Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Esterase‐Activated Charge‐Reversal Polymer for Fibroblast‐Exempt Cancer Gene Therapy

Selective gene expression in tumors via responsive dissociation of polyplexes triggered by intracellular signals is demonstrated. An esterase-responsive charge-reversal polymer mediates selective gene expression in the cancer cells high in esterases over fibroblasts low in esterase activity. Its gene therapy with the TRAIL suicide gene effectively induces apoptosis of HeLa cells but does not activate fibroblasts to secrete WNT16B, enabling potent cancer gene therapy with few side effects.
Toward an ethics of persuasive technology

Ask yourself whether your technology persuades users to do something you wouldn't want to be persuaded to do yourself. Technologies have always influenced our lives and how we lead them, but for the most part, their effects on our attitudes and behaviors have been incidental, even accidental. For example, automobiles and highways helped create the American suburbs, but they were not invented with the intent of persuading tens of millions of people to commute to work every day. Early computer spreadsheets gave us the number-crunching abilities needed to model future financial decisions, but did not advise us to take particular actions or reward us for what their designers might have viewed as " good " choices. Likewise, there have always been human persuaders in society, masters of rhetoric capable of changing our minds, or at least our behaviors. Obvious examples of persuaders abound—cult leaders, mothers, car salesmen. Teachers, too, are per-suaders of an invisible yet fundamental sort, altering the attitudes of their students day by day. Persuaders often turn to technology to amplify their persuasive ends, as when Adolf Hitler literally amplified his voice using a megaphone to sway the German masses toward war, genocide, and a new social order. Though the megaphone facilitated Hitler's persuasion, on its own, it could not have persuaded anyone to do anything. Likewise, a television can display commercials or influential after-school specials, but only if someone is transmitting them. Stripped of a signal , the television shows only static. Only recently have technologies emerged that are actively persuasive in their own right, artifacts created primarily to change the attitudes and behaviors of their users. The study of such technologies is called " captology " (see the Introduction to this special section). What if home financial planning software persuaded its users to invest in the stock market? And what if the market then crashed, leaving the users in financial ruin? Or, more subtly, what if the makers of the software arranged with certain companies to " push " their particular stocks? Would such designs differ in a morally relevant way from stockbrokers who encourage their clients to buy the stocks that earn them bonus commissions [6]? They do, though in unexpected ways. That's why our exploration of the ethics of persuasive technologies seeks to begin establishing a first set of principled guidelines for their design and implementation (see Figure 1). Doing so requires us to …
MASA: End-to-End Data Security in Sensor Networks Using a Mix of Asymmetric and Symmetric Approaches.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a new technology that is expected to be used increasingly in the near future due to its cheap cost and data processing ability. However, securing WSNs is a complicated issue since the chosen security scheme should offer data security requirements such as data integrity, confidentiality, authentication, and availability although of the existed resource constraints in the sensors. In this paper, we describe the design of securing end-to-end data in WSNs using a mixture of asymmetric and symmetric approaches (MASA) that improves the security level offered by similar schemes and reduces the resources consumptions.
High‐throughput quantitative analysis of HIV‐1 and SIV‐specific ADCC‐mediating antibody responses

We have developed a high‐throughput platform to detect the presence of HIV‐1 and SIV‐specific ADCC‐mediating antibody responses. The assay is based on the hydrolysis of a cell‐permeable fluorogenic peptide substrate containing a sequence recognized by the serine protease, Granzyme B (GzB). GzB is delivered into target cells by cytotoxic effector cells as a result of antigen (Ag)‐specific Ab‐Fcγ receptor interactions. Within the target cells, effector cell‐derived GzB hydrolyzes the substrate, generating a fluorescent signal that allows individual target cells that have received a lethal hit to be identified by flow cytometry. Results are reported as the percentage of target cells with GzB activity (%GzB). Freshly isolated or cryopreserved PBMC and/or NK cells can be used as effector cells. CEM.NKR cells expressing the CCR5 co‐receptor are used as a target cells following: (i) coating with recombinant envelope glycoprotein, (ii) infection with infectious molecular clones expressing the Env antigens of primary and lab adapted viruses, or (iii) chronic infection with a variant of HIV‐1/IIIB, termed A1953. In addition, primary CD4+ T cells infected with HIV‐1 in vitro can also be used as targets. The assay is highly reproducible with a coefficient of variation of less than 25%. Target and effector cell populations, in the absence of serum/plasma, were used to calculate background (8.6 ± 2.3%). We determined that an initial dilution of 1:50 and 1:100 is required for testing of human and non‐human primate samples, respectively. This assay allows for rapid quantification of HIV‐1 or SIV‐specific ADCC‐mediating antibodies that develop in response to vaccination, or in the natural course of infection, thus providing researchers with a new methodology for investigating the role of ADCC‐mediating antibodies as correlates of control or prevention of HIV‐1 and SIV infection. © 2011 International Society for Advancement of Cytometry
Speaker-dependent mapping of source and system features for enhancement of throat microphone speech

