Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing a model for trust management in pervasive devices

Pervasive devices interacting in open and dynamic spaces with each others require a mechanism that allows them acting autonomously in a secure way and protecting their resources. Trust is fundamental to establish communication with other users, because the identity is often uncertain and on one's own does not provide trust information, for instance, could an unknown user be trustworthy? Nowadays, these devices have a so limited security support. So, we propose a simple trust management model to enhance such support, allowing them interact in ad hoc networks and peer-to-peer applications in a secure way. In this paper, our main contribution is a mathematical and a probabilistic model, as well as demonstrating the model feasibility, since it has been assessed through the prototype implementation, which has been tested in a Pocket PC
Structured Value Elimination with D-Separation Analysis

In the last ten years, new models based on Bayesian Networks (BN) emerged to handle large and complex systems. These new models can be divided in two: the unification with First Order Logic and uncertainty (Markov Logic Networks, Bayesian Logic) and Knowledge Base Construction Models (Probabilistic Relational Models, Multy-Entity Bayesian Networks, Relational Bayesian Networks). SKOOB, a consortium of researchers and engineers in risk management, focuses on Probabilistic Relational Models (PRM). Inference in such models is a much more difficult task than in BN. Structured Value Elimination (SVE) is the state-of-the-art algorithm for PRM models. In this paper, we propose an enhancement of SVE based on a well known complexity reduction technique from BN. We show how to integrate a d-separation analysis in SVE and how this leads to important improvements for the inference task.
Detecting incorrectly-segmented utterances for posteriori restoration of turn-taking and ASR results

Appropriate turn-taking is important in spoken dialogue systems as well as generating correct responses. We have developed a method that performs a posteriori restoration of incorrectly segmented utterances caused by erroneous voice activity detection (VAD), which result in automatic speech recognition (ASR)errors and inappropriate turn-taking. A crucialpart ofthe method is to classify whether the restoration is required or not. We cast it as a binary classification problem detecting originally single utterances from pairs of utterance fragments. Various features are used representing timing, prosody, and ASR result information to improve its accuracy. Furthermore, two kinds of feature selection are performed to obtain effective and domainindependent features. The experimental results showed that the proposed method outperformed a baseline with manuallyselected features by 4.8% and 3.9% in cross-domain evaluations with two domains. More detailed analysis revealed that the dominant and domain-independent features were utterance intervals and results from the Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Index Terms: spoken dialogue system, VAD error, turn taking, a posteriori restoration
TNFα Affects Ciliary Beat Response to Increased Viscosity in Human Pediatric Airway Epithelium

In airway epithelium, mucociliary clearance (MCC) velocity depends on the ciliary beat frequency (CBF), and it is affected by mucus viscoelastic properties. Local inflammation induces secretion of cytokines (TNFα) that can alter mucus viscosity; however airway ciliated cells have an autoregulatory mechanism to prevent the collapse of CBF in response to increase in mucus viscosity, mechanism that is associated with an increment in intracellular Ca+2 level ([Ca2+]i). We studied the effect of TNFα on the autoregulatory mechanism that regulates CBF in response to increased viscosity using dextran solutions, in ciliated cells cultured from human pediatric epithelial adenoid tissue. Cultures were treated with TNFα, before and after the viscous load was changed. TNFα treatment produced a significantly larger decrease in CBF in cultures exposed to dextran. Furthermore, an increment in [Ca2+]i was observed, which was significantly larger after TNFα treatment. In conclusion, although TNFα has deleterious effects on ciliated cells in response to maintaining CBF after increasing viscous loading, it has a positive effect, since increasing [Ca2+]i may prevent the MCC collapse. These findings suggest that augmented levels of TNFα associated with an inflammatory response of the nasopharyngeal epithelium may have dual effects that contribute to maintaining the effectiveness of MCC in the upper airways.
Game theoretic channel allocation for the delay-sensitive cognitive radio networks

