Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Title Evolutionary cross-domain discriminative Hessian Eigenmaps

Is it possible to train a learning model to separate tigers from elks when we have 1) labeled samples of leopard and zebra and 2) unlabelled samples of tiger and elk at hand? Cross-domain learning algorithms can be used to solve the above problem. However, existing cross-domain algorithms cannot be applied for dimension reduction, which plays a key role in computer vision tasks, e.g., face recognition and web image annotation. This paper envisions the cross-domain discriminative dimension reduction to provide an effective solution for cross-domain dimension reduction. In particular, we propose the cross-domain discriminative Hessian Eigenmaps or CDHE for short. CDHE connects training and test samples by minimizing the quadratic distance between the distribution of the training set and that of the test set. Therefore, a common subspace for data representation can be well preserved. Furthermore, we basically expect the discriminative information used to separate leopards and zebra can be shared to separate tigers and elks, and thus we have a chance to duly address the above question. Margin maximization principle is adopted in CDHE so the discriminative information for separating different classes (e.g., leopard and zebra here) can be well preserved. Finally, CDHE encodes the local geometry of each training class (e.g., leopard and zebra here) in the local tangent space which is locally isometric to the data manifold and thus CDHE preserves the intraclass local geometry. The objective function of CDHE is not convex, so the gradient descent strategy can only find a local optimal solution. In this paper, we carefully design an evolutionary search strategy to find a better solution of CDHE. Experimental evidence on both synthetic and real word image datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of CDHE for cross-domain web image annotation and face recognition.
Multiple Access Channel Optimal Spectrum Balancing for Upstream DSL Transmission

Upstream DSL transmission suffers from in-domain crosstalk as well as out-of-domain or alien crosstalk. Here, the use of multi-user receiver signal coordination e.g. generalized decision feedback equalization, can lead to spectacular performance gains. This paper presents a transmission scheme, referred to as MAC-OSB, which focuses on the weighted rate sum capacity by joint receiver signal coordination and transmit spectrum coordination. The proposed scheme incorporates per-user total power constraints, spectral mask constraints and discrete bit or power loading constraints. Furthermore a low-complexity scheme, referred to as MAC-ISB, is presented which performs similar to MAC-OSB. Simulations show large performance gains over existing methods especially for scenarios with significant alien crosstalk
Performance enhancement of the compact microstrip antennas using AMC ground planes

In this paper, using AMC ground planes the performance of the miniature microstrip antennas were enhanced in both input impedance bandwidth and gain. Simulations demonstrate the input impedance of 8.6% and aperture efficiency of 104% in the best cases. Measurements on the fabricated antennas are currently being conducted and will be presented at the conference time.
A 40 nm inverse-narrow-width-effect-aware sub-threshold standard cell library

We have investigated the impact of inverse narrow width effect on the threshold voltage and drain current in the near/sub-threshold region at three technology nodes (90 nm, 65 nm and 40 nm) and proposed a new sub-threshold device sizing method which is inverse-narrow-width-effect-aware to reduce the gate area, power consumption and delay. We applied the proposed sizing method in designing a 40 nm sub-threshold standard cell library. Compared with the sub-threshold standard cell library designed using the conventional sizing method, the proposed library has up to 20% less delay, up to 34% less power consumption and up to 47% less area. We used the proposed library for designing a digital base-band processor and achieved a total power consumption of around 5 µw with 6 MHz at 0.5 V, which is 17% better than the counterpart design.
Soldering of nanotubes onto microelectrodes

Suspended bridges of individual multiwalled carbon nanotubes were fabricated inside a scanning electron microscope by soldering the nanotube onto microelectrodes with highly conducting gold−carbon material. By the decomposition of organometallic vapor with the electron beam, metal-containing solder bonds were formed at the intersection of the nanotube and the electrodes. Current−voltage curves indicated metallic conduction of the nanotubes, with resistances in the range of 9−29 kΩ. Bridges made entirely of the soldering material exhibited resistances on the order of 100 Ω, and the solder bonds were consistently found to be mechanically stronger than the carbon nanotubes.
Linguistic features in Turkish word representations

