Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Information Systems Engineering: What Is It?

This paper discusses the meaning of the term “information systems engineering”. It does so by giving an account of five notions embedded in the term, hence arriving to a concluding definition and a suggestion of the broad areas of knowledge needed by ISE experts. The paper ends with a brief discussion of new demands on ISE education caused by the fact that information systems are increasingly becoming multi-media and web based and that the look and feel aspect of the business process as reflected in process-oriented information systems is becoming ever more important.
Cyclothiazide unmasks AMPA‐evoked stimulation of [3H]‐L‐glutamate release from rat hippocampal synaptosomes

The effect of α‐amino‐3‐hydroxy‐5‐methylisoxazolepropionate (AMPA) on Ca2+‐sensitive, tetrodotoxin (TTX)‐insensitive K+‐stimulated [3H]‐L‐glutamate release from rat hippocampal synaptosomes was determined. AMPA in the presence, but not in the absence of cyclothiazide, a drug which blocks AMPA receptor desensitization, elicited a dose‐dependent increase in K+‐stimulated [3H]‐L‐glutamate release but had no effect on basal release. The AMPA/cyclothiazide stimulation was blocked by CNQX and by GYKI 52466, an antagonist at the cyclothiazide site. These results indicate that AMPA receptors are present on presynaptic terminals and suggest that they may play a role in the regulation of neurotransmitter release.
vCache: Architectural support for transparent and isolated virtual LLCs in virtualized environments

A key role of virtualization is to give an illusion that a consolidated workload runs on a dedicated machine although the underlying resources are actively shared by multiple workloads. Technical advances have enabled a virtual machine (VM) to exercise many shared resources of a machine in a transparent and isolated manner. However, such an illusion of resource dedication has not been supported for the last-level cache (LLC), although the LLC is the largest on-chip shared resource with a significant performance impact. In this paper, we propose vCache-architectural support to provide a transparent and isolated virtual LLC (vLLC) for each VM and interfaces to manage the vLLC. More specifically, this study first proposes architectural support for the guest OS of a VM to index the LLC with its guest physical address instead of a host physical address. This in turn allows that the guest OS transparently view its vLLC and preserve the effectiveness of its page placement policy. Second, this study extends the architectural support for each VM to keep its vLLC strongly isolated from other VMs. Such resource dedication is critical to offer performance isolation and preserve vLLC transparency for each VM in a highly consolidated machine. With little hardware overhead, vCache can facilitate various unchartered vLLC capacity-based services for the public clouds while providing up to 17% higher performance than a traditional virtualized system.
Evaluation of Technological Influence Power of Enterprises Through the Enterprise Citation Network

As an important source for discovering new competitive technological intelligence involved in enterprises, patents can be analyzed to identify the technological strategy and the potential competitors. Based on the patent citation information, the weighted and directed enterprise citation network is established. Based on the modified PageRank algorithm, a novel method is provided to evaluate the technological influence power of enterprises. Experiments with this method have been done using the patent dataset in the field of fluid-pressure and analogous brake systems during the 25-year period from 1975 to 1999 from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Compared with the traditional assessment indicator based on the citation count method, the proposed method is more reasonable in identifying the technological influential enterprises, as it gives a comprehensive consideration of the amount of citing enterprises, the influence of citing enterprises and the citation strength between them. This study helps enterprises discover potential technological competitors, which take the lead in the industry.
CTG Trinucleotide repeat instability in escherichia coli

The expansion of trmucleotide repeats in certain human genetic disease geñs causes a number of hereditary neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases including Huntington's disease, myotonic dystrophy and fragile X syndrome. The expansion of unstable trinucleotide repeats upon transmission from parent to offspring is the molecular basis of anticipation, which is characterized by earlier disease onset and an increase in the severity of disease symptoms with successive generations. The mutational mechanism by which these trinucleotide repeats are destabilised is still poorly understood. In order to identify cellular factors that affect trinucleotide repeat stability, changes in the length of a (CTG) 43 repeat were studied over 14 days (approximately 140 generations) in wild-type Escherichia coli (E. coli) and in strains that are deficient in post-replicative mismatch repair, secondary structure repair and homologous recombination. It is shown that (CTG) 43 inserted into pUC 18 expands and contracts in wild-type E. coli in an orientation-dependent manner that is unaffeáted by transcription. In cells deficient in post-replicative mismatch repair (CTG)43 repeat instability is greater than in wild-type cells but orientationindependent. The observation of single trinucleotide insertions and deletions in these mutator mutants indicates that replication slippages of 3 base pairs (bp) occur in vivo leading to repeat expansion and contraction if left unrepaired. Compared to wild-type cells large deletions are reduced in these mutator mutants, but only if the CTG sequence serves as the lagging strand. Based on the opposing effects of mismatch repair a model is proposed in which orientation-dependent CTG repeat instability in mismatch repair proficient cells is caused by the repair of 3-bp slippages. This may lead to the creation of larger deletions during repair synthesis due to the formation of unusual secondary structures by the CTG sequence on the lagging strand. Mutations in the recA and sbcCD genes do not affect the stability of plasmidborne CTG repeats. Similarly the viability of recA-deficient strains carrying chromosomal insertions of (CTG) 25 and (CTG) 43 suggests that, unlike long
SEMANTIC RELATIONS OF AN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL THESAURUS ?

