Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reproducibility of Structural and Diffusion Tensor Imaging in the TACERN Multi-Center Study

Background Multi-site MRI studies are often necessary for recruiting sufficiently sized samples when studying rare conditions. However, they require pooling data from multiple scanners into a single data set, and therefore it is critical to evaluate the variability of quantitative MRI measures within and across scanners used in multi-site studies. The aim of this study was to evaluate the reproducibility of structural and diffusion weighted (DW) MRI measurements acquired on seven scanners at five medical centers as part of the Tuberous Sclerosis Complex Autism Center of Excellence Research Network (TACERN) multisite study. Methods The American College of Radiology (ACR) phantom was imaged monthly to measure reproducibility of signal intensity and uniformity within and across seven 3T scanners from General Electric, Philips, and Siemens vendors. One healthy adult male volunteer was imaged repeatedly on all seven scanners under the TACERN structural and DW protocol (5 b = 0 s/mm2 and 30 b = 1000 s/mm2) over a period of 5 years (age 22–27 years). Reproducibility of inter- and intra-scanner brain segmentation volumes and diffusion tensor imaging metrics fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) within white matter regions was quantified with coefficient of variation. Results The American College of Radiology Phantom signal intensity and uniformity were similar across scanners and changed little over time, with a mean intra-scanner coefficient of variation of 3.6 and 1.8%, respectively. The mean inter- and intra-scanner coefficients of variation of brain structure volumes derived from T1-weighted (T1w) images of the human phantom were 3.3 and 1.1%, respectively. The mean inter- and intra-scanner coefficients of variation of FA in white matter regions were 4.5 and 2.5%, while the mean inter- and intra-scanner coefficients of variation of MD in white matter regions were 5.4 and 1.5%. Conclusion Our results suggest that volumetric and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) measurements are highly reproducible between and within scanners and provide typical variation amplitudes that can be used as references to interpret future findings in the TACERN network.
Analysis of Corticosterone and Testosterone Synthesis in Rat Salivary Gland Homogenates

Extra-adrenal steroid hormone production has been reported in several tissues, the biological role of which is interesting in terms of hormonal regulation of metabolism, growth, and behavior. In this report, we describe for the first time steroidogenesis in rat salivary glands. Enzyme activities associated with corticosterone and testosterone production were detected in rat salivary glands by LC-MS analysis. In tissue homogenates of rat salivary glands, progesterone was produced enzymatically in vitro from pregnenolone in the presence of NADPH and NADH. Deoxycorticosterone was produced from progesterone, corticosterone from deoxycorticosterone, and testosterone from androstenedione (but not pregnenolone from cholesterol) via enzymatic reactions using the same tissue homogenates. Immunoblotting analysis indicated the expression of 11β-hydroxylase (cytochrome P450 11β1; CYP11β1), which mediated the production of corticosterone from deoxycorticosterone. However, CYP family 11 subfamily A member 1 (CYP11A1)-mediated production of pregnenolone from cholesterol was not detected in the salivary glands by immunoblotting using a specific antibody. These results indicate that corticosterone and testosterone are produced from pregnenolone in rat salivary glands. The initial substrate in salivary steroidogenesis and the roles of salivary corticosterone and testosterone are discussed.
Treatment-Seeking Delay Among Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Women with Acute Myocardial Infarction

Abstract Purpose: Women and minorities with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) often fail to recognize prodromal symptoms leading to delays in care. The objective of this study was to conduct a mixed method assessment of the impact of ethnicity on symptom description, recognition, and treatment-seeking behavior in Hispanic and non-Hispanic women before hospitalization for AMI. Methods: We explored differences in symptomatology, treatment-seeking behavior, and delay patterns among a convenience sample of 43 women diagnosed with AMI (17 Hispanic women, 26 non-Hispanic women) in seven rural and urban Colorado hospitals. We performed in-depth interviews to establish patterns (typologies) of treatment-seeking behaviors. Chart abstraction provided delay times as a function of ethnicity. Results: Most (28/43) women reported prodromal symptoms in the weeks before their index AMI. Overall, fewer Hispanic women presented within 24 h of symptom onset (3/18, 17% vs. 15/18, 83%, p<0.01). A typology of treatment-seeking behavior emerged: women who (1) recognized symptoms and promptly sought care; (2) did not recognize symptoms, yet promptly sought care; (3) recognized symptoms and promptly sought care, but providers misconstrued symptoms as noncardiac; and (4) misinterpreted symptoms due to an underlying chronic disease. Conclusion: Women and primary care providers often underappreciate prodromal AMI symptoms. Hispanic women are more likely to misinterpret ischemic symptoms and delay care, suggesting a need for tailored patient and provider education.
Human Trichinellosis in Italy: an epidemiological review since 1989

