Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quantitative Study of Cellular Mechanisms of HIV Infection's Pathogenesis

CD4 lymphocyte affection underlies in HIV/AIDS infection pathogenesis. In this work we consider some questions of quantitative analysis of CD4 lymphocyte activity at the norm and HIV infection by mathematical modeling. Functional-differential equations for studying regulatory mechanisms of dynamics of CD4 lymphocyte's cellular communities' number have been developed. Results of the qualitative analysis, illustrating possibility of using the developed equations for studying mechanisms of HIV infection's pathogenesis without attraction of the "Hayflick limit" concept are presented. Some questions concerning choice of control ways of dynamics behavior of CD4 lymphocyte's cellular communities' number during HIV infection's pathogenesis are considered.
Survey on Ease of Use and Upgradability of Sensor Networks

Use of sensor networks in the research community is increasing and it is envisioned that their widespread use for day to day monitoring of the environment and events will continue to increase. However, many users and application developers for sensor networks are from areas other than computer science. It should therefore be easy and time efficient to develop applications for and to use sensor networks. This paper is a survey of the work done towards this goal and provides suggestions on possible future directions of work. We also discuss features that should be provided to sensor networks users.
Reproducibilities and responses to food intake of GFR measured with chromium-51-EDTA and iohexol simultaneously and independently in normal subjects.

BACKGROUND The aim was to evaluate the reproducibility of glomerular filtration rate (GFR) measured with iohexol and its response to food in a direct and independent comparison with Cr-51-ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA), and examine the influence of two different whole body scaling parameters, body surface area (BSA) and extracellular fluid volume (ECV). METHODS Fasting and non-fasting GFR were measured in 20 normal volunteers using Cr-51-EDTA and iohexol, simultaneously injected into opposite arms. In 10, the fasting study was repeated. Venous samples obtained bilaterally 20, 40, 60, 120, 180 and 240 min after injection were assayed for indicator injected contralaterally-Cr-51-EDTA by well-counting and iohexol by X-ray fluorescence. GFR scaled to BSA was measured from six samples (GFR/BSA6) and from the last three (GFR/BSA3). GFR scaled to ECV was calculated as the mean transit time of marker using six samples (GFR/ECV6) or the last three (GFR/ECV3). RESULTS GFR/BSA3 was reproducible (coefficient of variations of 7.4% for Cr-51-EDTA and 7.6% for iohexol). Using Cr-51-EDTA, GFR/ECV3 (9.1%) and GFR/ECV6 (7.7%) were as reproducible as GFR/BSA3 and GFR/BSA6 (both 8.1%). However, GFR/ECV3 measured with iohexol had poorer reproducibility (16.8%). Food resulted in an increase in scaled GFR of about 5 ml/min but this was statistically significant only with respect to GFR/BSA (measured with Cr-51-EDTA or iohexol) and not GFR/ECV. CONCLUSIONS Measured with Cr-51-EDTA, but not iohexol, GFR/ECV was as reproducible as GFR/BSA. GFR/BSA, measured with Cr-51-EDTA or iohexol, but not GFR/ECV, significantly increased after food.
FusePrint: A DIY 2.5D Printing Technique Embracing Everyday Artifacts

FusePrint is a Stereolithography-based 2.5D rapid prototyping technique that allows high-precision fabrication without high-end modeling tools, enabling the mixing of everyday physical artifacts and liquid conductive gels with photo-reactive resin during the printing process, facilitating the creation of 2.5D objects that perfectly fit the existing objects. Based on our polynomial model on 2.5D resin printing, we developed the design interface of FusePrint, which allows users to design the printed shapes using physical objects as references, generates projection patterns, and notifies users when to place the objects in the resin during the printing process. Our workshops suggested that FusePrint is easy to learn and use, provides a greater level of interactivity, and could be useful for a wide range of applications domains including: mechanical fabrication, wearable accessory, toys, interactive systems, etc.
Mindfulness training and neural integration: differentiation of distinct streams of awareness and the cultivation of well-being

In recent years, the ancient practice of being aware of one's sensory experience in the present moment—of ‘being mindful’—has taken a prominent place in discussions among clinicians, educators and the general public (Epstein, 1999; Kabat-Zinn, 2003; Bishop et al., 2004; Germer et al., 2005). Found in most cultures throughout history and now resurfacing in modern times, in both the East and in the West, the practice of living in the present has been offered as a way to cultivate well-being in our minds, our bodies, and even in our relationships with each other (Kornfield, 2008). Science has taken note of these suggestions and a number of investigators have focused their objective lens on this form of subjective, inner focus of the mind on present experience. Evidence from these studies supports the notion that being mindful, being aware of the present moment without grasping on to judgments, does indeed improve immune function, enhance a sense of equanimity and clarity and may even increase empathy and relational satisfaction (Davidson et al., 2003, and see Siegel, 2007, for a summary of these research studies).
High Quality , Curvature Dependent Triangulation of Implicit Surfaces

