Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acanthamoeba Keratitis in a 5-Year-Old Boy Without a History of Contact Lens Usage

Purpose: This study was designed to report a case of acanthamoeba keratitis in a 5-year-old child without a history of trauma or contact lens usage. Methods: The history, clinical presentation, diagnostic, and therapeutic approaches were reviewed. Results: A 5-year-old child without any history of trauma or contact lens use was referred to our university clinic with an initial diagnosis of disciform herpetic keratitis. After 2 weeks of antibacterial and antiviral therapy, a corneal biopsy was performed for diagnostic purposes. The biopsy revealed acanthamoeba. Subsequently intensive therapy with chlorhexidine diacetate 0.02%, ketoconazole tb, hexamidine di-isethionate 0.1% was initiated. At the end of the first month, topical prednisolone acetate 1% was added to reduce inflammation, Chlorhexidine diacetate 0.02% and oral ketoconazole were discontinued, and hexamidine di-isethionate 0.1% was lowered to 4 × 1 and was administered for an additional 4 months. At the end of 5 months, all medications were withdrawn and amblyopia treatment was started. Conclusion: When dealing with keratitis in children, acanthamoeba should be considered even without history of contact lens usage or trauma.
Functional assembly of intrinsic coagulation proteases on monocytes and platelets. Comparison between cofactor activities induced by thrombin and factor Xa

Generation of coagulation factor Xa by the intrinsic pathway protease complex is essential for normal activation of the coagulation cascade in vivo. Monocytes and platelets provide membrane sites for assembly of components of this protease complex, factors IXa and VIII. Under biologically relevant conditions, expression of functional activity by this complex is associated with activation of factor VIII to VIIIa. In the present studies, autocatalytic regulatory pathways operating on monocyte and platelet membranes were investigated by comparing the cofactor function of thrombin-activated factor VIII to that of factor Xa-activated factor VIII. Reciprocal functional titrations with purified human factor VIII and factor IXa were performed at fixed concentrations of human monocytes, CaCl2, factor X, and either factor IXa or factor VIII. Factor VIII was preactivated with either thrombin or factor Xa, and reactions were initiated by addition of factor X. Rates of factor X activation were measured using chromogenic substrate specific for factor Xa. The K1/2 values, i.e., concentration of factor VIIIa at which rates were half maximal, were 0.96 nM with thrombin- activated factor VIII and 1.1 nM with factor Xa-activated factor VIII. These values are close to factor VIII concentration in plasma. The Vsat, i.e., rates at saturating concentrations of factor VIII, were 33.3 and 13.6 nM factor Xa/min, respectively. The K1/2 and Vsat values obtained in titrations with factor IXa were not significantly different from those obtained with factor VIII. In titrations with factor X, the values of Michaelis-Menten coefficients (Km) were 31.7 nM with thrombin- activated factor VIII, and 14.2 nM with factor Xa-activated factor VIII. Maximal rates were 23.4 and 4.9 nM factor Xa/min, respectively. The apparent catalytic efficiency was similar with either form of factor VIIIa. Kinetic profiles obtained with platelets as a source of membrane were comparable to those obtained with monocytes. These kinetic profiles are consistent with a 1:1 stoichiometry for the functional interaction between cofactor and enzyme on the surface of monocytes and platelets. Taken together, these results indicate that autocatalytic pathways connecting the extrinsic, intrinsic, and common coagulation pathways can operate efficiently on the monocyte membrane.
Seagull -- A Real-Time Coflow Scheduling System

Data-parallel applications often generate hundreds of flows at the same time in data centers. Since these flows are always connected with application context, traditional flow-level optimization policies are hard to perform well in such collections. The coflow abstraction brings hope and opportunity to make the scheduling much more efficient. But exsiting schedule systems based on that related concept are either static (such as Varys) or impracticable (such as Baraat). In this paper, we address these limitations by presenting Seagull -- a dynamic precise coflow scheduling system to optimize the average CCT (Coflow Completion Time) and guaranteeing predictable completions within coflow deadlines. It's a centralized system which can share the bandwidth resources with background flows in the data center. Our experiments show that 80% CCT of the coflows is about 1.7× faster than Varys. As for deadline meeting, Seagull can guarantee about 50% of admitted coflows finishing within their deadline, which is 10% more precise than Varys.
Relevant subtask learning by constrained mixture models

