Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Value(s) for Whom? Creating Value(s) for Stakeholders

While mankind in the 21st century faces several sustainability challenges, many business practices remain on a nonsustainable pathway. At the same time, many scholars as well as managers consider maximizing shareholder wealth as the only business imperative. We argue that this situation calls for revisioning—that is, reorienting and redefining—what is meant by value creation. This revisioning requires a considerable broadening of our understanding about the purposes and functioning of businesses. Thus, we ask one central question: Value(s) for whom? In this article, we derive and discuss three phases of the academic debate on stakeholders and value creation. We argue that in today’s third phase, the notion of collective value frames the debate. To enable transformations toward creating collective value, embedded relations with stakeholders are of central relevance. In a nutshell, the answer to our question is the following: Creating value(s) for stakeholders.
Effects of iodinated contrast agent, xylocaine and gadolinium concentration on the signal emitted in magnetic resonance arthrography: a samples study*

Objective To investigate the effects of dilution of paramagnetic contrast agent with iodinated contrast and xylocaine on the signal intensity during magnetic resonance arthrography, and to improve the paramagnetic contrast agent concentration utilized in this imaging modality. Materials and Methods Samples specially prepared for the study with three different concentrations of paramagnetic contrast agent diluted in saline, iodinated contrast agent and xylocaine were imaged with fast spin echo T1-weighted sequences with fat saturation. The samples were placed into flasks and graphical analysis of the signal intensity was performed as a function of the paramagnetic contrast concentration. Results As compared with samples of equal concentrations diluted only with saline, the authors have observed an average signal intensity decrease of 20.67% for iodinated contrast agent, and of 28.34% for xylocaine. However, the increased gadolinium concentration in the samples caused decrease in signal intensity with all the dilutions. Conclusion Minimizing the use of iodinated contrast media and xylocaine and/or the use of a gadolinium concentration of 2.5 mmol/L diluted in saline will improve the sensitivity of magnetic resonance arthrography.
GEOMORPHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF MT. ERCIYES USING BY DTM AND REMOTE SENSING TECHNOLOGIES

Satellite data and Digital Terrain Models (DTM), complemented by field structural analysis permit a new understanding of relations between tectonics and volcanism. A DTM of Mt. Erciyes (3917 m.) is presented; it has 10m vertical and horizontal resolutions, respectively, and covers an area of about 3800 km2. Landsat ETM data were used to identification of morphological features of Erciyes Stratovolcano Complex (ESVC). This observations and analysis are able to improved by measure, monitor and analysis forms of terrain using by satellite and DTM data. Using both DTM and remote sensing together open new dimension on earthsciences and investigation morphological features of mountains and volcanoes. Perspective view of Mt. Erciyes allowed both recognition and location of the main morphological and volcanotectonic features of the valcano. A slope, aspect maps have been generated from the DTM. Geomorphological features of Mt. Erciyes including glaciations of ESVC and lineaments of surroundings area are discussed by remote sensing technologies and DTM both indepentedly and together in this paper 1 Corresponding Author
Sensor Pattern Noise Estimation Using Probabilistically Estimated RAW Values

Photo response nonuniformity (PRNU) is consider as reliable camera fingerprint for identifying source of a digital images. Digital cameras use various image processing operations to map linear color measurements (raw data) into nonlinear narrow gamut image. This nonlinear transformation affects estimation of PRNU. To undo the effect of nonlinear transformation, in this letter, we propose to estimate PRNU from probabilistically obtained raw values. Since not all cameras provide raw values as their output, we propose to compute estimate of raw values from the JPEG images using probabilistic color derendering procedure. The estimated raw values are modeled as a Poisson process and then maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is used for PRNU estimation. The experimental results show that, the digital camera identification using our proposed PRNU estimate is better than using other popular PRNU estimate.
Robust Multiclass Ensemble Classifiers via Symmetric Functions

