Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving performance of multi-dimensional array redistribution on distributed memory machines

Array redistribution is required very often in programs on distributed memory parallel computers. It is essential to use efficient algorithms for redistribution, otherwise the performance of the programs may degrade considerably. We focus on automatic generation of communication routines for multi dimensional redistribution. The principal advantage of this work is to gain the ability to handle redistribution between arbitrary source and destination processor sets and between arbitrary source and destination distribution schemes. We have implemented these algorithms using Parallelware communication library. Some optimization techniques for our algorithms are also proposed. Experimental results show the efficiency and flexibility of our techniques compared to other redistribution works.
Phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate alters pharmacological selectivity for epilepsy-causing KCNQ potassium channels

Pharmacological augmentation of neuronal KCNQ muscarinic (M) currents by drugs such as retigabine (RTG) represents a first-in-class therapeutic to treat certain hyperexcitatory diseases by dampening neuronal firing. Whereas all five potassium channel subtypes (KCNQ1–KCNQ5) are found in the nervous system, KCNQ2 and KCNQ3 are the primary players that mediate M currents. We investigated the plasticity of subtype selectivity by two M current effective drugs, retigabine and zinc pyrithione (ZnPy). Retigabine is more effective on KCNQ3 than KCNQ2, whereas ZnPy is more effective on KCNQ2 with no detectable effect on KCNQ3. In neurons, activation of muscarinic receptor signaling desensitizes effects by retigabine but not ZnPy. Importantly, reduction of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2) causes KCNQ3 to become sensitive to ZnPy but lose sensitivity to retigabine. The dynamic shift of pharmacological selectivity caused by PIP2 may be induced orthogonally by voltage-sensitive phosphatase, or conversely, abolished by mutating a PIP2 site within the S4–S5 linker of KCNQ3. Therefore, whereas drug-channel binding is a prerequisite, the drug selectivity on M current is dynamic and may be regulated by receptor signaling pathways via PIP2.
Semiautomated spleen volumetry with diffusion‐weighted MR imaging

In this article, we determined the relative accuracy of semiautomated spleen volumetry with diffusion‐weighted (DW) MR images compared to standard manual volumetry with DW‐MR or CT images. Semiautomated spleen volumetry using simple thresholding followed by 3D and 2D connected component analysis was performed with DW‐MR images. Manual spleen volumetry was performed on DW‐MR and CT images. In this study, 35 potential live liver donor candidates were included. Semiautomated volumetry results were highly correlated with manual volumetry results using DW‐MR (r = 0.99; P < 0.0001; mean percentage absolute difference, 1.43 ± 0.94) and CT (r = 0.99; P < 0.0001; 1.76 ± 1.07). Mean total processing time for semiautomated volumetry was significantly shorter compared to that of manual volumetry with DW‐MR (P < 0.0001) and CT (P < 0.0001). In conclusion, semiautomated spleen volumetry with DW‐MR images can be performed rapidly and accurately when compared with standard manual volumetry. Magn Reson Med, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
An efficient method for Finger-Knuckle-Print recognition based on information fusion

Information fusion of various biometrics for its high performance in biometric recognition system, has recently attracted much attention. So in this paper the information of biometrics in different aspects is considered. At the first, the information fusion in single modal is investigated. In this stage, two different subsets of feature vectors are extracted from each image and are serially combined. With this work a new vector with higher dimension is considered as feature vector of each image. The characteristic biometric used in this paper is Finger-Knuckle-Print (FKP) which is unique and is recently used for personal identity authentication. The database used in our experiment contains the images of four different fingers. Therefore at the second stage, the information fusion of each finger at feature level is investigated. In fact, this fusion works as a kind of multi-modal method with a single biometric characteristic but multiple units. Poly-U FKP database was used to examine the performance of the proposed method and the experimental results proved that combining the features of four fingers is able to increase the recognition rate compared to that produced by each finger, separability.
ON THE EMPIRICAL EIGENVALUE DISTRIBUTION OF SLOTTED AMPLIFY-AND-FORWARD RELAYING PROTOCOL MODEL

