Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A probabilistic patch based image representation using Conditional Random Field model for image classification

In this paper we proposed an ordered patch based method using Conditional Random Field (CRF) in order to encode local properties and their spatial relationship in images to address texture classification, face recognition, and scene classification problems. Typical image classification approaches work without considering spatial causality among distinctive properties of an image for image representation in feature space. In this method first, each image is encoded as a sequence of ordered patches, including local properties. Second, the sequence of these ordered patches is modeled as a probabilistic feature vector by CRF to model spatial relationship of these local properties. And finally, image classification is performed on such probabilistic image representation. Experimental results on several standard image datasets indicate that proposed method outperforms some of existing image classification methods.
Wnt3a-Mediated Formation of Phosphatidylinositol 4,5-Bisphosphate Regulates LRP6 Phosphorylation

The canonical Wnt–β-catenin signaling pathway is initiated by inducing phosphorylation of one of the Wnt receptors, low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 6 (LRP6), at threonine residue 1479 (Thr1479) and serine residue 1490 (Ser1490). By screening a human kinase small interfering RNA library, we identified phosphatidylinositol 4-kinase type II α and phosphatidylinositol-4-phosphate 5-kinase type I (PIP5KI) as required for Wnt3a-induced LRP6 phosphorylation at Ser1490 in mammalian cells and confirmed that these kinases are important for Wnt signaling in Xenopus embryos. Wnt3a stimulates the formation of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphates [PtdIns (4,5)P2] through frizzled and dishevelled, the latter of which directly interacted with and activated PIP5KI. In turn, PtdIns (4,5)P2 regulated phosphorylation of LRP6 at Thr1479 and Ser1490. Therefore, our study reveals a signaling mechanism for Wnt to regulate LRP6 phosphorylation.
Diagnosis and management of concussion in sports

Any sport has an inherent risk of injury. A balance must be reached between maintaining a competitive edge in a sport and ensuring participant safety. Frequently the loss of objectivity on the part of the athlete, coaches, sports media, and spectators is an unfortunate and potentially harmful bias. In that setting, the health professional's role is to provide objective assessment of the injured athlete and guidance about the advisability of safe return to competition. There are three main issues that should be addressed by any guideline for the management of concussion. The health outcomes that need to be addressed at the time of the injury and during the follow-up period include (1) the appropriate management of the injured athlete at the time of injury to identify potential neurosurgical emergencies (epidural, subdural, and intracerebral hemorrhages); (2) the prevention of catastrophic outcome related to acute brain swelling; and (3) the avoidance of cumulative brain injury related to repeated concussions. Mild traumatic brain injury typically does not require neurosurgical intervention, and the treatment of postconcussion symptoms often falls to the neurologist. [1] Questions addressed during neurologic or neurosurgical consultation for sports-related concussion call for advice to the patient that is guided by neuroscience and the consensus of experts, rather than local lore and individual opinion. Most importantly, consultation regarding the prevention of catastrophic outcome and cumulative neurobehavioral deficits from repeated concussions can best be provided by the well-informed physician. This report, based on a project already completed by the Colorado Medical Society, [2] was written to provide background information for a practice parameter of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN). [3] Disagreement about the terminology of mild traumatic brain injury and concerns about the proper management of sports-related concussion led to the development of this document. Several articles and textbook chapters have appeared …
Toxic Farm: A Cooperative Management Platform for Virtual Teams and Enterprises

The proliferation of the Internet has revolutionized the way people work together for business. People located at remote places can collaborate across organizational and national boundaries. Although the Internet provides the basic connectivity, researchers all over the world are grappling with the problems of defining, designing and implementing web services that would help people collaborate effectively in virtual teams and enterprises. These problems are exacerbated by a number of issues, such as coordination, communication, data sharing, mobility and security. Hence there is a strong need for multiple services (to address above issues) though an open cooperative management platform to support the design and implementation of virtual teams and enterprises in this dynamic business environment. This paper presents a cooperative management platform called Toxic Farm for this purpose and discusses its application in business applications.
Adaptive cache compression for high-performance processors

