Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A reduction in ATP demand and mitochondrial activity with neural differentiation of human embryonic stem cells

Here, we have investigated mitochondrial biology and energy metabolism in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and hESC-derived neural stem cells (NSCs). Although stem cells collectively in vivo might be expected to rely primarily on anaerobic glycolysis for ATP supply, to minimise production of reactive oxygen species, we show that in vitro this is not so: hESCs generate an estimated 77% of their ATP through oxidative phosphorylation. Upon differentiation of hESCs into NSCs, oxidative phosphorylation declines both in absolute rate and in importance relative to glycolysis. A bias towards ATP supply from oxidative phosphorylation in hESCs is consistent with the expression levels of the mitochondrial gene regulators peroxisome-proliferator-activated receptor γ coactivator (PGC)-1α, PGC-1β and receptor-interacting protein 140 (RIP140) in hESCs when compared with a panel of differentiated cell types. Analysis of the ATP demand showed that the slower ATP turnover in NSCs was associated with a slower rate of most energy-demanding processes but occurred without a reduction in the cellular growth rate. This mismatch is probably explained by a higher rate of macromolecule secretion in hESCs, on the basis of evidence from electron microscopy and an analysis of conditioned media. Taken together, our developmental model provides an understanding of the metabolic transition from hESCs to more quiescent somatic cell types, and supports important roles for mitochondria and secretion in hESC biology.
An Efficient Auction for Non Concave Valuations

We study an implementation problem for settings where some of the participants have non concave valuations. These valuations are common in the wireless industry in cases where primary users with property rights on a spectrum band would like to lease some of it to low power users. The non concavity void the efficiency results for standard designs of dynamic auctions. Moreover, policy concerns in such settings is often to prevent collusion and fraudulent bidding, therefore static Vickrey mechanisms do not provide the right incentives. We present an alternative mechanism that selects a core outcome that minimizes seller revenue. Such an allocation is efficient in equilibrium, limits the incentives to use shills, maximizes incentives for truthful bidding, and gives a Vickrey outcome whenever the latter is in the core.
Hardware‐Software Implementation of MPEG‐4 Video Codec

This paper presents an MPEG‐4 video codec, called MoVa, for video coding applications that adopts 3G‐324M. We designed MoVa to be optimal by embedding a cost‐effective ARM7TDMI core and partitioning it into hardwired blocks and firmware blocks to provide a reasonable tradeoff between computational requirements, power consumption, and programmability. Typical hardwired blocks are motion estimation and motion compensation, discrete cosine transform and quantization, and variable length coding and decoding, while intra refresh, rate control, error resilience, error concealment, etc. are implemented by software. MoVa has a pipeline structure and its operation is performed in four stages at encoding and in three stages at decoding. It meets the requirements of MPEG‐4 SP@L2 and can perform either 30 frames/s (fps) of QCIF or SQCIF, or 7.5 fps (in codec mode) to 15 fps (in encode/decode mode) of CIF at a maximum clock rate of 27 MHz for 128 kbps or 144 kbps. MoVa can be applied to many video systems requiring a high bit rate and various video formats, such as videophone, videoconferencing, surveillance, news, and entertainment.
Assessing Multicultural Parenting Values and Practices in Prevention Programs for Latino Youth

As communities become increasingly diverse, it is important to consider how cultural navigation interacts with adolescent development. We examined immigrant parenting values and practices to promote healthy development when developing Padres Informados/Jóvenes Preparados (Padres). Three focus groups were conducted with Latino immigrant parents (n = 27). Parents strove to foster a strong Latino identity to protect their children from detrimental preconceived notions about Latinos in the broader American culture. They conveyed a Latino identity by speaking Spanish and teaching the values of respect and familism. Parents expressed tremendous stress in parenting while navigating difficult policies, socioeconomic conditions, and unfamiliar systems. They actively sought practices to protect their children. Parents also held misconceptions about cultural influences and normative development. These findings provided cultural grounding for Padres, which demonstrated success in improving youth–parent relationships. Family-focused programs serving Latino youth need to consider strengthening cultural identity to improve youth–parent relationships and promote optimal development.
Software organization platform: Integrating organizational and individual learning

Software engineering (SE) is a highly collaborative and knowledge-intensive process involving a large number of different roles. On the one hand, it highly depends on efficient management of and access to various kinds of information about SE artifacts, processes, and knowledge, such as explicitly documented experiences. On the other hand, software engineers need to continuously learn while performing SE activities. This paper describes the underlying concept of the Flex-based wiki platform SOP, which aims at supporting the creation, storage, and exchange of SE information. One specific SOP extension called learning space generation is described in more detail: It enriches documented SE experiences with additional learning content and hence presents one effective way of integrating organizational and individual learning at the workplace. In addition, evaluation results and improvement suggestions for future work are provided.
Low memory overhead real-time garbage collection for Java

