Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hardware Acceleration of the Gipps Model for Real-Time Traffic Simulation

Traffic simulation software is becoming increasingly popular as more cities worldwide use it to better manage their crowded traffic networks. An important requirement for such software is the ability to produce accurate results in real time, requiring great computation resources. This work proposes an ASIC-based hardware accelerated approach for the AIMSUN traffic simulator, taking advantage of repetitive tasks in the algorithm. Different system configurations using this accelerator are also discussed. Compared with the traditional software simulator, it has been found to improve the performance by as much as 9x when using a single processing element approach, or more depending on the chosen hardware configuration.
Coronary CT Angiography in the Quantitative Assessment of Coronary Plaques

Coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) has been recently evaluated for its ability to assess coronary plaque characteristics, including plaque composition. Identification of the relationship between plaque composition by CCTA and patient clinical presentations may provide insight into the pathophysiology of coronary artery plaque, thus assisting identification of vulnerable plaques which are associated with the development of acute coronary syndrome. CCTA-generated 3D visualizations allow evaluation of both coronary lesions and lumen changes, which are considered to enhance the diagnostic performance of CCTA. The purpose of this review is to discuss the recent developments that have occurred in the field of CCTA with regard to its diagnostic accuracy in the quantitative assessment of coronary plaques, with a focus on the characterization of plaque components and identification of vulnerable plaques.
"Smart" coaching to promote physical activity, diet change, and cardiovascular health.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in the United States. A major contributor to CVD is the growing epidemic of overweight and obesity. Among adults in the United States, the prevalence of overweight and obesity, defined as having a body mass index (BMI) greater than 25 kg/m, was 68.0% in 2007Y2008. Research has shown that obesity, defined as a BMI greater than 30 kg/m, is significantly associated with excess mortality among adults. Therefore, the high rate of obesity (33.8%) in the US adult population is alarming to health care professionals. These alarming rates are also reflected in the child and adolescent populations. An adolescent or child is defined as obese if he/she is above the 95th percentile on the sex-specific BMI growth charts. The prevalence of obesity in children and adolescents aged 2 to 19 years is estimated at 16.9% in the United States. Poor dietary habits and lack of physical activity are the major contributors to the overweight and obesity epidemic in adults, children, and adolescents. Health care professionals across the country are urging patients and families to modify their dietary and physical activity patterns and behaviors. Even modest sustained changes in these behaviors have been shown to be beneficial in reducing CVD morbidity and mortality. The use of the Internet and mobile devices has exploded in the United States. As of June 2010, it was estimated that 77.4% of Americans were using the Internet, a growth rate of 146.3% from 2000Y2010. Also, the use of smartphones has increased in the United States, with up to 42% of Americans owning a smartphone as of December 2009. Because of a rise in use of the Internet and mobile devices including smartphones in the United States, approaches to promote and support physical activity and diet change are increasingly available through Web sites and the use of smartphone technology. A smartphone is a device that functions as a mobile telephone with text messaging function but also allows users to download applications and have access to a handheld computer anytime, anywhere. There are an estimated 400 000 smartphone applications, with more than 10 000 targeting diet and weight loss. Many of these applications are available for free or a nominal charge. In general, these Web sites and mobile applications offer calorie tracking, weight tracking, helpful reminders to log calories or weight, blogs and support, and friendly competitions with other users. Research has shown that the use of the Internet has many advantages for both patients and health care providers. Research has been conducted on the effectiveness of Web-based interventions in the modification of dietary and physical behaviors and weight loss. In a systematic review of Web-based weight management programs for children and adolescents, it was reported that 6 of 8 trials demonstrated clinically meaningful effects on outcomes such as weight loss, BMI, physical activity, and dietary fat intake. A similar review was conducted in adults and concluded that these types of
Exposure biomarkers and risk from gluing and heating of polyurethane: a cross sectional study of respiratory symptoms

