Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Computational dissection of human episodic memory reveals mental process-specific genetic profiles

Significance Human memory is a highly heritable and complex trait that is the outcome of several neurobiologically distinct mental processes, such as learning, memory maintenance, and emotional modulation of memory strength. Such processes, which are not always amenable to direct observation, can be dissociated using computational models. Here we provide converging evidence linking computational model parameters and related behavioral and neuroimaging phenotypes to sets of biologically related genes in several populations of healthy young and elderly adults. Our findings suggest that distinct genetic profiles underlie specific mental processes of human episodic memory. Understanding the genetic and neural bases of such processes is essential for the development of novel therapeutic approaches that could lead to a better treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. Episodic memory performance is the result of distinct mental processes, such as learning, memory maintenance, and emotional modulation of memory strength. Such processes can be effectively dissociated using computational models. Here we performed gene set enrichment analyses of model parameters estimated from the episodic memory performance of 1,765 healthy young adults. We report robust and replicated associations of the amine compound SLC (solute-carrier) transporters gene set with the learning rate, of the collagen formation and transmembrane receptor protein tyrosine kinase activity gene sets with the modulation of memory strength by negative emotional arousal, and of the L1 cell adhesion molecule (L1CAM) interactions gene set with the repetition-based memory improvement. Furthermore, in a large functional MRI sample of 795 subjects we found that the association between L1CAM interactions and memory maintenance revealed large clusters of differences in brain activity in frontal cortical areas. Our findings provide converging evidence that distinct genetic profiles underlie specific mental processes of human episodic memory. They also provide empirical support to previous theoretical and neurobiological studies linking specific neuromodulators to the learning rate and linking neural cell adhesion molecules to memory maintenance. Furthermore, our study suggests additional memory-related genetic pathways, which may contribute to a better understanding of the neurobiology of human memory.
Experimental investigation on the enhancement of Mode I fracture toughness of adhesive bonded joints by electrospun nanofibers

ABSTRACT The use of an electrospun nylon nanofibrous mat at the interface between adjacent plies of a composite laminate is a promising mean to improve the delamination strength, as the nanomat acts a reinforcing web enabling a ply-to-ply bridging. This kind of reinforcement can be potentially used in other applications, such as adhesive bonding, where it may also work as adhesive carrier. The present work is therefore aimed at analysing the potential of an electrospun polymeric nanomat as adhesive carrier and reinforcing web in adhesive bonding. The adhesive is used to pre-impregnate a nylon nanofibrous mat that is then placed at the interface between two metal pieces and cured. The effectiveness of this procedure is evaluated by comparing of the mode-I fracture toughness measured 2024-T3 aluminum alloy DCB (Double Cantilever Beam) specimen bonded using a two-part epoxy resin with and without the nanomat.
P(NIPAAM–co‐HEMA) thermoresponsive hydrogels: an alternative approach for muscle cell sheet engineering

Loss of skeletal muscle tissue caused by traumatic injury or damage due to myopathies produces a deficit of muscle function for which there is still no clinical treatment. Transplantation of myogenic cells, themselves or combined with materials, has been proposed to increase the regenerative capacity of skeletal muscle but it is hampered by many limitations, such as low cell survival and engraftment or immunological reaction and low biocompatibility of the exogenous materials. Recently, myoblast sheet engineering, obtained with thermoresponsive culture dishes, has attracted attention as a new technique for muscle damage treatment. For this purpose, a series of thermoresponsive hydrogels, constituted by poly(N‐isopropylacrylamide‐co‐2‐hydroxyethylmethacrylate) [p(NIPAAM‐co‐HEMA)] were synthesized by a simple and inexpensive free‐radical polymerization of the two co‐monomers with a redox initiator. Different ratios of N‐isopropylacrylamide (NIPAAm) and 2‐hydroxyethylmethacrylate (HEMA) have been examined to evaluate the effects on physicochemical, mechanical and optical hydrogel properties. The murine muscle cell line C2C12 has been exploited to test the cytotoxicity of the thermoresponsive hydrogels, depending on different synthesis conditions. In this study, we have identified a thermoresponsive hydrogel that allows cell adhesion and viability, together with the detachment of viable sheet of muscle cells, giving the chance to develop further applications for muscle damage and disease. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Imperfection sensitivity in cylindrical shells under uniform bending

