Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A psychovisual image Quality Metric based on multi-scale Structure Similarity

In this paper, a universal full-reference (FR) image quality metric based on Edge structure similarity (QMESS) is proposed using spatial position displacement degree of wavelet transform modulus maxima between reference image and distorted image in multi-resolution domain. Firstly, we decompose images in wavelet domain. The structure error between reference images and distorted images is computed based on the statistics of spatial position error of local modulus maxima in wavelet domain. At the same time, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is adopted to evaluate the stochastic noise in images. Finally, the low frequency resolution layer distortion is evaluated by means of the mutual information and the luminance distortion. The three components are combined for the whole visual distortion measurement. From the experiment results, the proposed metric is much better than conventional PSNR method and the state-of-the-art SSIM approach in terms of the performance relative to subjective judgment. Comparing to the excellent VIF method, the proposed method performs better in individual distortions and obtains similar results on cross-distortion type.
Disruption of the Candida albicans TPS1Gene Encoding Trehalose-6-Phosphate Synthase Impairs Formation of Hyphae and Decreases Infectivity

ABSTRACT The TPS1 gene from Candida albicans, which encodes trehalose-6-phosphate synthase, has been cloned by functional complementation of a tps1 mutant from Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In contrast with the wild-type strain, the doubletps1/tps1 disruptant did not accumulate trehalose at stationary phase or after heat shock. Growth of thetps1/tps1 disruptant at 30°C was indistinguishable from that of the wild type. However, at 42°C it did not grow on glucose or fructose but grew normally on galactose or glycerol. At 37°C, the yeast-hypha transition in the mutant in glucose-calf serum medium did not occur. During growth at 42°C, the mutant did not form hyphae in galactose or in glycerol. Some of the growth defects observed may be traced to an unbalanced sugar metabolism that reduces the cellular content of ATP. Mice inoculated with 106 CFU of thetps1/tps1 mutant did not show visible symptoms of infection 16 days after inoculation, while those similarly inoculated with wild-type cells were dead 12 days after inoculation.
Practical and Secure Outsourcing of Matrix Computations to the Cloud

Cloud computing enables a cost effective outsourcing of storage and resource-intensive computations. Secure outsourcing of data and computation is challenging in this emerging computing model. In particular, outsourcing of sensitive computations should be assured in terms of input privacy and cheating detection. Existing approaches use either expensive homomorphic encryption which is not yet efficient enough for practical applications or secure tamper-proof hardware that are expensive and not scalable. Works on devising a real-world framework enabling such secured outsourcing are still needed. In this paper, we propose practical protocols for secure outsourcing of matrix algebra using randomization and without using cryptography. We address the issues of a real deployment in terms of distributed, reliable and secure storage, secure data transfer and computation on multiple, non-colluding clouds. We present the architecture and the APIs of our framework as well as some experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Inverse optimal adaptive control for attitude tracking of spacecraft

The attitude tracking control problem of a rigid spacecraft with external disturbances and an uncertain inertia matrix is addressed using the adaptive control method. The adaptive control laws proposed in this paper are optimal with respect to a family of cost functionals. This is achieved by the inverse optimality approach, without solving the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs partial differential (HJIPD) equation directly. The design of the optimal adaptive controllers is separated into two stages by means of integrator backstepping, and a control Lyapunov argument is constructed to show that the inverse optimal adaptive controllers achieve H/sub /spl infin// disturbance attenuation with respect to external disturbances and global asymptotic convergence of tracking errors to zero for disturbances with bounded energy. The convergence of adaptive parameters is also analyzed in terms of invariant manifold. Numerical simulations illustrate the performance of the proposed control algorithms.
The DURAbility of Basal versus Lispro mix 75/25 insulin Efficacy (DURABLE) Trial

