Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
GEF-H1 controls focal adhesion signaling that regulates mesenchymal stem cell lineage commitment

ABSTRACT Focal adhesions (FAs) undergo maturation that culminates in size and composition changes that modulate adhesion, cytoskeleton remodeling and differentiation. Although it is well recognized that stimuli for osteogenesis of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) drive FA maturation, actin organization and stress fiber polarization, the extent to which FA-mediated signals regulated by the FA protein composition specifies MSC commitment remains largely unknown. Here, we demonstrate that, upon dexamethasone (osteogenic induction) treatment, guanine nucleotide exchange factor H1 (GEF-H1, also known as Rho guanine nucleotide exchange factor 2, encoded by ARHGEF2) is significantly enriched in FAs. Perturbation of GEF-H1 inhibits FA formation, anisotropic stress fiber orientation and MSC osteogenesis in an actomyosin-contractility-independent manner. To determine the role of GEF-H1 in MSC osteogenesis, we explore the GEF-H1-modulated FA proteome that reveals non-muscle myosin-II heavy chain-B (NMIIB, also known as myosin-10, encoded by MYH10) as a target of GEF-H1 in FAs. Inhibition of targeting NMIIB into FAs suppresses FA formation, stress fiber polarization, cell stiffness and osteogenic commitments in MSCs. Our data demonstrate a role for FA signaling in specifying MSC commitment.
A Landscape of the New Dark Silicon Design Regime

Because of the breakdown of Dennard scaling, the percentage of a silicon chip that can switch at full frequency drops exponentially with each process generation. This utilization wall forces designers to ensure that, at any point in time, large fractions of their chips are effectively "dark silicon"--that is, significantly underclocked or idle for large periods of time. As exponentially larger fractions of a chip's transistors become dark, silicon area becomes an exponentially cheaper resource relative to power and energy consumption. This shift is driving a new class of architectural techniques that "spend" area to "buy" energy efficiency. All these techniques seek to introduce new forms of heterogeneity into the computational stack. This article begins by examining four promising directions--the "four horsemen"--that have emerged as top contenders for thriving in the dark silicon age. Each direction carries with its virtues deep-seated restrictions that require a careful understanding of the underlying trade-offs and benefits. Furthermore, the author proposes a set of evolutionary dark silicon design principles and examines how one of the "darkest" computing architectures of all, the human brain, trades off energy and area in ways that provide potential insights into more revolutionary directions for computer architecture.
Adverse Reactions Associated With Studying Persons Recently Exposed to Mass Urban Disaster

This study assesses the psychological consequences of participation in a mental health study among people recently exposed to the September 11 attacks. Using cross-sectional telephone surveys, we interviewed random samples of English-speaking or Spanish-speaking adults living in New York City during the attacks 1 year after this event. Altogether, 2,368 people completed the surveys, including a random sample of 1,173 respondents who received mental health services after the attacks. Results indicated that 15% of New Yorkers found some of the survey questions stressful, whereas 28% of those who sought treatment found this to be the case. However, less than 2% reported being upset at survey completion, and among these persons, only four people consented to speak to the study's mental health consultant. Although the majority of those expressing adverse reactions had sought postdisaster treatment, even among these subjects, only 3% were still upset at survey completion, and 2% wanted more information about counseling services. In addition, more than 70% of participants expressed positive sentiments about survey participation. Predictive models indicated that respondents who met study criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, or anxiety were more likely to find questions stressful, with people having posttraumatic stress disorder or depression the most likely to be upset and to consent to psychiatric consultation at completion. We suggest that, with the proper safeguards, research with persons exposed to a resent mass urban disaster generally can be conducted safely and effectively.
An algorithm for reusable uninteresting rules in association rule mining

In this paper, we present a new framework for reusable association rule mining based on chi2 and odds ratio. We start at mining the association rules using standard Apriori algorithm. The strong rules are defined as association rules, while the weak rules will be evaluated by our proposed method. Firstly, the weak rules must be converted to 2 times 2 contingency table. We then compute the relationship between variables using chi2 and odds ratio. If the weak rules are related to each other with positive or negative relationship, then the weak rules will also be determined as association rules. Our system is evaluated with experiments on the crime data.
Approximating TSP on metrics with bounded global growth

