Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Potential Biomedical Application of Enzymatically Treated Alginate/Chitosan Hydrosols in Sponges—Biocompatible Scaffolds Inducing Chondrogenic Differentiation of Human Adipose Derived Multipotent Stromal Cells

Current regenerative strategies used for cartilage repair rely on biomaterial functionality as a scaffold for cells that may have potential in chondrogenic differentiation. The purpose of the research was to investigate the biocompatibility of enzymatically treated alginate/chitosan hydrosol sponges and their suitability to support chondrogenic differentiation of human adipose derived multipotent stromal cells (hASCs). The alginate/chitosan and enzyme/alginate/chitosan sponges were formed from hydrosols with various proportions and were used as a biomaterial in this study. Sponges were tested for porosity and wettability. The porosity of each sponge was higher than 80%. An equal dose of alginate and chitosan in the composition of sponges improved their swelling ability. It was found that equal concentrations of alginate and chitosan in hydrosols sponges assure high biocompatibility properties that may be further improved by enzymatic treatment. Importantly, the high biocompatibility of these biomaterials turned out to be crucial in the context of hydrosols’ pro-chondrogenic function. After exposure to the chondrogenic conditions, the hASCs in N/A/C and L/A/C sponges formed well developed nodules and revealed increased expression of collagen type II, aggrecan and decreased expression of collagen type I. Moreover, in these cultures, the reactive oxygen species level was lowered while superoxide dismutase activity increased. Based on the obtained results, we conclude that N/A/C and L/A/C sponges may have prospective application as hASCs carriers for cartilage repair.
The Generation of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells from Blood Cells: An Efficient Protocol Using Serial Plating of Reprogrammed Cells by Centrifugation

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) have demonstrated great potential for differentiation into diverse tissues. We report a straightforward and highly efficient method for the generation of iPSCs from PBMCs. By plating the cells serially to a newly coated plate by centrifugation, this protocol provides multiple healthy iPSC colonies even from a small number of PBMCs. The generated iPSCs expressed pluripotent markers and differentiated into all three germ layer lineages. The protocol can also be used with umbilical cord blood mononuclear cells (CBMCs). In this study, we present a simple and efficient protocol that improved the yield of iPSCs from floating cells such as PBMCs and CBMCs by serial plating and centrifugation.
Multimode $G_{m}$– $C$ Channel Selection Filter for Mobile Applications in 1-V Supply Voltage

A CMOS transconductor for multimode channel selection filter is presented. The transconductor includes a voltage-to-current converter and a current multiplier. Voltage-to-current conversion employs linear region MOS transistors, and the conversion features high linearity over a wide input swing range. The current multiplier which operates in the weak inversion region provides a wide transconductance tuning range without degrading the linearity. A third-order Butterworth low-pass filter implemented with the transconductors was designed by TSMC 0.18 mum CMOS process. The measurement results show that the filter can operate with the cutoff frequency of 135 kHz to 2.2 MHz. The tuning range and the linearity performance would be suitable for the wireless specifications of GSM, Bluetooth, cdma2000, and wide-band CDMA. In the design, the maximum power consumption at the highest cutoff frequency is 2 mW under a 1-V supply voltage.
Towards a general framework for program generation in creative domains

Choosing an efficient artificial intelligence approach for producing artefacts for a particular creative domain can be a difficult task. Seemingly minor changes to the solution representation and learning parameters can have an unpredictably large impact on the success of the process. A standard approach is to try various different setups in order to investigate their effects and refine the technique over time. Our aim is to produce a pluggable framework for exploring different representations and learning techniques for creative artefact generation. Here we describe our initial work towards this goal, including how problems are specified to our system in a format that is concise but still able to cover a wide range of domains. We also tackle the general problem of constrained solution generation by bringing information from the constraints into the generation and variation process and we discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of doing this. Finally, we present initial results of applying our system to the domain of algorithmic art generation, where we have used the framework to code up and test three different representations for producing artwork.
Initialization Free Graph Based Clustering

This paper proposes an original approach to cluster multi-component data sets, including an estimation of the number of clusters. From the construction of a minimal spanning tree with Prim’s algorithm, and the assumption that the vertices are approximately distributed according to a Poisson distribution, the number of clusters is estimated by thresholding the Prim’s trajectory. The corresponding cluster centroids are then computed in order to initialize the generalized Lloyd’s algorithm, also known as K-means, which allows to circumvent initialization problems. Some results are derived for evaluating the false positive rate of our cluster detection algorithm, with the help of approximations relevant in Euclidean spaces. Metrics used for measuring similarity between multi-dimensional data points are based on symmetrical divergences. The use of these informational divergences together with the proposed method leads to better results, compared to other clustering methods for the problem of astrophysical data processing. Some applications of this method in the multi/hyper-spectral imagery domain to a satellite view of Paris and to an image of the Mars planet are also presented. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of divergences in our problem, the method with informational divergence as similarity measure is compared with the same method using classical metrics. In the astrophysics application, we also compare the method with the spectral clustering algorithms.
Control reconfiguration demonstrated at a two-degrees-of-freedom helicopter model

