Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antitumor Effect of IP-10 by Using Two Different Approaches: Live Delivery System and Gene Therapy

Purpose Immunotherapy is one of the treatment strategies for breast cancer, the most common cancer in women worldwide. In this approach, the patient's immune system is stimulated to attack microscopic tumors and control metastasis. Here, we used interferon γ-induced protein 10 (IP-10), which induces and strengthens antitumor immunity, as an immunotherapeutic agent. We employed Leishmania tarentolae, a nonpathogenic lizard parasite that lacks the ability to persist in mammalian macrophages, was used as a live delivery system for carrying the immunotherapeutic agent. It has been already shown that arginase activity, and consequently, polyamine production, are associated with tumor progression. Methods A live delivery system was constructed by stable transfection of pLEXSY plasmid containing the IP-10-enhanced green fluorescent protein (IP-10-egfp) fusion gene into L. tarentolae. Then, the presence of the IP-10-egfp gene and the accurate integration location into the parasite genome were confirmed. The therapeutic efficacy of IP-10 delivered via L. tarentolae and recombinant pcDNA-(IP-10-egfp) plasmid was compared by determining the arginase activity in a mouse 4T1 breast cancer model. Results The pcDNA-(IP-10-egfp) group showed a significant reduction in tumor weight and growth. Histological evaluation also revealed that only this group demonstrated inhibition of metastasis to the lung tissue. The arginase activity in the tissue of the pcDNA-(IP-10-egfp) mice significantly decreased in comparison with that in normal mice. No significant difference was observed in arginase activity in the sera of mice receiving other therapeutic strategies. Conclusion Our data indicates that IP-10 immunotherapy is a promising strategy for breast cancer treatment, as shown in the 4T1-implanted BALB/c mouse model. However, the L. tarentolae-(IP-10-EGFP) live delivery system requires dose modifications to achieve efficacy in the applied regimen (six injections in 3 weeks). Our results indicate that the arginase assay could be a good biomarker to differentiate tumoral tissues from the normal ones.
Creativity or creativities: A study of domain generality and specificity

A series of studies investigated domain generality and specificity in creativity. Preliminary studies developed behavior report measures based on act-frequency and life-space approaches. The main studies examined two aspects of generality and specificity in creativity. A first group of studies analyzed the structure of creative behavior and the second group of studies concerned personality correlates of creativity. Dimensions of creative behavior were identified in a factor analysis of behavior reports and referred to creative life-style, arts, and intellectual achievement. Moreover, these dimensions were replicated in college students and professional adults. Groups of individuals with similar patterns of behavior were identified in a cluster analysis and described as conventional, everyday creative, artist, scholar, and renaissance people. A systems approach to personality was employed to select creativity relevant traits based on prior research and theories of creativity. Selected traits concerned global personality, emotions and motivation, cognition, social expression, and selfregulation. Creative behaviors were related to multiple areas in personality, which supported conceptions of creativity as a syndrome requiring multiple resources in the person (Amabile, 1996; Mumford & Gustafson, 1988; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Regression and discriminant function analyses showed that it was possible to identify both traits general to different dimensions and patterns in creativity and traits that are specific to one dimension or pattern in creative behavior.
A Context Aware Information Quality Framework

In an age dominated by information, information quality (IQ) is one of the most important factors to consider for obtaining competitive advantages. The general approach to the study of IQ has offered numerous management approaches, IQ frameworks and list of IQ criteria. There are many IQ measures proposed for several application domains; however organizations still are challenged to apply IQ frameworks and measurement approaches within a specific context. An analysis of related literature reveals that most approaches are context dependent, although the contextual dimension is usually not represented in IQ frameworks. With this paper we aim to address this limitation and extend current work on IQ frameworks. We base our research on the theoretical concept of semiotics with emphasizes on pragmatics. Subsequently we propose a context-aware IQ framework that can be applied in various contexts. Our framework is applied in an experimental setting that shows that context is an important consideration for IQ assessment. Our result can be used in further research studies or can assist practitioners to develop suitable IQ measures. Based on these results we aim to develop a context-aware IQ measurement tool.
OPAL: A multi-layer hybrid photonic NoC for 3D ICs

Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs) offer a significant opportunity to enhance the performance of emerging chip multiprocessors (CMPs) using high density stacked device integration and shorter through silicon via (TSV) interconnects that can alleviate some of the problems associated with interconnect scaling. In this paper we propose and explore a novel multi-layer hybrid photonic NoC fabric (OPAL) for 3D ICs. Our proposed hybrid photonic 3D NoC combines low cost photonic rings on multiple photonic layers with a 3D mesh NoC in active layers to significantly reduce on-chip communication power dissipation and packet latency. OPAL also supports dynamic reconfiguration to adapt to changing runtime traffic requirements, and uncover further opportunities for reduction in power dissipation. Our experimental results and comparisons with traditional 2D NoCs, 3D NoCs, and previously proposed hybrid photonic NoCs (photonic Torus, Corona, Firefly) indicate a strong motivation for considering OPAL for future 3D ICs as it can provide orders of magnitude reduction in power dissipation and packet latencies.
Metabolic syndrome disorders in urban black Zimbabweans with type 2 Diabetes mellitus.

OBJECTIVE The main aim of the study was to determine the prevalence of metabolic syndrome disorders and their interrelations in black Zimbabwean type 2 diabetic patients. STUDY DESIGN Prospective cross sectional study. SETTING Outpatient diabetic clinics at Harare and Parirenyatwa tertiary hospitals. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES We recruited 109 adult diabetic subjects attending a tertiary hospital Diabetic Clinic. Anthropometric and metabolic parameters were measured by standard methods. Eighty percent of the patients were hypertensive, 32% dyslipidaemic, 32% obese, 50% hyperinsulinaemic, 61% had poor glycaemic control and 43% of the participants had the metabolic syndrome. The means of BMI and triglycerides were significantly different in hyperinsulinaemic versus non-hyperinsulinaemic patients (p < 0.001 and 0.041 respectively), and diastolic blood pressure was significantly raised in the obese group (p = 0.043). The following significant associations were observed, hyperinsulinaemia with the metabolic syndrome (odds ratio = 3.9, p < 0.001) as well with obesity (odds ratio = 4.8, p < 0.001), however, only a weak association was observed between hypertension and hyperinsulinaemia (odds ratio = 2.5, p = 0.064). Patients exhibiting three metabolic disorders (dyslipidaemia, hypertension and obesity) were five times more likely to be hyperinsulinaemic (p = 0.025) and hypertensive patients were almost three times more likely to be hyperinsulinaemic. CONCLUSION In comparison to their counterparts from certain ethnic groups, this urban diabetic population is also burdened with a variety of metabolic disorders which are risk factors for coronary artery disease. In this population, hyperinsulinaemia has a relatively weak association with hypertension and the relationship between obesity versus diastolic blood pressure as well as hypertriglyceridaemia versus serum insulin levels requires further investigation.
Steady-State and Stability Analysis of Induction Motor Driven by Current Source Inverter

Steady-state characteristics and instability of an induction motor driven by current source inverter are studied in comparison with the system driven by voltage source inverter. It is shown that as the speed is increased the electromagnetic torque takes three extremities a maximum torque is close to the standstill and a minimum and a second maximum torques are near to the synchronous speed. Thus the magnitude of the starting torque is slightly less than the breakdown torque and larger than that for the voltage source type. Operation close to the synchronous speed is impractical, because of the higher copper loss and lower efficiency due to the increase of current and the decrease of the power factor with increasing speed. As this fact prevails also in the negative slip region, a dynamic brake action rather than a regenerative braking action will be obtained. Over a wide range of slip, higher torques than those for the voltage source type are obtained. Instability appears usually as a sustained oscillation on armature voltage and current. Applying the Routh-Hurwitz criterion, several instability boundaries for various parameters are described. Some experimental results are presented which show essential agreement with the theory.
A Mixed-Initiative Approach for Summarizing Discussions Coupled with Sentimental Analysis

