Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Geometric Approach to Statistical Learning Theory through Support Vector Machines ( SVM ) with Application to Medical Diagnosis

This dissertation deals with problems of Pattern Recognition in the framework of Machine Learning (ML) and, specifically, Statistical Learning Theory (SLT), using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The focus of this work is on the geometric interpretation of SVMs, which is accomplished through the notion of Reduced Convex Hulls (RCHs), and its impact on the derivation of new, efficient algorithms for the solution of the general, i.e., linear, nonlinear, separable and non-separable, SVM optimization task. The contributions of this work are i) the extension of the mathematical framework of RCHs (which allow the restriction of the expression of the extreme points of the RCHs and provide an analytic form of their projection onto a specific direction), ii) the development of novel geometric algorithms for SVMs (based on Schlesinger-Kozinec and Gilbert nearest point algorithms), which were tested using public benchmark datasets and outperformed the existing algebraic SVM algorithms and, finally, iii) the derivation and assessment of a set of qualitative and quantitative mammographic textural and morphological features (using methods of statistical and fractal analysis) and the application of the SVM algorithms (as well as other machine learning paradigms) to the field of Medical Image Analysis and Diagnosis (Mammography) with very encouraging practical results.
A novel androgen-regulated isoform of the TSC2 tumour suppressor gene increases cell proliferation

TSC2 (Tuberous sclerosis complex 2) is an important tumour suppressor gene, mutations within which are linked to the development of tuberous sclerosis and implicated in multiple tumour types. TSC2 protein complexes with TSC1 and blocks the ability of the Rheb (Ras homolog enriched in brain) GTPase to activate mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin), a crucial signal transducer which regulates protein synthesis and cell growth. Here, we report the characterisation of a novel isoform of TSC2 which is under direct control of the ligand-activated androgen receptor. TSC2 isoform A (TSC2A) is derived from an internal androgen-regulated alternative promoter and encodes a 508-amino acid cytoplasmic protein corresponding to the C-terminal region of full-length TSC2, lacking the interaction domain for TSC1 and containing an incomplete interaction domain required for Rheb inactivation. Expression of TSC2A is induced in response to androgens and full-length TSC2 is co-ordinately down-regulated, indicating an androgen-driven switch in TSC2 protein isoforms. In contrast to the well-characterised suppressive efect on cell proliferation of full-length TSC2 protein, both LNCaP and HEK293 cells over-expressing TSC2 isoform A proliferate more rapidly (measured by MTT assays) and have increased levels of cells in S-phase (measured by both Edu staining and FACS analysis). Our work indicates, for the first time, a novel role for this well-known tumour suppressor gene, which encodes an activator of cell proliferation in response to androgen stimulation.
Information needs in the outsourcing lifecycle

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify information needs in the outsourcing lifecycle, and to prioritize them according to their importance for governing and controlling the external provider.Design/methodology/approach – A three‐round Delphi study was conducted, where 17 and 16 outsourcing experts answered, respectively.Findings – The evaluation ranked “service reporting” as the number one information need for governing the external provider.Research limitations/implications – The paper aims to shed light on a so far little‐considered research field and to create the basis for deeper analysis. Future research activities should examine in further detail how to effectively design “service reporting” in theory and practice.Practical implications – This involves documentation of information needs in the outsourcing lifecycle which are the major prerequisite for making decisions to govern an outsourcing project.Originality/value – While there is a rapidly growing body of literature on outsourcing,.
Robust double D topology for roadway IPT applications

Roadway Inductive Power Transfer depends on robust and reliable primary magnetic couplers (pads), but existing pads use large quantities of ferrite, a brittle magnetic material. This paper presents two variations on the Double D topology to reduce or remove the ferrite thereby making the system more robust, using an additional coil to help shape the field instead. Simulations and laboratory validations are presented. Results show a ferrite-less Double D could allow a higher power to be transferred for a given leakage at the side of the roadway, at the expense of a higher primary current and system efficiency. In addition, a reduced ferrite pad with an additional coil allows a significant power transfer for a lower leakage profile than a full ferrite pad, enabling a less expensive and more robust system at the expense of end to end efficiency.
Covariate Shift in Hilbert Space: A Solution via Sorrogate Kernels

Covariate shift is an unconventional learning scenario in which training and testing data have different distributions. A general principle to solve the problem is to make the training data distribution similar to that of the test domain, such that classifiers computed on the former generalize well to the latter. Current approaches typically target on sample distributions in the input space, however, for kernel-based learning methods, the algorithm performance depends directly on the geometry of the kernel-induced feature space. Motivated by this, we propose to match data distributions in the Hilbert space, which, given a pre-defined empirical kernel map, can be formulated as aligning kernel matrices across domains. In particular, to evaluate similarity of kernel matrices defined on arbitrarily different samples, the novel concept of surrogate kernel is introduced based on the Mercer's theorem. Our approach caters the model adaptation specifically to kernel-based learning mechanism, and demonstrates promising results on several real-world applications.
Wireless sensor networks with RF energy harvesting: Energy models and analysis

