Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Androgen and Progesterone Receptors Are Targets for Bisphenol A (BPA), 4-Methyl-2,4-bis-(P-Hydroxyphenyl)Pent-1-Ene—A Potent Metabolite of BPA, and 4-Tert-Octylphenol: A Computational Insight

Exposure to toxic industrial chemicals that have capacity to disrupt the endocrine system, also known as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), has been increasingly associated with reproductive problems in human population. Bisphenol A (BPA; 4,4'-(propane-2,2-diyl)diphenol) and 4-tert-octylphenol (OP; 4-(1,1,3,3-tetramethylbutyl)phenol) are among the most common environmental contaminants possessing endocrine disruption properties and are present in plastics, epoxy resins, detergents and other commercial products of common personal and industrial use. A metabolite of BPA, 4-Methyl-2,4-bis(4-hydroxyphenyl)pent-1-ene (MBP) is about 1000 times more biologically active compared to BPA. Epidemiological, clinical, and experimental studies have shown association of BPA and OP with adverse effects on male and female reproductive system in human and animals. The endocrine disruption activity can occur through multiple pathways including binding to steroid receptors. Androgen receptor (AR) and progesterone receptor (PR) are critical for reproductive tract growth and function. Structural binding characterization of BPA, MBP, and OP with AR and PR using molecular docking simulation approaches revealed novel interactions of BPA with PR, and MBP and OP with AR and PR. For BPA, MBP, and OP, five AR interacting residues Leu-701, Leu-704, Asn-705, Met-742, and Phe-764 overlapped with those of native AR ligand testosterone, and four PR interacting residues Leu-715, Leu-718, Met-756, and Met-759 overlapped with those of PR co-complex ligand, norethindrone. For both the receptors the binding strength of MBP was maximum among the three compounds. Thus, these compounds have the potential to block or interfere in the binding of the endogenous native AR and PR ligands and, hence, resulting in dysfunction. The knowledge of the key interactions and the important amino-acid residues also allows better prediction of potential of xenobiotic molecules for disrupting AR- and PR-mediated pathways, thus, helping in design of less potent alternatives for commercial use.
Islet Grafting and Imaging in a Bioengineered Intramuscular Space

Background. Because the hepatic portal system may not be the optimal site for islet transplantation, several extrahepatic sites have been studied. Here, we examine an intramuscular transplantation site, bioengineered to better support islet neovascularization, engraftment, and survival, and we demonstrate that at this novel site, grafted beta cell mass may be quantitated in a real-time noninvasive manner by positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. Methods. Streptozotocin-induced rats were pretreated intramuscularly with a biocompatible angiogenic scaffold received syngeneic islet transplants 2 weeks later. The recipients were monitored serially by blood glucose and glucose tolerance measurements and by PET imaging of the transplant site with [11C] dihydrotetrabenazine. Parallel histopathologic evaluation of the grafts was performed using insulin staining and evaluation of microvasularity. Results. Reversal of hyperglycemia by islet transplantation was most successful in recipients pretreated with bioscaffolds containing angiogenic factors when compared with those who received no bioscaffolds or bioscaffolds not treated with angiogenic factors. PET imaging with [11C] dihydrotetrabenazine, insulin staining, and microvascular density patterns were consistent with islet survival, increased levels of angiogenesis, and with reversal of hyperglycemia. Conclusions. Induction of increased neovascularization at an intramuscular site significantly improves islet transplant engraftment and survival compared with controls. The use of a nonhepatic transplant site may avoid intrahepatic complications and permit the use of PET imaging to measure and follow transplanted beta cell mass in real time. These findings have important implications for effective islet implantation outside of the liver and offer promising possibilities for improving islet survival, monitoring, and even prevention of islet loss.
Word Sense Disambiguation Based on Relation Structure

This research is to disambiguate word sense occurred in document. We have studied a research to create a lexical dictionary automatically for unknown word that is generated newly by social trend, new technology, new products, and so on. The mandatory thing of the processes is word sense disambiguation (WSD). Many researches for WSD have showed good results however, they have a limitation to adapt for automation of our final objective. Therefore, we propose new WSD method. For WSD, we design a relation structure (RS) that measures relationship and distance between terms using WordNet . Based on the RS, we could grasp an exact sense of word. Through an experiment and evaluation, our method is as wonderful as a structural semantic interconnection (SSI) that is the best research for WSD.
Induction of c-fos in hamster accessory olfactory bulbs by natural and cloned aphrodisin

