Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimizing CNN Model Inference on CPUs

The popularity of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and the ubiquity of CPUs imply that better performance of CNN model inference on CPUs can deliver significant gain to a large number of users. To improve the performance of CNN inference on CPUs, current approaches like MXNet and Intel OpenVINO usually treat the model as a graph and use the high-performance libraries such as Intel MKL-DNN to implement the operations of the graph. While achieving reasonable performance on individual operations from the off-the-shelf libraries, this solution makes it inflexible to conduct optimizations at the graph level, as the local operation-level optimizations are predefined. Therefore, it is restrictive and misses the opportunity to optimize the end-to-end inference pipeline as a whole. This paper presents \emph{NeoCPU}, a comprehensive approach of CNN model inference on CPUs that employs a full-stack and systematic scheme of optimizations. \emph{NeoCPU} optimizes the operations as templates without relying on third-parties libraries, which enables further improvement of the performance via operation- and graph-level joint optimization. Experiments show that \emph{NeoCPU} achieves up to 3.45$\times$ lower latency for CNN model inference than the current state-of-the-art implementations on various kinds of popular CPUs.
“Holes” in the Jaw—A Report of Two Cases of Periapical Actinomycosis

Periapical actinomycosis is a relatively rare form of cervicofacial actinomycosis, which typically involves the periapical region with subsequent potential spread to the jaw bones. We hereby present two cases of periapical actinomycosis. Both patients presented with jaw pain and “holes” in their gum and lacked the characteristic clinical features commonly seen in cervicofacial actinomycosis such as jaw mass, draining ulcers, sinuses and fistulae. The first patient was an immunocompetent host with chronic stable medical conditions but with a rather bad dentition requiring multiple recent teeth extractions. The second patient was edentulous, had refractory multiple myeloma, was on low-dose chronic steroids and pomalidomide therapy and therefore relatively immunocompromised. Both cases of actinomycosis were diagnosed by jaw bone histopathology, which showed characteristic sulfur granules and embedded Actinomyces-like organisms. The two patients had excellent clinical response to six months of penicillin therapy without any need for surgical intervention. The cases remind clinicians of including actinomycosis in the differential diagnosis of periapical lesions and illustrates the possibility of achieving cure with non-surgical treatment.
Mixed Thymoma in an American Robin (Turdus migratorius)

Abstract A mixed thymoma was diagnosed in a 15-year-old female American robin (Turdus migratorius) that exhibited poor body condition, dysphagia, hyporexia, and depression. A 1.5-cm subcutaneous nodule was present in the cranio-ventral cervical region, which had been noticed by the owner 15 days before presentation. On cytologic evaluation of a fine-needle aspirate, well-differentiated lymphocytes were observed. Surgical excision was elected; however, the mass was firmly attached to the esophagus and the jugular vein, and the attempt at excision resulted in fatal hemorrhage. On histologic examination of the mass, small, well-differentiated lymphocytes were observed mixed with neoplastic reticular cells and Hassall's corpuscles. On immunohistochemical analysis, the cytoplasm of 80% of the reticular cells showed abundant detectable brown antigen binding with pancytokeratin staining, and most lymphoid cells showed detectable antigen in the cytoplasm by using CD3 antibodies. The cytologic, histopathologic, and immunohistochemical features of the neoplasm in this robin were consistent with a mixed thymoma.
Tea in Benefits of Health: A Literature Analysis Using Text Mining and Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Tea originated in Asian, which was initially used as a medicinal herb. The variety of tea is according to different manufacturing processes and levels of oxidation. The different varieties of tea have different level of effects on health, thus this study adopted text mining technique and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to analyze literature for tea in health effect. This study chose Web of Science as the database of literature source, and the search literature from 2007 to 2017. The total 1230 journal articles were collected in this study. The title, abstract, and keywords of the collected journal articles were used as a dataset for the experiment. Experimental results show that the VEM method is significantly lower than Gibbs sampling in perplexity. Hence, this study chooses K=150 when VEM method and Gibbs sampling reach the minimal perplexity in the same time. Many topics that related with tea and compounds of tea, however some topics had terms that related to health and disease. The top 10 topics show that tea could reduce the risk of diseases and benefit of health.
Oxytocin reduces neural activation in response to infant faces in nulliparous young women

