Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TREC 2017 Tasks Track Overview

Research in Information Retrieval has traditionally focused on serving the best results for a single query, ignoring the reasons (or the task) that might have motivated the user to submit that query. Often times search engines are used to complete complex tasks; achieving these tasks with current search engines requires users to issue multiple queries. For example, booking travel to a location such as London could require the user to submit various queries such as flights to London, hotels in London, points of interest around London, etc. Standard evaluation mechanisms focus on evaluating the quality of a retrieval system in terms of the topical relevance of the results retrieved, completely ignoring the fact that user satisfaction mainly depends on the usefulness of the system in helping the user complete the actual task that led the user issue the query. The TREC Tasks Track is an attempt in devising mechanisms for evaluating quality of retrieval systems in terms of (1) how well they can understand the underlying task that led the user submit a query, and (2) how useful they are for helping users complete their tasks. A number of application areas, beyond task-based retrieval, could benefit from such an evaluation framework and the constructed test collections, including, but not limited to, digital assistants tasks, query suggestions, session-based retrieval, exploratory search, entity-based search. In this paper, we first summarize the three categories of evaluation mechanisms used in the track and briefly describe the corpus, topics, and tasks that comprise the test collection. We then give an overview of the runs submitted to the 2017 Tasks Track and present the evaluation results.
JPE ? ??? Transient Performance Improvement in Boundary Control of Boost Converters Using the Synthetic Optimized Trajectory

This paper focuses on the improvement of the transient performance of Boost converters when the load changes abruptly, in the basis of the nature trajectory in Boost converters. Three key aspects for the transient performance are analyzed including the storage energy change law in inductor and capacitor of converters during transient process, the ideal minimum voltage deviation in the transient process and the minimum voltage deviation control trajectory. The changing relationship curve between the voltage deviation and the recovery time are depicted by analysis and simulation when the load suddenly increases. And the relationship curve between the current fluctuation and the recovery time are obtained when load suddenly decreases. Considering both aspects of the load increasing and decreasing, this paper proposes the transient performance synthetic optimized trajectory and control laws. By the simulation and experiment, the transient performances are compared with the other typical three control methods, the proposed synthetic trajectory and control law is proved to achieve optimal transient performance.
Learning Structured Knowledge from Social Tagging Data: A Critical Review of Methods and Techniques

For more than a decade, researchers have been proposing various methods and techniques to mine social tagging data and to learn structured knowledge. It is essential to conduct a comprehensive survey on the related work, which would benefit the research community by providing better understanding of the state-of-the-art and insights into the future research directions. The paper first defines the spectrum of Knowledge Organization Systems, from unstructured with less semantics to highly structured with richer semantics. It then reviews the related work by classifying the methods and techniques into two main categories, namely, learning term lists and learning relations. The method and techniques originated from natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, social network analysis, and the Semantic Web are discussed in detail under the two categories. We summarize the prominent issues with the current research and highlight future directions on learning constantly evolving knowledge from social media data.
Acquisition of locative utterances in Norwegian: structure-building via lexical learning

Abstract This paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly produce locative utterances lacking overt prepositions, with the rate of preposition omission decreasing significantly by age 3. Furthermore, our results suggest that phonologically strong and semantically unambiguous locative items appear earlier in Norwegian children's utterances than their phonologically weak and semantically ambiguous counterparts. This conclusion is confirmed by a corpus study. We argue that our results are best captured by the Underspecified P Hypothesis (UPH; Mitrofanova, 2017), which assumes that, at early stages of grammatical development, the underlying structure of locative utterances is underspecified, with more complex functional representations emerging gradually based on the input. This approach predicts that the rate of acquisition in the domain of locative PPs should be influenced by the lexical properties of individual language-specific grammatical elements (such as frequency, morphological complexity, phonological salience, or semantic ambiguity). Our data from child Norwegian show that this prediction is borne out. Specifically, the results of our study suggest that phonologically more salient and semantically unambiguous items are mastered earlier than their ambiguous and phonologically less salient counterparts, despite the higher frequency of the latter in the input (Clahsen et al., 1996).
Tracked 3D ultrasound targeting with an active cannula

The objective of our work is a system that enables both mechanically and electronically shapable thermal energy deposition in soft tissue ablation. The overall goal is a system that can percutaneously (and through a single organ surface puncture) treat tumors that are large, multiple, geometrically complex, or located too close to vital structures for traditional resection. This paper focuses on mechanical steering and image guidance aspects of the project. Mechanical steering is accomplished using an active cannula that enables repositioning of the ablator tip without complete retraction. We describe experiments designed to evaluate targeting accuracy of the active cannula (also known as a concentric tube robot) in soft tissues under tracked 3D ultrasound guidance.
Patients’ Interpersonal Communication Experiences in the Context of Type 2 Diabetes Care

