Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hypoxia-Induced MicroRNA-210 Targets Neurodegenerative Pathways

Hypoxia-regulated microRNA-210 (miR-210) is a highly conserved microRNA, known to regulate various processes under hypoxic conditions. Previously we found that miR-210 is also involved in honeybee learning and memory, raising the questions of how neural activity may induce hypoxia-regulated genes and how miR-210 may regulate plasticity in more complex mammalian systems. Using a pull-down approach, we identified 620 unique target genes of miR-210 in humans, among which there was a significant enrichment of age-related neurodegenerative pathways, including Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s diseases. We have also validated that miR-210 directly regulates various identified target genes of interest involved with neuronal plasticity, neurodegenerative diseases, and miR-210-associated cancers. This data suggests a potentially novel mechanism for how metabolic changes may couple plasticity to neuronal activity through hypoxia-regulated genes such as miR-210.
Memory Forensic Challenges Under Misused Architectural Features

With increasingly complex cyber attacks occurring every day, memory-based forensic techniques are becoming instrumental in digital investigations. Forensic examiners can unravel what happened on a system by acquiring and inspecting in-memory data. However, the foundation of this analysis can be invalidated if the memory acquisition has been altered. In this paper, we study the feasibility of malicious software misusing architectural features to sabotage memory forensics. The misuse of two architectural features, namely, physical address layout and secure containers, is presented. The first architectural feature explored in this paper is the physical address layout. It is used by the northbridge to route memory access to either physical memory or I/O devices on x86 platforms. Observing this design choice, we propose Hidden in I/O Space (HIveS), which manipulates CPU registers to alter the physical address layout to conceal memory. The system uses a novel I/O shadowing technique to lock a memory region named HIveS memory into I/O address space to prevent access. Two novel techniques, blackbox write and TLB camouflage, are developed to further protect the unlocked HIveS memory against memory forensics while allowing access for attackers. The second architectural feature explored in this paper is hardware-aided secure execution technology. More specifically, hardware-enforced memory encryption in Intel secure guard extension is used in malicious enclave software (Malclaveware) to prevent introspection and memory forensics. A prototype of HIveS is built and tested against a set of memory acquisition tools for both Windows and Linux running on the x86 platform. Malclaveware is also prototyped in Windows to demonstrate the risk. More importantly, we proposed countermeasures and mitigations for the newly discovered attacks. Through these discussions, we aim to raise the awareness of the potential risks of misusing hardware architectural features.
Towards a Probabilistic Model for Lexical Entailment

While modeling entailment at the lexical-level is a prominent task, addressed by most textual entailment systems, it has been approached mostly by heuristic methods, neglecting some of its important aspects. We present a probabilistic approach for this task which covers aspects such as differentiating various resources by their reliability levels, considering the length of the entailed sentence, the number of its covered terms and the existence of multiple evidence for the entailment of a term. The impact of our model components is validated by evaluations, which also show that its performance is in line with the best published entailment systems.
Bio-Inspired Artificial Olfactory System

Author(s): Huang, Ping-Chen | Advisor(s): Rabaey, Jan | Abstract: The escalating statistical variation of device behaviors in the nano-scale era has led to a search for alternative computational paradigms where randomness can be treated as opportunities rather than nuisance. This will allow computational systems to be built with circuits designed at the nominal case and have better access to the advantages of scaled technologies. Such computational paradigms may emerge as we explore the information processing in the biological sensory systems, which achieve unparalleled performance and energy efficiency with mediocre and unreliable components. Implementations of signal processing tasks such as feature extraction, learning, or recognition can especially benefit from bio-inspired computational models. In this thesis, we present a bio-inspired artificial olfactory system, which consists of an analog feature extraction front end that operates efficiently in the low-precision regime and a spike pattern classifier that exploits the randomness in circuits.The analog front end implements a novel trainable feature extraction algorithm for metal-oxide gas sensor arrays. The algorithm extracts one composite feature of all analytes and transforms the sensor responses into concentration-invariant spike patterns. This composite feature is extracted by performing the gradient decent algorithm during training. This 6-channel analog frond end consumes 519 nW/channel in the training mode, and 463 nW/channel in the recognition mode.The spike pattern classifier consists of a transformation of the input spikes into high-dimensional sparse vectors and a cortical memory model. The transformation is based on a random sampling scheme that can be efficiently performed with circuits exhibiting large parametric variations. Moreover, sparse representations allow fast and robust pattern storage and retrieval with associative memories such as the correlation matrix memory. It’s realized today that hyper-dimensional computing architectures like this may be a perfect match to the emerging nano-scale devices. We show how this classifier can be densely and efficiently implemented in a 3-D CNFET-RRAM technology.
Myeloid cell deficiency of p38γ/p38δ protects against candidiasis and regulates antifungal immunity

