Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
FPGA implementation of a SIMD-based array processor with torus interconnect

Matrix computations are a fundamental tool in scientific and engineering applications. Among many such applications, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that can be effectively computed by matrix-matrix multiplications are being popular and an efficient implementation of CNN is highly important. In this study, we have designed an parallel processor for the matrix computations using torus interconnect topology, and we implemented Cannon's algorithm for matrix-matrix multiply-add. We have evaluated the scalability of the proposed processor on a reconfigurable FPGA platform. More precisely, the designed processor with 8 × 8 functional units with 16 bit floating-point multiply-add unit was evaluated on Cyclone IV FPGA chip, with performance of 27 GFlops. We also implemented CNN calculations on our processor. We compared the matrix based approach and our proposed method. As a result, our method is 25 times faster than the matrix based approach if the processor has 8×8 functional units, image size is 32×32 and filter size is 5 × 5.
Regional Skin Temperature Response to Moderate Aerobic Exercise Measured by Infrared Thermography

Background: Infrared thermography (IRT) does not require contact with the skin, and it is a convenient, reliable and non-invasive technique that can be used for monitoring the skin temperature (TSK). Objectives: The aim of this study was to monitor the variations in the regional TSK during exercise on 28 regions of interest (ROIs) (forehead, face, chest, abdomen, back, lumbar, anterior and posterior neck, and posterior and anterior views of the right and left hands, forearms, upper arms, thighs, and legs) with IRT. Patients and Methods: 12 physically active young males were monitored with IRT during the following three phases: a) 30 minutes before exercise b) while performing one hour of moderate intensity exercise on a treadmill at 60% of the VO2max, and c) 60 minutes after exercise. Results: During pre-exercise, all TSK reached a steady-state (P ≤ 0.05), which ensured adequate thermal stabilisation. At the beginning of exercise, there was a significant reduction in the TSK in most ROIs after 10 minutes of activity, except for the lower limbs (legs and thighs). After one hour of recovery, in the anterior view of the hands and thighs and in the posterior view of the legs, there were significant increases in the TSK compared to pre-exercise. Conclusions: There were significant distinctions in the skin temperature distribution during exercise according to the activity of the area under consideration during exercise, which may be important in the development of physiological models and heat flux analyses for different purposes.
Inflammatory potential of the diet and colorectal tumor risk in persons with Lynch syndrome.

Background: Persons with Lynch syndrome (LS) have high lifetime risk of developing colorectal tumors (CRTs) because of a germline mutation in one of their mismatch repair (MMR) genes. An important process in the development of CRTs is inflammation, which has been shown to be modulated by diet.Objective: We aimed to investigate the association between the inflammatory potential of the diet and the risk of CRTs in persons with LS.Design: We used the dietary intake of 457 persons with LS from a prospective cohort study to calculate the adapted dietary inflammatory index (ADII). The ADII was split into tertiles in which the highest tertile reflects the most proinflammatory potential of the diet. Cox proportional hazard models, with robust sandwich variance estimates to adjust for dependency within families, were used to calculate HRs and 95% CIs of CRTs by ADII tertile. HRs were adjusted for age, smoking status, and education level, and number of colonoscopies as a time-dependent variable. A potential effect measure modification was explored by stratifying the results by mutated MMR gene, sex, and a history of CRTs. We performed sensitivity analyses by repeating the analyses in non-nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) users (n = 315). Results: During a median follow-up time of 59 mo, 200 participants (43.8%) developed CRTs. No significant association was shown between highest compared with lowest ADII tertiles (HR for highest compared with lowest tertiles: 1.37; 95% CI: 0.80, 2.34). Stratification by mutated MMR gene, sex, and CRT history did not show significantly differential associations (P-interactions ≥ 0.64). In non-NSAID users, an HR of 1.60 (95% CI: 0.88, 2.93) for highest compared with lowest tertiles was shown. No significant effect modification was shown in this group either (P-interactions ≥ 0.24). Conclusion: A proinflammatory potential of the diet does not seem to be significantly associated with CRT risk in persons with LS.
Operational drivers affecting credit risk of mutual guarantee institutions

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the drivers influencing the risk of default on mutual guaranteed loans. The authors aim to verify whether default is influenced by the specific business policies of mutual guarantee institutions (MGIs) and to recommend guidelines for directing their operating management. Design/methodology/approach - – The authors analyse the guaranteed portfolios of 19 Italian MGIs and investigate the determinants of the defaulted positions at the end of June 2011. The sample consists of 167,777 guaranteed loans, of which 11,349 are in default. Using regression models, we identify the variables related to the business model of MGIs that are significantly associated with default on their positions. Findings - – The defaulted positions of MGIs are significantly correlated with the type of issued guarantees. This condition should be considered in defining product and price policies. Practical implications - – The authors identify some critical issues in the risk-taking processes of MGIs. The tested hypothesis highlights the opportunities for the optimisation of guaranteed loan portfolios, which is necessary for reducing the profitability/liquidity pressures of these financial institutions and enhancing their efficiency as instruments for mitigating the effects of credit rationing and promoting the revitalisation of small-and medium-sized enterprises. Originality/value - – The results are based on an original and reserved dataset, which is not available in public financial statements or public statistics, but is collected directly from the MGIs that are part of the study.
Cross-sectional study of imatinib plasma trough levels in patients with advanced gastrointestinal stromal tumors: impact of gastrointestinal resection on exposure to imatinib.

