Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simulation and optimization of 420-nm InGaN/GaN laser diodes

Using self-consistent laser simulation, we analyze the performance of nitride Fabry-Perot laser diodes grown on sapphire. The active region contains three 4 nm InGaN quantum wells. It is sandwiched between GaN separate confinement layers and superlattice AlGaN/GaN cladding layers. AlGaN is used as an electron barrier layer. Pulsed lasing is measured near 420 nm wavelength and at temperatures up to 120 degrees Celsius. Advanced laser simulation is applied to link microscopic device physics to measurable device performance. Our two-dimensional laser model considers carrier drift and diffusion including thermionic emission at hetero-boundaries. The local optical gain is calculated from the wurtzite band structure employing a non-Lorentzian line broadening model. All material parameters used in the model are evaluated based on recent literature values as well as our own experimental data. Simulation results are in good agreement with measurements. Multi-lateral mode lasing is calculated with a high order vertical mode. The carrier distribution among quantum wells is found to be strongly non-uniform leading to a parasitic (absorbing) quantum well. The influence of defect recombination, vertical carrier leakage and lateral current spreading is investigated. The reduction of such carrier losses is important to achieve lower threshold currents and less self-heating. Several device optimization options are proposed. Elimination of the parasitic quantum well is shown to substantially enhance the device performance.
Semantic and syntactic processes in aphasia: a review of the literature.

Recent investigations of lexical and syntactic aspects of language comprehension in aphasia are reviewed. It is argued that these studies support theoretical assumptions concerning the functional independence of various components of normal language processing. Studies of the structure of the lexicon in aphasia provide support for componential theories of lexical semantics in that different types of features of meaning can be selectively disrupted under conditions of brain damage. Studies of sentence comprehension support the existence of a syntactic mechanism that is independent of lexically based heuristic strategies for assigning meaning. There is evidence that these independent elements of language are subserved by different portions of the dominant hemisphere of the brain. Focal brain damage can thus cause selective disruption of components, allowing the separation of elements that are highly integrated in the normal adult. Studies of aphasic language, therefore, provide a valuable source of constraints on theories of normal language processing.
Inky: a sloppy command line for the web with rich visual feedback

We present Inky, a command line for shortcut access to common web tasks. Inky aims to capture the efficiency benefits of typed commands while mitigating their usability problems. Inky commands have little or no new syntax to learn, and the system displays rich visual feedback while the user is typing, including missing parameters and contextual information automatically clipped from the target web site. Inky is an example of a new kind of hybrid between a command line and a GUI interface. We describe the design and implementation of two prototypes of this idea, and report the results of a preliminary user study.
Maximizing memory capacity of echo state networks with orthogonalized reservoirs

Recently, we systematically investigated short-term memory of an echo state network fed with a scalar random input, using computational simulations. We studied the effect of proper reservoir initialization and its subsequent orthogonalization, using two similar gradient descent iterative procedures. It was shown that the measure defined by Jaeger as memory capacity (MC) approached its theoretical limit for orthogonalized reservoirs in most cases up to size 100 units, and at the same time, it drove the reservoir dynamics toward the critical regime. In this paper, we investigate the effect of both orthogonalization procedures for larger reservoirs, up to 1000 units. We observe almost perfect maximization of MC in both procedures for roughly up to 500 units, beyond which the MC gradually becomes suboptimal, despite our effort to find optimal parameters. We also looked at the input weights scaling that also effects the MC and we confirmed the previously encountered finding that smaller input weights allow higher maxima for MC to be reached, with the reservoir neurons operating in the linear regime. Last but not least, we show that both procedures work well, one better than the other, even in the case of very sparse reservoirs.
Facebook’s Potential for Collaborative e-Learning

