Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
RGD-conjugated rod-like viral nanoparticles on 2D scaffold improve bone differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells

Viral nanoparticles have uniform and well-defined nano-structures and can be produced in large quantities. Several plant viral nanoparticles have been tested in biomedical applications due to the lack of mammalian cell infectivity. We are particularly interested in using Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), which has been demonstrated to enhance bone tissue regeneration, as a tunable nanoscale building block for biomaterials development. Unmodified TMV particles have been shown to accelerate osteogenic differentiation of adult stem cells by synergistically upregulating bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2) and integrin-binding bone sialoprotein (IBSP) expression with dexamethasone. However, their lack of affinity to mammalian cell surface resulted in low initial cell adhesion. In this study, to increase cell binding capacity of TMV based material the chemical functionalization of TMV with arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) peptide was explored. An azide-derivatized RGD peptide was “clicked” to tyrosine residues on TMV outer surface via an efficient copper(I) catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) reaction. The ligand spacing is calculated to be 2–4 nm, which could offer a polyvalent ligand clustering effect for enhanced cell receptor signaling, further promoting the proliferation and osteogenic differentiation of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs).
Afterword: the emergent literature on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research evaluation

The complexity of evaluating interdisciplinary (ID) and transdisciplinary (TD) research defies a single standard. Yet, common elements appear in the emergent literature. Five overriding themes stand out. (1) Quality is a relative concept, driven by variability of goals and criteria. (2) A coaching model of evaluation nurtures the research process. (3) Integration is central to the process. (4) Social and cognitive factors interact, requiring management of information and decision-making. (5) The need for change in peer review has led to a variety of strategies. ID and TD evaluation is a generative activity that entails acts of “capitalizing” and “harvesting” expertise while “calibrating” standards to produce new “cultures of evidence”. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.
Caracterización y comportamiento frente a la corrosión de recubrimientos de ácido fítico, obtenidos por conversión química, sobre substratos de magnesio en solución fisiológica

In order to improve the corrosion resistance of biodegradable magnesium and AZ31 magnesium alloy implants, a phytic acid coating has been applied on both substrates and their protective effect against corrosion has been assessed. The morphology and the chemical nature of the conversion coating were analyzed by SEM/EDX, XRD and FTIR. The spectra showed that the conversion coating was amorphous, and it was composed of Mg, O, and P on magnesium surface, along with Al, Zn and C on AZ31 alloy. The main coating components were chelate compounds formed by phytic acid and metallic ions. The corrosion resistance of bare and coated samples was evaluated by potentiodynamic polarization technique in Hank’s solution at 37 °C. The results indicate that phytic acid conversion coatings provided a very effective protection to the magnesium substrates studied.
Sound Categorization and Conceptual Priming for Nonlinguistic and Linguistic Sounds

The aim of these experiments was to compare conceptual priming for linguistic and for a homogeneous class of nonlinguistic sounds, impact sounds, by using both behavioral (percentage errors and RTs) and electrophysiological measures (ERPs). Experiment 1 aimed at studying the neural basis of impact sound categorization by creating typical and ambiguous sounds from different material categories (wood, metal, and glass). Ambiguous sounds were associated with slower RTs and larger N280, smaller P350/P550 components, and larger negative slow wave than typical impact sounds. Thus, ambiguous sounds were more difficult to categorize than typical sounds. A category membership task was used in Experiment 2. Typical sounds were followed by sounds from the same or from a different category or by ambiguous sounds. Words were followed by words, pseudowords, or nonwords. Error rate was highest for ambiguous sounds and for pseudowords and both elicited larger N400-like components than same typical sounds and words. Moreover, both different typical sounds and nonwords elicited P300 components. These results are discussed in terms of similar conceptual priming effects for nonlinguistic and linguistic stimuli.
Service Quality Evaluation by Personal Ontology

How to find and select a suitable service for services users are a challenging task. In this paper, we proposed a method of concept categorization with the use of personal ontology to evaluate and select more suitable service according to the preferences of users. We use the attributes of 'reputation' 'compliance', 'verity', and 'user ranking' for our evaluation of service quality. In addition, a new attribute called 'reformation' is also added to evaluate service quality. Based on the evaluation attributes, a fuzzy reasoning method is used for service selection. Our method is to aide the evaluation process with user preferences to reflect the fact that the user difference will affect the selection of different service providers. A system prototype has been built for determining the feasibility of our approach.
Voice conversion using duration-embedded bi-HMMs for expressive speech synthesis