In this paper, we propose several channel allocation schemes via the Game theoretical approaches for the distributed CR networks. Distinguished from the literature, more important factors are taken into account when designing the potential games for the interweave and underlay CR networks, i.e. the queueing delay, complete inter-system interference and protection of primary users (PUs). Particularly, in the underlay CR networks, a PU can be protected by adaptively adjusting the cost for secondary users (SUs) to share a subchannel with him. Consequently, SUs and PUs can achieve higher end-to-end throughput and maintain the desired signal-to-noise-and-interference ratio, respectively. Moreover, for proving the convergence of the proposed schemes, the associated potential functions are also defined. Via the simulation results, the proposed schemes are proved to be capable of effectively reducing the queuing delay at the cost of the slightly decreased throughput.
The TIGER Treebank

This paper reports on the TIGER Treebank, a corpus of currently 35.000 syntactically annotated German newspaper sentences. We describe what kind of information is encoded in the treebank and introduce the different representation formats that are used for the annotation and exploitation of the treebank. We explain the different methods used for the annotation: interactive annotation, using the tool Annotate, and LFG parsing. Furthermore, we give an account of the annotation scheme used for the TIGER treebank. This scheme is an extended and improved version of the NEGRA annotation scheme and we illustrate in detail the linguistic extensions that were made concerning the annotation in the TIGER project. The main differences are concerned with coordination, verb-subcategorization, expletives as well as proper nouns. In addition, the paper also presents the query tool TIGERSearch that was developed in the project to exploit the treebank in an adequate way. We describe the query language which was designed to facilitate a simple formulation of complex queries; furthermore, we shortly introduce TIGERin, a graphical user interface for query input. The paper concludes with a summary and some directions for future work.
An extensive allelic series of Drosophila kae1 mutants reveals diverse and tissue-specific requirements for t6A biogenesis

N6-threonylcarbamoyl-adenosine (t6A) is one of the few RNA modifications that is universally present in life. This modification occurs at high frequency at position 37 of most tRNAs that decode ANN codons, and stabilizes cognate anticodon–codon interactions. Nearly all genetic studies of the t6A pathway have focused on single-celled organisms. In this study, we report the isolation of an extensive allelic series in the Drosophila ortholog of the core t6A biosynthesis factor Kae1. kae1 hemizygous larvae exhibit decreases in t6A that correlate with allele strength; however, we still detect substantial t6A-modified tRNAs even during the extended larval phase of null alleles. Nevertheless, complementation of Drosophila Kae1 and other t6A factors in corresponding yeast null mutants demonstrates that these metazoan genes execute t6A synthesis. Turning to the biological consequences of t6A loss, we characterize prominent kae1 melanotic masses and show that they are associated with lymph gland overgrowth and ectopic generation of lamellocytes. On the other hand, kae1 mutants exhibit other phenotypes that reflect insufficient tissue growth. Interestingly, whole-tissue and clonal analyses show that strongly mitotic tissues such as imaginal discs are exquisitely sensitive to loss of kae1, whereas nonproliferating tissues are less affected. Indeed, despite overt requirements of t6A for growth of many tissues, certain strong kae1 alleles achieve and sustain enlarged body size during their extended larval phase. Our studies highlight tissue-specific requirements of the t6A pathway in a metazoan context and provide insights into the diverse biological roles of this fundamental RNA modification during animal development and disease.
Word Reordering Alignment for Combination of Statistical Machine Translation Systems

Word alignment is a basic and critical process in the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). The previous work on word alignment mainly focuses on the training process to get the word mapping relation between the source sentences and target sentences. However, the word alignment for combination of SMT system outputs is also important, which aims to find the word correspondence between alternative translation hypotheses of a source language sentence. Unfortunately, it does not attract so much attention in SMT research. In this paper, we propose a novel word alignment approach to effectively address the word alignment between sentences with different valid word orders, which changes the order of the word sequences (called word reordering) of the output hypotheses to make the word order more exactly match the alignment reference. We present experimental results on the IWSLT'2008 challenge tasks with the combination of four state-of-the-art SMT systems outputs. The results show that our approach significantly improves the performance of the system combination.
Essential roles of inhibin beta A in mouse epididymal coiling

