Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ChunkStash: Speeding Up Inline Storage Deduplication Using Flash Memory

Storage deduplication has received recent interest in the research community. In scenarios where the backup process has to complete within short time windows, inline deduplication can help to achieve higher backup throughput. In such systems, the method of identifying duplicate data, using disk-based indexes on chunk hashes, can create throughput bottlenecks due to disk I/Os involved in index lookups. RAM prefetching and bloom-filter based techniques used by Zhu et al. [42] can avoid disk I/Os on close to 99% of the index lookups. Even at this reduced rate, an index lookup going to disk contributes about 0.1msec to the average lookup time - this is about 1000 times slower than a lookup hitting in RAM. We propose to reduce the penalty of index lookup misses in RAM by orders of magnitude by serving such lookups from a flash-based index, thereby, increasing inline deduplication throughput. Flash memory can reduce the huge gap between RAM and hard disk in terms of both cost and access times and is a suitable choice for this application. To this end, we design a flash-assisted inline deduplication system using ChunkStash, a chunk metadata store on flash. ChunkStash uses one flash read per chunk lookup and works in concert with RAM prefetching strategies. It organizes chunk metadata in a log-structure on flash to exploit fast sequential writes. It uses an inmemory hash table to index them, with hash collisions resolved by a variant of cuckoo hashing. The in-memory hash table stores (2-byte) compact key signatures instead of full chunk-ids (20-byte SHA-1 hashes) so as to strike tradeoffs between RAM usage and false flash reads. Further, by indexing a small fraction of chunks per container, ChunkStash can reduce RAM usage significantly with negligible loss in deduplication quality. Evaluations using real-world enterprise backup datasets show that ChunkStash outperforms a hard disk index based inline deduplication system by 7x-60x on the metric of backup throughput (MB/sec).
Towards Collective Spatial Awareness Using Binary Relations

In this paper, we present an architecture for recognizing spatial relationships between real-world objects with integrated computing capabilities. The aim is to develop mechanisms for providing collectives of such artifacts with an awareness about spatial relations to other artifacts of the same collective. Therefore, an approach for recognizing binary relationships by a pairwise comparison of the spatial contexts of artifacts, as well as a novel algorithm which takes advantage of the relation properties in order to make all artifacts of the collective spatially-aware, are presented. The scope is on orientation- and distance-relationships, which are represented in a qualitative way. A general focus of this work is on the efficiency of the solutions with regard to their application in embedded systems. We expect the presented approach to be valuable for the interaction among artifacts and humans, as well as for acquiring high-level context information about artifact collectives.
Masibty: an anomaly based intrusion prevention system for web applications

In this whitepaper we briey describe Masibty, a novel anomaly-based web application rewall we devised. It has a modular and extensible structure. We give an overview of the anomaly detection models we implemented in it, and show that it is able to detect dierent kind of real world attacks on common web applications. We also evaluate its performance as an IPS, using both plain and mutated versions of exploits.
Options for fertility preservation in prepubertal boys.

BACKGROUND Fertility in adult life may be severely impaired by gonadotoxic therapies. For young boys who do not yet produce spermatozoa, cryopreservation of immature testicular tissue (ITT) is an option to preserve their fertility, albeit still experimental. This paper covers current options for ITT cryopreservation and fertility restoration. METHODS Relevant studies were identified by an extensive Medline search of English and French language articles. Search terms were: gonadotoxicity, cytoprotection, cryopreservation, ITT, spermatogonia, testicular transplantation, testicular grafting and in vitro maturation (IVM). RESULTS Although no effective gonadoprotective drug is yet available for in vivo spermatogonial stem cell protection in humans, current evidence supports the feasibility of ITT cryopreservation before gonadotoxic treatment with a view to fertility preservation. Controlled slow freezing with dimethyl sulfoxide allows survival and proliferation of human spermatogonia after xenotransplantation, but only partial differentiation. Animal data look promising, since healthy offspring have been obtained after transplantation of frozen testicular cell suspensions or tissue pieces. However, none of the fertility restoration options from frozen tissue, i.e. cell suspension transplantation, tissue grafting and IVM have proved efficient and safe in humans as yet. CONCLUSION While additional evidence is required to define optimal conditions for ITT cryopreservation with a view to transplantation or IVM, the putative indications for such techniques, as well as their limitations according to disease, are outlined.
First Report of CTNS Mutations in a Chinese Family with Infantile Cystinosis