We introduce a generalization to the multiclass framework of a previous approach to boosting by constructing symmetric functions. This approach contrasts with the usual AdaBoost-type boosting algorithms using linear separators. Indeed, multiclass induction does not necessitate combination tricks such as those for linear separators, and it achieves some novel agnostic learning properties, as well as significant malicious noise tolerance. Experiments on a large testbed against AdaBoost and C4.5 display the efficiency of the approach proned
Vertical ray shooting and computing depth orders of fat objects

We present new results for three problems dealing with a set P of n convex constant-complexity fat polyhedra in 3-space. (i) We describe a data structure for vertical ray shooting in P that has O (log 2 n ) query time and uses O ( n log 2 n ) storage. (ii) We give an algorithm to compute in O ( n log 3 n ) time a depth order on P if it exists. (iii) We give an algorithm to verify in O ( n log 3 n ) time whether a given order on P is a valid depth order. All three results improve on previous results.
Evaluation of the immune response to RTS,S/AS01 and RTS,S/AS02 adjuvanted vaccines

This phase II, randomized, double-blind study evaluated the immunogenicity of RTS,S vaccines containing Adjuvant System AS01 or AS02 as compared with non-adjuvanted RTS,S in healthy, malaria-naïve adults (NCT00443131). Thirty-six subjects were randomized (1:1:1) to receive RTS,S/AS01, RTS,S/AS02, or RTS,S/saline at months 0, 1, and 2. Antibody responses to Plasmodium falciparum circumsporozoite (CS) and hepatitis B surface (HBs) antigens were assessed and cell-mediated immune responses evaluated by flow cytometry using intracellular cytokine staining on peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Anti-CS antibody avidity was also characterized. Safety and reactogenicity after each vaccine dose were monitored. One month after the third vaccine dose, RTS,S/AS01 (160.3 EU/mL [95%CI: 114.1–225.4]) and RTS,S/AS02 (77.4 EU/mL (95%CI: 47.3–126.7)) recipients had significantly higher anti-CS antibody geometric mean titers (GMTs) than recipients of RTS,S/saline (12.2 EU/mL (95%CI: 4.8–30.7); P < 0.0001 and P = 0.0011, respectively). The anti-CS antibody GMT was significantly higher with RTS,S/AS01 than with RTS,S/AS02 (P = 0.0135). Anti-CS antibody avidity was in the same range in all groups. CS- and HBs-specific CD4+ T cell responses were greater for both RTS,S/AS groups than for the RTS,S/saline group. Reactogenicity was in general higher for RTS,S/AS compared with RTS,S/saline. Most grade 3 solicited adverse events (AEs) were of short duration and grade 3 solicited general AEs were infrequent in the 3 groups. No serious adverse events were reported. In conclusion, in comparison with non-adjuvanted RTS,S, both RTS,S/AS vaccines exhibited better CS-specific immune responses. The anti-CS antibody response was significantly higher with RTS,S/AS01 than with RTS,S/AS02. The adjuvanted vaccines had acceptable safety profiles.
Q-FISH Measurement of Hepatocyte Telomere Lengths in Donor Liver and Graft after Pediatric Living-Donor Liver Transplantation: Donor Age Affects Telomere Length Sustainability

Along with the increasing need for living-donor liver transplantation (LDLT), the issue of organ shortage has become a serious problem. Therefore, the use of organs from elderly donors has been increasing. While the short-term results of LDLT have greatly improved, problems affecting the long-term outcome of transplant patients remain unsolved. Furthermore, since contradictory data have been reported with regard to the relationship between donor age and LT/LDLT outcome, the question of whether the use of elderly donors influences the long-term outcome of a graft after LT/LDLT remains unsettled. To address whether hepatocyte telomere length reflects the outcome of LDLT, we analyzed the telomere lengths of hepatocytes in informative biopsy samples from 12 paired donors and recipients (grafts) of pediatric LDLT more than 5 years after adult-to-child LDLT because of primary biliary atresia, using quantitative fluorescence in situ hybridization (Q-FISH). The telomere lengths in the paired samples showed a robust relationship between the donor and grafted hepatocytes (r = 0.765, p = 0.0038), demonstrating the feasibility of our Q-FISH method for cell-specific evaluation. While 8 pairs showed no significant difference between the telomere lengths for the donor and the recipient, the other 4 pairs showed significantly shorter telomeres in the recipient than in the donor. Multiple regression analysis revealed that the donors in the latter group were older than those in the former (p = 0.001). Despite the small number of subjects, this pilot study indicates that donor age is a crucial factor affecting telomere length sustainability in hepatocytes after pediatric LDLT, and that the telomeres in grafted livers may be elongated somewhat longer when the grafts are immunologically well controlled.
Hysteresis compensation and adaptive controller design for a piezoceramic actuator system in atomic force microscopy

