Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MUSEBERT: PRE-TRAINING OF MUSIC REPRESENTATION FOR MUSIC UNDERSTANDING AND CONTROLLABLE GENERATION

BERT has proven to be a powerful language model in natural language processing and established an effective pre-training & ﬁne-tuning methodology. We see that music, as a special form of language, can beneﬁt from such methodology if we carefully handle its highly-structured and polyphonic properties. To this end, we propose Muse-BERT and show that: 1) MuseBERT has detailed spec-iﬁcation of note attributes and explicit encoding of music relations, without presuming any pre-deﬁned sequential event order, 2) the pre-trained MuseBERT is not merely a language model, but also a controllable music generator, and 3) MuseBERT gives birth to various downstream music generation and analysis tasks with practical value. Experiment shows that the pre-trained model outperforms the baselines in terms of reconstruction likelihood and generation quality. We also demonstrate downstream applications including chord analysis, chord-conditioned texture generation, and accompaniment reﬁnement.
Characteristics of Fecal Microbiota and Machine Learning Strategy for Fecal Invasive Biomarkers in Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Background Early diagnosis and treatment of pediatric Inflammatory bowel disease (PIBD) is challenging due to the complexity of the disease and lack of disease specific biomarkers. The novel machine learning (ML) technique may be a useful tool to provide a new route for the identification of early biomarkers for the diagnosis of PIBD. Methods In total, 66 treatment naive PIBD patients and 27 healthy controls were enrolled as an exploration cohort. Fecal microbiome profiling using 16S rRNA gene sequencing was performed. The correlation between microbiota and inflammatory and nutritional markers was evaluated using Spearman’s correlation. A random forest model was used to set up an ML approach for the diagnosis of PIBD using 1902 markers. A validation cohort including 14 PIBD and 48 irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) was enrolled to further evaluate the sensitivity and accuracy of the model. Result Compared with healthy subjects, PIBD patients showed a significantly lower diversity of the gut microbiome. The increased Escherichia-Shigella and Enterococcus were positively correlated with inflammatory markers and negatively correlated with nutrition markers, which indicated a more severe disease. A diagnostic ML model was successfully set up for differential diagnosis of PIBD integrating the top 11 OTUs. This diagnostic model showed outstanding performance at differentiating IBD from IBS in an independent validation cohort. Conclusion The diagnosis penal based on the ML of the gut microbiome may be a favorable tool for the precise diagnosis and treatment of PIBD. A study of the relationship between disease status and the microbiome was an effective way to clarify the pathogenesis of PIBD.
Gastrocnemius Muscle Architecture in Elite Basketballers and Cyclists: A Cross-Sectional Cohort Study

Eccentric and concentric actions produce distinct mechanical stimuli and result in different adaptations in skeletal muscle architecture. Cycling predominantly involves concentric activity of the gastrocnemius muscles, while playing basketball requires both concentric and eccentric actions to support running, jumping, and landing. The aim of this study was to examine differences in the architecture of gastrocnemius medialis (GM) and gastrocnemius lateralis (GL) between elite basketballers and cyclists. A trained sonographer obtained three B-mode ultrasound images from GM and GL muscles in 44 athletes (25 basketballers and 19 cyclists; 24 ± 5 years of age). The images were digitized and average fascicle length (FL), pennation angle (θ), and muscle thickness were calculated from three images per muscle. The ratio of FL to tibial length (FL/TL) and muscle thickness to tibial length (MT/TL) was also calculated to account for the potential scaling effect of stature. In males, no significant differences were identified between the athletic groups in all parameters in the GM, but a significant difference existed in muscle thickness in the GL. In basketballers, GL was 2.5 mm thicker (95% CI: 0.7–4.3 mm, p = 0.011) on the left side and 2.6 mm thicker (95% CI: 0.6–5.7 mm, p = 0.012) on the right side; however, these differences were not significant when stature was accounted for (MT/TL). In females, significant differences existed in the GM for all parameters including FL/TL and MT/TL. Female cyclists had longer FL in both limbs (MD: 11.2 and 11.3 mm), narrower θ (MD: 2.1 and 1.8°), and thicker muscles (MD: 2.1 and 2.5 mm). For the GL, female cyclists had significantly longer FL (MD: 5.2 and 5.8 mm) and narrower θ (MD: 1.7 and 2.3°) in both limbs; no differences were observed in absolute muscle thickness or MT/TL ratio. Differences in gastrocnemius muscle architecture were observed between female cyclists and basketballers, but not between males. These findings suggest that participation in sport-specific training might influence gastrocnemius muscle architecture in elite female athletes; however, it remains unclear as to whether gastrocnemius architecture is systematically influenced by the different modes of muscle activation between these respective sports.
Early Thalamic Injury After Resuscitation From Severe Asphyxial Cardiac Arrest in Developing Rats