Distributed word representations which are learned using unsupervised methods are employed in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. They have led to state-of-the-art results in many NLP tasks for many languages. There have been studies reporting that word representations include morphological and semantical information. There are also work that aim to propose word representations which handle the morphological and syntactical information better. However, studies that evaluate the quality of the word representations for morphologically rich languages like Turkish are limited. In this study, we aim to explore the syntactic and morphological information captured by the Turkish word representations which are learned using skip-gram method on a large corpus. To assess the quality of information found in relations between Turkish word embeddings, analogical reasoning task is performed using couples consisting of root words and their inflected or derivative forms. We contribute with detailed experiments and show that word embeddings trained with skip-gram method have differing capabilities in capturing information for inflection and derivation groups in Turkish. We make the test sets and word embeddings publicly available to other researchers for further research.
Wind–Diesel Generation Using Doubly Fed Induction Machines

In this paper, the modeling and control strategy of a wind-diesel generation system are discussed. In the proposed topology, the diesel engine and the wind turbine are both variable-speed machines, allowing maximum fuel efficiency and optimal energy capture from the wind. A vector-controlled doubly fed induction generator is used in each generation system to provide fixed voltage and frequency to the load. The diesel unit balances the system power and changes the speed according to the power demand in order to minimize the fuel consumption. The electrical torque of the wind system generator is regulated to maximize the energy capture of the wind turbine. The advantages of operating a diesel engine at variable speed are discussed. The dynamic and steady-state operation of the wind-diesel system, including voltage and frequency control, active power balancing, and control of the reactive power supplied to the grid/load are analyzed in this paper. Experimental results, from a 3-kW experimental prototype are presented in this paper.
Isolation of Phages for Phage Therapy: A Comparison of Spot Tests and Efficiency of Plating Analyses for Determination of Host Range and Efficacy

Phage therapy, treating bacterial infections with bacteriophages, could be a future alternative to antibiotic treatment of bacterial infections. There are, however, several problems to be solved, mainly associated to the biology of phages, the interaction between phages and their bacterial hosts, but also to the vast variation of pathogenic bacteria which implies that large numbers of different phages are going to be needed. All of these phages must under present regulation of medical products undergo extensive clinical testing before they can be applied. It will consequently be of great economic importance that effective and versatile phages are selected and collected into phage libraries, i.e., the selection must be carried out in a way that it results in highly virulent phages with broad host ranges. We have isolated phages using the Escherichia coli reference (ECOR) collection and compared two methods, spot testing and efficiency of plating (EOP), which are frequently used to identify phages suitable for phage therapy. The analyses of the differences between the two methods show that spot tests often overestimate both the overall virulence and the host range and that the results are not correlated to the results of EOP assays. The conclusion is that single dilution spot tests cannot be used for identification and selection of phages to a phage library and should be replaced by EOP assays. The difference between the two methods can be caused by many factors. We have analysed if the differences and lack of correlation could be caused by lysis from without, bacteriocins in the phage lysate, or by the presence of prophages harbouring genes coding for phage resistance systems in the genomes of the bacteria in the ECOR collection.
Organization of the extracellular portion of the macrophage galactose receptor: A trimeric cluster of simple binding sites for N-acetylgalactosamine

The properties of the human macrophage galactose receptor have been investigated. Specificity for N-acetylgalactosamine (GalNAc) residues with exposed 3- and 4-hydroxyl groups explains virtually all of the results obtained from a recently expanded array of synthetic glycans and is consistent with a model for the structure of the binding site. This simple interaction is sufficient to explain the ability of the receptor to bind to tumor-cell glycans bearing Tn and sialyl-Tn antigens, but not to more elaborate O-linked glycans that predominate on normal cells. This specificity also allows for binding of parasite glycans and screening of an array of bacterial outer membrane oligosaccharides confirms that the receptor binds to a subset of these structures with appropriately exposed GalNAc residues. A key feature of the receptor is the clustering of binding sites in the extracellular portion of the protein, which retains the trimeric structure observed in the cell membrane. Chemical crosslinking, gel filtration, circular dichroism analysis and differential scanning calorimetry demonstrate that this trimeric structure of the receptor is stabilized by an α-helical coiled coil that extends from the surface of the membrane to the globular carbohydrate-recognition domains. The helical neck domains form independent trimerization domains. Taken together, these results indicate that the macrophage galactose receptor shares many of the features of serum mannose-binding protein, in which clusters of monosaccharide-binding sites serve as detectors for a simple epitope that is not common on endogenous cell surface glycans but that is abundant on the surfaces of tumor cells and certain pathogens.
File-type Identification with Incomplete Information