OBJECTIVE This study compared the durability of glycemic control of twice-daily insulin lispro mix 75/25 (LM75/25: 75% insulin lispro protamine suspension/25% lispro) and once-daily insulin glargine, added to oral antihyperglycemic drugs in type 2 diabetes patients. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS During the initiation phase, patients were randomized to LM75/25 or glargine. After 6 months, patients with A1C ≤7.0% advanced to the maintenance phase for ≤24 months. The primary objective was the between-group comparison of duration of maintaining the A1C goal. RESULTS Of 900 patients receiving LM75/25 and 918 patients receiving glargine who completed initiation, 473 and 419, respectively, had A1C ≤7.0% and continued into maintenance. Baseline characteristics except age were similar in this group. Median time of maintaining the A1C goal was 16.8 months for LM75/25 (95% CI 14.0–19.7) and 14.4 months for glargine (95% CI 13.4–16.8; P = 0.040). A1C goal was maintained in 202 LM75/25-treated patients (43%) and in 147 glargine-treated patients (35%; P = 0.006). No differences were observed in overall, nocturnal, or severe hypoglycemia. LM75/25 patients had higher total daily insulin dose (0.45 ± 0.21 vs. 0.37 ± 0.21 units/kg/day) and more weight gain (5.4 ± 5.8 vs. 3.7 ± 5.6 kg) from baseline. Patients taking LM75/25 and glargine with lower baseline A1C levels were more likely to maintain the A1C goal (P = 0.043 and P < 0.001, respectively). CONCLUSIONS A modestly longer durability of glycemic control was achieved with LM75/25 compared with glargine. Patients with lower baseline A1C levels were more likely to maintain the goal, supporting the concept of earlier insulin initiation.
Towards automated nanomanipulation of nano-bio-entities using real-time molecular force feedback information

Bovine insulin molecular aggregates, a nano-scale bio-entity, has been manipulated using P-NUVO (programmable nanomanipulation using vibration-mode operation AFM) method. This method uses the amplitude of an AFM cantileverpsilas vibration as real-time feedback information to detect the boundary of the nano-entities under manipulation. This amplitude signal changes as a function of the distance between the probe-tip and a nano-entity due to their inter-molecular force interactions. The AFM tippsilas manipulating path could also be planned according to the manipulation task. Different configuration of bio-nano-entities, i.e., sphere and rod configurations were manipulated. Due to the difficulties of the sample preparation process, the real-time feedback information did not work as well as for other nano-entities such as carbon nanotubes.
Development and simulation application of a dynamic speed dynamic signal strategy for arterial traffic management

A traffic management with dynamic speed guidance and dynamic signal timing (DSDS) is presented to optimize the arterial coordinated signal control system. Details are discussed including VMS positioning, guided speed calculation, signal timing adjustment and DSDS integration model This strategy provides the vehicles with a possibility of passing the intersections without stop through guiding them with necessary speed dynamically in the link segment and adjusting the signal timing of the preceding intersection according to vehicle detected data Thus the stopped delay of traffic flow can be impressively decreased VISSIM, a microscopic simulator is applied to develop simulation architecture as a test tool of this strategy. As a case study, Cao'an Highway, a suburban highway in Shanghai, is taken for simulation and evaluation. The preliminary assessment results show that: the improvement of the delay and number of stops is obvious and robust considering the driver behavior.
Data Gathering in Sensor Networks ∗

We consider the problem of gathering data from an energy-constrained, multi-hop sensor network to a single location. Specifically, we aim to balance the total amount of data received from the network against a requirement of fairness between the sensor. The task is formulated as two kinds of linear programs (flow and packing). In the packing problem form, it can be efficiently approximated.
Numerical Examination of the Stability of an Exact Two-dimensional Solution for Flux Pile-up Magnetic Reconnection

The Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) and tearing instabilities are likely to be important for the process of fast magnetic reconnection that is believed to explain the observed explosive energy release in solar flares. Theoretical studies of the instabilities, however, typically invoke simplified initial magnetic and velocity fields that are not solutions of the governing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations. In the present study, the stability of a reconnecting current sheet is examined using a class of exact global MHD solutions for steady state incompressible magnetic reconnection, discovered by Craig & Henton. Numerical simulation indicates that the outflow solutions where the current sheet is formed by strong shearing flows are subject to the KH instability. The inflow solutions where the current sheet is formed by a fast and weakly sheared inflow are shown to be tearing unstable. Although the observed instability of the solutions can be interpreted qualitatively by applying standard linear results for the KH and tearing instabilities, the magnetic field and plasma flow, specified by the Craig-Henton solution, lead to the stabilization of the current sheet in some cases. The sensitivity of the instability growth rate to the global geometry of magnetic reconnection may help in solving the trigger problem in solar flare research.
The effect of stress on genome regulation and structure.

BACKGROUND Stresses exert evolutionary pressures on all organisms, which have developed sophisticated responses to cope and survive. These responses involve cellular physiology, gene regulation and genome remodelling. SCOPE In this review, the effects of stress on genomes and the connected responses are considered. Recent developments in our understanding of epigenetic genome regulation, including the role of RNA interference (RNAi), suggest a function for this in stress initiation and response. We review our knowledge of how different stresses, tissue culture, pathogen attack, abiotic stress, and hybridization, affect genomes. Using allopolyploid hybridization as an example, we examine mechanisms that may mediate genomic responses, focusing on RNAi-mediated perturbations. CONCLUSIONS A common response to stresses may be the relaxation of epigenetic regulation, leading to activation of suppressed sequences and secondary effects as regulatory systems attempt to re-establish genomic order.
Complex Question Answering: Unsupervised Learning Approaches and Experiments

Complex questions that require inferencing and synthesizing information from multiple documents can be seen as a kind of topic-oriented, informative multi-document summarization where the goal is to produce a single text as a compressed version of a set of documents with a minimum loss of relevant information. In this paper, we experiment with one empirical method and two unsupervised statistical machine learning techniques: K-means and Expectation Maximization (EM), for computing relative importance of the sentences. We compare the results of these approaches. Our experiments show that the empirical approach outperforms the other two techniques and EM performs better than K-means. However, the performance of these approaches depends entirely on the feature set used and the weighting of these features. In order to measure the importance and relevance to the user query we extract different kinds of features (i.e. lexical, lexical semantic, cosine similarity, basic element, tree kernel based syntactic and shallow-semantic) for each of the document sentences. We use a local search technique to learn the weights of the features. To the best of our knowledge, no study has used tree kernel functions to encode syntactic/semantic information for more complex tasks such as computing the relatedness between the query sentences and the document sentences in order to generate query-focused summaries (or answers to complex questions). For each of our methods of generating summaries (i.e. empirical, K-means and EM) we show the effects of syntactic and shallow-semantic features over the bag-of-words (BOW) features.
N-BEB: New backoff algorithm for IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol

IEEE 802.11 standard primarily utilizes Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) which is based on carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). IN DCF, when a collision occurs, then a backoff algorithm will take place to randomize medium access for the nodes. The default backoff mechanism used in 802.11 is the binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm. In this paper, we analyze the behavior of various backoff algorithms used in IEEE802.11 standard: BEB, I-BEB, and E-BEB, then we propose the New Binary Exponential Backoff (N-BEB) algorithm to improve channel access fairness while preserving the channel throughput. Our N-BEB algorithm improves the selection process of the contention window CW, based on the number of successful and unsuccessful transmissions. Simulation results confirm fairness improvement, power consumption enhancement, reduction of dropped packets and high delivery ratio for proposed protocol over BEB, I-BEB, and E-BEB protocols.
THE PREPARATION OF RELATIVELY PURE BACTERIOPHAGE

