Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs The Security Twin Peaks

The feedback from architectural decisions to the elaboration of requirements is an established concept in the software engineering community. However, pinpointing the nature of this feedback in a precise way is a largely open problem. Often, the feedback is generically characterized as additional qualities that might be affected by an architect’s choice. This paper provides a practical perspective on this problem by leveraging architectural security patterns. The contribution of this paper is the Security Twin Peaks model, which serves as an operational framework to co-develop security in the requirements and the architectural
Optimization-based inverse kinematic analysis of an experimental minimally invasive robotic surgery system

This paper describes an experimental minimally invasive surgical robot evaluation platform, in which a Phantom Omni haptic device is used as the master controller and a 7 degree-of-freedom Barrett arm is utilized as the biomimetic surgery robot manipulator. Remote center of motion (RCM) can be implemented by mechanical constraint or by virtual constraint. The mechanically constrained method employs mechanisms such as a double parallelogram to physically enforce the RCM. The virtually constrained method is more flexible and could be applied to traditional manipulators but requires an inverse kinematic analysis. We developed a novel optimization method to map the movement of the master haptic device to the slave surgery robot manipulator. The mapping algorithms were validated numerically and visually. The resulting trajectories, obtained while virtually constraining the RCM, were smooth and accurate.
Lipopolysaccharide-Induced Expression of Microsomal Prostaglandin E Synthase-1 Mediates Late-Phase PGE2 Production in Bone Marrow Derived Macrophages

Cyclooxygenase (COX)-2 expression and release of prostaglandins (PGs) by macrophages are consistent features of lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced macrophage inflammation. The two major PGs, PGE2 and PGD2, are synthesized by the prostanoid isomerases, PGE synthases (PGES) and PGD synthases (PGDS), respectively. Since the expression profile and the individual role of these prostanoid isomerases-mediated inflammation in macrophages has not been defined, we examined the LPS-stimulated PGs production pattern and the expression profile of their synthases in the primary cultured mouse bone marrow derived macrophages (BMDM). Our data show that LPS induced both PGE2 and PGD2 production, which was evident by ∼8 hrs and remained at a similar ratio (∼1∶1) in the early phase (≤12 hrs) of LPS treatment. However, PGE2 production continued increase further in the late phase (16–24 hrs); whereas the production of PGD2 remained at a stable level from 12 to 24 hrs post-treatment. In response to LPS-treatment, the expression of both COX-2 and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) was detected within 2 to 4 hrs; whereas the increased expression of microsomal PGES (mPGES)-1 and a myeloid cell transcription factor PU.1 did not appear until later phase (≥12 hrs). In contrast, the expression of COX-1, hematopoietic-PGDS (H-PGDS), cytosolic-PGES (c-PGES), or mPGES-2 in BMDM was not affected by LPS treatment. Selective inhibition of mPGES-1 with either siRNA or isoform-selective inhibitor CAY10526, but not mPGES-2, c-PGES or PU.1, attenuated LPS-induced burst of PGE2 production indicating that mPGES-1 mediates LPS-induced PGE2 production in BMDM. Interestingly, selective inhibition of mPGES-1 was also associated with a decrease in LPS-induced iNOS expression. In summary, our data show that mPGES-1, but not mPGES-2 or c-PGES isomerase, mediates LPS-induced late-phase burst of PGE2 generation, and regulates LPS-induced iNOS expression in BMDM.
http://dayta. me−A personal news+ data recommender for your day

http://dayta.me is a highly personal information recommender that augments a person’s online calendar with useful information pertaining to their upcoming activities. To perform this recommendation, it draws upon a large collection of distributed, linked-data and Web 2.0 data sources it queries live, and provides a clear, simple user interface that everyday citizens can easily use to contextualize formerly inaccessible information within easy and convenient reach.
Efficient Steganography Method to Implement Selected Lease Significant Bits in Spatial Domain ( SLSB – SD )