A well constructed thesaurus is recognized as a valuable source of semantic information for various applications, especially for Information Retrieval. The main hindrances to using thesaurus-oriented approaches are the high complexity and cost of manual thesauri creation. This paper addresses the problem of automatic thesaurus construction, namely we study the quality of automatically extracted semantic relations as compared with the semantic relations of a manually crafted thesaurus. The vector-space model based on syntactic contexts was used to reproduce relations between the terms of a manually constructed thesaurus. We propose a simple algorithm for representing both single word and multiword terms in the distributional space of syntactic contexts. Furthermore, we propose a method for evaluation quality of the extracted relations. Our experiments show significant difference between the automatically and manually constructed relations: while many of the automatically generated relations are relevant, just a small part of them could be found in the original thesaurus.
A directional and parametrized transition detection algorithm based on morphological residues

The boundary identification represents an interesting and difficult problem in image processing, mainly if two flat zones are separated by a gradual transition. The most common operators work very well for sharp edges, but fail for gradual transitions. In this work, we have done a characterization for gradient by a study of the opening residues. This characterization is useful to identify and classify sharp and gradual transitions between two consecutive flat zones according to a size criterion.
Transcription Analysis of the Beta-Glucosidase Precursor in Wild-Type and l- 4 i Mutant Bombyx mori (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae)

Abstract Lethal fourth-instar larvae ( l- 4 i ) mutant of Bombyx mori , a recently discovered novel mutant, die from energy depletion due to genetic mutation. Beta-glucosidase is a common digestive enzyme that hydrolyzes cellulose in the diet to provide energy. In this study, the mRNA expression profiles of B. mori beta-glucosidase precursor ( BmpreBG ) were characterized by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. The transcription level of BmpreBG varied in different tissues and developmental stages, except in the pupa and moth, which are the no-diet period. Remarkably, the mRNA expression level of BmpreBG was sharply reduced in l- 4 i but not in the wild type, which suggested that the digestive function of the mutant was severely damaged. This was consistent with the l- 4 i phenotypic traits of not eating mulberries, lack of energy, and ultimate death. 5′-rapid amplification of cDNA ends showed, for the first time, that BmpreBG has a 160-bp 5′-untranslated region. These findings suggested that B. mori β-glucosidase precursor was involved in the death process of l- 4 i mutant larvae.
Gamification and Serious Games for Personalized Health

Computer games are no longer just a trivial activity played by children in arcades. Social networking and casual gaming have broadened the market for, and acceptance of, games. This has coincided with a realization of their power to engage and motivate players. Good computer games are excellent examples of modern educational theory [1]. The military, health providers, governments, and educators, all use computer games. This paper focuses on Games for Health, discussing the range of areas and approaches to developing these games. We extend a taxonomy for Games for Health, describe a case study on games for dementia sufferers, and finally, present some challenges and research opportunities in this area.
Vehicle extraction based on focus of attention, multi feature segmentation and tracking

In this paper, we propose an automatic object tracking method for traffic video surveillance. The method is designed as a hybrid between a region based and a feature based technique. In a first stage, a motion detection algorithm identifies the objects from the background providing binary masks of the moving objects. In a second stage, a segmentation tool based on a multi-feature analysis further segments the areas corresponding to moving objects into homogenous regions. For each region, the method provides a set of characteristic feature values, which are used to track the regions (and thus the objects) along time. The results of this low-level analysis can be exploited by the content understanding module of an advanced video surveillance system for the detection of potentially dangerous situations, for law enforcement purposes, and for statistical traffic analysis.
Adapting Information Retrieval to User Signals via Stochastic Models

