Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Lévy Swap Market Model

Models driven by Lévy processes are attractive since they allow for better statistical fitting than classical diffusion models. The dynamics of the forward swap rate process is derived in a semimartingale setting and a Lévy swap market model is introduced. In order to guarantee positive rates, the swap rates are modelled as ordinary exponentials. The model starts with the most distant rate, which is driven by a non‐homogeneous Lévy process. Via backward induction the remaining swap rates are constructed such that they become martingales under the corresponding forward swap measures. Finally it is shown how swaptions can be priced using bilateral Laplace transforms.
Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis is associated with altered hepatic MicroRNA expression

The expression of microRNA in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and their role in the genesis of NASH are not known. The aims of this study were to: (1) identify differentially expressed microRNAs in human NASH, (2) tabulate their potential targets, and (3) define the effect of a specific differentially expressed microRNA, miR‐122, on its targets and compare these effects with the pattern of expression of these targets in human NASH. The expression of 474 human microRNAs was compared in subjects with the metabolic syndrome and NASH versus controls with normal liver histology. Differentially expressed microRNAs were identified by the μParaflo microRNA microarray assay and validated using quantitative real‐time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The effects of a specific differentially expressed miRNA (miR‐122) on its predicted targets were assessed by silencing and overexpressing miR‐122 in vitro. A total of 23 microRNAs were underexpressed or overexpressed. The predicted targets of these microRNAs are known to affect cell proliferation, protein translation, apoptosis, inflammation, oxidative stress, and metabolism. The miR‐122 level was significantly decreased in subjects with NASH (63% by real‐time PCR, P < 0.00001). Silencing miR‐122 led to an initial increase in mRNA levels of these targets (P < 0.05 for all) followed by a decrease by 48 hours. This was accompanied by an increase in protein levels of these targets (P < 0.05 for all). Overexpression of miR‐122 led to a significant decrease in protein levels of these targets. Conclusions: NASH is associated with altered hepatic microRNA expression. Underexpression of miR‐122 potentially contributes to altered lipid metabolism implicated in the pathogenesis of NASH. (HEPATOLOGY 2008;48:1810–1820.)
Face Recognition using Margin-enhanced Classifier in Graph-based Space

In this paper, we develop a face recognition system with the derived subspace learning method, i.e. classifier-concerning subspace, where not only the discriminant structure of data can be preserved but also the classification ability can be explicitly considered by introducing the Mahalanobis distance metric in the subspace. Most of graph-based subspace learning methods find a subspace with the preservation of certain geometric and discriminant structure of data but not explicitly include the classification information from the classifier. Via the distance metric, which is constrained by k-NN classification rule, the pairwise distance relation can be locally adjusted and thus the projected data in the classifier-concerning subspace are more suitable for k-NN classifier. In addition, an iterative procedure is derived to get rid of the overfitting problem. Experimental results show that the proposed system can yield the promising recognition results under various lighting, pose and expression conditions.
Gringotts: Securing Data for Digital Evidence

As digital storage and cloud processing become more common in business infrastructure and security systems, maintaining the provable integrity of accumulated institutional data that may be required as legal evidence also increases in complexity. Since data owners may have an interest in a proposed lawsuit, it is essential that any digital evidence be guaranteed against both outside attacks and internal tampering. Since the timescale required for legal disputes is unrelated to computational and mathematical advances, evidential data integrity must be maintained even after the cryptography that originally protected it becomes obsolete. In this paper we propose Gringotts, a system where data is signed on the device that generates it, transmitted from multiple sources to a server using a novel signature scheme, and stored with its signature on a database running Evidence Record Syntax, a protocol for long-term archival systems that maintains the data integrity of the signature, even over the course of changing cryptographic practices. Our proof of concept for a small surveillance camera network had a processing (throughput) overhead of 7.5%, and a storage overhead of 6.2%.
Simulation of respiratory motion during IMRT dose delivery