Abstract Infant faces have distinctive features that together are described as baby schema, a configuration that facilitates caregiving motivation and behavior, and increases the perception of cuteness. In the current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated the effect of a within‐subjects intranasal oxytocin administration (24 IU) and caregiving motivation on neural responses to infant faces of varying baby schema in 23 healthy nulliparous women. Overall, infant faces elicited activation in several brain regions involved in reward and salience processing, including the ventral tegmental area (VTA), putamen, amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and insula, and this activation was related to self‐reported caregiving motivation. Critically, whereas we hypothesized enhanced neural caregiving‐related responses after oxytocin administration, we observed reduced activation in the VTA, putamen and amygdala after oxytocin compared to placebo. In nulliparous women, oxytocin has been shown to reduce neural responses in the same regions in response to social stimuli using other paradigms. Oxytocin might affect neural activation toward social stimuli depending on elicited arousal and personal characteristics. The current study is the first to demonstrate this effect in response to infant faces and thereby adds to specify the role of oxytocin in human social information processing.
Safety of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation of Frontal, Parietal, and Cerebellar Regions in Fasting Healthy Adults

(1) Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation modality that has been investigated in a large number of studies in terms of it is effects on brain function, safety of use, and future implications. The principal aim of this study was to investigate the safety of 1.5-mA tDCS of three brain areas, that is, frontal, partial, and cerebellar cortices, in fasting healthy individuals during the month of Ramadan. (2) Methods: In a single-blinded, sham-controlled study, we assessed the safety of a 20-min tDCS current (1.5 mA, 35 cm2) over the right frontal, parietal, and cerebellar cortex areas after 8 h of fasting in healthy right-handed adult subjects using a standard safety questionnaire. (3) Results: A total of 49 subjects completed the tDCS sessions and safety questionnaire. None of the sessions were stopped due to pain or discomfort during stimulation. Moreover, no subject experienced serious adverse events such as seizures or loss of consciousness. (4) Conclusions: There was no significant difference in the frequency or type of side effects between active and sham stimulation sessions. The tDCS protocol applied in this study was found to be safe in fasting healthy adults.
Neural Basis of Dispositional Awe

Awe differs from common positive emotions, triggered by vast stimuli, and characterized by a need for accommodation (NFA). Although studies have revealed the downstream effects of awe experience, little is known about the neural basis of dispositional awe. In the current study, we determined the neural correlation of dispositional awe by using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in 42 young healthy adults, as measured by the Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale (DPES). Results revealed that the dispositional awe score was negatively associated with the regional gray matter volume (rGMV) in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), middle/posterior cingulate cortex (MCC/PCC) and middle temporal gyrus (MTG). These results suggest that individual differences in dispositional awe involve multiple brain regions related to attention, conscious self-regulation, cognitive control and social emotion. This study is the first to provide evidence for the structural neural basis of individual differences in dispositional awe.
Tissue plasminogen activator promotes white matter integrity and functional recovery in a murine model of traumatic brain injury

