Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hyaluronan–CD44 interaction hampers migration of osteoclast-like cells by down-regulating MMP-9

Osteoclast (OC) precursors migrate to putative sites of bone resorption to form functionally active, multinucleated cells. The preOC FLG 29.1 cells, known to be capable of irreversibly differentiating into multinucleated OC-like cells, displayed several features of primary OCs, including expression of specific integrins and the hyaluronan (HA) receptor CD44. OC-like FLG 29.1 cells adhered to and extensively migrated through membranes coated with fibronectin, vitronectin, and laminins, but, although strongly binding to HA, totally failed to move on this substrate. Moreover, soluble HA strongly inhibited OC-like FLG 29.1 cell migration on the permissive matrix substrates, and this behavior was dependent on its engagement with CD44, as it was fully restored by function-blocking anti-CD44 antibodies. HA did not modulate the cell–substrate binding affinity/avidity nor the expression levels of the corresponding integrins. MMP-9 was the major secreted metalloproteinase used by OC-like FLG 29.1 cells for migration, because this process was strongly inhibited by both TIMP-1 and GM6001, as well as by MMP-9–specific antisense oligonucleotides. After HA binding to CD44, a strong down-regulation of MMP-9 mRNA and protein was detected. These findings highlight a novel role of the HA–CD44 interaction in the context of OC-like cell motility, suggesting that it may act as a stop signal for bone-resorbing cells.
Comparison of clustering techniques of multiple partial discharge sources in high voltage transformer windings

Modern high voltage (HV) insulation systems consist of multiple dielectric media - multi-source partial discharge (PD) data discrimination is required. The ability to accurately distinguish between the PD signals generated from different sources is seen as a critical function of future diagnostic systems. Two model PD sources were utilized in this investigation to replicate void and surface discharges. The proposed processing technique relies on the assumption that the PD pulses generated from different sources exhibit unique waveform characteristics. Several clustering techniques have been employed to identify and separate multiple PD sources recently. However, for further analysis, the techniques used must produce a significant separation between the clustered data as the phase resolved patterns produced by multiple PD sources overlap - inhibiting automated classification. An experiment has been designed to activate a pair of PD sources and inject the signals simultaneously into an HV transformer winding. After the PD pulses were extracted from the measurement data recorded using two wideband radio frequency current transformers (RFCTs) positioned at the neutral to earth point and the bushing tappoint to earth. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and t- Distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) were applied to the Wavelet Energy (WE) data and their performance at discriminating between the two PD sources assessed.
Using Program Slicing Metrics for the Analysis of Bug Fixing Processes

Software Process Improvement is increasingly becoming a major activity for most software development organizations due to the benefits seen in the cost and business value. Software process assessments, however, can be tedious, complicated and costly. This research explores alternative assessments by analysis of fine grain processes of bug fixing with their bug characteristics. Using the novel approach of applying program slicing metrics to understand bugs, the research studied the relationships between bug characteristics and their bug fixing processes. The results suggested specific characteristics such as cyclomatic complexity may relate to how long it takes to fix a bug. Results in the study serve as a proof of concept to the feasibility of this proposed assessment. Future refinement of the metrics and much larger sample data is needed. This research is seen as the initial step in the development of assessment tools to assists with Software Process Improvement. It opens possibilities for assessment tools for software processes.
When Talk is “ Free ” : An Analysis of Subscriber Behavior Under Two-and Three-Part Tariffs

In many service industries, firms introduce three-part tariffs to replace or complement existing two-part tariffs. While both twoand three-part tariffs have been studied in the extant literature, to our best knowledge there have been no empirical studies of customer choice and usage when both types of tariffs are on offer. A pertinent question in that context is whether three-part tariff usage can be well predicted based on observed behavior on two-part tariffs. Given a unique data set from a mobile telephony operator, we investigate customer switching between twoand threepart tariffs as well as customers’ usage behavior under the two types of tariffs. We find empirically that customers who switched to a three-part tariff significantly “over-use” compared to their prior two-part tariff usage and attain a level of consumption that cannot be explained by a simple shift in the budget constraint or an explanation based on substitution between different types of calls. To account for this change in level of usage, we propose that the inclusive, or “free”, minutes of a three-part tariff introduces an additional attribute that is valued by the customer in her choice and usage decisions. While on the three-part tariff, the customer learns about her valuation of this attribute and adjusts her behavior accordingly. Such a valuation of an additional attribute of a three-part tariff, compared to a two-part tariff, is consistent with behavioral research that postulates that customers attach a special value to “free” products. In modeling how customers respond to this new attribute, we allow customers on a three-part tariff to have beliefs over its value and learn about it over time. Our empirical results show that the proposed model reflects significantly better the actual usage behavior relative to a model that only adjusts for a change in the budget constraint: 88.2% of switchers have a greater satiation level on a three-part than on a two-part tariff. Our results have important managerial implications for pricing and tariff design.
Subcellular Trafficking, Pentameric Assembly, and Subunit Stoichiometry of Neuronal Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors Containing Fluorescently Labeled α6 and β3 Subunits

Neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine (ACh) receptors are ligand-gated, cation-selective ion channels. Nicotinic receptors containing α4, α6, β2, and β3 subunits are expressed in midbrain dopaminergic neurons, and they are implicated in the response to smoked nicotine. Here, we have studied the cell biological and biophysical properties of receptors containing α6 and β3 subunits by using fluorescent proteins fused within the M3-M4 intracellular loop. Receptors containing fluorescently tagged β3 subunits were fully functional compared with receptors with untagged β3 subunits. We find that β3- and α6-containing receptors are highly expressed in neurons and that they colocalize with coexpressed, fluorescent α4 and β2 subunits in neuronal soma and dendrites. Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) reveals efficient, specific assembly of β3 and α6 into nicotinic receptor pentamers of various subunit compositions. Using FRET, we demonstrate directly that only a single β3 subunit is incorporated into nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) containing this subunit, whereas multiple subunit stoichiometries exist for α4- and α6-containing receptors. Finally, we demonstrate that nicotinic ACh receptors are localized in distinct microdomains at or near the plasma membrane using total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy. We suggest that neurons contain large, intracellular pools of assembled, functional nicotinic receptors, which may provide them with the ability to rapidly up-regulate nicotinic responses to endogenous ligands such as ACh, or to exogenous agents such as nicotine. Furthermore, this report is the first to directly measure nAChR subunit stoichiometry using FRET and plasma membrane localization of α6- and β3-containing receptors using TIRF.
Improvement in the Mobility of Mobile IPV6 Based Mobile Networks using Reverse Routing Header Protocol and Fast Handoff

Mobile IPv6 based Mobile Networks are becoming increasingly important with the widespread popularity of wireless internet connectivity. For large networks, an extension, namely, the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 is used, which suffers from overloading of the Home Agent as every packet sent has to pass through it and this produces a significant loss in performance. In this paper, a method to improve the mobility using the fast handover of Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) and the Reverse Routing Header Protocol is proposed. Simulation results at different packet intervals show that, the proposed scheme is able to reduce the average delay and achieve an optimum level of throughput.
RSIM: An Execution-Driven Simulator for ILP-Based Shared-Memory Multiprocessors and Uniprocessors

This paper describes RSIM { the Rice Simulator for ILP Multiprocessors { Version 1.0. RSIM simulates shared-memory multiprocessors (and uniprocessors) built from processors that aggressively exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP). RSIM is execution-driven and models state-of-the-art ILP processors, an aggressive memory system, and a multiprocessor coherence protocol and interconnect, including contention at all resources. Although originally designed as a research tool, RSIM is also being used successfully in both undergraduate and graduate computer architecture courses at Rice University. RSIM version 1.0 is publicly available.
Consumer Trust in E-Commerce

The lack of trust toward different elements of e-commerce has been recognized as one of the main causes of the collapse of a large number of dot-com companies. The concept of consumer trust has since been the object of many studies in the field of e-commerce. These studies permitted a better understanding of the role of trust in ecommerce, but an examination of the literature reveals that our understanding is limited due to important gaps in the ontological aspects of the trust concept, among which are (a) a lack of consensus concerning its definition, (b) a unidimensional as opposed to a multidimensional conceptualization of the construct, and (c) a confusion between trustworthiness and trust. The goal of this article is to identify these gaps and present ways of reducing their size and impacts. BACKGROUND
A Decomposition Method for E cient Use of DistributedSupercomputersfor Finite Element

The interconnection of geographically distributed supercomputers via high-speed networks makes available the needed compute power for large-scale scien-tiic applications, such as nite element applications. In this paper we propose a two-level data decomposition method for eecient execution of nite element applications on a network of supercomputers. Our method exploits the following features that may be diierent for each supercomputer in the system: processor speed, number of processors used from each supercomputer, local network performance , wide area network performance and wide area topology. Preliminary experiments involving a nonlinear, nite element application executed on a network of two supercomputers, one located at Argonne National Laboratory and the other one at the Cornell Theory Center, demonstrate a 20% reduction in execution time when the proposed decomposition is used as compared with naively applying conventional decompositions that are applicable to single supercomput-ers.
Auditory–Visual Multisensory Interactions in Humans: Timing, Topography, Directionality, and Sources

