Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Improves Naming Reaction Time in Fluent Aphasia: A Double-Blind, Sham-Controlled Study

Background and Purpose— Previous evidence suggests that anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (A-tDCS) applied to the left hemisphere can improve aphasic participants' ability to name common objects. The current study further examined this issue in a more tightly controlled experiment in participants with fluent aphasia. Methods— We examined the effect of A-tDCS on reaction time during overt picture naming in 8 chronic stroke participants. Anode electrode placement targeted perilesional brain regions that showed the greatest activation on a pretreatment functional MRI scan administered during overt picture naming with the reference cathode electrode placed on the contralateral forehead. A-tDCS (1 mA; 20-minute) was compared with sham tDCS (S-tDCS) in a crossover design. Participants received 10 sessions of computerized anomia treatment; 5 sessions included A-tDCS and 5 included S-tDCS. Results— Coupling A-tDCS with behavioral language treatment reduced reaction time during naming of trained items immediately posttreatment (Z=1.96, P=0.025) and at subsequent testing 3 weeks later (Z=2.52, P=0.006). Conclusions— A-tDCS administered during language treatment decreased processing time during picture naming by fluent aphasic participants. Additional studies combining A-tDCS, an inexpensive method with no reported serious side effects, with behavioral language therapy are recommended.
Gripper self-alignment for autonomous pole-grasping with a biped climbing robot

For biped climbing robots to climb poles, trusses or trees with dual grippers, it is required that the grippers are aligned with the target objects before they grasp for climbing or manipulating. However, this requirement is difficult to meet in practice with programming control, teaching-and-playback, or remote control with a joystick, due to the mobility of the base gripper, the manufacturing and control errors of the robot, and other uncertainty. It is hence necessary and significant for the grippers to be autonomously aligned with the target under utilization of sensors. In this paper, we develop a sensing system by integrating multiple sensors including a camera, a laser scanning range finder and two ultrasonic distance sensors to detect the relative configuration of a gripper with respect to the target to grasp, and then present an algorithm based on the sensor information to adjust the gripper configuration for alignment with the grasping target. In the experiments with our biped climbing robot Climbot, the gripper can grasp a static pole autonomously and can even follow a moving pole. The effectiveness and real-time of the sensing system and the self-alignment algorithm have been verified by the experiments.
Function Assistant: A Tool for NL Querying of APIs

In this paper, we describe Function Assistant, a lightweight Python-based toolkit for querying and exploring source code repositories using natural language. The toolkit is designed to help end-users of a target API quickly find information about functions through high-level natural language queries, or descriptions. For a given text query and background API, the tool finds candidate functions by performing a translation from the text to known representations in the API using the semantic parsing approach of (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017). Translations are automatically learned from example text-code pairs in example APIs. The toolkit includes features for building translation pipelines and query engines for arbitrary source code projects. To explore this last feature, we perform new experiments on 27 well-known Python projects hosted on Github.
System Dynamics of a Refined Epidemic Model for Infection Propagation Over Complex Networks

The ability to predict future epidemic threats, both in real and digital worlds, and to develop effective containment strategies heavily leans on the availability of reliable infection spreading models. The stochastic behavior of such processes makes them even more demanding to scrutinize over structured networks. This paper concerns the dynamics of a new susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic model incorporated with multistage infection (infection delay) and an infective medium (propagation vector) over complex networks. In particular, we investigate the critical epidemic thresholds and the infection spreading pattern using mean-field approximation (MFA) and results obtained through extensive numerical simulations. We further generalize the model for any arbitrary number of infective media to mimic existing scenarios in biological and social networks. Our analysis and simulation results reveal that the inclusion of multiple infective medium and multiple stages of infection significantly alleviates the epidemic threshold and, thus, accelerates the process of infection spreading in the population.
Rapid Systems of Systems Integration - Combining an Architecture-Centric Approach with Enterprise Service Bus Infrastructure

Rapid, yet methodical, systems of systems integration is in high demand. Application areas such as homeland security and disaster response add to the challenge because of a unique set of integration requirements; three examples are: (1) a high demand for flexibility with respect to the configuration and support of business processes to anticipate and cater to changing threat and mitigation scenarios, (2) high agility demands during both development and production to address legacy and emergent capabilities, processes, applications and technologies, (3) wide variety of trust relationships among and across stakeholders and their organizations. In this paper we report on an approach for balancing challenging integration requirements while rapidly delivering a high-quality, value added, integrated system architecture and service-based implementation infrastructure. In particular, we show how the choice of an enterprise service bus as a deployment infrastructure helps discharge many of the obligations induced by the mentioned requirements - if it is combined with an agile, yet systematic approach for architecture discovery and design
A Pulmonary Rehabilitation Decisional Score to Define Priority Access for COPD Patients

