Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Circulating miR-208b and miR-34a Are Associated with Left Ventricular Remodeling after Acute Myocardial Infarction

Left ventricular remodeling after acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is associated with adverse prognosis. It is becoming increasingly clear that circulating miRNAs could be promising biomarkers for various pathological processes in the heart, including myocardial infarction, myocardial remodeling and progression to heart failure. In the present study, a total of 359 consecutive patients were recruited. Plasma samples were collected on admission. Echocardiographic studies were performed during the admission and at six months follow-up after AMI. Remodeling was defined as an at least 10% increase from baseline in the left ventricular end-diastolic volume. Plasma miRNA levels were assessed for association with six months mortality or development of heart failure. Results showed that levels of plasma miR-208b and miR-34a were significantly higher in patients with remodeling than those without. Increased miRNA levels were strongly associated with increased risk of mortality or heart failure within six months for miR-208b (OR 17.91, 95% confidence interval = 2.07–98.81, p = 0.003), miR-34a (OR 4.18, 95% confidence interval = 1.36–12.83, p = 0.012) and combination of the two miRNAs (OR 18.73, 95% confidence interval = 1.96–101.23, p = 0.000). The two miRNA panels reclassified a significant proportion of patients with a net reclassification improvement of 11.7% (p = 0.025) and an integrated discrimination improvement of 7.7% (p = 0.002). These results demonstrated that circulating miR-208b and miR-34a could be useful biomarkers for predicting left ventricular remodeling after AMI, and the miRNA levels are associated with increased risk of mortality or heart failure.
Efficient Rank Aggregation via Lehmer Codes

We propose a novel rank aggregation method based on converting permutations into their corresponding Lehmer codes or other subdiagonal images. Lehmer codes, also known as inversion vectors, are vector representations of permutations in which each coordinate can take values not restricted by the values of other coordinates. This transformation allows for decoupling of the coordinates and for performing aggregation via simple scalar median or mode computations. We present simulation results illustrating the performance of this completely parallelizable approach and analytically prove that both the mode and median aggregation procedure recover the correct centroid aggregate with small sample complexity when the permutations are drawn according to the well-known Mallows models. The proposed Lehmer code approach may also be used on partial rankings, with similar performance guarantees.
A Graph-Based, Metric Space Proximity Calculator for Internet Objects

Proximity calculations in metric space have found new applications recently with the increased emphasis on Internet searching. In this work we present a novel approach to Internet searching. We use a combination of metric space distance calculations and link analysis to determine the proximity of internet objects. This framework is generic and can be applied to various domains such as help desk support, human resources or geographical information systems. We provide an example within the text mining domain. We also provide the mathematical preliminaries, give a detailed example and discuss our results. MOTS-CLES : recherche sur Internet, espace metrique, mesurer la distance, applications des graphes.
Research on the Creative Industries Cluster' forming factors and development strategies based on Porter's Diamond Model

Starting from an analysis of Guangzhou creative industries cluster, this paper analyzed the formation of Guangzhou Creative Industries Cluster based on Porter's Diamond Model. We discussed the four key factors including production factors, demand conditions; related supportive industries; corporate strategy, structure, and rivalry as well as two additional factors including government and chance which influencing Guangzhou creative industries cluster based on Porter's diamond model. We further explored the restrictive factors affecting the development of creative industrial cluster. Finally, suggestions on developing Guangzhou creative industrial cluster are given based on the analysis above.
Multiple cadherin extracellular repeats mediate homophilic binding and adhesion

