Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trafficking of Human Dendritic Cells and B cells in Helicobacter pylori-induced Gastritis

Infection with the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is widespread throughout the world, and is associated with development of gastric and duodenal ulcer disease as well as gastric adenocarcinoma and mucosa associated lymphoid tissue lymphoma. The infection generally leads to a large infiltration of immune cells, among them dendrite cells (DC) and IgA-secreting cells. Even though there is a strong innate and adaptive immune response, the bacteria are not eliminated from the stomach and the infection usually remains throughout life. The inductive site for the adaptive immune responses to H. pylori has not yet been identified and very little is known about the role of DC in the immune defense of the human stomach. The migration of DC from sites of antigen capture in peripheral tissues to the secondary lymphoid organs and the simultaneous maturation are crucial for initiation and amplification of primary immune responses. In this thesis we hypothesized that gastric DC fails to migrate to the lymph node and instead remains in the tissue and contribute to the chronic inflammation. Tissue-specific lymphocyte homing to the intestinal mucosa tissue is dependent on interactions between specific adhesion molecules. These are, however, not changed during H. pylori infection. Instead, we hypothesized that mucosal chemokines contribute to recruitment of B cells to the H. pylori infected gastric mucosa. Therefore, the overall aims of this thesis were to evaluate how H. pylori infection affect the recruitment, functions and migration of DC and to investigate the role of chemokines for B cell homing to the gastric mucosa. We have shown that DC stimulated with live H. pylori in vitro up-regulate the expression of the chemokine receptor CCR7, important for migration to the secondary lymphoid tissue, and that H. pylori stimulated DC migrate toward the CCR7 ligand CCL19. H. pylori stimulated DC were also capable of presenting antigen to T cells and secreted Th1 inducing cytokines. Using human gastric tissue we could also show that there is an accumulation of mature DC associated with lymphoid follicles and CD4+ T cells, in the infected gastric mucosa, and also increased levels of CCL19. Further, we have shown that production of the mucosal chemokine CCL28 is increased in H. pylori infections and that there is a correlation between CCL28 and IgA concentration in the gastric tissue of H. pylori infected individuals. Moreover, gastric IgA-secreting cells from H. pylori infected, but not uninfrcted, tissue had a robust migration toward CCL28. Based on our results in this thesis we suggest that mature DC are retained in the gastric mucosa due to H. pylori infection, and that they contribute to sustaining the chronic inflammation. We have also shown that the expression of CCL28 is increased in human H. pylori-induced gastritis and that CCL28 may contribute to effector B-cell recruitment to the gastric mucosa in H. pylori-induced gastritis.
Les Cahiers Du Gerad Variable Neighborhood Search for Least Squares Clusterwise Regression Variable Neighborhood Search for Least Squares Clusterwise Regression

Les textes publiés dans la série des rapports de recherche HEC n'engagent que la responsabilité de leurs auteurs. La publication de ces rapports de recherche bénéficie d'une subvention du Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies. Abstract Clusterwise regression is a technique for clustering data. Instead of using the classical homogeneity or separation criterion, clusterwise regression is based upon the accuracy of a linear regression model associated to each cluster. This model has many advantages, specially for the purpose of data mining, however, the underlying mathematical model is difficult to solve due to its large number of local optima. In this paper, we propose the use of the Variable Neighborhood Search metaheuristic (VNS) to improve the quality of the solution. Two perturbation strategies are described and one of them yields a substantial improvement if compared to multistart (the error is reduced by a factor of more than 1.5 on average for the 10 clusters problem). Résumé La régression par classes est une technique de classification des données. Au lieu d'utiliser les critères classiques d'homogénéité et de séparation, la régression par classes est basée sur l'adéquation d'un modèle de régression linéaire associéà chaque classe. Ce modèle a beaucoup d'avantages,particulì erement pour le data mining. Toutefois, le modèle mathématique sous-jacent est difficilè a résoudrè a cause de son grand nom-bre d'optima locaux. Dans cet article, nous proposons l'utilisation de la recherchè a voisinages variables (VNS) pour améliorer la qualité de la solution. Deux stratégies de perturbation sont décrites et une d'elles donne des améliorations substantielles par rapport au multistart (l'erreur est réduite par un facteur de plus de 1,5 en moyenne pour leprobì emè a 10 classes).
Comparison of the nucleic acids of helical and coccoid forms of Helicobacter pylori

