Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fibrocellular Contraction of a Lamellar Posterior Corneal Graft

Purpose: To report a case of progressive fibrotic contraction of the posterior lamellar graft after initially successful Descemet’s stripping automated endothelial keratoplasty (DSAEK). Methods: Retrospective report of clinical data and histopathological analysis of excised corneal tissue. Results: A 63-year-old woman underwent uncomplicated DSAEK in her left eye due to endothelial dystrophy. During the first months after surgery, her visual acuity was 0.3, and a semilunar contraction gradually appeared at the edge of the graft. Over the following months, the fibrotic changes progressed and visual acuity decreased, with no improvement after uncomplicated cataract surgery. A successful penetrating keratoplasty was performed, and the excised corneal button with an attached posterior lamellar graft was histologically examined. The affected part of the graft consisted of a thickened fibrocellular tissue positive for glycosaminoglycans and smooth muscle actin. Conclusions: The present case demonstrates asymmetric fibrotic contraction of a DSAEK graft.
An Examination of Job Titles Used for GIScience Professionals

Over the last 20 years the increasing availability, utility, and importance of geospatial data has led to new kinds of positions in government agencies, non-profit organizations and private businesses. While employment opportunities have grown substantially, guidelines for assigning titles, qualifications and responsibilities have not kept pace. Inconsistency in GIScience titles and job qualifications has made it difficult for employers and job seekers to compare positions across organizations in terms of duties, compensation, and status. This paper explores job titles used by public and private organizations that hire GIScience professionals. An analysis of 204 online job ads shows variation in qualifications associated with titles. Model job titles and career ladders are suggested as a means of attracting and retaining GIScience professionals.
An efficient image similarity measure based on approximations of KL-divergence between two gaussian mixtures

We present two new methods for approximating the Kullback-Liebler (KL) divergence between two mixtures of Gaussians. The first method is based on matching between the Gaussian elements of the two Gaussian mixture densities. The second method is based on the unscented transform. The proposed methods are utilized for image retrieval tasks. Continuous probabilistic image modeling based on mixtures of Gaussians together with KL measure for image similarity, can be used for image retrieval tasks with remarkable performance. The efficiency and the performance of the KL approximation methods proposed are demonstrated on both simulated data and real image data sets. The experimental results indicate that our proposed approximations outperform previously suggested methods.
Dental students' perceived sources of stress: a multi-country study.

The aim of this study was to identify dental students' self-reported sources of stress and to explore the role of specific curricular and institutional differences in the variation of perceived stressors among dental students in Greece, Ireland, Slovenia, Sweden, Spain, and Croatia. A thirty-item modified version of the Dental Environment Stress (DES) questionnaire was administered to all undergraduate students enrolled at six European dental schools selected to reflect geographical, curricular, and professional environment diversity: Athens, Greece; Dublin, Ireland; Ljubljana, Slovenia; Malmö, Sweden; Santiago de Compostela, Spain; and Zagreb, Croatia. Participation varied from 93 percent in Athens to 65 percent in Dublin. A total of 1,492 questionnaires were available for analysis. Univariate analysis and multivariate modelling were used for data analysis. Performance pressure, workload, and self-efficacy beliefs constituted the students' main concerns. In the univariate analysis, student responses differed by country: Swedish students provided the lowestst scores in five out of six DES factors, Spanish students were the most concerned about "clinical training" and "performance pressure," whereas Greek students were the most concerned about "patient treatment. " Multivariate modelling revealed that problem-based learning (PBL) was inversely associated with perceived stress for "self-efficacy beliefs" OR (95% CI): 0.66 (0.52, 0.84), "workload" OR (95% CI): 0.58 (0.41, 0.80); and "clinical training" OR (95% CI): 0.69 (0.50, 0.95) when compared to traditional curricula. Students' perceived stressors differed greatly among the six institutions and were associated with both individual (gender, study level) and educational/institutional (curriculum type, class size, educational costs) parameters.
Legendrian contact homology in the boundary of a subcritical Weinstein 4-manifold

We give a combinatorial description of the Legendrian contact homology algebra associated to a Legendrian link in $S^1\times S^2$ or any connected sum $\#^k(S^1\times S^2)$, viewed as the contact boundary of the Weinstein manifold obtained by attaching 1-handles to the 4-ball. In view of the surgery formula for symplectic homology, this gives a combinatorial description of the symplectic homology of any 4-dimensional Weinstein manifold (and of the linearized contact homology of its boundary). We also study examples and discuss the invariance of the Legendrian homology algebra under deformations, from both the combinatorial and the analytical perspectives.
Zoledronic acid overcomes chemoresistance and immunosuppression of malignant mesothelioma

