Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Delay minimization based joint routing and flow allocation for software defined networking

As an emerging technology, software defined networking (SDN) allows flexible control of network devices and supports user applications with guaranteed quality of service (QoS). To achieve flow transmission between two non-adjacent switches in SDN, efficient routing algorithm should be designed. In this paper, we jointly consider route selection and flow allocation problem. To stress the service sensitivity on delay, we design an optimization problem which minimizes the total delay subject to data transmission and service requirement constraints of user flow. Since the formulated optimization problem is an NP-complete problem, we propose a modified minimum cost algorithm. By selecting the minimum cost pathes in an updated auxiliary network iteratively, the optimal joint routing and flow allocation strategy can be obtained. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Psychiatric disability among tortured Bhutanese refugees in Nepal.

OBJECTIVE Most refugees live in low-income countries. There is a lack of data on psychiatric disability among such refugees. The authors compared psychiatric disability in tortured and nontortured Bhutanese refugees living in Nepal and examined factors associated with psychiatric disability among the tortured refugees. METHOD A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 418 tortured and 392 nontortured Bhutanese refugees, matched for age and gender. The Composite International Diagnostic Interview, version 2.1, and the World Health Organization Short Disability Assessment Schedule were used to measure ICD-10 psychiatric disorders and disability, respectively. RESULTS Approximately one in five tortured and nontortured Bhutanese refugees were found to be disabled. Posttraumatic stress disorder, specific phobia, and present physical disease were identified as factors associated with disability among the tortured refugees. On the other hand, present physical disease, greater age, and generalized anxiety disorder were associated with disability among the nontortured group. CONCLUSIONS These findings show that the tortured and nontortured refugees were equally likely to be disabled. Different sets of predictors were identified among tortured and nontortured refugees, indicating the need for comprehensive psychiatric assessment of both tortured and nontortured refugees in clinical practice.
Extending and relating semantic models of compensating CSP

Business transactions involve multiple partners coordinating and interacting with each other. These transactions have hierarchies of activities which need to be orchestrated. Usual database approaches (e.g.,checkpoint, rollback) are not applicable to handle faults in a long running transaction due to interaction with multiple partners. The compensation mechanism handles faults that can arise in a long running transaction. Based on the framework of Hoare's CSP process algebra, Butler et al introduced Compensating CSP (cCSP), a language to model long-running transactions. The language introduces a method to declare a transaction as a process and it has constructs for orchestration of compensation. Butler et al also defines a trace semantics for cCSP. In this thesis, the semantic models of compensating CSP are extended by defining an operational semantics, describing how the state of a program changes during its execution. The semantics is encoded into Prolog to animate the specification. The semantic models are further extended to define the synchronisation of processes. The notion of partial behaviour is defined to model the behaviour of deadlock that arises during process synchronisation. A correspondence relationship is then defined between the semantic models and proved by using structural induction. Proving the correspondence means that any of the presentation can be accepted as a primary definition of the meaning of the language and each definition can be used correctly at different times, and for different purposes. The semantic models and their relationships are mechanised by using the theorem prover PVS. The semantic models are embedded in PVS by using Shallow embedding. The relationships between semantic models are proved by mutual structural induction. The mechanisation overcomes the problems in hand proofs and improves the scalability of the approach.
Dynamics of the Ins(1,4,5)P3 receptor during polarization of MDCK cells

Background information. The uneven distribution of the Ins(1,4,5)P3R [Ins(1,4,5)P3 receptor] within the ER (endoplasmic reticulum) membrane generates spatially complex Ca2+ signals. The ER is a dynamic network, which allows the rapid diffusion of membrane proteins from one part of the cell to another. However, little is known about the localization and the dynamics of the Ins(1,4,5)P3R in the ER of living cells. We have used a MDCK (Madin—Darby canine kidney) clone stably expressing the Ins(1,4,5)P3R1‐GFP (where GFP stands for green fluorescent protein) to investigate the effect of cell polarity on the lateral mobility of the Ins(1,4,5)P3R.
PRIVACY PRESERVATION FOR ASSOCIATIVE CLASSIFICATION

