Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Control of proliferation of human vascular endothelial cells. Characterization of the response of human umbilical vein endothelial cells to fibroblast growth factor, epidermal growth factor, and thrombin

Because the response of human endothelial cells to growth factors and conditioning agents has broad implications for our understanding of wound healing angiogenesis, and human atherogenesis, we have investigated the responses of these cells to the fibroblast (FGF) and epidermal growth factors (EGF), as well as to the protease thrombin, which has been previously shown to potentiate the growth response of other cell types of FGF and EGF. Because the vascular endothelial cells that form the inner lining of blood vessels may be expected to be exposed to high thrombin concentrations after trauma or in pathological states associated with thrombosis, they are of particular interest with respect to the physiological role of this protease in potentiating cell proliferation. Our results indicate that human vascular endothelial cells respond poorly to either FGF or thrombin alone. In contrast, when cells are maintained in the presence of thrombin, their proliferative response to FGF is greatly increased even in cultures seeded at a density as low as 3 cells/mm2. Human vascular endothelial cells also respond to EGF and thrombin, although their rate of proliferation is much slower than when maintained with FGF and thrombin. In contrast, bovine vascular endothelial cells derived from vascular territories as diverse as the bovine heart, aortic arch, and umbilical vein respond maximally to FGF alone and neither respond to nor bind EGF. Furthermore, the response of bovine vascular endothelial cells to FGF was not potentiated by thrombin, indicating that the set of factors controlling the proliferation of vascular endothelial cells could be species-dependent. The requirement of cultured human vascular endothelial cells for thrombin could explain why the human cells, in contrast to bovine endothelial cells, are so difficult to maintain in tissue culture. Our results demonstrate that by using FGF and thrombin one can develop cultures of human vascular endothelial cells capable of being passage repeatedly while maintaining a high mitotic index. The stock cultures used for these studies have been passed weekly with a split ratio of 1 to 10 and are currently in their 30th passage. These cultures are indistinguishable from earlier passages when examined for the presence of Weibel-Palade bodies or Factor VIII antigen. We conclude that the use of FGF and thrombin can prevent the precocious senescence observed in most human endothelial cells cultures previously described.
Sea urchin zygote chromatin exhibit an unfolded nucleosomal array during the first S phase

To investigate changes in chromatin organization associated with DNA replication during the first stages of development of the sea urchin Tetrapygus niger, we compared micrococcal nuclease (MNase) digestion patterns of chromatin from zygotes harvested during the first S phase and from unfertilized eggs. We observed that the majority of DNA fragments derived from MNase digested zygote nuclei were similar to or smaller than a mononucleosome, while those derived from unfertilized egg nuclei were larger (1,500 to 410 bp). This result indicates that in zygotes, where active DNA replication is occurring, the major chromatin fraction is represented as unfolded nucleosomes. In contrast, in unfertilized eggs chromatin appears to be organized into polynucleosomes. To determine if the unfolded structure of nucleosomes observed during S phase is related to the level of poly (ADP‐ribosylation) of cleavage stage (CS) histone variants, zygotes were treated with 20 mM 3‐Amino Benzamide (3 ABA) during the interval between 3 and 30 min post‐insemination (p.i.). This treatment with 3 ABA decreases the poly (ADP‐ribosylation) of CS histone variants and inhibits the first S phase in zygotes [Imschenetzky et al. (1991): J Cell Biochem 46:234–241; Imschenetzky et al. (1993): J Cell Biochem 51:198–205]. When the MNase digested patterns of chromatin from these 3 ABA treated and control zygotes were compared, we found that the unfolded structure of the nucleosomes remains unaltered by the inhibition of the poly (ADP‐ribose) synthetase with 3 ABA. This result indicates that the unfolded nucleosomal structure, particular to the chromatin of S phase zygotes, is not contemporaneous to DNA replication and is independent of the normal level of poly (ADP‐ribosylation) of CS histone variants. © 1995 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Learning minimal abstractions

Static analyses are generally parametrized by an abstraction which is chosen from a family of abstractions. We are interested in flexible families of abstractions with many parameters, as these families can allow one to increase precision in ways tailored to the client without sacrificing scalability. For example, we consider k-limited points-to analyses where each call site and allocation site in a program can have a different k value. We then ask a natural question in this paper: What is the minimal (coarsest) abstraction in a given family which is able to prove a set of queries? In addressing this question, we make the following two contributions: (i) We introduce two machine learning algorithms for efficiently finding a minimal abstraction; and (ii) for a static race detector backed by a k-limited points-to analysis, we show empirically that minimal abstractions are actually quite coarse: It suffices to provide context/object sensitivity to a very small fraction (0.4-2.3%) of the sites to yield equally precise results as providing context/object sensitivity uniformly to all sites.
PostCAT - Posterior Constrained Alignment Toolkit

