Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CD14 Contributes to Warm Hepatic Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury in Mice

ABSTRACT Introduction: Ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) of the liver contributes to the pathobiology of liver injury in transplantation, liver surgery, and hemorrhagic shock. Ischemia/reperfusion induces an inflammatory response that is driven, in part, by Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR) signaling. CD14 is known to participate in the function of TLR4. We hypothesized that CD14 would be involved in the pathobiology of warm hepatic I/R. Methods: Using a 70% liver inflow inclusion model, CD14 knockout and wild-type (WT) mice were subjected to 1-h warm ischemia followed by reperfusion. CD14 mRNA, circulating transaminase, interleukin 6, soluble CD14, and high-mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) levels were measured. CD14 neutralizing antibody or isotype control antibody was given before ischemia or reperfusion for CD14 blockade in WT mice. Recombinant HMGB1 was given before reperfusion in some experiments to test if liver injury worsens. Results: There was an upregulation of CD14 mRNA in reperfused livers together with increased soluble CD14 levels in the circulation. Compared with WT control mice, CD14 knockout mice had much lower alanine aminotransferase and interleukin 6 levels at 6 and 24 h following I/R, and much less liver necrosis by histology. TUNEL (terminal deoxynucleotidyl-transferase dUTP nick end labeling) staining displayed less apoptosis at 24 h in the absence of CD14. CD14 blockage by neutralizing antibody also attenuated liver injury and the inflammatory response in C57BL/6 mice following I/R, but did not provide additional protection to TLR4 mutant C3H/Hej mice. CD14 deficiency did not change circulating HMGB1 levels following I/R (6 h). A dose of recombinant HMGB1, which worsened hepatic injury when given before reperfusion in WT mice, did not increase liver damage in CD14-deficient mice. Conclusions: CD14 is actively involved in hepatic I/R injury. Its deficiency or blockade ischemia attenuates liver injury and inflammatory response. CD14 mediates liver damage and inflammatory responses in the setting of warm hepatic I/R in mice.
Global Inequality in Energy Consumption from 1980 to 2010

We study the global probability distribution of energy consumption per capita around the world using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) for 1980-2010. We find that the Lorenz curves have moved up during this time period, and the Gini coefficient G has decreased from 0.66 in 1980 to 0.55 in 2010, indicating a decrease in inequality. The global probability distribution of energy consumption per capita in 2010 is close to the exponential distribution with G=0.5. We attribute this result to the globalization of the world economy, which mixes the world and brings it closer to the state of maximal entropy. We argue that global energy production is a limited resource that is partitioned among the world population. The most probable partition is the one that maximizes entropy, thus resulting in the exponential distribution function. A consequence of the latter is the law of 1/3: the top 1/3 of the world population consumes 2/3 of produced energy. We also find similar results for the global probability distribution of CO2 emissions per capita.
A real-time auto-adjustable smart pillow system for sleep apnea detection and treatment

Sleep apnea, which is a common sleep disorder characterized by the repetitive cessation of breathing during sleep, can result in various diseases, including headaches, hypertension, stroke and cardiac arrest, as well as produce severe consequences such as impaired concentration and traffic accidents. A traditional diagnosis method of sleep apnea is polysomnography, which can only be conducted in sleep center with specialized personals, thus is expensive and inconvenient. Moreover, it is only used for understanding the conditions, without treatment function. Some other methods or devices have been developed to alleviate sleep apnea, such as continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) and intraoral mandibular advancement device and surgery. However, they only provide a treatment method without detection or monitoring function. There is no existing device which can provide both apnea detection and treatment functionality. In this paper, we propose and implement a smart phone-based auto-adjustable pillow system, which enables both sleep apnea detection and treatment. Sleep apnea events can be detected in real-time using the blood oxygen sensor, accordingly, the height and shape of the pillow can be automatically adjusted to terminate the sleep apnea event. On the other hand, after the adjustment, the sensor can continuously monitor the blood oxygen signal to evaluate the effectiveness of the pillow adjustment and to help in selecting a suitable adjustment scheme. Therefore, a real-time feedback control system is formed. Besides, compared with existing diagnosis or treatment devices, our system is non-invasive, inexpensive and portable, which can be used at home or during traveling. In this paper, a real-time sleep apnea detection and classification algorithm is proposed to decide whether the pillow should be adjusted or not. We also design a real-time feedback pillow adjustment algorithm, to decide when and how to adjust the pillow and how to evaluate the effectiveness of the adjustment. We conducted experiments on 40 patients, which demonstrate that using our novel smart pillow system, both the sleep apnea duration and the number of sleep apnea events are dramatically reduced by more than 50%.
The Watson speech recognition engine

