Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhanced anxiety, depressive‐like behaviour and impaired recognition memory in mice with reduced expression of the vesicular glutamate transporter 1 (VGLUT1)

Three isoforms of a vesicular glutamate transporter (VGLUT1–3) have been identified. Of these, VGLUT1 is the major isoform in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus where it is selectively located on synaptic vesicles of excitatory glutamatergic terminals. Variations in VGLUT1 expression levels have a major impact on the efficacy of glutamate synaptic transmission. Given evidence linking alterations in glutamate neurotransmission to various neuropsychiatric disorders, we investigated the possible influence of a down‐regulation of VGLUT1 transporter on anxiety, depressive‐like behaviour and learning. The behavioural phenotype of VGLUT1‐heterozygous mice (C57BL/6) was compared to wild‐type (WT) littermates. Moreover, VGLUT1–3 expression, hippocampal excitatory terminal ultrastructure and neurochemical phenotype were analysed. VGLUT1‐heterozygous mice displayed normal spontaneous locomotor activity, increased anxiety in the light–dark exploration test and depressive‐like behaviour in the forced swimming test: no differences were shown in the elevated plus‐maze model of anxiety. In the novel object recognition test, VGLUT1+/– mice showed normal short‐term but impaired long‐term memory. Spatial memory in the Morris water maze was unaffected. Western blot analysis confirmed that VGLUT1 heterozygotes expressed half the amount of transporter compared to WT. In addition, a reduction in the reserve pool of synaptic vesicles of hippocampal excitatory terminals and a 35–45% reduction in GABA in the frontal cortex and the hippocampus were observed in the mutant mice. These observations suggest that a VGLUT1‐mediated presynaptic alteration of the glutamatergic synapses, in specific brain regions, leads to a behavioural phenotype resembling certain aspects of psychiatric and cognitive disorders.
Genetic and Functional Characterization of an MCR-3-Like Enzyme-Producing Escherichia coli Isolate Recovered from Swine in Brazil

ABSTRACT A collection of 126 pigs was screened for carriage of colistin-resistant Enterobacteriaceae in a farm in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Out of this collection, eight colistin-resistant Escherichia coli isolates were recovered, including one from Minas Gerais State producing a new MCR-3 variant (MCR-3.12). Analysis of the lipopolysaccharide revealed that MCR-3.12 had a function similar to that of MCR-1 and MCR-2 as a result of the addition of a phosphoethanolamine group to the lipid A moiety. Genetic analysis showed that the mcr-3.12 gene was carried by an IncA/C2 plasmid and was embedded in an original genetic environment. This study reports the occurrence of the MCR-3-like determinant in South America and is the first to demonstrate the functionality of this group of enzymes as a phosphoethanolamine transferase.
Mapping QTLs for Fusarium Head Blight Resistance in an Interspecific Wheat Population

Fusarium head blight (scab) is one of the most widespread and damaging diseases of wheat, causing grain yield and quality losses and production of harmful mycotoxins. Development of resistant varieties is hampered by lack of effective resistance sources in the tetraploid wheat primary gene pool. Here we dissected the genetic basis of resistance in a new durum wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. durum) Recombinant inbred lines (RILs) population obtained by crossing an hexaploid resistant line and a durum susceptible cultivar. A total of 135 RILs were used for constituting a genetic linkage map and mapping loci for head blight incidence, severity, and disease-related plant morphological traits (plant height, spike compactness, and awn length). The new genetic map accounted for 4,366 single nucleotide polymorphism markers assembled in 52 linkage groups covering a total length of 4,227.37 cM. Major quantitative trait loci (QTL) for scab incidence and severity were mapped on chromosomes 2AS, 3AL, and 2AS, 2BS, 4BL, respectively. Plant height loci were identified on 3A, 3B, and 4B, while major QTL for ear compactness were found on 4A, 5A, 5B, 6A, and 7A. In this work, resistance to Fusarium was transferred from hexaploid to durum wheat, and correlations between the disease and morphological traits were assessed.
TP53 mutant MDM2-amplified cell lines selected for resistance to MDM2-p53 binding antagonists retain sensitivity to ionizing radiation

