Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human eosinophils express and release IL‐13 following CD28‐dependent activation

Human eosinophils produce a large number of cytokines, including immunoregulatory cytokines. Given that eosinophils store and release interleukin (IL)‐4, a key cytokine in the pathogenesis of allergic inflammation, and that IL‐4 and IL‐13 share common biological functions, we investigated the possibility that IL‐13 may be synthesized by these cells. Using flow cytometry and immunocytochemistry, we show that eosinophils synthesize and store IL‐13. Granule localization was demonstrated after subcellular fractionation, and IL‐13 immunoreactivity was localized to crystalloid, granule‐enriched fractions. Furthermore, electron microscopic analyses specifically localized IL‐13 to the dense cores of bicompartmental secondary granules. Upon CD28 ligation, IL‐13 was released by eosinophils, whereas a combination of CD28 and immunoglobulin A complexes resulted in decreased IL‐13 secretion. Furthermore, eosinophil‐derived IL‐13 exerts a biological effect, inducing CD23 expression on B cells. By having the capacity to synthesize and release IL‐13, eosinophils may participate in the development and maintenance of the T helper cell type 2 response, a prominent feature of allergic diseases.
Document Image Quality Assessment

The amelioration in video capture technology has made recording videos very easy. The introduction of smaller affordable cameras which not only boast high-end specifications but are also capable of capturing videos at very high resolution (4K,8K and even 16K) have made recording of high quality videos accessible to everyone. Although this makes recording of videos very straightforward and effortless, a major part of the video production process Editing is still labor intensive and requires skill and expertise. This thesis takes a step towards automating the editing process and making it less time consuming. In this thesis, (1) we explore a novel approach of automatically editing stage performances such that both the context of the scene as well as close-up details of the actors are shown. (2) We propose a new method to optimally re-target videos to any desired aspect ratio while retaining the salient regions that are derived using gaze tracking. Recordings of stage performances are easy to capture with a high-resolution camera, but are difficult to watch because the actors’ faces are too small. We present an approach to automatically create a split screen video that transforms these recordings to show both the context of the scene as well as close-up details of the actors. Given a static recording of a stage performance and the tracking information about the actors positions, our system generates videos showing a focus+context view based on computed close-up camera motions using crop-and zoom. The key to our approach is to compute these camera motions such that they are cinematically valid close-ups and to ensure that the set of views of the different actors are properly coordinated and presented. We pose the computation of camera motions as convex optimization that creates detailed views and smooth movements, subject to cinematic constraints such as not cutting faces with the edge of the frame. Additional constraints link the close up views of each actor, causing them to merge seamlessly when actors are close. Generated views are placed in a resulting layout that preserves the spatial relationships between actors. This eliminates the need for manual labour and expertise required for both capturing the performance and later editing it, instead the splitscreen of focus+context views allows the viewer to make an active decision on attending to whatever seems important. We also demonstrate our results on a variety of staged theater and dance performances. When videos are captured they are captured according to a specific aspect ratio keeping in mind the size of target screen in which they are meant to be viewed, this results in a inferior viewing experience when they are not watched on screens with their native aspect ratio. We present an approach to auto-
Novel Approaches to Sentiment Analysis for Stock Prediction

Stock market predictions lend themselves well to a machine learning framework due to their quantitative nature. A supervised learning model to predict stock movement direction can combine technical information and qualitative sentiment through news, encoded into fixed length real vectors. We attempt a large range of models, both to encode qualitative sentiment information into features, and to make a final up or down prediction on the direction of a particular stock given encoded news and technical features. We find that a Universal Sentence Encoder, combined with SVMs, achieves encouraging results on our data.
The role of organic acid exudates in liberating phosphorus from seagrass‐vegetated carbonate sediments

Sediment‐bound phosphorus (P) is a potential nutrient source for P‐limited seagrasses inhabiting carbonate sediments. We explored the role of organic acid (OA) exudation by seagrasses in liberating mineral P from carbonate sediments. Organic acids can act to increase available P by dissolving carbonate sediment, competing with P for binding sites and complexing dissolution end products, and also by fueling microbial processes that change pore‐water pH. We used dialysis tubing placed around individual roots in situ to quantify dissolved species immediately adjacent to roots (root zone) and compared these to bulk pore‐water concentrations in vegetated and nonvegetated sediments. Total OA concentrations were highest in the root zone (29.8 ± 1.8 [mol L−1) compared to bulk measures of 15.5 ± 1.9 and 7.5 ± 0.6 [mol L−1 in vegetated and nonvegetated sediments, respectively. Phosphate concentrations were also highest in the root zone and were linearly related to OA concentrations (R2 = 0.63). Organic acid concentrations increased along a seagrass productivity gradient, and ratios of OA concentrations to productivity showed a significant response to a gradient in P‐limitation of seagrasses. Organic acid concentrations found in and around roots, compared to those found in bulk sediment measures, indicate that seagrasses are a significant source of OA. Sampling at small spatial scales (mm) immediately adjacent to the roots is critical, because bulk sediment pore‐water measures did not capture the observed fluctuations caused by the rapid reaction and consumption of OA in the sediment. Root‐zone processes can liberate considerable quantities of P, and OA exudates likely contribute significantly to the success of T. testudinum in P‐limited environments.
A physical model to determine snowfall over land by microwave radiometry

