Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MexXY Multidrug Efflux System Is More Frequently Overexpressed in Ciprofloxacin Resistant French Clinical Isolates Compared to Hospital Environment Ones

Modulation of the membrane permeability through a decrease in porin-mediated antibiotic entry and/or an increase in antibiotic efflux is one of the resistance mechanisms to antibiotics evolved by Gram-negative bacteria. To assess whether the outer membrane porin OprD and Resistance-Nodulation-Division (RND) efflux pumps were similarly expressed in 33 ciprofloxacin-resistant clinical strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and in 30 non-clinical strains originating from the hospital environment (mainly waterborne Pseudomonas aeruginosa), the expression of oprD, mexB, mexF, and mexY genes was investigated. Overall, the expression of oprD was not detected by RT-qPCR in 14 (22%) strains and underexpressed in 35 (56%) more. No significant difference in oprD expression was detected between clinical and non-clinical strains. As for efflux pumps, 23 (70%) of the clinical strains overexpressed at least one of the tested RND genes. Overexpression of mexB, mexF and mexY was detected in 27, 12, and 45% of the clinical strains, respectively. In the 30 non-clinical strains, no overexpression could be found for mexB, mexF, or mexY. On the contrary, a global underexpression of the tested efflux pump genes was recorded. In both clinical and environmental strains, a positive correlation was found between the expressions of oprD and mexB. Similarly, the expressions of oprD and mexF were positively correlated. This result contrasts with the inverse correlation between both MexAB-OprM/MexEF-OprN and OprD previously described in carbapenem-resistant P. aeruginosa strains. The only positive correlation between phenotypic ciprofloxacin minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) and the expression of efflux pump gene was witnessed with mexY (analysis on pooled results for clinical and environmental strains). However, in clinical strains, no statistically significant link could be found between the degree of reduction in ciprofloxacin MICs witnessed with Phenylalanine-Arginine β-naphthylamide (PAβN) and the expression of any of the 3 RND genes tested.
Epoxyeicosatrienoic Acid-Based Therapy Attenuates the Progression of Postischemic Heart Failure in Normotensive Sprague-Dawley but Not in Hypertensive Ren-2 Transgenic Rats

Epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs) and their analogs have been identified as potent antihypertensive compounds with cardio- and renoprotective actions. Here, we examined the effect of EET-A, an orally active EET analog, and c-AUCB, an inhibitor of the EETs degrading enzyme soluble epoxide hydrolase, on the progression of post-myocardial infarction (MI) heart failure (HF) in normotensive Hannover Sprague-Dawley (HanSD) and in heterozygous Ren-2 transgenic rats (TGR) with angiotensin II-dependent hypertension. Adult male rats (12 weeks old) were subjected to 60-min left anterior descending (LAD) coronary artery occlusion or sham (non-MI) operation. Animals were treated with EET-A and c-AUCB (10 and 1 mg/kg/day, respectively) in drinking water, given alone or combined for 5 weeks starting 24 h after MI induction. Left ventricle (LV) function and geometry were assessed by echocardiography before MI and during the progression of HF. At the end of the study, LV function was determined by catheterization and tissue samples were collected. Ischemic mortality due to the incidence of sustained ventricular fibrillation was significantly higher in TGR than in HanSD rats (35.4 and 17.7%, respectively). MI-induced HF markedly increased LV end-diastolic pressure (Ped) and reduced fractional shortening (FS) and the peak rate of pressure development [+(dP/dt)max] in untreated HanSD compared to sham (non-MI) group [Ped: 30.5 ± 3.3 vs. 9.7 ± 1.3 mmHg; FS: 11.1 ± 1.0 vs. 40.8 ± 0.5%; +(dP/dt)max: 3890 ± 291 vs. 5947 ± 309 mmHg/s]. EET-A and c-AUCB, given alone, tended to improve LV function parameters in HanSD rats. Their combination amplified the cardioprotective effect of single therapy and reached significant differences compared to untreated HanSD controls [Ped: 19.4 ± 2.2 mmHg; FS: 14.9 ± 1.0%; +(dP/dt)max: 5278 ± 255 mmHg/s]. In TGR, MI resulted in the impairment of LV function like HanSD rats. All treatments reduced the increased level of albuminuria in TGR compared to untreated MI group, but neither single nor combined EET-based therapy improved LV function. Our results indicate that EET-based therapy attenuates the progression of post-MI HF in HanSD, but not in TGR, even though they exhibited renoprotective action in TGR hypertensive rats.
Exploiting TLS Client Authentication for Widespread User Tracking