Candida albicans is a frequent aetiologic agent of sepsis associated with high mortality in immunocompromised patients. Developing new antifungal therapies is a medical need due to the low efficiency and resistance to current antifungal drugs. Here, we show that p38γ and p38δ regulate the innate immune response to C. albicans. We describe a new TAK1‐TPL2‐MKK1‐ERK1/2 pathway in macrophages, which is activated by Dectin‐1 engagement and positively regulated by p38γ/p38δ. In mice, p38γ/p38δ deficiency protects against C. albicans infection by increasing ROS and iNOS production and thus the antifungal capacity of neutrophils and macrophages, and by decreasing the hyper‐inflammation that leads to severe host damage. Leucocyte recruitment to infected kidneys and production of inflammatory mediators are decreased in p38γ/δ‐null mice, reducing septic shock. p38γ/p38δ in myeloid cells are critical for this effect. Moreover, pharmacological inhibition of p38γ/p38δ in mice reduces fungal burden, revealing that these p38MAPKs may be therapeutic targets for treating C. albicans infection in humans.
Utility-based cooperative spectrum leasing scheme for CR networks with hybrid energy supplies

As cognitive radio (CR) technologies developed, cooperative CR networks (CCRNs) have become a potential way to increase the spectrum efficiency. Moreover, as the authors face the problem of energy shortage nowadays, energy harvesting (EH) is considered to be an effective method to alleviate this problem. However, with fitful and random energy arrivals, the energy harvested from natural energy source cannot guarantee satisfactory quality of service in EH networks. Hybrid energy supplies system has emerged as a promising way to solve unstable power supply problems, which mean that the communication terminals in these networks are powered by both fixed power supply and harvested energy. In this study, they propose a novel utility-based cooperative spectrum leasing scheme for CCRNs with hybrid energy supplies. The secondary user (SU) is a cooperative relay powered largely by harvested energy extracted from the radio-frequency signal of the primary user (PU). In this way, SU can shorten the primary data transmission period, and then win the access opportunities for secondary data transmission. They formulate this model as a Stackelberg game. In such a scenario, the PU intends to enhance its revenue and save energy by cooperating with the SU, while the SU tries to improve throughput and minimise the fixed energy consumption. The Stackelberg equilibrium for the proposed scheme is analysed. The experimental results show that the utility of both PU and SU can be improved under this scheme.
Spiritual and religious coping and depression among family caregivers of pediatric cancer patients in Latin America

Several studies have shown that spiritual/religious beliefs are associated with mental health and quality of life. However, so far, no study assessed the relationship between spiritual/religious coping (SRC) and depressive symptoms in family caregivers (FCs) of pediatric cancer patients, particularly in Latin America. This study aimed to investigate whether Positive and Negative SRC strategies are associated with depressive symptoms in FCs of pediatric cancer patients in Brazil.
Liver metabolism in adult male mice offspring: consequences of a maternal, paternal or both maternal and paternal high-fructose diet

