Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Substrate Stiffness and Oxygen as Regulators of Stem Cell Differentiation during Skeletal Tissue Regeneration: A Mechanobiological Model

Extrinsic mechanical signals have been implicated as key regulators of mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) differentiation. It has been possible to test different hypotheses for mechano-regulated MSC differentiation by attempting to simulate regenerative events such as bone fracture repair, where repeatable spatial and temporal patterns of tissue differentiation occur. More recently, in vitro studies have identified other environmental cues such as substrate stiffness and oxygen tension as key regulators of MSC differentiation; however it remains unclear if and how such cues determine stem cell fate in vivo. As part of this study, a computational model was developed to test the hypothesis that substrate stiffness and oxygen tension regulate stem cell differentiation during fracture healing. Rather than assuming mechanical signals act directly on stem cells to determine their differentiation pathway, it is postulated that they act indirectly to regulate angiogenesis and hence partially determine the local oxygen environment within a regenerating tissue. Chondrogenesis of MSCs was hypothesized to occur in low oxygen regions, while in well vascularised regions of the regenerating tissue a soft local substrate was hypothesised to facilitate adipogenesis while a stiff substrate facilitated osteogenesis. Predictions from the model were compared to both experimental data and to predictions of a well established computational mechanobiological model where tissue differentiation is assumed to be regulated directly by the local mechanical environment. The model predicted all the major events of fracture repair, including cartilaginous bridging, endosteal and periosteal bony bridging and bone remodelling. It therefore provides support for the hypothesis that substrate stiffness and oxygen play a key role in regulating MSC fate during regenerative events such as fracture healing.
Bringing NoCs to 65 nm

Very deep submicron process technologies are ideal application fields for NoCs, which offer a promising solution to the scalability problem. This article sheds light on the benefits and challenges of NoC-based interconnect design in nanometer CMOS. The experimental results from fully working 65-nm NoC designs and a detailed scalability analysis are presented. The network on chip (NoC) is a promising solution to the scalability problem. NoCs build upon improvements in bus architecture-for example, in terms of topology design.
Dynamic beaconing control in energy-constrained Delay Tolerant Networks

Due to the uncertainty of network topology and intermittent connectivity among nodes in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), beaconing is used to detect probabilistic contacts. However, it causes the following new problem: beaconing frequency not only influences the probability of message transmission, but also affects the consumption rate of energy. Thus, putting forward a beaconing control strategy in energy-constrained DTNs becomes the key point. In this paper, we propose an efficient and dynamic beaconing control method DBCEC in energy-constrained DTNs based on the time-continuous Markov Model. A linear decline strategy (i.e. DBCEC-L) and exponential decay strategy (i.e. DBCEC-E) are respectively applied to control the beaconing frequency. Simulations based on the synthetic mobility model and real mobility traces are conducted in ONE, and results show that DBCEC-E achieves a better delivery rate without influencing average delay and the overhead ratio, compared with other beaconing control strategies.
Synaptic Interactions between Primate Precentral Cortex Neurons Revealed by Spike-Triggered Averaging of Intracellular Membrane Potentials In Vivo

To document synaptic interactions between neurons in the precentral cortex of macaque monkeys, we recorded in vivo the intracellular (IC) membrane potentials of cortical neurons simultaneously with extracellular (EC) action potentials of neighboring cells. The synaptic potentials correlated with EC spikes were obtained by spike-triggered averages (STA) of the IC membrane potentials for 373 cell pairs recorded in anesthetized and awake behaving monkeys. Sixty-three STAs (17%) showed excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs), beginning after the trigger spike. Pure EPSPs had onset latencies of 0.9 ± 0.7 msec (mean ± SD) and amplitudes of 226 ± 130 μV. Sixteen STAs (4%) showed postspike inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs), with onset latencies of 0.4 ± 0.4 msec and amplitudes of −274 ± 188 μV. The most common waveform, observed in 82% of the STAs with features, was a broad depolarization straddling the trigger spikes, reflecting synchronized synaptic input to both IC and EC neurons. These average synchronous excitation potentials (ASEPs) began 14.3 ± 6.6 msec before the trigger spike and had amplitudes of 1064 ± 867 μV. Twenty-three STAs (6%) showed an average synchronous inhibitory potential (ASIP): a hyperpolarization beginning before the trigger spike and reflecting IPSPs produced by a group of local inhibitory cells synchronized with the trigger cell. ASIPs had an onset latency of −5.5 ± 2.7 msec and amplitude of −589 ± 502 μV. Combinations of synchronous and postspike potentials were also observed. Successive recordings provided examples of convergent and divergent connections between EC and IC cells. Neuron pairs with depolarizing postsynaptic potentials (PSPs) in the STA yielded peaks in the cross-correlograms of the IC and EC action potentials; the peak area was proportional to the amplitude of the PSP. These data suggest that a significantly larger proportion of cortical neurons interact through synchronous activity than through simple serial interactions; moreover, synchronous excitation affected more widely separated cell pairs than EPSPs and IPSPs, which were seen most often among the closest cells.
Performance Evaluation of SSD-Index Maintenance Schemes in IR Applications