The extracellular homophilic-binding domain of the cadherins consists of 5 cadherin repeats (EC1–EC5). Studies on cadherin specificity have implicated the NH2-terminal EC1 domain in the homophilic binding interaction, but the roles of the other extracellular cadherin (EC) domains have not been evaluated. We have undertaken a systematic analysis of the binding properties of the entire cadherin extracellular domain and the contributions of the other EC domains to homophilic binding. Lateral (cis) dimerization of the extracellular domain is thought to be required for adhesive function. Sedimentation analysis of the soluble extracellular segment of C-cadherin revealed that it exists in a monomer–dimer equilibrium with an affinity constant of ∼64 μM. No higher order oligomers were detected, indicating that homophilic binding between cis-dimers is of significantly lower affinity. The homophilic binding properties of a series of deletion constructs, lacking successive or individual EC domains fused at the COOH terminus to an Fc domain, were analyzed using a bead aggregation assay and a cell attachment–based adhesion assay. A protein with only the first two NH2-terminal EC domains (CEC1-2Fc) exhibited very low activity compared with the entire extracellular domain (CEC1-5Fc), demonstrating that EC1 alone is not sufficient for effective homophilic binding. CEC1-3Fc exhibited high activity, but not as much as CEC1-4Fc or CEC1-5Fc. EC3 is not required for homophilic binding, however, since CEC1-2-4Fc and CEC1-2-4-5Fc exhibited high activity in both assays. These and experiments using additional EC combinations show that many, if not all, the EC domains contribute to the formation of the cadherin homophilic bond, and specific one-to-one interaction between particular EC domains may not be required. These conclusions are consistent with a previous study on direct molecular force measurements between cadherin ectodomains demonstrating multiple adhesive interactions (Sivasankar, S., W. Brieher, N. Lavrik, B. Gumbiner, and D. Leckband. 1999. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 96:11820–11824; Sivasankar, S., B. Gumbiner, and D. Leckband. 2001. Biophys J. 80:1758–68). We propose new models for how the cadherin extracellular repeats may contribute to adhesive specificity and function.
Mesenchymal-transitioned cancer cells instigate the invasion of epithelial cancer cells through secretion of WNT3 and WNT5B

Although the heterogeneities of epithelial and mesenchymal‐transitioned cancer cells are often observed within the tumor microenvironment, the biological significance of the interaction between epithelial cancer cells and mesenchymal‐transitioned cancer cells is not yet understood. In this study, we show that the mesenchymal‐transitioned cancer cells instigate the invasive ability and metastatic potential of the neighboring epithelial cancer cells in vitro and in vivo. We identify WNT3 and WNT5B as critical factors secreted from Transforming growth factor‐induced mesenchymal cancer cells for instigating the epithelial cancer cell invasion along with the induction of secondary EMT phenotype. These results shed light on the significance of cancer heterogeneity and the interaction between epithelial and mesenchymal‐transitioned cancer cells within the tumor microenvironment in promoting metastatic disease through the WNT‐dependent mechanism.
A Stochastic Geometry Approach to the Modeling of DSRC for Vehicular Safety Communication

Vehicle-to-vehicle safety communications based on the dedicated short-range communication technology have the potential to enable a set of applications that help avoid traffic accidents. The performance of these applications, largely affected by the reliability of communication links, stringently ties back to the MAC and PHY layer design, which has been standardized as IEEE 802.11p. The link reliabilities depend on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), which, in turn, depends on the locations and transmit power values of the transmitting nodes. Hence, an accurate network model needs to take into account the network geometry. For such geometric models, however, there is a lack of mathematical understanding of the characteristics and performance of IEEE 802.11p. Important questions such as the scalability performance of IEEE 802.11p have to be answered by simulations, which can be very time consuming and provide limited insights to future protocol design. In this paper, we investigate the performance of IEEE 802.11p by proposing a novel mathematical model based on queuing theory and stochastic geometry. In particular, we extend the Matérn hard-core type-II process with a discrete and nonuniform distribution, which is used to derive the temporal states of backoff counters. By doing so, concurrent transmissions from nodes within the carrier sensing ranges of each other are taken into account, leading to a more accurate approximation to real network dynamics. A comparison with Network Simulator 2 (ns2) simulations shows that our model achieves a good approximation in networks with different densities.
HMM-based brain age interpolation using kriging estimator

Age-related gray matter (GM) volume loss becomes widespread from middle age and the decreasing rate shows linear relationship with real age. These characteristics provide us evidences of brain ageing following certain patterns. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) based brain structural hidden Markov model (HMM) is a method to model brain ageing pattern, and further detect the patterns deviating from normal pattern to provide evidence of neurodegenerative disease for clinical diagnosis. It requires a complete candidate MRI database covering all age stages which is usually not easily available. Therefore, we propose a HMM-based brain age interpolation using kriging estimator for the creation of HMM of the uncollected MRI. Preliminary results show that the proposed interpolation scheme can create HMM with the age prediction error of 1.29 years which is better than other current brain age prediction methods.
Dynamical properties of the spatial distribution of snow