In this fast moving world, everybody has the urge to get updated to what's happening around the world. There is a heavy demand for knowing information which is crisp and to the point without getting reading the may be ten articles on it, but to get what the ten articles mean. So, to solve this issue, here we present a novel approach for 'Summarizing the Discussion' which is aimed at presenting the user with the most relevant summary containing all the important points of the discussion. At this juncture, we need to consider the polarity of comments and the whole discussion and present the user with a short, unbiased, comprehensive and non-redundant summary. Our proposal consists of a Nested Thematic Clustering approach coupled with Keyword or Key phrase extraction and sentiment analysis or rather polarity calculation. Be it political, social, geographical, philosophical, superstitious, educational, and environmental or entertainment domain, all the news is generally shared through forms or posts of internet. Now, it gets a little obvious that different people have different views. Hence, we make it a point to include and ensure the multi-dimensionality of every thread under the post. We have used an extractive method of summarization with the help of Natural Language Processing where we incorporate the techniques of repeated clustering and ranking. The proposed model is able to generate a desirably relevant summary.
Resilient Intrusion Tolerance through Proactive and Reactive Recovery

Previous works have studied how to use proactive recovery to build intrusion-tolerant replicated systems that are resilient to any number of faults, as long as recoveries are faster than an upper-bound on fault production assumed at system deployment time. In this paper, we propose a complementary approach that combines proactive recovery with services that allow correct replicas to react and recover replicas that they detect or suspect to be compromised. One key feature of our proactive-reactive recovery approach is that, despite recoveries, it guarantees the availability of the minimum amount of system replicas necessary to sustain system's correct operation. We design a proactive-reactive recovery service based on a hybrid distributed system model and show, as a case study, how this service can effectively be used to augment the resilience of an intrusion-tolerant firewall adequate for the protection of critical infrastructures.
Dengue Incidence Rate Clustering by District in Selangor

This study presents the used of Generalised Additive Model (GAM) in modelling Dengue Incidence Rate (DIR) with adopted clustering technique for districts in Selangor. This study identified a pattern for monthly observed dengue count and successfully select variables includes number of rainy days and amount of rainfall with time lags, number of locality and population density which significant to DIR in Selangor. Besides, this study found the districts divided into two clusters based on the value of mean DIR from January 2010 to August 2015. The first cluster consist of 6 districts of Selangor with value of mean DIR from 0 to 200 cases per 100,000 population. Meanwhile, there are 3 districts classified in the second cluster with value of mean DIR from 200 to 500 cases per 100,000 population. The Negative Binomial GAM then adopted in this study to able to handle the presence of overdispersion. In conclusion, clustering technique is one of the effective techniques to identify the different district with the higher potential of dengue risk.
Power Allocation in Wireless Relay Networks: A Geometric Programming-Based Approach

In this paper, we consider an amplify-and-forward (AF) wireless relay system where multiple source nodes communicate with their corresponding destination nodes with the help of relay nodes. While each user is assisted by one relay, one relay can assist many users. Conventionally, each relay node is assumed to equally distribute the available bandwidth and power resources to all sources for which it helps to relay information. Realizing the sub-optimality of this approach, in this paper, we present efficient power allocation schemes to i) maximize the minimum end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio among all users; ii) minimize the total transmit power over all sources; iii) maximize the system throughput. Our approach is based on geometric programming (GP), a well-studied class of nonlinear and nonconvex optimization. Since a GP problem is readily transformed into an equivalent convex optimization problem, optimal power allocation can be obtained efficiently. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
WebCom-G and MPICH-G2 Jobs

