Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimation of nonstationary EEG with Kalman smoother approach: an application to event-related synchronization (ERS)

An adaptive spectrum estimation method for nonstationary electroencephalogram by means of time-varying autoregressive moving average modeling is presented. The time-varying parameter estimation problem is solved by Kalman filtering along with a fixed-interval smoothing procedure. Kalman filter is an optimal filter in the mean square sense and it is a generalization of other adaptive filters such as recursive least squares or least mean square. Furthermore, by using the smoother the unavoidable tracking lag of adaptive filters can be avoided. Due to the properties of Kalman filter and benefits of the smoothing the time-frequency resolution of the presented Kalman smoother spectra is extremely high. The presented approach is applied to estimation of event-related synchronization/desynchronization (ERS/ERD) dynamics of occipital alpha rhythm measured from three healthy subjects. With the Kalman smoother approach detailed spectral information can be extracted from single ERS/ERD samples.
A SVD-Based Optical MIMO Precoding Scheme in Indoor Visible Light Communication

A novel optical precoding scheme based on singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed to solve the problem that strong channel correlation causes low spatial multiplexing gain in indoor visible light MIMO communication. This scheme first ensures a nonnegative signal after precoding through mapping the transmit bits into a specific symbol constellation. Then it eliminates the inter-channel interference by decomposing the MIMO channel through SVD. Finally, it reduces the BER by optimally allocating power among the sub-channels with the object to make the condition of each sub-channel equal. The simulation results show that SVD-based optical precoding scheme can significantly reduce the BER compared to ZF algorithm. And with the enhancement of channel correlation, the BER performance remains in a relatively low level, so it can obtain high spatial multiplexing gain under the strong correlation channel.
The mutational structure of metabolism in Caenorhabditis elegans

A properly functioning organism must maintain metabolic homeostasis. Deleterious mutations degrade organismal function, presumably at least in part via effects on metabolic function. Here we present an initial investigation into the mutational structure of the Caenorhabditis elegans metabolome by means of a mutation accumulation experiment. We find that pool sizes of 29 metabolites vary greatly in their vulnerability to mutation, both in terms of the rate of accumulation of genetic variance (the mutational variance, VM) and the rate of change of the trait mean (the mutational bias, ΔM). Strikingly, some metabolites are much more vulnerable to mutation than any other trait previously studied in the same way. Although we cannot statistically assess the strength of mutational correlations between individual metabolites, principal component analysis provides strong evidence that some metabolite pools are genetically correlated, but also that there is substantial scope for independent evolution of different groups of metabolites. Averaged over mutation accumulation lines, PC3 is positively correlated with relative fitness, but a model in which metabolites are uncorrelated with fitness is nearly as good by Akaike's Information Criterion.
Homography based Monocular Dense Reconstruction for a Mobile Robot

Single camera mobile robots, wherein the single camera becomes the quintessential sensor for robotic tasks such as localization, mapping and obstacle avoidance are challenging. From such a standpoint, we demonstrate a dense reconstruction as conducted by a navigating robot with a monocular camera. Unlike most other dense reconstruction methods this approach first identifies planar areas through homography. These segments are tracked over multiple views with homography based dense correspondences. The tracked correspondences are reconstructed within a VSLAM formulation, wherein the dense reconstructed points get added to the existing SLAM computed structure. The dense structure is further refined using a modified Bundle Adjustment which minimizes projection error in 3D to align with a inferred model of the scene. A mobile robot can thus make use of the reconstructed ground plane and planar obstacles to compute a collision free trajectory.
Mechanistic modeling expedites the development of spray dried biologics

Spray drying can be used to extend the shelf life of biologics stored at ambient temperature. Empirical and statistical design of experiments approaches typically require a relatively large number of experiments to determine suitable formulation and spray drying process parameters. An alternative approach, which may require fewer experiments, is to use mechanistic models to select these parameters. In this paper, mechanistic models are applied to develop a bacteriophage powder expected to have long-term physical stability at ambient temperature. The developed powder may be useful for decreasing incidences of foodborne illness in Kenya.Keywords: bacteriophage powder; glass transition temperature; supplemented phase diagram; spray drying; stability.
Optical Imaging of Diffusive Electrons with Different Kinetic Energies in a Semiconductor