Abstract. A simulation exercise has been performed to study the temporal development of snow covered area and the spatial distribution of snow-water equivalent (SWE). Special consideration has been paid to how the properties of the spatial statistical distribution of SWE change as a response to accumulation and ablation events. A distributed rainfall-runoff model at resolution 1 x 1 km2 has been run with time series of precipitation and temperature fields of the same spatial resolution derived from the atmospheric model HIRLAM. The precipitation fields are disaggregated and the temperature fields are interpolated. Time series of the spatial distribution of snow-water equivalent and snow-covered area for three seasons for a catchment in Norway is generated. The catchment is of size 3085 km2 and two rectangular sub-areas of 484 km2 are located within the larger catchment. The results show that the shape of the spatial distribution of SWE for all three areas changes during winter. The distribution is very skewed at the start of the accumulation season but then the skew decreases and, as the ablation season sets in, the spatial distribution again becomes more skewed with a maximum near the end of the ablation season. For one of the sub-areas, a consistently more skewed distribution of SWE is found, related to higher variability in precipitation. This indicates that observed differences in the spatial distribution of snow between alpine and forested areas can result from differences in the spatial variability of precipitation. The results obtained from the simulation exercise are consistent with modelling the spatial distribution of SWE as summations of a gamma distributed variable. Keywords: Snow, SWE, spatial distribution, simulated hydrometeorological fields
Multipoint-to-point ABR service in ATM networks

Efficient support for scalable multipoint-to-multipoint (mpt-mpt) communication in ATM has recently become a hot topic of discussion at the ATM Forum. Previously, we presented a new class of efficient switch algorithms for point-to-multipoint (pt-mpt) ABR service that deliver high performance in terms of fairness and link utilization and are significantly simpler to implement than other proposed protocols. However, the more challenging problem of providing bidirectional mpt-mpt ABR service has not been addressed before. While a number of key issues have been resolved in unidirectional pt-mpt ABR service, no satisfactory solution for multipoint-point (mpt-pt) ABR service is known. In this paper, we propose new efficient mpt-pt ABR mechanisms that can interoperate with existing standards for ABR service and provide a truly transparent and scalable solution to multipoint communication in ATM. We present simulation results to illustrate that our proposed ABR schemes provide high link utilization and fair bandwidth allocation in a mpt-pt connection for heterogeneous sources with different data rates.
Models for Prediction, Explanation and Control: Recursive Bayesian Networks

The Recursive Bayesian Net (RBN) formalism was originally developed for modelling nested causal relationships. In this paper we argue that the formalism can also be applied to modelling the hierarchical structure of mechanisms. The resulting network contains quantitative information about probabilities, as well as qualitative information about mechanistic structure and causal relations. Since information about probabilities, mechanisms and causal relations is vital for prediction, explanation and control respectively, an RBN can be applied to all these tasks. We show in particular how a simple two-level RBN can be used to model a mechanism in cancer science. The higher level of our model contains variables at the clinical level, while the lower level maps the structure of the cell's mechanism for apoptosis.
Estimating the Effect of a Community-Based Intervention with Two Communities

Abstract Due to the need to evaluate the effectiveness of community-based programs in practice, there is substantial interest in methods to estimate the causal effects of community-level treatments or exposures on individual level outcomes. The challenge one is confronted with is that different communities have different environmental factors affecting the individual outcomes, and all individuals in a community share the same environment and intervention. In practice, data are often available from only a small number of communities, making it difficult if not impossible to adjust for these environmental confounders. In this paper we consider an extreme version of this dilemma, in which two communities each receives a different level of the intervention, and covariates and outcomes are measured on a random sample of independent individuals from each of the two populations; the results presented can be straightforwardly generalized to settings in which more than two communities are sampled. We address the question of what conditions are needed to estimate the causal effect of the intervention, defined in terms of an ideal experiment in which the exposed level of the intervention is assigned to both communities and individual outcomes are measured in the combined population, and then the clock is turned back and a control level of the intervention is assigned to both communities and individual outcomes are measured in the combined population. We refer to the difference in the expectation of these outcomes as the marginal (overall) treatment effect. We also discuss conditions needed for estimation of the treatment effect on the treated community. We apply a nonparametric structural equation model to define these causal effects and to establish conditions under which they are identified. These identifiability conditions provide guidance for the design of studies to investigate community level causal effects and for assessing the validity of causal interpretations when data are only available from a few communities. When the identifiability conditions fail to hold, the proposed statistical parameters still provide nonparametric treatment effect measures (albeit non-causal) whose statistical interpretations do not depend on model specifications. In addition, we study the use of a matched cohort sampling design in which the units of different communities are matched on individual factors. Finally, we provide semiparametric efficient and doubly robust targeted MLE estimators of the community level causal effect based on i.i. d. sampling and matched cohort sampling.
Design and Development of Robotic Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation

This paper details the design and development of a robotic hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform that can be used for rapid-prototyping industrial manipulators. The architecture of the proposed platform has been presented by Martin and Emami (2006). Potential benefits of such a platform include allowing concurrent development of hardware and control system components and providing a reusable platform for reconfigurable manipulators through a generic and modular structure. Some preliminary tests on the platform have also been discussed in the paper
What is System Dynamics? A Paradigmatic Inquiry

