Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A motion-tolerant dissolve detection algorithm

Gradual shot change detection is one of the most important research issues in the field of video indexing/retrieval. Among the numerous types of gradual transitions, the dissolve-type gradual transition is considered the most common one, but it is also the most difficult one to detect. In most of the existing dissolve detection algorithms, the false/miss detection problem caused by motion is very serious. In this paper, we present a novel dissolve-type transition detection algorithm that can correctly distinguish dissolves from disturbance caused by motion. We carefully model a dissolve based on its nature and then use the model to filter out possible confusion caused by the effect of motion. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is indeed powerful.
First Principles Study on the Effect of Pressure on the Structure, Elasticity, and Magnetic Properties of Cubic GaFe(CN)6 Prussian Blue Analogue

The structure, elasticity, and magnetic properties of Prussian blue analogue GaFe(CN)6 under external pressure ranges from 0 to 40 GPa were studied by first principles calculations. In the range of pressure from 0 to 35 GPa, GaFe(CN)6 not only has the half-metallic characteristics of 100% spin polarization, but also has stable mechanical properties. The external pressure has no obvious effect on the crystal structure and anisotropy of GaFe(CN)6, but when the pressure exceeds 35 GPa, the half-metallicity of GaFe(CN)6 disappears, the mechanical properties are no longer stable, and total magnetic moments per formula unit are no longer integer values.
A Web-based Decision Support Center for Electrical Energy Companies

This study describes a framework for a Web-based decision support center (DSC) to aid various interrelated decisionmaking situations, which emerge from planning and management processes in electrical energy companies. This framework supports small collaborative groups working in an asynchronous way, in an environment where a single decision-maker (DM), who centralizes the responsibility for a final decision, can be aided by a group of experts, who contribute with their opinions to that decision. It is based on the construction and the analysis of (X, R) models, where X is a set of feasible solutions and R a set of fuzzy preference relations. Two preference formats, namely value functions and fuzzy sets, are made available to the input of preference information. Transformation functions adequate for dealing with preference measures on interval scales are utilized to construct fuzzy preference relations. The (X, R) models are analyzed by means of procedures based on the use of the Orlovsky choice function. The availability of different aggregation operators allows a DM to reproduce different attitudes: pessimistic, optimistic, compensatory with adjustment of the tradeoff rates among criteria, as well as lexicographic with prioritization of criteria. When the DM cannot choose a unique attitude to analyze a problem, DSC recommends a generalized solution, which considers all attitudes simultaneously. To demonstrate the applicability of the framework, an expansion planning decision-making problem is considered.
CS-2014-006 Symmetries of the State Transition Graph – Theorem 1 of the Main Paper

Proof: We only need to show one direction, since the inverse element σ−1 is also a symmetry. Let π = o1 · . · ok be a plan for s and let s0, . , sk be the sequence of states such that s0 = s and for 1 ≤ i ≤ k, si = si−1JoiK. Let TΠ = 〈S,E〉. Then we have 〈si−1, si; oi〉 ∈ E for all 1 ≤ i ≤ k and therefore, by the definition of symmetries we have 〈σ(si−1), σ(si);σ(oi)〉 ∈ E and C(σ(oi)) = C(oi). Thus, σ(π) is a sequence of actions that is applicable in σ(s) and ends with the state σ(sk). Since sk is a goal state, by the definition of symmetries σ(sk) is a goal state. Furthermore,
Species-specific antibiotic-ribosome interactions: implications for drug development

Abstract In the cell, the protein synthetic machinery is a highly complex apparatus that offers many potential sites for functional interference and therefore represents a major target for antibiotics. The recent plethora of crystal structures of ribosomal subunits in complex with various antibiotics has provided unparalleled insight into their mode of interaction and inhibition. However, differences in the conformation, orientation and position of some of these drugs bound to ribosomal subunits of Deinococcus radiodurans (D50S) compared to Haloarcula marismortui (H50S) have raised questions regarding the species specificity of binding. Revisiting the structural data for the bacterial D50S-antibiotic complexes reveals that the mode of binding of the macrolides, ketolides, streptogramins and lincosamides is generally similar to that observed in the archaeal H50S structures. However, small discrepancies are observed, predominantly resulting from species-specific differences in the ribosomal proteins and rRNA constituting the drug-binding sites. Understanding how these small alterations at the binding site influence interaction with the drug will be essential for rational design of more potent inhibitors.
Autocatalytic processing of procathepsin B is triggered by proenzyme activity

