Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Through the eye of a lizard: hue discrimination in a lizard with ventral polymorphic coloration

ABSTRACT Colour polymorphisms are thought to be maintained by complex evolutionary processes, some of which require that the colours of the alternative morphs function as chromatic signals to conspecifics. Unfortunately, a key aspect of this hypothesis has rarely been studied: whether the study species perceives its own colour variation as discrete rather than continuous. The European common wall lizard (Podarcis muralis) presents a striking colour polymorphism: the ventral surface of adults of both sexes may be coloured orange, white, yellow or with a mosaic of scales combining two colours (orange–white, orange–yellow). Here, we used a discrimination learning paradigm to test whether P. muralis is capable of discriminating colour stimuli designed to match the ventral colours of conspecifics. We trained 20 lizards to eat from colour-coded wells bored in wooden blocks. Blocks had four colour-coded wells (orange, white, yellow and an achromatic control), but only one contained food (mealworm larvae). After six trials, the lizards performed significantly better than expected by chance, showing a decrease in both the number of wells explored and the latency to finding the food. Using visual modelling techniques, we found that, based on their spectral properties and the lizards' cone sensitivities, the ventral colours of P. muralis correspond to discrete rather than continuous colour categories, and that colour discriminability (i.e. distance in perceptual space) varies depending on the morphs compared, which may have implications for signal detection and discrimination. These results suggest that P. muralis can discriminate hue differences matching their own ventral colour variation. Summary: Podarcis muralis are able to discriminate hue differences matching their own ventral colour variation; this has implications for unravelling the evolution and adaptive significance of colour polymorphisms.
Lapped convolutional neural networks for embedded systems

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved numerous breakthroughs in many artificial intelligent applications. However, its complexity is quite high and usually requires expensive GPU or FPGA implementation, which is not cost-effective for many embedded systems. In this paper, we develop a novel lapped CNN (LCNN) architecture that is suitable for resource-limited embedded systems. Our architecture follows the divide-and-conquer principle. The CNN is designed such that it can be decomposed into two or more stages, each can be implemented by a hardware module with a low-resolution input and very low complexity. The original input image is divided into some subimages of the same size, with properly designed overlaps with each other. These subimages are sequentially processed by the hardware module that implements the first stage of the CNN. The outputs from different subimages are then merged and processed by the next stage low-cost hardware CNN module. The result is exactly identical to that of applying a larger-scale CNN to the entire image with higher resolution. Therefore, by reusing low-cost hardware CNN modules, a low-cost and larger-scale CNN system can be achieved. The performance of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by experimental results.
Bidding strategy for participation of virtual power plant in energy market considering uncertainty of generation and market price

Due to the small capacity of DGs, their individual participation in the energy market is not beneficial. In the case of wind and solar plants, their uncertain power generation is another issue for their participation in the market, especially when their capacity is low. Commercial Virtual Power Plant (CVPP) is a new market participant, which represents a group of various DGs in the market, and bids to the market. This paper proposes a new bidding strategy approach for the participation of CVPP in the day-ahead energy market, considering uncertainties of wind turbine generation and Market Clearing Price (MCP). The market is pay as bid, and each participant bids a multi-step price-power curve. The uncertainty of MCP has formulated analytically, while the wind uncertainty is modeled by a quantized Rayleigh probability distribution function. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is utilized for optimizing the objective function, which is the expected benefit of the CVPP. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of proposed approach in increasing the benefit of VPP.
Use of defined TLR ligands as adjuvants within human vaccines

Summary: Our improved understanding of how innate immune responses can be initiated and how they can shape adaptive B‐ and T‐cell responses is having a significant impact on vaccine development by directing the development of defined adjuvants. Experience with first generation vaccines, as well as rapid advances in developing defined vaccines containing Toll‐like receptor ligands (TLRLs), indicate that an expanded number of safe and effective vaccines containing such molecules will be available in the future. In this review, we outline current knowledge regarding TLRs, detailing the different cell types that express TLRs, the various signaling pathways TLRs utilize, and the currently known TLRLs. We then discuss the current status of TLRLs within vaccine development programs, including the importance of appropriate formulation, and how recent developments can be used to better define the mechanisms of action of vaccines. Finally, we introduce the possibility of using TLRLs, either in combination or with non‐TLRLs, to synergistically potentiate vaccine‐induced responses to provide not only prophylactic, but therapeutic protection against infectious diseases and cancer.
Information integrity protection and authentication in a banking environment

