Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A dynamic and autonomous channel selection strategy for interference avoidance in 802.11

The coexistence of different technologies within the same spectrum swaths, as well as the distributed, non-coordinated channel assignment for WLANs is becoming not only an important research topic, but also a matter of sustainability for the trend we witness in moving all last-hop communications on wireless links to unleash the users from their wires and tethers. This work proposes, implements and evaluates a strategy that allows an entire 802.11 Basic Service Set (BSS) to dynamically hop between the available channels always selecting the “best” one. The selection not only guarantees the hopping BSS performances well above what can be achieved with a static selection, but it also minimizes the interference toward other BSSs, so that the overall performance of the system maximizes resource utilization. The performance of the protocol and strategy we propose is tested with an implementation on off-the-shelf 802.11g cards; the experiments are run in labs and around the campus of the University of Trento.
Identification of androgen-regulated genes in human prostate

Androgens are essential for the development of the prostate and prostate cancer. We examined androgen-regulated gene expression in the human prostate. Samples from benign and malignant prostate tissue and samples containing prostate tissue obtained from prostate cancer patients three days after surgical castration were further processed as probes for a GeneChip array. The comparison of gene expression profiles in castrated samples and in benign or malignant prostate tissue samples revealed androgen-regulated genes. We further evaluated the genes which were differentially expressed in benign and malignant prostate samples. The androgen-regulated expression of dual specificity phosphatase 1 (DUSP1) was confirmed in the LNCaP prostate cancer cell line, as the expression of DUSP1 increased with androgen treatment over the course of time. The expression of the genes CRISP3, PCA3, OR51E2, HOXC6, AGR3, AMACR and SLC14A1 was affected by castration in addition to differential expression in the benign and malignant prostate. These sample results require further investigation for the role of AGR3 and SLC14A1 in prostate cancer as these associations have not been reported previously.
Lesions of the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus differentially affect sign‐ and goal‐tracking conditioned responses

Recently, evidence has emerged suggesting a role for the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus (PVT) in the processing of reward‐associated cues. However, the specific role of the PVT in these processes has yet to be elucidated. Here we use an animal model that captures individual variation in response to discrete reward‐associated cues to further assess the role of the PVT in stimulus–reward learning. When rats are exposed to a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm, wherein a discrete cue predicts food reward, two distinct conditioned responses emerge. Some rats, termed sign‐trackers, approach and manipulate the cue, whereas others, termed goal‐trackers, approach the location of reward delivery upon cue presentation. For both sign‐ and goal‐trackers the cue is a predictor, but only for sign‐trackers is it also an incentive stimulus. We investigated the role of the PVT in the acquisition and expression of these conditioned responses using an excitotoxic lesion. Results indicate that PVT lesions prior to acquisition amplify the differences between phenotypes – increasing sign‐tracking and attenuating goal‐tracking behavior. Lesions of the PVT after rats had acquired their respective conditioned responses also attenuated the expression of the goal‐tracking response, and increased the sign‐tracking response, but did so selectively in goal‐trackers. These results suggest that the PVT acts to suppress the attribution of incentive salience to reward cues, as disruption of the functional activity within this structure enhances the tendency to sign‐track.
Facial reconstruction – anatomical art or artistic anatomy?

Facial reconstruction is employed in the context of forensic investigation and for creating three‐dimensional portraits of people from the past, from ancient Egyptian mummies and bog bodies to digital animations of J. S. Bach. This paper considers a facial reconstruction method (commonly known as the Manchester method) associated with the depiction and identification of the deceased from skeletal remains. Issues of artistic licence and scientific rigour, in relation to soft tissue reconstruction, anatomical variation and skeletal assessment, are discussed. The need for artistic interpretation is greatest where only skeletal material is available, particularly for the morphology of the ears and mouth, and with the skin for an ageing adult. The greatest accuracy is possible when information is available from preserved soft tissue, from a portrait, or from a pathological condition or healed injury.
ZART: A Multifunctional Itemset Mining Algorithm

