Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Certificate-Based Authentication in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The certificate-based authentication is w ell studied in wired networks. However, adapting certificate-based authentication protocols to mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is a nontrivial task, mainly because, in a MANET, as opposed to conventional wired networks, there typically exists no fixed infrastru cture or centralized management. For example, a conventional certificate-based authentication system relies on a fixed trusted Cer tificate Authority (CA), which is responsible for t he creation, distribution, renewing, and revocation of certificates. In a MANET, due to issues such as node mobility, limited wireless medi um, and frequent link failures, it is typically not feasible to include such a fixed c entralized CA in the network. Various approaches have been proposed to tackle the unique challenge of adapting certificate-based methods for distributed authentication in mobile ad hoc networks. Our contribution in this paper is twofold: we first analyze the require ments of a secure distributed authentication system for MANETs, and then survey some of the existing certificate-based authenticati on mechanisms, by analyzing their features, includi ng pros and cons, in the context of distributed authentication. Finally, a series of scenario-based simulation experiments and metrics are proposed to evaluate these fea tures.
Trafficking and secretion of matrix metalloproteinase‐2 in olfactory ensheathing glial cells: A role in cell migration?

Olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) are unique glia found only in the olfactory system. They retain exceptional plasticity and support olfactory neurogenesis and retargeting across the PNS:CNS boundary in the olfactory system. OECs have been shown to improve functional outcome when transplanted into rodents with spinal cord injury. The growth‐promoting properties of implanted OECs encompass their ability to migrate through the scar tissue and render it more permissive for axonal outgrowth, but the underlying molecular mechanisms remain poorly understood. OECs appear to regulate molecules of the extracellular matrix (ECM) that inhibit axonal growth. Among the proteins that have the potential to promote cell migration, axonal regeneration and remodeling of the ECM are matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), a family of endopeptidases that cleave matrix, soluble, and membrane‐bound proteins and that are regulated by their endogenous inhibitors, the tissue inhibitors of MMPs (TIMPs). Little is known about MMP/TIMP trafficking, secretion, and role in OECs. Using a combination of cell biology, biochemistry, pharmacology, and imaging techniques, we show that MMP‐2 and MMP‐9 are expressed and proteolytically active in the olfactory epithelium and in particular in the OECs of the lamina propria. These proteinases and regulatory proteins such as MT1‐MMP and TIMP‐2 are expressed in cultured OECs. MMPs exhibit nuclear localization and vesicular trafficking and secretion, with distribution along microtubules and microfilaments and co‐localization with the molecular motor protein kinesin. Finally, we show that MMPs are involved in migration of OECs in vitro on different ECM substrates. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Transport Layer End-to-End Error Correcting

In this paper we study the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating error correction schemes inside the TCP transport layer protocol. We show that under some circumstances, this scheme achieves better performance than that of retransmission schemes, and, in particular, the TCP-SACK scheme. We analyze the performance of both schemes and discuss the circumstances under which the error correction scheme is favorable.
Metabolic Syndrome in Bipolar Disorders

To review the data with respect to prevalence and risk factors of metabolic syndrome (MetS) in bipolar disorder patients. Electronic searches were done in PUBMED, Google Scholar and Science direct. From 2004 to June 2011, 34 articles were found which reported on the prevalence of MetS. The sample size of these studies varied from 15 to 822 patients, and the rates of MetS vary widely from 16.7% to 67% across different studies. None of the sociodemographic variable has emerged as a consistent risk factor for MetS. Among the clinical variables longer duration of illness, bipolar disorder- I, with greater number of lifetime depressive and manic episodes, and with more severe and difficult-to-treat index affective episode, with depression at onset and during acute episodes, lower in severity of mania during the index episode, later age of onset at first manic episode, later age at first treatment for the first treatment for both phases, less healthy diet as rated by patients themselves, absence of physical activity and family history of diabetes mellitus have been reported as clinical risk factors of MetS. Data suggests that metabolic syndrome is fairly prevalent in bipolar disorder patients.
Optimal DC-Segmentation for Multi-Infeed HVDC Systems Based on Stability Performance

This paper analyzes the optimal problems of dc-segmentation for multi-infeed HVDC systems based on stability performance and studies the selecting method for the optimal dc-segmentation scheme. First, three major stability problems of multi-infeed HVDC systems are pointed out, which implies the necessity of the optimization for dc-segmentation. Second, three typical evaluation indices which correspond to the above three stability problems are introduced: multi-infeed interaction factor, multi-infeed effective short-circuit ratio, and frequency bias factor. To improve evaluation effects of the typical indices, the subindices are presented. Third, in order to solve this multi-objective decision-making problem, a linear weighted sum model is built, and a comprehensive weight method is adopted to calculate the weight coefficients. Based on the stability problems, a selecting method is established to choose the optimal dc-segmentation scheme. Finally, a four-machine multi-infeed HVDC system and a practical multi-infeed HVDC system in China are taken as examples, respectively. Candidate dc-segmentation schemes of each system are evaluated by the proposed method, and the optimal one is selected. Detailed stability studies of the candidate schemes are executed. The result indicates that the stability of the optimal scheme is better than the stabilities of others, which verifies the validity of the proposed method.
Identification of amino acid residues in Streptococcus mutans glucosyltransferases influencing the structure of the glucan product

