Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Roles of hepatocyte growth factor/scatter factor and the met receptor in the early development of the metanephros

Several lines of evidence suggest that hepatocyte growth factor/scatter factor (HGF/SF), a soluble protein secreted by embryo fibroblasts and several fibroblast lines, may elicit morphogenesis in adjacent epithelial cells. We investigated the role of HGF/SF and its membrane receptor, the product of the c-met protooncogene, in the early development of the metanephric kidney. At the inception of the mouse metanephros at embryonic day 11, HGF/SF was expressed in the mesenchyme, while met was expressed in both the ureteric bud and the mesenchyme, as assessed by reverse transcription PCR, in situ hybridization, and immunohistochemistry. To further investigate the expression of met in renal mesenchyme, we isolated 13 conditionally immortal clonal cell lines from transgenic mice expressing a temperature-sensitive mutant of the SV-40 large T antigen. Five had the HGF/SF+/met+ phenotype and eight had the HGF/SF-/met+ phenotype. None had the HGF/SF+/met- nor the HGF/SF-/met- phenotypes. Thus the renal mesenchyme contains cells that express HGF/SF and met or met alone. When metanephric rudiments were grown in serum-free organ culture, anti- HGF/SF antibodies (a) inhibited the differentiation of metanephric mesenchymal cells into the epithelial precursors of the nephron; (b) increased cell death within the renal mesenchyme; and (c) perturbed branching morphogenesis of the ureteric bud. These data provide the first demonstration for coexpression of the HGF/SF and met genes in mesenchymal cells during embryonic development and also imply an autocrine and/or paracrine role for HGF/SF and met in the survival of the renal mesenchyme and in the mesenchymal-epithelial transition that occurs during nephrogenesis. They also confirm the postulated paracrine role of HGF/SF in the branching of the ureteric bud.
Thermodynamics and/of Horizons: A Comparison of Schwarzschild,RINDLER and desitter Spacetimes

The notions of temperature, entropy and `evaporation', usually associated with spacetimes with horizons, are analyzed using general approach and the following results, applicable to different spacetimes, are obtained at one go. (i) The concept of temperature associated with the horizon is derived in a unified manner and is shown to arise from purely kinematic considerations. (ii) QFT near any horizon is mapped to a conformal field theory without introducing concepts from string theory. (iii) For spherically symmetric spacetimes (in D=1+3) with a horizon at r=l, the partition function has the generic form $Z\propto \exp[S-\beta E]$, where $S= (1/4) 4\pi l^2$ and $|E|=(l/2)$. This analysis reproduces the conventional result for the blackhole spacetimes and provides a simple and consistent interpretation of entropy and energy for deSitter spacetime. (iv) For the Rindler spacetime the entropy per unit transverse area turns out to be (1/4) while the energy is zero. (v) In the case of a Schwarzschild black hole there exist quantum states (like Unruh vacuum) which are not invariant under time reversal and can describe blackhole evaporation. There also exist quantum states (like Hartle-Hawking vacuum) in which temperature is well-defined but there is no flow of radiation to infinity. In the case of deSitter universe or Rindler patch in flat spacetime, one usually uses quantum states analogous to Hartle-Hawking vacuum and obtains a temperature without the corresponding notion of evaporation. It is, however, possible to construct the analogues of Unruh vacuum state in the other cases as well. Associating an entropy or a radiating vacuum state with a general horizon raises conceptual issues which are briefly discussed.
Slow Inactivation Does Not Block the Aqueous Accessibility to the Outer Pore of Voltage-gated Na Channels

Slow inactivation of voltage-gated Na channels is kinetically and structurally distinct from fast inactivation. Whereas structures that participate in fast inactivation are well described and include the cytoplasmic III-IV linker, the nature and location of the slow inactivation gating mechanism remains poorly understood. Several lines of evidence suggest that the pore regions (P-regions) are important contributors to slow inactivation gating. This has led to the proposal that a collapse of the pore impedes Na current during slow inactivation. We sought to determine whether such a slow inactivation-coupled conformational change could be detected in the outer pore. To accomplish this, we used a rapid perfusion technique to measure reaction rates between cysteine-substituted side chains lining the aqueous pore and the charged sulfhydryl-modifying reagent MTS-ET. A pattern of incrementally slower reaction rates was observed at substituted sites at increasing depth in the pore. We found no state-dependent change in modification rates of P-region residues located in all four domains, and thus no change in aqueous accessibility, between slow- and nonslow-inactivated states. In domains I and IV, it was possible to measure modification rates at residues adjacent to the narrow DEKA selectivity filter (Y401C and G1530C), and yet no change was observed in accessibility in either slow- or nonslow-inactivated states. We interpret these results as evidence that the outer mouth of the Na pore remains open while the channel is slow inactivated.
Energy Efficiency in Mobile Cloud Computing Architectures