Abstract The study aimed to evaluate the consequences of the consumption of a high-fructose diet (HFR; fructose was responsible for 45% of the energy from carbohydrates) by the mother, the father, or both on C57BL/6 adult male offspring. Non-consanguineous parents received the diet (HFR or control, C) from 8 weeks before mating until weaning (n=10 fathers and n=10 mothers on each diet). After weaning, only the C diet was offered to offspring. The groups were formed by one male randomly taken from each litter. The offspring groups were identified according to the mother’s diet (the first letter), then the father’s diet (the second letter), that is, C/C, C/HFR, HFR/C, HFR/HFR (n=10 per group). The parents exhibited the following characteristics: compared with those of the C group, the HFR parents had higher blood pressure (BP), enlarged liver, increased hepatic triacylglycerol content, hypercholesterolemia, hypertriglyceridemia, high plasma leptin and low adiponectin. The offspring exhibited the following characteristics: compared with the C/C group, the HFR/HFR group had high BP. The C/HFR, HFR/C and HFR/HFR showed elevated uric acid and leptin levels and diminished adiponectin. The HFR/HFR group showed liver inflammation (increased NFκB, SOCS3, JNK, TNF-α, IL1-β and IL6 levels). Likewise, SREBP-1c and FAS were upregulated. In conclusion, the consumption of a HFR by the mother and/or father is associated with adverse effects on liver metabolism in adult male offspring. When both mother and father are fed a HFR, the adverse effects on the offspring are more severe.
Methylxanthine Drug Monitoring with Wearable Sweat Sensors

Drug monitoring plays crucial roles in doping control and precision medicine. It helps physicians tailor drug dosage for optimal benefits, track patients' compliance to prescriptions, and understand the complex pharmacokinetics of drugs. Conventional drug tests rely on invasive blood draws. While urine and sweat are attractive alternative biofluids, the state‐of‐the‐art methods require separate sample collection and processing steps and fail to provide real‐time information. Here, a wearable platform equipped with an electrochemical differential pulse voltammetry sensing module for drug monitoring is presented. A methylxanthine drug, caffeine, is selected to demonstrate the platform's functionalities. Sweat caffeine levels are monitored under various conditions, such as drug doses and measurement time after drug intake. Elevated sweat caffeine levels upon increasing dosage and confirmable caffeine physiological trends are observed. This work leverages a wearable sweat sensing platform toward noninvasive and continuous point‐of‐care drug monitoring and management.
M-PACT: Michigan Platform for Activity Classification in Tensorflow

Action classification is a widely known and popular task that offers an approach towards video understanding. The absence of an easy-to-use platform containing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models presents an issue for the community. Given that individual research code is not written with an end user in mind and in certain cases code is not released, even for published articles, the importance of a common unified platform capable of delivering results while removing the burden of developing an entire system cannot be overstated. To try and overcome these issues, we develop a tensorflow-based unified platform to abstract away unnecessary overheads in terms of an end-to-end pipeline setup in order to allow the user to quickly and easily prototype action classification models. With the use of a consistent coding style across different models and seamless data flow between various submodules, the platform lends itself to the quick generation of results on a wide range of SOTA methods across a variety of datasets. All of these features are made possible through the use of fully pre-defined training and testing blocks built on top of a small but powerful set of modular functions that handle asynchronous data loading, model initializations, metric calculations, saving and loading of checkpoints, and logging of results. The platform is geared towards easily creating models, with the minimum requirement being the definition of a network architecture and preprocessing steps from a large custom selection of layers and preprocessing functions. M-PACT currently houses four SOTA activity classification models which include, I3D, C3D, ResNet50+LSTM and TSN. The classification performance achieved by these models are, 43.86% for ResNet50+LSTM on HMDB51 while C3D and TSN achieve 93.66% and 85.25% on UCF101 respectively.
Thoracic ROM measurement system with visual bio-feedback: System design and biofeedback evaluation

Patients with diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) need to improve their thorax mobility. Thoracic ROM is one of the simplest and most useful indexes to evaluate the respiratory function. In this paper, we have proposed the prototype of a simple thoracic ROM measurement system with real-time visual bio-feedback in the chest expansion test. In this system, the thoracic ROM is measured using a wire-type linear encoder whose wire is wrapped around the thorax. In this paper, firstly, the repeatability and reliability of measured thoracic ROM was confirmed as a first report of the developed prototype. Secondly, we analyzed the effect of the bio-feedback system on the respiratory function. The result of the experiment showed that it was easier to maintain a large and stable thoracic ROM during deep breathing by using the real-time visual biofeedback system of the thoracic ROM.
Human Thalamic-Prefrontal Peduncle Connectivity Revealed by Diffusion Spectrum Imaging Fiber Tracking