PostCAT - Posterior Constrained Alignment Toolkit In this paper we present a new open-source toolkit for statistical word alignments - Posterior Constrained Alignment Toolkit (PostCAT). The toolkit implements three well known word alignment algorithms (IBM M1, IBM M2, HMM) as well as six new models. In addition to the usual Viterbi decoding scheme, the toolkit provides posterior decoding with several flavors for tuning the threshold. The toolkit also provides an implementation of alignment symmetrization heuristics and a set of utilities for analyzing and pretty printing alignments. The new models have already been shown to improve intrinsic alignment metrics and also to lead to better translations when integrated into a state of the art machine translation system. The toolkit is developed in Java and available in source at its website1. We encourage other researchers to build on our work by modifying the toolkit and using it for their research.
Improving Acoustic Models by Watching Television

Abstract : Obtaining sufficient labelled training data is a persistent difficulty for speech recognition research. Although well transcribed data is expensive to produce, there is a constant stream of challenging speech data and poor transcription broadcast as closed-captioned television. We describe a reliable unsupervised method for identifying accurately transcribed sections of these broadcasts, and show how these segments can be used to train a recognition system. Starting from acoustic models trained on the Wall Street Journal database, a single iteration of our training method reduced the word error rate on an independent broadcast television news test set from 62.2% to 59.5%.
Presynaptic Trafficking of Synaptotagmin I Is Regulated by Protein Palmitoylation*

Protein palmitoylation plays a critical role in sorting and targeting of several proteins to pre- and postsynaptic sites. In this study, we have analyzed the role of palmitoylation in trafficking of synaptotagmin I and its modulation by synaptic activity. We found that palmitoylation of N-terminal cysteines contributed to sorting of synaptotagmin I to an intracellular vesicular compartment at the presynaptic terminal. Presynaptic targeting is a unique feature of N-terminal sequences of synaptotagmin I because the palmitoylated N terminus of synaptotagmin VII failed to localize to presynaptic sites. We also found that palmitate was stably associated with both synaptotagmin I and SNAP-25 and that rapid neuronal depolarization did not affect palmitate turnover on these proteins. However, long-term treatment with drugs that either block synaptic activity or disrupt SNARE complex assembly modulated palmitoylation and accumulation of synaptotagmin I at presynaptic sites. We conclude that palmitoylation is involved in trafficking of specific elements involved in transmitter release and that distinct mechanisms regulate addition and removal of palmitate on select neuronal proteins.
Computational Management of an H . 264 Encoder

A complexity management approach is proposed for an H.264 encoder running in a processor/power constrained environment. The objective is to maintain smooth video frame rate whilst ensuring that the frame quality is not degraded unacceptably. Subjective results show that the managed complexity encoder outperforms the normal encoder (where frames are dropped when processing power is limited) consistently.
A Framework for Locating and Analyzing Hate Groups in Blogs

As blogs have become one of the fastest growing types of Web-based media, bloggers can express their opinions and emotions more freely and easily than before. In the blogspace, many communities have emerged, which include racists and hate groups that are trying to share their ideology, express their views, or recruit new group members. It is important to analyze these cyber communities, defined based on group membership and subscription linkages, in order to monitor for activities that are potentially harmful to society. While Web mining and network analysis techniques have been widely used to analyze the content and structure of the Web sites of hate groups on the Internet, these techniques have not been applied to the study of hate groups in blogs. In this research, we propose a framework to address this problem. The framework consists of four modules, namely blog spider, information extraction, network analysis, and visualization. We applied this framework to identify and analyze a selected set of 28 anti-Blacks hate groups (820 bloggers) on Xanga, one of the most popular blog hosting sites. Our analysis results revealed some interesting demographical and topological characteristics in these groups, and identified at least two large communities on top of the smaller ones. We suggest that the proposed framework can be generalized and applied to blog analysis in other domains.
Gene and Cell Therapy for the Treatment of Cystic Fibrosis