PURPOSE Imatinib plasma trough levels (C(min)) have been reported to correlate with treatment outcomes in patients with gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs). We therefore have evaluated the correlation between imatinib C(min) and the clinical characteristics of patients with GIST. PATIENTS AND METHODS Steady-state imatinib C(min) in 107 patients with GIST who were taking imatinib 300 to 800 mg/d was measured. RESULTS In patients treated with imatinib 400 (n = 92), 300 (n = 7), 600 (n = 2), or 800 (n = 11) mg/d, imatinib C(min) was 1,305 +/- 633 ng/mL, 1,452 +/- 830 ng/mL, 1,698 +/- 725 ng/mL, and 3,330 +/- 1,592 ng/mL, respectively. Of the 92 patients treated with 400 mg/d imatinib, 59 patients (63%) were men; the median age was 55 years (range, 28 to 76 years), and the median duration of imatinib use before sampling was 8.8 months (range, 0.5 to 67.6 months). The mean inter- and intrapatient variability rates were 44.7% and 26.5%, respectively. In univariate analyses, high C(min) was correlated with advanced age (P = .02), low creatinine clearance (P = .001), low hemoglobin (P = .03), and low albumin (P < .001) concentrations. Imatinib C(min) was also significantly lower in patients with (n = 18; 942 +/- 330 ng/mL) than without (n = 74; 1,393 +/- 659 ng/mL) major (ie, total or subtotal) gastrectomy (P = .002). In multivariate analysis, albumin (P = .001) concentrations, creatinine clearance (P = .002), and major gastrectomy (P = .003) were significantly correlated with C(min). CONCLUSION In patients with GIST, imatinib C(min) at steady state was significantly associated with albumin concentration, creatinine clearance, and previous major gastrectomy. Although its clinical impact is unclear at present time, monitoring of imatinib C(min) might be particularly important for optimal treatment with imatinib in patients who have undergone major gastrectomy.
In-hospital mortality from femoral shaft fracture depends on the initial delay to fracture fixation and Injury Severity Score: A retrospective cohort study from the NTDB 2002–2006

BACKGROUND Optimal surgical timing for definitive treatment of femur fractures in severely injured patients remains controversial. This study was performed to examine in-hospital mortality for patients with femur fractures with regard to surgical timing, Injury Severity Score (ISS), and age. METHODS The National Trauma Data Bank version 7.0 was used to evaluate in-hospital mortality for patients presenting with unilateral femur fractures. Patients were stratified into four groups by surgical timing (ST) and four groups by ISS. &khgr;2 tests were used to evaluate baseline interrelationships. Binary regression was used to examine the association between time to surgery, ISS score, age, and mortality after adjusting for patient medical comorbidities, and personal demographics. RESULTS A total of 7,540 patients met inclusion criteria, with a 1.4% overall in-hospital mortality rate. For patients with an isolated femur fracture, surgical delay beyond 48 hours was associated with nearly five times greater mortality risk compared with surgery within 12 hours (adjusted relative risk, 4.8; 95% confidence interval, 1.6–14.1). Only severely injured patients (ISS, 26+) had higher associated mortality with no delay in surgical fixation (ST1 < 12 hours) relative to ST2 of 13 hours to 24 hours with an adjusted relative risk of 4.2 (95% confidence interval, 1.0–16.7). The association between higher mortality rates and surgical delay beyond 48 hours was even stronger in the elderly patients. CONCLUSION This study supports the work of previous authors who reported that early definitive fixation of femur fractures is not only beneficial, particularly in the elderly, but also consistent with more recent studies recommending at least 12-hour to 24-hour delay in fixation in severely injured patients to promote better resuscitation. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE Therapeutic study, level III.
EFFECTS OF OPERATIONAL EMPLOYEE SKILLS ON ADVANCED MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY PERFORMANCE

This study employs structured interviews in a field setting to develop an in‐depth understanding of how a specific human resource decision affected manufacturing performance at 30 plants using advanced manufacturing technologies. Initial results suggested that there is no relationship between the skill level of operational employees and the level of performance of the installations. When a measure of “fit” between environmental characteristics and skills was employed, however, there was a significant relationship between the fit measure and performance.
Assignment Messages and Exchanges

