Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Co-occurrence of Multisensory Facilitation and Competition in the Human Brain and its Impact on Aging

Perceptual objects often comprise of a visual and auditory signature, which arrives simultaneously through distinct sensory channels, and multisensory features are linked by virtue of being attributed to a specific object. The binding of familiar auditory and visual signatures can be referred to as semantic audiovisual (AV) integration because it involves higher level representations of naturalistic multisensory objects. While integration of semantically related multisensory features is behaviorally advantageous, multisensory competition, or situations of sensory dominance of one modality at the expense of another, impairs performance. Multisensory facilitation and competition effects on performance are exacerbated with age. Older adults show a significantly larger performance gain from bimodal presentations compared to unimodal ones. In the present thesis project, magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings of semantically related bimodal and unimodal stimuli captured the spatiotemporal patterns underlying both multisensory facilitation and competition in young and older adults. We first demonstrate that multisensory processes unfold in multiple stages: first, posterior parietal neurons respond preferentially to bimodal stimuli; secondly, regions in superior temporal and posterior cingulate cortices detect the semantic category of the stimuli; and finally, at later processing stages, orbitofrontal regions process crossmodal conflicts when complex sounds and pictures are semantically incongruent. Older adults, in contrast to young, are more efficient at integrating semantically congruent multisensory information across auditory and visual channels. Moreover, in these multisensory facilitation conditions, increased neural activity in medial fronto-parietal brain regions predicts faster motor performance in response to bimodal stimuli in older compared to younger adults. Finally, by examining the variability of the MEG signal, we also showed that an increase in local entropy with age is also behaviourally adaptive in the older group as it significantly correlates with more stable and more accurate performance in older compared to young adults.
Physical protein–protein interactions predicted from microarrays

Motivation: Microarray expression data reveal functionally associated proteins. However, most proteins that are associated are not actually in direct physical contact. Predicting physical interactions directly from microarrays is both a challenging and important task that we addressed by developing a novel machine learning method optimized for this task. Results: We validated our support vector machine-based method on several independent datasets. At the same levels of accuracy, our method recovered more experimentally observed physical interactions than a conventional correlation-based approach. Pairs predicted by our method to very likely interact were close in the overall network of interaction, suggesting our method as an aid for functional annotation. We applied the method to predict interactions in yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). A Gene Ontology function annotation analysis and literature search revealed several probable and novel predictions worthy of future experimental validation. We therefore hope our new method will improve the annotation of interactions as one component of multi-source integrated systems. Contact: ts2186@columbia.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
A correlation-based MIMO performance model for the system level analysis on MAC layer

IMT-Advanced systems are currently in their evaluation phase. Due to the complexity of all the integrated algorithms and the multidimensional variability of the wireless channels a system evaluation is not easy and only very few large enterprises have the manpower to construct software to simulate all relevant effects. Traditionally the effects of channel and physical layer algorithms have been studied with bit-level algorithms on a single link. So are most of the results for MIMO processing. System level studies — on the other hand — take cellular layouts, multiple cells and users, real traffic and OSI layers 2 and above into account. They are able to deliver spectral efficiency results. There is a huge gap between these approaches. In order for system level models to give results within reasonable time there must be an abstraction of lower layer details. In this paper a simplified MIMO performance model is presented which can calculate the resource capacity in O(M) and has one parameter which allows to adjust the MIMO capability of a link. The model is then applied to the numeric evaluation of LTE in IMT-Advanced scenarios.
Super edge-antimagic labeling of a cycle with a chord

An (a, d)-edge-antimagic total labeling of G is a one-to-one mapping g taking the vertices and edges onto 1, 2, . , |V (G)| + |E(G)| so that the edgeweights w(uv) = g(u) + g(v) + g(uv), uv ∈ E(G), form an arithmetic progression with initial term a and common difference d. Such a labeling is called super if the smallest labels appear on the vertices. In this paper, we investigate the existence of super (a, d)-edge-antimagic total labelings of graphs derived from cycles by adding one chord.
LTE-Advanced – Release 10 Relaying

