Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Low Bit-Rate Image Compression using Adaptive Down-Sampling technique

In this paper, we are going to use a practical approach of uniform down sampling in image space and yet making the sampling adaptive by spatially varying, directional low-pass pre-filtering. The resulting down-sampled pre-filtered image remains a conventional square sample grid, and, thus, it can be compressed and transmitted without any change to current image coding standards and systems. The decoder first decompresses the low-resolution image and then up-converts it to the original resolution in a constrained least squares restoration process, using a 2-D piecewise autoregressive model and the knowledge of directional low-pass pre-filtering. The proposed compression approach of collaborative adaptive down-sampling and up-conversion (CADU) outperforms JPEG 2000 in PSNR measure at low to medium bit rates and achieves superior visual quality, as well. The superior low bit-rate performance of the CADU approach seems to suggest that over-sampling not only wastes hardware resources and energy, and it could be counterproductive to image quality given a tight bit budget.
A method for the estimation of defect detection probability of analog/RF defect-oriented tests

A method to realistically estimate the defect detection probability achieved by defect-oriented analog/RF integrated circuit tests at the circuit design level is presented in this paper. The proposed method also provides insight to the efficiency of the various available defect-oriented testing techniques, thus allowing the selection of the most suitable for a specific circuit. The effect of structural defects in the presence of process variations and device mismatches is taken into account, by the exploitation of the defect probability distributions and the statistical models of the used technology. Although the proposed methodology is generally applicable to the entire class of analog circuits, its application to simple RF circuits which consist of a few elements seems to be more practical, due to the affordable computational cost implied by circuits with shorter defect dictionaries. In order to obtain results without a reliability compromise, the number of required statistical simulation runs is reduced through regression. The application of the proposed method on a typical RF mixer, designed in a 0. 18μm CMOS technology, is also presented.
Serological pattern of anti-HBc alone infers occult hepatitis B virus infection in high-risk individuals in Iran.

INTRODUCTION Anti-hepatitis B core antibody (Anti-HBc) alone is defined as the presence of anti-HBc in the absence of HBsAg and anti-HBs. The significance of this serological pattern as a predicting factor for occult hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection remains largely unknown. This study aimed to assess the significance of anti-HBc alone in predicting occult HBV infection in high-risk and low-risk individuals. METHODOLOGY A total of 926 individuals were enrolled in this study, including 289 hemodialysis (HD) and 106 HIV-infected patients who were considered as a high-risk group and 531 blood donors who were considered as low-risk. HBsAg, anti-HBs, anti-HBc were tested in all subjects. The presence of HBV-DNA was determined quantitatively in patients with anti-HBc alone by real-time PCR. RESULTS Of the 395 high-risk patients, 40 cases (10.13%) had anti-HBc alone, while 11 subjects (2.07%) out of 531 blood donors had anti-HBc alone. HBV-DNA was detected in 12 out of 40 (30%) high-risk patients and none of the blood donors with anti-HBc alone. CONCLUSION Our study showed that the serological pattern of anti-HBc alone could reflect occult HBV infection in high risk cases but did not presume occult HBV infection in low-risk individuals.
Consistency and Asymptotic Normality of Sieve Estimators Under Weak and Verifiable Conditions

This paper considers sieve estimation of semi-nonparametric (SNP) models with an unknown density function as non-Euclidean parameter, next to a finite-dimensional parameter vector. The density function involved is modeled via an infinite series expansion, so that the actual parameter space is infinite-dimensional. It will be shown that under weak and verifiable conditions the sieve estimators of these parameters are consistent, and the estimators of the Euclidean parameters are √ N asymptotically normal, given a random sample of size N. The latter result is derived in a different way than in the sieve estimation literature. It appears that this asymptotic normality result is in essence the same as for the finite dimensional case. This approach is motivated and illustrated by an SNP discrete choice model.
Constituents of French Marigold (Tagetes patula L.) Flowers Protect Jurkat T-Cells against Oxidative Stress

The flowers of French marigold (Tagetes patula L.) are widely used in folk medicine, in particular for treating inflammation-related disorders. However, cellular mechanisms of this activity demand further investigation. In the present work, we studied the potential of T. patula compounds to alleviate the oxidative stress in hydrogen peroxide-challenged human lymphoblastoid Jurkat T-cells. Crude extracts of marigold flowers and purified fractions containing flavonoids patuletin, quercetagetin, and quercetin and their derivatives, as well as the carotenoid lutein, were brought in contact with Jurkat cells challenged with 25 or 50 μM H2O2. Hydrogen peroxide caused oxidative stress in the cells, manifested as generation of superoxide and peroxyl radicals, reduced viability, arrested cell cycle, and enhanced apoptosis. The stress was alleviated by marigold ingredients that demonstrated high radical-scavenging capacity and enhanced the activity of antioxidant enzymes involved in neutralization of reactive oxygen species. Flavonoid fraction rich in quercetin and quercetagetin showed the highest cytoprotective activity, while patuletin in high dose exerted a cytotoxic effect associated with its anticancer potential. T. patula compounds enhanced the production of anti-inflammatory and antioxidant interleukin-10 (IL-10) in Jurkat cells. Both direct radical-scavenging capacity and stimulation of protective cellular mechanisms can underlay the anti-inflammatory properties of marigold flowers.
Integrated Fault Diagnosis Algorithm for Motor Sensors of In-Wheel Independent Drive Electric Vehicles