The human malignant mesothelioma (HMM) is characterized by a chemoresistant and immunosuppressive phenotype. An effective strategy to restore chemosensitivity and immune reactivity against HMM is lacking. We investigated whether the use of zoledronic acid is an effective chemo-immunosensitizing strategy. We compared primary HMM samples with non-transformed mesothelial cells. HMM cells had higher rate of cholesterol and isoprenoid synthesis, constitutive activation of Ras/extracellular signal-regulated kinase1/2 (ERK1/2)/hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) pathway and up-regulation of the drug efflux transporter P-glycoprotein (Pgp). By decreasing the isoprenoid supply, zoledronic acid down-regulated the Ras/ERK1/2/HIF-1α/Pgp axis and chemosensitized the HMM cells to Pgp substrates. The HMM cells also produced higher amounts of kynurenine, decreased the proliferation of T-lymphocytes and expanded the number of T-regulatory (Treg) cells. Kynurenine synthesis was due to the transcription of the indoleamine 1,2 dioxygenase (IDO) enzyme, consequent to the activation of the signal transducer and activator of transcription-3 (STAT3). By reducing the activity of the Ras/ERK1/2/STAT3/IDO axis, zoledronic acid lowered the kyurenine synthesis and the expansion of Treg cells, and increased the proliferation of T-lymphocytes. Thanks to its ability to decrease Ras/ERK1/2 activity, which is responsible for both Pgp-mediated chemoresistance and IDO-mediated immunosuppression, zoledronic acid is an effective chemo-immunosensitizing agent in HMM cells.
Formal compliance verification of interface protocols

Verifying whether a building block conforms to certain interface protocol is one of the important steps while constructing an SoC. However, most existing methods have their own limitations. Simulation-based methods have the false positive problem while formal property checking methods may suffer from memory explosion and excessive runtime. In this paper, we propose a novel branch-and-bound algorithm for interface protocol compliance verification. The properties of the interface protocol are specified as a specification FSM, and the interface logic is formally verified at the higher FSM level. Using the FSM for property specification is relatively systematic than using other proprietary property languages, which greatly reduces the possibility of incomplete property identification. And it is shown theoretically and experimentally that the proposed algorithm can finish in reasonable time complexity.
Inferring Specifications of Object Oriented APIs from API Source Code

API libraries are becoming increasingly popular in modern software industries because these libraries provide various methods and classes for reuse. However, as pointed out by researchers, libraries are typically difficult to use. It is desirable to infer some specifications for libraries so that programmers can learn the correct usages of these libraries. In this paper, we propose an approach to infer specifications from source code of API libraries. Our approach is based on the observation that rules in object-oriented programs can be traced from basic constraints such as memory usage, file usage, and network protocol. In addition, rules of one class spread to its dependent classes through the features of object-oriented programs such as derivation, invocation relationship, and field access among methods. Based on our approach, we implemented a prototype named Java Rule Finder (JRF) to infer specifications from source code of API libraries in Java. We conducted four case studies using JRF. The result shows that JRF infers some rules correctly. We further conducted an experiment on three open source API libraries. The results show that JRF scales well with real API libraries.
Cross-coupled bit-line biasing for 22-nm SRAM

Sub-22nm processes necessitate the use of larger SRAM cells in order to counter the effects of increasing silicon variation. However, storage density is reduced when the SRAM cell grows in size. This paper proposes the use of a cross-coupled bit line (BL) biasing scheme that retains SRAM's fast access speed while reducing the read-access failures in the presence of V variation, without excessively increasing the SRAM cell size. We have shown, by extensive Monte-Carlo simulations using 22-nm predictive CMOS models, that the proposed scheme reduces the cell area by 6.5% compared to the conventional BL biasing schemes also analyzed in this paper.
HybDTM: a coordinated hardware-software approach for dynamic thermal management

With ever-increasing power density and cooling costs in modern high-performance systems, dynamic thermal management (DTM) has emerged as an effective technique for guaranteeing thermal safety at run-time. While past works on DTM have focused on different techniques in isolation, they fail to consider a synergistic mechanism using both hardware and software support and hence lead to a significant execution time overhead. In this paper, we propose HybDTM, a methodology for fine-grained, coordinated thermal management using a hybrid of hardware techniques, such as clock gating, and software techniques, such as thermal-aware process scheduling, synergistically leveraging the advantages of both approaches. We show that while hardware techniques can be used reactively to manage thermal emergencies, proactive use of low-overhead software techniques can rely on application-specific thermal profiles to lower system temperature. Our technique involves a novel regression-based thermal model which provides fast and accurate temperature estimates for run-time thermal characterization of applications running on the system, using hardware performance counters, while considering system-level thermal issues. We evaluate HybDTM on an actual desktop system running a number of SPEC2000 benchmarks, in both uniprocessor and simultaneous multithreading (SMT) environments, and show that it is able to successfully manage the overall temperature with an average execution time overhead of only 9.9% (16.3% maximum) compared to the case without any DTM, as opposed to 20.4% (29.5% maximum) overhead for purely hardware-based DTM
Automatic Detection and Correction of Multi-class Classification Errors Using System Whole-part Relationships

