Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Data-driven evaluation of building demand response capacity

Before a building can participate in a demand response program, its facility managers must characterize the site's ability to reduce load. Today, this is often done through manual audit processes and prototypical control strategies. In this paper, we propose a new approach to estimate a building's demand response capacity using detailed data from various sensors installed in a building. We derive a formula for a probabilistic measure that characterizes various tradeoffs between the available demand response capacity and the confidence level associated with that curtailment under the constraints of building occupant comfort level (or utility). Then, we develop a data-driven framework to associate observed or projected building energy consumption with a particular set of rules learned from a large sensor dataset. We apply this methodology using testbeds in two buildings in Singapore: a unique net-zero energy building and a modern commercial office building. Our experimental results identify key control parameters and provide insight into the available demand response strategies at each site.
Modeling and Evaluating the Environmental Degradation of UHTCs under Hypersonic Flow (Preprint)

Abstract : Recent advances in understanding the mechanisms of degradation of Ultra-High Temperature Ceramics (UHTCs) under hypersonic flight conditions are reviewed. Experimental and modeling efforts using leading edge samples of HfB2-20% (vol) SiC within a scramjet rig are presented. Other experimental efforts to study the behavior of UHTCs under simulated hypersonic conditions are reviewed.
A Novel Simple Assay System to Quantify the Percent HCV-RNA Levels of NS5A Y93H Mutant Strains and Y93 Wild-Type Strains Relative to the Total HCV-RNA Levels to Determine the Indication for Antiviral Therapy with NS5A Inhibitors

Aim Oral treatment with asunaprevir and daclatasvir has been reported to yield a SVR ratio of 80% in patients with genotype 1b HCV infection, however, treatment failure has been reported, especially in patients with HCV strains showing the NS5A-Y93H mutation at baseline. An assay system to detect such strains was established to facilitate selection of appropriate candidates for this antiviral therapy. Methods Primer sets and 2 types of cycling probe mixtures were designed, and real-time PCR was performed with HCV-RNA purified from 332 patients with genotype 1b HCV infection, and the results were compared with those obtained by direct sequencing. Results Both the wild-type and mutant strains were quantified, with a threshold of 4.0 Log copies/mL, in 295 of the 332 patients (88.9%), and the percentage of the mutant strains relative to the total HCV-RNA level in the serum was calculated. The percentage was 0% in 237 patients (80.3%) and 100% in 23 patients (7.8%), identical to the results of direct sequencing. Both wild-type and mutant strains were detected in the remaining 35 patients (11.9%), at levels between 1% and 99%, despite the mutant strains having been undetectable by direct sequencing in 11 patients with percentages of these strains of less than 25%. Conclusion A novel assay system to quantify the percent RNA of Y93H mutant strains relative to the total HCV-RNA level was established. This system may be useful to determine the indication for treatment with NA5A inhibitors in patients with HCV.
Automatic reconstruction of tree skeletal structures from point clouds

Trees, bushes, and other plants are ubiquitous in urban environments, and realistic models of trees can add a great deal of realism to a digital urban scene. There has been much research on modeling tree structures, but limited work on reconstructing the geometry of real-world trees -- even then, most works have focused on reconstruction from photographs aided by significant user interaction. In this paper, we perform active laser scanning of real-world vegetation and present an automatic approach that robustly reconstructs skeletal structures of trees, from which full geometry can be generated. The core of our method is a series of global optimizations that fit skeletal structures to the often sparse, incomplete, and noisy point data. A significant benefit of our approach is its ability to reconstruct multiple overlapping trees simultaneously without segmentation. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach on many raw scans of different tree varieties.
Methylseleninic acid synergizes with tamoxifen to induce caspase-mediated apoptosis in breast cancer cells

Tamoxifen has efficacy as a breast cancer therapy and chemoprevention agent. However, toxicity and resistance to tamoxifen limit its clinical application. There is an urgent need to develop compounds that may be combined with tamoxifen to improve efficacy and overcome toxicity and resistance. We showed previously that the organoselenium compound methylseleninic acid (MSA) increased the growth-inhibitory effect of tamoxifen and reversed tamoxifen resistance in breast cancer cells. In this study, we examined the mechanism for induction of apoptosis by MSA combined with tamoxifen in tamoxifen-sensitive and tamoxifen-resistant breast cancer cells. 4-hydroxytamoxifen (TAM; 10−7 mol/L) alone resulted in cell cycle arrest but no apoptosis, whereas MSA alone (10 μmol/L) induced apoptosis in tamoxifen-sensitive cells. Combination of MSA with TAM resulted in a synergistic apoptosis in both tamoxifen-sensitive and tamoxifen-resistant breast cancer cells compared with either agent alone. MSA and MSA combined with TAM induced apoptosis through the intrinsic, mitochondrial apoptotic pathway. MSA induced a sequential activation of caspase-9 and then caspase-8. These results indicate that the growth inhibition synergy and reversal of tamoxifen resistance by combination of selenium with tamoxifen occurs via a tamoxifen-induced cell cycle arrest, allowing more cells to enter the intrinsic apoptotic pathway elicited by selenium. [Mol Cancer Ther 2008;7(9):3056–63]
Portable real-time fluorescence cytometry of microscale cell culture analog devices