Infantile cystinosis (IC) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by a defect in the lysosomal-membrane transport protein, cystinosin. It serves as a prototype for lysosomal transport disorders. To date, several CTNS mutations have been identified as the cause of the prototypic disease across different ethnic populations worldwide. However, in Asia, the CTNS mutation is very rarely reported. For the Chinese population, no literature on CTNS mutation screening for IC is available to date. In this paper, by using the whole exome sequencing and Sanger sequencing, we identified two novel CTNS splicing deletions in a Chinese IC family, one at the donor site of exon 6 of CTNS (IVS6+1, del G) and the other at the acceptor site of exon 8 (IVS8-1, del GT). These data give information for the genetic counseling of the IC that occurred in Chinese population.
Fast super-resolution reconstructions of mobile video using warped transforms and adaptive thresholding

Multimedia services for mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular thanks to capabilities brought about by location awareness, customized programming, interactivity, and portability. With mounting attraction to these services there is desire to seamlessly expand the mobile multimedia experience to stationary environments where high-resolution displays can offer significantly better viewing conditions. In this paper, we propose a fast, high quality super-resolution algorithm that enables high resolution display of low-resolution video. The proposed algorithm, SWAT, accomplishes sparse reconstructions using directionally warped transforms and spatially adaptive thresholding. Comparisons are made with some existing techniques in terms of PSNR and visual quality. Simulation examples show that SWAT significantly outperforms these techniques while staying within a limited computational complexity envelope.
Ribonucleic Acid Synthesis of Vesicular Stomatitis Virus IV. Transcription by Standard Virus in the Presence of Defective Interfering Particles

Exposure of vesicular stomatitis virus-infected Chinese hamster ovary cells to cycloheximide results in the complete transcription of virion ribonucleic acid (RNA) into only 28S and 13 to 15S viral-specific RNA species. These RNA are identical to viral messenger RNA by the following criteria: size, single-strandedness, complementarity to virion RNA, and formation of messenger ribonucleoproteins. This transcription represents the intracellular enzymatic activity of the virion-associated polymerase and is shown to be dependent on input multiplicity. Intracellular transcription differs from in vitro polymerase activity in having a temperature optimum of 34 to 37 C and in synthesizing 28S as well as 13 to 15S messenger RNA species. Addition of interfering quantities of defective T particles to these cycloheximide-treated cells, either an hour before or at the same time as standard B particles of vesicular stomatitis virus, does not alter the rate of transcription nor does it change the sucrose gradient pattern of the viral RNA species. From these results it is concluded that the RNA of defective T particles does not serve a transcriptive function and probably interferes through the replicative mechanism for virion RNA synthesis.
Integrate Multilingual Web Search Results using Cross-Lingual Topic Models

With the thriving of the Internet, web users today have access to resources around the world in more than 200 different languages. How to effectively manage multilingual web search results has emerged as an essential problem. In this paper, we introduce the ongoing work of leveraging a CrossLingual Topic Model (CLTM) to integrate the multilingual search results. The CLTM detects the underlying topics of different language results and uses the topic distribution of each result to cluster them into topic-based classes. In CLTM, we unify distributions in topic level by direct translation, thus distinguishing from other multilingual topic models, which mainly concern the parallelism at document or sentence level (Mimno 2009; Ni, 2009). Experimental results suggest that our CLTM clustering method is effective and outperforms the 6 compared clustering approaches.
Consistent, Convergent, and Constant-Time SLAM