This paper formulates the location-dependent power harvesting rates in generalized 2D and 3D placement of multiple Radio Frequency (RF) Energy Transmitters (ETs) for recharging the nodes of a wireless sensor network (WSN). In particular, we study the distributions of total available and harvested power over the entire WSN. We provide closed matrix forms of harvestable power at any given point in space due to the action of concurrent energy transfer from multiple ETs, explicitly considering constructive and destructive interference of the transmitted energy signals. We also analyze the performance of energy transfer in the WSN through power outage probability, interference, and harvested voltage as a function of the wireless power received from the ETs. Our results reveal that the network wide received power and interference power from concurrent energy transfers exhibit Log-Normal distributions, and the harvested voltage over the network follows a Rayleigh distribution.
Active Tweet Recommendation Based on User Interest Profiles

The rapid growth of Twitter has made it one of the most popular information sources of current affairs. Twitter users gather information about their topics of interest through their followees’ posts or by searching for relevant posts. However, users are often overwhelmed by the large number of tweets which makes it difficult for them to find relevant and non-redundant information about their interests. Information filtering and recommender systems can help users by suggesting informative tweets based on their interests. Considering the wide variety of topics in users’ interest profiles and the sheer volume of tweets being published daily, it is difficult to have adequate and proper labeled data to train these systems on. We aim to tackle this problem by integrating active learning techniques into tweet recommendation, more specifically for finding relevant tweets and ranking them. Using active learning methods in the context of Twitter recommenders has not been well explored before. Our objective is to exploit these methods for improving the accuracy of tweet recommenders the most, while keeping the cost of labeling to a minimum.
Local Deformation and Crack Simulation of Plastic Thin Shell

We present a mesh less method for local deformation and crack simulation of plastic thin shell. Although previous mesh less methods have done the similar simulations, there exists a problem that the moment matrix may be singular. And the result is that the shape function cannot be constructed to finish the simulation. Special work is needed to deal with the problem. In this paper, we propose a mesh less method ¨C Local Radial Basis Point Interpolation Method (LRPIM) to carry out the simulation. The shape function is constructed using the radial basis function and it guarantees that the moment is nonsingular without any assistance. Results show that our method is feasible and effective.
A Switch in the Control of Growth of the Wing Imaginal Disks of Manduca sexta

Background Insulin and ecdysone are the key extrinsic regulators of growth for the wing imaginal disks of insects. In vitro tissue culture studies have shown that these two growth regulators act synergistically: either factor alone stimulates only limited growth, but together they stimulate disks to grow at a rate identical to that observed in situ. It is generally thought that insulin signaling links growth to nutrition, and that starvation stops growth because it inhibits insulin secretion. At the end of larval life feeding stops but the disks continue to grow, so at that time disk growth has become uncoupled from nutrition. We sought to determine at exactly what point in development this uncoupling occurs. Methodology Growth and cell proliferation in the wing imaginal disks and hemolymph carbohydrate concentrations were measured at various stages in the last larval instar under experimental conditions of starvation, ligation, rescue, and hormone treatment. Principal Findings Here we show that in the last larval instar of M. sexta, the uncoupling of nutrition and growth occurs as the larva passes the critical weight. Before this time, starvation causes a decline in hemolymph glucose and trehalose and a cessation of wing imaginal disks growth, which can be rescued by injections of trehalose. After the critical weight the trehalose response to starvation disappears, and the expression of insulin becomes decoupled from nutrition. After the critical weight the wing disks loose their sensitivity to repression by juvenile hormone, and factors from the abdomen, but not the brain, are required to drive continued growth. Conclusions During the last larval instar imaginal disk growth becomes decoupled from somatic growth at the time that the endocrine events of metamorphosis are initiated. These regulatory changes ensure that disk growth continues uninterrupted when the nutritive and endocrine signals undergo the drastic changes associated with metamorphosis.
Mechanism for alternating access in neurotransmitter transporters