Privacy preservation is becoming a critical issue to data‐mining processes. In practice, a data transformation process is often needed to preserve privacy. However, data transformation would introduce a data quality issue. In this case, the impact on data quality due to the data transformation should be estimated and made clear to the user of the data transformation process. In this article, we consider the problem of k‐anonymization transformation in associative classification. The privacy preservation and data quality issues are considered in twofold. First, we propose a frequency‐based data quality metric to represent the data quality for associative classification. Second, a novel heuristic algorithm, namely minimum classification correction rate transformation, is proposed. The algorithm is guided by the classification correction rate of the given datasets. We validate our proposed metric and algorithm with University of California–Irvine repository datasets. The experiment results have shown that our proposed metric can effectively demonstrate the data quality for associative classification. The results also show that the proposed algorithm is not only efficient but also highly effective.
International inter-organisational religious knowledge transfer

The rapid growth of Muslim-directed food markets and the emergence of a global Halal food industry have created new forms of international inter-organisational knowledge transfer within religious business networks. Religious in nature requires an academic approach capable of understanding the complex theological discussion characteristic of these processes, without neglecting the requisite methodological rigor of solid research. With these difficulties in mind, our method involves conducting interviews with religious authorities and Islamic scholars, and revising existing literature on religious and non-religious knowledge transfer. We also analyse a case involving a Brazilian Halal certifier, providing aid to a Mexican Halal producer, with no direct measurable return. To confine this research to a specific field is to lose sight of its inherent multidisciplinary complexity. For this reason, we propose a conceptual framework of four interconnected axes - technical-procedural; religious-procedural; socio-technical; and religious values - as an adequate tool for understanding cases of religious inter-organisational knowledge transfer.
Population Pharmacokinetics of Ciprofloxacin in Pediatric and Adolescent Patients with Acute Infections

ABSTRACT The aim of the present study was to characterize the population pharmacokinetics of ciprofloxacin in patients with and without cystic fibrosis ranging in age from 1 day to 24 years and to propose a limited sampling strategy to estimate individual pharmacokinetic parameters. Patients were divided into four groups according to the treatment schedule. They received ciprofloxacin by intravenous infusion (30 min) or by the oral route. The number of samples collected from each patient ranged from 1 to 12. The population parameters were computed for an initial group of 37 patients. The data were analyzed by nonlinear mixed-effect modeling by use of a two-compartment structural model. The interindividual variability in clearance (CL) was partially explained by a dependence on age and the patient's clinical status. In addition, a significant relationship was found between weight and the initial volume of distribution. Eighteen additional patients were used for model validation and evaluation of limited sampling strategies. When ciprofloxacin was administered intravenously, sampling at a single point (12 h after the start of infusion) allowed the precise and accurate estimation of CL and the elimination half-life, as well as the ciprofloxacin concentration at the end of the infusion. It should be noted that to take into account the presence of a lag time after oral administration, a schedule based on two sampling times of 1 and 12 h is needed. The results of this study combine relationships between ciprofloxacin pharmacokinetic parameters and patient covariates that may be useful for dose adjustment and a convenient sampling procedure that can be used for further studies.
Genetic adaptation of aspen (Populus tremuloides) populations to spring risk environments: a novel remote sensing approach

This study investigates geographic patterns of genetic variation in aspen (Populus tremuloides Michaux.) spring phenology with the aim of understanding adaptation of populations to climatic risk environments and the practical application of guiding seed transfer. We use a classical common garden experiment to reveal genetic differences among populations from western Canada and Minnesota, and we present a novel method to seamlessly map heat-sum requirements from remotely sensed green-up dates. Both approaches reveal similar geographic patterns: we find low heat-sum requirements in northern and high-elevation aspen populations, allowing them to take full advantage of a short growing season. High heat-sum requirements were found in populations from the central boreal plains of Saskatchewan and Alberta, and populations from Minnesota exhibit moderately low heat-sum requirements for budbreak. Analysis of corresponding climate normal data shows that late budbreak is strongly associated with the driest winter an.
Identification of a New Spore Wall Protein from Encephalitozoon cuniculi

