Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using WSDL/UDDI and DAML-S in Web Service Discovery

A voltage transformer for use with high voltages. The transformer includes an insulating body in which is disposed a high-potential winding and a bushing laterally joined to the insulating body. In accord with the invention, the transformer is further provided with control electrodes in the form of conducting cylinders which are disposed concentrically with respect to the longitudinal axis of the bushing, thereby affording control of the bushing at both its ends. Moreover, in further accord with the invention, the high-potential winding is arranged adjacent to one side of the bushing so that its width extends over the control length thereof, and is comprised of subwindings which are metallically connected to the respective conducting cylinders such that a uniform voltage distribution results during the occurrence of surge voltages.
A Dissimilarity-Weighted Sparse Self-Representation Method for Band Selection in Hyperspectral Imagery Classification

A new dissimilarity-weighted sparse self-representation (DWSSR) method has been presented to select a proper band subset for hyperspectral imagery (HSI) classification. The DWSSR assumes that all the bands can be represented by the selected band subset, and it formulates sparse representation of all the bands into a sparse self-representation (SSR) model with row-sparsity constraint in the coefficient matrix. Furthermore, the DWSSR integrates a dissimilarity-weighted regularization term with the SSR model to avoid the issue of too-close bands encountered in the SSR. The regularization term explains the encoding cost of all bands with the representative bands, and a new composite dissimilarity measure which combines spectral information divergence with intraband correlation is implemented to estimate the encoding weight. The DWSSR program is solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework, and the representative bands are finally selected according to the norm rankings of nonzero rows in the estimated coefficient matrix. Five groups of experiments on three popular HSI datasets are designed to test the performance of DWSSR in band selection, and five state-of-the-art methods are utilized to make comparisons. The results show that the DWSSR performs almost best among all the six methods, either in computational time or classification accuracies.
Oxidative Stress in Neurodegenerative Diseases: From Molecular Mechanisms to Clinical Applications

Increasing numbers of individuals, particularly the elderly, suffer from neurodegenerative disorders. These diseases are normally characterized by progressive loss of neuron cells and compromised motor or cognitive function. Previous studies have proposed that the overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) may have complex roles in promoting the disease development. Research has shown that neuron cells are particularly vulnerable to oxidative damage due to their high polyunsaturated fatty acid content in membranes, high oxygen consumption, and weak antioxidant defense. However, the exact molecular pathogenesis of neurodegeneration related to the disturbance of redox balance remains unclear. Novel antioxidants have shown great potential in mediating disease phenotypes and could be an area of interest for further research. In this review, we provide an updated discussion on the roles of ROS in the pathological mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and spinocerebellar ataxia, as well as a highlight on the antioxidant-based therapies for alleviating disease severity.
Chemical diffusion in an interacting lattice gas: Analytic theory and simple applications

A variational approach to microscopic kinetics of an interacting lattice gas is presented. It accounts for the equilibrium correlations in the system and allows one to derive an algebraic expression for the particle density (coverage) dependent chemical diffusion coefficient for a wide variety of interaction models. Detailed derivation is presented for a one dimensional case for which the results are compared with the results of Monte Carlo simulations. Generalization and an application to the simplest case of the two dimensional lattice gas is briefly described.
A weighted method for estimation of receptor occupancy for pharmacodynamic measurements in drug development

Flow cytometry‐based receptor occupancy (RO) assessments for pharmacodynamic (PD) response measurements along with drug pharmacokinetic (PK) measurements represent a cornerstone in mechanism based PK/PD modeling of drugs against cell surface targets. This report describes the utility of using a “Free” and a “Bound” assay in combination to derive RO estimations through a weighted calculation method.
Quantizing mixture-weights in a tied-mixture HMM

