Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Translational Grounding: Using Paraphrase Recognition and Generation to Demonstrate Semantic Abstraction Abilities of MultiLingual NMT

In this paper, we investigate whether multilingual neural translation models learn a stronger semantic abstraction of sentences than bilingual ones. We test this hypotheses by measuring the perplexity of such models when applied to paraphrases of the source language. The intuition is that an encoder produces better representations if a decoder is capable of recognizing synonymous sentences in the same language even though the model is never trained for that task. In our setup, we add 16 different auxiliary languages to a bidirectional bilingual baseline model (English-French) and test it with in-domain and out-of-domain paraphrases in English. The results show that the perplexity is significantly reduced in each of the cases, indicating that meaning can be grounded in translation. This is further supported by a study on paraphrase generation that we also include at the end of the paper.
Modified Methacrylate Hydrogels Improve Tissue Repair after Spinal Cord Injury

Methacrylate hydrogels have been extensively used as bridging scaffolds in experimental spinal cord injury (SCI) research. As synthetic materials, they can be modified, which leads to improved bridging of the lesion. Fibronectin, a glycoprotein of the extracellular matrix produced by reactive astrocytes after SCI, is known to promote cell adhesion. We implanted 3 methacrylate hydrogels: a scaffold based on hydroxypropylmethacrylamid (HPMA), 2-hydroxyethylmethacrylate (HEMA) and a HEMA hydrogel with an attached fibronectin (HEMA-Fn) in an experimental model of acute SCI in rats. The animals underwent functional evaluation once a week and the spinal cords were histologically assessed 3 months after hydrogel implantation. We found that both the HPMA and the HEMA-Fn hydrogel scaffolds lead to partial sensory improvement compared to control animals and animals treated with plain HEMA scaffold. The HPMA scaffold showed an increased connective tissue infiltration compared to plain HEMA hydrogels. There was a tendency towards connective tissue infiltration and higher blood vessel ingrowth in the HEMA-Fn scaffold. HPMA hydrogels showed a significantly increased axonal ingrowth compared to HEMA-Fn and plain HEMA; while there were some neurofilaments in the peripheral as well as the central region of the HEMA-Fn scaffold, no neurofilaments were found in plain HEMA hydrogels. In conclusion, HPMA hydrogel as well as the HEMA-Fn scaffold showed better bridging qualities compared to the plain HEMA hydrogel, which resulted in very limited partial sensory improvement.
Body Mass Index and Dental Caries: A Systematic Review

Introduction This review was undertaken to analyze the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and dental caries with the available literature evidence. Materials and methods The articles were searched from Medline/PubMed and Journal of Web published between 2005 and 2016. Results Out of the 146 references obtained, 16 articles in English language were read in full, which fulfilled the inclusion criteria after assessing by Down and Black criteria. Conclusion No consensus was reached in the relationship between BMI and dental caries in the present review due to varied associations How to cite this article: Shivakumar S, Srivastava A, Shivakumar GC. Body Mass Index and Dental Caries: A Systematic Review. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2018;11(3):228-232.
Isolation of tyrosinase and melanogenesis inhibitory flavonoids from Juniperus chinensis fruits

ABSTRACT A new biflavonoid, amentoflavone-7-O-β-D-glucoside, and thirteen known flavonoids were isolated from the fruits of Juniperus chinensis using a bioactivity-guided method and their tyrosinase inhibitory effects were tested using a mushroom tyrosinase bioassay. Two isolates, hypolaetin-7-O-β-D-glucoside and quercetin-7-O-α-L-rhamnoside, were found to reduce tyrosinase activity at a concentration of 50 μM. Quercetin-7-O-α-L-rhamnoside attenuated cellular tyrosinase activity and melanogenesis in α-MSH plus IBMX-stimulated B16F10 melanoma cells. Molecular docking simulation revealed that quercetin-7-O-α-L-rhamnoside inhibits tyrosinase activity by hydrogen bonding with residues His85, His244, Thr261, and Gly281 of tyrosinase. Abbreviations: EtOH, ethanol; CH2Cl2, dichloromethane; EtOAc, ethylacetate; n-BuOH, n-butanol; MeOH, metanol; CHCl3,chloroform; DMSO, dimethylsulfoxide; DMEM, Dulbecco’s modified Eagle’s medium; FBS, fetal bovine serum; α-MSH, α-melanocyte stimulating hormone; L-DOPA, L-3, 4-dihydroxyphenylalanine GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT A new biflavonoid, amentoflavone-7-O--D-glucoside, and a tyrosinase inhibitory flavonoid, quercetin-7-O--L-rhamnoside, were isolated from J. chinensis fruits.
Fully coupled numerical model of actin treadmilling in the lamellipodium of the cell