File-type Identification (FTI) is an important problem in digital forensics, intrusion detection, and other related fields. Using stateof-the-art classification techniques to solve FTI problems has begun to receive research attention; however, general conclusions have not been reached due to the lack of thorough evaluations for method comparison. This paper presents a systematic investigation of the problem, algorithmic solutions and an evaluation methodology. Our focus is on performance comparison of statistical classifiers (e.g., SVM and kNN) and knowledgebased approaches, especially COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) solutions which currently dominate FTI applications. We analyze the robustness of different methods in handling damaged files and file segments. We propose two alternative criteria in measuring performance: 1) treating file-name extensions as the true labels, and 2) treating the predictions by knowledge based approaches on intact files; these rely on signature bytes as the true labels (and removing these signature bytes before testing each method). In our experiments with simulated damages in files, SVM and kNN substantially outperform all the COTS solutions we tested, improving classification accuracy very substantially – some COTS methods cannot identify damaged files at all. Our experiments also show the scalability of SVM and kNN to large applications after adequate feature selection.
An Adaptive Error Modeling Scheme for the Lossless Compression of EEG Signals

Lossless compression of EEG signal is of great importance for the neurological diagnosis as the specialists consider the exact reconstruction of the signal as a primary requirement. This paper discusses a lossless compression scheme for EEG signals that involves a predictor and an adaptive error modeling technique. The prediction residues are arranged based on the error count through an histogram computation. Two optimal regions are identified in the histogram plot through a heuristic search such that the bit requirement for encoding the two regions is minimum. Further improvement in the compression is achieved by removing the statistical redundancy that is present in the residue signal by using a context-based bias cancellation scheme. Three neural network predictors, namely, single-layer perceptron, multilayer perceptron, and Elman network and two linear predictors, namely, autoregressive model and finite impulse response filter are considered. Experiments are conducted using EEG signals recorded under different physiological conditions and the performances of the proposed methods are evaluated in terms of the compression ratio. It is shown that the proposed adaptive error modeling schemes yield better compression results compared to other known compression methods.
Error Prone Translesion Synthesis Past γ-Hydroxypropano Deoxyguanosine, the Primary Acrolein-derived Adduct in Mammalian Cells*

8-Hydroxy-5,6,7,8-tetrahydropyrimido[1,2-a]purin- 10(3H)-one,3-(2′-deoxyriboside) (1,N 2-γ-hydroxypropano deoxyguanosine, γ-HOPdG) is a major DNA adduct that forms as a result of exposure to acrolein, an environmental pollutant and a product of endogenous lipid peroxidation. γ-HOPdG has been shown previously not to be a miscoding lesion when replicated in Escherichia coli. In contrast to those prokaryotic studies, in vivo replication and mutagenesis assays in COS-7 cells using single stranded DNA containing a specific γ-HOPdG adduct, revealed that the γ-HOPdG adduct was significantly mutagenic. Analyses revealed both transversion and transition types of mutations at an overall mutagenic frequency of 7.4 × 10−2/translesion synthesis. In vitro γ-HOPdG strongly blocks DNA synthesis by two major polymerases, pol δ and pol ε. Replicative blockage of pol δ by γ-HOPdG could be diminished by the addition of proliferating cell nuclear antigen, leading to highly mutagenic translesion bypass across this adduct. The differential functioning and processing capacities of the mammalian polymerases may be responsible for the higher mutation frequencies observed in this study when compared with the accurate and efficient nonmutagenic bypass observed in the bacterial system.
Intravesicular Phosphatase PHOSPHO1 Function in Enamel Mineralization and Prism Formation