Abstract TLS, and SSL before it, has long supported the option for clients to authenticate to servers using their own certificates, but this capability has not been widely used. However, with the development of its Push Notification Service, Apple has deployed this technology on millions of devices for the first time. Wachs et al. [42] determined iOS client certificates could be used by passive network adversaries to track individual devices across the internet. Subsequently, Apple has patched their software to fix this vulnerability. We show these countermeasures are not effective by demonstrating three novel active attacks against TLS Client Certificate Authentication that are successful despite the defenses. Additionally, we show these attacks work against all known instances of TLS Client Certificate Authentication, including smart cards like those widely deployed by the Estonian government as part of their Digital ID program. Our attacks include in-path man-in-the-middle versions as well as a more powerful on-path attack that can be carried out without full network control.
Trust-Based Privacy-Preserving Photo Sharing in Online Social Networks

With the development of social media technologies, sharing photos in online social networks has now become a popular way for users to maintain social connections with others. However, the rich information contained in a photo makes it easier for a malicious viewer to infer sensitive information about those who appear in the photo. How to deal with the privacy disclosure problem incurred by photo sharing has attracted much attention in recent years. When sharing a photo that involves multiple users, the publisher of the photo should take into all related users’ privacy into account. In this paper, we propose a trust-based privacy preserving mechanism for sharing such coowned photos. The basic idea is to anonymize the original photo so that users who may suffer a high privacy loss from the sharing of the photo cannot be identified from the anonymized photo. The privacy loss to a user depends on how much he or she trusts the receiver of the photo. And the user's trust in the publisher is affected by privacy loss. The anonymiation result of a photo is controlled by a threshold specified by the publisher. We propose a greedy method for the publisher to tune the threshold, in the purpose of balancing between the privacy preserved by anonymization and the information shared with others. Simulation results demonstrate that the trust-based photo sharing mechanism is helpful to reduce the privacy loss, and the proposed threshold tuning method can bring a good payoff to the user.
Leveraging Glocality for Fast Failure Recovery in Distributed RAM Storage

Distributed RAM storage aggregates the RAM of servers in data center networks (DCN) to provide extremely high I/O performance for large-scale cloud systems. For quick recovery of storage server failures, MemCube [53] exploits the proximity of the BCube network to limit the recovery traffic to the recovery servers’ 1-hop neighborhood. However, the previous design is applicable only to the symmetric BCube(n,k) network with nk+1 nodes and has suboptimal recovery performance due to congestion and contention. To address these problems, in this article, we propose CubeX, which (i) generalizes the “1-hop” principle of MemCube for arbitrary cube-based networks and (ii) improves the throughput and recovery performance of RAM-based key-value (KV) store via cross-layer optimizations. At the core of CubeX is to leverage the glocality (= globality + locality) of cube-based networks: It scatters backup data across a large number of disks globally distributed throughout the cube and restricts all recovery traffic within the small local range of each server node. Our evaluation shows that CubeX not only efficiently supports RAM-based KV store for cube-based networks but also significantly outperforms MemCube and RAMCloud in both throughput and recovery time.
Enhancing Speculative Execution With Selective Approximate Computing

