Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detecting spatial outliers with multiple attributes

A spatial outlier is a spatially referenced object whose non-spatial attribute values are significantly different from the values of its neighborhood. Identification of spatial outliers can lead to the discovery of unexpected, interesting, and useful spatial patterns for further analysis. Previous work in spatial outlier detection focuses on detecting spatial outliers with a single attribute. In the paper, we propose two approaches to discover spatial outliers with multiple attributes. We formulate the multi-attribute spatial outlier detection problem in a general way, provide two effective detection algorithms, and analyze their computation complexity. In addition, using a real-world census data, we demonstrate that our approaches can effectively identify local abnormality in large spatial data sets.
QueRIE reloaded: Using matrix factorization to improve database query recommendations

Interactive database exploration is a key task in information mining. Relational databases have been long used as a critical infrastructure component to access and analyze large volumes of data in a variety of applications, including ad-hoc analytics over big data, large-scale data warehouses that support business-intelligence tools, and services for scientific-data exploration. To aid the users of such databases, we developed the QueRIE system for personalized query recommendations. Similarly to traditional recommender systems, QueRIE continuously monitors the user's querying behavior and finds matching patterns in the system's query log, identifying "similar" users. Subsequently, these users and their queries are being used to recommend queries that the current user may find useful. We have previously shown that when employing different neighborhood-based collaborative filtering techniques, there exists a trade-off between computational efficiency and accuracy. In this paper we extend our previous work on the QueRIE framework, to address scalability, the most desirable characteristic of applications that rely on the mining of big data. Latent factor collaborative filtering models have been shown to address the scalability problem in traditional rating-based recommender systems, without much compromise to the recommender system's accuracy. In this work, we explore the use of latent factor models when, instead of ratings, the input consists of database-query log data. We show through experimentation that, as in the case of rating-based recommender systems, such techniques offer both scalability and prediction accuracy in the database query recommendations domain, outperforming the neighborhood-based approaches.
Low Expression of the IL-23/Th17 Pathway in Atopic Dermatitis Compared to Psoriasis1

The classical Th1/Th2 paradigm previously defining atopic dermatitis (AD) and psoriasis has recently been challenged with the discovery of Th17 T cells that synthesize IL-17 and IL-22. Although it is becoming evident that many Th1 diseases including psoriasis have a strong IL-17 signal, the importance of Th17 T cells in AD is still unclear. We examined and compared skin biopsies from AD and psoriasis patients by gene microarray, RT-PCR, immunohistochemistry, and immunofluorescence. We found a reduced genomic expression of IL-23, IL-17, and IFN-γ in AD compared with psoriasis. To define the effects of IL-17 and IL-22 on keratinocytes, we performed gene array studies with cytokine-treated keratinocytes. We found lipocalin 2 and numerous other innate defense genes to be selectively induced in keratinocytes by IL-17. IFN-γ had no effect on antimicrobial gene-expression in keratinocytes. In AD skin lesions, protein and mRNA expression of lipocalin 2 and other innate defense genes (hBD2, elafin, LL37) were reduced compared with psoriasis. Although AD has been framed by the Th1/Th2 paradigm as a Th2 polar disease, we present evidence that the IL-23/Th17 axis is largely absent, perhaps accounting for recurrent skin infections in this disease.
High Frequency of Autoreactive Myelin Proteolipid Protein–Specific T Cells in the Periphery of Naive Mice

