Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Running title : Human cord blood-derived neural stem cells Cellular Environment Directs Differentiation of Human Umbilical Cord Blood-derived Neural Stem Cells in vitro

Cord blood-derived neural stem cells (NSC) are proposed as an alternative cell source to repair brain damage upon transplantation. However, there is a lack of data showing how these cells are driven to generate desired phenotypes by recipient nervous tissue. Previous research indicates that local environment provides signals driving the fate of stem cells. In order to investigate the impact of these local cues interaction, we used a model of cord blood-derived NSCs co-culture with different rat brain-specific primary cultures creating the neural-like microenvironment conditions in vitro. Neuronal, as well as astro-, oligoand micro-glia cell cultures were obtained by the previously described methods. The CMFDA-labeled neural stem cells were originated from unique, non-transformed human umbilical cord blood cell line (HUCB-NSCs) established in our laboratory. We have shown that the close vicinity of astrocytes and oligodendrocytes promotes neuronal differentiation of HUCB-NSCs, while postmitotic neurones induce oligodendrogliogenesis of these cells. In turn, microglia or endothelial cells used as a contact cell culture system with HUCB-NSC do not favor any phenotypes of their neural commitment. Our studies have confirmed that HUCB-NSC can read cues from the neurogenic microenvironment attaining features of neurons, astrocytes or oligodendrocytes. The specific responses of neurally committed cord blood-derived cells, reported in the present work, are very much similar to those described previously for NSCs derived from other “more typical” sources. This proves their genuine neural nature still further. Apart from having a better insight into the neurogenesis in adult brain, these findings might be important when predicting the cord blood-cell derivatives behavior after their transplantation in neurological disorders.
Statistically Robust Design of Linear MIMO Transceivers

The treatment of channel state information (CSI) is critical in the design of MIMO systems. Accurate CSI at the transmitter is often not possible or may require high feedback rates. Herein, we consider the robust design of linear MIMO transceivers with perfect CSI either at the transmitter or at both sides of the link. The framework considers the design problem where the imperfect CSI consists of the channel mean and covariance matrix or, equivalently, the channel estimate and the estimation error covariance matrix. The robust transceiver design is based on a general cost function of the average MSEs as well as a design with individual MSE based constraints. In particular, a lower bound of the average MSE matrix is explored for the design when only the CSI at the transmitter is imperfect. Under different CSI conditions, the proposed robust transceivers exhibit a similar structure to the transceiver designs for perfect CSI, but with a different equivalent channel and/or noise covariance matrix.
Bacterial β-glucosidase function and metabolic activity depend on soil management in semiarid rainfed agriculture

Genomic and transcriptomic approaches were used to gain insights into the relationship between soil management and bacterial-mediated functions in an olive orchard agroecosystem. Four management practices were assessed in a 30-year trial in a semiarid Mediterranean region. Transcriptional activity of bacterial 16S rRNA genes increased in noncovered soils, indicating higher microbial maintenance requirements to thrive in less favorable environmental conditions. The 16S rRNA transcript:gene copy ratio confirmed this assumption and pointed toward a much higher constitutive expression from rRNA operons in noncovered soils and to even higher expression levels when spontaneous vegetation was removed chemically. As described for 16S rRNA, potential transcription did not reveal the real transcription of bacterial β-glucosidase genes, and higher gene expression in noncovered soils plus herbicides was evidenced. Since no relationship between total or soluble organic carbon and bacterial β-glucosidase transcription was found, the above hypothesis could indicate either that soluble organic carbon is not the main pool of enzyme-inducing substrates or that constitutive production of bacterial β-glucosidase enzymes increases as soil conditions worsen.
Assessments by principals, teachers, and parents on values education in Estonian kindergartens