In order to improve the capacity of the hidden secret data and to provide an imperceptible stego-image quality, a novel steganographic method based on least-significant-bit (LSB) replacement method is presented. First, a different value from two consecutive pixels by utilising the PVD method the security level is the same as previous. In the LSB matching, the choice of whether to add or subtract one from the cover image pixel is random. The new method uses the choice to set a binary function of two cover pixels to the desired value. The embedding is performed using a pair of pixels as a unit, where the LSB of the first pixel carries one bit of information, and a function of the two pixel values carries another bit of information. we expand the LSB matching revisited image stegano graphy and propose an edge adaptive scheme which can select the embedding regions according to the size of secret message and the difference between two consecutive pixels in the cover image. For lower embedding rates, only sharper edge regions are used while keeping the other smoother regions as they are. When the embedding rate increases, more edge regions can be released adaptively for data hiding by adjusting just a few parameter the proposed method show better performance than traditional LSB matching in terms of distortion and resistance against existing steganalysis.
Angiogenic Factor AGGF1 Activates Autophagy with an Essential Role in Therapeutic Angiogenesis for Heart Disease

AGGF1 is an angiogenic factor with therapeutic potential to treat coronary artery disease (CAD) and myocardial infarction (MI). However, the underlying mechanism for AGGF1-mediated therapeutic angiogenesis is unknown. Here, we show for the first time that AGGF1 activates autophagy, a housekeeping catabolic cellular process, in endothelial cells (ECs), HL1, H9C2, and vascular smooth muscle cells. Studies with Atg5 small interfering RNA (siRNA) and the autophagy inhibitors bafilomycin A1 (Baf) and chloroquine demonstrate that autophagy is required for AGGF1-mediated EC proliferation, migration, capillary tube formation, and aortic ring-based angiogenesis. Aggf1+/- knockout (KO) mice show reduced autophagy, which was associated with inhibition of angiogenesis, larger infarct areas, and contractile dysfunction after MI. Protein therapy with AGGF1 leads to robust recovery of myocardial function and contraction with increased survival, increased ejection fraction, reduction of infarct areas, and inhibition of cardiac apoptosis and fibrosis by promoting therapeutic angiogenesis in mice with MI. Inhibition of autophagy in mice by bafilomycin A1 or in Becn1+/- and Atg5 KO mice eliminates AGGF1-mediated angiogenesis and therapeutic actions, indicating that autophagy acts upstream of and is essential for angiogenesis. Mechanistically, AGGF1 initiates autophagy by activating JNK, which leads to activation of Vps34 lipid kinase and the assembly of Becn1-Vps34-Atg14 complex involved in the initiation of autophagy. Our data demonstrate that (1) autophagy is essential for effective therapeutic angiogenesis to treat CAD and MI; (2) AGGF1 is critical to induction of autophagy; and (3) AGGF1 is a novel agent for treatment of CAD and MI. Our data suggest that maintaining or increasing autophagy is a highly innovative strategy to robustly boost the efficacy of therapeutic angiogenesis.
Regulation of the cnr Cobalt and Nickel Resistance Determinant of Ralstonia eutropha (Alcaligenes eutrophus) CH34

