Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Geometric Approach for Deriving Multicontact Dynamic Identification Models

Dynamic identification models allow for system parameters such as mass and inertia to be computed by combining knowledge of the system’s configuration, and the forces applied to the system. These methods are often used to calibrate individual dynamic models in robots, and have also been used to estimate human parameters. While commonly used, the Denavit-Hartenberg approach can lead to modelling errors due to limitations in modelling rotations about arbitrary axes. This paper introduces a geometric framework for dynamic identification modelling. Geometric models rotation axes to be written explicitly, and offer a concise representation for common kinematic and dynamic operations. This Geometric approach is compared to the DH form, highlighting the ease in modelling complex rotations and the reduction in error due to the removal of oversimplification. Multiple points of contact can also be modelled easily using the geometric approach, allowing for under-actuated systems to be identified.
Film thickness measurement system using FPGA technology

The development of a technique for high spatial and temporal resolution film thickness measurement in oil-water flow is presented. A capacitance measurement system is used to measure thin water films near to the wall pipe. The system consists of seven parts: a signal generator, analog multiplexers, a planar sensor, auto-balancing bridges, logarithmic amplifiers, an analog-digital converter and a control unit. The measurement system is controlled by a NI FPGA RIO System. The FPGA has two state machines. The machines control the synchronization between the transmitter circuit board, the digitizer and a computer. FPGA technology has showed to be a flexible electronics, which let to change, easily, some important features as acquisition rate, number of channels and samples, among others. Experimental results of the technique indicated that the system can measure thickness between 400 μm and 2200 μm. Film thickness in oil-water flow was studied in a 12-m long vertical glass pipe, with 50.8 mm of internal diameter, using mineral oil (828 kg/m3 of density and 220 cP of viscosity) and tap water.
Modeling Patients' Acceptance of E-Health

Due to the emerging importance of e-health and the possibility that it can reduce health care costs, we try to explain patients’ behavioral intention to use their provider’s e-health system. Using the survey method to collect data from patients newly registered with an e-health site, we test three models of user acceptance: two well-known models (TAM and the Motivational model) and one that has recently been proposed that integrates the other two. We also include several antecedents to the models including satisfaction with medical care, health knowledge, information-seeking preference, health care need, and Internet dependence. We find that all three models produce similar results from our data and that several of the antecedents have significant effects on the model constructs. For example, satisfaction with medical care positively influences intrinsic motivation, information-seeking preference positively influences perceived ease of use, and Internet dependence positively influences both intrinsic motivation and perceived usefulness.
DNS-based Detection of Scanning Worms in an Enterprise Network

Worms are arguably the most serious security threat facing the Internet. Seeking a detection technique that is both suf(cid:2)ciently ef(cid:2)cient and accurate to enable automatic containment of worm propagation at the network egress points, we propose a new technique for the rapid detection of worm propagation from an enterprise network. It relies on the correlation of Domain Name System (DNS) queries with outgoing connections from an enterprise network. Improvements over existing scanning worm detection techniques include: (1) the possibility to detect worm propagation after only a single infection attempt; (2) the capacity to detect zero-day worms; and (3) a low false positive rate. The precision of this (cid:2)rst-mile detection technique supports the use of automated containment and suppression strategies to stop fast scanning worms before they leave the network boundary. We believe that this technique can be applied with the same precision to identify other forms of malicious behavior within an enterprise network including: mass-mailing worms, network reconnaissance activity, and covert communications. Currently, it is unclear if our DNS-based detector will work for all network protocols. In some network environments, the DNS detection technique may need to be used as a secondary input to a more sophisticated anomaly detector.
Upper Limb Ischemia: Clinical Experiences of Acute and Chronic Upper Limb Ischemia in a Single Center

Background Upper limb ischemia is less common than lower limb ischemia, and relatively few cases have been reported. This paper reviews the epidemiology, etiology, and clinical characteristics of upper limb ischemia and analyzes the factors affecting functional sequelae after treatment. Methods The records of 35 patients with acute and chronic upper limb ischemia who underwent treatment from January 2007 to December 2012 were retrospectively reviewed. Results The median age was 55.03 years, and the number of male patients was 24 (68.6%). The most common etiology was embolism of cardiac origin, followed by thrombosis with secondary trauma, and the brachial artery was the most common location for a lesion causing obstruction. Computed tomography angiography was the first-line diagnostic tool in our center. Twenty-eight operations were performed, and conservative therapy was implemented in seven cases. Five deaths (14.3%) occurred during follow-up. Twenty patients (57.1%) complained of functional sequelae after treatment. Functional sequelae were found to be more likely in patients with a longer duration of symptoms (odds ratio, 1.251; p=0.046) and higher lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) levels (odds ratio, 1.001; p=0.031). Conclusion An increased duration of symptoms and higher initial serum LDH levels were associated with the more frequent occurrence of functional sequelae. The prognosis of upper limb ischemia is associated with prompt and proper treatment and can also be predicted by initial serum LDH levels.
Trick Play Function for VOD with SVC source