The glucosyltransferases (GTFs) of mutans streptococci are important virulence factors in the sucrose-dependent colonization of tooth surfaces by these organisms. To investigate the structure-function relationship of the GTFs, an approach was initiated to identify amino acid residues of the GTFs which affect the incorporation of glucose residues into the glucan polymer. Conserved amino acid residues were identified in the GTF-S and GTF-I enzymes of the mutans streptococci and were selected for site-directed mutagenesis in the corresponding enzymes from Streptococcus mutans GS5. Conversion of six amino acid residues of the GTF-I enzyme to those present at the corresponding positions in GTF-S, either singly or in multiple combinations, resulted in enzymes synthesizing increased levels of soluble glucans. The enzyme containing six alterations synthesized 73% water-soluble glucan in the absence of acceptor dextran T10, while parental enzyme GTF-I synthesized no such glucan product. Conversely, when residue 589 of the GTF-S enzyme was converted from Thr to either Asp or Glu, the resulting enzyme synthesized primarily water-insoluble glucan in the absence of the acceptor. Therefore, this approach has identified several amino acid positions which influence the nature of the glucan product synthesized by GTFs.
A Plug-and-Play Priors Approach for Solving Nonlinear Imaging Inverse Problems

In the past two decades, nonlinear image reconstruction methods have led to substantial improvements in the capabilities of numerous imaging systems. Such methods are traditionally formulated as optimization problems that are solved iteratively by simultaneously enforcing data consistency and incorporating prior models. Recently, the Plug-and-Play Priors (PPP) framework suggested that by using more sophisticated denoisers, not necessarily corresponding to an optimization objective, it is possible to improve the quality of reconstructed images. In this letter, we show that the PPP approach is applicable beyond linear inverse problems. In particular, we develop the fast iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm variant of PPP for model-based nonlinear inverse scattering. The key advantage of the proposed formulation over the original ADMM-based one is that it does not need to perform an inversion on the forward model. We show that the proposed method produces high quality images using both simulated and experimentally measured data.
High SNR BER Comparison of Coherent and Differentially Coherent Modulation Schemes in Lognormal Fading Channels

Using an auxiliary random variable technique, we prove that binary differential phase-shift keying and binary phase-shift keying have the same asymptotic bit-error rate performance in lognormal fading channels. We also show that differential quaternary phase-shift keying is exactly 2.32 dB worse than quaternary phase-shift keying over the lognormal fading channels in high signal-to-noise ratio regimes.
Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 Glycoprotein E Is Required for Axonal Localization of Capsid, Tegument, and Membrane Glycoproteins

ABSTRACT Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) glycoprotein E (gE) promotes cell-to-cell spread at basolateral surfaces of epithelial cells, but its activity in neurons is less clear. We used the mouse retina infection model and neuronal cell cultures to define the spread phenotype of gE mutant viruses. Wild-type (WT) and gE-null (NS-gEnull) viruses both infected retina ganglion cell neurons; however, NS-gEnull viral antigens failed to reach the optic nerve, which indicates a defect in axonal localization. We evaluated two Fc receptor-negative gE mutant viruses containing four amino acid inserts in the gE ectodomain. One mutant virus failed to spread from the retina into the optic nerve, while the other spread normally. Therefore, the gE ectodomain is involved in axonal localization, and the Fc receptor and neuronal spread are mediated by overlapping but distinct gE domains. In the retina infection model, virus can travel to the brain via the optic nerve from presynaptic to postsynaptic neurons (anterograde direction) or via nerves that innervate the iris and ciliary body from postsynaptic to presynaptic neurons (retrograde direction). WT virus infected the brain by anterograde and retrograde routes, whereas NS-gEnull virus failed to travel by either pathway. The site of the defect in retrograde spread remains to be determined; however, infection of rat superior cervical ganglia neurons in vitro indicates that gE is required to target virion components to the axon initial segment. The requirement for gE in axonal targeting and retrograde spread highlights intriguing similarities and differences between HSV-1 and pseudorabies virus gE.
Active and Quiet Periods in the Preterm and Term Fetus

