Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Accumulation of Endogenous LITAF in Aggresomes

LITAF is a 161 amino acid cellular protein which includes a proline rich N-terminus and a conserved C-terminal domain known as the simple-like domain. Mutations in LITAF have been identified in Charcot-Marie tooth disease, a disease characterized by protein aggregates. Cells transfected with cellular LITAF reveal that LITAF is localized to late endosomes/lysosomes. Here we investigated the intracellular localization of endogenous LITAF. We demonstrated that endogenous LITAF accumulates at a discrete cytoplasmic site in BGMK cells that we identify as the aggresome. To determine the domain within LITAF that is responsible for the localization of LITAF to aggresomes, we created a construct that contained the C-terminal simple-like domain of LITAF and found that this construct also localizes to aggresomes. These data suggest the simple-like domain is responsible for targeting endogenous LITAF to the aggresome.
Representation of Cognitive Reappraisal Goals in Frontal Gamma Oscillations

Recently, numerous efforts have been made to understand the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive regulation of emotion, such as cognitive reappraisal. Many studies have reported that cognitive control of emotion induces increases in neural activity of the control system, including the prefrontal cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and increases or decreases (depending upon the regulation goal) in neural activity of the appraisal system, including the amygdala and the insula. It has been hypothesized that information about regulation goals needs to be processed through interactions between the control and appraisal systems in order to support cognitive reappraisal. However, how this information is represented in the dynamics of cortical activity remains largely unknown. To address this, we investigated temporal changes in gamma band activity (35–55 Hz) in human electroencephalograms during a cognitive reappraisal task that was comprised of three reappraisal goals: to decease, maintain, or increase emotional responses modulated by affect-laden pictures. We examined how the characteristics of gamma oscillations, such as spectral power and large-scale phase synchronization, represented cognitive reappraisal goals. We found that left frontal gamma power decreased, was sustained, or increased when the participants suppressed, maintained, or amplified their emotions, respectively. This change in left frontal gamma power appeared during an interval of 1926 to 2453 ms after stimulus onset. We also found that the number of phase-synchronized pairs of gamma oscillations over the entire brain increased when participants regulated their emotions compared to when they maintained their emotions. These results suggest that left frontal gamma power may reflect cortical representation of emotional states modulated by cognitive reappraisal goals and gamma phase synchronization across whole brain regions may reflect emotional regulatory efforts to achieve these goals. Our study may provide the basis for an electroencephalogram-based neurofeedback system for the cognitive regulation of emotion.
Improving Optical Character Recognition of Finnish Historical Newspapers with a Combination of Fraktur & Antiqua Models and Image Preprocessing

In this paper we describe a method for improving the optical character recognition (OCR) toolkit Tesseract for Finnish historical documents. First we create a model for Finnish Fraktur fonts. Second we test Tesseract with the created Fraktur model and Antiqua model on single images and combinations of images with different image preprocessing methods. Against commercial ABBYY FineReader toolkit our method achieves 27.48% (FineReader 7 or 8) and 9.16% (FineReader 11) improvement on word level.
Requirements trade-offs during UML design

Designs almost always require trade-offs between competing design choices to meet pervasive system dependability requirements (e.g., security, performance and fault tolerance system goals). In some cases, dependability requirements are realized by functionality that cross-cuts designs. Aspect-oriented modeling (AOM) methods allow developers to localize such cross-cutting functionality in design modeling views called aspects. Aspects can be composed with other design views to obtain an integrated view of a design. This paper presents a technique that extends such methods to cover dependability requirements that are not directly realized by functional structures in a design. Performance goals provide examples of such requirements. We also present a trade-off mechanism to rank feasible solutions with respect to requirements priorities between different dependability requirements. The paper applies this technique to an example that has performance, fault-tolerance, and security requirements.
Fluid Phase Separation via Nanochannel Array

