Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development of distributed fuzzy systems with a runtime-adaptable mobile components framework

A distributed fuzzy system is a real-time fuzzy system in which the input, output and computation may be located on different networked computing nodes. The ability for a distributed software application, such as a distributed fuzzy system, to adapt to changes in the computing network at runtime can provide real-time performance improvement and fault-tolerance. This paper introduces an Adaptable Mobile Component Framework (AMCF) that provides a distributed dataflow-based platform with a fine-grained level of runtime-reconfigurability. The execution location of small fragments (possibly as little as few machine-code instructions) of an AMCF application can be moved between different computing nodes at runtime. A case study is included that demonstrates the applicability of the AMCF to a distributed fuzzy system scenario involving multiple physical agents (such as autonomous robots). Using the AMCF, fuzzy systems can now be developed such that they can be distributed automatically across multiple computing nodes and are adaptable to runtime changes in the networked computing environment. This provides the opportunity to improve the performance of fuzzy systems deployed in scenarios where the computing environment is resource-constrained and volatile, such as multiple autonomous robots, smart environments and sensor networks.
Probabilistic Disclosure: Maximisation vs. Minimisation

We consider opacity questions where an observation function provides to an external attacker a view of the states along executions and secret executions are those visiting some state from a fixed subset. Disclosure occurs when the observer can deduce from a finite observation that the execution is secret, the e-disclosure variant corresponding to the execution being secret with probability greater than 1 − e. In a probabilistic and non deterministic setting, where an internal agent can choose between actions, there are two points of view, depending on the status of this agent: the successive choices can either help the attacker trying to disclose the secret, if the system has been corrupted, or they can prevent disclosure as much as possible if these choices are part of the system design. In the former situation, corresponding to a worst case, the disclosure value is the supremum over the strategies of the probability to disclose the secret (maximisation), whereas in the latter case, the disclosure is the infimum (minimisation). We address quantitative problems (comparing the optimal value with a threshold) and qualitative ones (when the threshold is zero or one) related to both forms of disclosure for a fixed or finite horizon. For all problems, we characterise their decidability status and their complexity. We discover a surprising asymmetry: on the one hand optimal strategies may be chosen among deterministic ones in maximisation problems, while it is not the case for minimisation. On the other hand, for the questions addressed here, more minimisation problems than maximisation ones are decidable.
Evolutionary conserved neural signature of early life stress affects animal social competence

In vertebrates, the early social environment can persistently influence behaviour and social competence later in life. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying variation in animal social competence are largely unknown. In rats, high-quality maternal care causes an upregulation of hippocampal glucocorticoid receptors (gr) and reduces offspring stress responsiveness. This identifies gr regulation as a candidate mechanism for maintaining variation in animal social competence. We tested this hypothesis in a highly social cichlid fish, Neolamprologus pulcher, reared with or without caring parents. We find that the molecular pathway translating early social experience into later-life alterations of the stress axis is homologous across vertebrates: fish reared with parents expressed the glucocorticoid receptor gr1 more in the telencephalon. Furthermore, expression levels of the transcription factor egr-1 (early growth response 1) were associated with gr1 expression in the telencephalon and hypothalamus. When blocking glucocorticoid receptors (GR) with an antagonist, mifepristone (RU486), parent-reared individuals showed more socially appropriate, submissive behaviour when intruding on a larger conspecific's territory. Remarkably, mifepristone-treated fish were less attacked by territory owners and had a higher likelihood of territory takeover. Our results indicate that early social-environment effects on stress axis programming are mediated by an evolutionary conserved molecular pathway, which is causally involved in environmentally induced variation of animal social competence.
Variability in Timing of Spontaneous Calcium Release in the Intact Rat Heart Is Determined by the Time Course of Sarcoplasmic Reticulum Calcium Load