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is an emerging and popular mobile technology which uses fully available Cloud Computing services and functionalities. This technology provides rich computational services to the users, network operators and Cloud service providers as well. However due to users mobility and high computational operations, consumption of energy is a major issue. Energy efficiency over MCC is needed since 57% of generated energy is used by ICT related devices and other negative impacts over environment. This paper investigates different mobile Cloud computing architectures and their performance over energy efficiency by examining different approaches: OSGi, overlay, and container based solutions.
Computing in the Presence of Timing Failures

Timing failures refer to a situation where the environment in which a system operates does not behave as expected regarding the timing assumptions, that is, the timing constraints are not met. In the immense body of work on the designing fault-tolerant systems, the type of failures that are usually considered are, process failures, link failures, messages loss and memory failures; and it is usually (implicitly) assumed that there are no timing failures. In this paper we investigate the ability to recover automatically from transient timing failures. We introduce and formally define the concept of algorithms that are resilient to timing failures, and demonstrate the importance of the new concept by presenting consensus and mutual exclusion algorithms, using atomic registers only, that are resilient to timing failures.
On-Tour Interactive Travel Recommendations Quang Nhat Nguyen ,

Travelers who access the Internet through currently available web information systems often experience difficulty in selecting interesting products. This is especially true for on-the-move travelers who browse information repositories using mobile devices with poor user interfaces. Travelers suffer from an overload of information and options to consider, and they lack system support in filtering information and comparing products. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to the problem of mapping travelers’ needs to a convenient set of travel products or services. In particular, we present an on-the-move restaurant recommender system (mITR) integrated with a pre-travel planning aid system (NutKing). In this approach, firstly, the knowledge contained in a repository of past user choices is exploited to initialize the recommendation process with a set of implicit preferences. Secondly, to minimize user efforts in building a precise search query, we do not require the user to formulate a query at the beginning of the interaction, rather we involve her i n a dialogue where the traveler is encouraged to provide critiques and feedback to the system recommendations. These critiques are then incorporated by the system into a new query that tries to better model the user preferences. The approach has been validated empirically by a set of users.
SCAR - Scatter, Conceal and Recover

This thesis describes a secure and reliable method for storing data in a distributed hash table (DHT) that leverages the inherent properties of the DHT to provide a secure storage substrate. The framework presented is referred to as "Scatter, Conceal, and Recover" (SCAR). The standard method of securing data in a DHT is to encrypt the data using symmetrical encryption before storing it in the network. SCAR provides this level of security, but also prevents any known cryptoanalysis from being performed. It does this by breaking the data into smaller blocks and scattering these blocks throughout the DHT. Hence, SCAR prevents any unauthorized user from obtaining the entire encrypted data block. SCAR uses hash chains to determine the storage locations for the data blocks within the DHT. To ensure storage availability, SCAR uses an erasure coding scheme to provide full data recovery given only partial block recovery. This thesis presents the details of SCAR. First, the framework, related protocols, and mechanisms are described. Second, a prototype implementation is presented showing the feasibility of SCAR. Third, analytical models are discussed that characterize SCAR's behavior, the models are then validated using experimental results. Lastly, the models are analyzed to further understand the tradeoff between data security and data availability. The exploration of this tradeoff leads to the conclusion that SCAR can effectively balance this tradeoff when the nodes of the network are "sufficiently" available.
The Effect of Conflicting Consumer Reviews on the Accuracy of a Purchase Decision Full Paper

Online consumer review plays an important role in customers’ purchase decisions. However, conflicting online reviews can confuse potential customers. As a result, he/she will take a risk of either selecting a product that is not able to satisfy their needs or not select an appropriate product. This error in purchasing can impose significant tangible and intangible costs on the supply chain. In this paper, a conceptual framework will be proposed to model the effect of three types of conflict among online consumer reviews: including Conflicting opinions among product attributes, Conflicting star ratings and the Disagreement intensity among reviewers (CCD model) on the perceived informativeness and accuracy of a purchase decision. Result of this study may help sellers to analyze and categorize online reviews and publish reviews that would improve the accuracy of a purchase decision, thereby decreasing the overall cost of a wrong purchase.
ORUVoD: A high performance and scalable architecture for P2P-VoD system