In this project, a photoluminescence (PL) imaging technique was developed for probing electron diffusion in a semiconductor thin film. This technique was applied to investigate electron diffusion in GaAs for electrons of different kinetic energies. A tightly focused laser beam at 532 nm was used to generate electrons in an area of about 0.72 μm, and the spatial profile of the PL in an area much larger than that of the laser excitation site was imaged by a digital camera. Analysis of the PL images at different wavelengths indicated that the electrons maintain the same thermal distribution during diffusion and exhibit a common diffusion length of approximately 3.5 ± 0.2 μm. This paper is based on work presented at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Arizona from Sunday, May 8, 2016 to Friday, May 13, 2016.
RE2: Reverse-engineering and reuse re-engineering

Initial research in reuse was in the designing and implementation of reusable software. This research, although fruitful, did not address the area of extracting reusable components from existing software. In this paper the term reuse is used to mean the ‘reuse of existing source code’. A process called ‘reuse re-engineering’ is defined and this, together with techniques from reverse-engineering, form a new method for achieving reuse. A reference paradigm is established to implement the reuse re-engineering process. This process is divided into five sequential phases, each characterized by the objects it produces. These phases are: candidature, election, qualification, classification and storage, and search and display. This paper concentrates on the first three phases because they produce reusable modules from existing systems. In selecting candidates for reuse, different abstractions have to be applied, namely functional abstraction (algorithms) and data abstractions (data structures and data types). This paper presents a formalized approach to each of these abstractions. The approach proposed in this paper aims to promote reuse in industrial software production environments.
A framework for learning semantic maps from grounded natural language descriptions

This paper describes a framework that enables robots to efficiently learn human-centric models of their environment from natural language descriptions. Typical semantic mapping approaches are limited to augmenting metric maps with higher-level properties of the robot’s surroundings (e.g. place type, object locations) that can be inferred from the robot’s sensor data, but do not use this information to improve the metric map. The novelty of our algorithm lies in fusing high-level knowledge that people can uniquely provide through speech with metric information from the robot’s low-level sensor streams. Our method jointly estimates a hybrid metric, topological, and semantic representation of the environment. This semantic graph provides a common framework in which we integrate information that the user communicates (e.g. labels and spatial relations) with metric observations from low-level sensors. Our algorithm efficiently maintains a factored distribution over semantic graphs based upon the stream of natural language and low-level sensor information. We detail the means by which the framework incorporates knowledge conveyed by the user’s descriptions, including the ability to reason over expressions that reference yet unknown regions in the environment. We evaluate the algorithm’s ability to learn human-centric maps of several different environments and analyze the knowledge inferred from language and the utility of the learned maps. The results demonstrate that the incorporation of information from free-form descriptions increases the metric, topological, and semantic accuracy of the recovered environment model.
The Changes of Pulmonary Function in COPD During Four-Year Period

Conflict of interest: none declared. Introduction COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) is characterized by airflow limitation that is not fully reversible. OBJECTIVE: to show the changes of pulmonary function in COPD during the 4 -year evolution of illness. Material and Methods The research was done on patients suffering from COPD treated at the Clinic “Podhrastovi” during 2006 and 2007. The tested parameters were examined from the date of receiving patient with COPD to hospital treatment in 2006 and 2007 and then followed prospectively until 2010 or 2011 (the follow-up period was 4 years). There were total 199 treated patients who were chosen at random and regularly attended the control examinations. The study was conducted on adult patients of both sexes, different age group. In each patient the duration of illness was recorded so is sex, age, data of smoking habits, information about the regularity of taking bronchodilator therapy during remissions of disease, about the treatment of disease exacerbations, results of pulmonary functional tests as follows: FVC (forced vital capacity), FEV1 (forced expiratory volume in one second) and bronchodilator reversibility testing. All these parameters were measured at the beginning and at the end of each hospital treatment on the apparatuses of Clinic “Podhrastovi”. We took in elaboration those data obtained in the beginning of the first hospitalization and at the end of the last hospitalization or at the last control in outpatient department when patient was in stable state. Patients were divided into three groups according to the number of exacerbations per year. Results airflow limitation in COPD is progressive; both FVC and FEV1 shows the statistically significant decrease during follow-up period of 4 years (p values / for both parameters/ =0.05) . But in patients regularly treated in phases of remission and exacerbations of illness the course of illness is slower. The fall of FVC and FEV1 is statistically significantly smaller in those received regular treatment in phases of remissions and exacerbations of illness (p values / for both parameters/ =0.01). The number of patients responding properly to bronchodilators decreased statistically significantly in patients with COPD during follow-up period (p=0.05). Conclusion COPD is characterized with airflow limitation which is progressive in the course of illness, but that course may be made slower using appropriate treatment during remission and exacerbations of diseases.
SELECTIVE EXTRACTION OF ISOLATED MITOTIC APPARATUS

