Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Early post-transplant renal allograft function between 1990 and 1998 in Spain.

BACKGROUND The last decade has witnessed a sustained improvement of renal allograft survival that is partly explained by a better preservation of renal allograft function. This study describes time-dependent modifications of serum creatinine (SCr) during the first year after transplantation in the last decade in Spain and characterizes the predictive value of SCr on death-censored graft survival. METHODS A total of 3365 adult patients transplanted in 1990 (n = 824), 1994 (n = 1075) and 1998 (n = 1466) with a functioning graft after the first year were included. Renal function deterioration during the first year was expressed as the difference between SCr at 1 year and SCr at 3 months. RESULTS Despite the projected renal allograft half-life, estimation was significantly higher in 1998 than in 1990 (17.7 vs 15.4 years, P = 0.007), the SCr levels at 3 months were significantly lower in 1990 (1.59+/-0.64) than in 1998 (1.65+/-0.66). While SCr tended to worsen during the first year in 1990 (0.05+/-0.64) it improved in 1998 (-0.003+/-0.48), P = 0.0001. The following variables were significantly associated with SCr at 3 months: donor age and sex, cause of death, recipient sex, time on dialysis, cold ischaemia time, delayed graft function, acute rejection, cytomegalovirus infection and reintervention for any reason. Renal function deterioration during the first year was associated with the presence of acute rejection and hepatitis C virus antibodies in the recipient. CONCLUSIONS Despite poorer renal function at 3 months in 1998 than in 1990, renal allograft survival has improved in Spain between 1990 and 1998. This result is partly explained by a slower deterioration of renal function during the first year of follow-up.
Potential Impacts of Four-Byte AS Numbers in Partial Deployment

Inter-domain routing is suffering from the lack of identifiers for the rapidly growing number of autonomous systems (AS), and therefore the 4-byte AS number has been proposed along with the transition scenario. In a partial deployment environment, 4-byte-enabled border gateway protocol (BGP) speakers have to exchange AS path vector with the old, 2-byte-only ones, via some way of translation and tunneling. The latter does not recognize and will possible lose the information about the 4-byte AS numbers. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis in order to identify the potential risks in deploying 4-byte AS numbers. It is found that (1) the loss of the AS4_PATH attributes will disable loop detection and lead to persistent oscillation in certain configuration; (2) AS_PATH-based match and COMMUNITY-based control may be ambiguously applied, and result in policy violations. Typical examples analyzed in real experiments validate these findings. Furthermore, AS path translation adds resource consumption for the routers, and it is necessary to identify the increment to router overhead of CPU time, memory and link bandwidth. Simulation results show that increased overhead will impact the scalability of the global inter-domain routing system, substantially.
BINARIZATION TECHNIQUE FOR CAMERA-BASED DOCUMENT IMAGES

Complex color documents with both graphics and text, where the text varies in color and size, call for specialized binarization techniques. We propose a novel method for binarization of color documents whereby the foreground text is output as black and the background as white regardless of the polarity of foreground and background shades. The method employs an edge-based connected component approach to determine text-like components and binarize them individually. The threshold for binarization and the logic for inverting the output are derived from the image data and do not require any manual tuning. Unlike existing binarization methods, our technique can handle documents with multi-colored texts with different background shades. The method is applicable to documents having text of widely varying sizes, usually not handled by local binarization methods. Experiments on a broad domain of target document types illustrate the effectiveness and adaptability of the method.
Within‐population Y‐linked genetic variation for lifespan in Drosophila melanogaster