Cathepsin B (EC 3.4.22.1) and other cysteine proteases are synthesized as zymogens, which are processed to their mature forms autocatalytically or by other proteases. Autocatalytic processing was suggested to be a bimolecular process, whereas initiation of the processing has not yet been clarified. Procathepsin B was shown by zymography to hydrolyze the synthetic substrate 7‐N‐benzyloxycarbonyl‐l‐arginyl‐l‐arginylamide‐4‐methylcoumarin (Z‐Arg‐Arg‐NH‐MEC), suggesting that procathepsin B is catalytically active. The activity‐based probe DCG‐04, which is an E‐64‐type inhibitor, was found to label both mature cathepsin B and its zymogen, confirming the zymography data. Mutation analyses in the linker region between the propeptide and the mature part revealed that autocatalytic processing of procathepsin B is largely unaffected by mutations in this region, including mutations to prolines. On the basis of these results, a model for autocatalytic activation of cysteine cathepsins is proposed, involving propeptide dissociation from the active‐site cleft as the first step during zymogen activation. This unimolecular conformational change is followed by a bimolecular proteolytic removal of the propeptide, which can be accomplished in one or more steps. Such activation, which can be also facilitated by glycosaminoglycans or by binding to negatively charged surfaces, may have important physiological consequences because cathepsin zymogens were often found secreted in various pathological states.
The Cybersecurity Competition Federation

In a time of global crisis in cybersecurity, competitions and related activities are rapidly emerging to provide fun and engaging ways of developing and assessing cybersecurity knowledge and skills. However, there is no neutral organization that brings them together to promote collective efforts and address common issues. This paper will describe the rationale and process for developing the Cybersecurity Competition Federation (CCF) (National Science Foundation Award DUE- 134536) which was created to facilitate a community that promotes cybersecurity competitions and related activities. CCF's vision is to maintain an engaged and thriving ecosystem of cybersecurity competitions and related activities to build career awareness and cybersecurity skill to address a global shortage of cybersecurity professionals.
High- and low-dose interferon alfa-2b in high-risk melanoma: first analysis of intergroup trial E1690/S9111/C9190.

PURPOSE Pivotal trial E1684 of adjuvant high-dose interferon alfa-2b (IFNalpha2b) therapy in high-risk melanoma patients demonstrated a significant relapse-free and overall survival (RFS and OS) benefit compared with observation (Obs). PATIENTS AND METHODS A prospective, randomized, three-arm, intergroup trial evaluated the efficacy of high-dose IFNalpha2b (HDI) for 1 year and low-dose IFNalpha2b (LDI) for 2 years versus Obs in high-risk (stage IIB and III) melanoma with RFS and OS end points. RESULTS A total of 642 patients were enrolled (608 patients eligible), of whom a majority (75%) had nodal metastasis (50% had nodal recurrence). Unlike E1684, E1690 allowed entry of patients with T4 (> 4 mm) deep primary tumors, regardless of nodal dissection, and 25% of the patients entered onto this trial had deep primary tumors (compared with 11% in E1684). At 52 months' median follow-up, HDI demonstrated an RFS benefit exceeding that of LDI compared with Obs. The 5-year estimated RFS rates for the HDI, LDI, and Obs arms were 44%, 40%, and 35%, respectively. The hazards ratio for the intent-to-treat analysis of HDI versus Obs was 1.28 (P(2) =. 05); for LDI versus Obs, it was 1.19 (P(2) =. 17). By Cox analysis, the impact of HDI on RFS achieved significance (P(2) =. 03). The RFS benefit was equivalent for node-negative and node-positive patients. Neither HDI nor LDI has demonstrated an OS benefit compared with Obs at this time. A major improvement in the median OS of patients in the E1690 Obs arm was noted in comparison with E1684 (6 years v 2.8 years). An analysis of salvage therapy for patients who relapsed on E1690 demonstrated that a significantly larger proportion of patients in the Obs arm received IFNalpha-containing salvage therapy compared with the HDI arm; this therapy was unavailable to patients during E1684, and patients with undissected regional nodes were not included in E1684. This study did not specify therapy at recurrence. Analysis of treatments received at recurrence demonstrated significantly more frequent use of IFNalpha2b at relapse from Obs than from HDI, which may have confounded interpretation of the survival benefit of assigned treatments in E1690. CONCLUSION The results of the intergroup E1690 trial demonstrate an RFS benefit of IFNalpha2b that is dose-dependent and significant for HDI by Cox multivariable analysis.
Determinants of Long-Term Growth: A Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (Bace) Approach

This paper examines the robustness of explanatory variables in cross-country economic growth regressions. It employs a novel approach, Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE), which constructs estimates as a weighted average of OLS estimates for every possible combination of included variables. The weights applied to individual regressions are justified on Bayesian grounds in a way similar to the well-known Schwarz criterion. Of 32 explanatory variables we find 11 to be robustly partially correlated with long-term growth and another five variables to be marginally related. Of all the variables considered, the strongest evidence is for the initial level of real GDP per capita.
Identification of a pheromone regulating caste differentiation in termites

