Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Unexpected prolonged presentation of influenza antigens promotes CD4 T cell memory generation

The kinetics of presentation of influenza virus–derived antigens (Ags), resulting in CD4 T cell effector and memory generation, remains undefined. Naive influenza-specific CD4 T cells were transferred into mice at various times after influenza infection to determine the duration and impact of virus-derived Ag presentation. Ag-specific T cell responses were generated even when the donor T cells were transferred 3–4 wk after viral clearance. Transfer of naive CD4 T cells during early phases of infection resulted in a robust expansion of highly differentiated effectors, which then contracted to a small number of memory T cells. Importantly, T cell transfer during later phases of infection resulted in a modest expansion of effectors with intermediate phenotypes, which were capable of persisting as memory with high efficiency. Thus, distinct stages of pathogen-derived Ag presentation may provide a mechanism by which T cell heterogeneity is generated and diverse memory subsets are maintained.
A Qualitative Analysis of Latina Adolescents' and their Mothers' Perspectives on Adolescent Dating Violence

A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF LATINA ADOLESCENTS’ AND THEIR MOTHERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON ADOLESCENT DATING VIOLENCE By Carla M. Shaffer, M.S. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University, 2013. Major Director: Rosalie Corona, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology Adolescent dating violence is a prevalent and disconcerting reality for many adolescents. Communication with others (e.g., parents, older siblings, friends) about dating violence may buffer some negative outcomes associated with experiencing dating violence. Although researchers are attending more to this public health problem, what we know about the messages that adolescents receive about dating violence is limited, especially for Latina teens. To address this gap in the literature, 18 Latina adolescents (14-17 years) and their mothers participated in semi-structured interviews to explore their beliefs about what dating violence means to them, messages that are shared about dating violence with mothers and friends, adolescents’ help seeking preferences and behaviors, and reasons for and against talking with parents about problems in dating relationships. Interviews were transcribed and coded for emergent themes. Participants described many examples of problems in dating relationships including some traditional forms of dating violence (e.g., physical harm) and some advancing forms of dating abuse (e.g., aggression through social media). Messages that Latina adolescents receive from parents and friends include advice to “try to work it out or get out of the relationship” and “talk to someone. ” Barriers to seeking help from parents and others included “worry about parent’s response” and “lack of closeness or trust. ” Themes of supports to seeking help from parents and others included having a “close and trusting relationship” and having had “an established pattern of communication. ” Latina adolescents also suggested they may prefer to seek help for problems in dating situations from friends and older siblings. Results suggest that Latina adolescents and their mothers may be knowledgeable about problems in dating situations. However, the messages that Latina adolescents receive differs by who is giving the message and Latina teens may hesitate talking to their parents about problems in dating if they fear negative parental reactions or they do not sense that parents can effectively facilitate the conversations. Given that many victims of dating violence do not tend to disclose their dating problems or seek help, these results highlight the importance of educating parents on how to promote open and effective communication. Results also highlight the importance of informing peers and siblings on how to respond when their friends/siblings experience dating problems. Finally, results suggest implications for primary prevention programs guided by support for culturally tailored interventions.
The Neuropeptide Substance P Is a Critical Mediator of Burn-Induced Acute Lung Injury1

The classical tachykinin substance P (SP) has numerous potent neuroimmunomodulatory effects on all kinds of airway functions. Belonging to a class of neuromediators targeting not only residential cells but also inflammatory cells, studying SP provides important information on the bidirectional linkage between how neural function affects inflammatory events and, in turn, how inflammatory responses alter neural activity. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effect of local burn injury on inducing distant organ pulmonary SP release and its relevance to lung injury. Our results show that burn injury in male BALB/c mice subjected to 30% total body surface area full thickness burn augments significant production of SP, preprotachykinin-A gene expression, which encodes for SP, and biological activity of SP-neurokinin-1 receptor (NK1R) signaling. Furthermore, the enhanced SP-NK1R response correlates with exacerbated lung damage after burn as evidenced by increased microvascular permeability, edema, and neutrophil accumulation. The development of heightened inflammation and lung damage was observed along with increased proinflammatory IL-1β, TNF-α, and IL-6 mRNA and protein production after injury in lung. Chemokines MIP-2 and MIP-1α were markedly increased, suggesting the active role of SP-induced chemoattractants production in trafficking inflammatory cells. More importantly, administration of L703606, a specific NK1R antagonist, 1 h before burn injury significantly disrupted the SP-NK1R signaling and reversed pulmonary inflammation and injury. The present findings show for the first time the role of SP in contributing to exaggerated pulmonary inflammatory damage after burn injury via activation of NK1R signaling.
Exploring multi-channel features for denoising-autoencoder-based speech enhancement

