Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Visualization and Quantification of Mitochondrial Structure in the Endothelium of Intact Arteries.

Aims To quantify the mitochondrial structure of ECs in intact arteries vs. cultured cells. Methods and Results Cre-stop mito-Dendra2 mice, expressing the fluorescent protein Dendra2 in the mitochondrial matrix only, were used to label EC mitochondria using Cre-recombinase under the control of the VE-cadherin promoter. Conduit arteries, resistance arterioles and veins were fixed, mounted on glass slides and fluorescent images were obtained using a laser scanning confocal microscope (ex 488 nm; em 550 nm). ImageJ was used to calculate form factor (FF) and aspect ratio (AR) of the mitochondrial segments. Mitochondrial fragmentation count (MFC) was calculated by counting non-contiguous mitochondrial particles and dividing by the number of pixels which comprise the mitochondrial network. Primary aortic EC cultures (48 h on culture plates) were generated to compare the mitochondrial structure of cultured ECs vs. intact arteries. Aortic segments were also exposed to high glucose overnight (33 mM) ex vivo, and separate groups of mice were either infused with a high glucose saline solution (300 mM) via tail vein catheter for one hour or injected with Streptozotocin (STZ; 50 mg/kg) to cause hyperglycemia. Compared to cultured ECs, the mitochondria of ECs from the intact aorta were more fragmented (MFC: 6.4±2.5 vs. 18.6±9.4, respectively; p < 0.05). The mitochondrial segments of ECs within the aorta were more circular in shape (FF: 3.5±0.75 vs. 1.8±0.30, respectively; p < 0.05) and had less branching (AR: 2.9±0.60 vs. 2.0±0.25, respectively; p < 0.05) compared to cultured ECs. Ex vivo exposure of the intact aorta to high glucose overnight caused mitochondrial fission compared to normal glucose conditions (5 mM; MFC: 25.5±11.1 high glucose vs. 11.0±3.6 normal glucose; p < 0.05). Both one-hour infusion of high glucose saline (MFC: 22.4±4.3) and STZ treatment (MFC: 40.3±14.2) caused mitochondrial fission compared to freshly fixed aortas from control mice (MFC: 18.6±9.4; p < 0.05 vs. high glucose infusion and STZ treatment). Conclusions Using a novel mouse model, we were able to, for the first time, obtain high resolution images of EC mitochondrial structure in intact arteries. We reveal the endothelial mitochondrial network is more fragmented in the intact aorta compared to cultured ECs, indicating that mitochondria assume a more elongated and branched phenotype in cell culture.
Glycogen Synthase Kinase 3β Enhances Hepatitis C Virus Replication by Supporting miR-122

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is associated with alterations in host lipid and insulin signaling cascades, which are partially explained by a dependence of the HCV life cycle on key molecules in these metabolic pathways. Yet, little is known on the role in the HCV life cycle of glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3), one of the most important kinases in cellular metabolism. Therefore, the impact of GSK3 on the HCV life cycle was assessed in human hepatoma cell lines harboring subgenomic genotype 1b and 2a replicons or producing cell culture-derived HCV genotype 2a by exposure to synthetic GSK3 inhibitors, GSK3 gene silencing, overexpression of GSK3 constructs and immunofluorescence analyses. In addition, the role of GSK3 in hepatitis E virus (HEV) replication was investigated to assess virus specificity of the observed findings. We found that both inhibition of GSK3 function by synthetic inhibitors as well as silencing of GSK3β gene expression resulted in a decrease of HCV replication and infectious particle production, whereas silencing of the GSK3α isoform had no relevant effect on the HCV life cycle. Conversely, overexpression of GSK3β resulted in enhanced HCV replication. In contrast, GSK3β had no effect on replication of subgenomic HEV replicon. The pro-viral effect of GSK3β on HCV replication was mediated by supporting expression of microRNA-122 (miR-122), a micro-RNA which is mandatory for wild-type HCV replication, as GSK3 inhibitors suppressed miR-122 levels and as inhibitors of GSK3 had no antiviral effect on a miR-122-independent HCV mutant. In conclusion, we have identified GSK3β is a novel host factor supporting HCV replication by maintaining high levels of hepatic miR-122 expression.
The Level-1 Tile-Muon Trigger in the Tile Calorimeter upgrade program