Testis-derived testosterone has been recognized as the key factor for morphogenesis of the Wolffian duct, the precursor of several male reproductive tract structures. Evidence supports that testosterone is required for the maintenance of the Wolffian duct via its action on the mesenchyme. However, it remains uncertain how testosterone alone is able to facilitate formation of regionally specific structures such as the epididymis, vas deferens, and seminal vesicle from a straight Wolffian duct. In this study, we identified inhibin beta A (or Inhba) as a regional paracrine factor in mouse mesonephroi that controls coiling of the epithelium in the anterior Wolffian duct, the future epididymis. Inhba was expressed specifically in the mesenchyme of the anterior Wolffian duct at embryonic day 12.5 before the production of androgens. In the absence of Inhba, the epididymis failed to develop the characteristic coiling in the epithelium, which showed a dramatic decrease in proliferation. This loss of epididymal coiling did not result from testosterone deficiency, because testosterone production and parameters for testosterone action such as testis descent and anogenital distance remained normal. We further found that initial Inhba expression did not require testosterone as Inhba was also expressed in the anterior Wolffian duct of female embryos where no testosterone was produced. However, Inhba expression at later stages depended on testosterone. These results demonstrated that Inhba, a mesenchyme-specific gene, acts collectively with testosterone to facilitate epididymal coiling by stimulating epithelial proliferation.
Plant recognition based on intersecting cortical model

Plant recognition recently becomes more and more attractive in computer vision and pattern recognition. Although some researchers have proposed several methods, their accuracy is not satisfactory. Therefore, a novel method of plant recognition based on leaf image is proposed in the paper. Both shape and texture features are employed in the proposed method Texture feature is extracted by intersecting cortical model, and shape feature is obtained by the representation of center distance sequence. Support vector machine is employed for the classifier. The leaf image is preprocessed to get better quality for extracting features, and then entropy sequence and center distance sequence are obtained by intersecting cortical model and center distance transform, respectively. Redundant data of entropy sequence vector and center distance are reduced by principal component analysis. Finally, feature vector is imported into the classifier for classification. In order to evaluate the performance, several existing methods are used to compare with the proposed method and three leaf image datasets are taken as test samples. The experimental result shows the proposed method gets the better accuracy of recognition than other methods.
Design of Multimode Power-Split Hybrid Vehicles—A Case Study on the Voltec Powertrain System

Planetary gears (PGs) have been used in power-split hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles, sometimes with clutches to enable multimode operations. Chevrolet Volt is a well-known production vehicle using such technologies; it achieves excellent performance in both charge-depleting (CD) and charge-sustaining modes. In this paper, a detailed analysis of the General Motors (GM) Voltec powertrain used in the 2016 Chevrolet Volt (Volt Gen 2) is presented. We search through a large topological space, which includes a total of around 1 million design candidates to find different powertrain layouts that achieve the same or better acceleration and fuel economy in comparison with the benchmark: a simulated Volt Gen 2. The key technologies enabling such large-scale design exercise are discussed, and preliminary findings are reported. The case study results show that 49 designs achieve better charge-sustaining, CD, and launching performances than the benchmark, which clearly demonstrated the value of the proposed design methodology.
Liquid State Machines in Adbiatic Quantum Computers for General Computation

This paper outlines the theory of Liquid State Machines, and describes how they may be used to filter the Hamiltonian space of a qubit network. The underlying principle of this kind of quantum computer is that when enough of the nodes in a filter activate, a desired output will be generated. A liquid state machine implementedon an adiabatic quantum computer is capable of solving NP and Sharp-P problems in BQP time.
A Phospholipase C Inhibitor Ameliorates Postischemic Neuronal Damage in Rats

