Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Response of choroidal blood flow to carbogen breathing in smokers and non-smokers

Aim: To investigate a potential difference in ocular vascular reactivity during carbogen breathing in optic nerve head, choroid, and retina between healthy smokers and non-smokers. Methods: 25 (13 smokers and 12 non-smokers) healthy male volunteers participated in this observer masked, two cohort study. During inhalation of carbogen (5% CO2 and 95% O2) over 10 minutes measurements were taken using laser Doppler flowmetry to assess submacular choroidal and optic nerve head blood flow, laser interferometry to assess fundus pulsation amplitudes, and retinal vessel analyser (RVA) to assess retinal vessel diameters. Results: At baseline choroidal blood flow was higher (p = 0.018, ANOVA) in smokers than in non-smokers. During administration of carbogen the response in choroidal blood flow was significantly different between the two groups: there was an increase in non-smokers after carbogen breathing (p = 0.048) compared with relatively stable blood flow in smokers (p = 0.049 between groups, ANOVA). A similar response pattern was seen for fundus pulsation amplitude, which increased notably after carbogen breathing in non-smokers but not in smokers (p<0.001 between groups, ANOVA). Optic nerve head blood flow and retinal vessel diameters were reduced in both groups to a comparable degree during carbogen breathing. Conclusion: The study indicated abnormal choroidal vascular reactivity in chronic smokers. These early haemodynamic changes may be related to the increased risk to smokers of developing ocular vascular diseases. The specific mechanisms underlying abnormal choroidal vascular reactivity in chronic smokers remain to be characterised.
Improving context-aware query classification via adaptive self-training

Topical classification of user queries is critical for general-purpose web search systems. It is also a challenging task, due to the sparsity of query terms and the lack of labeled queries. On the other hand, search contexts embedded in query sessions and unlabeled queries free on the web have not been fully utilized in most query classification systems. In this work, we leverage these information to improve query classification accuracy. We first incorporate search contexts into our framework using a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model. Discriminative training of CRFs is favored over the traditional maximum likelihood training because of its robustness to noise. We then adapt self-training with our model to exploit the information in unlabeled queries. By investigating different confidence measurements and model selection strategies, we effectively avoid the error-reinforcing nature of self-training. In extensive experiments on real search logs, we have averaged around 20% improvement in classification accuracy over other state-of-the-art baselines.
Mining Rank-Correlated Associations for Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems, best known for their use in e-commerce or social network applications, predict users’ preferences and output item suggestions. Modern recommenders are often faced with many challenges, such as covering high volume of volatile information, dealing with data sparsity, and producing high-quality results. Therefore, while there are already several strategies of this category, some of them can still be refined. Association rules mining is one of the widely applied techniques of recommender implementation. In this paper, we propose a tuned method, trying to overcome some defects of existing association rules based recommendation systems by exploring rank correlations. It builds a model for preference prediction with the help of rank correlated associations on numerical values, where traditional algorithms of such kind would choose to do discretization. An empirical study is then conducted to see the efficiency of our method.
Dense Correspondence Extraction in Difficult Uncalibrated Scenarios

The relationship between multiple cameras viewing the same scene may be discovered automatically by finding corresponding points in the two views and then solving for the camera geometry. In camera networks with sparsely placed cameras, low resolution cameras or in scenes with few distinguishable features it may be difficult to find a sufficient number of reliable correspondences from which to compute geometry. This paper presents a method for extracting a larger number of correspondences from an initial set of putative correspondences without any knowledge of the scene or camera geometry. The method may be used to increase the number of correspondences and make geometry computations possible in cases where existing methods have produced insufficient correspondences.
Mortality Associated with High Ambient Temperatures, Heatwaves, and the Urban Heat Island in Athens, Greece