The hallmark of social insects is their caste system: reproduction is primarily monopolized by queens, whereas workers specialize in the other tasks required for colony growth and survival. Pheromones produced by reining queens have long been believed to be the prime factor inhibiting the differentiation of new reproductive individuals. However, there has been very little progress in the chemical identification of such inhibitory pheromones. Here we report the identification of a volatile inhibitory pheromone produced by female neotenics (secondary queens) that acts directly on target individuals to suppress the differentiation of new female neotenics and identify n-butyl-n-butyrate and 2-methyl-1-butanol as the active components of the inhibitory pheromone. An artificial pheromone blend consisting of these two compounds had a strong inhibitory effect similar to live neotenics. Surprisingly, the same two volatiles are also emitted by eggs, playing a role both as an attractant to workers and an inhibitor of reproductive differentiation. This dual production of an inhibitory pheromone by female reproductives and eggs probably reflects the recruitment of an attractant pheromone as an inhibitory pheromone and may provide a mechanism ensuring honest signaling of reproductive status with a tight coupling between fertility and inhibitory power. Identification of a volatile pheromone regulating caste differentiation in a termite provides insights into the functioning of social insect colonies and opens important avenues for elucidating the developmental pathways leading to reproductive and nonreproductive castes.
Memory-centric system level design of heterogeneous embedded DSP systems

This thesis focuses on the wireless security in the physical layer with beamforming technique. As the wireless communications grow more important, a higher level of security is more demanding as well. New techniques have been proposed in complement to the existing encryption-based methods in the communications protocols. One of the emerging areas is the security enhancement in the physical layer, which exploits the intrinsic properties of the wireless medium. Beamforming, which has been proved to have many advantages, such as increasing data rates and reducing interference, can also be applied to enhance the wireless security. One of the most common threats, i.e., passive eavesdropping, is addressed in this thesis. Passive eavesdroppers bring significant challenges to the system design, because the knowledge of their locations and channel condition is generally difficult to acquire. To reduce the risk of leaking information to the eavesdroppers, the physical region where the transmission is exposed to eavesdropping has been studied. In this thesis, the exposure region based beamforming technique is proposed to combat the threat from the randomly located eavesdroppers in a fading channel. A stochastic geometry tool is used to model the distribution of the passive eavesdroppers. In this system model, the large-scale path loss and a general Rician fading channel model are considered. The exposure region is established to describe the secrecy performance of the system, based on which the probability that the secrecy outage event occurs is defined to evaluate the security level of the exposure region. The antenna array is one of the most important factors that affect the secrecy performance of the exposure region based beamforming technique. The potential of using different array geometry and array configuration to improve security is explored.
Effects of alterations of total muscular blood flow on local tissue clearance of radio-iodide in the cat.

Simultaneous measurement was made of isotope clearance and of venous outflow or arterial inflow in the gastrocnemius muscle of anesthetized cats. The purpose was to explore if vasomotor nerves to the skeletal muscles might innervate different types of blood vessels. Restriction of the arterial inflow resulted in approximately proportionate decreases in flow and clearance. Stimulation of the sympathetic supply to the area caused a somewhat greater decrease in total flow than in clearance. Intra-arterial infusion of compound 48/80 or of methacholine, stimulation of the sciatic nerve or of the appropriate anterior roots, all increased flow and clearance proportionately. In contrast, stimulation of vasodilator pathway in the hypothalamus caused significant increase in flow with no consistent change in tissue clearance. With sympathetic stimulation, clearance of intra-arterially injected isotope showed a drop more nearly proportional to the drop in blood flow. None of the vasodilating procedures, however, increased the rate of clearance of intra-arterially administered isotope. It is concluded that most procedures influence the shunt and nutritional blood flow in a proportionate manner, but the active vasodilation resulting from hypothalamic stimulation is restricted to the shunt flow.
Molecular Signatures from Gene Expression Data

Motivation: ``Molecular signatures'' or ``gene-expression signatures'' are used to predict patients' characteristics using data from coexpressed genes. Signatures can enhance understanding about biological mechanisms and have diagnostic use. However, available methods to search for signatures fail to address key requirements of signatures, especially the discovery of sets of tightly coexpressed genes. Results: After suggesting an operational definition of signature, we develop a method that fulfills these requirements, returning sets of tightly coexpressed genes with good predictive performance. This method can also identify when the data are inconsistent with the hypothesis of a few, stable, easily interpretable sets of coexpressed genes. Identification of molecular signatures in some widely used data sets is questionable under this simple model, which emphasizes the needed for further work on the operationalization of the biological model and the assessment of the stability of putative signatures. Availability: The code (R with C++) is available from this http URL under the GNU GPL.
Evaluating User-perceived Benefits of Content Distribution Networks

Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) are a class of successful content delivery architectures used by the most popular Web sites to enhance their performance. The basic idea is to address Internet bottleneck issues by replicating and caching the content of the customer Web sites and to serve it from the edge of the network. In this paper we evaluate to what extent the use of a CDN can improve the user-perceived response time. We consider a large set of scenarios with different network conditions and client connections, that have not been examined in previous studies. We found that CDNs can offer signiﬁcative performance gain in normal network conditions, but the advantage of using CDNs can be reduced by heavy network trafﬁc. Moreover, if CDN usage is not carefully designed, the achieved speedup can be suboptimal.
LOD2 Deliverable 1.2: State of the Art Analysis

This report documents the state of the art in the central technology areas of the LOD2 project. It identifies challenges and action items that have to be handled throughout the course of the project to reach the objectives defined in the Description of Work. These tasks and challenges, as well as their interdependencies are illustrated by a roadmap that spans the project runtime and gives an insight into the various expected outcomes. The information in this document reflects only the author’s views and the European Community is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. The information in this document is provided “as is” without guarantee or warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the fitness of the information for a particular purpose. The user thereof uses the information at his/ her sole risk and liability.
Synthesis and Cytotoxic Activity on Human Cancer Cells of Novel Isoquinolinequinone–Amino Acid Derivatives

A variety of aminoisoquinoline-5,8-quinones bearing α-amino acids moieties were synthesized from 3-methyl-4-methoxycarbonylisoquinoline-5,8-quinone and diverse l- and d-α-amino acid methyl esters. The members of the series were evaluated for their cytotoxic activity against normal and cancer cell lines by using the (3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide) (MTT) assay. From the current investigation, structure–activity relationships demonstrate that the location and structure of the amino acid fragment plays a significant role in the cytotoxic effects. Moderate to high cytotoxic activity was observed and four members, derived from l-alanine, l-leucine, l-phenylalanine, and d-phenylalanine, were selected as promising compounds by their IC50 ranging from 0.5 to 6.25 μM and also by their good selectivity indexes (≥2.24).
Fecal Carriage of Staphylococcus aureus in the Hospital and Community Setting: A Systematic Review

Background and rationale: Staphylococcus aureus fecal carriage has been identified as a potential source for nosocomial transmission and a risk factor for disease development. This systematic review determined the overall S. aureus [including methicillin susceptible and resistant S. aureus (MSSA and MRSA)] fecal carriage rates within the community and healthcare settings. Methodology: Peer-reviewed articles indexed in Medline, Scopus, Academic Search Premier, Africa-Wide Information, CINAHL, and Web of Science were identified using applicable and controlled vocabulary through to 11 November 2015. Eligible studies were ascertained by three independent reviewers. Random-effects meta-analyses of proportions were performed to determine S. aureus, MSSA and MRSA fecal carriage rates reported by eligible studies. Results: Twenty six studies were included in this review. The pooled estimates for S. aureus, MSSA and MRSA fecal carriage were 26% (95% confidence interval (CI): 16.8–36.3%), 86% (95% confidence interval (CI): 65.9–97.9%) and 10% (95% CI: 0.7–27.0%), respectively. Fecal S. aureus carriage rates increased on average from 10 to 65% during the first 8 weeks of life, followed by an average carriage rate of 64% at 6 months and 46% at 1 year of life. Genotyping techniques were employed mainly in studies conducted in developed countries and comprised largely of gel-based techniques. Six studies reported on the role of S. aureus fecal strains in diarrhea (n = 2) and the risk for acquiring infections (n = 4). Eight of the 26 studies included in this review performed antibiotic susceptibility testing of S. aureus fecal isolates. Conclusion: This study provides evidence that screening for S. aureus fecal carriage, at least in populations at high risk, could be an effective measure for the prevention of S. aureus transmission and infection in the healthcare and community setting. More well-structured studies need to be conducted and sequence-based genotyping techniques should be employed for the comparison of isolates on a global scale in both developing and developed countries.
Lung cancer diagnosis with quantitative DIC microscopy and a deep convolutional neural network.

We present a study on lung squamous cell carcinoma diagnosis using quantitative TI-DIC microscopy and a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). The 2-D phase map of unstained tissue sections is first retrieved from through-focus differential interference contrast (DIC) images based on the transport of intensity equation (TIE). The spatially resolved optical properties are then computed from the 2-D phase map via the scattering-phase theorem. The scattering coefficient ( μ S ) and the reduced scattering coefficient ( μ S ' ) are found to increase whereas the anisotropy factor (g) is found to decrease with cancer. A DCNN classifier is developed afterwards to classify the tissue using either the DIC images or 2-D optical property maps of μ S , μ S ' and g. The DCNN classifier with the optical property maps exhibits high accuracy, significantly outperforming the same DCNN classifier on the DIC images. The label-free quantitative phase microscopy together with deep learning may emerge as a promising approach for in situ rapid cancer diagnosis.