Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Surveying the Accessibility of Mobile Touchscreen Games for Persons with Motor Impairments : A Preliminary Analysis

Touchscreen devices have rapidly become one of the most pervasive video game platforms in the world and, in turn, an integral part of popular culture; however, little work exists on comprehensively examining their accessibility. In this poster paper, we present initial findings from a survey and qualitative analysis of popular iPad touchscreen games with a specific focus on exploring factors relevant to persons with motor impairments. This paper contributes a novel qualitative codebook with which to examine the accessibility of touchscreen games for users with motor impairments and the results from applying this codebook to 72 iPad games.
A Global View of Equatorial Waves and Tropical Cyclogenesis

AbstractThis study investigates the number of tropical cyclone formations that can be attributed to the enhanced convection from equatorial waves within each basin. Tropical depression (TD)-type disturbances (i.e., easterly waves) were the primary tropical cyclone precursors over the Northern Hemisphere basins, particularly the eastern North Pacific and the Atlantic. In the Southern Hemisphere, however, the number of storms attributed to TD-type disturbances and equatorial Rossby waves were roughly equivalent. Equatorward of 20°N, tropical cyclones formed without any equatorial wave precursor most often over the eastern North Pacific and least often over the western North Pacific.The Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) was an important tropical cyclone precursor over the north Indian, south Indian, and western North Pacific basins. The MJO also affected tropical cyclogenesis by modulating the amplitudes of higher-frequency waves. Each wave type reached the attribution threshold 1.5 times more often, and tropi.
Type-based Information Flow Analysis for a Low-level Language

A static program analysis called information flow analysis has been studied for high-level programming languages, to check that programs do not leak information about secret data such as passwords. The goal of this research is to establish a type-based method for information flow analysis for low-level languages such as assembly languages and virtual machine languages, so that information flow analysis can be performed even if source programs do not exist. Taking a subset of the Java virtual machine language as a target language, we formalize a type system for information flow analysis and implement an information flow analyzer based on the type system.
Endovascular brachytherapy combined with portal vein stenting and transarterial chemoembolization improves overall survival of hepatocellular carcinoma patients with main portal vein tumor thrombus

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients with main portal vein tumor thrombus have a median survival time of only about 4 months. We therefore compared the safety and efficacy of endovascular brachytherapy (EVBT) and sequential three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3-DCRT). From a cohort of 176 patients, we treated 123 with EVBT using iodine-125 seed strands (group A) and the remaining 53 with sequential 3-DCRT (group B). Overall survival, progression free survival and stent patency characteristics were compared between the two groups. Our analysis demonstrated a median survival of 11.7 ± 1.2 months in group A versus 9.5 ± 1.8 months in group B (p = 0.002). The median progression free survival was 5.3 ± 0.7 months in groupA versus 4.4 ± 0.4 months in group B (p = 0.010). The median stent patency period was 10.3 ± 1.1 months in group A versus 8.7 ± 0.7 months in group B (p = 0.003). Therefore, as compared to sequential 3-DCRT, EVBT combined with portal vein stenting and TACE improved overall survival of HCC patients with main portal vein tumor thrombus.
HAND GESTURES FOR REMOTE CONTROL

Gestures can be used as an alternative to traditional human computer interaction devices such as the keyboard and mouse. Gesture interaction can be flexible, natural, and intuitive. They can increase user immersion in virtual environments and reduce the need for learning systems specific interaction methods. In the talk, the general structure and main building blocks of gesture recognition systems will be discussed. The concepts discussed will be demonstrated as part of two applications employing hand gestures for remote control: control of the TV menu and control of a robotic manipulator.
(2D)2PCA plus MMC: A new feature extraction for face recognition

In this paper, we combine the advantages of (2D)2PCA and MMC, and propose a two-stage framework: “(2D)2PCA+ MMC”. Since the extracted features based on (2D)2PCA are most expressive and based on maximal margin criterion (MMC) are robust, stable and efficient, in the first stage, a 2D two-directional feature extraction technique, (2D)2PCA, is employed to condense the dimension of image matrix; in the second stage, the linear discriminant analysis (MMC) is performed in the (2D)2PCA subspace to find the optimal discriminant feature vectors. In addition, the proposed method can make use of the descriptive information and discriminant information of the image. Experiments conducted on ORL and Yale face databases demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.
Regulation of the anti-inulin antibody response by a nonallotype-linked gene

