Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A reconfigurable near-data systolic array accelerator for the three-dimensional DRAM systems

In this work, we propose a reconfigurable near-data systolic array accelerator (NDSAA) for the 3D DRAM systems. The NDSAA supports the iterative operations for different applications, and the data movement between the processor core and the 3D DRAM is reduced. In our experiments, the 3D DRAM stacking the NDSAA reduces the latency by 51% ~ 70% compared to the one stacking the general bi-directional systolic array.
Identification of Genetic Susceptibility Loci for Colorectal Tumors in a Genome-Wide Meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND & AIMS Heritable factors contribute to the development of colorectal cancer. Identifying the genetic loci associated with colorectal tumor formation could elucidate the mechanisms of pathogenesis. METHODS We conducted a genome-wide association study that included 14 studies, 12,696 cases of colorectal tumors (11,870 cancer, 826 adenoma), and 15,113 controls of European descent. The 10 most statistically significant, previously unreported findings were followed up in 6 studies; these included 3056 colorectal tumor cases (2098 cancer, 958 adenoma) and 6658 controls of European and Asian descent. RESULTS Based on the combined analysis, we identified a locus that reached the conventional genome-wide significance level at less than 5.0 × 10(-8): an intergenic region on chromosome 2q32.3, close to nucleic acid binding protein 1 (most significant single nucleotide polymorphism: rs11903757; odds ratio [OR], 1.15 per risk allele; P = 3.7 × 10(-8)). We also found evidence for 3 additional loci with P values less than 5.0 × 10(-7): a locus within the laminin gamma 1 gene on chromosome 1q25.3 (rs10911251; OR, 1.10 per risk allele; P = 9.5 × 10(-8)), a locus within the cyclin D2 gene on chromosome 12p13.32 (rs3217810 per risk allele; OR, 0.84; P = 5.9 × 10(-8)), and a locus in the T-box 3 gene on chromosome 12q24.21 (rs59336; OR, 0.91 per risk allele; P = 3.7 × 10(-7)). CONCLUSIONS In a large genome-wide association study, we associated polymorphisms close to nucleic acid binding protein 1 (which encodes a DNA-binding protein involved in DNA repair) with colorectal tumor risk. We also provided evidence for an association between colorectal tumor risk and polymorphisms in laminin gamma 1 (this is the second gene in the laminin family to be associated with colorectal cancers), cyclin D2 (which encodes for cyclin D2), and T-box 3 (which encodes a T-box transcription factor and is a target of Wnt signaling to β-catenin). The roles of these genes and their products in cancer pathogenesis warrant further investigation.
Demagnetization Withstand Capability Enhancement of Surface Mounted PM Machines Using Stator Modularity

The flux gaps in alternate stator teeth of the modular permanent-magnet machines can have a significant impact on the total magnet flux density, and hence the potential magnet reversible/irreversible demagnetization under flux weakening operations or short-circuit conditions. Such a problem has not been studied in literature and will be investigated in this paper. The influence of flux gaps on the <italic>d</italic>-axis inductance and the potential peak short-circuit current is analyzed for different slot/pole number combinations. It is found that the flux gaps will affect both <italic>d</italic>-axis inductance and open-circuit flux linkage, and hence reduce short-circuit current of machines with pole number (2<italic>p</italic>) smaller than slot number (<italic>N<sub>s</sub></italic>), while they will increase the short-circuit current of machines with 2<italic>p</italic> > <italic>N<sub>s </sub></italic>. However, the opposite phenomena can be observed for demagnetization withstand capability. For machines having 2<italic>p < N<sub>s</sub></italic>, the flux gaps tend to lower withstand capability, while for machines having 2<italic>p > N<sub>s</sub></italic>, this capability can be improved. Other parameters such as magnet thickness and temperature have also been accounted for in the demagnetization analysis. Tests have been carried out to validate the predictions of inductances and short-circuit current, as well as performance such as phase back electromotive force, cogging torque, and static torque for machines with one defective magnet, which represents the case of partially demagnetized magnets.
Application of Microfluidics in Experimental Ecology: The Importance of Being Spatial