Current real-time garbage collection algorithms are usually criticised for their high memory requirements. Even when consuming nearly 50% of cpu time, some garbage collectors ask for at least twice the memory as really needed. This paper explores the fundamental reason for this problem and proposes a new performance indicator for better design of real-time garbage collection algorithms. Use of this indicator motivates an algorithm that combines both reference counting and mark-and-sweep techniques. The implementation of this algorithm for jRate is described and its performance reviewed. The use of dual priority scheduling of the garbage collection tasks allows spare capacity in the system to be reclaimed whilst guaranteeing deadlines.
Young women adopted from foster care create personal public service announcements: narrative constructs in arts-based enquiry

ABSTRACT Young women adopted from foster care are seldom offered expressive therapies to voice their changing perceptions of loss or adoption throughout psychosocial development. The Personal Public Service Announcement (PPSA) exercise enabled four young women adopted from foster care to become experts on self-identity and their lived experiences by inviting them to create make-believe public service announcements using a drama therapy method called narradrama (Dunne, 2009). This arts-based narrative enquiry explored how these young women experienced making the PPSA as well as how it contributed to their self-identity. The following article presents examples of the constructed narratives resulting from the use of analysis methods such as portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis 1997), I-poems (Gilligan et al. 2003), and the three-dimensional enquiry (Clandinin & Connelly 2000). Embedded links to the PPSA data are included with the discussion of results. Implications argue the need for further exploration implementing the PPSA and drama therapy for this and other populations.
Real-Time Noncoherent UWB Positioning Radar With Millimeter Range Accuracy: Theory and Experiment

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning systems, which combines the architectures of carrier-based UWB systems and traditional energy detection-based UWB systems. By implementing the novel architecture, we have successfully developed a standalone noncoherent system for positioning both static and dynamic targets in an indoor environment with approximately 2 and 5 mm of 3-D accuracy, respectively. The results are considered a great milestone in developing such technology. 1-D and 3-D experiments have been carried out and validated using an optical reference system, which provides better than 0.3-mm 3-D accuracy. This type of indoor high-accuracy wireless localization system has many unique applications including robot control, surgical navigation, sensitive material monitoring, and asset tracking.
Design of a flexible high performance quadcopter platform breaking the MAV endurance record with laser power beaming

In this paper we present the design of a highly flexible quadcopter platform and the software tools used in an example experiment to show unlimited flight time of an MAV with laser power beaming. We describe the mechanical design as well as the flight control system architecture which are focused on easy adaption to a wide variety of experiments. The paper also includes size, payload and flight time considerations and explains the tools to adapt the vehicle to the specific application. The design of a position control system implemented on the microprocessor hardware using a specially developed framework for MATLAB/Simulink is described as well. The robustness of the overall system and the presented position control structure is proven by the result of the 12∶27 h continuous flight with a 1 kg MAV.
Risks in smart environments and adaptive access controls

In monitored environments, where risks can be prevented via sensors and spatial data technologies, security rules, in particular access control rules, should be made adaptive to the situation at hand at run time. The paper presents adaptive access controls suitable for “smart environments”, based on the Attribute-based Access Control paradigm. Risks are notified by monitoring devices and managed by a Risk Management System, which is illustrated. To adapt the access control decisions to risk mitigation needs, security policies are defined to dynamically activate or deactivate access rules according to the operations required to manage the risks.
Security and Usability in Knowledge-based User Authentication: A Review

This paper presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art research works in knowledge-based user authentication, covering the security and usability aspects of the most prominent user authentication schemes; text-, pin- and graphical-based. From the security perspective, we analyze current threats from a user and service provider perspective. Furthermore, based on current practices in authentication policies, we summarize and discuss their security strengths based on widely applied security metrics. From the usability point of view, we present and discuss the usability of each authentication scheme in regards with task performance and user experience. The analysis reveals that although a plethora of alternative user authentication schemes have been proposed in the literature and users interact differently with the various alternatives, online service providers do not yet adopt alternatives to text-based solutions. We further discuss and identify areas for further research and improved methodology with the aim to drive this research towards the design of sustainable, secure and usable authentication approaches.
Dynamic NoC-based architecture for MPSoC security implementation

