Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A targeted graphene nanoplatform carrying histamine dihydrochloride for effective inhibition of leukemia-induced immunosuppression

Abstract Despite the introduction of many efficient post-consolidation therapies for complete relapse in leukemia patients, many patients suffer from relapse. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are considered an important parameter in the immunosuppression of acute myeloid leukemia, where they suppress the cytotoxic action of immune cells such as NK cells and T cells. This study demonstrates a way to achieve effective inhibition of immunosuppression by loading the drug histamine dihydrochloride (HDC) onto graphene quantum dots (GQDs) using hyaluronic acid as a targeting moiety for K-562 cells. The prepared GQD-based nanoplatform was stable and achieved high drug loading on the surface, which resulted in a sustained drug release profile over a period of time. Additionally, the drug-loaded graphene nanoplatform proved to be non-toxic at higher concentrations to K-562 cells and could be effectively taken up into cells due to the targeting moiety. In vitro ROS detection assays proved that the HDC loaded graphene nanoplatform could effectively inhibit ROS and thus prevent the immunosuppression caused by leukemic cells.
MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF SURFACTANT-COATING CARBON NANOFIBER/EPOXY COMPOSITE

Carbon nanofibers (CNFs) were coated by surfactants of polyoxyetheylene alkyl ether (AEO9, AEO7) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA 1799), respectively, after being mixed with surfactant aqueous solution and then treated with ultrasonication, high shear and magnetic stirring. The CNF/epoxy composites were prepared by mixing the surfactant coated CNFs with epoxy. Tensile strength, elastic modulus and ultimate strain of the composites were studied. The tensile strength and the ultimate strain of the composites were increased by 20% and 70%, respectively, after the CNFs were coated by surfactants. However, the elastic modulus of the composite will be lowered when the CNFs were treated by too high a concentration of surfactant solution.
Multispectral imaging for quantitative and compartment‐specific immune infiltrates reveals distinct immune profiles that classify lung cancer patients

Semiquantitative assessment of immune markers by immunohistochemistry (IHC) has significant limitations for describing the diversity of the immune response in cancer. Therefore, we evaluated a fluorescence‐based multiplexed immunohistochemical method in combination with a multispectral imaging system to quantify immune infiltrates in situ in the environment of non‐small‐cell lung cancer (NSCLC). A tissue microarray including 57 NSCLC cases was stained with antibodies against CD8, CD20, CD4, FOXP3, CD45RO, and pan‐cytokeratin, and immune cells were quantified in epithelial and stromal compartments. The results were compared with those of conventional IHC, and related to corresponding RNA‐sequencing (RNAseq) expression values. We found a strong correlation between the visual and digital quantification of lymphocytes for CD45RO (correlation coefficient: r = 0.52), FOXP3 (r = 0.87), CD4 (r = 0.79), CD20 (r = 0.81) and CD8 (r = 0.90) cells. The correlation with RNAseq data for digital quantification (0.35–0.65) was comparable to or better than that for visual quantification (0.38–0.58). Combination of the signals of the five immune markers enabled further subpopulations of lymphocytes to be identified and localized. The specific pattern of immune cell infiltration based either on the spatial distribution (distance between regulatory CD8+ T and cancer cells) or the relationships of lymphocyte subclasses with each other (e.g. cytotoxic/regulatory cell ratio) were associated with patient prognosis. In conclusion, the fluorescence multiplexed immunohistochemical method, based on only one tissue section, provided reliable quantification and localization of immune cells in cancer tissue. The application of this technique to clinical biopsies can provide a basic characterization of immune infiltrates to guide clinical decisions in the era of immunotherapy. Copyright © 2017 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Cross-cultural adaptation of health measures. European Group for Health Management and Quality of Life Assessment.

There is increasing interest throughout Europe in measuring health needs in the general population and in the 'quality of life' of patients. This has led to a demand for questionnaires capable of measuring health status in a reliable and valid manner. Most existing measures have, however, been standardised only in the U.S.A. and, to a lesser extent, in the U.K. The issue of translation and retesting of questionnaires prepared in the English language for use in other countries has received surprisingly little attention. This paper describes some of the technical, linguistic and conceptual issues raised by translation and the processes involved in producing acceptable country-specific versions of the Nottingham Health Profile according to a systematic method.
EngageMon