The aim of our study is to determine the relational communication characteristics of professional–patient communication situations that have either facilitated or impeded patients’ self-management. Conducted from the perspective of Finnish patients in the context of type 2 diabetes care, we used as our research methods an open e-survey and semistructured interviews. Data were analyzed using inductive qualitative content analysis. The critical incident technique was utilized throughout in all these methods. The results show that both positive and negative experiences described by patients were connected to four multidimensional relational communication characteristics: (a) building trust in the other party in the professional–patient relationship, (b) willingness to communicate, (c) emotional presence, and (d) appropriateness. Although the findings support the recommendations of earlier studies concerning individually tailored patient-centered care, acknowledging the characteristics in question can be used as a communication frame for constructing significant care relationships from the perspective of patients’ self-management.
A Fast Forgery Detection Algorithm Based on Exponential-Fourier Moments for Video Region Duplication

Region duplication is one of the most common methods of video forgery. Existing forgery detection algorithms generally suffer from inefficiency and are not effective for the forged regions with mirroring. To address these problems, we present a fast forgery detection algorithm based on Exponential-Fourier moments (EFMs) for detecting region duplication in videos. The algorithm first extracts EFMs features from each block in the current frame, and performs a fast match to find potential matching pairs. Then, a postverification scheme is designed to eliminate falsely matched pairs and locate the altered regions in the current frame. Finally, an adaptive parameter-based fast compression tracking algorithm is used to track the tampered regions in the subsequent frames. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm has higher detection accuracy and computational efficiency than those of previous algorithms.
The Protective Effects of Κ-Opioid Receptor Stimulation in Hypoxic Pulmonary Hypertension Involve Inhibition of Autophagy Through the AMPK-MTOR Pathway

Background/Aims: In a previous study, we showed that κ-opioid receptor stimulation with the selective agonist U50,488H ameliorated hypoxic pulmonary hypertension (HPH). However, the roles that pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cell (PASMC) proliferation, apoptosis, and autophagy play in κ-opioid receptor-mediated protection against HPH are still unknown. The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of autophagy in U50,488H-induced HPH protection and the underlying mechanisms. Methods: Rats were exposed to 10% oxygen for three weeks to induce HPH. After hypoxia, the mean pulmonary arterial pressure (mPAP) and the right ventricular pressure (RVP) were measured. Cell viability was monitored using the Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) assay. Cell apoptosis was detected by flow cytometry and Western blot. Autophagy was assessed by means of the mRFP-GFP-LC3 adenovirus transfection assay and by Western blot. Results: Inhibition of autophagy by the administration of chloroquine prevented the development of HPH in the rat model, as evidenced by significantly reduced mPAP and RVP, as well as decreased autophagy. U50,488H mimicked the effects of chloroquine, and the effects of U50,488H were blocked by nor-BNI, a selective κ-opioid receptor antagonist. In vitro experiments showed that the inhibition of autophagy by chloroquine was associated with decreased proliferation and increased apoptosis of PASMCs. Under hypoxia, U50,488H also significantly inhibited autophagy, reduced proliferation and increased apoptosis of PASMCs. These effects of U50,488H were blocked by nor-BNI. Moreover, exposure to hypoxic conditions significantly increased AMPK phosphorylation and reduced mTOR phosphorylation, and these effects were abrogated by U50,488H. The effects of U50,488H on PASMC autophagy were inhibited by AICAR, a selective AMPK agonist, or by rapamycin, a selective mTOR inhibitor. Conclusion: Our data provide evidence for the first time that κ-opioid receptor stimulation protects against HPH by inhibiting PASMCs autophagy via the AMPK-mTOR pathway.
Fog Computing-Enabled Secure Demand Response for Internet of Energy Against Collusion Attacks Using Consensus and ACE

