Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Late-Onset Corticohippocampal Neurodepletion Attributable to Catastrophic Failure of Oxidative Phosphorylation in MILON Mice

We generated mitochondrial late-onset neurodegeneration (MILON) mice with postnatal disruption of oxidative phosphorylation in forebrain neurons. They develop normally and display no overt behavioral disturbances or histological changes during the first 5 months of life. The MILON mice display reduced levels of mitochondrial DNA and mitochondrial RNA from 2 and 4 months of age, respectively, and severely respiratory chain-deficient neurons from 4 months of age. Surprisingly, these respiratory chain-deficient neurons are viable for at least 1 month without showing signs of neurodegeneration or major induction of defenses against oxidative stress. Prolonged neuronal respiratory chain deficiency is thus required for the induction of neurodegeneration. Before developing neurological symptoms, MILON mice show increased vulnerability to excitotoxic stress. We observed a markedly enhanced sensitivity to excitotoxic challenge, manifest as an abundance of terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated biotinylated UTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) reactive cells after kainic acid injection, in 4-month-old MILON mice, showing that respiratory chain-deficient neurons are more vulnerable to stress. At ∼5–5.5 months of age, MILON mice start to show signs of disease, followed by death shortly thereafter. The debut of overt disease in MILON mice coincides with onset of rapidly progressive neurodegeneration and massive cell death in hippocampus and neocortex. This profound neurodegenerative process is manifested as axonal degeneration, gliosis, and abundant TUNEL-positive nuclei. The MILON mouse model provides a novel and powerful tool for additional studies of the role for respiratory chain deficiency in neurodegeneration and aging.
Multi-receiver authentication code for network coding

Systems exploiting network coding suffer greatly from pollution attacks which consist of injecting malicious packets in the network. The pollution attacks are amplified by the network coding process resulting in a greater damage than under traditional routing. In this paper, we address this issue with unconditionally secure multi-receiver authentication codes designed for network coding. Our scheme is robust against pollution attacks from outsiders and even from a coalition of k - 1 malicious insiders. With our authentication code, intermediate nodes can verify the message integrity and origin of the packets received without having to decode and thus detect and discard the malicious packets in-transit that fail the verification. This way, the pollution is canceled out before reaching the destinations.
Unambiguous determination of shape from photometric stereo with unknown light sources

Photometric stereo with uncalibrated lights determines surface orientations ambiguously up to any regular transformation. If the surface reflectance model is separable with respect to the illumination and viewing directions, its inherent symmetries enable to design two previously unrecognized constraints on normals that reduce this ambiguity. The two constraints represent projections of normals onto planes perpendicular to the viewing and illumination directions, respectively. We identify the classes of transformations that leave each constraint invariant. We construct the constraints using polarization measurement under the assumption of separable reflectance model for smooth dielectrics. We verify that applying the first constraint together with the integrability constraint results in bas-relief ambiguity, while application of the second constraint on integrable normals reduces the ambiguity to convex/concave ambiguity. Importantly, the latter result is also obtained when the first and second constraints alone are combined.
Data Mining Prototype for Detecting E-Commerce Fraud

The advent of electronic commerce (e-commerce) has marked a significant change in the way business now approach the implementation of their sales and marketing strategies. Electronic commerce growth has been accompanied by an increase in fraudulent practices. Researchers have proposed rules-based auditing systems for electronic commerce transactions, but they highly depend on the auditor’s knowledge of ecommerce fraud (Wong et al., 2000). While fraud patterns may occur, the management, control, and application of these patterns is difficult due to the increasing number of online transactions currently handled by e-commerce systems. In this paper, we present research in progress of the prototype of an extension to e-commerce auditing systems that use data mining techniques to generate rules from fraud patterns. Subsequently, the system applies these rules to e-commerce databases with the aim of isolating those transactions that have a high chance of being fraudulent.
EXPERIMENTAL AND ANALYTICAL STUDY OF THERMALLY INDUCED RESIDUAL STRESSES FOR STAINLESS STEEL GRADE USING GMAW PROCESS

Gas metal arc welding (GMAW) controls the metal from the wire rod by developing the arc as well as by controlling the input process parameters. High heating at a one location during welding and further rapid cooling generates residual stress and distortion in the weld and base metal. In the last few decades, various research efforts have been directed towards the control of welding process parameter aiming at reducing residual stress and distortion they are strongly affected by many parameters like structural, material and welding parameters. Such welding failure can be minimized by controlling the weld heat input. The distribution of the temperature in weld joint of AISI202 grade high strength steel is investigated by Finite Element Method (FEM) using ANSYS software and experiment has been performed to verify the developed thermo-mechanical finite element model using the GMAW process. Basic aim of our paper is to analyse temperature distribution and residual stresses in dissimilar metal welded plates to avoid future failure in material because experimental process is costly. The behavior of weld zone is affected by variation in temperature distribution, microstructure and mechanical properties of the material. The residual stress gradient near the fusion zone is higher than in any other location in the surrounding area. Because of this stress gradient, cold crack at the fusion zone in high strength steel occur. The main objective of this simulation is the determination of temperatures and stresses during and after the process. Temperature distributions define the heat affected zone (HAZ) where material properties are affected. Stress calculation is necessary because high residual stresses may be caused fractures, fatigue which causes unpredictable failures in regions near the weld bead region.
Workflows in Computation Grids