“Assignment messages” are messages that parameterize substitutable preferences using a particular linear program. An “assignment exchange” is a simplified Walrasian exchange in which participants are restricted to report only assignment messages. Any pure Nash or e-Nash equilibrium of the simplified mechanism is a Nash or e-Nash equilibrium of the Walrasian mechanism before simplification. With a further restriction to basic assignment messages, the exchange yields integer-valued allocations, thus generalizing the Shapley-Shubik assignment mechanism. Connections are reported between assignment exchanges and ascending multi-product clock auctions, double auctions for a single product, and Vickrey auctions. Applications include some cases of Leontieff complements.
Assessing Demand Artifacts in Consumer Research: An Alternative Perspective

In a recent Insightful article on demand artifacts in consumer research, T. A. Shimp, E. M. Hyatt, and D. J. Snyder, using a 1989 article by J. J. Kellaris and A. D. Cox as backdrop, provided an appraisal of demand artifacts. In this article, we critically evaluate some of the assumptions and conclusions of Shimp et al.'s analysis of the extent to which demand artifacts might explain the 1982 results of G. J. Gorn as analyzed by Kellaris and Cox. In addition, we offer some useful suggestions for minimizing demand problems.
Design Of Smart Robot For Wrist Rehabilitation

Abstract Generally, the rehabilitation process needs a physical interactions between patients and therapists. Based on the principles governing such human-human interactions (HHI), the design of rehabilitation robots received several attempts in order to abstract the HHI in human-robot interaction (HRI). To achieve this goal, the rehabilitation robot should be smart and provides a useful and comprehensive platform to track the patient status. In this paper, a biofeedback-based high fidelity smart robot for wrist rehabilitation is designed. This robot is intended for repetitive exercises without therapist intervention. Hold the two sets of wrist movement: flexion/extension and radial/ulnar derivation. Distinguished by its compact mechanism design, the developed wrist rehabilitation robot (HRR) offers high stiffness with a total absence of any friction and backlash. Based on EMG signal, the smart robot can understand the patient pain degree. Two features extractions are used to estimate the pain level. A fuzzy logic controller is implemented in the LabVIEW-based human-machine interface (HMI) to determine the desired angle and velocity in real time. Parameters and results of each exercise can be stored and operated later in analysis and evolution of patient progress
Noninvasive and real-time assessment of reconstructed functional human endometrium in NOD/SCID/γcnull immunodeficient mice

Human uterine endometrium exhibits unique properties of cyclical regeneration and remodeling throughout reproductive life and also is subject to endometriosis through ectopic implantation of retrogradely shed endometrial fragments during menstruation. Here we show that functional endometrium can be regenerated from singly dispersed human endometrial cells transplanted beneath the kidney capsule of NOD/SCID/γcnull immunodeficient mice. In addition to the endometrium-like structure, hormone-dependent changes, including proliferation, differentiation, and tissue breakdown and shedding (menstruation), can be reproduced in the reconstructed endometrium, the blood to which is supplied predominantly by human vessels invading into the mouse kidney parenchyma. Furthermore, the hormone-dependent behavior of the endometrium regenerated from lentivirally engineered endometrial cells expressing a variant luciferase can be assessed noninvasively and quantitatively by in vivo bioluminescence imaging. These results indicate that singly dispersed endometrial cells have potential applications for tissue reconstitution, angiogenesis, and human–mouse chimeric vessel formation, providing implications for mechanisms underlying the physiological endometrial regeneration during the menstrual cycle and the establishment of endometriotic lesions. This animal system can be applied as the unique model of endometriosis or for other various types of neoplastic diseases with the capacity of noninvasive and real-time evaluation of the effect of therapeutic agents and gene targeting when the relevant cells are transplanted beneath the kidney capsule.
A novel pipeline for motif discovery, pruning and validation in promoter sequences of human tissue specific genes

Identification and analysis of tissue-specific (TS) genes and their regulatory activities play an important role in the understanding of mechanisms of organisms, disease diagnosis and drug design. In this paper, we designed a pipeline for the discovery of promoter motifs for tissue-specific genes. The pipeline consists of three phases: motif searching, motif merging and motif validation. The motif searching phase integrated three algorithms: MEME, AlignACE and Gibbs Sampling. In the second phase, we proposed a motif merging method, which is based on Bayesian probabilistic principles, to reduce redundancies of motifs from the first phase. Lastly, the motif validation phase verified the statistical significance of discovered motifs using a Bayesian Hypothesis Test approach. We performed the analysis on the sequences of promoter regions (-449bp-1000bp) of 4,552 human tissue-specific genes across 82 tissues and 924 housekeeping genes. The distributions of motifs in different promoter regions show that most motifs prefer to be in the proximal region (+500~50bp, -50bp~-500bp) of promoters.
Phonemic and Graphemic Multilingual CTC Based Speech Recognition