Today, Facebook ( www.facebook.com ) is probably the most palpable example of environments known as ‘social networks’ or ‘Web 2.0’. Social networking sites are platforms that facilitate information sharing, interaction and collaboration among their users. However, Facebook’s success is not solely dependent on its capacity to connect people, although this was its initial orientation. The platform’s power for sharing resources and linking content on the Internet to user profiles, as well as its evolution towards lifestreaming and microblogging, enable it provide support for complex, continuous interaction experiences and, consequently, to structure collaborative-learning processes. The platform’s communication tools, combined with the option to enhance its potential by installing third-party modules and applications, allow members of a community or work team to carry out very diverse activities. On the basis of theoretical underpinnings represented by the socio-constructivist perspective on communities of practice, the Web2Learn work group analysed and assessed the features that enable Facebook to be used as a platform for carrying out collaborative online activities from two angles: technological and educational. Facebook ( www.facebook.com ) quizás sea hoy el ejemplo más «palpable» de los entornos denominados redes sociales o 2.0. Las redes sociales son plataformas que facilitan el intercambio de información, la interacción y la colaboración entre sus usuarios. El éxito de Facebook como red social, sin embargo, no depende sólo de su capacidad para conectar personas, aunque sea esta su orientación inicial. La potencia de la plataforma para compartir recursos, para vincular contenidos presentes en internet a los perfiles de los usuarios y su evolución hacia el lifestreaming y el microblogging la facultan para dar soporte a experiencias de interactión complejas y continuas, y, con ello, para estructurar procesos de aprendizaje colaborativo. Las herramientas comunicativas de la plataforma, así como la opción de enriquecer sus potencialidades mediante la instalación de aplicaciones y módulos de terceros permiten a los miembros de una comunidad o equipo de trabajo desarrollar actividades heterogéneas. Sobre el marco teórico representado por la perspectiva socioconstructivista de las comunidades de práctica, el grupo de trabajo Web2Learn ha analizado y valorado, desde una doble óptica, tecnológica y pedagógica, las características que hacen posible la utilización de Facebook como plataforma para el desarrollo de actividades colaborativas en línea.
Capacity and Delay Analysis for Data Gathering with Compressive Sensing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Compressive sensing (CS) provides a new paradigm for efficient data gathering in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, with the assumption that sensor data is sparse we apply the theory of CS to data gathering for a WSN where n nodes are randomly deployed. We investigate the fundamental limitation of data gathering with CS for both single-sink and multi-sink random networks under protocol interference model, in terms of capacity and delay. For the single-sink case, we present a simple scheme for data gathering with CS and derive the bounds of the data gathering capacity. We show that the proposed scheme can achieve the capacity Θ(\frac{nW}{M}) and the delay Θ(M\sqrtfrac{nlog n}), where W is the data rate on each link and M is the number of random projections required for reconstructing a snapshot. The results show that the proposed scheme can achieve a capacity gain of Θ (\frac{n}{M}) over the baseline transmission scheme and the delay can also be reduced by a factor of Θ(\fracsqrt{n\log n}{M}). For the multi-sink case, we consider the scenario where n_d sinks are present in the network and each sink collects one random projection from n_s randomly selected source nodes. We construct a simple architecture for multi-session data gathering with CS. We show that the per-session capacity of data gathering with CS is Θ(\frac{n\sqrt{n}W}{M n_d \sqrt{n_s \log n}}) and the per-session delay is Θ(M\sqrtfrac{{n}{log n}}). Finally, we validate our theoretical results for the scaling laws of the capacity in both single-sink and multi-sink networks through simulations.
Endogenous T-Cell Therapy: Clinical Experience

