Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Targeted Knockdown of RNA-Binding Protein TIAR for Promoting Self-Renewal and Attenuating Differentiation of Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells

RNA-binding protein TIAR has been suggested to mediate the translational silencing of ARE-containing mRNAs. To analyze the functions of TIAR, we established RNAi and genetic rescue assays. We evaluated the expression of neuroectoderm markers Pax6 and nestin, mesoderm markers brachyury and Flk1, and hypoblast and definitive endoderm markers Sox17 and Gata6 during EB differentiation and found that knockdown TIAR expression restrained the differentiation of E14 cells. We assessed gene expression levels of Flk-1 and VE-cadherin and observed attenuated differentiation of E14 cells into endothelial cells upon downregulation of TIAR gene expression. As such, we hypothesized an essential role of TIAR related to EB differentiation. As TIAR inhibits the translation of c-myc, we proposed that downregulation of TIAR results in restrained differentiation of E14 cells, due in part to the function of c-myc. We found that TIAR inhibited c-myc expression at the translational level in E14 cells; accordingly, a reduction of TIAR expression promoted self-renewal of pluripotent cells and attenuated differentiation. Additionally, we established that TIAR inhibited TIA-1 expression at the translational level in E14 cells. Taken together, we have contributed to the understanding of the regulatory relationships between TIAR and both c-myc and TIA-1.
AG Carinae: A Luminous Blue Variable with a High Rotational Velocity

We report the detection of broad absorptions due to Si IV λλ4088-4116 in the luminous blue variable (LBV) AG Carinae during its last hot phase (2001-2003). Our non-LTE spectral analysis, with the radiative transfer code CMFGEN, revealed the photospheric nature of these lines, predicting, however, much narrower and deeper absorption profiles than observed. Using a recently developed code to compute synthetic spectra in two-dimensional geometry allowing for the effects of rotation, we were able to match the broad absorptions with a high projected rotational velocity of 190 ± 30 km s-1 in 2001 April. Analysis of spectra obtained in 2002 March and 2003 January, when the star was cooling, yielded projected rotational velocities of 110 ± 10 and 85 ± 10 km s-1, respectively. The derived rotational velocities are proportional to R, as expected from angular momentum conservation. We discuss the effects of such high rotation on the spectral analysis of AG Car and on the wind terminal velocity. Our results show direct spectroscopic evidence, for the first time, that an LBV may rotate at a significant fraction of its breakup velocity. Thus, AG Car (and possibly other LBVs) is indeed close to the ΓΩ limit, as predicted by theoretical studies of LBVs.
Understanding invasion history and predicting invasive niches using genetic sequencing technology in Australia: case studies from Cucurbitaceae and Boraginaceae

The development of genetic profiles of invading plants can provide insight towards a better understanding of niche utilization. Recent advances in sequencing techniques have greatly facilitated genetic assessment and profiling. Here we review our recent studies on selected Australian Cucurbitaceae and Boraginaceae to demonstrate the application of genetic sequencing across a selection of invasive Australian plants.
Evaluating the Trade-Offs in the Parallelization of Probabilistic Search Algorithms

In this work, we propose a speculative parallelization strategy for Probabilistic Search algorithms. We design a parallel version of one such algorithm for a real-time computer vision problem with many practical applications. The implementation is performed on a cluster of eight DEC AlphaServer 2100 4/233 machines connected via a DEC Memory Channel network. Four types of run-time systems are tested: Hardware-coherent Shared Memory (HSM), Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) with software coherence (Cashmere-2L), Reflective Shared Memory (RSM), and message passing (Digital PVM). A runtime system that is normally not the most efficient among these four (RSM) is found to be the best choice for our combination of alg~ rithm and architecture. This shows that algorithmic parallelization and the selection of an implementation environment mutually interfere with each other and must be performed in a synergistic manner.
Swarm Based Intelligent Transition of Control from Manned to Unmanned Vehicular System Using Sun SPOT