Abstract The objective of this study was to analyse assessments made by principals, teachers and parents regarding the performance of values education in Estonian kindergartens. Six fields of activity were investigated: formulating and explaining values, promoting values, having a systematic approach towards values education, kindergarten culture, collaboration, and development activities related to values education. The authors also sought to identify the main values in preschool childcare institutions/kindergartens. Altogether, 978 respondents across Estonia returned the questionnaire. Principals, teachers and parents consider values education in kindergartens to be very important. Parent assessments of childcare institution activities related to values education are mostly lower than those given by teachers and principals, while parents assess collaboration with kindergartens at a higher level and emphasise their own part in the values education of a childcare institution. Discussions with teachers and parents play a significant role in kindergartens. It was mostly collaboration that was named as the core value for a kindergarten, followed by safety, caring, openness, child-orientation, health, trust, friendliness, traditions, professionalism, honesty and tolerance.
4-Hydroxynonenal Decreases Interleukin-6 Expression and Protein Production in Primary Rat Kupffer Cells by Inhibiting Nuclear Factor-κB Activation

Kupffer cells have been documented to play an important role in the early events of liver injury and regeneration by releasing biologically active mediators such as interleukin-6 (IL-6). 4-Hydroxy-trans-2-nonenal (4-HNE), a major end product of lipid peroxidation, has multiple cytotoxic effects and is implicated in chemical-induced liver injury. Consequently, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the ability of 4-HNE to modulate IL-6 production in isolated primary rat Kupffer cells. 4-HNE (0.1–10 μM) reduced both lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced IL-6 protein production and mRNA levels. The role of nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) in IL-6 induction was elucidated using Kupffer cells transduced in vitro with a recombinant adenovirus containing a IκBα super-repressor resistant to phosphorylation and degradation (Ad5IκB). Using this system, LPS-induced IL-6 protein production was inhibited by 65% in Ad5IκB-infected cells. The treatment of Kupffer cells for 1 h with 4-HNE followed by stimulation for 1 h with LPS (500 ng/ml) resulted in a concentration-dependent decrease in NF-κB activation. Similarly, decreased NF-κB activity in these cells paralleled a reduction in IκBα mRNA levels. Furthermore, upon LPS stimulation, 4-HNE stabilized IκBα, which corresponded to a decrease in phosphorylated IκBα. At lower 4-HNE concentrations (0–5 μM), interactions between p65 and IκBα proteins were maintained as detected by immunoprecipitation-immunoblot analyses. In conclusion, these data suggest that 4-HNE inhibits IL-6 production in rat Kupffer cells by preventing activation of the NF-κB pathway and suppressing IκBα phosphorylation. These results have functional implications in that 4-HNE may interfere with the ability of Kupffer cells to produce cytokines proposed to play an important role in liver regeneration.
Complementarity - the way towards guaranteed error estimates

This paper presents a review of the complementary technique with the emphasis on computable and guaranteed upper bounds of the approximation error. For simplicity, the approach is described on a numerical solution of the Poisson problem. We derive the complementary error bounds, prove their fundamental properties, present the method of hypercircle, mention possible generalizations and show a couple of numerical examples.
Secure communication of correlated sources over broadcast channels

Broadcast channels with correlated sources are considered from a joint source-channel coding perspective, where each receiver is kept in ignorance of the source intended for the other receiver. This setting can be seen as a generalization of Han-Costa's broadcast channel with correlated sources under additional secrecy constraints on both receivers. General outer and inner bounds for this reliable and secure communication are determined. The joint source-channel coding is proved to be optimal for two special cases, including the sources satisfying a certain Markov property sent over semi-deterministic broadcast channels, and arbitrary correlated sources sent over less-noisy broadcast channels.
The Menpo project