Abstract Adoptive cellular therapy represents a robust means of augmenting the tumor-reactive effector population in patients with cancer by adoptive transfer of ex vivo expanded T cells. Three approaches have been developed to achieve this goal: the use of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes or tumor-infiltrating lymphocytess extracted from patient biopsy material; the redirected engineering of lymphocytes using vectors expressing a chimeric antigen receptor and T-cell receptor; and third, the isolation and expansion of often low-frequency endogenous T cells (ETCs) reactive to tumor antigens from the peripheral blood of patients. This last form of adoptive transfer of T cells, known as ETC therapy, requires specialized methods to isolate and expand from peripheral blood the very low-frequency tumor-reactive T cells, methods that have been developed over the last 2 decades, to the point where such an approach may be broadly applicable not only for the treatment of melanoma but also for that of other solid tumor malignancies. One compelling feature of ETC is the ability to rapidly deploy clinical trials following identification of a tumor-associated target epitope, a feature that may be exploited to develop personalized antigen-specific T-cell therapy for patients with almost any solid tumor. With a well-validated antigen discovery pipeline in place, clinical studies combining ETC with agents that modulate the immune microenvironment can be developed that will transform ETC into a feasible treatment modality.
Monitoring gene therapy with cytosine deaminase: in vitro studies using tritiated-5-fluorocytosine.

UNLABELLED Genetically modified mammalian cells that express the cytosine deaminase (CD) gene are able to convert the nontoxic prodrug 5-fluorocytosine (5-FC) to the toxic metabolite 5-fluorouracil (5-FU). PET with 18F-5-FC may be used for in vivo measurement of CD activity in genetically modified tumors. METHODS A human glioblastoma cell line was stably transfected with the Escherichia coli CD gene. After incubation of lysates of CD-expressing cells and control cells with 3H-5-FC high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was performed. The uptake of 5-FC was measured after various incubation times using therapeutic amounts of 5-FC. In addition, saturation and competition experiments with 5-FC and 5-FU were performed. Finally, the efflux was measured. RESULTS We found that 3H-5-FU was produced in CD-expressing cells, whereas in the control cells only 3H-5-FC was detected. Moreover, significant amounts of 5-FU were found in the medium of cultured cells, which may account for the bystander effect observed in previous experiments. However, uptake studies revealed a moderate and nonsaturable accumulation of radioactivity in the tumor cells, suggesting that 5-FC enters the cells only through diffusion. Although a significant difference in 5-FC uptake was seen between CD-positive and control cells after 48 hr of incubation, no difference was observed after 2 hr of incubation. Furthermore, a rapid efflux could be demonstrated. CONCLUSION 5-Fluorocytosine transport may be a limiting factor for this therapeutic procedure. Quantitation with PET has to rely more on dynamic studies and modeling, including HPLC analysis of the plasma, than on nonmodeling approaches.
Do You Know Where Your Data Are? Secure Data Capsules for Deployable Data Protection

ions for an Asbestos-like kernel, is more practical, but suffers from a large TCB—including the entire Linux kernel—reducing assurance. Similarly, approaches that require new languages [21] or recompilation from source with annotations [31] imply universal application porting, an uncommon and error-prone process. Finally, commercial ERM systems that require per-application modifications or a single proprietary framework fail on interoperability and openness grounds, and are proprietary so offer few opportunities to assess assurance. Our high-assurance goal is most helped by approaches that minimize the TCB, most notably by removing from it the OS and application, primarily via virtualization. TrustVisor [19] has a very small TCB, but still requires trusted pieces of application logic to register themselves via hypercalls. Proxos [27] proxies sensitive system calls to a stub OS, but requires non-trivial application porting. Overshadow [7] extends a VMM to present an encrypted and integrity-protected version of an application’s memory to the OS without application modifications, but requires application trust. While closer, these approaches still do not achieve our practicality goal. Bringing together practicality and a small TCB, approaches that use dynamic information-flow tracking to precisely protect sensitive data and their derivatives, while trusting only a small information-flow tracker, seem to be the closest to our goals, in principle. In practice, most information-flow tracking solutions that require no application modifications are inefficient. Overhead reductions have been achieved by systems like Neon [33], which uses on-demand emulation of tainted instructions to track finegrained information flow for multiple principals’ sensitive data across applications and kernel. PIFT [13] further reduces overhead by tracking information flow asynchronously. Unfortunately, these tools dynamically analyze the whole image of a virtual machine (kernel and user space), which leads to significant loss in precision and safety due to kernel complexity [26]. What is more, to improve efficiency, they must trust applications somewhat (e.g., not to leak information via control flows). 4 A Conceptual Architecture Our constraints of practicality, efficiency and high assurance induce a number of properties on any solution. First, dealing with arbitrary legacy binaries entails reference monitor-like isolation mechanisms; redesign or recompilation are inapplicable. Secondly, efficient support for applications handling sensitive and insensitive data in complex variegated flows necessitates information flow tracking. The inclusion of OSes and commodity appli-
The impact of higher-order state and control effects on local relational reasoning