In this Modern era it has become mandatory that a better automated transportation service has to be provided with effective management of fuel, better traffic route planning compared with traditional transportation system. A new system with the view of preventing traffic congestion with the capability of effectively sensing and monitoring environmental factors such as temperature, illumination of the surrounding, acceleration and position of the vehicle in three dimensional spaces has to be devised. Further the system must be capable of learning and adapting itself to the external environment with the ultimate goal of predicting the current position of the vehicle at a given instant of time with greater accuracy. The transition of control from the Manned to the unmanned system is possible only if the artificially conscious systems evolve to suite cognitive human processes. A simulated real time ambient intelligent system called SUVs (Sun SPOT based Unmanned Vehicular System) which will have situational awareness and will be capable of taking complete control over the external environment by sensing with the help of ubiquitous devices such as Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) is modeled. Ubiquitous Collaboration Services is provided for SUVs in order to share its gained knowledge which provides effective adaptation to real time environment. Swarm intelligent techniques are adopted for effective traffic control and to mimic human behavior with the vision of providing infrastructure for Service oriented architecture along with a vision of building unmanned vehicular systems. A transition model is simulated utilizing various inputs to the ubiquitous devices providing real-time services for mobile vehicular agents. The full text of the article is not available in the cache. Kindly refer the IJCA digital library at www.ijcaonline.org for the complete article. In case, you face problems while downloading the full-text, please send a mail to editor at editor@ijcaonline.org
IMPROVING MULTILINGUAL CATALOG SEARCH SERVICES BY MEANS OF MULTILINGUAL THESAURUS DISAMBIGUATION

Multilinguality is an important aspect for the creation of public services in countries like Spain, with four official languages (Spanish, Catalonian, Basque and Galician), and overall, if these services are aimed for a European audience with a big number of official languages. Thus, an initiative for creating a catalog service at the Spanish or at the European level must take into account the necessity of supporting metadata written in a variety of languages. When a user submits a query request to a catalog, (s)he should obtain the data resources that verify the restriction specified by the user and with independence of the language used in the metadata records describing these resources. Our R&D group has developed a strategy for managing these multilingual metadata aspects that face up the problem from three points of view: the use of multilingual controlled lists, the use of multilingual and interrelated thesauri, and the word sense disambiguation of large text descriptive elements. These three substrategies, integrated within a catalog server, are being currently tested in several spatial data infrastructure projects.
Hybrid learning strategy to solve pendulum swing-up problem for real hardware

In this paper, we propose a machine learning strategy to obtain the optimal controller for actual machine using hybrid platforms; real hardware and simulator. A simulator consists of the neural networks which directly can learn actual behaviors of the latest hardware and emulates them without physical modeling. On the other hand, the controller of the hardware is trained with the simulator by the reinforcement learning method to realize the optimal control for the target task, and applied to the real hardware. Then, as long as the iteration of these processes is simultaneously performed, the system can automatically generate the optimal controller without any works even when hardware constitution is changed or switched. In this manner, the real hardware and the simulator affect each other to make the system adaptable. Furthermore, in the processes of sampling and supplying hardware data, we put a buffering component. It keeps the latest data of the hardware and supplies non-biased data to the simulator. As an example of the proposal method, we pick up the pendulum swing-up problem. In the experiments, firstly, the optimization process performs step by step for the initial hardware constitution and the basic idea of the method is evaluated. Afterward, by changing a pendulum, we confirm system can autonomously generate the new optimal controller for the real hardware without any human operations.
Inflation forecasts from the Bank of Italy-Sole 24 Ore survey of expectations of inflation and growth

Measures of inflation, and expectations thereof, are a typical concern of central banks. These parameters of the economy enter all types of loss function used by these institutions. The inflation rate is closely monitored as the main concern of monetary policy and in some cases explicitly targeted. All flavours of the Phillips curve include the inflation rate and expectations thereof, measured at different time lags. An accurate knowledge of inflation expectations among economic agents and the way they are formed is crucial to check, among other goals, if inflation expectations are properly anchored.
Novel low-power bus invert coding methods with crosstalk detector