Male hamsters were exposed to the female pheromone, aphrodisin (APH), its cloned protein backbone (rAPH), and the homologous lipocalin, β-lactoglobulin (β-LG). Of these, only APH elicited mating behavior. Enhanced c-fos protein was found in the nuclei of neurons in the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB) after exposure to these stimuli. Relative to β-LG, both rAPH and APH produced significant increases in AOB labeling. The modest labeling elicited by rAPH was evenly distributed, but the heavier staining elicited by APH was concentrated in the caudal region of the AOB. Thus, pheromone receptor neurons in the basal compartment of the vomeronasal epithelium, which project to the caudal region of the AOB, may respond to APH and provide the input which drives mating behavior.
Robot local navigation with learned social cost functions

Robot navigation in human environments is an active research area that poses serious challenges. Among them, human-awareness has gain lot of attention in the last years due to its important role in human safety and robot acceptance. The proposed robot navigation system extends state of the navigation schemes with some social skills in order to naturally integrate the robot motion in crowded areas. Learning has been proposed as a more principled way of estimating the insights of human social interactions. To do this, inverse reinforcement learning is used to derive social cost functions by observing persons walking through the streets. Our objective is to incorporate such costs into the robot navigation stack in order to “emulate” these human interactions. In order to alleviate the complexity, the system is focused on learning an adequate cost function to be applied at the local navigation level, thus providing direct low-level controls to the robot. The paper presents an analysis of the results in a robot navigating in challenging real scenarios, analyzing and comparing this approach with other algorithms.
(Nitrato-κO)oxido(5,10,15,20-tetraphenylporphyrinato-κ4 N)molybdenum(V) benzene solvate

In the title compound, [Mo(C44H28N4)(NO3)O]·C6H6, the porphyrin ring is centrosymmetric. The Mo atom, oxide ion and nitrate ion are equally disordered over two sites, such that the Mo atom is displaced by 0.366 (1) Å towards the oxide ion from the 24-atom mean plane of the porphyrin, and also makes a long Mo—O bond to a nitrate O atom. A centrosymmetric benzene solvent molecule is situated between adjacent porphyrin molecules.
In Vivo Pharmacodynamic Activity of Daptomycin

ABSTRACT Daptomycin is a lipopeptide antibiotic with activity against a wide range of gram-positive bacteria. We used the neutropenic murine thigh model to characterize the pharmacodynamics of daptomycin. ICR/Swiss mice were rendered neutropenic with cyclophosphamide; and the thigh muscles of the mice were infected with strains of Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Enterococcus faecium. Animals were treated by subcutaneous injection of daptomycin at doses of 0.20 to 400 mg/kg of body weight/day divided into one, two, four, or eight doses over 24 h. Daptomycin exhibited linear pharmacokinetics, with an area under the concentration-time curve (AUC) from time zero to infinity/dose of 9.4 and a half-life of 0.9 to 1.4 h. The level of protein binding was 90%. Free daptomycin exhibited concentration-dependent killing and produced in vivo postantibiotic effects (PAEs) of 4.8 to 10.8 h. Nonlinear regression analysis was used to determine which pharmacokinetic (PK) or pharmacodynamic (PD) parameter was important for efficacy by using free drug concentrations. The peak concentration/MIC (peak/MIC) ratio and 24-h AUC/MIC ratio were the PK and PD parameters that best correlated with in vivo efficacy (R2 = 83 to 87% for peak/MIC and R2 = 86% for the AUC/MIC ratio, whereas R2 = 47 to 50% for the time that the concentration was greater than the MIC) against standard strains of S. aureus and S. pneumoniae. The peak/MIC ratios required for a bacteriostatic effect ranged from 12 to 36 for S. pneumoniae, 59 to 94 for S. aureus, and 0.14 to 0.25 for E. faecium. The AUC/MIC ratios needed for a bacteriostatic effect ranged from 75 to 237 for S. pneumoniae, 388 to 537 for S. aureus, and 0.94 to 1.67 for E. faecium. The free daptomycin concentrations needed to average from one to two times the MIC over 24 h to produce a bacteriostatic effect and two to four times the MIC over 24 h to produce greater than 99% killing. The long PAE and potent bactericidal activity make daptomycin an attractive option for the treatment of infections caused by gram-positive bacteria.
Fear during labor: the impact of sexual abuse in adult life

Our aim was to study the occurrence of extreme fear during labor and its association with previous sexual abuse in adult life. All postpartum women (n = 414) in two municipalities in Norway participated in a questionnaire study. Self-reported fear during labor was categorized as “no fear/some fear/extreme fear”. Sexual abuse was measured by the Abuse Assessment Screen (AAS). Three percent of the women reported extreme fear during labor, 13% some fear and 84% no fear. In total, 12% had been sexually abused as an adult. Among the women with extreme fear during labor, however, one third had a history of sexual abuse in adult life (crude odds ratio 3.7; 95% CI: 1.0–3.7). When controlling for depression in pregnancy, duration of labor and mode of delivery, the adjusted odds ratio for extreme fear during labor was 4.9 (95% CI: 1.2–19.1). The results suggest that women with a history of sexual abuse in adult life have an increased risk of extreme fear during labor.
Engineering Wireless Mesh Networks: Joint Scheduling, Routing, Power Control, and Rate Adaptation