Children who survive cardiac arrest often develop debilitating sensorimotor and cognitive deficits. In animal models of cardiac arrest, delayed neuronal death in the hippocampal CA1 region has served as a fruitful paradigm for investigating mechanisms of injury and neuroprotection. Cardiac arrest in humans, however, is more prolonged than in most experimental models. Consequently, neurologic deficits in cardiac arrest survivors arise from injury not solely to CA1 but to multiple vulnerable brain structures. Here, we develop a rat model of prolonged pediatric asphyxial cardiac arrest and resuscitation, which better approximates arrest characteristics and injury severity in children. Using this model, we characterize features of microglial activation and neuronal degeneration in the thalamus 24 h after resuscitation from 11 and 12 min long cardiac arrest. In addition, we test the effect of mild hypothermia to 34°C for 8 h after 12.5 min of arrest. Microglial activation and neuronal degeneration are most prominent in the thalamic Reticular Nucleus (nRT). The severity of injury increases with increasing arrest duration, leading to frank loss of nRT neurons at longer arrest times. Hypothermia does not prevent nRT injury. Interestingly, injury occurs selectively in intermediate and posterior nRT segments while sparing the anterior segment. Since all nRT segments consist exclusively of GABA-ergic neurons, we asked if GABA-ergic neurons in general are more susceptible to hypoxic-ischemic injury. Surprisingly, cortical GABA-ergic neurons, like their counterparts in the anterior nRT segment, do not degenerate in this model. Hence, we propose that GABA-ergic identity alone is not sufficient to explain selective vulnerability of intermediate and posterior nRT neurons to hypoxic-ischemic injury after cardiac arrest and resuscitation. Our current findings align the animal model of pediatric cardiac arrest with human data and suggest novel mechanisms of selective vulnerability to hypoxic-ischemic injury among thalamic GABA-ergic neurons.
Flight Control System Using Backstepping Method for Space Transportation System

This paper presents a new adaptive flight control system using the backstepping method for a future space transportation system. A space transportation system using the backstepping method can be constructed with an expansion of a control system using feedback linearization with time-scale separation. It is difficult to obtain prior knowledge in detail, such as that regarding the aerodynamic forces and moments, and wind disturbances. Furthermore, the necessity of the derivative of pseudo-input is considered an issue in control systems using the backstepping method. Therefore, in this study, making use of a disturbance observer, we propose a method which can estimate dynamic properties of a vehicle and the derivative used as pseudo-input. Moreover, we attempt to guarantee the stability of the entire system, including the estimation mechanism, controller, and vehicle dynamics. We conducted numerical simulations to verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed system.
Protumorigenic Role of Elevated Levels of DNA Polymerase Epsilon Predicts an Immune-Suppressive Microenvironment in Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma

