Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mode Locking in a Spatially Extended Neuron Model: Active Soma and Compartmental Tree

Understanding the mode-locked response of excitable systems to periodic forcing has important applications in neuroscience. For example it is known that spatially extended place cells in the hippocampus are driven by the theta rhythm to generate a code conveying information about spatial location. Thus it is important to explore the role of neuronal dendrites in generating the response to periodic current injection. In this paper we pursue this using a compartmental model, with linear dynamics for each compartment, coupled to an active soma model that generates action potentials. By working with the piece-wise linear McKean model for the soma we show how the response of the whole neuron model (soma and dendrites) can be written in closed form. We exploit this to construct a stroboscopic map describing the response of the spatially extended model to periodic forcing. A linear stability analysis of this map, together with a careful treatment of the non-differentiability of the soma model, allows us to construct the Arnol'd tongue structure for 1:q states (one action potential for q cycles of forcing). Importantly we show how the presence of quasi-active membrane in the dendrites can influence the shape of tongues. Direct numerical simulations confirm our theory and further indicate that resonant dendritic membrane can enlarge the windows in parameter space for chaotic behavior. These simulations also show that the spatially extended neuron model responds differently to global as opposed to point forcing. In the former case spatio-temporal patterns of activity within an Arnol'd tongue are standing waves, whilst in the latter they are traveling waves.
Electronic steering for a microphone array by sub-band phase compensation

Directional microphones are widely used in spatial filtering applications. The directivity and steering capabilities are usually realized using arrays of sensors connected to a digital processor. In general, these techniques are very complicated and expensive. In this work a continuous-time electronic steering technique for microphone array based on sub-band phase compensation is presented. It can be realized by means of analogue electronics, selecting gain and phase value for each sensor as a function of look direction. First, the spatial performance of the proposed microphone is analyzed at a single frequency. Then, the frequency range of interest is divided into several sub-bands according to the desired frequency resolution, and the weights are designed independently for each sub-band frequency. The paper presents a theoretical formulation of the proposed methods, and a numerical simulation showing that the performance of the proposed microphone is comparable to that of a conventional delay-and-sum beamformer.
Human Herpesvirus-6 Pneumonitis around the Engraftment of Cord Blood Transplantation following Foscarnet Prophylaxis in a Patient with Acute Leukemia

Human herpesvirus-6 (HHV-6) reactivation is sometimes observed in immunocompromised patients, especially after allogeneic stem cell transplantation. The complications of HHV-6 reactivation in this setting are mainly recognized as HHV-6 encephalitis. We herein report the case of a patient who developed HHV-6 pneumonitis after cord blood transplantation (CBT). A 35-year-old male underwent CBT for T-cell/myeloid mixed phenotype acute leukemia and achieved neutrophil engraftment on day 31. He had received foscarnet as prophylaxis for HHV-6 reactivation. A computed tomography (CT) scan to evaluate the leukemic tumor showed bilateral interstitial pneumonitis on day 33, although he had no respiratory symptoms. The findings of the CT scan were consistent with those of HHV-6 pneumonitis that were reported previously. HHV-6 DNA, but no other pathogens, was detected in his bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid. The patient was successfully treated with a therapeutic dose of foscarnet. This case indicates that performing a CT scan around the time of neutrophil engraftment can play an important role in detecting the early phase of HHV-6 pneumonia, and BAL should be considered if features consistent with HHV-6 pneumonitis are observed in patients with a risk of HHV-6 reactivation.
Radiocarbon chronology of Manot Cave, Israel and Upper Paleolithic dispersals