The nucleic acids of the helical and coccoid forms of Helicobacter pylori were studied to determine if the coccoid forms are "viable (capable of growing) but nonculturable. " Using a reference strain (NCTC 11638) and five clinical strains, the nucleic acid contents, DNA integrity, and results of PCR and reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) were compared for helical H. pylori and coccoid forms induced using glycochenodeoxycholic acid or bismuth citrate. The DNA and RNA contents of the coccoid forms were respectively 6.8- and 8.1-fold lower than those of helical H. pylori after 3 days of induction and 11.5- and 14.7-fold lower after 7 days. Agarose gel electrophoresis of DNA extracted from the coccoid forms after 3 days of induction showed a smear pattern indicating DNA cleavage, whereas DNA from helical H. pylori showed a single band with a high molecular mass. After 12 days of induction, all RNA samples from 100% coccoid cultures were negative for the mRNA of urease A or the 26-kDa species-specific protein by RT-PCR. However, most RNA samples obtained after 3 or 7 days of induction were positive at low levels despite the lack of recovery from these cultures. These results suggest that the coccoid form of H. pylori has impaired genomic DNA and is in the process of cellular degeneration, thus being still alive but nonincreasable.
A Common Knowledge Representation for Plan Generation and Reactive Execution

Abstract : This paper describes the ACT formalism, which is designed to encode the knowledge required to support both the generation of complex plans and reactive execution of those plans in dynamic environments. ACT is a heuristically adequate representation that is useful in practical applications. It serves as an interlingua for Artificial Intelligence technologies in planning and reactive control. The design of the formalism is discussed and its use in practical applications is demonstrated. These applications show that the ACT representational constructs have reasonable computational properties and also are adequately expressive.
Heart-to-heart (H2H): authentication for implanted medical devices

We present Heart-to-Heart (H2H), a system to authenticate external medical device controllers and programmers to Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs). IMDs, which include pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators, are therapeutic medical devices partially or wholly embedded in the human body. They often have built-in radio communication to facilitate non-invasive reprogramming and data readout. Many IMDs, though, lack well designed authentication protocols, exposing patients to over-the-air attack and physical harm. H2H makes use of ECG (heartbeat data) as an authentication mechanism, ensuring access only by a medical instrument in physical contact with an IMD-bearing patient. Based on statistical analysis of real-world data, we propose and analyze new techniques for extracting time-varying randomness from ECG signals for use in H2H. We introduce a novel cryptographic device pairing protocol that uses this randomness to protect against attacks by active adversaries, while meeting the practical challenges of lightweight implementation and noise tolerance in ECG readings. Finally, we describe an end-to-end implementation in an ARM-Cortex M-3 microcontroller that demonstrates the practicality of H2H in current IMD hardware. Previous schemes have had goals much like those of H2H, but with serious limitations making them unfit for deployment---such as naively designed cryptographic pairing protocols (some of them recently broken). In addition to its novel analysis and use of ECG entropy, H2H is the first physiologically-based IMD device pairing protocol with a rigorous adversarial model and protocol analysis.
“ Emotions Guide Us ” : Behavioral and MEG correlates 2

Affectively salient stimuli are capable of capturing attentional resources which allows the 25 brain to change the current course of action in order to respond to potentially advantageous 26 or threatening stimuli. Here, we investigated the behavioral and cerebral impact of 27 peripherally presented affective stimuli on the subsequent processing of foveal information. 28 To this end, we recorded whole-head magnetoencephalograms from twelve participants 29 while they made speeded responses to the direction of leftor right-oriented arrows that 30 were presented foveally at fixation. Each arrow was preceded by a peripherally presented 31 pair of pictures, one emotional (unpleasant or pleasant), and one neutral. Paired pictures 32 were presented at 12° of eccentricity to the left and right of a central fixation cross. We 33 observed that the participants responded more quickly when the orientation of the arrow 34 was congruent with the location of the previously presented emotional scene. Results show 35 that non-predictive emotional information in peripheral vision interferes with subsequent 36 responses to foveally presented targets. Importantly, this behavioral effect was correlated 37 with an early (~135msec) increase of left fronto-central activity for the emotionally 38 congruent combination, whose cerebral sources were notably located in the left 39 orbitofrontal cortex. This study suggests that the prior spatial distribution of emotional 40 salience, like physical salience, grabs attentional resources and modifies the performance in 41 the center of the visual field. Thus, these data shed light on the neurobehavioral correlates 42 of the emotional coding of visual space. 43
When time matters: how to use a timeline built from ethnographic data

This paper aims at justifying and formalizing the role of the diachronic approach, and its tool,the timeline, in ethnographic research with regard to the other methods that the researcher canmobilize to build a dynamic analysis of a phenomenon. This paper proposes to develop the effectiveimplementation of the timeline in two different contexts: BtoC and BtoB. We place the timeline asan analytical tool in a "diachronic" approach, for two main reasons. First, the concept stems from thelinguistic field and is dedicated to study the evolution of a language. In this sense, it can be stronglylinked to phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, 1976) and to speech acts (Austin, 1970). It implies thatwe focus on the actors of a phenomenon, their representations of it and how these representations(and the wording they make of it) can influence the evolution of the experience in return. Second, we base our assumption on Geertz's view about culture. The ethnography is a technique allowing to readthe culture as a text (Geertz, 1973). It is then possible to interpret and discover hidden meanings inthe text. So, the culture of an environment can be addressed as a literary text, which presents a socialsemantic, that a diachronic approach will apprehend in its evolutionary aspect.
GPU Accelerated Lanczos Algorithm with Applications