Non-genotoxic reactivation of the p53 pathway by MDM2-p53 binding antagonists is an attractive treatment strategy for wild-type TP53 cancers. To determine how resistance to MDM2/p53 binding antagonists might develop, SJSA-1 and NGP cells were exposed to growth inhibitory concentrations of chemically distinct MDM2 inhibitors, Nutlin-3 and MI-63, and clonal resistant cell lines generated. The p53 mediated responses of parental and resistant cell lines were compared. In contrast to the parental cell lines, p53 activation by Nutlin-3, MI-63 or ionizing radiation was not observed in either the SJSA-1 or the NGP derived cell lines. An identical TP53 mutation was subsequently identified in both of the SJSA-1 resistant lines, whilst one out of three identified mutations was common to both NGP derived lines. Mutation specific PCR revealed these mutations were present in parental SJSA-1 and NGP cell populations at a low frequency. Despite cross-resistance to a broad panel of MDM2/p53 binding antagonists, these MDM2-amplified and TP53 mutant cell lines remained sensitive to ionizing radiation (IR). These results indicate that MDM2/p53 binding antagonists will select for p53 mutations present in tumours at a low frequency at diagnosis, leading to resistance, but such tumours may nevertheless remain responsive to alternative therapies, including IR.
Electromagnetic modeling and analysis of rectifier antennas

Electromagnetic modeling, design, development, and analysis of a zero-bias rectifier antenna (rectenna) are studied for RF energy harvesting purposes. A specific Schottky diode is selected for its desired parameters and its equivalent nonlinear circuit model with spice and scattering parameters are used to design the zero bias rectifier. The rectifier model is generated using nonlinear microwave and electromagnetic simulation tools and RF and DC responses are obtained, then input impedance is matched to 50ohms by using reactive elements to reduce the reflected RF power at the rectifiers' input. On the other hand, a miniaturized planar inverted F-shaped antenna (PIFA) with an input impedance of 50ohms is designed on a microstrip substrate and its response is simulated using a 3-D simulation tool. Once the circuits are manufactured, (i) different RF signals levels are applied at input of the rectifier and converted DC output voltage measurements are tabulated, (ii) the antenna's gain and radiation pattern are given and s-parameters are measured using a network analyzer, (iii) rectenna performance is measured and the RF energy harvesting potential is presented.
Simulation optimization with mathematical programming representation of discrete event systems

Optimization-via-simulation consists in applying iteratively two detached models until an optimality condition is reached: a simulation model for predicting the system performance, and a model for generating potential optimal solutions. Mathematical programming representation has been recently used to describe the behavior of discrete event systems as well as their formal properties. This paper proposes explicit mathematical programming representations for jointly simulating and optimizing discrete event systems. The main advantage of such models is the rapidity of searching for the optimal solution, given to the explicit knowledge of objective function and constraints. Three types of formulations are proposed for solving the buffer allocation problem in flow lines with finite buffer capacities: an exact mixed integer linear model, an approximate LP model and a stochastic programming model. Numerical analysis shows that the computational time required to solve resource allocation problems can be significantly reduced by using the proposed formulations.
Design Space and Viewpoint Visualizations for Single-Click 3 D Navigation

Single-click 3D navigation allows users to navigate a virtual space with a single click of the mouse or tap of the finger. As such, it is appealing for its simplicity, a trait especially important for mass consumer applications. In addition, single-click navigation is also suitable for incomplete or sparse models, and is thus commonly used for navigating partial 3D reconstructions based on panoramas or structure from motion. In this paper, we give a description of the design space for single-click 3D navigation, showing that the crucial design choices typically include a viewpoint selection algorithm and a viewpoint visualization. We further present a brief user study on viewpoint visualizations for single-click navigation. Our results indicate that current systems lack adequate visualizations for navigating complex environments and that the viewpoint selection algorithm is perhaps most important, requiring more investigation. CR Categories: I.3. 6 [Computing Methodologies]: Computer Graphics—Methodology and Techniques H.5. 2 [Information Systems]: Information Interfaces and Presentation—User Interfaces;
Configuration Issues and Efforts for Configuring Agile Approaches-Situational based Method Engineering

In software development process, the requirements are not stable and keep on changing according to the customers. In such dynamic situations the developers are required to use dynamic approaches for software development. The agile methodology provides dynamic methods such as extreme programming, scrum, feature driven approach and dynamic system development method. Studies reveals agile methods are not anti- methods and can be tailored as any other traditional methods. This paper investigates tailoring of various agile methods, approaches required to tailor the method components of agile methods. Further, this paper proposes the configuration issues and configuration efforts which must be kept in mind during tailoring of the agile components.
SketchML a representation language for novel sketch recognition approach