OBJECTIVES To define the relation between exposure to polyurethane (PUR) glue, biomarkers of exposure and effect, and work related symptoms that occur at least once a week. METHODS In a cross sectional study, 152 workers and 14 clerks in a factory with exposure to sprayed and heated PUR glue containing 4,4′-diphenylmethane (MDI) or 1,6-hexamethylene (HDI) di-isocyanate were examined with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) for metabolites of MDI in plasma (P-MDX) and urine (U-MDX), 2,4- and 2,6-toluene di-isocyanate (TDI; P-TDX, U-TDX) and HDI in plasma and urine, specific serum IgG (S-IgG-MDI, S-IgG-HDI, and S-IgG-TDI, respectively) and IgE (S-IgE-MDI). Work related symptoms of the eyes and airways (nose or lower airways, or both), and lung function were also evaluated. RESULTS P-MDX was detected in 65% of the workers, U-TDX in 47%, HDX in none. Three per cent were positive for S-IgE-MDI, 33% for S-IgG-MDI, 32% for S-IgG-TDI, and 12% for S-IgG-HDI. A few clerks had metabolites, and some had antibodies. Most metabolites and immunoglobulins were slightly correlated—for example, P-MDX v S-IgG-MDI: rs=0.21. Workers who heated glue had increased P-MDX (odds ratio (OR)=12 for a value above the median) and S-IgG-MDI (OR=3.7), sprayers P-2,4-TDX (OR=6.2) and P-2,6-TDX (OR=16). Twenty six per cent of the workers had work related symptoms of the airways, 21% from the nose, 11% from the lower airways. Spraying of glue increased the risk of work related symptoms and slightly decreased lung function. U-MDX was associated with work related symptoms from the airways (OR=3.7) and P-2,6-TDX with work related symptoms from the lower airways (OR=6.6). S-IgG-MDI was related to work related symptoms from the airways (OR=2.6). CONCLUSIONS There were relations between exposures to sprayed and heated PUR glue based on MDI and HDI, concentrations of metabolites of MDI and TDI in plasma and urine, specific IgG serum antibodies against MDI, TDI, and HDI, and work related symptoms.
A homologue of the Drosophila kinesin-like protein Costal2 regulates Hedgehog signal transduction in the vertebrate embryo

Orthologues of nearly all of the core components of the Hedgehog signalling pathway, defined originally through genetic analysis in Drosophila, have now been discovered in vertebrates and shown to have highly conserved functions. The one striking exception to this rule is the kinesin-like protein Costal2, which plays a central role in controlling the activity of the zinc-finger-containing transcriptional regulator, Cubitus interruptus that modulates all Hedgehog-dependent target gene expression, but whose involvement in Hedgehog signalling has not been demonstrated in vertebrates. We report the cloning of a kinesin-related gene from the zebrafish that in structure as well as function, appears to represent the first vertebrate orthologue of costal2. Using a combination of genetic and biochemical analysis, we provide evidence that as in Drosophila, zebrafish Costal2 acts principally as an intracellular repressor of signal transduction, in conjunction with Suppressor of Fused, another protein that negatively regulates signalling in Hedgehog-responsive cells.
Similarities and differences between imagery and perceptionin early and late visual cortex

Mental visual imagery has been suggested to require the same brain areas as visual perception. The extent of this overlap has long been investigated but visual cortex has not consistently been found to be involved during imagery. This review investigates the extent to which visual imagery and perception are similar. Behavioral, patient, and neuroimaging studies are reviewed. Specifically, recent decoding studies are reviewed. Decoding not only allows for investigation of overlapping brain activity between imagery and perception, but also reveals overlap in specific representational content related to both processes. Patient and behavioral studies indicate that many similar principles govern imagery and perception. Imaging studies show that different parts of visual cortex are activated during imagery. These activations follow the retinotopic and functional organization also observed during perception. Decoding studies show instances where a classifier trained on perceptual data could classify imagery data, and the other way around. This indicates that representational patterns for imagery and perception are highly alike in several visual areas. However, data also suggest a difference between early and later visual areas. Activity in higher order, functionally organized areas was observed during most imagery tasks. Conversely, activity in early areas depended on task demands. Imagery tasks resulted in V1 activity mostly only when stimulus details such as shape, orientation and retinotopy were important. Differences in specific task demands can strongly influence the extent of overlap between imagery and perception. Previous results should be viewed in light of the differences between task demands and future studies should take into account these differences.
Validating the inhalation of 7.5% CO2 in healthy volunteers as a human experimental medicine: a model of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)

Anxiety is a complex phenomenon that can represent contextually different experiences to individuals. The experimental modelling in healthy volunteers of clinical anxiety experienced by patients is challenging. Furthermore, defining when and why anxiety (which is adaptive) becomes an anxiety disorder (and hence maladaptive) is the subject of much of the published literature. Observations from animal studies can be helpful in deriving mechanistic models, but gathering evidence from patients and reverse translating this to healthy volunteers and thence back to laboratory models is a more powerful approach and is likely to more closely model the clinical disorder. Thus the development and validation of a robust healthy volunteer model of anxiety may help to bridge the gap between the laboratory and the clinic and provide ‘proof of concept’ in screening for novel drug treatments. This review considers these concepts and outlines evidence from a validated healthy volunteer model of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) following the inhalation of 7.5% CO2.
Self-Aware Traffic Route Planning