This paper shows that flexibility of workflow executions, i.e., the ability to deviate from a given model on the fly and during execution, is crucial for a wide applicability of workflow management technology in computing grids. Since flexibility concepts for workflows have been elaborated extensively in conventional business-oriented domains, we show how to reuse and adapt them for workflow management in computation grids
Accelerating Multicore Architecture Simulation Using Application Profile

Architecture simulators play an important role in exploring frontiers in the early stages of the architecture design. However, the execution time of simulators increases with an increase the number of cores. The sampling simulation technique that was originally proposed to simulate single-core processors is a promising approach to reduce simulation time. Two main hurdles for multi/many-core are preparing sampling points and thread skewing at functional simulation time. This paper proposes a very simple and low-error sampling-based acceleration technique for multi/many-core simulators. For a parallelized application, an iteration of a large loop including a parallelizable program part, is defined as a sampling unit. We apply X-means method to a profile result of the collection of iterations derived from a real machine to form clusters of those iterations. Multiple iterations are exploited as sampling points from these clusters. We execute the simulation along the sampling points and calculate the number of total execution cycles. Results from a 16-core simulation show that our proposed simulation technique gives us a maximum of 443x speedup with a 0.52% error and 218x speedup with 1.50% error on an average.
Systolic blood pressure and incident heart failure in the elderly. The Cardiovascular Health Study and the Health, Ageing and Body Composition Study

Background The exact form of the association between systolic blood pressure (SBP) and heart failure (HF) risk in the elderly remains incompletely defined, especially in individuals not receiving antihypertensive drugs. Objective To examine the association between SBP and HF risk in the elderly. Design Competing-risks proportional hazards modelling of incident HF risk, using 10-year follow-up data from two NIH-sponsored cohort studies: the Cardiovascular Health Study (inception: 1989–90 and 1992–3) and the Health ABC Study (inception: 1997–8). Setting Community-based cohorts. Participants 4408 participants (age, 72.8 (4.9) years; 53.1% women, 81.7% white; 18.3% black) without prevalent HF and not receiving antihypertensive drugs at baseline. Main outcome measures Incident HF, defined as first adjudicated hospitalisation for HF. Results Over 10 years, 493 (11.2%) participants developed HF. Prehypertension (120–139 mm Hg), stage 1 (140–159 mm Hg), and stage 2 (≥160 mm Hg) hypertension were associated with escalating HF risk; HRs versus optimal SBP (<120 mm Hg) in competing-risks models controlling for clinical characteristics were 1.63 (95% CI 1.23 to 2.16; p=0.001), 2.21 (95% CI 1.65 to 2.96; p<0.001) and 2.60 (95% CI 1.85 to 3.64; p<0.001), respectively. Overall 255/493 (51.7%) HF events occurred in participants with SBP <140 mm Hg at baseline. Increasing SBP was associated with higher HF risk in women than in men; no race–SBP interaction was seen. In analyses with continuous SBP, HF risk had a continuous positive association with SBP to levels as low as 113 mm Hg in men and 112 mm Hg in women. Conclusions There is a continuous positive association between SBP and HF risk in the elderly for levels of SBP as low as <115 mm Hg; over half of incident HF events occur in individuals with SBP <140 mm Hg.
MIP: Mashup for Industrial Internship Placement

In this paper, Mashup for Internship Placement (MIP) system for undergraduate students is presented. One of the problems in Student Industrial Internship Unit is the lack of proper channel for information sharing among the internship students during or after the training. Thus, it is a challenge for students to decide which internship offer to accept due to lack of knowledge about the potential company and the unavailability of information about the job offered. The MIP system for undergraduate students is proposed to integrate disparate data from multiple sources using Yahoo Pipes. The objectives of this research are two-fold: (1) To investigate mashup as a new paradigm for information visualization and (2) To develop a prototype system that incorporates features for user to view the location and information about the company that offers internship placement in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Rapid Prototyping methodology and Yahoo Pipes were used in the design of the MIP system. Data from Google Maps and host company’s details were extracted using Fetch Feed widget in Yahoo Pipes and integrated with the RSS feed to display search results on interactive map. Preliminary results show that the MIP prototype system is a useful Web 2.0 application for assisting users in making just-in-time decision.
A Probabilistic Power Estimation Method for Combinational Circuits Under Real Gate Delay Model