The Menpo Project [1] is a BSD-licensed set of tools and software designed to provide an end-to-end pipeline for collection and annotation of image and 3D mesh data. In particular, the Menpo Project provides tools for annotating images and meshes with a sparse set of fiducial markers that we refer to as landmarks. For example, Figure 1 shows an example of a face image that has been annotated with 68 2D landmarks. These landmarks are useful in a variety of areas in Computer Vision and Machine Learning including object detection, deformable modelling and tracking. The Menpo Project aims to enable researchers, practitioners and students to easily annotate new data sources and to investigate existing datasets. Of most interest to the Computer Vision is the fact that The Menpo Project contains completely open source implementations of a number of state-of-the-art algorithms for face detection and deformable model building. In the Menpo Project, we are actively developing and contributing to the state-of-the-art in deformable modelling [2], [3], [4], [5]. Characteristic examples of widely used state-of-the-art deformable model algorithms are Active Appearance Models [6],[7], Constrained Local Models [8], [9] and Supervised Descent Method [10]. However, there is still a noteworthy lack of high quality open source software in this area. Most existing packages are encrypted, compiled, non-maintained, partly documented, badly structured or difficult to modify. This makes them unsuitable for adoption in cutting edge scientific research. Consequently, research becomes even more difficult since performing a fair comparison between existing methods is, in most cases, infeasible. For this reason, we believe the Menpo Project represents an important contribution towards open science in the area of deformable modelling. We also believe it is important for deformable modelling to move beyond the established area of facial annotations and to extend to a wide variety of deformable object classes. We hope Menpo can accelerate this progress by providing all of our tools completely free and permissively licensed.
System Performance Evaluation of Para Virtualization, Container Virtualization, and Full Virtualization Using Xen, OpenVZ, and XenServer

When we consider virtualization, most of the times we get confused with virtualization technique that has to be used. That is which virtualization technology gives virtual machines with better system performance. The idea of this paper is to compare and evaluate the system performance of three basic hypervisors with one supporting Para virtualization other supporting Container virtualization and the last one supporting Full virtualization. Here we chose Xen-PV for Para Virtualization, OpenVZ for Container Virtualization and XenServer for Full virtualization. Then, performance of these three virtualization techniques is evaluated based on various tests conducted by the benchmarking tools. Finally a detailed comparison among these three hypervisors will be conducted to find out the hypervisor with which virtualization technique has better system performance.
Are you The One to Share? Secret Transfer with Access Structure

Abstract Sharing information to others is common nowadays, but the question is with whom to share. To address this problem, we propose the notion of secret transfer with access structure (STAS). STAS is a twoparty computation protocol that enables the server to transfer a secret to a client who satisfies the prescribed access structure. In this paper, we focus on threshold secret transfer (TST), which is STAS for threshold policy and can be made more expressive by using linear secret sharing. TST enables a number of applications including a simple construction of oblivious transfer (OT) with threshold access control, and (a variant of) threshold private set intersection (t-PSI), which are the first of their kinds in the literature to the best of our knowledge. The underlying primitive of STAS is a variant of OT, which we call OT for a sparse array. We provide two constructions which are inspired by state-of-the-art PSI techniques including oblivious polynomial evaluation (OPE) and garbled Bloom filter (GBF). The OPEbased construction is secure in the malicious model, while the GBF-based one is more efficient. We implemented the latter one and showed its performance in applications such as privacy-preserving matchmaking.
Comparison of automatic blood vessel segmentation methods in retinal images

Blood vessel segmentation can be used for automatic retinal disease screening system. In this paper, comparison of automatic blood vessel segmentation methods in retinal images is presented and discussed. Morphological operation for the automatic segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images has been proposed and the results are compared with matched filter technique using local entropy thresholding. Blood vessels in retinal images are enhanced by the application of matched filter. The gray levels are spatially distributed by using local entropy based thresholding. Label filtering is performed by connected pixel labeling to eliminate the misclassified and isolated pixels. The blood vessels are segmented by using morphological opening based on structuring element. These methods were evaluated on the publicly available DRIVE database and the database contains retinal images along with the ground truth data that has been precisely marked by the experts. Morphological operation is more suitable for blood vessel segmentation as compared to the local entropy thresholding.
Stability and conservation properties of transient field simulations using FIT