Abstract: Climate change looms as the biggest threat of the 21st century, and its effect on urban mortality is exacerbated by urban heat islands. This study analyzes the impact of high temperatures, heatwaves, and the urban heat island on the cardiovascular and respiratory mortality of people over 65 years of age for the years 2002 to 2012. The area of application is Athens, Greece, an urban agglomeration experiencing an urban heat island of high intensity. The correlation of the daily cardiovascular and respiratory mortality count of people over 65 years of age with various temperature measures confirmed a U-shaped exposure response curve, with fewer deaths in the range of moderate temperatures. At high and very high temperatures, this mortality increased by 20 to 35% correspondingly, at a 99.9% significance level. Mortality was further investigated with ordinary least squares, Poisson, and negative binomial times series models, which, although suffering from poor fit, showed a one-day lag for the maximum temperature effect on mortality. Finally, cluster analysis for observations confined to May to September, confirmed by multiple discriminant analysis, showed the existence of six clusters, with the highest excess mortality count of 23% for the cluster that included the hottest days and 20.6% for the heatwave cluster. To this end, it is recommended that policies target high ambient temperatures and heatwaves as a priority.
Electrohydraulic Lithotripsy in 111 Patients: A Safe and Effective Therapy for Difficult Bile Duct Stones

BACKGROUND:Choledocholithiasis and intrahepatic bile duct stones pose a significant health hazard, especially in the elderly. The large stone not removable with conventional endoscopic techniques, can be effectively and safely managed with electrohydraulic lithotripsy (EHL). METHODS:This study is a retrospective review of consecutive patients at the Wellesley Central Hospital and St. Michael's Hospital, who underwent peroral endoscopic fragmentation of bile duct stones with EHL under direct cholangioscopic control using a “mother-baby” endoscopic system between October 1990 and March 2002.RESULTS:To date, 111 patients have been analyzed. Of the 111 patients reviewed, 94 patients have had complete records and were included in this study. Mean follow-up was 26.2 months (range 0–80). Prior to EHL, 93 of 94 patients (99%) had endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) and failed standard stone extraction techniques (mean 1.9 ERCPs/patient, range 0–5). Indications for EHL were large stones (81 patients) or a narrow caliber bile duct below a stone of average size (13 patients). Successful fragmentation (61 complete, 28 partial) was achieved in 89 of 93 patients (96%) (1 patient was excluded from analysis due to a broken endoscope). Fragmentation failures were due to targeting problems (2 patients) and hard stones (2 patients). Seventy-six percent of patients required 1 EHL session, 14% required 2 sessions, and 10% required 3 or more. All patients with successful stone fragmentation required post-EHL balloon or basket extraction of fragments. Complications included: cholangitis and/or jaundice (13 patients); mild hemobilia (1 patient); mild post-ERCP pancreatitis (1 patient); biliary leak (1 patient); and bradycardia (1 patient). There were no deaths related to EHL. Final stone clearance was achieved in 85 of 94 patients (90%). CONCLUSIONS:EHL via peroral endoscopic choledochoscopy is a highly successful and safe technique for use in the management of difficult choledocholithiasis and intrahepatic stones. This study has shown a stone fragmentation rate of 96% (89 of 93 patients), and a final stone clearance rate of 90% (85 of 94 patients).
Ubiquitination-Mediated Inflammasome Activation during Bacterial Infection

Inflammasome activation is essential for host immune responses during pathogenic infection and sterile signals insult, whereas excessive activation is injurious. Thus, inflammasome activation is tightly regulated at multiple layers. Ubiquitination is an important post-translational modification for orchestrating inflammatory immune responses during pathogenic infection, and a major target hijacked by pathogenic bacteria for promoting their survival and proliferation. This review summarizes recent insights into distinct mechanisms of the inflammasome activation and ubiquitination process triggered by bacterial infection. We discuss the complex regulatory of inflammasome activation mediated by ubiquitination machinery during bacterial infection, and provide therapeutic approaches for specifically targeting aberrant inflammasome activation.
Control of Oxidative Stress and Generation of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell-like Cells by Jun Dimerization Protein 2