This paper discusses using WebCom-G to handle the management & scheduling of MPICH-G2 (MPI) jobs. Users can submit their MPI applications to a WebCom-G portal via a web interface. WebCom-G will then select the machines to execute the application on, depending on the machines available to it and the number of machines requested by the user. WebCom-G automatically & dynamically constructs a RSL script with the selected machines and schedules the job for execution on these machines. Once the MPI application has finished executing, results are stored on the portal server, where the user can collect them. A main advantage of this system is fault survival, if any of the machines fail during the execution of a job, WebCom-G can automatically handle such failures. Following a machine failure, WebCom-G can create a new RSL script with the failed machines removed, incorporate new machines (if they are available) to replace the failed ones and re-launch the job without any intervention from the user. The probability of failures in a Grid environment is high, so fault survival becomes an important issue.
A role for cerebellum in the hereditary dystonia DYT1

DYT1 is a debilitating movement disorder caused by loss-of-function mutations in torsinA. How these mutations cause dystonia remains unknown. Mouse models which have embryonically targeted torsinA have failed to recapitulate the dystonia seen in patients, possibly due to differential developmental compensation between rodents and humans. To address this issue, torsinA was acutely knocked down in select brain regions of adult mice using shRNAs. TorsinA knockdown in the cerebellum, but not in the basal ganglia, was sufficient to induce dystonia. In agreement with a potential developmental compensation for loss of torsinA in rodents, torsinA knockdown in the immature cerebellum failed to produce dystonia. Abnormal motor symptoms in knockdown animals were associated with irregular cerebellar output caused by changes in the intrinsic activity of both Purkinje cells and neurons of the deep cerebellar nuclei. These data identify the cerebellum as the main site of dysfunction in DYT1, and offer new therapeutic targets. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.22775. 001
Data fusion in electronic tongue for qualitative analysis of beers

This paper presents the development of an Electronic Tongue based on two different arrays of electrochemical sensors (i.e. potentiometric and voltammetric) for the identification of three styles of beer. Conventionally, electrochemical measurements contain hundreds of records and cannot be processed directly, due to its high data dimension. Therefore, information obtained from both sensor families was prepossessed in order to extract representative features and then fused to improve the classification ability regarding to the use of single sensor data. On the one hand, Discrete Wavelet Transform and statistical procedures were employed as feature extraction techniques. On the other hand, classification model was build using Linear Discriminant Analysis and validated by Leave-one-out cross-validation procedure. Final results demonstrate that the ET employing data fusion is able to distinguish 100% of the types of beer as well as its manufacturing process.
A new contrast enhancement method of retinal images in Diabetic Screening System

A new retinal image contrast enhancement method for Diabetic Screening System is presented here. The proposed method evaluated by comparing the retinal image quality with different contrast enhancement methods which are applied in numerous papers. The proposed method produces better image quality and also preserves the mean brightness of the input images which is very important for medical image analysis. Publicly available datasets like DRIVE, STARE, DIARETDB0, and DIARETDB1 are used for testing purpose. The low contrast noisy retinal images are collected from the Hospital and performance of the proposed contrast enhancement is also measured. The SSIM (Structure Similarity Index Measurement) and AAMBE (Average Absolute Mean Brightness Error) are the important performance measurement parameters applied here to examine the image quality and brightness preserving ability respectively. The average SSIM is reported as 0.82(Std. Dev=0.011) and AAMBE is 0.023(Std. Dev=0.030). The success rate on low contrast noisy retinal image analysis is showing the importance of the proposed method.
CMSC 858 F : Algorithmic Lower Bounds Fall 2014 Parameterized reductions and assumptions Instructor

