Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
RAPH : Distributed Graph Processing for Camera Networks

With the proliferation of sensors of various kinds, especially cameras, large-scale situation awareness applications employing camera networks will become common place. These applications are inherently distributed, dynamic, interactive, run 24×7, and generate spatiotemporal events that need to be stored and retrieved in a timely manner to satisfy real-time constraints. To address these challenges, we present CAMGRAPH, a distributed graph processing system for storing and querying events and event relationships generate by camera networks. CAMGRAPH presents a simple, easy to use high-level API for developers of situational awareness applications to store new events and query existing events. Under the covers, CAMGRAPH does all the heavy lifting to efficiently handle the events generated by the camera network. CAMGRAPH uses a graph abstraction to store the events and their relationships. The CAMGRAPH graph processing system is a distributed architecture embodying heuristics for automatic repartitioning of the graph to ensure load balancing, and careful placement of vertices on the nodes of the distributed system to ensure good edge locality which is important for efficient low latency query processing. We perform controlled experiments to showcase the low latency and scalability properties of CAMGRAPH.
The long-term outcome of patients diagnosed with sacrococcygeal teratoma in childhood. A study of a national cohort

Background/Purpose The improved survival of sacrococcygeal teratoma (SCT) has led to increased awareness of its long-term sequelae. Our aim was to assess the long-term outcome of a national cohort using detailed questionnaires. Methods The three paediatric surgery centres in Scotland were contacted to identify all SCT patients ≥5 years of age. Case notes were reviewed. Detailed separate questionnaires were used to assess long-term bowel, urinary and obstetric outcomes and were completed during an arranged interview. Groups were statistically compared using Z-tests or Fisher's exact test. Results Overall, 48 patients were identified but only 31 were available for follow-up. Age ranged from 5–35 years (median 12 years and 8 months). There were 25 (81%) females and 5 (16%) patients had malignant disease. Abnormal bowel function was noted in 42% of patients, with constipation being the commonest complaint (39%) with no obvious predictive features at presentation. Urinary symptoms were reported in 55% of the patients. A total of nine (29%) patients suffered from urgency and/or wetting. Confirmed urinary tract infections (UTIs) were reported by nine patients. Successful pregnancies were reported by two females and neither of their children had SCT. Conclusions This is one of the largest national studies assessing the long-term outcome of patients with SCT. It highlights the significant gastrointestinal and urological long-term morbidities of SCT patients, which is useful for counselling families.
Effects of Phytohormones on Nodulation and Nitrogen Fixation in Leguminous Plants

the number of indeterminate-type nodules. The effects of treatment with auxin transport inhibitors (NPA and TIBA) and with an auxin antagonist, α-(phenylethyl-2-one)-indole-3-acetic acid (PEO-IAA), on determinate-type nodulation were investigated by using Lotus japonicus . Both the nodule number and nodule development decreased and the formation of lenticels, which normally develop on the root surface and originate from the root outer cortex, was also inhibited by the treatment [7, 8]. The GH3:GUS transformant of L. japonicus showed auxin responses during nodule development. In rhizobia-inoculated roots, GH3 -driven expression started to increase in the outer cortical cells where cell divisions occurred in the nodule primordia. GH3 -driven expression was connected to the main root vascular tissues. These results suggest that auxins play an important role in the development of nodule vasculature, regardless of the nodule type [7-9]. In indeterminate-type nodule-forming plants, auxins accumulate at the site of rhizobia inoculation. This is caused by the inhibition of polar auxin transport by an accumulation of flavonoids, which are known as to be auxin transport regulators, around the infection site. In contrast, flavonoid-regulated auxin transport inhibi‐ tion is not crucial during root nodule formation in Glycine max , which produces determinate-type nodules [10]. In the determinate-type nodules of L. japonicus , no inhibition of auxin transport was observed [9]. These differences in auxin distribution and transport inhibition between plants with determinate and indeterminate nodules have been attributed to a difference in the developmental pattern of the two nodule types [3, 11]. fewer nodules than wild-type plants. Treatment with GR24 elevated nodule number in wild-type P. sativu m and also elevated nodule number in rms1 mutant to a level similar to that seen in untreated wild-type plants. These results indicated that endogenous SLs increase nodula‐ tion in P. sativum [92]. The role of SLs in L. japonicus was studied by using transgenic lines in which CAROTENOID CLEAVAGE DIOXYGENASE 7 ( LjCCD7 ), an orthologue of Arabidopsis More Axillary Growth 3 , was silenced. Silencing of LjCCD7 is expected to reduce SL levels. The plants with silenced LjCCD7 produced fewer nodules than control plants; this suggests that SLs have a slight positive effect on the formation of determinate nodules [93].
Clonal Composition of Staphylococcus aureus Isolates at a Brazilian University Hospital: Identification of International Circulating Lineages