Phase I/II gene therapy trials for the treatment of cystic fibrosis (CF) lung disease have demonstrated that CFTR cDNA transfer into respiratory epithelial cells is feasible, but a clinical effect is still far from reality. In addition, the duration of gene expression has been shown to be limited, lasting 1-4 weeks only. Nonviral cationic lipids and polymers, used as carriers of the CFTR gene, and recombinant viruses encounter anatomical, cellular and immunological barriers in the process of delivering genes to the relevant target cells, i.e. the epithelium lining the conducting airways. New nonviral vectors (among which polycations and chitosans) have been studied, which give higher levels of transfection in airway epithelial cells. Alternative and safer delivery methods of these nonviral vectors (magnetofection, electroporation, ultrasound) are being developed. Among recombinant viral vectors, adeno-associated viruses and lentiviruses are considered good candidates for achieving prolonged transgene expression in the airways. New model systems that are more representative of the barriers to gene transfer in the human airways are clearly needed to develop protocols and vectors for gene therapy of CF. The pig, sheep and ferret models are discussed. The final goal of CF gene therapy is to correct target cellular compartments in a lasting way. This could be only accomplished by introducing the CFTR gene in a staminal/progenitor niche in the respiratory epithelium. It has been demonstrated in mice and humans that engraftment of bone marrow-derived hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in epithelia-lined organs can occur, provided that damage to the epithelium is done. The possibility of using HSCs and MSCs (and embryonic stem cells) in cell therapy of CF is discussed. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Melperone in treatment-refractory schizophrenia: a case series

Objective: Clozapine is the treatment of choice in refractory schizophrenia, but a substantial proportion of patients experience inadequate response or tolerate the drug poorly. Melperone has been suggested as a possible alternative in such patients. This case series examines the efficacy of melperone in refractory schizophrenia. Method: All patients prescribed melperone at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust were identified using a pharmacy database. The main outcome was to determine the proportion of patients discharged on melperone. Results: Three of 21 patients were discharged on melperone. The primary reason for discontinuation was lack of efficacy. Conclusion: Melperone may be an option in a very few patients with refractory schizophrenia, but it should not be considered as an alternative to clozapine.
The assessments by trainees and an examination about walking posture on gait training system

Our developing gait training system is the training device that tries to obtain the effect similar to the walk training in the warm water swimming pool. A train patient hangs and is supported to the slinging system and walks the force plate top. Slinging it up power is controlled on the basis of the information from the force plates. This system can give the most effective load to a training person, by adjusting to the real time while slings in accordance with the recovery degree of a train patient. It becomes possible to evaluate the training effect on the basis of the data that was obtained from force plate, etc. This system is tested by handicapped person, to inspect the function and efficacy. The problem of walking posture is found from this test. We show the device that an walking posture in gait training system is improved.
A generative communication service for database interoperability

Parallel and distributed programming is conceptually harder to undertake and to understand than sequential programming, because a programmer often has to manage the coexistence and coordination of multiple concurrent activities. The model of 'Generative Communication' in Linda-a paradigm that has been developed for parallel computing-emphasizes the decoupling of cooperating parallel processes; thus, relieving the programmer from the burden of having to consider all process inter-relations explicitly. In many application areas, data is distributed over a multitude of heterogeneous, autonomous information systems. These systems are often isolated and an exchange of data among them is not easy. On the other hand, support for dynamic exchange of data is required to improve the business processes. Cooperative information systems enable such autonomous systems to interoperate. They are complex systems of systems which require a well designed and flexible software architecture. The Linda model had a great influence on research in parallel programming languages. Stimulated by this success, a Generative Communication Service, which offers a very flexible associative addressing mechanism based on metadata matching, has been developed for supporting interoperability of cooperative information systems. Some design patterns guided the construction of the resulting communication service that has been implemented on top of CORBA for an ODMG canonical data model.
Design a Cloud Security Model in VANET Communication: Design and Architecture

During the last few years, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) has been progressed at a rapid rate, which aimed to improve the transportation activities in the terms of the safety and efficiency. According to many issues with the traditional Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET), some efforts are made to merge the VANET with the cloud technology. This work proposes the VANET based on the cloud (V2Cloud), and designs a security model framework that is hosted on the cloud to manage the security services, and provide a secure VANET communication between the different entities e.g. vehicles, authorities and etc. This security model framework is called VANET Security as a Service (VSaaS). Our works will presented in a set of two papers. In this first one, it presents VSaaS design and architecture in order to show that the VSaaS fulfills the VANET's security requirements, and protects the VANET against the different types of attacks. The second paper will present the progress towards the implementation and the security analysis of the proposed architecture, along with the results of the performance of the security overhead for the secure Vehicle
Improving Language Modelling with Noise-contrastive estimation