The thalamic-prefrontal peduncle (TPP) is a large bundle connecting the thalamus and prefrontal cortex. The definitive structure and function of the TPP are still controversial. To investigate the connectivity and segmentation patterns of the TPP, we employed diffusion spectrum imaging with generalized q-sampling reconstruction to perform both subject-specific and template-based analyses. Our results confirmed the trajectory and spatial relationship of the TPP in the human brain and identified the connection areas in the prefrontal cortex. The TPP-connecting areas identified based on Brodmann areas (BAs) were BAs 8–11 and 45–47. Based on the automated anatomical atlas, these areas were the medial superior frontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, pars triangularis, pars orbitalis, anterior orbital gyrus, and lateral orbital gyrus. In addition, we identified the TPP connection areas in the thalamus, including the anterior and medial nuclei, and the lateral dorsal/lateral posterior nuclei. TPP fibers connected the thalamus with the ipsilateral prefrontal BAs 11, 47, 10, 46, 45, 9, and 8 seriatim from medial to lateral, layer by layer. Our results provide further details of the thalamic-prefrontal peduncle structure, and may aid future studies and a better understanding of the functional roles of the TPP in the human brain.
Coordinate Descent Faceoff: Primal or Dual?

Randomized coordinate descent (RCD) methods are state-of-the-art algorithms for training linear predictors via minimizing regularized empirical risk. When the number of examples (n) is much larger than the number of features (d), a common strategy is to apply RCD to the dual problem. On the other hand, when the number of features is much larger than the number of examples, it makes sense to apply RCD directly to the primal problem. In this paper we provide the first joint study of these two approaches when applied to L2regularized linear ERM. First, we show through a rigorous analysis that for dense data, the above intuition is precisely correct. However, we find that for sparse and structured data, primal RCD can significantly outperform dual RCD even if d n, and vice versa, dual RCD can be much faster than primal RCD even if n d. Moreover, we show that, surprisingly, a single sampling strategy minimizes both the (bound on the) number of iterations and the overall expected complexity of RCD. Note that the latter complexity measure also takes into account the average cost of the iterations, which depends on the structure and sparsity of the data, and on the sampling strategy employed. We confirm our theoretical predictions using extensive experiments with both synthetic and real data sets.
Plasmon Tunability of Gold Nanostars at the Tip Apexes

Herein, we present an optimized bottom-up approach to fabricate homogeneous Au nanostars with plasmon resonances fully tunable between the red and the infrared. The synthetic method relies on the kinetic control of the reaction upon optimization of the reactant concentrations (i.e., gold seeds, reducing agent, and gold salt). Optical enhancing properties of the obtained materials are demonstrated by using SERS with visible and infrared lasers.
Detection of Active Topology Probing Deception

Abstract : For all purposes and intents, being able to infer the topology of a network is crucial to both operators and adversaries alike. Traceroute is a common active probing technique but it may be subverted by deceptive responses. We identify possible inconsistencies in traceroute deception systems, and endeavor to find potential deception in the historic IPv4 Routed /24 Topology Dataset from the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). Our results show three major patterns in 2013 and 2014 that exhibited instances of inconsistencies matching the techniques in our methodology. In addition to analyzing the historic dataset, we evaluate three cases of traceroute manipulation in the wild. These case studies include The Pirate Bay (TPB) server supposedly residing in North Korea, the Star Wars- and Christmas Carol-themed gags involving customized Domain Name System (DNS) names, and the experimental DeTracer at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). In the TPB case, we discovered extensive and long-running deception in the /24 subnet. We find intriguing patterns in the gag traceroutes and fake topologies from the DeTracer for which we may use to improve our filtering process. In all, the findings will aid future operations in verifying inferred network topologies from traceroutes.
Myocardial strain estimated from standard cine MRI closely represents strain estimated from dedicated strain-encoded MRI

