Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ubicon: Observing Physical and Social Activities

The connection of ubiquitous and social computing is an emerging research area which is combining two prominent areas of computer science. In this paper, we tackle this topic from different angles: We describe data mining methods for ubiquitous and social data, specifically focusing on physical and social activities, and provide exemplary analysis results. Furthermore, we give an overview on the Ubicon platform which provides a framework for the creation and hosting of ubiquitous and social applications for diverse tasks and projects. Ubicon features the collection and analysis of both physical and social activities of users for enabling inter-connected applications in ubiquitous and social contexts. We summarize three real-world systems built on top of Ubicon, and exemplarily discuss the according mining and analysis aspects.
Security Analysis on "An Authentication Code Against Pollution Attacks in Network Coding"

We analyze the security of the authentication code against pollution attacks in network coding given by Oggier and Fathi and show one way to remove one very strong condition they required. Actually, we find a way to attack their authentication scheme. In their scheme, they considered that if some malicious nodes in the network collude to make pollution in the network flow or make substitution attacks to other nodes, they thought these malicious nodes must solve a system of linear equations to recover the secret parameters. Then they concluded that their scheme is an unconditional secure scheme. Actually, note that the authentication tag in the scheme of Oggier and Fathi is nearly linear on the messages, so it is very easy for any malicious node to make pollution attack in the network flow, replacing the vector of any incoming edge by linear combination of his incoming vectors whose coefficients have sum 1. And if the coalition of malicious nodes can carry out decoding of the network coding, they can easily make substitution attack to any other node even if they do not know any information of the private key of the node. Moreover, even if their scheme can work fruitfully, the condition in their scheme $H\leqslant M$ in a network can be removed, where $H$ is the sum of numbers of the incoming edges at adversaries. Under the condition $H\leqslant M$, $H$ may be large, so we need large parameter $M$ which increases the cost of computation a lot. On the other hand, the parameter $M$ can not be very large as it can not exceed the length of original messages.
A robot that reinforcement-learns to identify and memorize important previous observations

It is difficult to apply traditional reinforcement learning algorithms to robots, due to problems with large and continuous domains, partial observability, and limited numbers of learning experiences. This paper deals with these problems by combining: (1) reinforcement learning with memory, implemented using an LSTM recurrent neural network whose inputs are discrete events extracted from raw inputs; (2) online exploration and offline policy learning. An experiment with a real robot demonstrates the methodology's feasibility.
Endocytosis and Sphingolipid Scavenging in Leishmania mexicana Amastigotes

Leishmania species are the causative agents of the leishmaniases, a spectrum of neglected tropical diseases. Amastigote stage parasites exist within macrophages and scavenge host factors for survival, for example, Leishmania species utilise host sphingolipid for synthesis of complex sphingolipid. In this study L. mexicana endocytosis was shown to be significantly upregulated in amastigotes, indicating that sphingolipid scavenging may be enhanced. However, inhibition of host sphingolipid biosynthesis had no significant effect on amastigote proliferation within a macrophage cell line. In addition, infection itself did not directly influence host biosynthesis. Notably, in contrast to L. major, L. mexicana amastigotes are indicated to possess a complete biosynthetic pathway suggesting that scavenged sphingolipids may be nonessential for proliferation. This suggested that Old and New World species differ in their interactions with the macrophage host. This will need to be considered when targeting the Leishmania sphingolipid biosynthetic pathway with novel therapeutics.
A Model for Integrating Deterministic and Asynchronous Events in Reactive Multimedia Internet Based Languages

Current Internet based multimedia modeling systems and languages lack visualization based upon integration of asynchronous events and deterministic synchronization and triggering based upon such integration. Modeling interactive and real world systems needs such in tegration. The paper introduces a modeling technique for reactive distributed multimedia system based on triggers, active events and transformers. A scalable system of multimedia clocks (time bases) associated with streams is defined to control the synchronization of streams. Context-related reactions to context-related situations are detected with the use of an active persistent repository to take care of asynchronous events, as well as reactions to the external world.
On the Hawking effect

In terms of the Painlev{\'e}-Gullstrand-Lema{\^\i}tre coordinates a rather general scenario for the gravitational collapse of an object and the subsequent formation of a horizon is described by a manifestly $C^\infty$-metric. For a 1+1 dimensional model of the collapse the leading contributions to the Bogoliubov coefficients are calculated explicitely and the Hawking temperature is recovered. But depending on the particular dynamics of the collapse the final state represents either evaporation or anti-evaporation. The generalization of the calculation to 3+1 dimensions is outlined and possible implications are addressed. PACS-numbers: 04.70. Dy, 04.70. -s, 04.62. +v.
Video Retargeting: Video Saliency and Optical Flow Based Hybrid Approach