Modern processors use two or more levels of cache memories to bridge the rising disparity between processor and memory speeds. Compression can improve cache performance by increasing effective cache capacity and eliminating misses. However, decompressing cache lines also increases cache access latency, potentially degrading performance. In this paper, we develop an adaptive policy that dynamically adapts to the costs and benefits of cache compression. We propose a two-level cache hierarchy where the L1 cache holds uncompressed data and the L2 cache dynamically selects between compressed and uncompressed storage. The L2 cache is 8-way set-associative with LRU replacement, where each set can store up to eight compressed lines but has space for only four uncompressed lines. On each L2 reference, the LRU stack depth and compressed size determine whether compression (could have) eliminated a miss or incurs an unnecessary decompression overhead. Based on this outcome, the adaptive policy updates a single global saturating counter, which predicts whether to allocate lines in compressed or uncompressed form. We evaluate adaptive cache compression using full-system simulation and a range of benchmarks. We show that compression can improve performance for memory-intensive commercial workloads by up to 17%. However, always using compression hurts performance for low-miss-rate benchmarks - due to unnecessary decompression overhead - degrading performance by up to 18%. By dynamically monitoring workload behavior, the adaptive policy achieves comparable benefits from compression, while never degrading performance by more than 0.4%.
Antioxidant activity and protective effects of commercial propolis on gentamicin induced nephrotoxicity in rabbits- In vitro study

Objective: the aim of this study is to investigate the in vitro antioxidant activity, the total phenol and flavonoid content and the possible protective effects of commercial propolis on gentamicin-induced nephrotoxicity in rabbits. Methods: the in vitro antioxidant activity was measured by ferric reducing antioxidant power assay and cupric reducing antioxidant capacity assay, the total phenols content was measured by folin–ciocalteau assay, the flavonoids content by the alcl3 colorimetric method and the renoprotective effects of propolis methanol extract was evaluated in a rabbit model of gentamicin-induced nephrotoxicity. The protective effects of propolis on gentamicin-induced nephrotoxicity in rabbits were evaluated through biochemical parameter (measuring serum urea and creatinine) and histopathological alterations in kidneys Results: methanol extract of propolis showed a strong antioxidant activity, which is attributed to its high phenolic and flavonoid contents. Oral administration of propolis extract to rabbits at a dose of 1 mg/kg body weight significantly protected against histopathological and biochemical alterations induced by gentamicin. Conclusion: the present study demonstrated that commercial propolis is strong antioxidant and is effective for the prevention of gentamicin-induced renal damage in rabbits
Fungal Biofilms and Polymicrobial Diseases

Biofilm formation is an important virulence factor for pathogenic fungi. Both yeasts and filamentous fungi can adhere to biotic and abiotic surfaces, developing into highly organized communities that are resistant to antimicrobials and environmental conditions. In recent years, new genera of fungi have been correlated with biofilm formation. However, Candida biofilms remain the most widely studied from the morphological and molecular perspectives. Biofilms formed by yeast and filamentous fungi present differences, and studies of polymicrobial communities have become increasingly important. A key feature of resistance is the extracellular matrix, which covers and protects biofilm cells from the surrounding environment. Furthermore, to achieve cell–cell communication, microorganisms secrete quorum-sensing molecules that control their biological activities and behaviors and play a role in fungal resistance and pathogenicity. Several in vitro techniques have been developed to study fungal biofilms, from colorimetric methods to omics approaches that aim to identify new therapeutic strategies by developing new compounds to combat these microbial communities as well as new diagnostic tools to identify these complex formations in vivo. In this review, recent advances related to pathogenic fungal biofilms are addressed.
Unified Parallel C Profiling Interface Proposal

