Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Solanum lyratum Extracts Induce Extrinsic and Intrinsic Pathways of Apoptosis in WEHI-3 Murine Leukemia Cells and Inhibit Allograft Tumor

We investigated the molecular mechanisms of cell cycle arrest and apoptotic death induced by Solanum lyratum extracts (SLE) or diosgenin in WEHI-3 murine leukemia cells in vitro and antitumor activity in vivo. Diosgenin is one of the components of SLE. Our study showed that SLE and diosgenin decreased the viable WEHI-3 cells and induced G0/G1 phase arrest and apoptosis in concentration- or time-dependent manners. Both reagents increased the levels of ROS production and decreased the mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨm). SLE- and diosgenin-triggered apoptosis is mediated through modulating the extrinsic and intrinsic signaling pathways. Intriguingly, the p53 inhibitor (pifithrin-α), anti-Fas ligand (FasL) mAb, and specific inhibitors of caspase-8 (z-IETD-fmk), caspase-9 (z-LEHD-fmk), and caspase-3 (z-DEVD-fmk) blocked SLE- and diosgenin-reduced cell viability of WEHI-3 cells. The in vivo study demonstrated that SLE has marked antitumor efficacy against tumors in the WEHI-3 cell allograft model. In conclusion, SLE- and diosgenin-induced G0/G1 phase arrest and triggered extrinsic and intrinsic apoptotic pathways via p53 activation in WEHI-3 cells. SLE also exhibited antitumor activity in vivo. Our findings showed that SLE may be potentially efficacious in the treatment of leukemia in the future.
An Investigation of Foreign Exchange Risk Management in Chinese Multinational Companies Compared with US and UK MNEs

This paper investigated foreign exchange risk management of Chinese MNEs compared with US and UK MNEs. Based on the 14 MNEs selected from each country, annual reports are used to collect data. Whether hedging or not, foreign exchange risk measurement, foreign exchange risk management, determinations on hedging, and hedging techniques are the focus in this study. This study finds that USA and UK MNEs are more active in hedging than Chinese MNEs, which is in line with empirical findings. And more Chinese MNEs have not mentioned the way of measuring foreign exchange risk. In addition, compared with US and UK firms, a certain number of largescaled Chinese MNEs have not hedged, which is opposite to most previous research results. Also Chinese firms with relatively lower centralization have lower percentage on hedging in foreign exchange risk, which is in line with empirical studies. On the other hand, the USA, the UK and China are very similar in terms of foreign exchange risk management, goals, and external hedging techniques. Moreover, there is no significant difference in the relationship between the percentage of overseas business and hedging. Finally, this study concludes with the findings and provides important recommendations for further research. Keywords—Foreign exchange management; Firm size; Centralization; Hedging techniques
Design Principles for Competence Management Systems: A Synthesis of an Action Research Study

Even though the literature on competence in organizations recognizes the need to align organization level core competence with individual level job competence, it does not consider the role of information technology in managing competence across the macro and micro levels. To address this shortcoming, we embarked on an action research study that develops and tests design principles for competence management systems. This research develops an integrative model of competence that not only outlines the interaction between organizational and individual level competence and the role of technology in this process, but also incorporates a typology of competence (competence-in-stock, competence-in-use, and competence-in-the-making). Six Swedish organizations participated in our research project, which took 30 months and consisted of two action research cycles involving numerous data collection strategies and interventions such as prototypes. In addition to developing a set of design principles and considering their implications for both research and practice, this article includes a self-assessment of the study by evaluating it according to the criteria for canonical action research.
Enhanced Partial Tracking Using Linear Prediction

In this paper, we introduce a new partial tracking method suitable for the sinusoidal modeling of mixtures of instrumental sounds with pseudo stationary frequencies. This method, based on the linear prediction of the frequency evolutions of the partials, enables us to track these partials more accurately at the analysis stage, even in complex sound mixtures. This allows our spectral model to better handle polyphonic sounds
Monetary Discount Strategies for Real-Time Promotion Campaign

The effectiveness of monetary promotions has been well reported in the literature to affect shopping decisions for products in real life experience. Nowadays, e-commerce retailers are facing more fierce competition on price promotion in that consumers can easily use a search engine to find another merchant selling an identical product for comparing price. To achieve more effectiveness on real-time promotion in pursuit of better profits, we propose two discount-giving strategies: an algorithm based on Kernel density estimation, and the other algorithm based on Thompson sampling strategy. We show that, given a pre-determined discount budget, our algorithms can significantly acquire better revenue in return than classical strategies with simply fixed discount on label price. We then demonstrate its feasibility to be a promising deployment in e-commerce services for real-time promotion.
Zames–Falb Multipliers for Invariance