This paper presents an expressive voice conversion model (DeBi-HMM) as the post processing of a text-to-speech (TTS) system for expressive speech synthesis. DeBi-HMM is named for its duration-embedded characteristic of the two HMMs for modeling the source and target speech signals, respectively. Joint estimation of source and target HMMs is exploited for spectrum conversion from neutral to expressive speech. Gamma distribution is embedded as the duration model for each state in source and target HMMs. The expressive style-dependent decision trees achieve prosodic conversion. The STRAIGHT algorithm is adopted for the analysis and synthesis process. A set of small-sized speech databases for each expressive style is designed and collected to train the DeBi-HMM voice conversion models. Several experiments with statistical hypothesis testing are conducted to evaluate the quality of synthetic speech as perceived by human subjects. Compared with previous voice conversion methods, the proposed method exhibits encouraging potential in expressive speech synthesis
Relationship preserving auction for repeated e-procurement

While e-procurement auction has helped firms to achieve lower procurement costs, auction mechanisms that prevail at present in procurement markets need to address an important issue that concerns the ability to maintain long term relationships with the partners, especially in repeated e-procurement settings. In this paper, we propose a Relationship Preserving Auction (RPA) mechanism that augments the conventional auction mechanism with a bidder relationship scoring model. Our proposed mechanism gives increased chances of winning to the bidders who have bidden at relatively competitive price but had comparatively less wins so far. Keeping these bidders in the auction over time will lead to more competitive bidding prices and eventually reduce the auctioneer's total procurement cost in repeated auctions. From simulation experiments, we show how RPA works under different bidders' behavior. We show that RPA is able to obtain lower procurement cost compared to conventional procurement auctions when bidders bid opportunistically and renege readily to other markets.
Coupled Heat Transfer Analysis of Interlayer Active Cooling Barrel of Large Caliber Gun Based on CFX

Large caliber naval gun weapon system in sustained and rapid firing process, produced high temperature and high pressure gas will form pulsed high temperature flow in barrel, causing the barrel being heated and cooled sharply and then being in bad environment, affecting the life of the barrel. The research object of this paper is based on 155mm naval gun, to utilize the theories of fluid mechanics and heat transfer and use ANSYS-CFX software, to simulate the heat response of the gun’s rifling original portion under interlayer active cooling, and to analyse the effects of structure parameters of interlayer cooling system and flowing parameters of cooling liquid on cooling performance using the principle of heat transfer enhancement, providing guidance for the optimization of the structure of the interlayer cooling system.
Head pose estimation using isophote features for driver assistance systems

In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the pose of a driver from video data. We propose to use isophote features to improve classification performance when illumination varies. In particular, we both use the direction and curvature features. The features are encoded into direction histogram and curvature histogram in the blocks of the image. Experimental results show that the proposed features could well describe the structure of driver face image, and have a good performance in real scene.
Bioinspired hook surfaces based upon a ubiquitous weed (Galium aparine) for dry adhesion

Galium aparine is a plant noted for its ability to attach to solid objects through its microscopic hooked trichomes via a hook and loop mechanism. This dry adhesive behaviour has been mimicked using a simple and inexpensive epoxy resin replica moulding technique. Enhancement of adhesion strength is achieved by varying the epoxy resin replicas’ Young’s modulus in order to provide strong hook and loop interlocking, whilst retaining sufficient bulk material flexibility for subsequent detachment via a hook uncurling mechanism.
A novel self-aligned gate-lost MOSFET process comparing high-/spl kappa/ candidates

In this paper the two metal oxide dielectrics (ZrO/sub 2/ and HfO/sub 2/) deposited in the same chamber with the same technique using a newly developed self-aligned gate-last MOSFET process are compared. The compared results suggested that using either ZrO/sub 2/ or HfO/sub 2/ would provide similar on-to-off current ratio at a given device size.
An empirical study on mood classification in music through computational approaches

Music Information Retrieval aims computational approaches that can be used to facilitate managing, e.g., indexing, retrieving, storing, etc., music data in large-volume music datasets. In this study, we empirically explore different classification schemes on the mood classification problems in music data. It is long recognized that using mood to classify music data is subjective and ambiguous. Through comprehensive empirical experiments, we demonstrate that the current classification schemes are not sufficient to conduct music classification through mood. Various issues, such as feature selection, feature discretization, etc., are analyzed and discussed. The main purposes of this study is to find through empirical experiments what combinations of classifiers and feature selection techniques work better to classify moods in music data and in the meanwhile, analyze and discuss various issues related to the mood classification problem.
Rice proteomics: Ending phase I and the beginning of phase II