We present a number of significant engineering insights on what makes a good configuration for medium- to large-size wireless mesh networks (WMNs) when the objective function is to maximize the minimum throughput among all flows. For this, we first develop efficient and exact computational tools using column generation with greedy pricing that allow us to compute exact solutions for networks significantly larger than what has been possible so far. We also develop very fast approximations that compute nearly optimal solutions for even larger cases. Finally, we adapt our tools to the case of proportional fairness and show that the engineering insights are very similar.
A Comprehensive WSN-Based Approach to Efficiently Manage a Smart Grid

The Smart Grid (SG) is conceived as the evolution of the current electrical grid representing a big leap in terms of efficiency, reliability and flexibility compared to today's electrical network. To achieve this goal, the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are considered by the scientific/engineering community to be one of the most suitable technologies to apply SG technology to due to their low-cost, collaborative and long-standing nature. However, the SG has posed significant challenges to utility operators—mainly very harsh radio propagation conditions and the lack of appropriate systems to empower WSN devices—making most of the commercial widespread solutions inadequate. In this context, and as a main contribution, we have designed a comprehensive ad-hoc WSN-based solution for the Smart Grid (SENSED-SG) that focuses on specific implementations of the MAC, the network and the application layers to attain maximum performance and to successfully deal with any arising hurdles. Our approach has been exhaustively evaluated by computer simulations and mathematical analysis, as well as validation within real test-beds deployed in controlled environments. In particular, these test-beds cover two of the main scenarios found in a SG; on one hand, an indoor electrical substation environment, implemented in a High Voltage AC/DC laboratory, and, on the other hand, an outdoor case, deployed in the Transmission and Distribution segment of a power grid. The results obtained show that SENSED-SG performs better and is more suitable for the Smart Grid than the popular ZigBee WSN approach.
How hard is it to approximate the best Nash equilibrium?

The quest for a PTAS for Nash equilibrium in a two-player game seeks to circumvent the PPAD-completeness of an (exact) Nash equilibrium by finding an approximate equilibrium, and has emerged as a major open question in Algorithmic Game Theory. A closely related problem is that of finding an equilibrium maximizing a certain objective, such as the social welfare. This optimization problem was shown to be NP-hard by Gilboa and Zemel [Games and Economic Behavior 1989]. However, this NP-hardness is unlikely to extend to finding an approximate equilibrium, since the latter admits a quasi-polynomial time algorithm, as proved by Lipton, Markakis and Mehta [Proc. of 4th EC, 2003]. We show that this optimization problem, namely, finding in a two-player game an approximate equilibrium achieving large social welfare is unlikely to have a polynomial time algorithm. One interpretation of our results is that the quest for a PTAS for Nash equilibrium should not extend to a PTAS for finding the best Nash equilibrium, which stands in contrast to certain algorithmic techniques used so far (e.g. sampling and enumeration). Technically, our result is a reduction from a notoriously difficult problem in modern Combinatorics, of finding a planted (but hidden) clique in a random graph G(n, 1/2). Our reduction starts from an instance with planted clique size k = O(log n). For comparison, the currently known algorithms due to Alon, Krivelevich and Sudakov [Random Struct. & Algorithms, 1998], and Krauthgamer and Feige [Random Struct. & Algorithms, 2000], are effective for a much larger clique size k = Ω(√n).
Joint Connection Admission Control and Packet Scheduling in a Cognitive Radio Network with Spectrum Underlay

With the increasing popularity of cognitive radio networks (CRNs), providing data transmissions with quality of service (QoS) requirements in such networks becomes one of the most important topics. In this paper we study QoS provisioning in an ad hoc CRN with spectrum underlay. Both streaming traffic and non-real-time (nrt) data traffic are considered. The former requires a low session outage probability and the latter requires a minimum average throughput. A joint connection admission and packet scheduling scheme is proposed in this paper. The connection admission control scheme limits the amount of traffic admitted into the system so that all admitted connections can receive their required QoS through the proposed packet scheduling schemes. Two packet transmission scheduling schemes are designed, one is optimum and assumes that a central controller can collect the global channel and interference conditions within the CRN and between the primary network and the CRN, while the other one is a heuristic scheme based on the link and interference conditions measured by the nodes in the CRN. In addition to achieving the required QoS, the scheduling schemes utilize the available radio resources fairly and efficiently. Numerical results demonstrate that when the traffic load at the primary network is relatively stationary, the proposed scheduling scheme can achieve very low and fair outage probability for all admitted streaming connections, and all admitted non-real-time data connections can receive the required throughput and fair delay performance.
Seam Searching-Based Pixel Fusion for Image Retargeting