We describe new techniques to significantly reduce computational, storage and memory access requirements of a tied mixture HMM based speech recognition system. Although continuous mixture HMMs offer improved recognition performance, we show that tied mixture HMMs may offer significant advantage in complexity reduction for low cost implementations. In particular, we consider two tasks: (a) connected digit recognition in car noise; and (b) subword modeling for command word recognition in a noisy office environment. We show that quantization of mixture weights can provide an almost three fold reduction in mixture weight storage requirements without any significant loss in recognition performance. Furthermore, we show that by combining mixture weight quantization with techniques such as VQ-Assist, the computational and memory access requirements can be reduced by almost 60-80% without any degradation in recognition performance.
Security Mechanisms in High-Level Network Protocols

The implications of adding security mechanisms to high-level network protocols operating in an open-system environment are analyzed. First the threats to security that may arise in such an environment are described, and then a set of goals for communications security measures is established. This is followed by a brief description of the two basic approaches to communications security, link-oriented measures and end-to-end measures, which concludes that end-to-end measures are more appropriate in an open-system environment. Next, relevant properties of data encryption--the fundamental technique on which all communications security mechanisms are based--are discussed. The remainder of the paper describes ho~w end-to-end measures can be used to achieve each of the security goals previously established.
Approximate string matching in DNA sequences

Approximate string matching on large DNA sequences data is very important in bioinformatics. Some studies have shown that suffix tree is an efficient data structure for approximate string matching. It performs better than suffix array if the data structure can be stored entirely in the memory. However our study find that suffix array is much better than suffix tree for indexing the DNA sequences since the data structure has to be created and stored on the disk due to its size. We propose a novel auxiliary data structure which greatly improves the efficiency of suffix array in the approximate string matching problem in the external memory model. The second problem we have tackled is the parallel approximate matching in DNA sequence. We propose 2 novel parallel algorithms for this problem and implement them on a PC cluster The result shows that when the error allowed is small, a direct partitioning of the array over the machines in the cluster is a more efficient approach. On the other hand, when the error allowed is large, partitioning the data over the machines is a better approach.
Guess What: A Question Answering Game via On-demand Knowledge Validation

In this paper, we propose an idea of ondemand knowledge validation and fulfill the idea through an interactive Question-Answering (QA) game system, which is named Guess What. An object (e.g. dog) is first randomly chosen by the system, and then a user can repeatedly ask the system questions in natural language to guess what the object is. The system would respond with yes/no along with a confidence score. Some useful hints can also be given if needed. The proposed framework provides a pioneering example of on-demand knowledge validation in dialog environment to address such needs in AI agents/chatbots. Moreover, the released log data that the system gathered can be used to identify the most critical concepts/attributes of an existing knowledge base, which reflects human’s cognition about the world.
Weighted Model Integration with Orthogonal Transformations

Weighted model counting and integration ( WMC / WMI ) are natural problems to which we can reduce many probabilistic inference tasks, e.g., in Bayesian networks, Markov networks, and probabilistic programs. Typically, we are given a ﬁrst-order formula, where each satisfying assignment is associated with a weight—e.g., a probability of occurrence—and our goal is to compute the total weight of the formula. In this paper, we target exact inference techniques for WMI that leverage the power of satisﬁability modulo theories ( SMT ) solvers to decompose a ﬁrst-order formula in linear real arithmetic into a set of hyperrectangular regions whose weight is easy to compute. We demonstrate the challenges of hyperrectangular decomposition and present a novel technique that utilizes orthogonal transformations to transform SMT formulas in order to enable efﬁcient inference. Our evaluation demonstrates our technique’s ability to improve the time required to achieve exact probability bounds.
Using of PSTD-Method and Transmission Matrixes for Research of Light Diffraction by Periodic Nanostructures

The article develops method for solving diffraction problems on real optical planar structures. The periodic structure used in the study consists of aluminium and silica. The wavelength dependences of the permittivities of both materials are measured. The combined pseudo-spectral time domain-finite differences time domain (PSTD-FDTD) technique is used to solve the diffraction problem.
Dietary and Supplement Treatment of Iron Deficiency Results in Improvements in General Health and Fatigue in Australian Women of Childbearing Age