The autoreactive T cells that escape central tolerance and form the peripheral self-reactive repertoire determine both susceptibility to autoimmune disease and the epitope dominance of a specific autoantigen. SJL (H-2s) mice are highly susceptible to the induction of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) with myelin proteolipid protein (PLP). The two major encephalitogenic epitopes of PLP (PLP 139–151 and PLP 178–191) bind to IAs with similar affinity; however, the immune response to the PLP 139–151 epitope is always dominant. The immunodominance of the PLP 139–151 epitope in SJL mice appears to be due to the presence of expanded numbers of T cells (frequency of 1/20,000 CD4+ cells) reactive to PLP 139–151 in the peripheral repertoire of naive mice. Neither the PLP autoantigen nor infectious environmental agents appear to be responsible for this expanded repertoire, as endogenous PLP 139–151 reactivity is found in both PLP-deficient and germ-free mice. The high frequency of PLP 139–151-reactive T cells in SJL mice is partly due to lack of thymic deletion to PLP 139–151, as the DM20 isoform of PLP (which lacks residues 116–150) is more abundantly expressed in the thymus than full-length PLP. Reexpression of PLP 139–151 in the embryonic thymus results in a significant reduction of PLP 139–151-reactive precursors in naive mice. Thus, escape from central tolerance, combined with peripheral expansion by cross-reactive antigen(s), appears to be responsible for the high frequency of PLP 139–151-reactive T cells.
Towards an Expressive and Scalable Twitter's Users Profiles

Microblogging websites such as Twitter produce tremendous amount of data each second. Consequently, real-time recommendation systems require very efficient algorithm to quickly proceed this massive amount of data. In this paper we propose a scalable and extensible way of building content-based user profiles. Scalability refers to the relative complexity of algorithms involved in building the users profiles with respect to state-of-the-art solutions. Extensibility consider avoiding to recompute the model for newcomers. We present a tractable algorithm to build user profiles out of their tweets. Our model is a graph of terms cooccurency, driven by the fact that user sharing similar interests will share similar terms. We then present how this model can be encoded as a binary footprint, hence boosting comparison of users. We provide an empirical study to measure how the distance between users in the hash space differs from distance between users using standard Information Retrieval techniques. This experiment is based on a Twitter dataset we crawled, and represents 25K users and 1 million tweets. Our approach is driven by real-time analysis requirements and is thus oriented on a trade-off between expressivity and efficiency. Experimental results shows that our approach outperforms vector space model by three orders of magnitude, with a precision of 58%.
Specific protein 1 depletion attenuates glucose uptake and proliferation of human glioma cells by regulating GLUT3 expression

It has been reported previously that the expression of glucose transporter member 3 (GLUT3) is increased in malignant glioma cells compared with normal glial cells. However, the regulating mechanism that causes this phenomenon remains unknown. The present study investigated the regulating role of transcription factor specific protein 1 (Sp1) in GLUT3 expression in a human glioma cell line. In the present study, Sp1 was identified to directly bind to the GLUT3 5′-untranslated region in human glioma U251 cells. Small interfering RNA- and the Sp1-inhibitor mithramycin A-mediated Sp1 knockdown experiments revealed that Sp1 depletion decreased glucose uptake and inhibited cell growth and invasion of U251 cells by downregulating GLUT3 expression. Therefore Sp1 is an important positive regulator for the expression of GLUT3 in human glioma cells, and may explain the overexpression of GLUT3 in U251 cells. These results suggest that Sp1 may have a role in glioma treatment.
Plasma Cell-Free DNA Levels Are Elevated in Acute Puumala Hantavirus Infection

Introduction Puumala hantavirus (PUUV) causes a hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome called nephropathia epidemica (NE). The aim of the present study was to evaluate plasma cell-free DNA (cf-DNA) levels and urinary cf-DNA excretion in acute NE as well as their associations with the severity of the disease. Methods Total plasma cf-DNA was quantified directly in plasma of 61 patients and urine of 20 patients with acute NE. We also carried out a qualitative high-sensitivity lab-on-a-chip DNA assay in 20 patients to elucidate the appearance of cf-DNA in plasma and urine. Results The maximum plasma cf-DNA values taken during acute NE were significantly higher than the control values taken after the hospitalization period (median 1.33 µg/ml, range 0.94–3.29 µg/ml vs. median 0.77 µg/ml, range 0.55–0.99 µg/ml, P<0.001). The maximum plasma cf-DNA levels correlated positively with maximum blood leukocyte count (r = 0.388, P = 0.002) and the length of hospital stay (r = 0.376, P = 0.003), and inversely with minimum blood platelet count (r = −0.297, P = 0.020). Qualitative analysis of plasma cf-DNA revealed that in most of the patients cf-DNA displayed a low-molecular weight appearance, corresponding to the size of apoptotic DNA (150–200 bp). The visually graded maximum cf-DNA band intensity correlated positively with the maximum quantity of total plasma cf-DNA (r = 0.513, P = 0.021). Maximum urinary excretion of cf-DNA in turn was not markedly increased during the acute phase of NE and did not correlate with any of the variables reflecting severity of the disease or with the maximum plasma cf-DNA level. Conclusions The plasma levels of cf-DNA are elevated during acute PUUV infection and correlate with the apoptotic cf-DNA-band intensity. The plasma cf-DNA concentration correlates with some variables reflecting the severity of the disease. The urinary excretion of cf-DNA does not reflect the degree of inflammation in the kidney.
Handling illumination variation in face recognition using multiscale retinex