This paper provides information about the relaying procedures and architectures in LTE-Advanced technology, topic on which the group 8 for the SSY145 Wireless Networks project has been working during the period 4, 2011. An overview of the adopted schemes and types of relays are presented first, then a study of the relaying coverage improvement is given in the second section. Finally, the last section contains some related relay integration challenges, and their possible solutions. Keywords— LTE-Advanced, Release 10, 4G, 3GPP, Relays.
Association of breast cancer–related microRNA polymorphisms with idiopathic primary ovarian insufficiency

ObjectiveThe aim of our study was to investigate whether breast cancer–related microRNA polymorphisms are associated with primary ovarian insufficiency (POI) risk. MethodsFour breast cancer–related microRNA polymorphisms (miR-27aA > G [rs895819], miR-135bC > T [rs74141216], miR-423C > A [rs6505162], and miR-608G > C [rs4919510]) were genotyped in 136 women with idiopathic POI and 224 controls of Korean ethnicity using polymerase chain reaction–restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. Differences in genotype frequencies between cases and controls were compared. Odds ratios and 95% CIs were determined as measures of the strength of association between genotype and POI. ResultsTwo haplotypes (G-C-A-G and A-T-C-C) of miR-27a/miR-135b/miR-423/miR-608 were associated with increased POI risk. The haplotypes G-A-G of miR-27a/miR-423/miR-608 and A-T-C of miR-27a/miR-135b/miR-608 were associated with higher POI risk, whereas the G-T haplotype of miR-27a/miR-135b was associated with decreased POI risk. The association between POI risk and the G-A-G haplotype of miR-27a/miR-423/miR-608 remained significant after false discovery rate correction for multiple comparisons. The combined genotypes AA/CT/CC/CC, AG/CC/CA/GC, GG/CC/CC/CC, and GG/CC/CA/GG of miR-27a/miR-135b/miR-423/miR-608 were also associated with higher POI risk. Increased POI risk was observed in combined genotypes GG/CC/GG of miR-27a/miR-135b/miR-608; AA/CC/GC, AG/CA/GC, GG/CC/GG, GG/CC/CC, and GG/CA/GG of miR-27a/miR-423/miR-608; and GG/GG of miR-27a/miR-608; however, these associations were not significant after false discovery rate correction. None of the four microRNA polymorphisms alone was associated with POI risk. ConclusionsOur data suggest that breast cancer–related microRNA polymorphisms, including miR-27aA > G, miR-423C > A, and miR-608G > C, are associated with increased POI risk via interactions between miR-27aG, miR-423A, and miR-608G variants. However, our results should be interpreted cautiously because of our small sample size and the low statistical power of our study design.
Send Orders of Reprints at Reprints@benthamscience.ae Anomalies of the Sea Surface Temperature in the Indonesian Throughflow Regions: a Need for Further Investigation

Indonesian throughflow (ITF) regions are important in terms of inter-oceanic exchange of heat as well as freshwater between the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. These regions also linking the North Pacific Ocean and North Atlantic through a global conveyor belt. However, information about the long-term variations of sea surface temperature (SST) across the ITF regions is rather limited. Here, we use long-term Hadley sea surface temperature and advance satellite-derived sea-surface winds to understand long-term changes in and around the ITF. The SST has been lower during the summer season (May–August) with a pronounced minimum in the eastern Indonesia region (INA) and then decreases towards the west due to the activity of southeasterly monsoon winds. The cooling is noticed in the beginning of May, intensifies during July and subsides during the later half of August. The Lambok Strait has been identified as the coolest region (<26°C) in the ITF. Though there has been a general agreement of warm and cool SSTs with El Niño and La Niña conditions respectively, and increasing trend since 1970s, however, there is no consensus among the major passages in the ITF, suggesting complex internal dynamic processes those need to be studied.
Double Blind Comparisons: A New Approach to the Database Aggregation Problem