Networked video applications have become more and more popular. However, most commercially available video on demand (VOD) solutions still lack trick play features (fast forward, fast rewind etc.), because it usually needs high processing complexity and huge consumption of network bandwidth to support trick play function. On the other hand, H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) will be adopted in more and more video contents, and have great impact on the video application. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to support trick play function for H.264 SVC video source. According to different fast speed, appropriate combination of temporal and SNR layers are selected and transmitted in server side. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively reduce network bandwidth consumption, while keeping satisfied quality of experience (QoE) for users.
Data-Driven Color Manifolds

Color selection is required in many computer graphics applications, but can be tedious, as 1D or 2D user interfaces are employed to navigate in a 3D color space. Until now the problem was considered a question of designing general color spaces with meaningful (e.g., perceptual) parameters. In this work, we show how color selection usability improves by applying 1D or 2D color manifolds that predict the most likely change of color in a specific context. A typical use-case is manipulating the color of a banana; instead of presenting a 2D+1D RGB, CIE Lab, or HSV widget, our approach presents a simple 1D slider that captures the most likely change for this context. Technically, for each context, we learn a lower-dimensional manifold with varying density from labeled Internet examples. We demonstrate the increase in task performance of color selection in a user study.
An On-line Evolvable Hardware for Learning Finite-State Machine

The paper proposes an on-line evolvable hardware (EHW), called mimetic EHW. The task is to mimic a sequential circuit by observing its partial input/output sequences. The genetic algorithm (GA) is used to search for the circuit satisfying input/output sequences collected from the target circuit. The mimetic EHW consists of a custom microprocessor and a tness evaluator. The microprocessor is particularly designed for an execution of GA. The evaluator acts as a coprocessor, accelerating the tness evaluation which is a bottleneck of GA. The microprocessor and the evaluator are designed using the Verilog hardware description language (Verilog HDL), then realised on Xilinx XC4010 FPGAs. The result shows that, by using the state-of-the-art FPGA, the microprocessor combined with a parallel of 8 tness evaluators could perform 36 times faster then the software version running on a conventional computer (Pentium Pro with Linux OS).
Life Science’s Average Publishable Unit (APU) Has Increased over the Past Two Decades

Quantitative analysis of the scientific literature is important for evaluating the evolution and state of science. To study how the density of biological literature has changed over the past two decades we visually inspected 1464 research articles related only to the biological sciences from ten scholarly journals (with average Impact Factors, IF, ranging from 3.8 to 32.1). By scoring the number of data items (tables and figures), density of composite figures (labeled panels per figure or PPF), as well as the number of authors, pages and references per research publication we calculated an Average Publishable Unit or APU for 1993, 2003, and 2013. The data show an overall increase in the average ± SD number of data items from 1993 to 2013 of approximately 7±3 to 14±11 and PPF ratio of 2±1 to 4±2 per article, suggesting that the APU has doubled in size over the past two decades. As expected, the increase in data items per article is mainly in the form of supplemental material, constituting 0 to 80% of the data items per publication in 2013, depending on the journal. The changes in the average number of pages (approx. 8±3 to 10±3), references (approx. 44±18 to 56±24) and authors (approx. 5±3 to 8±9) per article are also presented and discussed. The average number of data items, figure density and authors per publication are correlated with the journal’s average IF. The increasing APU size over time is important when considering the value of research articles for life scientists and publishers, as well as, the implications of these increasing trends in the mechanisms and economics of scientific communication.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Overview of RepLab 2012 : Evaluating Online Reputation Management Systems

This paper summarizes the goals, organization and results of the first RepLab competitive evaluation campaign for Online Reputation Management Systems (RepLab 2012). RepLab focused on the reputation of companies, and asked participant systems to annotate different types of information on tweets containing the names of several companies. Two tasks were proposed: a profiling task, where tweets had to be annotated for relevance and polarity for reputation, and a monitoring task, where tweets had to be clustered thematically and clusters had to be ordered by priority (for reputation management purposes). The gold standard consisted of annotations made by reputation management experts, a feature which turns the RepLab 2012 test collection in a useful source not only to evaluate systems, but also to reach a better understanding of the notions of polarity and priority in the context of reputation management.
Separation of concerns through semantic annotations

Programming languages provide a limited range of mechanisms to represent concepts. This means that the final program lacks important information that the programmer has about the domain. We propose the use of programmer-extensible program annotations as a means to represent that information about the domain. Using these program annotations we can specify join points by means of semantic properties of the programs, thereby improving the reusability and robustness of aspects.
Iteratively Detected Irregular Variable Length Coding and Sphere-Packing Modulation-Aided Differential Space-Time Spreading