Falling snow is an important component of global precipitation in extratropical regions. This paper describes the methodology and results of physically based retrievals of snow falling over land surfaces. Because microwave brightness temperatures emitted by snow-covered surfaces are highly variable, precipitating snow above such surfaces is difficult to observe using window channels that occur at low frequencies (/spl nu/<100 GHz). Furthermore, at frequencies /spl nu//spl les/37 GHz, sensitivity to liquid hydrometeors is dominant. These problems are mitigated at high frequencies (/spl nu/>100 GHz) where water vapor screens the surface emission, and sensitivity to frozen hydrometeors is significant. However, the scattering effect of snowfall in the atmosphere at those higher frequencies is also impacted by water vapor in the upper atmosphere. The theory of scattering by randomly oriented dry snow particles at high microwave frequencies appears to be better described by regarding snow as a concatenation of "equivalent" ice spheres rather than as a sphere with the effective dielectric constant of an air-ice mixture. An equivalent sphere snow scattering model was validated against high-frequency attenuation measurements. Satellite-based high-frequency observations from an Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-B) instrument during the March 5-6, 2001 New England blizzard were used to retrieve snowfall over land. Vertical distributions of snow, temperature, and relative humidity profiles were derived from the Mesoscale Model (MM5) cloud model. Those data were applied and modified in a radiative transfer model that derived brightness temperatures consistent with the AMSU-B observations. The retrieved snowfall distribution was validated with radar reflectivity measurements obtained from a ground-based radar network.
Biophysical, Biochemical, and Physiological Characterization ofChlamydomonas reinhardtii Mutants with Amino Acid Substitutions at the Ala251 Residue in the D1 Protein That Result in Varying Levels of Photosynthetic Competence*

The QBbinding site of the D1 reaction center protein, located within a stromal loop between transmembrane helices IV and V formed by residues Ile219 to Leu272, is essential for photosynthetic electron transport through photosystem II (PSII). We have examined the function of the highly conserved Ala251D1 residue in this domain in chloroplast transformants ofChlamydomonas reinhardtii and found that Arg, Asp, Gln, Glu, and His substitutions are nonphotosynthetic, whereas Cys, Ser, Pro, Gly, Ile, Val, and Leu substitutions show various alterations in D1 turnover, photosynthesis, and photoautotrophic growth. The latter mutations reduce the rate of QA to QB electron transfer, but this is not necessarily rate-limiting for photoautotrophic growth. The Cys mutant divides and evolves O2 at wild type rates, although it has slightly higher rates of D1 synthesis and turnover and reduced electron transfer between QA and QB. O2 evolution, D1 synthesis, and accumulation in the Ser, Pro, and Gly mutants in high light is reduced, but photoautotrophic growth rate is not affected. In contrast, the Ile, Val, and Leu mutants are impaired in photoautotrophic growth and photosynthesis in both low and high light and have elevated rates of D1 synthesis and degradation, but D1 accumulation is normal. While rates of synthesis/degradation of the D1 protein are not necessarily correlated with alterations in specific parameters of PSII function in these mutants, bulkiness of the substituted amino acids is highly correlated with the dissociation constant for QB in the seven mutants examined. These observations imply that the Ala251 residue plays a key role in D1 protein.
SCF E 3 ligase PP 2-B 11 plays a positive role in response to salt stress in Arabidopsis

Skp1–Cullin–F-box (SCF) E3 ligases are essential to the post-translational regulation of many important factors involved in cellular signal transduction. In this study, we identified an F-box protein from Arabidopsis thaliana, AtPP2-B11, which was remarkably induced with increased duration of salt treatment in terms of both transcript and protein levels. Transgenic Arabidopsis plants overexpressing AtPP2-B11 exhibited obvious tolerance to high salinity, whereas the RNA interference line was more sensitive to salt stress than wild-type plants. Isobaric tag for relative and absolute quantification analysis revealed that 4311 differentially expressed proteins were regulated by AtPP2-B11 under salt stress. AtPP2-B11 could upregulate the expression of annexin1 (AnnAt1) and function as a molecular link between salt stress and reactive oxygen species accumulation in Arabidopsis. Moreover, AtPP2-B11 influenced the expression of Na homeostasis genes under salt stress, and the AtPP2-B11 overexpressing lines exhibited lower Na accumulation. These results suggest that AtPP2-B11 functions as a positive regulator in response to salt stress in Arabidopsis.
’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs An experiment in integrating sentiment features for tech stock prediction in Twitter Conference Item

