Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Large‐scale chromatin remodeling in germinal vesicle bovine oocytes: Interplay with gap junction functionality and developmental competence

In mammals, oocyte acquires a series of competencies sequentially during folliculogenesis that play critical roles at fertilization and early stages of embryonic development. In mouse, chromatin in germinal vesicle (GV) undergoes dynamic changes during oocyte growth and its progressive condensation has been related to the achievement of developmental potential. Cumulus cells are essential for the acquisition of meiotic competence and play a role in chromatin remodeling during oocyte growth. This study is aimed to characterize the chromatin configuration of growing and fully grown bovine oocytes, the status of communications between oocyte and cumulus cells and oocyte developmental potential. Following nuclear staining, we identified four discrete stages of GV, characterized by an increase of chromatin condensation. GV0 stage represented 82% of growing oocytes and it was absent in fully grown oocytes. GV1, GV2, and GV3 represented, respectively, 24, 31, and 45% of fully grown oocytes. Our data indicated a moderate but significant increase in oocyte diameter between GV0 and GV3 stage. By dye coupling assay the 98% of GV0 oocytes showed fully open communications while the number of oocytes with functionally closed communications with cumulus cells was significantly higher in GV3 group than GV1 and GV2. However, GV0 oocytes were unable to progress through metaphase II while GV2 and GV3 showed the highest developmental capability. We conclude that in bovine, the progressive chromatin condensation is related to the sequential achievement of meiotic and embryonic developmental competencies during oocyte growth and differentiation. Moreover, gap‐junction‐mediated communications between oocyte and cumulus cells could be implicated in modulating the chromatin remodeling process. Mol. Reprod. Dev. 74: 740–749, 2007. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Reversible Data Hiding through Adaptive Prediction and Prediction Error Histogram Modification

Reversible data hiding embeds information in a host media in a visually plausible way such that both the embedded message and the original host media can be exactly recovered. In this paper we present a new reversible data hiding framework based on prediction error histogram modification. This framework is general and flexible that includes some of the state-of-the-art methods as special cases. In addition, we propose a new adaptive prediction method using the autoregression model. In this method, a threshold is adjusted for each image to divide all pixels into two regions: the smooth region and the texture region. Then the proposed method optimally estimates the coefficients of the autoregression model for pixel value prediction through least-squares minimization. Experimental results show that the proposed reversible data hiding framework and the adaptive prediction algorithm offer valuable advantages over state-of-the-art methods in general.
Improving the Web text content by extracting significant pages into a Web site

Web systems have reached a very important role in today's business world. Every day organizations fight to keep their present clients and to gain new ones. In order to accomplish this goal it is very important to make precise changes in the Web site content. However, the development of these improvements is a complex and specialized task because of the nature of the Web data itself. We propose a novel approach to successfully make changes to improve the Web site content using text mining. We use a self organizing feature map (SOFM) to find the most relevant text content, and then we propose a reverse clustering analysis in order to extract the most significant pages of the whole Web site. The effectiveness of this method was experimentally tested in a real Web site.
Improved Adaptive Antialiasing for Ray Tracing Implicit Surfaces

Interval arithmetic has been extensively used to create guaranteed intersection test when ray tracing implicit surfaces. Aliasing is one of the principal problems in ray tracing, but the interval algorithms are not designed to correct this situation. This paper shows a novel technique to create a guaranteed interval adaptive anti aliasing method (IAA) for interval ray tracing of implicit surfaces. The method is based in the study of the coherence of sets of neighboring rays in a pixel, to detect variations over the hit surface. If those variations are not small enough, the area of the pixel is subdivided and the process is started over the new sub pixels. The subdivision continues until the variations over the surface are small. This method allows us to obtain a better visualization than traditional interval ray
How Babies Learn to Find Words

A recent study by Sa ran and colleagues (1996) has demonstrated that young infants have a striking ability to rapidly learn the statistical relationships present in sequences of syllables. Eight-month-olds were able to distinguish three-syllable \words" that they had heard previously in a stream of syllables from those that they had not. Since the only evidence available in the input stream is the relative transition probabilities between syllables, the babies have apparently learned to distinguish the probabilities between syllable within words from those between words. In this paper we propose a neural network model which simulates the behavior of the babies in the experiment. The output layer of the network consists of units responding to sequences of syllables, and after training, these units are more highly activated following a word sequence than a non-word sequence. The model also o ers an account of how this behavior relates to segmentation and to the learning of more abstract, grammatical regularities in the input. grammatical regularities in the input.
Entity Set Expansion using Interactive Topic Information