To address the challenge of adapting Information Retrieval (IR) to the constantly evolving user tasks and needs and to adjust it to user interactions and preferences we develop a new model of user behavior based on Markov chains. We aim at integrating the proposed model into several aspects of IR, i.e. evaluation measures, systems and collections. Firstly, we studied IR evaluation measures and we propose a theoretical framework to describe their properties. Then, we presented a new family of evaluation measures, called Markov Precision (MP), based on the proposed model and able to explicitly link lab-style and on-line evaluation metrics. Future work will include the presented model into Learning to Rank (LtR) algorithms and will define a collection for evaluation and comparison of Personalized Information Retrieval (PIR) systems.
CXCL10 increases in human skeletal muscle following damage but is not necessary for muscle regeneration

CXCL10 is a chemokine for activated and memory T cells with many important immunological functions. We recently found that CXCL10 is upregulated in human muscle following contraction‐induced damage. No information is available on the role of CXCL10 in the context of muscle damage or repair. In this study, we confirm that CXCL10 is elevated in human muscle at 2 and 3 days following damage and perform cell culture and animal studies to examine the role of CXCL10 in muscle repair. CXCL10 did not impact proliferation rates of human primary myoblasts but it did promote myogenic differentiation in vitro, suggesting a possible direct impact on muscle regeneration. To test if CXCL10 was dispensable for effective muscle regeneration in vivo, we measured functional and histological markers of muscle repair out to 14 days postmuscle injury caused by a myotoxin in wild‐type (WT) mice and CXCL10 knockout (KO) mice. Between genotypes, no significant differences were found in loss or restoration of in situ muscle force, cross‐sectional area of newly formed myofibers, or the number of embryonic myosin heavy chain‐positive myofibers. In addition, KO animals were not deficient in T‐cell accumulation in the damaged muscle following injury. Gene expression of the other two ligands (CXCL9 and 11) that bind to the same receptor as CXCL10 were also elevated in the damaged muscle of KO mice. Thus, other ligands may have compensated for the lack of CXCL10 in the KO mice. We conclude that CXCL10 is not necessary for effective muscle regeneration.
A small world approach for scalable and resilient position estimation algorithms for wireless sensor networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) there are network functions and applications that need to know the localization of a node such as the association of the sensed data with a given position. In general, it may be impossible or unfeasible to have either a planned deployment or a localization hardware. Thus, an important problem in wireless sensor networks is to find out the localization of sensor nodes. In this work, we propose a heterogeneous wireless sensor network topology based on small world concepts to improve the Recursive Position Estimation algorithm. By using the small world topology we have two goals: (i) the error in position estimation for large wireless sensor networks is reduced, and (ii) the resilience in the position estimation in the presence of node failures is increased. We evaluate the Recursive Position Estimation algorithm in the proposed model. Simulation results show that a small set of powerful nodes with a higher communication range can reduce significantly the error and increase the resilience in the position estimation.
In search of influential event organizers in online social networks

Recently, with the emergence of event-based online social services(e.g. Meetup), there have been increasing online activities to create, distribute, and organize social events. In this paper, we take the first systematic step to discover influential event organizers from online social networks who are essential to the overall success of social events. Informally, such event organizers comprise a small group of people who not only have the relevant skills or expertise that are required for an event (e.g. conference) but they are also able to influence largest number of people to actively contribute to it. We formulate it as the problem of mining influential cover set (ICS) where we wish to find k users in a social network G that together have the required skills or expertise (modeled as attributes of nodes in G) to organize an event such that they can influence the greatest number of individuals to participate in the event. The problem is, however, NP-hard. Hence, we propose three algorithms to find approximate solutions to the problem. The first two algorithms are greedy; they run faster, but have no guarantees. The third algorithm is 2-approximate and guarantees to find a feasible solution if any. Our empirical study over several real-world networks demonstrates the superiority of our proposed solutions.
Mean Shift Based Target Tracking in FLIR Imagery via Adaptive Prediction of Initial Searching Points

Tracking targets using mean shift algorithm is performed by iteratively translating a kernel in the image space such that the past and current target observations are similar. The standard mean shift, however, assumes that the initialization point falls within the basin of attraction of the desired mode. When tracking objects in FLIR imagery this assumption may not hold, particularly when the target's displacement between successive frames is large. A novel mean shift based tracking algorithm based on adaptive prediction of initial searching points is proposed to make the tracker procedure converge to the global mode of the density function. The infrared target is represented in the cascade grey space. We use Kalman filter to track the variance of target coordinate transformation parameter. Especially, an on-line noise model estimation mechanism is developed to accommodate different target movement adaptively. Experiment results show our novel scheme is efficient and robust for the infrared targets with severe clutter background and large displacement.
Rab GTPase Mediated Procollagen Trafficking in Ascorbic Acid Stimulated Osteoblasts