Understanding the engagement levels players have with a game is a useful proxy for evaluating the game design and user experience. This is particularly important for mobile games as an alternative game is always just an easy download away. However, engagement is a subjective concept and usually requires fine-grained highly disruptive interviews or surveys to determine accurately. In this paper, we present EngageMon, a first-of-its-kind system that uses a combination of sensors from the smartphone (touch events), a wristband (photoplethysmography and electrodermal activity sensor readings), and an external depth camera (skeletal motion information) to accurately determine the engagement level of a mobile game player. Our design was guided by feedback obtained from interviewing 22 mobile game developers, testers, and designers. We evaluated EngageMon using data collected from 64 participants (54 in a lab-setting study and another 10 in a more natural setting study) playing six games from three different categories including endless runner, 3D motorcycle racing, and casual puzzle. Using all three sets of sensors, EngageMon was able to achieve an average accuracy of 85% and 77% under cross-sample and cross-subject evaluations respectively. Overall, EngageMon can accurately determine the engagement level of mobiles users while they are actively playing a game.
Construcción de un corpus etiquetado sintácticamente para el euskera

The aim of this work is the construction of a syntactically annotated treebank for Basque. In this paper we present first, the basis of the annotation. After examining several options we chose the scheme presented in (Carrol et al., 1998). It follows the EAGLES standards and it is based on the idea of adding to each sentence in the corpus a series of grammatical relations specifying the dependencies between modifiers and their nucleus. After the formalism has been presented, we will describe the problems we have found and the decisions we have taken to solve them. Next we present an example showing the application of the scheme to an initial corpus. Finally, we present the main conclusions about the applicability to Basque and future work.
p4pktgen: Automated Test Case Generation for P4 Programs

With the rise of programmable network switches, network infrastructure is becoming more flexible and more capable than ever before. Programming languages such as P4 lower the barrier for changing the inner workings of network switches and offer a uniform experience across different devices. However, this programmability also brings the risk of introducing hard-to-catch bugs at a level that was previously covered by well-tested devices with a fixed set of capabilities. Subtle discrepancies between different implementations pose a risk of introducing bugs at a layer that is opaque to the user. To reap the benefit of programmable hardware and keep---or improve upon---the reliability of traditional approaches, new tools are needed. In this work, we present p4pktgen, a tool for automatically generating test cases for P4 programs using symbolic execution. These test cases can be used to validate that P4 programs act as intended on a device.
Dynamic associativity management using utility based way-sharing

The non-uniform distribution of memory accesses of todays applications affect the performance of cache memories. Due to such non-uniform accesses some sets of large sized caches are used heavily while some other sets are used lightly. This paper presents a technique WS-DAM, to dynamically increase the associativity of the heavily used sets without increasing the cache size. The heavily used sets can use the idle ways of the lightly used sets to distribute the load. A limited number of ways from every lightly used set are reserved for the heavily used sets. To search a block in a heavily used set, both: the set and the entire reserve area is searched. To reduce the cost of searching the entire reserve storage an additional tag-array is used. During execution the sets are re-categorized at intervals. The proposed technique needs much lesser storage, area and power overhead as compared to the other similar techniques. It improves both miss rate and CPI by 14.46% and 6.63% respectively as compared to an existing technique called V-Way. WS-DAM is also compared with another existing proposal called CMP-VR and it improves the performance by 9% and 4.20% in terms of miss-rate and CPI respectively.
In-Situ Visualization for Cultural Heritage Sites using Novel Augmented Reality Technologies

Mobile Augmented Reality is an ideal technology for presenting information in an attractive, comprehensive and personalized way to visitors of cultural heritage sites. One of the pioneer projects in this area was certainly the European project ArcheoGuide (IST-1999-11306) which developed and evaluated Augmented Reality (AR) at a very early stage. Many progresses have been done since then, and novel devices and algorithms offer novel possibilities and functionalities. In this paper we present current research work and discuss different approaches of Mobile AR for cultural heritage. Since this area is very large we focus on the visual aspects of such technologies, namely tracking and computer vision, as well as visualization.
Voltage‐dependent intracellular pH in Helix aspersa neurones.