In this paper, we present and detail a multifunctional itemset mining algorithm called Zart, which is based on the Pascal algorithm. Zart shows a number of additional features and performs the following, usually independent, tasks: identify frequent closed itemsets and associate generators to their closures. This makes Zart a complete algorithm for computing classes of itemsets including generators and closed itemsets. These characteristics allow one to extract minimal non-redundant association rules, a useful and lossless representation of association rules. In addition, being based on the Pascal algorithm, Zart has a rather efficient behavior on weakly and strongly correlated data. Accordingly, Zart is at the heart of the Coron platform, which is a domain independent, multi-purposed data mining platform, incorporating a rich collection of data mining algorithms.
Can fully automated detection of corticospinal tract damage be used in stroke patients?

Objective: We compared manual infarct definition, which is time-consuming and open to bias, with an automated abnormal tissue detection method in measuring corticospinal tract–infarct overlap volumes in chronic stroke patients to help predict motor outcome. Methods: Using diffusion tensor imaging and probabilistic tractography, 4 corticospinal tracts from the primary motor cortex, dorsal and ventral premotor cortices, and supplementary motor area to the ipsilateral lower pons were reconstructed in 23 healthy controls. Tract–infarct overlap volume of each of the 4 corticospinal tracts was determined by overlapping the patients' lesions onto the control tract templates, using both manually and automatically defined infarcts in 51 patients. Correlations with upper limb motor impairment were assessed and both methods were directly compared using intraclass correlations (ICC). Results: Greater impairment was seen in patients with greater corticospinal tract–infarct overlap with either method (rmanual range = 0.32–0.46; rautomated range = 0.42–0.57). Consistency between manual and automated methods was good to excellent for all 4 corticospinal tracts (ICC range = 0.71–0.80). Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that automated infarct identification performs equally as well as a manual method in quantifying corticospinal tract–infarct overlap following stroke.
Mechanical Characterization of XD-Grade Carbon Nanotube/Epon 862 Processed by Dual Phase Dispersion Technique

Uniform dispersion of the constituent nanomaterial is essential in attaining optimal results for nanocomposite fabrication. In this research, a dual-phase dispersion method is studied combining a high intensity ultrasonic liquid processor with a three roll milling technique. XD-grade carbon nanotubes (XD-CNTs) were infused into Epon 862 epoxy and the mixture was then mechanically mixed with a mechanical stirrer before placing into a sonicator. This mixture was submerged continuously in a cooling bath to prevent premature polymerization. Once the sonication cycle was completed, the mixture was then placed in a three roll milling processor for six successive cycles incrementally reduced from 20 to 5 μm gap spacings at 140 rpm. Epikure curing agent W was then added to the modified resin and mixed using a high-speed mechanical stirrer. To reduce the chance of void formation, the mixture was preheated and placed in a vacuum oven to remove trapped air and reaction volatiles. Flexural and dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) tests were performed on neat, 0.015 wt. %, and 0.15 wt. % xd-CNT/epoxy plaques to identify the loading effect on the mechanical properties of the composite material. Flexural results indicated homogeneity with improvements in mechanical properties of up to 15% in strength as well as modulus enhancement of up to 25%, respectively. Interfacial adhesion and dispersion were improved with viscosity reduction while utilizing the secondary mixing method. DMA tests resulted in an increase in storage modulus in the nanophased specimens as CNT loading increased. This is mainly attributed to enhanced CNT dispersion and distribution causing reduced polymer chain movement and increased stiffness. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed the fracture morphology of the tested specimens indicating proper dispersion of the xd-CNTs by fracture propagation and cleavage plane displacement.
Medication use in a large international sample of people with multiple sclerosis: associations with quality of life, relapse rate and disability