The view that the Y chromosome is of little importance for phenotypic evolution stems from early studies of Drosophila melanogaster. This species’ Y chromosome contains only 13 protein‐coding genes, is almost entirely heterochromatic and is not necessary for male viability. Population genetic theory further suggests that non‐neutral variation can only be maintained at the Y chromosome under special circumstances. Yet, recent studies suggest that the D. melanogaster Y chromosome trans‐regulates hundreds to thousands of X and autosomal genes. This finding suggests that the Y chromosome may play a far more active role in adaptive evolution than has previously been assumed. To evaluate the potential for the Y chromosome to contribute to phenotypic evolution from standing genetic variation, we test for Y‐linked variation in lifespan within a population of D. melanogaster. Assessing variation for lifespan provides a powerful test because lifespan (i) shows sexual dimorphism, which the Y is primarily predicted to contribute to, (ii) is influenced by many genes, which provides the Y with many potential regulatory targets and (iii) is sensitive to heterochromatin remodelling, a mechanism through which the Y chromosome is believed to regulate gene expression. Our results show a small but significant effect of the Y chromosome and thus suggest that the Y chromosome has the potential to respond to selection from standing genetic variation. Despite its small effect size, Y‐linked variation may still be important, in particular when evolution of sexual dimorphism is genetically constrained elsewhere in the genome.
Impaired neutrophil directional chemotactic accuracy in chronic periodontitis patients

Aim To investigate the chemotactic accuracy of peripheral blood neutrophils from patients with chronic periodontitis compared with matched healthy controls, before and after non-surgical periodontal therapy. Material & Methods Neutrophils were isolated from patients and controls (n = 18) by density centrifugation. Using the Insall chamber and video microscopy, neutrophils were analysed for directional chemotaxis towards N-formyl-methionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine [fMLP (10 nM), or CXCL8 (200 ng/ml)]. Circular statistics were utilized for the analysis of cell movement. Results Prior to treatment, neutrophils from patients with chronic periodontitis had significantly reduced speed, velocity and chemotactic accuracy compared to healthy controls for both chemoattractants. Following periodontal treatment, patient neutrophils continued to display reduced speed in response to both chemoattractants. However, velocity and accuracy were normalized for the weak chemoattractant CXCL8 while they remained significantly reduced for fMLP. Conclusions Chronic periodontitis is associated with reduced neutrophil chemotaxis, and this is only partially restored by successful treatment. Dysfunctional neutrophil chemotaxis may predispose patients with periodontitis to their disease by increasing tissue transit times, thus exacerbating neutrophil-mediated collateral host tissue damage.
Agent-based System for Emotion Generation

The domain of Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems have always searched for ways of developing systems that model human behaviour. They begun with adding intelligence to agent-based system, but then they realized that this is not enough. One important factor that influences human behaviour are emotions. Machines have to learn to recognize emotions, but also to generate them. In this article we are focusing on the second research direction: we have built a system that generates emotions for a general, universal situation. Later on, adding a knowledge base to this agent, the system can be applied for a specific domain.
CD105 Expression on CD34-Negative Spindle-Shaped Stromal Cells of Primary Tumor Is an Unfavorable Prognostic Marker in Early Breast Cancer Patients

Several studies have confirmed that the breast tumor microenvironment drives cancer progression and metastatic development. The aim of our research was to investigate the prognostic significance of the breast tumor microenvironment in untreated early breast cancer patients. Therefore, we analyzed the association of the expression of α-SMA, FSP, CD105 and CD146 in CD34-negative spindle-shaped stromal cells, not associated with the vasculature, in primary breast tumors with classical prognostic marker levels, metastatic recurrence, local relapse, disease-free survival, metastasis-free survival and the overall survival of patients. In the same way, we evaluated the association of the amount of intra-tumor stroma, fibroblasts, collagen deposition, lymphocytic infiltration and myxoid changes in these samples with the clinical-pathological data previously described. This study is the first to demonstrate the high CD105 expression in this stromal cell type as a possible independent marker of unfavorable prognosis in early breast cancer patients. Our study suggests that this new finding can be useful prognostic marker in the clinical-pathological routine.
Mobi-SAGE: A Sparse Additive Generative Model for Mobile App Recommendation