A portable fluorescence cytometric system that provides a modular platform for quantitative real-time image measurements has been used to explore the applicability to investigating cellular events on multiple time scales. For a short time scale, we investigated the real-time dynamics of uptake of daunorubicin, a chemotherapeutic agent, in cultured mouse L-cells in a micro cell culture analog compartment using the fluorescent cytometric system. The green fluorescent protein (GFP) expression to monitor induction of pre-specified genes, which occurs on a much longer time scale, has also been measured. Here GFP fluorescence from a doxycycline inducible promoter in a mouse L-cell line was determined. Additionally, a system based on inexpensive LEDs showed performance comparable to a broadband light source based system and reduced photobleaching compared to microscopic examination.
Management of von Hippel-Lindau Disease: An Interdisciplinary Review

Von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) disease is an autosomal dominantly inherited tumour predisposition syndrome with an incidence of 1:36,000 newborns, the estimated prevalence in Europe is about 1-9/100,000. It is associated with an increased risk of developing various benign and malignant tumours, thus affecting multiple organs at different time points in the life of a patient. Disease severity and diversity as well as age at first symptoms vary considerably, and diagnostic delay due to failure of recognition is a relevant issue. The identification of a disease-causing VHL germline mutation subsequently allows family members at risk to undergo predictive genetic testing after genetic counselling. Clinical management of patients and families should optimally be offered as an interdisciplinary approach. Prophylactic screening programs are a cornerstone of care, and have markedly improved median overall survival of affected patients. The aim of this review is to give an overview of the heterogeneous manifestations of the VHL syndrome and to highlight the diagnostic and therapeutic challenges characteristic for this orphan disease. A comprehensive update of the underlying genetic and molecular principles is additionally provided. We also describe how the St. Gallen VHL multidisciplinary group is organised as an example of interdisciplinary cooperation in a tertiary hospital in Switzerland.
Observer Design for Lipschitz Nonlinear Systems: The Discrete-Time Case

This brief deals with observer design for a class of discrete-time nonlinear systems, namely, linear systems with Lipschitz nonlinearities. Perhaps one of the main features, with respect to the existing results, is the use of new particular Lyapunov functions to deduce nonconservative conditions for asymptotic convergence of the state estimation errors. The established sufficient conditions are expressed in terms of linear matrix inequalities, which are easily and numerically tractable by standard software algorithms. By means of simple transformations, a reduced-order version is established where the observer gain is computed in an optimal manner. Performances of the proposed approach are illustrated through simulation and experimental results; one of them concerns synchronization of chaotic nonlinear models
Commitment of embryonic stem cells to an epidermal cell fate and differentiation in vitro

The epidermis develops from a stem cell population in the surface ectoderm that feeds a single vertical terminal differentiation pathway. To date, however, the limited capacity for the isolation or purification of epidermal stem or precursor cells has hampered studies on early commitment and differentiation events. We have developed a two‐step culture scheme in which pluripotent mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells are induced first to a surface ectoderm phenotype and then are positively selected for putative epidermal stem cells. We show that the earliest stages of epidermal development follow an ordered sequence that is similar to that observed in vivo (expression of keratin 8, keratin 19, keratin 17, and keratin 14), suggesting that ES cell‐derived surface ectoderm‐like cells can be induced to follow the epidermal developmental pathway. At a low frequency, keratin 14‐positive early epidermal cells progressed to keratin 1‐positive and terminally differentiated cells producing a cornified envelope. This culturing protocol provides an invaluable system in which to study both the mechanisms that direct stem cells along the epidermal pathway as well as those that influence their subsequent epidermal differentiation. Developmental Dynamics 232:293–300, 2005. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Modeling network coded TCP throughput: a simple model and its validation