A method of non-rigid image registration was developed and evaluated for the purpose of quantifying myocardial displacement and strain from cine MRI using DENSE MRI as the reference standard. The objective of this paper was to study the potential use of cine MRI with image registration, as a means of measuring strain. The local displacement of the left ventricle was modelled by free-form deformations using b-splines. Cardiac MRI images were obtained from four healthy volunteers at 1.5T and analysed by the implementation of image registration algorithms in cine data and with DENSE view in DENSE data. The results indicated there was less than 3% difference between the strain values obtained from cine and DENSE scans averaging across the regions of the left ventricle in healthy subjects (n=4). There lies great potential in the implementation of cine MRI as a means of strain estimation. As such the measurement of strain from standard cine MRI poses an appealing and potentially clinically useful new option for assessing patients with myocardial dysfunction.
Neuroprotection by post‐stroke administration of an oral formulation of angiotensin‐(1–7) in ischaemic stroke

What is the central question of this study? Angiotensin‐(1–7) decreases cerebral infarct volume and improves neurological function when delivered centrally before and during ischaemic stroke. Here, we assessed the neuroprotective effects of angiotensin‐(1–7) when delivered orally post‐stroke. What is the main finding and its importance? We show that oral delivery of angiotensin‐(1–7) attenuates cerebral damage induced by middle cerebral artery occlusion in rats, without affecting blood pressure or cerebral blood flow. Importantly, these treatments begin post‐stroke at times coincident with the treatment window for tissue plasminogen activator, providing supporting evidence for clinical translation of this new therapeutic strategy.
Tyrosine kinase receptor c‐ros‐oncogene 1 inhibition alleviates aberrant bone formation of TWIST‐1 haploinsufficient calvarial cells from Saethre–Chotzen syndrome patients

Saethre–Chotzen syndrome (SCS), associated with TWIST‐1 mutations, is characterized by premature fusion of cranial sutures. TWIST‐1 haploinsufficiency, leads to alterations in suture mesenchyme cellular gene expression patterns, resulting in aberrant osteogenesis and craniosynostosis. We analyzed the expression of the TWIST‐1 target, Tyrosine kinase receptor c‐ros‐oncogene 1 (C‐ROS‐1) in TWIST‐1 haploinsufficient calvarial cells derived from SCS patients and calvaria of Twist‐1del/+ mutant mice and found it to be highly expressed when compared to TWIST‐1 wild‐type controls. Knock‐down of C‐ROS‐1 expression in TWIST‐1 haploinsufficient calvarial cells derived from SCS patients was associated with decreased capacity for osteogenic differentiation in vitro. Furthermore, treatment of human SCS calvarial cells with the tyrosine kinase chemical inhibitor, Crizotinib, resulted in reduced C‐ROS‐1 activity and the osteogenic potential of human SCS calvarial cells with minor effects on cell viability or proliferation. Cultured human SCS calvarial cells treated with Crizotinib exhibited a dose‐dependent decrease in alkaline phosphatase activity and mineral deposition, with an associated decrease in expression levels of Runt‐related transcription factor 2 and OSTEOPONTIN, with reduced PI3K/Akt signalling in vitro. Furthermore, Crizotinib treatment resulted in reduced BMP‐2 mediated bone formation potential of whole Twist‐1del/+ mutant mouse calvaria organotypic cultures. Collectively, these results suggest that C‐ROS‐1 promotes osteogenic differentiation of TWIST‐1 haploinsufficient calvarial osteogenic progenitor cells. Furthermore, the aberrant osteogenic potential of these cells is inhibited by the reduction of C‐ROS‐1. Therefore, targeting C‐ROS‐1 with a pharmacological agent, such as Crizotinib, may serve as a novel therapeutic strategy to alleviate craniosynostosis associated with aberrant TWIST‐1 function.