The Data Aggregation Problem occurs when a large collection of data takes on a higher security level than any of its individual component records. Traditional approaches of breaking up the data and restricting access on a "need to know" basis take away one of the great advantages of collecting the data in the first place. This paper introduces a new cryptographic primitive, Double Blind Comparisons, which allows two co-operating users, who each have an encrypted secret, to determine the equality or inequality of those two secrets, even though neither user can discover any information about what the secret is. This paper also introduces a new problem in bilinear groups, conjectured to be a hard problem. Assuming this conjecture, it is shown that neither user can discover any information about whether the secrets are equal, without the other user's co-operation. We then look at how Double Blind Comparisons can be used to mitigate the Data Aggregation Problem. Finally, the paper concludes with some suggested possibilities for future research and some other potential uses for Double Blind Comparisons.
Dual grating-assisted directional coupling between fibers and thin semiconductor waveguides

A novel dual grating-assisted directional coupler (DGADC) for coupling an optical fiber with a thin semiconductor waveguide is proposed. As an example, a DGADC in silicon-on-insulator is discussed. Maximum coupling efficiency in excess of 90% can be obtained using this coupler, while the highest coupling efficiency previously reported was only 40%.
Analysis and Performance Results of a Molecular Modeling Application on Merrimac

The Merrimac supercomputer uses stream processors and a high-radix network to achieve high performance at low cost and low power. The stream architecture matches the capabilities of modem semiconductor technology with compute-intensive parallel applications. We present a detailed case study of porting the GROMACS molecular-dynamics force calculation to Merrimac. The characteristics of the architecture which stress locality, parallelism, and decoupling of memory operations and computation, allow for high performance of compiler optimized code. The rich set of hardware memory operations and the ample computation bandwidth of the Merrimac processor present a wide range of algorithmic trade-offs and optimizations which may be generalized to several scientific computing domains. We use a cycle-accurate hardware simulator to analyze the performance bottlenecks of the various implementations and to measure application run-time. A comparison with the highly optimized GROMACS code, tuned for an Intel Pentium 4, confirms Merrimac’s potential to deliver high performance.
Financial Integration and Growth in a Risky World

The debate on the benefits of financial integration is revisited in a two-country neoclassical growth model with aggregate uncertainty. Gains from more efficient capital allocation and gains from risk sharing are accounted for simultaneously|together with their interaction. Global numerical methods allow for meaningful welfare comparisons. Gains from integration are quantitatively small, even for riskier and capital scarce emerging economies. These countries import capital for efficiency reasons before exporting it for self-insurance, leading to capital ows and growth reversals along the transition. This opens the door to a richer set of empirical implications than previously considered in the literature.
The impact of physical activity and sex differences on intraindividual variability in inhibitory performance in older adults

ABSTRACT It is well-known that processing speed and executive functions decline with advancing age. However, physical activity (PA) has a positive impact on cognitive performances in aging, specifically for inhibition. Less is known concerning intraindividual variability (iiV) in reaction times. This study aims to investigate the influence of PA and sex differences on iiV in inhibitory performance during aging. Healthy adults were divided into active and sedentary groups according to PA level. To analyse iiV in reaction times, individual mean, standard deviation and the ex-Gaussian parameters were considered. An interaction between activity level and sex was revealed, sedentary females being slower and more variable than sedentary men. No sex differences were found in the active groups. These results indicate that the negative impact of sedentariness on cognitive performance in older age is stronger for females. The present findings underline the need to consider sex differences in active aging approaches.
Applying a subtraction technique to minimize cochlear implant artifact with soundfield and direct audio input stimulations