Background and Purpose The hypothesis of calcium-induced neuronal damage has been proposed regarding brain ischemia. Phospholipase C is an enzyme that catalyzes the phosphodiesteratic cleavage of phosphatidylinositol. The cleavage of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate by phospholipase C yields 1,4,5-inositol triphosphate, which mediates intracellular release of calcium, and 1,2-diacylglycerol, which is an activator of protein kinase C. We examined the effect of phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride, a phospholipase C inhibitor, on delayed neuronal damage after transient forebrain ischemia in the hippocampal CA1 subfield in rats to assess the role of phospholipase C in postischemic neuronal damage. Methods Twenty-minute forebrain ischemia was induced using the method of Pulsinelli and Brierley. We measured the neuronal density of the hippocampal CA1 subfield 7 days after reperfusion. The effect of phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride was tested in both pretreatment and posttreatment groups. Results In the vehicle treatment group (n = 13), neuronal density was 51±42/mm (mean±SD). The neuronal densities in the 50-mg/kg (n=12) and 100-mg/kg (n=14) phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride pretreatment groups and the 100-mg/kg (n=10) phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride posttreatment group were 99 ±50, 150 ±55, and 143±63/mm, respectively. These values were significantly higher than that of the vehicle treatment group (p<0.05, p<0.01, and p<0.01, respectively). Conclusions It is suggested that the activation of phospholipase C has an important role in postischemic delayed neuronal damage.
A Zinc Linchpin Motif in the MUTYH Glycosylase Interdomain Connector Is Required for Efficient Repair of DNA Damage

Mammalian MutY glycosylases have a unique architecture that features an interdomain connector (IDC) that joins the catalytic N-terminal domain and 8-oxoguanine (OG) recognition C-terminal domain. The IDC has been shown to be a hub for interactions with protein partners involved in coordinating downstream repair events and signaling apoptosis. Herein, a previously unidentified zinc ion and its coordination by three Cys residues of the IDC region of eukaryotic MutY organisms were characterized by mutagenesis, ICP-MS, and EXAFS. In vitro kinetics and cellular assays on WT and Cys to Ser mutants have revealed an important function for zinc coordination on overall protein stability, iron–sulfur cluster insertion, and ability to mediate DNA damage repair. We propose that this “zinc linchpin” motif serves to structurally organize the IDC and coordinate the damage recognition and base excision functions of the C- and N-terminal domains.
LIPOXYGENASE PRODUCTS IN MARINE DIATOMS: A CONCISE ANALYTICAL METHOD TO EXPLORE THE FUNCTIONAL POTENTIAL OF OXYLIPINS 1

Oxylipins are oxygenated derivatives of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) that act as chemical mediators in many ecological and physiological processes in marine and freshwater diatoms. The occurrence and distribution of these molecules are relatively widespread within the lineage with considerable species‐specific differences due to the variability of both the fatty acids recognized as substrates and the enzymatic transformations. The present review provides a general introduction to recent studies on diatom oxylipins and describes an analytical method for the detection and assessment of these elusive molecules in laboratory and field samples. This methodology is based on selective enrichment of the oxylipin fraction by solvent extraction, followed by parallel acquisition of full‐scan UV and tandem mass spectra on reverse phase liquid chromatography (LC) peaks. The analytical procedure enables identification of potential genetic differences, enzymatic regulation, and ecophysiological conditions that result in different oxylipin signatures, thus providing an effective tool for probing the functional relevance of this class of lipids in plankton communities. Examples of oxylipin measurements in field samples are also provided as a demonstration of the analytical potential of the methodology.
A System to Analyze Group Socializing Behaviors in Social Parties