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a canonical NP-complete problem which is known to be MAX-SNP hard even on (high-dimensional) Euclidean metrics [39]. In order to circumvent this hardness, researchers have been developing approximation schemes for low-dimensional metrics [4, 38] (under different notions of dimension). However, a feature of most current notions of metric dimension is that they are "local": the definitions require <i>every</i> local neighborhood to be well-behaved. In this paper, we consider the case <i>when the metric is less restricted: it has a few "dense" regions, but is "well-behaved on the average"? </i> To this end, we define a global notion of dimension which we call the <i>correlation dimension</i> (denoted by dim<sub><i>C</i></sub>), which generalizes the popular notion of doubling dimension. In fact, the class of metrics with dim<sub><i>C</i></sub> = <i>O</i>(1) not only contains all doubling metrics, but also contains some metrics containing uniform submetrics of size √<i>n</i>. We first show, using a somewhat "local" argument, that one can solve TSP on these metrics in time 2<sup><i>O</i>(√<i>n</i>)</sup>; we then take advantage of the global nature of TSP (and the global nature of our definition) to give a (1 + ε)-approximation algorithm that runs in <i>sub-exponential time</i>: i.e., in 2<sup><i>O</i>(<i>n</i>Δε-4dimC)</sup>-time for every constant 0 < Δ < 1.
Audio constrained particle filter based visual tracking

We present a robust and efficient audio-visual (AV) approach to speaker tracking in a room environment. A challenging problem with visual tracking is to deal with occlusions (caused by the limited field of view of cameras or by other speakers). Another challenge is associated with the particle filtering (PF) algorithm, commonly used for visual tracking, which requires a large number of particles to ensure the distribution is well modelled. In this paper, we propose a new method of fusing audio into the PF based visual tracking. We use the direction of arrival angles (DOAs) of the audio sources to reshape the typical Gaussian noise distribution of particles in the propagation step and to weight the observation model in the measurement step. Experiments on AV16.3 datasets show the advantage of our proposed method over the baseline PF method for tracking occluded speakers with a significantly reduced number of particles.
Estudo comparativo da Aptidão Aeróbia e do IMC em jovens adolescentes que cursam o Ensino Secundário, provenientes do meio rural e urbano

X Abstract This study aims to examine and compare the levels of aerobic fitness and body mass index (BMI) in young adolescents who attend the Secondary School, from rural and urban areas. The study sample consists of 181 individuals who attend the Secondary School, aged between 15 and 20 years. These individuals are from an urban area (n = 92) and from a rural area (n = 89). For body composition analysis was used body mass index (BMI) and the values of the cutoff point for overweight and obesity presented by Cole et al. (2000). For the evaluation of aerobic fitness was used the "Run 1 Mile" test presented on the battery of tests Fitnessgram (TCIFAR, 2002). The results show that: i) individuals in this sample, have higher levels of aerobic fitness compared with similar studies in the past; ii) the individuals in this sample, present values of the incidence of overweight and obesity of 19.9%; iii) there is an association between a level of aerobic fitness within the zone of healthy fitness and male; iv) there is an association between female and BMI values corresponding to a level normponderal; v) there is an association between a level of aerobic fitness within the zone of healthy fitness and rural areas; vi) there is an association between the BMI values corresponding to a level of normponderal and individuals in rural areas; vii) there is an association between the BMI values corresponding to a level normponderal and levels of aerobic fitness within the zone of healthy physical fitness; KEY-WORDS: BMI, AEROBIC FITNESS, URBAN AREA, RURAL AREA Lista de Abreviaturas XI Lista de Abreviaturas e Simbolos IMC Indice de Massa Corporal. H (1,2,3,.) Hipoteses. ZNI Zona com Necessidade de Incremento. ZSAF Zona Saudavel Aptidao Fisica. ZSAF_Milha Niveis de aptidao fisica referentes ao resultados obtidos na prova “Corrida 1 Milha”. ZSAF_IMC Valores de IMC segundo a caracterizacao dos pontos de corte estabelecidos por Cole et al. (2000). CAPITULO I Introducao
Assessment of strategies to manage or avoid perceived threats among panic disorder patients: the Texas Safety Maneuver Scale (TSMS)

Safety maneuvers are defined as strategies people use to manage or avoid their perceived threats. The present study presents the development of the Texas Safety Maneuver Scale (TSMS), an instrument that assesses the pattern and extent of use of safety maneuvers in formerly treated panic patients. Ex-patients (N=105), who had completed cognitive behavioral treatment at the Anxiety Disorders Laboratory of the University of Texas retrospectively rated their use of safety maneuvers at the time of their intake evaluation. Scores on measures of anxiety, fear of fear, agoraphobic avoidance and depression from intake records were used to examine the reliability and validity of the TSMS. Exploratory factor analysis and alpha reliability analyses indicated high internal consistency, and revealed meaningful subscales. The pattern of correlations between the TSMS and the selected self-report measures supported its convergent and discriminant validity. Use of safety maneuvers is negatively associated with perceived ability to cope with panic attacks, supporting the proposed detrimental nature of use of safety maneuvers. Patients with mild agoraphobic avoidance frequently rely on more subtle forms of within-situation avoidance behaviors that need to be addressed in treatment. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
News Video Retrieval using Multi-modal Query-dependent Model and Parallel Text Corpus