Graphics Processing Units provide a large computational power at a very low price which position them as an ubiquitous accelerator. GPGPU is accelerating general purpose computations using GPU's. GPU's have been used to accelerate many Linear Algebra routines and Numerical Methods. Lanczos is an iterative method well suited for finding the extreme eigenvalues and the corresponding eigenvectors of large sparse symmetric matrices. In this paper, we present an implementation of Lanczos Algorithm on GPU using the CUDA programming model and apply it to two important problems : graph bisection using spectral methods, and image segmentation. Our GPU implementation of spectral bisection performs better when compared to both an Intel Math Kernel Library implementation and a Matlab implementation. Our GPU implementation shows a speedup up to 97.3 times over Matlab Implementation and 2.89 times over the Intel Math Kernel Library implementation on a Intel Core i7 920 Processor, which is a quad-core CPU. Similarly, our image segmentation implementation achieves a speed up of 3.27 compared to a multicore CPU based implementation using Intel Math Kernel Library and OpenMP. Through this work, we therefore wish to establish that the GPU may still be a better platform for also highly irregular and computationally intensive applications.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HEALTH AND GROWTH : WHEN

• This paper revisits the relationship between health and growth in light of modern endogenous growth theory. We propose a unified framework that encompasses the growth effects of both the rate of improvement of health and the level of health. Based on cross-country regressions over the period 1960-2000, we find that a higher initial level and a higher rate of improvement in life expectancy both have a significantly positive impact on per capita GDP growth. Then, restricting attention to OECD countries, we find supporting evidence that only the reduction in mortality below age forty generates productivity gains, which in turn may explain why the positive correlation between health and growth in cross-OECD country regressions appears to have weakened since 1960.
Corpus-Based methods for Short Text Similarity

This paper presents corpus-based methods to find similarity between short text (sentences, paragraphs, .) which has many applications in the field of NLP. Previous works on this problem have been based on supervised methods or have used external resources such as WordNet, British National Corpus etc. Our methods are focused on unsupervised corpus-based methods. We present a new method, based on Vector Space Model, to capture the contextual behavior, senses and correlation, of terms and show that this method performs better than the baseline method that uses vector based cosine similarity measure. The performance of existing document similarity measures, Dice and Resemblance, are also evaluated which in our knowledge have not been used for short text similarity. We also show that the performance of the vector-based baseline method is improved when using stems instead of words and using the candidate sentences for computing the parameters rather than some external resource.
Robust Global Motion Compensation in Presence of Predominant Foreground

Global motion compensation (GMC) removes intentional and unwanted camera motion. GMC is widely applicable for video stitching and, as a pre-processing module, for motion-based video analysis. While state-of-the-art GMC algorithms generally estimate homography satisfactorily between consecutive frames, their performances deteriorate on real-world unconstrained videos, for instance, videos with predominant foreground, e.g., moving objects or human, or uniform background. Since GMC transformation of frames to the global motion-compensated coordinate is done by cascading homographies, failure in GMC of a single frame drastically harms the final result. Thus, we propose a robust GMC, termed RGMC, based on homography estimation using keypoint matches. RGMC first suppresses the foreground impact by clustering the keypoint matches and removing those pertaining to the foreground, as well as erroneous matches. For homography verification, we propose a probabilistic model that combines keypoint matching error, consistency of edges after homograhy transformation, the motion history, and prior camera motion information. Experimental results on the Sports Videos in the Wild, Holleywood2, and HMDB51 datasets demonstrate the superiority of RGMC.
Workplace flexibility as a paradoxical phenomenon: Exploring employee experiences

How do employees of dynamic consulting firms deal with their demanding professional environment, where they must be accessible, responsive and flexible seemingly around the clock? This case study of a large consulting firm explores employee experiences of flexible working through the lens of paradox. It finds that flexible working far exceeds the set of approved flexible work arrangements and practices enshrined in formal HR policies. Rather, individuals develop varied perceptions, expectations and ways of organizing flexible working, which emerge and evolve as they accumulate experience in a context where client-focused responsiveness is key. The article argues that flexible working is part of the deeper psychological contract between professional employees and the firm. This allows us to better understand how the paradoxical tensions that characterize workplace flexibility are experienced as evolving combinations of contributions and inducements. Employees manage these tensions in different ways, including vacillating between polar opposites and integrating contradictory elements, creating an overall mental picture of their flexible working experience.
XtraGen - A Natural Language Generation System Using XML- and Java-Technologies