1. The intracellular pH (pHi) of large nerve cells from the mollusc, Helix aspersa, was measured with pH‐sensitive micro‐electrodes. Cells were held under voltage clamp and the effect on pHi of different holding potentials was determined. 2. Depolarization of the cell from the resting potential (about ‐50 mV) to ‐10 mV produced a fall in pHi that could be reduced by bathing the cell in nominally Ca2+‐free saline. 3. At positive holding potentials pHi increased to a steady level that depended upon the electrochemical gradient for H+ across the cell membrane; it shifted by about 1 unit when the external pH was increased from 7 to 8 (or when the membrane potential increased by 58 mV, Thomas & Meech, 1982). 4. The depolarization‐induced increase in H+ permeability was insensitive to SITS (4‐acetamido‐4'‐isothiocyanostilbene‐2,2'‐disulphonic acid, 20 microM), which blocks pHi regulation at the resting potential in these cells (Thomas, 1976). When pHi was displaced from a steady level by ionophoretic injection of HCl, there was a rapid recovery at depolarized potentials even in the presence of SITS. The H+ pathway appeared to be little affected by prolonged periods at positive membrane potentials. 5. The depolarization‐induced H+ efflux was insensitive to the metabolic inhibitor CCmP (carbonyl cyanide‐m‐chlorophenylhydrazone, 20 microM) and persisted in cells bathed in pH‐buffered n‐methyl glucamine‐gluconate. It was also insensitive to DCCD (N, N'‐dicyclohexylcarbodiimide, 10‐100 microM) and oligomycin (2‐10 micrograms/ml). 6. The H+ pathway could be fully blocked by 1 mM‐ZnCl2, 1 mM‐LaCl3, 1 mM‐CuCl2, 2 mM‐CdCl2 or 10 mM‐CoCl2. Other divalent ions such as BaCl2 (10 mM) produced a block at membrane potentials near 0 mV but the block was released at more positive potentials. Low levels of LaCl3 (0.1 mM), the organic Ca2+ channel antagonist D600 (100 mg/ml) and high levels of the K+ channel blocker TEA (50 mM) all had similar effects to Ba2+. 7. The K+ channel blocker 4‐aminopyridine (10 mM), which blocks H+ currents in perfused Lymnaea neurones (Byerly, Meech & Moody, 1984), has a complex action. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Adaptive pedestrian detection by modulating features in dynamical environment

The accuracy of a trained pedestrian detector is always decreased in a new scenario, if the distributions of the samples in the testing and training scenarios are different. Traditional methods solve this problem based on domain adaption techniques. Unfortunately, most of existing methods need to keep source samples or label target samples in the detection phase. Therefore, they are hard to be applied in the real applications with dynamical environment. For this problem, we propose a feature modulation model, which consists of a Simple Dynamical Neural Network (SDNN) and a Modulating Neural Network (MNN). In SDNN, a dynamical layer is adopt to adaptively weight the feature maps, whose parameters are predicted by MNN. For each candidate proposal, the SDNN generates a proprietary deep feature respectively. Our contributions include 1) the first feature-based unsupervised domain adaptation method which is very suitable for real applications and 2) a new scheme of dynamically weighting feature maps, in which the corresponding training method is also given. Experimental results confirm that our method can achieve the competitive results on two pedestrian datasets.
Decompression of the anterior thoracic spinal canal using a novel full‐endoscopic uniportal transthoracic retropleural technique—an anatomical feasibility study in human cadavers

Surgery for thoracic disc herniation and spinal stenosis is comparatively rare and often demanding. The goal is to achieve sufficient decompression without manipulating the spinal cord. Individual planning and various surgical techniques and approaches are required. This anatomical study examines the feasibility of a novel full‐endoscopic uniportal technique with a transthoracic retropleural approach for decompression of the anterior thoracic spinal canal. Operations were performed on three fresh adult cadavers. The endoscope used, from RIWOspine, Germany, has a shaft cross‐section of 6.9 × 5.9 mm and a 25° view angle. It contains an eccentric intraendoscopic working channel with a diameter of 4.1 mm. A transthoracic retropleural approach was used. The anatomical structures were dissected and the anterior thoracic epidural space was decompressed. The planned steps of the operation were performed on all cadavers. The transthoracic retropleural approach allowed the target region to be accessed easily. The anatomical structures could be identified and dissected. The anterior thoracic epidural space could be decompressed sufficiently. Using the uniportal full‐endoscopic operation technique with a transthoracic retropleural approach, the anterior thoracic epidural space can be adequately reached. This is a minimally invasive method with the known advantages of an endoscopic technique under continuous irrigation. The retropleural approach allows direct access. The instruments are available for clinical use and have been established for years in other operations on the entire spine. Clin. Anat. 31:716–723, 2018. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
TyCo: Towards Typicality-based Collaborative Filtering Recommendation

Collaborative filtering (CF) is an important and popular technology for recommendation systems. However, current collaborative filtering methods suffer from some problems such as sparsity problem, inaccurate recommendation and producing big-error predictions. In this paper, we borrow ideas of object typicality from cognitive psychology and propose a novel typicality-based collaborative filtering recommendation method named TyCo. A distinct feature of typicality-based CF is that it finds ‘neighbors’ of users based on user typicality degrees in user groups (instead of the co-rated items of users or common users of items in traditional CF). To the best of our knowledge, there is no work on investigating collaborative filtering recommendation by combining object typicality. We conduct experiments to validate TyCo and compare it with previous methods.
Compressed Sensing Encryption: Compressive Sensing Meets Detection Theory