MPSoCs have been proposed as a promising architecture choice to overcome the challenging embedded electronics requirements, characterized by tights development times and fast evolution of applications. The MPSoC flexibility, also represents a system vulnerability. As security requirements vary dramatically for different applications, the challenge is to provide MPSoC security that allows a trustworthy system that meets all the security requirements of such applications. NoC has become an attractive alternative to support the MPSoC communication requirements. Our work proposes the implementation of dynamic security architecture to overcome present MPSoC vulnerabilities. We integrate agile and dynamic security firewalls into the NoC in order to detect attacks based on different security rules. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach over several MPSoCs scenarios and estimate their impact on the overall performance. We show that our architecture can perform a fast detection of a wide range of attacks and a fast configuration of the different security policies for several MPSoC applications.
Multi-target tracking algorithm based on noise-adaptive cardinality-balanced multi-Bernoulli filter

The Gaussian mixture cardinality-balanced multi-target multi-Bernoulli filter (GM-CBMeMBer) always uses standard Kalman or extended Kalman in prediction and updating stages. However, its performance declines greatly when the statistical characteristics of the process noise or measurement noise change abruptly. In order to solve this problem, an improved filtering solution which adopts adaptive fading Kalman technique is proposed. It adaptively adjusts the prediction covariance matrix and then the gain matrix in multi-target filtering process by introducing an adaptive fading factor to restrain the divergence of the filter. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm evidently reduced the influence of inaccurate modeling for process noise or measurement noise caused by abrupt change of noise characterizes and obtained more stable result in multiple target tracking.
Lattice paths of slope 2/5

We analyze some enumerative and asymptotic properties of Dyck paths under a line of slope 2/5.This answers to Knuth's problem \\#4 from his "Flajolet lecture" during the conference "Analysis of Algorithms" (AofA'2014) in Paris in June 2014.Our approach relies on the work of Banderier and Flajolet for asymptotics and enumeration of directed lattice paths. A key ingredient in the proof is the generalization of an old trick of Knuth himself (for enumerating permutations sortable by a stack),promoted by Flajolet and others as the "kernel method". All the corresponding generating functions are algebraic,and they offer some new combinatorial identities, which can be also tackled in the A=B spirit of Wilf--Zeilberger--Petkov{\v s}ek.We show how to obtain similar results for other slopes than 2/5, an interesting case being e.g. Dyck paths below the slope 2/3, which corresponds to the so called Duchon's club model.
Inherent Noise‐Aware Insect Swarm Simulation

Collective behaviour of winged insects is a wondrous and familiar phenomenon in the real world. In this paper, we introduce a highly efficient field‐based approach to simulate various insect swarms. Its core idea is to construct a smooth yet noise‐aware governing velocity field that can be further decomposed into two sub‐fields: (i) a divergence‐free curl‐noise field to model noise‐induced movements of individual insects in a swarm, and (ii) an enhanced global velocity field to control navigational paths in a complex environment along which all the insects in a swarm fly. Through simulation experiments and comparisons with existing crowd simulation approaches, we demonstrate that our approach is effective to simulate various insect swarm behaviours including aggregation, positive phototaxis, sedation, mass‐migrating, and so on. Besides its high efficiency, our approach is very friendly to parallel implementation on GPUs (e.g. the speedup achieved through GPU acceleration is higher than 50 if the number of simulated insects is more than 10 000 on an off‐the‐shelf computer). Our approach is the first multi‐agent modelling system that introduces curl‐noise into agents' velocity field and uses its non‐scattering nature to maintain non‐colliding movements in 3D crowd simulation.
Dynamical Teams of Genetic Predictors

Genetic Programming (GP) has been shown to be a good method of predicting functions. In this context, a solution given by GP generally consists of a sole predictor. In contrast, Stack-based GP systems manipulate structures containing several predictors, which can be considered as teams of predictors. Work in Machine Learning reports that combining predictors gives good results in terms of both quality and robustness. In this paper, we use Stack-based GP to study different linear cooperations between predictors. Preliminary tests and parameter tuning are performed on a GP benchmark. A comparative study with standard methods has shown limits and advantages of teams prediction, leading to encourage the use of combinations taking into account the response quality of each team member.
Fast lexicon-based word recognition in noisy index card images