Speculative execution is an optimization technique used in modern processors by which predicted instructions are executed in advance with an objective of overlapping the latencies of slow operations. Branch prediction and load value speculation are examples of speculative execution used in modern pipelined processors to avoid execution stalls. However, speculative executions incur a performance penalty as an execution rollback when there is a misprediction. In this work, we propose to aid speculative execution with approximate computing by relaxing the execution rollback penalty associated with a misprediction. We propose a sensitivity analysis method for data and branches in a program to identify the data load and branch instructions that can be executed without any rollback in the pipeline and yet can ensure a certain user-specified quality of service of the application with a probabilistic reliability. Our analysis is based on statistical methods, particularly hypothesis testing and Bayesian analysis. We perform an architectural simulation of our proposed approximate execution and report the benefits in terms of CPU cycles and energy utilization on selected applications from the AxBench, ACCEPT, and Parsec 3.0 benchmarks suite.
Treatment Methods and Early Neurologic Improvement After Endovascular Treatment of Tandem Occlusions in Acute Ischemic Stroke

Background and Purpose: A tandem occlusion of the intracranial circulation and the extracranial carotid artery (ICA) occurs in 10–20% of all strokes based on large vessel occlusion (LVO). The optimal treatment strategy for those patients is unknown. We report our management strategy and the outcome in these patients in a large single-center cohort. Materials and Methods: We retrospectively identified and analyzed all patients treated by Mechanical Thrombectomy (MT) for an intracranial LVO associated with an occlusion of the extracranial ICA between April 2009 and May 2016 (163/1,645, 9.9%). The following data was collected: Recanalization rate, occurrence of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage (sICH), clinical result according to the early neurological improvement (ENI, NIHSS score improvement of ≥8 points after 24 h or NIHSS score of 0 or 1 after 3 days) and functional outcome and mortality during long term follow up. Secondary endpoints were the patency of the internal carotid artery at 24 h. Patient demographics and anti-aggregation regimen were recorded as co-variables. Results: 163/1,645 (9.9%) MT patients had a tandem occlusion. All thrombectomy procedures were performed with stent retrievers. PTA with or without additional placement of a stent was performed in 149 vs. 14 patients. The overall rate of TICI IIB/III recanalization was 91.4%. An early neurological improvement was found in 79 of 163 patients (48.4%), 51% (76/149) in the stent group and 21% (3/14) in the non stent group. 120/163 patients (73.6%) had a long term favorable outcome (mRS 0–2). The ICA re-occlusion rate at 24 h was 5.4% (8/149) in the stent group and 42% (6/14) in the non stent group. The rate of symptomatic hemorrhage was 4.9%. The regression analysis showed that only younger age (p = 0.002) and shorter recanalization times (p = 0.017) were associated with good outcome. Conclusion: Stent-PTA of the ICA in addition to MT with a stent retriever was safe and effective in tandem occlusion of the anterior brain circulation. PTA and MT without stenting in tandem lesions showed a higher early re-occlusion rate and lower rate of early neurological improvement. The technical approach should aim for the fastest possible recanalization of the intracranial vessels, either with stenting first or last.
Indoor Localization With a Single Wi-Fi Access Point Based on OFDM-MIMO

In this paper, we propose S-Phaser, an indoor localization system that uses a single Wi-Fi access point (AP) to locate terminals. Compared to traditional indoor localization systems based on the fingerprint positioning technology, S-Phaser does not need to deploy a large number of APs and has better localization accuracy. S-Phaser utilizes channel state information (CSI) to compute the direct path length between a single AP and terminals, thereby efficiently improving the accuracy in the line-of-sight (LOS) scenario. S-Phaser is still able to get satisfied accuracy in the non-LOS scenario even not as good as in the LOS scenario. Using the feature of multiple channels in 802.11n, we design an interpolation-based algorithm, named as the interpolation elimination method to calibrate signal phases from CSI, and then we use two different algorithms, the Chinese residue theorem and broadband angle ranging, to compute the real distance of the direct path from the calibrated phases. Then, S-Phaser uses a geometric positioning algorithm to determine the user's location. To verify the practicability of the proposed S-Phaser, we set up a localization system in an actual environment. S-Phaser can improve the median localization error to 1.5 m with a single Wi-Fi AP.
My Genome Belongs to Me: Controlling Third Party Computation on Genomic Data