Current models of brain organization include multisensory interactions at early processing stages and within low-level, including primary, cortices. Embracing this model with regard to auditory–visual (AV) interactions in humans remains problematic. Controversy surrounds the application of an additive model to the analysis of event-related potentials (ERPs), and conventional ERP analysis methods have yielded discordant latencies of effects and permitted limited neurophysiologic interpretability. While hemodynamic imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation studies provide general support for the above model, the precise timing, superadditive/subadditive directionality, topographic stability, and sources remain unresolved. We recorded ERPs in humans to attended, but task-irrelevant stimuli that did not require an overt motor response, thereby circumventing paradigmatic caveats. We applied novel ERP signal analysis methods to provide details concerning the likely bases of AV interactions. First, nonlinear interactions occur at 60–95 ms after stimulus and are the consequence of topographic, rather than pure strength, modulations in the ERP. AV stimuli engage distinct configurations of intracranial generators, rather than simply modulating the amplitude of unisensory responses. Second, source estimations (and statistical analyses thereof) identified primary visual, primary auditory, and posterior superior temporal regions as mediating these effects. Finally, scalar values of current densities in all of these regions exhibited functionally coupled, subadditive nonlinear effects, a pattern increasingly consistent with the mounting evidence in nonhuman primates. In these ways, we demonstrate how neurophysiologic bases of multisensory interactions can be noninvasively identified in humans, allowing for a synthesis across imaging methods on the one hand and species on the other.
Query-Relevant Summarization using FAQs

This paper introduces a statistical model for query-relevant summarization: succinctly characterizing the relevance of a document to a query. Learning parameter values for the proposed model requires a large collection of summarized documents, which we do not have, but as a proxy, we use a collection of FAQ (frequently-asked question) documents. Taking a learning approach enables a principled, quantitative evaluation of the proposed system, and the results of some initial experiments---on a collection of Usenet FAQs and on a FAQ-like set of customer-submitted questions to several large retail companies---suggest the plausibility of learning for summarization.
Row-by-row dynamic source-line voltage control (RRDSV) scheme for two orders of magnitude leakage current reduction of sub-1-V-VDD SRAM's

A new Row-by-Row Dynamic Source-line Voltage control (RRDSV) scheme is proposed to reduce the active leakage as well as the stand-by leakage in SRAM. By dynamically controlling the source-line voltage of cells row by row, the cell leakage through inactive cells can be reduced by two orders of magnitude. Moreover, the bit-line leakage through pass transistors can be completely cut off. This leakage reduction is caused from the cooperation of reverse body-to-source biasing and Drain Induced Barrier Lowering (DIBL) effects. A test chip has been fabricated using 0.18-μm triple-well CMOS technology to verify the data retention capability of this RRDSV scheme. The minimum retention voltage in the RRDSV is measured to be reduced by more than 60mV, when shielding metal is inserted to protect the memory cell nodes from bit-line coupling noise. It can reduce the leakage by another 50% in addition to the reduction by two orders of magnitude.
Wind Turbine Modeling With Data-Driven Methods and Radially Uniform Designs

This paper proposes a radially uniform (RU) design to sample representative datasets from a large volume of wind turbine data to build accurate data-driven models. The sampling capability and computational complexity are theoretically analyzed. It is shown that the RU design is representative of the original dataset and has computational complexity that is of the same order as sorting algorithms. Five algorithms, the neural networks (NN), multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), support vector machines (SVM), k nearest neighbors (kNN), and linear regression (LR) are applied to model the wind turbine power output, drive-train vibratory acceleration, and tower vibratory acceleration based on the training dataset and sampled datasets. Extensive computational experiments are conducted to demonstrate advantages of the RU sampler over the random and maximin samplers. Results show that RU sampler outperforms the random sampler for building all five types of models and is more effective than the maximin sampler for building nonlinear models.
Tactics of interruption : provoking participation in performance art