As smart phones, tablets and similar computing devices become an integral part of our lives, we increasingly watch various types of streaming visual data on the display of those devices, especially as cloud video services become ubiquitous. One challenge is to present videos on diverse devices with an acceptable quality. Video retargeting is the key technology in video adaptation of cloud based video streaming. The most important challenge of video retargeting is to retain the shape of important objects, while ensuring temporal smoothness and coherence. We propose in this paper a new approach that adopts to the content of the video. We describe a cropping video retargeting method that ensures temporal coherence while enforcing spatial constraints by a saliency method. The average motion dynamics is calculated for each frame with optical flow and merged with the information of the user attention model for a given video. The resulting information is used to estimate a cropping window size. The output is a video that preserves important actions and the important parts of the scene. The results are promising in respect to overcoming the temporal and spatial challenges of video retargeting.
Postnatal factors associated with failure to thrive in term infants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children

Objective: To assess the contribution of postnatal factors to failure to thrive in infancy. Methods: 11 900 infants from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), born at 37–41 weeks’ gestation, without major malformations and with a complete set of weight measurements in infancy (83% of the original ALSPAC birth cohort) were studied. Conditional weight gain was calculated for the periods from birth to 8 weeks and 8 weeks to 9 months. Cases of growth faltering were defined as those infants with a conditional weight gain below the 5th centile. Results: Analysis yielded 528 cases of growth faltering from birth to 8 weeks and 495 cases from 8 weeks to 9 months. In multivariable analysis, maternal factors predicting poor infant growth were height <160 cm and age >32 years. Growth faltering between birth and 8 weeks was associated with infant sucking problems regardless of the type of milk, and with infant illness. After 8 weeks of age, the most important postnatal influences on growth were the efficiency of feeding, the ability to successfully take solids and the duration of breast feeding. Conclusions: The most important postnatal factors associated with growth faltering are the type and efficiency of feeding: no associations were found with social class or parental education. In the first 8 weeks of life, weak sucking is the most important symptom for both breastfed and bottle-fed babies. After 8 weeks, the duration of breast feeding, the quantity of milk taken and difficulties in weaning are the most important influences.
Twitter part-of-speech tagging using pre-classification Hidden Markov model

Hidden Markov models (HMM) have been widely used in natural language processing (NLP), especially in syntactic level applications, which appears naturally as short-range-dependent sequence recognition problems. But the structure of HMM limits the usage of global knowledge including the sentiment analysis of the text, which has become an increasingly popular research topic in NLP now. In this paper, we propose a novel treatment of HMM model to use the result of sentimental subjectivity analysis in syntactic level task, i.e. part-of-speech (POS) tagging. The subjectivity information is introduced as a pre-classification procedure into the interval-type HMM. The subjectivity degree of the testing sentence is used as a combination factor to choose an appropriate value from the interval. Experiments results on public tagging data sets shows that the proposed approach enhanced the performance of POS tagging.
Development of a critical appraisal tool to assess the quality of cross-sectional studies (AXIS)

Objectives The aim of this study was to develop a critical appraisal (CA) tool that addressed study design and reporting quality as well as the risk of bias in cross-sectional studies (CSSs). In addition, the aim was to produce a help document to guide the non-expert user through the tool. Design An initial scoping review of the published literature and key epidemiological texts was undertaken prior to the formation of a Delphi panel to establish key components for a CA tool for CSSs. A consensus of 80% was required from the Delphi panel for any component to be included in the final tool. Results An initial list of 39 components was identified through examination of existing resources. An international Delphi panel of 18 medical and veterinary experts was established. After 3 rounds of the Delphi process, the Appraisal tool for Cross-Sectional Studies (AXIS tool) was developed by consensus and consisted of 20 components. A detailed explanatory document was also developed with the tool, giving expanded explanation of each question and providing simple interpretations and examples of the epidemiological concepts being examined in each question to aid non-expert users. Conclusions CA of the literature is a vital step in evidence synthesis and therefore evidence-based decision-making in a number of different disciplines. The AXIS tool is therefore unique and was developed in a way that it can be used across disciplines to aid the inclusion of CSSs in systematic reviews, guidelines and clinical decision-making.
Image Magnification through Non-local Edge Directed Interpolation

In this paper, we present a non-local edge directed interpolation method to magnify single frame image. The basic idea is to first extract the edge features and geometric features of image patches and use these feature matrices to match with the image patches to be interpolated employing the SSIM algorithm. Then taking advantage of the geometric duality between the low-resolution covariance and the high-resolution covariance to obtain the optimization coefficients and exploit multiple linear regression model (MLR) to reconstruct the image patch. The new algorithm can preserve the edge features and natural appearance of images efficiently. Simulation results demonstrate that our new interpolation algorithm substantially improves the subjective and objective quality.
High-Dimensional Multimodal Distribution Embedding