Cryptographic techniques for integrity protection and authentication in a banking environment are discussed. A flrst solution is to add controlled redundancy with or without encryption. A more secure alternative, the digital signature is explained and compared to the other techniques. As an example, TRASEC, the Belgian standard security system for electronic funds transfer is treated. Finally we present our conclusions.
Kronos: a workflow assembler for genome analytics and informatics

Background The field of next generation sequencing informatics has matured to a point where algorithmic advances in sequence alignment and individual feature detection methods have stabilized. Practical and robust implementation of complex analytical workflows (where such tools are structured into ‘best practices’ for automated analysis of NGS datasets) still requires significant programming investment and expertise. Results We present Kronos, a software platform for automating the development and execution of reproducible, auditable and distributable bioinformatics workflows. Kronos obviates the need for explicit coding of workflows by compiling a text configuration file into executable Python applications. The framework of each workflow includes a run manager to execute the encoded workflows locally (or on a cluster or cloud), parallelize tasks, and log all runtime events. Resulting workflows are highly modular and configurable by construction, facilitating flexible and extensible meta-applications which can be modified easily through configuration file editing. The workflows are fully encoded for ease of distribution and can be instantiated on external systems, promoting and facilitating reproducible research and comparative analyses. We introduce a framework for building Kronos components which function as shareable, modular nodes in Kronos workflows. Conclusion The Kronos platform provides a standard framework for developers to implement custom tools, reuse existing tools, and contribute to the community at large. Kronos is shipped with both Docker and Amazon AWS machine images. It is free, open source and available through PyPI (Python Package Index) and https://github.com/jtaghiyar/kronos.
Coumestrol induces mitochondrial dysfunction by stimulating ROS production and calcium ion influx into mitochondria in human placental choriocarcinoma cells

STUDY QUESTION Does coumestrol inhibit proliferation of human placental choriocarcinoma cells? SUMMARY ANSWER Coumestrol promotes cell death in the choriocarcinoma cells by regulating ERK1/2 MAPK and JNK MAPK signaling pathways and through disruption of Ca2+ and ROS homeostasis. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY A number of patients who suffer from choriocarcinomas fail to survive due to delayed diagnosis or a recurrent tumor and resistance to traditional chemotherapy using platinum-based agents and methotrexate. To overcome these limitations, it is important to discover novel compounds which have no adverse effects yet can inhibit the expression of a target molecule to develop, as a novel therapeutic for prevention and/or treatment of choriocarcinomas. STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION Effects of coumestrol on human placental choriocarcinoma cell lines, JAR and JEG3, were assessed in diverse assays in a dose- and time-dependent manner. PARTICIPCANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS Effects of coumestrol on cell proliferation, apoptosis (annexin V expression, propidium iodide staining, TUNEL and invasion assays), mitochondria-mediated apoptosis, production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), lipid peroxidation, glutathione levels and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress proteins in JAR and JEG3 cells were determined. Signal transduction pathways in JAR and JEG3 cells in response to coumestrol were determined by western blot analyses. MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE Results of the present study indicated that coumestrol suppressed proliferation and increased apoptosis in JAR and JEG3 cells by inducing pro-apoptotic proteins, Bax and Bak. In addition, coumestrol increased ROS production, as well as lipid peroxidation and glutathione levels in JAR and JEG3 cells. Moreover, coumestrol-induced depolarization of mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP) and increased cytosolic and mitochondrial Ca2+ levels in JAR and JEG3 cells. Consistent with those results, treatment of JAR and JEG3 cells with a Ca2+ chelator and an inhibitor of IP3 receptor decreased coumestrol-induced depolarization of MMP and increased proliferation in JAR and JEG3 cells. LARGE SCALE DATA N/A. LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION A lack of in vivo animal studies is a major limitation of this research. The effectiveness of coumestrol to induce apoptosis of human placental choriocarcinoma cells requires further investigation. WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS Our results indicate that coumestrol induces apoptotic effects on placental choriocarcinoma cells by regulating cell signaling and mitochondrial-mediated functions, with a potential to impair progression of the cancer. STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTEREST(S) This research was supported by grants from the Korea Health Technology R&D Project through the Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI), funded by the Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea (No. HI15C0810 awarded to G.S. and HI17C0929 awarded to W.L.).
Utility of p57 immunohistochemistry in differentiating between complete mole, partial mole & non-molar or hydropic abortus