Most of existing Peer-to-Peer (P2P) VoD systems do not take full advantage of the idle resources of peer nodes which have strong ability. To address this problem, we propose a high performance and scalable architecture named Optimal Resource Utilizing Video on Demand (ORUVoD) for P2P-VoD system to enlarge the overall throughput of peer nodes, especially for the system with many unpopular videos. In this work, peer nodes are classified into three kinds of nodes. The peer nodes with high CPU performance are selected to be SN. Those with large storage capacity and high bandwidth are selected as USN. By using of SN, USN and the cache replacement algorithm proposed for USN, the idle resources of the system are made full use of to improve the performance of the system. There are four characteristics of this architecture: 1) easy to globally balance and manage; 2) highly cost-effective; 3) reliable quality of service; 4) good scalability. A prototype system has been developed based on ORUVoD. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our architecture and cache replacement algorithm.
EraMobile: Epidemic-Based Reliable and Adaptive Multicast for MANETs

We present a novel protocol EraMobile (epidemic-based reliable and adaptive multicast for mobile ad hoc networks) and its performance analysis. EraMobile's target is group applications requiring high-level of reliability and the protocol aims to provide fully reliable multicast data delivery with minimal network overhead even in the adverse network conditions. EraMobile utilizes an epidemic-based method in multicast operation to cope with dynamic and unpredictable topology changes arising from the mobility. Our epidemic mechanism does not require the maintenance of any tree- or mesh-like structure for multicasting. It also needs neither having global or partial view of the network nor having information of neighboring nodes and group members. Besides, it substantially minimizes the overhead incurred by eliminating redundant data transmissions. Another distinguishing feature of EraMobile is its capability of adapting to varying node densities in order to provide reliable data delivery in both sparse networks, where the network connectivity is prone to interruptions, and dense networks, where congestion is likely to occur. We study the performance of EraMobile through comparative and extensive simulations on ns-2 network simulator. EraMobile is shown to achieve fully reliable multicasting for most of the scenarios investigated.
Entrepreneurial alertness: Study of the Influence of Individual Characteristics and Entrepreneurship

This research tried to understand which statistical variables associated to the individual and the company influence the entrepreneurial alertness. The sample was constituted by 180 entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial alertness was measured in agreement with the model of Tang, Kacmar and Busenitz (2012). Descriptive statistical tests and normality exam were developed; as well as checked the validity and reliability of the scale through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). In order to identify the factors that influenced the alertness we developed multiple linear regression and the ANOVA test to determine possible differences among groups (gender, education). The results showed the negative influence of the educational level and the size of enterprises on alertness level; as well as the negative relationship between age and entrepreneurial experience, furthermore, shows that alert level is not determined by gender difference. One of the main implications of this research is to present factors that can potentiate the effects of the entrepreneurial alertness, enlarging the possibilities of identification of opportunities for individuals.
Efficient Pruning Methods for Separate-and-Conquer Rule Learning Systems

Recent years have seen increased interest in systems that learn sets of rules. The goal of this paper is to study the degree to which \separate and conquer" rule learning induction methods scale up to large, real-world learning problems. In particular, we study the asymptotic complexity of rule induction on large training sets in the presence of noise. We present formal arguments and experimental data supporting the claim that existing methods do not scale up well on noisy data. We then present a solution in the form of new pruning techniques that dramatically improve the runtime of rule induction methods with no loss in accuracy: formal analysis shows an improvement in asymp-totic time complexity, and experiments show an order-of-magnitude speedup on a set of benchmark problems while obtaining slightly more accurate hypotheses.
An Enhanced TCP Corruption Control Mechanism for Wireless Network