ABSTRACT The linked resistance to nickel and cobalt of Ralstonia eutropha-like strain CH34 (Alcaligenes eutrophusCH34) is encoded by the cnr operon, which is localized on the megaplasmid pMOL28. The regulatory genes cnrYXH have been cloned, overexpressed, and purified in Escherichia coli. CnrY fractionated as a 10.7-kDa protein in in vitro translation assays. CnrX, a periplasmic protein of 16.5 kDa, was overproduced and purified as a histidine-tagged fusion protein inE. coli. His-CnrX was found to posses a secondary structure content rich in alpha-helical and beta-sheet structures. CnrH, a sigma factor of the extracytoplasmic function family, was purified as an N-terminally histidine-tagged fusion. In gel shift mobility assays, His-CnrH, in the presence of E. coli core RNA polymerase enzyme, could retard at least two different promoter DNA targets,cnrYp and cnrHp, localized within thecnrYXH locus. These promoters and their transcription start sites were confirmed by primer extension. Purified His-CnrX did not inhibit the DNA-binding activity of His-CnrH and is therefore unlikely to be an anti-sigma factor, as previously hypothesized (EMBL M91650 description entry). To study the transcriptional response of the regulatory locus to metals and to probe promoter regions, transcriptional fusions were constructed between fragments ofcnrYXH and the luxCDABE, luciferase reporter genes. Nickel and cobalt specifically induced thecnrYXH-luxCDABE fusion at optimal concentrations of 0.3 mM Ni2+ and 2.0 mM Co2+ in a noncomplexing medium for metals. The two promoter regions PY (upstreamcnrY) and PH (upstream cnrH) were probed and characterized using this vector and were found to control the nickel-inducible regulatory response of the cnr operon. The cnrHp promoter was responsible for full transcription of the cnrCBA structural resistance genes, while thecnrYp promoter was necessary to obtain metal-inducible transcription from the cnrHp promoter. The zinc resistance phenotype (ZinB) of a spontaneous cnr mutant strain, AE963, was investigated and could be attributed to an insertion of IS1087, a member of the IS2 family of insertion elements, within the cnrY gene.
Lateralized activation in the inferior frontal cortex during syntactic processing: Event‐related optical topography study

Functional imaging with near‐infrared light has the potential to provide novel information that cannot be obtained with other imaging techniques. An event‐related paradigm has not been fully established for studying human cognitive functions with near‐infrared optical imaging. We conducted language experiments to develop an event‐related paradigm with optical topography (OT). We directly compared cortical activation during syntactic and semantic decision tasks, both of which involved error detection in a sentence stimulus that consisted of a noun phrase and a verb. In the syntactic decision task, subjects judged whether the presented sentence is syntactically correct, where the syntactic knowledge about the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs was required. In the semantic decision task, subjects judged whether the presented sentence is semantically correct, where the lexico‐semantic knowledge about selectional restrictions was indispensable. We found local increases in oxyhemoglobin concentration, which were selectively associated with the syntactic decision task. Activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus was detected when syntactically anomalous sentences were presented, whereas there was no significant activation in this region when semantically anomalous sentences were presented. Moreover, identical stimuli of normal sentences elicited activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus, only when the employment of syntactic knowledge was required. This task‐selective activation was not observed in any other measured regions, including the right homologous region. These results demonstrate that OT techniques, when coupled with the event‐related paradigm, are useful for studying the higher cognitive functions of the human cerebral cortex. Hum. Brain Mapping 17:89–99, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Comparative RNA-seq Analysis in the Unsequenced Axolotl: The Oncogene Burst Highlights Early Gene Expression in the Blastema

The salamander has the remarkable ability to regenerate its limb after amputation. Cells at the site of amputation form a blastema and then proliferate and differentiate to regrow the limb. To better understand this process, we performed deep RNA sequencing of the blastema over a time course in the axolotl, a species whose genome has not been sequenced. Using a novel comparative approach to analyzing RNA-seq data, we characterized the transcriptional dynamics of the regenerating axolotl limb with respect to the human gene set. This approach involved de novo assembly of axolotl transcripts, RNA-seq transcript quantification without a reference genome, and transformation of abundances from axolotl contigs to human genes. We found a prominent burst in oncogene expression during the first day and blastemal/limb bud genes peaking at 7 to 14 days. In addition, we found that limb patterning genes, SALL genes, and genes involved in angiogenesis, wound healing, defense/immunity, and bone development are enriched during blastema formation and development. Finally, we identified a category of genes with no prior literature support for limb regeneration that are candidates for further evaluation based on their expression pattern during the regenerative process.
Remote sensing image matching based on corner structures

In this paper, we propose a matching method for remote sensing images based on corner structures. Firstly corner angle vector is defined to analysis corner structure, and the process of how to obtain it is discussed in detail. Then some measures are given to eliminate the false corners. Finally a relaxation matching scheme is presented. The experiments show the effectiveness and feasibility of our matching method.
Adaptive techniques used for lifetime estimation of lithium-ion batteries