Background & objectives: There is considerable inter-observer variability in the diagnosis of molar pregnancies by histomorphological examination of products of conception (POC). The p57KIP2 gene is paternally imprinted and expressed from the maternal allele. On immunohistochemistry (IHC) with p57, complete mole (CM) shows absent staining whereas hydropic abortus (HA) and partial mole (PM) show positive staining. This study was undertaken to evaluate the role of p57 IHC along with histomorphology in differentiating between CM, PM and non-molar or HA. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study over a period of three and a half years on archival material. Detailed histomorphological review along with p57 IHC was carried out in 28 diagnosed cases (23 CM, 4 PM and 1 molar pregnancy not categorized) and 25 controls of four normal placentas and 21 POC (8 non-hydropic and 13 HA). Results: In 14.8 per cent (4/27) cases, there was discordance in accurate subtyping of molar pregnancy. One case of CM showed inconsistent IHC pattern. In 15.4 per cent (2/13) HA, molar pregnancy was final diagnosis. After final review, there were 25 CM, five PM, 22 non-molar controls including 10 HA and one not assigned (PM/HA). IHC with p57 was negative in 96 per cent CM and positive in 100 and 95 per cent PM and non-molar controls, respectively. Interpretation & conclusions: This study showed that negative p57KIP2 immunostaining reliably identified CM and could be used in association with the histological findings to distinguish CM from its mimics.
Learning class‐specific descriptors for deformable shapes using localized spectral convolutional networks

In this paper, we propose a generalization of convolutional neural networks (CNN) to non‐Euclidean domains for the analysis of deformable shapes. Our construction is based on localized frequency analysis (a generalization of the windowed Fourier transform to manifolds) that is used to extract the local behavior of some dense intrinsic descriptor, roughly acting as an analogy to patches in images. The resulting local frequency representations are then passed through a bank of filters whose coefficient are determined by a learning procedure minimizing a task‐specific cost. Our approach generalizes several previous methods such as HKS, WKS, spectral CNN, and GPS embeddings. Experimental results show that the proposed approach allows learning class‐specific shape descriptors significantly outperforming recent state‐of‐the‐art methods on standard benchmarks.
Depicting E-business application adoption for small and medium enterprises (SMEs): The e-business triangle model

Given the importance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to economic development, both academics and policy makers have been interested in measuring the progression of SMEs' e-business adoption. Numerous ebusiness “stage models” for SMEs have previously been proposed to track such progression. However, there remain a few issues with these models. Previous models tend to be too linear and prescriptive of certain e-business applications for SMEs. The problem with this is that SMEs do not necessarily adopt application in linear fashion and given the diversity of SMEs, some applications may not be relevant for some SMEs. In addition, most of these models tend to overlook secondary value chain activities that support an enterprise. We thus proposed a model that attempts to address these issues. The proposed model, called the e-business triangle model, attempts to depict SMEs' adoption of e-business in non-linear way and categorizes them into new groups of activities, namely support activities, primary activities, integrated activities and analytics activities. To apply the model, we conducted a personally administered survey in two industries, trade and services, depicting different e-business adoption patterns between them.
Effect of Slideshows in Websites on Information Search Based on Gaze Data

This paper examines the effect of menu items placed around a slide, in the center of a webpage, on searching for information; the goal is to improve website page design. First, we show that most visitors direct their gaze away from the center slide and that when visitors move their eyes in the direction opposite to the side on which the target information is, the search time increases. Second, a probabilistic model is developed according to each initial gaze direction such that the search time can be inferred from each visitor’s eye movement. From this model, we study behavioral properties of visitors whose search times are either long or short. Finally, we suggest that menu items should not be placed on both sides of a slide. Author
Multi-Version Software Analysis to Detect Architectural Mismatches

A software repository is a special kind of information syste m maintaining information about one or more software components. The information may r ange from software code to design and requirement specifications, design decisions , test data, software versions and configurations. Software repository data are available for most large softw are projects and represent a detailed record of the development of a software system. Sof tware repositories are not only useful to record development history, this data can also be u sed to study various aspects of software development such as software design and architect ure. In this thesis we investigate whether the problems of increa sed effort encountered during code changes at ASML are caused by an inappropriate softw are architecture. To answer this question, we use software repository mining technique s to find evidence of architectural problems. The thesis consists of two main parts: a literature study in s oftware repository mining and a case study in which we conduct various mining experiments o ASML source code.
Open System Categorical Quantum Semantics in Natural Language Processing