The method described above, based on the electrophoretic migration of bacteriophage particles into an agar gel and their subsequent re-suspension in a suitable medium, has the following advantages: It is simple and can be readily carried out on a comparatively large scale by merely inserting additional units between the same electrode cups. It requires but one extraction and the resulting phage suspension is strongly lytic, an average sample being capable of completely lysing susceptible bacteria at a dilution of 10–16. The suspension contains no proteins demonstrable by the biuret, alcohol, xanthoproteic, Millon or Hopkins-Cole reactions and yields but 0.044 mg. N/cc. directly attributable to the phage. Each corpuscle contains no more nitrogen than a single molecule of protein. In addition the method is applicable to determinations of the electric charge carried by biologically active substances of small dimensions, e.g., phage, toxins, and perhaps some viruses. It offers as well a possible means of purification of these substances. The purified bacteriophage obtained by such a procedure or similar ones is relatively unstable. Work now in progress indicates that it does not possess nearly the resistance to chemical agents, drying, etc., that non-purified phage displays. It is suggested that experiments designed to test the therapeutic value of bacteriophage be conducted, when possible, with purified suspensions thereby avoiding any possibility of obscure non-specific reactions due to other constituents of the lysates.
Research and Implementation on Machine Translation System with Online Corpora Extraction Technology

Bilingual parallel sentence pairs are important resources of machine translation. Due to the limitation of obtaining ways, sentence levelled parallel corpora are not only limited in quantity, but they also concentrate in specific field. So they are difficult to be adapted to genuine application requirements. This paper introduces a Web-based automatic acquisition system of bilingual parallel sentence pairs. The system integrates the advantages of current system and improves its key technologies. We proposes a URL naming method in automatic discovery bilingual network and improves the extraction technology of bilingual parallel sentence pairs. Experimental results show that the methods in this paper greatly improves recalling rate of candidate bilingual network discovery. Its recall rate of obtaining bilingual parallel sentence pairs is 93% as well as accuracy rate is 96%, which proves its effectiveness. In addition, this paper also studies bilingual parallel sentence pairs inside bilingual network and obtains some primary result. Multi-group experiments of statistical machine translation prove that our method can improve the performance of machine translation system so that it can play a part in practical application of online corpora.
Effectiveness of long-acting reversible contraception.

BACKGROUND The rate of unintended pregnancy in the United States is much higher than in other developed nations. Approximately half of unintended pregnancies are due to contraceptive failure, largely owing to inconsistent or incorrect use. METHODS We designed a large prospective cohort study to promote the use of long-acting reversible contraceptive methods as a means of reducing unintended pregnancies in our region. Participants were provided with reversible contraception of their choice at no cost. We compared the rate of failure of long-acting reversible contraception (intrauterine devices [IUDs] and implants) with other commonly prescribed contraceptive methods (oral contraceptive pills, transdermal patch, contraceptive vaginal ring, and depot medroxyprogesterone acetate [DMPA] injection) in the overall cohort and in groups stratified according to age (less than 21 years of age vs. 21 years or older). RESULTS Among the 7486 participants included in this analysis, we identified 334 unintended pregnancies. The contraceptive failure rate among participants using pills, patch, or ring was 4.55 per 100 participant-years, as compared with 0.27 among participants using long-acting reversible contraception (hazard ratio after adjustment for age, educational level, and history with respect to unintended pregnancy, 21.8; 95% confidence interval, 13.7 to 34.9). Among participants who used pills, patch, or ring, those who were less than 21 years of age had a risk of unintended pregnancy that was almost twice as high as the risk among older participants. Rates of unintended pregnancy were similarly low among participants using DMPA injection and those using an IUD or implant, regardless of age. CONCLUSIONS The effectiveness of long-acting reversible contraception is superior to that of contraceptive pills, patch, or ring and is not altered in adolescents and young women. (Funded by the Susan Thompson Buffet Foundation.).
Toward CCA-secure bidirectional proxy re-encryption without pairing nor random oracle