Background: Abnormalities in intracellular calcium (Ca) cycling during Ca overload can cause triggered activity because spontaneous calcium release (SCR) activates sufficient Ca-sensitive inward currents to induce delayed afterdepolarizations (DADs). However, little is known about the mechanisms relating SCR and triggered activity on the tissue scale. Methods and Results: Laser scanning confocal microscopy was used to measure the spatiotemporal properties of SCR within large myocyte populations in intact rat heart. Computer simulations were used to predict how these properties of SCR determine DAD magnitude. We measured the average and standard deviation of the latency distribution of SCR within a large population of myocytes in intact tissue. We found that as external [Ca] is increased, and with faster pacing rates, the average and SD of the latency distribution decreases substantially. This result demonstrates that the timing of SCR occurs with less variability as the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) Ca load is increased, causing more sites to release Ca within each cell. We then applied a mathematical model of subcellular Ca cycling to show that a decrease in SCR variability leads to a higher DAD amplitude and is dictated by the rate of SR Ca refilling following an action potential. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that the variability of the timing of SCR in a population of cells in tissue decreases with SR load and is dictated by the time course of the SR Ca content.
Complete Genome Sequencing of Acinetobacter baumannii Strain K50 Discloses the Large Conjugative Plasmid pK50a Encoding Carbapenemase OXA-23 and Extended-Spectrum β-Lactamase GES-11

ABSTRACT Multidrug-resistant (MDR) Acinetobacter baumannii strains appeared as serious emerging nosocomial pathogens in clinical environments and especially in intensive care units (ICUs). A. baumannii strain K50, recovered from a hospitalized patient in Kuwait, exhibited resistance to carbapenems and additionally to ciprofloxacin, chloramphenicol, sulfonamides, amikacin, and gentamicin. Genome sequencing revealed that the strain possesses two plasmids, pK50a (79.6 kb) and pK50b (9.5 kb), and a 3.75-Mb chromosome. A. baumannii K50 exhibits an average nucleotide identity (ANI) of 99.98% to the previously reported Iraqi clinical isolate AA-014, even though the latter strain lacked plasmid pK50a. Strain K50 belongs to sequence type 158 (ST158) (Pasteur scheme) and ST499 (Oxford scheme). Plasmid pK50a is a member of the Aci6 (replication group 6 [RG6]) group of Acinetobacter plasmids and carries a conjugative transfer module and two antibiotic resistance gene regions. The transposon Tn2008 carries the carbapenemase gene blaOXA-23, whereas a class 1 integron harbors the resistance genes blaGES-11, aacA4, dfrA7, qacEΔ1, and sul1, conferring resistance to all β-lactams and reduced susceptibility to carbapenems and resistance to aminoglycosides, trimethoprim, quaternary ammonium compounds, and sulfamethoxazole, respectively. The class 1 integron is flanked by MITEs (miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements) delimiting the element at its insertion site.
Case study on the pathophysiology of Fabry disease: abnormalities of cellular membranes can be reversed by substrate reduction in vitro

It is still not entirely clear how α-galactosidase A (GAA) deficiency translates into clinical symptoms of Fabry disease (FD). The present communication investigates the effects of the mutation N215S in FD on the trafficking and processing of lysosomal GAA and their potential association with alterations in the membrane lipid composition. Abnormalities in lipid rafts (LRs) were observed in fibroblasts isolated from a male patient with FD bearing the mutation N215S. Interestingly, LR analysis revealed that the distribution of cholesterol and flotillin-2 are distinctly altered in the Fabry fibroblasts when compared with that of the wild-type cells. Furthermore, increased levels of glycolipid globotriaosylceramide 3 (Gb3) and sphingomyelin (SM) were observed in non-raft membrane fractions of Fabry cells. Substrate reduction with N-butyldeoxynojirimycin (NB-DNJ) in vitro was capable of reversing these abnormalities in this patient. These data led to the hypothesis that alterations of LRs may contribute to the pathophysiology of Morbus Fabry. Furthermore, it may be suggested that substrate reduction therapy with NB-DNJ might be a promising approach for the treatment of GAA deficiency at least for the selected patients.
Clustering-based Phonetic Projection in Mismatched Crowdsourcing Channels for Low-resourced ASR