Our aim is the development of a novel probabilistic method to estimate the power consumption of a combinational circuit under real gate delay model handling temporal, structural and input pattern dependencies. The chosen gate delay model allows handling both the functional and spurious transitions. It is proved that the switching activity evaluation problem assuming real gate delay model is reduced to the zero delay switching activity evaluation problem at specific time instances. A modified Boolean function, which describes the logic behavior of a signal at any time instance, including time parameter is introduced. Moreover, a mathematical model based on Markov stochastic processes, which describes the temporal and spatial correlation in terms of the associated zero delay based parameters is presented. Based on the mathematical model and considering the modified Boolean function, a new algorithm to evaluate the switching activity at specific time instances using Ordering Binary Decision Diagrams (OBBDs) is also presented. Comparative study of benchmark circuits demonstrates the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.
Towards 3-D distributed odor source localization: An extended graph-based formation control algorithm for plume tracking

The large number of potential applications for robotic odor source localization has motivated the development of a variety of plume tracking algorithms, the majority of which work in restricted two-dimensional scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a distributed algorithm for 3-D plume tracking using a system of ground and aerial robots in formation. We propose an algorithm that takes advantage of spatially distributed measurements to track the plume in 3-D and lead the robots to the source by integrating three behaviors - upwind movement, plume centering, and Laplacian feedback formation control. We evaluate this strategy in simulation and with real robots in a wind tunnel. For a source close to the ground, results show that a team of robots running our algorithm reaches the source with low lateral error while also tracing the horizontal and vertical plume shape.
Shape-based Object Matching Using Point Context

This paper proposes a novel object matching algorithm based on shape contours. In order to ensure low computational complexity in shape representation, our descriptor is composed by a small number of interest points which are generated by considering both curvatures and the overall shape trend. To effectively describe each point of interest, we introduce a simple and highly discriminative point descriptor, namely Point Context, which represents its geometrical and topological location. For shape matching, we observed that the correspondences are not only dependent on the similarities between these single points in different objects, but they are also related to the geometric relations between multiple points of interest in the same object. Therefore, a high-order graph matching formulation is introduced to merge the single point similarities and the similarities between point triangles. The main contributions of this paper include (i) the introduction of a novel shape descriptor with robust shape points and their descriptors and (ii) the implementation of a high-order graph matching algorithm that solves the shape matching problem. Our method is validated through a series of object retrieval experiments on four datasets demonstrating its robustness and accuracy.
Formal Verification of Fault-Tolerant and Recovery Mechanisms for Safe Node Sequence Protocol

Fault-tolerance has huge impact on embedded safety-critical systems. As technology that assists to the development of such improvement, Safe Node Sequence Protocol (SNSP) is designed to make part of such impact. In this paper, we present a mechanism for fault-tolerance and recovery based on the Safe Node Sequence Protocol (SNSP) to strengthen the system robustness, from which the correctness of a fault-tolerant prototype system is analyzed and verified. In order to verify the correctness of more than thirty failure modes, we have partitioned the complete protocol state machine into several subsystems, followed to the injection of corresponding fault classes into dedicated independent models. Experiments demonstrate that this method effectively reduces the size of overall state space, and verification results indicate that the protocol is able to recover from the fault model in a fault-tolerant system and continue to operate as errors occur.
Recurrent neural network-based language modeling for an automatic Russian speech recognition system

In the paper, we describe a research of recurrent neural network language models for N-best list rescoring for automatic continuous Russian speech recognition. We tried recurrent neural networks with different number of units in the hidden layer. We achieved the relative word error rate reduction of 14% with respect to the baseline 3-gram model.
The Cold War and the Transformation of Latin American Studies in the United States

The Cold War assumptions of mainstream Latin American studies in the United States were challenged in the 1960s by a new generation of academics that opened up the field to progressive thinking, including Marxism. West Coast intellectuals played a major role in this transformation. These new Latin Americanists rejected the university-government-foundation nexus in the field and emphasized field research that brought them into close relationships with Latin Americans struggling for change and engaging with radical alternatives to mainstream thinking. In the course of this work, they confronted efforts to co-opt them and to discourage and even prevent their field research. Despite this they managed to transform Latin American studies into a field that was intellectually and politically vibrant both in theory and in practice. Los supuestos de la Guerra Fría dominantes en los estudios latinoamericanos en los Estados Unidos fueron cuestionados en la década de 1960 por una nueva generación de académicos que abrió el campo al pensamiento progresista, incluso el Marxismo. Los intelectuales de la costa oeste jugaron un papel importante en esta transformación. Estos nuevos latinoamericanistas rechazaron el nexo universidad-gobierno-fundación que caracterizó el campo y enfatizaron la investigación en el terreno que los ubicó en una estrecha relación con los latinoamericanos que luchan por el cambio y se enfrentan con alternativas radicales al pensamiento dominante. En el curso de este trabajo, confrontaron esfuerzos para cooptarlos y desalentar e incluso prevenir su investigación en el terreno. A pesar de esto, lograron transformar los estudios latinoamericanos en un campo que era intelectualmente y políticamente vibrante tanto en la teoría como en la práctica.
Some remarks on the delay effects on the stability of biochemical networks