A review on the different studies made on the lifetime estimation of the Lithium-Ion batteries. As lithium batteries are one off the main components of many instruments nowadays. This paper reviews and summaries the main studies and researches made to estimate the lifetime, the SOC (State-Of-charge) and the SOH (State Of Health - ability of a battery to display its discharge rate over its lifetime) of this battery model. This is a crucial study because the battery end-of-service-lifetime is important to prevent any sudden power shortages. Four adaptive systems will be illustrated in this article, The Accelerated Lifetime testing Method, the Kalman filter, the Artificial Neural Network, the fuzzy logic systems and the accelerated aging tests.
MIRROR DESCENT FOR METRIC LEARNING

Introduction. The concepts of similarity, distance or metric are central to a many well-known and popular algorithms such as k-means clustering [13], the nearest neighbor algorithm [6], locallylinear embedding [14], multi-dimensional scaling [7] and semi-supervised clustering [18]. While there are many approaches to metric learning, a large body of work is focussed on learning the Mahalanobis distance, which amounts to learning a transformation and computing the distance in the transformed space. Among these approaches are the work of Xing et al., [20], relevant components analysis [17], the large-margin nearest neighbor (LMNN) algorithm [19], Globerson and Roweis’ method of collapsing classes [10], information-theoretic metric learning (ITML) [8] and BoostMetric [16]. Aside from the batch approaches above, online algorithms such as the online ITML algorithm [8] and the pseudo-metric online learning algorithm (POLA) [15] have proven successful. All these approaches are characterized by diverse loss functions and projection methods, which naturally begs the question: is there a wider framework that can generalize many of these existing methods? In addition, ever persistent issues are t hose of scalability to large data sets and the question of kernelizability. Thus, we propose a unifi ed approach to Mahalanobis metric learning: an online regularized metric learningalgorithm based on the ideas of composite objective mirror descent(COMID) [9]. We propose to formulate the metric learning problem as a regularized positive semi-definite matrix learningproblem, whose update rules can be derived using the COMID framework. This approach aims to be scalable, kernelizable, and admissible to many different types of Bregman and loss functions which allows for the tailoring of several different classes of algorithms. The most novel contribution is the use of the trace norm, which yields a sparse metric in its eigenspectrum, thus simultaneously performing feature selection along with me tric learning. Unifying Framework. The goal is to incrementally learn a squared Mahalanobis metric d(x, z) 2 = (xt −zt) ′ M(xt −zt), given training data of the form (xt, zt, yt) T=1 , where labels yt = ±1 indicate
Interactive local color transfer based on Coupled Map Lattices

The paper presents a new interactive local color transformation method base on GrowCut image segmentation algorithm. The method improves Maslennikova et al's CIM based color transformation algorithm by using Coupled Map Lattices (CML). An intuitive and easy user interface is also supported. User just needs to draft some trails both in reference and target image to make the local color matched. The color transformation method represents some good characteristics auto-repair and segmentation with the usage of GrowCut.
Reliable techniques of leakage current reduction for SRAM-6T Cell: A review

Feature size of the transistor is shrinking by the rapid progress in semiconductor technology in deep sub-micron (DSM) technology. At the present time; these days's leakage power is more important in hardware's and microprocessors. Memory contains large number of transistor in advanced computer system. Mainly the leakage dissipation is directly related to the no. of transistors. As technology scaling static random memory in standby leakage power is becoming one of the more important concerns for low power application. In this paper we have study of different leakage components of sram cell and some leakage reduction techniques like Gated Vdd, MTCMOS, transistor stacking, source biasing and negative word line scheme approach to optimizing low leakage in sram memory cell.
Generalizations of Davidson's method for computing eigenvalues of sparse symmetric matrices

This paper analyzes Davidson’s method for computing a few eigenpairs of large sparse symmetric matrices. An explanation is given for why Davidson’s method often performs well but occasionally performs very badly. Davidson’s method is then generalized to a method which offers a powerful way of applying preconditioning techniques developed for solving systems of linear equations to solving eigenvalue problems.
A LU Matrix-Based Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for WSNs