This paper describes a fully automated news video retrieval system that is capable of retrieving relevant shots using a multimedia query. The emphasis we adopted is three-fold. First, we explore the use multi-modal features such as speaker identification, video OCR, face recognition and Name-entities in ASR text, along with pseudo relevance feedback, for video retrieval. Second, we employ query modeling similar to that used in text Question-Answering (QA) to classify the text query into different query-classes and use heuristics and pseudo relevance feedback to assign feature-weights to each query-class. Third, we perform query expansion on a parallel set of news articles online to enhance the recall of the retrieval process. The initial results from TRECVID 2004 evaluation indicate that the use of multimodal query-class dependent model, coupled with external knowledge source, is effective in news video retrieval.
Learning end-to-end application QoS from openflow switch statistics

We use statistical learning to estimate end-to-end QoS metrics from device statistics, collected from a server cluster and an OpenFlow network. The results from our testbed, which runs a video-on-demand service and a key-value store, demonstrate that the learned models can estimate QoS metrics like frame rate or response time with errors bellow 10% for a given client. Interestingly, we find that service-level QoS metrics seem "encoded" in network statistics and it suffices to collect OpenFlow per port statistics to achieve accurate estimation at small overhead for data collection and model computation.
Multi-camera indoor video processing for context awareness

In this paper a system is presented able to acquire images from multiple indoor network cameras and extract contextual information about persons detected within the considered environment. Distributed system architecture allows one to process images from several cameras on a network of PCs. Objects tracking and posture classification techniques are used in order to extract contextual information from video. These information are stored in a remote database that is accessed from an higher level application that is able to interact with users' mobile phones for delivering context-based-services. In particular, proposed scene understanding techniques have been used for implementing an automatic terminal silencing service in case of a meeting and a sos-call in case of a falling person.
Flexible use of cloud resources through profit maximization and price discrimination

Modern frameworks, such as Hadoop, combined with abundance of computing resources from the cloud, offer a significant opportunity to address long standing challenges in distributed processing. Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds reduce the investment cost of renting a large data center while distributed processing frameworks are capable of efficiently harvesting the rented physical resources. Yet, the performance users get out of these resources varies greatly because the cloud hardware is shared by all users. The value for money cloud consumers achieve renders resource sharing policies a key player in both cloud performance and user satisfaction. In this paper, we employ microeconomics to direct the allotment of cloud resources for consumption in highly scalable master-worker virtual infrastructures. Our approach is developed on two premises: the cloud-consumer always has a budget and cloud physical resources are limited. Using our approach, the cloud administration is able to maximize per-user financial profit. We show that there is an equilibrium point at which our method achieves resource sharing proportional to each user's budget. Ultimately, this approach allows us to answer the question of how many resources a consumer should request from the seemingly endless pool provided by the cloud.
Face Recognition Using Kernel PrincipalComponent Analysis

Face recognition is attracting much attention in the society of network multimedia information access. Areas such as network security, content indexing and retrieval, and video compression benefits from face recognition technology because people are the center of attention in a lot of video. Network access control via face recognition not only makes hackers virtually impossible to steal one's password, but also increases the user-friendliness in human-computer interaction. The data in face images are distributed in a complex manner due to the variation of light intensity, facial expression and pose. In this paper the Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) is used to recognize the faces. A Gaussian model of skin segmentation method is applied here to exclude the global features such as beard, eyebrow, moustache, etc. both training and test images are randomly selected from four different data bases to improve the training. The experimental results show that the proposed framework is efficient for recognizing the humanfaces.
Speech Audiometry: Nonsense Monosyllabic Lists in Modern Greek

Results: A nonsense monosyllabic speech audiometry test for speakers of Modern Greek has been developed. The test material consists of two lists, each of which contains 50 open-set monosyllabic combinations. The lists satisfied the criteria of equal phonemic balance, composition of Modern Greek speech, phonemic differentiation, and equal average difficulty. Statistical analysis of the results revealed no statistical significant differences among the lists at the 0.05 level.
A σ28-Regulated Nonflagella Gene Contributes to Virulence of Campylobacter jejuni 81-176

ABSTRACT A Campylobacter jejuni 81-176 mutant in Cj0977 was fully motile but reduced >3 logs compared to the parent in invasion of intestinal epithelial cells in vitro. The mutant was also attenuated in a ferret diarrheal disease model. Expression of Cj0977 protein was dependent on a minimal flagella structure.
Synchronization of motor-unit firings in several human muscles.