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) generate ideas and techniques for creating new devices at the micro/nano scale. This dissertation study designed a gas generator system utilizing nanochannels for phase separation that is useful for micro-pneumatic actuators, micro-valves, and micro-pumps. The new gas generator has the potential to be an integral part of a propulsion system for small-scale satellites. Nano/picosatellites have limited orientation capability partly due to the current limitations of microthruster devices. Development of a self-contained micro propulsion system enables dynamic orbital maneuvering of picoand nano-class satellites. Additionally, the new gas generator utilizes a high efficiency, green propellant that is less harmful to the environment. This dissertation study tested aqueous antifreeze solutions to verify vapor pressures and establish previously unknown kinematic viscosities. A viscometer, developed expressly for this study, measured kinematic viscosity values between 1E-2 and 1E-4 m/s for water solutions mixed with propylene glycol, ethylene glycol, methanol, and glycerol. CubeSats, 10-centimeter cube satellites, are volume limited, and high strain expansion of water during crystallization could destroy the structure. Validation of the freezing point depression and measurement of previously unknown percent expansion with increasing concentration are valuable for setting safe design specifications. A 7.5 %w/w propylene glycol-water solution reduces the overall expansion by 2% while 20 %w/w PG reduces the expansion 4%. Potassium hydroxide etched silicon micro/nanochannels regulated vaporization of aqueous propylene glycol to a vacuum environment. Sequential still images captured with a Basler Scout camera were used to measure mass flow rates, representative of Washburn capillary flow. Magnitude of single channel flow rates ranged from 1E-10 mol/s to 1E-8 mol/s for 600nm channels up to 12μm channels, respectively. Although the flow rate increased using nanochannel arrays, it was 35% slower than expected based on single nanochannel measurements. A system utilizing nanochannel arrays for fluid phase separation, with propylene glycol as the propellant, is feasible in a low-cost, green, non-toxic, and non-pressurized CubeSat propulsion system. Depressing the freezing point of water by adding antifreeze creates a wider liquid working range, decreases power requirements, but also maintains appreciable flow rates for thrust generation (micro-millinewton). Successful nanofluidic research on an aqueous antifreeze solution is foundational for future propulsion system research and pushes CubeSats in the right direction.
A semi-algebraic approach to multiuser beamforming and power control

The problem of joint multiuser beam-forming and power control can be reduced to the search of the minimal-norm element over a set of polynomial roots. This problem belongs to the field of semialgebraic geometry. In this paper we use semialgebraic techniques to show that the optimal power allocation is unique
Body-terrain interaction affects large bump traversal of insects and legged robots

Small animals and robots must often rapidly traverse large bump-like obstacles when moving through complex 3D terrains, during which, in addition to leg-ground contact, their body inevitably comes into physical contact with the obstacles. However, we know little about the performance limits of large bump traversal and how body-terrain interaction affects traversal. To address these, we challenged the discoid cockroach and an open-loop six-legged robot to dynamically run into a large bump of varying height to discover the maximal traversal performance, and studied how locomotor modes and traversal performance are affected by body-terrain interaction. Remarkably, during rapid running, both the animal and the robot were capable of dynamically traversing a bump much higher than its hip height (up to 4 times the hip height for the animal and 3 times for the robot, respectively) at traversal speeds typical of running, with decreasing traversal probability with increasing bump height. A stability analysis using a novel locomotion energy landscape model explained why traversal was more likely when the animal or robot approached the bump with a low initial body yaw and a high initial body pitch, and why deflection was more likely otherwise. Inspired by these principles, we demonstrated a novel control strategy of active body pitching that increased the robot’s maximal traversable bump height by 75%. Our study is a major step in establishing the framework of locomotion energy landscapes to understand locomotion in complex 3D terrains.
How Structure Determines Correlations in Neuronal Networks

Networks are becoming a ubiquitous metaphor for the understanding of complex biological systems, spanning the range between molecular signalling pathways, neural networks in the brain, and interacting species in a food web. In many models, we face an intricate interplay between the topology of the network and the dynamics of the system, which is generally very hard to disentangle. A dynamical feature that has been subject of intense research in various fields are correlations between the noisy activity of nodes in a network. We consider a class of systems, where discrete signals are sent along the links of the network. Such systems are of particular relevance in neuroscience, because they provide models for networks of neurons that use action potentials for communication. We study correlations in dynamic networks with arbitrary topology, assuming linear pulse coupling. With our novel approach, we are able to understand in detail how specific structural motifs affect pairwise correlations. Based on a power series decomposition of the covariance matrix, we describe the conditions under which very indirect interactions will have a pronounced effect on correlations and population dynamics. In random networks, we find that indirect interactions may lead to a broad distribution of activation levels with low average but highly variable correlations. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in networks with distance dependent connectivity. In contrast, networks with highly connected hubs or patchy connections often exhibit strong average correlations. Our results are particularly relevant in view of new experimental techniques that enable the parallel recording of spiking activity from a large number of neurons, an appropriate interpretation of which is hampered by the currently limited understanding of structure-dynamics relations in complex networks.
Localizing near and far field acoustic sources with distributed microhone arrays