Definition 1 ETH: there is no 2 time algorithm for n variable 3-SAT. (the current best bound is 1.30704 [1]). Note that an n-variable 3-SAT can have Ω(n) clauses but Impagliazzo et al. [2] show that there is a 2-time algorithm for n-variable 3-SAT iff there is a 2-time algorithm for m-clause 3-SAT. Thus ETH also says: There is no 2-time algorithm for m-clause 3-SAT. The standard textbook NP-hardness reduction from 3-SAT to 3-coloring constructs a graph of O(n+m) = O(m) edges and O(n+m) = O(m) vertices to solve 3-SAT instance of n-variables and m-clauses. Thus assuming ETH, there is no 2 algorithm for 3-coloring on an n-vertex graph G. Since there are many standard polynomial-time reductions from 3-coloring to many other problems such that the reduction increases the number of vertices by at most a constant factor, we have
Neural bases of listening to speech in noise

Ubiquitous speech processing involves listening to speech in ecological environments where noise is often present. The current study investigates the neural mechanisms involved in perceiving speech in noise using a sparse sampling fMRI method. Subjects were asked to match auditorily presented words with picture choices. The auditory stimuli were either presented in quiet or embedded in multi-talker babble noise without the presence of scanner noise in either condition. Behaviorally, it was found that subjects were slower and less accurate in identifying words presented in noise. Comparison of hemodynamic responses associated with listening to the two types of stimuli revealed increased activation in left prefrontal, inferior frontal, anterior insular, and superior temporal regions when subjects listened to speech in noise. These results confirm the importance of the lateral auditory cortex in complex auditory processing and suggest that the prefrontal cortex is likely to be prominently engaged in subvocal rehearsal when noise is affecting the integrity of the speech signal.
SmartTools: A Development Environment Generator based on XML Technologies

SmartTools is a development environment generator that provides a structure editor and semantic tools as main features. SmartTools is easy to use, thanks to its graphical user interface. Being based on Java and XML technologies offers all the features of SmartTools to any defined language. The main goal of this tool is to provide help and support for designing software development environments for programming languages as well as domain-specific languages defined with XML technologies.
Solving the Data Inter-operability Problem Using a Universal Data Access Broker

Stored data has been fundamental to human enterprise ever si nc the invention of clay tablets, or perhaps even as early as primitive cave paintings. All stored data requires the definition of persistent representations for that data, and corresponding interfaces to access and use that data. On ce invented, each representation of persistent data must inevitably inter-operate with humans or mechanisms th at use other persistent representations. None of this is new to the human experience, yet the Biblical Tower of Babe l is as nothing compared to the bewildering data interoperability problem brought forth by the computer in j ust fifty years. It’s perhaps hard to imagine Alexander halting his armies whilst critical data was translated by sc ribes from obsolete forms. But no great leap at all to imagine a modern day corporate Alexander stopped in his trac ks because his CIO simply cannot get one enterprise system to inter-operate in the necessary manner with data pr oduced by another enterprise system. Or perhaps because his CIO cannot achieve the required data inter-oper ability at the transaction speeds required by some new business campaign.
Upregulation of miR-196b Confers a Poor Prognosis in Glioblastoma Patients via Inducing a Proliferative Phenotype

Purpose To explore the expression pattern, prognostic value and functional role of miR-196b in glioblastoma (GBM) patients using large cohorts. Experimental Design MiR-196b expression was measured using the Human v2.0 miRNA Expression BeadChip (Illumina) in 198 frozen glioma tissues. The expression levels of miR-196b were also validated in an independent cohort containing 128 formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) glioma samples using qRT-PCR. The presence of other molecular prognostic indicators was assessed centrally in the glioma samples. Whole genome gene profiling was performed to investigate the underlying biological behavior. MiR-196b functional analyses were performed in U87 and U251 cell lines. Results The expression levels of miR-196b were inversely correlated with overall survival in GBM patients. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) showed that the gene sets relating to cell cycle were significantly enriched in the cases with miR-196b overexpression. Functional analyses in U87 and U251 cells revealed that miR-196b was involved in cell proliferation. Conclusions MiR-196b is overexpressed and confers a poor prognosis via promoting cellular proliferation in GBM patients.