Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling contextual agreement in preferences

Personalization, or customizing the experience of each individual user, is seen as a useful way to navigate the huge variety of choices on the Web today. A key tenet of personalization is the capacity to model user preferences. The paradigm has shifted from that of individual preferences, whereby we look at a user's past activities alone, to that of shared preferences, whereby we model the similarities in preferences between pairs of users (e.g., friends, people with similar interests). However, shared preferences are still too granular, because it assumes that a pair of users would share preferences across all items. We therefore postulate the need to pay attention to "context", which refers to the specific item on which the preferences between two users are to be estimated. In this paper, we propose a generative model for contextual agreement in preferences. For every triplet consisting of two users and an item, the model estimates both the prior probability of agreement between the two users, as well as the posterior probability of agreement with respect to the item at hand. The model parameters are estimated from ratings data. To extend the model to unseen ratings, we further propose several matrix factorization techniques focused on predicting agreement, rather than ratings. Experiments on real-life data show that our model yields context-specific similarity values that perform better on a prediction task than models relying on shared preferences.
CRAC: a Grid Environment to Solve Scientific Applications with Asynchronous Iterative Algorithms

This paper presents CRAC, an environment dedicated to design efficient asynchronous iterative algorithms for a grid architecture. Those algorithms are particularly suited for grid architecture since they naturally allow to overlap communications by computations. Each processor computes its iterations freely without any synchronization with its neighbors. All the characteristics of CRAC are described. A real application using four distant clusters, with a total of 120 processors, shows the interest of this environment and of asynchronous algorithms.
Motivation of Engineering Students Participating in Multinational Design Projects - Comparison Based on Gender and Class Status

There have been different active-learning initiatives introduced in academia to provide engineering students with the necessary knowledge, skills and attitude to be competitive in the global market. These initiatives have been in response to the need in the corporate world for engineers with exposure to global collaborative environments. Consequently, multinational collaborative design projects have been used by the authors as means of introducing professional global skills to engineering students while exposing them to a project-based learning experience. This educational activity is expected to motivate students so that they can start developing the professional skills that will help them to overcome difficulties and to carry out the project successfully. However, this activity faces many challenges including, among others, cultural and academic background differences, language and time zone barriers, and issues with communication tools. Therefore, this work compares the motivation of students before and after their participation in a multinational design project, using gender and class standing as differentiating parameters. To accomplish this objective, the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) was adapted to the implemented multinational collaborative experience and administered to the participating students. For this study, three motivation constructs are taken into consideration: (a) interest/enjoyment, (b) perception of choice, and (c) perceived competence. Results are discussed based on the research questions posed for this comparative work, and result reflections are presented.
The A-site Finger in 23 S rRNA Acts as a Functional Attenuator for Translocation*

Helix 38 (H38) in 23 S rRNA, which is known as the “A-site finger (ASF),” is located in the intersubunit space of the ribosomal 50 S subunit and, together with protein S13 in the 30 S subunit, it forms bridge B1a. It is known that throughout the decoding process, ASF interacts directly with the A-site tRNA. Bridge B1a becomes disrupted by the ratchet-like rotation of the 30 S subunit relative to the 50 S subunit. This occurs in association with elongation factor G (EF-G)-catalyzed translocation. To further characterize the functional role(s) of ASF, variants of Escherichia coli ribosomes with a shortened ASF were constructed. The E. coli strain bearing such ASF-shortened ribosomes had a normal growth rate but enhanced +1 frameshift activity. ASF-shortened ribosomes showed normal subunit association but higher activity in poly(U)-dependent polyphenylalanine synthesis than the wild type (WT) ribosome at limited EF-G concentrations. In contrast, other ribosome variants with shortened bridge-forming helices 34 and 68 showed weak subunit association and less efficient translational activity than the WT ribosome. Thus, the higher translational activity of ASF-shortened ribosomes is caused by the disruption of bridge B1a and is not due to weakened subunit association. Single round translocation analyses clearly demonstrated that the ASF-shortened ribosomes have higher translocation activity than the WT ribosome. These observations indicate that the intrinsic translocation activity of ribosomes is greater than that usually observed in the WT ribosome and that ASF is a functional attenuator for translocation that serves to maintain the reading frame.
Code complete - a practical handbook of software construction, 2nd Edition