This paper presents a new efficient algorithm for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), using multiple overlapping submaps, each built with respect to a local frame of reference defined by one of the features in the submap. The global position of each submap is estimated using information from other submaps in an efficient, provably consistent manner. For situations where the mobile robot is able to make repeated visits to all regions of the environment, the method achieves convergence to a near-optimal result with time complexity while maintaining consistent error bounds. Simulation results demonstrate the ability of the technique to converge to errors that are only slightly greater than the full solution, while maintaining consistency.
Kinetic Characterization and Molecular Docking of a Novel, Potent, and Selective Slow-Binding Inhibitor of Human Cathepsin L

A novel small molecule thiocarbazate (PubChem SID 26681509), a potent inhibitor of human cathepsin L (EC 3.4.22.15) with an IC50 of 56 nM, was developed after a 57,821-compound screen of the National Institutes of Health Molecular Libraries Small Molecule Repository. After a 4-h preincubation with cathepsin L, this compound became even more potent, demonstrating an IC50 of 1.0 nM. The thiocarbazate was determined to be a slow-binding and slowly reversible competitive inhibitor. Through a transient kinetic analysis for single-step reversibility, inhibition rate constants were kon = 24,000 M-1s-1 and koff = 2.2 × 10-5 s-1 (Ki = 0.89 nM). Molecular docking studies were undertaken using the experimentally derived X-ray crystal structure of papain/CLIK-148 (1cvz. pdb). These studies revealed critical hydrogen bonding patterns of the thiocarbazate with key active site residues in papain. The thiocarbazate displayed 7- to 151-fold greater selectivity toward cathepsin L than papain and cathepsins B, K, V, and S with no activity against cathepsin G. The inhibitor demonstrated a lack of toxicity in human aortic endothelial cells and zebrafish. In addition, the thiocarbazate inhibited in vitro propagation of malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum with an IC50 of 15.4 μM and inhibited Leishmania major with an IC50 of 12.5 μM.
Structural isoforms of the circadian neuropeptide PDF expressed in the optic lobes of the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus: Immunocytochemical evidence from specific monoclonal antibodies

Pigment‐dispersing factor (PDF) is an 18‐mer peptide that acts as a principal neurotransmitter of the insect circadian clock. Our previous study, utilizing anti‐Uca β‐PDH polyclonal antibody (pAb) to immunolabel the optic lobe of the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus, suggested the existence of an alternative PDF‐like peptide in the outer cells of the first neuropile, or lamina (La), which were much less immunoreactive than the inner cells of the second neuropile, the medulla (Me). To obtain structural information about such a PDF‐like peptide, we prepared 10 anti‐Gryllus PDF monoclonal (mAb) and pAb antibodies and analyzed their detailed epitope specificities. The PDFMe and PDFLa inner cells and their axonal projections were clearly immunoreactive to all these antibodies, revealing the widespread immunocytochemical organization of the PDF system in the optic lobe, as seen previously with anti‐Uca β‐PDH pAb and anti‐Gryllus PDF mAb, the epitope structures of which were also clarified in this study. The lamina outer cells, which we found lacked a target pdf mRNA, displayed specific immunoreactivities, indicating that the cells contain a distinct PDF‐like peptide possessing both N‐ and C‐terminal structures. These cells were not immunolabeled by some other monoclonal antibodies, however, implying that the PDFLa outer cells have a PDF isoform peptide devoid of Asn at positions 6 and 16. This isoform was also identified in a varicose arborization in the lamina. These results suggest not only the structure of the peptide, but also the possibility of additional functions of this novel PDF isoform. J. Comp. Neurol. 499:404–421, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Hypoxia promotes CXC chemokine receptor type 4 expression through microRNA-150 in pancreatic cancer cells