Real-world dynamic systems such as physical and atmosphereocean systems often exhibit a hierarchical system-subsystem structure. However, the paradigm of making this hierarchical/modular structure and the rich properties they encode a “first-class citizen” of machine learning algorithms is largely absent from the literature. Furthermore, traditional data mining approaches focus on designing new classifiers or ensembles of classifiers, while there is a lack of study on detecting and correcting prediction errors of existing forecasting (or classification) algorithms. In this paper, we propose DETECTOR, a hierarchical method for detecting and correcting forecast errors by employing the whole-part relationships between the target system and non-target systems. Experimental results show that DETECTOR can successfully detect and correct forecasting errors made by state-of-art classifier ensemble techniques and traditional single classifier methods at an average rate of 22%, corresponding to a 11% average forecasting accuracy increase, in seasonal forecasting of hurricanes and landfalling hurricanes in North Atlantic and North African rainfall.
DIADEM Firewall: Web Server Overload Attack Detection and Response

High-profile web servers often become the victim of web server overload Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. Motivations of such attacks range from technical challenge (e.g. script kiddies) to financial profit (e.g. blackmailing the web server’s owner). This paper presents the DIADEM Firewall architecture that allows an ISP to protect its customers from being the target of a DDoS attack. Additionally, it provides protection against usage of customer hosts for attacks. Furthermore, the use-case of the web server overload attack detection and response mechanism will be explained in more details. Finally, we outline the integration an FPGA based highspeed classifier engine integrated into the Linux Netfilter firewall as well as its deployment during a response action against the DDoS attack.
The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence, and the Experience of God's Love

Acknowledgements List of Tables and Figures Introduction Chapter 1: Why Should We Care about Godly Love? Chapter 2: Diversities in the Experience and Expression of Godly Love Chapter 3: Introducing the Exemplars of Godly Love Chapter 4: Partnering with the Divine: Spiritual Transformation and Godly Love Chapter 5: The Breath of Prayer: Energizing Godly Love Chapter 6: The Cup of Suffering and Joy: Divine Love and Healing Chapter 7: Human Partners and Godly Love: Relationships Forming Fluid Networks Chapter 8: Benevolence in the Eyes of the Beholder: Effects of Social Filters Conclusion: Cultural Grids and Biblical Holes Notes Index
Botzilla: detecting the "phoning home" of malicious software

Hosts infected with malicious software, so called malware, are ubiquitous in today's computer networks. The means whereby malware can infiltrate a network are manifold and range from exploiting of software vulnerabilities to tricking a user into executing malicious code. Monitoring and detection of all possible infection vectors is intractable in practice. Hence, we approach the problem of detecting malicious software at a later point when it initiates contact with its maintainer; a process referred to as "phoning home". In particular, we introduce Botzilla, a method for detection of malware communication, which proceeds by repetitively recording network traffic of malware in a controlled environment and generating network signatures from invariant content patterns. Experiments conducted at a large university network demonstrate the ability of Botzilla to accurately identify malware communication in network traffic with very low false-positive rates.
Simulation of Online Social Networks with Krowdix

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a key phenomenon of Internet. Simulations are widely used in their study as means to harness their size and complexity, and to overcome the difficulties to set up experiments in real environments. However, these tools are still limited. They are usually focused on the structure of relationships and emulate changes only from statistical data. This approach is unsuitable to study OSN evolution as a result of the personal attributes and behaviours of their members. Our work addresses this issue with an agent-based simulation framework for OSNs called Krowdix. It provides support to specify simulations of discrete time where agents represent members acting according to their profiles and context. This context comprehends the environment, other agents, groups of agents and the whole network. Agent actions are responsible of network changes. Additionally, system actions can be used to represent unexpected events. This agent-based approach facilitates the translation of actual observations to simulation models, and explaining networks in terms of their members. A case study on Facebook illustrates the use of the framework.
I would rather be happy than right: Consumer impulsivity, risky decision making, and accountability