Abstract Objectives: To examine associations between medication use and health-related quality of life (HRQOL), relapse rate and disability in an international cohort of people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS). Methods: Using Web 2.0 platforms, the authors recruited PwMS who completed survey items on demographics, medication use, HRQOL, relapse rate and disability. Results: Of 2276 respondents from 56 countries, approximately half were taking a disease-modifying drug (DMD), most commonly glatiramer acetate or an interferon. Use of DMDs was not consistently associated with HRQOL. Individually, glatiramer acetate was associated with better HRQOL when compared with other DMDs or no DMD use. Overall, DMD use was neither associated with disability nor lower relapse rate, although those taking a DMD >12 months had 23.9% fewer relapses than those not taking a DMD. Polypharmacy, defined as those taking five or more over the counter, prescription or herbal medications, irrespective of DMD use, was associated with markedly worse HRQOL across all domains. Discussion: There was no consistent association of DMD use with better health outcomes in this large international \sample of PwMS, although relapse rate appears lower for those taking a DMD for >12 months. Glatiramer acetate had associations with better HRQOL compared with other DMDs.
T-type Ca2+ channels are required for enhanced sympathetic axon growth by TNFα reverse signalling

Tumour necrosis factor receptor 1 (TNFR1)-activated TNFα reverse signalling, in which membrane-integrated TNFα functions as a receptor for TNFR1, enhances axon growth from developing sympathetic neurons and plays a crucial role in establishing sympathetic innervation. Here, we have investigated the link between TNFα reverse signalling and axon growth in cultured sympathetic neurons. TNFR1-activated TNFα reverse signalling promotes Ca2+ influx, and highly selective T-type Ca2+ channel inhibitors, but not pharmacological inhibitors of L-type, N-type and P/Q-type Ca2+ channels, prevented enhanced axon growth. T-type Ca2+ channel-specific inhibitors eliminated Ca2+ spikes promoted by TNFα reverse signalling in axons and prevented enhanced axon growth when applied locally to axons, but not when applied to cell somata. Blocking action potential generation did not affect the effect of TNFα reverse signalling on axon growth, suggesting that propagated action potentials are not required for enhanced axon growth. TNFα reverse signalling enhanced protein kinase C (PKC) activation, and pharmacological inhibition of PKC prevented the axon growth response. These results suggest that TNFα reverse signalling promotes opening of T-type Ca2+ channels along sympathetic axons, which is required for enhanced axon growth.
Subcellular spatial segregation of integrin subtypes by patterned multicomponent surfaces.

While it is well known that individual integrins are critical mediators of cell behavior, recent work has shown that when multiple types of integrins simultaneously engage the ECM, cell functions are enhanced. However, it is not known how integrins spatially coordinate to regulate cell adhesion because no reliable method exists to segregate integrins on the cell membrane. Here, we use a microcontact printing-based strategy to pattern multiple ECMs that bind distinct integrins in order to study how integrins might interact. In our technique, proteins are first adsorbed uniformly to a poly(dimethyl siloxane) stamp, and then selectively "de-inked. " Our strategy overcomes several inherent limitations of conventional microcontact printing, including stamp collapse and limited functionality of the surface patterns. We show that integrins spatially segregate on surfaces patterned with multiple ECMs, as expected. Interestingly, despite spatial segregation of distinct integrins, cells could form adhesions and migrate across multicomponent surfaces as well as they do on single component surfaces. Together, our data indicate that although cells can segregate individual integrins on the cell surface to mediate ECM-specific binding, integrins function cooperatively to guide cell adhesion and migration.
Logic Program Induction using MDL and MAP : An Application to Grammars