ABSTRACT In only a few instances has the clonal composition of Staphylococcus aureus collections that include methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) been extensively characterized. In order to investigate the clonal composition of MSSA and methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and examine whether the infections diagnosed at our hospital were related to internationally distributed S. aureus lineages, we collected 89 clinical S. aureus isolates from patients at a public university hospital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from September 1999 to June 2000. All S. aureus isolates were genotyped by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis and multilocus restriction fragment typing (MLRFT), and a subset (n = 17) was further characterized by multilocus sequence typing (MLST). The 34 MRSA isolates were additionally characterized by SCCmec typing. The MSSA population (n = 55) was grouped into 18 restriction fragment types (RFTs); of these, five RFTs accounted for 67% (37) of the MSSA isolates. MRSA isolates were clustered into only three RFTs (P = 0.02). The majority of MSSA RFTs were related to sequence type 30 (ST30) (12 isolates, 22%), ST1, ST188, and ST432 (6 isolates, 11% each). The predominant MRSA RFT comprised 31 (91%) of 34 isolates; four randomly selected isolates of this RFT were ST239, the previously described widely disseminated Brazilian clone. However, a fifth isolate belonging to this RFT was the ST644, a new single locus variant of ST239. By applying MLRFT and MLST, we found evidence for a clonal structure in MSSA isolates and detected the dissemination of MSSA clonal complexes 1, 5, 8, 30, and 45.
Immune serum against Anaplasma marginale initial bodies neutralizes infectivity for cattle.

The first demonstration of immune serum-mediated neutralization of Anaplasma marginale and identification of the involved surface antigens is presented. Anaplasma marginale initial bodies were purified from parasitized erythrocytes by using ultrasonic disruption and differential centrifugation. The initial bodies were morphologically intact, as determined by electron microscopy, were not agglutinated by anti-bovine erythrocyte sera, and were infective. Sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) demonstrated minimal erythrocytic contamination in the purified initial bodies. Rabbit antisera against initial bodies completely neutralized the infectivity of purified initial bodies for splenectomized calves, whereas normal rabbit serum did not alter infectivity. Nine initial body proteins were surface radioiodinated by using lactoperoxidase, and five of these were precipitated by the neutralizing antibody (105,000, 86,000, 61,000, 36,000, and 31,000 apparent m.w.). The results demonstrate that initial body determinants capable of inducing neutralizing antibody are present. The identification of surface radiolabeled proteins immunoprecipitated by the neutralizing antibody provides candidates to be tested as protective immunogens in cattle.
Childhood Pemphigus Vulgaris Treated with Dapsone: A Case Report

