Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Pedestrian Path Prediction with Recursive Bayesian Filters : A Comparative Study

In the context of intelligent vehicles, we perform a comparative study on recursive Bayesian filters for pedestrian path prediction at short time horizons (< 2s). We consider Extended Kalman Filters (EKF) based on single dynamical models and Interacting Multiple Models (IMM) combining several such basic models (constant velocity/acceleration/turn). These are applied to four typical pedestrian motion types (crossing, stopping, bending in, starting). Position measurements are provided by an external state-of-the-art stereo vision-based pedestrian detector. We investigate the accuracy of position estimation and path prediction, and the benefit of the IMMs vs. the simpler single dynamical models. Special care is given to the proper sensor modeling and parameter optimization. The dataset and evaluation framework are made public to facilitate benchmarking.
Interaction of the c-Jun/JNK Pathway and Cyclin-dependent Kinases in Death of Embryonic Cortical Neurons Evoked by DNA Damage*

DNA damage, an important initiator of neuronal death, has been implicated in numerous neurodegenerative conditions. We previously delineated several pathways that control embryonic cortical neuronal death evoked by the DNA-damaging agent, camptothecin. In this model, the tumor suppressor p53 and cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) are activated independently and cooperate to mediate the conserved death pathway. To further our understanding, we presently examined whether the c-Jun/JNK pathway modulates death and whether this pathway is regulated by CDKs, p53, and Bax. We show that c-Jun/JNK is activated following DNA damage. Moreover, the c-Jun pathway is one mediator of death, because expression of dominant negative c-Jun and cdc42, and JNK pathway inhibitors are neuroprotective. Although previous evidences indicate that JNK3 is required for neuronal death under certain conditions, we show that JNK3 deficiency only partially mediates c-Jun phosphorylation and its deficiency does not protect neurons from death. Interestingly, we provide evidence that CDK activity regulates c-Jun but does not affect upstream pathways that lead to JNK phosphorylation. Finally, c-Jun activation is independent of p53 and Bax. Accordingly, we propose that c-Jun is regulated by the JNK and CDK pathways and that both must be activated for efficient c-Jun activation to occur.
Age‐related changes of germline stem cell activity, niche signaling activity and egg production in Drosophila

Adult stem cells are important in replenishing aged cells to maintain tissue homeostasis. Aging in turn may exert profound effects on stem cell's regenerative potential, but to date the mechanisms of such stem cell aging are poorly understood, and it is not clear to what extent stem cell aging contributes to tissue or organ aging. Here we show in female Drosophila that germline stem cell (GSC) division rate progressively declines with age, which is accompanied by reduced decapentaplegic (dpp) niche signaling pathway activation within GSCs. Egg production also rapidly declines with age, which is accompanied by both decreased stem cell division and increased incidence of cell death of developing eggs, especially in the oldest females. Genetically increasing dpp expression delays GSC activity decline and transiently increases egg production. We conclude that age‐related decline of reproduction is caused by both decreased GSC activity and increased incidence of cell death during oogenesis, while decreased GSC activity is attributed to declined signaling from the regulatory niche. We suggest that niche functional decay may be an important mechanism for stem cell aging and system failure.
Dual control of relaxation. Its role in the ventricular function in the mammalian heart.

II y a toujours plus de chaleur dans le coeur qu' en aucun autre endroit du corps. Cette chaleur est capable de faire que, s'il entre quelque goutte de sang en ses concavite's, elle s'enfle promptement et se dilate, ainsi que font ge'ne'ralement toutes les liqueurs, lorsqu'on les laisse tomber goutte a goutte en quelque vaisseau qui est fort chaud. Ces gouttes se rare'fient et se dilatent, a cause de la chaleur qu'ellesy trouvent, au moyen de quoi, faisant enfler tout le coeur, elles poussent et ferment les cinq petites portes*; et continuant a se rare'fier de plus en plus, elles poussent et ouvrent les six autres petites portes'f qui sont aux entrees des deux autres vaisseaux par ou elles sortent; le coeur, incontinent apres, se de'senfle.
Text2voronoi: An Image-driven Approach to Differential Diagnosis

