Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Old Yellow Enzyme from Trypanosoma cruzi Exhibits In Vivo Prostaglandin F2α Synthase Activity and Has a Key Role in Parasite Infection and Drug Susceptibility

The discovery that trypanosomatids, unicellular organisms of the order Kinetoplastida, are capable of synthesizing prostaglandins raised questions about the role of these molecules during parasitic infections. Multiple studies indicate that prostaglandins could be related to the infection processes and pathogenesis in trypanosomatids. This work aimed to unveil the role of the prostaglandin F2α synthase TcOYE in the establishment of Trypanosoma cruzi infection, the causative agent of Chagas disease. This chronic disease affects several million people in Latin America causing high morbidity and mortality. Here, we propose a prokaryotic evolutionary origin for TcOYE, and then we used in vitro and in vivo experiments to show that T. cruzi prostaglandin F2α synthase plays an important role in modulating the infection process. TcOYE overexpressing parasites were less able to complete the infective cycle in cell culture infections and increased cardiac tissue parasitic load in infected mice. Additionally, parasites overexpressing the enzyme increased PGF2α synthesis from arachidonic acid. Finally, an increase in benznidazole and nifurtimox susceptibility in TcOYE overexpressing parasites showed its participation in activating the currently anti-chagasic drugs, which added to its observed ability to confer resistance to hydrogen peroxide, highlights the relevance of this enzyme in multiple events including host–parasite interaction.
Efficiency evaluation of a super-directive masking system that tracks the masker beam towards the target human head

We evaluated the masking performance of the prototype super-directive masking system that uses a parametric speaker to steer a directional masker beam towards the head of the subject to be masked (maskee). The parametric speaker is placed on an iRobot-like platform (turtlebot), and tracks the maskee using the Kinect sensor. We compared the masking performance (intelligibility decrease) of the prototype system with a conventional masking system using loudspeakers, and found them to be comparable. Moreover, the prototype maintains the range of the masking noise to a narrow beam, thereby not annoying surrounding listeners with increased noise levels.
Fall 10-7-2015 Analyzing and organizing the sonic space of vocal imitation

The sonic space that can be spanned with the voice is vast and complex and, therefore, it is difficult to organize and explore. In order to devise tools that facilitate sound design by vocal sketching we attempt at organizing a database of short excerpts of vocal imitations. By clustering the sound samples on a space whose dimensionality has been reduced to the two principal components, it is experimentally checked how meaningful the resulting clusters are for humans. Eventually, a representative of each cluster, chosen to be close to its centroid, may serve as a landmark in the exploration of the sound space, and vocal imitations may serve as proxies for synthetic sounds.
Field Trial of Copper Treated Moso Bamboo in Southern China

The field trial of Moso bamboo treated with 9 copper preservatives was conducted in Guangzhou, China. The result showed that two formulations of ammonia-based copper azole (F17 and F18 ) and a formulation of amine copper added with boron (F10), as well as 2 kinds of ammonia-based ACQ, at the copper retention of 3.2 kg/m3 or over, were very resistant to decay and termites after the 5- year field test. And the durability of ACQ-B treated Moso bamboo was similar to that of treated Masson pine and slash pine at the same copper level.
Parameterized Intractability of Motif Search Problems

We show that Closest Substring, one of the most important problems in the eld of biological sequence analysis, is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the number k of input strings (and remains so, even over a binary alphabet). This problem is therefore unlikely to be solvable in time O(f(k) n c ) for any function f of k and constant c independent of k. The problem can therefore be expected to be intractable, in any practical sense, for k 3. Our result supports the intuition that Closest Substring is computationally much harder than the special case of Closest String, although both problems are NP-complete. We also prove W[1]-hardness for other parameterizations in the case of unbounded alphabet size. Our W[1]-hardness result for Closest Substring generalizes to Consensus Patterns, a problem of similar signicance in computational biology.
Association Control in Mobile Wireless Networks

As mobile nodes roam in a wireless network, they continuously associate with different access points and perform handoff operations. However, frequent handoffs can potentially incur unacceptable delays and even interruptions for interactive applications. To alleviate these negative impacts, we present novel association control algorithms that can minimize the frequency of handoffs occurred to mobile devices. Specifically, we show that a greedy LookAhead algorithm is optimal in the offline setting, where the user's future mobility is known. Inspired by such optimality, we further propose two online algorithms, namely LookBack and Track, that operate without any future mobility information. Instead, they seek to predict the lifetime of an association using randomization and statistical approaches, respectively. We evaluate the performance of these algorithms using both analysis and trace-driven simulations. The results show that the simple LookBack algorithm has surprisingly a competitive ratio . of (log k + 2), where k is the maximum number of APs that a user can hear at any time, and the Track algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance in practical scenarios.
An improved timestamp-based password authentication scheme: comments, cryptanalysis, and improvement