In this paper we present XtraGen, a XML-and Java-based software system for the ﬂexible, real-time generation of natural language that is easily integrated and used in real-world applications. We describe its grammar formalism and implementation in detail, depict the context of how the system was evaluated and ﬁnally provide an outlook on future work with the system.
R&D of a Parameterized Method for 3D Virtual Human Body Based on Anthropometry

—The traditional individual 3D virtual humand modeling method has drawbacks of mass data and complex post-processing. It doesn’t suit the Web application. The research presented in this paper is to propose a novel real-time approach of 3D human parameterized modeling based on anthropometry. According to the principle in Anthropometry and Anatomy, the model surface is divided into several parts. The human cross-section of torso and limbs are simulated by surper-ellipse curvers. Some feature points are selected from supre-ellipse curvers to generate the Nurbs surfaces of torso and limbs. A hiberarchy parameterization driven mechanism based on Anthropometry data is used to calculate parameter values during the humand model generating. The experiment result indicates that the method is flexible, little data quantity, easy-control, realistic and exact, and fit for many Web applications such as virtual image-building, virtual human motion and virtual try-on.
Frequency-Based Steganography Using 32x32 Interpolated Quantization Table and Discrete Cosine Transform

Image steganography is the art of hiding the existence of the information in the image. The steganography can be categorized into two types in spatial domain and frequency domain. In this study, the frequency based image steganography using Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) and JPEG is proposed. Instead of using 8x8-pixel blocks with the 8x8-pixel quantization table, a larger block of size 32x32 will be used with a corresponding 32x32 quantization table created by cubic interpolation technique. Our results show that we can reduce the computation time and increase the capacity of the secret messages while maintaining the image quality and the size of JPEG stego-image.
Breathing Spaces: Educating Indoor Plant Carbon Absorption through Interaction

Climate change is a constant natural phenomenon. However, human activities over the last century have caused drastic changes well beyond its natural trajectory. Due to the unprecedented changes to the environment, rapid solutions to combat the consequences of climate change need to be implemented. Whatever strategy is adopted, education is key in order to achieve goals. Education interventions can be used to facilitate knowledge acquisition, skill development and build attitudes. Art-based education has become increasingly popular among educators, specifically in explaining scientific principles within a visualised environment using the latest technologies. Interior Design is a discipline that relies on visual thinking but lacks empirical work on using these developing technologies to capture student attention and transfer knowledge. This paper presents a study that explores digital art created to communicate the principle of using indoor plants as a means to purify air. The research is designed as a four-step action research project in which one cycle is completed. The results revealed that students were interested in the artwork, regardless of their level of prior knowledge of the subject.
Autophagy pathway intersects with HIV-1 biosynthesis and regulates viral yields in macrophages

Autophagy is a cytoplasmic degradative pathway that can participate in biosynthetic processes, as in the yeast Cvt pathway, but is more commonly known for its functions in removing damaged or surplus organelles and macromolecular complexes. Here, we find that autophagy intersects with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) biogenesis, mirroring the above dichotomy. Early, nondegradative stages of autophagy promoted HIV yields. HIV Gag-derived proteins colocalized and interacted with the autophagy factor LC3, and autophagy promoted productive Gag processing. Nevertheless, when autophagy progressed through maturation stages, HIV was degraded. This, however, does not occur, as the HIV protein Nef acts as an antiautophagic maturation factor through interactions with the autophagy regulatory factor Beclin 1, thus protecting HIV from degradation. The dual interaction of HIV with the autophagy pathway enhances viral yields by using the early stages while inhibiting the late stages of autophagy. The role of Nef in the latter process enhances yields of infectious HIV and may be of significance for progression to clinical AIDS.
Opinion interaction network: opinion dynamics in social networks with heterogeneous relationships

Recent empirical studies have discovered that many social networks have heterogeneous relationships, which are signed and weighted relationships between individual nodes. To explore the pattern of opinion dynamics in diverse social networks with heterogeneous relationships, we set up a general agent-based simulation framework named opinion interaction network (OIN), and propose a novel model of opinion dynamics, in which the influence of agents depends on their heterogeneous relationships. Then, by conducting a series of simulations based on OIN, we find that the opinions at steady state depend on the degree of social harmoniousness and average connectivity, and the similar pattern can be observed in the network of Erdös_Rényi, small world and scale free, which illustrates that the topological properties such as short path length, high clustering, and heterogeneous degrees have few effects on opinion dynamics with heterogeneous relationships.