Cells rely on an interplay of subcellular elements for motility and migration. Certain regions of motile cells, such as the lamellipodium, are made of a complex mixture of actin monomers and filaments, which polymerize at the front of the cell, close to the cell membrane, and depolymerize at the rear. The dynamic actin turnover induces the so‐called intracellular retrograde flow, and it is a fundamental process for cell motility. Apart from some comprehensive mathematical models, the computational modelling of actin treadmilling has been based on simpler biophysical models. Here, we adopt a highly detailed theoretical model of the actin treadmilling process and develop a coupled unsteady finite element formulation. We clearly describe the structure and implementation of the coupled problem within the finite element method. Our numerical results show an excellent correlation with experimental results from literature and with previous models. We include time dependent effects and convective transport terms, which expose puzzling dynamics in the retrograde flow. We propose several biological scenarios to analyze the behavior of the actin treadmilling along space and time. We observed response times of the main density variables in the order of seconds. Compared with previous analytical solutions, which make assumptions related to convective transport, transient dynamics, and actin fluxes, the generic solution can have significant influence on the retrograde flow. All together, our results unveil a promising applicability of classical finite element methods to derive an in silico testing platform for the actin treadmilling processes in motile cells, which could allow for an extension to other biophysical effects.
Self-associated molecular patterns mediate cancer immune evasion by engaging Siglecs on T cells

First-generation immune checkpoint inhibitors, including anti–CTLA-4 and anti–programmed death 1 (anti–PD-1) antibodies, have led to major clinical progress, yet resistance frequently leads to treatment failure. Thus, new targets acting on T cells are needed. CD33-related sialic acid–binding immunoglobulin-like lectins (Siglecs) are pattern-recognition immune receptors binding to a range of sialoglycan ligands, which appear to function as self-associated molecular patterns (SAMPs) that suppress autoimmune responses. Siglecs are expressed at very low levels on normal T cells, and these receptors were not until recently considered as interesting targets on T cells for cancer immunotherapy. Here, we show an upregulation of Siglecs, including Siglec-9, on tumor-infiltrating T cells from non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), colorectal, and ovarian cancer patients. Siglec-9–expressing T cells coexpressed several inhibitory receptors, including PD-1. Targeting of the sialoglycan-SAMP/Siglec pathway in vitro and in vivo resulted in increased anticancer immunity. T cell expression of Siglec-9 in NSCLC patients correlated with reduced survival, and Siglec-9 polymorphisms showed association with the risk of developing lung and colorectal cancer. Our data identify the sialoglycan-SAMP/Siglec pathway as a potential target for improving T cell activation for immunotherapy.
A Secure Sharing System for Cloud Desktop Applications Migrating with Optimized User Experience

It is becoming easy to share cloud based desktop applications for group work among multiple users accessing them from any locations by advances in virtualization technology. This kind of sharing requires a secure mechanism for authenticating users to provide a good user experience under the group work. We have been developing a secure sharing system for cloud desktop applications migrating with those requirements. The proposed system includes a user authority authentication mechanism using attribute-based encryption and IP mobility mechanism migrating desktop applications from the current cloud to the other one to improve the quality of the user's interaction. This paper describes implementation of the proposed system and the specification of a prototype system.
DeepFense: Online Accelerated Defense Against Adversarial Deep Learning