With the advent of flash memory based new storage device (SSD), there is considerable interest within the computer industry in using flash memory based storage devices for many different types of application. The dynamic index structure of large text collections has been a primary issue in the Information Retrieval Applications among them. Previous studies have proven the three approaches to be effective: In-Place, merge-based index structure and a combination of both. The above-mentioned strategies have been researched with the traditional storage device (HDD) which has a constraint on how keep the contiguity of dynamic data. However, in case of the new storage device, we don’t have any constraint contiguity problems due to its low access latency time. But, although the new storage device has superiority such as low access latency and improved I/O throughput speeds, it is still not well suited for traditional dynamic index structures because of the poor random write throughput in practical systems. Therefore, using the experimental performance evaluation of various index maintenance schemes on the new storage device, we propose an efficient index structure for new storage device that improves significantly the index maintenance speed without degradation of query performance.
Performing Gender: Automatic Stylistic Analysis of Shakespeare's Characters

Since these texts were considered sentimental, most chapters were scored in the medium or high range, so the categories were changed to “highly sentimental” and “not highly sentimental. ” With D2K, the Naive Bayes method was used to extract features from these texts, which we might call markers of sentimentality. Looking at the top 100 of these features, some interesting patterns have emerged, including the privileging of proper names of minor characters in chapters that ranked as highly sentimental. Also interesting are blocks of markers that appear equally prevalent, or equally sentimental, we might say: numbers 70-74 are “wet,” lamentations,” “cheerfulness,” “slave-trade,” and “author. ” The line of critical argument that goes that the sentimental works focus on motherhood is borne out by “mother” at number 16 and “father” not in the top 100. As we move into the next three phases of the project, we will include stemming as an area of interest in classifying the results. Phase two will use two more novels by the same authors as those in the training set; phrase three may include ephemera, broadsides, and other materials collected in the EAF collection at the UVa Etext Center. Phase four will run the software on texts considered nonsentimental in the nineteenth century and other phases might include twentieth and twenty-first century novels that are or are not considered sentimental. We hope to discover markers that can identify elements of the sentimental in any text.
EFFECTS OF MISSING VALUE IMPUTATION ON DOWN-STREAM ANALYSES IN MICROARRAY DATA

Amongst the high-throughput technologies, DNA microarray experiments provide enormous quantity of genes and arrays with biological information to disease. The studies of gene expression values in various conditions and various organisms in public health have led to the identification of genes to the comparison between tumor and normal, clinically relevant subtypes of tumor, and prognostic signatures and have ultimately provided the potential targets for specific therapy of public health disease. Despite such advances and the popular usage of microarray, the microarray experiments frequently produce multiple missing values due to many flaw factors such as dust, scratches on the slides, insufficient resolution, or hybridization errors on the chips. Thus, gene expression data contains missing entries and a large number of genes may be affected. Unfortunately, many downstream algorithms for gene expression analysis require a complete matrix as an input. Therefore effective missing value imputation methods are needed and have been developed in the literature so far. There exists no uniformly superior imputation method and the performance depends on the structure and nature of a data set. In addition, imputation methods have been mostly compared in terms of variants of RMSEs (Root Mean Squared Error) to compare similarity between true expression values and imputed expression values. The drawback of RMSE-based evaluation is that the measure does not reflect the true biological effect in down-stream analyses. In this dissertation, we will investigate how missing value imputation process affects the biological result of differentially expressed genes discovery, clustering and classification. Multiple statistical methods in each of the downstream analysis will be considered. Quantitative measures reflecting the true biological effects in each down-stream analysis will be used to evaluate imputation methods and be compared to RMSE-based evaluation.
A greedy adaptive method for time scale modification based on acoustic prediction characteristics of human auditory system

The Synchronized Overlap-Add (SOLA) algorithm neglected the perceptual characteristics of real sound speech signals, when sampling rate was low or scaling proportion was large the process effect would obviously be reduced, aimed at such problems, a greedy adaptive algorithm was proposed through analyzing the acoustic prediction characteristics of human auditory system. This method firstly detected the transition segments of the speech using a subband spectrum entropy measure and applied different scaling factors to the transition segments and non transition segments and put forward an adaptive algorithm. Then it changed the scaling factors locally, the defect of the whole modified proportion was further ameliorated and a greedy adaptive algorithm was created. The simulation showed that the method improved the natural degree of the synthetic speech signals and the scaled time deviation was small. The greedy adaptive algorithm solves the problem of how to improve the quality of the time scaled speech and how to exactly modify the duration of speech signals.
Seeing and understanding people

