Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Zebrafish 20β-Hydroxysteroid Dehydrogenase Type 2 Is Important for Glucocorticoid Catabolism in Stress Response

Stress, the physiological reaction to a stressor, is initiated in teleost fish by hormone cascades along the hypothalamus-pituitary-interrenal (HPI) axis. Cortisol is the major stress hormone and contributes to the appropriate stress response by regulating gene expression after binding to the glucocorticoid receptor. Cortisol is inactivated when 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (HSD) type 2 catalyzes its oxidation to cortisone. In zebrafish, Danio rerio, cortisone can be further reduced to 20β-hydroxycortisone. This reaction is catalyzed by 20β-HSD type 2, recently discovered by us. Here, we substantiate the hypothesis that 20β-HSD type 2 is involved in cortisol catabolism and stress response. We found that hsd11b2 and hsd20b2 transcripts were up-regulated upon cortisol treatment. Moreover, a cortisol-independent, short-term physical stressor led to the up-regulation of hsd11b2 and hsd20b2 along with several HPI axis genes. The morpholino-induced knock down of hsd20b2 in zebrafish embryos revealed no developmental phenotype under normal culture conditions, but prominent effects were observed after a cortisol challenge. Reporter gene experiments demonstrated that 20β-hydroxycortisone was not a physiological ligand for the zebrafish glucocorticoid or mineralocorticoid receptor but was excreted into the fish holding water. Our experiments show that 20β-HSD type 2, together with 11β-HSD type 2, represents a short pathway in zebrafish to rapidly inactivate and excrete cortisol. Therefore, 20β-HSD type 2 is an important enzyme in stress response.
Pitch-controlled wind turbine synchronized cutting-in control and modeling-simulation

As in cutting-in control process of pitch-controlled doubly-fed wind power generation system, the synchronized control strategy of DFIG can only regulate the stator voltages before cut in, the performance of pitch control for maintaining wind turbine rotating speed is studied, in order to prevent turbine over-speed. For accomplishing the whole cutting-in process simulation, a method based on modeling generator respectively and time-sharing simulation is also adopted. The simulating results validate that both the control strategies and Modeling methods discussed in this paper are efficient.
Stress Spillover and Crossover in Same-Sex Couples: Concurrent and Lagged Daily Effects

ABSTRACT A growing body of literature on romantic relationships demonstrates associations between daily stress and relationship quality; however, this research has largely focused on heterosexual couples. Whereas all couples may experience common external stressors originating outside the relationship (e.g., work and finances), sexual-minority couples may also experience unique stressors due to their sexual orientation (e.g., discrimination or harassment). To address the dearth of literature on the daily experience of stress in same-sex relationships, we examine concurrent (same-day) and lagged (next-day) effects of common external and sexual-minority stressors on relationship quality using 14-day daily diaries from 81 same-sex couples. In doing so, we identify the types of external stress most likely to spill over into the relationship, as well as those vulnerable to crossing over from one partner to the other. We further examine whether the effects are proximal (concurrent) or carry over from one day to the next (lagged). Common external stress was negatively associated with same-day actor and partner relationship quality. Sexual-minority stress demonstrated lagged effects for actor relationship quality, but only for men. Implications for the proximal impact of common external stress and the lagged effects of sexual-minority stress, specifically for men, on relationship quality are discussed.
CONTINUOUS FREQUENCY-LIMITED PROCESSES AND THEIR MACROECONOMIC APPLICATIONS

Econometricians are liable to regard discrete-time autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) models as approximations to continuous-time stochastic differential equations. (For a recent exposition of this point of view, see Sims 2010.) In common with other statisticians, they tend to assume that the differential equations are powered by the increments of a Wiener process. A Wiener process is formed from the accumulation of a continuous stream of infinitesimal impulses. This generates a trajectory that is everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable. The impulses that underlie a Wiener process correspond to Dirac delta functions. These generalised functions are zero-valued everywhere except at a single point. The Fourier transform of a Dirac function indicates that it comprises sinusoidal elements of uniform but infinitesimal amplitudes that cover an unbounded range of frequencies. A Wiener process is a non-anticipatory process that has the martingale property, whereby its future evolution cannot be predicted—and the best estimate of its future values is its present value. This property is exploited extensively in financial mathematics, which is one of the reasons for the prevalence of Wiener processes. In many cases of financial modelling, the concomitant property of the unbounded frequencies, which must seem unreasonable, can be overlooked. However, in the context of macroeconomics, where the trajectories of the variables are dominated by trends and by motions of low frequency, it seems inappropriate to propose that the forcing functions should be Wiener processes. The notion of unbounded frequency is also at odds with the modern technology of digital signal processing and communications engineering. Here, the assumption
Reo: a channel-based coordination model for component composition