This paper investigates a multi-channel denoising autoencoder (DAE)-based speech enhancement approach. In recent years, deep neural network (DNN)-based monaural speech enhancement and robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) approaches have attracted much attention due to their high performance. Although multi-channel speech enhancement usually outperforms single channel approaches, there has been little research on the use of multi-channel processing in the context of DAE. In this paper, we explore the use of several multi-channel features as DAE input to confirm whether multi-channel information can improve performance. Experimental results show that certain multi-channel features outperform both a monaural DAE and a conventional time-frequency-mask-based speech enhancement method.
Novel architecture of EBC for JPEG2000

The paper presents a novel architecture of EBC (embedded block coding) for JPEG2000. It presents three speed-up methods: bit-plane parallelization, three stage pipelined architecture of context formation block and three stage pipelined architecture of MQ encoder block. The proposed design would consequently enhance the throughput and reduce latency, enabling high speed compression. The synthesis and implementation of the design was done on 0.13/spl mu/ technology using Cadence RTL compiler.
Monocyte Chemoattractant Protein-1/CCR2 Axis Promotes Vein Graft Neointimal Hyperplasia Through Its Signaling in Graft-Extrinsic Cell Populations

Objective—To evaluate direct versus indirect monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP)-1/CCR2 signaling and to identify the cellular producers and effectors for MCP-1 during neointimal hyperplasia (NIH) development in vein grafts. Methods and Results—Genomic analysis revealed an overrepresentation of 13 inflammatory pathways in wild-type vein grafts compared with CCR2 knockout vein grafts. Further investigation with various vein graft–host combinations of MCP-1- and CCR2-deficient mice was used to modify the genotype of cells both inside (graft-intrinsic group) and outside (graft-extrinsic group) the vein wall. CCR2 deficiency inhibited NIH only when present in cells extrinsic to the graft wall, and MCP-1 deficiency required its effectiveness in cells both intrinsic and extrinsic to the graft wall to suppress NIH. Deletion of either MCP-1 or CCR2 was equally effective in inhibiting NIH. CCR2 deficiency in the predominant neointimal cell population had no impact on NIH. Direct MCP-1 stimulation of primary neointimal smooth muscle cells had minimal influence on cell proliferation and matrix turnover, confirming an indirect mechanism of action. Conclusion—MCP-1/CCR2 axis accelerates NIH via its signaling in graft-extrinsic cells, particularly circulating inflam-matory cells, with cells both intrinsic and extrinsic to the graft wall being critical MCP-1 producers. These findings underscore the importance of systemic treatment for anti–MCP-1/CCR2 therapies.
Integrating research into clinical internship training bridging the science/practice gap in pediatric psychology.

Existing literature highlights a critical gap between science and practice in clinical psychology. The internship year is a "capstone experience"; training in methods of scientific evaluation should be integrated with the development of advanced clinical competencies. We provide a rationale for continued exposure to research during the clinical internship year, including, (a) critical examination and integration of the literature regarding evidence-based treatment and assessment, (b) participation in faculty-based and independent research, and (c) orientation to the science and strategy of grantsmanship. Participation in research provides exposure to new empirical models and can foster the development of applied research questions. Orientation to grantsmanship can yield an initial sense of the "business of science. " Internship provides an important opportunity to examine the challenges to integrating the clinical evidence base into professional practice; for that reason, providing research exposure on internship is an important strategy in training the next generation of pediatric psychologists.
CURRENT CONCEYTS REVIEW Patellar Instability

Recurrent patellar instability can result from osseous abnormalities, such as patella alta, a distance of >20 mm between the tibial tubercle and the trochlear groove, and trochlear dysplasia, or it can result from soft-tissue abnormalities, such as a torn medial patellofemoral ligament or a weakened vastus medialis obliquus. Nonoperative treatment includes physical therapy, focusing on strengthening ofthe gluteal muscles and the vastus medialis obliquus, and patellar taping or bracing. Acute medial-sided repair may be indicated when there is an osteochondral fracture fragment or a retinacular injury. The recent literature does not support the use of an isolated lateral release for the treatment of patellar instability. A patient with recurrent instability, with or without trochlear dysplasia, who has a normal tibial tubercle-trochlear groove distance and a normal patellar height may be a candidate for a reconstruction of the medial patellofemoral ligament with autograft or allograft. Distal realignment procedures are used in patients who have an increased tibial tubercle-trochlear groove distance or patella alta. The degree of anteriorization, distalization, and/or medialization depends on associated arthrosis of the lateral patellar facet and the presence of patella alta. Associated medial or proximal patellar chondrosis is a contraindication to distal realignment because of the potential to overload tissues that have already undergone degeneration.
Unsupervised Quality Estimation Model for English to German Translation and Its Application in Extensive Supervised Evaluation