Any technical system is liable to the occurrence of faults. A major fault in the plant like the complete loss of an actuator or sensor breaks the control loop and renders the system in-operational, unless the control structure is changed in response to the fault. This paper shows how the LQG (linear quadratic Gaussian) optimal control problem can be posed and solved automatically for the faulty plant, resulting in a new controller that allows to stabilise the plant despite of an actuator fault. The same approach can be used to design a bank of observers (one per fault case) that can be used for sensor fault diagnosis and reconfiguration at the same time. The approach is experimentally verified at a two-degrees-of-freedom helicopter model.
Image regions contributing to perceptual translucency: A psychophysical reverse-correlation study

The spatial luminance relationship between shading patterns and specular highlight is suggested to be a cue for perceptual translucency (Motoyoshi, 2010). Although local image features are also important for translucency perception (Fleming & Bulthoff, 2005), they have rarely been investigated. Here, we aimed to extract spatial regions related to translucency perception from computer graphics (CG) images of objects using a psychophysical reverse-correlation method. From many trials in which the observer compared the perceptual translucency of two CG images, we obtained translucency-related patterns showing which image regions were related to perceptual translucency judgments. An analysis of the luminance statistics calculated within these image regions showed that (1) the global rms contrast within an entire CG image was not related to perceptual translucency and (2) the local mean luminance of specific image regions within the CG images correlated well with perceptual translucency. However, the image regions contributing to perceptual translucency differed greatly between observers. These results suggest that perceptual translucency does not rely on global luminance statistics such as global rms contrast, but rather depends on local image features within specific image regions. There may be some “hot spots” effective for perceptual translucency, although which of many hot spots are used in judging translucency may be observer dependent.
Crystallographic characterization of CCG repeats

CCG repeats are highly over-represented in exons of the human genome. Usually they are located in the 5′ UTR but are also abundant in translated sequences. The CCG repeats are associated with three tri-nucleotide repeat disorders: Huntington’s disease, myotonic dystrophy type 1 and chromosome X-linked mental retardation (FRAXE). In this study, we present two crystal structures containing double-stranded CCG repeats: one of an RNA in the native form, and one containing LNA nucleotides. Both duplexes form A-helices but with strands slipped in the 5′ (native structure) or the 3′ direction (LNA-containing structure). As a result, one of two expected C-C pairs is eliminated from the duplex. Each of the three observed C-C pairs interacts differently, forming either one weak H-bond or none. LNA nucleotides have no apparent effect on the helical parameters but the base stacking is increased compared to the native duplex and the distribution of electrostatic potential in the major groove is changed. The CCG crystal structures explain the thermodynamic fragility of CCG runs and throw light on the observation that the MBNL1 protein recognises CCG runs, as well as CUG and CAG, but not the relatively stable CGG repeats.
Quantitative Proteomics in Plants: Choices in Abundance

The field of proteomics is evolving from cataloguing proteins under static conditions to comparative analyses. Defining proteins that change in abundance, form, location, or activity may indicate which proteins are involved in developmental changes or responses to alterations in environmental conditions. Such studies are facilitated by an increasing number of complementary technical options for performing quantitative proteomic comparisons. As with any developing field, however, rapid expansion in new techniques introduces concerns about choosing the appropriate approach. The goals of this perspective essay, therefore, are both to introduce the various options that are available (or nearly so) for quantitative proteomics and to discuss considerations related to applying these methods in the laboratory.
iSense: a wireless sensor network based conference room management system

In this paper, we have studied the IT system (e.g. MS-outlook) that is used to book meeting rooms in a corporate environment. In the existing IT system, the status of meeting rooms is manually entered, and as a result, it is not reflected in real time in the IT system. This results in severe underutilization of resources (conference rooms) across the corporation, and wastage of electricity with the lights and air-conditioning system being operational even when the rooms are unoccupied. We have created a test bed of motes and analyzed the occupancy and electricity consumption data to estimate the under-utilization of conference rooms, and the wastage of electricity in the process. In order to eliminate these problems, we have designed a wireless sensor network based solution which results in two main benefits: (i) the utilization of the conference room is increased from 67% to 90% and (ii) electricity saving is equivalent to 16000 full grown banyan trees in a year.
2D Saturable Absorbers for Fibre Lasers

Two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials are an emergent and promising platform for future photonic and optoelectronic applications. Here, we review recent progress demonstrating the application of 2D nanomaterials as versatile, wideband saturable absorbers for Q-switching and mode-locking fibre lasers. We focus specifically on the family of few-layer transition metal dichalcogenides, including MoS2, MoSe2 and WS2.
Stereoscopic image quality metric based on binocular perception model