The transport of mineral ions from the enamel organ-associated blood vessels to the developing enamel crystals involves complex cargo packaging and carriage mechanisms across several cell layers, including the ameloblast layer and the stratum intermedium. Previous studies have established PHOSPHO1 as a matrix vesicle membrane-associated phosphatase that interacts with matrix vesicles molecules phosphoethanolamine and phosphocholine to initiate apatite crystal formation inside of matrix vesicles in bone. In the present study, we sought to determine the function of Phospho1 during amelogenesis. PHOSPHO1 protein localization during amelogenesis was verified using immunohistochemistry, with positive signals in the enamel layer, ameloblast Tomes' processes, and in the walls of ameloblast secretory vesicles. These ameloblast secretory vesicle walls were also labeled for amelogenin and the exosomal protein marker HSP70 using immunohistochemistry. Furthermore, PHOSPHO1 presence in the enamel organ was confirmed by Western blot. Phospho1−/− mice lacked sharp incisal tips, featured a significant 25% increase in total enamel volume, and demonstrated a significant 2-fold reduction in silver grain density of von Kossa stained ground sections indicative of reduced mineralization in the enamel layer when compared to wild-type mice (p < 0.001). Scanning electron micrographs of Phospho1−/− mouse enamel revealed a loss of the prominent enamel prism “picket fence” structure, a loss of parallel crystal organization within prisms, and a 1.56-fold increase in enamel prism width (p < 0.0001). Finally, EDS elemental analysis demonstrated a significant decrease in phosphate incorporation in the enamel layer when compared to controls (p < 0.05). Together, these data establish that the matrix vesicle membrane-associated phosphatase PHOSPHO1 is essential for physiological enamel mineralization. Our findings also suggest that intracellular ameloblast secretory vesicles have unexpected compositional similarities with the extracellular matrix vesicles of bone, dentin, and cementum in terms of vesicle membrane composition and intravesicular ion assembly.
The agouti gene product inhibits lipolysis in human adipocytes via a Ca2+‐dependent mechanism

Overexpression of the murine agouti gene results in obesity. The human homologue of agouti is expressed primarily in human adipocytes, and we have shown recombinant agouti protein to increase adipocyte intracellular Ca2+([Ca2+]i) and thereby stimulate lipogenesis. However, since recent data demonstrate that increasing adipocyte [Ca2+]i may also inhibit lipolysis, we have investigated the role of agouti‐induced [Ca2+]i increases in regulating lipolysis in human adipocytes. Short‐term (1 h) exposure to recombinant agouti (100 nM) protein had no effect on basal lipolysis, although longer term treatment (24 h) caused a 60% decrease in basal lipolysis (P<0.0001). Short‐term agouti treatment totally inhibited ACTH‐induced lipolysis (P<0.05). Since melanocortin receptors (MCR) are involved in some actions of agouti, we next determined whether agouti's antilipolytic effect is exerted through competitive antagonism of the ACTH receptor (MCR‐2). Forskolin (1 µM), an adenylate cyclase activator, induced a 48% increase in lipolysis in human adipocytes (P<0.05); this effect was reversed by 100 nM agouti (P<005), demonstrating that the antilipolytic effect of agouti is distal to the ACTH receptor. To determine the role of [Ca2+]i in the antilipolytic effect of agouti, human adipocytes were treated with KCl or arginine vasopressin to stimulate voltage‐ and receptor‐stimulated Ca2+ influx, respectively. Both agents caused inhibition of forskolin‐induced lipolysis (P<0.005). Furthermore, agouti's antilipolytic effect was also blocked by the Ca2+ channel blocker nitrendipine. These data demonstrate that agouti exerts a potent antilipolytic effect in human adipocytes viaaCa2+‐dependent mechanism. This effect, combined with agouti‐induced lipogenesis, represents a coordinate control of adipocyte lipid metabolism that may contribute to an agouti‐induced obesity syndrome. — Xue, B. , Moustaid‐Moussa, N. , Wilkison, W. O. , Zemel, M. B. The agouti gene product inhibits lipolysis in human adipocytes via a Ca2+‐dependent mechanism. FASEB J. 12, 1391–1396 (1998)
Seasonal dynamics of organic carbon and metals in thermokarst lakes from the discontinuous permafrost zone of western Siberia

