Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Virus-free iPS-derived cardiomyocytes: a new piece in the puzzle of patient-tailored therapies.

This editorial refers to ‘Pharmacological response of human cardiomyocytes derived from virus-free induced pluripotent stem cells’ by A. Mehta et al . , doi:10.1093/cvr/cvr132 The potential of human embryonic stem (hES) cells for therapeutic purposes became immediately clear after their derivation by Thomson's group in 1998.1 It was also clear, though, that their origin represented their main limitation. The ethical and legislative issues challenging hES cell-based research have produced a ‘selective pressure’ in response to which a new type of stem cells has stemmed: human induced pluripotent stem (hiPS) cells.2 The generation of hiPS cells from somatic cells, by virus-mediated ectopic expression of a very limited number of pluripotency genes (Oct4, Nanog, Sox2, Kfl4, and c-myc),3 is undoubtedly one of the most important research advancements of the last decade. hiPS cells have indeed overcome two of the most important drawbacks of hES cells: their ethically questionable origin and their intrinsic immunogenic potential. The first generations of iPS cells presented nonetheless some important limitations, deriving from the random insertion of the reprogramming genes and of the virus in the genome, a manoeuvre that can repress genes influencing the differentiation potential or activate oncogenes. Recently, virus- and vector-free hiPS cells have been generated using episomal …
Computed tomographic patterns of orbital cellulitis due to sinusitis.

PURPOSE To describe the CT findings of orbital cellulitis due to sinusitis. METHODS The records and CT scans of 45 consecutive patients with orbital cellulitis due to sinusitis treated at the Hospital of the Medical School of Ribeirão Preto were analyzed by a radiologist and two orbital surgeons. RESULTS Three major types of CT changes were observed: diffuse fat infiltration, subperiosteal abscess and orbital abscess. Diffuse fat infiltration (characterized by an increased density of the extra- or intraconal fat) was seen in 11 patients (24.44%). A subperiosteal abscess was diagnosed in 28 patients (62.23%). A surgically proved orbital abscess was detected in 6 patients (13.33%). CONCLUSIONS In all cases of orbital cellulitis due to sinusitis intraorbital changes can be detected by CT scans either as a diffuse infiltration of the orbital fat or as a detachment of the periorbita (subperiosteal abscess) or a true orbital abscess. Category I of Chandler orbital cellulitis classification (inflammatory edema) must be understood as a stage of a process that is already happening within the orbit and, as the term "preseptal cellulitis" means a palpebral infection, this designation should not be used to stage orbital cellulitis.
Use of OPAC in Central University of Haryana, Mahendragarh and Maharishi Dayanand University, Rohtak: A study

This paper describes the usability of OPAC searching facility in the university libraries of Haryana. The study revealed that 86.0% of the users were aware of OPAC services in MDU, while 89.7% of the users were aware of OPAC service in CUH. In MDU, the maximum of 52.4% users used the OPAC system daily, while in CUH, the maximum of 32.0% users used the OPAC system biweekly. In MDU, the maximum of 34.2% users searched the information through OPAC, while in CUH, the maximum of 36.9% users searched the information by direct browsing. In MDU, the maximum of 60.2% users always obtained the documents through OPAC, while in CUH, the maximum of 43.9% of the users most of the times obtained the documents through OPAC. In MDU, the maximum of 26.9% users faced problems of lack of staff assistance, while in CUH, the maximum of 23.6% users faced problems of lack of staff assistance. The maximum of 49.9 and 37.8% users were satisfied with the present OPAC facilities in both the university libraries of MDU and CUH, respectively.
A CRITICAL REVIEW OF VARIOUS METHODOLOGIES FOR MINING HIGH UTILITY ITEM SETS FROM A UTILITY DATA SET

- Data Mining, also called knowledge Discovery in Database, is one of the latest research area, which has emerged in response to the Tsunami data or the flood of data, world is facing nowadays. It has taken up the challenge to develop techniques that can help humans to discover useful patterns in massive data. One such important technique is utility mining. Frequent item set mining works to discover item set which are frequently appear in transaction database, which can be discover on the basis of support and confidence value of different item set. Using frequent item set mining concept as a base, many researchers have also proposed different new concept on utility based mining of item set. This paper presents an analysis of various methodologies used for mining high utility item sets from a utility data set.
Recovery of acidified European surface waters.