In this paper we consider the case of large cooperative communication systems where terminals use the protocol known as slotted amplify-and-forward protocol to aid the source in its transmission. Using the perturbation expansion methods of resolvents and large deviation techniques we obtain an expression for the Stieltjes transform of the asymptotic eigenvalue distribution of a sample covariance random matrix of the type HH† where H is the channel matrix of the transmission model for the transmission protocol we consider. We prove that the resulting expression is similar to the Stieltjes transform in its quadratic equation form for the Marcenko-Pastur distribution.
COMPARATIVE ALBUMIN AND BIOCHEMICAL EVOLUTION IN PLETHODONTID SALAMANDERS

Evidence that the serum protein albumin evolves "in step" with other proteins was presented in 1973 (Sarich et al., 1973). A good correlation was demonstrated between micro-complement fixation (MC'F) measured albumin evolution and multiprotein evolution (as measured by Nei distance calculations from electrophoretic studies) for a few pairs of frog species and several pairs of primate species. This work was extended for frogs (Case et al., 1975) and further substantiated for mammals and reptiles by Sarich (1977). We present additional data on lungless salamanders of the family Plethodontidae, stemming from studies of several plethodontid genera (Wake et al., 1978; Highton and Larson, 1979; Maxson et al., 1979). We also compare albumin evolution in the genus Plethodon with DNA evolution as measured by DNA hybridization studies of Mizuno and Macgregor (1974). A good correlation is observed between albumin evolution and these other independent assessments of molecular evolution in salamanders.
Modelling of the Polymorph Nucleation based on Classical Nucleation Theory

To elucidate the relative nucleation rates of different polymorphs, a competitive kinetic model is developed based on classical nucleation theory to describe the time evolution of two different polymorphic cluster size distributions controlled by the association and dissociation of the solute molecules during polymorph nucleation. Although there is only one type of the solute molecules, the agglomerated solute clusters are divided into two types–A form and B form, which resemble the structures and morphologies of the different mature polymorphs and eventually lead to the formation of two polymorphic crystals. A dissociation kernel is incorporated into the proposed model to account for gradual dissolution of the solute clusters smaller than a critical nucleus size due to the thermodynamic instability. By fitting the experimental induction period data and the final measured weight fractions of eflucimibe polymorphs with the proposed model, the association and dissociation rate constants for two polymorphs are determined. The developed model is satisfactory to explain the competitive mechanism of polymorph nucleation for eflucimibe that B form dominates at higher supersaturation while A form dominates at lower supersaturation. The results also indicate that A form is more stable than B form with a transition energy of 3.1kJ/mole at 35°C.
Application Schema Mapping based on Ontology: An Approach for Geospatial Data Storage

The heterogeneous nature of geospatial data makes the sharing of it across organizations a complex issue. As a standard means of geospatial data encoding, Geography Markup Language (GML) has been proposed by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), which facilitates sharing and exchange of geospatial information. With the proliferation of GML in many geospatial applications and storage support from the standard DBMS, the need arises for the efficient storage mechanism of GML data. This paper analyses approaches for XML data storage in traditional DBMS and proposes alternative solutions for GML. Every GML document structure is defined in an application schema. We propose an approach for GML storage based on the analysis of the underlying application schema. A semi-automatic mapping mechanism has been proposed for the application schema to relational schemas of standard database with the utilization of the domain ontology. A set of relational schema is presumed to exist for different geospatial features. The proposed ontology based schema-matching approach for GML storage enhances the mapping process, thus facilitates sharing of heterogeneous data repositories.
Serum glucose level of healthy adolescents within Bukuru metropolis, Jos South Local Government Area, Plateau State, Nigeria