An integrated fault-diagnosis algorithm for a motor sensor of in-wheel independent drive electric vehicles is presented. This paper proposes a method that integrates the high- and low-level fault diagnoses to improve the robustness and performance of the system. For the high-level fault diagnosis of vehicle dynamics, a planar two-track non-linear model is first selected, and the longitudinal and lateral forces are calculated. To ensure redundancy of the system, correlation between the sensor and residual in the vehicle dynamics is analyzed to detect and separate the fault of the drive motor system of each wheel. To diagnose the motor system for low-level faults, the state equation of an interior permanent magnet synchronous motor is developed, and a parity equation is used to diagnose the fault of the electric current and position sensors. The validity of the high-level fault-diagnosis algorithm is verified using Carsim and Matlab/Simulink co-simulation. The low-level fault diagnosis is verified through Matlab/Simulink simulation and experiments. Finally, according to the residuals of the high- and low-level fault diagnoses, fault-detection flags are defined. On the basis of this information, an integrated fault-diagnosis strategy is proposed.
Challenging the gendered rhetoric of success? The limitations of women‐only mentoring for tackling gender inequality in the workplace

Mentoring is widely acknowledged to be an important contributor to women’s career success and progression but women often struggle to access mentoring networks that can help sponsor and develop their careers. Formal mentoring programmes designed specifically for women help overcome this challenge, but such schemes may at the same time reinforce masculine discourses which position women as deficient in relation to the invisibly male norm that is implicit within contemporary working practices. Drawing on a formal women-only mentoring programme built on gender-positive goals to empower women to ‘be the best they can be’ within the events industry, this paper considers the extent to which such programmes can both challenge and reproduce gendered discourses of business and success. Interviews with mentors and mentees illustrate how such programmes make gender visible within business and individual careers, but masculinist underpinnings of organisational discourses remain invisible, unacknowledged and thus largely unchallenged.
An OpenMP Extension that Supports Thread-Level Speculation

OpenMP directives are the de-facto standard for shared-memory parallel programming. However, OpenMP does not guarantee the correctness of the parallel execution of a given loop if runtime data dependences arise. Consequently, many highly-parallel regions cannot be safely parallelized with OpenMP due to the possibility of a dependence violation. In this paper, we propose to augment OpenMP capabilities, by adding thread-level speculation (TLS) support. Our contribution is threefold. First, we have defined a new speculative clause for variables inside parallel loops. This clause ensures that all accesses to these variables will be carried out according to sequential semantics. Second, we have created a new, software-based TLS runtime library to ensure correctness in the parallel execution of OpenMP loops that include speculative variables. Third, we have developed a new GCC plugin, which seamlessly translates our OpenMP speculative clause into calls to our TLS runtime engine. The result is the ATLaS C Compiler framework, which takes advantage of TLS techniques to expand OpenMP functionalities, and guarantees the sequential semantics of any parallelized loop.
Pencil of polynomials and the plane Jacobian conjecture

The invertibility of polynomial maps $F=(P,Q)$ of $\mathbb{C}^2$, $P,Q\in \mathbb{C}^2[x,y]$, can be characterized by the irreducibility of the polynomials $aP+bQ$ and the rationality of the curves $aP+bQ=0$, $(a:b)\in \mathbb{P}^1$, without the Jacobian condition.
Design of a spike detector for fully Integrated Neuromodulation SoC

The paper presents a new spike detector proposed for the Neuromodulation SoC. The SoC designed combines the 64 acquisition channels with digital compression and simulation. The objective of this work is to design a spike detector for event detector. In literature several designs available which uses above 90nm technology with supply voltage greater than 1.8V. The spike detector consists of an non linear energy operator, moving average filter, pipeline stage, processing elements like multiplier, adder and comparator. The design supports adaptive thersholding for event detector which depends on the physiological parameters like electrode movements, skin impedance, etc. This work proposes a design in 65nm and 45nm, the system works in supply voltage less than 1V by which the power consumption is reduced. The lower technology allows the design to be area efficient.
User-guided reinforcement learning of robot assistive tasks for an intelligent environment