With the rapid prevalence of smart mobile devices and the dramatic proliferation of mobile applications (Apps), App recommendation becomes an emergent task that will benefit different stockholders of mobile App ecosystems. Unlike traditional items, Apps have privileges to access a user's sensitive resources (e.g., contacts, messages and locations) which may lead to security risk or privacy leak. Thus, users' choosing of Apps are influenced by not only their personal interests but also their privacy preferences. Moreover, user privacy preferences vary with App categories. In this paper, we propose a mobile sparse additive generative model (Mobi-SAGE) to recommend Apps by considering both user interests and category-aware user privacy preferences. We collected a real-world dataset from 360 App store - the biggest Android App platform in China, and conduct extensive experiments on it. The experimental results show that our Mobi-SAGE consistently and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, which implies the importance of exploiting category-aware user privacy preferences.
SUMO Modification of Human XRCC4 Regulates Its Localization and Function in DNA Double-Strand Break Repair

ABSTRACT The nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) pathway is responsible for rejoining the majority of double-strand breaks in mammalian cells, including the programmed breaks introduced by V(D)J recombination. The regulation of the enzymatic activities associated with this recombination pathway is still largely unknown. Here we report that human XRCC4 (for X-ray cross-complementation group 4), a protein essential for NHEJ, is subject to posttranslational protein modification. The modifier peptide, SUMO, can be added to XRCC4 both in vitro and in vivo. The site of modification is mapped to lysine 210 by using specific mutagenesis. A protein mutated such that it cannot be SUMOylated remains localized in the cytoplasm rather than accumulating in the nucleus. Cells expressing only the mutated protein are radiation sensitive and fail to complete V(D)J recombination. Genetic fusion of the SUMO sequence to the C terminus of the mutant restores nuclear localization and radiation resistance. The modification may serve a regulatory role. Our finding fits with an emerging literature associating SUMO modification with the control of the repair and recombination associated with DNA breaks.
Optimal control-based efficient synthesis of building blocks of quantum algorithms: A perspective from network complexity towards time complexity

In this paper, we demonstrate how optimal control methods can be used to speed up the implementation of modules of quantum algorithms or quantum simulations in networks of coupled qubits. The gain is most prominent in realistic cases, where the qubits are not all mutually coupled. Thus the shortest times obtained depend on the coupling topology as well as on the characteristic ratio of the time scales for local controls vs nonlocal (i.e., coupling) evolutions in the specific experimental setting. Relating these minimal times to the number of qubits gives the tightest known upper bounds to the actual time complexity of the quantum modules. As will be shown, time complexity is a more realistic measure of the experimental cost than the usual gate complexity. In the limit of fast local controls (as, e.g., in NMR), time-optimized realizations are shown for the quantum Fourier transform (QFT) and the multiply controlled NOT gate $({\mathrm{C}}^{n\ensuremath{-}1}\mathrm{NOT})$ in various coupling topologies of $n$ qubits. The speed-ups are substantial: in a chain of six qubits the quantum Fourier transform so far obtained by optimal control is more than eight times faster than the standard decomposition into controlled phase, Hadamard and SWAP gates, while the ${\mathrm{C}}^{n\ensuremath{-}1}\mathrm{NOT}$ gate for a completely coupled network of six qubits is nearly seven times faster.
ISP: Learning Inferential Selectional Preferences

Semantic inference is a key component for advanced natural language understanding. However, existing collections of automatically acquired inference rules have shown disappointing results when used in applications such as textual entailment and question answering. This paper presents ISP, a collection of methods for automatically learning admissible argument values to which an inference rule can be applied, which we call inferential selectional preferences, and methods for filtering out incorrect inferences. We evaluate ISP and present empirical evidence of its effectiveness.
Learning Parametric Models for Social Infectivity in Multi-Dimensional Hawkes Processes