Recent advances in adversarial Deep Learning (DL) have opened up a largely unexplored surface for malicious attacks jeopardizing the integrity of autonomous DL systems. With the wide-spread usage of DL in critical and time-sensitive applications, including unmanned vehicles, drones, and video surveillance systems, online detection of malicious inputs is of utmost importance. We propose DeepFense, the first end-to-end automated framework that simultaneously enables efficient and safe execution of DL models. DeepFense formalizes the goal of thwarting adversarial attacks as an optimization problem that minimizes the rarely observed regions in the latent feature space spanned by a DL network. To solve the aforementioned minimization problem, a set of complementary but disjoint modular redundancies are trained to validate the legitimacy of the input samples in parallel with the victim DL model. DeepFense leverages hardware/software/algorithm co-design and customized acceleration to achieve just-in-time performance in resource-constrained settings. The proposed countermeasure is unsupervised, meaning that no adversarial sample is leveraged to train modular redundancies. We further provide an accompanying API to reduce the non-recurring engineering cost and ensure automated adaptation to various platforms. Extensive evaluations on FPGAs and GPUs demonstrate up to two orders of magnitude performance improvement while enabling online adversarial sample detection.
An Assertion Framework for Mobile Robotic Programming with Spatial Reasoning

Assertions are intensively used to facilitate correctness reasoning and error detection in daily programming. However, composing assertions for mobile robotic programs can be painfully inconvenient, because classic Hoare logic lacks the expressing power on spatial knowledge, which is crucial when robots interact with their physical environments. The problem is especially evident for Behavior-Based Robotics (BBR) where the world is not explicitly represented with program variables. In this paper, we propose to incorporate spatial reasoning capability in the assertion framework of Hoare logic. The proposed framework features a two-dimensional region calculus and additional axioms for robot movements. The calculus makes the world representation and the specification of mobile robotic program natural and intuitive, and the axioms enable the reasoning about program correctness. We illustrate the use of the framework with a typical behavior-based robotic program. In addition, we present a runtime error detection and recovery mechanism for BBR programs based on the assertion framework. Preliminary experiments with NAO robots demonstrate the effectiveness.
Fast Spectrogram Inversion Using Multi-Head Convolutional Neural Networks

We propose the multi-head convolutional neural network (MCNN) for waveform synthesis from spectrograms. Nonlinear interpolation in MCNN is employed with transposed convolution layers in parallel heads. MCNN enables significantly better utilization of modern multi-core processors than commonly used iterative algorithms like Griffin–Lim, and yields very fast (more than 300 × real time) runtime. For training of MCNN, we use a large-scale speech recognition dataset and losses defined on waveforms that are related to perceptual audio quality. We demonstrate that MCNN constitutes a very promising approach for high-quality speech synthesis, without any iterative algorithms or autoregression in computations.
Spatial memories in place recognition

This thesis investigates the role of spatial memories in place recognition. The first study focuses on the interplay between the spatial working memory and place codes in long-term memory. Further we want to figure out how the local position information is encoded in spatial working memory. Our proposal is that place recognition is based on an intermediate representation, containing distance and bearing information about the surrounding environmental cues. Therefore we designed an experimental setup , in which we measure the distributions of decisions, where the participants recognized a target location. The experimental result were compared with the simulated data of the formulated likelihood-based model which takes into account the perceived distance and bearing represented by the working memory and the stored place code. The results show that the spatial working memory and the place code are based on a map-like structure. Spatial working memory is built up by probabilistic metric estimates of the environment. However, distance estimates in spatial working memory are not derived from Euclidean space, but rather are assumed to be hyperbolically compressed. Whereas the place code estimates are assumed to be more veridical due to triangulation. The second study addresses the question whether retrieval of temporal context from episodic memory, which is crucial for multiple view integration in place recognition, evokes a characterizing event-related potential. Concerning this we modified the classical ‘old/new’ task by inquiring the temporal context of a learned sequence of presented scenes. The results revealed that the retrieval of temporal context from episodic memory is signalized by a latency delay of the P600 amplitude located in the mid-parietal region. We assume that this effect is linked to the multiple view integration in spatial working memory.
The perceived barriers and facilitators in completing a Master’s degree in Physiotherapy