In 1995, AT&T Research (then within Bell Labs) began work on a software-only automated speech recognition system named Watson(TM). The goal was ambitious; Watson was to serve as a single code base supporting applications ranging from PC-desktop command and control through to scaleable telephony interactive voice services. Furthermore, the software was to be the new code base for the research group, allowing fast deployment of new algorithmic advances from the lab into the field. A set of C++ objects has been developed which support these objectives. This paper gives an overview of the Watson automatic speech recognizer software architecture, describes the algorithms employed, and provides performance numbers for some sample tasks.
A more elaborative way to check codon quality: an open source program

Relative Synonymous Codon Usage (RSCU) and Relative Adaptiveness of a Codon (RAC) table bias importance in gene expression are well documented in the literature. However, to improve the gene expression we need to figure out which codons are optimal for the expression in order to synthesise an appropriate DNA sequence. An alternative to the manual approach, which is obviously a tedious task, is to set up software on your computer to perform this. Though such kinds of programs are available on the internet, none of them are open-source libraries. Here, one can use our Perl program to do his or her task more easily and efficiently. It is free for everyone.
An analysis of the operation of differential evolution at high and low crossover rates

A key parameter affecting the operation of differential evolution (DE) is the crossover rate Cr ∊ [0, 1]. While very low values are recommended for and used with separable problems, on non-separable problems, which include most real-world problems, Cr = 0.9 has become the de facto standard, working well across a large range of problem domains. Recent work on separable and non-separable problems has shown that lower-dimensional searches can play an important role in the performance of search techniques in higher-dimensional search spaces. However, the standard value of Cr = 0.9 implies a very high-dimensional search, which is not effective for other search techniques. An analysis of Cr across its range [0, 1] provides insight into how its value affects the performance of DE and suggests how low values may be used to improve the performance of DE. This new understanding of the operation of DE at high and low crossover rates is useful for analysing how adaptive parameters affect DE performance and leads to new suggestions for how adaptive DE techniques might be developed.
Semantic data management for situation-aware assistance in ambient assisted living

Smart Homes (SH) have emerged as a realistically viable solution capable of providing technology-driven assistive living for the elderly and disabled. Nevertheless, it still remains a challenge to provide situation-aware assistance for those in need in their Activity of Daily Living (ADL). This paper introduces a systematic approach to providing situation-aware ADL assistances in a smart home environment. The approach makes use of semantic technologies for sensor data modeling, fusion and management, thus creating machine understandable and processable situational data. It exploits intelligent agents for interpreting and reasoning semantic situational (meta)data to enhance situation-aware decision support. We analyze the nature and issues of SH-based healthcare for cognitively deficient inhabitants. We discuss the ways in which semantic technologies enhance situation comprehension. We describe a cognitive agent for realizing high-level cognitive capabilities such as prediction and explanation. We outline the implementation of a prototype assistive system and illustrate the proposed approach through simulated and real-time ADL assistance scenarios in the context of situation aware assistive living.
A practical RAKE combining scheme for synchronous CDMA systems

In this paper we consider the performance of a RAKE receiver in a code division multiple access (CDMA) system employing maximal-ratio combining. A simple select and combine algorithm is introduced in which the RAKE receiver combines only the synchronization path and those resolvable paths with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) larger than a given threshold. We analyze its performance based on moment generating functions of the SNR of the combined signal. We study the cases with equal and unequal average SNR for different diversity paths. In particular, closed-form expressions for the average combined SNR and symbol error probability with the proposed RAKE receiver over block fading channels are derived. We also study the outage probability of the system and the number of channels estimated. Numerical results are given to illustrate the analytical results.
A Broadband Access Market Framework: Towards Consumer Service Level Agreements

Ubiquitous broadband access is considered by many to be necessary for the Internet to realize its full potential. But there is no generally accepted definition of what constitutes broadband access. Furthermore, there is only limited understanding of how the quality of end-to-end broadband Internet services might be assured in today’s nascent multi-service, multi-provider environment. The absence of generally accepted and standardized service definitions and mechanisms for assuring service quality is a significant barrier to competitive broadband access markets. In the business data services market and in the core of the Internet, this problem has been addressed, in part, by increased reliance on Service Level Agreements (SLAs). These SLAs provide a mechanism for service providers and customers to flexibly specify the quality of service (QoS) that will be delivered. When used in conjunction with the new standards-based technical solutions for implementing QoS, these SLAs are helping to facilitate the development of robust wholesale markets for backbone transport services and content delivery services for commercial customers. The emergence of bandwidth traders, brokers, and exchanges provide an institutional and market-based framework to support effective competition. This paper explains why broadband access creates a need for consumergrade SLAs in edge networks. The form these agreements take will affect incentives by service providers to adopt technology and offer new services (e.g., is it necessary to be able to guarantee QoS? ), the extent and intensity of
Mining Affective Context in Short Films for Emotion-Aware Recommendation