There is not one single system dynamics approach. Apart from ’mainstream’ system dynamics, there are several distinctive practices in use. In this explorative paper, an attempt is made to reveal basic assumptions of dierent practices and to classify them in a paradigmatic classification framework on the basis of these basic assumptions. Revealing its basic assumptions might be important for increasing the acceptance and use of system dynamics. It will be shown here that mainstream system dynamics corresponds well with critical pluralism, that other approaches are more postpositivist, pragmatist or constructivist, and that still other paradigmatic approaches might potentially be interesting. The classification framework might be used furthermore to find (i) approaches that suit issues, circumstances, parties involved and goals, (ii) the basic assumptions of dierent approaches and hence the interpretation and use of the results, and (iii) consistent matches and mixes of system dynamics approaches with other method(ologie)s.
IMM Filter based Sensor Scheduling for Maneuvering Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper discusses the problem of maneuvering target tracking in a distributed wireless sensor network (WSN). In many applications, such as the human motion tracking or military/civilian surveillance, the target often moves with high maneuvering, and appeal to more advanced tracking approaches. The limited energy constraint in WSN complicates the problem further. In this paper, we present an interactive multiple model (IMM) filter based collaborative maneuvering target tracking framework that incorporates a novel energy- efficient sensor scheduling scheme in a distributed WSN using low cost range wireless sensor nodes. The proposed algorithm applies the IMM filter to estimate and predict the target's dynamic state and select the tasking sensor node and sampling interval for each time step based on both of the tracking accuracy and the energy cost. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms the popular extended Kalman filter (EKF) based tracking scheme for maneuvering target in terms of tracking accuracy and energy efficiency.
Borsa Parole – A Market for LinguisticSpeculation

This article describes a novel approach to linguistic field research consisting in exploiting the self-regulation of a market for collecting data on language use. The market is conceived as an output-agreement game with a purpose called Borsa Parole. The agreement can be traded with by the players what makes it adjustable. Borsa Parole has been conceived and is deployed for a linguistic study on the divergence of Italian dialects and vernaculars.
A Comparison of SIFT and Harris conner features for correspondence points matching

This paper presents a comparative study of two competing features for the task of finding correspondence points in consecutive image frames. One is the Harris corner feature and the other is the SIFT feature. First, consecutive frames are extracted from video data then two kinds of features are computed. Second, correspondence points matching will be found. The results of SIFT key points matching and Harris key points will be compare and discussed. The comparison based on the result of implementation video data of outdoor with difference condition of intensity and angle of view.
Pronominal Anaphora Resolution for Unrestricted Text

The paper presents an anaphora resolution algorithm for unrestricted text. In particular, we examine portability of a knowledge-based approach of (Mitamura et al., 2002), proposed for a domain-specific task. We obtain up to 70% accuracy on unrestricted text, which is a significant improvement (almost 20%) over a baseline we set for general text. As the overall results leave much room for improvement, we provide a detailed error analysis and investigate possible enhancements.
Determination of Spring Onset and Growing Season Duration using Satellite Measurements

An integrated approach to retrieve microwave emissivity difference vegetation index (EDVI) over land regions has been developed from combined multi-platform/multi-sensor satellite measurements, including SSM/I measurements. A possible relationship of the remotely sensed EDVI and the leaf physiology of canopy is exploited at the Harvard Forest site for two growing seasons. This study finds that the EDVI is sensitive to leaf development through vegetation water content of the crown layer of the forest canopy, and has demonstrated that the spring onset and growing season duration can be determined accurately from the time series of satellite estimated EDVI within uncertainties about 3 and 7 days for spring onsets and growing season duration, respectively, compared to in-situ observations. The leaf growing stage may also be quantitatively monitored by a normalized EDVI. Since EDVI retrievals from satellite are generally possible during both daytime and nighttime under non-rain conditions, the EDVI technique studied here may provide higher temporal resolution observations for monitoring the onset of spring and the duration of growing season compared to currently operational satellite methods.
Nonparametric Predictive Inference for Ordinal Data

Nonparametric predictive inference (NPI) is a powerful frequentist statistical framework based only on an exchangeability assumption for future and past observations, made possible by the use of lower and upper probabilities. In this article, NPI is presented for ordinal data, which are categorical data with an ordering of the categories. The method uses a latent variable representation of the observations and categories on the real line. Lower and upper probabilities for events involving the next observation are presented, and briefly compared to NPI for non ordered categorical data. As application, the comparison of multiple groups of ordinal data is presented.