We propose a newmethod for entity set expansion that achieves highly accurate extraction by suppressing the effect of semantic drift; it requires a small amount of interactive information. We supplement interactive information to re-train the topic models (based on interactive Unigram Mixtures) not only the contextual information. Although the topic information extracted from an unsupervised corpus is effective for reducing the effect of semantic drift, the topic models and target entities sometimes suffer grain mismatch. Interactive Unigram Mixtures can, with very few interactive words, ease the mismatch between topic and target entities. We incorporate the interactive topic information into a two-stage discriminative system for stable set expansion. Experiments confirm that the proposal raises the accuracy of the set expansion system from the baselines examined.
Robust transmit beamforming for multi-user MIMO systems using a probabilistic constraint approach

This paper considers the multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) downlink system where each user is equipped with multiple receive antennas. As the design of transmit beamformers relies heavily on perfect channel state information, channel uncertainties may cause substantial performance degradation. Here we suggest a solution based on a probabilistic constraint approach. The suggested method maximizes the average signal power and keeps leakage power below an acceptable level, leading to an upper bound on signal to leakage noise ratio (SLNR). To solve the underlying problem efficiently, the probabilistic constraint is transformed to a deterministic, convex one through the application of the Markov inequality. Simulation results show that the probabilistic constraint approach provides excellent performance in terms of signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) and bit error rate (BER) for large channel errors and various error distributions.
Towards an Improved SVC-to-AVC Rewriter

The Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of the H.264/AVC (AVC) video coding standard features spatial, quality and temporal scalability. Backwards compatibility with legacy decoding devices is maintained through an H.264/AVC compliant base layer, which represents the lowest quality of an SVC bit-stream. However, it is often desirable to also provide the higher quality layers to legacy H.264/AVC devices. This is achieved by a process commonly known as “bit-stream rewriting”, which allows for an efficient SVC to AVC conversion by exploiting the similarities of the two codecs. This paper introduces an improved version of the existing JSVM reference software rewriter (JSVM-rewriter). The improvements include a better run-time performance through parallel processing, as well as applicability in streaming scenarios. A detailed evaluation provides performance measurements for the improved rewriter and compares it to the existing JSVM-rewriter. The evaluation shows that notable performance improvements can be achieved using the presented approach. The paper concludes on how the rewriter could be further improved.
Supplementary Material : A Richly Annotated Catalog of Surface Appearance

In this supplementary material, we provide further details for each of our Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) tasks, and on our implementation. The data from all of our experiments is fully open and available on-line at http://opensurfaces.cs. cornell.edu/. Statistics about the experiments and the results are also hosted online, and they will be continually updated as the database grows. Task descriptions include anonymized user feedback. Such feedback is quoted with the original spelling and capitalization. 2 Downloading images Images were downloaded from Flickr. They were selected according to several criteria. A complete description of the selection process is below. • Queries were constructed as a scene category + tag + "-hdr ". – "-hdr " : we avoided photos that use HDR tonemapping since we found that such images often aimed for artistic effects rather than realistic appearance. • The extra tag is discarded and photos are grouped by scene. Duplicates are detected by md5 hash of the file (to facilitate running scripts multiple times). The extra tags are used only to encourage nicer photos; we found that these tags resulted in images that were less cluttered and aimed more at showing off the space, rather than showing people or other activities. • We limited ourselves to Creative Commons photos that allow " sharing " and " remixing ". • Automatic filtering of images: each image must satisfy the following conditions, – JPEG format – ≥ 6 megapixel resolution – ≤ 32 megabyte file size – at least one pixel has color (defined as minimum difference between RGB channels ≥ 10) – focal length specified in an EXIF header (obtained with the jhead utility program) – the camera model exists in a camera database. Figure 1: Interface for filtering images that do not match their scene label. Instructions. Users are instructed to click on pictures that match a specific category label, while excluding: • Rotated photos (an overhead view is acceptable) • Black-and-white or sepia-tone photos • Photos with special effects or superimposed text • Very blurry photos • Rooms under construction • Toy models of a scene • Naked people or sexual poses • Pictures of mostly people, where the scene is not clearly visible. Interface. Users are presented with a grid of 50 images, each annotated with the Flickr search query (e.g. " living room " , " kitchen " , etc.). The photos are grouped by category, and then …
Recognition of Closed-Form and Free-Form Surfaces from Minimal Tactile Data