Increasing evidence indicates that DNA polymerase epsilon (POLE), which mediates DNA damage repair, is significantly associated with tumor prognosis. This study aimed to analyze POLE expression in tumor samples and its prognostic value for patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). We found significantly elevated POLE expression in ccRCC tissues compared with normal tissues of multiple independent cohorts. The POLE expression levels of 523 patients with ccRCC (The Cancer Genome Atlas RNA-seq data) and 179 patients with ccRCC with immunohistochemical data (Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center) were analyzed to investigate the prognostic implications of POLE expression. Cox regression analyses were implemented to explore the effect of POLE expression on the prognosis of pan-cancer. These findings revealed that elevated POLE expression levels significantly correlated with shorter overall survival (p < 0.001, n = 701) of patients with ccRCC. These data indicate that POLE expression may serve as a prognostic biomarker for cancers. Although POLE mutations were not significantly associated with survival benefits conferred upon patients with ccRCC, a CD4+ T cell-regulated immune microenvironment was significantly activated. Moreover, we found that POLE expression in cancers significantly correlated with an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, higher intratumoral heterogeneity, and expression of immune checkpoint genes PDCD1, CTLA4, and CD86, possibly mediated via the JAK/STAT and Notch signaling pathways. In conclusion, the present study is the first to our knowledge to indicate that elevated POLE expression is significantly associated with poor survival and an immune-suppressive tumor microenvironment in ccRCC. These findings suggest that POLE can serve as a biomarker for guiding molecular diagnosis and facilitating the development of novel individual therapeutic strategies for patients with advanced ccRCC.
Viscoelasticity Acts as a Marker for Tumor Extracellular Matrix Characteristics

Biological materials such as extracellular matrix scaffolds, cancer cells, and tissues are often assumed to respond elastically for simplicity; the viscoelastic response is quite commonly ignored. Extracellular matrix mechanics including the viscoelasticity has turned out to be a key feature of cellular behavior and the entire shape and function of healthy and diseased tissues, such as cancer. The interference of cells with their local microenvironment and the interaction among different cell types relies both on the mechanical phenotype of each involved element. However, there is still not yet clearly understood how viscoelasticity alters the functional phenotype of the tumor extracellular matrix environment. Especially the biophysical technologies are still under ongoing improvement and further development. In addition, the effect of matrix mechanics in the progression of cancer is the subject of discussion. Hence, the topic of this review is especially attractive to collect the existing endeavors to characterize the viscoelastic features of tumor extracellular matrices and to briefly highlight the present frontiers in cancer progression and escape of cancers from therapy. Finally, this review article illustrates the importance of the tumor extracellular matrix mechano-phenotype, including the phenomenon viscoelasticity in identifying, characterizing, and treating specific cancer types.
OPEN KINEMATIC CHAIN EXERCISES FOR SICK SCAPULA IN COMPETITIVE ASYMPTOMATIC OVER HEAD ATHLETES FOR 3 WEEKS

Background and Objective: SICK scapula may result in ineffective energy transfer, placing added stress on the tissues around the shoulder which must compensate for a weak link in the chain. This added stress may result in further muscle fatigue and tissue injury about the shoulder. Restoring and maintaining a stable scapular base is essential to rehabilitating the shoulder and returning to the sport. So the present study intends to study the effectiveness of open kinematic chain exercises on asymptomatic overhead athletes with SICK scapula. Methods:In the present experimental study 20 participants were included and received open kinematic chain exercise (OKC) protocol for 4 sessions per week for 3 weeks for 60 minutes with 20 minutes of warm and 10 minutes of cool down respectively. Pre and post intervention of Lateral Scapular Slide Test (LSST), Range of motion (ROM), Pectoralis muscle length, Davies Closed Kinetic Chain Upper Extremity Test (CKCUEST) and Functional Throwing Performance Index (FTPI) were assessed. Results: Pre and post intervention characteristics were analyzed by unpaired t test. The results showed significant improvement after 3 weeks of intervention in outcome measures LSST, FTPI, ROM, CKCUEST and Pectoralis Muscle Length. The level of significance was set at p<0.05 and p<0.001 as highly significant. Conclusion: Open kinematic chain exercises are effective for treating asymptomatic overhead athletes with SICK scapula.
Economic dispatch in view of the Clean Air Act of 1990

