Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gene expression changes in melanoma metastases in response to high‐dose chemotherapy during isolated limb perfusion

Despite recent advances in melanoma therapy, disseminated melanoma still lacks effective treatment, and recurrence of the tumor frequently occurs, even after high‐dose chemotherapy. The mechanisms responsible for this chemoresistance or for the formation of new relapses remain poorly understood. Using a human ‘model’, in which the isolated limb is perfused with high doses of the chemotherapeutic melphalan (ILP), we identified a five‐gene set (ATF3, CYR61, IER5, IL6, and PTGS2) of stress‐induced genes that was consistently upregulated after ILP in all in‐transit metastatic melanoma samples as well as in three melphalan‐treated melanoma cell lines. Early post‐ILP relapses retained these elevated expressions, whereas the expression of these genes returned to their original levels in late post‐ILP recurrences. In addition, we identified upregulation of these genes in the A375 cell line’s side population (SP) and melanospheres, established methods to enrich for candidate cancer stem cells (CSCs), which are considered chemoresistant and tumorigenic, and thus proposed to be responsible for tumor relapse. Our data identify an immediate and short‐term upregulation of early stress‐responsive genes that are potentially linked to chemoresistance and CSCs.
Development of an Integrated Risk Assessment Platform for the Management of Cardiovascular Diseases, Diabetes and Hypertension

Health care is an important requirement of life. It is defined as the prevention, treatment or management of health related problems by using diverse strategies and services. Information Technology (IT) has pervaded every sphere of life including health care. It not only includes information systems in hospitals for managing clinical information about patients but also includes telemedicine, computer-assisted instructions to patients as well as doctors, and extends to computer-assisted imaging and surgery. IT has now become a key component in Disease Management Systems used in the assessment and management of chronic diseases such as Diabetes and Coronary artery disease. We have developed an Integrated Risk Assessment and Health Management System [IRAHMS] to assess the risk of developing “life-style” diseases such as Cardio Vascular Disease, Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and Hypertension. This includes a patient clinical information database; a Framingham data based cardiovascular risk calculator and a module that provides personalized health management advice and healthy life style modifications that help an individual to lead a healthy life. The system also features an interactive risk analysis facility to analyze the contribution of each clinical parameter to the overall risk that can help motivate patients to see the overall benefits of risk factor modification or elimination.
Improving feature vectors for iris recognition through design and implementation of new filter bank and locally compound using of PCA and ICA

With a growing emphasis on human identification, iris recognition as a biometric identification has recently received increasing attention. Feature vectors are extracted from iris templates and are used for classification purpose. But efficiency of classification operation depends on exclusivity of feature vectors. We have improved features of iris templates by using new filter bank and applying locally of Principle and Independent component analysis on extracted features. Simulation results show improvement of iris recognition by decreasing false match rate in matching level.
Quantification of uncertain bed roughness under design conditionsand propagation to the design water levels, a case study for the riverRhine

Hydrodynamic river models are applied to design and evaluate measures for purposes such as safety against flooding. The modeling of river processes involves numerous uncertainties, resulting in uncertain model results. Knowledge of the type and magnitude of these uncertainties is crucial for a meaningful interpretation of the model results. The aim of this study is to quantify the uncertainty due to the hydraulic roughness predictor for the river bed in the main channel and assess its effect on the uncertainty in the modelled water levels under design discharge conditions. This uncertainty in the main channel roughness predictor consists of the uncertainty between different roughness predictors and the uncertainty within each roughness predictor. To assess the uncertainty between the selected roughness predictors, we compared five roughness predictors that computed the hydraulic resistance of the river bed in the Dutch river Rhine, based on measurements of bed forms characteristics and water levels for different discharges. The propagation of this uncertainty to the water levels is carried out using a two dimensional hydrodynamic river model with dimensions similar to the river Rhine in The Netherlands. It is shown that different roughness predictors result in significantly different roughness values for the same measurements of bed form and flow characteristics. To determine the uncertainty between the different roughness predictors under design conditions, the Generalized Extreme Value distribution is used to extrapolate the predicted roughness values for each roughness predictor to design conditions. The uncertainty between and within the roughness predictors are combined to show that with 95% confidence the Nikuradse roughness for the main channel of the river Rhine under design conditions lies between 0.32 m to 1.03 m. The uncertain roughness results in a large uncertainty range in the design water levels of 71 cm.
Anchoring platinum on graphene using metallic adatoms: a first principles investigation