Significance Tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is employed in stroke patients to lyse blood clots, but its therapeutic potential in brain trauma victims is far from settled, partly due to fears of internal bleeding. The long-term effects of tPA upon the white matter of the brain and neurological outcomes after head trauma are also uncertain. To address these gaps, we performed electrophysiological, anatomical, and behavioral studies in genetically modified or wild-type mice subjected to traumatic brain injury and infused tPA through the nose. We found that natural or synthetic forms of tPA protect or repair white matter tracts without magnifying internal bleeding. Thus, tPA treatment after brain injury promotes communication across neuronal networks through nerve fiber tracts and improves long-term adaptive behavior. Recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is a Food and Drug Administration-approved thrombolytic treatment for ischemic stroke. tPA is also naturally expressed in glial and neuronal cells of the brain, where it promotes axon outgrowth and synaptic plasticity. However, there are conflicting reports of harmful versus neuroprotective effects of tPA in acute brain injury models. Furthermore, its impact on white matter integrity in preclinical traumatic brain injury (TBI) has not been thoroughly explored, although white matter disruption is a better predictor of long-term clinical outcomes than focal lesion volumes. Here we show that the absence of endogenous tPA in knockout mice impedes long-term recovery of white matter and neurological function after TBI. tPA-knockout mice exhibited greater asymmetries in forepaw use, poorer sensorimotor balance and coordination, and inferior spatial learning and memory up to 35 d after TBI. White matter damage was also more prominent in tPA knockouts, as shown by diffusion tensor imaging, histological criteria, and electrophysiological assessments of axon conduction properties. Replenishment of tPA through intranasal application of the recombinant protein in tPA-knockout mice enhanced neurological function, the structural and functional integrity of white matter, and postinjury compensatory sprouting in corticofugal projections. tPA also promoted neurite outgrowth in vitro, partly through the epidermal growth factor receptor. Both endogenous and exogenous tPA protected against white matter injury after TBI without increasing intracerebral hemorrhage volumes. These results unveil a previously unappreciated role for tPA in the protection and/or repair of white matter and long-term functional recovery after TBI.
Memory buddies: exploiting page sharing for smart colocation in virtualized data centers

Many data center virtualization solutions, such as VMware ESX, employ content-based page sharing to consolidate the resources of multiple servers. Page sharing identifies virtual machine memory pages with identical content and consolidates them into a single shared page. This technique, implemented at the host level, applies only between VMs placed on a given physical host. In a multiserver data center, opportunities for sharing may be lost because the VMs holding identical pages are resident on different hosts. In order to obtain the full benefit of content-based page sharing it is necessary to place virtual machines such that VMs with similar memory content are located on the same hosts. In this paper we present Memory Buddies, a memory sharingaware placement system for virtual machines. This system includes a memory fingerprinting system to efficiently determine the sharing potential among a set of VMs, and compute more efficient placements. In addition it makes use of live migration to optimize VM placement as workloads change.We have implemented a prototype Memory Buddies system with VMware ESX Server and present experimental results on our testbed, as well as an analysis of an extensive memory trace study. Evaluation of our prototype using a mix of enterprise and e-commerce applications demonstrates an increase of data center capacity (i.e. number of VMs supported) of 17%, while imposing low overhead and scaling to as many as a thousand servers.
Discerning depressive symptoms in patients with obstructive sleep apnea: the effect of continuous positive airway pressure therapy on Hamilton Depression Rating Scale symptoms

The assessment of depression in obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is confounded by the overlap in symptoms between the disorders. However, previous analysis by our group has suggested that while some depressive symptoms tend to overlap with OSA (such as insomnia, lethargy, impaired concentration, psychomotor retardation) other, nonoverlapping symptoms appear more specific to depression (such as negative affect, anhedonia, and depressive cognitions). We sought to determine the value of such categorization of depressive symptoms in identifying clinical depression within OSA patient populations by examining the response of these two categories of depression symptoms to treatment of OSA by continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). Three hundred fifty-seven unselected, CPAP-naïve OSA patients were treated with CPAP and followed over 12 weeks. Depressive symptoms were elicited before, during and at the end of this period using the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D). Data were analyzed using latent growth curve modeling. At baseline, individuals reported proportionally more severe overlapping than nonoverlapping depressive symptoms. Both overlapping and nonoverlapping symptoms significantly decreased over time, but with a greater reduction in the severity of overlapping than nonoverlapping depressive symptoms. Moreover, greater CPAP use was associated with a faster rate of improvement in overlapping symptoms, but not in nonoverlapping symptoms. These findings suggest that nonoverlapping depressive symptoms may be useful discriminators of clinical depression amongst patients with untreated, symptomatic OSA.
Expert-augmented actor-critic for ViZDoom and Montezumas Revenge