The antibody response to the inulin [(In), beta-(2 leads to 1) fructosan] determinant of bacterial levan [(BL), a beta-(2 leads to 6) polyfructosan that contains beta-(2 leads to 1) branch points] requires the presence of the a haplotype of the Igh gene complex. BALB/c (Igh a) mice immunized with BL produce IgG anti-In antibodies of a single spectrotype by isoelectric focusing analysis. C57BL/6 mice, which possess the b haplotype of the Igh gene complex and which fail to produce anti-In antibodies, nevertheless possess a gene, spectrotype regulation gene 1 (Sr-1), that regulates the isoelectric focusing (IEF) pattern of anti-In antibodies in mice of the a haplotype. Thus, the IEF patterns of anti-In antibodies of (BALB/c x C57BL/6)F1 mice and of B.C8 mice (C57BL/Ka . Igh-Ca) are considerably more complex than those of BALB/c. Backcross analysis indicates that Sr-1 is not linked to the Igh complex, the major histocompatibility complex, or to the genes that code for coat color. Studies of the heterogeneity of anti-In antibodies in recombinant inbred lines and their progeny from matings to BALB/c and C.B20 (BALB/c . Igh-Cb) suggest the existence of other regulatory genes.
Insights into Regulation and Function of the Major Stress-Induced hsp70 Molecular Chaperone In Vivo: Analysis of Mice with Targeted Gene Disruption of the hsp70.1 orhsp70.3 Gene

ABSTRACT The murine hsp70 gene family includes the evolutionarily conserved hsp70.1 andhsp70.3 genes, which are the major proteins induced by heat and other stress stimuli.hsp70.1 andhsp70.3 encode identical proteins which protect cells and facilitate their recovery from stress-induced damage. While the hsp70 gene family has been widely studied and the roles of the proteins it encodes as molecular chaperones in a range of human pathologies are appreciated, little is known about the developmental regulation of hsp70.1 andhsp70.3 expression and the in vivo biological function of their products. To directly study the physiological role of these proteins in vivo, we have generated mice deficient in heat shock protein 70 (hsp70) by replacing thehsp70.1 orhsp70.3 gene with an in-frame β-galactosidase sequence. We report here that the expression ofhsp70.1 andhsp70.3 is developmentally regulated at the transcriptional level, and an overlapping expression pattern for both genes is observed during embryo development and in the tissues of adult mice. hsp70.1 −/− orhsp70.3 −/− mice are viable and fertile, with no obvious morphological abnormalities. In late embryonic stage and adult mice, both genes are expressed constitutively in tissues exposed directly to the environment (the epidermis and cornea) and in certain internal organs (the epithelium of the tongue, esophagus, and forestomach, and the kidney, bladder, and hippocampus). Exposure of mice to thermal stress results in the rapid induction and expression of hsp70, especially in organs not constitutively expressing hsp70 (the liver, pancreas, heart, lung, adrenal cortex, and intestine). Despite functional compensation in the single-gene-deficient mice by the intact homologous gene (i.e.,hsp70.3 inhsp70.1 −/− mice and vice versa), a marked reduction in hsp70 protein expression was observed in tissues under both normal and heat stress conditions. At the cellular level, inactivation of hsp70.1 orhsp70.3 resulted in deficient maintenance of acquired thermotolerance and increased sensitivity to heat stress-induced apoptosis. The additive or synergistic effects exhibited by coexpression of both hsp70 genes, and the evolutionary significance of the presence of both hsp70genes, is hence underlined.
Optimizing Virtual Machine Consolidation in Virtualized Datacenters Using Resource Sensitivity

In virtualized datacenters (vDCs), dynamic consolidation of virtual machines (VMs) is used to achieve both energy-efficiency and load balancing among different physical machines (PMs). Using VM live migrations, we can consolidate VMs on a smaller number of hosts to power down unused PMs and save energy. Most migration schemes are however oblivious to the characteristics of services that run inside VMs, and thus may lead to migrations where VMs competing for the same resource type are packed on the same PM. As a result, VMs may suffer from significant resource contention and noticeable degradation in their performance. Using resource sensitivity values of VMs (i.e., quantitative measures to reflect how much a VM is sensitive to its requested resources such as CPU, Mem, and Disk), we have designed a novel VM consolidation approach to optimize placement of VMs on available PMs. We validated our approach using five well-known applications/benchmarks with various resource demand signatures: varying from pure CPU/Mem/Disk-intensive to mixtures of them. Our extensive numerical evaluation illustrates that, for the same power consumption, our approach improve the performance of cloud services by 9 - 12%, on average, when compared with current sensitivity oblivious approaches.
Stromal fibroblasts present in breast carcinomas promote tumor growth and angiogenesis through adrenomedullin secretion