Hypoxia promotes pancreatic cancer progression by triggering cancer cell invasion. However, the mechanism underlying this process remains unclear, hindering the development of effective therapies. The present study aimed to delineate the molecular mechanisms underlying the prometastatic effect of hypoxia in pancreatic cancer cells. The expression of microRNA-150 (miRNA-150) was detected using reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction in pancreatic cancer samples and in the hypoxia-induced CaPan2 human pancreatic cancer cell line. The target gene was identified using bioinformatics and a luciferase reporter assay. Inhibition of the expression of C-X-C chemokine receptor type 4 (CXCR4) by miRNA‐150 was confirmed using transfection with miRNA-150 mimics. The prometastatic effect of hypoxia was detected using migration assays. The expression of miRNA-150 was shown to be downregulated in pancreatic cancer samples compared with that in normal pancreatic tissue samples. Furthermore, its expression was reduced in hypoxia-induced CaPan2 cells, compared with that in control cells. Bioinformatics and the results of the luciferase reporter assay, demonstrated that miRNA-150 inhibited the expression of CXCR4 by directly targeting the 3' untranslated region of CXCR4 mRNA. The results of the migration assay showed that hypoxia promotes cell migration and invasion. However, this prometastatic effect was reversed by transfection with miRNA-150 mimics. The present results suggest that hypoxia promotes pancreatic cancer migration by downregulating miRNA-150.
Intracortical Origins of Interocular Suppression in the Visual Cortex

The response of neurons in the primary visual cortex to an optimally oriented grating is usually suppressed quite dramatically when a second grating of, for example, orthogonal orientation is superimposed. Such “cross-orientation suppression” has been implicated in the generation of cortical orientation selectivity and local response normalization. Until recently, little experimental evidence was available concerning the neurophysiological substrate of this phenomenon, although an involvement of intracortical inhibition was commonly assumed. However, Freeman et al. (2002) proposed that cortical cross-orientation suppression is caused by suppression in the thalamus and depression at geniculocortical synapses. Here, we examine a dichoptic form of cross-orientation suppression, termed interocular suppression and thought to be involved in binocular rivalry (Sengpiel et al., 1995a). We show that its dependency on the drift rate of the suppressing stimulus is consistent with a cortical origin; unlike monocular cross-orientation suppression, it cannot be evoked by very fast-moving stimuli. Moreover, we find that previous adaptation to the orthogonal stimulus essentially eliminates interocular suppression. Because adaptation is a cortical phenomenon, this result also argues in favor of a cortical locus of suppression, again unlike monocular cross-orientation suppression, which is not affected by adaptation to the suppressor (Freeman et al., 2002). Finally, interocular suppression is greatly reduced in the presence of the GABA antagonist bicuculline. Together, our study demonstrates that interocular suppression is substantially different from monocular cross-orientation suppression and is mediated by inhibitory circuitry within the visual cortex.
Malware Slums: Measurement and Analysis of Malware on Traffic Exchanges

Auto-surf and manual-surf traffic exchanges are an increasingly popular way of artificially generating website traffic. Previous research in this area has focused on the makeup, usage, and monetization of underground traffic exchanges. In this paper, we analyze the role of traffic exchanges as a vector for malware propagation. We conduct a measurement study of nine auto-surf and manual-surf traffic exchanges over several months. We present a first of its kind analysis of the different types of malware that are propagated through these traffic exchanges. We find that more than 26% of the URLs surfed on traffic exchanges contain malicious content. We further analyze different categories of malware encountered on traffic exchanges, including blacklisted domains, malicious JavaScript, malicious Flash, and malicious shortened URLs.
Environment-independent formation flight for micro aerial vehicles

Some aerial tasks are achieved more efficiently and at a lower cost by a group of independently controlled micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) when compared to a single, more sophisticated robot. Controlling formation flight can be cast as a two-level problem: stabilization of relative distances of agents (formation shape control) and control of the center of gravity of the formation. To date, accurate shape control of a formation of MAVs usually relies on external tracking devices (e.g. fixed cameras) or signals (e.g. GPS) and uses centralized control, which severely limits its deployment. In this paper, we present an environment-independent approach for relative MAV formation flight, using a distributed control algorithm which relies only on embedded sensing and agentto- agent communication. In particular, an on-board monocular camera is used to acquire relative distance measurements in combination with a consensus-based distributed Kalman filter. We evaluate our methods in- and outdoors with a formation of three MAVs while controlling the formation's center of gravity manually.
The CSTR entry to the Blizzard Challenge 2016