One of the most ubiquitous AI applications is vehicle route planning. While state-of-the-art systems take into account current traffic conditions or historic traffic data, current planning approaches ignore the impact of their own plans on the future traffic conditions. We present a novel algorithm for self-aware route planning that uses the routes it plans for current vehicle traffic to more accurately predict future traffic conditions for subsequent cars. Our planner uses a roadmap with stochastic, time-varying traffic densities that are defined by a combination of historical data and the densities predicted by the planned routes for the cars ahead of the current traffic. We have applied our algorithm to large-scale traffic route planning, and demonstrated that our self-aware route planner can more accurately predict future traffic conditions, which results in a reduction of the travel time for those vehicles that use our algorithm.
The Million Domain Challenge: Broadcast Email Prioritization by Cross-domain Recommendation

With email overload becoming a billion-level drag on the economy, personalized email prioritization is of urgent need to help predict the importance level of an email. Despite lots of previous effort on the topic, broadcast email, an important type of emails with its unique challenges and intriguing opportunities, has been overlooked. The most salient opportunity lies in that effective collaborative filtering can be exploited due to thousands of receivers of a typical broadcast email. However, every broadcast email is completely cold and it is very costly to obtain users' preference feedback. Fortunately, there exist up to million-level broadcast mailing lists in a real life email system. Similar mailing lists can provide useful extra information for broadcast email prioritization in a target mailing list. How to mine such useful extra information is a challenging problem that has never been touched. In this work, we propose the first broadcast email prioritization framework considering large numbers of mailing lists by formulating this problem as a cross domain recommendation problem. An optimization framework is proposed to select the optimal set of source domains considering multiple criteria including overlap of users, feedback pattern similarity and coverage of users. Our method is thoroughly evaluated on a real world industrial dataset from Samsung Electronics and is proved highly effective and outperforms all the baselines.
The Directed Closure Process in Hybrid Social-Information Networks, with an Analysis of Link Formation on Twitter

It has often been taken as a working assumption that directed links in information networks are frequently formed by "short-cutting'' a two-step path between the source and the destination — a kind of implicit "link copying'' analogous to the process of triadic closure in social networks. Despite the role of this assumption in theoretical models such as preferential attachment, it has received very little direct empirical investigation. Here we develop a formalization and methodology for studying this type of directed closure process, and we provide evidence for its important role in the formation of links on Twitter. We then analyze a sequence of models designed to capture the structural phenomena related to directed closure that we observe in the Twitter data.
Chd4 and associated proteins function as corepressors of Sox9 expression during BMP‐2–induced chondrogenesis

Mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) differentiate into fully functional chondrocytes in response to bone morphogenetic protein‐2 (BMP‐2). However, the comprehensive proteomic aspect of BMP‐2–induced chondrogenesis remains unknown. We took advantage of quantitative proteomic analysis based on isobaric tag for relative and absolute quantitation (iTRAQ) and on‐line 2D nano‐liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) to identify proteins differentially expressed during BMP‐2–induced chondrogenic differentiation of MEFs. We found 85 downregulated proteins, and ingenuity pathways analysis (IPA) revealed a protein‐protein network with chromodomain‐helicase‐DNA‐binding protein 4 (Chd4) in the center. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) and nuclease hypersensitivity assays showed that Chd4, interacting with Hdac1/2, cooperates with its related proteins Kap1 and Cbx1 to bind at −207/−148 of the Sox9 promoter. We also provided evidence that let‐7a targets the 3'UTR of Chd4 to promote chondrogenesis of MEFs. Together, our findings indicate that BMP‐2 induced the upregulation of let‐7a, targeting Chd4 and positively controlling the chondrogenic differentiation of MEFs. These findings illustrate epigenetic regulation of the chondrogenic differentiation process and also expand the understanding of the involved intracellular mechanisms.
Visual Cortex Inspired CNN Model for Feature Construction in Text Analysis

Recently, biologically inspired models are gradually proposed to solve the problem in text analysis. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are hierarchical artificial neural networks, which include a various of multilayer perceptrons. According to biological research, CNN can be improved by bringing in the attention modulation and memory processing of primate visual cortex. In this paper, we employ the above properties of primate visual cortex to improve CNN and propose a biological-mechanism-driven-feature-construction based answer recommendation method (BMFC-ARM), which is used to recommend the best answer for the corresponding given questions in community question answering. BMFC-ARM is an improved CNN with four channels respectively representing questions, answers, asker information and answerer information, and mainly contains two stages: biological mechanism driven feature construction (BMFC) and answer ranking. BMFC imitates the attention modulation property by introducing the asker information and answerer information of given questions and the similarity between them, and imitates the memory processing property through bringing in the user reputation information for answerers. Then the feature vector for answer ranking is constructed by fusing the asker-answerer similarities, answerer's reputation and the corresponding vectors of question, answer, asker, and answerer. Finally, the Softmax is used at the stage of answer ranking to get best answers by the feature vector. The experimental results of answer recommendation on the Stackexchange dataset show that BMFC-ARM exhibits better performance.
SeeThrough: Finding Objects in Heavily Occluded Indoor Scene Images