Efforts are ongoing to characterise a comprehensive resistance function for cylindrical shells under uniform bending, a ubiquitous structural system that finds application in load-bearing circular hollow sections, tubes, piles, pipelines, wind turbine support towers, chimneys and silos. A recent computational study by Rotter et al. demonstrated that nonlinear buckling of perfect elastic cylinders under bending is governed by four length-dependent domains –‘short’, ‘medium’, ‘transitional’ and ‘long’– depending on the relative influence of end boundary conditions and cross-sectional ovalisation. The study additionally transformed its resistance predictions into compact algebraic relationships for use as design equations within the recently developed framework of reference resistance design. This article extends on the above to present a detailed computational investigation into the imperfection sensitivity of thin elastic cylindrical shells across the most important length domains, using automation to carry out the vast number of necessary finite element analyses. Geometric imperfections in three forms – the classical linear buckling eigenmode, an imposed cross-sectional ovalisation and a realistic manufacturing ‘weld depression’ defect – are applied to demonstrate that imperfection sensitivity is strongly length dependent but significantly less severe than for the closely related load case of cylinders under uniform axial compression. The axisymmetric weld depression almost always controls as the most deleterious imperfection. The data are processed computationally to offer an accurate yet conservative lower-bound algebraic design characterisation of imperfection sensitivity for use within the RRD framework. The outcomes are relevant to researchers and designers of large metal shells under bending and will appeal to computational enthusiasts who are encouraged to adopt the automation methodology described herein to explore other structural systems.
The stochastic knapsack problem

The authors consider a knapsack with integer volume F which is capable of holding K different classes of objects. An object from class-k has integer volume b/sub k/, k=1, . ,K. Objects arrive randomly to the knapsack; interarrivals are exponential with mean depending on the state of the system. The sojourn time of an object has a general class-dependent distribution. An object in the knapsack from class-k accrues revenue at a rate of r/sub k/. The problem is to find a control policy in order to accept/reject the arriving objects as a function of the current state in order to maximize the average revenue. Optimization is carried out over the class of coordinate convex policies. Among other results, for the general case of K classes, the authors consider the problem of finding the optimal static control, where for each class a portion of the knapsack is dedicated. <<ETX>>
Maximal nonlinearity in balanced boolean functions with even number of inputs, revisited

The problem of obtaining maximal nonlinearity in Boolean functions is well researched, both from the cryptographic and the evolutionary computation side. However, the results are still not conclusive enough to be able to show how good a heuristic approach is when tackling this problem. In this paper, we investigate how to obtain the maximal possible nonlinearity in balanced Boolean functions, but we also analyze how difficult is the problem itself. In order to do so, we conduct experiments with Estimation of distribution algorithms as well as the fitness landscape analysis and the deception analysis. Our results indicate that the first difficulties arise from the inappropriate fitness function and representation of solutions coupled with a huge search space. The fitness landscape analysis does not reveal any significant differences that could justify the assumed jump in problem difficulty when going from Boolean functions with 6 inputs to those with 8 inputs. Finally, we show that this problem is not order-1 deceptive.
Experiment Management Support for Performance Tuning

The development of a high performance parallel system or application is an evolutionary process -- both the code and the environment go through many changes during a program's lifetime -- and at each change, a key question for developers is: how and how much did the performance change? No existing performance tool provides the necessary functionality to answer this question. We report on the design and preliminary implementation of a tool that views each execution as a scientific experiment and provides the functionality to answer questions about a program's performance that span more than a single execution or environment.
Similarities and differences in borderline and organic personality disorder

Introduction Previous research has shown that brain injury patients with Organic Personality Disorder (OPD) may display “borderline” traits due to prefrontal damage, and their personality structure may be unstable and close to a borderline personality organisation. They may have few general neuropsychological dysfunctions but specific executive deficits. Similar deficits have been found in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The objective of this study was to identify differences and similarities between the neuropsychological and personality profiles of BPD and OPD patients. Methods Twenty BPD patients and 24 OPD patients were assessed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II Disorders (SCID-II), the Karolinska Psychodynamic Profile (KAPP), and a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery. Results Very few neuropsychological differences were found between the two patient groups. However, the verbal fluency, verbal intelligence, verbal memory, and immediate auditory memory/attention of the BPD patients were significantly poorer than the OPD patients'. The KAPP profiles of the BPD patients showed significantly poorer functioning in three areas: frustration tolerance, the body as a factor of self-esteem, and overall personality organisation. Conclusions These results support our clinical experience and expectations concerning the severity of symptoms of both patient groups. We suggest considering in depth assessments of both neuropsychological and personality-related problems for each of these patients in order to inform treatment.
Integration of 3D Printed and Micropatterned Polycaprolactone Scaffolds for Guidance of Oriented Collagenous Tissue Formation In Vivo