"Code complete" is the phrase used by programmers to announce the completion of a software program. Drawing its examples from a variety of computer languages, this book focuses on programming technique rather than the requirements of a specific programming language or environment. Steve McConnell developed True Type and Windows for the Microsoft Corporation. Topics include: front-end planning, applying good design techniques to construction, using data effectively, using common and advanced control structures, secrets of self-documenting code, testing and debugging techniques, improving performance with code tuning, managing construction activities, and relating personal character to the development of superior software.
Ultrasound Activated Bone Morphogenetic -2 (BMP-2) Nanocomplexes that Provides On-Demand, Controlled Release for Bone Regeneration

Recombinant bone morphogenetic-2 (BMP-2) delivered on an acellular collagen sponge (ACS) is clinically approved for bone regeneration. Post implantation, BMP-2 is rapidly released as a bolus from the ACS, cleared quickly from the site requiring high doses to compensate for diffusional loss. Additionally, the advantages of using BMP-2 for bone regeneration are offset by safety concerns attributed to the high doses of BMP-2 used. Further the rapid release of BMP-2 does not match the temporal release of endogenous BMP-2 during natural physiological bone healing. To address this, rhBMP-2 polyethylene glycol sonodisruptable liposome nanocomplexes (NSD) that releases BMP-2 only on ultrasound (US) exposure were developed. I hypothesized that US control release of BMP-2 that matched the expression of endogenous BMP-2 during physiological bone healing would require lower doses of BMP-2 to be effective. To test this hypothesis we investigated two specific objectives: 1. To develop and characterize NSD-BMP and evaluate US controlled release mechanism in vitro and in vivo and, 2. To evaluate in vivo, the temporal effects of US controlled delivery of BMP-2 on bone formation. In vitro, NSD-BMP released bioactive BMP-2 proportional to ultrasound duration and pressure. In vivo these
Simplified Proofs of Error Estimates for the Least Squares Method for Dirichlet's Problem

Recently, Bramble and Schatz have proposed a projection method for approximating the solution of Dirichlet's problem. Error estimates are derived by the authors using arguments based on certain interpolation theorems for linear operators on Hilbert spaces. It is shown here that simpler and shorter methods can be used to obtain these error estimates. 1. Introduction. The purpose of this note is to give a simplified proof of the results obtained by Bramble and Schatz in (1), where they proposed a method of least squares for obtaining approximations to solutions of Dirichlet's problem. To obtain error estimates in (1), Bramble and Schatz employed certain interpola- tion theorems for linear operators on Hilbert space, and, in particular, used these theorems in an iterative argument to get the results. Subsequently, an observation of Thomee (7) showed that the iterative argument mentioned above could be avoided with the use of appropriate trace theorems and a reformulation of the approximability assumptions on the subspaces used. This observation resulted in a slight simplification of the methods used in (1). Here, we present a new technique for obtaining the results of (1) which is much simpler and shorter than the prior ones. An entirely different approach is used which in essence involves a basic a priori estimate, and an argument based on duality. This new technique also yields a slight extention of the results of (1). In particular, the estimate (5.3) of Theorem 5.1 is new.
Bayes Optimal DDoS Mitigation by Adaptive History-Based IP Filtering