Crystal structures of LeuT, a bacterial homologue of mammalian neurotransmitter transporters, show a molecule of bound substrate that is essentially exposed to the extracellular space but occluded from the cytoplasm. Thus, there must exist an alternate conformation for LeuT in which the substrate is accessible to the cytoplasm and a corresponding mechanism that switches accessibility from one side of the membrane to the other. Here, we identify the cytoplasmic accessibility pathway of the alternate conformation in a mammalian serotonin transporter (SERT) (a member of the same transporter family as LeuT). We also propose a model for the cytoplasmic-facing state that exploits the internal pseudosymmetry observed in the crystal structure. LeuT contains two structurally similar repeats (TMs1–5 and TMs 6–10) that are inverted with respect to the plane of the membrane. The conformational differences between them result in the formation of the extracellular pathway. Our model for the cytoplasm-facing state exchanges the conformations of the two repeats and thus exposes the substrate and ion-binding sites to the cytoplasm. The conformational change that connects the two states primarily involves the tilting of a 4-helix bundle composed of transmembrane helices 1, 2, 6, and 7. Switching the tilt angle of this bundle is essentially equivalent to switching the conformation of the two repeats. Extensive mutagenesis of SERT and accessibility measurements, using cysteine reagents, are accommodated by our model. These observations may be of relevance to other transporter families, many of which contain internal inverted repeats.
Checking type safety of foreign function calls

We present a multi-lingual type inference system for checking type safety across a foreign function interface. The goal of our system is to prevent foreign function calls from introducing type and memory safety violations into an otherwise safe language. Our system targets OCaml's FFI to C, which is relatively lightweight and illustrates some interesting challenges in multi-lingual type inference. The type language in our system embeds OCaml types in C types and vice-versa, which allows us to track type information accurately even through the foreign language, where the original types are lost. Our system uses representational types that can model multiple OCaml types, because C programs can observe that many OCaml types have the same physical representation. Furthermore, because C has a low-level view of OCaml data, our inference system includes a dataflow analysis to track memory offsets and tag information. Finally, our type system includes garbage collection information to ensure that pointers from the FFI to the OCaml heap are tracked properly. We have implemented our inference system and applied it to a small set of benchmarks. Our results show that programmers do misuse these interfaces, and our implementation has found several bugs and questionable coding practices in our benchmarks.
Visualizing Graphs - A Generalized View

The visualization of graphs has proven to be very useful for exploring structures in different application domains. However, in certain fields of computer science, graph visualization is understood and focused quite differently. While "graph drawing" focuses on optimized layouts for node-link-representations of networks, "information visualization" prefers to work on hierarchies focusing on very large structures, different views and interactivity. This paper gives a systematic view of the problem of graph visualization by combining both approaches. We introduce a general view of different visualization methods as well as describe occurring problems and discuss basic constraints. These are used to propose a visualization framework for graphs, whose development motivated this paper
Cytogenetical observations in five human anaplastic thyroid carcinomas.

Mark, J., Ekedahl, C. , Dahlenfors, K. and Westermark B. 1987. Cytogenetical observations in five human anaplastic thyroid carcinomas. —Hereditas 107 163–174. Lund, Sweden. ISSN 0018–0661. Received January 14, 1987 Observations by banding methods in 5 human anaplastic thyroid carcinomas are reported. All tumors had a polyploid, often very flat, mode. Karyotype analyses, however, revealed that in spite of a mostly profound numerical-structural variability, all carcinomas were monoclonal products. Numerical deviations in common were proportional gains of No. 20 and often losses of Nos. 1,4and 13. Structural aberrations particularly common were a variety of Robertsonian translocations and isochromosomes. Double-minutes (Dms) were seen in 2 tumors. The Dms in one of these cases did not contain any of the oncogenes previously demonstrated to be amplified in human tumors harbouring correspondent aberrations. The present study indicates that undifferentiated thyroid carcinomas are easily established as cell lines. Because of this characteristic and, also, the suggestive common occurrence of Dms, the anaplastic carcinomas seem to comprise an unusually favourable material for future molecular studies.
Ectodysplasin A1 promotes placodal cell fate during early morphogenesis of ectodermal appendages

Organs developing as appendages of the ectoderm are initiated from epithelial thickenings called placodes. Their formation is regulated by interactions between the ectoderm and underlying mesenchyme, and several signalling molecules have been implicated as activators or inhibitors of placode formation. Ectodysplasin (Eda) is a unique signalling molecule in the tumour necrosis factor family that, together with its receptor Edar, is necessary for normal development of ectodermal organs both in humans and mice. We have shown previously that overexpression of the Eda-A1 isoform in transgenic mice stimulates the formation of several ectodermal organs. In the present study, we have analysed the formation and morphology of placodes using in vivo and in vitro models in which both the timing and amount of Eda-A1 applied could be varied. The hair and tooth placodes of K14-Eda-A1 transgenic embryos were enlarged, and extra placodes developed from the dental lamina and mammary line. Exposure of embryonic skin to Eda-A1 recombinant protein in vitro stimulated the growth and fusion of placodes. However, it did not accelerate the initiation of the first wave of hair follicles giving rise to the guard hairs. Hence, the function of Eda-A1 appears to be downstream of the primary inductive signal required for placode initiation during skin patterning. Analysis of BrdU incorporation indicated that the formation of the epithelial thickening in early placodes does not involve increased cell proliferation and also that the positive effect of Eda-A1 on placode expansion is not a result of increased cell proliferation. Taken together, our results suggest that Eda-A1 signalling promotes placodal cell fate during early development of ectodermal organs.
SERRATED CHIP PREDICTION IN FINITE ELEMENT MODELING OF THE CHIP FORMATION PROCESS