Rice is a critically important food crop plant on our planet. It is also an excellent model plant for cereal crops, and now in position to serve as a reference plant for biofuel production. Proteomics study of rice therefore is crucial to better understand “rice” as a whole. Rice proteomics has moved well beyond the initial proteome analysis in the early to late 1990s. Since the year 2000, numerous proteomic studies have been performed in rice during growth and development and against a wide variety of environmental factors. These proteomic investigations have established the high‐resolution 2‐D reference gels of rice tissues, organs, and organelle under normal and adverse (stressed) conditions by optimizing suitable, reproducible systems for gel, and MS‐based proteomic techniques, which “rejuvenated” the rice proteome field. This constituted the “phase I” in rice proteomics, and resulted in rice being labeled as the “cornerstone” of cereal food crop proteomes. Now, we are in position to state that rice proteomics today marks the “beginning of phase II”. This is due to the fact that rice researchers are capable of digging deeper into the rice proteome, mapping PTMs (in particular reversible protein phosphorylation), performing inter‐ and intra‐species comparisons, integrating proteomics data with other “omic” technologies‐generated data, and probing the functional aspect of individual proteins. These advancements and their impact on the future of rice proteomics are the focus of this review.
Modeling QoE of Video Streaming in Wireless Networks with Large-Scale Measurement of User Behavior

Unraveling quality of experience (QoE) of video streaming is very challenging in bandwidth shared wireless networks. It is unclear how QoE metrics such as starvation probability and buffering time interact with dynamics of streaming traffic load. In this paper, we collect view records from one of the largest streaming providers in China over two weeks and perform an in-depth measurement study on flow arrival and viewing time that shed light on the real traffic pattern. Our most important observation is that the viewing time of streaming users fits a hyper-exponential distribution quite well. This implies that all the views can be categorized into two classes, short and long views with separated time scales. We then map the measured traffic pattern to bandwidth shared cellular networks and propose an analytical framework to compute the closed-form starvation probability on the basis of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Our framework can be naturally extended to investigate practical issues including the progressive downloading and the finite video duration. Extensive trace-driven simulations validate the accuracy of our models. Our study reveals that the starvation metrics of the short and long views possess different sensitivities to the scheduling priority at base station. Hence, a better QoE tradeoff between the short and long views has a potential to be leveraged by offering them different scheduling weights. The flow differentiation involves tremendous technical and non-technical challenges because video content is owned by content providers but not the network operators and the viewing time of each session is unknown beforehand. To overcome these difficulties, we propose an online Bayesian approach to infer the viewing time of each incoming flow with the "least" information from content providers.
XPS analysis of the effect of fillers on PTFE transfer film development in sliding contacts

The development of transfer films atop steel counterfaces in contact with unfilled and bronze-filled PTFE has been studied using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The sliding apparatus was contained within the vacuum of the analytical system, so the effects of the native oxide, hydrocarbon, and adsorbed gaseous surface layers of the steel upon the PTFE transfer behavior could be studied in-situ. For both the filled and the unfilled PTFE, cleaner surfaces promoted greater amounts of transfer. Metal fluorides, which formed at the transfer film/counterface interface, were found solely in cases where the native oxide had been removed to expose the metallic surface prior to sliding. These fluorides also were found at clean metal/PTFE interfaces formed in the absence of frictional contact. A fraction of these fluorides resulted from irradiation damage inherent in XPS analysis. PTFE transfer films were found to build up with repeated sliding passes, by a process in which strands of transfer filled in the remaini.
Personalized search: Integrating collaboration and social networks

Despite improvements in their capabilities, search engines still fail to provide users with only relevant results. One reason is that most search engines implement a “one size fits all” approach that ignores personal preferences when retrieving the results of a user's query. Recent studies (Smyth, 2010) have elaborated the importance of personalizing search results and have proposed integrating recommender system methods for enhancing results using contextual and extrinsic information that might indicate the user's actual needs. In this article, we review recommender system methods used for personalizing and improving search results and examine the effect of two such methods that are merged for this purpose. One method is based on collaborative users' knowledge; the second integrates information from the user's social network. We propose new methods for collaborative‐and social‐based search and demonstrate that each of these methods, when separately applied, produce more accurate search results than does a purely keyword‐based search engine (referred to as “standard search engine”), where the social search engine is more accurate than is the collaborative one. However, separately applied, these methods do not produce a sufficient number of results (low coverage). Nevertheless, merging these methods with those implemented by standard search engines overcomes the low‐coverage problem and produces personalized results for users that display significantly more accurate results while also providing sufficient coverage than do standard search engines. The improvement, however, is significant only for topics for which the diversity of terms used for queries among users is low. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
GENERATION AND ASSEMBLY OF CELL-LADEN HYDROGELS ON A DIGITAL MICROFLUIDIC PLATFORM

We demonstrate an integrated platform combining (1) digital microfluidic and (2) photo-patterning techniques to manipulate and fabricate cell-laden hydrogels for the tissue engineering application. Different hydrogels cured from individuallydriven polymer droplets provide three-dimensional (3D) microenvironments for in vitro cell culture. With the ability to actively drive the polymer droplets, assemble the hydrogels, and arrange the cells inside the hydrogel, this work provides an essential approach to tissue engineering, cell-cell interaction, stem cell differentiation studies on a highly programmable digital microfluidic device.
Toll-Like Receptor 2 (TLR2) and TLR9 Signaling Results in HIV-Long Terminal Repeat Trans-Activation and HIV Replication in HIV-1 Transgenic Mouse Spleen Cells: Implications of Simultaneous Activation of TLRs on HIV Replication1