In System-on-a-Chip designs, crosstalk effects cause serious problems, such as wire propagation delay, noise, and power dissipation. In this article, we propose two new bus coding methods to reduce the dynamic power dissipation and wire propagation delay on buses efficiently. The proposed methods reduce both the dynamic power dissipation and wire propagation delay more than the existing bus coding methods do. Experimental results show that the crosstalk detector bus invert (CDBI) method reduces coupling activity to 25.7% from 36.4% and switching activity to 4.5% from 8.5% on 8-bit to 32-bit data buses. It reduces total power dissipation more than the other bus coding methods when a load capacitance is more than 0.3 pF/bit with UMC 0.09-µm CMOS technology. The enhanced CDBI (ECDBI) coding method reduces coupling activity to 28.4% from 38.4% and switching activity to 10.1% from 14% on 8-bit to 32-bit data buses. It reduces total power dissipation more than the other bus coding methods when a load capacitance is more than 0.2 pF/bit with UMC 0.09-µm CMOS technology. For a 0.8 pF/bit load capacitance, both the proposed methods reduce total power use by 19.3–30.9% when systems are implemented with UMC 0.09-µm CMOS technology. Similarly, both the proposed methods also reduce total power consumption more than the other bus coding methods with TSMC 0.18-µm CMOS technology. Meanwhile, the CDBI and the ECDBI schemes reduce total propagation delay up to 31.8% and 34.2%, respectively, on 32-bit data buses.
Exploiting Parallel Corpus for Handling Out-of-Vocabulary Words

This paper presents a hybrid model for handling out-of-vocabulary words in Japaneseto-English statistical machine translation output by exploiting parallel corpus. As the Japanese writing system makes use of four different script sets (kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romaji), we treat these scripts differently. A machine transliteration model is built to transliterate out-ofvocabulary Japanese katakana words into English words. A Japanese dependency structure analyzer is employed to tackle outof-vocabulary kanji and hiragana words. The evaluation results demonstrate that it is an effective approach for addressing out-ofvocabulary word problems and decreasing the OOVs rate in the Japanese-to-English machine translation tasks.
Social Advertising : Does Social Influence Work ?

We study the impact of social influence on the performance of ads on social networks. Using data for several ads on Facebook for two different firms, we measure the impact of past connections on the click rate and endorsement rate of ads. We find that increase in the connections does not lead to an increase in the click performance and may even decrease the click performance. We also find that increase in connections can increase the endorsement rate of ads provided that ads have been clicked. However, when the number of connections is very large the connection performance may also reduce. Our results inform advertisers on how the social influence impacts the performance of their ads and how should they advertise on social platforms such as Facebook. Our results also provide insight into consumer behavior in social networks. Specifically we show that consumers are less likely to be influenced by social connections to click ads. However, if they do click ads they are more likely to endorse ads if more of their connections do.
Heart rate variability, the autonomic nervous system, and neuroeconomic experiments

Measuring the activity of the autonomic nervous system may yield insights into individual stress levels. One small, nonintrusive instrument for collecting such data is a high-resolution heart rate monitor that allows measurement of heart rate variability (HRV). This complements brain-scanning methods and increases the number of participants that can be studied simultaneously. Combining HRV data with recorded data on the decisions made in experimental games throws light on how different individuals react in (economic) decision-making situations. This article therefore introduces the HRV measurement method and, using data from an ultimatum bargaining experiment in a laboratory environment, illustrates its application in experimental economic research.
Privacy-Aware Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for Real Time Route Planning