The Tile Calorimeter (TileCal) is the central hadronic calorimeter of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). TileCal provides highly-segmented energy measurements for incident particles. Information from TileCal's outermost radial layer can assist in muon tagging in the Level-1 Muon Trigger by rejecting fake muon triggers due to slow charged particles (typically protons) without degrading the efficiency of the trigger. The main activity of the Tile-Muon Trigger in the ATLAS Phase-0 upgrade program was to install and to activate the TileCal signal processor module for providing trigger inputs to the Level-1 Muon Trigger. This report describes the Tile-Muon Trigger, focusing on the new detector electronics such as the Tile Muon Digitizer Board (TMDB) that receives, digitizes and then provides the signal from eight TileCal modules to three Level-1 muon endcap Sector-Logic Boards.
LSICC: A Large Scale Informal Chinese Corpus

Deep learning based natural language processing model is proven powerful, but need large-scale dataset. Due to the significant gap between the real-world tasks and existing Chinese corpus, in this paper, we introduce a large-scale corpus of informal Chinese. This corpus contains around 37 million book reviews and 50 thousand netizen's comments to the news. We explore the informal words frequencies of the corpus and show the difference between our corpus and the existing ones. The corpus can be further used to train deep learning based natural language processing tasks such as Chinese word segmentation, sentiment analysis.
Expressing formal rules within ontology-based models using SWRL: an application to the nuclear industry

Ontology-based models propose a new modelling paradigm for the industry. In this study, we explore the maturity of ontology-based models for industrial applications from a special point of view: the execution of business rules. Indeed, expressing and implementing rules nowadays is a crucial issue. We therefore propose an overview of the use of OWL-DL/SWRL approaches in the industry, as well as a critical overview of the execution of SWRL rules on an industrial use case in the nuclear industry.
Evaluation of the diagnostic performance of platelet-derived indices for the differential diagnosis of thrombocytopenia in pediatrics

Background. Platelet-derived indices have a well-established correlation with the differential diagnosis of thrombocytopenia in adult-based research. These indices include mean platelet volume, platelet distribution width, and platelet-large cell ratio. Objective. To determine the values of platelet-derived indices in a pediatric population with diagnoses of thrombocytopenia and their etiologic correlation. Materials and methods. Analytic observational diagnostictest study. The population for this analytical study was pediatric patients between 6 months and 18 years of age who had thrombocytopenia (<100x109/L). The study period was 18 months long. Results. Of 54 subjects, 18 (33.3%) were diagnosed with idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, and 36 (66.7%) were diagnosed with acute leukemia. Mean age was 7.4 years and 6.8 years for immune thrombocytopenic purpura and acute leukemia, respectively. Mean platelet distribution width values for immune thrombocytopenic purpura and acute leukemia were 15.08 fL and 10.73, respectively. Mean MPV for immune thrombocytopenic purpura and acute leukemia was 11.7 fL and 9.8 fL, respectively. Mean platelet-large cell ratio was 38.26% and 24.97% for idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura and acute leukemia, respectively. Differences in these three distinct platelet indices between idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura and acute leukemia were statistically significant (p=0.00). The area under the ROC curve for platelet-derived indices showed that they were adequate for defining the causes of thrombocytopenia. MPV and platelet-large cell ratio had an area under the curve of 0.89 and 0.88, respectively, while platelet size deviation width had an area under the curve of 0.903. Conclusions. Platelet-derived indices could be useful in the initial approach for the differential diagnosis of pediatric patients with thrombocytopenia.
Beyond One Glance: Gated Recurrent Architecture for Hand Segmentation

As mixed reality is gaining increased momentum, the development of effective and efficient solutions to egocentric hand segmentation is becoming critical. Traditional segmentation techniques typically follow a one-shot approach, where the image is passed forward only once through a model that produces a segmentation mask. This strategy, however, does not reflect the perception of humans, who continuously refine their representation of the world. In this paper, we therefore introduce a novel gated recurrent architecture. It goes beyond both iteratively passing the predicted segmentation mask through the network and adding a standard recurrent unit to it. Instead, it incorporates multiple encoder-decoder layers of the segmentation network, so as to keep track of its internal state in the refinement process. As evidenced by our results on standard hand segmentation benchmarks and on our own dataset, our approach outperforms these other, simpler recurrent segmentation techniques, as well as the state-of-the-art hand segmentation one. Furthermore, we demonstrate the generality of our approach by applying it to road segmentation, where it also outperforms other baseline methods.
Improving Sequence-to-sequence Voice Conversion by Adding Text-supervision

