Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SHE based non interactive privacy preserving biometric authentication protocols

Being unique and immutable for each person, biometric signals are widely used in access control systems. While biometric recognition appeases concerns about password's theft or loss, at the same time it raises concerns about individual privacy. Central servers store several enrolled biometrics, hence security against theft must be provided during biometric transmission and against those who have access to the database. If a server's database is compromised, other systems using the same biometric templates could also be compromised as well. One solution is to encrypt the stored templates. Nonetheless, when using traditional cryptosystem, data must be decrypted before executing the protocol, leaving the database vulnerable. To overcame this problem and protect both the server and the client, biometrics should be processed while encrypted. This is possible by using secure two-party computation protocols, mainly based on Garbled Circuits (GC) and additive Homomorphic Encryption (HE). Both GC and HE based solutions are efficient yet interactive, meaning that the client takes part in the computation. Instead in this paper we propose a non-interactive protocol for privacy preserving biometric authentication based on a Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SHE) scheme, modified to handle integer values, and also suggest a blinding method to protect the system from spoofing attacks. Although our solution is not as efficient as the ones based on GC or HE, the protocol needs no interaction, moving the computation entirely on the server side and leaving only inputs encryption and outputs decryption to the client.
Effect of CaF2 and CaO Substituted for MgO on the Phase Evolution and Mechanical Properties of K‐Fluorrichterite Glass Ceramics

Chain silicate glass ceramics based on K-fluorrichterite (KNa-CaMg 5 Si 8 O 22 F 2 , KFR) have potential for use in restorative dentistry and biomedical applications because they may be cast to shape and, when cerammed, have high biaxial flexural strength and fracture toughness. Excess CaO in canasite-based chain silicate compositions is known to enhance their bioactivity. Therefore, two new glass ceramic compositions have been fabricated with 5 mol% CaF 2 (Glass A) and 5 mol% CaO (Glass B) substituted for MgO in the KFR formula unit. The phase evolution of Glasses A and B was studied in detail using X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy. In addition, their mechanical properties were assessed. For Glass A, the fracture toughness (FT = 2.66±0.02 MPa·m 1/2 ) and biaxial flexural strength (BFS = 227.3±24.5 MPa) were optimized for samples heat treated at 900°C for 4 h. In Glass B, however, the best FT (2.08±0.02 MPa·m 1/2 ) and BFS (217.4±4.4 MPa) were obtained at 950°C. In view of their excellent mechanical properties and castability, Glasses A and B are considered potential candidates for fabrication of custom medical devices in restorative dentistry and moderate load-bearing reconstructive bone surgery.
HIV and Hepatitis Virus Resistance to Antivirals: Review of Data from the Xix International HIV and Hepatitis Virus Drug Resistance Workshop and Curative Strategies

The XIX International HIV and Hepatitis Virus Drug Resistance Workshop offered scientists, clinical investigators, physicians and others an opportunity to present study results selected in a rigorous peer-review process and to discuss those data in an open forum. In 2010, Workshop organizers expanded the programme to include hepatitis B and C viruses, reasoning that workers in all three fields could benefit from shared experience, positive and negative. Slide sessions at the 2010 Workshop focused on hepatitis virus resistance to current and experimental antivirals; epidemiology of HIV resistance; HIV pathogenesis, fitness and resistance; resistance to new antiretrovirals; markers of response to HIV entry inhibitors; HIV persistence, reservoirs and elimination strategies; application of new viral sequencing techniques; and mechanisms of HIV drug resistance. This article summarizes all slide presentations at the Workshop.
Salusin-β Is Involved in Diabetes Mellitus-Induced Endothelial Dysfunction via Degradation of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor Gamma