A throat microphone (TM) produces speech which is perceptually poorer than that produced by a close speaking microphone (CSM) speech. Many attempts at improving the quality of TM speech have been made by mapping the features corresponding to the vocal tract system. These techniques are limited by the methods used to generate the excitation signal. In this paper a method to map the source (excitation) using multilayer feedforward neural networks is proposed for voiced segments. This method anchors the analysis windows at the regions around the instants of glottal closure, so that the non-linear characteristics in these region of TM and CSM microphone is emphasized in the mapping process. The features obtained from these regions for both TM and CSM speech are used to train a MLFFNN to capture the non-linear relation between them. An improved technique for mapping the system features is also proposed. Speech synthesized using the proposed techniques was evaluated through subjective tests and was found to be significantly better than TM speech.
Discovering and summarizing email conversations

With the ever increasing popularity of emails, it is very common nowadays that people discuss specific issues, events or tasks among a group of people by emails. Those discussions can be viewed as conversations via emails and are valuable for the user as a personal information repository. For instance, in 10 minutes before a meeting, a user may want to quickly go through a previous discussion via emails that is going to be discussed in the meeting soon. In this case, rather than reading each individual email one by one, it is preferable to read a concise summary of the previous discussion with major information summarized. In this thesis, we study the problem of discovering and summarizing email conversations. We believe that our work can greatly support users with their email folders. However, the characteristics of email conversations, e.g., lack of synchronization, conversational structure and informal writing style, make this task particularly challenging. In this thesis, we tackle this task by considering the following aspects: discovering emails in one conversation, capturing the conversation structure and summarizing the email conversation. We first study how to discover all emails belonging to one conversation. Specifically, we study the hidden email problem, which is important for email summarization and other applications but has not been studied before. We propose a framework to discover and regenerate hidden emails. The empirical evaluation shows that this framework is accurate and scalable to large folders. Second, we build a fragment quotation graph to capture email conversations. The hidden emails belonging to each conversation are also included into the corresponding graph. Based on the quotation graph, we develop a novel email conversation summarizer, ClueWordSummarizer. The comparison with a state-of-the-art email summarizer as well as with a popular multi-document summarizer shows that ClueWordSummarizer obtains a higher accuracy in most cases. Furthermore, to address the characteristics of email conversations, we study several ways to improve the ClueWordSummarizer by considering more lexical features. The experiments show that many of those improvements can significantly increase the accuracy especially the subjective words and phrases.
Best Analysis Selection in Inflectional Languages

Ambiguity is the fundamental property of natural language. Perhaps, the most burdensome case of ambiguity manifests itself on the syntactic level of analysis. In order to face up to the high number of obtained derivation trees, this paper describes several techniques for evaluation of the figures of merit, which define a sort order on parsing trees. The presented methods are based on language specific features of synthetical languages and they improve the results of simple stochastic approaches.
Chemical genetic approach identifies microtubule affinity‐regulating kinase 1 as a leucine‐rich repeat kinase 2 substrate

Mutations in leucine‐rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) are the most common cause of autosomal‐dominant forms of Parkinson's disease. LRRK2 is a modular, multidomain protein containing 2 enzymatic domains, including a kinase domain, as well as several protein‐protein interaction domains, pointing to a role in cellular signaling. Although enormous efforts have been made, the exact pathophysiologic mechanisms of LRRK2 are still not completely known. In this study, we used a chemical genetics approach to identify LRRK2 substrates from mouse brain. This approach allows the identification of substrates of 1 particular kinase in a complex cellular environment. Several of the identified peptides are involved in the regulation of microtubule (MT) dynamics, including microtubule‐associating protein (MAP)/microtubule affinity‐regulating kinase 1 (MARK1). MARK1 is a serine/threonine kinase known to phosphorylate MT‐binding proteins such as Tau, MAP2, and MAP4 at KXGS motifs leading to MT destabilization. In vitro kinase assays and metabolic‐labeling experiments in living cells confirmed MARK1 as an LRRK2 substrate. Moreover, we also showed that LRRK2 and MARK1 are interacting in eukaryotic cells. Our findings contribute to the identification of physiologic LRRK2 substrates and point to a potential mechanism explaining the reported effects of LRRK2 on neurite morphology. —Krumova, P., Reyniers, L. , Meyer, M. , Lobbestael, E. , Stauffer, D. , Gerrits, B. , Muller, L. , Hoving, S. , Kaupmann, K. , Voshol, J., Fabbro, D. , Bauer, A. , Rovelli, G. , Taymans, J.‐M. , Bouwmeester, T. , Baekelandt, V. Chemical genetic approach identifies microtubule affinity‐regulating kinase 1 as a leucine‐rich repeat kinase 2 substrate. FASEB J. 29, 2980‐2992 (2015). www.fasebj. org
Point-process based localization of primary users in collaborative dynamic spectrum access