This paper presents a method for recognition of 3D objects with curved surfaces from “one-dimensional” tactile data. For every surface model in a given database, a lookup table is constructed to store the principal curvatures pre-computed at points of discretization over the surface. To recognize an object, a robot hand with touch sensing capability obtains data points on its surface along three concurrent curves. At the curve intersection point, the two principal curvatures are estimated. They are used in a separate table lookup on every model to locate surface discretization points that have similar local geometries. Local searches are then performed starting at these points to register the tactile data onto the model. Recognition of the model depends on the quality of the registration in comparison with the results on other models. The presented method can recognize closed-form as well as free-form surfaces, as demonstrated through simulations and robot experiments. In the lookup table construction, principal curvatures are obtained through differentiation for closed-form surfaces and local fitting for free-form surfaces. Data registration is performed via nonlinear optimization and by a discrete greedy algorithm for the two shape classes, respectively.
Contribution to Skin Cancer Prevention in South Africa: Modelling the UV Index Utilizing Imprecise Data

South Africa has a high incidence of skin cancer and eye disorders because of the high number of sunshine hours per day. The ultraviolet (UV) index (UVI) provides a factual measure of the UV irradiance including biological effects. It is considered extremely important when gauging ultraviolet doses. A survey conducted across South Africa during January 1999 provided data records that contain nine independent variables for UVI inference purposes. This set of data includes cloud cover and other subjectively observed variables such as turbidity. The data set was recorded at 272 locations. Modelling the UVI by standard regression techniques using this data failed to produce reliable models for UVI prediction. The imprecision in some of the variables and small sample size implied that much more sophisticated techniques should be used. In the current research we resorted to artificial neural networks (ANNs) to cluster the data and then to model the UVI estimate in each of the data clusters. In the ANN training, we utilized the weights pruning method of optimal brain surgeon type to enable good generalization of the ANN models. The results obtained in the UVI assessment by this method produced results of significant accuracy.
Overt visual attention inside JDE control architecture

In this paper a visual overt attention mechanism is presented. It builds and keeps updated a scene representation of all the relevant objects around a robot, especially if they are far away of each other and do not lie in the same camera image. The algorithm chooses the next fixation point for a monocular camera, which is mounted over a pantilt unit. Our approach is based on two related dynamics: liveliness and saliency. The liveliness of each relevant object diminishes in time but increases with new observations of such object. The position of each valid object is a possible fixation point for the camera. The saliency of each fixation point increases in time but is reset after the camera visit such location. Real experiments with a pioneer robot endowed with a firewire camera on a pantilt unit are displayed
Towards combining rule-based and statistical part of speech tagging in agglutinative languages

We present a composite part of speech tagger for Turkish which combines the rule- based and statistical approaches. The tagger makes use of word frequencies and n-gram statistics from a corpus. We use the output of a morphological analyzer in order to get more accurate results and also to eliminate the sparse data problem. In addition, we employ a heuristics about the position of words in the sentences. Although the experiments have been performed on a very small corpus, the results have shown that the use of a composite approach and heuristics improves the accuracy of the tagger.
Free Vibration of Circular Plate with Oscillators and Elastic Supports at Arbitrary Positions by Integral Equation Method

The paper concerns on the free vibrations of circular plate with arbitrary number of the elastic supports and the elastically mounted masses at arbitrary positions by using the integral equation method. A set of complete systems of orthogonal functions, which is constructed by Bessel functions of the first kind, is used to construct the Green's function of circular plates firstly. Then the eigenvalue problem of free vibration of circular plate carrying oscillators and elastic supports at arbitrary positions is transformed into the problem of integral equation by using the superposition theorem and the physical meaning of the Green’s function. And then the eigenvalue problem of integral equation is transformed into a standard eigenvalue problem of a matrix with infinite order. Numerical examples are presented.
Ensemble document clustering using weighted hypergraph generated by NMF

In this paper, we propose a new ensemble document clustering method. The novelty of our method is the use of Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) in the generation phase and a weighted hypergraph in the integration phase. In our experiment, we compared our method with some clustering methods. Our method achieved the best results.
Adaptive fuzzy control for synchronization of nonlinear teleoperators with stochastic time-varying communication delays

In this paper, adaptive fuzzy control is investigated for nonlinear teleoperators with time-delays, which ensures synchronization of positions and velocities of the master and slave manipulators, and does not rely on the use of the scattering transformation. Compared with previous passivity framework, the communication delays are assumed to be stochastic time-varying. By feedback linearization, the nonlinear dynamics of the tele-operation system is transformed into two sub-systems: local master/slave position control with unmodelled dynamics and delayed motion synchronization. Then, based on linear matrix inequalities (LMI) and Markov jump linear systems, adaptive fuzzy control strategies are developed for the nonlinear teleoperators with time-delay, modeling uncertainties and external disturbances by using the approximation property of the fuzzy logic systems. It is proven that the master-slave tele-operation system is stochastically stable in mean square under specific LMI conditions, and all the signals of the resulting closed-loop system are uniformly bounded.
Differential Effects of Lovastatin on Cisplatin Responses in Normal Human Mesothelial Cells versus Cancer Cells: Implication for Therapy

