Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mathematical modelling of adult hippocampal neurogenesis: effects of altered stem cell dynamics on cell counts and bromodeoxyuridine-labelled cells

In the adult hippocampus, neurogenesis—the process of generating mature granule cells from adult neural stem cells—occurs throughout the entire lifetime. In order to investigate the involved regulatory mechanisms, knockout (KO) experiments, which modify the dynamic behaviour of this process, were conducted in the past. Evaluating these KOs is a non-trivial task owing to the complicated nature of the hippocampal neurogenic niche. In this study, we model neurogenesis as a multicompartmental system of ordinary differential equations based on experimental data. To analyse the results of KO experiments, we investigate how changes of cell properties, reflected by model parameters, influence the dynamics of cell counts and of the experimentally observed counts of cells labelled by the cell division marker bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU). We find that changing cell proliferation rates or the fraction of self-renewal, reflecting the balance between symmetric and asymmetric cell divisions, may result in multiple time phases in the response of the system, such as an initial increase in cell counts followed by a decrease. Furthermore, these phases may be qualitatively different in cells at different differentiation stages and even between mitotically labelled cells and all cells existing in the system.
Comparison of lateral controllers for autonomous vehicle: Experimental results

A good path tracker is one of the keys for the successful development of a self-driving car. In the literature, there exists a wide variety of techniques, some complex and some simple and yet effective in particular scenarios. The choice of the path tracker influences the performance in terms of precision, stability and passenger comfort. This paper addresses the lateral control of a self-driving car in an urban environment, where speed is not high but variations in velocity and curvature are frequent. In choosing a lateral controller, simplicity, efficiency and robustness are considered as the main criteria. In this paper, three classical techniques used for controlling the lateral error are analyzed: pure pursuit, Stanley and a simplified kinematic steering control. Additionally, a novel kinematic controller based on the lateral speed is proposed. A home-made realistic simulation environment has been developed to allow rapid testing of the control laws. The relevance of this work has been demonstrated for all controllers through realistic simulations and experiments. The experimental site is the campus of Ecole Centrale de Nantes, where all control laws have been compared along the same path. A longer path, involving a portion of the ring road of Nantes (France) has been simulated. It involves speeds up to 90 km/h, allowing to extrapolate the comparison results to higher velocities.
TimeNET-a toolkit for evaluating non-Markovian stochastic Petri nets

Stochastic Petri nets are well suited for the model-based performance and dependability evaluation of complex systems. Most commonly, the firing times of the transitions are exponentially distributed, leading to an underlying continuous-time Markov chain. In order to increase the modeling power, several classes of non-Markovian SPNs were defined, in which the transitions may fire after a nonexponentially distributed firing time. TimeNET (Timed Petri Net Evaluation Tool) is a software package for the modeling and evaluation of SPNs in which the firing times of the transitions may be exponentially distributed, deterministic, or more generally distributed. TimeNET has been developed at the Technical University of Berlin in several research projects.
Pornography Use and Depressive Symptoms: Examining the Role of Moral Incongruence

While studies have consistently observed an association between pornography use and depressive symptoms, data limitations have precluded understanding the nature of this relationship. Drawing on data from a representative panel study of American adults and building on insights from stress process theory, this article demonstrates that the connection between pornography use and depressive symptoms hinges on the (1) (in)congruence between Americans’ moral beliefs about pornography and their viewing practices and (2) gender. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses reveal that American men (not women) who believe viewing pornography is always immoral but watch it anyway are more likely to experience depressive symptoms compared to others who do not report this incongruence. Results also suggest the connection between viewing pornography and depressive symptoms is bidirectional, contingent on men’s moral evaluation of its use. For male porn users who morally reject it, pornography use predicts depressive symptoms at low frequencies, likely stemming from cognitive stress or dissonance. For those who do not morally reject porn, however, only viewing it at the highest frequencies is associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms, which suggests reverse causation—depressed men likely view higher levels of pornography as a coping aid, especially when they do not view it as immoral.
Temporal Patterning of Saccadic Eye Movement Signals