Abstract: A 5‐year‐old boy developed hemorrhagic mucocutaneous blisters on various parts of the body leading to fetor, dysphagia, dysuria, anal pruritus, pain on defecation, and weight loss. The histopathology showed the classic features of pemphigus vulgaris, and direct immunofluorescence showed intercellular deposition of IgG and C3 in the epidermis. Circulating pemphigus antibodies were also detected. He was treated with a combination of systemic prednisone and dapsone which induced a rapid remission and controlled the disease well. He has been in remission for 1 year and 7 months with no immunosuppressive therapy except for the use of topical agents for the oral lesions. An adjuvant to corticosteroids has been used only once before in children with pemphigus vulgaris under the age of 12 years. This is the third and the youngest child in the literature treated in this fashion.
Exchange Implications of Obsidian Source Analysis from the Lower Rio Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico

This article considers the results of instrumental neutron-activation analyses of 61 obsidian artifacts recovered from excavations at four archaeological sites in the lower Río Verde valley on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. Determinations of source locations of these artifacts permit the examination of changes in obsidian exchange patterns spanning the late Middle Formative to the Classic period. The results show that through most of this period the importation of obsidian into the lower Verde region was dominated by sources in the Basin of Mexico and Michoacan. The data allow us to evaluate previous models of interregional relations during the Formative and Classic periods, including interaction with the highland centers of Monte Albán and Teotihuacán.
Evasão nos cursos superiores da região norte e estudo comparativo para avaliação das IFES tocantinenses

Nas ultimas decadas a educacao sofreu grandes transformacoes no Brasil. Na educacao superior, a expansao das instituicoes de ensino, publicas e privadas, e o crescente aumento do numero de vagas, sao decorrentes de programas educacionais implantados pelas politicas publicas da educacao superior, de abrangencia nacional. Essa nova realidade, caracterizada pela existencia de programas sociais diversos, criou condicoes para que estudantes ate entao sem perspectiva de graduacao pudessem ter acesso a educacao superior. Isso se deve, em grande parte, a necessidade desenvolvimentista do Estado, de formar cidadaos preparados para um cenario mundial de competitividade e internacionalizacao dos mercados. Entretanto, para que os programas educacionais sejam efetivos, eles tambem precisam ser avaliados e reformulados, caso necessario. Os indicadores educacionais sao de grande utilidade nos processos avaliativos das politicas publicas e sao amplamente utilizados com esse proposito no Brasil. Este trabalho apresenta indicadores de evasao da educacao superior da Regiao Norte do Brasil, agrupados por Estado da Federacao e categoria administrativa. Esses indicadores foram calculados a partir dos microdados extraidos do Censo da Educacao Superior do Inep no periodo de 2010 a 2014, e utilizados em um estudo comparativo para avaliar o desempenho das Instituicoes Pubicas Federais de Ensino Superior em funcionamento no Estado do Tocantins. Os resultados apontaram que nos Estados, de uma forma geral, a categoria publica federal apresentou melhor desempenho quanto a evasao que as demais categorias administrativas. Dentre as Instituicoes Federais, as do Estado do Tocantins apresentaram o quarto melhor indice de evasao. Na comparacao entre as categorias administrativas dentro do Estado do Tocantins, as Instituicoes Federais apresentaram bom desempenho, obtendo o melhor indice medio de evasao anual no periodo.
Nonimmune immunoglobulin binding and multiple adhesion characterize Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes of placental origin

The harmful effects of pregnancy-associated malaria (PAM) are engendered by the heavy sequestration of Plasmodium falciparum-parasitized RBCs in the placenta. It is well documented that this process is mediated by interactions of parasite-encoded variant surface antigens and placental receptors. A P. falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 variant, VAR2CSA, and the placental receptor chondroitin sulfate A (CSA) are currently the focus of PAM research. A role for immunoglobulins (IgG and IgM) from normal human serum and hyaluronic acid as additional receptors in placental sequestration have also been suggested. We show here (i) that CSA and nonimmune IgG/IgM binding are linked phenotypes of in vitro-adapted parasites, (ii) that a VAR2CSA variant shown to bind CSA also harbors IgG- and IgM-binding domains (DBL2-X, DBL5-ε, and DBL6-ε), and (iii) that IgG and IgM binding and adhesion to multiple receptors (IgG/IgM/HA/CSA) rather than the exclusive binding to CSA is a characteristic of fresh Ugandan placental isolates. These findings are of importance for the understanding of the pathogenesis of placental malaria and have implications for the ongoing efforts to develop a global PAM vaccine.
Intraocular Tumor Antigen Drains Specifically to Submandibular Lymph Nodes, Resulting in an Abortive Cytotoxic T Cell Reaction