Heart rate variability and fetal movement were used to classify active and quiet fetal periods. Fetuses at 28 to 30 weeks and at 38 to 40 weeks' gestation were compared. A period of fetal movement with increased variability of heart beat was classified as active and one with the absence of movement and diminished fetal heart beat was classified as quiet. The results demonstrated significant differences both in the number of active-quiet cycles per hour and in the length of the active periods. These findings suggest that analogs of fetal behavioral states may be present before birth and have cyclic patterns, and that the time spent in each fetal period is longer in older fetuses.
Students' Satisfaction in Learning Style-Based Adaptation

Initiatives based on learning style adaptation are often marked by a lack of experimental evaluation of their efficacy in general and of student satisfaction in particular. A high level of satisfaction can increase the motivation of students, their engagement and experience, and therefore improve their learning. This paper is concerned with the investigation of the effect of adaptation based on learning style on students' satisfaction. An adaptive approach, which involves the construction of personalised learning paths based on learning style, was implemented in an adaptive e-learning system. A controlled experiment in this learning environment was conducted with sixty undergraduate students to evaluate their level of satisfaction with the system. The results indicate that the students were generally satisfied with their learning experience. It can be concluded that adaptation of learning content according to learning style can improve student satisfaction and enhance their experience and motivation.
Touch me once and i know it's you!: implicit authentication based on touch screen patterns

Password patterns, as used on current Android phones, and other shape-based authentication schemes are highly usable and memorable. In terms of security, they are rather weak since the shapes are easy to steal and reproduce. In this work, we introduce an implicit authentication approach that enhances password patterns with an additional security layer, transparent to the user. In short, users are not only authenticated by the shape they input but also by the way they perform the input. We conducted two consecutive studies, a lab and a long-term study, using Android applications to collect and log data from user input on a touch screen of standard commercial smartphones. Analyses using dynamic time warping (DTW) provided first proof that it is actually possible to distinguish different users and use this information to increase security of the input while keeping the convenience for the user high.
Immersive environment for distributed creative collaboration

While videoconferencing has been available for years, tools for distributed creative collaboration such as brainstorming have not yet reached professional use. Unlike regular conferencing, brainstorming relies on information exchange across multiple channels in shared task and communication spaces. If a participant joins a facilitated brainstorming session remotely through his/her mobile device, perceiving these spaces is challenging. By proposing an immersive environment for the remote participant, this tech note addresses how to provide him/her a stronger engagement. Offered as a client application for the remote participant's tablet device, it enables him/her to see all channels and select which one to interact with. Our proof-of-concept client allows us to examine how this immersive environment for distributed creative collaboration can provide the remote participant with an increased engagement.
HIV regulation of the IL‐7R: a viral mechanism for enhancing HIV‐1 replication in human macrophages in vitro

We report a novel mechanism, involving up‐regulation of the interleukin (IL)‐7 cytokine receptor, by which human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) enhances its own production in monocyte‐derived macrophages (MDM) in vitro. HIV‐1 infection or treatment of MDM cultures with exogenous HIV‐1 Tat(86) protein up‐regulates the IL‐7 receptor (IL‐7R) α‐chain at the levels of steady‐state RNA, protein, and functional IL‐7R on the cell surface (as measured by ligand‐induced receptor signaling). This IL‐7R up‐regulation is associated with increased amounts of HIV‐1 virions in the supernatants of infected MDM cultures treated with exogenous IL‐7 cytokine. The overall effect of IL‐7 stimulation on HIV replication in MDM culture supernatants is typically in the range of one log and greater. The results are consistent with a model in which HIV infection produces the Tat protein, which in turn up‐regulates IL‐7R in a paracrine manner. This results in increased IL‐7R signaling in response to the IL‐7 cytokine, which ultimately promotes early events in HIV replication, including binding/entry and possibly other steps prior to reverse transcription. The results suggest that the effects of IL‐7 on HIV replication in MDM should be considered when analyzing and designing clinical trials involving treatment of patients with IL‐7 or Tat vaccines.
Learning a Robust Word Sense Disambiguation Model using Hypernyms in Definition Sentences

This paper proposes a method to improve the robustness of a word sense disambiguation (WSD) system for Japanese. Two WSD classifiers are trained from a word sense-tagged corpus: one is a classifier obtained by supervised learning, the other is a classifier using hypernyms extracted from definition sentences in a dictionary. The former will be suitable for the disambiguation of high frequency words, while the latter is appropriate for low frequency words. A robust WSD system will be constructed by combining these two classifiers. In our experiments, the F-measure and applicability of our proposed method were 3.4% and 10% greater, respectively, compared with a single classifier obtained by supervised learning.
Prognostic Value of Plasma Tight-Junction Proteins for Sepsis in Emergency Department: an Observational Study

