Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detection of HIV-1 p24 at Attomole Level by Ultrasensitive ELISA with Thio-NAD Cycling

To reduce the window period between HIV-1 infection and the ability to diagnose it, a fourth-generation immunoassay including the detection of HIV-1 p24 antigen has been developed. However, because the commercially available systems for this assay use special, high-cost instruments to measure, for example, chemiluminescence, it is performed only by diagnostics companies and hub hospitals. To overcome this limitation, we applied an ultrasensitive ELISA coupled with a thio-NAD cycling, which is based on a usual enzyme immunoassay without special instruments, to detect HIV-1 p24. The p24 detection limit by our ultrasensitive ELISA was 0.0065 IU/assay (i.e., ca. 10-18 moles/assay). Because HIV-1 p24 antigen is thought to be present in the virion in much greater numbers than viral RNA copies, the value of 10-18 moles of the p24/assay corresponds to ca. 103 copies of the HIV-1 RNA/assay. That is, our ultrasensitive ELISA is chasing the detection limit (102 copies/assay) obtained by PCR-based nucleic acid testing (NAT) with a margin of only one different order. Further, the detection limit by our ultrasensitive ELISA is less than that mandated for a CE-marked HIV antigen/antibody assay. An additional recovery test using blood supported the reliability of our ultrasensitive ELISA.
Observational Assessment of Empathy in Parent-Child Verbal Exchanges and Their Influence on Child Behavior

How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know! Follow this and additional works at: http://academicworks.cuny. edu/gc_etds Part of the Behavioral Disciplines and Activities Commons, Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms Commons, Biological Psychology Commons, Child Psychology Commons, Clinical Psychology Commons, Cognition and Perception Commons, Cognitive Psychology Commons, Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons, Mental Disorders Commons, Other Psychiatry and Psychology Commons, Psychological Phenomena and Processes Commons, and the Social Psychology Commons
Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication PrinciplesSingle password, multiple accounts

Most users have multiple accounts on the Internet where each account is protected by a password. To avoid the headache in remembering and managing a long list of different and unrelated passwords, most users simply use the same password for multiple accounts. Unfortunately, the predominant HTTP basic authentication protocol (even over SSL) makes this common practice remarkably dangerous: an attacker can effectively steal users' passwords for high-security servers (such as an online banking website) by setting up a malicious server or breaking into a low-security server (such as a high-school alumni website). Furthermore, the HTTP basic authentication protocol is vulnerable to phishing attacks because a client needs to reveal his password to the server that the client wants to login. Proposed scheme allows a client to securely use a single password across multiple servers, attacks. Our protocol achieves client authentication without the client revealing his password to the server at any point. Therefore, a compromised server cannot steal a client's password and replay it to another server. Our protocol is secure, efficient and user-friendly.
A Lightweight Pseudonymization Approach for Textual Personal Information

Sharing personal information benefits both users and third parties in many ways such as recommendation systems, user modeling, etc. Recent advances in sensor networks and personal archives enable us to record all of our digital objects such as emails, social networking activities and life events (life logging). These information objects are privacy sensitive and here we introduce a lightweight pseudonymization framework which enables users to benefit from sharing their personal information while considering their privacy. This framework enables users with fewer IT skills to pseudonymize their text based information. Tools which improve users privacy, are going to be necessary in the near future. This is due to the fact that on one hand these tools enable information owners to share their information, while being aware of what they are sharing, and thus the third party access is more transparent than before. On the other hand new personal information objects, which are valuable for third parties, are going to be more privacy sensitive than before such as biological information. Author Keywords
The State of Young Children in the United States

School readiness refers to the set of foundational skills, behaviors, and knowledge children display as they enter school that enable them to achieve academic success in elementary school, graduate from high school, and eventually thrive in the workforce and beyond (La Paro & Pianta, 2000; Pianta, Cox, & Snow, 2007; Zaslow, Tout, Halle, Whittaker, & Lavelle, 2010). Children prepared to adapt to the school environment when they enter kindergarten are more likely to meet academic and social demands of the classroom and succeed in school. Although there is no clear consensus on the exact definition of school readiness, it is generally agreed to include a combination of cognitive, language, executive functioning, socioemotional, behavioral, and health characteristics that cooperate to p romote children’s functioning in a school setting (Boivin & Bierman, 2013; Sabol & Pianta, 2012). In the United States, kindergarten teachers report that children on average are not fully prepared to meet the demands of the classroom environment, particularly in terms of academic skills. In 2010–2011, teachers reported that only 27% of children were proficient in reading and math at school entry based on a nationally representative sample of newly entering kindergarteners (Bernstein, West, Newsham, & Reid, 2014). Moreover, the United States has large disparities in school readiness based on children’s family backgrounds. Children from low‐income backgrounds are almost a year behind at school entry
Anxiolytic effects of propranolol and diphenoxylate on mice and automated stretch-attend posture analysis