Twenty years after acid rain captured headlines and forced governments to act, acid deposition has now declined by ∼60% in Europe. Some lakes and streams have even begun to recover. Richard F. Wright and 13 colleagues from research institutes in Europe and the United States use models of 12 acid-sensitive regions to predict the continuing effect of declining acid deposition. Will all waters recover, or do acid-rain-causing emissions need to be reduced even more? And how long will the recovery take?
Rpi-blb2-Mediated Hypersensitive Cell Death Caused by Phytophthora infestans AVRblb2 Requires SGT1, but not EDS1, NDR1, Salicylic Acid-, Jasmonic Acid-, or Ethylene-Mediated Signaling

Potato Rpi-blb2 encodes a protein with a coiled-coil-nucleotide binding site and leucine-rich repeat (CC-NBS-LRR) motif that recognizes the Phytophthora infestans AVRblb2 effector and triggers hypersensitive cell death (HCD). To better understand the components required for Rpi-blb2-mediated HCD in plants, we used virus-induced gene silencing to repress candidate genes in Rpi-blb2-transgenic Nicotiana benthamiana plants and assayed the plants for AVRblb2 effector. Rpi-blb2 triggers HCD through NbSGT1-mediated pathways, but not NbEDS1- or NbNDR1-mediated pathways. In addition, the role of salicylic acid (SA), jasmonic acid (JA), and ethylene (ET) in Rpi-blb2-mediated HCD were analyzed by monitoring of the responses of NbICS1-, NbCOI1-, or NbEIN2-silenced or Rpi-blb2::NahG-transgenic plants. Rpi-blb2-mediated HCD in response to AVRblb2 was not associated with SA accumulation. Thus, SA affects Rpi-blb2-mediated resistance against P. infestans, but not Rpi-blb2-mediated HCD in response to AVRblb2. Additionally, JA and ET signaling were not required for Rpi-blb2-mediated HCD in N. benthamiana. Taken together, these findings suggest that NbSGT1 is a unique positive regulator of Rpi-blb2-mediated HCD in response to AVRblb2, but EDS1, NDR1, SA, JA, and ET are not required.
How Much Practice Is Required to Reduce Performance Variability in a Virtual Reality Mining Simulator?

Virtual reality allows researchers to explore training scenarios that are not feasible or are potentially risky to recreate in the real world. The aim of this research was to examine whether using a tutorial session prior to using the mining simulator could adequately reduce the performance variability and increase the consistency of participant performance metrics. Eighteen participants were randomly assigned to a tutorial or a non-tutorial group. The tutorial group completed a five-minute tutorial that introduced them to the basics of the machine and virtual reality environment. All participants then completed five sessions in the simulator lasting five minutes each. Personality scores were recorded and participants answered questions to test their situational awareness after each session. Performance metrics such as number of collisions and perception response time were recorded by the simulator. A Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to determine at what point a significant difference in performance metrics was apparent across the five sessions. A mixed effects multilevel regression was done to evaluate the change in variability across time. There were no significant correlations between the personality questionnaire scores and the number of collisions or the perception response time. Both groups demonstrated high standard deviation scores for collisions and perception response time, but the tutorial group had decreasing variability across time. Both groups began to exhibit more consistent scores in the simulator after 10 min of use. Situational awareness questions require some refinement prior to further testing.
Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate and C31G as Microbicidal Alternatives to Nonoxynol 9: Comparative Sensitivity of Primary Human Vaginal Keratinocytes