Internet of Energy (IoE) is a novel decentralized energy supplying paradigm, which integrated highly scalable and distributed energy resources to satisfy the various demands in future green applications. The existing works focus on the monitor and control of the state of networked energy storage devices. However, optimizing the security of demand response (DR) management with given energy states under IoE circumstance is rarely studied. Due to the connection to the Internet, the DR management in IoE faces a number of unique cyber-physical security challenges. First, as distributed energy resources have a large number of stakeholders and any illegal skip-level energy access may cause disastrous results, it requires fog computing paradigm to enforce a more secure DR management. Second, in the localized energy networks of IoE, a corrupt DR participator can maliciously read and write DR strategies by using collusion attacks (e.g., reputation-based cheating and unfair competing). To address these issues, we propose a fog computing-enabled secure demand response (FSDR) scheme for IoE against collusion attacks using consensus and access control encryption. In FSDR, the fog node was reconstructed as a sanitizer to randomly transfer encrypted energy states and DR strategies with homomorphic operations. Moreover, a simulated annealing-based consensus algorithm was presented to examine the validity of the energy states and DR strategies. In addition, we establish the mathematical models of collusion attacks and attack defense approaches. The performance evaluation validated its efficiency.
A Study of Recent Contributions on Information Extraction

This paper reports on modern approaches in Information Extraction (IE) and its two main sub-tasks of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE). Basic concepts and the most recent approaches in this area are reviewed, which mainly include Machine Learning (ML) based approaches and the more recent trend to Deep Learning (DL) based methods.
The Modular Nature of Dendritic Cell Responses to Commensal and Pathogenic Fungi

The type of adaptive immune response following host-fungi interaction is largely determined at the level of the antigen-presenting cells, and in particular by dendritic cells (DCs). The extent to which transcriptional regulatory events determine the decision making process in DCs is still an open question. By applying the highly structured DC-ATLAS pathways to analyze DC responses, we classified the various stimuli by revealing the modular nature of the different transcriptional programs governing the recognition of either pathogenic or commensal fungi. Through comparison of the network parts affected by DC stimulation with fungal cells and purified single agonists, we could determine the contribution of each receptor during the recognition process. We observed that initial recognition of a fungus creates a temporal window during which the simultaneous recruitment of cell surface receptors can intensify, complement and sustain the DC activation process. The breakdown of the response to whole live cells, through the purified components, showed how the response to invading fungi uses a set of specific modules. We find that at the start of fungal recognition, DCs rapidly initiate the activation process. Ligand recognition is further enhanced by over-expression of the receptor genes, with a significant correspondence between gene expression and protein levels and function. Then a marked decrease in the receptor levels follows, suggesting that at this moment the DC commits to a specific fate. Overall our pathway based studies show that the temporal window of the fungal recognition process depends on the availability of ligands and is different for pathogens and commensals. Modular analysis of receptor and signalling-adaptor expression changes, in the early phase of pathogen recognition, is a valuable tool for rapid and efficient dissection of the pathogen derived components that determine the phenotype of the DC and thereby the type of immune response initiated.
DNA Barcoding Reveals Cryptic Diversity in Lumbricus terrestris L., 1758 (Clitellata): Resurrection of L. herculeus (Savigny, 1826)

The widely studied and invasive earthworm, Lumbricus terrestris L. , 1758 has been the subject of nomenclatural debate for many years. However these disputes were not based on suspicions of heterogeneity, but rather on the descriptions and nomenclatural acts associated with the species name. Large numbers of DNA barcode sequences of the cytochrome oxidase I obtained for nominal L. terrestris and six congeneric species reveal that there are two distinct lineages within nominal L. terrestris. One of those lineages contains the Swedish population from which the name-bearing specimen of L. terrestris was obtained. The other contains the population from which the syntype series of Enterion herculeum Savigny, 1826 was collected. In both cases modern and old representatives yielded barcode sequences allowing us to clearly establish that these are two distinct species, as different from one another as any other pair of congeners in our data set. The two are morphologically indistinguishable, except by overlapping size-related characters. We have designated a new neotype for L. terrestris. The newly designated neotype and a syntype of L. herculeus yielded DNA adequate for sequencing part of the cytochrome oxidase I gene (COI). The sequence data make possible the objective determination of the identities of earthworms morphologically identical to L. terrestris and L. herculeus, regardless of body size and segment number. Past work on nominal L. terrestris could have been on either or both species, although L. herculeus has yet to be found outside of Europe.
Golgi stress–induced transcriptional changes mediated by MAPK signaling and three ETS transcription factors regulate MCL1 splicing

Transcriptomic profiling of cells treated with Golgi-disrupting compounds reveals that some target genes including several spliceosome components are controlled by ELK1, GABPA, and ETS1, the activity of which is regulated by MEK/ERK signaling. Furthermore, brefeldin A and golgicide A cause increased splicing of the proapoptotic MCL1-S isoform.
Retinal degeneration in primary-progressive multiple sclerosis: A role for cortical lesions?