Differential diagnosis aims at distinguishing between diseases causing similar symptoms. This is exemplified by epilepsies and dissociative disorders. Recently, it has been shown that linguistic features of physician-patient talks allow for differentiating between these two diseases. Since this method relies on trained linguists, it is not suitable for daily use. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, called text2voronoi, for utilizing the paradigm of text visualization to reconstruct differential diagnosis as a task of text categorization. In line with current research on linguistic differential diagnosis, we explore linguistic characteristics of physician-patient talks to span our feature space. However, unlike standard approaches to categorization, we do not use linguistic feature spaces directly, but explore visual features derived from the talks’ pictorial representations. That is, we provide an approach to image-driven differential diagnosis. By example of 24 talks of epileptics and dissociatively disordered patients, we show that our approach outperforms its counterpart based on the bag-of-words model.
A Fast Learning Strategy Using Pattern Selection for Feedforward Neural Networks

Intelligent pattern selection is an active learning strategy where the classifiers select during training the most informative patterns. This paper investigates such a strategy where the informativeness of a pattern is measured as the approximation error produced by the classifier. The algorithm builds the training corpus starting from a small randomly chosen initial dataset and new patterns are added to the learning corpus based on their error sensitivity. The training dataset expansion is based on the selection of the most erroneous patterns. Our experimental results on MNIST 1 separated digit dataset show that only 3.26%of training data are sufficient for training purpose without decreasing the performance (98.36%) of the resulting neural classifier.
Rapid Sanger Sequencing of the 16S rRNA Gene for Identification of Some Common Pathogens

Conventional Sanger sequencing remains time-consuming and laborious. In this study, we developed a rapid improved sequencing protocol of 16S rRNA for pathogens identification by using a new combination of SYBR Green I real-time PCR and Sanger sequencing with FTA® cards. To compare the sequencing quality of this method with conventional Sanger sequencing, 12 strains, including three kinds of strains (1 reference strain and 3 clinical strains, which were previously identified by biochemical tests), which have 4 Pseudomonas aeruginosa, 4 Staphyloccocus aureus and 4 Escherichia coli, were targeted. Additionally, to validate the sequencing results and bacteria identification, expanded specimens with 90 clinical strains, also comprised of the three kinds of strains which included 30 samples respectively, were performed as just described. The results showed that although statistical differences (P<0.05) were found in sequencing quality between the two methods, their identification results were all correct and consistent. The workload, the time consumption and the cost per batch were respectively light versus heavy, 8 h versus 11 h and $420 versus $400. In the 90 clinical strains, all of the Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphyloccocus aureus strains were correctly identified, but only 26.7% of the Escherichia coli strains were recognized as Escherichia coli, while 33.3% as Shigella sonnei and 40% as Shigella dysenteriae. The protocol described here is a rapid, reliable, stable and convenient method for 16S rRNA sequencing, and can be used for Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphyloccocus aureus identification, yet it is not completely suitable for discriminating Escherichia coli and Shigella strains.
An autonomic approach to denial of service defence

Denial of service attacks, viruses and worms are common tools for malicious adversarial behaviour in networks. We propose the use of our autonomic routing protocol, the cognitive packet network (CPN), as a means to defend nodes from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, where one or more attackers generate flooding traffic from multiple sources towards selected nodes or IP addresses. We use both analytical and simulation modelling, and experiments on our CPN testbed, to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of our approach in the presence of imperfect detection of DDoS attacks, and of false alarms.
Inactivation of serine protease Matriptase1a by its inhibitor Hai1 is required for epithelial integrity of the zebrafish epidermis