This paper presents methods of making using of text supervision to improve the performance of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) voice conversion. Compared with conventional frame-to-frame voice conversion approaches, the seq2seq acoustic modeling method proposed in our previous work achieved higher naturalness and similarity. In this paper, we further improve its performance by utilizing the text transcriptions of parallel training data. First, a multi-task learning structure is designed which adds auxiliary classifiers to the middle layers of the seq2seq model and predicts linguistic labels as a secondary task. Second, a data-augmentation method is proposed which utilizes text alignment to produce extra parallel sequences for model training. Experiments are conducted to evaluate our proposed method with training sets at different sizes. Experimental results show that the multi-task learning with linguistic labels is effective at reducing the errors of seq2seq voice conversion. The data-augmentation method can further improve the performance of seq2seq voice conversion when only 50 or 100 training utterances are available.
Building a New Intimate Relationship After Experiencing Intimate Partner Violence in Victim-Survivors of South Korea

Intimate partner violence (IPV) refers to harmful acts occurring among members of an intimate relationship. Many studies have explored individuals’ experiences of IPV as well as its consequences; however, so far, few studies have explored the lives of IPV victim-survivors after escaping from the violent relationship and the experiences of building new intimate relationships. Thus, the purpose of this study was to understand the young female adults’ experience of building a new intimate relationship after ending their abusive relationship. This study used a qualitative phenomenological design to understand the women’s lived experiences in their own voices, as suggested by Giorgi. In total, 13 young female adults in South Korea were recruited and interviewed. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Drawing on the interview data, we constructed the structure of their experiences through identifying five themes: (I) having difficulty in meeting new people, (II) starting to build a new relationship based on trauma, (III) struggling to escape the boundaries of the abuser, (IV) learning about healthy intimate relationships, and (V) something’s wrong again. The findings were meaningful in that they showed how victim-survivors clearly needed care and support even after they escaped from their abusive relationships and began new ones. In addition, we found that some of them entered into another abusive relationship with their new partners. Finally, this study informs researchers and health professionals across the world about the experiences of IPV victims within specific cultural background. We hope that the findings of this study will contribute to building various interventions and programs for victim-survivors of IPV.
Modular and deep QoE/QoS mapping for multimedia services over satellite networks

Satellite networks are promising alternatives to deal with the increasing traffic volume and provide universal access for end users. Quality of experience (QoE) as an aggregate of user perception and network quality will be a critical success factor for multimedia service delivery over satellite networks. Quality of experience prediction based on quality of service (QoS) has received much attention recently, but it has been little investigated in satellite networks. In this paper, on the basis of the modular neural network and deep belief networks (DBNs), we design a QoE/QoS mapping method for multimedia services over satellite networks to translate QoS parameters into user QoE. The task of QoE/QoS mapping for multimedia services is decomposed into several different subtasks by using traffic classification. Heterogeneous DBNs are used to learn the mapping relationships between QoE and QoS for different types of services (ie, subtask) simultaneously. An integrative approach based on relative distance is exploited to select subneural network(s) to predict resulting QoE collaboratively. To determine the weight parameters of the QoE/QoS correlation model, the dataset composed of QoS parameters and subjective opinion scores is built on the basis of satellite network simulator and subjective test. Finally, the effectiveness of our QoE/QoS mapping method is validated, and the relationship between adoption rating and opinion scores is analyzed.
HistoScale: An Efficient Approach for Computing Pseudo-Cartograms