Discovering 3D arrangements of objects from single indoor images is important given its many applications such as interior design and content creation for virtual environments. Although heavily researched in the recent years, existing approaches break down under medium to heavy occlusion as the core image-space region detection module fails in absence of directly visible cues. Instead, we take into account holistic contextual 3D information, exploiting the fact that objects in indoor scenes co-occur mostly in typical configurations. First, we use a neural network trained on real indoor annotated images to extract 2D keypoints, and feed them to a 3D candidate object generation stage. Then, we solve a global selection problem among these candidates using pairwise co-occurrence statistics discovered from a large 3D scene database. We iterate the process allowing for candidates with low keypoint response to be incrementally detected based on the location of the already discovered nearby objects. We demonstrate significant performance improvement over combinations of state-of-the-art methods, especially for scenes with moderately to severely occluded objects.
The Social Reconstruction of Emotions: Insights from Members of a 12-Step Community

Common among many approaches to the study of emotions that are emerging across disciplines is the fundamental proposition that emotions "are emergent properties of social relations and sociocultural processes" (McCarthy 1994: 269). Consistent with Berger's (1977) assessment of ideas, emotions–their meanings and associated behavioral counterparts–are believed to succeed in history by virtue of their relationship to specific social processes. Hence, as Steams and Steams (1994) observed, emotions have histories that are a part of every individual's socializing environment Emotions, then, are social things that are learned and can be relearned (McCarthy 1989). As in Power (1984), this paper positions the emotions as a critical component of the socialization process. It then endeavors to establish the equally critical role of emotions in the process of resocialization–the intentional effort to transform one's subjective reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966)–as experienced among members of a 12-Step group for Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOAs). Following McCarthy's (1994) lead, this analysis proceeds from a social constructionist standpoint as informed by culture theory. As such, it is believed mat "emotions are best grasped as objects of investigation within the domain of cultural forms and meanings" (McCarthy 1994: 268). The context of this analysis is the contrasting cultural domains of a family with parental alcoholism and an ACOA community. The goal is two-fold: first, to better understand how culture matters in the way emotions are "differentiated, socialized, and managed socially" (McCarthy 1994: 269); and secondly, to investigate the relationship between an individual's emotional experience, subjective reality, and overarching experience of self.
Where The Elite Teach, It's Still A Man's World

While women have made inroads in professions like English and psychology, over all more than 70 percent of professors teaching at the country's top research institutions in the 2001-2 academic year were male. Even at the entry level, men made up nearly 60 percent of the assistant professors that year at research universities, according to a survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.
PLCFRS Parsing Revisited: Restricting the Fan-Out to Two

Linear Context-Free Rewriting System (LCFRS) is an extension of Context-Free Grammar (CFG) in which a non-terminal can dominate more than a single continuous span of terminals. Probabilistic LCFRS have recently successfully been used for the direct data-driven parsing of discontinuous structures. In this paper we present a parser for binary PLCFRS of fan-out two, together with a novel monotonous estimate for A parsing, with which we conduct experiments on modified versions of the German NeGra treebank and the Discontinuous Penn Treebank in which all trees have block degree two. The experiments show that compared to previous work, our approach provides an enormous speed-up while delivering an output of comparable richness.
Cisplatin Prodrug-Conjugated Gold Nanocluster for Fluorescence Imaging and Targeted Therapy of the Breast Cancer

Theranostic nanomedicine has emerged as a promising modality for cancer diagnosis and treatment. In this study, we report the fabrication of fluorescence gold nanoclusters (GNC) conjugated with a cisplatin prodrug and folic acid (FA) (FA-GNC-Pt) for fluorescence imaging and targeted chemotherapy of breast cancer. The physio-chemical properties of FA-GNC-Pt nanoparticles are thoroughly characterized by fluorescence/UV-Vis spectroscopic measurement, particle size and zeta-potential examination. We find that FA-modification significantly accelerated the cellular uptake and increased the cytotoxicity of GNC-Pt nanoparticles in murine 4T1 breast cancer cells. Fluorescence imaging in vivo using 4T1 tumor bearing nude mouse model shows that FA-GNC-Pt nanoparticles selectively accumulate in the orthotopic 4T1 tumor and generate strong fluorescence signal due to the tumor targeting effect of FA. Moreover, we demonstrate that FA-GNC-Pt nanoparticles significantly inhibit the growth and lung metastasis of the orthotopically implanted 4T1 breast tumors. All these data imply a good potential of the GNC-based theranostic nanoplatform for fluorescence tumor imaging and cancer therapy.