This paper presents a new image retargeting method based on seam searching and pixel fusion. First, the importance map of the original image, which is represented by the saliency of every pixel, is generated. Second, all the pixels in the original image are divided into W (width of the original image) groups with the help of seam searching. Then, it performs inter-row coherence filtering on importance map to maintain the spatial coherence, and directly utilizes the filtered importance map to generate the scaling map. Finally, after pixel fusion with the scaling map, the image can be retargeted effectively. Experimental results show that our method is able to provide visually pleasing resized images.
Robust in-car spelling recognition - a tandem BLSTM-HMM approach

As an intuitive hands-free input modality automatic spelling recognition is especially useful for in-car human-machine interfaces. However, for today’s speech recognition engines it is extremely challenging to cope with similar sounding spelling speech sequences in the presence of noises such as the driving noise inside a car. Thus, we propose a novel Tandem spelling recogniser, combining a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with a discriminatively trained bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) recurrent neural net. The BLSTM network captures long-range temporal dependencies to learn the properties of in-car noise, which makes the Tandem BLSTM-HMM robust with respect to speech signal disturbances at extremely low signal-to-noise ratios and mismatches between training and test noise conditions. Experiments considering various driving conditions reveal that our Tandem recogniser outperforms a conventional HMM by up to 33%. Index Terms: spelling recognition, recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory, noise robustness
Sixteenths or pennies? Observations from a simulation of the Nasdaq stock market

We have built a model that represents a highly realistic picture of a dealer-mediated market like Nasdaq, with the flexibility to model many features of real-world markets. While we have conducted a fairly significant amount of research using the model, we have limited it to four areas: 1) investigating, mainly in a qualitative fashion, the consequences of regulatory and structural changes to the market (the most important being tick size effects); 2) investigating whether our model, at least in a stylized fashion, is able to replicate some of the observed features of real-world markets; 3) validating the model (this encompasses the previous two points); 4) designing learning agents, and investigating the behaviors they learn and their ability to perform profitably in the market. Our results are significant in two respects. First, the model is robust: the simulated market as a whole, as well as the investors and dealers that make it up, perform realistically under a wide variety of conditions. Second, the market dynamics produced by the model have the same qualitative properties as those observed in real markets. Thus the model provides a test bed in which to investigate the effects of changes in market rules and conditions, and to investigate other aspects of the Nasdaq market.
Convergence-optimized variable node structure for stochastic LDPC decoder

By using stochastic computation, a fully-parallel low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoder can be implemented using a lower wire complexity. In order to enhance the decoder performance, probability tracers, such as up/down counters, are added at each edge between variable nodes and check nodes, as described in previous literature. However, this causes a large decoding latency and a high number of decoding failures. In this paper, a convergence-optimized structure for variable nodes is proposed that is able to overcome these issues. As a result, the throughput for the proposed decoder is 20.5Gb/s, which is 101% higher than the original counter-based decoder presented in the previous literature.
Schottky Barrier Heights at Two-Dimensional Metallic and Semiconducting Transition-Metal Dichalcogenide Interfaces

Author(s): Zahin, Adiba | Advisor(s): Lake, Roger K | Abstract: ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATIONSchottky Barrier Heights at Two-Dimensional Metallic and SemiconductingTransition-Metal Dichalcogenide InterfacesbyAdiba ZahinMaster, Graduate Program in Electrical and Computer EngineeringUniversity of California, Riverside, September 2017Dr. Roger K. Lake, ChairpersonSeveral advances have been made in the realization of electronic devices that utilizeatomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials. The semiconducting transition metaldichalcogenides in particular have been used to demonstrate a wide range of deviceswhich include steep tunnel-field-effect transistors [1,2], photodetectors [3,4], field-effecttransistors [5, 6] and chemical sensors [7, 8]. A variety of experimental [9, 10] and theoretical [11, 12] studies have been devoted to understand the interface formed betweenthe bulk metals that are deposited on the surface of the 2D transition metal dichalcognides. There is growing evidence that the Schottky-like transport behavior observedin TMDC-metal contacts is a consequence of strong Fermi level pinning (FLP). Theorigin of the Fermi level pinning in metal-TMDC interfaces has been attributed to theformation of interface dipoles [11], defects at the metal-TMDC interface and the existence of metal-induced-gap-states (MIGS) which arise from the exponential decay ofthe wavefunction of the metal Fermi level into the TMDC band gap [13, 14]. One approach to minimize the effect of Fermi level pinning would be achieving an epitaxiallyclean interface between the metal and the semiconducting TMDC. Prior experimentalstudies of the contact resistance between the 2H/1T polytypes of MoS2 succeeded inidemonstrating record low contact resistance [15]. Indeed recent study shows that, FLP