In this paper, we present Reo, which forms a paradigm for composition of software components based on the notion of mobile channels. Reo is a channel-based exogenous coordination model in which complex coordinators, called connectors, are compositionally built out of simpler ones. The simplest connectors in Reo are a set of channels with well-defined behaviour supplied by users. Reo can be used as a language for coordination of concurrent processes, or as a ‘glue language’ for compositional construction of connectors that orchestrate component instances in a component-based system. The emphasis in Reo is just on connectors and their composition, and not on the entities that connect to, communicate and cooperate through these connectors. Each connector in Reo imposes a specific coordination pattern on the entities (for example, components) that perform I/O operations through that connector, without the knowledge of those entities. Channel composition in Reo is a very powerful mechanism for construction of connectors. We demonstrate the expressive power of connector composition in Reo through a number of examples. We show that exogenous coordination patterns that can be expressed as (meta-level) regular expressions over I/O operations can be composed in Reo out of a small set of only five primitive channel types.
Camera-Captured Document Image Analysis

Text is no longer confined to scanned pages and often appears in camera-based images originating from text on real world objects. Unlike the images from conventional flatbed scanners, which have a controlled acquisition environment, camera-based images pose new challenges such as uneven illumination, blur, poor resolution, perspective distortion and 3D deformations that can severely affect the performance of any optical character recognition (OCR) system. Due to the variations in the imaging condition as well as the target document type, traditional OCR systems, designed for scanned images, cannot be directly applied to camera-captured images and a new level of processing needs to be addressed. In this thesis, we study some of the issues commonly encountered in camerabased image analysis and propose novel methods to overcome them. All the methods make use of color connected components. 1. Connected component descriptor for document image mosaicing Document image analysis often requires mosaicing when it is not possible to capture a large document at a reasonable resolution in a single exposure. Such a document is captured in parts and mosaicing stitches them into a single image. Since connected components (CCs) in a document image can easily be extracted regardless of the image rotation, scale and perspective distortion, we design a robust feature named connected component descriptor that is tailored for mosaicing camera-captured document images. The method involves extraction of a circular measurement region around each CC and its description using the angular radial transform (ART). To ensure geometric consistency during feature matching, the ART coefficients of a CC are augmented with those of its 2 nearest neighbors. Our method addresses two critical issues often encountered in correspondence matching: (i) the stability of features and (ii) robustness against false matches due to multiple instances of many characters in a document image. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on camera-captured document images exhibiting large variations in viewpoint, illumination and scale. 2. Font and background color independent text binarization The first step in an OCR system, after document acquisition, is binarization, which
Dynamic Length Changes of Telomeres and Their Nuclear Organization in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a myeloproliferative neoplasm characterized by the t(9;22) translocation. As in most cancers, short telomeres are one of the features of CML cells, and telomere shortening accentuates as the disease progresses from the chronic phase to the blastic phase. Although most individual telomeres are short, some of them are lengthened, and long individual telomeres occur non-randomly and might be associated with clonal selection. Telomerase is the main mechanism used to maintain telomere lengths, and its activity increases when CML evolves toward advanced stages. ALT might be another mechanism employed by CML cells to sustain the homeostasis of their telomere lengths and this mechanism seems predominant at the early stage of leukemogenesis. Also, telomerase and ALT might jointly act to maintain telomere lengths at the chronic phase, and as CML progresses, telomerase becomes the major mechanism. Finally, CML cells display an altered nuclear organization of their telomeres which is characterized by the presence of high number of telomeric aggregates, a feature of genomic instability, and differential positioning of telomeres. CML represents a good model to study mechanisms responsible for dynamic changes of individual telomere lengths and the remodeling of telomeric nuclear organization throughout cancer progression.
Fabrication quality of glass microfluidic chips

Microfluidic chips, which are of excellent properties and for biochemical testing, are researched and manufactured in this paper. The biochemical reactor cells and microchannels in glass substrates of microfluidic chips are fabricated by processes of doping, photomask and wet etching etc, surface morphology and surface roughness are measured by the stylus profiler; at the same time sample-input through-holes in glass covers of microfluidic chips are fabricated by laser machining and mechanical drilling, surface morphology and surface roughness are also measured by the metallurgical microscope. Experimental results show at last that sample-input is done smoothly through cover holes of microfluidic chips; two side surfaces of substrate channels, which are satisfied to the predesigned shapes and smoothness, are smooth and assure fluid sample-input from reactor cells to channels successfully, the manufactured microfluidic chips are of prospected properties in practical use.
Mining behaviors of students in autograding submission system logs