This letter provides a comprehensive framework for local stability analysis of uncertain feedback interconnections within the integral quadratic constraints theory using general dynamic multipliers. It is shown how so-called hard and soft constraints can be effectively combined in order to (locally) capture the action of the uncertainty. This is illustrated for Zames–Falb multipliers, where it is proven that the subclasses of causal and anticausal multipliers can easily be factorized into hard constraints and thus individually be incorporated into the framework without introducing conservatism.
Una valutazione preliminare della performance previsiva di EZEO

In this paper, we analyse, for the first time, the track record of the forecast published in the Euro Zone Economic Outlook (EZEO). The EZEO is a quarterly publication jointly prepared by the German institute IFO, the French institute Insee, and the Italian institute Istat. EZEO’s forecast are assessed in terms of accuracy, efficiency and unbiasedness.
A Comprehensive Motivating Use Case on the New Technology Landscape

Fog/edge computing, function as a service, and programmable infrastructures, like software-defined networking or network function virtualisation, are becoming ubiquitously used in modern Information Technology infrastructures. These technologies change the characteristics and capabilities of the underlying computational substrate where services run (e.g. higher volatility, scarcer computational power, or programmability). As a consequence, the nature of the services that can be run on them changes too (smaller codebases, more fragmented state, etc.). These changes bring new requirements for service orchestrators, which need to evolve so as to support new scenarios where a close interaction between service and infrastructure becomes essential to deliver a seamless user experience. Here, we present the challenges brought forward by this new breed of technologies and where current orchestration techniques stand with regards to the new challenges. We also present a set of promising technologies that can help tame this brave new world.
Life Satisfaction of Highly Qualified Professionally Achieving Women Post Retirement

In this paper life satisfaction of highly qualified professionally achieving (HQPA) aging women post retirement is investigated. Respondents were 306 HQPA older women who were surveyed in the city of Mumbai. The Satisfaction with Life scale, Silver Lining Questionnaire and Meaning in Life Questionnaire were used. Results showed variations on life satisfaction as a result of certain independent socio-demographic variables and the type of careers that HQPA women retired from. Findings have relevance for designing and promoting different types of activity engagement for HQPA older women. This is a move away from the solely poverty focused approach to addressing issues of aging population in India. Implications for practice with HQPA older women have also been discussed.
proposed a latent SVM based algorithm for classifying and localizing events in a time-series . They later proposed a fully supervised structured SVM for predicting Action Unit segments in video sequences

We study the problem of facial analysis in videos. We propose a novel weakly supervised learning method that models the video event (expression, pain etc.) as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative sub-events (e.g. onset and offset phase for smile, brow lower and cheek raise for pain). The proposed model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple Instance Learning and latent SVM/HCRF – it extends such frameworks to model the ordinal or temporal aspect in the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent improvements over relevant competitive baselines on four challenging and publicly available video based facial analysis datasets for prediction of expression, clinical pain and intent in dyadic conversations. In combination with complimentary features, we report state-of-the-art results on these datasets.
Can opponent models aid poker player evolution?

We investigate the impact of Bayesian opponent modeling upon the evolution of a player for a simplified poker game. Through the evolution of artificial neural networks using NEAT we create and compare players both utilizing and ignoring Bayesian opponent beliefs. We test the effectiveness of this model against various collections of dynamic and partially randomized opponents and find that using a Bayesian opponent model enhances our AI players even when dealing with a previously unseen collection of players. We further utilize the inherent recurrency of our evolved players in order to recognize the opponent models of multiple players. Through ablative studies upon the inputs of the network, we show that utilization of an opponent model as an evolutionary aid yields significantly stronger players in this case.
Size-Based Rendering for Lung Cancer Screening

We present two relevant clinical use cases for thoracic computed tomography data, where the recently introduced concept of size-based rendering can be beneﬁcially applied to medical visualization in the context of screening for lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD): (a) Gradual suppression of thorax and vessels for quick appraisal of the presence of pulmonary nodules. (b) Visualization of bullous versus diffuse emphysema. In the ﬁrst use case, the opacity is chosen to decrease with local structure size, whereas in the second case, the opacity is chosen to increase with structure size. Both algorithms are robust in particular because they do not depend on any prior segmentation or classiﬁcation. They are ideally suited for full parallelization and GPU implementation.
First Human Administration of MR04A3: A Novel Water-soluble Nonbenzodiazepine Sedative