Tumor- or cancer-associated fibroblasts (TAFs or CAFs) are active players in tumorigenesis and exhibit distinct angiogenic and tumorigenic properties. Adrenomedullin (AM), a multifunctional peptide plays an important role in angiogenesis and tumor growth through its receptors calcitonin receptor-like receptor/receptor activity modifying protein-2 and -3 (CLR/RAMP2 and CLR/RAMP3). We show that AM and AM receptors mRNAs are highly expressed in CAFs prepared from invasive breast carcinoma when compared to normal fibroblasts. Immunostaining demonstrates the presence of immunoreactive AM and AM receptors in the CAFs (n = 9). The proliferation of CAFs is decreased by anti-AM antibody (αAM) and anti-AM receptors antibody (αAMR) treatment, suggesting that AM may function as a potent autocrine/paracrine growth factor. Systemic administration of αAMR reduced neovascularization of in vivo Matrigel plugs containing CAFs as demonstrated by reduced numbers of the vessel structures, suggesting that AM is one of the CAFs-derived factors responsible for endothelial cell-like and pericytes recruitment to built a neovascularization. We show that MCF-7 admixed with CAFs generated tumors of greater volume significantly different from the MCF-7 xenografts in nude mice due in part to the induced angiogenesis. αAMR and AM22-52 therapies significantly suppressed the growth of CAFs/MCF-7 tumors. Histological examination of tumors treated with AM22-52 and aAMR showed evidence of disruption of tumor vasculature with depletion of vascular endothelial cells, induced apoptosis and decrease of tumor cell proliferation. Our findings highlight the importance of CAFs-derived AM pathway in growth of breast carcinoma and in neovascularization by supplying and amplifying signals that are essential for pathologic angiogenesis.
User Behavior Under the Influence of Groups in Social Media

Social Media are at the heart of our communications and are among the most visited places on the web. Their user-generated content allows the gathering of immensely many information that cannot be processed entirely by the users. Thus it is of interest to understand how these users are deciding what pieces of information they are trusting and what are the reasons that influenced them. In this thesis proposal, we survey three papers presenting different methods to detect influence in social media. We show that the content produced is an important feature which hasn’t been extensively studied yet and deserves a closer attention. Toward this goal, we present our first results of influence detection via emotion recognition and propose several extensions.
Identification of Untrained Facial Image in Combined Global and Local Preserving Feature Space

In real time applications, biometric authentication has been widely regarded as the most foolproof or at least the hardest to forge or spoof. Several research works on face recognition based on appearance, features like intensity, color, textures or shape have been done over the last decade. In those works, mostly the classification is achieved by using the similarity measurement techniques that find the minimum distance among the training and testing feature set. When presenting this leads to the wrong classification when presenting the untrained image or unknown image, since the classification process locates at least one wining cluster that having minimum distance or maximum variance among the existing clusters. But for the real time security related applications, these new facial image should be reported and the necessary action has to be taken accordingly. In this paper we propose the following two techniques for this purpose: i. Uses a threshold value calculated by finding the average of the minimum matching distances of the wrong classifications encountered during the training phase. ii. Uses the fact that the wrong classification increases the ratio of withinclass distance and between-class distance. Experiments have been conducted using the ORL facial database and a fair comparison is made with these two techniques to show the efficiency of these techniques.
Monopole antennas with modified Minkowski fractal geometry

This paper presents monopole antenna using the technique of square pulse Minkowski fractal geometry. The presented antenna is designed to cover at the operating frequency bands of 2.3, 2.45, 2.5, 5.2, 5.5, and 5.8 GHz, which is used in wireless local area network (WLAN; IEEE 802.11a, b, g) and mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e) applications. Especially, the radiation patterns of antenna are still similar to omnidirectional at the operating frequencies. The properties of antenna such as return loss, radiation pattern and gain are determined via numerical simulation and measurement.
Fuzzy logic system for miniature climbing robots

This paper presents a fuzzy navigation and motion control system for miniature climbing robots. After the introduction of robot structure, a navigation approach based on a fuzzy multi-sensor data fusion scheme is proposed, which integrates task scheduling, sensing, planning and real-time execution in a unified task reference framework and makes the task synchronization much easier. For a highly nonlinear system as the miniature climbing robot, a fuzzy motion controller with gravity compensation is designed to reduce energy consumption and improve the robot performance at different situations. Experimental results prove the validity of the proposed method.
A Requirement for Cyclin D3–Cyclin-dependent Kinase (cdk)-4 Assembly in the Cyclic Adenosine Monophosphate–dependent Proliferation of Thyrocytes