Nowadays, two types of maps, the so-called Thematic Map and Choropleth Map, are used in Cartography and GISSystems. Thematic Maps are used to emphasize the spatial distribution of one or more geographic attributes. Popular thematic maps are the Choropleth Maps (Greek: choro = area, pleth = value), in which enumeration or data collection units are shaded to represent different magnitudes of a variable. Besides, the statistical values are often encoded as colored regions on these maps. On both types of maps, high values are often concentrated in densely populated areas, and low statistical values are spread out over sparsely populated areas. These maps, therefore, tend to highlight patterns in large areas, which may, however, be of low importance. A cartogram can then be seen as a generalization of a familiar land-covering choropleth map. According to this interpretation, an arbitrary parameter vector gives the intended sizes of the cartogram’s regions, that is, a familiar land-covering choropleth map is simply a cartogram whose regions sizes proportional to the land area. In addition to the classical applications mentioned above, a key motivation for cartograms as a general information visualization technique is to have a method for trading off shape and area adjustments. PseudoCartograms provide an efficient and convenient approximation of cartograms, since a complete computation of cartograms is expensive. In this poster, we propose an efficient method called HistoScale to compute Pseudo-Cartograms.
Classification of landslide surfaces using fully polarimetric SAR: examples from Taiwan

Landslides typically denude forested hillsides, changing dominant scattering from multiple- to single-bounce. SAR polarimetry can be used to determine the dominant scattering mechanism of the terrain on a per pixel basis. Thus, hillslopes affected by landslides may be distinguished easily from adjacent, unaffected hillslopes. Based on the polarimetric eigenvalue decomposition and the relative amplitudes of scattering matrix terms, dominant scattering mechanisms can be determined. These mechanisms - odd- or single-bounce (bare surface), double- or even-bounce, and volume (diffuse) scattering - describe the total radar returns for each pixel. The modified approach of Kim and van Zyl (2001) include the radar vegetation index, pedestal height and entropy, all representative of forest. Our analysis follows Kim and van Zyl to reveal that at L-band, the landslide scar areas of the Tsaolong and Mt. Jou-Feng-Err mega-slides are dominated by single-bounce scattering and the surrounding forested regions are dominated by volume scattering. In addition, fully polarimetric SAR is sensitive to reforestation in tropical jungle environments as demonstrated by comparison with a panchromatic Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) image. Inversion of SAR polarimetry for terrain scattering mechanisms offers a new approach for landslide mapping that has significant operational advantages over traditional methods that rely on optical sensors for rapid response to and management of landslide disasters.
Revisiting the chemistry of star formation

Les etudes astrochimiques de la formation stellaire sont particulierement importantes pour la comprehension de l'evolution de l'Univers, du milieu interstellaire diffus a la formation des systemes stellaires. Les recentes avancees en matiere de modelisation chimique permettent d'apporter de nouveaux resultats sur le processus de formation stellaire et les structures mises en jeu. L'objectif de ma these etait donc d'apporter un regard neuf sur la chimie de la formation stellaire en utilisant les recentes avancees sur le modele chimique Nautilus. J'ai pour cela etudie l'evolution de la chimie du soufre durant la formation stellaire pour tenter d'apporter de nouvelles reponses au probleme de depletion du soufre. J'ai d'abord effectue une revision du reseau chimique soufre et etudie son effet sur la modelisation du soufre dans les nuages denses. En comparant aux observations, j'ai montre que le modele textsc{Nautilus} etait capable de reproduire les abondances des especes soufrees dans les nuages denses en utilisant comme abondance elementaire de soufre son abondance cosmique. Ce resultat m'a permis d'apporter de nouveaux indices sur les reservoirs de soufre dans ces objets. Puis j'ai effectue une etude complete de la chimie du souffre dans les coeurs chauds en me concentrant sur les effets sur la chimie de la composition pre-effondrement. J'ai egalement etudie les consequences des differentes simplifications couramment faites pour la modelisation des coeurs chauds. Mes resultats montrent que la composition pre-effondrement est un parametre majeur de l'evolution chimique des coeurs chauds, fournissant de nouveaux indices pour expliquer la variete de compositions en especes soufrees observee dans ces objets. De plus, ma recherche a mis en evidence la necessite d'uniformiser les modeles de chimie utilises pour les coeurs chauds. Enfin, j'ai developpe une methode efficace pour inverser les parametres initiaux d'effondrement de nuages denses en me basant sur une base de donnees de modeles physico-chimiques d'effondrement, ainsi que sur l'observation d'enveloppes de protoetoiles de Classe 0. A partir d'un echantillon de 12 sources, j'ai pu en deduire des probabilites concernant les possibles parametres initiaux d'effondrement de la formation d'etoiles de faible masse.
Distributionally Robust Chance Constrained Geometric Optimization