This paper discusses the impact of the enactment of the Clean Air Act of 1990 on the current industry practices as related to the economic dispatch problem. The problem was investigated in view of the new SO/sub 2/ emissions and underutilization constraints. Detailed problem formulations are presented and tools to evaluate different compliance plans and operation strategies are proposed. Test results on a large size power system are also included in the paper. >
Meta‐structured one‐unit‐cell epsilon negative antenna

This Letter presents a metamaterial‐based compact one‐unit‐cell epsilon negative zeroth‐order resonant antenna designed on a microstrip line. The size of the proposed antenna is only 7.85 mm × 18 mm (or 0.05λ0 × 0.12λ0) at 1.79 GHz owing to zeroth‐order resonance. Closed‐form design equations for the proposed antenna are provided based on the equivalent circuit employing transmission line theory considering radiation loss. The return losses based on circuit/EM simulations and measurement are in excellent agreement. The measured antenna bandwidth is 17 MHz (about 1%) and total gain is 2.6 dBi. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 51: 2991–2994, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.24751
Detecting Audio Adversarial Examples with Logit Noising

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are vulnerable to audio adversarial examples that attempt to deceive ASR systems by adding perturbations to benign speech signals. Although an adversarial example and the original benign wave are indistinguishable to humans, the former is transcribed as a malicious target sentence by ASR systems. Several methods have been proposed to generate audio adversarial examples and feed them directly into the ASR system (over-line). Furthermore, many researchers have demonstrated the feasibility of robust physical audio adversarial examples (over-air). To defend against the attacks, several studies have been proposed. However, deploying them in a real-world situation is difficult because of accuracy drop or time overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel method to detect audio adversarial examples by adding noise to the logits before feeding them into the decoder of the ASR. We show that carefully selected noise can significantly impact the transcription results of the audio adversarial examples, whereas it has minimal impact on the transcription results of benign audio waves. Based on this characteristic, we detect audio adversarial examples by comparing the transcription altered by logit noising with its original transcription. The proposed method can be easily applied to ASR systems without any structural changes or additional training. The experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to over-line audio adversarial examples as well as over-air audio adversarial examples compared with state-of-the-art detection methods.
Westworld: Fuzzing-Assisted Remote Dynamic Symbolic Execution of Smart Apps on IoT Cloud Platforms

Existing symbolic execution typically assumes the analyzer can control the I/O environment and/or access the library code, which, however, is not the case when programs run on a remote proprietary execution environment managed by another party. For example, SmartThings, one of the most popular IoT platforms, is such a cloud-based execution environment. For programmers who write automation applications to be deployed on IoT cloud platforms, it raises significant challenges when they want to systematically test their code and find bugs. We propose fuzzing-assisted remote dynamic symbolic execution, which uses dynamic symbolic execution as backbone and utilizes fuzzing when necessary to automatically test programs running in a remote proprietary execution environment over which the analyzer has little control. As a case study, we enable it for analyzing smart apps running on SmartThings. We have developed a prototype and the evaluation shows that it is effective in testing smart apps and finding bugs.
Dynamic Taint Analysis versus Obfuscated Self-Checking

Software protection in practice addresses the yearly loss of tens of billion USD for software manufacturers, a result of malicious end-users tampering with the software (”software cracking”). Software protection is prevalent in the gaming and license checking industries, and also relevant in the embedded and other industries. State of the art research in the area of software tamper protection against man-at-the-end (MATE) attackers focuses on the localization of integrity checks. The goal of this paper is a general assessment of the resilience of software self-checking, protected themselves by obfuscations against (1) (automated) detection and (2) (automated) bypass, without deobfuscating the code. Using dynamic taint analysis on a benchmark set of programs, we study how easy it is to detect and bypass combinations of self-checking and various obfuscation transformations. We aim at generalizing these findings across different programs rather than focusing on one particular program instance. To this end, we perform a set of controlled experiments using a data set of real-world programs, the MiBench suite and open-source games, and show that all of these can be broken by dynamic taint analysis attacks. To counter such attacks, we propose and implement improvements to an existing obfuscation implementation. We evaluate the implemented improvement and discuss the security-performance trade-offs.
FlexFilt: Towards Flexible Instruction Filtering for Security