Mitotic apparatus isolated from sea urchin eggs has been treated with meralluride sodium under conditions otherwise resembling those of its isolation. The treatment causes a selective morphological disappearance of microtubules while extracting a major protein fraction, probably consisting of two closely related proteins, which constitutes about 10% of mitotic apparatus protein. Extraction of other cell particulates under similar conditions yields much less of this protein. The extracted protein closely resembles outer doublet microtubule protein from sea urchin sperm tail in properties considered typical of microtubule proteins: precipitation by calcium ion and vinblastine, electrophoretic mobility in both acid and basic polyacrylamide gels, sedimentation coefficient, molecular weight, and, according to a preliminary determination, amino acid composition. An antiserum against a preparation of sperm tail outer doublet microtubules cross-reacts with the extract from mitotic apparatus. On the basis of these findings it appears that microtubule protein is selectively extracted from isolated mitotic apparatus by treatment with meralluride, and is a typical microtubule protein.
Methodological and physiological test–retest reliability of 13C‐MRS glycogen measurements in liver and in skeletal muscle of patients with type 1 diabetes and matched healthy controls

Glycogen is a major substrate in energy metabolism and particularly important to prevent hypoglycemia in pathologies of glucose homeostasis such as type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM). 13C‐MRS is increasingly used to determine glycogen in skeletal muscle and liver non‐invasively; however, the low signal‐to‐noise ratio leads to long acquisition times, particularly when glycogen levels are determined before and after interventions. In order to ease the requirements for the subjects and to avoid systematic effects of the lengthy examination, we evaluated if a standardized preparation period would allow us to shift the baseline (pre‐intervention) experiments to a preceding day.
Biofilm dispersal: multiple elaborate strategies for dissemination of bacteria with unique properties

In most environments, microorganisms evolve in a sessile mode of growth, designated as biofilm, which is characterized by cells embedded in a self‐produced extracellular matrix. Although a biofilm is commonly described as a “cozy house” where resident bacteria are protected from aggression, bacteria are able to break their biofilm bonds and escape to colonize new environments. This regulated process is observed in a wide variety of species; it is referred to as biofilm dispersal, and is triggered in response to various environmental and biological signals. The first part of this review reports the main regulatory mechanisms and effectors involved in biofilm dispersal. There is some evidence that dispersal is a necessary step between the persistence of bacteria inside biofilm and their dissemination. In the second part, an overview of the main methods used so far to study the dispersal process and to harvest dispersed bacteria was provided. Then focus was on the properties of the biofilm‐dispersed bacteria and the fundamental role of the dispersal process in pathogen dissemination within a host organism. In light of the current body of knowledge, it was suggested that dispersal acts as a potent means of disseminating bacteria with enhanced colonization properties in the surrounding environment.
‘New Embryos’ – New Challenges for the Ethics of Stem Cell Research

Among the many ethical issues raised by human embryonic stem cell research (in the following all references to ‘stem cells’ should be read as references to human embryonic stem cells), two have gained specific prominence: (1) whether stem cell research is ethically problematic because it entails the destruction of human embryos and (2) what kind of control embryo donors should have over the stem cell lines derived from their embryos. In the present paper, I will analyse how these two issues are engaged by various attempts to derive stem cells from anomalous embryos (e.g. embryos in cleavage arrest, embryos not implanted following pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or embryos created by altered nuclear transfer) or in ways that are claimed to be non-destructive for the embryo (e.g. blastocyst or blastomere biopsy).
Parallel checking of content integrity in multi‐cloud storage of heterogeneous sensor systems

Heterogeneous sensor systems collect a large amount of sensor data. Because of limited processing capability of sensor nodes, such data are typically stored and processed in a centralized environment in the cloud. However, when data are managed and processed by multiple cloud servers, users do not physically possess these data. The risk of unauthorized access to the cloud data increases dramatically. Therefore, enforcing the integrity of the outsourced data remotely becomes a challenge in the heterogeneous sensor system. Remote data possession auditing is a solution to guarantee the availability and integrity of data outsourced to the cloud. Most existing solutions only target at a single cloud service provider (CSP) environment without considering the multi‐cloud scenario. How to audit the data possession among the distributed CSP servers effectively becomes a major concern. In this paper, we propose a parallel cloud data possession checking scheme for the multi‐cloud environment. Our approach utilizes the homomorphic verification tag created by the Paillier cryptosystem to support unlimited query challenges and introduces the error‐correction encoding method to ensure error localization and data correction. We prototype our solution and analyze the scheme comprehensively. Our evaluation results demonstrate the efficiency and security of our method. It also supports simultaneous verification of multiple CSPs. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Raman analysis and mapping of cellulose nanocrystal-polypropylene composite