Background: JM-1232(–), (–)-3-[2-(4-methyl-1-piperazinyl)-2-oxoethyl]-2-phenyl-3,5,6,7-tetrahydrocyclopenta [f]isoindol-1(2H)-one, molecular formula, C24H27N3O2; molecular weight, 389.49, is a novel isoindoline water-soluble benzodiazepine receptor agonist with favorable anesthetic/sedative properties in animals. MR04A3 is a 1% aqueous presentation of JM-1232(–). Methods: In Step 1, healthy male volunteers received 10-min infusions of MR04A3, 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, and 0.8 mg/kg, with three MR04A3 subjects and one placebo subject per dose concentration. In Step 2, doses were 0.025, 0.05, 0.075, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.4 mg/kg over 1 min with six MR04A3 subjects and one placebo subject per dose concentration. Results: Hypnotic effects of MR04A3 were seen at all dose concentrations in Step 1 and at doses of 0.075 mg/kg or more in Step 2. Central nervous system effect was seen at all dose concentrations with larger doses of MR04A3 producing a deeper and longer reduction in bispectral index. Ramsay sedation scores were increased with higher doses causing sedation and then unresponsiveness. The adverse event profile of subjects receiving MR04A3 was similar to that of subjects given placebo except that some subjects receiving MR04A3 developed upper airway obstruction while sedated. This responded to simple maneuvers (i.e., chin lift). Changes in systolic arterial blood pressure and heart rate were minimal. Conclusions: MR04A3 is hypnotic in man with a satisfactory hemodynamic and safety profile.
Model predictive control for finger joint trajectory of TU Biomimetic hand

A long standing goal in rehabilitation robotics is to emulate the human-like stable grasping operations by upper limb prosthesis. For stable grasping and manipulation by a prosthetic hand, the finger joints should follow the trajectories of the natural counterparts. Although a number of commercial prosthetic hands and research prototypes have been developed, mimicking the human-like movement is still a challenge. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of fast on-line error minimizing control approach during trajectory tracking. In this paper, we propose a model predictive control (MPC) architecture that can generate desired motions through online error minimization. Focus is on emulating the human-like finger joint trajectories by Tezpur University (TU) Biomimetic Hand. The MPC perform the online error minimization and control in a unified way by tracking reference trajectories. The reference trajectories were generated by recording the finger joint trajectories of human hand. The proposed MPC was implemented on the TU Biomimetic Hand index finger; wherein finger joint trajectories of human finger was used to actuate the control architecture. The simulation results show that the finger joint trajectories of TU Biomimetic Hand are in close conformity to that of the human finger. The experimental results for the TU Biomimetic Hand index finger satisfies the dynamic constraints of human hand and thus ensures stable grasping by the prosthetic hand.
Social Enterprise in Belgium: A Diversity of Roots, Models and Fields

This working paper is structured as follows. The first section reviews the main historical roots that have led to the emergence of a diversity of models related to social enterprise and the social economy in Belgium. Next, the second section sketches the main features of these models in terms of legal forms, types of social missions addressed, governance dynamics and resources. In the third section, these models are then illustrated in different fields of activity, both established and emerging. Finally, the fourth section proposes a transversal analysis of the main trends and challenges that the different models face in terms of development and coexistence.
Effects of variation at the ALDH2 locus on alcohol metabolism, sensitivity, consumption, and dependence in Europeans.

BACKGROUND The low-activity variant of the aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2) gene found in East Asian populations leads to the alcohol flush reaction and reduces alcohol consumption and risk of alcohol dependence (AD). We have tested whether other polymorphisms in the ALDH2 gene have similar effects in people of European ancestry. METHODS Serial measurements of blood and breath alcohol, subjective intoxication, body sway, skin temperature, blood pressure, and pulse were obtained in 412 twins who took part in an alcohol challenge study. Participants provided data on alcohol reactions, alcohol consumption, and symptoms related to AD at the time of the study and subsequently. Haplotypes based on 5 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were used in tests of the effects of variation in the ALDH2 gene on alcohol metabolism and alcohol's effects. RESULTS The typed SNPs were in strong linkage disequilibrium and 2 complementary haplotypes comprised 83% of those observed. Significant effects of ALDH2 haplotype were observed for breath alcohol concentration, with similar but smaller and nonsignificant effects on blood alcohol. Haplotype-related variation in responses to alcohol, and reported alcohol consumption, was small and not consistently in the direction predicted by the effects on alcohol concentrations. CONCLUSIONS Genetic variation in ALDH2 affects alcohol metabolism in Europeans. However, the data do not support the hypothesis that this leads to effects on alcohol sensitivity, consumption, or risk of dependence.
Functional Validation of BrARF 3 . 1 and BrAXR 1 in Brassica rapa and Arabidopsis thaliana : Role in Heading Traits in Chinese Cabbage

