesting the need for further studies. Clinical Trial Registration: NCT01300598
Foveated Retinal Optimization for See-Through Near-Eye Multi-Layer Displays

In order to implement 3-D displays with focus cues, several technologies, including multi-layer displays, have been introduced and studied. In multi-layer displays, a volumetric 3-D scene is represented by 2-D layer images via optimization process. Although this methodology has been thoroughly explored and discussed in optical aspect, the optimization method has not been fully analyzed. In this paper, we deal with pupil movement that may prevent efficient synthesis of layer images. We propose a novel optimization method called foveated retinal optimization, which considers the foveated visual acuity of human. Exploiting the characteristic of human vision, our method has tolerance for pupil movement without gaze tracking while maintaining image definition and accurate focus cues. We demonstrate and verify our method in terms of contrast, visual metric, and experimental results. In experiment, we implement a see-through near-eye display that consists of two display modules, a light guide, and a holographic lens. The holographic lens enables us to design a more compact prototype as performing the roles of an image combiner and floating lens, simultaneously. Our system achieves $38^\circ \times 19^\circ $ field of view, continuous focus cues, low aberration, small form factor, and clear see-through property.
Soft shadow volumes for ray tracing

We present a new, fast algorithm for rendering physically-based soft shadows in ray tracing-based renderers. Our method replaces the hundreds of shadow rays commonly used in stochastic ray tracers with a single shadow ray and a local reconstruction of the visibility function. Compared to tracing the shadow rays. our algorithm produces exactly the same image while executing one to two orders of magnitude faster in the test scenes used. Our first contribution is a two-stage method for quickly determining the silhouette edges that overlap an area light source, as seen from the point to be shaded. Secondly, we show that these partial silhouettes of occluders, along with a single shadow ray, are sufficient for reconstructing the visibility function between the point and the light source.
Evaluating Lineup Fairness: Variations Across Methods and Measures

Triers of fact sometimes consider lineup fairness when determining the suggestiveness of an identification procedure. Likewise, researchers often consider lineup fairness when comparing results across studies. Despite their importance, lineup fairness measures have received scant empirical attention and researchers inconsistently conduct and report mock-witness tasks and lineup fairness measures. We conducted a large-scale, online experiment (N = 1,010) to examine how lineup fairness measures varied with mock-witness task methodologies as well as to explore the validity and reliability of the measures. In comparison to descriptions compiled from multiple witnesses, when individual descriptions were presented in the mock-witness task, lineup fairness measures indicated a higher number of plausible lineup members but more bias toward the suspect. Target-absent lineups were consistently estimated to be fairer than target-present lineups—which is problematic because it suggests that lineups containing innocent suspects are less likely to be challenged in court than lineups containing guilty suspects. Correlations within lineup size measures and within some lineup bias measures indicated convergent validity and the correlations across the lineup size and lineup bias measures demonstrated discriminant validity. The reliability of lineup fairness measures across different descriptions was low and reliability across different sets of mock witnesses was moderate to high, depending on the measure. Researchers reporting lineup fairness measures should specify the type of description presented, the amount of detail in the description, and whether the mock witnesses viewed target-present and/or -absent lineups.
Statistical Learning Techniques for Costing XML Queries

Developing cost models for query optimization is significantly harder for XML queries than for traditional relational queries. The reason is that XML query operators are much more complex than relational operators such as table scans and joins. In this paper, we propose a new approach, called COMET, to modeling the cost of XML operators; to our knowledge, COMET is the first method ever proposed for addressing the XML query costing problem. As in relational cost estimation, COMET exploits a set of system catalog statistics that summarizes the XML data; the set of "simple path" statistics that we propose is new, and is well suited to the XML setting. Unlike the traditional approach, COMET uses a new statistical learning technique called "transform regression" instead of detailed analytical models to predict the overall cost. Besides rendering the cost estimation problem tractable for XML queries, COMET has the further advantage of enabling the query optimizer to be self-tuning, automatically adapting to changes over time in the query workload and in the system environment. We demonstrate COMET's feasibility by developing a cost model for the recently proposed XNAV navigational operator. Empirical studies with synthetic, benchmark, and real-world data sets show that COMET can quickly obtain accurate cost estimates for a variety of XML queries and data sets.
Plasma dickkopf-related protein 1, an antagonist of the Wnt pathway, is associated with HIV-associated neurocognitive impairment