ABSTRACT A broad-spectrum vaginal microbicide must be effective against a variety of sexually transmitted disease pathogens and be minimally toxic to the cell types found within the vaginal epithelium, including vaginal keratinocytes. We assessed the sensitivity of primary human vaginal keratinocytes to potential topical vaginal microbicides nonoxynol-9 (N-9), C31G, and sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). Direct immunofluorescence and fluorescence-activated cell sorting analyses demonstrated that primary vaginal keratinocytes expressed epithelial cell-specific keratin proteins. Experiments that compared vaginal keratinocyte sensitivity to each agent during a continuous, 48-h exposure demonstrated that primary vaginal keratinocytes were almost five times more sensitive to N-9 than to either C31G or SDS. To evaluate the effect of multiple microbicide exposures on cell viability, primary vaginal keratinocytes were exposed to N-9, C31G, or SDS three times during a 78-h period. In these experiments, cells were considerably more sensitive to C31G than to N-9 or SDS at lower concentrations within the range tested. When agent concentrations were chosen to result in an endpoint of 25% viability after three daily exposures, each exposure decreased cell viability at the same constant rate. When time-dependent sensitivity during a continuous 48-h exposure was examined, exposure to C31G for 18 h resulted in losses in cell viability not caused by either N-9 or SDS until at least 24 to 48 h. Cumulatively, these results reveal important variations in time- and concentration-dependent sensitivity to N-9, C31G, or SDS within populations of primary human vaginal keratinocytes cultured in vitro. These investigations represent initial steps toward both in vitro modeling of the vaginal microenvironment and studies of factors that impact the in vivo efficacy of vaginal topical microbicides.
Speech Recognition of Czech Using Finite-State Machines

Speech recognition has become a thriving field with many real-life applications. Voice dialing in cell phones, voice control in embedded devices, speech-driven interactive manuals and many other utilities rely on solid speech recognition software. We believe that research in speech recognition can boost performance of many applications related to the area. The thesis concentrates on automatic large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition of Czech. Czech differs from English in a few aspects. We focus on these differences and propose new language-depended techniques. Namely rich morphology is investigated and its impact on speech recognition is studied. Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words are identified as one of the major sources deteriorating recognition performace. New language modeling techniques are proposed to alleviate the problem of OOV words. The proposed language models are tested in speech recognition systems on diverse speech corpora. The obtained results validate the original approach to language modeling. Significant overall speech recognition improvement is observed. Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is my own work and where it draws on the work of others it is properly cited in the text. Acknowledgments First of all I would like to thank my parents for their continuous support during my studies. They encouraged me to complete my education. I thank my wife for her love and for making me happy. My supervisor Jan Hajič guided my research. I am also grateful to him for arranging a one-year stay at the Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, USA. It was a great experience. I learned a lot on speech recognition during the visit. This research would not be possible without financial support of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and the Center for Computational Linguistics where I was employed as a research assistant. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my colleagues Nino Peterek, Pavel Ircing, Pavel Krbec and David Mrva for numerous discussions, Honza Cuř́ın, Martin Čmejrek, Pavel Květoň, Roman Ondruška, Pavel Pecina, Jǐŕı Mı́rovský, Jirka Semecký and Jura Havelka for keeping a pleasant working environment in the office and in the department corridors.
Can collocations be translated automatically? An evaluation of available machine translation services on a sample of ‘adjective + noun’ combinations

Recent technological development has had a deep and positive impact on automatic translation. The increase in terms of size and number of parallel corpora produced in many different languages, in conjunction with considerable improvement in the available algorithms, have seen machine translation enter a new stage, whose outcomes are right before our eyes. In particular, a shift in the paradigm from statistical to neural network-based machine translation (Brown et al. 1990, Brown et al. 1993) has successfully addressed many shortcomings of traditional machine translation systems (Wu et al. 2016), thus improving the quality of the proposed translations. Indeed, for many decades statistical machine translation has been the framework of reference within which computer scientists and computational linguists have worked. Such a system is based on the translation of sequences of words (i.e. statistically identified ‘phrases’) of different lengths (Kohen, Och & Marcu 2003)1. The machine translation system is trained on large bilingual corpora, which limits its versatility. In fact, some of the shortcomings of statistical machine translation concern translating material that is not similar to the content of the training corpus. Particularly problematic is the treatment of idiomatic and slang expressions which are more typical in informal language thus tend to be less represented in the training corpora. The delta in the
PAC-Bayes Generalization Bounds for Randomized Structured Prediction