We analyze the performance of TCP and TCP with network coding (TCP/NC) in lossy wireless networks. We build upon the simple framework introduced by Padhye et al. and characterize the throughput behavior of classical TCP as well as TCP/NC as a function of erasure rate, round-trip time, maximum window size, and duration of the connection. Our analytical results show that network coding masks random erasures from TCP, thus preventing TCP's performance degradation in lossy networks (e.g. wireless networks). It is further seen that TCP/NC has significant throughput gains over TCP. Our analysis and simulation results show very close concordance and support that TCP/NC is robust against erasures. TCP/NC is not only able to increase its window size faster but also to maintain a large window size despite the random losses, whereas TCP experiences window closing because losses are mistakenly attributed to congestion. Note that network coding only masks random erasures, and allows TCP to react to congestion; thus, when there are correlated losses, TCP/NC also closes its window.
Web image retrieval on ImagEVAL: evidences on visualness and textualness concept dependency in fusion model

We present in this article an efficient visuo-textual Web Image Retrieval system (WIR), which is the second best system according to the official European ImagEVAL 2006 campaign evaluation. It uses very simple tfidf textual analysis, and subband entropy profile visual features. Our mean fusion model represents a simple but nearly state of the art WIR. We depict analyses of the fusion behavior of each query. We then demonstrate that "visualness" of images, and "textualness" of web page, relative to the discriminant power of each features, are concept dependant, and that fusion model could take advantage of their possible complementarity. We finally discuss on their automatic estimations that may enhance WIR.
Merging Sentences using Shallow Semantic Analysis: A first Experiment

Multiple document summarisation involves the selection of important information in a collection of related documents, and the compilation of this information into one summary. This paper addresses a key problem in multiple document summarisation, that of merging two semantically similar sentences. Unlike the case of single document summarisation, when important sentences are extracted from multiple related documents, one is likely to find repetition of content within these extracted sentences. To avoid the resulting summary being repetitive and hence incoherent, there is a need for a merging process to handle such repetition. We present work in progress on an algorithm that takes annotated lexical dependency trees corresponding to an abstraction of the key semantics of the input sentences and produces a representation of their combined content that can be used to generate a new sentence.
Plant Polyphenol Intake Alters Gene Expression in Canine Leukocytes

Background/Aims: Polyphenol compounds may explain most of the health-related beneficial effects of plants and vegetables, mainly through their antioxidant properties. The aim of the study was to assess the main changes on leukocyte gene expression of dogs caused by intake of three natural polyphenol-rich extracts and to compare them with caloric restriction. Methods: 20 female dogs were divided into 5 groups: control fed ad libitum (C), caloric-restricted to 30% less than control (CR), and 3 groups fed ad libitum supplemented with citrus extract (CE), green tea extract (GTE) or grape seed extract (GSE). Leukocytes gene expression was analyzed in a specially designed microarray. Results: CE treatment mainly downregulated genes related to inflammative (IL-8, VLA-4) and cytotoxic response (GRP 58) as well as proliferation of leukocytes. GTE induced gene expression related to leukocyte proliferation and signaling (GNAQ, PKC-B). GSE upregulated some of the genes increased by CE treatment. CR downregulated genes related with energy metabolism (ATP5A1, COX7C) and inflammatory markers (VLA-4). Conclusion: A chronic ingestion of citric, grape seed and green tea polyphenols is able to modulate canine leukocyte functions through changes in gene expression. CE ingestion reduces expression of some genes also diminished by a 30% caloric restriction.
Changes in the surface morphologies of the cells in the bursa cloacalis (bursa of Fabricius) and thymus during ontogeny of the chick embryo

Slices or sections through the bursa cloacalis and thymus of chick embryos at 7–21 days of incubation were observed by light and electron microscopy to determine whether major differences existed in the surface morphologies of lymphoid cells in these organs, and whether the surface morphologies of these cells changed during ontogeny. These organs were fixed concurrently and identically at each stage.
Indexing Query Regions for Streaming Geospatial Data

This paper introduces the Dynamic Cascade Tree (DCT), a structure designed to index query regions on multi-dimensional data streams. The DCT is designed for a stream management system with a particular focus on Remotely-Sensed Imagery (RSI) data streams. For these streams, an important query operation is to efficiently restrict incoming geospatial data to specified regions of interest. As nearly every query to an RSI stream has a spatial restriction, it makes sense to optimize specifically for this operation. In addition, spatial data is highly ordered in it’s arrival. The DCT takes advantage of this trendiness. The problem generalizes to solving many stabbing point queries. While the worst case performance is quite bad, the DCT performs very well when the stabbing point exhibits certain trending characteristics that are common in RSI data streams. This paper describes the DCT, discusses performance issues, and provides extensions of the DCT.
Predicting Frequency of Metamerism in Natural Scenes by Entropy of Colors