Face recognition has an important role in the age of information technology to improve comfort and security. Various face recognition algorithms are proven to be effective if done under a controlled environment. However, recognition performance will decrease significantly in the uncontrolled environment, for example caused by illumination variation. This paper discusses the approach to deal with varying illumination on face recognition with Multi-Scale Retinex method. To verify accuracy of this algorithm, it is used Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Eulidean distance as algorithms to identify faces. In the experiments, Multi-Scale Retinex is also compared to other normalization methods, such as gamma correction, histogram equalization, Retinex, and Single-Scale Retinex. Based on several face recognition dataset, that is Extended Yale B, Faces95, and Grimace, it can be concluded that the Multi-Scale Retinex method with one scale (Single-Scale Retinex) can properly normalize the illumination on the face image in term of speed and performance.
Enhancement of Heterologous Gene Expression in Flammulina velutipes Using Polycistronic Vectors Containing a Viral 2A Cleavage Sequence

Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation for edible mushrooms has been previously established. However, the enhancement of heterologous protein production and the expression of multi-target genes remains a challenge. In this study, heterologous protein expression in the enoki mushroom Flammulina velutipes was notably enhanced using 2A peptide-mediated cleavage to co-express multiple copies of single gene. The polycistronic expression vectors were constructed by connecting multi copies of the enhanced green fluorescent protein (egfp) gene using 2A peptides derived from porcine teschovirus-1. The P2A peptides properly self-cleaved as shown by the formation of the transformants with antibiotic resistant capacity and exciting green fluorescence levels after introducing the vectors into F. velutipes mycelia. The results of western blot analysis, epifluorescent microscopy and EGFP production showed that heterologous protein expression in F. velutipes using the polycistronic strategy increased proportionally as the gene copy number increased from one to three copies. In contrast, much lower EGFP levels were detected in the F. velutipes transformants harboring four copies of the egfp gene due to mRNA instability. The polycistronic strategy using 2A peptide-mediated cleavage developed in this study can not only be used to express single gene in multiple copies, but also to express multiple genes in a single reading frame. It is a promising strategy for the application of mushroom molecular pharming.
Enhanced Brain Disposition and Effects of Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol in P-Glycoprotein and Breast Cancer Resistance Protein Knockout Mice

The ABC transporters P-glycoprotein (P-gp, Abcb1) and breast cancer resistance protein (Bcrp, Abcg2) regulate the CNS disposition of many drugs. The main psychoactive constituent of cannabis Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) has affinity for P-gp and Bcrp, however it is unknown whether these transporters modulate the brain accumulation of THC and its functional effects on the CNS. Here we aim to show that mice devoid of Abcb1 and Abcg2 retain higher brain THC levels and are more sensitive to cannabinoid-induced hypothermia than wild-type (WT) mice. Abcb1a/b (−/−), Abcg2 (−/−) and wild-type (WT) mice were injected with THC before brain and blood were collected and THC concentrations determined. Another cohort of mice was examined for THC-induced hypothermia by measuring rectal body temperature. Brain THC concentrations were higher in both Abcb1a/b (−/−) and Abcg2 (−/−) mice than WT mice. ABC transporter knockout mice exhibited delayed elimination of THC from the brain with the effect being more prominent in Abcg2 (−/−) mice. ABC transporter knockout mice were more sensitive to THC-induced hypothermia compared to WT mice. These results show P-gp and Bcrp prolong the brain disposition and hypothermic effects of THC and offer a novel mechanism for both genetic vulnerability to the psychoactive effects of cannabis and drug interactions between CNS therapies and cannabis.
Numerical analysis of a locking‐free mixed finite element method for a bending moment formulation of Reissner‐Mindlin plate model