Purpose: This study was designed to determine the blood glucose level of healthy adolescents living in the southern region of Plateau State in northern Nigeria. Design: The study screened apparently healthy adolescents to identify individuals at high risk of developing diabetes mellitus. Methods and materials: Individuals who were confirmed healthy and not on any form of medication were enrolled in the study after the administration of a questionnaire which ruled out any form of aliment such as fever, gastroenteritis, and malaria. The serum glucose level was quantified using the glucose oxidase reagent. Data generated were analyzed using Excel 2007 (Microsoft®, Redmond, WA) and Student’s t-test for an established normal range. Results: The age distribution showed that those aged 14–16 years had a mean serum glucose level of 4.8 ± 1.11 mmol/L, while in those aged 17–19 years it was 4.9 ± 1.115 mmol/L, with a standard error of the mean of 0.17 and 0.15, respectively. The mean glucose level, weight, and height of the enrollees were 4.8 ± 1.12 mmol/L, 56.6 ± 6.20 kg, and 1.6 ± 0.009 m, respectively. The mean serum glucose of those from the Berom tribe and other tribes was 4.9 ± 1.21 mmol/L and 4.8 ± 1.15 mmol/L, respectively. Analysis of the mean glucose level with respect to sex, age, tribe, weight, and height of the established normal mean resulted in a P value of <0.05, which was not significant. Conclusion: There was no significant difference in the serum glucose level of enrolled subjects. It was also observed that there was no significant difference between the glucose level based on the different tribes, sex, weight, and height of all enrolled subjects. Since glucose is involved with various body metabolic processes and is also an analyte of interest in diabetes mellitus, screening of adolescents would reduce the incidence of the disease.
Measuring Opinion Relevance in Latent Topic Space

Opinion retrieval engines aim to retrieve documents containing user opinions towards a given search query. Different from traditional IR engines which rank documents by their topic relevance to the search query, opinion retrieval engines also consider opinion relevance. The result documents should contain user opinions which should be relevant to the search query. In previous opinion retrieval algorithms, opinion relevance scores are usually calculated by using very straightforward approaches, e.g., the distance between search query and opinion-carrying words. These approaches may cause two problems: 1) opinions in the returned result documents are irrelevant to the search query, 2) opinions related to the search query are not well identified. In this paper, we propose a new approach to deal with this topic-opinion mismatch problem. We leverage the idea of Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis. Both queries and documents are represented in a latent topic space, and then opinion relevance is calculated semantically in this topic space. Experiments on the TREC blog datasets indicate that our approach is effective in measuring opinion relevance and the opinion retrieval system based on our algorithm yields significant improvements compared with most state-of-the-art methods.
Improvement on Timestamp-based User Authentication Scheme with Smart Card Lost Attack Resistance

Smart card-based user authentication is a useful mechanism for performing private session over an insecure network. Tang et al have proposed a robust and e‐cient scheme in 2013 that is based on elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). It is for eliminating the attack in Awasthi et al’s scheme. However, Tang et al’s scheme is still vulnerable to denial of service attack and ofi-line password guessing attack. In this paper, the weakness of Tang et al’s scheme is presented. Furthermore, it gives the improvement of Tang et al’s scheme, and is proposed for avoiding the possible attack in Tang et al’s scheme.
Predictors of sexual risk‐taking among new drug users

We studied predictors of HIV‐related sexual risk‐taking among individuals who initiated the use of heroin or metham‐phetamine during the past 5 years. Many studies have linked drug use to HIV risk, but most research has been based on samples of users with long‐established drug careers. We conducted face‐to‐face interviews with 153 adult new drug users in Atlanta, GA. Drug use was not a statistically significant predictor of sexual risk, but gender, age, race, homelessness status, childhood neglect, level of paranoia, and level of (dys)functionality in handling disagreements were associated with frequency of sexual risk‐taking. We discuss the need to incorporate new drug users in HIV/AIDS and other health‐related prevention and intervention programs.
Design of magnetically actuated surgical devices using magnetic micro-particles embedded in a polymeric matrix