Economic analysis indicates a relationship between consumer sentiment and stock price movements. In this study we harness features from Twitter messages to capture public mood related to four Tech companies for predicting the daily up and down price movements of these companies’ NASDAQ stocks. We propose a novel model combining features namely positive and negative sentiment, consumer confidence in the product with respect to ‘bullish’ or ‘bearish’ lexicon and three previous stock market movement days. The features are employed in a Decision Tree classifier using cross-fold validation to yield accuracies of 82.93%,80.49%, 75.61% and 75.00% in predicting the daily up and down changes of Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) stocks respectively in a 41 market day sample.
Structure and activity of the only human RNase T 2

Mutations in the gene of human RNase T2 are associated with white matter disease of the human brain. Although brain abnormalities (bilateral temporal lobe cysts and multifocal white matter lesions) and clinical symptoms (psychomotor impairments, spasticity and epilepsy) are well characterized, the pathomechanism of RNase T2 deficiency remains unclear. RNase T2 is the only member of the Rh/T2/S family of acidic hydrolases in humans. In recent years, new functions such as tumor suppressing properties of RNase T2 have been reported that are independent of its catalytic activity. We determined the X-ray structure of human RNase T2 at 1.6 Å resolution. The a+b core fold shows high similarity to those of known T2 RNase structures from plants, while, in contrast, the external loop regions show distinct structural differences. The catalytic features of RNase T2 in presence of bivalent cations were analyzed and the structural consequences of known clinical mutations were investigated. Our data provide further insight into the function of human RNase T2 and may prove useful in understanding its mode of action independent of its enzymatic activity.
Wikipedia-assisted concept thesaurus for better web media understanding

Concept ontology has been used in the area of artificial intelligence, biomedical informatics and library science and it has been shown as an effective approach to better understand data in the respective domains. One main difficulty that hedge against the development of ontology approaches is the extra work required in ontology construction and annotation. With the emergent lexical dictionaries and encyclopedias such as WordNet, Wikipedia, innovations from different directions have been proposed to automatically extract concept ontologies. Unfortunately, many of the proposed ontologies are not fully exploited according to the general human knowledge. We study the various knowledge sources and aim to build a construct scalable concept thesaurus suitable for better understanding of media in the World Wide Web from Wikipedia. With its wide concept coverage, finely organized categories, diverse concept relations, and up-to-date information, the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia has almost all the requisite attributes to contribute to a well-defined concept ontology. Besides the explicit concept relations such as disambiguation, synonymy, Wikipedia also provides implicit concept relations through cross-references between articles. In our previous work, we have built ontology with explicit relations from Wikipedia page contents. Even though the method works, mining explicit semantic relations from every Wikipedia concept page content has unsolved scalable issue when more concepts are involved. This paper describes our attempt to automatically build a concept thesaurus, which encodes both explicit and implicit semantic relations for a large-scale of concepts from Wikipedia. Our proposed thesaurus construction takes advantage of both structure and content features of the downloaded Wikipedia database, and defines concept entries with its related concepts and relations. This thesaurus is further used to exploit semantics from web page context to build a more semantic meaningful space. We move a step forward to combine the similarity distance from the image feature space to boost the performance. We evaluate our approach through application of the constructed concept thesaurus to web image retrieval. The results show that it is possible to use implicit semantic relations to improve the retrieval performance.
Incidental verbatim memory for language

Abstract It is widely believed that explicit verbatim memory for language is virtually nonexistent except in certain circumstances, for example if participants are warned they are to receive a memory test, if the language is ‘interactive’ (emotion-laden), or if the texts are exceedingly short and memory is tested immediately. The present experiments revisit the question of verbatim memory for language and demonstrate that participants do reliably recognize and recall full sentences that they are exposed to only once at above chance rates (Experiments 1 and 3). The texts are 300 words long, non-interactive, and no advanced warning of a memory test is given. Verbatim memory is demonstrated even when lexical content and memory for gist are controlled for (Experiments 2 and 4). The most striking finding is one of incidental recall: even after a six-day delay, participants reliably reproduce sentences they have heard before when asked to describe scenes, even though they are not asked to recall what they had heard (Experiment 5).
The ASPICE project: inclusive design for the motor disabled