Abstract We explored the feasibility of a subtraction technique described by Friesen and Picton to remove the cochlear implant (CI) artifact to long duration stimuli in the soundfield and using direct input all through the participant's preferred MAP. Friesen and Picton previously explored this technique by recording cortical potentials in four CI users with 1000 pulse per second (pps) stimuli, bypassing the speech processor. Cortical auditory evoked potentials (N1–P2) to 1000 Hz tones were recorded from a post-lingually deafened adult with three different stimulus presentation setups: soundfield to processor T-mic (SF), soundfield to lapel mic (SF-LM), and direct input (DI). Stimuli were presented at 65 dB SPL(A). The SF setup required stabilizing the head to minimize changes in magnitude for the CI artifact. The SF-LM and DI setups did not require head stabilization, but were evaluated as alternatives to the SF setup. Clear N1–P2 responses were obtained with comparable waveform morphologies, amplitudes, and latencies despite some differences in the magnitude of the CI artifact for the different stimulus presentation setups. The results of this study demonstrate that subtraction technique is feasible for recording N1–P2 responses in CI users, though further studies are needed for the three stimulation setups.
Image steganalysis based on moments of characteristic functions using wavelet decomposition, prediction-error image, and neural network

In this paper, a general blind image steganalysis system is proposed, in which the statistical moments of characteristic functions of the prediction-error image, the test image, and their wavelet subbands are selected as features. Artificial neural network is utilized as the classifier. The performance of the proposed steganalysis system is significantly superior to the prior arts.
Regulation of Neurod1 Contributes to the Lineage Potential of Neurogenin3+ Endocrine Precursor Cells in the Pancreas

During pancreatic development, transcription factor cascades gradually commit precursor populations to the different endocrine cell fate pathways. Although mutational analyses have defined the functions of many individual pancreatic transcription factors, the integrative transcription factor networks required to regulate lineage specification, as well as their sites of action, are poorly understood. In this study, we investigated where and how the transcription factors Nkx2.2 and Neurod1 genetically interact to differentially regulate endocrine cell specification. In an Nkx2.2 null background, we conditionally deleted Neurod1 in the Pdx1+ pancreatic progenitor cells, the Neurog3+ endocrine progenitor cells, or the glucagon+ alpha cells. These studies determined that, in the absence of Nkx2.2 activity, removal of Neurod1 from the Pdx1+ or Neurog3+ progenitor populations is sufficient to reestablish the specification of the PP and epsilon cell lineages. Alternatively, in the absence of Nkx2.2, removal of Neurod1 from the Pdx1+ pancreatic progenitor population, but not the Neurog3+ endocrine progenitor cells, restores alpha cell specification. Subsequent in vitro reporter assays demonstrated that Nkx2.2 represses Neurod1 in alpha cells. Based on these findings, we conclude that, although Nkx2.2 and Neurod1 are both necessary to promote beta cell differentiation, Nkx2.2 must repress Neurod1 in a Pdx1+ pancreatic progenitor population to appropriately commit a subset of Neurog3+ endocrine progenitor cells to the alpha cell lineage. These results are consistent with the proposed idea that Neurog3+ endocrine progenitor cells represent a heterogeneous population of unipotent cells, each restricted to a particular endocrine lineage.
Towards Fast Overlapping Community Detection

Accelerating sequential algorithms in order to achieve high performance is often a nontrivial task. However, there are certain properties that can exacerbate this process and make it particularly daunting. For example, building an efficient parallel solution for a data-intensive algorithm requires a deep analysis of the memory access patterns and data reuse potential. Attempting to scale out the computations on clusters of machines introduces further complications due to network speed limitations. In this context, the optimization landscape can be extremely complex owing to the large number of trade-off decisions. In this paper, we discuss our experience designing two parallel implementations of an existing data-intensive machine learning algorithm that detects overlapping communities in graphs. The first design uses a single GPU to accelerate the computations of small data sets. We employed a code generation strategy in order to test and identify the best performing combination of optimizations. The second design uses a cluster of machines to scale out the computations for larger problem sizes. We used a mixture of MPI, RDMA and pipelining in order to circumvent networking overhead. Both these efforts bring us closer to understanding the complex relationships hidden within networks of entities.
A Vision-Based Automated Manipulation System for the Pick-Up of Carbon Nanotubes