High-dimensional data is emerging in more and more varied domains, but its analysis has revealed to be difficult due to the curse of dimensionality. Dimension reduction emerged as a powerful tool in overcoming problems related to high-dimensionality, still the curse of dimensionality continues to impact many of the existing methods. The current paper concentrates on low-dimensional distance-based embeddings for high-dimensional multimodal distributions, i.e. clustered data. Pair wise distances are particularly influenced by high-dimensionality. Their analysis is at the basis of the embedding method presented here and called HDME. To avoid the problems of high-dimensionality, HDME performs a distance transformation based on interpoint relationships. The positive influence of the transformation in preserving and emphasizing clusters is first demonstrated using label information. The distance transformation is driven by the estimation of the neighbourhood information. The transformed distances are embedded in a low-dimensional space using a classical embedding method. Experiments on real-world data show that distance transformations can be effectively used in conjunction with distance-based embedding methods to obtain representation spaces that well discriminate clusters.
International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology. LXXIII. Nomenclature for the Formyl Peptide Receptor (FPR) Family

Formyl peptide receptors (FPRs) are a small group of seven-transmembrane domain, G protein-coupled receptors that are expressed mainly by mammalian phagocytic leukocytes and are known to be important in host defense and inflammation. The three human FPRs (FPR1, FPR2/ALX, and FPR3) share significant sequence homology and are encoded by clustered genes. Collectively, these receptors bind an extraordinarily numerous and structurally diverse group of agonistic ligands, including N-formyl and nonformyl peptides of different composition, that chemoattract and activate phagocytes. N-formyl peptides, which are encoded in nature only by bacterial and mitochondrial genes and result from obligatory initiation of bacterial and mitochondrial protein synthesis with N-formylmethionine, is the only ligand class common to all three human receptors. Surprisingly, the endogenous anti-inflammatory peptide annexin 1 and its N-terminal fragments also bind human FPR1 and FPR2/ALX, and the anti-inflammatory eicosanoid lipoxin A4 is an agonist at FPR2/ALX. In comparison, fewer agonists have been identified for FPR3, the third member in this receptor family. Structural and functional studies of the FPRs have produced important information for understanding the general pharmacological principles governing all leukocyte chemoattractant receptors. This article aims to provide an overview of the discovery and pharmacological characterization of FPRs, to introduce an International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (IUPHAR)-recommended nomenclature, and to discuss unmet challenges, including the mechanisms used by these receptors to bind diverse ligands and mediate different biological functions.
p16INK4a Suppression by Glucose Restriction Contributes to Human Cellular Lifespan Extension through SIRT1-Mediated Epigenetic and Genetic Mechanisms

Although caloric restriction (CR) has been shown to increase lifespan in various animal models, the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have not yet been revealed. We developed an in vitro system to mimic CR by reducing glucose concentration in cell growth medium which excludes metabolic factors and allows assessment of the effects of CR at the cellular and molecular level. We monitored cellular proliferation of normal WI-38, IMR-90 and MRC-5 human lung fibroblasts and found that glucose restriction (GR) can inhibit cellular senescence and significantly extend cellular lifespan compared with cells receiving normal glucose (NG) in the culture medium. Moreover, GR decreased expression of p16INK4a (p16), a well-known senescence-related gene, in all of the tested cell lines. Over-expressed p16 resulted in early replicative senescence in glucose-restricted cells suggesting a crucial role of p16 regulation in GR-induced cellular lifespan extension. The decreased expression of p16 was partly due to GR-induced chromatin remodeling through effects on histone acetylation and methylation of the p16 promoter. GR resulted in an increased expression of SIRT1, a NAD-dependent histone deacetylase, which has positive correlation with CR-induced longevity. The elevated SIRT1 was accompanied by enhanced activation of the Akt/p70S6K1 signaling pathway in response to GR. Furthermore, knockdown of SIRT1 abolished GR-induced p16 repression as well as Akt/p70S6K1 activation implying that SIRT1 may affect p16 repression through direct deacetylation effects and indirect regulation of Akt/p70S6K1 signaling. Collectively, these results provide new insights into interactions between epigenetic and genetic mechanisms on CR-induced longevity that may contribute to anti-aging approaches and also provide a general molecular model for studying CR in vitro in mammalian systems.
A novel methodology for the interoperability evaluation of an iris segmentation algorithm