Abstract. Despite relatively good knowledge of the biogeochemistry of Siberian thermokarst lakes during summer base flow, their seasonal dynamics remains almost unexplored. This work describes the chemical composition of ~130 thermokarst lakes ranging in size from a few m2 to several km2, located in the discontinuous permafrost zone. Lakes were sampled during spring flood, just after the ice break (early June), the end of summer (August), the beginning of ice formation (October) and during the full freezing season in winter (February). The lakes larger than 1000 m2 did not exhibit any statistically significant control of the lake size on dissolved organic carbon (DOC), the major and trace element concentrations over three major open water seasons. On the annual scale, the majority of dissolved elements including organic carbon increased their concentration from 30 to 500%, with a statistically significant (p summer > autumn > winter. The ice formation in October included several stages: first, surface layer freezing followed by crack (fissure) formation with unfrozen water from the deeper layers spreading over the ice surface. This water was subsequently frozen and formed layered ice rich in organic matter. As a result, the DOC and metal (Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Ba and Pb) concentrations were highest near the surface of the ice column (0 to 20 cm) and decreased by a factor of 2 towards the bottom. The main implications of discovered freeze-driven solute concentrations in thermokarst lake waters are enhanced colloidal coagulation and removal of dissolved organic matter and associated insoluble metals from the water column to the sediments. The measured distribution coefficients of a TE between amorphous organo-ferric coagulates and lake water (
Cyclosporin A Decreases Apolipoprotein E Secretion from Human Macrophages via a Protein Phosphatase 2B-dependent and ATP-binding Cassette Transporter A1 (ABCA1)-independent Pathway*

Cyclosporin A (CsA) is an immunosuppressant that inhibits protein phosphatase 2B (PP2B/calcineurin) and is associated with hyperlipidemia, decreased cholesterol efflux via ATP-binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1), and increased risk of atherosclerosis. Apolipoprotein E (apoE) is an important regulator of lipid metabolism and atherosclerosis, the secretion of which from human macrophages is regulated by the serine/threonine protein kinase A (PKA) and intracellular calcium (Ca2+) (Kockx, M., Guo, D. L., Huby, T., Lesnik, P., Kay, J., Sabaretnam, T., Jary, E., Hill, M., Gaus, K., Chapman, J., Stow, J. L., Jessup, W., and Kritharides, L. (2007) Circ. Res. 101, 607–616). As PP2B is Ca2+-dependent and has been linked to PKA-dependent processes, we investigated whether CsA modulated apoE secretion. CsA dose- and time-dependently inhibited secretion of apoE from primary human macrophages and from Chinese hamster ovary cells stably transfected with human apoE and increased cellular apoE levels without affecting apoE mRNA. [35S]Met kinetic modeling studies showed that CsA inhibited both secretion and degradation of apoE, increasing the half-life of cellular apoE 2-fold. CsA also inhibited secretion from primary human Tangier disease macrophages and from mouse macrophages deficient in ABCA1, indicating that the effect is independent of the known inhibition of ABCA1 by CsA. The role of PP2B in mediating apoE secretion was confirmed using additional peptide and chemical inhibitors of PP2B. Importantly, kinetic modeling, live-cell imaging, and confocal microscopy all indicated that CsA inhibited apoE secretion by mechanisms quite distinct from those of PKA inhibition, most likely inducing accumulation of apoE in the endoplasmic reticulum compartment. Taken together, these results establish a novel mechanism for the pro-atherosclerotic effects of CsA, and establish for the first time a role for PP2B in regulating the intracellular transport and secretion of apoE.