Reasoning about program equivalence is one of the oldest problems in semantics. In recent years, useful techniques have been developed, based on bisimulations and logical relations, for reasoning about equivalence in the setting of increasingly realistic languages - languages nearly as complex as ML or Haskell. Much of the recent work in this direction has considered the interesting representation independence principles enabled by the use of local state, but it is also important to understand the principles that powerful features like higher-order state and control effects disable. This latter topic has been broached extensively within the framework of game semantics, resulting in what Abramsky dubbed the "semantic cube": fully abstract game-semantic characterizations of various axes in the design space of ML-like languages. But when it comes to reasoning about many actual examples, game semantics does not yet supply a useful technique for proving equivalences. In this paper, we marry the aspirations of the semantic cube to the powerful proof method of step-indexed Kripke logical relations. Building on recent work of Ahmed, Dreyer, and Rossberg, we define the first fully abstract logical relation for an ML-like language with recursive types, abstract types, general references and call/cc. We then show how, under orthogonal restrictions to the expressive power our language - namely, the restriction to first-order state and/or the removal of call/cc - we can enhance the proving power of our possible-worlds model in correspondingly orthogonal ways, and we demonstrate this proving power on a range of interesting examples. Central to our story is the use of state transition systems to model the way in which properties of local state evolve over time.
Low power sub-milligram resonant MEMS load sensor

A miniaturized resonant load sensor demonstrating sub-milligram sensitivity is presented. The sensor response is not limited by creep and hysteresis often observed in traditional load sensors. A prototype sensor demonstrates a resolution of 0.1 mg over a load range of 300 mg demonstrating excellent linearity over this range (R2=0.9998). An energy efficient front-end CMOS readout circuit consumes only 5 μW from a 1.2 V supply.
Omnidirectional relay in wireless networks

For wireless networks with multiple sources, an omnidirectional relay scheme is developed, where each node can help relay multiple sources in different directions. This is accomplished by the decode-and-forward relay strategy, with each relay binning the multiple messages to be transmitted, in the same spirit of network coding. Specially for the all-source all-cast problem, where each node is an independent source to be transmitted to all the other nodes, this scheme completely eliminates interference in the whole network, and the signal transmitted by any node is used by any other node. For networks with regular topologies, assuming no beamforming is to be performed, this omnidirectional scheme is capable of achieving the maximum achievable rate.
Collection of Human Genomic DNA From Buccal Cells for Genetics Studies: Comparison Between Cytobrush, Mouthwash, and Treated Card

Alternative sources such as buccal cells have already been tested for genetic studies and epidemiological investigations. Thirty-seven volunteers participated in this study to compare cytology brushes, mouthwash, and treated cards for DNA collection. Quantity and quality of DNA and cost and feasibility were assessed. The mean DNA yield at 260 nm was found to be 3.5, 4, and 2.6 μg for cytobrushes, mouthwashes, and treated cards, respectively. A second quantification technique by fluorescence showed differences in the DNA yield with 1.1 and 5.2 μg for cytobrushes and mouthwash, respectively. All buccal samples allowed isolation of DNA suitable for polymerase chain reaction. According to the procedure of sample collection, the yield and purity of collected DNA, and storage conditions, the use of cytobrush appears to be the more appropriate method for DNA collection. This protocol has been validated and is currently applied in three large-scale multicentric studies including adults or children.
Modeling and Predicting Retweeting Dynamics on Microblogging Platforms