We present a new PAC-Bayes generalization bound for structured prediction that is applicable to perturbation-based probabilistic models. Our analysis explores the relationship between perturbation-based modeling and the PAC-Bayes framework, and connects to recently introduced generalization bounds for structured prediction. We obtain the first PAC-Bayes bounds that guarantee better generalization as the size of each structured example grows.
STI-BT: A Scalable Transactional Index

Distributed Key-Value (DKV) stores have been intensively used to manage online transaction processing on large data-sets. DKV stores provide simplistic primitives to access data based on the primary key of the stored objects. To help programmers to efficiently retrieve data, some DKV stores provide distributed indexes. Besides that, and also to simplify programming such applications, several proposals have provided strong consistency abstractions via distributed transactions. In this paper we present STI-BT, a highly scalable, transactional index for Distributed Key-Value stores. STI-BT is organized as a distributed B<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^+$</tex-math> <alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="diegues-ieq1-2485267.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>Tree and adopts an innovative design that allows to achieve high efficiency in large-scale, elastic DKV stores. As such, it provides both the desirable properties identified above, and does so in a far more efficient and scalable way than the few existing state of the art proposals that also enable programmers to have strongly consistent distributed transactional indexes. We have implemented STI-BT on top of an open-source DKV store and deployed it on a public cloud infrastructure. Our extensive study demonstrates scalability in a cluster of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$100$</tex-math> <alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="diegues-ieq2-2485267.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> machines, and speed ups with respect to state of the art up to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5.4\times$</tex-math> <alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="diegues-ieq3-2485267.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>.
Biological bar code

The present invention is intended to provide compositions and methods useful, they are the samples will be biological samples or abiotic sample, for any kind of sample, identification, certification , or it is possible to perform authentication. Furthermore, the present invention provides a composition devoted to identify the sample, the sample generates the identified samples are uniquely identified using the compositions and methods, as well as the compositions and methods identifying the samples generated using, using the compositions and methods, it is uniquely identified. For example, two or more oligonucleotides, compositions of the present invention may be added to the sample. Here, each of the two or more oligonucleotides for samples oligonucleotide is added, specifically not hybridize.
Integration of Male Mating and Feeding Behaviors in Caenorhabditis elegans

The Caenorhabditis elegans male must integrate various environmental cues to ensure proper execution of mating. One step of male mating, the insertion of the male copulatory spicules into its mate, requires UNC-103 ERG (ether-a-go-go-related gene)-like K+ channels. unc-103(lf) alleles cause males to protract their spicules spontaneously in the absence of mating cues. To identify proteins that work with UNC-103, we suppressed unc-103(lf) and isolated lev-11(rg1). LEV-11 (tropomyosin) regulates the spicules directly by controlling the male sex muscles and indirectly by controlling the pharyngeal muscles. lev-11-mediated suppression requires the pharyngeal NSM neurosecretory motor neurons; ablating these neurons in lev-11(rg1); unc-103(lf) males restores spontaneous spicule protraction. Additionally, unc-103-induced spicule protraction can be suppressed by reducing a pharyngeal-specific troponin T. These observations demonstrate that non-genitalia cells involved in feeding also mediate male sexual behaviors.
Kernel-Based Least Squares Temporal Difference With Gradient Correction