In this paper, we consider near-field acoustic source localization using distributed microphone arrays. Range differences (RDs) are estimated using a recently proposed joint direction of arrival (DOA) and range estimator. The RDs are used to estimate the location of an acoustic source using a recently proposed cone-based localization method. The performance of the proposed localization method is compared to generalized cross-correlation with phase transform, and a pitch-based time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimator, using synthetic and real signals. Results show a decrease in the error of the estimated position when joint DOA and range estimation is used for RD estimation.
Definition of Accurate Reference Synchrophasors for Static and Dynamic Characterization of PMUs

The calibration of phasor measurement units (PMUs) consists of comparing coordinated universal time time-aligned phasors (synchrophasors) measured by the PMU under test, against reference synchrophasors generated through a PMU calibrator. The IEEE Standard C37.118–2011 and its latest amendment (IEEE Std) describe compliance tests for static and dynamic conditions, and indicate the relative limits in terms of accuracy. In this context, this paper focuses on the definition and accuracy assessment of the reference synchrophasors in the test conditions defined by the above IEEE Std. In the first part of this paper, we describe the characterization of a nonlinear least-squares fitting algorithm used to determine the parameters of these reference synchrophasors. For this analysis, we deploy the proposed algorithm in a PMU calibrator and characterize the algorithm performance within the actual hardware implementation for both static and dynamic test conditions. More specifically, we generate reference waveforms through a highly stable high-resolution digital-to-analog converter and evaluate how the algorithm parameters (observation interval length and sampling frequency) affect the solution accuracy. In the second part, we discuss on the appropriateness of the synchrophasor model in the evaluation of PMU performance under step test conditions. In this regard, we propose an alternative time-domain approach to assess the synchrophasor estimate during transient events.
Heterogeneous Natural Language Processing Tools via Language Processing Chains

One of the most recent developments in NLP is the emergence of linguistic annotation metasystems which make use of existing processing tools and implement pipelined architecture. In this paper we describe a system that offers a new perspective in exploiting NLP meta-systems by providing a common processing framework. This framework supports most of common NLP tasks by chaining tools that are able to communicate on the basis of common formats. As a demonstration of the effectiveness of the system to manage heterogeneous NLP tools, we developed an English processing chain, pipelining OpenNLP-based and C++ NLP implementations. Furthermore, we conducted experiments to test the stability and measure the performance of the English processing chain. A baseline processing chain for the Bulgarian language illustrates the capabilities of the system to support and manage processing chains for more languages.
Barriers: friend or foe?

Modern garbage collectors rely on read and write barriers imposed on heap accesses by the mutator, to keep track of references between different regions of the garbage collected heap, and to synchronize actions of the mutator with those of the collector. It has been a long-standing untested assumption that barriers impose significant overhead to garbage-collected applications. As a result, researchers have devoted effort to development of optimization approaches for elimination of unnecessary barriers, or proposed new algorithms for garbage collection that avoid the need for barriers while retaining the capability for independent collection of heap partitions. On the basis of the results presented here, we dispel the assumption that barrier overhead should be a primary motivator for such efforts. We present a methodology for precise measurement of mutator overheads for barriers associated with mutator heap accesses. We provide a taxonomy of different styles of barrier and measure the cost of a range of popular barriers used for different garbage collectors within Jikes RVM. Our results demonstrate that barriers impose surprisingly low cost on the mutator, though results vary by architecture. We found that the average overhead for a reasonable generational write barrier was less than 2% on average, and less than 6% in the worst case. Furthermore, we found that the average overhead of a read barrier consisting of just an unconditional mask of the low order bits read on the PowerPC was only 0.85%, while on the AMD it was 8.05%. With both read and write barriers, we found that second order locality effects were sometimes more important than the overhead of the barriers themselves, leading to counter-intuitive speedups in a number of situations.
Smooth Path Planning for Intelligent Wheelchair Based on Human-Machine Interaction

Path planning is a complicated and challenge problem in mobile robotics if a mobile robot is expected operated in the real world. Human-machine interaction (HMI) could play an important role in this process and the robot can get help from the user during path planning. In this paper, we introduce a smooth path planning method for an intelligent wheelchair (IW) based on HMI. The user first presents some key points on a known environment map to the system via HCI. Then these key points are used by IW as path skeleton points for generating a smooth collision-free path. Under the cooperation of the user and IW, smooth path planning becomes easy and convenient. Simulation results show that the proposed method works well and very convenient for the user
Mobile video stream monitoring system