Objectives Trichinellosis is a worldwide zooantroponosis caused by a nematode of the genus Trichinella that can pose a risk to human health. Among the species of Trichinella, T. Spiralis is the most common represented. The main source of human infection is the consumption of raw or undercooked meat (especially from pigs, wild boars and horses). Infection with Trichinella was one of the most frequent parasitic diseases in Italy until 1959 when obligatory screening for these parasites in slaughtered swines was introduced. As the last review on this topic was performed in 1989, the aim of our study was to describe the epidemiology of Trichinellosis in Italy from 1989 to 2017. Study design We performed a systematic research in Pubmed (MEDLINE). Methods We included in our review studies that were published in the peer reviewed literature using the MESH terms "Trichinellosis" and "Italy". The only restrictions were the language (articles should be in English, Italian, Spanish or French) and the date of publication: from 1989 to March 2017. We excluded all the articles which referred to trichinellosis in the animals or which focused only on molecular biology of trichinella or on diagnostic techniques. Results We found 56 studies, but only 8 were considered eligible. During the study period, 764 cases of Trichinellosis occurred in Italy: 13.7% caused by T. Britovi and 84.4% by T. spiralis; in 14 cases the identification of the parasite was not performed. The outbreaks occurred in Umbria, Piedmont, Apulia (500 cases in 1990, by T. spiralis), Basilicata, Tuscany, Abruzzo, Emilia Romagna, Sardinia. In 2001 and in 2008 two outbreaks occurred in Lazio and Veneto respectively, but imported from abroad. The most important sources of infections were: horse meat (82.2%); wild boar meat (11.9%); pig meat (5.9%). Conclusions Trichinellosis is still present in Italy, but often forgotten by general practitioners and infectious diseases specialists. It's pivotal to improve awareness about this parasitic disease in Physicians and veterinarians. A strict surveillance, especially on meat products from endemic countries or from wild animals is necessary to considerably reduce the risk of acquiring the infection.
Design and implementation of low-latency, low-power reconfigurable on-chip networks

In this dissertation, I tackle large, low-latency, low-power on-chip networks. I focus on two key challenges in the realization of such NoCs in practice: (1) the development of NoC design toolchains that can ease and automate the design of large-scale NoCs, paving the way for advanced ultra-low-power NoC techniques to be embedded within many-core chips, and (2) the design and implementation of chip prototypes that demonstrate ultralow-latency, low-power NoCs, enabling rigorous understanding of the design tradeoff of such NoCs. I start off by presenting DSENT (joint work), a timing, area and power evaluation toolchain that supports flexibility in modeling while ensuring accuracy, through a technology-portable library of standard cells [108]. DSENT enables rigorous design space exploration for advanced technologies, and have been shown to provide fast and accurate evaluation of emerging opto-electronics. Next, low-swing signaling has been shown to substantially reduce NoC power, but requires custom circuit design in the past. I propose a toolchain that automates the embedding of low-swing cells into the NoC datapath, paving the way for low-swing signaling to be part of future many-core chips [17]. Third, clockless repeated links have been shown to be embeddable within a NoC datapath, allowing packets to go from source to destination cores without being latched at intermediate routers. I propose SMARTapp, a design that leverages theses clockless repeaters for configuration of a NoC into customized topologies tailored for each applications, and present a synthesis toolchain that takes each SoC application as input, and synthesize a NoC configured for that application, generating RTL to layout [18]. The thesis next presents two chip prototypes that I designed to obtain on-depth understanding of the practical implementation costs and tradeoffs of high-level architectural ideas. The SMART NoC chip is a 3 x 3 mm chip in 32 nm SOI realizing traversal of 7 hops within a cycle at 548 MHz, dissipating 1.57 to 2.53 W. It enables a rigorous understanding of the tradeoffs between router clock frequency, network latency and throughput, and is a demonstration of the proposed synthesis toolchain. The SCORPIO 36-core chip (joint work) is an 11 x 13 mm 2 chip in 45 nm SOI demonstrating snoopy coherence on a scalable ordered mesh NoC, with the NoC taking just 19 % of tile power and 10 % of tile area [19, 28]. Thesis Supervisor: Li-Shiuan Peh Title: Professor
Formal verification of probabilistic systems