First principles calculations based on spin-polarized density functional theory were used to identify metallic adatoms that would strengthen the Pt(111)/graphene interface (with a low work of separation of 0.009 J m−2), when the adatom was placed between the Pt(111) and the graphene. It was shown that the strength of the Pt–adatom bond, which had a metallic character, increased with the amount of charge transferred from the adatom to the Pt. The carbon–adatom bond, on the other hand, had a mixed ionic and covalent character and was weaker than the Pt–adatom bond for each of the 25 elements considered. Consequently, the total Pt(111)/graphene interface strength and, hence, the anchoring effect of the adatom were controlled by the carbon–adatom bond strength. Metals with unfilled d orbitals increased the Pt/graphene interface strength to above 0.5 J m−2. The carbon–adatom bond strength was proportional to the ratio between the charge transferred from the adatom to the graphene (ΔZC) and the charge transferred to the Pt surface (ΔZPt); i.e., the ΔZC/ΔZPt ratio defined the ability of an adatom to anchor Pt to graphene. For Ir, Os, Ru, Rh and Re, ΔZC/ΔZPt > 1.0, making these elements the most effective adatoms for anchoring Pt to graphene.
Experimental analysis of multipoint-to-point UAV communications with IEEE 802.11n and 802.11ac

The commercial availability of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) opens new horizons for applications in disaster response, search and rescue, event monitoring, and delivery of goods. An important building block is the wireless communication between UAVs and to base stations. Design of such a wireless network may vary vastly from existing networks due to aerial network characteristics such as high mobility of UAVs in 3D space. This paper presents experimental performance results with commercially available UAVs. First, we show throughput results for IEEE 802.11ac in a UAV setting. Second, we demonstrate that IEEE 802.11n can have much higher throughput over longer ranges than reported in [1] and [2]. Third, we analyze the fairness in a multi-sender aerial network. Fourth, we test a real-world coverage scenario with two mobile UAVs sending to a single receiver. Performance analysis considers the rate adaptation mechanism in both indoor and outdoor line-of-sight scenarios.
The cause of global amphibian declines: a developmental endocrinologist's perspective

SUMMARY Greater than 70% of the world's amphibian species are in decline. We propose that there is probably not a single cause for global amphibian declines and present a three-tiered hierarchical approach that addresses interactions among and between ultimate and proximate factors that contribute to amphibian declines. There are two immediate (proximate) causes of amphibian declines: death and decreased recruitment (reproductive failure). Although much attention has focused on death, few studies have addressed factors that contribute to declines as a result of failed recruitment. Further, a great deal of attention has focused on the role of pathogens in inducing diseases that cause death, but we suggest that pathogen success is profoundly affected by four other ultimate factors: atmospheric change, environmental pollutants, habitat modification and invasive species. Environmental pollutants arise as likely important factors in amphibian declines because they have realized potential to affect recruitment. Further, many studies have documented immunosuppressive effects of pesticides, suggesting a role for environmental contaminants in increased pathogen virulence and disease rates. Increased attention to recruitment and ultimate factors that interact with pathogens is important in addressing this global crisis.
Exploration of social support systems for older adults: A preliminary study

Abstract Objectives: To explore the lived experience of older adults participating regularly in a social support network group in the community. Method: Hermeneutic phenomenology was employed for this preliminary study as little was known about the lived experience of older adults engaged with peers. Six older adults, four females and two males, volunteered to participate in a focus group interview for the purpose of testing interview techniques and questions and to examine alternative lines of enquiry for subsequent interviews.The group interview was transcribed verbatim and analysed to gain meaning of the phenomena under study. Findings: Being a member of a group, where peer support was experienced, was extremely important and this support assisted in the maintenance of physical and psychological well-being of individual group members. Conclusion: As a result of this study a greater understanding of what is meaningful to older adults in terms of social support, and the importance of network systems and peer contact was made clearer. By appreciating the need for older adults to engage regularly in a support group with their peers, nurses, and other healthcare professionals can promote the health of older adults for whom they provide care. Interview techniques were perceived to be appropriate.
Allorecognition of isolated, denatured chains of class I and class II major histocompatibility complex molecules. Evidence for an important role for indirect allorecognition in transplantation