In 2003, Shen et al. proposed a timestamp-based password authentication scheme by using smart card. Later, in 2005 and 2008, this scheme was found susceptible to forged login attacks by some researchers, and improved schemes were proposed. In 2011, Awasthi et al. pointed out an additional security threat on the scheme of Shen et al. and also suggested remedy by proposing an enhanced scheme. In this paper, we analyze the additional attack identified by Awasthi et al. on the scheme of Shen et al. show its flaws and rectify it. Further, we find that the scheme of Awasthi et al. still fails to withstand forged login attack, smart card loss attack, offline password guessing attack, and so on, and also inherits some weaknesses from the original scheme. Therefore, we propose an improved version of the scheme of Awasthi et al. Our improved scheme not only resists the attacks that we depict on the scheme of Awasthi et al. but is also free from the attacks pointed out so far on the scheme of Shen et al. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
New perspectives on weak Oblivious Transfer

In this paper we provide a generalization of weak oblivious transfer through the constructive cryptography framework. This generalization requires the global order of the inputs and outputs from and to two parties called Alice and Bob to be completely defined, a subtlety which has been overlooked by previous work on the subject. We provide evidence that the order of inputs and outputs in weak oblivious transfer matters. In particular, it may influence the kind and strength of symmetry results which can be obtained about such resources.
Heparinase Is Essential for Pseudomonas aeruginosa Virulence during Thermal Injury and Infection

ABSTRACT The opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a major cause of sepsis in severely burned patients. If it is not eradicated from the wound, it translocates to the bloodstream, causing sepsis, multiorgan failure, and death. We recently described the P. aeruginosa heparinase-encoding gene, hepP, whose expression was significantly enhanced when P. aeruginosa strain UCBPP_PA14 (PA14) was grown in whole blood from severely burned patients. Further analysis demonstrated that hepP contributed to the in vivo virulence of PA14 in the Caenorhabditis elegans model. In this study, we utilized the murine model of thermal injury to examine the contribution of hepP to the pathogenesis of P. aeruginosa during burn wound infection. Mutation of hepP reduced the rate of mortality from 100% for mice infected with PA14 to 7% for mice infected with PA14::hepP. While comparable numbers of PA14 and PA14::hepP bacteria were recovered from infected skin, only PA14 was recovered from the livers and spleens of infected mice. Despite its inability to spread systemically, PA14::hepP formed perivascular cuffs around the blood vessels within the skin of the thermally injured/infected mice. Intraperitoneal inoculation of the thermally injured mice, bypassing the need for translocation, produced similar results. The rate of mortality for mice infected with PA14::hepP was 0%, whereas it was 66% for mice infected with PA14. As before, only PA14 was recovered from the livers and spleens of infected mice. These results suggest that hepP plays a crucial role in the pathogenesis of PA14 during burn wound infection, most likely by contributing to PA14 survival in the bloodstream of the thermally injured mouse during sepsis.
Construction of Improved Tools for Protein Localization Studies in Streptococcus pneumoniae

We have constructed a set of plasmids that allow efficient expression of both N- and C-terminal fusions of proteins of interest to fluorescent proteins mCherry, Citrine, CFP and GFP in the Gram-positive pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae. In order to improve expression of the fluorescent fusions to levels that allow their detection by fluorescence microscopy, we have introduced a 10 amino acid tag, named i-tag, at the N-terminal end of the fluorescent proteins. This caused increased expression due to improved translation efficiency and did not interfere with the protein localization in pneumococcal bacteria. Localizing fluorescent derivatives of FtsZ, Wzd and Wze in dividing bacteria validated the developed tools. The availability of the new plasmids described in this work should greatly facilitate studies of protein localization in an important clinical pathogen.
Is There a Distress Risk Anomaly? Pricing of Systematic Default Risk in the Cross Section of Equity Returns

The standard measures of distress risk ignore the fact that firm defaults are correlated and that some defaults are more likely to occur in bad times. The paper uses risk premium computed from corporate credit spreads to measure a firm's exposure to systematic variation in default risk. Unlike previously used measures that proxy for a firm's physical probability of default, credit spreads proxy for a risk-adjusted default probability and thereby explicitly account for the non-diversifiable component of distress risk. In contrast to prior findings in the literature, the authors find that stocks that have higher credit risk premia, that is stocks with higher systematic default risk exposures, have higher expected equity returns. Consistent with structural models of default, they show that the premium to a high-minus-low systematic default risk hedge portfolio is largely explained by the market factor. The authors confirm the robustness of these results by using an alternative systematic default risk factor for firms that do not have bonds outstanding. The results show no evidence of firms with high systematic default risk exposure delivering anomalously low returns.
STExNMF: Spatio-Temporally Exclusive Topic Discovery for Anomalous Event Detection