Measuring a perceptual quality of an image is one of the important tasks in various applications such as image coding, processing, enhancement, and monitoring system. Although active researches have been made for objective quality assessment of 2D images for some decades, still very few efforts have been concentrated on 3D image quality assessment. In this paper, we propose a new quality metric for stereoscopic images based on the binocular perception model considering asymmetric property of a stereoscopic image pair. Experiments for publicly available databases show that the proposed metric provides consistent correlations with subjective quality scores. The results also show that the proposed metric outperforms state-of-the-arts metrics.
A 3.5 GS/s 5-b Flash ADC in 90 nm CMOS

A 5-bit flash ADC incorporates 20 mum by 20 mum inductors to improve both comparator preamplification bandwidth and regeneration speed. A switched-cascode scheme reduces comparator kickback. Offset cancellation is achieved by modifying the comparator reference voltages without degrading high-speed performance. The ADC achieves a measured SNDR of 27.5 dB for a 5 MHz input at 4 GS/s, and 23.6 dB for a 1 GHz input at 3.5 GS/s. The power consumption (including clock buffer and ladder) is 227 mW at 3.5 GS/s. The active area is 0.658 mm2
K-Nearest Neighbor Classification Using Anatomized Data

This paper analyzes k nearest neighbor classification with training data anonymized using anatomy. Anatomy preserves all data values, but introduces uncertainty in the mapping between identifying and sensitive values. We first study the theoretical effect of the anatomized training data on the k nearest neighbor error rate bounds, nearest neighbor convergence rate, and Bayesian error. We then validate the derived bounds empirically. We show that 1) Learning from anatomized data approaches the limits of learning through the unprotected data (although requiring larger training data), and 2) nearest neighbor using anatomized data outperforms nearest neighbor on generalization-based anonymization.
Topic Mining based on Word Posterior Probability in Spoken Document

For speech recognition system, there are three kinds of result representations as one-best, N -best and Lattice. Since lattice has multi-path which can reduce the effect of recognition error rate, it is widely applied nowadays. In fact, there are amount of redundancies in lattice, which leads to the increasing of complexity of latter algorithm based on it. Additionally, for the decoding algorithm, it is acted as maximum a posterior probability (MAP) which can only guarantee the posterior probability of the whole sentence is of maximum. For MAP does not mean the highest syllable recognition rate, here, confusion network is introduced in topic mining system. In the clustering during confusion network, the minimum word error rule is adopted, which is proper to topic mining system since the least meaningful unit is word in Chinese and word information is most important in topic mining. In this paper, a simplified confusion network generation algorithm is proposed to handle some problems caused by insertion error during recognition. Then based on the confusion network, a word list extraction approach is proposed, in which, the dictionary is adopted to judge whether the consecutive arc in confusion sets is a word. At this stage, the error word information produced by error recognition rate can be corrected to some extent. After the competition part in word list extraction on confusion network, a final word list with posterior probability can be obtained. Furthermore, this kind of posterior probability can be combined in topic mining system. SVD and NMF are adopted here to decompose the term-document matrix on the word list of confusion network. From the experiments, it can be drawn that the proposed approach based on confusion network can achieve better performance than that of one-best and N -best. Additionally, the modified weight which combined posterior probability into term-document matrix can further improve the system performance.
Statistical Bistratal Dependency Parsing

We present an inexact search algorithm for the problem of predicting a two-layered dependency graph. The algorithm is based on a k-best version of the standard cubic-time search algorithm for projective dependency parsing, which is used as the backbone of a beam search procedure. This allows us to handle the complex non-local feature dependencies occurring in bistratal parsing if we model the interdependency between the two layers. We apply the algorithm to the syntactic---semantic dependency parsing task of the CoNLL-2008 Shared Task, and we obtain a competitive result equal to the highest published for a system that jointly learns syntactic and semantic structure.
Efficient Direct Rendering of Digital Height Fields

A digital height field is an array of height values assigned to the vertices of a regular grid in the two-dimensional domain over which an explicit function (landscape) is defined. A new direct rendering algorithm for digital height fields is described. “Direct rendering” means that the image is calculated without an intermediate step of conversion to a polygonal mesh. It is shown that direct height field rendering is of particular advantage if the height field is manipulated interactively, as for instance required in geome tric modeling or simulation of processes of manufacturing. Rendering times in the range of seconds are achieved on PC hardware even for highly resolved height fields.
Eye Spacing Measurement for Facial Recognition