Opportunistic infections are common in HIV-infected patients; they activate HIV replication and contribute to disease progression. In the present study we examined the role of Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) and TLR9 in HIV-long terminal repeat (HIV-LTR) trans-activation and assessed whether TLR4 synergized with TLR2 or TLR9 to induce HIV replication. Soluble Mycobacterium tuberculosis factor (STF) and phenol-soluble modulin from Staphylococcus epidermidis induced HIV-LTR trans-activation in human microvessel endothelial cells cotransfected with TLR2 cDNA. Stimulation of ex vivo spleen cells from HIV-1 transgenic mice with TLR4, TLR2, and TLR9 ligands (LPS, STF, and CpG DNA, respectively) induced p24 Ag production in a dose-dependent manner. Costimulation of HIV-1 transgenic mice spleen cells with LPS and STF or CpG DNA induced TNF-α and IFN-γ production in a synergistic manner and p24 production in an additive fashion. In the THP-1 human monocytic cell line stably expressing the HIV-LTR-luciferase construct, LPS and STF also induced HIV-LTR trans-activation in an additive manner. This is the first time that TLR2 and TLR9 and costimulation of TLRs have been shown to induce HIV replication. Together these results underscore the importance of TLRs in bacterial Ag- and CpG DNA-induced HIV-LTR trans-activation and HIV replication. These observations may be important in understanding the role of the innate immune system and the molecular mechanisms involved in the increased HIV replication and HIV disease progression associated with multiple opportunistic infections.
Improvement of Human Keratinocyte Migration by a Redox Active Bioelectric Dressing

Exogenous application of an electric field can direct cell migration and improve wound healing; however clinical application of the therapy remains elusive due to lack of a suitable device and hence, limitations in understanding the molecular mechanisms. Here we report on a novel FDA approved redox-active Ag/Zn bioelectric dressing (BED) which generates electric fields. To develop a mechanistic understanding of how the BED may potentially influence wound re-epithelialization, we direct emphasis on understanding the influence of BED on human keratinocyte cell migration. Mapping of the electrical field generated by BED led to the observation that BED increases keratinocyte migration by three mechanisms: (i) generating hydrogen peroxide, known to be a potent driver of redox signaling, (ii) phosphorylation of redox-sensitive IGF1R directly implicated in cell migration, and (iii) reduction of protein thiols and increase in integrinαv expression, both of which are known to be drivers of cell migration. BED also increased keratinocyte mitochondrial membrane potential consistent with its ability to fuel an energy demanding migration process. Electric fields generated by a Ag/Zn BED can cross-talk with keratinocytes via redox-dependent processes improving keratinocyte migration, a critical event in wound re-epithelialization.
New measures of brain functional connectivity by temporal analysis of extreme events

Understanding brain structure and function can benefit from studying functional connectivity. A common methodology to measure functional connectivity between two brain regions is to estimate the correlation between their corresponding average time courses. Usually, these correlations are computed either via the Pearson estimator or the non-parametric Spearman estimator. However, these two measures do not fully reflect the information we want to extract about the spontaneous activity in the different areas of the brain. In this paper, we propose to estimate functional connectivity between two regions by modeling the activation parts of the time course as the extreme events and by measuring the co-activation between these events. We show that our new measure of functional connectivity contains key information about the co-activations, which is lost when using common functional connectivity measures; i.e., Pearson or Spearman correlation.
A novel E-SIMOX high voltage device structure with the charge islands on the SOI

Based on ENDIF (ENhanced DIelectric layer Field), a new E-SIMOX high voltage device structure with the charge islands on the SOI and its breakdown mechanism proposed in this paper. The structure is characterized by the charge islands inserted on the top interface of silicon layer and dielectric layer. Inversion holes located by Coulomb's force enhance the electric field of the dielectric layer (EI) and so increase the vertical breakdown voltage (BV). EI =917V/µm and VB,V =345V is obtained by 2D simulation on a 0.375-µm-thick dielectric layer and 2-µm-thick top silicon layer. Voltage shared by dielectric layer is more than 95% of BV.
Progress toward uranium scrap recycling via electron beam cold hearth refining

A 250 kW electron beam cold hearth refining (EBCHR) melt furnace at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been in operation for over a year producing 5.5 in. -diameter ingots of various uranium alloys. Production of in-specification uranium-6%-niobium (U-6Nb) alloy ingots has been demonstrated using Virgin feedstock. A vibratory scrap feeder has been installed on the system and the ability to recycle chopped U-6Nb scrap has been established. A preliminary comparison of vacuum arc remelted (VAR) and electron beam (EB) melted product is presented.