A least squares temporal difference with gradient correction (LS-TDC) algorithm and its kernel-based version kernel-based LS-TDC (KLS-TDC) are proposed as policy evaluation algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL). LS-TDC is derived from the TDC algorithm. Attributed to TDC derived by minimizing the mean-square projected Bellman error, LS-TDC has better convergence performance. The least squares technique is used to omit the size-step tuning of the original TDC and enhance robustness. For KLS-TDC, since the kernel method is used, feature vectors can be selected automatically. The approximate linear dependence analysis is performed to realize kernel sparsification. In addition, a policy iteration strategy motivated by KLS-TDC is constructed to solve control learning problems. The convergence and parameter sensitivities of both LS-TDC and KLS-TDC are tested through on-policy learning, off-policy learning, and control learning problems. Experimental results, as compared with a series of corresponding RL algorithms, demonstrate that both LS-TDC and KLS-TDC have better approximation and convergence performance, higher efficiency for sample usage, smaller burden of parameter tuning, and less sensitivity to parameters.
Approximate Contextual Preference Scoring in Digital Libraries

The increasing availability of a wide variety of digital libraries provides a heterogeneous population of users with access to a heterogeneous collection of data. To help users find interesting items from this huge volume of available information, personalization systems allow users to directly or indirectly indicate preferences. Such preferences may depend on context, for instance, on the device used to access information. In this paper, we consider a preference model that allows users to assign interest scores to pieces of data based on context. We address the problem of locating interesting data items efficiently by exploiting some form of precomputation. To this end, instead of computing scores for all data items in all potential context states, we exploit the hierarchical nature of context attributes to identify representative context states and compute scores for them. This provides users with fast but potentially approximate results. We discuss this issue and report some preliminary results.
An Internet Architecture for the Challenged

Enabling universal Internet access is one of the key issues that is currently being addressed globally. However the existing Internet architecture is seriously “challenged” to ensure universal service provisioning. This short paper puts forth our vision to make the Internet more accessible by architecting a universal communication architectural framework combining two emerging architecture and connectivity approaches: Information Centric Networking (ICN) and Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). Such an unified architecture will aggressively seek to widen the connectivity options and provide flexible service models beyond what is currently pursued in the game around universal service provisioning.
Framewise phone classification using support vector machines

We describe the use of SupportVector Machines for phonetic classiﬁcation on theTIMIT corpus. Unlike previous work, in which entire phonemes are classiﬁed, our system operates in a framewise manner and is intended for use as the front-end of a hybrid system similar toABBOT.We therefore avoid the problems of classifying variable-length vectors. Our frame-level phone classiﬁcation accuracy on the complete TIMIT testsetiscompetitivewithotherresultsfromtheliterature. In addition, we address the serious problem of scaling Support Vector Machines by using the Kernel Fisher Discriminant.
Name Variation in Community Question Answering Systems

Name Variation in Community Question Answering Systems Abstract Community question answering systems are forums where users can ask and answer questions in various categories. Examples are Yahoo! Answers, Quora, and Stack Overflow. A common challenge with such systems is that a significant percentage of asked questions are left unanswered. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to reduce the number of unanswered questions in Yahoo! Answers by reusing the answer to the most similar past resolved question to the unanswered question, from the site. Semantically similar questions could be worded differently, thereby making it difficult to find questions that have shared needs. For example, “Who is the best player for the Reds? ” and “Who is currently the biggest star at Manchester United? ” have a shared need but are worded differently; also, “Reds” and “Manchester United” are used to refer to the soccer team Manchester United football club. In this research, we focus on question categories that contain a large number of named entities and entity name variations. We show that in these categories, entity linking can be used to identify relevant past resolved questions with shared needs as a given question by disambiguating named entities and matching these questions based on the disambiguated entities, identified entities, and knowledge base information related to these entities. We evaluated our algorithm on a new dataset constructed from Yahoo! Answers. The dataset contains annotated question pairs, (Qgiven, [Qpast, Answer]). We carried out experiments on several question categories and show that an entity-based approach gives good performance when searching for similar questions in entity rich categories.