The ability to pick up a single carbon nanotube (CNT) from a bundle of CNTs is of great importance for nanodevice fabrication. In this study, we propose a nanorobotic manipulation system allowing automated pick-up of CNTs based on visual feedback. We used histogram thresholding for automatic binarization, and it clearly distinguished CNTs from the substrate and other impurities under various image brightnesses and contrasts. Furthermore, the CNT tip was successfully extracted by making use of the geometrical characteristics of the CNT. We designed a segment detection method to separate the CNT and atomic force microscope cantilever during overlapping. The contact detection between them was identified by evaluating the linearity of the fitted CNT curve. We also further analyzed the specific properties of point contact and linear contact, significantly improving the success rate of pick-up. Finally, the experimental results show that our method is highly promising for realistic fabrication of nanodevices.
Video Segmentation Descriptors for Event Recognition

This paper presents a new video motion descriptor based on a multi-scale video segmentation to provide a multi-layered output as well as connections with the rich interactions that occur between objects at the semantic level. We also put the emphasis on relationships between motion clusters by providing a new relative motion descriptor encapsulating relative motion patterns within a local spatio-temporal neighborhood. Experimental results on the challenging TRECVID MED11 event recognition dataset validate the approach.
Enzymatic Colorimetric Method for the Determination of Inorganic Phosphorus in Serum and Urine

The performance of an enzymatic colorimetric method for the determination of inorganic phosphorus in serum and urine is described. Phosphate ions react with inosine in the presence of purine nucleoside phosphorylase to form hypoxanthine; this is oxidized by xanthine oxidase to uric acid with production of hydrogen peroxide. The latter is determined with the aid of the chromogen system peroxidase/4-aminophenazone/N-ethyl-N-(3-methylphenyl)-N'-acetylethyl enediamine , the coloured product being measured at 555 nm. This series of reactions is completed in 5 min at 37 degrees C. The test is linear up to 240 mg/l. Analytical recovery in serum averaged 101.2 +/- 1.2% and in urine 101.9 +/- 3.2%. Within-run and between-run precision studies in serum and urine samples gave CVs less than or equal to 4.54% (at 22.0 mg/l). Results obtained by this method agree (r = greater than or equal to 0.983) with the molybdate UV and molybdenum blue methods. Interference by endogenous substances, including organic phosphate, was negligible.
Linear time encodable and list decodable codes

We present the first construction of error-correcting codes which can be (list) decoded from a noise fraction arbitrarily close to 1 in linear time. Specifically, we present an explicit construction of codes which can be encoded in linear time as well as list decoded in linear time from a fraction (1-ε) of errors for arbitrary ε > 0. The rate and alphabet size of the construction are constants that depend only on ε. Our construction involves devising a new combinatorial approach to list decoding, in contrast to all previous approaches which relied on the power of decoding algorithms for algebraic codes like Reed-Solomon codes.Our result implies that it is possible to have, and in fact explicitly specifies, a coding scheme for arbitrarily large noise thresholds with only constant redundancy in the encoding and constant amount of work (at both the sending and receiving ends) for each bit of information to be communicated. Such a result was known for certain probabilistic error models, and here we show that this is possible under the stronger adversarial noise model as well.
A Minimally Invasive Antenna for Microwave Ablation Therapies: Design, Performances, and Experimental Assessment

A new coaxial antenna for microwave ablation therapies is proposed. The antenna design includes a miniaturized choke and an arrowhead cap to facilitate antenna insertion into the tis sues. Antenna matching and the shape and dimension of the area of ablated tissue (thermal lesion) obtained in ex vivo conditions are evaluated both numerically and experimentally, finding an optimal agreement between numerical and experimental data. Results show that the antenna is well matched, and that it is able to produce a thermal lesion with an average length of 6.5 cm and an average diameter of 4.5 cm in ex vivo bovine liver when irradiates 60 W for 10 min. Finally, the dependence of antenna performances on possible changes in the antenna's structure is investigated, finding an optimal stability with respect to manufacturing tolerances and highlighting the fundamental role played by the antenna's choke.