This paper provides some qualitative results concerning the asymptotic stability of some dynamical systems encountered in biochemical networks. We adopt a frequency-domain approach combined with a simple geometric interpretation and we give a complete characterization of the dynamical behavior of the linearized system under consideration. The conclusion of the analysis can be resumed as follows: the linearized system is either delay-independent stable/unstable or it has only one delay stability interval.
A novel dynamic slip prediction and compensation approach based on haptic surface exploration

Slip prediction is important for maintaining the stability of object handling in robust grasping and dexterous manipulation. However, up to date a challenge still remains that how to accurately predict slip occurrence before it actually happens to allow robotic hands to conduct slip compensation in time. The concept of friction cone has been conventionally used to predict slip occurrence, where the static/kinetic friction coefficient is used as a threshold. However, this threshold, i.e. the ratio of the friction and normal forces at slip occurrence (also named as break-away friction ratio), is found not constant but varies with changes in acceleration and disturbing forces applied on the grasped object, raising difficulties when attempting to accurately predict slip. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to accurately predict varying slip thresholds in real time and compensate the predicted slip during a dynamic grasping. To achieve this, first a simple but efficient haptic surface exploration using robotic fingers is carried out to identify the friction properties of an object surface. Once the friction properties are established, the slip threshold at a given grasping condition can be predicted and the grasping forces are adjusted to prevent slip. The presented approach has been evaluated, showing good performance in terms of prediction accuracy and computational efficiency.
A Cost-Effective Noise-Reduction Filtering Structure Based on Unsymmetrical Working Windows

In this paper, we propose a fast, efficient algorithm and the associated VLSI architecture to perform the impulse-noise reduction for image pixels. The algorithm proposed here is developed with the principle that the horizontal and vertical, nearly neighboring pixels are more significantly correlated to a pixel than other distant ones. We conduct a few first- level simulations of our algorithm to prove its effectiveness. Then the associated VLSI architecture is coded with Verilog-HDL and the codes are simulated and verified in Quartus-II environment. The architecture is implemented in a FPGA, and the FPGA serves on a real-time platform to demonstrate the performance of our algorithm.
Performance evaluation of mobile front-haul employing ethernet- based TDM-PON with IQ data compression [Invited]

In this paper, we experimentally and numerically evaluate the performance of a common public radio interface (CPRI) over a time division multiplexed passive optical network (TDM-PON) system for accommodating densely deployed small cells in centralized-radio-accessnetwork- based future radio access. A prototype of the CPRI over TDM-PON is developed by using Ethernet-based TDM-PON. Experimental results showed that its synchronization accuracy and latency meet the requirements of a mobile front-haul using CPRI by the implemented delay jitter reduction and low-latency bandwidth allocation techniques. An in-phase and quadrature (IQ) data compression technique is also implemented on the system to enable a higher accommodation of remote radio heads. Experiments confirmed that the compression technique meets open radio equipment interface standards in terms of latency and signal quality degradation. Numerical results showed that the technique with a 0.45 compression ratio increases the number of supportable remote radio heads from 3 to 7 for a mobile front-haul with a 100 μs latency limitation.
Automatic Generation of Service Composition Plans for Correlated Queries

Service-oriented situational data integration provides end-users an opportunity to integrate Internet-based data sources by composing data services, thereby satisfying users' immediate and personalized demands. Correlated query of multiple sources is a common way of data integration. Because it is difficult for users to select and compose services manually, an approach is proposed in this paper to automatically generate data service composition plans for correlated queries according to user requests. As the input and output parameters of the traditional Web service operations are fixed, it is hard for them to meet diverse data query requests. In our approach, data content description is added to the data service model, and a query-friendly operation is provided for data services so that their input and output parameters can be dynamically determined. An algorithm for generating composition plans according to user requests is proposed. This algorithm selects proper services based on a query request, builds up service correlations with the data content description of the services, and then generates service composition plans on the basis of the service correlations. Experiments show that the approach can obtain effective composition plans of data services with a reasonable time cost.