Route planning devices have become a ubiquitous system on our lives. However, they are not normally used when travelling inside a city since the system is unaware of city’s transit. Although, there are some systems that are aware of transit, many follow a reactive approach, thus only re-routing drivers after a traffic jam occurs. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that pro-actively tries to distribute possible routes for real-time city demand without the need to know in advance the origin and destination of drivers, thus eliminating the privacy concern. Our method is based on the usage of an inverted Ant Colony Optimization algorithm that allows a better vehicle distribution, optimizing the global efficiency of the road network. Results show that our method is able to perform better when compared to Shortest Time and Shortest Distance algorithms.
Manual and semi-automatic normalization of historical spelling - case studies from Early New High German

This paper presents work on manual and semi-automatic normalization of historical language data. We first address the guidelines that we use for mapping historical to modern word forms. The guidelines distinguish between normalization (preferring forms close to the original) and modernization (preferring forms close to modern language). Average inter-annotator agreement is 88.38% on a set of data from Early New High German. We then present Norma, a semi-automatic normalization tool. It integrates different modules (lexicon lookup, rewrite rules) for normalizing words in an interactive way. The tool dynamically updates the set of rule entries, given new input. Depending on the text and training settings, normalizing 1,000 tokens results in overall accuracies of 61.78‐79.65% (baseline: 24.76‐59.53%).
How to Touch Humans: Guidelines for Social Agents and Robots That Can Touch

Touch is an essential channel in interpersonal and affective communication, yet most social agents currently lack the capability to touch the user. In this paper we show the credibility of three premises that make the case that providing touch capability to social robots will increase their effectiveness in communicating emotions, building trust and achieving behavioral changes. The first premise is that humans can communicate distinct emotions through touch only, the second is that this is also possible through mediated (virtual) touch, and the third is that social agents can use the same mediated touch technology as effectively as humans. Based on a literature review, we also formulate ten design rules as guidance for the development of social agents that can touch. These rules concern parameters that regulate the meaning of touch cues like context and familiarity, the implicit and explicit meanings of touch, user characteristics, and parameters that can be communicated through affective touch.
Relating creative cognition to prefrontal function

Angesichts des heterogenen Konzepts der Kreativitat zielte das Projekt darauf ab, unterschiedliche Aspekte von kreativer Kognition unter dem Gesichtspunkt prafrontal vermittelter top-down Kontrolle zu betrachten. Drei empirische Leitlinien wurden verfolgt, um den Zusammenhang zwischen kreativem Denken und kortikaler Kontrolle besser zu verstehen - die Untersuchung von Erwachsenen mit Schizophrenie, Jugendlichen mit ADHD und Storung des Sozialverhaltens, und gesunden Personen, die sich in der Auspragung des Personlichkeitsmerkmals Psychotizismus und Schizotypie unterschieden. Die Befunde zeigten die differentielle Rolle von Kontext auf bestimmte Facetten kreativer Kognition und wurden im Sinne veranderter Top-Down Informationsverarbeitung diskutiert. Das allgemeine Bild, das sich aus der Evidenz ergab, weist sowohl dem "Grad" als auch dem "Typ" der Top-Down-Kontrolle eine entscheidende Rolle zu bei der Koordination verschiedener Aspekte von Kreativitat.
Effect of Intensive Lipid Lowering, With or Without Antioxidant Vitamins, Compared With Moderate Lipid Lowering on Myocardial Ischemia in Patients With Stable Coronary Artery Disease: The Vascular Basis for the Treatment of Myocardial Ischemia Study