In this paper, we propose a statistical estimation framework to estimate Primary User (PU) transmitter locations by using the spatial characterization of spectrum usage in a collaborative spectrum sensing context in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) networks. First, a statistical likelihood model of the received power by collaborating Secondary Users (SUs) is constructed by assuming a propagation model and known PU transmitter locations. The added value of the paper is the improvement of this likelihood model by adding the a priori information on the PU transmitter locations in the form of spatial densities and point interactions taken from the theory of point processes. The resulting models are used in a statistical optimization framework to find the Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimates of the number of PU transmitters and their locations. Since the ML and the MAP estimations do not accept tractable closed-form analytical formulations, we propose to solve the optimization problems by the numerical Nelder-Mead algorithm. To assess the performance, the resulting random field is considered in the form of an interference map. The effects of the number of collaborating SUs, the shadowing standard deviation and the ratio of the number of SUs to the number of PU transmitters on the estimation quality are also evaluated.
New insights into the origin and the genetic status of the Balkan donkey from Serbia

The Balkan donkey (Equus asinus L.) is commonly regarded as a large-sized, unselected, unstructured and traditionally managed donkey breed. We assessed the current genetic status of the three largest E. asinus populations in the central Balkans (Serbia) by analysing the variability of nuclear microsatellites and the mitochondrial (mtDNA) control region of 77 and 49 individuals respectively. We further analysed our mtDNA dataset along with 209 published mtDNA sequences of ancient and modern individuals from 19 European and African populations to provide new insights into the origin and the history of the Balkan donkey. Serbian donkey populations are highly genetically diverse at both the nuclear and mtDNA levels despite severe population decline. Traditional Balkan donkeys in Serbia are rather heterogeneous; we found two groups of individuals with similar phenotypic features, somewhat distinct nuclear backgrounds and different proportions of mtDNA haplotypes belonging to matrilineal Clades 1 and 2. Another group, characterized by larger body size, different coat colour, distinct nuclear gene pool and predominantly Clade 2 haplotypes, was delineated as the Banat donkey breed. The maternal landscape of the large Balkan donkey population is highly heterogeneous and more complex than previously thought. Given the two independent domestication events in donkeys, multiple waves of introductions into the Balkans from Greece are hypothesized. Clade 2 donkeys probably appeared in Greece prior to those belonging to Clade 1, whereas expansion and diversification of Clade 1 donkeys within the Balkans predated that of Clade 2 donkeys.
Interpretation of TOMS observations of tropical tropospheric ozone with a global model and in-situ observations

[1] We interpret the distribution of tropical tropospheric ozone columns (TTOCs) from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) by using a global three-dimensional model of tropospheric chemistry (GEOS-CHEM) and additional information from in situ observations. The GEOS-CHEM TTOCs capture 44% of the variance of monthly mean TOMS TTOCs from the convective cloud differential method (CCD) with no global bias. Major discrepancies are found over northern Africa and south Asia where the TOMS TTOCs do not capture the seasonal enhancements from biomass burning found in the model and in aircraft observations. A characteristic feature of these northern tropical enhancements, in contrast to southern tropical enhancements, is that they are driven by the lower troposphere where the sensitivity of TOMS is poor due to Rayleigh scattering. We develop an efficiency correction to the TOMS retrieval algorithm that accounts for the variability of ozone in the lower troposphere. This efficiency correction increases TTOCs over biomass burning regions by 3–5 Dobson units (DU) and decreases them by 2–5 DU over oceanic regions, improving the agreement between CCD TTOCs and in situ observations. Applying the correction to CCD TTOCs reduces by � 5 DU the magnitude of the ‘‘tropical Atlantic paradox’’ [Thompson et al., 2000], i.e. the presence of a TTOC enhancement over the southern tropical Atlantic during the northern African biomass burning season in December–February. We reproduce the remainder of the paradox in the model and explain it by the combination of upper tropospheric ozone production from lightning NOx, persistent subsidence over the southern tropical Atlantic as part of the Walker circulation, and cross-equatorial transport of upper tropospheric ozone from northern midlatitudes in the African ‘‘westerly duct. ’’ These processes in the model can also account for the observed 13–17 DU persistent wave-1 pattern in TTOCs with a maximum over the tropical Atlantic and a minimum over the tropical Pacific during all seasons. The photochemical effects of mineral dust have only a minor role on the modeled distribution of TTOCs, including over northern Africa, due to multiple competing effects. The photochemical effects of mineral dust globally decrease annual mean OH concentrations by 9%. A global lightning NOx source of 6 Tg N yr � 1 in the model produces a simulation that is most consistent with TOMS and in situ observations. INDEX TERMS: 0343 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Planetary atmospheres (5405, 5407, 5409, 5704, 5705, 5707); 0365 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Troposphere—composition and chemistry;
Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy for Critical Dimension Monitoring in Wafer Manufacturing