Training automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems requires large amounts of data in the target language in order to achieve good performance. Whereas large training corpora are readily available for languages like English, there exists a long tail of languages which do suffer from a lack of resources. One method to handle data sparsity is to use data from additional source languages and build a multilingual system. Recently, ASR systems based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained with connectionist temporal classification (CTC) have gained substantial research interest. In this work, we extended our previous approach towards training CTC-based systems multilingually. Our systems feature a global phone set, based on the joint phone sets of each source language. We evaluated the use of different language combinations as well as the addition of Language Feature Vectors (LFVs). As contrastive experiment, we built systems based on graphemes as well. Systems having a multilingual phone set are known to suffer in performance compared to their monolingual counterparts. With our proposed approach, we could reduce the gap between these mono- and multilingual setups, using either graphemes or phonemes.
Fathers' whereabouts and children's welfare in Malawi

Children's welfare may be affected by the absence of a parent – be it due to migration, divorce or death. These reasons for absence have largely been addressed separately in the literature; we present a unified framework. Using Demographic and Health Survey data from Malawi, we compare welfare indicators for four categories of children: those who live with both parents, and those who live with their mother but whose father is absent due to migration, divorce, or death. We find a clear pattern of welfare differences: children whose father is either present or a migrant are better off, and children whose father is deceased or whose parents are divorced are worse off. Our findings indicate that concern about the welfare of migrants' children might be exaggerated. By contrast, vulnerable children of divorcees are at risk of being overlooked in a policy environment that focuses on orphans.
Regional trade agreements for Mercosur : a comparison between the FTAA and the FTA with the European Union

This paper analyzes the impact on Mercosur of a free trade area in the Americas (FTAA) and a free trade area with the EU. The results show that trade liberalization generates substantial economic gains for Mercosur, although the FTAA option is slightly inferior to that of the FTA with the EU. Hemispheric integration stimulates export specialization in manufacturing industries relative to primary sector industries.
Influence of Family Relationships on Succession Planning and Training: The Importance of Mediating Factors

This study models the influence of family relationships on succession variables, using a sample of 130 participants from 109 family businesses. Results suggest that the effects of family adaptability and family cohesion on succession planning and successor training are determined by the family'S commitment to the business and the quality of the owner-manager and successor relationship. The study finds that the influence of family relationships on administrative behavior in family businesses is not always direct, as was previously assumed, but is mediated by various factors.
Differences in Trading Behavior Across NYSE Specialist Firms

Using a sample of NYSE-listed equities from 1992, this study examines whether market maker performance differs across specialist firms. We find that spreads and depth differ across specialist firms, but the competitiveness of NYSE quotes relative to other exchanges does not appear to be affected by these differences. Differences are also evident in measures of transitory volatility and in the frequency and duration of order-imbalance trading halts. The results suggest that specialists have a significant effect on execution costs, liquidity, and noise in security prices and that these effects are not completely eliminated by competition or the NYSE's monitoring mechanisms. Copyright The American Finance Association 1999.
Suicide gene-mediated sequencing ablation revealed the potential therapeutic mechanism of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiovascular cell patch post-myocardial infarction.

AIMS This study is designed to assess the protective cardiac effects after myocardial infarction (MI) of (i) cardiovascular progenitor cells (PC) differentiated directly into cardiomyocytes (CM) and endothelial cells (ECs) at the injury site, as separable from the effects of (ii) paracrine factors released from PC. RESULTS In vivo: bi-cell patch containing induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived CM and EC (BIC) was transplanted onto the infarcted heart. BIC were transduced with herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase "suicide" gene driven by cardiac NCX1 or endothelial vascular endothelium-cadherin promoter. IGF-1α and VEGF levels released from ischemic tissues were significantly enhanced in the BIC patch treatment group. Heart function, infarction size, and vessel density were significantly improved after BIC patch treatment. These effects were completely abolished in the group given ganciclovir (GCV) at week 1 as a suicide gene activator, and partially abolished in the group given GCV at week 3 as compared with the untreated cell patch group. INNOVATION This study was designed to distinguish between cell-based and noncell-based therapeutic effects of PC lineages after MI. PCs derived from iPSC were genetically modified to express "suicide" gene. iPSC-derived CM and EC were then ablated in situ at week 1 and 3 by intraperitoneal administration of GCV. This enabled direct assessment of the effects of iPSC transplantation on myocardial function and tissue regeneration potential. CONCLUSIONS Data support a mechanism in which iPSC-derived cardiovascular lineages contribute directly to improved cardiac performance and attenuated remodeling. Paracrine factors provide additional support to the restoration of heart function.