Ocular immune privilege is considered essential in the protection against sight-threatening immune responses, as illustrated by the ability of the ocular environment to permit the growth of tumors that are rejected when implanted at other sites. Although several studies indicate that soluble Ag can drain directly into the spleen when injected into the anterior chamber, the primary site of intraocular tumor Ag presentation to tumor-specific CTLs has not been studied. To gain a better understanding of the mechanism involved in ocular immune privilege, we examined to which lymphoid organs anterior chamber tumor Ags primarily drain. Our data show that intraocular tumor Ag drains exclusively to the submandibular lymph nodes, resulting in activation of tumor-specific CTLs, whereas no Ag drainage was found in spleen. However, these tumor-specific CTLs do not distribute systemically and, as a consequence, intraocular tumor growth is unhampered. A similar lack of CTL efficacy has been observed in mice bearing s.c. tumors, which is converted to a systemic tumoricidal CTL response by administration of agonistic anti-CD40 mAb. In contrast, systemic anti-CD40 treatment of eye tumor-bearing mice did not result in mobilizing tumor-specific CTLs or tumor eradication. Together, these results show that intraocular tumor Ag drains to regional lymph nodes for activation of tumor-specific CTLs. However, the induced tumor-specific immunity is insufficient for tumor clearance, even combined with otherwise highly effective immune intervention protocols.
Global Transposon Mutagenesis and Essential Gene Analysis of Helicobacter pylori

ABSTRACT We have constructed a genome-saturating mutant library of the human gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori. Microarray tracking of transposon mutants (MATT) allowed us to map the position of 5,363 transposon mutants in our library. While we generally found insertions well distributed throughout the genome, 344 genes had no detectable transposon insertions, and this list is predicted to be highly enriched for essential genes. Comparison to the essential gene set of other bacteria revealed a surprisingly limited overlap with all organisms tested (11%), while 55% were essential in some organisms but not others. We independently verified the essentiality of several gene products, including an HtrA family serine protease, a hypothetical protein with putative phospholipase D activity, and a riboflavin specific deaminase. A limited screen for motility mutants allowed us to estimate that 4.5% of the genome is dedicated to this virulence-associated phenotype.
Poly‐N‐hydroxyethylacrylamide (polyDuramide™): A novel, hydrophilic, self‐coating polymer matrix for DNA sequencing by capillary electrophoresis

A replaceable polymer matrix, based on the novel monomer N‐hydroxyethylacrylamide (HEA), has been synthesized for application in DNA separation by microchannel electrophoresis. The monomer was found by micellar electrokinetic chromatography analysis of monomer partitioning between water and 1‐octanol to be more hydrophilic than acrylamide and N,N‐dimethylacrylamide. Polymers were synthesized by free radical polymerization in aqueous solution. The weight‐average molar mass of purified polymer was characterized by tandem gel permeation chromatography‐multiangle laser light scattering. The steady‐shear rheological behavior of the novel DNA sequencing matrix was also characterized, and it was found that the viscosity of the novel matrix decreases by more than 2 orders of magnitude as the shear rate is increased from 0.1 to 1000 s–1. Moreover, in the shear‐thinning region, the rate of change of matrix viscosity with shear rate increases with increasing polymer concentration. Poly‐N‐hydroxyethylacrylamide (PHEA) exhibits good capillary‐coating ability, via adsorption from aqueous solution, efficiently suppressing electroosmotic flow (EOF) in a manner comparable to that of poly‐N,N‐dimethylacrylamide. Under DNA sequencing conditions, adsorptive PHEA coatings proved to be stable and to maintain negligible EOF for over 600 h of electrophoresis. Resolution of DNA sequencing fragments, particularly fragments > 500 bases, in PHEA matrices generally improves with increasing polymer concentration and decreasing electric field strength. When PHEA is used both as a separation matrix and as a dynamic coating in bare silica capillaries, the matrix can resolve over 620 bases of contiguous DNA sequence within 3 h. These results demonstrate the good potential of PHEA matrices for high‐throughput DNA analysis by microchannel electrophoresis.
Generic Construction of Certificate-Based Signature from Certificateless Signature with Provable Security