Acquiring labeled speech for low-resource languages is a difficult task in the absence of native speakers of the language. One solution to this problem involves collecting speech transcriptions from crowd workers who are foreign or non-native speakers of a given target language. From these mismatched transcriptions, one can derive probabilistic phone transcriptions that are defined over the set of all target language phones using a noisy channel model. This paper extends prior work on deriving probabilistic transcriptions (PTs) from mismatched transcriptions by 1) modelling multilingual channels and 2) introducing a clustering-based phonetic mapping technique to improve the quality of PTs. Mismatched crowdsourcing for multilingual channels has certain properties of projection mapping, e.g., it can be interpreted as a clustering based on singular value decomposition of the segment alignments. To this end, we explore the use of distinctive feature weights, lexical tone confusions, and a two-step clustering algorithm to learn projections of phoneme segments from mismatched multilingual transcriber languages to the target language. We evaluate our techniques using mismatched transcriptions for Cantonese speech acquired from native English and Mandarin speakers. We observe a 5-9% relative reduction in phone error rate for the predicted Cantonese phone transcriptions using our proposed techniques compared with the previous PT method.
A improved Network Security Situation Awareness Model

In order to reflect the situation of network security assessment performance fully and accurately, a new network security situation awareness model based on information fusion was proposed. Network security situation is the result of fusion three aspects evaluation. In terms of attack, to improve the accuracy of evaluation, a situation assessment method of DDoS attack based on the information of data packet was proposed. In terms of vulnerability, a improved Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) was raised and maked the assessment more comprehensive. In terms of node weights, the method of calculating the combined weights and optimizing the result by Sequence Quadratic Program (SQP) algorithm which reduced the uncertainty of fusion was raised. To verify the validity and necessity of the method, a testing platform was built and used to test through evaluating 2000 DAPRA data sets. Experiments show that the method can improve the accuracy of evaluation results.
Impact of user height on the coverage of 3D beamforming-enabled massive MIMO systems

In this paper, we perform a coverage analysis of a cellular massive multiple-input multiple-output (MaMIMO) network which adopts 3D beamforming. In contrast to the previous works on 3D beamforming which assume that all users are placed on the ground (i.e., in a 2D environment), we consider a more practical scenario where the users of the network are dropped in a 3D environment with different heights. In this scenario, by adopting a stochastic geometry framework, first we calculate the coverage probability of the network as a function of the users height. Then considering this coverage probability as the objective function, the optimum tilt angle of the base stations antenna pattern is found and the effect of users' heights on this tilt angle is investigated. Our numerical results show that by taking the users' heights into account and using the proposed method, a considerable improvement is achieved in the performance of the network compared to other similar 3D beamforming methods that ignore the users' height distribution.
SMT-Based Observer Design for Cyber-Physical Systems under Sensor Attacks

We introduce a scalable observer architecture to estimate the states of a discrete-time linear-time-invariant (LTI) system whose sensors can be manipulated by an attacker. Given the maximum number of attacked sensors, we build on previous results on necessary and sufficient conditions for state estimation, and propose a novel multi-modal Luenberger (MML) observer based on efficient Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT) solving. We present two techniques to reduce the complexity of the estimation problem. As a first strategy, instead of a bank of distinct observers, we use a family of filters sharing a single dynamical equation for the states, but different output equations, to generate estimates corresponding to different subsets of sensors. Such an architecture can reduce the memory usage of the observer from an exponential to a linear function of the number of sensors. We then develop an efficient SMT-based decision procedure that is able to reason about the estimates of the MML observer to detect at runtime which sets of sensors are attack-free, and use them to obtain a correct state estimate. We provide proofs of convergence for our algorithm and report simulation results to compare its runtime performance with alternative techniques. Our algorithm scales well for large systems (including up to 5000 sensors) for which many previously proposed algorithms are not implementable due to excessive memory and time requirements. Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on the design of resilient power distribution systems.
Enhancing Patient Safety in Pediatric Primary Care