This article deals with the approximation of the bending of a clamped plate, modeled by Reissner‐Mindlin equations. It is known that standard finite element methods applied to this model lead to wrong results when the thickness t is small. Here, we propose a mixed formulation based on the Hellinger‐Reissner principle which is written in terms of the bending moments, the shear stress, the rotations and the transverse displacement. To prove that the resulting variational formulation is well posed, we use the Babuška‐Brezzi theory with appropriate t ‐dependent norms. The problem is discretized by standard mixed finite elements without the need of any reduction operator. Error estimates are proved. These estimates have an optimal dependence on the mesh size h and a mild dependence on the plate thickness t. This allows us to conclude that the method is locking‐free. The proposed method yields direct approximation of the bending moments and the shear stress. A local postprocessing leading to H1 ‐type approximations of transverse displacement and rotations is introduced. Moreover, we propose a hybridization procedure, which leads to solving a significantly smaller positive definite system. Finally, we report numerical experiments which allow us to assess the performance of the method. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2013
Recognizing focus areas using isophote pupil location

In several subject areas within computer science, such as usability research and alternative input devices, eye gaze tracking plays an important role. While there are several existing approaches (eg. [17, 16, 15]), most of them are either invasive by requiring the attachment of sensors, cameras or controllers to the user’s head, or are prohibitively expensive, such as those using infrared corneal reflection techniques and stereovision. In this paper, I introduce a method that tracks the eye’s gaze using only a webcam. It relies on face detection using boosted cascade classifiers, as proposed in [20], 3D reconstruction using POSIT, as described in [5], and pupil detection using isophote centers as discussed in [19]. It also uses the isophotes to detect the eye corners, and Lucas–Kanade tracking, as developed in [13], to keep track of the eye corners once found. This method was implemented in a proof of concept application using OpenCV. This proof of concept has been evaluated, discovering several important issues with the approach used. These concern not only the pupil tracking itself, but also the effective localization of a face in 3D. Based on the problems discovered, several approaches for further improvement are suggested. In conclusion, while this implementation did not achieve an accuracy anywhere near sufficient to be usable in general real-world applications, I remain hopeful as to its eventual usefulness in the field.
Hepatocyte Growth Factor Enhances Engraftment and Function of Nonhuman Primate Islets

OBJECTIVE—Adenoviral delivery of hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) to rodent islets improves islet graft survival and function, markedly reducing the number of islets required to achieve glucose control. Here, we asked whether these prior observations in rodent models extend to nonhuman primate (NHP) islets. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—NHP islets were transduced with murine (Ad.mHGF) or human (Ad.hHGF) adenoviral HGF (Ad.HGF) at low multiplicity of infection and studied in vitro. To study the function of Ad.HGF-transduced NHP islets in vivo, a renal subcapsular marginal mass islet transplant model was developed in streptozotocin-induced diabetic NOD-SCID mice. RESULTS—Baseline glucose values were 454.7 ± 11.3 mg/dl (n = 7). Transplant of 500 NHP islet equivalents (IE) had only a marginal effect on blood glucose (369.1 ± 9.7 mg/dl, n = 5). In striking contrast, 500 NHP IE transduced with Ad.mHGF promptly and continuously corrected blood glucose (142.0 ± 6.2 mg/dl, n = 7) for the 6-week duration of the experiment. Unilateral nephrectomy resulted in an immediate return of glucose to baseline diabetic levels. Interestingly, adenoviral DNA, as well as mouse HGF (mHGF) mRNA derived from the adenovirus, were present for 42 days posttransplantation. Surprisingly, transplant of 500 IE with Ad.hHGF, as compared with Ad.mHGF, resulted in only marginal correction of blood glucose, suggesting that human HGF is less efficient than mHGF in this system. CONCLUSIONS—These studies demonstrate that mHGF markedly improves islet transplant outcomes in the highest preclinical species examined to date. HGF has promise as an agent that can improve islet mass and function in transplant models and likely in other models of types 1 and 2 diabetes.
? ? A Systematic Method for Software Architecture Design