Electrical microstimulation is used widely in experimental neurophysiology to examine causal links between specific brain areas and their behavioral functions and is used clinically to treat neurological and psychiatric disorders in patients. Typically, microstimulation is applied to local brain regions as a train of equally spaced current pulses. We were interested in the sensitivity of a neural circuit to a train of variably spaced pulses, as is observed in physiological spike trains. We compared the effect of fixed, decelerating, accelerating, and randomly varying microstimulation patterns on the likelihood and metrics of eye movements evoked from the frontal eye field of monkeys, while holding the mean interpulse interval constant. Our results demonstrate that the pattern of microstimulation pulses strongly influences the probability of evoking a saccade, as well as the metrics of the saccades themselves. Specifically, the pattern most closely resembling physiological spike trains (accelerating pattern) was most effective at evoking a saccade, three times more so than the least effective decelerating pattern. A saccade-triggered average of effective random trains confirmed the positive relationship between accelerating rate and efficacy. These results have important implications for the use of electrical microstimulation in both experimental and clinical settings and suggest a means to study the role of temporal pattern in the encoding of behavioral and cognitive functions.
The use of development history in software refactoring using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

One of the widely used techniques for evolving software systems is refactoring, a maintenance activity that improves design structure while preserving the external behavior. Exploring past maintenance and development history can be an effective way of finding refactoring opportunities. Code elements which undergo changes in the past, at approximately the same time, bear a good probability for being semantically related. Moreover, these elements that experienced a huge number of refactoring in the past have a good chance for refactoring in the future. In addition, the development history can be used to propose new refactoring solutions in similar contexts. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization-based approach to find the best sequence of refactorings that minimizes the number of bad-smells, and maximizes the use of development history and semantic coherence. To this end, we use the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to find the best trade-off between these three objectives. We report the results of our experiments using different large open source projects.
Muslims, home education and risk in British society

Abstract The number of families who choose to home educate has significantly increased in the last decade. This article explores the experiences of British Muslims who home educate using data from a larger study exploring the views of a diverse range of families. Drawing on the work of Beck, we discuss how ‘risk’ is understood in relation to Muslim home educators. For these families, decisions to home educate were often made in response to identifying risks associated with their children attending school. At the same time, OFSTED has identified ‘risks’ of radicalisation associated with the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair which they linked specifically to Muslim families who home educate. We argue that Muslim families are both marginalised by the perception of ‘risk’ associated with radicalisation and also by their consequent decisions to home educate.
HUKB at NTCIR-12 IMine-2 Task: Utilization of Query Analysis Results and Wikipedia Data for Subtopic Mining

Query understandings is a task to identify the important subtopics of a given query with vertical intent. In this task, characteristic keywords extracted from query analysis re-sults and Wikipedia are used as candidates for the subtopics. From these candidates, topic-model based on the web documents retrieved by an original query is used for selecting appropriate subtopics, Vertical intent is judged mainly by the typical keyword list used for the particular vertical intent. For the Image, News and Shopping, the system checks type of retrieved documents that are estimated by using ALT value of IMG tag, anchor text and site list for URLs for vertical intent estimation.
Classifying Vietnamese disease outbreak reports with important sentences and rich features

Text classification is an important field of research from mid 90s up to now. It has many applications, one of them is in Web-based biosurveillance systems which identify and summarize online disease outbreak reports. In this paper we focus on classifying Vietnamese disease outbreak reports. We investigate important properties of disease outbreak reports, e.g., sentences containing names of outbreak disease, locations. Evaluation on 10-time 10fold cross-validation using the Support Vector Machine algorithm shows that using sentences containing disease outbreak names with its preceding/following sentences in combination with location features achieve the best F-score with 86.67% - an improvement of 0.38% in comparison to using all raw text. Our results suggest that using important sentences and rich feature can improve performance of Vietnamese disease outbreak text classification.
Overexpression of broad: a new insight into its role in the Drosophila prothoracic gland cells

SUMMARY Insect molting is triggered by ecdysteroids, which are produced in the prothoracic glands (PG). The broad (br) gene is one of the `early genes' directly regulated by ecdysteroids. Ectopic expression of the BR-Z3 isoform in early second instar Drosophila larvae (L2) before the rise of the ecdysteroid titer prevented molting to the third instar, but the larvae subsequently formed L2 prepupae after prolonged feeding. When these larvae were fed on diet containing 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E), they formed pharate third instar larvae. The critical weight for normal L3 pupariation of w1118 larvae was found to be 0.8 mg and that for L2 pupariation was 0.45 mg. We also defined a threshold weight for metamorphosis of 0.3 mg, above which L2 larvae will metamorphose when provided with 20E. BR-Z3 apparently works through the PG cells of the ring gland but not the putative neurosecretory cells that drive ecdysone secretion, because ectopic expression of BR-Z3 specifically in the ring gland caused 53% of the larvae to become permanent first instar larvae. Driving other BR isoforms in the ring gland prevented larval molting or pupariation to varying degrees. These molting defects were rescued by feeding 20E. Overexpression of each of the BR isoforms caused degeneration of the PG cells but on different time courses, indicating that BR is a signal for the degeneration of the PG cells that normally occurs during the pupal–adult transition.
Dynamic buffer management based on rate estimation in IP networks = IP 망에서의 전송율 측정에 기반한 동적 버퍼 관리