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are today the most destabilizing factor in the global internet and there is a strong need for sophisticated solutions. We introduce a formal statistical framework and derive a Bayes optimal packet classifier from it. Our proposed practical algorithm "adaptive history-based IP filtering" (AHIF) mitigates DDoS attacks near the victim and outperforms existing methods by at least 32% in terms of collateral damage. Furthermore, it adjusts to the strength of an ongoing attack and ensures availability of the attacked server. In contrast to other adaptive solutions, firewall rulesets used to resist an attack can be precalculated before an attack takes place. This ensures an immediate response in a DDoS emergency. For evaluation, simulated DDoS attacks and two real-world user traffic datasets are used.
Shaping Skeletal Growth by Modular Regulatory Elements in the Bmp5 Gene

Cartilage and bone are formed into a remarkable range of shapes and sizes that underlie many anatomical adaptations to different lifestyles in vertebrates. Although the morphological blueprints for individual cartilage and bony structures must somehow be encoded in the genome, we currently know little about the detailed genomic mechanisms that direct precise growth patterns for particular bones. We have carried out large-scale enhancer surveys to identify the regulatory architecture controlling developmental expression of the mouse Bmp5 gene, which encodes a secreted signaling molecule required for normal morphology of specific skeletal features. Although Bmp5 is expressed in many skeletal precursors, different enhancers control expression in individual bones. Remarkably, we show here that different enhancers also exist for highly restricted spatial subdomains along the surface of individual skeletal structures, including ribs and nasal cartilages. Transgenic, null, and regulatory mutations confirm that these anatomy-specific sequences are sufficient to trigger local changes in skeletal morphology and are required for establishing normal growth rates on separate bone surfaces. Our findings suggest that individual bones are composite structures whose detailed growth patterns are built from many smaller lineage and gene expression domains. Individual enhancers in BMP genes provide a genomic mechanism for controlling precise growth domains in particular cartilages and bones, making it possible to separately regulate skeletal anatomy at highly specific locations in the body.
Performance of the EuroSCORE Models in Emergency Cardiac Surgery

Background—Accurate risk-adjustment models are useful for clinical decision making and are important for minimizing any tendency toward risk-averse clinical practice. In cardiac surgery, emergency patients are potentially at greatest risk of inappropriate risk-averse clinical decisions. UK cardiac surgery outcomes are currently risk-adjusted with EuroSCORE models. The objective of this study was to assess the performance of the EuroSCORE models in emergency cardiac surgery. Methods and Results—The National Institute for Cardiovascular Outcomes Research database was used to identify adult cardiac surgery procedures performed in the United Kingdom between April 2008 and March 2011. A subset of procedures (July 2010–March 2011) was used for EuroSCORE II validation. The outcome measure was in-hospital mortality. Model calibration (Hosmer–Lemeshow test, calibration plots, calculation of calibration intercept and slope) and discrimination (area under receiver-operating characteristic curve [area under the curve]) were assessed. In total, 109 988 cardiac procedures at 41 hospitals were included, of which 3342 were defined as emergency procedures. Compared with performance in all cardiac surgery and nonemergency cardiac surgery, the logistic EuroSCORE and EuroSCORE II models had poorer discrimination (area under the curve, 0.703 and 0.690, respectively) and poorer calibration for emergency surgery. The EuroSCORE risk factors of female sex, chronic pulmonary disease, neurological disease, active endocarditis, unstable angina, recent myocardial infarction, and pulmonary hypertension were not identified as important risk factors for emergency cardiac surgery. Conclusions—Both EuroSCORE models demonstrated poor calibration and comparatively poor discrimination for emergency cardiac surgery. This has important implications when these models are used for clinical decision making or to adjust governance analyses.
A content-based video copy detection method with randomly projected binary features

Video copy detection has been actively studied in a wide range of multimedia applications. This paper presents a novel content-based video copy detection method using the randomly projected binary features. A very efficient sparse random projection method is employed to encode the image features while retaining their discrimination capability. By taking advantage of the extremely fast similarity computation of binary features using Hamming distance, we present a keyframe-based copy retrieval method that exhaustively searches the copy candidates from the large video database without indexing. Moreover, an effective scoring and localization algorithm is proposed to further refine the retrieved copies and accurately locate the video segments. The experimental evaluation has been performed to show the efficacy of the proposed randomly projected binary features. The promising results in the TRECVID2011 [14] content-based copy detection task demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
SMPOST: Parts of Speech Tagger for Code-Mixed Indic Social Media Text