Originally inspired by categorical quantum mechanics (Abramsky and Coecke, LiCS'04), the categorical compositional distributional model of natural language meaning of Coecke, Sadrzadeh and Clark provides a conceptually motivated procedure to compute the meaning of a sentence, given its grammatical structure within a Lambek pregroup and a vectorial representation of the meaning of its parts. The predictions of this first model have outperformed that of other models in mainstream empirical language processing tasks on large scale data. Moreover, just like CQM allows for varying the model in which we interpret quantum axioms, one can also vary the model in which we interpret word meaning. In this paper we show that further developments in categorical quantum mechanics are relevant to natural language processing too. Firstly, Selinger's CPM-construction allows for explicitly taking into account lexical ambiguity and distinguishing between the two inherently different notions of homonymy and polysemy. In terms of the model in which we interpret word meaning, this means a passage from the vector space model to density matrices. Despite this change of model, standard empirical methods for comparing meanings can be easily adopted, which we demonstrate by a small-scale experiment on real-world data. This experiment moreover provides preliminary evidence of the validity of our proposed new model for word meaning. Secondly, commutative classical structures as well as their non-commutative counterparts that arise in the image of the CPM-construction allow for encoding relative pronouns, verbs and adjectives, and finally, iteration of the CPM-construction, something that has no counterpart in the quantum realm, enables one to accommodate both entailment and ambiguity.
A CLINICAL STUDY OF TRANSFUSION REACTIONS: THE HEMOLYTIC EFFECT OF GROUP-O BLOOD AND POOLED PLASMA CONTAINING INCOMPATIBLE ISOAGGLUTININS.

The stored blood employed during World War II for the treatment of battle casualties was almost exclusively group-O blood, in consequence of which patients of blood groups A, B and AB were obliged to receive incompatible isoagglutinins in the course of transfusion. Anti-A and anti-B isoagglutinins, incompletely absorbed in the process of pooling, were likewise contained in the dried plasma supplied by the Army. Thus, all patients of blood groups other than group 0 receiving pooled plasma, and over 50 per cent of those who were transfused with whole blood were subjected to the injection of incompatible isoagglutinins. The preponderance of evidence in the literature indicates that the transfusion of group-O blood into recipients of other blood groups rarely produces serious reactions (1). The most extensive observations in this connection were reported by Aubert et al. (2), who described instances of chills, fever and evidences of blood destruction, but no serious complications following such transfusions. Reports of severe reactions in response to the injection of incompatible group-O blood have, however, appeared from time to time. A proper evaluation of such records in the earlier literature is difficult, because of the lack of data pertaining to Rh compatibility, but isolated cases have more recently been described (3 to 5) in which the Rh factor clearly could not be implicated. The present report is based on a detailed study of transfusion recipients, including 85 soldiers who received incompatible isoagglutinins in varying amounts. This investigation has been conducted for the purpose of determining in what manner and to what extent humans may react to the administration of whole blood and plasma containing these isoagglutinins, with the hope that such observations might yield data of practical
A proposal of a distributed access control over Fog computing: The ITS use case

Internet of Things (IoT) raises many security challenges in relation with the different applications that can be deployed over these environments. IoT access control systems must respond to the new IoT requirements such as scalability, dynamicity, real-time interaction and resources constraint. The goal of this paper is to propose an approach based on Fog and Distributed Hash Table (DHT) toward access control for the Internet of Things. To evaluate the performances of our access solution, we used NS-3 and SUMO. The preliminary obtained results show acceptable overhead for the considered Intelligent Transport System (ITS) scenario.
MODELLING OF CONCRETE PAVEMENT DOWEL-SLAB INTERACTION

In this study, the interaction between a dowel and the concrete slab of a transverse pavement joint are modeled using a finite element analysis tool. The model is designed to investigate the deflection of a dowel bar under traffic loading and the bearing stresses that are produced at the dowel-concrete interface. High bearing stresses can damage the concrete encasing the dowel leading to dowellooseness and eventual slab-faulting. Non-corrosive materials such as fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) have been introduced as alternative dowel materials. FRP exhibits lower flexural stiffness than typical epoxy-coated steel dowels, but has been shown to transfer traffic loads across the joint adequately. FRP has provided excellent performance in pavements thus far, but the long-term performance is unknown. This study utilizes the finite element approach to investigate the behavioural differences between steel and lower-strength FRP dowels under load. Two diameter sizes of each material were modeled in order to determine the effect of dowel diameter on deflections and bearing stresses. Results from the finite element model were compared with widely accepted theoretical solutions and it was found that correlation between the two was sensitive to an elastic parameter known as the modulus of dowel support.