This paper presents the Systematic Method for Architecture Design (SyMAD) which extends the Attribute Driven Design (ADD) method by (i) enforcing, at any level of granularity, a separation between application design addressing functional requirements and architecture design addressing non-functional requirements, (ii) making it explicit that non-functional requirements at any particular level of granularity may give rise to both functional and non-functional requirements at the next lower level of granularity and that these are, in turn, addressed through application and architecture design at that lower level, (iii) enforcing that at any level of granularity the infrastructure of any component is constrained by a single structural pattern, (iv) introducing concepts and constraints within which application components are to be realized, and (v) explicitly including the identification of reuse candidates and the customization of reused architectural components. The separation of concerns enforced by SyMAD allows the architecture and application designs of any component to evolve independently. This leads to improved reuse of both architectural and application components. A case study is presented in order to illustrate the method and to expose the differences between SyMAD and other software architecture design approaches.
Scale-Free Networks with the Same Degree Distribution: Different Structural Properties

We have analysed some structural properties of scale-free networks with the same degree distribution. Departing from a degree distribution obtained from the Barabasi-Albert (BA) algorithm, networks were generated using four additional different algorithms (Molloy-Reed, Kalisky, and two new models named A and B) besides the BA algorithm itself. For each network, we have calculated the following structural measures: average degree of the nearest neighbours, central point dominance, clustering coefficient, the Pearson correlation coefficient, and global efficiency. We found that different networks with the same degree distribution may have distinct structural properties. In particular, model B generates decentralized networks with a larger number of components, a smaller giant component size, and a low global efficiency when compared to the other algorithms, especially compared to the centralized BA networks that have all vertices in a single component, with a medium to high global efficiency. The other three models generate networks with intermediate characteristics between B and BA models. A consequence of this finding is that the dynamics of different phenomena on these networks may differ considerably.
Flexible Wormhole-Switched Network-on-chip with Two-Level Priority Data Delivery Service

A synchronous network-on-chip using wormhole packet switch- ing and supporting guaranteed-completion best-effort with low-priority (LP) and high-priority (HP) wormhole packet delivery service is presented in this paper. Both our proposed LP and HP message services deliver a good quality of service in term of lossless packet completion and in-order message data delivery. However, the LP message service does not guarantee minimal completion bound. The HP packets will absolutely use 100% bandwidth of their reserved links if the HP packets are injected from the source node with maximum injection. Hence, the service are suitable for small size messages (less than hundred bytes). Otherwise the other HP and LP messages, which require also the links, will experience relatively high latency depending on the size of the HP message. The LP packets are routed using a minimal adaptive routing, while the HP packets are routed using a non-minimal adaptive routing algorithm. Therefore, an additional 3-bit field, identifying the packet type, is introduced in their packet headers to classify and to determine the type of service committed to the packet. Our NoC prototypes have been also synthesized using a 180-nm CMOS standard-cell technology to evaluate the cost of implementing the combination of both services.
Improving autocorrelation performance of Skew Tent sequence based on APAS theorem

Chaotic sequences, as a kind of pseudorandom sequences, have been widely used. But some well known chaotic sequences, such as Skew Tent sequence, have poor autocorrelation performance, and their applications are limited. Based on recently presented APAS theorem, we modified Skew Tent map to S-Skew Tent map, and S-Skew Tent sequence has excellent autocorrelation performance and simple structure, whereas its other performances are remained invariant or become better, and can be used more widely.