Epithelial integrity requires the adhesion of cells to each other as well as to an underlying basement membrane. The modulation of adherence properties is crucial to morphogenesis and wound healing, and deregulated adhesion has been implicated in skin diseases and cancer metastasis. Here, we describe zebrafish that are mutant in the serine protease inhibitor Hai1a (Spint1la), which display disrupted epidermal integrity. These defects are further enhanced upon combined loss of hai1a and its paralog hai1b. By applying in vivo imaging, we demonstrate that Hai1-deficient keratinocytes acquire mesenchymal-like characteristics, lose contact with each other, and become mobile and more susceptible to apoptosis. In addition, inflammation of the mutant skin is evident, although not causative of the epidermal defects. Only later, the epidermis exhibits enhanced cell proliferation. The defects of hai1 mutants can be phenocopied by overexpression and can be fully rescued by simultaneous inactivation of the serine protease Matriptase1a (St14a), indicating that Hai1 promotes epithelial integrity by inhibiting Matriptase1a. By contrast, Hepatocyte growth factor (Hgf), a well-known promoter of epithelial-mesenchymal transitions and a prime target of Matriptase1 activity, plays no major role. Our work provides direct genetic evidence for antagonistic in vivo roles of Hai1 and Matriptase1a to regulate skin homeostasis and remodeling.
A new Formal Concept Analysis based learning approach to Ontology building

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a concept clustering approach that has been widely applied in ontology learning. In our work, we present an innovative approach to generating information context from a tentative domain specified scientific corpus and mapping a concept lattice to a formal ontology. The application of the proposed approach to Semantic Web search demonstrates this automatically constructed ontology can provide a semantic way to expand users’ query context, which can complement a conventional search engine.
Roles for Receptors, Pheromones, G Proteins, and Mating Type Genes During Sexual Reproduction in Neurospora crassa

Here we characterize the relationship between the PRE-2 pheromone receptor and its ligand, CCG-4, and the general requirements for receptors, pheromones, G proteins, and mating type genes during fusion of opposite mating-type cells and sexual sporulation in the multicellular fungus Neurospora crassa. PRE-2 is highly expressed in mat a cells and is localized in male and female reproductive structures. Δpre-2 mat a females do not respond chemotropically to mat A males (conidia) or form mature fruiting bodies (perithecia) or meiotic progeny (ascospores). Strains with swapped identity due to heterologous expression of pre-2 or ccg-4 behave normally in crosses with opposite mating-type strains. Coexpression of pre-2 and ccg-4 in the mat A background leads to self-attraction and development of barren perithecia without ascospores. Further perithecial development is achieved by inactivation of Sad-1, a gene required for meiotic gene silencing. Findings from studies involving forced heterokaryons of opposite mating-type strains show that presence of one receptor and its compatible pheromone is necessary and sufficient for perithecial development and ascospore production. Taken together, the results demonstrate that although receptors and pheromones control sexual identity, the mating-type genes (mat A and mat a) must be in two different nuclei to allow meiosis and sexual sporulation to occur.
Cost-effectiveness of tissue plasminogen activator for acute ischemic stroke.

Dates to which data relate Effectiveness and resource use data were extracted from NINDS rt-PA Stroke Trial conducted between January 1991 and October 1994, the results of which were published in 1995. Clinical probabilities relating to the epidemiological course of events were obtained from studies published between 1982 and 1997. The utility values related to different discharge states were based on studies published in 1994 and 1995. The cost data were extracted from studies published between 1991 and 1996. The fiscal year was 1996.
Scalable IP lookup for programmable routers