We report here that the Jun dimerization protein 2 (JDP2) plays a critical role as a cofactor for the transcription factors nuclear factor-erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) and MafK in the regulation of the antioxidants and production of reactive oxygen species (ROS). JDP2 associates with Nrf2 and MafK (Nrf2-MafK) to increase the transcription of antioxidant response element-dependent genes. Oxidative-stress-inducing reagent led to an increase in the intracellular accumulation of ROS and cell proliferation in Jdp2 knock-out mouse embryonic fibroblasts. In Jdp2-Cre mice mated with reporter mice, the expression of JDP2 was restricted to granule cells in the brain cerebellum. The induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC)-like cells were generated from DAOY medulloblastoma cell by introduction of JDP2, and the defined factor OCT4. iPSC-like cells expressed stem cell-like characteristics including alkaline phosphatase activity and some stem cell markers. However, such iPSC-like cells also proliferated rapidly, became neoplastic, and potentiated cell malignancy at a later stage in SCID mice. This study suggests that medulloblastoma cells can be reprogrammed successfully by JDP2 and OCT4 to become iPSC-like cells. These cells will be helpful for studying the generation of cancer stem cells and ROS homeostasis.
Modular and verified automatic program repair

We study the problem of suggesting code repairs at design time, based on the warnings issued by modular program verifiers. We introduce the concept of a verified repair, a change to a program's source that removes bad execution traces while increasing the number of good traces, where the bad/good traces form a partition of all the traces of a program. Repairs are property-specific. We demonstrate our framework in the context of warnings produced by the modular cccheck (a.k.a. Clousot) abstract interpreter, and generate repairs for missing contracts, incorrect locals and objects initialization, wrong conditionals, buffer overruns, arithmetic overflow and incorrect floating point comparisons. We report our experience with automatically generating repairs for the . NET framework libraries, generating verified repairs for over 80% of the warnings generated by cccheck.
Do Cross-language Specializations in Phonetic Perception Extend across Novel Acoustic Transforms?

Native Japanese speakers can have difficulty learning the English /r/-/l/ distinction, and they likewise are poorer than native English speakers at discriminating acoustic differences at the /r/-/l/ identification boundary. This study investigated the specificity of this specialization by comparing the discrimination of /r/ and /l/ under stimulus transforms that disrupted the natural acoustics of the stimuli but still allowed them to be identified as /r/ and /l/ (i.e., sinewave speech, vocoded speech). The results demonstrated that the cross-language discrimination difference held across these stimulus transforms. This suggests that language specialization is speech specific rather than occurring in general auditory processing, given that there is little pure-auditory reason that these stimuli should all be processed similarly.
The Design and Implementation of a Mobile Internetworking Architecture

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Mobile*IP, a set of IP-based protocols and mechanisms to support host mobility throughout the Internet. The design requires changes only in the mobile hosts and their special routers; leaves transport and higher protocols unaffected, and requires no changes in the device drivers for individual interfaces. No modifications whatsoever are needed in non-mobile hosts and routers, the system scales well, and has no single points of failure. We have implemented Mobile*IP under Mach 2.6, and the code is readily portable to any version of Unix that uses Berkeley networking code.
Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone Induces Apoptosis of Prostate Cancer Cells