The performance of an iris recognition system depends greatly on how well the iris segmentation part of the system performs its task. The performance of an iris segmentation algorithm can be evaluated using different criteria and methods. Some of the methods evaluate the performance of the segmentation algorithm based on the performance of the whole iris recognition system. Other methods evaluate the performance of an iris segmentation subsystem independent of the performance of the system's other subsystems. To our knowledge there do not exist a generally accepted method or criteria for the evaluation of the standalone iris segmentation subsystem. This paper proposes a novel methodology to compare the performance of different iris segmentation algorithms, applied to different image datasets in a consistent way. The methodology employs the F1 score and an empirical cumulative distribution function. The implementation of the F1 score estimation, adapted to the iris segmentation task is described. Finally the application of the proposed methodology is demonstrated and discussed.
Astroglial Differentiation of Cortical Precursor Cells Triggered by Activation of the cAMP-Dependent Signaling Pathway

In the developing brain, differentiation of neural precursors into neurons or glial cells occurs in response to neurotrophic factors acting on the cell surface. Intracellular signaling mechanisms that relay information to initiate differentiative responses of neural precursor cells are poorly understood. To investigate whether stimulation of the cAMP-dependent signaling pathway participates in differentiative responses of cells in the developing CNS, we performed experiments using both conditionally immortalized neural precursor cells (RC2.E10 cells) and primary cultures of cells from developing rat cortex. Initially, we determined that RC2.E10 cells retain phenotypic features of neural precursors after inactivation of the immortalizing oncogene, a temperature-sensitive mutant of the simian virus 40 large-T antigen (SV40T). We found that, once SV40T is inactivated, RC2.E10 cells cease to divide and die. However, RC2.E10 cells can proliferate in the presence of basic fibroblast growth factor. In addition, they express nestin, a marker of neural precursor cells. Both RC2.E10 cells and primary cortical precursor cells undergo astroglial differentiation in response to cAMP stimulation by treatment with 8-bromo-cAMP. In both cases, cAMP-induced astrocyte differentiation is characterized by morphological changes, stimulation of glial fibrillary acidic protein expression, downregulation of nestin expression, and decreased proliferation. No increases in the expression of neuronal or oligodendrocytic markers were observed. Our results support the notion that the developing CNS contains neural precursor cells with the capacity of undergoing astrocyte differentiation in response to increased intracellular cAMP concentrations.
Method to construct conceptual graph with technical term dictionary for schema matching

Information distribution is facilitated by data creation according to XML Schema. The definitions of a term are not uniquely defined between schemas in the same field because anyone can create a schema. Consequently, efforts are being made to share dictionaries of common terms and definitions of common XML Schema in each field as documents. However, in some cases a concept not defined in these documents should be newly defined, or in other cases two or more different expressions having the similar meaning are separately defined in different documents. In such a case, matching between schemas cannot be performed if a proper term cannot be selected, and the interoperability between the created data may decrease. Thus, for the purpose of supporting definition of a schema in conformity with the existing documents, this research proposes a method to give core components to technical terms using a conceptual graph, and demonstrates its usability.
Open Access Research Article Development of an Oligo Dna Microarray for the European Sea Bass and Its Application to Expression Profiling of Jaw Deformity

Background: The European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) is a marine fish of great importance for fisheries and aquaculture. Functional genomics offers the possibility to discover the molecular mechanisms underlying productive traits in farmed fish, and a step towards the application of marker assisted selection methods in this species. To this end, we report here on the development of an oligo DNA microarray for D. labrax. Results: A database consisting of 19,048 unique transcripts was constructed, of which 12,008 (63%) could be annotated by similarity and 4,692 received a GO functional annotation. Two non-overlapping 60mer probes were designed for each unique transcript and in-situ synthesized on glass slides using Agilent SurePrint™ technology. Probe design was positively completed for 19,035 target clusters; the oligo microarray was then applied to profile gene expression in mandibles and whole-heads of fish affected by prognathism, a skeletal malformation that strongly affects sea bass production. Statistical analysis identified 242 transcripts that are significantly down-regulated in deformed individuals compared to normal fish, with a significant enrichment in genes related to nervous system development and functioning. A set of genes spanning a wide dynamic range in gene expression level were selected for quantitative RT-PCR validation. Fold change correlation between microarray and qPCR data was always significant. Conclusions: The microarray platform developed for the European sea bass has a high level of flexibility, reliability, and reproducibility. Despite the well known limitations in achieving a proper functional annotation in non-model species, sufficient information was obtained to identify biological processes that are significantly enriched among differentially expressed genes. New insights were obtained on putative mechanisms involved on mandibular prognathism, suggesting that bone/nervous system development might play a role in this phenomenon. Background Lower jaw protrusion or mandibular prognathism (MP) is a developmental malformation conferring a very distinctive facial phenotype. The most famous example of MP is the Habsburg family, one of the oldest European royal families, where prognathism has been observed in several successive generations [1], suggesting a strong genetic component for this disorder. In fact, although environmental factors appear to contribute to the development