Automated scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) metrology provides critical dimension (CD) measurements an order of magnitude more precise than comparable scanning electron microscopy (SEM) measurements. New developments in automation now also provide throughput and response time sufficient to support high volume microelectronic manufacturing processes. The newly developed methodology includes automated, focused ion beam (FIB) based sample preparation; innovative, ex-situ sample extraction; and automated metrology. Although originally developed to control the production of thin film magnetic heads for data storage, the technique is fully applicable to any wafer-based manufacturing process.
Near-Infrared Optical Technologies in Brain-Computer Interface Systems

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of near-infrared spectrometry (NIRS) and related methods, implemented in brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Basic physical principles of such devices are described. Reviews supply readers with summary of recent development in dynamics and perspectives of the field in question. Examples of NIRS usage in BCI systems are provided and different experimental paradigms are described. Review not only deals mainly with noninvasive NIRS-BCIs but also covers some instances of usage of neighboring fields methods (such as EEG, for instance) for the sake of their importance in so-called hybrid BCI systems and/or in fundamental research, which may be less relevant in case of separate application of different encephalographic methods. As potentially beneficial for NIRS-BCIs, the phenomena of fast optical signals (FOS) are described, and some research on connectivity, including those based on NIRS, is covered. Some attention is paid to the perspective for future BCI ’ s construction using optogenetics.
Toward real-time human-computer interaction with continuous dynamic hand gestures

This paper, aiming at real-time gesture-controlled interaction, describes visual modeling, analysis, and recognition of continuous dynamic hand gestures. By hierarchically integrating multiple cues, a spatio-temporal appearance model and novel approaches are proposed for modeling and analysis of dynamic gestures respectively. At low level, fusion of flesh chrominance analysis and coarse image motion detection is employed to detect and segment hand gestures; at high level, parameters of the spatio-temporal appearance model are recovered by combining robust parameterized image motion estimation and hand shape analysis. The approach, therefore, fulfils real-time processing as well as high recognition rates. Without resorting to any special marks, twelve kinds of hand gestures can be recognized with average accuracy over 89%. A prototype system, gesture-controlled panoramic map browser is designed and implemented to demonstrate the usability of gesture-controlled interaction.
Hierarchical Web Page Classification Based on a Topic Model and Neighboring Pages Integration

Most Web page classification models typically apply the bag of words (BOW) model to represent the feature space. The original BOW representation, however, is unable to recognize semantic relationships between terms. One possible solution is to apply the topic model approach based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm to cluster the term features into a set of latent topics. Terms assigned into the same topic are semantically related. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical classification method based on a topic model and by integrating additional term features from neighboring pages. Our hierarchical classification method consists of two phases: (1) feature representation by using a topic model and integrating neighboring pages, and (2) hierarchical Support Vector Machines (SVM) classification model constructed from a confusion matrix. From the experimental results, the approach of using the proposed hierarchical SVM model by integrating current page with neighboring pages via the topic model yielded the best performance with the accuracy equal to 90.33% and the F1 measure of 90.14%; an improvement of 5.12% and 5.13% over the original SVM model, respectively.
Life cell quantification of mitochondrial membrane potential at the single organelle level

Mitochondrial membrane potential (Δψ) is key to mitochondrial function and cellular survival. Here, we aimed to develop an automated protocol allowing sensitive quantification of Δψ in living cells at the level of individual mitochondria. Human skin fibroblasts were stained with the fluorescent cation tetramethyl rhodamine methyl ester (TMRM), which is sequestered by mitochondria according to their Δψ. Cells were visualized by videomicroscopy and the acquired images were processed to generate a mitochondria‐specific mask. The latter was superimposed on the original image to allow quantification of TMRM fluorescence. Following validation, our approach revealed that mitochondria with different Δψ coexisted within the same cell. Furthermore, our method allowed reproducible detection of small (<10%) reductions in TMRM intensity induced by the complex III inhibitor antimycin A. Mitochondrial uncoupling by p‐trifluoromethoxy carbonyl cyanide phenyl hydrazone (FCCP) greatly reduced mitochondrial TMRM fluorescence. Under these conditions faithful mask calculation and TMRM intensity analysis were still possible using a mitochondria‐targeted green fluorescence protein (mitoAcGFP1), expressed in the cells using baculoviral transfection. © 2007 International Society for Analytical Cytology