Few approaches to automated facial recognition have employed geometric measurement of characteristic features of a human face. Eye spacing measurement has been identified as an important step in achieving this goal. Measurement of spacing has been made by application of the Hough transform technique to detect the instance of a circular shape and of an ellipsoidal shape which approximate the perimeter of the iris and both the perimeter of the sclera and the shape of the region below the eyebrows respectively. Both gradient magnitude and gradient direction were used to handle the noise contaminating the feature space. Results of this application indicate that measurement of the spacing by detection of the iris is the most accurate of these three methods with measurement by detection of the position of the eyebrows the least accurate. However, measurement by detection of the eyebrows' position is the least constrained method. Application of these techniques has led to measurement of a characteristic feature of the human face with sufficient accuracy to merit later inclusion in a full package for automated facial recognition.
Impact of a Reduced Arctic Sea Ice Cover on Ocean and Atmospheric Properties

AbstractThe Arctic sea ice cover declined over the last few decades and reached a record minimum in 2007, with a slight recovery thereafter. Inspired by this the authors investigate the response of atmospheric and oceanic properties to a 1-yr period of reduced sea ice cover. Two ensembles of equilibrium and transient simulations are produced with the Community Climate System Model. A sea ice change is induced through an albedo change of 1 yr. The sea ice area and thickness recover in both ensembles after 3 and 5 yr, respectively. The sea ice anomaly leads to changes in ocean temperature and salinity to a depth of about 200 m in the Arctic Basin. Further, the salinity and temperature changes in the surface layer trigger a “Great Salinity Anomaly” in the North Atlantic that takes roughly 8 yr to travel across the North Atlantic back to high latitudes. In the atmosphere the changes induced by the sea ice anomaly do not last as long as in the ocean. The response in the transient and equilibrium simulations, w.
On the applicability of software defined networking to large scale networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) has attracted many research interests among the networking community and has been deployed in many small to moderate networks. Although many approaches have been proposed to address the scalability issue of SDN, however, it is still an open problem whether SDN can be applied to large scale networks such as Tier-1 Internet service providers (ISP) when it works in passive mode. To address this problem, we in this paper analyze the number of flow entries that a switch needs to maintain and the number of flow setup requests per second that a controller needs to deal with, based on real data traces collected from a link between two routers in a Tier-1 ISP. The results show that, if we store a unique flow entry for every flow, SDN cannot be applied to large ISPs. In addition, if switches are required to deal with 12-tuple flow entries, SDN still cannot be applied to large Tier-1 ISPs even if we only setup unique flow entries for flows whose sizes are larger than 100 MB. However, if switches are required to deal with only 2-tuple flow entries, SDN can be applied to large Tier-1 ISPs if we only setup unique flow entries for flows whose sizes are larger than 10 MB.
Alteration of plasma membrane glycopeptides and gangliosides of Chinese hamster cells accompanying development of resistance to daunorubicin and vincristine.

Abstract Glycoproteins and gangliosides of spontaneously transformed Chinese hamster lung cells (DC-3F) and of vincristine- and daunorubicin-resistant sublines of DC-3F have been compared. These resistant cells and also actinomycin D-resistant cells have been shown to have reduced permeability to drug and to exhibit some degree of mutual cross-resistance to all three agents. Glycoproteins of tritiated glucosamine-labeled membrane preparations from drug-sensitive and-resistant cells were separated by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide and two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. Analysis of the cylindrical gels revealed that drug-resistant cells synthesize a major glycoprotein species which is much larger (Mr about 150,000) than the major species synthesized by control DC-3F cells (Mr about 100,000). Data obtained with a revertant DC-3F/AD × subline exhibiting a 45-fold decrease in resistance as well as with vincristine-resistant DC-3F/VCRd revertant cells with a 20-fold decrease in resistance to the Vinca compound indicate a concomitant decrease in amount of the Mr 150,000 species and an increase in the Mr 100,000 species characterizing drugsensitive DC-3F cells, thereby substantiating the observed relationship between drug resistance and plasma membrane glycoprotein expression. Examination of the major glycopeptide species characteristic of the drug-resistant cell lines by two-dimensional electrophoresis revealed that the Mr 150,000 glycopeptide appears to be a family of glycopeptides with an isoelectric point range of 6.5 to 7.5. The Mr 100,000 species of control cells also comprises a heterogeneous group of acidic peptides with apparent isoelectric points near 5. Gangliosides labeled with [14C]glucosamine were extracted and separated by thin-layer chromatography. DC-3F cells synthesize a full complement of gangliosides, whereas daunorubicin-resistant cells appear to be blocked at the level of hematosides (GM3), as observed previously for actinomycin D-resistant cells. Cells highly resistant to vincristine synthesize the full complement of gangliosides seen in the parental line but contain relatively more GM3 and GM2. Membrane glycoprotein and ganglioside changes in the drug-resistant cells are concomitants of the development of resistance to vincristine, daunorubicin, or actinomycin D. The changes are also correlated with the previously observed alterations in cell morphology and the suppression of the malignant phenotype occurring in the cells selected for resistance to these drugs.