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has gained popularity in the medical field because the reduction of trauma, pain and recovery time that offers to patients. However, surgical instrumentation used in this approach limits maneuverability and dexterity. Magnetic actuation as a control method provide important advantages such as remote control and fast response, and, since it is safe to use in the human body, it offers a promising alternative for the design of new surgical tools. In this project, the fabrication of soft magnetic robots and its further actuation under an external magnetic field are investigated with the objective of reproducing controlled motion patterns. Soft robots have flexible and compliant bodies that results in higher degrees of freedom and better adaptability to their surroundings, making them suitable for applications involving soft biological tissue. Magnetic actuation in soft polymers was achieved by mixing ferromagnetic microparticles (PrFeB) with polymer precursors before its curing. The resultant magnetic polymer composite (MPC) was used to fabricate soft robots by a squeegee-coating fabrication technique. Magnetization of the soft robots was done under a uniform 1 T magnetic field. Using different magnetization profiles and the behavior of the external field used for actuation, three different designs, each with a different type of locomotion inspire by nature, were achieved. The use of soft robots with integrated magnetic actuation in MIS can result in an improvement during task performance, easier control, and reduced possibilities of tissue damage. Future work regarding this project will focus in miniaturization to integrate these notions about locomotion of the samples into the design of surgical tools.
Iterative Learning Control: Brief Survey and Categorization

In this paper, the iterative learning control (ILC) literature published between 1998 and 2004 is categorized and discussed, extending the earlier reviews presented by two of the authors. The papers includes a general introduction to ILC and a technical description of the methodology. The selected results are reviewed, and the ILC literature is categorized into subcategories within the broader division of application-focused and theory-focused results.
Microgrid Cost Optimization: A Case Study on Abu Dhabi

This paper presents a microgrid cost optimization study specifically focused on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) based on the Genetic and Ant-Bee Colony algorithms. The main objective of the paper is to identify size and amount of power supply sources in Microgrids that result in minimum cost. Specific parameters pertaining to the UAE were employed within the new objective function and constraints. Two different scenarios were tested, and their results have been discussed. During this study, it was evident that solar-PV systems were the second most cost-effective way to reduce cost of microgrids preceded by micro-turbines.
Mechanical and electronic properties under high pressure on ternary AlGaN and InGaN compounds—a first-principles perspective

The electronic and mechanical properties of AlGaN and InGaN were analyzed in the pressure range of 0 GPa to 50 GPa by the first-principles study. Moreover, the energy band structure gets modified upon increasing pressure. The density of states (DOS) spectrum of AlGaN and InGaN shows the shift in the peaks upon increase in the pressure. The elastic constants for rhombohedral AlGaN and InGaN were established. By estimating the Young’s, bulk and shear moduli, an upsurge in the magnitude was observed with the intensifying pressure. The ductility of AlGaN and InGaN were demonstrated by examining the Poisson’s ratio, Cauchy’s pressure and Pugh’s criterion under increasing the pressure. We observed increase in the ductility of AlGaN and InGaN upon applied pressure. Thus, the findings suggest that the band gap of AlGaN and InGaN can be fine-tuned on applying the pressure, which is suitable to fabricate new optoelectronic devices.
Predictive current control of a doubly fed inductor generator (DFIG) for fast power reference tracking

This paper presents a power control strategy for the doubly fed induction machine. Calculated from the active and reactive power references in the stator, the rotor current references are then controlled through a predictive control algorithm, which calculates rotor voltages required for high-bandwidth current tracking. Using a two-voltage level three-phase inverter, pulse width modulation is used to generate voltage pulses within one period of a constant frequency carrier signal. The use of predictive control in conjunction with PWM allows for high-bandwidth current control at fixed switching frequency.
Knowledge Extraction from Question and Answer Platforms on the Semantic Web: A Systematic Review of Technologies Available for Information Extraction