Manot Cave radiocarbon dates establish Levantine chronology, which is critical for understanding Upper Paleolithic dispersals. The timing of archeological industries in the Levant is central for understanding the spread of modern humans with Upper Paleolithic traditions. We report a high-resolution radiocarbon chronology for Early Upper Paleolithic industries (Early Ahmarian and Levantine Aurignacian) from the newly excavated site of Manot Cave, Israel. The dates confirm that the Early Ahmarian industry was present by 46,000 calibrated years before the present (cal BP), and the Levantine Aurignacian occurred at least between 38,000 and 34,000 cal BP. This timing is consistent with proposed migrations or technological diffusions between the Near East and Europe. Specifically, the Ahmarian could have led to the development of the Protoaurignacian in Europe, and the Aurignacian in Europe could have spread back to the Near East as the Levantine Aurignacian.
Islet-like cell clusters: viability, cell types, and subretinal transplantation in pancreatectomized cats

We investigated a method for isolating sufficient feline islets of Langerhans to restore normoglycaemia following transplantation into the subretinal space of pancreatectomized cats. Collagenase digestate of feline pancreas was maintained in serum-free tissue culture medium for 1–9 days. Viability of islet-like cell clusters (ICC) was assessed with ethidium bromide and fluorescein diacetate staining; cell types were identified immunohistochemically. After nine days, the ICC were transplanted. We estimated viable ICC in tissue culture at nine days as 3800 ± 2000 (mean ± SD) per pancreas. While numbers of β cells decreased over time in culture, ductal cells increased. Bromodeoxyuridine labelling showed no proliferation of β cells but extensive proliferation of ductal cells. Subretinal transplants of cultured ICC in the diabetic cats maintained normoglycaemia for up to 12 days, while they provoked massive lymphocyte infiltration indicating rejection. Islet transplantation into the feline subretinal space temporarily restored normoglycaemia. Our current method of culture achieved sufficient reduction of acinar cells but an insufficient yield of insulin-producing cells.
Adaptive Noise Immune Cluster Ensemble Using Affinity Propagation

Cluster ensemble is one of the main branches in the ensemble learning area which is an important research focus in recent years. The objective of cluster ensemble is to combine multiple clustering solutions in a suitable way to improve the quality of the clustering result. In this paper, we design a new noise immune cluster ensemble framework named as AP2CE to tackle the challenges raised by noisy datasets. AP2CE not only takes advantage of the affinity propagation algorithm (AP) and the normalized cut algorithm (Ncut), but also possesses the characteristics of cluster ensemble. Compared with traditional cluster ensemble approaches, AP2CE is characterized by several properties. (1) It adopts multiple distance functions instead of a single Euclidean distance function to avoid the noise related to the distance function. (2) AP2CE applies AP to prune noisy attributes and generate a set of new datasets in the subspaces consists of representative attributes obtained by AP. (3) It avoids the explicit specification of the number of clusters. (4) AP2CE adopts the normalized cut algorithm as the consensus function to partition the consensus matrix and obtain the final result. In order to improve the performance of AP2CE, the adaptive AP2CE is designed, which makes use of an adaptive process to optimize a newly designed objective function. The experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that (1) AP2CE works well on most of the datasets, in particular the noisy datasets; (2) AP2CE is a better choice for most of the datasets when compared with other cluster ensemble approaches; (3) AP2CE has the capability to provide more accurate, stable and robust results.
A 6Gb/s 40dB burst-mode digitally adaptive equalizer with reference-calibrated overshoot control

This paper presents a burst-mode equalizer for the communication incorporating electrical idle state which is usually used for power management. Fabricated in 0. 18μm CMOS technology, the proposed equalizer can compensate over 90-inch microstrip on an FR4 PCB, which has a 40dB loss at 3GHz. The proposed overshoot control scheme with reference calibration can reduce offset-induced error on detections and is observed to achieve jitter improvement of 0.06UI. With the help of envelope detector and digital adaptation, the reaction time under burst-mode transmission is 5.5ns or 33bit-time. The equalizer consumes 26.7mW from a 1.8V supply and measured BER is less than 10-12.
Understanding Open Source Software Evolution: Applying, Breaking, and Rethinking the Laws of Software Evolution