Understanding newly emerging events or topics associated with a particular region of a given day can provide deep insight on the critical events occurring in highly evolving metropolitan cities. We propose herein a novel topic modeling approach on text documents with spatio-temporal information (e.g., when and where a document was published) such as location-based social media data to discover prevalent topics or newly emerging events with respect to an area and a time point. We consider a map view composed of regular grids or tiles with each showing topic keywords from documents of the corresponding region. To this end, we present a tilebased spatio-temporally exclusive topic modeling approach called STExNMF, based on a novel nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) technique. STExNMF mainly works based on the two following stages: (1) first running a standard NMF of each tile to obtain general topics of the tile and (2) running a spatiotemporally exclusive NMF on a weighted residual matrix. These topics likely reveal information on newly emerging events or topics of interest within a region. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach using the geo-tagged Twitter data of New York City. We also provide quantitative comparisons in terms of the topic quality, spatio-temporal exclusiveness, topic variation, and qualitative evaluations of our method using several usage scenarios. In addition, we present a fast topic modeling technique of our model by leveraging parallel computing.
Can obesity and physical activity predict outcomes of elective knee or hip surgery due to osteoarthritis? A meta-analysis of cohort studies

Objective The aim of this study was to systematically review the literature to identify whether obesity or the regular practice of physical activity are predictors of clinical outcomes in patients undergoing elective hip and knee arthroplasty due to osteoarthritis. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data source and eligibility criteria A systematic search was performed on the Medline, CINAHL, EMBASE and Web of Science electronic databases. Longitudinal cohort studies were included in the review. To be included, studies needed to have assessed the association between obesity or physical activity participation measured at baseline and clinical outcomes (ie, pain, disability and adverse events) following hip or knee arthroplasty. Data extraction Two independent reviewers extracted data on pain, disability, quality of life, obesity, physical activity and any postsurgical complications. Results 62 full papers were included in this systematic review. From these, 31 were included in the meta-analyses. Our meta-analysis showed that compared to obese participants, non-obese participants report less pain at both short term (standardised mean difference (SMD) −0.43; 95% CI −0.67 to −0.19; P<0.001) and long term post-surgery (SMD −0.36; 95% CI −0.47 to −0.24; P<0.001), as well as less disability at long term post-surgery (SMD −0.32; 95% CI −0.36 to −0.28; P<0.001). They also report fewer postsurgical complications at short term (OR 0.48; 95% CI 0.25 to 0.91; P<0.001) and long term (OR 0.55; 95% CI 0.41 to 0.74; P<0.001) along with less postsurgical infections after hip arthroplasty (OR 0.33; 95% CI 0.18 to 0.59; P<0.001), and knee arthroplasty (OR 0.42; 95% CI 0.23 to 0.78; P=0.006). Conclusions Presurgical obesity is associated with worse clinical outcomes of hip or knee arthroplasty in terms of pain, disability and complications in patients with osteoarthritis. No impact of physical activity participation has been observed. PROSPERO registration number CRD42016032711.
Disocclusion compensation using adaptive template matching for view synthesis

In a multi-view application, view synthesis is required to synthesize unavailable views using texture and depth information of the given views. In this paper, a compensation algorithm based on template matching for partial recovery of disocclusion regions is proposed. The shape of a template is dynamically adjusted, and a new reference mode which mimics pushing dominoes is also proposed. To find an appropriate template region, a histogram-based clustering approach is proposed to distinguish the background from the foreground objects. The improved performance is confirmed using subjective and objective evaluation methods.
SHARK2: a large vocabulary shorthand writing system for pen-based computers

Zhai and Kristensson (2003) presented a method of speed-writing for pen-based computing which utilizes gesturing on a stylus keyboard for familiar words and tapping for others. In SHARK<sup>2</sup>:, we eliminated the necessity to alternate between the two modes of writing, allowing any word in a large vocabulary (e.g. 10,000-20,000 words) to be entered as a shorthand gesture. This new paradigm supports a gradual and seamless transition from visually guided tracing to recall-based gesturing. Based on the use characteristics and human performance observations, we designed and implemented the architecture, algorithms and interfaces of a high-capacity multi-channel pen-gesture recognition system. The system's key components and performance are also reported.
Detecting radio frequency interference for CSI measurements on COTS WiFi devices

In recent years, WiFi-based sensing applications have been proliferated due to growing capacities of the physical layer. Channel State Information (CSI), which depicts the characteristics of propagation environment and reflects different human behaviors, can be easily obtained on commodity WiFi devices with slight driver modification. For the sake of higher accuracy and robustness of CSI-based sensing, a variety of research efforts have been devoted to model refinement, algorithm optimization and data sanitization. Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a crucial problem, which, however, is surprisingly overlooked and largely unexplored. The sensing performance can be significantly boosted by identifying and properly handling the interfered CSI measurements. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is feasible to identify the interfered CSI measurements due to the unique properties induced by RFI. We propose two RFI detection algorithms by utilizing cyclostationary analysis from different angles. Experimental results on off-the-shelf WiFi devices show that both algorithms are robustly stable for different scenarios and can achieve a remarkable overall accuracy of > 90%.
Natural and Effective Obfuscation by Head Inpainting