This thesis addresses a research study predicated on practice in order to explore aspects of participation in Performance Art. The study makes a contribution to knowledge in participative performance practice and the positive deployment of using interruptive processes; this is in order to provoke participation within the context of Performance Art as well as gain a better understanding of the operations of power relations at play. Within the discourse of impoliteness study (Bousfield, 2008; Culpeper, 2011 et al.), there is a term that deserves much greater attention: interruption . Examining interruption and exploiting its virtues using practice brings out some productive insights that go beyond abstract theorisation. Working in response to Nicolas Bourriaud s conception (1998) of participation in Relational Aesthetics as a means of attacking power relations, I use my practice as an artist/performance provocateur and amplify consideration of my previous usage of interruption in order to provoke participation and then interrogation of power relations. Slapstick and heckling as extreme versions of interruptive processes that are physical in nature are put forward as tactics of interruption that extend comedy tactics within my practice. Circumventing commentary of interruption that often posits the term and its affiliation with impoliteness and capacity to be disruptive as negative (Bilmes, 1997), interruption is used for the purposes of my study as the key strategy that underpins the performance Lost for Words (2011) and the collaborative project Contract with a Heckler (2013), and are presented as prime examples of the operations of interruption in practice. Lost for Words supports the difficulties of participation when interruptive processes connected to physical and bodily slapstick are structurally engineered into a live performance and Contract with a Heckler supports power relations when live performance is predicated upon physical and linguistic interruptive processes relating to heckling. Both Lost for Words and Contract with a Heckler demonstrate a complex knitting of theory and practice whereby argument is supported by the undertaking of action (by the necessity of experiencing interruption in practice). The written dimension of the thesis operates in conjunction with the accompanying photographs and video recordings included here as documentation serving to deconstruct the examples of practice presented. Writing adds detail in the form of critical analysis, reflective commentary and personal experience to the supplied documentation and is used as a tool to communicate that working with interruption on a theoretical, practical and emotional level can be exciting, provocative and dangerous.
Optimistic policy iteration and natural actor-critic: A unifying view and a non-optimality result

Approximate dynamic programming approaches to the reinforcement learning problem are often categorized into greedy value function methods and value-based policy gradient methods. As our first main result, we show that an important subset of the latter methodology is, in fact, a limiting special case of a general formulation of the former methodology; optimistic policy iteration encompasses not only most of the greedy value function methods but also natural actor-critic methods, and permits one to directly interpolate between them. The resulting continuum adjusts the strength of the Markov assumption in policy improvement and, as such, can be seen as dual in spirit to the continuum in TD(λ)-style algorithms in policy evaluation. As our second main result, we show for a substantial subset of soft-greedy value function approaches that, while having the potential to avoid policy oscillation and policy chattering, this subset can never converge toward an optimal policy, except in a certain pathological case. Consequently, in the context of approximations (either in state estimation or in value function representation), the majority of greedy value function methods seem to be deemed to suffer either from the risk of oscillation/chattering or from the presence of systematic sub-optimality.
Uncertainties in Publish / Subscribe System

In this proposal, we introduce a scalable distributed publish/subscribe system for selective information dissemination. We propose two models A-ToPSS and G-ToPSS for two different matching problems: approximate matching and semantic matching. A-ToPSS aims at processing uncertainty information, while G-ToPSS aims at filtering graph-based metadata. We describe problems left in these two models and make a plan for the future work.
Continuous Assurance of E-Business Transactions For Fraud Detection

This paper is concerned about improving our understanding of preventing fraud in e-business transactions using continuous assurance systems. A conceptual model has been constructed to produce a generalised overview of the fraud auditing environment, and the objects and forces influencing the process. The second aim of this paper is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of continuous assurance systems. Towards this goal, a specific implementation of one such system, eSCARF (electronic System Control Audit Review File) has been constructed and will be tested in the IBM WebSphere Commerce environment. This evaluation will be in the form of a case study of the usage of such a system in a real world business environment. One company will be selected for this purpose, and the eSCARF system will be integrated, after information gathering interviews, into their e-business system, and the resulting eSCARF reporting will be analysed and evaluated by the organisation’s management.
Cetrotide administration in the early luteal phase in patients at high risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome: A controlled clinical study

The aim of the present pilot study was to assess the feasibility and efficacy of Cetrotide administration in the early luteal phase in patients at high risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), undergoing embryo cryopreservation following superovulation. A total of 135 patients at high risk of OHSS and undergoing embryo cryopreservation were divided into two groups. In the treatment group (n=39), the patients received daily subcutaneous injections of 0.25 mg Cetrotide between days 1 and 5 following ooctye retrieval, and volume expansion and symptomatic treatment were also provided. In the control group (n=96), the patients received routine treatments, including volume expansion therapy. The serum steroid hormone concentrations of the patients were measured on days 2, 5 and 8 following ooctye retrieval, while the incidence of moderate or severe OHSS, self-evaluated clinical symptoms and various clinical indicators were recorded. The serum estradiol (E2), luteinizing hormone and progesterone levels in the treatment group on days 2, 5 and 8 following oocyte retrieval were not found to differ significantly when compared with the patients in the control group (P>0.05). The incidence of severe OHSS did not differ significantly between the two groups (P>0.05). The average length of hospital stay and length of luteal phase were not found to be significantly different between the treatment and control groups (P>0.05). In conclusion, Cetrotide injections in the early luteal phase did not alter the serum steroid levels of patients at high risk of OHSS undergoing embryo cryopreservation, and were unable to reduce the incidence of severe early OHSS. However, further randomized studies are required to evaluate the effectiveness of Cetrotide in the prevention of OHSS.