The pathophysiological mechanisms for vascular lesions in diabetes mellitus (DM) are complex, among which endothelial dysfunction plays a vital role. Therapeutic target against endothelial injury may provide critical venues for treatment of diabetic vascular diseases. We recently identified that salusin-β contributed to high glucose-induced endothelial cell apoptosis. However, the roles of salusin-β in DM-induced endothelial dysfunction remain largely elusive. Male C57BL/6J mice were used to induce type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) model. Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) were cultured in high glucose/high fat (HG/HF) medium. We demonstrated increased expression of salusin-β in diabetic aortic tissues and high-glucose/high-fat- (HG/HF-) incubated HUVECs. Disruption of salusin-β by shRNA abrogated the reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, inflammation, and nitrotyrosine content of HUVECs cultured in HG/HF medium. The HG/HF-mediated decrease in peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPARγ) expression was restored by salusin-β shRNA, and PPARγ inhibitor T0070907 abolished the protective actions of salusin-β shRNA on endothelial injury in HG/HF-treated HUVECs. Salusin-β silencing obviously improved endothelium-dependent vasorelaxation, oxidative stress, inflammatory response, and nitrative stress in diabetic aorta. Taken together, our results highlighted the essential role of salusin-β in pathological endothelial dysfunction, and salusin-β may be a promising target in treatment of vascular complications of DM.
Predicting a change in the order of spring phenology in temperate forests

The rise in spring temperatures over the past half‐century has led to advances in the phenology of many nontropical plants and animals. As species and populations differ in their phenological responses to temperature, an increase in temperatures has the potential to alter timing‐dependent species interactions. One species‐interaction that may be affected is the competition for light in deciduous forests, where early vernal species have a narrow window of opportunity for growth before late spring species cast shade. Here we consider the Marsham phenology time series of first leafing dates of thirteen tree species and flowering dates of one ground flora species, which spans two centuries. The exceptional length of this time series permits a rare comparison of the statistical support for parameter‐rich regression and mechanistic thermal sensitivity phenology models. While mechanistic models perform best in the majority of cases, both they and the regression models provide remarkably consistent insights into the relative sensitivity of each species to forcing and chilling effects. All species are sensitive to spring forcing, but we also find that vernal and northern European species are responsive to cold temperatures in the previous autumn. Whether this sensitivity reflects a chilling requirement or a delaying of dormancy remains to be tested. We then apply the models to projected future temperature data under a fossil fuel intensive emissions scenario and predict that while some species will advance substantially others will advance by less and may even be delayed due to a rise in autumn and winter temperatures. Considering the projected responses of all fourteen species, we anticipate a change in the order of spring events, which may lead to changes in competitive advantage for light with potential implications for the composition of temperate forests.
Learning and memory with neuropathic pain: impact of old age and progranulin deficiency

Persistent neuropathic pain is a frequent consequence of peripheral nerve injuries, particularly in the elderly. Using the IntelliCage we studied if sciatic nerve injury obstructed learning and memory in young and aged mice, each in wild type and progranulin deficient mice, which develop premature signs of brain aging. Both young and aged mice developed long-term nerve injury-evoked hyperalgesia and allodynia. In both genotypes, aged mice with neuropathic pain showed high error rates in place avoidance acquisition tasks. However, once learnt, these aged mice with neuropathic pain showed a significantly stronger maintenance of the aversive memory. Nerve injury did not affect place preference behavior in neither genotype, neither in young nor aged mice. However, nerve injury in progranulin deficient mice impaired the learning of spatial sequences of awarded places, particularly in the aged mice. This task required a discrimination of clockwise and anti-clockwise sequences. The chaining failure occurred only in progranulin deficient mice after nerve injury, but not in sham operated or wildtype mice, suggesting that progranulin was particularly important for compensatory adaptations after nerve injury. In contrast, all aged mice with neuropathic pain, irrespective of the genotype, had a long maintenance of aversive memory suggesting a negative alliance and possibly mutual aggravation of chronic neuropathic pain and aversive memory at old age.
Person Re-Identification via Unsupervised Transfer of Learned Visual Representations