Abstract Background. When intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) is realised with dynamic multi-leaf collimators (MLC) and given under respiratory motion, dosimetric errors may occur. These errors are a consequence of the dose blurring and the interplay between the organ motion and the leaf motion. In the present study, a model for evaluating these dosimetric effects for patient-specific cases has been developed and tested. Material and methods. In the purpose written software, three dimensional (3D) dose distributions can be calculated both with and without a generated breathing cycle. To validate the presented model and illustrate its application, periodic breathing cycles were generated, where the starting phase was set randomly for each field during the calculations. Respiration in the anterior-posterior (AP), superior-inferior (SI) and left-right (LR) direction was tested and verified. To illustrate the application of the presented model, two 5-fields IMRT plans with different complexity were calculated with a 2 cm peak-to-peak motion in the AP direction for one fraction and for 25 fractions. Results. The results showed that the calculation method is of good accuracy, in particular for IMRT plans consisting of several fields, where 97% of the pixels within the body fulfilled a tolerance set to 4% dose difference and 4 mm distance to agreement (DTA). For the two IMRT plans with different complexity, pronounced respiratory induced dose errors, which increased with increasing complexity, were found for both one fraction and 25 fractions, but due to the random stating phase the interplay effect was considerably reduced for the plans consisting of 25 fractions. This illustrates how the dosimetric effects will vary depending on the dose plan and on the number of fractions investigated. Conclusion. For patient specific cases, the model can with good accuracy calculate 3D dose distributions both with and without respiratory motion, and evaluate the dosimetric effects.
Building a Coreless Internet without Ripping out the Core

Despite an ostensible purpose of connecting networks, the Internet itself has, over the course of the past decade or more, become systemically fragmented. There are many causes of fragmentation, including middleboxes, incomplete peering, and the structure of Internet governance. While fragmentation may be desirable in certain circumstances and for various reasons, it can also be problematic, violating central Internet design principles and rendering routine tasks difﬁcult. We motivate the need for a system designed to facilitate connectivity throughout the Internet, providing the beneﬁts of locality, universal access, and distributed management, while interoperating with the existing infrastructure. Using this system as our context, we explore the somewhat unconventional perspective that the Internet need not have a well-deﬁned core and envision an Internet consisting of a set of loosely-connected fragments, each with its own naming and address space. We explore what we gain and what we lose by taking this “coreless” approach.
Learning Good Taste : Classifying Aesthetic Images

When humans look at an image they not only understand the subject matter, they also make a number of subjective assessments about it such as aesthetic quality, emotional intensity, creativity, etc. In this work we attempt to classify images based on their aesthetic appeal. Much like image recognition, the features which comprise a beautiful image are difficult to describe and quantify by hand. Thus we use convolutional neural networks to automatically learn features and evaluate images. Our system is more accurate than previous systems on the same dataset.
Data-driven online motion analysis

The paper proposed an online analysis for motion captured motion data. Traditional manifold-based motion analysis can only perform in offline mode, which limits the applications and developments of the data-driven computer animation. By reserving the eigenspace and reconstructing the space using only the new instance, online motion analysis can be achieved. Numerical new training instances can be extended while maintaining the reasonable dimensions. The experiments results demonstrated the feasibility and merits.
Variability of Prefrontal Neuronal Discharges before and after Training in a Working Memory Task

Variability of neural discharges can be revealing about the computations and network properties of neuronal populations during the performance of cognitive tasks. We sought to quantify neuronal variability in the prefrontal cortex of naïve monkeys that were only required to fixate, and to examine how this measure was altered by learning and execution of a working memory task. We therefore performed analysis of a large database of recordings in the same animals, using the same stimuli, before and after training. Our results indicate that the Fano Factor, a measure of variability, differs across neurons depending on their functional properties both before and after learning. Fano Factor generally decreased after learning the task. Variability was modulated by task events and displayed lowest values during the stimulus presentation. Nonetheless, the decrease in variability after training was present even prior to the presentation of any stimuli, in the fixation period. The greatest decreases were observed comparing populations of neurons that exhibited elevated firing rate during the trial events. Our results offer insights on how properties of the prefrontal network are affected by performance of a cognitive task.
Security Threats and its Countermeasures in Wireless Sensor Networks: An Overview

ireless sensor networks (WSN) have lot of interest in research due to their wide range of typical application areas such as environmental, military and commercial enterprises. Sensor network possesses unique challenges to protocol builders, because these tiny wireless devices are often deployed in unattended environment with limited capabilities. Hence these networks are vulnerable to different types of malicious attacks. This paper surveyed the different types of attacks and security related issues in WSN. Moreover an analysis about some of the security protocols in two major domains namely, cryptography based protocols and en-route filtering schemes have been done.
Segment protection for embedded systems using run-time checks