ABSTRACT Microsporidia form environmentally resistant spores that are critical for their host-to-host transmission and persistence in the environment. The spore walls of these organisms are composed of two layers, the exospore and the endospore. Two spore wall proteins (SWP1 and SWP2) have been previously identified in members of the Encephalitozoonidae family. These proteins localize to the exospore. The endospore is known to contain chitin, and a putative glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchored chitin deacetylase has been localized to the plasmalemma-endospore interface. Using proteomic techniques, we have identified a new spore wall protein (SWP3) that is located in the endospore. The gene for this protein is located on chromosome 1 and corresponds to the open reading frame ECU01_1270. SWP3 is predicted to have a signal peptide and to be GPI anchored. Consistent with these modifications, two-dimensional electrophoresis demonstrated that SWP3 has an acidic pI and a molecular mass of <20 kDa. By immunoelectron microscopy, this protein was found on the cell surface during sporogony and in the endospore in mature spores. SWP3 has several potential O-glycosylation sites, and it is possible that it is a mannosylated protein like the major polar tube protein (PTP1).
An adaptive lung nodule detection algorithm

An adaptive lung nodule detection algorithm is presented in computed tomography (CT) images. Here, we present the details of the proposed algorithm and provide a performance analysis using a database from the department of radiology. Our algorithm consists of a feature selected part and a feature classified part. In the feature selected part, eight image features are extracted and Support Vector Machine (SVM) approach is applied to evaluate the classified performance of each feature. In the feature classified part, a nonlinear classifier is constructed on the basis of modified Mahalanobis distance. The adaptive algorithm is used to adjust the threshold in the classifier. The experiment indicated that the algorithm has a good sensitivity and accuracy for lung nodule detection.
Sleep classification according to AASM and Rechtschaffen & Kales: effects on sleep scoring parameters.

STUDY OBJECTIVE To investigate differences between visual sleep scoring according to the classification developed by Rechtschaffen and Kales (R&K, 1968) and scoring based on the new guidelines of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM, 2007). DESIGN All-night polysomnographic recordings were scored visually according to the R&K and AASM rules by experienced sleep scorers. Descriptive data analysis was used to compare the resulting sleep parameters. PARTICIPANTS Healthy subjects and patients (38 females and 34 males) aged between 21 and 86 years. INTERVENTIONS N/A. MEASUREMENT AND RESULTS While sleep latency and REM latency, total sleep time, and sleep efficiency were not affected by the classification standard, the time (in minutes and in percent of total sleep time) spent in sleep stage 1 (S1/N1), stage 2 (S2/N2) and slow wave sleep (S3+S4/N3) differed significantly between the R&K and the AASM classification. While light and deep sleep increased (S1 vs. N1 [+10.6 min, (+2.8%)]: P<0.01; S3+S4 vs. N3 [+9.1 min (+2.4%)]: P<0.01), stage 2 sleep decreased significantly according to AASM rules (S2 vs. N2 [-20.5 min, (-4.9%)]: P<0.01). Moreover, wake after sleep onset was significantly prolonged by approximately 4 minutes (P<0.01) according to the AASM standard. Interestingly, the effects on stage REM were age-dependent (intercept at 20 years: -7.5 min; slope: 1.6 min for 10-year age increase). No effects of sex and diagnosis were observed. CONCLUSION The study shows significant and age-dependent differences between sleep parameters derived from conventional visual sleep scorings on the basis of R&K rules and those based on the new AASM rules. Thus, new normative data have to be established for the AASM standard.
Expression of the firefly luciferase gene in vaccinia virus: a highly sensitive gene marker to follow virus dissemination in tissues of infected animals.