Objective. We developed and implemented a patient safety (PS) curriculum targeted at clinicians and nonclinical office practice staff within a large primary care pediatric network. Methods. Curricular content was informed by medical literature, local PS experts, and malpractice claims data. Sessions were centered on illustrative closed malpractice cases or informed by identified safety events. Participants provided subjective responses to the postsession evaluations. Results. Invited participants from 12 practices included both clinical and nonclinical practice staff (up to 24 attendees per session). Participants reported that they were confident in their knowledge and skills. Several participants engaged in improvement projects that included active surveillance of high-risk patients, improvements in referral and test result management processes, and the distribution of patient educational materials. Conclusions. We successfully developed and implemented a multifaceted PS curriculum for pediatric providers. Participants enjoyed the sessions and several engaged in new PS projects as a result of the program.
Analysis of Mold Filling in RTM Process

A simplified RTM process analysis is presented which is based on the one-dimensional resin flow model by using Darcy's law for flow through porous media. Closed form solutions for the wet length, mold filling time, and pressure distributions are derived for different simplified mold shapes such as rectangular, trapezoidal, and circular sections. These results are then applied to the mold design and vent arrangement in RTM process. Two design principles are proposed from these derivations and confirmed by nu merical application examples. One is to arrange the vents to assure that flow takes the shorter path whenever possible. The other is to use line gates and to inject the fluid from the larger side to the smaller side, or with rapid reduction of the filling volume. Illustration examples show that these arrangements can cut down the mold filling time or reduce the required applied pressure. Especially in the case of RTM with high volume fraction of fibrous preforms, where the process usually involves appl.
Fabrication of C/Cu Composites by Mechanical Activation and Spark Plasma Sintering

C/Cu self-lubricating composites were a kind of potentially functional materials. Nanostructured C/Cu composites were prepared by the new technology of mechanical activation-spark plasma sintering (MA-SPS). Microstructures of the as-milled powder and the as-sintered simple were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD), respectively. These investigations indicated that in Cu-C immiscible system, the nanostructured supersaturated solid solution of carbon in copper was formed at atomic level after milling for 24 h. Microstructures of SPS sintered C/Cu composites still kept the nanostructure. In addition, Cu-C interface bonding was good. It was ascribed to a double activation mechanism in the MA-SPS process, which improved the sintering activity of C/Cu powders. Nanostructured C/Cu composites were obtained by SPS sintered at 600 °C for 3 min.
TDMA is Optimal for All-Unicast DoF Region of TIM if and only if Topology is Chordal Bipartite

The main result of this paper is that an orthogonal access scheme, such as time division multiple access achieves the all-unicast degrees of freedom (DoF) region of the topological interference management problem if and only if the network topology graph is chordal bipartite, i.e., every cycle that can contain a chord, does contain a chord. The all-unicast DoF region includes the DoF region for any arbitrary choice of a unicast message set, so e.g., the results of Maleki and Jafar on the optimality of orthogonal access for the sum-DoF of one-dimensional convex networks are recovered as a special case. The result is also established for the corresponding topological representation of the index coding problem.
Clinical and laboratory considerations for the rapid detection of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae

ABSTRACT Carbapenem resistance among the Enterobacteriaceae has become a significant clinical and public health dilemma. Rapid administration of effective antimicrobials and implementation of supplemental infection control practices is required to both improve patient outcomes and limit the spread of these highly resistant organisms. However, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE)-infected patients are predominantly identified by routine culture methods, which take days to perform. Rapid genomic and phenotypic methods are currently available to accelerate the identification of carbapenemase-producing CRE. Effective use of these technologies is reliant on close collaboration between clinical microbiology, infection prevention, antimicrobial stewardship and infectious diseases specialists. This review discusses the performance characteristics of these technologies to date, and describes strategies for their optimal implementation.
Genetic variations in apoptosis pathway and the risk of ovarian cancer