Person re-identification is an open and challenging problem in computer vision. Most of the existing literature has focused on designing solutions which advantage of a supervised phase either to learn an end-to-end solution based on deep learning architectures or to find the optimal metric between hand-crafted features. Such solutions require a significant manual labor to annotate a large number of matching pairs to obtain good generalization performance. As a result, an extremely poor scalability is achieved. To address such a problem, we propose a deep learning scheme which leverages on the large quantity of labeled data that may be available in a source domain - different from the re-identification one- to learn a robust visual representation. This is then exploited in an unsupervised transfer learning scheme to better handle the difficulties in the target re-identification domain. The transferred sparse representation obtained via dictionary learning is used to perform the re-identification. Results on two benchmark datasets have shown that our approach performs on par or even better than state-of-the-art approaches.
Air flow resistance across nonwoven filter fabric covered with microfiber layer used in wood dust separation

Modern nonwoven filter fabrics covered with a microfiber layer make it possible to carry out surface filtration. A dust cake forms only on their upstream side and influences the air flow resistance across the filter. The mode of formation of the flow resistance caused by such a fabric during the separation of very fine wood dust particles was the subject of a comparative investigation using a homogeneous, standard nonwoven filtering fabric. The experiments carried out in a pilot-scale pulse-jet bag filter enabled a detailed description of the increase in pressure drop across the dust cake formed during filtering cycles repeated hundreds of times. Based of the results obtained the difference in this filtration parameter between polyester-based nonwoven filter fabrics with a standard and a layered structure with microfiber was also shown.
Chainy: an universal tool for standardized relative quantification in real-time PCR

Chainy is a cross-platform web tool providing systematic pipelines and steady criteria to process real-time PCR data, including the calculation of efficiencies from raw data by kinetic methods, evaluation of the suitability of multiple references, standardized normalization using one or more references, and group-wise relative quantification statistical testing. We illustrate the utility of Chainy for differential expression and chromatin immunoprecipitation enrichment (ChIP-QPCR) analysis. AVAILABILITY Chainy is open source and freely available at http://maplab.cat/chainy. CONTACT imallona@igtp.catSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Orchestrated scheduling and prefetching for GPGPUs

In this paper, we present techniques that coordinate the thread scheduling and prefetching decisions in a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) architecture to better tolerate long memory latencies. We demonstrate that existing warp scheduling policies in GPGPU architectures are unable to effectively incorporate data prefetching. The main reason is that they schedule consecutive warps, which are likely to access nearby cache blocks and thus prefetch accurately for one another, back-to-back in consecutive cycles. This either 1) causes prefetches to be generated by a warp too close to the time their corresponding addresses are actually demanded by another warp, or 2) requires sophisticated prefetcher designs to correctly predict the addresses required by a future "far-ahead" warp while executing the current warp. We propose a new prefetch-aware warp scheduling policy that overcomes these problems. The key idea is to separate in time the scheduling of consecutive warps such that they are not executed back-to-back. We show that this policy not only enables a simple prefetcher to be effective in tolerating memory latencies but also improves memory bank parallelism, even when prefetching is not employed. Experimental evaluations across a diverse set of applications on a 30-core simulated GPGPU platform demonstrate that the prefetch-aware warp scheduler provides 25% and 7% average performance improvement over baselines that employ prefetching in conjunction with, respectively, the commonly-employed round-robin scheduler or the recently-proposed two-level warp scheduler. Moreover, when prefetching is not employed, the prefetch-aware warp scheduler provides higher performance than both of these baseline schedulers as it better exploits memory bank parallelism.
Refractive index sensing using fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM)