Mobile Ad-Hoc networks are collections of mobile nodes, dynamically forming a temporary network without pre-existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. (TCP) provides connection oriented, reliable and end to end mechanism. Comparing to wire networks, there are many different characteristics in wireless environments. In this paper an enhanced mechanism for TCP corruption control is presented. It considers the influences to TCP sender's packet sending rate not only by the congestion but also by the corruption. The sending window will be calculated after each transmission, according to number of corrupted packet. So, there is less packet drop occurring in transmission. The comparative study of Enhanced TCP (ETCP) with other TCP variants is also presented with variation in speed of node, pause time and number of nodes in network. The enhanced mechanism can be easily implemented with fewer overheads and can effectively improve reliability with small variances of throughput and delay. Implementation and Simulation for this mechanism is performed in QualNet 4.0 [9], simulator. I. Introduction Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) [1-2], is the predominant Internet protocol and carries approximately 90% of Internet traffic in today's heterogeneous wireless and wired networks. TCP is widely used as a connection oriented transport layer protocol that provides reliable packet delivery over unreliable links. TCP does not depend on the underlying network layers and, hence, design of various TCP variants is based on the properties of wired networks. However, TCP congestion control algorithms may not perform well in heterogeneous networks. Wireless networks have higher bit error rates due to weather conditions, obstacles, multipath interferences, mobility of wireless end-devices, and signal attenuation and fading, which may lead to packet loss. Various TCP algorithms and techniques have been proposed to improve congestion and reduce the non-congestion related packet loss. Binary Increase Congestion (BIC) are examples of proposed end-to-end solutions. Snoop-TCP is a link layer control approach while M-TCP [7] and I-TCP are split connection approaches. They are all proposed to improve network Performance [3,9]. The end-to-end techniques are the most promising because they require changes only to the end systems rather than to the intermediate nodes. These end-to-end control approaches are used in today's deployed networks.
Natural Language Access to Enterprise Data

This paper describes USI Answers — a natural language question answering system for enterprise data. We report on the progress towards the goal of offering easy access to enterprise data to a large number of business users, most of whom are not familiar with the specific syntax or semantics of the underlying data sources. Additional complications come from the nature of the data, which comes both as structured and unstructured. The proposed solution allows users to express questions in natural language, makes apparent the system's interpretation of the query, and allows easy query adjustment and reformulation. The application is in use by more than 1500 users from Siemens Energy. We evaluate our approach on a data set consisting of fleet data.
A precise time-integration for analysis of time-domain response to lossy transmission lines

The precise integration method is a semi analytical solution method of partial differential equation method. Based on the precise integration method, the lossy transmission line transient response analysis method is a time domain analysis method. The lossy transmission line transient response analysis method can easily deal with the transmission line problems, which is difficult for the nonzero initial value and nonlinear load frequency domain method to deal with, but it is still difficult to deal with the reactance load of transmission line. By separating and integrating the beginning and terminal conditions of the precise integration method, and introducing time domain adjoint model of the various kinds of load, this paper solves the problems of the load reactance of transmission line, also solves the transmission line problems of long time transition, short circuit and open circuit, which greatly improves the precise integration method for the analysis of the efficacy of transmission lines in time domain response. Finally, the correctness of the presented method is illustrated by the application examples, which provide a theoretical basis for the time domain analysis of the transient response of the transmission line.
An adaptive neuro-fuzzy control approach for nonlinear systems via Lyapunov function derivative estimation

An adaptive neuro-fuzzy controller is proposed in this paper to deal with the problem of tracking nonlinear affine in the control dynamical systems with unknown nonlinearities. The plant is described by means of a Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model, including dynamic fuzzy rules of generalized form, where the local submodels are realized through nonlinear input-output mappings. Instead of modelling the plant dynamics directly, our approach relies upon the effective approximation of certain terms that involve the derivative of the Lyapunov function and the unknown system nonlinearities on a local basis using linear in the weights neural networks. A resetting scheme is proposed to assure validity of the control input. The uniform ultimate boundedness of the tracking error with respect to an arbitrarily small set of the origin is achieved, along with the boundedness of all other signals in the closed loop. Illustrative simulations highlight the approach
Two approaches to repetition suppression

Repetition suppression refers to the phenomenon that prior processing of stimuli (or stimulus attributes) decreases activation elicited by processing subsequent stimuli with identical attributes. We present two complementary approaches to identify regions that show repetition suppression for subsequent sentences with either identical: (1) sentence forms or (2) speakers. The first categorical approach simply compares sentences that are presented in Same and Different blocks. The second factorial approach operationally defines repetition suppression as decreased activation for the subsequent Same stimulus relative to its preceding sentence. To account for nonspecific time confounds, this approach tests for a repetition × condition (Same or Different) interaction. Surprisingly, the two approaches revealed different results: Only the categorical analysis detected sentence repetition effects in multiple regions within a bilateral frontotemporal system that has previously been implicated in sentence processing. These discrepancies might be due to the different efficiencies with which the particular contrasts were estimated or spurious differences in stimuli or attentional set that could not be entirely controlled within a single subject. Finally, we combined the two approaches in a [global null] conjunction analysis. Hum Brain Mapp, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.