Objective: Dickkopf-related protein 1 (DKK1) is a soluble antagonist of the Wningless (Wnt) pathway. It binds to and sequesters low-density lipoprotein receptor-related proteins 5/6 away from Wnts. Because the Wnt pathway regulates synaptic transmission and plasticity, we hypothesized that increased DKK1 would increase the risk for neurocognitive impairment (NCI) in HIV-positive (HIV+) individuals. We evaluated, here, the relationship between plasma DKK1 and global NCI. Methods: Plasma samples and data from 41 HIV+ to 42 HIV− adults were obtained from the University of California, San Diego, California, USA. Concentrations of DKK1 and a comparator protein, monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), were quantified in plasma by immunoassay. All study participants completed a standardized comprehensive neuropsychological test battery and their performance was summarized using the global deficit score method. Results: A higher DKK1 level was associated with NCI among HIV+ participants (d = 0.63, P = 0.05), particularly among the 26 participants whose plasma HIV RNA level was suppressed (d = 0.74, P = 0.08). DKK1 level was not associated with NCI among HIV− participants (P = 0.98). was not associated with NCI in either group. In HIV+ adults with suppressed plasma HIV RNA, a receiver operator characteristic curve identified that a DKK1 level of at least 735 pg/ml had a positive predictive value of 83.3% for a diagnosis of NCI. This association did not weaken after accounting for the effect of AIDS, nadir CD4+ T-cell count, addictive drug use, or demographic characteristics. Conclusion: DKK1 is a specific biomarker for NCI in HIV+ adults, implicating the Wnt pathway in HIV neuropathogenesis.
Role of Protein Kinase C and Nox2-Derived Reactive Oxygen Species Formation in the Activation and Maturation of Dendritic Cells by Phorbol Ester and Lipopolysaccharide

Aims. Activation/maturation of dendritic cells (DCs) plays a central role in adaptive immune responses by antigen processing and (cross-) activation of T cells. There is ongoing discussion on the role of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in these processes and with the present study we investigated this enigmatic pathway. Methods and Results. DCs were cultured from precursors in the bone marrow of mice (BM-DCs) and analyzed for ROS formation, maturation, and T cell stimulatory capacity upon stimulation with phorbol ester (PDBu) and lipopolysaccharide (LPS). LPS stimulation of BM-DCs caused maturation with moderate intracellular ROS formation, whereas PDBu treatment resulted in maturation with significant ROS formation. The NADPH oxidase inhibitors apocynin/VAS2870 and genetic gp91phox deletion both decreased the ROS signal in PDBu-stimulated BM-DCs without affecting maturation and T cell stimulatory capacity of BM-DCs. In contrast, the protein kinase C inhibitors chelerythrine/Gö6983 decreased PDBu-stimulated ROS formation in BM-DCs as well as maturation. Conclusion. Obviously Nox2-dependent ROS formation in BM-DCs is not always required for their maturation or T cell stimulatory potential. PDBu/LPS-triggered BM-DC maturation rather relies on phosphorylation cascades. Our results question the role of oxidative stress as an essential “danger signal” for BM-DC activation, although we cannot exclude contribution by other ROS sources.
CPI-17 drives oncogenic Ras signaling in human melanomas via Ezrin-Radixin-Moesin family proteins

Hyperactive Ras signaling has strong oncogenic effects causing several different forms of cancer. Hyperactivity is frequently induced by mutations within Ras itself, which account for up to 30% of all human cancers. In addition, hyperactive Ras signaling can also be triggered independent of Ras by either mutation or by misexpression of various upstream regulators and immediate downstream effectors. We have previously reported that C-kinase potentiated protein phosphatase-1 inhibitor of 17 kDa (CPI-17) can drive Ras activity and promote tumorigenic transformation by inhibition of the tumor suppressor Merlin. We now describe an additional element of this oncogenic mechanism in the form of the ezrin-radixin-moesin (ERM) protein family, which exhibits opposing roles in Ras activity control. Thus, CPI-17 drives Ras activity and tumorigenesis in a two-fold way; inactivation of the tumor suppressor merlin and activation of the growth promoting ERM family. The in vivo significance of this oncogenic switch is highlighted by demonstrating CPI-17's involvement in human melanoma pathogenesis.