Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhanced applicability of loop transformations

Data transfers and storage of large arrays in background memories are dominating contributors to the chip area and power consumption of all modern multimedia embedded systems. Modern high-level memory optimizations contribute to the cost-ef? cient realization of these systems. In these optimizations an important step involves loop transformations across the global program scope. These transformations can be performed on a geometrical model extracted from the program. The geometrical model captures all the memory access dependencies in the program. Loop transformations in general modify the order in which the iterations and statements within a loop body are executed. This could be bene? cial for different reasons such as enabling more parallelism or improving locality of the accessed data. Due to the limitations of current geometrical models, the applicability of the transformations is limited. In this dissertation, we propose several applicability-enhancing techniques for loop transformations. First, hierarchical rewriting separates and encapsulates the details of the application into functions, reducing the complexity of the problem by hiding undesired constructs. Second, we instantiate and extend the scenario technique for loop transformations. A scenario is de? ned as a selected set of paths in the program which we choose to exploit in the same way. A careful exploitation of scenario information, similar to inlining, path predication or hyperblock creation, can signi? cantly enlarge the exploration space for optimizations. Unlike path predication or inlining, however it can work across several conditional branches, merge several condition bodies, and still control the exponential code explosion. Applying scenarios introduces several tradeoffs. The most obvious is that of code duplication vs. more optimizations (similar to tail duplication during hyperblock creation) when additional loop transformations are enabled by scenario usage. The exploration space of the scenario creation technique grows exponentially with the number of paths in the control-? ow graph of the application. In this dissertation we propose several heuristics for the scenario creation technique. These heuristics have different time requirements and accuracy limitations. Thus the designer has the possibility to choose the heuristic based on his time and accuracy constraints and the size of the problem. In addition, most current (global scope) loop optimizations target the best solution for locality. In this dissertation we show that targeting the best solution for locality is not necessarily optimal for a particular platform instance, and that trade-offs should be involved during loop transformations when the platform is unknown. This dissertation provides real-life examples of trade-offs during loop transformations and gives an overview of the joint research work in high-lever estimators for loop transformations which will make the loop transformations trade-off oriented.
A Real Options Case Study on Technology Carve-Out Venture Valuation

FALL 2007 I nvestors in high-tech industries face a common issue: how to put a valuation on a technology based venture or project? Although classic investment valuation methods, such as discounted cash flow, are well understood, they tend to fail in this environment. Technology investments not only look into an uncertain future, they also have a business plan that is still flexible and subject to change. Both issues often make an investment decision a matter of a mere “judgment call. ” In this article, we provide a compelling solution to assist investors in high-tech investment decisions: the Real Options Toolkit. This model allows one to capture and evaluate the flexibility of managers to adjust their strategy to alterations in the uncertain high-tech environment. This type of managerial flexibility is modeled as a “real option. ” Based on the actual investment case of SemCo. , a technology carve-out venture, we give clear guidelines on when and how to use real options analysis to evaluate technology-driven investment decisions. Beyond its appeal for pure investment valuation, the real options framework also provides another insight: the hidden “option value” in a technology investment does not just unfold by itself. Managers need to understand its logic in order to actively leverage and capture the value of their flexibility. REAL OPTIONS CAN MAKE A STRIKING DIFFERENCE IN TECHNOLOGY VALUATION
Effect of Friction Stir Forming Process Parameters on Mechanical Interlock between A5083Alloy and Ultra-Thin Stainless Steel Strands

Fibre-reinforced materials have gathered attention because of their significant properties such as heat resistance, abrasion resistance and specific strength. The present study proposes a new method of joining stainless steel strands with an aluminium alloy using friction stir forming and analyses the formation of a fibre-reinforced aluminium alloy composite material. Mechanical interlocks between the strands and the aluminium alloy are evaluated based on cross-sectional microstructure observations and EDS analysis. The tensile test indicated an increasing tendency of strength by increasing the number of strands and bending tests showed that higher strength is achieved in rare bend because of inhomogeneous grain distribution after friction stir forming (FSF).
Development of Clove Oil In Situ Gels for Buccal Mucoadhesive