Continuing growth in optical link speeds places increasing demands on the performance of Internet routers, while deployment of embedded and distributed network services imposes new demands for flexibility and programmability. IP address lookup has become a significant performance bottleneck for the highest performance routers. Amid the vast array of academic and commercial solutions to the problem, few achieve a favorable balance of performance, efficiency, and cost. New commercial products utilize content addressable memory (CAM) devices to achieve high lookup speeds at an exorbitantly high hardware cost with limited flexibility. In contrast, this paper describes an efficient, scalable lookup engine design, able to achieve high performance with the use of a small portion of a reconfigurable logic device and a commodity random access memory (RAM) device. The Fast Internet Protocol Lookup (FIPL) engine is an implementation of Eatherton and Dittia's previously unpublished Tree Bitmap algorithm (1998) targeted to an open-platform research router. FIPL can be scaled to achieve guaranteed worst-case performance of over 9 million lookups per second with a single SRAM operating at the fairly modest clock speed of 100 MHz. Experimental evaluation of FIPL throughput, latency, and update performance is provided using a sample routing table from Mae West.
Base Rates, Representativeness, and the Logic of Conversation: The Contextual Relevance of “Irrelevant” Information

According to the cooperative principle of conversation that governs social discourse in everyday life, listeners expect speakers to be relevant, truthful, and informative. In studies on judgmental biases, researchers frequently violate this principle by presenting information that is neither informative nor relevant in a communicative context that suggests otherwise. However, subjects have no reason to doubt the relevance of the presented information and try to make sense of it, as they would be expected to do in everyday life. In Experiment 1, the applicability of the cooperative principle was varied to explore the impact of conversational principles on the apparent overreliance of individuals on nondiagnostic person information at the expense of base-rate information. Nondiagnostic person information was presented either as a statement written by a psychologist or as a random sample of information drawn by a computer. As predicted, subjects relied on the personality information rather than on base-rate .
Low-Complexity Modem Design for GFDM

Due to its attractive properties, generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) is recently being discussed as a candidate waveform for the fifth generation of wireless communication systems (5G). GFDM is introduced as a generalized form of the widely used orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation scheme and since it uses only one cyclic prefix (CP) for a group of symbols rather than a CP per symbol, it is more bandwidth efficient than OFDM. In this paper, we propose novel modem structures for GFDM by taking advantage of the particular structure in the modulation matrix. Our proposed transmitter is based on modulation matrix sparsification through application of fast Fourier transform (FFT) to reduce the implementation complexity. A unified demodulator structure for matched filter (MF), zero forcing (ZF), and minimum mean square error (MMSE) receivers is also derived. The proposed demodulation techniques harness the special block circulant property of the matrices involved in the demodulation stage to reduce the computational cost of the system implementation. We have derived the closed forms for the ZF and MMSE receiver filters. Additionally, our algorithms do not incur any performance loss as they maintain the optimal performance. The computational costs of our proposed techniques are analyzed in detail and are compared with the existing solutions that are known to have the lowest complexity. It is shown that through application of our structures a substantial amount of computational complexity reduction can be achieved.
Unipolar depression does not moderate responses to the Sweet Taste Test

Background: The Sweet Taste Test (STT) measures hedonic responses to sweet tastes and has been linked to both alcoholism and to a family history of alcoholism. However, STT response profiles in unipolar major depressive disorder (MDD), a disorder characterized by anhedonia, have been minimally investigated. Methods: Twelve adults with and 15 adults without MDD participated in two identical STT assessments separated by approximately 12 weeks. Between assessments, MDD outpatients received Behavioral Activation Therapy for Depression, a psychotherapy modality designed to increase engagement with rewarding stimuli and reduce avoidance behaviors. Primary‐dependent measures included sensitivity to sucrose, hedonic response to sucrose, and designation as a Sweet‐Liker or Sweet‐Disliker. Results: A total of 75% of adults with MDD were treatment responders. There were no significant differences in STT response profiles between groups overall or at either timepoint. Furthermore, STT profiles of MDD participants did not differ after psychotherapy, relative to baseline. Conclusions: Findings suggest that although anhedonia is a symptom of MDD, the disorder is not characterized by altered responses to sweet tastes. Implications and future directions are discussed. Depression and Anxiety, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
T‐cell diversification reflects antigen selection in the blood of patients on immune checkpoint inhibition and may be exploited as liquid biopsy biomarker