Background—Lipid lowering with statins prevents adverse cardiac events. Both lipid-lowering and antioxidant therapies may favorably affect vasomotor function and thereby improve ischemia. Methods and Results—In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, 300 patients with stable coronary disease, a positive exercise treadmill test, 48-hour ambulatory ECG with ≥1 episode of ischemia, and fasting total cholesterol of 180 to 250 mg/dL were assigned to 1-year treatment with intensive atorvastatin to reduce LDL to <80 mg/dL (n=96), intensive atorvastatin to reduce LDL to <80 mg/dL plus antioxidant vitamins C (1000 mg/d) and E (800 mg/d) (n=101), or diet and low-dose lovastatin, if needed, to reduce LDL to <130 mg/dL (n=103; control group). Ischemia end points, including ambulatory ECG monitoring and exercise treadmill testing, and endothelial assessment using brachial artery flow-mediated dilation were obtained at baseline and at 6 and 12 months. Baseline characteristics were similar in all groups. LDL decreased from ≈153 mg/dL at baseline in the 2 atorvastatin groups to ≈83 mg/dL at 12 months (each P<0.0001) and from 147 to 120 mg/dL in the control group (P<0.0001). During ambulatory ECG monitoring, mean number of ischemic episodes per 48 hours decreased 31% to 61% in each group (each P<0.001; P=0.15 across groups), without a change in daily heart rate activity. Mean duration of ischemia for 48 hours decreased 26% to 62% in each group (each P<0.001; P=0.06 across groups). Mean exercise duration to 1-mm ST-segment depression significantly increased in each group, but total exercise duration and mean sum of maximum ST depression were unchanged. Angina frequency decreased in each group. There was no incremental effect of supplemental vitamins C and E on any ischemia outcome. Flow-mediated dilation studies indicated no meaningful changes. Conclusions—Intensive lipid lowering with atorvastatin to an LDL level of 80 mg/dL, with or without antioxidant vitamins, does not provide any further benefits in ambulatory ischemia, exercise time to onset of ischemia, and angina frequency than moderate lipid lowering with diet and low-dose lovastatin to an LDL level of <120 mg/dL.
Leveraging IS theory by exploiting the isomorphism between different research areas

The discipline of Information Systems is sometimes accused of being heavy on practical technology but light on conceptual theory. Identifying 'isomorphisms' between specialist research areas in other disciplines (especially mathematics) has produced spectacular results. This paper suggests that isomorphic thinking could also benefit IS research, in particular by leveraging existing frameworks and applying them outside their original context in isomorphic IS research areas. The paper briefly defines the concept of isomorphism and illustrates the principle of isomorphic mapping using some well-known IS frameworks and theories which originate from other disciplines. This is followed by a practical case study on how a suggested framework for evaluating models could be applied almost literally to seemingly unrelated research areas such as website analysis. This case study exposes the underlying similarities ('isomorphism') between these research fields. The article concludes with some additional suggestions on how isomorphic thinking could advance research in other IS areas.
On-Line Learning of Undirected Sparse n-grams

n-grams are simple learning models considered state-of-the -art in many sequential domains. They suffer from an exponential number of parameters in thei r width,n. We introduce undirectedsparsen-grams, which store probability estimates only for some n-tuples from the unconditional joint distribution, specifically the most fr equent. Experimental results show this sparse version can outperform a narrower n-gram with the same number of parameters. In addition, our models predict equally well forward, backw ard, or in any combination. We present an on-line learning algorithm which induces both mo del parameters and structure (which patterns to include), despite a priori uncertainty a bout which patterns are frequent. Dynamic pattern inclusion complicates probability estima tion during on-line learning, but we present and examine several solutions, including a Bayes ian approach. Lastly, we describe multiwidth combinations of sparse n-grams that solve two important problems with the simple sparse models, and which are useful for hierarchi cal identification and composition of repeated substructure in data. These hierarchical sparsen-gramscan be learned on-line with no fixed bound on width, using less memory than th at aken by the training data.
SpeckleEye: gestural interaction for embedded electronics in ubiquitous computing

We introduce SpeckleEye, design and implementation of an embedded gesture and real-time motion tracking system using laser speckle. SpeckleEye is a low-cost, scalable, open source toolkit for embedded speckle sensing and gestural interaction with ubiquitous devices in the environment. We describe embedded speckle sensing hardware and firmware, a cross-platform gesture recognition library optimized to run on embedded processors, and a set of prototypes that illustrate the flexibility of our platform.