Abstract. Time domain simulations for high-frequency applications are widely dominated by the leapfrog timeintegration scheme. Especially in combination with the spatial discretization approach of the Finite Integration Technique (FIT) it leads to a highly efficient explicit simulation method, which in the special case of Cartesian grids can be regarded to be computationally equivalent to the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) algorithm. For stability reasons, however, the leapfrog method is restricted to a maximum stable time step by the well-known Courantcriterion, and can not be applied to most low-frequency applications. Recently, some alternative, unconditionally stable techniques have been proposed to overcome this limitation, including the Alternating Direction Implicit (ADI)-method. We analyze such schemes using a transient modal decomposition of the electric fields. It is shown that stability alone is not sufficient to guarantee correct results, but additionally important conservation properties have to be met. Das Leapfrog-Verfahren ist ein weit verbreitetes Zeitintegrationsverfahren fur transiente hochfrequente elektrodynamischer Felder. Kombiniert mit dem raumlichen Diskretisierungsansatz der Methode der Finiten Integration (FIT) fuhrt es zu einer sehr effizienten, expliziten Simulationsmethode, die im speziellen Fall kartesischer Rechengitter als aquivalent zur Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) Methode anzusehen ist. Aus Stabilitatsgrunden ist dabei die Zeitschrittweite durch das bekannte Courant-Kriterium begrenzt, so dass das Leapfrog- Verfahren fur niederfrequente Probleme nicht sinnvoll angewendet werden kann. In den letzten Jahren wurden alternativ einige andere explizite oder “halb-implizite" Zeitbereichsverfahren vorgeschlagen, u.a. das “Alternating Direction Implicit" (ADI)-Verfahren, die keiner Beschrankung des Zeitschritts aus Stabilitatsgrunden unterliegen. Es zeigt sich aber, dass auch diese Methoden im niederfrequenten Fall nicht zu sinnvollen Simulationsergebnissen fuhren. Wie anhand einer transienten Modalanalyse der elektrischen Felder in einem einfachen 2D-Beispiel deutlich wird, ist die Ursache dafur die Verletzung wichtiger physikalischer Erhaltungseigenschaften durch ADI und verwandte Methoden.
Wireless Sensor Network: Research vs. Reality Design and Deployment Issues

The availability of low cost, low power, and miniature embedded processors, radios, and sensors, integrated on a single chip, is leading to the use of wireless communications and computing for interacting with the physical world in many civilian and military applications. The resulting systems, called wireless sensor networks (WSN). The advances in the integration of complex wireless integrated products and the increase in performance and functionality of the design tools, the requirements and properties of a single device (sensor node) are well understood. Yet it is not simple and straightforward to implement WSN concepts into a functional prototype system or even a commercial product. This tutorial will address the key factors in WSN design. The capabilities of the current WSNs will be examined. The new security scenarios for WSN will be illustrated. Different localization techniques in WSN will be discussed and compared. Future trends in WSN research will be introduced.
SH2D2A Modulates T Cell Mediated Protection to a B Cell Derived Tumor in Transgenic Mice

Background T cell specific adapter protein (TSAd), encoded by the SH2D2A gene, modulates signaling downstream of the T cell receptor (TCR). Young, unchallenged SH2D2A-deficient C57BL/6 mice exhibit a relatively normal immune phenotype. To address whether SH2D2A regulates physiologic immune responses, SH2D2A-deficient TCR-transgenic BALB/c mice were generated. The transgenic TCR recognizes a myeloma-derived idiotypic (Id) peptide in the context of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II molecule I-Ed, and confers T cell mediated resistance to transplanted multiple myeloma development in vivo. Principal Findings The immune phenotype of SH2D2A-deficient C57BL/6 and BALB/c mice did not reveal major differences compared to the corresponding wild type mice. When challenged with myeloma cells, Id-specific TCR-transgenic BALB/c mice lacking SH2D2A displayed increased resistance towards tumor development. Tumor free TCR-transgenic SH2D2A-deficient mice had higher numbers of Id-specific single positive CD4+ thymocytes compared to TCR-transgenic wild-type mice. Conclusion Our results suggest a modulatory role for SH2D2A in T cell mediated immune surveillance of cancer. However, it remains to be established whether its effect is T-cell intrinsic. Further studies are required to determine whether targeting SH2D2A function in T cells may be a potential adjuvant in cancer immunotherapy.
Natural Language Processing for Solving Simple Word Problems