IMVS (Intelligent Mobile Video Stream Monitoring System) is a mobile video surveillance system. The objective of IMVS is to design a high performance video stream monitoring system in a mobile computing environment. In particular, the technical questions to be addressed are: (1) how to minimize the amount of video signals to be transmitted between the front-end mobile device and the backend server over the mobile network; and (2) how to divide the jobs to be performed between the front-end and backend processes so that the workload at the front-end mobile device can be maintained within its processing capacity.
Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator Therapy for Prevention of Sudden Death in Patients With Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy/Dysplasia

Background—Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy/dysplasia (ARVC/D) is a condition associated with the risk of sudden death (SD). Methods and Results—We conducted a multicenter study of the impact of the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) for prevention of SD in 132 patients (93 males and 39 females, age 40±15 years) with ARVC/D. Implant indications were a history of cardiac arrest in 13 patients (10%), sustained ventricular tachycardia in 82 (62%), syncope in 21 (16%), and other in 16 (12%). During a mean follow-up of 39±25 months, 64 patients (48%) had appropriate ICD interventions, 21 (16%) had inappropriate interventions, and 19 (14%) had ICD-related complications. Fifty-three (83%) of the 64 patients with appropriate interventions received antiarrhythmic drug therapy at the time of first ICD discharge. Programmed ventricular stimulation was of limited value in identifying patients at risk of tachyarrhythmias during the follow-up (positive predictive value 49%, negative predictive value 54%). Four patients (3%) died, and 32 (24%) experienced ventricular fibrillation/flutter that in all likelihood would have been fatal in the absence of the device. At 36 months, the actual patient survival rate was 96% compared with the ventricular fibrillation/flutter-free survival rate of 72% (P <0.001). Patients who received implants because of ventricular tachycardia without hemodynamic compromise had a significantly lower incidence of ventricular fibrillation/flutter (log rank=0.01). History of cardiac arrest or ventricular tachycardia with hemodynamic compromise, younger age, and left ventricular involvement were independent predictors of ventricular fibrillation/flutter. Conclusions—In patients with ARVC/D, ICD therapy provided life-saving protection by effectively terminating life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias. Patients who were prone to ventricular fibrillation/flutter could be identified on the basis of clinical presentation, irrespective of programmed ventricular stimulation outcome.
Exonic remnants of whole-genome duplication reveal cis-regulatory function of coding exons

Using a comparative genomics approach to reconstruct the fate of genomic regulatory blocks (GRBs) and identify exonic remnants that have survived the disappearance of their host genes after whole-genome duplication (WGD) in teleosts, we discover a set of 38 candidate cis-regulatory coding exons (RCEs) with predicted target genes. These elements demonstrate evolutionary separation of overlapping protein-coding and regulatory information after WGD in teleosts. We present evidence that the corresponding mammalian exons are still under both coding and non-coding selection pressure, are more conserved than other protein coding exons in the host gene and several control sets, and share key characteristics with highly conserved non-coding elements in the same regions. Their dual function is corroborated by existing experimental data. Additionally, we show examples of human exon remnants stemming from the vertebrate 2R WGD. Our findings suggest that long-range cis-regulatory inputs for developmental genes are not limited to non-coding regions, but can also overlap the coding sequence of unrelated genes. Thus, exonic regulatory elements in GRBs might be functionally equivalent to those in non-coding regions, calling for a re-evaluation of the sequence space in which to look for long-range regulatory elements and experimentally test their activity.
The Application of Nuclear Medicine

Currently, the practice of nuclear medicine in modern countries comprises a large number of procedures. It is applied to study function of organs/body systems, to visualize, to characterize, and to quantify the functional state of lesions and for targeted radionuclide therapy. This overview presents all kinds of application in nuclear medicine services. Instrumentation and radioactive/radiolabeled substances are the basic components for application. Biotechnology contributes to the development and production of biomolecules used in radiopharmaceuticals. As a diagnostic modality, imaging depicts radioactivity distribution as a function of time. Hybrid imaging provides more precise localization and definition of le-sions as well as molecular imaging cross validation. Counting tests study invivoorgan functions externally or assess analytes in the biologic samples. Radiopharmaceutical therapy can be applied directly into the lesion or targeted systemically. Nanotechnology facilitates targeting and opens the development of bimodal techniques. In addition, neutron application contributes to the advancement of nuclear medicine services, such as neutron activation analysis, neutron teletherapy and neutron capture therapy.