Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sensory-motor control and adaptation in cooperative action

The objective of this thesis is to present how implicit, nonverbal cues support coordinated action between two people. A set of five experiments shows how people utilise sensory information about a partner in order to control goal-directed action involving synchronous vertical hand movement. Chapter 1 reviews recent developments in studies of interpersonal interaction and highlights control issues that are critical in cooperative action. In Chapter 2, an experimental study addresses the importance of haptic feedback about object dynamics for learning behavioural characteristics of another person who manipulated the same object from the other side. In Chapter 3, the contributions of feedback and feedforward control are assessed as the interaction of the task partners are experimentally controlled using a humanoid robot which serves the role of task partner. Chapter 4 proposes error-based learning as a model of cooperative action wherein subsequent motor response is regressed on current error in order to improve coordination between partners. Chapter 5 shows that adaptation rate of a participant is modulated with respect to the rate of the task partner so that the net adaptation of the two partners becomes optimal using a computer simulated task partner. In Chapter 6, this joint adaptation model is applied to continuous movement to demonstrate the generalisability of the model. The last chapter discusses the contribution of the empirical chapters and reviews the theoretical and methodological contribution of the thesis as a whole to the field of cognitive neuroscience. In conclusion, the thesis provides strong evidence that movement characteristics of a partner expressed both within and across trials determine the way a person engages in a joint task.
Gene therapy for primary immunodeficiencies

Gene therapy has effectively entered Medicine via the field of primary immunodeficiencies (PID). Because hematopoietic stem cells are accessible and because it was understood that genetic correction of lymphocyte progenitor cells carrying a genetic defect impairing differentiation, could result in the production of long‐lived T lymphocytes, it was reasoned that ex vivo gene transfer in hematopoietic cells could lead to disease phenotype correction. Retroviral vectors were designed to ex vivo transduce such cells. This has indeed been shown to lead to sustained correction of the T cell immunodeficiency associated with two forms of severe combined immunodeficiencies (SCID) for now more than ten years. Occurrence in some patients of genotoxicity related to retroviral vectors integration close to and transactivation of oncogenes has led to the development of retroviral vectors devoid of its enhancer element. Results of recent trials performed for several forms of PID indeed suggest that their use is both safe and efficacious. It is thus anticipated that their application to the treatment of many more life threatening PID will be developed over the coming years.
A Soft State Protocol for Accessing Multimedia Archives

The advent and deployment of IP Multicast has fueled the growth of multi-user collaborative applications. The MBone, the Internet multicast infrastructure, extends the traditional best-effort unicast delivery model of the Internet to enable efficient multipoint packet delivery. Using IP Multicast to deliver archived multimedia content can provide significant advantages in scalability and efficiency. With the popularity of collaboration tools for audio/video conferencing on the MBone, we have seen a number of applications developed to record and play back these MBone sessions. In this paper, we look at the requirements for an archive system control protocol that allows the initiation and manipulation of a playback session. We present a control protocol which itself uses IP multicast. This provides benefits in scalability, fault recovery, and allows simultaneous control of an archive session by multiple clients. The interesting features of our protocol include the application of soft server state techniques, and a built-in mechanism for fault detection and recovery. We have implemented and deployed a prototype and are actively using it in our research group.
Word Sense Disambiguation Corpora Acquisition via Confirmation Code

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is one of the fundamental natural language processing tasks. However, lack of training corpora is a bottleneck to construct a high accurate all-words WSD system. Annotating a large-scale corpus by experts costs enormous time and financial resources. Human Computation is a novel idea for integrating human resources behind the Web, which has been wasted, to solve practical problems that are difficult for computers. Based on human computation, we design a confirmation code system, which can not only distinguish between human beings and computers (the function of normal confirmation code system), but also annotate WSD corpora. The preliminary experimental result shows that the proposed method can annotate large-scale and high-quality WSD corpora within a short time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use confirmation code in natural language processing for corpora acquisition.
A comparison of different compressive forces on graft materials during alveolar ridge preservation