Use of social media has grown dramatically during the last few years. Users follow informal languages in communicating through social media. The language of communication is often mixed in nature, where people transcribe their regional language with English and this technique is found to be extremely popular. Natural language processing (NLP) aims to infer the information from these text where Part-of-Speech (PoS) tagging plays an important role in getting the prosody of the written text. For the task of PoS tagging on Code-Mixed Indian Social Media Text, we develop a supervised system based on Conditional Random Field classifier. In order to tackle the problem effectively, we have focused on extracting rich linguistic features. We participate in three different language pairs, ie. English-Hindi, English-Bengali and English-Telugu on three different social media platforms, Twitter, Facebook & WhatsApp. The proposed system is able to successfully assign coarse as well as fine-grained PoS tag labels for a given a code-mixed sentence. Experiments show that our system is quite generic that shows encouraging performance levels on all the three language pairs in all the domains.
In Transit to Constant Time Shortest-Path Queries in Road Networks

When you drive to somewhere 'far away', you will leave your current location via one of only a few 'important' traffic junctions. Starting from this informal observation, we develop an algorithmic approach---transit node routing---that allows us to reduce quickest-path queries in road networks to a small number of table lookups. We present two implementations of this idea, one based on a simple grid data structure and one based on highway hierarchies. For the road map of the United States, our best query times improve over the best previously published figures by two orders of magnitude. Our results exhibit various trade-offs between average query time (5 μs to 63 μs), preprocessing time (59 min to 1200 min), and storage overhead (21 bytes/node to 244 bytes/node).
BUILDING PRIVACY-PRESERVING C4.5 DECISION TREE CLASSIFIER ON MULTI-PARTIES

– In this paper, we address Privacy-preserving classification problem in a multi-party sense. We focus the general classification in a secured manner and introduce a Privacy-preserving decision tree classifier using C4.5 algorithm without involving third party. C4.5 algorithm is a software extension of the basic ID3 algorithm designed by Quinlan. Our protocol is considerably more efficient than any existing solutions.
Development of a hydroxyapatite/POSS-PCU composite film for bone grafting and augmentation

The current approach towards treating critical size bone defects, with the aim of repairing or regenerating bone, is the use of bone grafts (autografts or allografts). However, due to various disadvantages associated with the use of autografts and allografts, biomaterials; synthetic ceramic/polymer composites as bone grafts substitutes and guided bone regeneration membranes in particular, have been recognised as effective alternatives to the traditional methods. Polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane covalently bonded to poly(carbonate- urea-urethane), (POSS-PCU), a novel co-polymer, has displayed improved physico-chemical and material-cell interaction properties, which have led to variety of investigations on clinical applications of this material such as in synthetic heart valve production, bypass grafts, POSS-PCU coated stents and biomaterial scaffolds. In this thesis, hydroxyapatite incorporated POSS-PCU composite films were developed and examined for the purpose of bone grafting and augmentation. Various concentrations of hydroxyapatite, filler integration and fabrication techniques as well as in vitro models were used to find the most suitable HA/POSS-PCU based composite film that has a closer characteristics to natural bone and enhances bone repair and new bone formation for bone grafting and augmentation applications. It was shown that hydroxyapatite has a concentration-dependent effect on the physico-chemical and material-cell interaction properties of POSS-PCU. In addition, it was shown that hydroxyapatite particles were exposed on the surface of the 50 wt% HA/POSS-PCU composite films and enhanced the bioactivity of these composite films in simulated body fluid. Finally, optimisation of the samples using surface solvent etching and porosity showed that the former increased surface hydrophobicity and reduced mechanical properties of both HA incorporated and HA free POSS-PCU films. Amongst all of the HA/POSS-PCU based composite films investigated here porous 50 wt% HA/POSS-PCU composites showed the most enhanced material-cell interaction properties. In conclusion, HA/POSS-PCU composites have the potential to be further investigated for bone augmentation as guided bone regeneration membranes.
Effect of Brick Dust on Strength and Workability of Concrete