Introduction This chapter examines whether or how the evolution of open source software conforms to the laws of software evolution that have been in development for more than 30 years. The laws of software evolution and their development as the basis for a theory of software evolution represents a major intellectual contribution and challenge to the software engineering research community, and to the broader community of computer science. The principal developer and advocate for the laws of software evolution is Professor M.M. (Manny) Lehman from Imperial College in London, and over the years his work has been expanded and refined by a growing list of students and scholars of software evolution. However, the emerging trend of free or open source software (F/OSS) development, often focusing attention to popular software systems like the GNU/Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, the Mozilla Web browser, and many others, raises the question as to whether F/OSS conforms to or breaks the laws of software evolution as currently formulated. Finding conformance would be reassuring to the current outstanding effort representing decades of study, whereas finding breakdowns, inconsistencies, or failures might point to refutations of the laws/theory, or at least the need to rethink, refine, and reformulate the laws/theory to account for the evolution of F/OSS.
Genome-Wide Linkage and Regional Association Study of Blood Pressure Response to the Cold Pressor Test in Han Chinese: The Genetic Epidemiology Network of Salt Sensitivity Study

Background—Blood pressure (BP) response to cold pressor test (CPT) is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease. We performed a genome-wide linkage scan and regional association analysis to identify genetic determinants of BP response to CPT. Methods and Results—A total of 1961 Chinese participants completed the CPT. Multipoint quantitative trait linkage analysis was performed, followed by single-marker and gene-based analyses of variants in promising linkage regions (logarithm of odds ≥2). A suggestive linkage signal was identified for systolic BP response to CPT at 20p13 to 20p12.3, with a maximum multipoint logarithm of odds score of 2.37. On the basis of regional association analysis with 1351 single nucleotide polymorphisms in the linkage region, we found that marker rs2326373 at 20p13 was significantly associated with mean arterial pressure responses to CPT (P=8.8×10−6) after false discovery rate adjustment for multiple comparisons. A similar trend was also observed for systolic BP response (P=0.03) and diastolic BP response (P=4.6×10−5). Results of gene-based analyses showed that variants in genes MCM8 and SLC23A2 were associated with systolic BP response to CPT (P=4.0×10−5 and 2.7×10−4, respectively), and variants in genes MCM8 and STK35 were associated with mean arterial pressure response to CPT (P=1.5×10−5 and 5.0×10−5, respectively). Conclusions—Within a suggestive linkage region on chromosome 20, we identified a novel variant associated with BP responses to CPT. We also found gene-based associations of MCM8, SLC23A2, and STK35 in this region. Additional work is warranted to confirm these findings. Clinical Trial Registration—URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov; Unique identifier: NCT00721721.
Slepian-Wolf coding for nonuniform sources using turbo codes

The recently proposed turbo-binning scheme is shown to be both efficient and optimal for uniform source Slepian-Wolf coding problem (Z. Tu et al., 2003). This paper studies the case when sources are i.i. d. but nonuniformly distributed. It is firstly shown that any algebraic binning scheme based on linear codes is optimal for nonuniform sources only asymptotically. Next two modifications are proposed to improve the performance of the turbo-binning scheme for nonuniform sources. The first is to carefully design the constituent encoder structures to maximally match the turbo code to the nonuniform source distribution, and the second is to use variable-length syndrome sequences to index the bins. Simulations show that the combination of both strategies can lead to an improvement of as much as 0.22 bit/symbol in overall compression rate for highly nonuniform sources.
Forecasting Auroral Substorms from Observed Data with a Supervised Learning Algorithm