This paper presents an indirect adaptive controller combined with hysteresis compensation to achieve high scanning performance of an atomic force microscopy (AFM) system. Dynamic model of a piezoceramic actuator system in AFM is derived and analyzed by using standard system identification method. The indirect adaptive controller is designed to achieve desired tracking performance as well as to deal with system parameters variation based on the identified model of the piezoceramic actuator system. A feedforward controller based on the Preisach model is proposed to compensate the nonlinear hysteresis effect. Experimental results indicate that the proposed controller can significantly improve the tracking control accuracy of the piezoceramic actuator as well as achieve high scanning performance of the AFM system. Maximum scanning error was reduced from 2 µm to 0.3 µm in comparison with proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controlled AFM.
A Framework of Recommendation System Based on Both Network Structure and Messages

The evolving of Internet technology allows people to communicate even they are far away from each other. More and more people share information and exchange their thoughts via the communities on the websites and become friends. A larger community usually attracts more users, therefore, how to enhance the development of a social network on the website is an important issue for the survival of a website. In this paper, we combine the social network features into the recommendation system. In addition to messages between nodes, the features of network structure are taken into consideration. Experimental results show that the recommendation accuracy of our method is higher than the existing method which is based on the message ratio.
DISCRETE ATOMIC COMPRESSION OF DIGITAL IMAGES: ALMOST LOSSLESS COMPRESSION

In this paper, we consider the problem of digital image compression with high requirements to the quality of the result. Obviously, lossless compression algorithms can be applied. Since lossy compression provides a higher compression ratio and, hence, higher memory savings than lossless compression, we propose to use lossy algorithms with settings that provide the smallest loss of quality. The subject matter of this paper is almost lossless compression of full color 24-bit digital images using the discrete atomic compression (DAC) that is an algorithm based on the discrete atomic transform. The goal is to investigate the compression ratio and the quality loss indicators such as uniform (U), root mean square (RMS) and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) metrics. We also study the distribution of the difference between pixels of the original image and the corresponding pixels of the reconstructed image. In this research, the classic test images and the classic aerial images are considered. U-metric, which is highly dependent on even minor local changes, is considered as the major metric of quality loss. We solve the following tasks: to evaluate memory savings and loss of quality for each test image. We use the methods of digital image processing, atomic function theory, and approximation theory. The computer program "Discrete Atomic Compression: User Kit" with the mode "Almost Lossless Compression" is used to obtain results of the DAC processing of test images. We obtain the following results: 1) the difference between the smallest and the largest loss of quality is minor; 2) loss of quality is quite stable and predictable; 3) the compression ratio depends on the smoothness of the color change (the smallest and the largest values are obtained when processing the test images with the largest and the smallest number of small details in the image, respectively); 4) DAC provides 59 percent of memory savings; 5) ZIP-compression of DAC-files, which contain images compressed by DAC, is efficient. Conclusions: 1) the almost lossless compression mode of DAC provides sufficiently stable values of the considered quality loss metrics; 2) DAC provides relatively high compression ratio; 3) there is a possibility of further optimization of the DAC algorithm; 4) further research and development of this algorithm are promising.
Localization and mobility edge for sparsely random potentials

In this paper we consider sparsely random potentials in 5 or more dimensional cubic lattice and exhibit localized and extended states. We identify also the mobility edge for a class of potentials going to infinity at infinity. Our treatment includes a large class of unperturbed selfadjoint opeartors commuting with the usual Laplacian on the lattice.
Enterovirus A71 DNA-Launched Infectious Clone as a Robust Reverse Genetic Tool