Despite advances in investigating functional aspects of osteoblast (OB) differentiation, especially studies on how bone proteins are deposited and mineralized, there has been little research on the intracellular trafficking of bone proteins during OB differentiation. Collagen synthesis and secretion is the major function of OBs and is markedly up-regulated upon ascorbic acid (AA) stimulation, significantly more so than in fibroblast cells. Understanding the mechanism by which collagen is mobilized in specialized OB cells is important for both basic cell biology and diseases involving defects in bone protein secretion and deposition. Protein trafficking along the exocytic and endocytic pathways is aided by many molecules, with Rab GTPases being master regulators of vesicle targeting. In this study, we used microarray analysis to identify the Rab GTPases that are up-regulated during a 5-day AA differentiation of OBs, namely Rab1, Rab3d, and Rab27b. Further, we investigated the role of identified Rabs in regulating the trafficking of collagen from the site of synthesis in the ER to the Golgi and ultimately to the plasma membrane utilizing Rab dominant negative (DN) expression. We also observed that experimental halting of biosynthetic trafficking by these mutant Rabs initiated proteasome-mediated degradation of procollagen and ceased global protein translation. Acute expression of Rab1 and Rab3d DN constructs partially alleviated this negative feedback mechanism and resulted in impaired ER to Golgi trafficking of procollagen. Similar expression of Rab27b DN constructs resulted in dispersed collagen vesicles which may represent failed secretory vesicles sequestered in the cytosol. A significant and strong reduction in extracellular collagen levels was also observed implicating the functional importance of Rab1, Rab3d and Rab27b in these major collagen-producing cells.
A Unified Relevance Retrieval Model by Eliteness Hypothesis

In this paper, an Eliteness Hypothesis for information retrieval is proposed, where we define two generative processes to create information items and queries. By assuming the deterministic relationships between the eliteness of terms and relevance, we obtain a new theoretical retrieval framework. The resulting ranking function is a unified one as it is capable of using available relevance information on both the document and the query, which is otherwise unachievable by existing retrieval models. Our preliminary experiment on a simple ranking function has demonstrated the potential of the approach.
Force measurement capability for robotic assisted minimally invasive surgery systems

An automated laparoscopic instrument capable of non-invasive measurement of tip/tissue interaction forces for direct application in robotic assisted minimally invasive surgery systems_ is introduced in this paper. It has the capability to measure normal grasping forces as well as lateral interaction forces without any sensor mounted on the tip jaws. Further to non-invasive actuation of the tip, the proposed instrument is also able to change the grasping direction during surgical operation. Modular design of the instrument allows conversion between surgical modalities (e.g., grasping, cutting, and dissecting). The main focus of this paper is on evaluation of the grasping force capability of the proposed instrument. The mathematical formulation of fenestrated insert is presented and its non-linear behaviour is studied. In order to measure the stiffness of soft tissues, a device was developed that is also described in this paper. Tissue characterisation experiments were conducted and results are presented and analysed here. The experimental results verify the capability of the proposed instrument in accurately measuring grasping forces and in characterising artificial tissue samples of varying stiffness.
Optimal Load-Balancing for High-Density Wireless Networks with Flow-Level Dynamics

We consider the load-balancing design for forwarding incoming flows to access points (APs) in high-density wireless networks with both channel fading and flow-level dynamics, where each incoming flow has a certain amount of service demand and leaves the system once its service request is complete. The efficient load-balancing design is strongly needed for supporting high-quality wireless connections in high-density areas. In this work, we propose a Joint Load-Balancing and Scheduling (JLBS) Algorithm that always forwards the incoming flows to the AP with the smallest workload in the presence of flow-level dynamics and each AP always serves the flow with the best channel quality. Our analysis reveals that our proposed JLBS Algorithm not only achieves maximum system throughput, but also minimizes the total system workload in the heavy-traffic regime. Moreover, we observe from both our theoretical and simulation results that the mean total workload performance under the proposed JLBS Algorithm does not degrade as the number of APs increases, which is strongly desirable in high-density wireless networks.
The Performance of Female Computer Science Students across Three Caribbean Islands

We examine the gender balance of students in the Computer Science programme at a prominent Caribbean university---with campuses in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad---from three perspectives: enrollment, retention and completion. In the US, in 2011, females accounted for approximately 17.7% of all graduands with a computing degree. These numbers are considered low, especially since when all subjects are taken into account, women account for more than 50% of American college graduates. On one campus of the Caribbean University, for the same year, the proportion of females graduating in Computer Science was 44.2%. These numbers are higher than the US national averages, even after normalizing them for the high female student population on the campus (approximately 70%). We introduce the notion of gender neutrality to represent these normalized ratios. Notably, we did not observe any statistically significant difference in the average performance of males and that of females, which is similar to the result found in the US. We discuss the methods that we used to make these comparisons.