We propose an expert-augmented actor-critic algorithm, which we evaluate on two environments with sparse rewards: Montezumas Revenge and a demanding maze from the ViZDoom suite. In the case of Montezumas Revenge, an agent trained with our method achieves very good results consistently scoring above 27,000 points (in many experiments beating the first world). With an appropriate choice of hyperparameters, our algorithm surpasses the performance of the expert data. In a number of experiments, we have observed an unreported bug in Montezumas Revenge which allowed the agent to score more than 800,000 points.
Textual Analogy Parsing: What’s Shared and What’s Compared among Analogous Facts

To understand a sentence like “whereas only 10% of White Americans live at or below the poverty line, 28% of African Americans do” it is important not only to identify individual facts, e.g., poverty rates of distinct demographic groups, but also the higher-order relations between them, e.g., the disparity between them. In this paper, we propose the task of Textual Analogy Parsing (TAP) to model this higher-order meaning. Given a sentence such as the one above, TAP outputs a frame-style meaning representation which explicitly specifies what is shared (e.g., poverty rates) and what is compared (e.g., White Americans vs. African Americans, 10% vs. 28%) between its component facts. Such a meaning representation can enable new applications that rely on discourse understanding such as automated chart generation from quantitative text. We present a new dataset for TAP, baselines, and a model that successfully uses an ILP to enforce the structural constraints of the problem.
Acute reduction of lower‐body contractile function following a microbiopsy of m. vastus lateralis

Twenty‐three resistance trained men 18‐35 years (23 [3] years, 1.8 [0.1] m, 81 [10] kg body mass, 2.3 [1.1] years resistance training experience; mean [SD]) performed repeated maximal voluntary isometric squats (ISQ) and countermovement jumps (CMJ) pre‐ and +30 minutes post a unilateral microbiopsy of m. vastus lateralis. ISQ and CMJ were simultaneously measured by two force plates sampling ipsilateral (biopsied) and contralateral (non‐biopsied) limb force. Bilateral limb force (ipsilateral + contralateral) and imbalance (ipsilateral/bilateral) data are reported as % change from pre‐biopsy (mean [95% CI]). A post‐biopsy reduction in bilateral ISQ peak force (−17 [−23, −11] %; P < 0.001), ISQ rate of force development (RFD; −28 [−41, −15] %, P = 0.002) and CMJ peak take‐off force (−7 [−13, −1]%, P = 0.019) occurred. Imbalance was observed for ISQ peak force (3.2 [2.1, 4.3] %, P < 0.001), RFD (2.8 [1.6, 4.0] %, P < 0.001) and CMJ landing (3.3 [1.0, 5.6] %, P = 0.009), resultant of a force transfer from the ipsilateral (biopsied) to the contralateral (non‐biopsied) limb. These data suggest that in young, resistance trained men a modulatory influence on maximal voluntary static and dynamic lower‐body contractile function is evoked acutely (+30 minutes) following a microbiopsy of m. vastus lateralis.
Genome-Wide Identification and Functional Analyses of the CRK Gene Family in Cotton Reveals GbCRK18 Confers Verticillium Wilt Resistance in Gossypium barbadense