The lack of virtual memory protection is a serious source of unreliability in many embedded systems. Without the segment-level protection it provides, these systems are subject to memory access violations, stemming from programmer error, whose results can be dangerous and catastrophic in safety-critical systems. The traditional method of testing embedded software before its deployment is an insufficient means of detecting and debugging all software errors, and the reliance on this practice is a severe gamble when the reliable performance of the embedded device is critical. Additionally, the use of safe languages and programming semantic restrictions as prevention mechanisms is often infeasible when considering the adoptability and compatibility of these languages since most embedded applications are written in C and C++. This work improves system reliability by providing a completely automatic software technique for guaranteeing segment protection for embedded systems lacking virtual memory. This is done by inserting optimized run-time checks before memory accesses that detect segmentation violations in cases in which there would otherwise be no error, enabling remedial action before system failure or corruption. This feature is invaluable for safety-critical embedded systems. Other advantages of our method include its low overhead, lack of any programming language or semantic restrictions, and ease of implementation. Our compile-time analysis, known as intended segment analysis, is a uniquely structured analysis that allows for the realization of optimizations used to reduce the number of required run-time checks and foster our technique into a truly viable solution for providing segment protection in embedded systems lacking virtual memory.Our experimental results show that these optimizations are effective at reducing the performance overheads associated with providing software segment protection to low, and in many cases, negligible levels. For the eight evaluated embedded benchmarks, the average increase in run-time is 0.72%, the average increase in energy consumption is 0.44%, and the average increase in code size is 3.60%.
Challenges in Translational Research: The Views of Addiction Scientists

Objectives To explore scientists' perspectives on the challenges and pressures of translating research findings into clinical practice and public health policy. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 20 leading scientists engaged in genetic research on addiction. We asked participants for their views on how their own research translates, how genetic research addresses addiction as a public health problem and how it may affect the public's view of addiction. Results Most scientists described a direct translational route for their research, positing that their research will have significant societal benefits, leading to advances in treatment and novel prevention strategies. However, scientists also pointed to the inherent pressures they feel to quickly translate their research findings into actual clinical or public health use. They stressed the importance of allowing the scientific process to play out, voicing ambivalence about the recent push to speed translation. Conclusions High expectations have been raised that biomedical science will lead to new prevention and treatment modalities, exerting pressure on scientists. Our data suggest that scientists feel caught in the push for immediate applications. This overemphasis on rapid translation can lead to technologies and applications being rushed into use without critical evaluation of ethical, policy, and social implications, and without balancing their value compared to public health policies and interventions currently in place.
Metabolomic Signatures of Inbreeding at Benign and Stressful Temperatures in Drosophila melanogaster

While the population genetics of inbreeding is fairly well understood, the effects of inbreeding on the physiological and biochemical levels are not. Here we have investigated the effects of inbreeding on the Drosophila melanogaster metabolome. Metabolite fingerprints in males from five outbred and five inbred lines were studied by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy after exposure to benign temperature, heat stress, or cold stress. In both the absence and the presence of temperature stress, metabolite levels were significantly different among inbred and outbred lines. The major effect of inbreeding was increased levels of maltose and decreased levels of 3-hydroxykynurenine and a galactoside [1-O-(4-O-(2-aminoethyl phosphate)-β-d-galactopyranosyl)-x-glycerol] synthesized exclusively in the paragonial glands of Drosophila species, including D. melanogaster. The metabolomic effect of inbreeding at the benign temperature was related to gene expression data from the same inbred and outbred lines. Both gene expression and metabolite data indicate that fundamental metabolic processes are changed or modified by inbreeding. Apart from affecting mean metabolite levels, inbreeding led to an increased between-line variation in metabolite profiles compared to outbred lines. In contrast to previous observations revealing interactions between inbreeding and environmental stress on gene expression patterns and life-history traits, the effect of inbreeding on the metabolite profile was similar across the different temperature treatments.
Revenue Management for Transportation Problems

In this paper, we consider the problem of managing a fleet of trucks with different capacity to serve the requests of different customers that arise randomly over time. Customers make a request by demanding the transportation of a given quantity of goods from an origin to a destination, at a given time. It is well known that these problems arise in the dynamic resource allocation context, where tasks (requests of renting) arriving over time have to be covered by a set of indivisible and reusable resources of different types (trucks with different capacity). The assignment of a resource to a task removes the task from the system, modifies the resources and generates profit. We give a dynamic formulation of the problem. Due to the “curse of dimensionality” the dynamic model cannot be solved to optimality. Thus to provide a valuable support for the rental decision making process, we develop a linear programming version of the problem and exploit its solution via revenue management techniques.
The effects of oil contamination and cleaning on sea otters (Enhydra lutris), I. Thermoregulatory implications based on pelt studies

The contamination of sea otter (Enhydra lutris) fur with crude oil or dispersants reduces its insulation and could subject the animal to hypothermia. This study tested methods for removing crude oil from sea otter pelts, and measured changes in insulation caused by oil contamination and subsequent cleaning. Four detergents and two pretreatments were tested on sea otter pelts soiled with fresh crude, 5-day weathered crude, and an oil–dispersant (COREXIT 9527) solution. To examine the effects of oiling and cleaning on the thermal properties of the fur, the thermal conductance of untreated, oiled, and cleaned pelt samples was determined with a heat-flow transducer. Changes in lipid concentration in the fur resulting from contamination and cleaning were also assessed. The results demonstrated that Dawn dishwashing detergent was the most effective agent in removing crude oil from sea otter fur. This detergent removed similar amounts of oil with 15 or 40 °C rinse water, and was less effective when used in conju.
Expression, purification, refolding, and characterization of recombinant human interleukin-13: utilization of intracellular processing.