The ASPICE project aims at the development of a system which allows the neuromotor disabled persons to improve or recover their mobility (directly or by emulation) and communication within the surrounding environment. The system pivots around a software controller running on a personal computer, which offers a proper interface to communicate through input interfaces matched with the individual's residual abilities.This system links to the concept of user-centered interface promoted by human-computer interaction researchers. Each person has a "singular disability", thus the system must provide the possibility to use an adaptive interface customized to their own ability and requirements, which stem from contingent factors or simple preferences, depending on the user and his or her life stage, task, and environment.At this time, the system is under clinical validation, that will provide assessment through patients' feedback and guidelines for customized system installation.
Earthquake Engineering October 12-17 , 2008 , Beijing , China ESTIMATING GROUND-MOTION VARIABILITY : ISSUES , INSIGHTS & CHALLENGES

The variability (sigma) associated with empirical ground-motion prediction equations has a significant impact on the results of seismic hazard analysis, and in some cases represents the main source of uncertainty. Consequently, numerous attempts have been made at reducing the value of sigma, mostly without success. The root of the problem lies in the fact that the models that are fitted to the data during the regression process are highly idealised with respect to the physical processes actually taking place during the generation and propagation of seismic waves. Assumptions regarding the functional form and measurement errors in both the predicted and the explanatory variables might also contribute to the variability, but their impact generally remains marginal. The present paper reviews the key methodological aspects involved in the estimation of sigma, with the aim of identifying the approaches that are the most promising in terms of reducing the value of sigma.
Measuring the public health impact of injuries.

In its groundbreaking 1985 report, Injury in America: A Continuing Public Health Problem, the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Trauma Research stated that “injury is caused by acute exposure to energy, such as heat, electricity, or the kinetic energy of a crash, fall, or bullet. It may also be caused by the sudden absence of essentials, such as heat or oxygen, as in the case of drowning. Injury may be either unintentional (accidental) or deliberate (assaultive or suicidal)” (1, pp. 3–4). The extent, severity, and impact of injury are largely determined by the amount of this energy concentrated outside the band of human tolerance. Records on the impact of injuries date back to biblical times, when we are told about the massive drowning that occurred when “the waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen and all the hosts of the Pharaoh that had followed [the Israelis] into the sea; not so much as one of them remained” (Exodus 14:28). Although the specific mechanisms by which injuries happen may have changed over time, the collective impact on society of all fractures, sprains, cuts, contusions, and the many other forms of injury has been felt since the beginning of history. Measuring this impact and its characteristics has been critical to our efforts to identify priorities for programs and policies aimed at reducing injuries and their consequences. In contrast to other reviews, which present scales to measure the impact of injuries at the individual level (2), in this paper we focus on metrics used to quantify the burden of illness and injuries to populations. We present the evolution of these metrics and discuss their application to injury. We start with those that quantify the burden related to fatal injuries. We then cover metrics that expand the measurement to nonfatal injuries.
An Investigation of the Gains from Specialized Equity: Tracking Stock and Minority Carve-Outs

We examine companies that issue tracking stock or undertake a minority carve-out. These restructurings create equity claims on a business unit yet the parent retains control. Although the average announcement stock price effect is approximately 3%, our evidence implies that these equity restructurings do not lead to an improvement in operating performance. We conclude that corporate restructuring without a change in control of assets does not enhance operating performance. Like other research, our tests are unable to identify the reasons for the positive stock price effects of tracking stock and minority carve-out arrangements.
Molecular epidemiology of norovirus in Singapore, 2004–2011

Norovirus (NoV) is the most common cause of sporadic and epidemic gastroenteritis, globally. This study aimed to investigate the molecular epidemiology of NoV‐associated acute gastroenteritis in Singapore by classifying circulating NoV genotypes and genogroup II, genotype 4 (GII.4) variants between September 2004 and February 2011. The temporal dominance and antigenic variation within the circulating epidemic NoV GII.4 variants was also examined, in order to compare the trends in Singapore to those observed globally during the same period. A total of 312 of 1,060 fecal specimens were positive for NoV RNA, using a quantitative RT‐PCR. In a subset (125 of 312) of NoV positive samples, the 5′ end of ORF2 (region C) of the GI or GII NoV genome was amplified and sequenced. Subsequent phylogenetic analysis identified GII.4 was the most commonly identified genotype representing 80.8% (101/125) of NoV sequenced in this study. The predominant GII.4 variants in circulation during the 2004–2011 epidemic periods were Hunter 2004 (2004–2005), Den Haag 2006b (2006–2009), and New Orleans 2009 (2009–2011). Amino acid variation within the P2 domain of the major capsid protein, VP1, was followed longitudinally within the GII.4 lineage. A constant turnover of variant‐specific amino acid change was observed, particularly within the antigenic epitopes A, C and E. In conclusion, this study has characterized the NoV strains in circulation in Singapore between 2004 and 2011. The molecular epidemiology and persistence of GII.4 pandemic NoV lineages in Singapore was similar to trends seen globally, with a noted absence of the Asia 2003 variant. J Med. Virol. 85:1842–1851, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.