Popularity prediction on microblogging platforms aims to predict the future popularity of a message based on its retweeting dynamics in the early stages. Existing works mainly focus on exploring effective features for prediction, while ignoring the underlying arrival process of retweets. Also, the effect of user activity variation on the retweeting dynamics in the early stages has been neglected. In this paper, we propose an extended reinforced Poisson process model with time mapping process to model the retweeting dynamics and predict the future popularity. The proposed model explicitly characterizes the process through which a message gain its retweets, by capturing a power-law temporal relaxation function corresponding to the aging in the ability of the message to attract new retweets and an exponential reinforcement mechanism characterizing the "richer-get-richer" phenomenon. Further, we introduce the notation of weibo time and integrate a time mapping process into the proposed model to eliminate the effect of user activity variation. Extensive experiments on two Weibo datasets, with 10K and 18K messages respectively, well demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model in popularity prediction.
A Prototype Constraint Deductive Database System based on HH ¬ ( C )

This paper presents, from a user point of view, a deductive database system based on Hereditary Harrop Formulas with Constraints and Negation, HH¬(C). The Prolog implementation of this system is based on a fixpoint semantics proposed in a previous work. The answer to a query posed to a database is intended as a constraint of the constraint system associated to C. We have developed several solvers for specific constraint domains, composed of data values and predefined functions and operators, including finite domains, real numbers, Boolean and user-defined enumerated types. They have been implemented by taking advantage of the underlying constraint solvers in SWI-Prolog. In the current version of the system, some improvements regarding the efficiency and the user interface have been introduced. In addition, we have included aggregate functions as count, sum, avg and min. We propose to use aggregate functions as components of the constraint language, so that solving of constraints including aggregate functions is delegated to the constraint solver.
The BTB-ZF transcription factors

The BTB-ZF (broad-complex, tramtrack and bric-à-brac - zinc finger) proteins are encoded by at least 49 genes in mouse and man and commonly serve as sequence-specific silencers of gene expression. This review will focus on the known physiological functions of mammalian BTB-ZF proteins, which include essential roles in the development of the immune system. We discuss their function in terminally differentiated lymphocytes and the progenitors that give rise to them, their action in hematopoietic malignancy and roles beyond the immune system.
Heterotrimeric Kinesin II Is the Microtubule Motor Protein Responsible for Pigment Dispersion in Xenopus Melanophores

Melanophores move pigment organelles (melanosomes) from the cell center to the periphery and vice-versa. These bidirectional movements require cytoplasmic microtubules and microfilaments and depend on the function of microtubule motors and a myosin. Earlier we found that melanosomes purified from Xenopus melanophores contain the plus end microtubule motor kinesin II, indicating that it may be involved in dispersion (Rogers, S.L., I.S. Tint, P.C. Fanapour, and V.I. Gelfand. 1997. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 94: 3720–3725). Here, we generated a dominant-negative construct encoding green fluorescent protein fused to the stalk-tail region of Xenopus kinesin-like protein 3 (Xklp3), the 95-kD motor subunit of Xenopus kinesin II, and introduced it into melanophores. Overexpression of the fusion protein inhibited pigment dispersion but had no effect on aggregation. To control for the specificity of this effect, we studied the kinesin-dependent movement of lysosomes. Neither dispersion of lysosomes in acidic conditions nor their clustering under alkaline conditions was affected by the mutant Xklp3. Furthermore, microinjection of melanophores with SUK4, a function-blocking kinesin antibody, inhibited dispersion of lysosomes but had no effect on melanosome transport. We conclude that melanosome dispersion is powered by kinesin II and not by conventional kinesin. This paper demonstrates that kinesin II moves membrane-bound organelles.