In different systems, cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) either blocks or promotes cell cycle progression in mid to late G1 phase. Dog thyroid epithelial cells in primary culture constitute a model of positive control of DNA synthesis initiation and G0-S prereplicative phase progression by cAMP as a second messenger for thyrotropin (TSH). The cAMP-dependent mitogenic pathway is unique as it is independent of mitogen-activated protein kinase activation and differs from growth factor-dependent pathways at the level of the expression of several protooncogenes/transcription factors. This study examined the involvement of D-type G1 cyclins and their associated cyclin-dependent kinase (cdk4) in the cAMP-dependent G1 phase progression of dog thyroid cells. Unlike epidermal growth factor (EGF)+serum and other cAMP-independent mitogens, TSH did not induce the accumulation of cyclins D1 and D2 and partially inhibited the basal expression of the most abundant cyclin D3. However, TSH stimulation enhanced the nuclear detection of cyclin D3. This effect correlated with G1 and S phase progression. It was found to reflect both the unmasking of an epitope of cyclin D3 close to its domain of interaction with cdk4, and the nuclear translocation of cyclin D3. TSH and EGF+serum also induced a previously undescribed nuclear translocation of cdk4, the assembly of precipitable cyclin D3-cdk4 complexes, and the Rb kinase activity of these complexes. Previously, cdk4 activity was found to be required in the cAMP-dependent mitogenic pathway of dog thyrocytes, as in growth factor pathways. Here, microinjections of a cyclin D3 antibody showed that cyclin D3 is essential in the TSH/ cAMP-dependent mitogenesis, but not in the pathway of growth factors that induce cyclins D1 and D2. The present study (a) provides the first example in a normal cell of a stimulation of G1 phase progression occurring independently of an enhanced accumulation of cyclins D, (b) identifies the activation of cyclin D3 and cdk4 through their enhanced assembly and/or nuclear translocation, as first convergence steps of the parallel cAMP-dependent and growth factor mitogenic pathways, and (c) strongly suggests that this new mechanism is essential in the cAMP-dependent mitogenesis, which provides the first direct demonstration of the requirement for cyclin D3 in a G1 phase progression.
Optimal parallel scheduling for resolution a triangular system with availability constraints

We present in this paper a parallel scheduling for resolution a triangular system. In order to have the possibilities of deleting or adding a processor, we study also its behaviour by taking into account the constraint of processors availability. For p identical processors, we show theoretical its optimality and we compare its experimental performances to those of parallel BLAS routine.
Identifying the Sources of the Predictive Ability of the Yield Spread

This paper aims at identifying the sources of the predictive power of the nominal yield spread for economic activity. For this purpose, we analyse the relationship between the yield spread and future GDP growth in an economy subject to three types of structural disturbances: Supply shocks, monetary shocks and shocks to term premia. The theoretical model extends the work of Harvey (1988) and Hu (1993), which attributes the correlation between the real term structure and future output growth to intertemporal consumption smoothing, by allowing short-term price stickiness in the economy. Sticky prices imply that economic disturbances generate expectations of future changes in output and inflation, thus allowing for intertemporal substitution effects and changes in both the real and the nominal term structure. We derive analytical solutions of the covariance between the nominal yield spread and future output growth and show that this covariance is not independent of the type of economic disturbances. Using data for the U.S. over the period 1957:1 - 2002:4, we find empirical evidence that the predictive power of the yield spread is due to supply shocks. In contrast, monetary shocks and term premia shocks generate a negative correlation between the yield spread and future economic activity, explaining why, at times, the predictive power of the yield spread may break down.
The use of evolutionary algorithm-based methods in EEG based BCI systems

Electroencephalogram (EEG) based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is a system that uses human brainwaves recorded from the scalp as a means for providing a new communication channel by which people with limited physical communication capability can effect control over devices such as moving a mouse and typing characters. Evolutionary approaches have the potential to improve the performance of such system through providing a better sub-set of electrodes or features, reducing the required training time of the classifiers, reducing the noise to signal ratio, and so on. This chapter provides a survey on some of the commonly used EA methods in EEG study. INTRODUCTION Motor nerves and muscles used in nervous system are traditional communication channel for interaction between brain and computer. A Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is a communication device that bypasses the peripheral nervous system and derives intention directly from brain activity, which it then translates into executable commands. A formal definition for BCI proposed at the first International BCI Meeting (Rensselaerville, New York, 1999) is “A brain-computer interface is a communication system that does not depend on the brain’s normal output pathways of peripheral nerves and muscles” (Wolpaw et al., 2000). BCI devices typically incorporate stages such as signal acquisition, feature extraction, and classification in their operation. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of the commonly used non-invasive techniques in BCI for signal acquisition. EEG records variations of the surface potential from the scalp using some electrodes. The recorded signal is expected to reflect the functional activity of the underlying brain. The EEG signal is a mixture of signals that includes the desired brain activity (the summated signal of millions of cells in the cortex), as well as the heartbeat, eye movement, voluntary and involuntary muscle activity and some possible noise. Feature extraction stage is used to provide alternative representations of the raw measured signals that help the classifier to better discriminate the set of BCI operations. It is common to use preprocessing stage containing activities such as re-referencing electrodes, demeaning, normalizing, dimension reduction, artifact removal, and so on prior to feature extraction.