1. Synchronization of concurrently active motor-unit firings was studied in six human muscles performing isometric constant-force contractions at 30% of the maximal level. The myoelectric signal was detected with a quadrifilar needle electrode and was decomposed into its constituent motor-unit action-potential trains with the Precision Decomposition technique, whose accuracy has been proven previously. 2. Synchronization was considered as the tendency of two motor units to fire at fixed time intervals with respect to each other more often than would be expected if the motor units fired independently. A rigorous statistical technique was used to measure the presence of peaks in the cross-interval histogram of pairs of motor-unit action-potential trains. The location of the center of peak as well as their width and amplitude were measured. A synch index was developed to measure the percentage of firings that were synchronized. The percentage of concurrently active motor-unit pairs that contained synchronized firings was measured. 3. Synchronization of motor-unit firings was observed to occur in two modalities. The short-term modality was seen as a peak in the cross-interval histogram centered about zero-time delay (0.5 +/- 2.9 ms, mean +/- SD) and with an average width of 4.5 +/- 2.5 ms. The long-term modality was seen as a peak centered at latencies ranging from 8 to 76 ms. On the average, the peaks of the long-term synchronization were 36% lower but had approximately the same width as the peaks for the short-term synchronization. Short-term synchronization was seen in 60% of the motor-unit paris, whereas long-term synchronization was seen in 10% of the pairs. 4. Short-term synchronization occurred in bursts of consecutive firings, ranging in number from 1 to 10, with 91% of all synchronized firing occurring in groups of 1 or 2; and the bursts of discharges appeared at sporadic times during the contraction. 5. The amount of synchronization in motor-unit pairs was found to be low. In the six muscles that were tested, an average of 8.0% of all the firings were short-term synchronized, and an average of 1.0% were long-term synchronized. The synch index was statistically indistinguishable (P = 0.07-0.89) among the different muscles and among 9 of the 11 subjects tested. 6. Sixty percent of concurrently active motor-unit pairs displayed short-term synchronization, 10% of the pairs displayed long-term synchronization, and 8% displayed both modalities. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Isospectrality of spherical MHD dynamo operators: Pseudo-hermiticity and a no-go theorem

The isospectrality problem is studied for the operator of the spherical hydromagnetic α2-dynamo. It is shown that this operator is formally pseudo-Hermitian (J-symmetric) and lives in a Krein space. Based on the J-symmetry, an operator intertwining Ansatz with first-order differential intertwining operators is tested for its compatibility with the structure of the α2-dynamo operator matrix. An intrinsic structural inconsistency is obtained in the set of associated matrix Riccati equations. This inconsistency is interpreted as a no-go theorem which forbids the construction of isospectral α2-dynamo operator classes with the help of first-order differential intertwining operators.
Hierarchical Image Partitioning using Combinatorial Maps

We present a hierarchical partitioning of images using a pairwise similarity function on a combinatorial map based representation. We used the idea of minimal spanning tree to fi nd region borders quickly and effortlessly in a bottom-up way, based on local differences in a color space. The result is a hierarchy of partitions with multiple resolutions suitable for further goal driven analysis. The algorithm can handle large variation and gradient intensity in images. Dual graph pyramid representations lack the explicit encoding of edge orientation around vertices i.e they lack an explicit encoding of the orientation of planes, existing in combinatorial maps. Moreover with combinatorial maps, the dual must not be explicitly represented because one map is enough to fully characterize the partition.
1-point RANSAC for EKF-based Structure from Motion

Recently, classical pairwise Structure From Motion (SfM) techniques have been combined with non-linear global optimization (Bundle Adjustment, BA) over a sliding window to recursively provide camera pose and feature location estimation from long image sequences. Normally called Visual Odometry, these algorithms are nowadays able to estimate with impressive accuracy trajectories of hundreds of meters; either from an image sequence (usually stereo) as the only input, or combining visual and propioceptive information from inertial sensors or wheel odometry.
Efficient single-chip implementation of SHA-384 and SHA-512

The rapid developments in the communications industry over the last decade have led to an escalation in the amount of sensitive data being transmitted over the Internet. This has resulted in an increased awareness of the need to provide security measures. Authentication is one such security measure. A novel highly efficient single-chip hardware design of the SHA-384 and SHA-512 authentication algorithms is described in this paper. The compact implementation achieves a throughput of 479 Mbits/sec utilising a shift register design approach and look-up tables (LUTs). This is believed to be the first SHA-384/SHA-512 hardware implementation to be reported in the literature.
Static frequency divider featuring reduced circuit complexity by utilizing resonant tunneling diodes in combination with HEMTs

A static frequency divider constructed with resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) in combination with HEMTs is proposed and demonstrated. The circuit complexity is reduced drastically. The proposed circuit is fabricated using InP-based RTD/HEMT monolithic integration technology. Proper operation is demonstrated at room temperature by a quasi-static test pattern. The circuit includes two sub-circuits which behave like D-latches. Each sub-circuit consists of only three components. This number of components is one fifth of that required to construct a D-latch using conventional SCFL technology. The strong nonlinear I-V characteristics of RTD's are fully utilized for this reduction.