We introduce relevant subtask learning, a new learning problem which is a variant of multi-task learning. The goal is to build a classifier for a task-of-interest for which we have too few training samples. We additionally have "supplementary data'' collected from other tasks, but it is uncertain which of these other samples are relevant, that is, which samples are classified in the same way as in the task-of-interest. The research problem is how to use the "supplementary data" from the other tasks to improve the classifier in the task-of-interest. We show how to solve the problem, and demonstrate the solution with logistic regression classifiers. The key idea is to model all tasks as mixtures of relevant and irrelevant samples, and model the irrelevant part with a sufficiently flexible model such that it does not distort the model of relevant data. We give two learning algorithms for the method - a simple maximum likelihood optimization algorithm and a more advanced variational Bayes inference algorithm; in both cases we show that the method works better than a comparable multi-task learning model and naive methods.
Is the Internet for Porn? An Insight Into the Online Adult Industry

The online adult industry is among the most profitable business branches on the Internet, and its web sites attract large amounts of visitors and traffic. Nevertheless, no study has yet characterized the industry’s economical and securityrelated structure. As cyber-criminals are motivated by financial incentives, a deeper understanding and identification of the economic actors and interdependencies in the online adult business is important for analyzing securityrelated aspects of this industry. In this paper, we provide a survey of the different economic roles that adult web sites assume, and highlight their economic and technical features. We provide insights into security flaws and potential points of interest for cybercriminals. We achieve this by applying a combination of automatic and manual analysis techniques to investigate the economic structure of the online adult industry and its business cases. Furthermore, we also performed several experiments to gain a better understanding of the flow of visitors to these sites and the related cash flow, and report on the lessons learned while operating adult web sites on our own.
Knowledge structures in close relationships : a social psychological approach

Contents: Preface. G.J.O. Fletcher, J. Fitness, Introduction. Part I: Knowledge Structures and Individual/Couple Differences. G.J.O. Fletcher, G. Thomas, Close Relationship Lay Theories: Their Structure and Function. P.R. Shaver, N. Collins, C.L. Clark, Attachment Styles and Internal Working Models of Self and Relationship Partners. C.E. Rusbult, N.A. Yovetich, J. Verette, An Interdependence Analysis of Accommodation Processes. S.L. Murray, J.G. Holmes, The Construction of Relationship Realities. J.A. Simpson, S.W. Gangestad, C. Nations, Sociosexuality and Relationship Initiation: An Ethological Perspective of Nonverbal Behavior. L.K. Acitelli, A.M. Young, Gender and Thought in Relationships. Discussant Chapter: Part I. H.T. Reis, C.R. Knee, What We Know, What We Don't Know, and What We Need to Know About Relationship Knowledge Structures. Part II: Knowledge Structures and Emotions. J. Fitness, Emotion Knowledge Structures in Close Relationships. B. Fehr, M. Baldwin, Prototype and Script Analyses of Laypeople's Knowledge of Anger. M.S. Clark, S.P. Pataki, V.H. Carver, Some Thoughts and Findings on Self-Presentation of Emotions in Relationships. Discussant Chapter: Part II. J.P. Forgas, The Role of Emotion Scripts and Transient Moods in Relationships: Structural and Functional Perspectives. Part III: Knowledge Structures and Relationship Development. S. Planalp, M. Rivers, Changes in Knowledge of Personal Relationships. A. Aron, E.N. Aron, Self and Self-Expansion in Relationships. D. Holmberg, J. Veroff, Rewriting Relationship Memories: The Effects of Courtship and Wedding Scripts. J.D. Vorauer, M. Ross, The Pursuit of Knowledge in Close Relationships: An Informational Goals Analysis. Discussant Chapter: Part III. C.A. Surra, Knowledge Structures in Developing Relationships: Progress and Pitfalls.
Impact of Leptin-Mediated Sympatho-Activation on Cardiovascular Function in Obese Mice