The paper describes an algorithm to generate a triangulation of an implicit surface. The generated triangles are close to equilateral and the triangle edge lengths vary with local surface curvature (the user may choose the ratio of edge length to surface curvature). The output of this algorithm is useful for applications that require high quality triangulations, such as medical imaging, molecular modeling, computer aided design, and finite element analysis. Triangles are “grown” on the surface outward from a seed triangle. After the growing stops, the remaining gap in the triangulation is filled by a set of heuristics. Experiments show that the algorithm consistently builds high quality triangulations which compare favourably to those produced by cell–based and particle–based algorithms.
Don’t Fight Like a Girl

Military culture promotes status hierarchy and a hypermasculine paradigm, upholding combat arms, and war heroism to exemplify the ideal soldier, contributing to existing gender disparities. This study utilized an online anonymous survey of U.S. military veterans (N = 25) to examine veterans’ likability related to gender and level of combat exposure using frequencies, descriptives, and Mann–Whitney U tests. Results indicate that veterans prefer combat experienced and male soldiers. Female, noncombat exposed or injured veterans may be more socially isolated than their male counterparts following military service or deployment, illuminating potential barriers to help seeking and service provision with this vulnerable population.
Multi Source Feedback Processes And Student Learning Styles: Measuring The Influence On Learning Outcomes

With the realization that active and cooperative learning are effective pedagogical modes, and stimulated by ABET’s EC-2000, more and more engineering courses are being designed to give students hands-on experiences including working in a team. This trend towards team-based course work has also been influenced by industry where teams have become the prevalent mode of work. In fact, multidisciplinary teams have become an integral part of product development, process improvement, and manufacturing activities. Such management techniques as concurrent engineering, total quality management, and business process re-engineering are based on people effectively working together in teams. Hence, engineering educators, recognizing these trends, are designing more and more courses around teams and providing increased opportunities for students to work in teams. These experiences range from short, decision-making exercises to course-long project management or business simulations, and senior design capstone courses. Such programs as MIT’s undergraduate design course and their “New Products Program” make extensive use of teams composed of students, faculty and outside sponsors [1]. That model is currently being replicated across US engineering institutions. Now, almost every accredited engineering program has at least one project-driven course that provides students with the opportunity to experience, as part of a team, design from idea conception to some level of completion. If properly structured, such courses can teach students the skills necessary for being effective team members, including multidisciplinary teams.
Why and How Do We Model Circadian Rhythms?

In our attempts to understand the circadian system, we unavoidably rely on abstractions. Instead of describing the behavior of the circadian system in all its complexity, we try to derive basic features from which we form a global concept on how the system works. Such a basic concept is a model of reality. The author discusses why it is advantageous or even necessary to transform conceptual models into mathematical formulations. As examples to demonstrate those advantages, the author reviews 4 types of mathematical models: negative feedback models thought to operate within pacemaker cells, models on coupling between pacemaker cells to generate pacemaker output, oscillator models describing the behavior of the composite circadian pacemaker, and models describing how the circadian pacemaker influences behavior.
Agility Evaluation Factor: Identification of flexibility level

Since evolution of software development process, researchers are involved in developing new software methods for reducing the software failure rate. Agile Software Development Process (ASDP) has addressed the various issues related to software failure such as low customer satisfaction, delay in software delivery etc. However, many new developing methods claimed themselves to follow ASDP due to its elicit practices of ASDP. These practices are mainly; just enough document, short releases, higher customer interaction, self organized team etc. Thus, there is a strong need to identify the agility level in any software development method. In this paper, we have presented the Agility Evaluation Factor (AEF) that will be useful to determine agility level of any software development method. We have proposed to compute AEF for quantification of agile practices used and flexibility available in a particular software development method. Identification of AEF provides scope of improvement in existing AMs as well as defines the criteria for entry in set of agile methods.
Access Point Selection Tradeoff for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Mesh Network

In this paper, we address access point (AP) selection for mobile nodes (MNs) in IEEE 802.11 wireless mesh network (WMN). Unlike the hotspot-based AP model, the service capacity of mesh AP in WMN is limited by the wireless connection to gateway AP and varies with the hop distance to the gateway AP. Using the multi-rate throughput model of (1), we formulate the problem of AP selection in WMN as a nonlinear optimiza- tion problem where the tradeoff between total throughput and fairness is achieved by applying a weighting parameter λ . W e evaluate the tradeoff over several WMN topologies, and show that the AP selection result from the proposed formulation can result in a reasonable tradeoff.
Topic-Dependent Language Model with Voting on Noun History