This manuscript and associated talk gives an historical but not exhaustive overview of work in the Cognitive Vision Lab at the University of Surrey’s Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing. Work concentrates on people, tracking or identifying their actions and interpreting the meaning of those actions. To do this we employ techniques from a variety of sources which include the use of Mutual Information in Tracking, Data mining in Learning and using linguistics in classification. This Manuscript covers approaches to General Tracking, Multutal Information Estimation, Human Pose Estimation, Head and Hand Tracking, Expression Recognition, Lip Reading, Non Verbal Communication, Sign Language Recognition and Activity Recognition.
Spontaneous speech recognition using HMMs

This thesis describes a speech recognition system that was built to support spontaneous speech understanding. The system is composed of (1) a front end acoustic analyzer which computes Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, (2) acoustic models of context-dependent phonemes (triphones), (3) a back-off bigram statistical language model, and (4) a beam search decoder based on the Viterbi algorithm. The contextdependent acoustic models resulted in 67.9% phoneme recognition accuracy on the standard TIMIT speech database. Spontaneous speech was collected using a "Wizard of Oz" simulation of a simple spatial manipulation game. Naive subjects were instructed to manipulate blocks on a computer screen in order to solve a series of geometric puzzles using only spoken commands. A hidden human operator performed actions in response to each spoken command. The speech from thirteen subjects formed the corpus for the speech recognition results reported here. Using a task-specific bigram statistical language model and context-dependent acoustic models, the system achieved a word recognition accuracy of 67.6%. The recognizer operated using a vocabulary of 523 words. The recognition had a word perplexity of 36. Thesis Supervisor: Deb Roy Title: Assistant Professor
TrustZone Explained: Architectural Features and Use Cases

ARM TrustZone is a hardware security extension technology, which aims to provide secure execution environment by splitting computer resources between two execution worlds, namely normal world and secure world. TrustZone is supported on different flavors of ARM architectures, that include architecture deployed on targets running regular applications, such as mobile devices and architecture for micro-controllers. As ARM is widely deployed on the majority of mobile and micro-controller devices, TrustZone's goal is to provide security for those platforms. In this paper, we will discuss details of different ARM architectures that support TrustZone technology. Then, we will review how TrustZone is implemented in the hardware and software of ARM products. We will also compare TrustZone with other implementations of trusted execution environments on the market.
Forebrain‐specific knockout of B‐raf kinase leads to deficits in hippocampal long‐term potentiation, learning, and memory

Raf kinases are downstream effectors of Ras and upstream activators of the MEK‐ERK cascade. Ras and MEK‐ERK signaling play roles in learning and memory (L&M) and neural plasticity, but the roles of Raf kinases in L&M and plasticity are unclear. Among Raf isoforms, B‐raf is preferentially expressed in the brain. To determine whether B‐raf has a role in synaptic plasticity and L&M, we used the Cre‐LoxP gene targeting system to derive forebrain excitatory neuron B‐raf knockout mice. This conditional knockout resulted in deficits in ERK activation and hippocampal long‐term potentiation (LTP) and impairments in hippocampus‐dependent L&M, including spatial learning and contextual discrimination. Despite the widespread expression of B‐raf, this mutation did not disrupt other forms of L&M, such as cued fear conditioning and conditioned taste aversion. Our findings demonstrate that B‐raf plays a role in hippocampal ERK activation, synaptic plasticity, and L&M. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The pursuit of variety: creation of new products and strategic differentiation

The generation of new varieties is crucial for economic growth. The capitalistic mode of production has shown over time a remarkable capability of setting incentives for economic actors to create new products and processes. Concerning the development of new products, the incentives lie in the possibility to gain market power either by offering goods and services that are not provided by competitors, or by increasing the range of products´ palette via small modifications and by exploiting the resulting market segmentation in a strategic way. In terms of the impact on the economic growth, these two strategies are not equivalent, because the latter results in welfare transfers among firms or between consumers and producers, while the former generates something truly new and therefore generates welfare. In this paper we claim that firms cannot pursue both strategies at the same time. In particular, we investigate whether the generation of truly new products, which represents the real engine of growth, can be hindered by strategies that simply seek the introduction of minor variations in existing products to exploit pricing advantages. Our empirical analysis relies upon an original dataset including all the skis produced by 42 manufacturers and sold in the European market between 1992 and 2007. For 4193 models, we have collected data on the key product characteristics and we investigate the relationship between the distance of the product from its competitors and a series of variables accounting for firm-specific differentiation strategies at the level of technical and service characteristics over time. In the next paragraph, we clarify and discuss the two concepts of variety above mentioned and we formulate our working hypotheses. In the third section, we describe the dataset and test empirically the hypotheses. Results and conclusions follow.
Study on the random characteristics of joint FBC and CFO in an asynchronous MC-CDMA system