Clove oil is the volatile essential oil obtained from Syzygium aromaticum. Eugenol, which is the main component, has antimicrobial, antifungal activity and antioxidant. From antiseptic activity, clove oil can be used in treatment of oral cavity infection. The aims of this research are to formulate and evaluate clove oil mucoadhesive gel for oral applications. Gel bases were prepared from Poloxamer 407 (P407). The effect of clove oil, P407 and xanthan gum on formulations were studied. Clove oil preparations were evaluated for their physicochemical properties (physical appearance, pH, viscosity, gelling capacity and gel dissolving time at 37 °C in artificial saliva). Mucoadhesive property was studied using porcine buccal mucosa. The amount of eugenol in clove oil was analyzed by gas chromatography (GC). Stability study of clove oil gel was performed under stress and room temperature conditions (1 month). The results showed that preparations containing 0% and 1% clove oil were in situ gel while those containing 3% and 5% clove oil were gel. All formulations showed good and clear physical appearance with the pH value of 5.2. The gelling capacity and gel dissolving time of more than 15 minutes in artificial saliva at 37°C was found in all preparations. They also showed mucoadhesive property. The GC results showed that the amount of eugenol in clove oil were 99.52 ± 0.51 %V/V. The preparations containing 1% clove oil showed good physical and chemical stability after storage at room temperature for 1 month. There was no significant difference in the amount of eugenol after storage (p>0.05). In conclusion, the preparations containing 20% P407 and 1% clove oil are the most appropriate formulation.
Marine Heatwave Stress Test of Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management in the Gulf of Alaska Pacific Cod Fishery

In 2014–2016 an unprecedented warming event in the North Pacific Ocean triggered changes in ecosystem of the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) impacting fisheries management. The marine heatwave was noteworthy in its geographical extent, depth range, and persistence, with evidence of shifts in species distribution and reduced productivity. In 2017 a groundfish survey indicated that GOA Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) had experienced a 71% decline in abundance from the previous 2015 survey. The GOA Pacific cod fishery supports a $103 million fishery which is 29% of the groundfish harvest value in the GOA. In this paper, we demonstrate that an increase in metabolic demand during this extended marine heatwave as well as a reduced prey supply can explain the decline in GOA Pacific cod biomass. Although increased mortality likely led to the decline in the Pacific cod population, historically low recruitment concurrent with the heatwave portends a slow recovery for the stock and gives a preview of impacts facing this region due to climate change. We evaluate the intersection of climate change with ecosystem-based fisheries management in the context of GOA Pacific cod with a description of the sensitivities of the ecosystem, how the changes in the ecosystem affected the Pacific cod stock, and a description of how the management system in the North Pacific handled this shock. We also provide suggestions on how fisheries management systems could be improved to better contend with the impacts of climate change such as the effects of heatwaves like that experienced in 2014–2016.
Expression and Role of the G Protein-Coupled Estrogen Receptor (GPR30/GPER) in the Development and Immune Response in Female Reproductive Cancers

Cancer is a major public health issue and represents the second leading cause of death in women worldwide, as female reproductive-related neoplasms are the main cause of incidence and mortality. Female reproductive cancers have a close relationship to estrogens, the principal female sex steroid hormones. Estrogens exert their actions by the nuclear estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) and estrogen receptor beta (ERβ). ERα, and ERβ act as transcription factors mediating genomic effects. Besides, the G protein-coupled estrogen receptor (GPER, formerly known as GPR30) was recently described as a seven-transmembrane receptor that mediates non-genomic estrogenic signaling, including calcium mobilization, cAMP synthesis, cleavage of matrix metalloproteinases, transactivation of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), and the subsequent activation of PI3K and MAPK signaling pathways, which are the reasons why it is related to cellular processes, such as cell-cycle progression, cellular proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, migration, and invasion. Since its discovery, selective agonists and antagonists have been found and developed. GPER has been implicated in a variety of hormone-responsiveness tumors, such as breast, endometrial, ovarian, cervical, prostate, and testicular cancer as well as lung, hepatic, thyroid, colorectal, and adrenocortical cancers. Nevertheless, GPER actions in cancer are still debatable due to the conflicting information that has been reported to date, since many reports indicate that activation of this receptor can modulate carcinogenesis. In contrast, many others show that its activation inhibits tumor activity. Besides, estrogens play an essential role in the regulation of the immune system, but little information exists about the role of GPER activation on its modulation within cancer context. This review focuses on the role that the stimulation of GPER plays in female reproductive neoplasms, specifically breast, endometrial, ovarian, and cervical cancers, in its tumor activity and immune response regulation.
Roles of the PTP61F Gene in Regulating Energy Metabolism of Tribolium castaneum (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae)

Protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B) is a negative regulator in the insulin signaling pathway. It belongs to a class of non-receptor phosphatases of protein tyrosine phosphatase and can catalyze the dephosphorylation of tyrosine to regulate cell differentiation, growth, and metabolism. However, few studies have focused on the role of PTP1B in regulating energy metabolism of insects. In this study, we investigated the expression profiles and the functions of a PTP1B gene (designated TcPTP61F) in the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum. Quantitative real-time PCR analyzed showed that TcPTP61F was highly expressed in the pupal and adult stages. In adult tissues, TcPTP61F was prominently expressed in the tarsus and head. RNA interference-mediated silencing of TcPTP61F reduced the expression of eight genes in trehalose metabolic and glycolytic pathways. TcPTP61F depletion also caused a significant change in the distribution of trehalose, glucose, and glycogen. Additionally, knockdown of TcPTP61F inhibited the pyruvate kinase (PK) activity and significantly decreased the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) level. The results suggest that TcPTP61F is indispensible for trehalose and energy metabolism of T. castaneum.
AVX overhead profiling: how much does your fast code slow you down?

The AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions found in recent Intel CPUs can increase the performance of vectorized code. Their complexity and increased power consumption, however, causes the CPU to reduce its frequency. This frequency reduction can affect parts of the workload which do not use AVX2 or AVX-512, with previous work reporting an overall slowdown of more than 10% for various workloads with AVX-512-enabled parts. Although countermeasures against this frequency reduction overhead exist, they themselves cause additional overhead and are therefore only viable if the gains are larger than the additional overhead. It is, however, often not clear how much AVX2/AVX-512 frequency reduction overhead is present. In this paper, we describe a sampling profiler to determine the magnitude of the overhead as an aid during software development or during the selection of countermeasures. Our profiler temporarily stops individual CPU cores to let the cores recover their maximum (non-AVX) frequency. The profiler then observes whether the frequency is immediately reduced again once the workload is resumed to determine whether the previous frequency reduction was actually necessary. The resulting information is used to calculate the approximate AVX2/AVX-512 frequency reduction overhead. In the case of AVX-512, our prototype is able to estimate the overhead with an average error of 1.2 percentage points for various benchmarks. We describe potential improvements to our design, and we describe a novel hardware-software interface which would allow more accurate measurement of the overhead.
How the Barrel Cortex Became a Working Model for Developmental Plasticity: A Historical Perspective

For half a century now, the barrel cortex of common laboratory rodents has been an exceptionally useful model for studying the formation of topographically organized maps, neural patterning, and plasticity, both in development and in maturity. We present a historical perspective on how barrels were discovered, and how thereafter, they became a workhorse for developmental neuroscientists and for studies on brain plasticity and activity-dependent modeling of brain circuits. For half a century now, the barrel cortex of common laboratory rodents has been an exceptionally useful model for studying the formation of topographically organized maps, neural patterning, and plasticity, both in development and in maturity. We present a historical perspective on how barrels were discovered, and how thereafter, they became a workhorse for developmental neuroscientists and for studies on brain plasticity and activity-dependent modeling of brain circuits. What is particularly remarkable about this sensory system is a cellular patterning that is induced by signals derived from the sensory receptors surrounding the snout whiskers and transmitted centrally to the brainstem (barrelettes), the thalamus (barreloids), and the neocortex (barrels). Injury to the sensory receptors shortly after birth leads to predictable pattern alterations at all levels of the system. Mouse genetics have increased our understanding of how barrels are constructed and revealed the interplay of the molecular programs that direct axon growth and cell specification, with activity-dependent mechanisms. There is an ever-rising interest in this sensory system as a neurobiological model to study development of somatotopy, patterning, and plasticity at both the morphologic and physiological levels. This article is part of a group of articles commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Society for Neuroscience.
Learning Rule Embeddings over Knowledge Graphs: A Case Study from E-Commerce Entity Alignment

E-Commerce platforms such as Alibaba and Amazon make people's life more convenient and play an important role in people's life. One critical issue for these platforms is entity alignment over item knowledge graph aiming at detecting if two items belong to the same product. In knowledge graph, rule learning methods and embedding-based methods are either inefficient or unexplainable. In this paper, we combine these two methods together and propose an embedding-based rule learning method that regard alignment rules as embeddings and learn these embeddings in the model training process. The experimental results on the real world E-Commerce dataset indicate that our proposed method is more effective and can reach better performance than other related methods.
Interplay Between Angiotensin II Type 1 Receptor and Thrombin Receptor Revealed by Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer Assay