Efficient and effective learning of social infectivity presents a critical challenge in modeling diffusion phenomena in social networks and other applications.Existing methods require substantial amount of event cascades to guarantee the learning accuracy and they only consider time-invariant infectivity.Our paper overcomes those two drawbacks by constructing a more compact model and parameterizing the infectivity using time-varying features, thus dramatically reduces the data requirement, and enables the learning of time-varying infectivity which also takes into account the underlying network topology.We replace the pairwise infectivity in the multidimensional Hawkes processes with linear combinations of those time-varying features, and optimize the associated coefficients with lasso-type of regularization. To efficiently solve the resulting optimization problem, we employ the technique of alternating direction method of multipliers which allows independent updating of the individual coefficients by optimizing a surrogate function upper-bounding the original objective function. On both synthetic and real world data, the proposed method performs better than alternatives in terms of both recovering the hidden diffusion network and predicting the occurrence time of social events.
Phenomenology of a new minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model

We study the phenomenology of a new minimally extended supersymmetric standard model (nMSSM) where a gauge singlet superfield is added to the MSSM spectrum. The superpotential of this model contains no dimensionful parameters, thus solving the ? problem of the MSSM. A global discrete R symmetry, forbidding the cubic singlet self-interaction, imposed on the complete theory, guarantees its stability with respect to generated higher-order tadpoles of the singlet and solves both the domain wall and Peccei-Quinn axion problems. We give the free parameters of the model and display some general constraints on them. Particular attention is devoted to the neutralino sector where a (quasipure) singlino appears to be always the LSP of the model, leading to additional cascades, involving the NLSP ? LSP transition, compared with the MSSM. We then present the upper bounds on the masses of the lightest and next-to-lightest—when the lightest is an invisible singlet—CP-even Higgs bosons, including the full one-loop and dominant two-loop corrections. These bounds are found to be much higher than the equivalent ones in the MSSM. Finally, we discuss some phenomenological implications for the Higgs sector of the nMSSM in Higgs boson production at future hadron colliders.
TIME : Highly Scalable OLTP DBMS for Managing Update-Intensive Stream Workload

Over the past thirty years since the system R and Ingres projects started to lay the foundation for today’s RDBMS implementations, the underlying hardware and software platforms have changed dramatically. However, the fundamental RDBMS architecture, especially, the storage engine architecture, largely remains unchanged. While this conventional architecture may suffices for satisfying most of today’s applications, its deliverable performance range is far from meeting the so-called growing “realtime enterprise” demand of acquiring and querying high-volume update data streams costeffectively. P*TIME is a new, memory-centric lightweight OLTP RDBMS designed and built from scratch to deliver orders of magnitude higher scalability on commodity SMP hardware than existing RDBMS implementations, not only in search but also in update performance. Its storage engine layer incorporates our previous innovations for exploiting engine-level microparallelism such as differential logging and optimistic latch-free index traversal concurrency control protocol. This paper presents the architecture and performance of P*TIME and reports our experience of deploying P*TIME as the stock market database server at one of the largest on-line brokerage firms.
Evaluation of Multiscale Entropy based HRV for Ectopic Beats

The concomitant effect of the cardiovascular regulating mechanisms known as heart rate variability (HRV) occurs over a large set of time scales. Multiscale entropy (MSE) is a promising technique for measuring the complexity based HRV of finite length time series at different time scales. Ectopic beats, originating from other than the normal site, are the artifacts that cause a serious limitation to HRV analysis. In this study, normal RR interval time series of 10 healthy subjects with 2000 RR intervals were analysed by inserting high (g=0.1), medium (g=0.4) and low level (g=08) artificial ectopic beats. Addition of artificial ectopic beats lead to reduced complexity, resulting in decreased MSE. This reduction has been found to be dependent on amount and level of ectopic beats. Therefore certain form of ectopic editing methods are required to be apply for MSE based HRV. Interpolation methods are found to be more suitable editing methods than deletion of ectopic beats. The findings of the study can be partly used as a reference for the acceptable amount of ectopic beats for the MSE based HRV.
Design of Low Power Low Noise Amplifier using Gm-boosted Technique