Auroras are beautiful phenomena and attract many people. However, its physical model still remains a subject of dispute because it is caused by the interaction of diverse areas, such as solar wind, magnetosphere, and ionosphere, and it is difficult to simultaneously obtain data in such wide areas. This paper is devoted to forecasting the onset of brightening of auroras followed by poleward expansion, called auroral substorms. We adopt a data-driven approach, instead of physical models of auroras. This approach requires labeled data, which shows when auroras appeared. However, this is challenging because there exist a wide variety of observed data from diverse areas while they are not tied with onset time of auroras. We identified auroral substorms using all-sky images obtained at Tromso, Norway. Then, we chose solar wind and geomagnetic field data as the first attempt toward the goal, out of many types of data, and associated them with the onset times of the identified auroral substorms. We trained a classifier of the support vector machine, which is a typical supervised learning algorithm, using the constructed data, and the classifier achieves around 78% classification accuracy at 5-fold cross validation.
Metabolic engineering of Bacillus amyloliquefaciens for poly-gamma-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) overproduction

We constructed a metabolically engineered glutamate‐independent Bacillus amyloliquefaciens strain with considerable γ‐PGA production. It was carried out by double‐deletion of the cwlO gene and epsA‐O cluster, as well as insertion of the vgb gene in the bacteria chromosome. The final generated strain NK‐PV elicited the highest production of γ‐PGA (5.12 g l−1), which was 63.2% higher than that of the wild‐type NK‐1 strain (3.14 g l−1). The γ‐PGA purity also improved in the NK‐PV strain of 80.4% compared with 76.8% for the control. Experiments on bacterial biofilm formation experiment showed that NK‐1 and NK‐c (ΔcwlO) strains can form biofilm; the epsA‐O deletion NK‐7 and NK‐PV strains could only form an incomplete biofilm.
Linear independence over tropical semirings and beyond

We investigate different notions of linear independence and of ma- trix rank that are relevant for max-plus or tropical semirings. The factor rank and tropical rank have already received attention, we compare them with the ranks defined in terms of signed tropical determinants or arising from a no- tion of linear independence introduced by Gondran and Minoux. To do this, we revisit the symmetrization of the max-plus algebra, establishing properties of linear spaces, linear systems, and matrices over the symmetrized max-plus algebra. In parallel we develop some general technique to prove combinatorial and polynomial identities for matrices over semirings that we illustrate by a number of examples.
Reference point based distributed computing for multiobjective optimization

As the computational complexity of the problem and/or the number of objectives increases, a large population has to be evaluated at each generation of algorithm, and this process needs more computational resources, or requires more time for the same computational resource. However, distributing the tasks into different processors (or cores) is a good solution in speeding up the process overall. In this study, a novel and pragmatic distributed computing approach for multiobjective evolutionary optimization algorithm is proposed. Instead of dividing the objective space into pre-defined cone-domination principles, as proposed in an earlier study, a distribution of reference points initialized on a hyper-plane spanning the entire objective space is assigned to different processors and the R-NSGA-II procedure is invoked to find respective partial efficient fronts. Our results show that the proposed distributed computing approach reduces the overall computational effort compared to that needed with a single-processor method.
Some dimensions of risk not often considered by engineers

For many years risk analysis has informed the design and operation of technologically risky systems, and many engineers and scientists consider risk to be objectively measurable. But a great deal of research into the subject by social scientists, including psychological studies into risk perception and decision-making, should interest engineers and could inform improvements to the process of risk analysis.
Multi-document summarization via sentence-level semantic analysis and symmetric matrix factorization

Multi-document summarization aims to create a compressed summary while retaining the main characteristics of the original set of documents. Many approaches use statistics and machine learning techniques to extract sentences from documents. In this paper, we propose a new multi-document summarization framework based on sentence-level semantic analysis and symmetric non-negative matrix factorization. We first calculate sentence-sentence similarities using semantic analysis and construct the similarity matrix. Then symmetric matrix factorization, which has been shown to be equivalent to normalized spectral clustering, is used to group sentences into clusters. Finally, the most informative sentences are selected from each group to form the summary. Experimental results on DUC2005 and DUC2006 data sets demonstrate the improvement of our proposed framework over the implemented existing summarization systems. A further study on the factors that benefit the high performance is also conducted.
Beneficial Contribution of Alloy Disorder to Electron and Phonon Transport in Half‐Heusler Thermoelectric Materials