This dissertation presents methods for the formal modeling and specification of probabilistic systems, and algorithms for the automated verification of these systems. Our system models describe the behavior of a system in terms of probability, nondeterminism, fairness and time. The formal specification languages we consider are based on extensions of branching-time temporal logics, and enable the expression of single-event and long-run average system properties. This latter class of properties, not expressible with previous formal languages, includes most of the performance properties studied in the field of performance evaluation, such as system throughput and average response time. Our choice of system models and specification languages has been guided by the goal of providing efficient verification algorithms. The algorithms rely on the theory of Markov decision processes, and exploit a connection between the graph-theoretical and probabilistic properties of these processes. This connection also leads to new results about classical problems, such as an extension to the solvable cases of the stochastic shortest path problem, an improved algorithm for the computation of reachability probabilities, and new results on the average reward problem for semi-Markov decision processes.
The Role of Animacy and Structural Information in Relative Clause Attachment: Evidence From Chinese

We report one production and one comprehension experiment investigating the effect of animacy in relative clause attachment in Chinese. Experiment 1 involved a fill-in-the-blank task that manipulated the order of an animate noun phrase in a complex NP construction. The results showed that while low attachment responses exceeded high attachment responses overall (cf. Shen, 2006), a tendency exists to attach a relative clause to an animate NP in Chinese (cf. Desmet et al., 2002). Experiment 2 used a rating task to examine the interplay between animacy and structural information by manipulating the order of the animate NP as well as the relative clause type (i.e., subject vs. object relative clauses). The results showed that the animate NP modification tendency found in Experiment 1 was limited to subject-relative clauses and that no animacy-related effect was found with object-relative clauses. These results are incompatible with purely structural parsing strategies such as Late Closure (Frazier, 1987) and the Predicate Proximity Principle (Gibson et al., 1996). Instead, the current results suggest that attachment ambiguity resolution in Chinese relative clauses is sensitive to animacy as well as structural information.
A Structured Approach for Reviewing Architecture Documentation

Abstract : This technical note proposes a structured approach for reviewing architecture documentation. Given the critical importance of architecture to software project success, it follows that the architecture cannot be effective unless it is effectively captured in documentation that allows the architecture's stakeholders to understand and use the architecture in the way it was intended. The approach does not assume a particular architecture methodology or a particular architecture documentation practice, although it was conceived in the context of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Recommended Practice for Architecture Description of Software-Intensive Systems and the SEI Views and Beyond approach to documenting software architectures. Like both of them, our approach is centered on the stakeholders of the artifact, engaging them in a focused, guided way to ensure that the documentation carries sufficient quality to enable them to do their jobs and to help them point out gaps and weaknesses. Our approach is not intended as a complete framework for architecture evaluation; rather it is meant to be used within such a framework, when one is available.
Ultrathin Films of Cellulose: A Materials Perspective

A literature review on ultrathin films of cellulose is presented. The review focuses on different deposition methods of the films—all the way from simple monocomponent films to more elaborate multicomponent structures—and the use of the film structures in the vast realm of materials science. The common approach of utilizing cellulose thin films as experimental models is therefore omitted. The reader will find that modern usage of cellulose thin films constitutes an exciting emerging area within materials science and it goes far beyond the traditional usage of the films as model systems.
Post-Quantum UC-Secure Oblivious Transfer in the Standard Model with Adaptive Corruptions

Since the seminal result of Kilian, Oblivious Transfer (OT) has proven to be a fundamental primitive in cryptography. In such a scheme, a user is able to gain access to an element owned by a server, without learning more than this single element, and without the server learning which element the user has accessed. The NIST call for post-quantum encryption and signature schemes has revived the interest for cryptographic protocols based on post-quantum assumptions and the need for secure post-quantum OT schemes. In this paper, we show how to construct an OT scheme based on lattices, from a collision-resistant chameleon hash scheme (CH) and a CCA encryption scheme accepting a smooth projective hash function (SPHF). Note that our scheme does not rely on random oracles and provides UC security against adaptive corruptions assuming reliable erasures.
Estimation of Failure Probability and its Applications in Reliability Data Analysis

Evaluation method of reliability parameter estimation needs to be improved effectively with the advance of science and technology. This paper develops a new method of parameter estimation, which is named E-Bayesian estimation method. In the case one hyper-parameter, the definition of E-Bayesian estimation of the failure probability is provided, moreover, the formulas of E-Bayesian estimation and hierarchical Bayesian estimation, and the property of E-Bayesian estimation of the failure probability are also provided. Finally, calculation on practical problems shows that the provided method is feasible and easy to perform.
Pragh: Locality-preserving Graph Traversal with Split Live Migration