This retrospective study aimed to evaluate, through an ad hoc 17-item tool, the Pulmonary Rehabilitation Decisional Score (PRDS), the priority access to PR prescription by respiratory specialists. The PRDS, scoring functional, clinical, disability, frailty, and participation parameters from 0 = low priority to 34 = very high priority for PR access, was retrospectively calculated on 124 specialist reports sent to the GP of subjects (aged 71 ± 11 years, FEV1% 51 ± 17) consecutively admitted to our respiratory outpatient clinic. From the specialist's report the final subject's allocation could be low priority (LP) (>60 days), high priority (HP) (30–60 days), or very high priority (VHP) (<30 days) to rehabilitation. The PRDS calculation showed scores significantly higher in VHP versus LP (p < 0.001) and significantly different between HP and VHP (p < 0.001). Comparing the specialist's allocation decision and priority choice based on PRDS cut-offs, PR prescription was significantly more appropriate in VHP than in HP (p = 0.016). Specialists underprescribed PR in 49% of LP cases and overprescribed it in 46% and 30% of the HP and VHP prescriptions, respectively. A multicomprehensive score is feasible being useful for staging the clinical priorities for PR prescription and facilitating sustainability of the health system.
Distributed Field Reconstruction in Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Hybrid Shift-Invariant Spaces

We use the theory and algorithms developed for so-called shift-invariant spaces to develop a novel distributed architecture for sampling and reconstructing time-varying non-bandlimited physical fields in wireless sensor networks. We introduce hybrid shift-invariant spaces that generalize conventional shift-invariant spaces and can adapt to local smoothness properties of the field. Using shift-invariant spaces with compactly supported generator functions allows us to split the global reconstruction into several smaller local problems that can be solved independently. Capitalizing on the sparsity of the matrices involved in the reconstruction, we propose direct and iterative reconstruction algorithms whose complexity per time slot scales only linearly with the number of sensor nodes. We furthermore analyze the impact of sensor localization errors on the mean square error of the reconstructed field. Numerical simulations illustrate that the proposed field reconstruction scheme performs close to bandlimited reconstruction and is less sensitive to sensor location errors while providing a significant reduction in computational complexity.
A Novel Secretion Pathway of Salmonella enterica Acts as an Antivirulence Modulator during Salmonellosis

Salmonella spp. are Gram-negative enteropathogenic bacteria that infect a variety of vertebrate hosts. Like any other living organism, protein secretion is a fundamental process essential for various aspects of Salmonella biology. Herein we report the identification and characterization of a horizontally acquired, autonomous and previously unreported secretion pathway. In Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium, this novel secretion pathway is encoded by STM1669 and STM1668, designated zirT and zirS, respectively. We show that ZirT is localized to the bacterial outer membrane, expected to adopt a compact β-barrel conformation, and functions as a translocator for ZirS. ZirS is an exoprotein, which is secreted into the extracellular environment in a ZirT-dependent manner. The ZirTS secretion pathway was found to share several important features with two-partner secretion (TPS) systems and members of the intimin/invasin family of adhesions. We show that zirTS expression is affected by zinc; and that in vivo, induction of zirT occurs distinctively in Salmonella colonizing the small intestine, but not in systemic sites. Additionally, strong expression of zirT takes place in Salmonella shed in fecal pellets during acute and persistent infections of mice. Inactivation of ZirTS results in a hypervirulence phenotype of Salmonella during oral infection of mice. Cumulatively, these results indicate that the ZirTS pathway plays a unique role as an antivirulence modulator during systemic disease and is involved in fine-tuning a host–pathogen balance during salmonellosis.
Effect of substrate stiffness and PDGF on the behavior of vascular smooth muscle cells: Implications for atherosclerosis

Vascular disease, such as atherosclerosis, is accompanied by changes in the mechanical properties of the vessel wall. Although altered mechanics is thought to contribute to disease progression, the molecular mechanisms whereby vessel wall stiffening could promote vascular occlusive disease remain unclear. It is well known that platelet‐derived growth factor (PDGF) is a major stimulus for the abnormal migration and proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) and contributes critically to vascular disease. Here we used engineered substrates with tunable mechanical properties to explore the effect of tissue stiffness on PDGF signaling in VSMCs as a potential mechanism whereby vessel wall stiffening could promote vascular disease. We found that substrate stiffness significantly enhanced PDGFR activity and VSMC proliferation. After ligand binding, PDGFR followed distinct routes of activation in cells cultured on stiff versus soft substrates, as demonstrated by differences in its intensity and duration of activation, sensitivity to cholesterol extracting agent, and plasma membrane localization. Our results suggest that stiffening of the vessel wall could actively promote pathogenesis of vascular disease by enhancing PDGFR signaling to drive VSMC growth and survival. J. Cell. Physiol. 225: 115–122, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Overview of the NTCIR-10 INTENT-2 Task