This paper studies the generic construction of certificate-based signature (CBS) from certificateless signature (CLS). This paper proposes a new generic conversion from CLS to CBS which is more intuitive, simpler, and provably secure without random oracles than the current one. To develop the security proof, we put forth one novel CLS security model which features a previously neglected but nontrivial attack and hence captures the CLS security notion more comprehensively. We show that many existing CLS schemes can be proved secure in the current model by slightly modifying its original security proof. Following this conversion, many provably secure CBS schemes can be constructed from the corresponding existing CLS schemes.
A Novel Stochastic Stratified Average Gradient Method: Convergence Rate and Its Complexity

SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent gradient variance. To attack the problem, mini-batch SGD was proposed to get a trade-off in terms of convergence rate and iteration cost. In this paper, a general CVI (ConvergenceVariance Inequality) equation is presented to state formally the interaction of convergence rate and gradient variance. Then a novel algorithm named SSAG (Stochastic Stratified Average Gradient) is introduced to reduce gradient variance based on two techniques, stratified sampling and averaging over iterations that is a key idea in SAG (Stochastic Average Gradient). Furthermore, SSAG can achieve linear convergence rate of $O{\left(\left(1-\frac{\mu}{8CL}\right)^k\right)}$ at smaller storage and iterative costs, where $C \ge 2$ is the category number of training data. This convergence rate depends mainly on the variance between classes, but not on the variance within the classes. In the case of$C \lt\lt N$ (N is the training data size), SSAG’s convergence rate is much better than SAG’s convergence rate of $O{\left(\left(1-\frac{\mu}{8CL}\right)^k\right)}$. Our experimental results show SSAG outperforms SAG and many other algorithms.
Hypergraph-Based Edge Detection in Gray Images by Suppression of Interior Pixels

This paper presents a new two-stage hypergraph-based algorithm for edge detection in noise-free gray images. The first stage consists of mapping the input image onto a hypergraph called the Intensity Interval Hypergraph (IIHG) associated with the image. In the second stage, each hyperedge is partitioned into two disjoint subsets, namely, the interior pixels and the edge pixels. The interior pixels are then suppressed, so that the edge pixels trace out the edges in the image. These edges are then sharpened using an edge sharpener function to eliminate all the duplicated edges. The algorithm is validated on a number of images of largely varying details, and shows promising results. Other hypergraph-based algorithms are of computational complexity O (n) or O (n) whereas the IIHG model works at a reduced computational complexity of O (n).
FPGA implementation of Integer DCT for HEVC

-In this paper, area-efficient architectures for the implementation of integer discrete cosine transform (DCT) of different lengths to be used in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) are proposed. An efficient constant matrix multiplication scheme can be used to derive parallel architectures for 1-D integer DCT of different lengths such as 4, 8, 16, and 32. Also power-efficient structures for folded and full-parallel implementations of 2-D DCT is implemented with proposed architecture. The proposed architecture with 32-point length is 29.2% and 9.2% area efficient, also results in 13.1% and 2.8% less Area-Delay product respectively when compared to basic and existing models. Also pruning is applied to proposed architecture to improve the performance which results in 50.78% decrease in area Delay product for 32-point integer DCT. Key Words-High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), integer discrete cosine transform (DCT), video coding.