As more and more personal photos are shared online, being able to obfuscate identities in such photos is becoming a necessity for privacy protection. People have largely resorted to blacking out or blurring head regions, but they result in poor user experience while being surprisingly ineffective against state of the art person recognizers [17]. In this work, we propose a novel head inpainting obfuscation technique. Generating a realistic head inpainting in social media photos is challenging because subjects appear in diverse activities and head orientations. We thus split the task into two sub-tasks: (1) facial landmark generation from image context (e.g. body pose) for seamless hypothesis of sensible head pose, and (2) facial landmark conditioned head inpainting. We verify that our inpainting method generates realistic person images, while achieving superior obfuscation performance against automatic person recognizers.
A practical model for traffic forecasting based on big data, machine-learning, and network KPIs

Traffic forecasting plays an important role in improving network quality and energy saving of mobile networks. In 5G, traffic forecasting directly influences the self-organizing network (SON) in managing and controlling the network effectively. Especially, long-term traffic forecasting can provide a detailed pattern of future traffic, besides permitting more time for planning and optimizing. Most of the traffic forecasting models used the history of traffic, while the utilization of another network KPIs (key performance indicators) for traffic forecasting is limited. Therefore, the authors propose here a practical platform and process for traffic forecasting, based on big data, machine-learning (ML), and network KPIs that are flexible to forecast accurately different statistical traffic characteristics of different types of cells (GSM, 3G, 4G) for both long- and short-term forecasting. The performance of the proposed model was evaluated by applying it to a real dataset that collected KPIs of more than 6000 cells of a real network during the years, 2016 and 2017.
Scalable Video Multicast With Adaptive Modulation and Coding in Broadband Wireless Data Systems

Future mobile broadband networks are characterized with high data rate and improved coverage, which will enable real-time video multicast and broadcast services. Scalable video coding (SVC), combined with adaptive modulation and coding schemes (MCS) and wireless multicast, provides an excellent solution for streaming video to heterogeneous wireless devices. By choosing different MCSs for different video layers, SVC can provide good video quality to users in good channel conditions while maintaining basic video quality for users in bad channel conditions. A key issue to apply SVC to wireless multicast streaming is to choose appropriate MCS for each video layer and to determine the optimal resource allocation among multiple video sessions. We formulate this problem as total utility maximization, subject to the constraint of available radio resources. We prove that the formulated problem is NP-hard and propose an optimal, two-step dynamic programming solution with pseudo-polynomial time complexity. Simulation results show that our algorithm offers significant improvement on the video quality over a naive algorithm and an adapted greedy algorithm, especially in the scenarios with multiple real video sequences and limited radio resources.
evoGraphs — A jQuery plugin to create web accessible graphs

Graphs are considered as one of the most important tools to represent information, and as such, they are widely used across the Internet in various formats to visualize statistics and data. However, for the visually impaired individuals, who can presently rely only on the ALT attribute of images, receiving and interpreting information displayed in graphs is a highly challenging task. This paper presents a novel solution to this problem, called evoGraphs, which is a jQuery plugin that allows users to create fully dynamic, customizable graphs that are easily read by screen readers. In contrast to traditional images, the proposed approach relies on HTML, CSS and jQuery components in order to create graphs while reducing page load time and making the graphs readable by voiceover software applications and screen readers. This paper presents the design and customization of evo-Graphs. Examples are provided to highlight the advantages of the proposed methodology by comparing page load times of traditional image-based graphs with those produced by evoGraphs.
Investigation of chlorine-based etchants in wet and dry etching technology for an InP planar Gunn diode

Mesa etching technology is considerably important in the Gunn diode fabrication process. In this paper we fabricate InP Gunn diodes with two different kinds of chlorine-based etchants for the mesa etching for comparative study. We use two chlorine-based etchants, one is HCl-based solution (HCl/H 3 PO 4 ), and the other is Cl 2 -based gas mixture by utilizing inductively coupled plasma system (ICP). The results show that the wet etching (HCl-based) offers low cost and approximately vertical sidewall, whilst ICP system (Cl 2 -based) offers an excellent and uniform vertical sidewall, and the over-etching is tiny on the top and the bottom of mesa. And the fabricated mesas of Gunn diodes have average etching rates of ～ 0.6 μm/min and ～ 1.2 μm/min, respectively. The measured data show that the current of Gunn diode by wet etching is lower than that by ICP, and the former has a higher threshold voltage. It provides a low-cost and reliable method which is potentially applied to the fabrication of chip terahertz sources.