Purpose Following tooth extraction, alveolar ridge preservation (ARP) can maintain the dimensions of ridge height and width. Although previous studies have demonstrated the effects of ARP, few if any studies have investigated the compressive force applied during grafting. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of different compressive forces on the graft materials during ARP. Methods After tooth extraction, sockets were filled with deproteinized bovine bone mineral with 10% porcine collagen and covered by a resorbable collagen membrane in a double-layered fashion. The graft materials were compressed using a force of 5 N in the test group (n=12) and a force of 30 N in the control group (n=12). A hidden X suture was performed to secure the graft without primary closure. Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) was performed immediately after grafting and 4 months later, just before implant surgery. Tissue samples were retrieved using a trephine bur from the grafted sites during implant surgery for histologic and histomorphometric evaluations. Periotest values (PTVs) were measured to assess the initial stability of the dental implants. Results Four patients dropped out from the control group and 20 patients finished the study. Both groups healed without any complications. The CBCT measurements showed that the ridge volume was comparably preserved vertically and horizontally in both groups (P>0.05). Histomorphometric analysis demonstrated that the ratio of new bone formation was significantly greater in the test group (P<0.05). The PTVs showed no significant differences between the 2 groups (P>0.05). Conclusions The application of a greater compressive force on biomaterials during ARP significantly enhanced new bone formation while preserving the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the alveolar ridge. Further studies are required to identity the optimal compressive force for ARP.
Effects of physical training and potassium supplementation on blood pressure, glucose metabolism and albuminuria of spontaneously hypertensive rats.

INTRODUCTION It is still controversial whether there are synergistic effects among different non-pharmacological interventions used in the treatment of hypertension. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the effect of aerobic exercise, oral supplementation of potassium and their combination on blood pressure, glucose metabolism, urinary albumin excretion and glomerular morphology in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). METHODS SHR were divided into groups: Control Group (SHR; standard diet and sedentary, n = 10), Exercise Group (SHR + E; trained on a treadmill, standard diet, n = 10), Potassium Group (SHR + K; sedentary, potassium supplementation, n = 10) and Group Exercise + Potassium (SHR + E + K, exercise, potassium supplementation n = 10). Weekly, body weight (BW) and tail blood pressure (TAP) were measured. At the end of 16 weeks, a Oral Glucose Tolerance Test was performed. Albuminuria was determined in the baseline period, at 8th and at 16th week. After sacrifice, the analysis of glomerular sclerosis index and visceral fat weight was performed. RESULTS The TAP and BW did not change significantly. There was improvement in insulin sensitivity in SHR + E and SHR + K, but not in SHR + E + K. At week 16, albuminuria in all groups was significantly lower than the SHR control. The glomerular sclerosis index and visceral fat content were also significantly lower in all groups compared to control. CONCLUSION An oral supplementation of potassium and exercise led to an improvement in glucose metabolism, in albuminuria and glomerular morphology, however, the overlap of the treatments did not show synergism.
G-SQL: Fast Query Processing via Graph Exploration

A lot of real-life data are of graph nature. However, it is not until recently that business begins to exploit data's connectedness for business insights. On the other hand, RDBMSs are a mature technology for data management, but they are not for graph processing. Take graph traversal, a common graph operation for example, it heavily relies on a graph primitive that accesses a given node's neighborhood. We need to join tables following foreign keys to access the nodes in the neighborhood if an RDBMS is used to manage graph data. Graph exploration is a fundamental building block of many graph algorithms. But this simple operation is costly due to a large volume of I/O caused by the massive amount of table joins. In this paper, we present G-SQL, our effort toward the integration of a RDBMS and a native in-memory graph processing engine. G-SQL leverages the fast graph exploration capability provided by the graph engine to answer multi-way join queries. Meanwhile, it uses RDBMSs to provide mature data management functionalities, such as reliable data storage and additional data access methods. Specifically, G-SQL is a SQL dialect augmented with graph exploration functionalities and it dispatches query tasks to the in-memory graph engine and its underlying RDMBS. The G-SQL runtime coordinates the two query processors via a unified cost model to ensure the entire query is processed efficiently. Experimental results show that our approach greatly expands capabilities of RDBMs and delivers exceptional performance for SQL-graph hybrid queries.
Observations of convective and dynamical instabilities in tropopause folds and their contribution to stratosphere-troposphere exchange

With aircraft-mounted in situ and remote sensing instruments for dynamical, thermal, and chemical measurements we studied two cases of tropopause folding. In both folds we found Kelvin-Helmholtz billows with horizontal wavelength of ∼900 m and thickness of ∼120 m. In one case the instability was effectively mixing the bottomside of the fold, leading to the transfer of stratospheric air into the troposphere. Also, we discovered in both cases small-scale secondary ozone maxima shortly after the aircraft ascended past the topside of the fold that corresponded to regions of convective instability. We interpreted this phenomenon as convectively breaking gravity waves. Therefore we posit that convectively breaking gravity waves acting on tropopause folds must be added to the list of important irreversible mixing mechanisms leading to stratosphere-troposphere exchange.
Spontaneous Crystallization in Athermal Polymer Packings