The average fluorescence lifetime of GFP in solution is a function of the refractive index of its environment. Here, we demonstrate that this also appears to be the case for GFP-tagged proteins in cells. Using TCSPC-based FLIM with a scanning confocal microscope, we image GFP-tagged proteins in fixed cells in different media. We find that the average fluorescence lifetime of GFP in cells is shortened, as glycerol or sucrose are added to the medium. This is the case for GFP-tagged MHC proteins with the GFP located inside the cytoplasm, and also for GPI-anchored GFP which is located outside the cell membrane. We observe a linear relationship between the inverse average lifetime of GFP in fixed cells and the square of the refractive index of the medium. Implications of this phenomenon when using Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy will also be discussed as a shortening of the lifetime is seen close to the glass prism used to produce the evanescent wave in TRIF.
Survey of German Clinical Prescribing Philosophies for Hyperopia

Purpose. We surveyed a group of German ophthalmologists to evaluate their prescribing philosophies for hyperopic refractive error in symptom-free children and to compare them with the two groups of U.S. pediatric ophthalmologists and U.S. pediatric optometrists as surveyed by Lyons et al. Methods. Practitioners were selected from a list of ophthalmologists on the Internet. They were either in general practice in three cities in northern Bavaria or affiliated with large ophthalmology teaching hospitals in Wuerzburg and Erlangen. The survey questions of Lyons et al. were translated into German and mailed to 103 ophthalmologists. The data received from the German ophthalmologists were compared with those of the U.S. optometrists and ophthalmologists. Results. A total of 45 surveys (44%) were returned to us and analyzed. In cases of asymptomatic bilateral hyperopia, German ophthalmologists did not prescribe significantly differently from U.S. optometrists at all patient age groups (p ≥ 0.05), but they did differ significantly from U.S. ophthalmologists (p < 0.001). Prescribing fractional amounts of hyperopia or astigmatism was not a popular rule of thumb among the German ophthalmologists, and there was no statistical difference between the German and U.S. practitioners. German ophthalmologists would prescribe for anisometropia for all patient age groups in the same way as both U.S. optometrists and U.S. ophthalmologists. Conclusion. The prescribing philosophies of German ophthalmologists for pediatric patients did not differ from those of U.S. ophthalmologists and U.S. optometrists when prescribing for anisometropia; they did differ from those of U.S. ophthalmologists but not of those of the U.S. optometrists when prescribing for asymptomatic bilateral hyperopia.
Using Science Fiction in Teaching Artificial Intelligence

Many factors are blamed for the decreasing enrollments in computer science and engineering programs in the U.S., including the dot-com economic bust and the increase in the use of “off-shore” programming labor. One major factor is also the lack of bold new vision and excitement about computer science, which thus results in a view of computer science as a field wedded to routine programming. To address this concern, we have focused on science fiction as a means to generate excitement about Artificial Intelligence, and thus in turn in Computer Science and Engineering. In particular, since the Fall of 2006, we have used science fiction in teaching Artificial Intelligence to undergraduate students at the University of Southern California (USC), in teaching activities ranging from an undergraduate upper division class in computer science to a semester-long freshman seminar for nonengineering students to micro-seminars during the welcome week. As an interdisciplinary team of scholar/instructors, our goal has been to use science fiction not only in motivating students to learn about AI, but also to use science fiction in understanding fundamental issues that arise at the intersection of technology and culture, as well as to provide students with a more creative and well-rounded course that provided a big picture view of computer science. This paper outlines the courses taught using this theme, provides an overview of our classroom teaching techniques in using science fiction, and discusses some of the lectures in more detail as exemplars. We conclude with feedback received, lessons learned and impact on both the computer science students and noncomputer-science (and non-engineering) students. “Science fiction like Star Trek is not only good fun, but serves a serious purpose, that of expanding human imagination” Physicist Stephen Hawking (from (Krauss 1995))
Microarray Image Processing Based on Clustering and Morphological Analysis