The factor of CFO (carrier frequency offset) definitely degrades the final results of system performance evaluation for an asynchronous MC-CDMA (multi-carrier coded-division multiple-access) system is one of the most frequently discussed issues in every kind of assuming situations. However, the other one important parameter of FBC (fading branch correlation) is much rare for implying in the study of MC-CDMA system, since they are almost considered as independent between the subchannel for the reason of algebra simplification. The issue of exploring aggregately to the matter of which parameter, CFO or FBC, is mainly dominating the system performance of an MC-CDMA system is studied in this paper. Furthermore, the properties of random in generation of CFO and FBC, which are given with the symbols of ɛ and λ, respectively, are taking simultaneously into account to calculate the system performance with BER (bit error rate) for an MC-CDMA system.
ReaxFF: A Reactive Force Field for Hydrocarbons

To make practical the molecular dynamics simulation of large scale reactive chemical systems (1000s of atoms), we developed ReaxFF, a force field for reactive systems. ReaxFF uses a general relationship between bond distance and bond order on one hand and between bond order and bond energy on the other hand that leads to proper dissociation of bonds to separated atoms. Other valence terms present in the force field (angle and torsion) are defined in terms of the same bond orders so that all these terms go to zero smoothly as bonds break. In addition, ReaxFF has Coulomb and Morse (van der Waals) potentials to describe nonbond interactions between all atoms (no exclusions). These nonbond interactions are shielded at short range so that the Coulomb and van der Waals interactions become constant as Rij → 0. We report here the ReaxFF for hydrocarbons. The parameters were derived from quantum chemical calculations on bond dissociation and reactions of small molecules plus heat of formation and geometry data for.
The coste ciency of Swedish Arable-Nitrogen Abatement Policy

The purpose of this article was to study the economics of Sweden's scheme of 'multiple' arable nitrogen abatement instruments. A large-scale, spatially distributed mathematical programming model that linked changes in agricultural production practices to coastal nitrogen load was developed. Actual abatement policy induced 21% abatement. A rst-best solution to 21% abatement required increased concentration of commodity production and remaining land to be farmed relatively more pro tably. A second-best solution required sparser production and less cost-e ective commodity production. Under actual policy, relative abatement was too high in the fertile southern coastal regions than either of the benchmarks. The choice of efciency benchmark was critical to de ning 'cost-e ective' policies. Abatement could be increased without causing excessive ine ciencies with a) incentives that also steer crop choice decisions and b) increased relative abatement in less pro table regions. Coordination of environmental and agricultural policy could o er considerable e ciency gains.
Teenage housing tenure and neighbourhoods and the links with adult outcomes: evidence from the 1970 cohort study

This study is one of a pair funded by the Homes and Communities Agency and the Tenant Services Authority. The other report can be found at http://sticerd.lse. ac.uk/case/. This pair of studies develops the findings of two previous reports on the relationship between housing and life chances (Feinstein et al, 2008, Lupton et al, 2009). These previous reports examined housing circumstances in childhood for those born in 1946, 1958, 1970 and 2000, and the relationship between childhood housing and adult outcomes across a range of measures for those born in 1946, 1958 and 1970. They found as yet unexplained connections between being ‘ever’ in social housing in childhood and worse adult outcomes on an overall measure of deprivation and a range of individual measures for those born in 1958 and in 1970 (but not for those born in 1946) (Feinstein et al, 2008, Lupton et al, 2009). Statistically significant associations remained after using a very large set of more than 50 controls for family and individual characteristics, for many outcomes and many ages, although the size of all of the associations was substantially reduced.
Glass object localization by joint inference of boundary and depth

We address the problem of localizing glass objects with a multimodal RGB-D camera. Our method integrates the intensity and depth information from a single view point, and builds a Markov Random Field that predicts glass boundary and region jointly. Based on the localization, we also reconstruct the depth of the scene and fill in the missing depth values. The efficacy of our algorithm is validated on a new RGB-D Glass dataset of 43 distinct glass objects.
Using asymmetric links to improve SSR's routing performance

Empirical evidence shows that asymmetric links occur frequently in wireless networks. Still, most routing protocols assume symmetric links. Thus, they cannot exploit the additional connectivity and bandwidth that asymmetric links provide. In this paper, we propose an extension of the scalable source routing protocol (SSR) that enables SSR to use asymmetric links. It enhances SSR's hello messages with a limited amount of local topology information, which allows the nodes to discover directed cycles in the network. Such cycles provide a return path in cases where the forward path contains asymmetric links. With our proposed extension, SSR can thus use asymmetric links and still guarantee bidirectional connectivity. We evaluate our proposals with extensive simulations. A practical test in a 150 node test bed is ongoing work.