Due to the wide range of compilers and the lack of a standardized profiling interface, writers of performance tools face many challenges when incorporating support for Unified Parallel C (UPC) programs. This document presents a preliminary specification for a standard profiling interface that attempts to be flexible enough to be adapted into current UPC compiler and runtime infrastructures with little effort, while allowing performance analysis tools to gather much information about the performance of UPC programs.
On the Numerical Modelling of Orthotropic Large Strain Elastoplasticity

The paper deals with a new aspect of anisotropic elastoplastic analysis at finite strain. An anisotropic elastic constitutive law, described in invariant setting by use of the structural tensors and the elastic part of right Cauchy-Green tensor, is presented. The material model enjoys a feature of the multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient. An anisotropic Hill's type yield criterion described by Eshelby' stress tensor and structural tensors is applied. A model of the nonlinear isotropic hardening is employed. Explicit results for the specific case of orthotropic anisotropy are given. An accurate and trivial wise objective integration algorithm employing exponential map is derived. The numerical example demonstrates the influence of anisotropy on elastoplastic deformation responses as well as robustness and accuracy of the proposed formulation.
GARField magnetic resonance of ultraviolet cured acrylic adhesives

Pressure sensitive adhesives are a category of adhesives which can be used for both permanent and removable applications. The use of radiation to cure these materials prior to application is becoming more widespread due in part to the recent drive to reduce the release of volatile organic compounds and hazardous air pollutants produced from more traditional solvent or thermal curing methods. For the manufacturer, a greater understanding of how these adhesives cure under near to real life conditions is highly desired. This thesis presents the first use of one-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging to provide information on the molecular mobility as revealed by spin relaxation times as a function of depth in cross-linking acrylic adhesives during photoinitiated curing by ultraviolet light. Imperfect curing in these adhesives may lead to crosslink density inhomogeneities and consequently, to variations in the adhesion and cohesion properties throughout the depth of the adhesive. The GARField magnet developed at the University of Surrey, along with a new high temperature sample mounting probe developed during this work allowed thin film samples to be measured at various temperatures with a spatial resolution better than 16 mum. Two separate components were identified in the exponential decay of the NMR signal from the bulk adhesive. These were attributed to the inter-crosslinked network and to lower molecular weight dangling chain ends. Curing was seen to increase the fraction of the shorter component indicative of an increase in crosslink density. GARField profiles showed that formulations with additional multifunctional acrylates produced the highest cure owing to the increased crosslink density afforded by the multifunctional acrylates. However, the addition of these groups also led to a reduced homogeneity in the depth of cure. The inclusion of further photoinitiating species, sensitive to a wider range of wavelengths was shown to reduce this effect. Measurements at 60°C showed that UV irradiation was more efficient at producing crosslinks at this temperature. However, the contrast between cured and uncured samples on GARField was reduced due to the additional, thermally driven molecular motion. The activation energy for this thermal motion was calculated to be 0.34 +/- 0.04 eV and 0.28 +/- 0.05 eV for the uncured and cured adhesives, respectively. The irradiation regime only became important when small doses separated by more than 20 minutes were used. This regime led to sufficient build up of oxygen in the upper surface of the adhesive to inhibit the curing reaction.
Increase of translatable mRNA for major microsomal proteins in n-alkane-grown Candida maltosa

In an n-alkane-assimilating Candida sp. , transfer from glucose- to n-alkane-containing medium induced changes in the microsomal proteins, and several distinctive polypeptides were demonstrated in the solubilized microsomal fraction derived from n-alkane-grown cells. Long-term-labeling and pulse-labeling experiments in vivo demonstrated the synthesis of the specific microsomal polypeptides. The polypeptides were synthesized as in vitro translation products directed by polyadenylated RNA extracted from n-alkane-grown cells. Two major polypeptides were partially purified from the microsomal fraction from n-alkane-grown cells, and antiserum was prepared in a rabbit. Immunoprecipitation of these two polypeptides was accompanied by an increase in the amount of translatable mRNA. The molecular weights of the polypeptides derived from long-term-labeling, pulse-labeling and in vitro translation experiments appeared to be identical.
Reducing Call Blocking Probability in Hybrid Multicast wavelength Division Multiplexing Networks using Weighted Routing and wavelength Assignment Algorithm