This paper provides an overview of the NTCIR-10 INTENT-2 task (the second INTENT task), which comprises the Subtopic Mining and the Document Ranking subtasks. INTENT-2 attracted participating teams from China, France, Japan and South Korea – 12 teams for Subtopic Mining and 4 teams for Document Ranking (including an organisers’ team). The Subtopic Mining subtask received 34 English runs, 23 Chinese runs and 14 Japanese runs; the Document Ranking subtask received 12 Chinese runs and 8 Japanese runs. We describe the subtasks, data and evaluation methods, and then report on the official results, as well as the revised results for Subtopic Mining.
The Relationship between Visual Impairment and Gestures

This study found that the gestural activity of persons who are visually impaired differs from that of persons who are sighted. Specifically, the subjects who were visually impaired used more adaptors (especially finger-to-hand gestures) and fewer conversational gestures than did those who were sighted. Differences in gestural activity by degree of visual impairment and grade in school were also observed.
Homosexuality Anxiety: A Misunderstood Form of OCD

A web-based online store includes a configurator, a cart, a checkout, and a database, further in which a user interface of the online store enables a custom configuration of a computer system according to an identification of a user belonging to a prescribed customer set. The configurator is provided for configuring a computer system with options selected according to a prescribed user input, the options and a respective pricing for each option being presented on a configurator web page in accordance with the identification of the user belonging to a prescribed customer set. The cart is provided for temporarily storing the customer configured computer system, the cart including a cart web page. The checkout is provided for presenting payment options and for obtaining payment and delivery information, the checkout including a checkout web page. Lastly, the database is provided for dynamically supplying configuration options to the configurator in accordance with the identification of the user belonging to the prescribed customer set. An online store method and user interface are also disclosed.
Opposing Roles of Synaptic and Extrasynaptic NMDA Receptor Signaling in Cocultured Striatal and Cortical Neurons

The NMDAR plays a unique and vital role in subcellular signaling. Calcium influx initiates signaling cascades important for both synaptic plasticity and survival; however, overactivation of the receptor leads to toxicity and cell death. This dichotomy is partially explained by the subcellular location of the receptor. NMDARs located at the synapse stimulate cell survival pathways, while extrasynaptic receptors signal for cell death. Thus far, this interplay between synaptic and extrasynaptic NMDARs has been studied exclusively in cortical (CTX) and hippocampal neurons. It was unknown whether other cell types, such as GABAergic medium-sized spiny projection neurons of the striatum (MSNs), which bear the brunt of neurodegeneration in Huntington's disease, follow the same pattern. Here we report synaptic versus extrasynaptic NMDAR signaling in striatal MSNs and resultant activation of cAMP response element binding protein (CREB), in rat primary corticostriatal cocultures. Similarly to CTX, we found in striatal MSNs that synaptic NMDARs activate CREB, whereas extrasynaptic NMDARs dominantly oppose CREB activation. However, MSNs are much less susceptible to NMDA-mediated toxicity than CTX cells and show differences in subcellular GluN2B distribution. Blocking NMDARs with memantine (30 μm) or GluN2B-containing receptors with ifenprodil (3 μm) prevents CREB shutoff effectively in CTX and MSNs, and also rescues both neuronal types from NMDA-mediated toxicity. This work may provide cell and NMDAR subtype-specific targets for treatment of diseases with putative NMDAR involvement, including neurodegenerative disorders and ischemia.
A Prospective, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled, Double-Blind Trial about Safety and Efficacy of Combined Treatment with Alteplase (rt-PA) and Cerebrolysin in Acute Ischaemic Hemispheric Stroke

Background The neurotrophic drug Cerebrolysin accelerated recovery and prevented acute neuronal damage in preclinical models of ischaemia. Previous clinical trials support therapeutic effects in stroke patients. The study investigated whether the combination with alteplase and Cerebrolysin is safe and can further reduce disability after acute ischaemic stroke. Methods This placebo-controlled, double-blind trial involved 119 patients with acute ischaemic hemispheric stroke, randomly assigned to a combined treatment with alteplase plus Cerebrolysin or placebo (administered 1 h after thrombolytic treatment) starting within three-hours after onset of symptoms. A daily i.v. infusion of 30 ml Cerebrolysin or placebo was given for 10 consecutive days. Primary outcome was the modified Rankin Scale at day 90. A sequential design with interim analyses was applied. Results The third interim analysis did not show a benefit in the modified Rankin Scale for Cerebrolysin on day 90 compared to placebo and the study was stopped. The National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale responder analysis (secondary outcome measure) showed significantly more patients with an improvement of 6 or more points (or a total score of 0 or 1) after two-, five-, 10, and 30 days in the Cerebrolysin group. Similar trends were observed for the modified Rankin Scale responder analysis without achieving statistical significance. There was no difference between treatment groups regarding adverse events. Conclusions The combination of Cerebrolysin with recombinant tissue-Plasminogen Activator is safe for treatment of acute ischaemic stroke but did not improve outcome at day 90. During the treatment period with Cerebrolysin (10 days), significantly more patients had a favourable response in neurological outcome measures (National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale) as compared to the placebo group.
Hindi to English Machine Translation: Using Effective Selection in Multi-Model SMT