This paper describes the text-to-speech system entered by The Centre for Speech Technology Research into the 2016 Blizzard Challenge. This system is a hybrid synthesis system which uses output from a recurrent neural network to drive a unit selection synthesiser. The annual Blizzard Challenge conducts side-by-side testing of a number of speech synthesis systems trained on a common set of speech data. The task of the 2016 Bliz-zard Challenge is to train on expressively-read children’s story-books, and to synthesise speech in the same domain. The Challenge therefore presents an opportunity to test the effectiveness of several techniques we have developed when applied to expressive speech data.
Regulation of β1C and β1A Integrin Expression in Prostate Carcinoma Cells*

β1C and β1A integrins are two splice variants of the human β1 integrin subfamily that act as an inhibitor and a stimulator of cell proliferation, respectively. In neoplastic prostate epithelium, both these variants are down-regulated at the mRNA level, but only β1C protein levels are reduced. We used an experimental model consisting of PNT1A, a normal immortalized prostate cell line, and LNCaP and PC-3, two prostate carcinoma cell lines, to investigate both the transcription/post-transcription and translation/post-translation processes of β1C and β1A. Transcriptional regulation played the key role for the reduction in β1C and β1A mRNA expression in cancer cells, as β1C and β1A mRNA half-lives were comparable in normal and cancer cells. β1C translation rate decreased in cancer cells in agreement with the decrease in mRNA levels, whereas β1A translation rate increased more than 2-fold, despite the reduction in mRNA levels. Both β1C and β1A proteins were degraded more rapidly in cancer than in normal cells, and pulse-chase experiments showed that intermediates and/or rates of β1C and β1A protein maturation differ in cancer versus normal cells. Inhibition of either calpain- or lysosomal-mediated proteolysis increased both β1C and β1A protein levels, the former in normal but not in cancer cells and the latter in both cell types, albeit at a higher extent in cancer than in normal cells. Interestingly, inhibition of the ubiquitin proteolytic pathway increased expression of ubiquitinated β1C protein without affecting β1A protein levels in cancer cells. These results show that transcriptional, translational, and post-translational processes, the last involving the ubiquitin proteolytic pathway, contribute to the selective loss of β1C integrin, a very efficient inhibitor of cell proliferation, in prostate malignant transformation.
How Can Self-Regulation Enhance Our Understanding of Trauma and Dissociation?

More than a century ago, Pierre Janet noted that dissociation results not only from genetic vulnerability, illness, or fatigue but also from exposure to potentially traumatizing events (Nijenhuis & Van der Hart, 2011). How best to understand, assess, diagnose, and treat trauma-related dissociation has led to many informative lines of inquiry since. We know that trauma exposure increases the risk of acute (Bryant, 2007) and chronic (Carlson, Dalenberg, & McDade-Montez, 2012; Dalenberg et al., 2012) dissociative problems. We also know that alterations in brain activation (Lanius et al., 2010) and personality styles (Daniels, Frewen, McKinnon, & Lanius, 2011) could constitute a dissociative subtype of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I would like to suggest an integrative conceptual framework for these investigations: self-regulation. Dissociation can be understood as the result of an involuntary shift from modes of self-regulation that facilitate biopsychosocial development to threat-related defensive modes (Ford, 2009). Severe dissociative symptoms have been conceptualized as involuntary and often unconscious posttraumatic adaptations that occur when a person cannot tolerate “traumatic memories, affects, sensations, beliefs, or behaviors” and as a result experiences a “fragmentation and encapsulation of traumatic experiences” (International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, 2011, p. 122). I believe this essentially describes fundamental alterations in self-regulation. More specifically, these posttraumatic dissociative symptoms and experiences could be understood as a shift in self-regulation from growth-focused psychobiological operations