The aim of this research is to utilize the waste generated in concrete. Brick dust is lavish material which on dumping not only occupy land but also it has environmental problems which is hazardous to livings. This waste is generated in brick kilns, brick masonry construction sites and during transportation. By recycling brick dust the problem could be solved up to some extent. In this research, brick dust was used in plain cement concrete to check its fresh and hardened properties. Brick dust was used to check the workability and strength of concrete, using the water-cement ratio of 0.55 which was kept constant during research. Three samples were cast for each 3, 7, 14, 28 and 56 days with 0%, 5%, 10% 15% and 20% incorporation of brick dust. The test results reveals that replacing cement with brick dust shows higher workability than control sample for 5%, 10% and 15%, of which 15% was greater of all. However, strength results were quite competitive, replacing cement with 15% brick dust shows higher compressive strength. The split tensile test were also conducted, which shows high tensile strength by replacing cement with 15% brick dust. This research shows that cement can be replaced with brick dust.
in mouse aorta Differential regulation of gene expression by ovariectomy

24 times a year (twice monthly) by the American Physiological Society, 9650 Rockville Pike, Bethesda MD systems with techniques linking genes and pathways to physiology, from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. It is published publishes results of a wide variety of studies from human and from informative model Physiological Genomics
EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES TREATMENT OF TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY IN ADULT RATS WITH INTRAVENOUS ADMINISTRATION OF HUMAN BONE MARROW STROMAL CELLS

Accepted, April 23, 2003. OBJECTIVE: We investigated the effect of human bone marrow stromal cells (hMSCs) administered intravenously on functional outcome after traumatic brain injury in adult rats. METHODS: hMSCs were harvested from three human donors. A controlled cortical impact was delivered to 27 adult male rats to induce traumatic brain injury, and 24 hours after injury, hMSCs were injected into the tail veins of the rats (n 18). These rats were divided into two groups: Group 1 was administered 1 10 hMSCs, and Group 2 was administered 2 10 hMSCs. Group 3 (control) rats received saline intravenously. Neurological function was evaluated according to the rotarod test and modified neurological severity score. All rats were killed 1 month after injury, and immunohistochemical staining was performed on the brain sections to identify donor hMSCs. To study the phenotypic differentiation of hMSCs, coronal brain sections were stained for neuronal (Tuj1) and astrocytic (glial fibrillary acidic protein) markers. RESULTS: Treatment with 2 10 hMSCs significantly improved the rats’ functional outcomes (P 0.05). The transplanted cells successfully migrated into injured brain and were preferentially localized around the injury site. Some of the donor cells also expressed the neuronal and astrocytic markers. CONCLUSION: These data suggest that hMSCs may be a potential therapy for patients who have sustained traumatic brain injuries.
Msi1-Like (MSIL) Proteins in Fungi

Abstract Msi1-like (MSIL) proteins, which are eukaryote-specific and contain a series of WD40 repeats, have pleiotropic roles in chromatin assembly, DNA damage repair, and regulation of nutrient/stress-sensing signaling pathways. In the fungal kingdom, the functions of MSIL proteins have been studied most intensively in the budding yeast model Saccharomyces cerevisiae, an ascomycete. Yet their functions are largely unknown in other fungi. Recently, an MSIL protein, Msl1, was discovered and functionally characterized in the pathogenic yeast Cryptococcus neoformans, a basidiomycete. Interestingly, MSIL proteins appear to have redundant and unique roles in both fungi, suggesting that MSIL proteins may have evolutionarily divergent roles in different parts of the fungal kingdom. In this review, we will describe the current findings regarding the role of MSIL proteins in fungi and discuss future directions for research on this topic.