Objective: To examine the effects of iron deficiency and its treatment by iron supplementation or a high iron diet on fatigue and general health measures in women of childbearing age. Design: Randomised controlled trial to compare supplement and dietary treatment of iron deficiency. Subjects: 44 iron deficient (serum ferritin <15 μg/L or serum ferritin 15–20 μg/L, plus two of the following: serum iron <10 μmol/L, total iron binding capacity >68 μmol/L or transferrin saturation <15%) and 22 iron replete (hemoglobin ≥120 g/L and serum ferritin >20 μg/L) women 18 to 50 years of age were matched for age and parity. Interventions: Iron deficient women were randomly allocated to either iron supplementation or a high iron diet for 12 weeks. Measures of Outcome: Iron deficient and iron replete participants had iron studies performed and completed the Piper Fatigue Scale (PFS) and the SF-36 general health and well-being questionnaire at baseline (T0), following the 12 week intervention (T1) and again after a six-month non-intervention phase (T2). The SF-36 includes measures of physical (PCS) and mental (MCS) health and vitality (VT). Results: MCS and VT scores were lower and PFS scores were higher for iron deficient women (diet and supplement groups) than iron replete women at baseline. Both intervention groups showed similar improvements in MCS, VT and PFS scores during the intervention phase, but mean increases in serum ferritin were greater in the supplement than the diet group. PCS scores were not related to iron status. Conclusions: Treatment of iron deficiency with either supplementation or a high iron diet results in improved mental health and decreased fatigue among women of childbearing age.
Capsaicin Regulates the NF-κB Pathway in Salivary Gland Inflammation

Salivary gland epithelial cells (SGEC) release several cytokines that play important roles in the inflammatory process. In this study, we examined whether capsaicin can modulate cytokine release in SGEC. After cells were stimulated with polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid [poly(I:C)] or lipopolysaccharide (LPS), mRNA transcript and protein levels were detected by reverse-transcriptase-polymerase chain-reaction (RT-PCR), real-time PCR, and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). These findings demonstrated that the increases in TNFα and IL-6 mRNA transcripts were highest at 3 hrs and 1 hr after incubation with poly(I:C) and LPS, respectively. Pre-treatment of the cells with 10 μµ capsaicin, however, significantly inhibited mRNA transcripts and its protein levels. The simultaneous application of 10 μµ capsazepine with capsaicin did not block the inhibitory effect of capsaicin. Furthermore, the inhibitory effect of capsaicin was also shown in primary cultured cells from TRPV1−/− mice. We found that both poly(I:C) and LPS induced IκB-α degradation and phosphorylation, which resulted in NF-κB activation, and capsaicin inhibited this NF-κB pathway. These results demonstrate that SGEC release pro-inflammatory cytokines mediated by TLR, and capsaicin inhibits this process through the NF-κB pathway. This study suggests that capsaicin could potentially alleviate inflammation in salivary glands.
Textual resource acquisition and engineering

A key requirement for high-performing question-answering (QA) systems is access to high-quality reference corpora from which answers to questions can be hypothesized and evaluated. However, the topic of source acquisition and engineering has received very little attention so far. This is because most existing systems were developed under organized evaluation efforts that included reference corpora as part of the task specification. The task of answering Jeopardy! ™ questions, on the other hand, does not come with such a well-circumscribed set of relevant resources. Therefore, it became part of the IBM Watson™ effort to develop a set of well-defined procedures to acquire high-quality resources that can effectively support a high-performing QA system. To this end, we developed three procedures, i.e., source acquisition, source transformation, and source expansion. Source acquisition is an iterative development process of acquiring new collections to cover salient topics deemed to be gaps in existing resources based on principled error analysis. Source transformation refers to the process in which information is extracted from existing sources, either as a whole or in part, and is represented in a form that the system can most easily use. Finally, source expansion attempts to increase the coverage in the content of each known topic by adding new information as well as lexical and syntactic variations of existing information extracted from external large collections. In this paper, we discuss the methodology that we developed for IBM Watson for performing acquisition, transformation, and expansion of textual resources. We demonstrate the effectiveness of each technique through its impact on candidate recall and on end-to-end QA performance.
H9N2 influenza viruses prevalent in poultry in China are phylogenetically distinct from A/quail/Hong Kongl/G1/97 presumed to be the donor of the internal protein genes of the H5N1 Hong Kong/97 virus