The prevention o f social anxiety, performance anxiety, and social phobia via the combination o f two generic drugs, diphenoxylate HC1 (opioid) plus atropine sulfate (anticholinergic) and propranolol HC1 (beta blocker) was evaluated in mice through behavioral studies. A patent published on a September 8, 2011 by Benjamin D. Holly, US 2011/0218215 A l, prompted the research. The drug combination of diphenoxylate and atropine plus propranolol could be an immediate treatment for patients suffering from acute phobic and social anxiety disorders. Demonstrating the anxiolytic effects of the treatment on mice would validate a mouse model for neuroscientist to be used to detect the mechanism of action behind the drug combination. To detect more sensitive anxiety measures in mice, a MATLAB-based software called MATSAP was developed as a quick, consistent, and open source program that provides objective automated analysis of stretch-attend posture in rodent behavioral experiments. Stretch-attend posture occurs during risk assessment and is prevalent in common rodent behavioral tests. Stretch-attend posture is a more sensitive measure o f the effects o f anxiolytics than traditional spatiotemporal indices. However, quantifying stretch-attend posture using human observers is time consuming, somewhat subjective, and prone to errors. Unlike human observers, MATSAP is not susceptible to fatigue or subjectivity. MATSAP performance was assessed with videos of male Swiss mice moving in an open field box and in an elevated plus maze. MATSAP reliably detected stretch-attend posture on par with human observers. This freely-available program can be broadly used by biologists and psychologists to accelerate neurological, pharmacological, and behavioral studies. To further expand on methods to automate the detection o f SAP, EthoStock was developed. This not only can detect SAP, but has the potential to detect other ethological behaviors such as grooming and rearing. APPROVAL FOR SCHOLARLY DISSEMINATION The author grants to the Prescott Memorial Library of Louisiana Tech University the right to reproduce, by appropriate methods, upon request, any or all portions o f this Dissertation. It is understood that “proper request” consists of the agreement, on the part o f the requesting party, that said reproduction is for his personal use and that subsequent reproduction will not occur without written approval o f the author of this Dissertation. Further, any portions of the Dissertation used in books, papers, and other works must be appropriately referenced to this Dissertation. Finally, the author o f this Dissertation reserves the right to publish freely, in the literature, at any time, any or all portions of this Dissertation. Author y ^ h _______________
2000 NIST EVALUATION OF CONVERSATIONAL SPEECH RECOGNITION OVER THE TELEPHONE: ENGLISH AND MANDAR IN PERFORMANCE RESULTS

This paper documents the use of conversational telephone speech test materials in the NIST coordinated evaluation conducted early in 2000. The primary evaluation was of General American English speech, but a subsidiary evaluation of Mandarin speech was also offered. The primary test data consisted of twenty conversations collected for the original Switchboard Corpus but not released with the published corpus and twenty conversations from the CallHome English Corpus. The lowest English word error rates this year were 19.3% for the Switchboard-type data and 31.4% for the CallHome data. These are considerably lower error rates than those achieved in previous evaluations, the most recent of which was in 1998. These error rate reductions were due in part to improved recognition systems, but also in large part to these test sets being easier than those used in previous evaluations. We discuss in the Appendices some reasons for these test sets being easier than previous test sets.
A Formal Approach to Verify Grid Service Composition Based on Interaction Pattern

Grid services mismatching, resulted from non-compatible interfaces, protocols or behaviors, has been a barrier to realize services composition for coordination of distributed application. So itpsilas important to check and verify service composition to guarantee smooth interaction among services from different grid domain correctly. Pi-calculus, characterized by name exchanging of different processes, can be seen as a valid theoretical tool to model grid service behavior. In this paper, two typical service interaction patterns are established, based on which some grid service contexts are defined and exemplified by application cases. Depending on the theoretical analysis, Pi-calculus based Grid Service Composition Verification algorithm, PGSCV, is proposed for Verifying the grid service composition and proved available and efficient by experimental results. As a conclusion the future research work is also discussed.
Coupled Kernel Embedding for Low-Resolution Face Image Recognition

Practical video scene and face recognition systems are sometimes confronted with low-resolution (LR) images. The faces may be very small even if the video is clear, thus it is difficult to directly measure the similarity between the faces and the high-resolution (HR) training samples. Face recognition based on traditional super-resolution (SR) methods usually have limited performance because the target of SR may not be consistent with that of classification, and time-consuming SR algorithms are not suitable for real-time applications. In this paper, a new feature extraction method called coupled kernel embedding (CKE) is proposed for LR face recognition without any SR preprocessing. In this method, the final kernel matrix is constructed by concatenating two individual kernel matrices in the diagonal direction, and the (semi)positively definite properties are preserved for optimization. CKE addresses the problem of comparing multimodal data that are difficult for conventional methods in practice due to the lack of an efficient similarity measure. Particularly, different kernel types (e.g., linear, Gaussian, polynomial) can be integrated into a uniform optimization objective, which cannot be achieved by simple linear methods. CKE solves this problem by minimizing the dissimilarities captured by their kernel Gram matrices in the LR and HR spaces. In the implementation, the nonlinear objective function is minimized by a generalized eigenvalue decomposition. Experiments on benchmark and real databases show that our CKE method indeed improves the recognition performance.
Distributed Bees Algorithm Parameters Optimization for a Cost Efficient Target Allocation in Swarms of Robots