Autonomous robots hold the possibility of performing a variety of assistive tasks in intelligent environments. However, widespread use of robot assistants in these environments requires ease of use by individuals who are generally not skilled robot operators. In this paper we present a method of training robots that bridges the gap between user programming of a robot and autonomous learning of a robot task. With our approach to variable autonomy, we integrate user commands at varying levels of abstraction into a reinforcement learner to permit faster policy acquisition. We illustrate the ideas using a robot assistant task, that of retrieving medicine for an inhabitant of a smart home.
Multiple Roles of Bone Morphogenetic Protein Signaling in the Regulation of Cortical Cell Number and Phenotype

Members of the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) family have been implicated in multiple aspects of neural development in both the CNS and peripheral nervous system. BMP ligands and receptors, as well as the BMP antagonist noggin, are expressed in the developing cerebral cortex, making the BMPs likely candidates for regulating cortical development. To define the role of these factors in the developing cerebral cortex, we examined the effects of BMP2 and BMP4 on cortical cells in vitro. Cells were cultured from embryonic day 13 (E13) and E16 rat cerebral cortex in the absence or presence of different concentrations of fibroblast growth factor 2, a known regulator of cortical cell proliferation and differentiation. At E13, the BMPs promoted cell death and inhibited proliferation of cortical ventricular zone cells, resulting in the generation of fewer neurons and no glia. At E16, the effects of the BMPs were more complex. Concentrations of BMP2 in the range of 1–10 ng/ml promoted neuronal and astroglial differentiation and inhibited oligodendroglial differentiation, whereas 100 ng/ml BMP2 promoted cell death and inhibited proliferation. Addition of the BMP antagonist noggin promoted oligodendrogliogenesis in vitro, demonstrating that endogenous BMP signaling influences the differentiation of cortical cells in vitro. The distribution of BMP2 and noggin within the developing cortex suggests that local concentrations of ligands and antagonists define gradients of BMP signaling during corticogenesis. Together, these results support the hypothesis that the BMPs and their antagonist noggin co-regulate cortical cell fate and morphogenesis.
A Natural Variant of the T Cell Receptor-Signaling Molecule Vav1 Reduces Both Effector T Cell Functions and Susceptibility to Neuroinflammation

The guanine nucleotide exchange factor Vav1 is essential for transducing T cell antigen receptor signals and therefore plays an important role in T cell development and activation. Our previous genetic studies identified a locus on rat chromosome 9 that controls the susceptibility to neuroinflammation and contains a non-synonymous polymorphism in the major candidate gene Vav1. To formally demonstrate the causal implication of this polymorphism, we generated a knock-in mouse bearing this polymorphism (Vav1R63W). Using this model, we show that Vav1R63W mice display reduced susceptibility to experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) induced by MOG35-55 peptide immunization. This is associated with a lower production of effector cytokines (IFN-γ, IL-17 and GM-CSF) by autoreactive CD4 T cells. Despite increased proportion of Foxp3+ regulatory T cells in Vav1R63W mice, we show that this lowered cytokine production is intrinsic to effector CD4 T cells and that Treg depletion has no impact on EAE development. Finally, we provide a mechanism for the above phenotype by showing that the Vav1R63W variant has normal enzymatic activity but reduced adaptor functions. Together, these data highlight the importance of Vav1 adaptor functions in the production of inflammatory cytokines by effector T cells and in the susceptibility to neuroinflammation.
A communication-aware solution framework for mapping AUTOSAR runnables on multi-core systems

An AUTOSAR-based software application contains a set of software components, each of which encapsulates a set of runnable entities. In fact, the mission of the system is fulfilled as result of the collaboration between the runnables. Several trends have recently emerged to utilize multi-core technology to run AUTOSAR-based software. Not only the overhead of communication between the runnables is one of the major performance bottlenecks in multi-core processors but it is also the main source of unpredictability in the system. Appropriate mapping of the runnables onto a set of tasks (called mapping process) along with proper allocation of the tasks to processing cores (called task allocation process) can significantly reduce the communication overhead. In this paper, three solutions are suggested, each of which comprises both the mapping and the allocation processes. The goal is to maximize key performance aspects by reducing the overall inter-runnable communication time besides satisfying given timing and precedence constraints. A large number of randomly generated experiments are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solutions.
Trust negotiation: authorization for virtual organizations

Trust negotiation is an authorization approach for open distributed systems, such as dynamic coalitions and other types of virtual organizations. Under the trust negotiation approach to authorization, every resource that might be shared within the coalition is protected by an access policy that describes the attributes of those qualified to access it (e.g., employer, job title, role, age). Each party collects digital credentials, such as X.509 attribute certificates or SAML assertions, from credential issuers who can attest to that party's attributes. At run time, a resource owner and potential client exchange information on their access policies and attributes, to determine whether the client possesses the attributes necessary to gain access, and vice versa. Trust negotiation has a firm theoretical foundation and a number of freely available implementations. In this paper, we argue that trust negotiation is ready for a trial deployment in a real-world application. We describe the software available for a deployment, including the flexible TrustBuilder2 framework for experimenting with trust negotiation runtime systems, and the CLOUSEAU compliance checker, which can quickly determine whether a set of credentials complies with a particular policy. We also describe the Traust approach for letting legacy applications take advantage of trust negotiation.
What Can the Accretion-induced Collapse of White Dwarfs Really Explain?