Enterovirus A71 (EV-A71) causes major outbreaks of hand, foot and mouth disease, and is occasionally associated with neurological complications and death in children. Reverse genetics is widely used in the field of virology for functional study of viral genes. For EV-A71, such tools are limited to clones that are transcriptionally controlled by T7/SP6 bacteriophage promoter. This is often time-consuming and expensive. Here, we describe the development of infectious plasmid DNA-based EV-A71 clones, for which EV-A71 genome expression is under transcriptional control by the CMV-intermediate early promoter and SV40 transcriptional-termination signal. Transfection of this EV-A71 infectious DNA produces good virus yield similar to in vitro-transcribed EV-A71 infectious RNA, 6.4 and 5.8 log10PFU/ml, respectively. Infectious plasmid with enhanced green fluorescence protein and Nano luciferase reporter genes also produced good virus titers, with 4.3 and 5.0 log10 PFU/ml, respectively. Another infectious plasmid with both CMV and T7 promoters was also developed for easy manipulation of in vitro transcription or direct plasmid transfection. Transfection with either dual-promoter infectious plasmid DNA or infectious RNA derived from this dual-promoter clone produced infectious viral particles. Incorporation of hepatitis delta virus ribozyme, which yields precise 3’ ends of the DNA-launched EV-A71 genomic transcripts, increased infectious viral production. In contrast, the incorporation of hammerhead ribozyme in the DNA-launched EV-A71 resulted in lower virus yield, but improved the virus titers for T7 promoter-derived infectious RNA. This study describes rapid and robust reverse genetic tools for EV-A71.
Automatic cartridge case image mosaic using SIFT and graph transformation matching

Characteristic marks on the cartridge can be viewed as a “fingerprint” for identification of a firearm. Sometimes, however, not all information can be obtained from just one image due to the limitations of microscope and the unsmoothed specimen surface in the cartridge case image detection. Image mosaic that refers to the combination of two or more images into a single composite image is precisely to solve this problem. This paper proposes a new cartridge case image mosaic approach by using automatic image registration and fusion techniques. In the registration stage, the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) is employed to obtain initial matching. Then the graph transformation matching (GTM) is used to remove incorrect matches effectively. In the fusion stage, histogram matching is applied to smooth seams which exist in the stitched image. Finally, a stitched image is obtained, which contains more information than each of the two original images. Experimental results demonstrate for cartridge case image mosaic in both subjective and objective evaluations.
Globally consistent depth labeling of 4D light fields

We present a novel paradigm to deal with depth reconstruction from 4D light fields in a variational framework. Taking into account the special structure of light field data, we reformulate the problem of stereo matching to a constrained labeling problem on epipolar plane images, which can be thought of as vertical and horizontal 2D cuts through the field. This alternative formulation allows to estimate accurate depth values even for specular surfaces, while simultaneously taking into account global visibility constraints in order to obtain consistent depth maps for all views. The resulting optimization problems are solved with state-of-the-art convex relaxation techniques. We test our algorithm on a number of synthetic and real-world examples captured with a light field gantry and a plenoptic camera, and compare to ground truth where available. All data sets as well as source code are provided online for additional evaluation.
An Anti-Wnt-2 Monoclonal Antibody Induces Apoptosis in Malignant Melanoma Cells and Inhibits Tumor Growth