A standard therapy used today for prostate cancer is androgen ablation by gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogs (GnRH-a). Although most patients respond to androgen ablation as an initial systemic therapy, nearly all cases will develop androgen resistance, the management of which is still a major challenge. Here, we report that GnRH-a can directly induce apoptosis of the androgen-independent prostate cancer-derived DU145 and PC3 cell lines. Using specific inhibitors, we found that the apoptotic effect of GnRH-a is mediated by c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK) and inhibited by the phosphatidylinositol 3′-kinase (PI3K)-protein kinase B (PKB) pathway. Indeed, in DU145 cells, GnRH-a activates the JNK cascade in a c-Src- and MLK3-dependent manner but does not involve protein kinase C and epidermal growth factor receptor. Concomitantly, GnRH-a reduces the activity of the PI3K-PKB pathway, which results in the dephosphorylation of PKB mainly in the nucleus. The reduction of PKB activity releases PKB-induced inhibition of MLK3 and thus further stimulates JNK activity and accelerates the apoptotic effect of GnRH-a. Interestingly, extracellular signal-regulated kinase is also activated by GnRH-a, and this occurs via a pathway that involves matrix metalloproteinases and epidermal growth factor receptor, but its activation does not affect JNK activation and the GnRH-a-induced apoptosis. Our results support a potential use of GnRH-a for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer and suggest that the outcome of this treatment can be amplified by using PI3K-PKB inhibitors.
Analysis of speedup as function of block size and cluster size for parallel feed-forward neural networks on a Beowulf cluster

The performance of feed-forward neural networks trained with the backpropagation algorithm on a dedicated Beowulf cluster is analyzed. The concept of training set parallelism is applied. A new model for run time and speedup prediction is developed. With the model the speedup and efficiency of one iteration of the neural networks can be estimated as a function of block size and cluster size. The model is applied to three example problems representing different applications and network architectures. The estimation of the model has a higher accuracy than traditional methods for run time estimation and can be efficiently calculated. Experiments show that speedup of one iteration does not necessarily translate to a shorter training time toward a given error level. To overcome this problem a heuristic extension to training set parallelism called weight averaging is developed. The results show that training in parallel should only be done on clusters with high performance network connections or a multiprocessor machine. A rule of thumb is given for how much network performance of the cluster is needed to achieve speedup of the training time for a neural network.
Estimation of ancestral states of continuous characters: A computer simulation study

In systematics, we usually estimate ancestral phenotypes of morphological and molecular characters measured as categorical or " state " variables. Ancestral estimation has also been important in the studies of animal behavior, physiology, ecology, and other areas of biology, where the characters are usually measured as continuous rather than categorical variables. In the past, the most common way of estimating the ancestral states of continuous characters was to use a parsimony algorithm have been developed for estimating the ancestral states of continuous characters on a phy-logeny. For several reasons, the theory underlying these methods provides a major leap forward from the traditional parsimony methods. In the current study, I use computer simulation to examine the statistical properties of these methods and to determine how much of an improvement these methods actually provide when applied to realistic data. estimates the phenotype of each ancestor as a weighted average of all the phenotypes measured for extant taxa. The weights used in calculating averages correspond to the phylogenetic distance between each ex-tant taxon and the ancestor being estimated. Huey and Bennett (1987) applied this approach , iteratively calculating each ancestral state as the average of its three nearest neighbors until estimates converged on stable solutions. Maddison (1991) provided a recur-sive equation for getting the estimates and explored the assumptions of the method. Specically, he showed that SSP is a statistically reasonable approach very similar to using least-squares regression to estimate ancestral states. McArdle and Rodrigo (1994) showed how SSP could be described as a system of linear equations and thus provided a direct algorithm that can be used to reduce computational time. Linear or Wagner parsimony (Farris, 1970; Swofford and Maddison, 1987) is a similar method that lacks the above statistical development and justication. Instead of minimizing the sum of squared evolutionary changes on the phylogeny, it minimizes the simple sum of changes. In a computer simulation study, Butler and Losos (1997) found that the two methods produce rather different results and that linear parsimony gave worse estimates under the type of phe-notypic evolution (Brownian motion) considered in their simulation procedure. I do not consider linear parsimony in the current study. One weakness of SSP is that it does not include any measure of estimation accuracy. For example, the state at the root of a phy-logeny is known with less accuracy than a state nearer the tips, simply because the longer time since …
Social construction of mathematical meaning through collaboration and argumentation