In this study, Raman spectroscopy was used to investigate the spatial distribution of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) in extruded polypropylene (PP) filaments. Raman maps, based on cellulose and PP bands, obtained at 1 micron spatial resolution showed that the CNCs were aggregated to various degrees in the PP matrix. Of the three composites analyzed, two showed clear existence of phase separated regions – Raman images with PP strong and cellulose absent or vice versa . For the third composite, the situation was slightly improved but a clear transition interface between the PP-abundant and CNC-abundant regions was observed indicating that the CNC remained poorly dispersed. Nevertheless, tensile and modulus tests of the composites indicated up to 10% improvement compared to PP alone.
Modelling and optimization of electrospun materials for technical applications

Optimization and modelling of electrospun nanofibrous nonwovens and their technical applications, i-e heat generation and respiratory protection, were studied in this work. For utilization in these applications, nanowebs were statistically modelled and optimized using different electrospinning techniques i-e needle and needleless setups based on significance of these techniques for lab and bulk scale production of nanowebs. Moreover, quantitative impact of different electrospinning parameters was also observed. Statistical analysis was found to be a useful tool for study of electrospinning process and production of nanowebs with minimum defects. The optimized nanowebs were used for selected applications and based on results it was concluded that they can be a potential material for both, heat generation and respiratory protection. These observations are expected to initiate more focused studies in both the fields.
ß‐Arrestin 2 is required for B1 receptor‐dependent post‐translational activation of inducible nitric oxide synthase

A major source of “high‐output” NO in inflammation is inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS). iNOS is primarily transcriptionally regulated and is thought to function as an uncontrolled generator of high NO. We found that iNOS in cytokine‐stimulated human lung microvascular endothelial cells (HLMVECs) is highly regulated post‐translationally via activation of the B1 kinin G protein‐coupled receptor (B1R). We report here that B1R‐mediated iNOS activation was significantly inhibited by knockdown of ß‐arrestin 2 with siRNA in cytokine‐treated HLMVECs or HEK293 cells transfected with iNOS and B1R In contrast, ß‐arrestin 1 siRNA had no effect. The prolonged phase of B1R‐dependent ERK activation was also inhibited by ß‐arrestin 2 knockdown. Furthermore, robust ERK activation by the epidermal growth factor receptor (a ß‐arrestin 2 independent pathway) had no effect on iNOS‐derived NO production. ß‐arrestin 2 and iNOS coimmunoprecipitated, and there was significant fluorescence resonance energy transfer between CFP‐iNOS and ß‐arrestin 2‐YFP (but not ß‐arrestin 1‐YFP) that increased 3‐fold after B1R stimulation. These data show that ß‐arrestin 2 mediates B1R‐dependent high‐output NO by scaffolding iNOS and ERK to allow post‐translational activation of iNOS. This could play a critical role in mediating endothelial function in inflammation. —Kuhr, F. K, Zhang, Y. , Brovkovych, V. , Skidgel, R A. ß‐Arrestin 2 is required for B1 receptor‐dependent post‐translational activation of inducible nitric oxide synthase. FASEBJ. 24, 2475–2483 (2010). www.fasebj. org
Concurrent drug use and the risk of perforated colonic diverticular disease: a population-based case–control study

Objective To determine the risk of diverticular perforation associated with current and ever use of corticosteroids, opiate analgesics, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, aspirin, cyclo-oxygenase-2 inhibitors, statins and calcium antagonists. Design, setting and participants Case–control analysis using conditional logistic regression analysis of data from the UK General Practice Research Database. The study involved 899 cases of incident diverticular perforation and 8980 population controls from 1990 to 2005. Main outcome measures Odds ratios (ORs) are presented for perforation associated with use of corticosteroids, opiate analgesics, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, aspirin, cyclo-oxygenase-2 inhibitors, statins and calcium antagonists. Data were adjusted for smoking, comorbidity, prior abdominal pain and body mass index. Results A total of 899 patients with an incident diagnosis of perforated diverticular disease were identified. Current use of opiate analgesics (OR=2.16; 95% CI 1.55 to 3.01) and oral corticosteroids (OR=2.74; 95% CI 1.63 to 4.61) was associated with a two- and threefold increase in the risk of diverticular perforation, respectively. Current use of a calcium antagonist and aspirin were not associated with an increased risk of diverticular perforation. Current statin use was associated with a reduction in the risk of perforation (OR=0.44; 95% CI 0.20 to 0.95). Conclusion Perforated diverticular disease is a serious surgical emergency with current opiate analgesics and oral corticosteroids being strongly associated with an increased risk of diverticular perforation.