We review recent results from extensive simulations of the crystallization of athermal polymer packings. It is shown that above a certain packing density, and for sufficiently long simulations, all random assemblies of freely-jointed chains of tangent hard spheres of uniform size show a spontaneous transition into a crystalline phase. These polymer crystals adopt predominantly random hexagonal close packed morphologies. An analysis of the local environment around monomers based on the shape and size of the Voronoi polyhedra clearly shows that Voronoi cells become more spherical and more symmetric as the system transits to the ordered state. The change in the local environment leads to an increase in the monomer translational contribution to the entropy of the system, which acts as the driving force for the phase transition. A comparison of the crystallization of hard-sphere polymers and monomers highlights similarities and differences resulting from the constraints imposed by chain connectivity.
Article of footwear with a lattice sole structure

An article (100) of footwear (1600) includes an upper (1602) and a sole structure (300, 400). The sole structure (300, 400) can be manufactured using a customized cushioning sole system. A user's foot(100) morphology and/or preferences may be used to design the sole structure (300, 400). The sole structure (300, 400) can also include a lattice structure made by a three-dimensional printer (502). The sole structure (300, 400) includes compartments to receive air bladder components.
CONTENT BASED IMAGE RETRIEVAL USING COLOR, TEXTURE & SHAPE

I. ABSTRACT- Images contain information in a very dense and complex form, which a human eye, after years of training, can extract and understand. The main goal is to extract form an image a set of composing objects or real life attributes. This information is inferred from low-level physical and mathematical properties of the image using a complex model of the reality the image reproduces. The existing systems based on domain specific models are incapable of retrieving images from heterogeneous collections or in the case they are only based on some abstract perceptually semantic feature like texture. Most systems use this lower level approach to retrieve images from heterogeneous collections [4]. Besides containing a large quantity of complex data, images are also of very large dimensionality. Methods like comparing and correlating pixels that operate on the image directly are seldom powerful (costly in terms of time complexity) enough to full the users requirements. The usual approach to overcome this problem is to extract from the image a certain number of relevant features, which reduces the dimensionality, yet preserving useful information. These features are then considered as components of a feature vector, which makes the image, correspond to a point in a much lower but still high dimensional abstract space called the feature space. Two images are then considered similar if their feature vectors lay close in the feature space. The features that are extracted usually fall in three general categories color, shape and texture.
Can Private Sector Strategic Information Systems Planning Techniques Work for the Public Sector?

This study investigated strategic information technology planning (SISP) at the statewide level. Even though thirty-eight states reported having a strategic information technology plan in place and ten reported having a plan in progress; analysis of the data shows that the executive and legislative or highest levels of state government are “not involved” in SISP. A lack of integrated statewide governmental strategic information systems planning (SISP) suggests that SISP as defined by private sector models may not be accomplished easily in the public sector. Significant differences in the process of setting organizational objectives, planning horizons, and stakeholder involvement are barriers to public sector application of private sector SISP models which few states seem to have overcome.
Developing object‐based learning environment to promote learners' motivation for learning digital systems

This article aims at sharing the authors' experiences with object‐based learning environment. The purpose of this study is to assess the learners' perceptions and usage of learning objects in Digital Systems course. Overall, learning objects are good alternative learning strategy, which enables learners to take more control over their own learning. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 18: 640–650, 2010; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com; DOI 10.1002/cae20268
IL-8 Reduced Tumorigenicity of Human Ovarian Cancer In Vivo Due to Neutrophil Infiltration1

Paclitaxel is a frontline therapy for ovarian cancer. Our laboratory has shown that paclitaxel induces IL-8, a member of the C-X-C family of chemokines, in subsets of human ovarian cancer cells. However, the critical issue concerns the biological significance of this chemokine in human ovarian cancer. To study the influence of IL-8 on tumor growth, human ovarian cancer cell lines were transfected with an expression vector for human IL-8 and tested for their ability to form tumors in nude mice. IL-8 expression by the transfected cells did not alter their growth properties in vitro. In contrast, tumor growth in vivo was significantly attenuated in animals receiving IL-8-expressing cells when compared with mice injected with control cells. As additional evidence that IL-8 is a crucial factor in tumor growth, it was noted that ovarian cell lines in which constitutive IL-8 expression is elevated did not form tumors. Injection of neutralizing Ab to IL-8 reverted the phenotype and caused tumor growth in vivo. Examination of tissue from the inoculation site revealed a dramatically elevated cellularity, containing neutrophils and macrophages, in mice receiving IL-8-expressing tumor cells. These results suggest that IL-8 production by human ovarian tumor cells can play a role in reducing the rate of tumor growth; this effect may be mediated by the increased targeting of neutrophil and other mononuclear cells to the tumor injection site. These studies indicate a role for IL-8 in ovarian cancer control and suggest that chemotherapy-induced IL-8 may have a positive role in controlling tumor growth.
Integrative transcriptomic analysis of two cell lines elucidates the architecture of endoplasmic reticulum stress signaling in glioblastoma