Background Participating in postgraduate study is daunting and as yet there is a dearth of literature on what students’ experiences are when obtaining their Master’s degree in Physiotherapy. Objectives The aim of this study was to gain insight into the perceived barriers and facilitators in completing a Master’s degree in Physiotherapy. Method Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 physiotherapists who had completed a Master’s degree in Physiotherapy from a university in South Africa, representative of coursework and dissertation Master’s degrees, completed within the stipulated time period as well as taking longer to complete the degree. The topics covered a range of speciality areas. The interviews were transcribed, sent for member checking and analysed thematically. Results Within 10 interviews data saturation was reached. Two themes were identified: research environment and support, both of which were seen as either a facilitator or a barrier, depending on the participant. The theme of research environment was divided into categories of workplace and data collection. The second theme, support, was also seen as either a barrier or a facilitator. This theme encapsulated the categories of supervisor support, workplace support and a personal support network. Conclusion The research environment and support are two major factors that can influence the experience of obtaining a master’s degree in physiotherapy, both positively and negatively. Clinical implications With increasing numbers of physiotherapists obtaining postgraduate degrees, universities need to facilitate the process of obtaining the degree, which will ensure more physiotherapists with postgraduate degrees, thereby strengthening the profession.
Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Treatment and Depression in Adults with Coronary Artery Disease and Nonsleepy Obstructive Sleep Apnea. A Secondary Analysis of the RICCADSA Trial

Rationale: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and depression are common among adults with coronary artery disease (CAD). Objectives: To determine the impact of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment on depression in adults with CAD and nonsleepy OSA. Methods: This was a secondary analysis of the RICCADSA (Randomized Intervention with CPAP in CAD and Sleep Apnea) trial, conducted in Sweden between 2005 and 2013. Adults with CAD and nonsleepy OSA (apnea‐hypopnea index ≥15/h, and Epworth Sleepiness Scale <10 at baseline) and complete Zung Self‐Rating Depression Scale (SDS) questionnaires at baseline, after 3 and 12 months, were included. Participants analyzed in their randomized arm were CPAP (n = 99) or no‐CPAP (n = 104). Depression was defined as a Zung SDS score of 50 or greater. The primary outcome was the between‐group difference in the absolute change in the SDS score from baseline. Results: No significant between‐group differences were observed in SDS scores during follow‐up in the entire study sample. Among the 56 participants with an SDS of 50 or greater at baseline (27.6%), the mean (±SD) baseline SDS was 55.0 (±5.5) in the CPAP group, and 53.9 (±4.0) in the no‐CPAP group. In the CPAP group, SDS scores decreased at 3 months (47.2 ± 8.2) and 12 months (45.8 ± 7.6), but remained stable in the no‐CPAP group at 3 months (53.1 ± 8.0) and 12 months (52.6 ± 8.1) (P = 0.01). The proportion with depression decreased from 30.3% at baseline to 16.2% after 3 months, and to 13.1% after 12 months in the CPAP group, from 25.0% at baseline to 23.1% after 3 months, and to 24.0% after 12 months in the no‐CPAP group (P = 0.001). Moreover, there was an association between the duration of CPAP usage (h/night) and the longitudinal decline in SDS score (r = 0.46; P < 0.001). CPAP usage categories (3, 4, and 5 h/night) were significantly associated with improvement in SDS (odds ratio = 3.92, 4.45, and 4.89, respectively) in multivariate analyses adjusted for age, sex, body mass index, left ventricular ejection fraction, apnea‐hypopnea index, and Epworth Sleepiness Scale at baseline. Conclusions: Among adults with depression, nonsleepy OSA, and CAD, 3 months of CPAP treatment improved depression scores. The improvement in mood persisted up to 12 months. An on‐treatment adjusted analysis confirmed these findings. Clinical trial registered with www.clinicaltrials. gov (NCT00519597).
A Study on Comparative Analysis of End-to-End Routing and Opportunistic Routing