Abstract An individual’s genetic information is possibly the most valuable personal information. While knowledge of a person’s DNA sequence can facilitate the diagnosis of several heritable diseases and allow personalized treatment, its exposure comes with significant threats to the patient’s privacy. Currently known solutions for privacy-respecting computation require the owner of the DNA to either be heavily involved in the execution of a cryptographic protocol or to completely outsource the access control to a third party. This motivates the demand for cryptographic protocols which enable computation over encrypted genomic data while keeping the owner of the genome in full control. We envision a scenario where data owners can exercise arbitrary and dynamic access policies, depending on the intended use of the analysis results and on the credentials of who is conducting the analysis. At the same time, data owners are not required to maintain a local copy of their entire genetic data and do not need to exhaust their computational resources in an expensive cryptographic protocol. In this work, we present METIS, a system that assists the computation over encrypted data stored in the cloud while leaving the decision on admissible computations to the data owner. It is based on garbled circuits and supports any polynomially-computable function. A critical feature of our system is that the data owner is free from computational overload and her communication complexity is independent of the size of the input data and only linear in the size of the circuit’s output. We demonstrate the practicality of our approach with an implementation and an evaluation of several functions over real datasets.
A Diet With Docosahexaenoic and Arachidonic Acids as the Sole Source of Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids Is Sufficient to Support Visual, Cognitive, Motor, and Social Development in Mice

Polyunsaturated fatty acids serve multiple functions in neurodevelopment and neurocognitive function. Intravenous lipid emulsions are administered to children that are dependent on parenteral nutrition to provide the essential fatty acids needed to sustain growth and development. One of these emulsions, derived from fish-oil, is particularly poor in the traditional essential fatty acids, linoleic and alpha-linolenic acids. However, it does contain adequate amounts of its main derivatives, arachidonic acid (ARA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), respectively. This skewed composition has raised concern about the sole use of fish-oil based lipid emulsions in children and how its administration can be detrimental to their neurodevelopment. Using a custom-made diet that contains ARA and DHA as a sole source of polyunsaturated fatty acids, we bred and fed mice for multiple generations. Compared to adult, chow-fed mice, animals maintained on this special diet showed similar outcomes in a battery of neurocognitive tests performed under controlled conditions. Chow-fed mice did perform better in the rotarod test for ataxia and balance, although both experimental groups showed a conserved motor learning capacity. Conversely, mice fed the custom diet rich in DHA and ARA showed less neophobia than the chow-fed animals. Results from these experiments suggest that providing a diet where ARA and DHA are the sole source of polyunsaturated fatty acids is sufficient to support gross visual, cognitive, motor, and social development in mice.
Understanding the Impact of Time-Dependent Random Variability on Analog ICs: From Single Transistor Measurements to Circuit Simulations

Advanced scaling and the introduction of new materials in the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) raise concerns about its reliability. Several degradation mechanisms, depending on operating conditions and time, can cause a significant change of the transistor parameters. The transistor area plays a large role when it comes to aging. In large-area MOSFETs, aging appears deterministic, while in small-area devices it is stochastic and convoluted with random telegraph noise. This is analogous to the time-zero random variability, which also reduces as the transistor gate area increases. The scope of this paper is to extend the knowledge of the time-dependent random variability as a function of MOSFET gate area scaling. The goal is to aid the designers in transistor sizing toward a more reliable design. As an example, the impact of time-dependent random variability is illustrated for an analog-to-digital converter.
Examining Technology Enactment in the Fixed Income Market

While the use of electronic trading systems (ETS) in fixed income (FI) market is becoming more common in the last few years, only a small number of empirical studies have been conducted to examine their adoption and impact in the market. In this study, we use the technology enactment framework (TEF) to identify various institutional and organizational factors that influence ETS adoption. Based on a comprehensive survey and face-to- face interviews with senior managers, sales representatives, and traders from major Canadian financial institutions, we find that the FI market is characterized by a high level of embedded relationships and that the ETS users do not entirely trust their ETS. This study also presents, among others, important findings regarding the impact of ETS on the users' job performance and their perception about the asymmetric nature of benefits provided by ETS in the FI market.
Cell Wall Hydrolases in Bacteria: Insight on the Diversity of Cell Wall Amidases, Glycosidases and Peptidases Toward Peptidoglycan