Background: Retinal atrophy in multiple sclerosis (MS) is secondary to optic nerve focal inflammation and to injury of the posterior visual pathway. Objectives: To investigate the contribution of cortical lesions (CLs) to retinal pathology in primary-progressive multiple sclerosis (PPMS). Methods: We performed a cross-sectional evaluation of 25 patients and 20 controls, relating magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) metrics of visual pathway integrity with parameters derived from spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness, ganglion cell + inner plexiform layer (GCIPL) thickness, and macular volume (MV)). Results: Mean RNFL, GCIPL thickness, and MV were significantly reduced in patients compared to controls. MV and GCIPL thickness were significantly correlated with visual acuity. RNFL thinning was associated with thalamus and visual cortex volume (respectively, p = 0.01 and p < 0.05). In addition to thalamic volume, GCIPL thinning was associated with CLs and intracortical lesion number and volume, leucocortical lesion volume (all p ⩽ 0.05) while MV decrease was associated with CLs volume (p = 0.05) and intracortical lesion number and volume (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Our results suggest that RNFL thinning and GCIPL thinning/MV decrease may be explained by alternative mechanisms including retrograde trans-synaptic degeneration and/or a common pathophysiologic process affecting both the brain with CLs and the retina with neuronal loss.
DeepVein: Novel finger vein verification methods based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Finger vein verification is using vein patterns to verify a person's identity, which is widely used in various fields. In practice, the method for verification is the most important part of a biometric system, which determines the reliability of the system. In this paper, we propose methods called DeepVein for finger vein verification based on deep convolutional neural networks and conduct experiments to evaluate our methods. The experimental results show that our proposed methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance in accuracy. In addition, we present how the amount of data for training affects the accuracy in the test datasets.
The role of polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFAs) on the pancreatic β-cells and insulin action

ABSTRACT Polyunsaturated Fatty acids have multiple effects in peripheral tissues and pancreatic beta cell function. The n-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty acids prevent and reverse high-fat-diet induced adipose tissue inflammation and insulin resistance. Insulin secretion is stimulated by glucose, amino acids, and glucagon- like peptide-1 in tissue containing high levels of n-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty acids than lower level of n-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty acids. Also, n-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty acids led to decreased production of prostaglandin, which in turn contributed to the elevation of insulin secretion. N-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids prevent cytokine-induced cell death in pancreatic islets. Supplementation of n-3 Polyunsaturated Fatty acids for human subjects prevent beta cell destruction and insulin resistance. It also enhances insulin secretion, reduction in lipid profiles and glucose concentration particularly in type II diabetes patients. Therefore there should be a focus on the treatment mechanism of insulin related obesity and diabetes by n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids.
International Journal of Biological & Medical Research Renin-angiotensin-aldosterone System Gene Polymorphisms in Type 2 Diabetic Patients among the Mewari Population of Rajasthan. a B C D E Original Article

Aim: Diabetes is the one of the most serious health problems of modern times and India is the top most country with the highest number of individuals affected with type 2diabetes and an extremely limited data on the genetics of diabetes in the Indian populations is available. In this context the aim of the present study was to investigate the distribution of RAAS pathway genes polymorphism and its relationship with Type 2 Diabetes patients in Mewari population. Methods: The present study examined the prevalence of RAAS gene polymorphism among 111 Mewari individuals from Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Among them 50 individuals belong to type 2 diabetic (T2DM) and 61 healthy controls. Isolated DNA samples from the studied subjects were genotyped using PCR-RFLP methods. Result: There was a significant difference in age, gender, SBP, BMI, glucose, GGT, urea, creatinine, LDL and total protein between T2DM and Control subjects (p <0.05). The minor allele frequency of RAAS pathway gene polymorphism AGT (rs4762), REN (rs41317140), ACE (rs4646994), AGTR1 (rs5186), CYP11B2 (rs1799998) in T2DM patients (T2DM) are found to be 0.18, 0.20, 0.41, 0.05 and 0.30 respectively. The allele frequencies of the same polymorphisms among the normal controls are found to be 0.13, 0.16, 0.48, 0.10 and 0.40 respectively. The general associations were not found in significant result (p> 0.05). Conclusion: The study found that no association of RAAS gene polymorphisms with increased risk of type 2 diabetes among the Mewari population except rs4762. The AGT (rs4762) was associated at recessive model (p = 0.038).