Microarrays allow the monitoring of expressions for tens of thousands of genes simultaneously. Image analysis is an important aspect for microarray experiments that can affect subsequent analysis such as identification of differentially expressed genes. Image processing for microarray images includes three tasks: spot gridding, segmentation and information extraction. In this paper, we address the segmentation and information extraction problems, and proposed a new segmentation method based on K-means clustering and a new background and foreground correction algorithm based on mathematical morphological and histogram analysis for information extraction. The advantage of our method is that it does not have any restrictions for the shape of spots. We compare our experimental results with those obtained from the popular software GenePix.
Commentary: Causal Effects in Mediation Modeling: An Introduction with Applications to Latent Variables

Causal mediation1 is an increasingly popular analysis, as recently described by Muthén and Asparouhov (2015, M&A)2. We suggest a simplified notation for causal mediation effects, iT/iP=BK and dT/dP, provide a graphical view of potential outcomes (PO) and expand the M&A approach by using VanderWeele’s (2014) mediation decomposition. An intuitive way to label and see causal in/direct effects is to directly display POs, as in Figure 1 below. POs are values that could be observed, but have not been realized (yet). They reveal themselves partially once nature or researchers assign people to specific experimental conditions, or when people make choices. POs are useful in defining causal total effects (TE), as differences between the same individual’s (i) two POs, Yi1 – Yi0, had the person been treated (subscript 1), and alternatively (but simultaneously) not treated (0); evidently, in our reality one of these has to be “contrary-to-fact” (CF). The indirect effect of X on Y through a mediator M is the part of the total effect that “flows through” M, or the contribution of the path X->M->Y to the observed association between X and Y, which is an open path because causal association flows through it (Elwert, 2013). The key problem in intuitively grasping causal in/direct effects is the “nesting” of the POs due to the double role of the mediator as a cause and an effect3: the PO “Y if X was set to x,” or Yx, can be combined with “Y if M was set to m,” or Ym (we suggest using a superscript for scenarios involving M). So ∗YM0 1 , for example, labeled Y(1, M(0)) in M&A, is the PO of the outcome Y if a person was treated (1), but his/her mediator took on the value had s/he would belonged to the opposite (control) condition (M0). This PO is clearly contrary-to-fact (CF), never observable, a “cross-worlds” quantity (Lok, 2016), hence our ∗ sign. Y0 and Y 1 1 are in principle realizable, only one of them at a time for the same person, however.
An Integrative Genomic and Transcriptomic Analysis Reveals Potential Targets Associated with Cell Proliferation in Uterine Leiomyomas

Background Uterine Leiomyomas (ULs) are the most common benign tumours affecting women of reproductive age. ULs represent a major problem in public health, as they are the main indication for hysterectomy. Approximately 40–50% of ULs have non-random cytogenetic abnormalities, and half of ULs may have copy number alterations (CNAs). Gene expression microarrays studies have demonstrated that cell proliferation genes act in response to growth factors and steroids. However, only a few genes mapping to CNAs regions were found to be associated with ULs. Methodology We applied an integrative analysis using genomic and transcriptomic data to identify the pathways and molecular markers associated with ULs. Fifty-one fresh frozen specimens were evaluated by array CGH (JISTIC) and gene expression microarrays (SAM). The CONEXIC algorithm was applied to integrate the data. Principal Findings The integrated analysis identified the top 30 significant genes (P<0.01), which comprised genes associated with cancer, whereas the protein-protein interaction analysis indicated a strong association between FANCA and BRCA1. Functional in silico analysis revealed target molecules for drugs involved in cell proliferation, including FGFR1 and IGFBP5. Transcriptional and protein analyses showed that FGFR1 (P = 0.006 and P<0.01, respectively) and IGFBP5 (P = 0.0002 and P = 0.006, respectively) were up-regulated in the tumours when compared with the adjacent normal myometrium. Conclusions The integrative genomic and transcriptomic approach indicated that FGFR1 and IGFBP5 amplification, as well as the consequent up-regulation of the protein products, plays an important role in the aetiology of ULs and thus provides data for potential drug therapies development to target genes associated with cellular proliferation in ULs.