The key hormone of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS), angiotensin II (AngII), and thrombin are known to play major roles in the vascular system and its related disorders. Previous studies reported connections between AngII and thrombin in both physiological and pathophysiological models. However, the molecular mechanisms controlling such interplay at the level of their receptors belonging to the family of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are not fully understood. In this study, we investigated the functional interaction between the AngII type 1 receptor (AT1R) and the thrombin receptor [or protease-activated receptor 1 (PAR1)] in human embryonic kidney 293 (HEK293) cells. For this, we used various bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) proximity-based assays to profile the coupling to the heterotrimeric Gαq protein, β-arrestin recruitment, and receptor internalization and trafficking in intact cells. The overall dose-response and real-time kinetic BRET data demonstrated the specific molecular proximity between AT1R and PAR1 resulting in their functional interaction. This was characterized by thrombin inducing BRET increase within AT1R/Gαq and AT1R/β-arrestin pairs and synergistic effects observed upon the concomitant activation of both receptors suggesting a positive allosteric interaction. The BRET data corroborated with the data on the downstream Gαq/inositol phosphate pathway. Moreover, the selective pharmacological blockade of the receptors revealed the implication of both AT1R and PAR1 protomers in such a synergistic interaction and the possible transactivation of AT1R by PAR1. Interestingly, the positive action of PAR1 on AT1R activation was contrasted with its apparent inhibition of AT1R internalization and its endosomal trafficking. Finally, BRET saturation and co-immunoprecipitation assays supported the physical AT1-PAR1 interaction in HEK293 cells. Our study reveals for the first time the functional interaction between AT1R and PAR1 in vitro characterized by a transactivation and positive allosteric modulation of AT1R and inhibition of its desensitization and internalization. This finding may constitute the molecular basis of the well-known interplay between RAS and thrombin. Thus, our data should lead to revising some findings on the implication of RAS and thrombin in vascular physiology and pathophysiology revealing the importance to consider the functional and pharmacological interaction between AT1R and thrombin receptors.
Libservices: dynamic storage provisioning for multitenant I/O isolation

Containers are commonly used to run the data-intensive applications of different tenants in cloud infrastructures. The storage I/O of the colocated tenants is typically handled by the shared system kernel of the container host. When a data-intensive container competes with a noisy neighbor, the kernel I/O services can cause performance variability and slowdown. This is a challenging problem for which several approaches have already been explored. Although the dynamic resource allocation, kernel structure replication, and hardware-level virtualization are helpful, they incur costs of high implementation complexity and execution overhead. As a realistic cost-effective alternative, we isolate the I/O path of each tenant by running dedicated storage systems at user level on reserved resources. We introduce the libservices as a unified user-level storage abstraction to dynamically provision per tenant container root filesystems, application data filesystems and image repositories. We outline several examples of container storage systems whose clients and servers can be composed from libservices. With an early prototype, we successfully demonstrate that the libservices combine the required efficiency and flexibility to build isolated I/O services on multitenant hosts with superior performance over existing user-level or kernel-level systems.
Tyrosine Nitration Contributes to Nitric Oxide–Stimulated Degradation of CYP2B6

Human cytochrome P450 (P450) CYP2B6 undergoes nitric oxide (NO)-dependent proteasomal degradation in response to the NO donor dipropylenetriamine NONOate (DPTA) and biologic NO in HeLa and HuH7 cell lines. CYP2B6 is also downregulated by NO in primary human hepatocytes. We hypothesized that NO or derivative reactive nitrogen species may generate adducts of tyrosine and/or cysteine residues, causing CYP2B6 downregulation, and selected Tyr and Cys residues for mutation based on predicted solvent accessibility. CYP2B6V5-Y317A, -Y380A, and -Y190A mutant proteins expressed in HuH7 cells were less sensitive than wild-type (WT) enzyme to degradation evoked by DPTA, suggesting that these tyrosines are targets for NO-dependent downregulation. The Y317A or Y380A mutants did not show increases in high molecular mass (HMM) species after treatment with DPTA or bortezomib + DPTA, in contrast to the WT enzyme. Carbon monoxide–releasing molecule 2 treatment caused rapid suppression of 2B6 enzyme activity, significant HMM species generation, and ubiquitination of CYP2B6 protein but did not stimulate CYP2B6 degradation. The CYP2B6 inhibitor 4-(4-chlorophenyl)imidazole blocked NO-dependent CYP2B6 degradation, suggesting that NO access to the active site is important. Molecular dynamics simulations predicted that tyrosine nitrations of CYP2B6 would cause significant destabilizing perturbations of secondary structure and remove correlated motions likely required for enzyme function. We propose that cumulative nitrations of Y190, Y317, and Y380 by reactive nitrogen species cause destabilization of CYP2B6, which may act synergistically with heme nitrosylation to target the enzyme for degradation. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT This work provides novel insight into the mechanisms by which nitric oxide, which is produced in hepatocytes in response to inflammation, triggers the ubiquitin-dependent proteasomal degradation of the cytochrome P450 (P450) enzyme CYP2B6. Our data demonstrate that both nitration of specific tyrosine residues and interaction of nitric oxide (NO) with the P450 heme are necessary for NO to trigger ubiquitination and protein degradation.