Scaffold design incorporating multiscale cues for clinically relevant, aligned tissue regeneration has potential to improve structural and functional integrity of multitissue interfaces. The objective of this preclinical study is to develop poly(ε‐caprolactone) (PCL) scaffolds with mesoscale and microscale architectural cues specific to human ligament progenitor cells and assess their ability to form aligned bone–ligament–cementum complexes in vivo. PCL scaffolds are designed to integrate a 3D printed bone region with a micropatterned PCL thin film consisting of grooved pillars. The patterned film region is seeded with human ligament cells, fibroblasts transduced with bone morphogenetic protein‐7 genes seeded within the bone region, and a tooth dentin segment positioned on the ligament region prior to subcutaneous implantation into a murine model. Results indicate increased tissue alignment in vivo using micropatterned PCL films, compared to random‐porous PCL. At week 6, 30 μm groove depth significantly enhances oriented collagen fiber thickness, overall cell alignment, and nuclear elongation relative to 10 μm groove depth. This study demonstrates for the first time that scaffolds with combined hierarchical mesoscale and microscale features can align cells in vivo for oral tissue repair with potential for improving the regenerative response of other bone–ligament complexes.
Personality Stability From Age 14 to Age 77 Years

There is evidence for differential stability in personality trait differences, even over decades. The authors used data from a sample of the Scottish Mental Survey, 1947 to study personality stability from childhood to older age. The 6-Day Sample (N = 1,208) were rated on six personality characteristics by their teachers at around age 14. In 2012, the authors traced as many of these participants as possible and invited them to take part in a follow-up study. Those who agreed (N = 174) completed a questionnaire booklet at age 77 years, which included rating themselves and asking someone who knew them well to rate them on the same 6 characteristics on which they were rated in adolescence. Each set of 6 ratings was reduced to the same single underlying factor, denoted dependability, a trait comparable to conscientiousness. Participants’ and others’ older-age personality characteristic ratings were moderately correlated with each other, and with other measures of personality and wellbeing, but correlations suggested no significant stability of any of the 6 characteristics or their underlying factor, dependability, over the 63-year interval. However, a more complex model, controlling rater effects, indicated significant 63-year stability of 1 personality characteristic, Stability of Moods, and near-significant stability of another, Conscientiousness. Results suggest that lifelong differential stability of personality is generally quite low, but that some aspects of personality in older age may relate to personality in childhood.
Monotonous and Randomized Reductions to Sparse Sets

An oracle machine is called monotonous, if after a negative answer the machine does not ask further queries to the oracle. For example, one-query truth-table, conjunctive, and Hausdorff reducibilities are monotonous. We study the consequences of existence of sparse hard sets for different complexity classes under monotonous and randomized reductions. We prove trade-offs between the randomized time complexity of NP sets that reduce to a set B via such reductions and the density of B as well as the number of queries made by the monotonous reduction. As a consequence, bounded Turing hard sets for NP are not co-rp reducible to a sparse set unless RP = NP. We also prove prove similar results under the apparently weaker assumption that some solution of the promise problem (ISAT, SAT) reduces via the mentioned reductions to a sparse set.
Collection of Spontaneous Speech for the ATIS Domain and Comparative Analyses of Data Collected at MIT and TI

As part of our development of a spoken language system in the ATIS domain, we have begun a small-scale effort in collecting spontaneous speech data. Our procedure differs from the one used at Texas Instruments (TI) in many respects, the most important being the reliance on an existing system, rather than a wizard, to participate in data collection. Over the past few months, we have collected over 3,600 spontaneously generated sentences from 100 subjects. This paper documents our data collection process, and makes some comparative analyses of our data with those collected at TI. The advantages as well as disadvantages of this method of data collection will be discussed.
Macroevolutionary speciation rates are decoupled from the evolution of intrinsic reproductive isolation in Drosophila and birds

Significance Rates of species diversification vary widely in the natural world, leading to profound differences in species richness among different kinds of organisms. Variation in the rate at which new species arise is frequently assumed to result from factors that influence the rate at which populations become reproductively isolated from each other. We tested this assumption in Drosophila flies and birds. Surprisingly, we find no evidence that the propensity of organisms to evolve reproductive isolation predicts the rate at which they form new species over geological timescales. These results suggest that factors that cause intrinsic reproductive isolation may play less of a role in explaining biological diversity than generally assumed. The rate at which speciation occurs varies greatly among different kinds of organisms and is frequently assumed to result from species- or clade-specific factors that influence the rate at which populations acquire reproductive isolation. This premise leads to a fundamental prediction that has never been tested: Organisms that quickly evolve prezygotic or postzygotic reproductive isolation should have faster rates of speciation than organisms that slowly acquire reproductive isolation. We combined phylogenetic estimates of speciation rates from Drosophila and birds with a method for analyzing interspecific hybridization data to test whether the rate at which individual lineages evolve reproductive isolation predicts their macroevolutionary rate of species formation. We find that some lineages evolve reproductive isolation much more quickly than others, but this variation is decoupled from rates of speciation as measured on phylogenetic trees. For the clades examined here, reproductive isolation—especially intrinsic, postzygotic isolation—does not seem to be the rate-limiting control on macroevolutionary diversification dynamics. These results suggest that factors associated with intrinsic reproductive isolation may have less to do with the tremendous variation in species diversity across the evolutionary tree of life than is generally assumed.
The Geography of Hospital Admission in a National Health Service with Patient Choice