Background: Studies have illustrated that the breakdown of tight junction (TJ) contributed to an increase in vascular permeability in response to stimulation of inflammatory cytokines. Additionally, the release of TJ-associated proteins into the circulation was observed in many diseases. The present study was designed to investigate whether plasma levels of TJ-associated proteins could serve as predictors of severity and clinical outcome of sepsis. Methods: In total, 51 septic patients were enrolled. The peripheral blood samples were collected for each patient on emergency department arrival. Plasma levels of occludin (OCLN), claudins (CLDN)-5, and zonula occludens (ZO)-1 and serum levels of procalcitonin (PCT) and lactate were measured. In addition, APACHE II score as well as SOFA score was calculated. The prognostic values of OCLN, CLDN-5, and ZO-1 were compared with the first 24-h maximum APACHE II score and SOFA score. Results: The median levels of OCLN and ZO-1 were elevated with sepsis severity. The levels of plasma OCLN and ZO-1 were positively correlated with APACHE II score, SOFA score as well as lactate levels of the patients. The levels of ZO-1 revealed valuable diagnostic capacity to diagnose MODS, and the areas under the receiver-operating characteristic (AUC) curves of ZO-1 were similar to those of lactate levels, but better than those of PCT levels. The prognostic value for in-hospital mortality of ZO-1 was comparable to that of lactate levels, APACHE II score, and SOFA score, and superior to OCLN or PCT. Conculsions: OCLN and ZO1 levels appear to be early prognostic markers in patients suffering from sepsis.
Photonic crystal laser based on Fano interference allows for ultrafast frequency modulation in the THz range

Replacing a conventional mirror in a photonic crystal laser by one based on Fano interference leads to rich laser dynamics, including realization of stable self-pulsing and potential for ultra-fast modulation. In particular, the narrowband Fano mirror guarantees single-mode operation and significantly alters the modulation response compared to Fabry-Perot lasers. In this work the small-signal response is analyzed using a dynamical model based on coupled-mode theory and rate equations, which shows how the 3-dB bandwidth of the frequency modulation response may exceed tens of THz, orders of magnitude larger than for conventional semiconductor lasers.
Who Should I Interact With ?

The growth of social networks such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter has provided us a great medium to communicate with many people across the world. However, as it turns out, behind a keyboard and a screen, not everyone is nice and not everyone shares our interests. Wrongly choosing people to interact may not only waste our time but can also negatively affect our habits, our emotion, our health and our lifestyles [1,5]. Therefore, even in a social network, it’s important to find good users and good friends. We call this the user quality problem. The first challenge of this problem is: what are properties of a good user? In this project, we identify two aspects of a good user:
Sonority rise: Aiding backoff in syllable-based speech synthesis

Back off techniques are employed in syllable based unit selection speech synthesis systems to maintain the naturalness of the speech in spite of the missing syllables. In synthesizing the missing complex consonant clusters syllables of Telugu, we introduced reduced vowel epenthesis as a rule-based backoff strategy[1]. In this paper, we refine the scope of the approach in selectively applying vowel epenthesis only in cases of sonority rise between adjacent consonants. When the sonority does not rise (stop-stop, liquid-stop clusters), we increase the duration of the consonant. Owing to specific patterns of vowel epenthesis observed in languages, we conduct a subjective evaluation to determine the identity of the epenthetic vowel in Hindi. From the inferences of the listening test, we devise a class based rule to perform epenthesis. Further, to evaluate the performance of the designed system, we perform both subjective as well as an objective evaluation based on confidence measures from an ASR system. We conduct a phone level automatic speech recognition task on the intelligibility of the words synthesized using epenthesis as a cluster-repair strategy. The results show that the proposed back off method helps in producing more natural-sounding speech compared to the conventional backoffs.
A Review on Web Image Retrieval Techniques

In today’s era search engines are used everywhere, as it is source to retrieve efficient result related to query. Web based image search engines frequently uses keywords as queries to search images. These search engines entails complexity due to the ambiguity of query keywords, since it is hard for users to properly illustrate the visual content of target images by only using keywords. For example, if query keyword is mouse, then result may contain mouse animal, Mickey Mouse, wireless mouse, or optical mouse etc. To overcome this problem search engines uses re-ranking. Image Re-Ranking is the process which reorganizes the result by considering different features of image. A main challenge in the research of image re-ranking is that the similarities of visual features do not correlate semantic meanings of images that understand users’ search aim. This paper represents an extensive survey of feature extraction; image searching and reranking for different queries is carried out. Keywords— image search engine, keyword, image reranking, semantic signatures
SAR image despeckling with structure preserving

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images despeckling technique has been developed for many years. Most methods cannot strike a good balance between smoothing speckle noise and preserving structure. In order to both smoothing speckle and preserving structure, we proposed a despeckling method using singular value thresholding and iterative regularization which inspires from spatially adaptive iterative singular value thresholding algorithm. This approach combines local and nonlocal structures so that lead to a better performance on structure preserving. The experimental results using simulated speckle Lena image and a real SAR intensity image show that the proposed method has the better performance than the state-of-the-art method like PPB and SAR-BM3D.