With the rapid development of machine translation (MT), the MT evaluation becomes very important to timely tell us whether the MT system makes any progress. The conventional MT evaluation methods tend to calculate the similarity between hypothesis translations offered by automatic translation systems and reference translations offered by professional translators. There are several weaknesses in existing evaluation metrics. Firstly, the designed incomprehensive factors result in language-bias problem, which means they perform well on some special language pairs but weak on other language pairs. Secondly, they tend to use no linguistic features or too many linguistic features, of which no usage of linguistic feature draws a lot of criticism from the linguists and too many linguistic features make the model weak in repeatability. Thirdly, the employed reference translations are very expensive and sometimes not available in the practice. In this paper, the authors propose an unsupervised MT evaluation metric using universal part-of-speech tagset without relying on reference translations. The authors also explore the performances of the designed metric on traditional supervised evaluation tasks. Both the supervised and unsupervised experiments show that the designed methods yield higher correlation scores with human judgments.
Cost-Optimal Scheduling in Hybrid IaaS Clouds for Deadline Constrained Workloads

With the recent emergence of public cloud offerings, surge computing –outsourcing tasks from an internal data center to a cloud provider in times of heavy load– has become more accessible to a wide range of consumers. Deciding which workloads to outsource to what cloud provider in such a setting, however, is far from trivial. The objective of this decision is to maximize the utilization of the internal data center and to minimize the cost of running the outsourced tasks in the cloud, while fulfilling the applications’ quality of service constraints. We examine this optimization problem in a multi-provider hybrid cloud setting with deadline-constrained and preemptible but non-provider-migratable workloads that are characterized by memory, CPU and data transmission requirements. Linear programming is a general technique to tackle such an optimization problem. At present, it is however unclear whether this technique is suitable for the problem at hand and what the performance implications of its use are. We therefore analyze and propose a binary integer program formulation of the scheduling problem and evaluate the computational costs of this technique with respect to the problem’s key parameters. We found out that this approach results in a tractable solution for scheduling applications in the public cloud, but that the same method becomes much less feasible in a hybrid cloud setting due to very high solve time variances.
RatSLAM: a hippocampal model for simultaneous localization and mapping

The work presents a new approach to the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping - SLAM - inspired by computational models of the hippocampus of rodents. The rodent hippocampus has been extensively studied with respect to navigation tasks, and displays many of the properties of a desirable SLAM solution. RatSLAM is an implementation of a hippocampal model that can perform SLAM in real time on a real robot. It uses a competitive attractor network to integrate odometric information with landmark sensing to form a consistent representation of the environment. Experimental results show that RatSLAM can operate with ambiguous landmark information and recover from both minor and major path integration errors.
The Review of Economic Studies Ltd . Sequentially Optimal Mechanisms

This paper characterizes the revenue maximizing allocation mechanism in a T-period model under non-commitment. A risk neutral seller has one object to sell and faces a risk neutral buyer whose valuation is private information and drawn from an arbitrary bounded subset of the real line. The seller has all the bargaining power; she designs a mechanism to sell the object at t but cannot commit not to propose another mechanism at t+ 1 if trade does not occur at t: A mechanism consists of a game form and is endowed with a communication device (mediator). The buyer may employ mixed strategies. We show that the optimal mechanism is to post a price in each period. A methodological contribution of the paper is to develop a procedure to characterize the optimal dynamic incentive schemes under noncommitment in asymmetric information environments that is valid irrespective of the structure of the agents type. Keywords: mechanism design, non-commitment, bargaining under incomplete information, optimal auctions, durable good monopoly. JEL Classi cation Codes: C72, D44, D82. This work is based on Chapter 1 of my doctoral thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. I am indebted to Masaki Aoyagi and Phil Reny for superb supervision, guidance and support. I am especially grateful to Kim-Sau Chung and Radu Saghin. Many thanks to Andreas Blume, Roberto Burguet, Hal Cole, Dean Corbae, Jacques Cremer, Jim Dana, Peter Eso, Philippe Jehiel, Patrick Kehoe, Erzo Luttmer, Ellen McGrattan, Mark Satterthwaite, Kathy Spier, Dimitri Vayanos, Asher Wolinsky and Charles Zheng for helpful discussions and comments. I would also like to thank the Department of Management and Strategy, KGSM, Northwestern University for its warm hospitality, the Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and the TMR Network Contract ERBFMRXCT980203 for nancial support. A signi cant amount of this work was performed while I was at the University of Minnesota and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. All remaining errors are my own. yDepartment of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles; Box 951477, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477, USA. T 310 794 7241, F 310 825 9528, skreta@econ.ucla. edu
Driving with Style: Inverse Reinforcement Learning in General-Purpose Planning for Automated Driving