Knowledge Extraction is the process of getting structured data from unstructured or semi-structured sources. Much research has been conducted in this field and applying these technologies to the web has become a key effort in the past few years. This is due to changes from web 1.0 where the web was simply a set of static pages where user interaction was minimal. With the rise of web 2.0, the internet is no longer a medium to access static information. Users can now share their own thoughts easily thus increasing the amount of user generated content. This has made the web ripe with knowledge, however not all information can be easily accessed. This paper aims to bridge the gap between knowledge available and the knowledge accessed using knowledge extraction.
Length-dependent energetics of (CTG)n and (CAG)n trinucleotide repeats

Trinucleotide repeats are involved in a number of debilitating diseases such as myotonic dystrophy. Twelve to seventy-five base-long (CTG)n oligodeoxynucleotides were analysed using a combination of biophysical [UV-absorbance, circular dichroism and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC)] and biochemical methods (non-denaturing gel electrophoresis and enzymatic footprinting). All oligomers formed stable intramolecular structures under near physiological conditions with a melting temperature that was only weakly dependent on oligomer length. Thermodynamic analysis of the denaturation process by UV-melting and calorimetric experiments revealed an unprecedented length-dependent discrepancy between the enthalpy values deduced from model-dependent (UV-melting) and model-independent (calorimetry) experiments. Evidence for non-zero molar heat capacity changes was also derived from the analysis of the Arrhenius plots and DSC profiles. Such behaviour is analysed in the framework of an intramolecular ‘branched-hairpin’ model, in which long CTG oligomers do not fold into a simple long hairpin–stem intramolecular structure, but allow the formation of several independent folding units of unequal stability. We demonstrate that, for sequences ranging from 12 to 25 CTG repeats, an intramolecular structure with two loops is formed which we will call ‘bis-hairpin’. Similar results were also found for CAG oligomers, suggesting that this observation may be extended to various trinucleotide repeats-containing sequences.
Association of low serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels in pregnancy with glucose homeostasis and obstetric and newborn outcomes.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the association of maternal serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH]D) status with glucose homeostasis and obstetric and newborn outcomes in women screened for gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). METHODS Consecutive women were screened for GDM at 24 to 28 weeks' gestation during the months of maximal sunlight exposure in Spain (June through September). Serum 25(OH)D levels and parameters of glucose homeostasis were measured. Outcomes of the delivery and newborn were collected. RESULTS Two hundred sixty-six women were screened. Vitamin D deficiency (25[OH]D <20 ng/mL) was observed in 157 women (59%). We observed an inverse correlation between 25(OH)D levels and hemoglobin A1c, homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance, serum insulin, and fasting and 1-hour oral glucose tolerance test glucose levels (P<.001). With a 25(OH)D concentration less than 20 ng/mL, the odds ratios were 3.31 for premature birth (95% confidence interval, 1.52-7.19; P<.002) and 3.93 for cesarean delivery (95% confidence interval, 2.00-7.73; P<.001). A 25(OH)D concentration of 20 ng/mL had 79% sensitivity and 51% specificity for cesarean delivery and 80% sensitivity and 45% specificity for premature birth. The cutoffs with the best combination of sensitivity and specificity were 16 ng/mL for cesarean delivery (62.9% sensitivity and 61.2% specificity) and 14 ng/mL for premature birth (66.7% sensitivity and 71.0% specificity). CONCLUSIONS In the population we sampled, vitamin D deficiency is very common during pregnancy. Lower 25(OH)D levels are associated with disorders of glucose homeostasis and adverse obstetric and newborn outcomes.
Cephalexin Induced Cholestatic Jaundice

Cephalexin is a very commonly prescribed orally administered antibiotic which has many potential side effects. Amongst these cholestatic jaundice has been infrequently reported as an adverse reaction. We present a case of a 57-year-old male who exhibited features of cholestatic jaundice including elevated liver function tests (LFTs) after taking cephalexin and showed improvement on removal of the offending agent. During this time he was symptomatically treated with cholestyramine. Complete resolution of LFTs was seen in four weeks. Cephalexin induced cholestasis is rare and hence requires a high degree of clinical suspicion for prompt diagnosis and treatment.