In the proposed work, the focus is on increasing the available wavelength in the all-optical networks, for which the Routing and Wavelength Assignment plays a vital role. In the earlier reported work, the wavelengths were assigned to the links which covers a set of destinations but not all the intended destinations. However this proposed work, attempts were made to create multiple spanning tree with minimum cost for reaching all the nodes in the network. Also, the delay (associated with transmission and propagation delay) was considered in the proposed work for demonstrating the Quality of Service. Experimentally the proposed algorithm works by means of constructing Multiple Minimum Spanning Trees (MMST) using Mayeda and Seshu algorithm considering the QoS parameter delay and avoids the call blocking probabilities. For the performance measurement, the parameters such as the cost and delay are considered and depending on the application they can be traded-off. The significance of the work lies in the optimization of the wavelength used in the fibre network, which mainly contributes to the backbone of the Internet. The experiments were conducted for the different scenarios of simulated network configuration and found to produce promising results compared to the existing work.
Physiotherapy intervention in Alzheimer's disease: systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND Many studies reported that physiotherapy interventions are available to treat Alzheimer's disease (AD), but the efficacy remains uncertain. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of physiotherapy intervention on AD. METHODS The data sources were searched from literature databases, journals, and reference lists from 1 January 1990 to the end of 1 April 2014. Randomized and non-randomized controlled trials with physiotherapy intervention were included in our meta-analysis. Jadad score and Newcastle-Ottawa scale were used to assess the quality of included trials. Outcome measures were cognition function, physical function, activity of daily life (ADL) and neuropsychiatric inventory (NPI). RESULTS 23 trials met the inclusion standard finally. Significant changes were seen in cognitive function: Mini-Mental State Examination score (weighted mean difference (WMD): 1.84, 95% confidence interval (CI): [0.76, to, 2.93], p < 0.0001), and verbal fluency (standard mean difference (SMD): 0.34, 95% CI: [0.01 to 0.66], p = 0.04). Other outcomes are also significant, they were timed up and go test (SMD: 0.56, 95% CI: [0.30 to 0.83], p < 0.0001), berg functional balance scale (SMD: 1.11, 95% CI: [0.37 to 1.84], p = 0.003), 6-min walk distance test (SMD: 141.45, 95% CI: [11.72 to 271.18], p = 0.03), ADL (SMD: 0.78, 95% CI: [0.33 to 1.23], p = 0.0007) and NPI (SMD: -0.69, 95% CI: [-1.31 to -0.07], p = 0.03). CONCLUSION The available data indicate that physiotherapy intervention may have benefits in AD. However, current data are not definitive; more carefully designed and conducted observational studies are needed to definitively establish that whether physiotherapy intervention can effectively alleviate symptoms of AD.
NEURAL NETWORK APPROACH TO BAYESIAN BACKGROUND MODELING FOR VIDEO OBJECT SEGMENTATION

Object segmentation from a video stream is an essential task in video processing and forms the foundation of scene understanding, object-based video encoding (e.g. MPEG4), various surveillance and 2D to pseudo 3D conversion applications. The task is difficult and exacerbated by the advances in video capture and storage (e.g. HDTV, QuadHDTV). Increased resolution of the sequences requires development of new, more efficient algorithms for object detection and segmentation. The paper presents a novel neural network based approach to background modelling for motion based object segmentation in video sequences. The proposed approach is designed to enable efficient, highly-parallelized hardware implementation. Such a system would be able to achieve real time segmentation of high-resolution sequences.
Engineering Semantic Web Information Systems in Hera