Microfluidics is an emerging technology that is used more and more in biology experiments. Its capabilities of creating precisely controlled conditions in cellular dimensions make it ideal to explore cell-cell and cell-environment interactions. Thus, a wide spectrum of problems in microbial ecology can be studied using engineered microbial habitats. Moreover, artificial microfluidic ecosystems can serve as model systems to test ecology theories and principles that apply on a higher level in the hierarchy of biological organization. In this mini review we aim to demonstrate the versatility of microfluidics and the diversity of its applications that help the advance of microbiology, and in more general, experimental ecology.
Cross-curricular skills development in final-year dissertation by active and collaborative methodologies

ABSTRACT European Frame for Higher Education has led universities to adapt their teaching schemes. Degrees must train students in competences including specific and cross-curricular skills. Nevertheless, there are important limitations to follow skill improvement through the consecutive academic years. Final-year dissertation (FYD) offers the opportunity to assess these aspects so linked to the professional requirements. The experience reported here offers an alternative methodology for the FYD in order to reinforce cross-curricular skills and substitute the classic final evaluation schemes. A new protocol for the FYD was defined and tested in the Degree in Human Nutrition and Dietetics, with the participation of students and lecturers from different disciplines. The new methodology included collaborative activities that required students active implication and participation. New cross-curricular skills not considered before were included and evaluated in a continuous way: analysis and critical attitude, as well as team working. Obtained data revealed an improvement over cross-curricular skills. Student–student cooperation resulted in significant contributions to enhance FYD quality. The new methodology was satisfactorily valued by students. The main keys for the successful implementation of this protocol were the followings: encouragement of teachers and students, coordination, information and communication technologies, and clear guidelines.
Extreme Anomalous Oversampling Technique for Class Imbalance

Class imbalance problem is an important classification problem in machine learning which shows undesirable performance of a minority class. These minority instances have a tendency to be misclassified due to their tiny portion in a dataset. For a binary classification, they are labeled as positive while the rest are labeled as negative. This research proposes the novel parameter-free oversampling technique called the extreme anomalous oversampling technique, EXOT, based on an extreme anomalous score, EAS, and a negative anomalous score, NAS. This technique is used for rebalancing a data distribution that can be classified by any classifier. EAS of the instance p is the largest radius of an open ball centering at p containing only a single instance while NAS is the largest radius of an open ball centering at p without negative instances. EXOT synthesizes positive instances surrounding the original positive one using these two EAS and NAS. This work was conducted with three UCI datasets comparing SMOTE, borderline-SMOTE, safe-level SMOTE, and EXOT based on four classifiers which are C4.5, K-nearest neighbor classifier, multilayer perceptron, and naïve Bayes using precision, recall, F1-measure, and G-mean as performance measures. The results show the improvement of classification performances on a minority class on all three UCI datasets.
Energy-Efficient Wide-Range Voltage Level Shifters Reaching 4.2 fJ/Transition

This letter proposes a new level-shifting structure that can convert extremely low levels of input voltages to high output voltages while maintaining excellent delay and power dissipation. In order to reduce contention and voltage swing in the internal nodes, the proposed circuit uses a diode-connected level shifter between gate terminals of the output inverter. Using a control circuit, only during the high-to-low transitions of the output, a current is forced into the diode-connected device. Measurement results demonstrate that the proposed circuit can consume as small energy as 4.2 fJ/transition with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V} _{\text {DDL}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V} _{\text {DDH}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of 0.35 V and 1.1 V, respectively, when implemented in a 40-nm CMOS technology. Furthermore, when fabricated in a 180-nm technology, the level-shifting circuit can convert <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V} _{\text {DDL}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> as small as 80 mV to 1.8 V without using low-threshold devices.
5′-Terminal nucleotide variations in human cytoplasmic tRNAHisGUG and its 5′-halves

Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) are fundamental adapter components of translational machinery. tRNAs can further serve as a source of tRNA-derived noncoding RNAs that play important roles in various biological processes beyond translation. Among all species of tRNAs, tRNAHisGUG has been known to uniquely contain an additional guanosine residue at the −1 position (G−1) of its 5′-end. To analyze this −1 nucleotide in detail, we developed a TaqMan qRT-PCR method that can distinctively quantify human mature cytoplasmic tRNAHisGUG containing G−1, U−1, A−1, or C−1 or lacking the −1 nucleotide (starting from G1). Application of this method to the mature tRNA fraction of BT-474 breast cancer cells revealed the presence of tRNAHisGUG containing U−1 as well as the one containing G−1. Moreover, tRNA lacking the −1 nucleotide was also detected, thus indicating the heterogeneous expression of 5′-tRNAHisGUG variants. A sequence library of sex hormone-induced 5′-tRNA halves (5′-SHOT-RNAs), identified via cP-RNA-seq of a BT-474 small RNA fraction, also demonstrated the expression of 5′-tRNAHisGUG halves containing G−1, U−1, or G1 as 5′-terminal nucleotides. Although the detected 5′-nucleotide species were identical, the relative abundances differed widely between mature tRNA and 5′-half from the same BT-474 cells. The majority of mature tRNAs contained the −1 nucleotide, whereas the majority of 5′-halves lacked this nucleotide, which was biochemically confirmed using a primer extension assay. These results reveal the novel identities of tRNAHisGUG molecules and provide insights into tRNAHisGUG maturation and the regulation of tRNA half production.
Electromigration of Contaminated Soil by Electro-Bioremediation Technique

Soil contamination with heavy metals poses major environmental and human health problems. This problem needs an efficient method and affordable technological solution such as electro-bioremediation technique. The electro-bioremediation technique used in this study is the combination of bacteria and electrokinetic process. The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of Pseudomonas putida bacteria as a biodegradation agent to remediate contaminated soil. 5 kg of kaolin soil was spiked with 5 g of zinc oxide. During this process, the anode reservoir was filled with Pseudomonas putida while the cathode was filled with distilled water for 5 days at 50 V of electrical gradient. The X-Ray Fluorescent (XRF) test indicated that there was a significant reduction of zinc concentration for the soil near the anode with 89% percentage removal. The bacteria count is high near the anode which is 1.3x107 cfu/gww whereas the bacteria count at the middle and near the cathode was 5.0x106 cfu/gww and 8.0x106 cfu/gww respectively. The migration of ions to the opposite charge of electrodes during the electrokinetic process resulted from the reduction of zinc. The results obtained proved that the electro-bioremediation reduced the level of contaminants in the soil sample. Thus, the electro-bioremediation technique has the potential to be used in the treatment of contaminated soil.
Design of Highly-Parallel, 2.2Gbps Throughput Signal Detector for MIMO Systems

This paper presents a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of a new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signal detection algorithm applicable to ultra-high throughput MIMO communication systems. The algorithm simplifies the computation significantly compared to traditional K-Best algorithm, and with negligible bit error ratio (BER) degradation. A highly-parallel structure is implemented on the Xilinx Virtex-4 (XC4VLX200) platform, which achieves 2.2 Gbps detection throughput and is about four times over previous implementation. Moreover, a pre-processing method is realized to reduce the number of multipliers inside the detector and shrinks the critical path delay down to 6.79 ns. Together with candidate-sharing-architecture to further save the hardware cost, a high speed, compact signal detector for MIMO systems is demonstrated.
Metabolomics reveals that dietary xenoestrogens alter cellular metabolism induced by palbociclib/letrozole combination cancer therapy