This thesis is part of the PhD program of Xiaoxue Sun (sandwich PhD Wageningen UR, Plant Breeding and Institute of vegetables and flowers, Chinese Academy of Agriculture sciences (CAAS)). The main topic of her PhD project is to understand the genetics behind heading traits of Chinese cabbage (B. rapa ssp. pekinensis). Transformation is a useful tool in molecular biology and can be used to validate gene functions of candidate genes within organisms by knocking-out genes or overexpressing genes, do promotor studies with reporter genes, etc. However, B. rapa is quite recalcitrant for Agrobacterium mediated transformation. The aim of this project can be split into two parts. The development of an A. tumefaciens mediated transformation system in B. rapa. And the validation of ARF3-1 and AXR1’s function in heading of Chinese cabbage by transformation of A. thaliana. No verified B. rapa transformants have been established as of yet, however various experiments have been conducted in order to try and establish a working transformation protocol. This included progressively increasing the selective pressure, the use of acetosyringone in the co-cultivation medium and the use of different A. tumefaciens strains. Progressively adding hygromycin selection first of all showed that non transformed shoots could still be killed when hygromycin was applied later on in the in vitro culture process. In addition, we suspected that continuous application of 10mg/l hygromycin was also lethal to transformed shoots. It has been reported that the addition of acetosyringone to the co-cultivation medium increases the transformation rate in B. rapa considerably. However, this effect was not observed during the experiments of this thesis. Two A. tumefaciens strains were used in the B. rapa transformation experiments, AGL1 and GV3101. The GV3101 strain grew much faster and cefotaxime was added to the decolonization/selection media as an additional antibiotic to prevent overgrowth of A. tumefaciens. However, cefotaxime represses shoot regeneration in B. rapa and should be omitted in future experiment. The transformation of A. thaliana resulted in 27 transformants consisting of 11 35s::BrARF3-1cc, 8 35s::BrARF3-1pc, 3 35s::BrAXR1cc, 3 35s::BrAXR1pc, and 2 arf4-2 BrAXR1cc overexpression lines. Three (plants 1, 6, and 7) independent non heading BrARF3-1 allele overexpression T1 transformants had narrower outward curving leaves, while independent 35s heading BrARF3-1 allele T1 transformants showed no clear phenotype compared to the Col-0 wild type. Further phenotyping of these overexpression lines should be conducted after homozygous T3 lines are established by self-pollination.
Annotation of the Syntax/Semantics interface as a Bridge between Deep Linguistic Parsing and TimeML

This paper presents the development of an annotation scheme for the syntax/semantics interface that may feed into the generation of (ISO-)TimeML style annotations. The annotation scheme accounts for compositionality and calculates the semantic contribution of tense and aspect. The annotation builds on output from syntactic parsers and links information from morphosyntactic cues to a representation grounded in formal semantics/pragmatics that may be used to automatize the process of annotating tense/aspect and temporal relations
Adopters and non‐adopters of internet banking: a segmentation study

Purpose – This study examines internet banking adoption and resistance behaviour in Greece in order to develop profiles of adopters and non‐adopters of the service. The aim is to illustrate customers' resistance behaviour towards internet banking. The existing research does not explain resistance behaviour, since it does not clearly distinguish non‐adoption from resistance. Consequently, it has not recognised the different types of non‐adoption.Design/methodology/approach – A measuring instrument was developed and utilised in a survey of a convenience sample of 1,200 customers. The derived dimensionality of the relevant perceptual variables was used to explore the existence of different customer segments through cluster analysis.Findings – Three segments were identified, where the description of their profiles is based on customer perceptions of the service and general usage data. Across these segments adopters and non‐adopters were found to have different characteristics. With regard to demographics, onl.
SGX-Shield: Enabling Address Space Layout Randomization for SGX Programs

—Traditional execution environments deploy Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) to defend against memory corruption attacks. However, Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX), a new trusted execution environment designed to serve security-critical applications on the cloud, lacks such an effective, well-studied feature. In fact, we find that applying ASLR to SGX programs raises non-trivial issues beyond simple engineering for a number of reasons: 1) SGX is designed to defeat a stronger adversary than the traditional model, which requires the address space layout to be hidden from the kernel; 2) the limited memory uses in SGX programs present a new challenge in providing a sufficient degree of entropy; 3) remote attestation conflicts with the dynamic relocation required for ASLR; and 4) the SGX specification relies on known and fixed addresses for key data structures that cannot be randomized. This paper presents SGX-Shield, a new ASLR scheme designed for SGX environments. SGX-Shield is built on a secure in-enclave loader to secretly bootstrap the memory space layout with a finer-grained randomization. To be compatible with SGX hardware (e.g., remote attestation, fixed addresses), SGX-Shield is designed with a software-based data execution protection mechanism through an LLVM-based compiler. We implement SGX-Shield and thoroughly evaluate it on real SGX hardware. It shows a high degree of randomness in memory layouts and stops memory corruption attacks with a high probability. SGX-Shield shows 7.61% performance overhead in running common micro-benchmarks and 2.25% overhead in running a more realistic workload of an HTTPS server.