Systematic or multiple reproduction or distribution to multiple locations via electronic or other means is prohibited and is subject to penalties under law. Estimating the frequency of metameric surfaces in natural scenes usually requires many comparisons of surface colors to determine which are visually indistinguishable under one light but distinguishable—by a certain criterion degree—under another. The aim here was to test the predictive power of a simpler approach to estimation based on the entropy of colors. In simulations with 50 hyperspectral images of natural scenes, the logarithm of the observed relative frequency of metamerism in each scene under two successive daylights was regressed on combinations of the estimated Shannon differential entropies of the colors of the scene under the same two daylights. The regression was strong, and it remained so when restricted to the estimated differential entropy under just the first daylight, providing that the criterion degree of metamerism was limited. When the criterion degree was made more extreme, however, the restricted regression failed. A possible explanation of the predictive power of differential entropy is briefly considered.
Activation of the oncogenic potential of the avian cellular src protein by specific structural alteration of the carboxy terminus.

The role of tyrosine phosphorylation in the regulation of tyrosine protein kinase activity was investigated using site‐directed mutagenesis to alter the structure and environment of the three tyrosine residues present in the C terminus of avian pp60c‐src. Mutations that change Tyr 527 to Phe or Ser activate in vivo tyrosine protein kinase activity and induce cellular transformation of chicken cells in culture. In contrast, alterations of tyrosine residues present at positions 511 or 519 in c‐src do not induce transformation or in vivo tyrosine protein kinase activity. Amber mutations, which alter the structure of the pp60c‐src C terminus by inducing premature termination of the c‐src protein at either residue 518 or 523 also induce morphological transformation and increase in vivo tyrosine phosphorylation, whereas removal of the last four residues of c‐src by chain termination at residue 530 does not alter the kinase activity or the biological activity of the resultant c‐src protein. We conclude from these studies that C‐terminal alterations which either remove or replace Tyr 527 serve to activate the c‐src protein resulting in cellular transformation and increased in vivo tyrosine protein kinase activity.
Characterization of porcine pregnane X receptor, farnesoid X receptor and their splice variants

The pregnane X receptor (PXR; NR1I2) and the farnesoid X receptor (FXR; NR1H4) regulate the expression of many major metabolic enzymes. With the pig being used as a model for humans in metabolic and toxicological studies and also an important food animal, we characterized the transactivation profile of the porcine orthologs of these receptors, pgPXR and pgFXR. We compared the transactivation profiles of these receptors and their splice variants to their human orthologs using mostly endogenous ligands. Five alternatively spliced variants were identified for pgFXR as part of this study, while five alternatively spliced variants of pgPXR had been previously described. Insertions and deletions within these splice variants generated truncated proteins or proteins with altered tertiary structures, resulting in altered transactivation. Realtime polymerase chain reaction analyses showed that the pgPXR variants were present in liver cDNA samples from 3.33% to 7.92% of the total pgPXR, while the pgFXR variants were present from 1.92% to 9.26% of the total pgFXR. pgFXR was fairly evenly expressed in seven different tissues. In a luciferase reporter assay, wild-type pgPXR (pgPXR-WT) and human PXR (hPXR) responded to 12 common ligands, with similar levels of activation occurring for six of these. Wild-type pgFXR (pgFXR-WT) significantly responded to three ligands, two of which also activated hFXR. 3-Methylindole (skatole) was identified as a novel inverse agonist for pgPXR-WT and pgFXR-WT as well as porcine constitutive androstane receptor. None of the pgPXR splice variants (SVs) were active in the luciferase reporter assay on their own; pgFXR-SV1 was activated by chenodeoxycholic acid to a similar degree as pgFXR-WT. When co-transfected with their corresponding wild-type proteins, pgPXR-SV1 and pgFXR-SV1 significantly increased receptor transactivation. In conclusion, pgPXR-WT and pgFXR-WT both responded to ligands that activated their human orthologs, and some of the alternatively spliced variants significantly altered pgPXR and pgFXR transactivation at in vivo expression levels.
Workload Reduction for Multi-Input Proﬁle-Directed Optimization

Proﬁle-directed optimization is an effective technique to improve program performance, but it may result in program performance and compiler behavior that is sensitive to both the selection of inputs used for training and the actual input in each run of the program. Cross-validation over a workload of inputs can address the input-sensitivity problem, but introduces the need to select a representative workload of minimal size from the population of available inputs. We present a compiler-centric clustering methodology to group similar inputs so that redundant inputs can be eliminated from the training workload. Input similarity is determined based on the compile-time code transformations made by the compiler after training separately on each input. Differences between inputs are weighted by a performance metric based on cross-validation in order to account for code transformation differences that have little impact on performance. We introduce the CrossError metric that allows the exploration of correlations between transformations based on the results of clustering. The methodology is applied to several SPEC [14] benchmark programs, and illustrated using selected case studies.