This paper describes our system which solves simple arithmetic word problems. The system takes a word problem described in natural language, extracts information required for representation, orders the facts presented, applies procedures and derives the answer. It then displays this answer in natural language. The emphasis of this paper is on the natural language processing(NLP) techniques used to retrieve the relevant information from the English word problem. The system shows improvements over existing systems.
Computer-Assisted Content Analysis: Topic Models for Exploring Multiple Subjective Interpretations

Content analysis, a labor-intensive but widely-applied research method, is increasingly being supplemented by computational techniques such as statistical topic modeling. However, while the discourse on content analysis centers heavily on re-producibility, computer scientists often focus more on increasing the scale of analysis and less on establishing the reliability of analysis results. The gap between user needs and available tools leads to justiﬁed skepticism, and limits the adoption and effective use of computational approaches. We argue that enabling human-in-the-loop machine learning requires establishing users’ trust in computer-assisted analysis. To this aim, we introduce our ongoing work on analysis tools for interactively exploring the space of available topic models. To aid tool development, we propose two studies to examine how a computer-aided workﬂow affects the un-covered codes, and how machine-generated codes impact analysis outcome. We present our prototypes and ﬁndings currently under submission.
A randomized, multicenter, phase II study of vandetanib monotherapy versus vandetanib in combination with gemcitabine versus gemcitabine plus placebo in subjects with advanced biliary tract cancer: the VanGogh study.

BACKGROUND The management of biliary tract cancers (BTCs) is complex due to limited data on the optimal therapeutic approach. This phase II multicenter study evaluated the efficacy and tolerability of vandetanib monotherapy compared with vandetanib plus gemcitabine or gemcitabine plus placebo in patients with advanced BTC. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients were randomized in a 1 : 1 : 1 ratio to three treatment groups: vandetanib 300 mg monotherapy (V), vandetanib 100 mg plus gemcitabine (V/G), gemcitabine plus placebo (G/P). Vandetanib (300 mg or 100 mg) or placebo was given in single oral daily doses. Gemcitabine 1000 mg/m(2) was i.v. infused on day 1 and day 8 of each 21-day cycle. The primary end point was progression-free survival (PFS). Secondary end points were: objective response rate (ORR), disease control rate, overall survival, duration of response, performance status and safety outcomes. RESULTS A total of 173 patients (mean age 63.6 years) were recruited at 19 centers across Italy. Median (95% confidence intervals) PFS (days) were 105 (72-155), 114 (91-193) and 148 (71-225), respectively, for the V, V/G and G/P treatment groups, with no statistical difference among them (P = 0.18). No statistical difference between treatments was observed for secondary end points, except ORR, which slightly favored the V/G combination over other treatments. The proportion of patients reporting adverse events (AEs) was similar for the three groups (96.6% in V arm, 91.4% in the V/G arm and 89.3% in the G/P arm). CONCLUSIONS Vandetanib treatment did not improve PFS in patients with advanced BTC. The safety profile of vandetanib did not show any additional AEs or worsening of already known AEs. CLINICAL TRIAL NUMBER NCT00753675.
Micromachined Thermal Multimorph Actuators Fabricated by Bulk-etched MUMPs Process

Micromachined thermal multimorph actuators for out-of-plane displacements have been designed and fabricated by Multi-Users MEMS Process (MUMPs) with a post-processing bulk etching step. Micromachined actuators have potential applications in micromanipulation and nanoposition such as manipulation of scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tips, nanopositioner for nano-assembly, micro/nanorobots and cantilever-based nanosensors. The actuator consists of a multilayer micromachined beam constructed of various combinations of polysilicon, oxide and metal layers. The multimorph is heat by applying current to an embedded polysilicon wire to achieve beam bending The maximum tip deflection of 2.5 Pm with an input power of 40 mW is achieved. The maximum operating frequency of 2.7 kHz is measured by focus laser reflecting method. A design methodology, device fabrication, and device characterization are presented.