Highlights Synergism of combined palbociclib/letrozole chemotherapy was examined by global metabolomics Combination therapy led to more pronounced effects on the MCF-7 metabolome than single agents Dietary phyto- and mycoestrogens significantly affected the metabolic and anti-oncogenic response of the drugs Implications of these bio-active chemicals on therapeutic success in breast cancer patients appear plausible In Brief Warth et al. used innovative global metabolomics and pathway prediction technology to describe the metabolic effects of the combined palbociclib/letrozole breast cancer therapy. Moreover, the role of dietary xenoestrogens on this treatment was examined by metabolite data, proliferation experiments, and functional assays. Summary Recently, the palbociclib/letrozole combination therapy was granted accelerated FDA approval for the treatment of estrogen receptor (ER) positive breast cancer. Since the underlying metabolic effects of these drugs are yet unknown, we investigated their synergism at the metabolome level in MCF-7 cells. As xenoestrogens interact with the ER, we additionally aimed at deciphering the impact of the phytoestrogen genistein, and the estrogenic mycotoxin zearalenone on this treatment. A global metabolomics approach was applied to unravel metabolite and pathway modifications. The results clearly showed that the combined effects of palbociclib and letrozole on cellular metabolism were far more pronounced than that of each agent alone and potently influenced by xenoestrogens. This behavior was confirmed in proliferation experiments and functional assays. Specifically, amino acids and central carbon metabolites were attenuated while higher abundances were observed for fatty acids and most nucleic acid related metabolites. Interestingly, exposure to model xenoestrogens appeared to partially counteract these effects.
Phase estimation for fast action recognition and trajectory generation in human–robot collaboration

This paper proposes a method to achieve fast and fluid human–robot interaction by estimating the progress of the movement of the human. The method allows the progress, also referred to as the phase of the movement, to be estimated even when observations of the human are partial and occluded; a problem typically found when using motion capture systems in cluttered environments. By leveraging on the framework of Interaction Probabilistic Movement Primitives, phase estimation makes it possible to classify the human action, and to generate a corresponding robot trajectory before the human finishes his/her movement. The method is therefore suited for semi-autonomous robots acting as assistants and coworkers. Since observations may be sparse, our method is based on computing the probability of different phase candidates to find the phase that best aligns the Interaction Probabilistic Movement Primitives with the current observations. The method is fundamentally different from approaches based on Dynamic Time Warping that must rely on a consistent stream of measurements at runtime. The resulting framework can achieve phase estimation, action recognition and robot trajectory coordination using a single probabilistic representation. We evaluated the method using a seven-degree-of-freedom lightweight robot arm equipped with a five-finger hand in single and multi-task collaborative experiments. We compare the accuracy achieved by phase estimation with our previous method based on dynamic time warping.
THE ARECIBO METHANOL MASER GALACTIC PLANE SURVEY. III. DISTANCES AND LUMINOSITIES

We derive kinematic distances to the 86 6.7 GHz methanol masers discovered in the Arecibo Methanol Maser Galactic Plane Survey. The systemic velocities of the sources were derived from 13CO (J = 2–1), CS (J = 5–4), and NH3 observations made with the ARO Submillimeter Telescope, the APEX telescope, and the Effelsberg 100 m telescope, respectively. Kinematic distance ambiguities were resolved using H i self-absorption with H i data from the VLA Galactic Plane Survey. We observe roughly three times as many sources at the far distance compared to the near distance. The vertical distribution of the sources has a scale height of ∼ 30 pc, and is much lower than that of the Galactic thin disk. We use the distances derived in this work to determine the luminosity function of 6.7 GHz maser emission. The luminosity function has a peak at approximately 10−6 L☉. Assuming that this luminosity function applies, the methanol maser population in the Large Magellanic Cloud and M33 is at least 4 and 14 times smaller, respectively, than in our Galaxy.
On the Leakage Resilience of Ideal-Lattice Based Public Key Encryption