In this paper we consider serially concatenated and iteratively decoded irregular variable length coding (IrVLC) combined with preceded differential space-time spreading (DSTS) aided multidimensional sphere packing (SP) modulation designed for near-capacity joint source and channel coding. The IrVLC scheme comprises a number of component variable length coding (VLC) codebooks having different coding rates for the sake of encoding particular fractions of the input source symbol stream. The relative length of these source-stream fractions can be chosen with the aid of extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts in order to shape the EXIT curve of the IrVLC codec, so that an open EXIT chart tunnel may be created even at low Eb/N0 values that are close to the capacity bound of the channel. These schemes are shown to be capable of operating within 0.9 dB of the DSTS-SP channel's capacity bound using an average interleaver length of 113,100 bits and an effective bandwidth efficiency of 1 bit/s/Hz, assuming ideal Nyquist filtering. By contrast, the equivalent-rate regular VLC-based bench- marker scheme was found to be capable of operating at 1.4 dB from the capacity bound, which is about 1.56 times the corresponding discrepancy of the proposed IrVLC-aided scheme.
Inferring Protein Domain Semantic Roles Using word2vec

In this paper, using word2vec, we demonstrate that proteins domains may have semantic “meaning” in the context of multi-domain proteins. Word2vec is a group of models which can be used to produce semantically meaningful embeddings of words or tokens in a vector space. In this work we treat multi-domain proteins as “sentences” where domain identifiers are tokens which may be considered as “words”. Using all Interpro (Finn, Attwood et al. 2017) eukaryotic proteins as a corpus of “sentences” we demonstrate that Word2vec creates functionally meaningful embeddings of protein domains. We additionally show how this can be applied to identifying the putative functional roles for Pfam (Finn, Coggill et al. 2016) Domains of Unknown Function.
Fuzzy Randomness-Towards a new Modeling of Uncertainty

In the paper a new concept of modeling uncertainty is presented, based on the theory of fuzzy random variables. By this means, a super-ordinate uncertainty model is made available which includes the models developed so far, based on random variables and fuzzy variables as special cases. The fuzzy random variables are accounted for as input values in the fuzzy probabilistic structural analysis and the fuzzy probabilistic safety assessment of structures. The method of fuzzy probabilistic structural analysis is demonstrated by way of an example. Bernd Möller, Wolfgang Graf, Michael Beer, Jan-Uwe Sickert
ELFN1-AS1: A Novel Primate Gene with Possible MicroRNA Function Expressed Predominantly in Human Tumors

Human gene LOC100505644 uncharacterized LOC100505644 [Homo sapiens] (Entrez Gene ID 100505644) is abundantly expressed in tumors but weakly expressed in few normal tissues. Till now the function of this gene remains unknown. Here we identified the chromosomal borders of the transcribed region and the major splice form of the LOC100505644-specific transcript. We characterised the major regulatory motifs of the gene and its splice sites. Analysis of the secondary structure of the major transcript variant revealed a hairpin-like structure characteristic for precursor microRNAs. Comparative genomic analysis of the locus showed that it originated in primates de novo. Taken together, our data indicate that human gene LOC100505644 encodes some non-protein coding RNA, likely a microRNA. It was assigned a gene symbol ELFN1-AS1 (ELFN1 antisense RNA 1 (non-protein coding)). This gene combines features of evolutionary novelty and predominant expression in tumors.
Expression of dectin-1 and enhanced activation of NALP3 inflammasome are associated with resistance to paracoccidioidomycosis

Dectin-1 is a pattern recognition receptor (PRR) that recognizes β-glucans and plays a major role in the immunity against fungal pathogens. Paracoccidioides brasiliensis, the causative agent of paracoccidioidomycosis, has a sugar-rich cell wall mainly composed of mannans and glucans. To investigate the role of dectin-1 in the innate immunity of resistant (A/J) and susceptible (B10.A) mice to P. brasiliensis infection, we evaluated the role of curdlan (a dectin-1 agonist) and laminarin (a dectin-1 antagonist) in the activation of macrophages from both mouse strains. We verified that curdlan has a negligible role in the activation of B10.A macrophages but enhances the phagocytic and fungicidal abilities of A/J macrophages. Curdlan up-regulated the expression of costimulatory molecules and PRRs in A/J macrophages that express elevated levels of dectin-1, but not in B10.A cells. In addition, curdlan treatment inhibited arginase-1 and enhanced NO-synthase mRNA expression in infected A/J macrophages but had not effect in B10.A cells. In contrast, laminarin reinforced the respective M2/M1 profiles of infected A/J and B10.A macrophages. Following curdlan treatment, A/J macrophages showed significantly higher Syk kinase phosphorylation and expression of intracellular pro-IL-1β than B10.A cells. These findings led us to investigate if the NRLP3 inflammasome was differently activated in A/J and B10.A cells. Indeed, compared with B10.A cells A/J macrophages showed an increased expression of NALP3, ASC, and IL-1β mRNA. They also showed elevated caspase-1 activity and secreted high levels of mature IL-β and IL-18 after curdlan treatment and P. brasiliensis infection. Our data demonstrate that soluble and particulate β-glucans exert opposed modulatory activities on macrophages of diverse genetic patterns. Moreover, the synergistic action of dectin-1 and NALP3 inflammasome were for the first time associated with the innate response of resistant hosts to P. brasiliensis infection.
Robust Trajectory Estimation for Crowdsourcing-Based Mobile Applications