While traffic volume of real-time applications is rapidly increasing, current routers do not guarantee the minimum QoS values of fairness and drop packets in random fashion. If routers provide a minimum QoS, less delays, more fairness, and smoother sending rates, TCP-Friendly Rate Control can be adopted for real-time applications. We propose a dynamic buffer management scheme that meets the requirements described above, and can be applied to TCP flow and to data flow for transfer of real-time applications. The proposed scheme consists of a virtual threshold function, an accurate and stable per-flow rate estimation, a per-flow exponential drop probability, and a dropping strategy that guarantees fairness when there are many flows. Moreover, we introduce a practical definition of active flows to reduce the overhead coming from maintaining per-flow states. Introduction of a virtual threshold function that divides router operation into three modes helps routers support more flows than RED, FRED and DRR with the same buffer size. Moreover, we introduce Fair Drop that guarantees fairness even when there are so many flows that each flow can buffer less than one packet in average in a router buffer.
Efeito de um Programa de Histórias com Abordagem Sociocognitiva em Crianças de Educação Infantil

RESUMO - Este estudo objetivou avaliar um programa para promocao de habilidades sociocognitivas, baseado na leitura de historias, quanto a possiveis efeitos no desenvolvimento sociocognitivo e comportamental. O programa conta com 25 livros infantis, ricos em pistas sociais. Participaram duas turmas consecutivas da educacao infantil, compondo dois grupos, GI e GII. Para aferir efeitos do programa, foram avaliadas habilidades sociocognitivas, habilidades sociais e problemas de comportamento. GI foi avaliado antes e depois de passar pelo programa. No ano seguinte, GII foi avaliado antes da intervencao duas vezes, com intervalo equivalente ao da duracao do programa, e novamente depois da intervencao. Comparacoes entre e intra grupos mostraram aumento nas habilidades sociocognitivas e sociais, bem como reducao de difculdades comportamentais, sugerindo efeitos positivos do programa. Palavras-chaves : educacao infantil, cognicao social, intervencao psicologica
Investigating Cognitive Performance Deficits in Male and Female Soccer Players after a 4-week Heading- Training Programme: A Controlled Study

This experimental study with a controlled pre-test and post-test group design investigated the possible effects of four sessions of heading training on cognitive performance. A total of 118 participants (mean age of 22.25 years) were assigned to one of the three following groups: a heading-training group, a passing-training group and a waiting control group. The participants completed a cognitive test battery of attention (D2-test), working memory (Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task, PASAT-2) and visual spatial intelligence (Mental Rotation Test) tests before, immediately after the second training session and one week after the fourth training session. There were no between-group differences in cognitive performance after the second or the fourth heading training sessions. However, within the heading-training group, women complained more of headaches than men after the fourth training session. These results build on the results from the study of Rieder and Jansen (2011) that showed no neuropsychological consequences after one heading session, showing no cumulative effects of repeat heading.
Conceptual design and implementation of Indicator-based Smart Glasses: A navigational device for remote assistance of senior citizens suffering from memory loss

The development of wearable technologies has generated considerable interest in the last decade. It opens doors to the emergence of user-centered assistive technologies, which are targeting senior citizens suffering from memory loss. This paper is dedicated to introducing the conceptual, behavioural and architectural design of a remote controllable head mounted display. The Indicator-based Smart Glasses are designed to assist senior citizens in daily navigational tasks with the guidance of human remote caretakers. The use of eyeglasses among the senior citizens is quite common, and it derived us to construct navigation interface prototype by implanting a set of light-emitting diode indicators on the frame of eyeglasses. The system aims to provide senior citizens with visual cues that could be perceived intuitively for navigational commands. Furthermore, the system would improve the independent mobility of senior citizens. The global positioning system- and geographical information system-based location-aware system could be integrated into Indicator-based Smart Glasses to facilitate the remote assisting process. The research method of the study is constructive design science with applied qualitative and quantitative approaches to improve and evaluate the system. The Living Lab, Wizard of Oz methods, plus observation and interviews are used to evaluate and improve the system through iterative pilot and usability tests.
A pointwise characterization of the subdifferential of the total variation functional

We derive a new pointwise characterization of the subdifferential of the total variation (TV) functional. It involves a full trace operator which maps certain $ L^q $ - vectorfields to integrable functions with respect to the total variation measure of the derivative of a bounded variation function. This full trace operator extents a notion of normal trace, frequently used, for example, to characterize the total variation flow.
Oblivious Enforcement of Hidden Information Release Policies Using Online Certification Authorities