Language models (LMs) are an important field of study in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. LM helps acoustic models find the corresponding word sequence of a given speech signal. Without it, ASR systems would not understand the language and it would be hard to find the correct word sequence. During the past few years, researchers have tried to incorporate long-range dependencies into statistical word-based n-gram LMs. One of these long-range dependencies is topic. Unlike words, topic is unobservable. Thus, it is required to find the meanings behind the words to get into the topic. This research is based on the belief that nouns contain topic information. We propose a new approach for a topic-dependent LM, where the topic is decided in an unsupervised manner. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is employed to reveal hidden (latent) relations among nouns in the context words. To decide the topic of an event, a fixed size word history sequence (window) is observed, and voting is then carried out based on noun class occurrences weighted by a confidence measure. Experiments were conducted on an English corpus and a Japanese corpus: The Wall Street Journal corpus and Mainichi Shimbun (Japanese newspaper) corpus. The results show that our proposed method gives better perplexity than the comparative baselines, including a word-based/class-based n-gram LM, their interpolated LM, a cache-based LM, a topic-dependent LM based on n-gram, and a topic-dependent LM based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The n-best list rescoring was conducted to validate its application in ASR systems.
Using Migratable Objects to Enhance Fault Tolerance Schemes in Supercomputers

Supercomputers have seen an exponential increase in their size in the last two decades. Such a high growth rate is expected to take us to exascale in the timeframe 2018-2022. But, to bring a productive exascale environment about, it is necessary to focus on several key challenges. One of those challenges is fault tolerance. Machines at extreme scale will experience frequent failures and will require the system to avoid or overcome those failures. Various techniques have recently been developed to tolerate failures. The impact of these techniques and their scalability can be substantially enhanced by a parallel programming model called migratable objects. In this paper, we demonstrate how the migratable-objects model facilitates and improves several fault tolerance approaches. Our experimental results on thousands of cores suggest fault tolerance schemes based on migratable objects have low performance overhead and high scalability. Additionally, we present a performance model that predicts a significant benefit of using migratable objects to provide fault tolerance at extreme scale.
The Max‐P‐Regions Problem

In this paper, we introduce a new spatially constrained clustering problem called the max‐‐regions problem. It involves the clustering of a set of geographic areas into the maximum number of homogeneous regions such that the value of a spatially extensive regional attribute is above a predefined threshold value. We formulate the max‐‐regions problem as a mixed integer programming (MIP) problem, and propose a heuristic solution.
Fractional Diffusion: Numerical Methods and Applications in Neuroscience

Author(s): Bhattacharya, Nirupama | Abstract: In biological contexts, experimental evidence suggests that classical diffusion is not the best description in instances of complex biophysical transport. Instead, anomalous diffusion has been shown to occur in various circumstances, potentially caused by such underlying mechanisms as active transport, macromolecular crowding in a complex and tortuous extracellular or intracellular environment, or complex media geometry. Elegant ways of simulating these complicated transport processes are to connect the spatial characteristics of a medium (porosity or tortuosity of a complex extracellular environment), to fractional order operators. Some approaches include special random walk models representing crowded or disordered media; at the continuum limit, these random walk models approach fractional differential equations (FDEs), including variations of the fractional diffusion equation. Fractional differential equations are an extension of classical integer-order differential equations, and in recent decades have been increasingly used to model the dynamics of complex systems in a wide variety of fields including science, engineering, and finance. However, finding tractable and closed form analytical solutions to FDEs, including the fractional diffusion equation and its variants, is generally extremely difficult and often not feasible, and especially so when integrating these equations into more complex physical models with multiple other components; therefore, the development of stable and accurate numerical methods is vital. In this thesis we explore the topic of anomalous diffusion and the fractional diffusion equation from multiple perspectives. We begin by connecting the micro-molecular behavior of diffusing particles undergoing anomalous diffusion, to the general derivation of the fractional diffusion equation. We then develop numerical approaches to efficiently solve the time-fractional diffusion equation, and characterize these methods in terms of accuracy, stability, and algorithmic complexity. We then make use of these numerical methods by applying fractional diffusion to a model of the signaling events leading up the induction of long-term depression (LTD). We leverage the fact that the fractional diffusion equation can capture the complex geometry in which diffusing particles travel, and use this to simplify an existing model of LTD induction; furthermore, we show that our modified model is capable of retaining the most important functionality of the original model
Canonical Wnt signaling promotes the proliferation and neurogenesis of peripheral olfactory stem cells during postnatal development and adult regeneration