The cell wall (CW) of bacteria is an intricate arrangement of macromolecules, at least constituted of peptidoglycan (PG) but also of (lipo)teichoic acids, various polysaccharides, polyglutamate and/or proteins. During bacterial growth and division, there is a constant balance between CW degradation and biosynthesis. The CW is remodeled by bacterial hydrolases, whose activities are carefully regulated to maintain cell integrity or lead to bacterial death. Each cell wall hydrolase (CWH) has a specific role regarding the PG: (i) cell wall amidase (CWA) cleaves the amide bond between N-acetylmuramic acid and L-alanine residue at the N-terminal of the stem peptide, (ii) cell wall glycosidase (CWG) catalyses the hydrolysis of the glycosidic linkages, whereas (iii) cell wall peptidase (CWP) cleaves amide bonds between amino acids within the PG chain. After an exhaustive overview of all known conserved catalytic domains responsible for CWA, CWG, and CWP activities, this review stresses that the CWHs frequently display a modular architecture combining multiple and/or different catalytic domains, including some lytic transglycosylases as well as CW binding domains. From there, direct physiological and collateral roles of CWHs in bacterial cells are further discussed.
Network-on-Chip Programmable Platform in VersalTM ACAP Architecture

This paper outlines the Network-on-Chip (NoC) on Xilinx's next generation Versal-architecture. It is a hardened NoC that is present in Xilinx's next-generation 7nm architecture devices. These devices include many other new hardened features that make up the Adaptable Computing Acceleration Platform (ACAP) devices. There is a trend in FPGA devices of hardening many commonly used components such as processors, memory controllers and other IO controllers. The next generation of Xilinx devices take this a step further by providing a device-global memory mapped NoC which connects these components and the fabric in an integrated fashion. The NoC unifies communication between the processor system, FPGA fabric, memory subsystem and other hardened accelerator functions. This paper gives an overview of the Versal architecture NoC. It also motivates some of the specific characteristics of the architecture. We show how hardening the NoC lets users quickly implement high performance system level interconnect.
Technologies for automated analysis of co-located, real-life, physical learning spaces: Where are we now?

The motivation for this paper is derived from the fact that there has been increasing interest among researchers and practitioners in developing technologies that capture, model and analyze learning and teaching experiences that take place beyond computer-based learning environments. In this paper, we review case studies of tools and technologies developed to collect and analyze data in educational settings, quantify learning and teaching processes and support assessment of learning and teaching in an automated fashion. We focus on pipelines that leverage information and data harnessed from physical spaces and/or integrates collected data across physical and digital spaces. Our review reveals a promising field of physical classroom analysis. We describe some trends and suggest potential future directions. Specifically, more research should be geared towards a) deployable and sustainable data collection set-ups in physical learning environments, b) teacher assessment, c) developing feedback and visualization systems and d) promoting inclusivity and generalizability of models across populations.
Sustainable lean redesign of manufacturing enterprises

Lean manufacturing has been widely used to develop manufacturing processes. Lack of lean and lean-over is a common problem in the process of production. Searching for sustainable lean production has become a hot research topic. Through research on the factors influencing lean sustainability, a lean redesign method is proposed. Reconstructing the traditional lean indicators and the sustainability indicators from the three aspects of economy, society and environment to regenerate the lean redesign indicators, determine the sustainability evaluation methods in the production process, and integrate them into the VSM (Value Stream Mapping). Describing the manufacturing system use redesign VSM and assess the lean sustainability of the manufacturing system to improve productivity. Case studies show that lean redesign method determines the level of lean sustainability in each operation and describes manufacturing systems in more detail than traditional methods to help enterprises make reasonable decisions, and establish their lean sustainability aims.