E ff ective mining of data from online submission systems o ff ers the potential to improve educational outcomes by identifying student habits and behaviours and their relationship with levels of achievement. In particular, it may assist in identifying students at risk of performing poorly, allowing for early intervention. In this paper we investigate different methods of following the development of student behaviour throughout the semester using online submission system data, and different approaches to analysing this development. We demonstrate the application of these methods to data from a junior computer science course (N=494) and discuss their usefulness in understanding the common behavioural strategies of students in this course and how these develop over time. Finally, we draw links between behaviour in weekly coding tasks and student performance in the final exam and discuss whether these methods could be applicable midway through the semester.
Novel HIV-1 Recombinant Forms in Antenatal Cohort, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Near full-length genomes of 4 unclassified HIV-1 variants infecting patients enrolled in an antenatal cohort in Canada were obtained by sequencing. All 4 variants showed original recombination profiles, including A1/A2/J, A1/D, and A1/G/J/CRF11_cpx structures. Identification of these variants highlights the growing prevalence of unique recombinant forms of HIV-1 in North America.
Generalized practical stability analysis of discontinuous dynamical systems

In practice, one is not only interested in the qualitative characterizations provided by Lyapunov stability, but also in quantitative information concerning system behavior, including estimates of trajectory bounds, possibly over finite time intervals. This type of information has been ascertained in the past in a systematic manner, using the concept of practical stability. In the present paper, we give a new definition of generalized practical stability (abbreviated as GP-stability) and establish some sufficient conditions concerning GP-stability for a wide class of discontinuous dynamical systems. As in the classical Lyapunov theory, our results constitute a direct method, making use of auxiliary scalar-valued Lyapunov-like functions. These functions, however, have properties that differ significantly from the usual Lyapunov functions. We demonstrate the applicability of our results by means of several specific examples.
Shared-Neighbours methods for visual content structuring and mining. (Structuration et découverte de contenus visuels par des méthodes basées sur les voisins partagés)

This thesis investigates new clustering paradigms and algorithms based on the principle of the shared nearest-neighbors (SNN. As most other graph-based clustering approaches, SNN methods are actually well suited to overcome data complexity, heterogeneity and high-dimensionality.The first contribution of the thesis is to revisit existing shared neighbors methods in two points. We first introduce a new SNN formalism based on the theory of a contrario decision. This allows us to derive more reliable connectivity scores of candidate clusters and a more intuitive interpretation of locally optimum neighborhoods. We also propose a new factorization algorithm for speeding-up the intensive computation of the required sharedneighbors matrices.The second contribution of the thesis is a generalization of the SNN clustering approach to the multi-source case. Whereas SNN methods appear to be ideally suited to sets of heterogeneous information sources, this multi-source problem was surprisingly not addressed in the literature beforehand. The main originality of our approach is that we introduce an information source selection step in the computation of candidate cluster scores. As shown in the experiments, this source selection step makes our approach widely robust to the presence of locally outlier sources. This new method is applied to a wide range of problems including multimodal structuring of image collections and subspace-based clustering based on random projections. The third contribution of the thesis is an attempt to extend SNN methods to the context of bipartite k-nn graphs. We introduce new SNN relevance measures revisited for this asymmetric context and show that they can be used to select locally optimal bi-partite clusters. Accordingly, we propose a new bipartite SNN clustering algorithm that is applied to visual object’s discovery based on a randomly precomputed matching graph. Experiments show that this new method outperformed state-of-the-art object mining results on OxfordBuilding dataset. Based on the discovered objects, we also introduce a new visual search paradigm, i.e. object-based visual query suggestion.
Development of the Early Childhood Traumatic Stress Screen

DEVELOPMENT OF THE EARLY CHILDHOOD TRAUMATIC STRESS SCREEN Sara E. Harris, M.C. Marquette University, 2016 The study aimed to develop a brief screening instrument to assess symptoms associated with potentially traumatic experiences (PTE) in very young children (under 6). Potential items for the Early Childhood Traumatic Stress Screen (ECTSS) were sampled from each of the major content areas implicated in trauma. The items underwent a principle component analysis, which produced a 34-item screening measure with four reliable factors and one sub-scale assessing response style. All subscales and the overall trauma composite score significantly correlated with pre-established measures of traumatic stress in very young children, and a receiver operating characteristics curve analysis identified a cut-score with good sensitivity and specificity. The ECTSS fulfills an important need as a first-line screener for maladaptive response following a PTE in very young children. The ECTSS is brief, simple to administer, easy to score, and has acceptable reliability and validity. First-line screeners, such as the ECTSS, are a necessary part of multi-stage screening processes that promote early intervention by rapidly identifying children in need of services.
Design of discrete coefficient FIR filters by a fast entropy-directed deterministic annealing algorithm