The mammalian olfactory epithelium (OE) has a unique stem cell or progenitor niche, which is responsible for the constant peripheral neurogenesis throughout the lifespan of the animal. However, neither the signals that regulate the behavior of these cells nor the lineage properties of the OE stem cells are well understood. Multiple Wnt signaling components exhibit dynamic expression patterns in the developing OE. We generated Wnt signaling reporter TOPeGFP transgenic mice and found TOPeGFP activation predominantly in proliferating Sox2+ OE basal cells during early postnatal development. FACS-isolated TOPeGFP+ OE basal cells are required, but are not sufficient, for formation of spheres. Wnt3a significantly promotes the proliferation of the Sox2+ OE sphere cells. Wnt-stimulated OE sphere cells maintain their multipotency and can differentiate into most types of neuronal and non-neuronal epithelial cells. Also, Wnt activators shift the production of differentiated cells toward olfactory sensory neurons. Moreover, TOPeGFP+ cells are robustly increased in the adult OE after injury. In vivo administration of Wnt modulators significantly alters the regeneration potential. This study demonstrates the role of the canonical Wnt signaling pathway in the regulation of OE stem cells or progenitors during development and regeneration.
Star-disk interaction in brown dwarfs: implications for substellar formation

Abstract I review the current state of knowledge regarding disk accretion in young brown dwarfs (BDs), and the interaction of the disk with the central object. In particular, I discuss (1) observations of accretion/outflow phenomena in BDs; (2) techniques for measuring accretion rates (Ṁacc); (3) the dependence of Ṁacc on the central mass from stars to brown dwarfs; (4) the temporal evolution of Ṁacc; and (5) observations of variability in the accretion line profiles. I then examine the implications of these issues for the formation mechanism of BDs, and discuss new observations that can further constrain substellar origins.
Guided crossword-puzzle games aimed at children with Attentional Deficit: Preliminary results

Attention Deficit with Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which affects an estimated 5.29% of children worldwide, is one of the most prevalent disorders within the child population today. Succeeding to motivate children with ADHD to undertake academic activities is a key element in their development. This article shows the preliminary results of the pilot-phase in an experiment performed to evaluate the use of guided crossword-puzzle games within a group of 32 typically developing children between 8 and 12 years old without ADHD. To do so, we relied on the collection of parameters and the conduct of screening surveys, as well as measuring system usability. None of the users obtained significant scores in the screening test, so they were all able to take part in the control group. The final calculations based on the usability questionnaire resulted in an average score of 87.11 out of 100. The replication of the current study in conjunction with the development of new guided mini-games for working different areas may help to understand these user's needs and boost behavioral skills such as attention and organization capabilities among children with and without ADHD.
The Effects of Coloring on Anxiety, Mood, and Perseverance

Abstract This study tested whether the structure of a coloring task has an effect on anxiety, mood, and perseverance. Eighty-five undergraduate students were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 coloring conditions: free choice, where they could color an image using any colors they wanted, and forced choice, where they were instructed to copy the colors of a precolored image. Anxiety and mood were measured before and after coloring; in addition, perseverance was measured after coloring. Results showed positive effects of coloring, with greater anxiety reduction and evidence of higher perseverance in the free-choice group compared to the forced-choice group. This suggests that well-being might be facilitated by a coloring task that balances structure and engagement.
A tool for vision based pedestrian detection performance evaluation

This paper describes a system for evaluating pedestrian detection algorithm results. The developed tool allows a human operator to annotate on a file all pedestrians in a previously acquired video sequence. A similar file is produced by the algorithm being tested using the same annotation engine. A matching rule has been established to validate the association between items of the two files. For each frame a statistical analyzer extracts the number of mis-detections, both positive and negative, and correct detections. Using these data, statistics about the algorithm behavior are computed with the aim of tuning parameters and pointing out recognition weaknesses in particular situations.
Abundance studies of sdB stars using UV echelle HST/STIS spectroscopy

Aims. We test the hypothesis that the pulsations in sdB stars are correlated with the surface abundances of iron-group elements. Any correlation might explain why, when given two spectroscopically similar stars, one will pulsate while the other will not. Methods. We have obtained high-resolution ultraviolet spectra two pulsating and three non-pulsating sdB stars using the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph onboard the Hubble Space Telescope . We determined abundances for 25 elements including the iron group and even heavier elements such as tin and lead using LTE curve-of-growth and spectrum synthesis techniques. Results. We find no clear correlation between pulsations and metal abundances, and we comment on the resulting implications, including whether it is possible to determine the difference between a pulsating and a non-pulsating sdB spectroscopically. In addition to the main goal of our observations, we have also investigated the effect of supersolar metallicity on fundamental parameter determination, possible trends with iron abundance, and the hypothesis that weak winds may be selectively removing elements from the stellar envelopes. These effects provide challenges to stellar atmosphere modelling and diffusion models for sdB stars.