Probabilistic programs provide an appealing language for describing mental theories, because they are Turing complete: any computable process may be described as a program. Program induction is the problem of inferring theories, in the form of (probabilistic) programs, that describe some set of observations. Minimum Description Length, or MDL, is one common approach to program induction [11]. The MDL approach selects the hypothesis (program) such that the sum of the length of the program, along with the length of the data (observations), when encoded with the help of the program, is minimized. Exactly how the data is encoded depends upon the hypothesis; when MDL is used for program induction, the encoding of the data is typically some sort of certificate proving that the program outputs the observations. Instead of MDL, one may also take a Bayesian approach to program induction. This approach involves placing a prior upon programs and calculating, for a given program, the likelihood of the observations. Typically the prior penalizes longer programs [7, pg 385]. In many situations, such as polynomial curve fitting, the MDL and Bayesian approaches coincide: the MAP hypothesis and the hypothesis with minimal description length are the same [7, pg 392]. In this project, I explore the problem of evaluating candidate programs to explain some number of observations, using both the MDL and MAP criteria. I focus on grammar induction: inferring the process (probabilistic program) that generates phrases found within a corpus. Both MDL and MAP are used
Approximation Limits of Linear Programs (Beyond Hierarchies)

We develop a framework for proving approximation limits of polynomial-size linear programs from lower bounds on the nonnegative ranks of suitably defined matrices. This framework yields unconditional impossibility results that are applicable to any linear program as opposed to only programs generated by hierarchies. Using our framework, we prove that quadratic approximations for CLIQUE require linear programs of exponential size. (This lower bound applies to linear programs using a certain encoding of CLIQUE as a linear optimization problem) Moreover, we establish a similar result for approximations of semi definite programs by linear programs. Our main technical ingredient is a quantitative improvement of Razborov's rectangle corruption lemma (1992) for the high error regime, which gives strong lower bounds on the nonnegative rank of certain perturbations of the unique disjoint ness matrix.
Answering Queries over OWL Ontologies with SPARQL

The SPARQL query language is currently being extended by W3C with so-called entailment regimes, which define how queries are evaluated under more expressive semantics than SPARQL’s standard simple entailment. We describe a sound and complete algorithm for the OWL Direct Semantics entailment regime. The queries of the regime are very expressive since variables can occur within complex class expressions and can also bind to class or property names. We propose several novel optimizations such as strategies for determining a good query execution order, query rewriting techniques, and show how specialized OWL reasoning tasks and the class and property hierarchy can be used to reduce the query execution time. We provide a prototypical implementation and evaluate the efficiency of the proposed optimizations. For standard conjunctive queries our system performs comparably to already deployed systems. For complex queries an improvement of up to three orders of magnitude can be observed.
An Energy-Aware Routing Scheme with Node Relay Willingness in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency has been known as the most significant problem in all facets of the wireless sensor network operations. For energy-aware routing scheme for the wireless sensor networks, it is necessary to use sub-optimal paths occasionally to increase the survivability of networks. In this paper, we present a new network lifetime definition and formulate the energy-aware routing problem with defined network lifetime. And then we propose an energy-aware routing scheme with the node relay willingness for wireless sensor networks. It considers not only to route packets through sensor nodes that have sufficient energy reserves, but also to route packets through light-loaded nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed routing algorithm can achieve longer network lifetime than that of the routing algorithm only considering the energy reserves
Computing minimal deformations: application to construction of statistical shape models

Nonlinear registration is mostly performed after initialization by a global, linear transformation (in this work, we focus on similarity transformations), computed by a linear registration method. For the further processing of the results, it is mostly assumed that this preregistration step completely removes the respective linear transformation. However, we show that in deformable settings, this is not the case. As a consequence, a significant linear component is still existent in the deformation computed by the nonlinear registration algorithm. For construction of statistical shape models (SSM) from deformations, this is an unwanted property: SSMs should not contain similarity transformations, since these do not capture information about shape. We propose a method which performs an a posteriori extraction of a similarity transformation from a given nonlinear deformation field, and we use the processed fields as input for SSM construction. For computation of minimal displacements, a closed-form solution minimizing the squared Euclidean norm of the displacement field subject to similarity parameters is used. Experiments on real inter-subject data and on a synthetic example show that the theoretically justified removal of the similarity component by the proposed method has a large influence on the shape model and significantly improves the results.
TinyCoAP: A Novel Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) Implementation for Embedding RESTful Web Services in Wireless Sensor Networks Based on TinyOS