Classical RT1‐A class I and RT1‐B class II major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules were purified from DA (RT1av1) spleens, and the individual chains separated and purified by preparative polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in sodium dodecyl sulfate. LEW (RT11) rats were immunized with the pure class I heavy chain, the RT1‐B α chain and the RT1‐B β chain with the aim of priming to indirect allorecognition (i.e. after processing and presentation of DA MHC chains on LEW antigen‐presenting cells) in the absence of any priming to direct allorecognition (i.e. to whole, undenatured, dimeric DA MHC molecules). LEW rats immunized with each of the three DA MHC chains produced alloantibodies to these chains, suggesting that indirect allorecognition did occur, because of the requirement for cognate recognition of B cells by T helper cells. This also demonstrated polymorphism of all three chains between the DA and LEW strains. The antibodies to the isolated, denatured MHC chains did not react to the whole MHC molecules on DA cells, with the possible exception of very weak reactions in some class I heavy chain‐immunized rats. DA skin grafts placed on LEW recipients immunized with each of the DA MHC chains were rejected in an accelerated fashion. Following DA skin grafting, there was an accelerated production of antibodies to whole, undenatured class I MHC molecules, even in the LEW rats preimmunized with RT1‐B α and RT1‐B β chains. These data suggest that indirect allorecognition can play an important role in the effector mechanisms of allograft rejection, and demonstrate T helper priming as one possible mechanism whereby this might be effective.
Face Recognition and Retrieval Using Cross-Age Reference Coding With Cross-Age Celebrity Dataset

This paper introduces a method for face recognition across age and also a dataset containing variations of age in the wild. We use a data-driven method to address the cross-age face recognition problem, called cross-age reference coding (CARC). By leveraging a large-scale image dataset freely available on the Internet as a reference set, CARC can encode the low-level feature of a face image with an age-invariant reference space. In the retrieval phase, our method only requires a linear projection to encode the feature and thus it is highly scalable. To evaluate our method, we introduce a large-scale dataset called cross-age celebrity dataset (CACD). The dataset contains more than 160 000 images of 2,000 celebrities with age ranging from 16 to 62. Experimental results show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on both CACD and the other widely used dataset for face recognition across age. To understand the difficulties of face recognition across age, we further construct a verification subset from the CACD called CACD-VS and conduct human evaluation using Amazon Mechanical Turk. CACD-VS contains 2,000 positive pairs and 2,000 negative pairs and is carefully annotated by checking both the associated image and web contents. Our experiments show that although state-of-the-art methods can achieve competitive performance compared to average human performance, majority votes of several humans can achieve much higher performance on this task. The gap between machine and human would imply possible directions for further improvement of cross-age face recognition in the future.
Stepping towards dynamic measurement for object oriented software

Software metrics are very helpful in measuring the different aspects of software like cohesion, coupling, polymorphism, inheritance etc. The objective of measuring software metrics are quality assurance, defect prediction, maintainability prediction, cost estimation, debugging, etc. Many authors proposed the use of static metrics for the software maintainability prediction (SMP) and were successful, but static metrics don't take into account the run-time behavior of software. Hence, to capture this dynamic behavior, dynamic metrics are necessary to be evaluated. This paper presents the empirical investigation of dynamic metrics for SMP and also compares them with static metrics. Six machine learning algorithms are used to build the prediction models for both the static and dynamic metrics. The performance of all models is compared using prevalent accuracy measures. Results show that dynamic metrics perform better than static metrics, and can be used as a sound alternative for SMP.
On the use of postural synergies to improve human hand pose reconstruction

In this paper we consider the problem of estimating the posture of a human hand using sensing gloves, and how to improve their performance by exploiting the knowledge on how humans most frequently use their hands. We consider low-cost gloves providing measurements which are limited under several regards: they are generated through an imperfectly known model, are subject to noise, and are less than the number of degrees of freedom of the hand. Under these conditions, direct reconstruction of the hand pose is an ill-posed problem, and performance is very limited. To obtain an acceptable level of accuracy without modifying the glove hardware, hence basically at no extra cost, we propose to exploit the information on most frequent human hand poses, as represented in a database of postural synergies built beforehand. We discuss how such an a priori information can be fused with glove data in a consistent way, so as to provide a good hand pose reconstruction in spite of insufficient and inaccurate sensing data. Simulations and experiments on a low-cost glove are reported which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.
Kinematic modeling of mobile robots by transfer method of augmented generalized coordinates