We have introduced the firefly luciferase gene of Photinus pyralis into the vaccinia virus genome. This gene is expressed in a coordinate fashion during virus infection. Luminescence produced by the action of luciferase [Photinus-luciferin:oxygen 4-oxidoreductase(decarboxylating, ATP-hydrolyzing), EC 1.13. 12.7] was easily detectable in infected cells in culture as well as in cells of tissues of infected mice. The limits of detection were about one infected cell in a background of a million noninfected cells. The luciferase assay was about 1000-fold more sensitive than that of beta-galactosidase. Our findings show that the luciferase assay can be conveniently used to follow viral gene expression and virus dissemination both in cell cultures and in tissues of infected animals.
Learning task-parametrized assistive strategies for exoskeleton robots by multi-task reinforcement learning

Recent studies suggest that reinforcement learning has great potential for generating assistive strategies in exoskeletons through physical interactions between a user and a robot. Previous methods focused on a task-specific assistive strategy, where for every single task (situation/context), the user needs to interact with a robot to learn an appropriate assistive strategy. Therefore, the learned strategies cannot be generalized for a new task. Since the sampling cost is expensive for such human-in-the-loop systems as exoskeletons, generalization must be enabled. In this paper, we propose to learn task-parametrized assistive strategies for exoskeleton robots. Our method employs an assistive strategy, which depends on the task parameter and the state variable, that can be learned from multiple sets of human-robot interaction data across different tasks and generalized even for an unseen task, given the task parameter without additional learning. To alleviate the user's burden in the learning process across multiple tasks, we exploit a data-efficient multi-task reinforcement learning framework. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we developed an experimental platform with an exoskeleton robot. We conducted a series of experiments whose experimental results show that our method can learn such a task-parametrized assistive strategy and be generalized for unseen tasks to reduce the user's electromyography signals (EMGs) during tasks.
Involvement of cytochrome P-450 enzyme activity in the control of microvascular permeability in canine lung

Ivey, Claire L. , Alan H. Stephenson, and Mary I. Townsley. Involvement of cytochrome P-450 enzyme activity in the control of microvascular permeability in canine lung. Am. J. Physiol. 275 (Lung Cell. Mol. Physiol. 19): L756–L763, 1998. —Products of cytochrome P-450 enzymes may play a role in capacitative Ca21 entry in endothelial cells, which can promote a rise in vascular permeability. Thapsigargin (150 nM) stimulated capacitative Ca21 entry and increased the capillary filtration coefficient (Kf,c) in isolated normal canine lung lobes. Pretreatment of the lobes with cytochrome P-450 inhibitors clotrimazole (10 μM) or 17-octadecynoic acid (5 μM) abolished the thapsigargin-induced increases in Kf,c. Because clotrimazole also blocks Ca21-activated K1 channels, the K1-channel blocker tetraethylammonium (10 mM) was used to ensure that permeability was not influenced by this mechanism. Tetraethylammonium did not affect thapsigargininduced permeability. The effects of the cytochrome P-450 arachidonic acid metabolite 5,6-epoxyeicosatrienoic acid (EET) were also investigated in lobes taken from control dogs and dogs with pacing-induced heart failure (paced at 245 beats/ min for 4 wk). 5,6-EET (10 μM) significantly increased Kf,c in lobes from the control but not from the paced animals. We conclude that cytochrome P-450 metabolites are involved in mediating microvascular permeability in normal canine lungs, but an absence of 5,6-EET after heart failure does not explain the resistance of lungs from these animals to permeability changes.
A method to recognize distant repeats in protein sequences

An automated algorithm is presented that delineates protein sequence fragments which display similarity. The method incorporates a selection of a number of local nonoverlapping sequence alignments with the highest similarity scores and a graphtheoretical approach to elucidate the consistent start and end points of the fragments comprising one or more ensembles of related subsequences. The procedure allows the simultaneous identification of different types of repeats within one sequence. A multiple alignment of the resulting fragments is performed and a consensus sequence derived from the ensemble(s). Finally, a profile is constructed form the multiple alignment to detect possible and more distant members within the sequence. The method tolerates mutations in the repeats as well as insertions and deletions. The sequence spans between the various repeats or repeat clusters may be of different lengths. The technique has been applied to a number of proteins where the repeating fragments have been derived from information additional to the protein sequences. © 1993 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Dopamine Transporter Activity Is Modulated by α-Synuclein*