Emotion is fundamental to human experience and impacts our daily activities and decision-making processes where, e.g., the affective state of a user influences whether or not she decides to consume a recommended item - movie, book, product or service. However, information retrieval and recommendation tasks have largely ignored emotion as a source of user context, in part because emotion is difficult to measure and easy to misunderstand. In this paper we explore the role of emotions in short films and propose an approach that automatically extracts affective context from user comments associated to short films available in YouTube, as an alternative to explicit human annotations. We go beyond the traditional polarity detection (i.e., positive/negative), and extract for each film four opposing pairs of primary emotions: joy-sadness, anger-fear, trust-disgust, and anticipation-surprise. Finally, in our empirical evaluation, we show how the affective context extracted automatically can be leveraged for emotion-aware film recommendation.
Integrating Virtual Worlds with Tangible User Interfaces for Teaching Mathematics: A Pilot Study

This article presents a pilot study of the use of two new tangible interfaces and virtual worlds for teaching geometry in a secondary school. The first tangible device allows the user to control a virtual object in six degrees of freedom. The second tangible device is used to modify virtual objects, changing attributes such as position, size, rotation and color. A pilot study on using these devices was carried out at the “Florida Secundaria” high school. A virtual world was built where students used the tangible interfaces to manipulate geometrical figures in order to learn different geometrical concepts. The pilot experiment results suggest that the use of tangible interfaces and virtual worlds allowed a more meaningful learning (concepts learnt were more durable).
A globally asymptotically stabilizing trajectory tracking controller for fully actuated rigid bodies using landmark‐based information

In this paper, we address the problem of designing a control law based on sensor measurements that provides global asymptotic stabilization to a reference trajectory defined on the SE(3)×R6 . The proposed control law is a function of the angular velocity, of vector measurements characterizing the position of some given landmarks, and of their rate of change. We provide sufficient conditions for the existence of synergistic potential functions on SO(3) which are pivotal in the generation of a suitable hybrid control law. We also provide sufficient conditions on the geometry of the landmarks to solve the given problem. Finally, the proposed solution is simulated and compared with a continuous feedback control law. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A token-based admission control and request scheduling in lane reservation systems

In many parts of the world, the ever-expanding traffic congestion problem has become a major source of wasted fuel, economic burden, and environmental pollution. Alleviating traffic congestion is not only a matter of expanding the transportation capacity, such as adding more lanes or building new roads, but also the problem of providing good traffic management and polices. Recently, the concept of road reservation systems has been widely discussed. With this system, in order to use the lanes and roads controlled by the transportation operators, drivers make reservations in advance. The goal of the system is to provide certain quality of services to the drivers, e.g., guaranteed end to end travel delay. In this work, we focus on the admission control and request scheduling for a reservation system. Specifically, we consider a high-priority lane reservation scenario, in which the system has to determine which vehicles could be allowed to enter the high-priority lane, so that the traffic workload does not exceed the lane capacity. We present a token-based admission control policy that implements the reservation scheme. We have also designed an on-line scheduling algorithm that selects which reservation requests can be allowed based on the admission control policy. Using a simulation model to evaluate the system performance in a variety of scenarios, we show that the proposed algorithm can achieve efficient utilization of the high priority lane.
Eye gaze performance for children with severe physical impairments using gaze-based assistive technology—A longitudinal study

ABSTRACT Gaze-based assistive technology (gaze-based AT) has the potential to provide children affected by severe physical impairments with opportunities for communication and activities. This study aimed to examine changes in eye gaze performance over time (time on task and accuracy) in children with severe physical impairments, without speaking ability, using gaze-based AT. A longitudinal study with a before and after design was conducted on 10 children (aged 1–15 years) with severe physical impairments, who were beginners to gaze-based AT at baseline. Thereafter, all children used the gaze-based AT in daily activities over the course of the study. Compass computer software was used to measure time on task and accuracy with eye selection of targets on screen, and tests were performed with the children at baseline, after 5 months, 9–11 months, and after 15–20 months. Findings showed that the children improved in time on task after 5 months and became more accurate in selecting targets after 15–20 months. This study indicates that these children with severe physical impairments, who were unable to speak, could improve in eye gaze performance. However, the children needed time to practice on a long-term basis to acquire skills needed to develop fast and accurate eye gaze performance.
LTE Uplink Interference-Aware Scheduling Using High Interference and Overload Indicators