Electron and phonon transport characteristics determines the potential of thermoelectric materials for power generation or refrigeration. This work shows that, different from most of high performance thermoelectric materials with dominant acoustic phonon scattering, the promising ZrNiSn based half‐Heusler thermoelectric solid solutions exhibit an alloy scattering dominated charge transport. A low deformation potential and a low alloy scattering potential are found for the solid solutions, which is beneficial to maintain a relatively high electron mobility despite of the large effective mass, and can be intrinsic favorable features contributing to the noticeably high power factors of ZrNiSn based alloys. A quantitive description of the different phonon scattering mechanisms suggests that the point defect scattering is the most important mechanism that determines the phonon transport process of the solid solutions. The present results indicate that alloying can be an effective approach for such materials systems to enhance thermoelectric figure of merit ZT by reducing phonon thermal conductivity, while minimizing the deterioration of charge mobility due to the low alloy scatteirng potential.
On the analysis of channel-aware schedulers in OFDMA-based networks using FFR

Interference coordination techniques are typically incorporated in OFDMA-based multi-cellular networks in order to preserve high spectral efficiencies over the whole coverage area and to improve the system capacity. Fractional frequency reuse (FFR) and its variants are employed to mitigate the inter-cell interference that particularly suffer cell-edge users. This paper presents an analytical framework that is used to optimise the FFR parameters in OFDMA networks when using channel-aware scheduling policies. The downlink performance evaluation results are obtained as a function of, for instance, the resource block scheduling policy or the density of UEs per cell. Furthermore, different optimisation designs of the FFR component are proposed that allow a tradeoff between throughput performance and fairness by suitably dimensioning the FFR inner and outer areas and the corresponding frequency allocation to each of these regions.
Efficient Nash Computation in Large Population Games with Bounded Influence

We introduce a general representation of large-population games in which each player's influence on the others is centralized and limited, but may otherwise be arbitrary. This representation significantly generalizes the class known as congestion games in a natural way. Our main results are provably correct and efficient algorithms for computing and learning approximate Nash equilibria in this general framework.
Nuclear Accretion in Galaxies of the Local Universe: Clues from Chandra Observations

In order to find an explanation for the radiative quiescence of supermassive black holes in the local universe, the most accurate estimates for a sample of nearby galaxies are collected for the mass of a central black hole (MBH), the nuclear X-ray luminosity LX,nuc, and the circumnuclear hot gas density and temperature, by using Chandra data. The nuclear X-ray luminosity LX,nuc varies by ~3 orders of magnitude and does not show a relationship with MBH or with the Bondi mass accretion rate B; LX,nuc is always much lower than expected if B ends in a standard accretion disk with high radiative efficiency (this instead can be the case of the active nucleus of Cen A). Radiatively inefficient accretion as in the standard advection-dominated accretion flow (ADAF) modeling may explain the low luminosities of a few cases; for others, the predicted luminosity is still too high, and, in terms of Eddington-scaled quantities, it is increasingly higher than that observed for increasing B. Variants of the simple radiatively inefficient scenario including outflow and convection may reproduce the low emission levels observed, since the amount of matter actually accreted is reduced considerably. However, the most promising scenario includes feedback from accretion on the surrounding gas; this has the important advantages of naturally explaining the observed lack of relationship among LX,nuc, MBH, and B, and evading the problem of the fate of the material accumulating in the central galactic regions over cosmological times.
Synchronization of sub-picosecond electron and laser pulses

Sub-picosecond laser-electron synchronization is required to take full advantage of the experimental possibilities arising from the marriage of modern high intensity lasers and high brightness electron beams in the same laboratory. Two particular scenarios stand out in this regard, injection of ultra-short electron pulses in short wavelength laser-driven plasma accelerators, and Compton scattering of laser photons from short electron pulses. Both of these applications demand synchronization, which is sub-picosecond, with tens of femtosecond synchronization implied for next generation experiments. The design of a microwave timing modulator system is now being investigated in more detail. (AIP)