DTN (Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networking) aims to realize efficient and reliable end-to-end communication even when communication links among nodes are intermittently connected due to several reasons such as unstable wireless connectivity and dynamic network topology. It is well known that end-to-end routing is suitable for networks with non-intermittent (i.e., always connected) communication links. Also, it is well known that opportunistic routing is suitable for networks with highly intermittent communication links since the end-to-end path between the source and the destination nodes is not likely to exist. In this paper, we address the research question — for a given level of link intermittency, which of end-to-end routing and opportunistic routing is better than the other in terms of the average end-to-end message delivery delay? We try to answer this question through mathematical analysis. Specifically, we analytically derive average end-to-end message delivery delays with the end-to-end routing and the epidemic routing.
Identifying Supplementary Bug-fix Commits

Real-world bugs and the bug-fix activities are essential in many fields such as bug prediction and automatic program repair. Identifying bug-fix commits from version histories has received much recent attention. Linking commits to bug reports and analyzing the commits individually are common practice. However, considering the one-to-many relationship between the bug report and the bug-fix commits, analyzing commits individually will miss the relevance between commits, since several commits might fix the same bug together. In addition, some supplementary bug-fix commits which supplement or correct the identified bug-fix commit may be neglected. For empirical studies on bug-fix commits, it is important to study all the relevant commits as a whole, otherwise we will fail to understand the complete real bug-fix activities. In this paper, we investigate the relevance between bug-fix commits that are linked to the same bug-fix pull request, and utilize machine learning techniques to determine supplementary bug-fix commits for an identified bug-fix commit. Experimental results show that there indeed exist supplementary bug-fix commits (i.e., 19.8% on average) that are neglected when analyzing commits individually. The performance of our tool SupBCFinder is much better than that of using a sliding window of one hour and that of analyzing the local change. Moreover, inspired by our learning-based approach and extracted features, we propose one effective heuristic as an alternative for the cases when there are not enough pull requests for training.
Effects of Antiretroviral Therapy on Sperm DNA Integrity of HIV-1-Infected Men

HIV-1-affected couples’ desire to have children and free sexual intercourses with the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis for the negative partner has emerged as an alternative option to assisted reproduction in aviremic patients under highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). It is already known that sperm quality may be impaired in HIV-infected men. The underlying physiopathological mechanism is still debated. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of HAART on sperm DNA fragmentation, comparing HIV-1-infected patients taking HAART versus naïve HIV-1-infected patients. This is a prospective case-control study. Sperm nuclear DNA fragmentation rate was evaluated by the sperm chromatin dispersion test in 77 HIV-infected men: 53 HIV-1 patients receiving HAART (Group 1) versus 24 naïve HIV-1 patients not receiving HAART (Group 2). Complete semen analysis was performed according to WHO 2010 recommendations. Patients with HBV infection or HCV infection coinfections and genital tract infections wre excluded. All the patients did not present any clinical signs of their disease. Seminal parameters were examined in the two groups, showing no significant differences. Increased sperm DNA fragmentation > 30% was demonstrated in 67.9% of patients in Group 1 and 37.5% of patients in Group 2, respectively (p = .02). A positive but nonsignificant trend toward increased fragmentation was reported with advancing patients’ age. In conclusion, sperm nuclear fragmentation rate is increased in HIV-1-infected patients taking HAART compared to HIV-1 patients not receiving HAART.
Letter to the Editor

I read with interest this case report by Patini and colleagues. I have also encountered several patients with inflammation and necrosis associated with a Nance acrylic button on a trans-palatal arch. I have found that removal of the Nance button has been followed by reasonably rapid healing and resolution of the infection, without the need to prescribe systemic antibiotics. In these days of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, I believe that removal of the Nance and use of an antimicrobial mouthrinse is the most appropriate first course of action.