LTE uses single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) scheme for the uplink transmission which limits the flexibility of the allocation process as the sub carriers assigned to a single user have to be contiguous. We propose an LTE uplink interference-aware search-tree based scheduling scheme using the high interference indicator (HII) and the overload indicator (OI) messages that are exchanged over the X2-interface. HII indicates the potential uplink inter-cell interference (ICI) to other cells while OI indicates the detection of low, medium or high uplink ICI from other cells. The exchanged HII and OI messages are used to scale down the proportional-fair (PF) scheduling metric before being processed by the search-tree scheduler to make interfered physical resource blocks (PRBs) less favorable to cell-edge (CE) UEs. Unlike previous work which handles these problems separately, the proposed integrated RRM framework jointly takes into account 1) interference information exchanged between neighbor eNBs, 2) constraints on max power per UE and equal power on different PRBs, and 3) constraints on the contiguity in PRBs allocation due to SC-FDMA mechanism. It is also fully integrated with the LTE uplink open and closed-loop fractional power control for proper power allocation. The proposed interference-aware scheduler reduces the effect of the generated ICI mainly on CE users and also manages to provide fair resource sharing between CE and cell-center (CC) users. Simulation results show that the proposed framework improves CE users' throughput by around 5% compared to soft frequency reuse (SFR). It also reduces the probability of not being served to 1% -- compared to 10% in SFR.
Biometric System Based on EEG Signals: A Nonlinear Model Approach

A research on biometry based on motor imagery EEG signals was described. In this study, I select EEG signals related to motor imagery, and an ARMA model was built. Estimated model parameters vectors as feature vector were extracted, and then to classified by artificial neural networks. Two different classify cases, including authentication and identification, were investigated. Four types of motor imagery EEG signals and three subjects were compared. Experiment results show that EEG carrying individual-specific information which can be successfully exploited for purpose of person authentication and identification.
Bridging the Parallelization Gap : Automating Parallelism Discovery and Planning

Multicore processors have forced mainstream programmers to rethink the way they design software. Parallelism will be the avenue for performance gains in these multicore processors but will require new tools and methodologies to gain full acceptance by everyday programmers. As a step towards improved parallelization tools, we propose a parallelization taxonomy that categorizes tools based on which of five fundamental stages of parallelization they assist with. Based on this taxonomy, we find that many popular parallelization tools focus on the final stages, leaving the programmer to perform the initial stages without assistance. In this paper we provide a preliminary description of pyrprof, a tool that helps the programmer locate parallel regions of code and decide which regions to parallelize first. pyrprof performs dynamic critical path analysis and utilizes the structure of programs to highlight exploitable forms of parallelism. A case study based on MPEG encoding is used to demonstrate pyrprof’s effectiveness.
Genetic Recombination and Cryptosporidium hominis Virulent Subtype IbA10G2

Little is known about the emergence and spread of virulent subtypes of Cryptosporidium hominis, the predominant species responsible for human cryptosporidiosis. We conducted sequence analyses of 32 genetic loci of 53 C. hominis specimens isolated from a longitudinally followed cohort of children living in a small community. We identified by linkage disequilibrium and recombination analyses only limited genetic recombination, which occurred exclusively within the 60-kDa glycoprotein gene subtype IbA10G2, a predominant subtype for outbreaks in industrialized nations and a virulent subtype in the study community. Intensive transmission of virulent subtype IbA10G2 in the study area might have resulted in genetic recombination with other subtypes. Moreover, we identified selection for IbA10G2 at a 129-kb region around the 60-kDa glycoprotein gene in chromosome 6. These findings improve our understanding of the origin and evolution of C. hominis subtypes and the spread of virulent subtypes.
Disaster Mental Health Epidemiology: Methodological Review and Interpretation of Research Findings

Worldwide, disasters are increasing in frequency and severity. Mental health consequences of disasters are extensive, and knowledge of anticipated mental health effects is needed for effective disaster response. Difficulties inherent in conducting disaster research have limited the understanding of research findings. This article presents and interprets disaster mental health research findings in the context of research methods. A brief history of the disaster mental health research field is provided, and the presentation of findings is ordered into topical areas of disaster mental health consequences and timing and prediction of mental health outcomes. Results of different studies varied greatly by several main characteristics of research methods, especially methods of psychiatric assessment, sampling and exposure group determination, and consideration of confounding variables. In conclusion, many complexities in conducting disaster mental health research have limited the understanding and interpretation of available knowledge needed to inform efforts to plan and carry out effective mental health responses to disasters. Thoughtful interpretation of findings in the context of research design and methods is vital to accurate understanding of the types, prevalence, and predictors of anticipated mental health effects of disasters. A wealth of knowledge from disaster mental health research has accumulated in recent decades, but more research is still needed to resolve inconsistent findings through methodological refinements.