Activation of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway has been associated with human cancers. To test whether Wnt-2 signal is a survival factor in human melanoma cells and thus represents a potential therapeutic target, we investigated the effects of inhibition of Wnt-2 signaling in human melanoma cell lines. We have developed a novel monoclonal antibody against the NH2 terminus of the human Wnt-2 ligand that induces apoptosis in human melanoma cells overexpressing Wnt-2. Whereas incubation of this antibody with normal cells lacking Wnt-2 expression does not induce apoptosis, Wnt-2 signaling blockade by the ligand-binding antibody is confirmed by down-regulation of Dishevelled and β-catenin. Wnt-2 small interfering RNA treatment in these cells yielded similar apoptotic effects and downstream changes. Down-regulation of an inhibitor of apoptosis family protein, survivin, was observed in both the Wnt-2 antibody-treated and small interfering RNA-treated melanoma cell lines, suggesting that the antibody induces apoptosis by inactivating survivin. In an in vivo study, this monoclonal anti-Wnt-2 antibody suppresses tumor growth in a xenograft model. These findings suggest that the anti-Wnt-2 monoclonal antibody may be useful for the treatment of patients with malignant melanoma.
Dynamic Routing Protocols and Energy Efficient Communication in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper examines ad hoc networks in terms of their self-organization, dynamic multi-hop routing protocols and limited energy supply. First, the concept of a self-organized network is introduced and explained. Next, the topic of routing protocols addresses the necessity of efficient, scalable, and adaptive routing protocols for MANETs. It details the three fundamental routing protocols approaches: proactive, reactive, and hybrid. Five useful protocols are explained and evaluated in terms of their overall performance. The third topic motivates the need for energy efficient communication in ad hoc networks. Network-layer and MAC-layer power-saving protocols are the focus of this section, with four such protocols investigated.
Estimate and serve: scheduling soft real-time packets for delay sensitive media applications on the internet

This paper presents a new scheduling algorithm for real time network delivery of packets over Diffserv networks for delay sensitive applications. We name the networks that support this algorithm as Estimated Service (Estserv) networks. These networks, for real time packets, estimate the probability of the packet meeting its deadline and schedule it according to this estimation. This paper validates, given this estimation mechanism, the better performance of the scheduling algorithm over traditional solutions. We show that using Estserv for delay sensitive applications, we can provide out-of-band scheduling, save bandwidth on packets with expired deadlines and handle bursts without loosing the scalability of Diffserv. We show with the help of an implementation in the Linux kernel's ip-forwarding part, that, given the estimation value, Estserv performs better than Diffserv in terms of deadlines, while still saving bandwidth.
Optimizing selection of competing features via feedback-directed evolutionary algorithms

Software that support various groups of customers usually require complicated configurations to attain different functionalities. To model the configuration options, feature model is proposed to capture the commonalities and competing variabilities of the product variants in software family or Software Product Line (SPL). A key challenge for deriving a new product is to find a set of features that do not have inconsistencies or conflicts, yet optimize multiple objectives (e.g., minimizing cost and maximizing number of features), which are often competing with each other. Existing works have attempted to make use of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to address this problem. In this work, we incorporated a novel feedback-directed mechanism into existing EAs. Our empirical results have shown that our method has improved noticeably over all unguided version of EAs on the optimal feature selection. In particular, for case studies in SPLOT and LVAT repositories, the feedback-directed Indicator-Based EA (IBEA) has increased the number of correct solutions found by 72.33% and 75%, compared to unguided IBEA. In addition, by leveraging a pre-computed solution, we have found 34 sound solutions for Linux X86, which contains 6888 features, in less than 40 seconds.
KameleonFuzz: evolutionary fuzzing for black-box XSS detection

Fuzz testing consists in automatically generating and sending malicious inputs to an application in order to hopefully trigger a vulnerability. Fuzzing entails such questions as: Where to fuzz? Which parameter to fuzz? Where to observe its effects? In this paper, we specifically address the questions: How to fuzz a parameter? How to observe its effects? To address these questions, we propose KameleonFuzz, a black-box Cross Site Scripting (XSS) fuzzer for web applications. KameleonFuzz can not only generate malicious inputs to exploit XSS, but also detect how close it is revealing a vulnerability. The malicious inputs generation and evolution is achieved with a genetic algorithm, guided by an attack grammar. A double taint inference, up to the browser parse tree, permits to detect precisely whether an exploitation attempt succeeded. Our evaluation demonstrates no false positives and high XSS revealing capabilities: KameleonFuzz detects several vulnerabilities missed by other black-box scanners.