Swarms of robots can use their sensing abilities to explore unknown environments and deploy on sites of interest. In this task, a large number of robots is more effective than a single unit because of their ability to quickly cover the area. However, the coordination of large teams of robots is not an easy problem, especially when the resources for the deployment are limited. In this paper, the Distributed Bees Algorithm (DBA), previously proposed by the authors, is optimized and applied to distributed target allocation in swarms of robots. Improved target allocation in terms of deployment cost efficiency is achieved through optimization of the DBA’s control parameters by means of a Genetic Algorithm. Experimental results show that with the optimized set of parameters, the deployment cost measured as the average distance traveled by the robots is reduced. The cost-efficient deployment is in some cases achieved at the expense of increased robots’ distribution error. Nevertheless, the proposed approach allows the swarm to adapt to the operating conditions when available resources are scarce.
Multi-carrier DS-CDMA using frequency spread coding

A multi-carrier direct sequence code division multiple access (MC-DS-CDMA) system combined with frequency spread coding is proposed and investigated for the downlink. The proposed system exploits frequency diversity without additional redundancy by using frequency spread coding in a frequency-selective fading channel. Computer simulation results show its effectiveness in terms of average bit error rate and bandwidth efficiency. Furthermore, the proposed system is compared with a multi-carrier (MC)-CDMA system and a single-carrier (SC)-DS-CDMA system using a RAKE receiver.
Semi-Blind Channel Estimation in OFDM System

Channel estimation using pilot is common used in OFDM system. The pilot is usually time division multiplexed with the informative sequence. One of main drawbacks is bandwidth losing. In this paper, a new method to perform channel estimation is proposed in OFDM system. The pilot is arithmetically added to the output of OFDM modulator. Receiver uses the hidden pilot to get an accurate estimation of the channel. Then pilot is removed after channel estimation. We also deprive the Cramer-Rao lower bound for this method. The performance of the algorithm is finally shown. Compared with traditional methods, the proposed algorithm increases the bandwidth efficiency dramatically.
An investigation into the reliability of upper-limb robotic exoskeleton measurements for clinical evaluation in neurorehabilitation

Robotic exoskeletons are increasingly being used for neurorehabilitation, due to a number of perceived advantages. Once such advantage is the potential to use the large amounts of previously unavailable measurements to provide continuous assessment of the patient. This study investigates the validity of such measurements through an experimental protocol. Reaching movements within and outside an upper-arm rehabilitation exoskeleton (ArmeoPower) of 10 healthy subjects are compared using five commonly-used kinematic metrics (Peak Speed, Time to Peak Speed, Curvature, Smoothness, Accuracy). The study finds that (1) the robotic exoskeleton significantly affects the reaching movements of healthy subjects, (2) the measurements of the exoskeleton accurately represent the movements of the wrist, and (3) evolution of the in-exoskeleton movements over multiple sessions is indicative of changes in movements outside the robot, even though differences remain - suggesting that evolution of this data may be used to monitor patient progress.
Wave-domain echo-path model with aliasing for echo cancellation

Wave-domain adaptive filtering for echo cancellation has been proposed for achieving immersive full-duplex sound conferencing that uses wave field reconstruction as spatial sound rendering. In wave-domain adaptive filtering, fundamental solutions of the wave equation are spatially sampled and used as the orthogonal basis functions. This sampling is determined by loudspeaker spacing and results in aliasing; aliasing occurs above a few thousand Hz for spacing of several centimeters. The goal of this work is to investigate the effect of applying adaptive filtering on echo signal with aliasing when the loudspeaker array and microphone array are uniform linear arrays of identical geometries. We came to the conclusion that we can apply the wave-domain echo-path model, used below spatial Nyquist frequency, to wave-domain adaptive filtering over this frequency even in the presence of aliasing components.
Ant clustering for the CPT and DMT-based soil profile generation

The paper presents the automated method of the soil profile generation using the unsupervised learning. This method can be used as the main source of knowledge for the future soil classification module, which would identify geotechnical layers without the interaction with the user. The method uses the ant clustering, which groups measurements from the Dilatometer of Marchetti Test and Cone Penetration Test. The test site, algorithm and its application to the generation of soil profiles in the Warsaw University of Life Sciences campus are described. Results are discussed to provide a more general insight into application of intelligent algorithms into the geotechnical data analysis.
Islet Inflammation and Fibrosis in a Spontaneous Model of Type 2 Diabetes, the GK Rat