This paper discusses distributionally robust geometric programs with individual or joint chance constraints. Several groups of uncertainty sets are considered: uncertainty sets with first two order moments information; uncertainty sets with known first order or first two order moments information under nonnegative support; uncertainty sets constrained by the Kullback–Leibler divergence with a normal or discrete reference distribution; uncertainty sets constrained by the Wasserstein distance under discrete, full, or nonnegative real-space support; and joint uncertainty sets for the product of random variables. Under each group of uncertainty sets, we find deterministic reformulations of the distributionally robust geometric programs with individual or joint chance constraints. Convexity, solution methods, and relationships of the reformulation programs are discussed. Finally, numerical tests are carried out on a shape optimization problem.
Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network: A Survey

Space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN), as an integration of satellite systems, aerial networks, and terrestrial communications, has been becoming an emerging architecture and attracted intensive research interest during the past years. Besides bringing significant benefits for various practical services and applications, SAGIN is also facing many unprecedented challenges due to its specific characteristics, such as heterogeneity, self-organization, and time-variability. Compared to traditional ground or satellite networks, SAGIN is affected by the limited and unbalanced network resources in all three network segments, so that it is difficult to obtain the best performances for traffic delivery. Therefore, the system integration, protocol optimization, resource management, and allocation in SAGIN is of great significance. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present the state-of-the-art of the SAGIN since existing survey papers focused on either only one single network segment in space or air, or the integration of space-ground, neglecting the integration of all the three network segments. In light of this, we present in this paper a comprehensive review of recent research works concerning SAGIN from network design and resource allocation to performance analysis and optimization. After discussing several existing network architectures, we also point out some technology challenges and future directions.
Chemical Constituents and C ytotoxic activity of Cassia glauca Lan . L eaves

The defatted 85 % methanolic extract from the leaves of Cassia gluaca Lan. (Family Leguminaceae) s howed high cytotoxic effect against liver carcinoma cell line (HepG2) ( IC 50 = 17 μg / ml) . Therefore this extract was fractionated using different organic solvents; chloroform, ethyl acetate and n - butanol . Each fraction was submitted to chromatographic separation and the structure of the isolated compounds were elucidated using physica l properties and certain spectroscopic analysis. From the chloroform fraction , three compounds ; Di - (2 - ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) (1), apigenin (2) and luteolin (3) were isolated . Q uercetin (4) , quercetin - 3 - O - β - D - glucopyranoside (5) and kaempferol - 3 - O - rut inoside (6) were isolated and identified from ethyl acetate fraction whereas from the n - butanol fraction three compounds were identified as D (+) - pinitol (7) , quercetin - 3 - O - α - L - rhamnopyranosyl - (1 → 6) - β - D - glucopyranoside (Rutin) (8) and quercetin - 3 - O - (α - L - r hamnopyronosyl - (1→2) - α - L - rhamnopyronosyl - (1→6) - ) - β - D - glucopyronoside (9). The cytotoxicity of the isolated compounds 5, 6 and 9 was evaluated against Hep G2 cell lines . The results showed that the three compounds 5, 6 and 9 have promising cytotoxicity with IC 50 = 16.1, 14.3 and 15.2 μg /ml respectively. From the above results and our previous reports, the methanol extract of the leaves of Cassia glauca could be used as promising antioxidant and anticancer agent after more in vitro and in vivo studies. ( Mortad a M. El - Sayed; Maher M. Abdel - Aziz; Mahfouz M. Abdel - Gawad; El - Sayed S. Abdel - Hameed; Wafaa S. Ahmed; Ezzat E. Abdel - Lateef . Chemical Constituents and Cytotoxic activity of Cassia glauca Lan . Leaves . Life Sci J 2013; 10(3): 1617 - 162 5 ) (ISSN: 1097 - 8135). http://www.lifesciencesite. com . 2 43