Since compressive sensing utilizes a random matrix to map the sparse signal space to a lower dimensional transform domain, it may be possible to apply this matrix at the same time for encrypting the signal opportunistically. In this paper, a compressed sensing based encryption method is considered and the secrecy of the measurement matrix of compressive sensing analyzed from the detection theory perspective. Here the detection probabilities of the intended and unintended receivers are compared by applying the Neyman-Pearson test. We prove that the detection probability of the eavesdropper will be reduced significantly because he does not know the transform domain sub-space. Furthermore, in some situations, the unintended receiver’s probability of detection may be decreased to 0.5, which makes the eavesdropped data useless, i.e., perfect secrecy will be achieved theoretically. On the other hand, from an information theoretic point of view, since the signal to noise ratio are different for the main and wiretapper channels, we showed that it is possible to design a measurement matrix for secure transmission even when the wiretapper knows the measurement matrix.
SiFi

There has been a booming interest in developing WiFi localization using multi-antenna (MIMO) access points (APs). Recent advances have demonstrated promising results that break the meter-accuracy barrier using commodity APs. Yet these state-of-the-art solutions require either multiple APs that are not necessarily available in practice, or multiple-channel measurements that disrupt normal data communication. In this paper, we present SiFi, a single AP-based indoor localization system that for the first time achieves sub-meter accuracy with a single channel only. The SiFi design is based on a key observation: with MIMO, the multiple (typically three) antennas of an AP are frequency-locked; although the accurate Time-of-Arrival (ToA) estimation on commodity APs is fundamentally limited by the imperfect time and frequency synchronization between the transmitter and receiver, there should be only one value for the ToA distortion that can cause three direct-path ToAs of the antennas to intersect at a single point, i.e., the position of the target. We develop the theoretical foundations of SiFi and demonstrate its realworld implementation with off-the-shelf WiFi cards. Our implementation introduces no hardware modification and is fully compatible with concurrent data transmission. It achieves a median accuracy of 0.93 m, which significantly outperforms the best known single AP single channel solution.
SpiderWalk

This paper presents the design and implementation of the SpiderWalk system for circumstance-aware transportation activity detection using a novel contact vibration sensor. Different from existing systems that only report the type of activity, our system detects not only the activity but also its circumstances (e.g., road surface, vehicle, and shoe types) to provide better support for applications such as activity logging, location tracking, and smart persuasive applications. Inspired by but different from existing audio-based context detection approaches using microphones, the SpiderWalk system is designed and implemented using an ultra-sensitive, flexible contact vibration sensor which mimics the spiders' sensory slit organs. By sensing vibration patterns from the soles of shoes, the system can accurately detect transportation activities with rich circumstance information while resisting undesirable external signals from other sources or speech that may cause the data assignment and privacy preserving issues. Moreover, our system is implemented by reusing existing audio devices and can be used by an unmodified smartphone, making it ready for large-scale deployments. Finally, a novel temporal and spatial correlated classification approach is proposed to accurately detect the complex combinations of transportation activities and circumstances based on the output of each individual classifiers. Experiments conducted on a real-world data set suggest our system can accurately detect different transportation activities and their circumstances with an average detection accuracy of 93.8% with resource overheads comparable to existing audio- and GPS-based systems.
Environmental effects on fine‐scale spatial genetic structure in four Alpine keystone forest tree species

Genetic responses to environmental changes take place at different spatial scales. While the effect of environment on the distribution of species' genetic diversity at large geographical scales has been the focus of several recent studies, its potential effects on genetic structure at local scales are understudied. Environmental effects on fine‐scale spatial genetic structure (FSGS) were investigated in four Alpine conifer species (five to eight populations per species) from the eastern Italian Alps. Significant FSGS was found for 11 of 25 populations. Interestingly, we found no significant differences in FSGS across species but great variation among populations within species, highlighting the importance of local environmental factors. Interannual variability in spring temperature had a small but significant effect on FSGS of Larix decidua, probably related to species‐specific life history traits. For Abies alba, Picea abies and Pinus cembra, linear models identified spring precipitation as a potentially relevant climate factor associated with differences in FSGS across populations; however, models had low explanatory power and were strongly influenced by a P. cembra outlier population from a very dry site. Overall, the direction of the identified effects is according to expectations, with drier and more variable environments increasing FSGS. Underlying mechanisms may include climate‐related changes in the variance of reproductive success and/or environmental selection of specific families. This study provides new insights on potential changes in local genetic structure of four Alpine conifers in the face of environmental changes, suggesting that new climates, through altering FSGS, may also have relevant impacts on plant microevolution.