In this paper we present the design and implementation of the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) for TinyOS, which we refer to as TinyCoAP. CoAP seeks to apply the same application transfer paradigm and basic features of HTTP to constrained networks, while maintaining a simple design and low overhead. The design constraints of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) require special attention in the design process of the CoAP implementation. We argue that better performance and minimal resource consumption can be achieved developing a native library for the operating system embedded in the network. TinyOS already includes in its distribution an implementation of CoAP called CoapBlip. However, this is based on a library not originally designed to meet the requirements of TinyOS. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by a comprehensive performance evaluation. In particular, we test and evaluate TinyCoAP and CoapBlip in a real scenario, as well as solutions based on HTTP. The evaluation is performed in terms of latency, memory occupation, and energy consumption. Furthermore, we evaluate the reliability of each solution by measuring the goodput obtained in a channel affected by Rayleigh fading. We also include a study on the effects that high workloads have on a server.
Limitation of Studies on Food Intake and Dietary Pattern in Iran and other Middle East Countries: Lack of Alcohol Intake Assessment

Department of Cellular and Molecular Nutrition, School of Nutritional Sciences and Dietetics, Tehran Universityof Medical Sciences (TUMS), P.O. Box 14155-6446, Tehran P.O. Box 14155-6446, Iran; sh_alizadeh@razi.tums. ac.irReceived: 10 October 2017; Accepted: 26 October 2017; Published: 28 October 2017
Forkhead Transcription Factors (FoxOs) Promote Apoptosis of Insulin-Resistant Macrophages During Cholesterol-Induced Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress

OBJECTIVE—Endoplasmic reticulum stress increases macrophage apoptosis, contributing to the complications of atherosclerosis. Insulin-resistant macrophages are more susceptible to endoplasmic reticulum stress–associated apoptosis probably contributing to macrophage death and necrotic core formation in atherosclerotic plaques in type 2 diabetes. However, the molecular mechanisms of increased apoptosis in insulin-resistant macrophages remain unclear. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—The studies were performed in insulin-resistant macrophages isolated from insulin receptor knockout or ob/ob mice. Gain- or loss-of-function approaches were used to evaluate the roles of forkhead transcription factors (FoxOs) in endoplasmic reticulum stress–associated macrophage apoptosis. RESULTS—Insulin-resistant macrophages showed attenuated Akt activation and increased nuclear localization of FoxO1 during endoplasmic reticulum stress induced by free cholesterol loading. Overexpression of active FoxO1 or FoxO3 failed to induce apoptosis in unchallenged macrophages but exacerbated apoptosis in macrophages with an active endoplasmic reticulum stress response. Conversely, macrophages with genetic knockouts of FoxO1, -3, and -4 were resistant to apoptosis in response to endoplasmic reticulum stress. FoxO1 was shown by chromatin immunoprecipitation and promoter expression analysis to induce inhibitor of κBε gene expression and thereby to attenuate the increase of nuclear p65 and nuclear factor-κB activity during endoplasmic reticulum stress, with proapoptotic and anti-inflammatory consequences. CONCLUSIONS—Decreased Akt and increased FoxO transcription factor activity during the endoplasmic reticulum stress response leads to increased apoptosis of insulin-resistant macrophages. FoxOs may have a dual cellular function, resulting in either proapoptotic or anti-inflammatory effects in an endoplasmic reticulum stress–modulated manner. In the complex plaque milieu, the ultimate effect is likely to be an increase in macrophage apoptosis, plaque inflammation, and destabilization.
Phishing Detection Using PSOAANN Based One-Class Classifier

We propose to detect phishing emails and websites using particle swarm optimization (PSO) trained auto associative neural network (PSOAANN), which is employed as one class classifier. PSOAANN achieved better results when compared to previous efforts. In the study, we also developed a new feature selection method based on the weights from input to hidden layers of the PSOAANN. We compared its performance with other methods.