Ten H9N2 influenza virus strains isolated from diseased chickens in different farms in China during 1995 to 1999 were antigenically and genetically characterized. The haemagglutinins of the isolates were not related to those of AlquaillHong KonglG1197 (H9N2) (Qa/HK/G1/97), but were closely related to that of A/chicken/Hong Kong/G9/97 (H9N2) (Ck/HK/G9/97). The neuraminidase of these isolates had a deletion of three aminoacid residues at positions 63 to 65 as compared with those of Ck/HK/G9/97, while that of Qa/HK/G1/97 lackedtwo amino acids at positions 38 and 39. The PB2 genes of the isolates were not related to those of QalHIUG1197 or Ck/HK/G9/97, but showed some relationship to that of A/duck/Hong Kong/Y439/97 (H9N2) (DWHK/Y439197). The PB1 genes of the isolates were not related to those of the three representative strains. The PA,NP, M, and NS genes of the isolates belonged to the same lineage as those of Ck/HK/G9/97, and were distinctfrom those of Qa/HK/G1/97 and Dk/HK/Y439/97. The present results indicate that H9N2 influenza virusesprevalent in chicken populations in China belong genetically to one lineage and are distinct from Qa/HK/G1/97,presumed to be the donor of the internal protein genes of the highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus in HongKong in 1997.
A Mammalian Homolog of Yeast MOB1 Is Both a Member and a Putative Substrate of Striatin Family-Protein Phosphatase 2A Complexes*

Striatin and S/G2 nuclear autoantigen (SG2NA) are related proteins that contain membrane binding domains and associate with protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) and many additional proteins that may be PP2A regulatory targets. Here we identify a major member of these complexes as class II mMOB1, a mammalian homolog of the yeast protein MOB1, and show that its phosphorylation appears to be regulated by PP2A. Yeast MOB1 is critical for cytoskeletal reorganization during cytokinesis and exit from mitosis. We show that mMOB1 associated with PP2A is not detectably phosphorylated in asynchronous murine fibroblasts. However, treatment with the PP2A inhibitor okadaic acid induces phosphorylation of PP2A-associated mMOB1 on serine. Moreover, specific inhibition of PP2A also results in hyperphosphorylation of striatin, SG2NA, and three unidentified proteins, suggesting that these proteins may also be regulated by PP2A. Indirect immunofluorescence produced highly similar staining patterns for striatin, SG2NA, and mMOB1, with the highest concentrations for each protein adjacent to the nuclear membrane. We also present evidence that these complexes may interact with each other. These data are consistent with a model in which PP2A may regulate mMOB1, striatin, and SG2NA to modulate changes in the cytoskeleton or interactions between the cytoskeleton and membrane structures.
A Framework for Navigation-Driven Lazy Mediators

We propose a framework for navigation-driven evaluation of virtual mediated views. The approach is based on lazy mediators that translate incoming client navigations on a virtual XML view (or the result of an XML query) into navigations on wrapped sources or lower level mediators. Such a demand-driven approach is inevitable in order to handle up-to-date mediated views of huge Web sources or large query results, which are commonplace when querying the Web. The proposed MIX mediator provides to the client an abstraction of the DOM API, the de facto API to XML documents, hence hiding the non-materialization of the view or the query. We also describe the inherent navigational complexity of queries and view de nitions wrt. navigations. Next, we discuss the query/navigation processing aspects of the MIX mediator. The mediator translates a view into an algebraic plan. Then each operator of the algebraic plan acts as a navigation-driven lazy mediator. This allows to characterize the complexity of plans and to compare their navigational complexity.
High treatment success in children treated for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis: an observational cohort study