Cysteine-rich receptor-like kinases (CRKs) are a large subfamily of plant receptor-like kinases that play a critical role in disease resistance in plants. However, knowledge about the CRK gene family in cotton and its function against Verticillium wilt (VW), a destructive disease caused by Verticillium dahliae that significantly reduces cotton yields is lacking. In this study, we identified a total of 30 typical CRKs in a Gossypium barbadense genome (GbCRKs). Eleven of these (>30%) are located on the A06 and D06 chromosomes, and 18 consisted of 9 paralogous pairs encoded in the A and D subgenomes. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the GbCRKs could be classified into four broad groups, the expansion of which has probably been driven by tandem duplication. Gene expression profiling of the GbCRKs in resistant and susceptible cotton cultivars revealed that a phylogenetic cluster of nine of the GbCRK genes were up-regulated in response to V. dahliae infection. Virus-induced gene silencing of each of these nine GbCRKs independently revealed that the silencing of GbCRK18 was sufficient to compromise VW resistance in G. barbadense. GbCRK18 expression could be induced by V. dahliae infection or jasmonic acid, and displayed plasma membrane localization. Therefore, our expression analyses indicated that the CRK gene family is differentially regulated in response to Verticillium infection, while gene silencing experiments revealed that GbCRK18 in particular confers VW resistance in G. barbadense.
Lifestyle Modification in Secondary Prevention

Despite significant advances in medical technology and pharmacology, cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a major contributor to health care expenses and the leading cause of death in the United States. Patients with established CVD and their health care providers are challenged with achieving cardiovascular risk reduction to decrease the likelihood of recurrent cardiovascular events. This “secondary prevention” can be achieved, in part, through adherence to prescribed pharmacotherapies that favorably modify major coronary risk factors (ie, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, diabetes, and obesity). However, lifestyle modification can also be helpful in this regard, providing independent and additive benefits to the associated reductions in cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Accordingly, physicians and other health care providers should routinely counsel their coronary patients to engage in structured exercise and increased lifestyle physical activity, consume a heart-healthy diet, quit smoking and avoid secondhand smoke, and purposefully address psychosocial stressors that may elevate cardiovascular risk. These lifestyle interventions, either as an adjunct to medication therapy or independently in those patients where medications may be poorly tolerated, cost prohibitive, or ineffective, can significantly decrease cardiovascular mortality and the risk of recurrent cardiac events.
Generalized Linear Mixed Models for the Analysis of Categorical Data: A Case Study in Cognitive Psychology

The forced-choice response in the experiment is very common in cognitive psychology. This study provided in informal introduction to a method (generalized linear mixed models) for analysis a case about categorical data in binocular vison. The results showed that the two important factors (vertical disparity gradient and cue conflict) in binocular vision has significant influence in depth perception. Moreover, the results also revealed that the two factors have a positive effect on double fusion, but a negative effect on no fusion or single fusion. Additionally, the subjects' random effects should be involved in the model to estimate probability. These findings systematically suggested the relationship between the two factors and different depth perceptions, which corroborated and extended the previous researches.
Signaling specificity in the c-di-GMP-dependent network regulating antibiotic synthesis in Lysobacter

Abstract Enzymes controlling intracellular second messengers in bacteria, such as c-di-GMP, often affect some but not other targets. How such specificity is achieved is understood only partially. Here, we present a novel mechanism that enables specific c-di-GMP-dependent inhibition of the antifungal antibiotic production. Expression of the biosynthesis operon for Heat-Stable Antifungal Factor, HSAF, in Lysobacter enzymogenes occurs when the transcription activator Clp binds to two upstream sites. At high c-di-GMP levels, Clp binding to the lower-affinity site is compromised, which is sufficient to decrease gene expression. We identified a weak c-di-GMP phosphodiesterase, LchP, that plays a disproportionately high role in HSAF synthesis due to its ability to bind Clp. Further, Clp binding stimulates phosphodiesterase activity of LchP. An observation of a signaling complex formed by a c-di-GMP phosphodiesterase and a c-di-GMP-binding transcription factor lends support to the emerging paradigm that such signaling complexes are common in bacteria, and that bacteria and eukaryotes employ similar solutions to the specificity problem in second messenger-based signaling systems.