This thesis examines a new approach to attribute-based access control with hidden policies and hidden credentials. In this setting, a resource owner has an access control policy that is a function of Boolean-valued attributes of the resource requester. Access to the resource should be granted if and only if the resource owner's policy is satisfied, but we wish to hide the access control policy from the resource requester and the requester's attributes from the resource owner.Previous solutions to this problem involved the use of cryptographic credentials held by the resource requester, but it is obvious that if no information is provided about the access control policy, then the resource requester must try to satisfy the policy using every available credential. An initial contribution of this thesis is the first published empirical evaluation of the state-of-the-art protocol of Frikken, Atallah, and Li for access control with hidden policies and hidden credentials, demonstrating that the computational cost of the required cryptographic operations is highly burdensome.A new system model is then proposed that includes the active involvement of online certification authorities (CAs). These are entities that can provide authoritative information about the attributes in a resource owner's access control policy. Allowing the resource owner to query these online CAs immediately removes the need for the resource requester to guess which credentials to use.If the resource owner was allowed to learn the values of a requester's attributes from online CAs, however, the requester's credentials would no longer be private. This thesis examines cryptographic solutions in which the CAs' replies do not directly reveal any attribute information to the resource owner, but can nevertheless be used in the enforcement of an access control policy. The techniques considered involve scrambled circuit evaluation, homomorphic encryption, and secure multiparty computation using arithmetic circuits and Shamir secret sharing. Empirical experiments demonstrate that the proposed protocols can provide an order-of-magnitude performance improvement over existing solutions.
Real-time Collision Handling in Railway Network: An Agent-based Approach

Advancement in intelligent transportation systems with complex operations requires autonomous planning and management to avoid collisions in day-to-day traffic. As failure and/or inadequacy in traffic safety system are life-critical, such collisions must be detected and resolved in an efficient way to manage continuously rising traffic. In this paper, we address different types of collision scenarios along with their early detection and resolution techniques in a complex railway system. In order to handle collisions dynamically in distributed manner, a novel agent based solution approach is proposed using the idea of max-sum algorithm, where each agent (train agent, station agent, and junction agent) communicates and cooperates with others to generate a good feasible solution that keeps the system in a safe state, i.e., collision free. We implement the proposed mechanism in Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE). The results are evaluated with exhaustive experiments and compared with different existing collision handling methods to show the efficiency of our proposed approach.
Type Synthesis of 3-DOF RPR-Equivalent Parallel Mechanisms

The moving platform of an RPR-equivalent parallel mechanism (PM) can undergo a 3-degree-of-freedom (DOF) motion that is the product of a rotation followed by a translation and another rotation. A 5-DOF hybrid parallel manipulator can be developed by adding an x-y gantry or an RR serial mechanism to an RPR-equivalent PM, which is suitable for manipulations requiring high rigidity and accuracy with good dexterity along surfaces of the 3-D space. This paper investigates the type synthesis of the RPR-equivalent PM. First, the RPR motion is briefly discussed. Then, the kinematic bonds of limb chains and their mechanical generators are presented. Structural conditions for constructing an RPR-equivalent PM are presented. Furthermore, the RPR-equivalent PMs are classified into several categories, depending on the DOF of its limb chains. Numerous new architectures of the RPR-equivalent PMs are synthesized.
Games of Social Influence

This paper considers a game played among players who seek to extract payoffs from a group of individuals subject to local interaction effects. We are interested in the relation between the network of social interaction and equilibrium actions and payoffs. We start with an analysis of two economic examples A¢â‚¬â€œ strategic advertising in the presence of word of mouth advertising and social non-competitive marketing A¢â‚¬â€œ to bring out the simple point that changing network connections can increase as well as decrease equilibrium actions and payoffs. This leads to an investigation of general conditions on payoffs under which equilibrium actions and payoffs increase/decrease with an increase in density of connections. We also develop conditions under which a greater dispersion in network connections leads unambiguously to positive and negative effects on actions as well as payoffs.
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In this paper we present a new approach to solve the satisfiability problem (SAT), based on boolean networks (BN). We define a mapping between a SAT instance and a BN, and we solve SAT problem by simulating the BN dynamics. We prove that BN fixed points correspond to the SAT solutions. The mapping presented allows to develop a new class of algorithms to solve SAT. Moreover, this new approach suggests new ways to combine symbolic and connectionist computation and provides a general framework for local search algorithms.