We present an entropy-directed deterministic annealing optimization algorithm and show its applicability to the problem of designing digital filters with discrete coefficients, each implemented as a sum of signed power-of-two terms and additional general hardware constraints. The algorithm is based on analogies from statistical mechanics and is related to the well-known mean field annealing algorithm. It utilizes estimates of conditional entropy to prune the problem during the optimization, thereby reducing the computational time by 30 to 50%. In conjunction with a scheme to compute the value of the objective function as a sequence of updates, this approach leads to a very fast algorithm. As an application example demonstrating the potential of the new method, we consider the design of digital filters with discrete coefficients consisting of a minimum number of signed power-of-two terms.
Reconstructing urban 3D model using vehicle-borne laser range scanners

In this research, a novel method of reconstructing 3D urban scene using vehicle-borne laser range scanners is proposed. Two one-dimensional laser range scanners are mounted on the roof of a vehicle, doing horizontal and vertical profiling respectively. As the vehicle moves ahead, a horizontal and vertical range profile of the surroundings is captured at each odometer trigger. The freedom of vehicle motion is reduced from six to three by assuming that the ground surface is flat and smooth so resulting in the vehicle moving on almost the same horizontal plane. Horizontal range profiles, which have an overwhelming overlay between successive ones, are registered to trace vehicle location and attitude. Vertical range profiles are aligned to the coordinate system of the horizontal one according to the physical geometry between the pair of laser range scanners, and subsequently to a global coordinate system to generate a 3D model. An experiment is conducted where a 3D model is reconstructed by registering and integrating 2412 horizontal and vertical range profiles. Two ground truths are used in examination. They are the outputs of a GPS/INS/Odometer based positioning system and a 1:500 digital map of the test site. Accuracy and efficiency of the method in reconstructing 3D urban scene is demonstrated.
Designing a user-defined gesture vocabulary for an in-vehicle climate control system

Hand gestures are a suitable interface medium for in-vehicle interfaces. They are intuitive and natural to perform, and less visually demanding while driving. This paper aims at analysing human gestures to define a preliminary gesture vocabulary for in-vehicle climate control using a driving simulator. We conducted a user-elicitation experiment on 22 participants performing two driving scenarios with different levels of cognitive load. The participants were filmed while performing natural gestures for manipulating the air-conditioning inside the vehicle. Comparisons are drawn between the proposed approach to define a vocabulary using 9 new gestures (GestDrive) and previously suggested methods. The outcomes demonstrate that GestDrive is successful in describing the employed gestures in detail.
Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Model Adaptation For Balanced Energy Fading In Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the wireless sensor network's major obstacles in maintaining a long-term functionality is the inevitable communication cost while in the same time retaining the capability of distributed problem solving on an overall network level. In this paper, our main interest is the adaptation of distributed constraint satisfaction algorithms in wireless sensor networks for an energy-efficient design. We treat the network as distributed constraint satisfaction system by using the Asynchronous Weak-Commitment search algorithm for solving distributed problems. To manage the energy consumption, required by the agents (nodes) when communicating, we propose a simple energy adjusting mechanism to make energy fading more distributed among nodes. We will firstly summarize and review the current situation, presenting some of the ongoing and past projects and research papers. We will then propose our approach and present our evaluation findings on this subject.
A Study of Parallel MRI Reconstruction Approaches for Sub-Sampled Partial-Fourier Acquisitions

We compare here two approaches to reconstruct sub-sampled partial Fourier MRI data acquired with multiple receiver coils. The first approach combines homodyne detection with SENSE-like reconstructions. The second approach employs separate regularization of the real and imaginary components (two-parameters) of the parallel MRI linear system to constrain the magnitude of phase variation in the reconstructed image. We show that both methods robustly reconstruct images from several sampling patterns. The dominant difference is the number of symmetric lines of k-space needed to provide high quality reconstructions. The two parameter approach can reconstruct good images using only two whereas the homodyne approach requires significantly more. We present a method for automatic selection of the two parameters, and results from both high resolution and low contrast phantom data.
FPGA-based emulation system dedicated to the test of specific PWM strategies for automotive VSI inverter

The aim of this paper is to present a FPGA-base emulation system allowing us to test PWM strategies dedicated to automotive voltage switching inverters. This study is mainly focused on the behavior of the DC bus of this converter, especially the current in electrolytic capacitors. Indeed, the proposed emulator will be used in a health monitoring system of these components that are well known as the least reliable ones in a PWM Voltage Source Inverter (VSI).