Multimodal interfaces can be profitably used to support increasingly complex services in assistive environments. In particular, sketch-based interfaces offer users an effortless and powerful communication way to represent concepts and commands on different devices. Unlike other modalities, sketch-based interaction can be easily fitted according to heterogeneous services. Moreover it can be quickly personalized according to the user needs. Developing a sketch-based interface for a specific service is a time-consuming operation that requires the re-engineering and/or the re-designing of the whole recognizer framework. This paper describes a definitive framework by which the user, simply by using freehand drawing, can define every kind of sketch-based interface. The definition of the interface and its recognition process are performed by using our developed Sketch Modeling Language (SketchML).
A color super-resolution with multiple nonsmooth constraints by hybrid steepest descent method

An efficient scheme is presented to the color super-resolution problem for recovery of a color high-resolution image with knowledge of multiple Bayer filtered low-resolution images. To recover a visually natural high-resolution image, we restrict fairly smooth initial candidates to all images satisfying all bounds imposed on the several nonsmooth convex color total variations as well as a non-smooth convex inter cross correlation measure among color channels. In the proposed scheme, the data-fidelity is optimized in a systematic way, over all initial candidates, with the hybrid steepest descent method for quasi-nonexpansive mappings [Yamada & Ogura 2004], by minimizing successively an weighted average of pure mean square errors between the low-resolution transforms of the high-resolution estimate and the multiple low-resolution images. Numerical examples show that the proposed scheme recovers visually natural high resolution images by resolving the tradeoff between noise suppression and edge preservation of the recovered image while keeping fair inter channel cross correlation among color channels.
900 MHz CMOS RF-to-DC converter using a cross-coupled charge pump for energy harvesting

This paper presents a CMOS RF-to-DC converter with a cross-coupled charge pump for energy harvesting. The proposed RF-to-DC converter consists of a cross-coupled rectifier and a cross-coupled charge pump. The charge pump can operate with a non-overlapping clock with a switching frequency of 25 MHz using a pump capacitance of 4 pF. The RF-to-DC converter IC was designed and fabricated using a 0.13 μm CMOS process. An output voltage of 2.05 V was achieved at an RF input power of −6 dBm with an input frequency of 900 MHz and the load of 100 KΩ. For this condition, the charge pump exhibited a high efficiency of about 74 %
High-performance K-means Implementation based on a Simplified Map-Reduce Architecture

The k-means algorithm is one of the most common clustering algorithms and widely used in data mining and pattern recognition. The increasing computational requirement of big data applications makes hardware acceleration for the k-means algorithm necessary. In this paper, a simplified Map-Reduce architecture is proposed to implement the k-means algorithm on an FPGA. Algorithmic segmentation, data path elaboration and automatic control are applied to optimize the architecture for high performance. In addition, high level synthesis technique is utilized to reduce development cycles and complexity. For a single iteration in the k-means algorithm, a throughput of 28.74 Gbps is achieved. The performance shows at least 3.93x speedup compared with four representative existing FPGA-based implementations and can satisfy the demand of big data applications.
CSAE Working Paper WPS / 2013 13 MEASURING THE OPTION VALUE OF EDUCATION

Many recent descriptive studies find convex schooling-earnings profiles in developing countries. In these countries forward-looking students should attach option values to completing lower levels of schooling. Another option value may arise due to the uncertain economic environment in which the sequence of enrolment decisions is made. Most theoretical models that are used to motivate and interpret OLS or IV estimates of the returns to schooling assume away convexity in the schoolingearnings profile, uncertainty and the inherently dynamic nature of schooling investment decisions. This paper develops a decomposition technique that calculates the relative importance of different benefits of completing additional schooling years, including the option values associated with convex schooling returns and uncertainty. These components are then estimated on a sample of workers who has revealed a highly convex schooling-earnings profile, and who face considerable uncertainty regarding future wage offers: young black South African men. We find that rationalising the observed school enrolment decisions requires large option values of early schooling levels (mainly associated with convexity rather than uncertainty), as well as a schooling cost function that increases steeply between schooling phases. 1 Senior lecturer, Economics Department, University of Stellenbosch. 2 Research associate, Centre for Studies of African Economics, University of Oxford.
Disjoint-Access Parallelism: Impossibility, Possibility, and Cost of Transactional Memory Implementations