This paper describes a complete system for reading type-written lexicon words in noisy images - in this case museum index cards. The system is conceptually simple, and straightforward to implement. It involves three stages of processing. The first stage extracts row-regions from the image, where each row is a hypothesized line of text. The next stage scans an OCR classifier over each row image, creating a character hypothesis graph in the process. This graph is then searched using a priority-queue based algorithm for the best matches with a set of words (lexicon). Performance evaluation on a set of museum archive cards indicates competitive accuracy and also reasonable throughput. The priority queue algorithm is over two hundred times faster than using flat dynamic programming on these graphs.
The Neuron-Specific Ca 2-Binding Protein Caldendrin : Gene Structure , Splice Isoforms , and Expression in the Rat Central Nervous System

Caldendrin is the founder member of a recently discovered family of calmodulin-like proteins, which are highly abundant in brain. In this study we examined the organization of the murine and human caldendrin gene as well as the expression pattern of transcripts for caldendrin and two novel splice variants. In addition the distribution of caldendrin in rat brain has been assessed by immunohistochemistry. Caldendrin is localized to the somatodendritic compartment of a subpopulation of mainly principal neurons in brain regions with a laminar organization and is present only at a subset of mature excitatory synapses. Caldendrin immunoreactivity (IR) is tightly associated with the cortical cytoskeleton, enriched in the postsynaptic density (PSD) fraction, and associates late during development with the synaptic cytomatrix. The expression is highly heterogenous within cortex, with highest levels of caldendrin IR in layer III of the piriform and layer II/III of the somatosensory cortex. The segregated cortical distribution to areas, which represent the most important primary sensory systems of the rodent brain, may reflect different requirements for dendritic Ca -signaling in these neurons. The presence of caldendrin in the PSD of distinct synapses may have important implications for Ca -modulated processes of synaptic plasticity.
Modeling the near-infrared lines of O-type stars

We use a grid of 30 line-blanketed unified stellar photosphere and wind models for O-type stars; computed with the code  in order to evaluate its potential in the near-infrared spectral domain. The grid includes dwarfs, giants and supergiants. We analyse the equivalent width behaviour of the 20 strongest lines of hydrogen and helium in spectral windows that can be observed using ground-based instrumentation and compare the results with observations. Our main findings are that: i) He /He  line ratios in the J, H and K bands correlate well with the optical ratio employed in spectral classification, and can therefore be used to determine the spectral type; ii) in supergiant stars the transition from the stellar photosphere to the wind follows a shallower density gradient than the standard approach followed in our models, which can be mimicked by adopting a lower gravity in our prescription of the density stratification; iii) the Brγ line poses a number of peculiar problems which might partly be related to wind clumping; and iv) the Brα line is an excellent mass-loss indicator. For the first and last item we provide quantitative calibrations.
Stripping Coupons with Linear Programming

When using market prices to fit the parameters of models for the price of bonds, the first step is to strip the market bonds of their coupons. The standard bootstrapping technique of stripping coupons can cause mispricing if there are no bonds that mature for some periods or if there are several bonds that mature at the same time. In this article we suggest a new linear programming formulation to strip out riskfree and risky zero coupon bond prices, which works whatever the current date, coupon dates, and sampling dates. The stripped U.S. Treasury bond prices match the observed U.S. STRIPS prices. We also discuss issues of liquidity, sampling periods, and implied default probabilities of corporate bonds.
Examining the impact of regional familiarity and design characteristics on use of a map-based news visualization

We present results from two studies exploring how people use Geo-clouds, our visualization system for quickly reviewing news stories using interactive maps and extracted images from associated news images. In combination the text and image data forms a kind of collage of news information. To test this approach, we developed a Canada-centric prototype. In the first study, we assessed how familiarity with geographic region and local culture impacts the use of our system. We find that those less familiar with Canada quickly zoomed in on regions they were familiar with and remarked on image tags more frequently, while those more familiar with Canada tended to browse wider regions and to read text tags more frequently. In the second study, we explored how the ratio of text to images impacts the participant experience. We analyzed four categories of interaction behavior: zooming and panning, scanning patterns, distraction, and reading news summaries. Results show that increasing the ratio of images-to-text causes more distraction but also leads to more news summaries read. The ratio of text to images also impacted scanning behavior, with participants tending to first scan whichever tag type (images or text) was most prevalent on the map.
Multilevel Dialogue Acts and Feature Selection

This report discusses the use of multi-layered tagsets for dialogue acts, in the context of dialogue understanding for multi-party meeting recording and retrieval applications. We discuss some desiderata for such tagsets and critically examine some previous proposals. We then define MALTUS, a new tagset based on the ICSI-MR and Switchboard tagsets, which satisfies these requirements. We present some experiments using MALTUS which attempt to compare the merits of integrated versus multi-level classifiers for the detection of dialogue acts, and discuss some simple contextual features that are useful in this task.