Background: DAT regulates dopamine neurotransmission in the brain. Results: α-Synuclein influences DA efflux and membrane microdomain distribution of DAT. Conclusion: DAT activation recruits α-synuclein to the membrane, which in turn influences dopamine neurotransmission. Significance: Understanding the mechanisms associated with α-synuclein regulation of DAT may reveal disease-modifying targets for the treatment of pathologies associated with DA dysregulation. The duration and strength of the dopaminergic signal are regulated by the dopamine transporter (DAT). Drug addiction and neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases have all been associated with altered DAT activity. The membrane localization and the activity of DAT are regulated by a number of intracellular proteins. α-Synuclein, a protein partner of DAT, is implicated in neurodegenerative disease and drug addiction. Little is known about the regulatory mechanisms of the interaction between DAT and α-synuclein, the cellular location of this interaction, and the functional consequences of this interaction on the basal, amphetamine-induced DAT-mediated dopamine efflux, and membrane microdomain distribution of the transporter. Here, we found that the majority of DAT·α-synuclein protein complexes are found at the plasma membrane of dopaminergic neurons or mammalian cells and that the amphetamine-mediated increase in DAT activity enhances the association of these proteins at the plasma membrane. Further examination of the interaction of DAT and α-synuclein revealed a transient interaction between these two proteins at the plasma membrane. Additionally, we found DAT-induced membrane depolarization enhances plasma membrane localization of α-synuclein, which in turn increases dopamine efflux and enhances DAT localization in cholesterol-rich membrane microdomains.
Un-supervised feature learning and its application in image classification

1) Feed forward neural network: Suppose we have a training set containing M samples {xn ∈ R1 ,yn ∈ RL}, n = 1, . ,M . xn and yn may or may not be the same. We represent each xn using N1 neurons as shown in Figure 2 layer L1. Then we construct layer L2 which consists of N2 neurons, representing an ∈ R2 . At each layer, we add one more neuron which has “1” in the circle as bias term. The value of each neuron is computed as
A Modified Dual Active Bridge Converter With Hybrid Phase-Shift Control for Wide Input Voltage Range

By inserting a small inductor between the transformer center tap and the midpoint of two split output capacitors in the dual active bridge (DAB) topology, this paper proposes a modified DAB converter for wide-input applications. A hybrid phase-shift (HPS) control scheme is proposed to allow all power switches to achieve practical ZVS over the full operating range; thereby, significantly minimizing the switching losses and alleviating electromagnetic interference. Moreover, the proposed control scheme does not significantly increase the conduction losses in comparison with the extended phase-shift (EPS) control. Therefore, the modified DAB can operate efficiently. The topology derivation and description are first presented. Then, the EPS and triple phase-shift (TPS) modulations are applied, and the corresponding operating principles and characteristics, including the soft-switching, power transfer, and root-mean-square current, are investigated in detail. To achieve practical ZVS operation of all switches over full operating range, while minimizing the conduction losses, the EPS and TPS are combined, and an HPS control scheme is proposed. Finally, experimental results from a 1.4-kW converter prototype with 200-400-V input and 400-V output are presented to verify the feasibility and advantages of the converter and control.
Contention window allocation scheme for V2V

This paper proposes a contention window (CW) allocation scheme for real-time emergency data for vehicle ad hoc networks. The proposed scheme reduces the probability of packet collisions with the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) protocol and provides bandwidth efficiency with a short delay for emergency sporadic data. In the case of high-density traffic, the proposed scheme decreases re-collision probability using dynamic CW adjustments. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can enhance network performance in terms of throughput, end-to-end delays, and network loads in the case of highway traffic.