Proxy re-encryption, introduced by Blaze et al. in 1998, allows a proxy to transform a ciphertext computed under Alice's public key into one that can be opened under Bob's decryption key. An open problem of constructing (bidirectional or unidirectional) IND-PRE-CCA2 secure proxy re-encryption scheme in the standard model yet without pairings was left until now. In this paper, based on Hanaoka's efficient chosen ciphertext secure public key encryption under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption, we try to solve this open problem by presenting two new bidirectional proxy re-encryption schemes, which are restricted IND-PRE-CCA2 secure without pairing nor random oracle.
OptMem: Dark-silicon aware low latency hybrid memory design

In this article, we present a convex optimization model to design a three dimension (3D)stacked hybrid memory system to improve performance in the dark silicon era. Our convex model optimizes numbers and placement of static random access memory (SRAM) and spin-transfer torque magnetic random-access memory(STT-RAM) memories on the memory layer to exploit advantages of both technologies. Power consumption that is the main challenge in the dark silicon era is represented as a main constraint in this work and it is satisfied by the detailed optimization model in order to design a dark silicon aware 3D Chip-Multiprocessor (CMP). Experimental results show that the proposed architecture improves the energy consumption and performanceof the 3D CMPabout 25.8% and 12.9% on averagecompared to the Baseline memory design.
Accurate Synthesis and Design of Wideband and Inhomogeneous Inductive Waveguide Filters

In this paper, a new synthesis and design methodology is presented and applied for the fast and accurate design of inductive rectangular waveguide filters. By using this technique, the dimensions of both homogeneous and inhomogeneous filters can be successfully synthesized for almost any practical filter bandwidth, return loss, or filter order. This novel technique is based on a prototype with additional degrees of freedom, able to match the response of the different filter components in a wideband frequency range, and an elaborated design procedure that fully exploits this flexibility. During the design procedure, the prototype and the real structure are continuously aligned in order to have the same electromagnetic behavior and jointly evolve to obtain an equiripple response. Once the final prototype has been synthesized, excellent filter dimensions can be extracted that, in most cases, do not require further optimization. Examples will show the outstanding performance of the proposed design technique in terms of versatility, accuracy, and CPU time.
Vision-based Autonomous Control of a Quadrotor UAV using an Onboard RGB-D Camera and its Application to Haptic Teleoperation

Abstract In this paper we present the design of a platform for autonomous navigation of a quadrotor UAV based on RGB-D technology. The proposed platform can safely navigate in an unknown environment while self-stabilization is done relying only on its own sensor perception. We developed an estimation system based on the integration of IMU and RGB-D measurements in order to estimate the velocity of the quadrotor in its body frame. Experimental tests conducted as teleoperation experiments show the effectiveness of our approach in an unstructured environment.
PGPIPN, a Therapeutic Hexapeptide, Suppressed Human Ovarian Cancer Growth by Targeting BCL2

Bioactive peptides, either derived from nature resources or synthesized by rational design, have been demonstrated potential for therapeutic agents against numerous human diseases, including cancer. However, the mechanism of therapeutic peptides against cancer has not been well elucidated. Here we show that PGPIPN, a hexapeptide derived from bovine β-casein, inhibited the proliferation of human ovarian cancer cells line SKOV3 as well as the primary ovarian cancer cells in vitro. Consistently, PGPIPIN also decreased tumor growth rate in xenograft ovarian cancer model mice in a dose-dependent manner. Further study demonstrated that the anti-tumor effect of PGPIPN is partially through promoting cell apoptosis by inhibiting BCL2 pathway. Thus, our study suggests that PGPIPN is a potential therapeutic agent for the treatment of ovarian cancer or other types of cancer.
Heterelogous Expression of Plant Genes

Heterologous expression allows the production of plant proteins in an organism which is simpler than the natural source. This technology is widely used for large-scale purification of plant proteins from microorganisms for biochemical and biophysical analyses. Additionally expression in well-defined model organisms provides insights into the functions of proteins in complex pathways. The present review gives an overview of recombinant plant protein production methods using bacteria, yeast, insect cells, and Xenopus laevis oocytes and discusses the advantages of each system for functional studies and protein characterization.