The success of the World Wide Web has caused the concepts of information system to change. Web Information Systems (WIS) use from the Web its paradigm and technologies in order to retrieve information from sources on the Web, and to present the information in terms of a Web or hypermedia presentation. Hera is a methodology that supports the design and engineering of WIS. It is a model-driven methodology that distinguishes three parts in the design: integration, data retrieval, and presentation generation. The integration part manages the gathering of data from different sources on the basis of source ontologies and mappings between those source ontologies and the conceptual model of the WIS. The data retrieval part handles the user queries and produces the data that represents the query result. In the presentation generation part this query result is trasformed into a Web presentation and that presentation is constructed to suit the user (platform), e.g. HTML, WML, or SMIL. In this paper we address the Hera design methodology and specifically explain two models: the integration model that covers the different aspects of integration, and the adaptation model that specifies how the generated presentations can be adaptable (e.g. based on device capabilities, user preferences) and adaptive (e.g. based on user browsing history). This detailed description includes an explanation of how the Hera software is constructed. This software provides a set of trasformations that allow a WIS to go from integration to presentation generation. These transformations are based on RDF(S), the foundation of the Semantic Web. We show how RDF(S) has proven its value in combining all relevant aspects of WIS design, thus illustrating how Hera allows the engineering of Semantic Web Information Systems (SWIS).
Signorini's contact model for deformable objects in haptic simulations

In this paper we consider deformable objects in haptic simulations. The physical simulation that drives haptic perception requires a good dynamic behavior. The inputs of the deformable model come from the treatment of the collision. We propose to focus on the contact restitution between deformable objects to guarantee "physical and perceptual realisms" of the haptic feedback. Signorini, in 1933, proposed a physical model of contact for deformable objects interacting with rigid static bodies (Signorini, S, 1933). This paper shows that the Signorini's model extents to contacts between two deformable objects using Gauss-Seidel resolution of complementarity problems. An interactive resolution of the overall formulation is presented and experienced on deformable objects using the finite linear-elements method.
Behaviour of Geopolymer Mortars after Exposure to Elevated Temperatures

In this study it was investigated the behavior of class F fly ash based geopolymer mortars subjected to elevated temperatures. Geopolimer composites were prepared with CEN-sand, water, fly ash as the binder, nSiO2Na2O and NaOH mixture combination as alkali activator. After mixing fresh geopolymer mixture, prismatic specimens were prepared using 40 mm × 40 mm × 160 mm prism molds. After molding, fresh geopolymer mortar samples with their mold were subjected to heat curing at 50 °C, 60 °C, 70 °C, 80 °C, 90 °C and 100 °C temperature for 48 hours in an oven. After 48 hours initial heat curing, the hardened samples were taken out of their mold. Then, they were further cured by leaving them in laboratory environment at about 22 ± 2 °C temperature, until 28 days together with heat curing duration. At the end of 28 days, geopolymer mortar samples developed flexural strength values between 2,9 MPa and 8,51 MPa. Geopolymer mortar samples developed compressive strength values between 7,63 MPa and 50,64 MPa. High temperature experiments were conducted to observe behaviour of geopolymer mortars at elevated temperatures. The control cement mortar mixtures were also prepared and subjected to high temperature exposure in comparison to geopolymer mortar mixtures. Control cement mortars were cured at laboratory environment for 28 days without initial temperature curing. Control cement mortar mixtures and geopolymer mortar mixtures were exposed to elevated temperatures of 200 °C, 400 °C, 600 °C and 800 °C temperature. The unit weight, ultrasonic pulse velocity, flexural and compressive strength of all mixtures were measured before and after high temperature exposure. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of the mixtures were taken and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer analyses were carried out. It was observed that there was an increase in the flexural and compressive strengths of some geopolymer mortars after high temperature exposure. In general, geopolymer mortars exhibited better performance at elevated temperatures in comparison to control cement mortar mixture. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.5755/j01.ms.24.4. 18829