The endoplasmic-reticulum (ER) stress response represents a pivotal cellular process, triggered by a variety of stimuli implying incorrect protein folding in the ER. Solid evidence implicates ER stress-induced dysfunction as major contributors in many cancers, among which brain cancers. In this work, an integrative analysis in two transcriptomic datasets scrutinizes the regulatory potency of ER stress mechanisms in glioblastoma. Besides confirming the results of the initial analyses, the integration of both datasets manages to study the effect of cellular stress in conjunction to the dysregulation of the IRE1α branch of the ER stress signaling pathways. Given the respective diversified phenotypic profile of glioblastomas, ranging from increased proliferation to enhanced migration and aggressiveness as a result of the IRE1α molecular switch, this study suggests potential target groups of master regulators of the ER stress pathways, through the application of an established, exhaustive computational framework.
A low spur fractional-N digital PLL for 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac with 0.19 psrms jitter

A 5.9-to-8.0 GHz fractional-N digital PLL with TDC histogram calibration, reference doubler compensation and non-periodic DCO dithering is implemented in 55nm CMOS. With reference doubled from 40 MHz, the rms jitter integrated from 1kHz to 10MHz is 0.19ps or 0.4° for a 5825 MHz clock measured at TX output, and the in-band noise floor is −108 dBc/Hz. The reference and worst-case fractional spurs are −94dBc and −70dBc, respectively, and it draws 36mW.
RECORD: Reference-Assisted Genome Assembly for Closely Related Genomes

Background. Next-generation sequencing technologies are now producing multiple times the genome size in total reads from a single experiment. This is enough information to reconstruct at least some of the differences between the individual genome studied in the experiment and the reference genome of the species. However, in most typical protocols, this information is disregarded and the reference genome is used. Results. We provide a new approach that allows researchers to reconstruct genomes very closely related to the reference genome (e.g., mutants of the same species) directly from the reads used in the experiment. Our approach applies de novo assembly software to experimental reads and so-called pseudoreads and uses the resulting contigs to generate a modified reference sequence. In this way, it can very quickly, and at no additional sequencing cost, generate new, modified reference sequence that is closer to the actual sequenced genome and has a full coverage. In this paper, we describe our approach and test its implementation called RECORD. We evaluate RECORD on both simulated and real data. We made our software publicly available on sourceforge. Conclusion. Our tests show that on closely related sequences RECORD outperforms more general assisted-assembly software.
Guidelines for resection of colorectal cancer liver metastases

There has been increasing recognition of the potential benefits of liver resection for colorectal metastases in the UK although this treatment has been established more widely in other Western countries. There are no randomised studies assessing outcome following resection compared with no treatment or other therapeutic modalities in patients with known resectable liver metastases as it is generally considered unethical not to offer surgery for resectable disease. There has been increased interest in more aggressive chemotherapy regimens that have been reported to not only control metastatic disease but also to render some advanced liver metastases resectable.1–4 Furthermore, other new modalities have become available that allow safe ablation of liver metastases without the need for surgical intervention. There is therefore a need to produce clear guidelines on the appropriate management of patients with colorectal cancer who have been shown to have hepatic metastases. These guidelines are intended to address a number of issues: 1. the principles under which patients with hepatic metastases should be managed; 2. which patients who have undergone attempted curative resection of the primary colorectal tumour should be offered surveillance; 3. what investigations are required to determine appropriate management; and 4. which treatment modality is most appropriate in a given clinical context. The process of formulating any clinical guidelines requires a guideline development group, a search strategy with review of the relevant literature, synthesis of evidence (and consensus methods for topics when evidence is lacking), followed by external review. A multidisciplinary meeting with representation from a number of interested bodies involving surgeons, gastroenterologists, oncologists, diagnostic and interventional radiologists, pathologists, general practitioners, clinical nurse specialists, nurse practitioners, and patients was held in the Pelican Centre in Basingstoke on 2–4 October 2003 (see appendix 1). The Appraisal of Guidelines Research and Evaluation (AGREE) instrument was used to provide a framework for assessing …