Cancer immunotherapy with antibodies targeting immune checkpoints, such as programmed cell death protein 1 (PD‐1), shows encouraging results, but reliable biomarkers predicting response to this costly and potentially toxic treatment approach are still lacking. To explore an immune signature predictive for response, we performed liquid biopsy immunoprofiling in 18 cancer patients undergoing PD‐1 inhibition before and shortly after initiation of treatment by multicolor flow cytometry and next‐generation T‐ and B‐cell immunosequencing (TCRß/IGH). Findings were correlated with clinical outcomes. We found almost complete saturation of surface PD‐1 on all T‐cell subsets after the first dose of the antibody. Both T‐ and B‐cell compartments quantitatively expanded during treatment. These expansions were mainly driven by an increase in the activated T‐cell compartments, as well as of naïve B‐ and plasma cells. Deep immunosequencing revealed a clear diversification pattern of the clonal T‐cell space indicative of antigenic selection in 47% of patients, while the remaining patients showed stable repertoires. 43% of the patients with a diversification pattern showed disease control in response to the PD‐1 inhibitor. No disease stabilizations were observed without clonal T‐cell space diversification. Our data show for the first time a clear impact of PD‐1 targeting not only on circulating T‐cells, but also on B‐lineage cells, shedding light on the complexity of the anti‐tumor immune response. Liquid biopsy T‐cell next‐generation immunosequencing should be prospectively evaluated as part of a composite response prediction biomarker panel in the context of clinical studies.
Finding Robust Itemsets under Subsampling

Mining frequent patterns is plagued by the problem of pattern explosion making pattern reduction techniques a key challenge in pattern mining. In this paper we propose a novel theoretical framework for pattern reduction. We do this by measuring the robustness of a property of an item set such as closed ness or non-derivability. The robustness of a property is the probability that this property holds on random subsets of the original data. We study four properties: closed, free, non-derivable and totally shattered item sets, demonstrating how we can compute the robustness analytically without actually sampling the data. Our concept of robustness has many advantages: Unlike statistical approaches for reducing patterns, we do not assume a null hypothesis or any noise model and the patterns reported are simply a subset of all patterns with this property as opposed to approximate patterns for which the property does not really hold. If the underlying property is monotonic, then the measure is also monotonic, allowing us to efficiently mine robust item sets. We further derive a parameter-free technique for ranking item sets that can be used for top-k approaches. Our experiments demonstrate that we can successfully use the robustness measure to reduce the number of patterns and that ranking yields interesting itemsets.
In Vitro Trypanocidal Activity of Antibodies to Bacterially Expressed Trypanosoma brucei Tubulin

Background There are only four drugs for treating African trypanosomiasis, a devastating disease in sub-Saharan Africa. With slow discovery of better drugs, vaccination is viewed as the best method of control. We previously showed that antibodies to native Trypanosoma brucei brucei tubulin inhibit the growth of trypanosomes in culture. Here, we aimed to determine the effect of antibodies to bacterially expressed trypanosome tubulin on T. brucei brucei growth. Methods T. brucei brucei alpha and beta tubulin genes were individually expressed in Escherichia coli under the tryptophan promoter. Monoclonal tubulin antibodies reacted specifically with the expressed tubulins with no cross-reaction with the opposite tubulin. Rabbits were immunized with 450µg each of the concentrated recombinant tubulin, and production of antibodies assessed by ELISA and Western blotting. The effect of polyclonal antibodies on trypanosome growth was determined by culturing bloodstream T. brucei brucei in up to 25% of antisera. Results Low antisera dilutions (25%) from the immunized rabbits inhibited trypanosome growth. The most cytotoxic antisera were from one rabbit immunized with a mixture of both alpha and beta tubulins. However, the result was not reproduced in other rabbits and there was no apparent effect on growth at higher antisera dilutions. Conclusion Antibodies to bacterially expressed trypanosome tubulin are not effective at killing cultured bloodstream trypanosomes.