In the existing key pre-distribution scheme suitable for low power and resource sensor nodes, mutual authentication is not allowed and the security tolerance of network is low. In this paper, we propose a new key pre-distribution scheme guaranteeing that any two sensor nodes can find a shared key between themselves. The basic idea of the paper is to combine matrix decomposition technique and polynomial-based key pre- distribution approach. The analysis indicates the proposed scheme allows almost 100% connectivity regardless of the number of keys and it enhances security by node-to-node mutual authentication. On the other hand, introducing polynomial-based key pre-distribution, our scheme greatly improves the resilience against node capture.
Deferred, Self‐Organizing BSP Trees

bsp trees and KD trees are fundamental data structures for collision detection in walkthrough environments. A basic issue in the construction of these hierarchical data structures is the choice of cutting planes. Rather than base these choices solely on the properties of the scene, we propose using information about how the tree is used in order to determine its structure. We demonstrate how this leads to the creation of bsp trees that are small, do not require much preprocessing time, and respond very efficiently to sequences of collision queries.
OCBPSR: Orthogonal Complex BandPass Sampling Receiver

Second-order/Complex BandPass Sampling Receivers (CBPSR) are attractive for acquiring multi-signals for SDR/CR applications. One of the issues caused by the implementation of such receivers is the signals IQ mismatch. This paper proposes a CBPSR implementation that eliminates this IQ mismatch by reformatting the received signals in an orthogonal analytic form (thus named OCBPSR). Our implementation will also reduce the required sampling frequency to below the Nyquist rate, and so reducing the processing time to recover the signals. This is achieved by folding the upper-side of the received signals to the same fold-frequency in the baseband domain without overlapping, by making the signals orthogonal. MATLAB simulation is used to evaluate the performance of our OCBPSR using various scenarios of harsh signal environment, including Doppler and multipath effects.
A Feasibility Study of Enhancing Independent Task Performance for People with Cognitive Impairments Through the Use of a Handheld Location-Based Prompting System

An autonomous task-prompting system is presented to increase workplace and life independence for people with cognitive impairments such as traumatic brain injury, intellectual disability, schizophrenia, and down syndrome. This paper describes an approach to providing distributed cognition support of work engagement for persons with cognitive disabilities. In the pilot study, a prototype was built and tested in a community-based rehabilitation program involving preservice food preparation training of eight participants with cognitive impairments. The results show improvement in helping with task engagement is statistically significant compared to the oral-instruction method. A follow-up comparative study with two participants evaluated the shadow-team approach against the proposed system. Although the number of participants was few, the participants were studied in depth and the findings were very promising. The results in the autonomous task prompting without staff intervention indicate that the performance is statistically as good as the shadow-team approach. Our findings suggest that acquisition of job skills may be facilitated by the proposed system in conjunction with operant conditioning strategies.
Energy efficient body area networking for mHealth applications

Propelled by the need to reduce the cost of caring for the ageing population, we observe an impetus towards enabling remote patient monitoring (mHealth) via low power medical sensor networks. A practical mHealth network consisting of several sensor modules located on the patients body needs to operate over long periods of time without any intervention. This requires efficient hardware and software design which will enable the battery powered sensor devices to operate efficiently and reliably with minimal energy consumption. This paper combines efficient antenna design with a cross layer energy efficient protocol to realize wireless body area networks (WBANs) where the main aim is to maximise network life time. Towards this goal, we demonstrate a high efficiency system design approach where the performance of WBANs are greatly enhanced.
Psychometric Validity and Gender Invariance of the Academic Buoyancy Scale in the Philippines: A Construct Validation Approach

The current study examined the psychometric validity and gender invariance of the Academic Buoyancy Scale in the Philippines through a construct validation approach. In terms of within-network construct validity, our results demonstrated that the unidimensional model of academic buoyancy significantly fit the current sample and was invariant across gender. Male students scored significantly higher than female students on academic buoyancy. Regarding between-network construct validity, our results revealed that academic buoyancy was positively associated with behavioral and emotional engagement. Implications of the findings of the study are discussed.