Background Few studies have described the management of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis (TB) in children and evidence-based guidance on management is lacking. We describe the presentation, treatment and outcome in children treated for severe and non-severe MDR-TB in Cape Town, South Africa. Methods We conducted an observational cohort study of all children (<15 years) treated for MDR-TB if routinely initiated on treatment between January 2009 and December 2010. Treatment was based on local standard of care, based on international guidelines. Data were collected through family interviews and folder review. Standardised definitions were used for diagnosis, severity of disease, adverse events and outcome. Results Of 149 children started on MDR-TB treatment, the median age was 36 months (IQR 16–66), 32 (22%; of 146 tested) had HIV infection and 59 (40%) had a confirmed diagnosis. Ninety-four (66%) children were treated with an injectable drug and the median total duration of treatment was 13 months (IQR 11–18). Thirty-six (24%) children were cured, 101 (68%) probably cured, 1 (1%) was transferred out, 8 (5%) were lost to follow-up and 3 (2%) died. Children with severe disease were older (54 months (IQR 18–142) vs 31.5 months (IQR 17.5–53.5); p=0.012), more commonly had HIV infection (OR 6.25; 95% CI 2.50 to 15.6; p<0.001) and were more likely to die (p=0.008). Discussion A confirmed diagnosis of MDR-TB is not possible in all cases but this should not impede the treatment of MDR-TB in children. More than 90% of children with MDR-TB can be successfully treated. Non-severe disease could be successfully treated with reduced treatment duration.
A case study on the effectiveness of recommendations in the mobile internet

This paper summarizes the initial findings of an experimental evaluation of how recommender systems affect the buying behavior of online customers. The study was conducted in the context of a large-scale, commercial Mobile Internet platform, from which end users can download games to their mobile phones. Item recommendations were presented to platform visitors in different navigational situations; the recommendation lists were either determined with the help of different recommendation algorithms or based on nonpersonalized ranking techniques. The study is based on a sample of more than 155,000 different customers who visited the portal during a four week evaluation period. The analysis revealed that the use of personalized recommendations instead of non-personalized ones leads to a significant increase in viewed and sold items in different navigational situations and to an overall sales increase.
Five-year follow-up of immediate fixed restorations of maxillary implants inserted in both fresh extraction and healed sites using the NobelGuide™ system.

BACKGROUND Transition from a hopeless dentition to an implant prosthesis, without wearing a removable denture, requires adaptation with guided surgery in postextraction cases. PURPOSE The study aims to evaluate mid-term follow-up of patients with compromised dentition treated with immediate fixed restorations on maxillary implants inserted in fresh extraction and healed sites by using NobelGuide™ (Nobel Biocare AB, Gothenburg, Sweden) in combination with a specially designed radiographic stent. MATERIALS AND METHODS Twenty-seven patients (females 20, males 7) aged 34 to 71 years (mean 55.8) were treated with flapless surgery. Immediate full-arch (n = 19) or partial (n = 10) restorations were delivered. Patients were followed both clinically (mean 61.3 months, 48-77) and radiologically for up to 5 years (mean 46.5 months, 12-61). Cumulative survival rate (CSR) was assessed. Marginal bone remodeling was evaluated at implant insertion, after 2 and 4/5 years. Soft tissue parameters as well as biological and mechanical complications were also recorded. RESULTS One-hundred sixty implants were assessed. Four implants in two patients failed and were removed (overall CSR 97.33%), and two were replaced. All final prostheses were stable and in good function throughout the study. Bone loss from insertion to 2 years, for implants placed in both extraction and healed sites, was 0.85 mm (SD 1.28, n = 130); from insertion to last radiological control (4-5 years), 1.39 mm (SD 1.88, n = 127); and between 2 years and last control, 0.64 mm (SD 1.66, n = 111). No bone loss difference was found between extraction and healed sites at any time (p > .05). At the last visit, most implants showed normal mucosa. No other complications occurred. CONCLUSIONS This 5-year retrospective study demonstrated a good outcome with regard to implant survival, marginal bone changes, and soft tissue conditions.