Interleukin-13 (IL-13) is a pleiotropic cytokine that elicits both proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory immune responses. Recent studies underscore its role in several diseases, including asthma and cancer. Solution studies of IL-13 and its soluble receptors may facilitate the design of antagonists/agonists which would require milligram quantities of specifically labeled protein. A synthetic gene encoding human IL-13 (hIL-13) was inserted into the pMAL-c2 vector with a cleavage site for the tobacco etch virus (TEV) protease. Coexpression of the fusion protein and TEV protease led to in vivo cleavage, resulting in high levels of hIL-13 production. hIL-13, localized to inclusion bodies, was purified and refolded to yield approximately 2 mg per liter of bacteria grown in minimal media. Subsequent biochemical and biophysical analysis of both the unlabeled and (15)N-labeled protein revealed a bioactive helical monomer. In addition, the two disulfide bonds were unambiguously demonstrated to be Cys29-Cys57 and Cys45-Cys71 by a combined proteolytic digestion and mass spectrometric analysis.
The Protective Effect of Fucoidan in Rats with Streptozotocin-Induced Diabetic Nephropathy

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) has long been recognized as the leading cause of end-stage renal disease, but the efficacy of available strategies for the prevention of DN remains poor. The aim of this study was to investigate the possible beneficial effects of fucoidan (FPS) in streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetes in rats. Wistar rats were made diabetic by injection of STZ after removal of the right kidney. FPS was administered to these diabetic rats for 10 weeks. Body weight, physical activity, renal function, and renal morphometry were measured after 10 weeks of treatment. In the FPS-treated group, the levels of blood glucose, BUN, Ccr and Ucr decreased significantly, and microalbumin, serum insulin and the β2-MG content increased significantly. Moreover, the FPS-treated group showed improvements in renal morphometry. In summary, FPS can ameliorate the metabolic abnormalities of diabetic rats and delay the progression of diabetic renal complications.
Adaptive value of a predatory mouth-form in a dimorphic nematode

Polyphenisms can be adaptations to environments that are heterogeneous in space and time, but to persist they require conditional-specific advantages. The nematode Pristionchus pacificus is a facultative predator that displays an evolutionarily conserved polyphenism of its mouthparts. During development, P. pacificus irreversibly executes either a eurystomatous (Eu) or stenostomatous (St) mouth-form, which differ in the shape and number of movable teeth. The Eu form, which has an additional tooth, is more complex than the St form and is thus more highly derived relative to species lacking teeth. Here, we investigate a putative fitness trade-off for the alternative feeding-structures of P. pacificus. We show that the complex Eu form confers a greater ability to kill prey. When adults were provided with a prey diet, Eu nematodes exhibited greater fitness than St nematodes by several measures, including longevity, offspring survival and fecundity when followed by bacterial feeding. However, the two mouth-forms had similar fecundity when fed ad libitum on bacteria, a condition that would confer benefit on the more rapidly developing St form. Thus, the two forms show conditional fitness advantages in different environments. This study provides, to our knowledge, the first functional context for dimorphism in a model for the genetics of plasticity.
Free radical scavenging activity, metal chelation and antioxidant power of some of the Indian spices

Food constituents are the major source of various phytochemicals and micronutrients. The importance of these dietary constituents has been stressed in recent years due to their antioxidant and anticarcinogenic potential. Spices used in Indian foods such as cloves (Syzygium aromaticum), licorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra), mace (aril of Myristica fragans), and greater cardamom (Amomum subulatum) were tested for their antioxidant properties in vitro. The metal chelating activity, bleomycin dependent DNA oxidation, diphenyl‐p‐picryl hydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging activity and the ferric reducing /antioxidant power (FRAP) were measured in rat liver homogenate in presence of spices. Metal chelating activity was significantly high with all the spice extracts except mace. The spices due to higher reducing potential (in presence of bleomycin‐FeCl3 ) showed increased DNA oxidation. Cloves showed the highest DPPH radical scavenging activity, followed by licorice, mace and cardamom. FRAP values for cloves were also the highest, while other spices showed comparatively lesser FRAP values. The results show that the spices tested are strong antioxidants and may have beneficial effects on human health.