A 2D Finite Element Model set up using the Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (A.L.E) formulation proposed in Abaqus/Explicit (v6.4) is employed to predict serrated chip formation during cutting process. No artificial criterion is employed to create the chip or to initiate serrated chip formation. The sensitivity of serrated chip prediction to numerical and process parameters is analyzed in this paper. Experimental tests in orthogonal cutting conditions on machining of AISI-4140 with coated and uncoated cemented-carbide inserts were carried out to validate numerical results. They showed significant influence of cutting speed and rake angle on the serrated chip phenomena. The comparison between numerical and experimental results showed a good qualitative agreement and underlined the outstanding influence of the element dimensions employed in Finite Element Modeling (F.E.M.) tests.
Cloud Computing-Conversion Technology for Interoperability

Though the current cloud computing is in its initial stage of development, some established players, such as Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, have captured market shares with their own strategies and standards. However, for a further development for this immature market, it has been proposed a general standard (like TCP/IP for internet) among cloud participants. There are some standards under drafting, but it seems impractical for established players to agree on a general one, for they already have their own standards. What's more, the ongoing creation in the industry undermines standardization, On the other hand, each cloud provider is taking an active role in making its own API, for instance VMware's vCloud, an open standard, but the cost is consumers' lock-in. Thus, conversion technology seems to have a brighter future than standardization towards achieving interoperability. This study discusses various issues concerning the realization of interoperability by conversion technology. Primarily, an economic model is used for reference to analyze the market's incentive to adopt such technology, especially in such a market with network effects. Then a sequence of issues regarding technique, economy, management, security and politics are put forward and discussed, ending with an outlook for the industry. These discussions have important implications for realization of interoperability under the current condition where standardization is somewhat costly and impractical.
A Glucose Biosensor Based on Immobilization of Glucose Oxidase in Electropolymerized o-Aminophenol Film on Platinized Glassy Carbon Electrode.

A high-performance amperometric glucose biosensor has been developed, based on immobilization of glucose oxidase in an electrochemically synthesized, nonconducting poly(o-aminophenol) film on a platinized glassy carbon electrode. The large microscopic surface area and porous morphology of the platinized glassy carbon electrode result in high enzyme loading, and the enzyme entrapped in the electrodeposited platinum microparticle matrix is stabler than that on a platinum disk electrode surface. The response current of the sensor is 20-fold higher than that of the sensor prepared with a platinum disk electrode of the same geometric area. The experiments showed that the high sensitivity of the sensor is due not only to the large microscopic area but also to the high efficiency of transformation of H(2)O(2) generated by enzymatic reaction to current signal on the platinized glassy carbon electrode. The response time of the sensor is <4 s, and its lifetime is >10 months.
Lipidomic Analysis of Endocannabinoid Signaling: Targeted Metabolite Identification and Quantification

The endocannabinoids N-arachidonoylethanolamide (or anandamide, AEA) and 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) belong to the larger groups of N-acylethanolamines (NAEs) and monoacylglycerol (MAG) lipid classes, respectively. They are biologically active lipid molecules that activate G-protein-coupled cannabinoid receptors found in various organisms. After AEA and 2-AG were discovered in the 1990s, they have been extensively documented to have a broad range of physiological functions. Along with AEA, several NAEs, for example, N-palmitoylethanolamine (PEA), N-stearoylethanolamine (SEA), and N-oleoylethanolamine (OEA) are also present in tissues, usually at much larger concentrations than AEA. Any perturbation that involves the endocannabinoid pathway may subsequently alter basal level or metabolism of these lipid mediators. Further, the altered levels of these molecules often reflect pathological conditions associated with tissue damage. Robust and sensitive methodologies to analyze these lipid mediators are essential to understanding how they act as endocannabinoids. The recent advances in mass spectrometry allow researchers to develop lipidomics approaches and several methodologies have been proposed to quantify endocannabinoids in various biological systems.