Although the anorexic effects of leptin are lost in obesity, leptin-mediated sympatho-activation is preserved. The cardiovascular consequences of leptin-mediated sympatho-activation in obesity are poorly understood. We tested the hypothesis that 32 weeks of high-fat diet (HFD) induces metabolic leptin resistance but preserves leptin-mediated sympatho-activation of the cardiovascular system. HFD in mice significantly increased body weight and plasma leptin concentrations but significantly reduced the anorexic effects of leptin. HFD increased heart rate, stroke volume, cardiac output, and plasma aldosterone levels but not blood pressure. As reflected by the contractile response to phenylephrine measured both in vivo and ex vivo, vascular adrenergic reactivity was reduced by HFD, suggesting that reductions in sympathetic tone to the periphery vasculature may mitigate sympatho-activation of the heart and the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system. Tachyphylaxis was partially restored by symptho-inhibition and not present in ob/ob and db/db mice, despite obesity, arguing for a sympatho-mediated and leptin-specific mechanism. Although infusion of leptin in HFD mice had no effect on heart rate or blood pressure, it further increased aldosterone levels and further reduced vascular adrenergic tone in the absence of weight loss, indicating persistent leptin-mediated stimulation of the cardiovascular system in obesity. In conclusion, these data indicate that, despite metabolic leptin resistance, leptin-mediated stimulation of the heart, the vasculature, and aldosterone production persists in obesity. Blood pressure effects in response to leptin may be limited by a tachyphylactic response in the circulation, suggesting that failure of adrenergic desensitization may be a requisite step for hypertension in the context of obesity.
The OpdQ porin of Pseudomonas aeruginosa is regulated by environmental signals associated with cystic fibrosis including nitrate‐induced regulation involving the NarXL two‐component system

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a versatile opportunistic pathogen that causes chronic infections in immunocompromised hosts. Multiple porins modulate outer membrane permeability under various environmental conditions. The lung environment of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients is unique with changes occurring in nutrient availability, osmolarity, and oxygen content. Although P. aeruginosa gene expression is modified under these conditions, little is known about how they influence porin regulation. In this study, we evaluated the regulation of the outer membrane porin OpdQ, a member of the OprD family of porins, with regard to oxygen, nitrate, and/or NaCl levels. We demonstrated using promoter::fusion clones of P. aeruginosa PAO1 and clinical strains collected from CF patients that OpdQ was transcriptionally repressed under low oxygen but increased in the presence of nitrate. The nitrate‐induced regulation of OpdQ was found to be dependent on the transcription factor NarL via the NarXL two‐component system. In addition, NaCl‐induced osmotic stress increased OpdQ production among most of the clinical strains evaluated. In conclusion, these data identify for the first time that specific environmental cues associated with the CF microenvironment influence porin regulation, and that the nitrate‐induced regulation of OpdQ is associated with nitrate metabolism via the NarXL two‐component system of P. aeruginosa.
CCG Parsing and Multiword Expressions