As the complexity of software applications increases, there has been a growing demand for intra-process memory isolation. The commercially available intra-process memory isolation mechanisms in modern processors, e.g., Intel’s memory protection keys, trade-off between efficiency and security guarantees. Recently, researchers have tended to leverage the features with low security guarantees for intra-process memory isolation. Subsequently, they have relied on binary scanning and runtime binary rewriting to prevent the execution of unsafe instructions, which improves the security guarantees. Such intra-process memory isolation mechanisms are not the only security solutions that have to prevent the execution of unsafe instructions in untrusted parts of the code. In fact, we identify a similar requirement in a variety of other security solutions. Although binary scanning and runtime binary rewriting approaches can be leveraged to address this requirement, it is challenging to efficiently implement these approaches. In this paper, we propose an efficient and flexible hardware-assisted feature for runtime filtering of user-specified instructions. This flexible feature, called FlexFilt, assists with securing various isolation-based mechanisms. FlexFilt enables the software developer to create up to 16 instruction domains, where each instruction domain can be configured to filter the execution of user-specified instructions. In addition to filtering unprivileged instructions, FlexFilt is capable of filtering privileged instructions. To illustrate the effectiveness of FlexFilt compared to binary scanning approaches, we measure the overhead caused by scanning the JIT compiled code while browsing various webpages. We demonstrate the feasibility of FlexFilt by implementing our design on the RISC-V Rocket core, providing the Linux kernel support for it, and prototyping our full design on an FPGA.
A Novel Internal Dual-Polarized EBG Antenna for Indoor Reception of UHF Terrestrial Digital TV Broadcasting

A novel internal antenna has been developed for indoor reception of UHF terrestrial digital TV broadcasting. The overall size of some configurations of the new antenna is less than 2 cm3, and its weight is less than 1 gm. It is made of a flexible material that can be bent or folded and shaped in any form. It is an unbalanced resonant antenna that does not need a matching circuit. The new antenna can be fully embedded inside TV sets or portable computers. It has a bandwidth of about 68%. Thus, it can also cover the bands of GSM and CDMA, which is advantageous in case of portable computers. The new antenna is linearly polarized. It can be easily modified to be dual polarized by combining two orthogonal antennas with one or two feed points. The overall efficiency of some configurations of the new indoor digital TV receiving antenna is more than 80%, and its peak gain is about 2 dBi over the whole UHF band. The peak gain can be increased to more than 5 dBi by adding EBG (electromagnetic bandgap) structures. The EBG structure also increases the efficiency to around 90%.
Advanced System Resiliency Based on Virtualization Techniques for IoT Devices

An increasing number of powerful devices are equipped with network connectivity and are connected to the Internet of Things (IoT). Influenced by the steady growth of computing power of the devices, the paradigm of IoT-based service deployment is expected to change, following the example of cloud-based infrastructure: An embedded platform can be provided as-a-service to several independent application service suppliers. This fosters additional challenges concerning security and isolation. At the same time, recently revealed critical vulnerabilities like Ripple20 and Amnesia:33 show that embedded devices are not spared from wide-spread attacks. In this paper, we define new trusted computing concepts, focusing on privilege separation among several entities sharing one physical device. The concepts guarantee remote recovery capabilities within a bounded amount of time, even if notable portions of the software stack have been compromised. We derive a resilient system architecture suitable for the secure operation of multiple isolated services on one embedded device. We integrate an interface for detecting intrusions and anomalies to enable the automatic recovery of compromised devices and prototype our system on a Nitrogen8M development board. Our evaluation shows that the overhead in terms of network throughput and CPU performance is low so that we believe that our concept is a meaningful step towards more resilient future IoT devices.