Shirley Atzmon, the Hebrew University <shirlyazmon@walla.com>, Rina Hershkowitz (organizer), the Weizmann Institute <rina.hershkovitz@weizmann.ac.il> Chris Rasmussen, San Diego State University <chrisraz@sciences.sdsu. edu>, Baruch Schwarz (organizer and chair), the Hebrew University <msschwar@mscc.huji. ac.il>, Gerry Stahl, Drexel University <gs47@drexel.edu>, Megan Wawro, San Diego State University <meganski110@hotmail.com>, Michelle Zandieh, Arizona State University zandieh@asu.edu, Mitchell Nathan (discussant), University of Wisconsin-Madison <mnathan@wisc.edu>
Distributed Consensus Algorithms in Sensor Networks: Quantized Data and Random Link Failures

The paper studies the problem of distributed average consensus in sensor networks with quantized data and random link failures. To achieve consensus, dither (small noise) is added to the sensor states before quantization. When the quantizer range is unbounded (countable number of quantizer levels), stochastic approximation shows that consensus is asymptotically achieved with probability one and in mean square to a finite random variable. We show that the mean-squared error (mse) can be made arbitrarily small by tuning the link weight sequence, at a cost of the convergence rate of the algorithm. To study dithered consensus with random links when the range of the quantizer is bounded, we establish uniform boundedness of the sample paths of the unbounded quantizer. This requires characterization of the statistical properties of the supremum taken over the sample paths of the state of the quantizer. This is accomplished by splitting the state vector of the quantizer in two components: one along the consensus subspace and the other along the subspace orthogonal to the consensus subspace. The proofs use maximal inequalities for submartingale and supermartingale sequences. From these, we derive probability bounds on the excursions of the two subsequences, from which probability bounds on the excursions of the quantizer state vector follow. The paper shows how to use these probability bounds to design the quantizer parameters and to explore tradeoffs among the number of quantizer levels, the size of the quantization steps, the desired probability of saturation, and the desired level of accuracy ¿ away from consensus. Finally, the paper illustrates the quantizer design with a numerical study.
Animating Eyes

Accurately and efficiently depicting the liveliness of eyes is not an easy task in animation. In this paper, we propose a method that utilizes eye tracking and motion capture technologies to animate 3D eyes. We measure it based on accuracy, efficiency, and user satisfaction. CR Categories: I.3. 7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Animation;
The HEROIC Framework: Encrypted Computation Without Shared Keys

Outsourcing computation to the cloud has recently become a very attractive option for enterprises and consumers, due to mostly reduced cost and extensive scalability. At the same time, however, concerns about the privacy of the data entrusted to cloud providers keeps rising. To address these concerns and thwart potential attackers, cloud providers today resort to numerous security controls as well as data encryption. Since the actual computation is still unencrypted inside cloud microprocessor chips, it is only a matter of time until new attacks and side channels are devised to leak sensitive information. To address the challenge of securing general-purpose computation inside microprocessor chips, we propose a novel computer architecture, and present a complete framework for general-purpose encrypted computation without shared keys, enabling secure data processing. This new architecture, called homomophically encrypted one instruction computation, contrary to the previous work in the area does not require a secret key installed inside the microprocessor chip. Instead, it leverages the powerful properties of homomorphic encryption combined with the simplicity of one instruction set computing. The proposed framework introduces: 1) a RTL implementation for reconfigurable hardware and 2) a ready-to-deploy virtual machine, which can be readily ported to existing server processor architectures.
Time-to-Digital-Converter with small circuitry

A Time-to-Digital-Converter (TDC) is to measure the interval time between two signals, and its time resolution of several pico seconds is achieved when it is implemented with advanced CMOS process [1–5]. Its applications are gradually expanding such as a phase comparator of all-digital-PLL, a sensor interface circuit, modulation circuit and demodulation circuit as well as a TDC-based ADC [1–6]. The TDC will play more important role in nano-CMOS era because it is well-matched to implement with fine digital CMOS process; it consists of mostly digital circuits, and as the switching speed increases, its performance is improved.