Behavior and motion planning play an important role in automated driving. Traditionally, behavior planners instruct local motion planners with predefined behaviors. Due to the high scene complexity in urban environments, unpredictable situations may occur in which behavior planners fail to match predefined behavior templates. Recently, general-purpose planners have been introduced, combining behavior and local motion planning. These general-purpose planners allow behavior-aware motion planning given a single reward function. However, two challenges arise: First, this function has to map a complex feature space into rewards. Second, the reward function has to be manually tuned by an expert. Manually tuning this reward function becomes a tedious task. In this paper, we propose an approach that relies on human driving demonstrations to automatically tune reward functions. This study offers important insights into the driving style optimization of general-purpose planners with maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning. We evaluate our approach based on the expected value difference between learned and demonstrated policies. Furthermore, we compare the similarity of human driven trajectories with optimal policies of our planner under learned and expert-tuned reward functions. Our experiments show that we are able to learn reward functions exceeding the level of manual expert tuning without prior domain knowledge.
Protect Thyself: How Affective Self-Protection Increases Self-Interested Behavior

In this research, we draw on the characteristics of disgust — an affective state that prompts a self-protection response — to demonstrate that experiencing disgust can also increase self-interested, unethical behaviors such as cheating. This series of studies contributes to the literature demonstrating context-specific effects on self-interested, unethical behavior. Specifically, we show that innocuous emotion-eliciting cues can elicit a focus on the protection of one’s own welfare, leading people to engage in self-interested behaviors that are unethical. This research provides evidence that the importance of clean physical environments may extend beyond visual beautification of surroundings to include economic behaviors.
Improving multipath routing performance in WSNs by tuning ieee 802.11 parameters

Multipath routes are claimed to improve throughput, end-to-end delay and the reliability of data transport in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However we have observed that multipath routing does not perform better than single path routing because the default parameter settings in 802.11 cause high rates of packet collisions. In this paper we report the results of a series of simulations based on a full-factorial experimental design. Our results show that congestion window size and retry limit are the key factors. Simulations with the tuned parameter values show significant improvement in both zone disjoint and node disjoint multipath routing schemes.
Membrane currents evoked by afferent fiber stimulation in rat piriform cortex. I. Current source-density analysis.

1. The membrane currents evoked by afferent fiber stimulation in the piriform cortex were derived by the use of current source-density (CSD) analysis in the rat under urethan anesthesia. The primary goals were to test hypotheses concerning the sequence of synaptic events evoked by afferent fiber stimulation and to derive data required for development and testing of the model presented in the companion paper. 2. In confirmation of previous studies, it was found that afferent fiber stimulation evokes a monosynaptic excitatory postsynaptic current (EPSC) in distal segments of pyramidal cell apical dendrites (layer Ia) followed by a strong disynaptic EPSC in adjacent middle segments (superficial layer Ib). 3. Given the central importance of the strong disynaptic EPSC in models for operation of the piriform cortex, the hypothesis that it is mediated by long association fibers from the anterior piriform cortex was tested by comparing its latency in response to stimulation at anterior and posterior locations. The results confirmed the hypothesis and ruled out a significant contribution from local connections in the posterior piriform cortex. 4. Intensification of pyramidal cell activity by spatially restricted disinhibition with picrotoxin confirmed the hypothesis that associational projections from the posterior piriform cortex can mediate a long-latency disynaptic EPSC in proximal dendritic segments (mid to deep layer Ib) in the anterior piriform cortex. 5. Analysis of the time course of the monosynaptic EPSC in different areas revealed that activation of the anterior piriform cortex from afferent fiber stimulation is fast and nearly synchronous throughout its extent as a result of the relatively high conduction velocities of afferent fibers in the lateral olfactory tract (LOT). By contrast, the posterior piriform cortex is sequentially activated by this EPSC as a consequence of the slow propagation velocity of afferent fiber collaterals that course across its surface. This activation is sufficiently slow that a large phase lag is present between rostral and caudal regions. 6. The time courses of the monosynaptic and principal disynaptic EPSCs changed in characteristically different ways with increasing distance from the LOT within the posterior piriform cortex. Simulations in the companion paper indicate that initiation and propagation patterns for activity in fiber systems rather than differences in synaptic conductance waveforms are responsible for these differences. 7. Although the laminar distribution of the active inward current component of the monosynaptic EPSC remained constant over time, the peak outward current associated with this EPSC shifted from the depth of proximal apical dendrites (layer Ib) to the depth of superficial pyramidal cell somata (layer II). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)