Consumer impulsivity accounts for a large percentage of purchases yet this aspect of personality is measured with a variety of instruments. Three studies were conducted to examine how measures of consumer impulsiveness relate to each other, other measures of trait level impulsivity, and a variety of decisions and judgments. These studies looked at the relationship between biases resulting from motivated reasoning and the trait of impulsiveness. Motivated reasoning and impulsiveness was considered within the context of consumer and other choice decisions. Consumer impulsivity was found to be related to both general measures of trait level impulsivity as well as containing a lot of content overlap among the three measures considered here. One measure was distinct and formed its own factor in a factor analysis suggesting it may be the most specific measure of consumer impulsivity. The other measures of consumer impulsivity overlapped quite a bit with general impulsivity. The Iowa Gambling Task was used to measure both choice behavior and anticipatory SCR, however no significant results were found. The cups task, a risky decision making task, was also administered and results mirrored classic findings such that participants were more risk averse in the domain of gains than losses. Additionally, both expected value and outcome magnitude influenced results. Individuals who scored higher on the UPPS urgency subscale made more risk advantageous choices when looking at sensitivity to expected value. The third task assessed differences in purchase time for hedonic and utilitarian items. Impulsive consumers reported they would purchase both hedonic and utilitarian items sooner than their less impulsive counterparts. Abstract Approved: _________________________________ Thesis SupervisorApproved: _________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________ Title and Department ____________________________________ Date I WOULD RATHER BE HAPPY THAN RIGHT: CONSUMER IMPULSIVITY, RISKY DECISION MAKING, AND ACCOUNTABILITY by Suzanne Beth Bellman A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Interdisciplinary Studies – Ph. D. degree in Decision Neuroscience in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa
Integration of optical and electrochemical sensors on a microfluidic platform using organic optoelectronic components and silver nanowires

Since the emergence of microfluidic platforms sensors integration has been a major challenge. With the advances in miniaturization of these platforms, there is a need for solutions to integrate various optical components in order to build sensors, which will offer different detection characteristics such as several emission and sensing wavelengths. Moreover, the integration of an electrochemical sensor including a transparent electrode that will be compatible with the optical sensor represents an additional challenge. In this perspective, organic optoelectronic devices combined with silver nanowire electrodes could be a solution. The integration of a fluorescent sensor and an electrochemical oxygen sensor into a microfluidic platform and the different characteristics, advantages and disadvantages that offer organic light-emitting diodes (OLED), organic photodetectors (OPD) and silver nanowire electrodes are discussed. Finally, an example of the integration of an optical and an electrochemical sensor into a microfluidic chip for water pollution detection will be described.
A New Methodology for Collecting and Exploiting Vast Amounts of Dynamic Data

The current approaches aiming at collective intelligence modelling often rely on traditional methods (ontologies, graphs). Even if those traditional methods may have reached their limitations in front of demanding emerging practices, the major conceptual tools enrolled for current and future Web are deeply rooted in the information storage and retrieval practices. The focus is on developing more original technologies for capturing, analyzing, exploiting and visualizing data. The age cements/arrangements provide the appropriate epistemological context of our contribution. The simplicial complexes are the mathematical support of the methodology. The result is a shift from networks studied towards graph theory to higher dimensional networks structures. The representation is more than graphs, or even hyper graphs. A geometric perspective shows the arrangement as assembling polyhedra of all sizes. Their contacts can form chains of adjacencies. It does not only generalize the notion of path graphs but it also makes available a range of quantitative and qualitative tools on the structure. Thus, separate parts, which can be more or less strongly linked, length of paths to traverse, and even loops or "missing parts", are meaningful metadata representations.
Cathepsin-L Can Resist Lysis by Human Serum in Trypanosoma brucei brucei

Closely related African trypanosomes cause lethal diseases but display distinct host ranges. Specifically, Trypanosoma brucei brucei causes nagana in livestock but fails to infect humans, while Trypanosoma brucei gambiense and Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense cause sleeping sickness in humans. T. b. brucei fails to infect humans because it is sensitive to innate immune complexes found in normal human serum known as trypanolytic factor (TLF) 1 and 2; the lytic component is apolipoprotein-L1 in both TLFs. TLF resistance mechanisms of T. b. gambiense and T. b. rhodesiense are now known to arise through either gain or loss-of-function, but our understanding of factors that render T. b. brucei susceptible to lysis by human serum remains incomplete. We conducted a genome-scale RNA interference (RNAi) library screen for reduced sensitivity to human serum. Among only four high-confidence ‘hits’ were all three genes previously shown to sensitize T. b. brucei to human serum, the haptoglobin-haemoglobin receptor (HpHbR), inhibitor of cysteine peptidase (ICP) and the lysosomal protein, p67, thereby demonstrating the pivotal roles these factors play. The fourth gene identified encodes a predicted protein with eleven trans-membrane domains. Using chemical and genetic approaches, we show that ICP sensitizes T. b. brucei to human serum by modulating the essential cathepsin, CATL, a lysosomal cysteine peptidase. A second cathepsin, CATB, likely to be dispensable for growth in in vitro culture, has little or no impact on human-serum sensitivity. Our findings reveal major and novel determinants of human-serum sensitivity in T. b. brucei. They also shed light on the lysosomal protein-protein interactions that render T. b. brucei exquisitely sensitive to lytic factors in human serum, and indicate that CATL, an important potential drug target, has the capacity to resist these factors.