This thesis presents a study about the integration of information about Multiword Expressions (MWEs) into parsing with Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). We build on previous work which has shown the benefit of adding information about MWEs to syntactic parsing by implementing a similar pipeline with CCG parsing. More specifically, we collapse MWEs to one token in training and test data in CCGbank, a corpus which contains sentences annotated with CCG derivations. Our collapsing algorithm however can only deal with MWEs when they form a constituent in the data which is one of the limitations of our approach. We study the effect of collapsing training and test data. A parsing effect can be obtained if collapsed data help the parser in its decisions and a training effect can be obtained if training on the collapsed data improves results. We also collapse the gold standard and show that our model significantly outperforms the baseline model on our gold standard, which indicates that there is a training effect. We show that the baseline model performs significantly better on our gold standard when the data are collapsed before parsing than when the data are collapsed after parsing which indicates that there is a parsing effect. We show that these results can lead to improved performance on the non-collapsed standard benchmark although we fail to show that it does so significantly. We conclude that despite the limited settings, there are noticeable improvements from using MWEs in parsing. We discuss ways in which the incorporation of MWEs into parsing can be improved and hypothesize that this will lead to more substantial results. We finally show that turning the MWE recognition part of the pipeline into an experimental part is a useful thing to do as we obtain different results with different recognizers.
Studies of Suspicious Lesions through Local Texture Analysis in Spine Radiographs

This paper presents a method to assess and classify the textural abnormalities created by the cellular changes made available through digital radiographs. In this process, digital X-ray images of the spine were subjected to investigations. A study has been made to choose the optimum set of features selectively to train the classifier. In most common applications, the feature vector is extracted from the image data using pixel intensity and magnitude of the frequency displayed as an image. In this case, the introduction of the phase angle of the frequency involved in generating the hue of the suspicious lesions considerably enhanced the success rate of the detection (approximately by 25%). Our experimental study based on 32 subjects indicates that the proposed system is successfully classifying the abnormal regions with 94.37% mean Correct Classification Ratio (CCR). Here, CCR is defined as correctly classified samples versus all the samples.
Introducing the "SPHERICLE": an experimental testbed for research and teaching in nonholonomy

In this paper we describe an experimental apparatus developed in our laboratory for research and advanced teaching purposes. The device consists of an untethered spherical vehicle that autonomously rolls on the laboratory floor, and can reach arbitrary positions and orientations in the environment. The kinematics of the vehicle are nonholonomic and result from the combination of the kinematics of two classical nonholonomic systems, namely, a unicycle and a plate-ball system. The "SPHERICLE" introduces features that are new with respect to the two systems.
Fractal and Chaos Characteristics of Acoustic Emission During Failure of Cemented Filling Body

The cemented filling body is taken as the object of this study, whose nonlinear dynamic characteristics of damage and instability are researched by virtue of acoustic emission (AE) under uniaxial cyclic loading and unloading test. The results show that there exists similarity in variation trend between correlation dimension and maximum Lyapunov exponent during each loading stage, which also verifies the disorder and chaos often reflect the complexity of fractal. Before the filling body gets to the instability, the correlation dimension declines continuously. So the filling body’s unstable failure is a kind of ordered dimension reduction process. Such kind of characteristic can be as a criterion condition for filling body’s failure. The maximum Lyapunov exponent varies little in magnitude, therefore, it can’t be apt to be used as the criterion condition, but it can be used to predict the AE time series that is of chaos feature, and through it higher forecast precision can be got.
The different stages of PRPD pattern for negative point to plane corona driven by a DC voltage containing a ripple

This paper presents the different patterns, which can be observed by means of a phase resolved partial discharge analysis, when a negative dc voltage is applied to a point to plane arrangement in air. The required phase relation is obtained due to the ripple being present on the dc voltage generated by a half-wave rectification. Phase resolved partial discharge patterns are given from corona onset to glow inception. Discharge pulses appearing at the test object are used to support physical explanations of the pattern occurrence. It is shown that five clearly identifiable patterns accompany the evolution of corona discharges when a dc voltage with a ripple is used. The uniqueness of the different patterns and the accompanied reduction in test effort for dc partial discharges is emphasized.
Picture-specific cohort score normalization for face pair matching