The molecular pathways leading to islet fibrosis in diabetes are unknown. Therefore, we studied gene expression in islets of 4-month-old Goto-Kakizaki (GK) and Wistar control rats. Of 71 genes found to be overexpressed in GK islets, 24% belong to extracellular matrix (ECM)/cell adhesion and 34% to inflammatory/immune response families. Based on gene data, we selected several antibodies to study fibrosis development during progression of hyperglycemia by immunohistochemistry. One-month-old GK and Wistar islets appeared to be similar. Two-month-old GK islets were strongly heterogenous in terms of ECM accumulation compared with Wistar islets. GK islet vascularization, labeled by von Willebrand factor, was altered after 1 month of mild hyperglycemia. Numerous macrophages (major histocompatibility complex class II+ and CD68+) and granulocytes were found in/around GK islets. These data demonstrate that marked inflammatory reaction accompanies GK islet fibrosis and suggest that islet alterations in this nonobese model of type 2 diabetes develop in a way reminiscent of microangiopathy.
Minimized-Laplacian residual interpolation for color image demosaicking

A color difference interpolation technique is widely used for color image demosaicking. In this paper, we propose a minimized-laplacian residual interpolation (MLRI) as an alternative to the color difference interpolation, where the residuals are differences between observed and tentatively estimated pixel values. In the MLRI, we estimate the tentative pixel values by minimizing the Laplacian energies of the residuals. This residual image transfor- mation allows us to interpolate more easily than the standard color difference transformation. We incorporate the proposed MLRI into the gradient based threshold free (GBTF) algorithm, which is one of current state-of- the-art demosaicking algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed demosaicking algorithm can outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms for the 30 images of the IMAX and the Kodak datasets.
Using mental imagery to promote positive intergroup relations

In this chapter we outline a new technique for tackling prejudicial attitudes and promoting more positive intergroup relations. Imagined intergroup contact (Crisp and Turner, 2009) is a simple, inexpensive and effective technique for changing the negative attitudes that different groups hold about one another. It represents both a novel experimental paradigm for investigating the impacts of social contact, as well as a flexible and effective tool for challenging the deep-rooted antipathies that can characterize relations in conflict settings. We describe the theoretical basis for the imagined contact effects, report emerging empirical support, and provide a practical guide for the application of the technique in varied contexts of conflict, discrimination and prejudice. Finally, we discuss how it can be integrated with existing interventions that target intergroup attitudes and behavior to provide maximally effective strategies for improving intergroup relations.
The Optically Determined Size of Exo/Endo Cycling Vesicle Pool Correlates with the Quantal Content at the Neuromuscular Junction ofDrosophila Larvae

According to the current theory of synaptic transmission, the amplitude of evoked synaptic potentials correlates with the number of synaptic vesicles released at the presynaptic terminals. Synaptic vesicles in presynaptic boutons constitute two distinct pools, namely, exo/endo cycling and reserve pools (Kuromi and Kidokoro, 1998a). We defined the vesicles that were endocytosed and exocytosed during high K+ stimulation as the exo/endo cycling vesicle pool. To determine the role of exo/endo cycling vesicle pool in synaptic transmission, we estimated the quantal content electrophysiologically, whereas the pool size was determined optically using fluorescent dye FM1–43. We then manipulated the size of the pool with following treatments. First, to change the state of boutons of nerve terminals, motoneuronal axons were severed. With this treatment, the size of exo/endo cycling vesicle pool decreased together with the quantal content. Second, we promoted the FM1–43 uptake using cyclosporin A, which inhibits calcineurin activities and enhances endocytosis. Cyclosporin A increased the total uptake of FM1–43, but neither the size of exo/endo cycling vesicle pool nor the quantal content changed. Third, we increased the size of exo/endo cycling vesicle pool by forskolin, which enhances synaptic transmission. The forskolin treatment increased both the size of exo/endo cycling vesicle pool and the quantal content. Thus, we found that the quantal content was closely correlated with the size of exo/endo cycling vesicle pool but not necessarily with the total uptake of FM1–43 fluorescence by boutons. The results suggest that vesicles in the exo/endo cycling pool primarily participate in evoked exocytosis of vesicles.
Vectorial Signatures for Pattern Recognition

Due to the variety of shapes and sizes that present both living organisms and static objects, the necessity to look for automated systems of identification, both in industry and scientific research has arisen. During the 1960s, the scientific community in the field of optics has used the Fourier transform and other types of mathematical transformations for pattern recognition, taking advantage of their different properties; for example, invariance to position, rotation and scale.