Each year about 20% of the 10 million hospital inpatients in Italy get admitted to hospitals outside the Local Health Authority of residence. In this paper we carefully explore this phenomenon and estimate gravity equations for 'trade' in hospital care using a Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood method. Consistency of the PPML estimator is guaranteed under the null of independence provided that the conditional mean is correctly specified. In our case we find that patients' flows are affected by network autocorrelation. We correct for it by relying upon spatial filtering. Our results suggest that the gravity model is a good framework for explaining patient mobility in most of the examined diagnostic groups. We find that the ability to restrain patients' outflows increases with the size of the pool of enrollees. Moreover, the ability to attract patients' inflows is reduced by the size of pool of enrollees for all LHAs except for the very big LHAs. For LHAs in the top quintile of size of enrollees, the ability to attract inflows increases with the size of the pool.
Photo-Realistic Rendering of Blond Hair

We present a method for photo-realistic hair rendering, which is based on light scattering from (human) hair fibers. In contrast to existing approaches our method gives realistic results also for light hair types and for close-ups. These results are obtained by using a “near-field” model taking into account different scattering components and indirect illumination. Our near-field model is a generalization of previously published methods that can be seen as far-field models. Nevertheless our more general shading model can be used computationally as efficiently as the previous ones.
Integrating Spanish lexical resources by meta-classifiers for polarity classification

In this paper we focus on unsupervised sentiment analysis in Spanish. The lack of resources for languages other than English, as for example Spanish, adds more complexity to the task. However, we take advantage of some good already existing lexical resources. We have carried out several experiments using different unsupervised approaches in order to compare the different methodologies for solving the problem of the Spanish polarity classification in a corpus of movie reviews. Among all these approaches, perhaps the newest one integrates SentiWordNet with the Multilingual Central Repository to tackle polarity detection directly over the Spanish corpus. However, the results obtained were not as promising as we expected, and so we carried out another group of experiments combining all the methods using meta-classifiers. The results obtained with stacking outperformed the individual experiments and encourage us to continue in this way.
Designing a model-based interaction planner with dialogue analysis

We present an approach to computer-based training that takes advantage of two techniques related to modelling. Dialogue modelling (DM) and model-based training (MBT) are examined here with a view to using DM to provide the models needed in MBT. Our work is motivated by the fact that certain domains are very difficult to produce models for, which makes MBT impracticable. We describe a computer-based training agent that has been developed as a result of using dialogue analysis and DM techniques. MBT is investigated as a technique that could be compatible with DM to support instruction through use of dynamic model-based explanations. Together these two techniques enable a computer-based training system to be designed that is able to support technical skills, such as controlling a power plant, and creative skills, such as design.
Robust stabilization of recurrent fuzzy systems via switching control

A method for stabilization of known equilibria in recurrent fuzzy systems is presented, which particularly accounts for model uncertainties. Since the dynamics of recurrent fuzzy systems are defined over a rectangular grid, it is first observed that for stability analysis, only gradient conditions at grid points have to be considered given that the inputs are piecewise constant. Therefore, a robust structure variable controller is proposed, switching between constant inputs. In order to prevent the system from deadlock phenomena due to the switching of the system, the structure variable control is augmented by a piecewise polynomial controller, guaranteeing asymptotic stability. The proposed method is applied to the example of an inverted pendulum.
Distributed Diagnosis Algorithms for Regular Interconnected Structures

A distributed diagnosis algorithm to locate faulty processing elements in large-scale regular interconnected structures based on the concepts of system-level diagnosis is developed. This algorithm can either operate in a systolic manner or may be executed on a supervisory processor to locate the faulty processors. The computational complexity of the algorithm is linear when run on a supervisory processor and constant when run in parallel systolic manner. The implementation complexity and diagnosis capability of the algorithm are also analyzed without restricting the fault set size. The probability of correct diagnosis is shown to be very high even in the presence of large fault sets. >