Background Apoptosis is a highly conserved form of cell death and aberrant regulation of apoptotic cell death mechanisms leads to variety of major human diseases, especially tumor formation. Genetic variations in apoptosis genes may increase susceptibility to ovarian cancer. Results In individual SNP analysis, 12 SNPs in 5 apoptosis pathway genes were significantly associated with ovarian cancer risk after adjustment for multiple comparisons at q-value <0.05. The most significant SNP was rs11152377 in the Bcl-2 gene. The homozygous variant TT genotype was associated with a significantly decreased risk of ovarian cancer (odds ratio [OR] =0.53; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.37-0.77, P<0.001). Cumulative effect analysis showed joint effects of increased risk of ovarian cancer with increasing number of unfavorable genotypes in patients. Classification and regression tree (CART) analysis further revealed high-order gene-gene interactions and categorized the study subjects into low-, medium-, and high-risk groups. Compared with the low-risk group, medium-risk group and high-risk group conferred 1.76-fold (95% CI: 1.06–2.90) and 3.64-fold (95% CI: 2.37–5.59) increased risk of ovarian cancer (P for trend <0.001) Materials and Methods In a case-control study of 417 ovarian cancer patients and 417 matched controls, we evaluated the associations of 587 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 65 genes of the apoptosis pathway with the risk of ovarian cancer. Conclusions Our results suggest that genetic variations in apoptosis pathway genes modulate the risk of ovarian cancer individually and jointly.
A CONSORT-compliant prospective randomized controlled trial: radiation dose reducing in computed tomography using an additional lateral scout view combined with automatic tube current modulation

Background: Radiation exposure has been a hot point in research field of computed tomography (CT). Recently, automated tube current modulation (ATCM) has emerged as an important technique to reduce radiation exposure. Many studies have shown that the difference in scout view would affect modulation. This prospective randomized controlled study is aimed to investigate the impact of an additional lateral scout view on radiation dose and image quality in CT using ACTM. Methods: Combined with ATCM (Care Dose 4D) on multidetector CT, 2 thoracic phantom CT image series were acquired in which planning was conducted with either an anteroposterior (AP) or an AP-lateral scout view. Also, 410 patients underwent thoracic CT examinations using Care Dose 4D modulation and were randomized to either a scan planned with an AP-lateral scout or a single AP scout. Effects of the different scout views on applied effective milliampere seconds (mAs), volume CT dose index (CTDIvol) and dose–length–product (DLP) were analyzed. The quality of patient CT images was also assessed. Data were analyzed using independent t tests and linear correlation analysis. Results: Compared with AP groups, the mean CTDIvol (phantom, 0.89 ± 0.08 vs 1.36 ± 0.26 mGy, P < .001; in patients, 1.12 [0.96, 1.34] vs 2.16 [1.66, 2.64] mGy, P < .001) and DLP (in phantom, 26 [23.25, 28] vs 40 [34.25, 48] mGy×cm, P < .001; in patients, 41 [33, 41] vs 77 [60.5, 99.5] mGy×cm, P < .001) were significantly reduced by approximately 50% in AP-lateral scout view group. With the AP-lateral topogram, the radiation dose on different off-center positions was essentially equal (CTDIvol: 0.76–0.99 mGy; DLP: 22–28 mGy×cm effective dose: 0.31–0. 39 mSv). For image quality, contrast-to-noise ratio and signal-to-noise ratio values in the AP group were similar to those of AP-lateral scout view group. Conclusion: AP combined with an additional lateral scout view using ACTM can significantly reduce the radiation dose without compromising image quality in chest screening CT.