Crowdsourcing-based mobile applications are becoming more and more prevalent in recent years, as smartphones equipped with various built-in sensors are proliferating rapidly. The large quantity of crowdsourced sensing data stimulates researchers to accomplish some tasks that used to be costly or impossible, yet the quality of the crowdsourced data, which is of great importance, has not received sufficient attention. In reality, the low-quality crowdsourced data are prone to containing outliers that may severely impair the crowdsourcing applications. Thus in this work, we conduct pioneer investigation considering crowdsourced data quality. Specifically, we focus on estimating user motion trajectory information, which plays an essential role in multiple crowdsourcing applications, such as indoor localization, context recognition, indoor navigation, etc. We resort to the family of robust statistics and design a robust trajectory estimation scheme, name TrMCD, which is capable of alleviating the negative influence of abnormal crowdsourced user trajectories, differentiating normal users from abnormal users, and overcoming the challenge brought by spatial unbalance of crowdsourced trajectories. Two real field experiments are conducted and the results show that TrMCD is robust and effective in estimating user motion trajectories and mapping fingerprints to physical locations.
Patients using statin treatment within 24 h after admission for ST-elevation acute coronary syndromes had lower mortality than non-users: a report from the first Euro Heart Survey on acute coronary syndromes.

AIMS Statins provide effective secondary prevention in cardiovascular disease. However, it remains uncertain how soon statins should be started after an acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Recently published trials suggest starting before discharge. We hypothesize that statins should be initiated without delay. METHODS AND RESULTS Data from a large cohort of 10,484 consecutive patients with an ACS were analysed. Of this cohort, 1426 first-time statin receivers and survivors of the first 24 h were compared with 6771 first-day survivors not receiving statin therapy. A propensity score for the likelihood of receiving statin therapy within 24 h was developed and used with other established risk factors in a multivariable analysis. There was a significantly reduced all-cause 7-day mortality in patients receiving early statin therapy [0.4 vs. 2.6%, unadjusted hazard ratio (HR) 0.16, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.08-0.37, adjusted HR 0.34, 95% CI 0.15-0.79]. Statistical significance was observed in patients presenting with STE-ACS (adjusted HR 0.17, 95% CI 0.04-0.70) and not in NSTE-ACS patients. However, no statistical evidence of heterogeneity in treatment effect was observed between these groups. CONCLUSION These data suggest that very early statin therapy is associated with reduced mortality in patients presenting with STE-ACS; however, these findings have to be confirmed by prospective, randomized controlled trials before firm treatment recommendations can be given.
The AP-1 adaptor complex binds to immature secretory granules from PC12 cells, and is regulated by ADP-ribosylation factor

Immature secretory granules (ISGs) in endocrine and neuroendocrine cells have been shown by morphological techniques to be partially clathrin coated (Orci, L., M. Ravazzola, M. Amherdt, D. Lonvard, A. Perrelet. 1985a. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 82:5385-5389; Tooze, J., and S. A. Tooze. 1986. J. Cell Biol. 103:839-850). The function, and composition, of this clathrin coat has remained an enigma. Here we demonstrate using three independent techniques that immature secretory granules isolated from the rat neuroendocrine cell line PC12 have clathrin coat components associated with their membrane. To study the nature of the coat association we have developed an assay whereby the binding of the AP-1 subunit gamma-adaptin to ISGs was reconstituted by addition of rat or bovine brain cytosol. The amount of gamma-adaptin bound to the ISGs was ATP independent and was increased fourfold by the addition of GTPgammaS. The level of exogenous gamma-adaptin recruited to the ISG was similar to the level of gamma-adaptin present on the ISG after isolation. Addition of myristoylated ARF1 peptide stimulated binding. Reconstitution of the assay using AP-1 adaptor complex and recombinant ARF1 provided further evidence that ARF is involved in gamma-adaptin binding to ISGs; BFA inhibited this binding. Trypsin treatment and Trisstripping of the ISGs suggest that additional soluble and membrane-associated components are required for gamma-adaptin binding.