Face pair matching is the task of deciding whether or not two face images belong to the same person. This has been a very active and challenging topic recently due to the presence of various sources of variation in facial images, especially under unconstrained environment. We investigate cohort normalization that has been widely used in biomet-ric verification as means to improve the robustness of face recognition under challenging environments to the face pair matching problem. Specifically, given a pair of images and an additional fixed cohort set (identities of cohort samples never appear in the test stage), two picture-specific cohort score lists are computed and the correspondent score profiles of which are modeled by polynomial regression. The extracted regression coefficients are subsequently classified using a classifier. We advance the state-of-the-art in cohort normalization by providing a better understanding of the cohort behavior. In particular, we found that the choice of the cohort set had little impact on the generalization performance. Furthermore, the larger the size of the cohort set, the more stable the system performance becomes. Experiments performed on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark show that our system achieves performance that is comparable to state-of-the-art methods.
A vision system for daily assistive robots using character information in daily environments

This paper describes a vision system that is for using character information for robots working on daily environments. It is mainly composed of image-based recognition module that detects character candidates by taking particular note of closed contour in an image. In addition, to cope with tiny or distant characters, a camera system with mechanical gaze adjustment is collaborated with the image processing. By combining the detection result with OCR (Optical Character Reader), applications to daily assistance by an autonomous robot were introduced.
Applying Large-Scale Multi-unit Combinatorial Auctions with Reserve-Price Biddings for Resource Allocations -- A Preliminary Analysis

An auction-based pricing mechanism has been presented to be applied for the problems that can be modeled as a variant of reserve price biddings on combinatorial auctions. In there, the combinatorial auction is extended to cover a multi-unit scenario, which allows placing bids for indistinguishable items to cover the case, for example, to assign an allocation of electricity power usage for services, considering electricity generation costs on the power suppliers. Although such a mechanism could be naively applied to various purposed such as dynamic electricity auctions, it was difficult to be applied for large-scale auction problems due to its computational intractability and theoretical limitations. In this paper, a preliminary analysis for an extended pricing mechanism is presented. The mechanism employs an approximate allocation and pricing algorithm that is capable to handle multi-unit auctions with reserve price biddings, guaranteeing the reserve price condition. The presented preliminary analysis shows the approach efficiently produces approximation allocations that are also necessary in its pricing process and it behaves as an approximation of VCG (Vickrey-Clarke-Groves) mechanism satisfying budget balance condition and bidders' individual rationality without having single-minded bidders assumption.
Trajectory clustering and its applications for video surveillance

In this paper we present a trajectory clustering method suited for video surveillance and monitoring systems. The clusters are dynamic and built in real-time as the trajectory data is acquired, without the need of an off-line processing step. We show how the obtained clusters can be successfully used both to give proper feedback to the low-level tracking system and to collect valuable information for the high-level event analysis modules.
Enhanced vascular permeability facilitates entry of plasma HDL and promotes macrophage-reverse cholesterol transport from skin in mice

Reverse cholesterol transport (RCT) pathway from macrophage foam cells initiates when HDL particles cross the endothelium, enter the interstitial fluid, and induce cholesterol efflux from these cells. We injected [3H]cholesterol-loaded J774 macrophages into the dorsal skin of mice and measured the transfer of macrophage-derived [3H]cholesterol to feces [macrophage-RCT (m-RCT)]. Injection of histamine to the macrophage injection site increased locally vascular permeability, enhanced influx of intravenously administered HDL, and stimulated m-RCT from the histamine-treated site. The stimulatory effect of histamine on m-RCT was abolished by prior administration of histamine H1 receptor (H1R) antagonist pyrilamine, indicating that the histamine effect was H1R-dependent. Subcutaneous administration of two other vasoactive mediators, serotonin or bradykinin, and activation of skin mast cells to secrete histamine and other vasoactive compounds also stimulated m-RCT. None of the studied vasoactive mediators affected serum HDL levels or the cholesterol-releasing ability of J774 macrophages in culture, indicating that acceleration of m-RCT was solely due to increased availability of cholesterol acceptors in skin. We conclude that disruption of the endothelial barrier by vasoactive compounds enhances the passage of HDL into interstitial fluid and increases the rate of RCT from peripheral macrophage foam cells, which reveals a novel tissue cholesterol-regulating function of these compounds.