Many real-world data like social, transportation, biology, and communication data can be efﬁciently modeled as a graph. Hence, graph traversal such as multi-hop or graph-walking queries has been key operations atop graph stores. However, since different graph traversals may touch different sets of data, it is hard or even impossible to have a one-size-ﬁts-all graph partitioning algorithm that preserves access locality for various graph traversal workloads. Meanwhile, prior shard-based migration faces a dilemma such that coarse-grained migration may incur more migration overhead over increased locality beneﬁts, while ﬁne-grained migration usually requires excessive metadata and incurs non-trivial maintenance cost. This paper proposes Pragh, an efﬁcient locality-preserving live graph migration scheme for graph store in the form of key-value pairs. The key idea of Pragh is a split migration model which only migrates values physically while retains keys in the initial location. This allows ﬁne-grained migration while avoiding the need to maintain excessive metadata. Pragh integrates an RDMA-friendly location cache from DrTM-KV to provide fully-localized accesses to migrated data and further makes a novel reuse of the cache replacement policy for lightweight monitoring. Pragh further sup-ports evolving graphs through a check-and-forward mechanism to resolve the conﬂict between updates and migration of graph data. Evaluations on an 8-node RDMA-capable cluster using a representative graph traversal benchmark show that Pragh can increase the throughput by up to 19 × and decrease the median latency by up to 94%, thanks to split live migration that eliminates 97% remote accesses. A port of split live migration to Wukong with up to 2.53 × throughput improvement further conﬁrms
Open Infrastructure for Edge: A Distributed Ledger Outlook

High demand for low latency services and local data processing has given rise for edge computing. As opposed to cloud computing, in this new paradigm computational facilities are located close to the end-users and data producers, on the edge of the network, hence the name. The critical issue for the proliferation of edge computing is the availability of local computational resources. Major cloud providers are already addressing the problem by establishing facilities in the proximity of end-users. However, there is an alternative trend, namely, developing open infrastructure as a set of standards, technologies, and practices to enable any motivated parties to o ﬀ er their computational capacity for the needs of edge computing. Open infrastructure can give an additional boost to this new promising paradigm and, moreover, help to avoid problems for which cloud computing has been long criticized for, such as vendor lock-in or privacy. In this paper, we discuss the challenges related to creating such an open infrastructure, in particular focusing on the applicability of distributed ledgers for contractual agreement and payment. Solving the challenge of contracting is central to realizing an open infrastructure for edge computing, and in this paper, we highlight the potential and shortcomings of distributed ledger technologies in the context of our use case.
INSIDER: Designing In-Storage Computing System for Emerging High-Performance Drive

We present INSIDER, a full-stack redesigned storage system to help users fully utilize the performance of emerging storage drives with moderate programming efforts. On the hardware side, INSIDER introduces an FPGA-based reconfigurable drive controller as the in-storage computing (ISC) unit; it is able to saturate the high drive performance while retaining enough programmability. On the software side, INSIDER integrates with the existing system stack and provides effective abstractions. For the host programmer, we introduce virtual file abstraction to abstract ISC as file operations; this hides the existence of the drive processing unit and minimizes the host code modification to leverage the drive computing capability. By separating out the drive processing unit to the data plane, we expose a clear drive-side interface so that drive programmers can focus on describing the computation logic; the details of data movement between different system components are hidden. With the software/hardware co-design, INSIDER runtime provides crucial system support. It not only transparently enforces the isolation and scheduling among offloaded programs, but it also protects the drive data from being accessed by unwarranted programs. We build an INSIDER drive prototype and implement its corresponding software stack. The evaluation shows that INSIDER achieves an average 12X performance improvement and 31X accelerator cost efficiency when compared to the existing ARM-based ISC system. Additionally, it requires much less effort when implementing applications. INSIDER is opensourced [5], and we have adapted it to the AWS F1 instance for public access.
Strategic repositioning in a dynamic environment

Purpose – The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the strategic repositioning of an academic library using the dynamic capability framework.Design/methodology/approach – The discussion is based on the re‐organizational process of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library. Three stages are focused, illustrating how the library managed to be dynamically capable, including: sensing the environmental impacts; realigning and reconfiguring its resources; and implementing effective strategies to respond to these challenges.Findings – The library adopted a multitude of channels and media in sensing environmental challenges. By going through a strategic reorganization, the library has realigned and redeployed its staff resources to better prepare for incoming changes. The reformed organization moved ahead with renewed culture and values, including better internal communication, team spirit, collective learning mechanisms, and effective user communication.Research limitations/implications – Re.
Agile Cold Starts for Scalable Serverless

The Serverless or Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) model capitalizes on lightweight execution by packaging code and dependencies together for just-in-time dispatch. Often a container environment has to be set up afresh– a condition called “cold start", and in such cases, performance suffers and overheads mount, both deteriorating rapidly under high concurrency. Caching and reusing previously employed containers ties up memory and risks information leakage. Latency for cold starts is frequently due to work and wait-times in setting up various dependencies – such as in initializing networking elements. This paper proposes a solution that pre-crafts such resources and then dynamically reassociates them with baseline containers. Applied to networking, this approach demonstrates an order of magnitude gain in cold starts, negligible memory consumption, and flat startup time under rising concurrency.