Disjoint-Access Parallelism (DAP) is considered one of the most desirable properties to maximize the scalability of Transactional Memory (TM). This paper investigates the possibility and inherent cost of implementing a DAP TM that ensures two properties that are regarded as important to maximize efficiency in read-dominated workloads, namely having invisible and wait-free read-only transactions. We first prove that relaxing Real-Time Order (RTO) is necessary to implement such a TM. This result motivates us to introduce Witnessable Real-Time Order (WRTO), a weaker variant of RTO that demands enforcing RTO only between directly conflicting transactions. Then we show that adopting WRTO makes it possible to design a strictly DAP TM with invisible and wait-free read-only transactions, while preserving strong progressiveness for write transactions and an isolation level known in literature as Extended Update Serializability. Finally, we shed light on the inherent inefficiency of DAP TM implementations that have invisible and wait-free read-only transactions, by establishing lower bounds on the time and space complexity of such TMs.
Observations on an interdisciplinary design process using a sonification framework

In sonification of scientific data, designers know very little about the domain science and domain scientists are not familiar with the sonification methodology. The knowledge about the domain science is not given, but evolved during the problem-solving process. We discuss design challenges in auditory display design regarding user-centerdness and introduce an approach to involve domain scientists throughout a sonification design. We explore this within a workshop in which sonification experts, domain experts, and programmers worked together to better understand and solve problems collaboratively. The sonification framework that is used during the workshops is briefly described and the workshop process and how each group worked together during the workshop sessions is examined. Participants worked on pre-defined and exploratory tasks to sonify climate data. Resulting sonification prototypes and workshop sessions are documented on a wiki and could be used as a starting point for future sonification procedures. Furthermore, the participants grasped each others’ domains; climate scientists especially became more open to use auditory display and sonification as a tool in their data mining tasks.
Analysis of Variational Bayesian Latent Dirichlet Allocation: Weaker Sparsity Than MAP

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a popular generative model of various objects such as texts and images, where an object is expressed as a mixture of latent topics. In this paper, we theoretically investigate variational Bayesian (VB) learning in LDA. More specifically, we analytically derive the leading term of the VB free energy under an asymptotic setup, and show that there exist transition thresholds in Dirichlet hyperparameters around which the sparsity-inducing behavior drastically changes. Then we further theoretically reveal the notable phenomenon that VB tends to induce weaker sparsity than MAP in the LDA model, which is opposed to other models. We experimentally demonstrate the practical validity of our asymptotic theory on real-world Last.FM music data.
Beyond reuse distance analysis

Emerging computer architectures will feature drastically decreased flops/byte (ratio of peak processing rate to memory bandwidth) as highlighted by recent studies on Exascale architectural trends. Further, flops are getting cheaper, while the energy cost of data movement is increasingly dominant. The understanding and characterization of data locality properties of computations is critical in order to guide efforts to enhance data locality. Reuse distance analysis of memory address traces is a valuable tool to perform data locality characterization of programs. A single reuse distance analysis can be used to estimate the number of cache misses in a fully associative LRU cache of any size, thereby providing estimates on the minimum bandwidth requirements at different levels of the memory hierarchy to avoid being bandwidth bound. However, such an analysis only holds for the particular execution order that produced the trace. It cannot estimate potential improvement in data locality through dependence-preserving transformations that change the execution schedule of the operations in the computation. In this article, we develop a novel dynamic analysis approach to characterize the inherent locality properties of a computation and thereby assess the potential for data locality enhancement via dependence-preserving transformations. The execution trace of a code is analyzed to extract a Computational-Directed Acyclic Graph (CDAG) of the data dependences. The CDAG is then partitioned into convex subsets, and the convex partitioning is used to reorder the operations in the execution trace to enhance data locality. The approach enables us to go beyond reuse distance analysis of a single specific order of execution of the operations of a computation in characterization of its data locality properties. It can serve a valuable role in identifying promising code regions for manual transformation, as well as assessing the effectiveness of compiler transformations for data locality enhancement. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach using a number of benchmarks, including case studies where the potential shown by the analysis is exploited to achieve lower data movement costs and better performance.
Variability Specification and Resolution of Textual Requirements

Since software product lines emerged, various techniques have provided for commonality and variability modelling of functionally similar products within a given domain. However, so far the emphasis of variability modelling proposals has mostly been on the solution rather than the requirements level, which is mainly due to stakeholders often associating variability with the software implementation instead of the problem analysis. Taken into consideration the positive impact that a high-quality system requirements specification plays within a software project, this paper proposes and evaluates an innovative approach for the modelling and management of variability at the requirements level, based on the Common Variability Language (CVL), the OMG proposal for a domain-independent variability modelling standard. This approach has been implemented as a core feature of the ITBox system, a Web-based collaborative platform for the management of technical documentation.