The cancer killing efficacy of standard chemotherapeutic agents such as cisplatin (CDDP) is limited by their side effects to normal tissues. Therefore, research efforts optimizing the safety and efficacy of those agents are clinically relevant. We did screen for agents that specifically protect normal human mesothelial cells against CDDP without reducing the cancer cell killing efficacy. Lovastatin was identified from the screen. Lovastatin at a pharmacologically relevant concentration strongly arrested the proliferation of normal cells, whereas cancer cells were less affected. CDDP-induced DNA damage response was not activated and normal cells showed enhanced tolerance to CDDP when normal cells were treated with the combination of CDDP and lovastatin. We demonstrate that interfering with protein geranylgeranylation is involved in the lovastatin-mediated CDDP protective effect in normal cells. In contrast to normal cells, in cancer cells lovastatin did not change the CDDP-induced response, and cancer cells were not protected by lovastatin. Furthermore, lovastatin at the pharmacological relevant concentration per se induced DNA damage, oxidative stress and autophagy in cancer cells but not in normal mesothelial cells. Therefore, our data suggest that lovastatin has a potential to improve the therapeutic index of cisplatin-based therapy.
Early evolutionary origin of the neurotrophin receptor family

Neurotrophins and their Trk receptors play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of the vertebrate nervous system, but to date no component of this signalling system has been found in invertebrates. We describe a molluscan Trk receptor, designated Ltrk, from the snail Lymnaea stagnalis. The full‐length sequence of Ltrk reveals most of the characteristics typical of Trk receptors, including highly conserved transmembrane and intracellular tyrosine kinase domains, and a typical extracellular domain of leucine‐rich motifs flanked by cysteine clusters. In addition, Ltrk has a unique N‐terminal extension and lacks immunoglobulin‐like domains. Ltrk is expressed during development in a stage‐specific manner, and also in the adult, where its expression is confined to the central nervous system and its associated endocrine tissues. Ltrk has the highest sequence identity with the TrkC mammalian receptor and, when exogenously expressed in fibroblasts or COS cells, binds human NT‐3, but not NGF or BDNF, with an affinity of 2.5 nM. These findings support an early evolutionary origin of the Trk family as neuronal receptor tyrosine kinases and suggest that Trk signalling mechanisms may be highly conserved between vertebrates and invertebrates.
Immune and clinical responses in patients with metastatic melanoma to CD34(+) progenitor-derived dendritic cell vaccine.

Immunization to multiple defined tumor antigens for specific immune therapy of human cancer has thus far proven difficult. Eighteen HLA A*0201(+) patients with metastatic melanoma received injections s.c. of CD34(+)progenitor-derived autologous dendritic cells (DCs), which included Langerhans cells. DCs were pulsed with peptides derived from four melanoma antigens [(MelAgs) MelanA/MART-1, tyrosinase, MAGE-3, and gp100], as well as influenza matrix peptide (Flu-MP) and keyhole limpet hemocyanin (KLH) as control antigens. Overall immunological effects were assessed by comparing response profiles using marginal likelihood scores. DC injections were well tolerated except for progressive vitiligo in two patients. DCs induced an immune response to control antigens (KLH, Flu-MP) in 16 of 18 patients. An enhanced immune response to one or more MelAgs was seen in these same 16 patients, including 10 patients who responded to >2 MelAgs. The two patients failing to respond to both control and tumor antigens experienced rapid tumor progression. Of 17 patients with evaluable disease, 6 of 7 patients with immunity to two or less MelAgs had progressive disease 10 weeks after study entry, in contrast to tumor progression in only 1 of 10 patients with immunity to >2 MelAgs. Regression of >1 tumor metastases were observed in seven of these patients. The overall immunity to MelAgs after DC vaccination is associated with clinical outcome (P = 0.015).
Ensuring privacy in presence awareness: an automated verification approach

Providing information about other users and their activites is a central function of many collaborative applications. The data that provide this "presence awareness" are usually automatically generated and highly dynamic. For example, services such as AOL Instant Messenger allow users to observe the status of one another and to initiate and participate in chat sessions. As such services become more powerful, privacy and security issues regarding access to sensitive user data become critical. Two key software engineering challenges arise in this context: Policies regarding access to data in collaborative applications have subtle complexities, and must be easily modifiable during a collaboration. Users must be able to have a high degree of confidence that the implementations of these policies are correct. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses an automated verification approach to ensure that such systems conform to complex policies. Our approach takes advantage of VeriSoft, a recent tool for systematically testing implementations of concurrent systems, and is applicable to a wide variety of specification and development platforms for collaborative applications. we illustrate the key features of our framework by applying it to the development of a presence awareness system.