The accretion-induced collapse (AIC) of a white dwarf into a neutron star has been invoked to explain gamma-ray bursts, Type Ia supernovae, and a number of problematic neutron star populations and specific binary systems. The ejecta from this collapse has also been claimed as a source of r-process nucleosynthesis. So far, most AIC studies have focused on determining the event rates from binary evolution models and less attention has been directed toward understanding the collapse itself. However, the collapse of a white dwarf into a neutron star is followed by the ejection of rare neutron-rich isotopes. The observed abundance of these chemical elements may set a more reliable limit on the rate at which AICs have taken place over the history of the Galaxy. In this paper, we present a thorough study of the collapse of a massive white dwarf in one- and two-dimensions and determine the amount and composition of the ejected material. We discuss the importance of the input physics (equation of state, neutrino transport, rotation) in determining these quantities. These simulations affirm that AICs are too baryon rich to produce gamma-ray bursts and do not eject enough nickel to explain Type Ia supernovae (with the possible exception of a small subclass of extremely low-luminosity Type Ias). Although nucleosynthesis constraints limit the number of neutron stars formed via AICs to ≲0.1% of the total Galactic neutron star population, AICs remain a viable scenario for forming systems of neutron stars that are difficult to explain with Type II core-collapse supernovae.
Dense structure from a dense optical flow sequence

This paper presents a structure-from-motion system which delivers dense structural information from a sequence of dense optical flows. Most traditional feature-based approaches cannot be extended to compute dense structure due to impractical computational complexity. We demonstrate that by decomposing uncertainty information into independent and correlated parts we can decrease these complexities from O(N/sup 2/) to O(N), where N is the number of pixels in the images. We also show that this dense structure-from-motion system requires only local optical flows, i.e. image matchings between two adjacent frames, instead of the tracking of features over a long sequence.
Hadamard determinants Möbius functions, and the chromatic number of a graph

The three subjects of the title are bound together by an interesting combinatorial identity, stated below as Theorem 1. This identity is itself rooted in special cases which have already appeared in the literature [3], but it could not have been stated in its full generality before the well known work of Rota [4] on Möbius functions. Indeed, we have here a good example of the unifying power of the concept of a Möbius function on a lattice in combinatorial analysis, for we are able to deduce as corollaries of this one piece of machinery (a) the evaluation of a determinant appearing in [l] as an example of a matrix of ± l's whose determinant is "nearly" the Hadamard upper bound, (b) a theorem of [2] which is a partial generalization of (a), but is tied closely to a particular lattice, (c) perhaps most interesting, based on [4] we are able to exhibit a symmetric matrix depending on a parameter X which is singular if and only if a given graph cannot be colored in X colors. This matrix is reminiscent of another one found earlier by G. D* Birkhoff [5]. In reference [l] there appears an evaluation of the following determinant of ± l ' s . Let a(i, j) denote the number of l's in common positions in the binary expansions of the integers i and j , and define an (n + l)X(n + l) matrix M(n) by
SIX MORE QUASARS AT REDSHIFT 6 DISCOVERED BY THE CANADA–FRANCE HIGH-z QUASAR SURVEY

We present imaging and spectroscopic observations for six quasars at z ⩾ 5.9 discovered by the Canada–France High-z Quasar Survey (CFHQS). The CFHQS contains subsurveys with a range of flux and area combinations to sample a wide range of quasar luminosities at z ∼ 6. The new quasars have luminosities 10–75 times lower than the most luminous Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasars at this redshift. The least luminous quasar, CFHQS J0216−0455 at z = 6.01, has absolute magnitude M1450 = −22.21, well below the likely break in the luminosity function. This quasar is not detected in a deep XMM-Newton survey showing that optical selection is still a very efficient tool for finding high-redshift quasars.
elegansembryonic expression of microRNA genes in The FLYWCH transcription factors FLH-1 , FLH-2 , and FLH-3 repress data

data Supplementary http://genesdev.cshlp. org/cgi/content/full/22/18/2520/DC1 "Supplemental Research Data" References http://genesdev.cshlp. org/cgi/content/full/22/18/2520#References This article cites 54 articles, 16 of which can be accessed free at: service Email alerting click here top right corner of the article or Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article sign up in the box at the