We consider the leakage resilience of the Ring-LWE analogue of the Dual-Regev encryption scheme (R-Dual-Regev for short), originally presented by Lyubashevsky et al. (Eurocrypt ’13). Specifically, we would like to determine whether the R-Dual-Regev encryption scheme remains IND-CPA secure, even in the case where an attacker leaks information about the secret key. We consider the setting where R is the ring of integers of the m-th cyclotomic number field, for m which is a power-of-two, and the Ring-LWE modulus is set to q ≡ 1 mod m. This is the common setting used in practice and is desirable in terms of the efficiency and simplicity of the scheme. Unfortunately, in this setting Rq is very far from being a field so standard techniques for proving leakage resilience in the general lattice setting, which rely on the leftover hash lemma, do not apply. Therefore, new techniques must be developed. In this work, we put forth a high-level approach for proving the leakage resilience of the R-Dual-Regev scheme, by generalizing the original proof of Lyubashevsky et al. (Eurocrypt ’13). We then give three instantiations of our approach, proving that the R-Dual-Regev remains IND-CPA secure in the presence of three natural, non-adaptive leakage classes.
Beyond Boys’ Bad Behavior: Paternal Incarceration and Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

Abstract:A growing number of American school-aged children have incarcerated or formally incarcerated parents, necessitating a more comprehensive understanding of the intergenerational effects of mass imprisonment. Using the Fragile Families Study, I assess whether having an incarcerated father impacts children’s cognitive skill development into middle childhood. While previous studies have primarily found effects for boys’ behavior problems, matching models and sensitivity analyses demonstrate that experiencing paternal incarceration by age nine is associated with lower cognitive skills for both boys and girls, and these negative effects hold net of a pre-paternal incarceration measure of child cognitive ability. Moreover, I estimate that paternal incarceration explains between 2 and 15 percent of the Black–White achievement gap at age nine. These findings represent new outcomes of importance and suggest that paternal incarceration may play an even larger role in the production of intergenerational inequalities for American children than previously documented.
Detection and quantification of inbreeding depression for complex traits from SNP data

Significance Inbreeding depression (ID) is the reduction of fitness in offspring of related parents. This phenomenon can be quantified from SNP data through a number of measures of inbreeding. Our study addresses two key questions. How accurate are the different methods to estimate ID? And how and why should investigators choose among the multiple inbreeding measures to detect and quantify ID? Here, we compare the behaviors of ID estimates from three commonly used SNP-based measures of inbreeding and provide both theoretical and empirical arguments to answer these questions. Our work illustrates how to analyze SNP data efficiently to detect and quantify ID, across species and traits. Quantifying the effects of inbreeding is critical to characterizing the genetic architecture of complex traits. This study highlights through theory and simulations the strengths and shortcomings of three SNP-based inbreeding measures commonly used to estimate inbreeding depression (ID). We demonstrate that heterogeneity in linkage disequilibrium (LD) between causal variants and SNPs biases ID estimates, and we develop an approach to correct this bias using LD and minor allele frequency stratified inference (LDMS). We quantified ID in 25 traits measured in ∼140,000 participants of the UK Biobank, using LDMS, and confirmed previously published ID for 4 traits. We find unique evidence of ID for handgrip strength, waist/hip ratio, and visual and auditory acuity (ID between −2.3 and −5.2 phenotypic SDs for complete inbreeding; P<0.001). Our results illustrate that a careful choice of the measure of inbreeding combined with LDMS stratification improves both detection and quantification of ID using SNP data.
A Survey on Data Storage and Information Discovery in the WSANs-Based Edge Computing Systems

In the post-Cloud era, the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) has pushed the horizon of Edge computing, which is a new computing paradigm with data processed at the edge of the network. As the important systems of Edge computing, wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) play an important role in collecting and processing the sensing data from the surrounding environment as well as taking actions on the events happening in the environment. In WSANs, in-network data storage and information discovery schemes with high energy efficiency, high load balance and low latency are needed because of the limited resources of the sensor nodes and the real-time requirement of some specific applications, such as putting out a big fire in a forest. In this article, the existing schemes of WSANs on data storage and information discovery are surveyed with detailed analysis on their advancements and shortcomings, and possible solutions are proposed on how to achieve high efficiency, good load balance, and perfect real-time performances at the same time, hoping that it can provide a good reference for the future research of the WSANs-based Edge computing systems.