A kinematic modeling method is proposed which uses augmenting variables to match the dimensions of the input vector and output vector of each serial subchain of the mobile robots. Firstly, kinematic models of various type of wheels are derived including skidding and sliding velocities. Then the method of augmented generalized coordinates is applied to obtain inverse and forward kinematic models. The kinematic models derived by the direct inverse of the augmented matrices provide an accurate solution, which was not achievable by the modeling method based on the pseudo-inverse method which provides an approximate solution. Lastly, two kinematic models for typical, differential-driven mobile robots are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed modeling method.
Shopping Hesitation

This study was designed to understand which factors influence consumer hesitation or delay in online product purchases. The study examined four groups of variables (i.e., consumer characteristics, contextual factors perceived uncertainty factors, and medium/channel innovation factors) that predict three types of online shopping hesitation (i.e., overall hesitation, shopping cart abandonment, and hesitation at the final payment stage). We found that different sets of delay factors are related to different aspects of online shopping hesitation. The study concludes with suggestion for various delay-reduction devices to help consumers close their online decision hesitation. 261 CYBERPSYCHOLOGY & BEHAVIOR Volume 9, Number 3, 2006 © Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Generating Up-to-Date and Detailed Land Use and Land Cover Maps Using OpenStreetMap and GlobeLand30

With the opening up of the Landsat archive, global high resolution land cover maps have begun to appear. However, they often have only a small number of high level land cover classes and they are static products, corresponding to a particular period of time, e.g., the GlobeLand30 (GL30) map for 2010. The OpenStreetMap (OSM), in contrast, consists of a very detailed, dynamically updated, spatial database of mapped features from around the world, but it suffers from incomplete coverage, and layers of overlapping features that are tagged in a variety of ways. However, it clearly has potential for land use and land cover (LULC) mapping. Thus the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the OSM can be converted into a LULC map and how this OSM-derived LULC map can then be used to first update the GL30 with more recent information and secondly, enhance the information content of the classes. The technique is demonstrated on two study areas where there is availability of OSM data but in locations where authoritative data are lacking, i.e., Kathmandu, Nepal and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The GL30 and its updated and enhanced versions are independently validated using a stratified random sample so that the three maps can be compared. The results show that the updated version of GL30 improves in terms of overall accuracy since certain classes were not captured well in the original GL30 (e.g., water in Kathmandu and water/wetlands in Dar es Salaam). In contrast, the enhanced GL30, which contains more detailed urban classes, results in a drop in the overall accuracy, possibly due to the increased number of classes, but the advantages include the appearance of more detailed features, such as the road network, that becomes clearly visible.
EDUCATIONAL ASSORTATIVE MATING AND CHILDBEARING WITHIN COHABITATION-EVIDENCE FROM FOUR EUROPEAN CONTEXTS

Childbearing within unmarried cohabitation has increased significantly over past decades. Earlier studies have linked non-marital childbearing to low educational attainment. In this study, we address non-marital childbearing from a couple’s perspective, taking into account both his and her human capital. We examine the link between educational assortative mating and family formation within and outside marriage in Austria, Belgium, western Germany and eastern Germany. From a socio-economic point of view, we expect that higher education is associated with a lower likelihood of parenthood outside marriage. Furthermore, we expect that relationships where the man is more highly educated than the woman are more inclined towards traditional family behaviors. We apply competing risks models to the Generations and Gender Surveys for Austria and Belgium, and to the German Family Panel. For Germany, results show that non-marital childbearing is less likely among couples with a higher education. In western Germany, non-marital childbearing is more likely if the woman is more highly educated than the man. In Austria, we find that less educated couples are least likely to have their first child outside marriage, probably the result of the higher proportion of migrants who honor marriage over non-marriage in this group. In Belgium, we find no effect of educational pairing. Our results point to the peculiarity of each context and lead us to emphasize that results from one context should not be readily generalized. This study also shows that considering the male partner’s educational background gives a more complete picture of the link between education and non-marital fertility.
Single channel speech enhancement technique — An implementation on MATLAB

Speech is one of the efficient communication medium; if it can be recognized by machine then human interaction can be improved. As the noise produced by various ambient sources like vehicles normally lies in this frequency range, speech signals get easily distorted by the ambient noises or AWGN. The degraded speech therefore needs to be processed for the enhancement of the speech components. The aim of the speech enhancement is to improve the quality and intelligibility of degraded speech signal. In this work, two types of noises are added to the speech signal, AWGN and Traffic noise. The noisy speech signal is applied with Spectral subtraction method and modified versions of spectral subtraction methods. The outcomes of technique are discussed in detail.