This paper presents the development of low noise amplifier integrated circuit using 130nm RFCMOS technology. The low noise amplifier function is to amplify extremely low noise amplifier without adding noise and preserving required signal to a noise ratio. A detailed methodology and analysis that leads to a low power LNA are being discussed throughout this paper. Inductively degenerated and Gm-boosted topology are used to design the circuit. Design specifications are focused for 802.11b/g/n IEEE Wireless LAN Standards with center frequency of 2.4 GHz. The best low noise amplifier provides a power gain (S21) of 19.841 dB with noise figure (NF) of 1.497 dB using the gm-boosted topology while the best low power amplifier drawing 4.19mW power from a 1.2V voltage supply using the inductively degenerated.
Integrating motion and hierarchical fingertip grasp planning

In this work, we present an algorithm that simultaneously searches for a high quality fingertip grasp and a collision-free path for a robot hand-arm system to achieve it. The algorithm combines a bidirectional sampling-based motion planning approach with a hierarchical contact optimization process. Rather than tackling these problems in a decoupled manner, the grasp optimization is guided by the proximity to collision-free configurations explored by the motion planner. We implemented the algorithm for a 13-DoF manipulator and show that it is capable of efficiently planning reachable high quality grasps in cluttered environments. Further, we show that our algorithm outperforms a decoupled integration in terms of planning runtime.
The seroepidemiology of Bordetella pertussis infection in Western Europe

High titres of pertussis toxin (PT) antibody have been shown to be predictive of recent infection with Bordetella pertussis. The seroprevalence of standardized anti-PT antibody was determined in six Western European countries between 1994 and 1998 and related to historical surveillance and vaccine programme data. Standardized anti-PT titres were calculated for a series of whole-cell and acellular pertussis vaccine trials. For the serological surveys, high-titre sera (>125 units/ml) were distributed throughout all age groups in both high- (>90%) and low-coverage (<90%) countries. High-titre sera were more likely in infants in countries using high-titre-producing vaccines in their primary programme (Italy, 11·5%; Western Germany, 13·3%; France, 4·3%; Eastern Germany, 4·0%) compared to other countries (The Netherlands, 0·5%; Finland, 0%). Recent infection was significantly more likely in adolescents (10–19 years old) and adults in high-coverage countries (Finland, The Netherlands, France, East Germany), whereas infection was more likely in children (3–9 years old) than adolescents in low-coverage (<90%; Italy, West Germany, United Kingdom) countries. The impact and role of programmatic changes introduced after these surveys aimed at protecting infants from severe disease by accelerating the primary schedule or vaccinating older children and adolescents with booster doses can be evaluated with this approach.
Conversational attitude-aware behavioral design for robot assistant combined with video communication

This paper proposes a videophone conversation support system by the behaviors of a companion robot and the switching of camera images in coordination with the user's conversational attitude toward the communication. In order to maintain a conversation and to achieve comfortable communication, it is necessary to understand a user's conversational states, which are whether the user is talking (taking the initiative) and whether the user is concentrating on the conversation. First, a) the system estimates the user's conversational state by a machine learning method. Next, b-1) the robot appropriately expresses its active listening behaviors, such as nodding and gaze turns, to compensate for the listener's attitude when she/he is not really listening to another user's speech, b-2) the robot shows communication-evoking behaviors (topic provision) to compensate for the lack of a topic, and b-3) the system switches the camera images to create an illusion of eye-contact corresponding to the current context of the user's attitude. From empirical studies, a detailed experiment, and a demonstration experiment, i) both the robot's active listening behaviors and the switching of the camera image compensate for the other person's attitude, ii) the topic provision function is effective for awkward silences, and iii) elderly people prefer long intervals between the robot's behaviors.