Recent studies in machine translation support the fact that multi-model systems perform better than the individual models. In this paper, we describe a Hindi to English statistical machine translation system and improve over the baseline using multiple translation models. We have considered phrase based as well as hierarchical models and enhanced over both these baselines using a regression model. The system is trained over textual as well as syntactic features extracted from source and target of the aforementioned translations. Our system shows significant improvement over the baseline systems for both automatic as well as human evaluations. The proposed methodology is quite generic and easily be extended to other language pairs as well.
Design of ready-made acoustic model library by two-dimensional visualization of acoustic space

This paper proposes the technique enabling a design of readymade library composed of high performance and small size acoustic models utilizing the method of visualizing multiple HMM acoustic models onto two-dimensional space (“COSMOS” method: aCOustic Space Map Of Sound), and providing one of these models without overburdening users. The acoustic space (as expressed in multi-dimensional future parameters) is partitioned into zones on two-dimensional space, allowing for the creation of highly precise acoustic models through the generation of acoustic models for respective zones of the acoustic space. A set of these acoustic models is called an acoustic model library. In an experiment of this paper, a plotted map (called the COSMOS map) featuring a total of 145 male speakers speaking in various styles was generated utilizing the COSMOS method. Through the COSMOS map, the distribution of each speaking styles and the relationship between the positioning of the speaker on the COSMOS map and the speech-recognition performance were analyzed, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of the COSMOS method in the analysis of acoustic space. The COSMOS map was then partitioned into concentric acoustic space zones to produce acoustic models representing each acoustic space zones. By selecting the acoustic model providing maximum likelihood score effectively using voice samples consisting of 5 words, the acoustic model, even if expressed in single Gaussian distribution, showed high performance comparable to speaker-independent acoustic model (called SI-model) expressed in 16 mixture Gaussian distributions. Furthermore, the acoustic model showed performance higher than SI-model adapted with voice samples of 30 words by the MLLR [2] method.
Robust VLC sequence decoding exploiting additional video stream properties with reduced complexity

Joint source-channel decoding of variable length codes (VLC) for image and video streaming transmission over unreliable links, such as wireless networks, is a subject of increasing interest. Much more residual source redundancy can be exploited when both types of correlation: (i) the correlation between bits inside a VLC codeword as well as; (ii) the correlation between VLC codewords of a VLC sequence unit (e.g. corresponding to one image block), are taken into account. The paper (Hang Nguyen et al, IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Sigpro., 2004) proposes an optimum maximum likelihood (ML) decoder of VLC sequences which can exploit these two kinds of correlation and outperforms the existing VLC decoders. This paper proposes a reduced complexity version of this optimal VLC decoder. Simulation results show that the complexity is reduced by 5 in terms of number of possible candidates, while the performance is only slightly sub-optimal compared with the optimal version of the Hang Nguyen paper.
Vibrio parahaemolyticus infection induces modulation of IL-8 secretion through dual pathway via VP1680 in Caco-2 cells.

BACKGROUND Vibrio parahaemolyticus causes acute gastroenteritis and inflammations in humans. A variety of pathogenic bacteria can stimulate mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) in host cells. Phosphorylation of MAPKs leads to production of interleukin (IL)- 8 and subsequently causes inflammations. Thus, MAPK cascades were strong candidates for the main signaling pathway of V. parahaemolyticus-induced acute inflammation. METHODS To determine whether the signaling pathway on V. parahaemolyticus infection induces inflammation, we analyzed the secretion level of IL-8 and phosphorylation of MAPKs by use of intestinal epithelial Caco-2 cells. RESULTS V. parahaemolyticus infection of Caco-2 cells activated extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) 1/2 and p38 MAPK signal pathways, leading to IL-8 secretion, whereas MAPK inhibitors, UO126 or SB203580, suppressed IL-8 secretion. A strain carrying a deletion of VP1680, a type three secretion system 1 (T3SS1) effector protein, failed to activate phosphorylation of ERK1/2 and p38 MAPK and secretion of IL-8. ERK1/2 pathway inhibitor, UO126, failed IL-8 promoter activity, whereas p38 MAPK inhibitor, SB203580, decreased the stabilization of IL-8 messenger RNA following V. parahaemolyticus infection. CONCLUSIONS We showed that V. parahaemolyticus infection of Caco-2 cells results in the secretion of IL-8, and that VP1680 plays a pivotal role in manipulating host cell signaling and is responsible for triggering IL-8 secretion.