Neural language models do not scale well when the vocabulary is large. Noise contrastive estimation (NCE) is a sampling-based method that allows for fast learning with large vocabularies. Although NCE has shown promising performance in neural machine translation, its full potential has not been demonstrated in the language modelling literature. A sufficient investigation of the hyperparameters in the NCE-based neural language models was clearly missing. In this paper, we showed that NCE can be a very successful approach in neural language modelling when the hyperparameters of a neural network are tuned appropriately. We introduced the `search-then-converge' learning rate schedule for NCE and designed a heuristic that specifies how to use this schedule. The impact of the other important hyperparameters, such as the dropout rate and the weight initialisation range, was also demonstrated. Using a popular benchmark, we showed that appropriate tuning of NCE in neural language models outperforms the state-of-the-art single-model methods based on standard dropout and the standard LSTM recurrent neural networks.
An Ant Colony Optimization Method for Prize-collecting Traveling Salesman Problem with Time Windows

Focused on a variation of the Euclidean traveling salesman problem (TSP), namely the prize-collecting traveling salesman problem with time windows (PCTSPTW), this paper presents a novel ant colony optimization solving method. The time window constraints are considered in the computation for the probability of selection of the next city. The parameters of the algorithm are analyzed by experiments. Numerical results also show that the proposed method is effective for the PCTSPTW problem.
Knowledge Sources for Constituent Parsing of German, a Morphologically Rich and Less-Configurational Language

We study constituent parsing of German, a morphologically rich and less-configurational language. We use a probabilistic context-free grammar treebank grammar that has been adapted to the morphologically rich properties of German by markovization and special features added to its productions. We evaluate the impact of adding lexical knowledge. Then we examine both monolingual and bilingual approaches to parse reranking. Our reranking parser is the new state of the art in constituency parsing of the TIGER Treebank. We perform an analysis, concluding with lessons learned, which apply to parsing other morphologically rich and less-configurational languages.
Updating Procedures in NENOK

In this chapter we are going to describe how one can add tree modification and updating facilities to Nenok. Remember that Nenok’s main subject is generic local computation on specific implemented valuation algebras. Based on Nenok, users may realize their own valuation algebra instances or implement new local computation architectures. Both is of little interest here. But we will see that tree modification and updating can anyway be realized in Nenok and parts of it even in a generic way. The presented framework is further open to new algorithms, different to the ones introduced in the former chapters 5 and 6 respectively. Since updating may not necessarily depend on tree modification, we treat both subjects apart: Implementations of tree modification methods are first discussed in section 11.1; updating procedures follow then in section 11.2. We conclude the chapter with experimental results presented in the final section 11.3.
Contribution of Adventitial Fibroblasts to Neointima Formation and Vascular Remodeling: From Innocent Bystander to Active Participant

The adventitial layer surrounding the blood vessels has long been exclusively considered a supporting tissue the main function of which is to provide adequate nourishment to the muscle layers of tunica media. Although functionally interconnected, the adventitial and medial layers are structurally interfaced at the external elastic lamina level, clearly distinguishable at the maturational phase of vascular morphogenesis. Over the last few years the “passive” role that the adventitia seemed to play in experimental and spontaneous vascular pathologies involving proliferation, migration, differentiation, and apoptosis of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) has been questioned. It has been demonstrated that fibroblasts from the adventitia display an important partnership with the resident medial VSMCs in terms of phenotypic conversion, proliferation, apoptotic, and migratory properties the result of which is neointima formation and vascular remodeling. This article is an attempt at reviewing the major themes and more recent findings dealing with the phenotypic conversion process that leads adventitial “passive” (static) fibroblasts to become “activated” (mobile) myofibroblasts. This event shows some facets in common with vascular morphogenesis, ie, the process of recruitment, incorporation, and phenotypic conversion of cells surrounding the primitive endothelial tube in the definitive vessel wall. We hypothesize that during the response to vascular injuries in the adult, “activation” of adventitial fibroblasts is, at least in part, reminiscent of a developmental program that also invests, although with distinct spatiotemporal features, medial VSMCs.
Food Search Based on User Feedback to Assist Image-based Food Recording Systems

Food diaries or diet journals are thought to be effective for improving the dietary lives of users. One important challenge in this field involves assisting users in recording their daily food intake. In recent years, food image recognition has attracted a considerable amount of research interest as a new technology to help record users 'food intake. However, since there are so many types of food, and it is unrealistic to expect a system to recognize all foods. In this paper, we propose an optimal combination of image recognition and interactive search in order to record users 'intake of food. The image recognition generates a list of candidate names for a given food picture. The user chooses the closest name to the meal, which triggers an associative food search based on food contents, such as ingredients. We show the proposed system is efficient to assist users maintain food journals.