Social events such as networking parties are excellent opportunities to expand one's social network and make new social ties, as well as simply have fun and enjoy oneself. With the emergence of pervasive technology, we now have the opportunity to discover face-to-face socializing behaviors of individual guests and support them in their socializing goals. Quantitative measures of socializing behaviors will be useful in diverse applications from social therapy to social event management. We propose a system that detects and analyzes group-level socializing behaviors to support real-time and ex post facto social applications deployed in real social event situations. In our approach, we exploit attendees’ characteristics of socializing such as proximity and body orientation to determine social proximity among guests and subsequently detect socializing groups. We performed preliminary studies and multiple deployments of our system and example applications in real social networking parties. Evaluation shows the system can detect socializing groups accurately and support applications that satisfy the interests of guests and party hosts.
Unpacking the Role of Mindfulness in Conscientiousness and Spirituality

The present study examined relationships between conscientiousness and intrinsic spirituality, with the proposed trait ‘mindfulness’ as mediator. The results from 161 functioning adults within an Australian context revealed that mindfulness was significantly predicted by conscientiousness. This study examined the relationship among conscientiousness, trait mindfulness and intrinsic spirituality. It was hypothesised that trait mindfulness would mediate the relationship between conscientiousness and spirituality. We found this hypothesis partially supported. Practically, these results suggest that conscientious individuals do significantly connect with mindfulness, and it was only the more mindful of conscientious individuals that also displayed high levels of intrinsic spirituality. Additional analyses also suggest that conscientious individuals connect with mindfulness through attending to current actions or regulating impulses (act aware) and have an accepting attitude towards thoughts and feelings (non-judge). Possible explanations and implications of these results are discussed in relation to theory, practice and delivery mechanisms of mindfulness.
A protocol for reputation management in super-peer networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have recently seen an enormous success and have reached millions of users. The main reason of this success is the anonymity the users enjoy. However, as recent experiences with P2P networks show, this anonymity offers an opportunity to exploit the network for abuses (e.g., the spread of malware). In this paper we extend our previous work on P2PRep, a reputation management protocol for pure P2P networks, in the case of super-peer networks. We present the design and implementation of reputation-aware servants.
Formative and Summative Evaluation of a Practice Doctorate Program

Practice doctorate programs are developing rapidly to meet the American Association of Colleges of Nursing recommendation that advanced practice nurses will be prepared with a Doctor of Nursing Practice by 2015. Evaluation of nursing doctoral programs has focused almost exclusively on research doctorate programs. The authors examine formative evaluations from students enrolled in a practice doctorate program and summative evaluations provided by students at the time of and 1 year following graduation. Suggestions for nurse educators and administrators are presented.
The choice of a chelating agent for inactivating trace metals: II. Derivatives of oxine (8-hydroxyquinoline).

Oxine has been shown to retain its avidity for a number of biologically interesting metallic ions at pH 7 and 370 (Albert & Gledhill, 1947) and to possess a much more powerful antibacterial activity than other commercial chelating agents (Albert, Rubbo, Goldacre & Balfour, 1947). Hence it seemed desirable to investigate the isomerides and derivatives of oxine in order to correlate chelating activity, under physiological conditions of pH and temperature, with molecular structures. It seemed that such an elementary study might pave the way for. the discovery of more delicate or selective reagents for depriving cells of essential trace metals. In addition, it was hoped to shed some light on the antibacterial action of oxine, which has been used as an antiseptic since 1895, mainly in the form of 'Chinosol' (Potassii Hydroxyquinolini Sulphas, B.P.C.), an acidic powder containing 50% oxine. Forty-five analogues and derivatives of oxine have accordingly been investigated, with the result that the ability to chelate with a number of metals at pH 7 and 370 has been found to be widely distributed throughout the series. Certain of the derivatives gave visible evidence of activity at greater dilution than does oxine, but no outstanding instance of specificity was found. Some fundamental correlations between chemical constitution and chelatingpower and antibacterial activity have been brought to light.