Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A unified approach to topology generation and optimal sizing of floorplans

Existing algorithms for floorplan topology generation by rectangular dualization usually do not consider sizing issues. In this paper, given a rectangularly dualizable adjacency graph and a set of aspect ratios of the modules, a topology which is likely to yield an optimally sized floorplan, is produced first in a top-down fashion by an AI-based search technique with novel heuristic estimates based on size parameters. It is shown that for any rectangular graph, there exists a feasible topology using only either straight or Z-cutlines recursively within a bounding rectangle. The significance of this result is four-fold: (1) considerable acceleration of the heuristic search, (2) topology generation with minimal number of nonslice cores, (3) guaranteed safe routing order without addition of pseudo modules, and (4) design of an efficient bottom-up heuristic for optimal sizing. Experimental results show that this integrated method elegantly solves floorplan optimization problem for general including inherently nonslicible adjacency graphs.
Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect with Parent Training: Evidence and Opportunities

Researchers have identified four common co-occurring parental risk factors—substance abuse, mental illness, domestic violence, and child conduct problems—that lead to child maltreatment. The extent to which maltreatment prevention programs must directly address these risk factors to improve responsiveness to parenting programs or can directly focus on improving parenting skills, says Richard Barth, remains uncertain. Barth begins by describing how each of the four parental issues is related to child maltreatment. He then examines a variety of parent education interventions aimed at preventing child abuse. He cautions that many of the interventions have not been carefully evaluated and those that have been have shown little effect on child maltreatment or its risk factors. Although some argue that parent education cannot succeed unless family problems are also addressed, much evidence suggests that first helping parents to be more effective with their children can address mental health needs and improve the chances of substance abuse recovery. Barth recommends increased public support for research trials to compare the effectiveness of programs focused on parenting education and those aiming to reduce related risk factors. Child welfare services and evidence-based parent training, says Barth, are in a period of transformation. Evidence-based methods are rapidly emerging from a development phase that has primarily involved local and highly controlled studies into more national implementation and greater engagement with the child welfare system. The next step is effectiveness trials. Citing the importance and success of multifaceted campaigns in public health policy, Barth discusses a multifaceted parenting campaign that has demonstrated substantial promise in several large trials. The goal of the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program is to help parents deal with the full gamut of children’s health and behavioral issues. The campaign includes five levels of intervention, each featuring a different means of delivery and intensity of service. More broadly, Barth suggests that the evidence-based Triple P approach offers a general framework that could be used to guide the future evolution of parenting programs.
A Truncated Form of Rod Photoreceptor PDE6 β-Subunit Causes Autosomal Dominant Congenital Stationary Night Blindness by Interfering with the Inhibitory Activity of the γ-Subunit

Autosomal dominant congenital stationary night blindness (adCSNB) is caused by mutations in three genes of the rod phototransduction cascade, rhodopsin (RHO), transducin α-subunit (GNAT1), and cGMP phosphodiesterase type 6 β-subunit (PDE6B). In most cases, the constitutive activation of the phototransduction cascade is a prerequisite to cause adCSNB. The unique adCSNB-associated PDE6B mutation found in the Rambusch pedigree, the substitution p.His258Asn, leads to rod photoreceptors desensitization. Here, we report a three-generation French family with adCSNB harboring a novel PDE6B mutation, the duplication, c.928-9_940dup resulting in a tyrosine to cysteine substitution at codon 314, a frameshift, and a premature termination (p.Tyr314Cysfs*50). To understand the mechanism of the PDE6β1-314fs*50 mutant, we examined the properties of its PDE6-specific portion, PDE6β1-313. We found that PDE6β1-313 maintains the ability to bind noncatalytic cGMP and the inhibitory γ-subunit (Pγ), and interferes with the inhibition of normal PDE6αβ catalytic subunits by Pγ. Moreover, both truncated forms of the PDE6β protein, PDE6β1-313 and PDE6β1-314fs*50 expressed in rods of transgenic X. laevis are targeted to the phototransduction compartment. We hypothesize that in affected family members the p.Tyr314Cysfs*50 change results in the production of the truncated protein, which binds Pγ and causes constitutive activation of the phototransduction thus leading to the absence of rod adaptation.
Sensitivity and Specificity of Oral Brush Biopsy

The aim of this study was to evaluate the advantage of computer-assisted analysis of the oral brush biopsy compared with synchronous scalpel biopsy in the early detection of oral lesions. In this prospective, randomized, controlled study, brush and scalpel biopsies were performed on 75 patients. Six patients had to be excluded due to inadequate results, and 43 were shown to have dysplastic epithelium, 15 carcinoma, and 11 suspicious lesions. Therefore, the sensitivity for the detection of abnormal cells by means of OralCDx was 52%, specificity 29%, and the positive predictive value 63%. According to our results, the use of oral brush biopsy as a standardized, minimally invasive method of screening oral lesions should be reconsidered.
Stealthy code obfuscation technique for software security

Code obfuscation, a tool converts a program into one that is functionally identical to the original but which is much more difficult for attacker to understand is currently the most viable technique for preventing malicious reverse engineering of software. This paper examines the use of opaque predicates as one of the building blocks of obfuscating transformations that conceal the control flow of the program in conjunction with obfuscation techniques employed by viruses in commercial side software to achieve the power of virus's hiding with the aim of improving the quality of overall obfuscation and the protection of intellectual property. This work utilizes an IF statement mechanism as a way to construct inexpensive and stealthy opaque predicates. Experimental results indicate that significant portions of source code that have been obfuscated using the proposed technique are disassembled incorrectly, thereby protecting the functionality of the codes.
FRACTURE TOUGHNESS OF S2 COLUMNAR FRESHWATER ICE: CRACK LENGTH AND SPECIMEN SIZE EFFECTS - PART II

Wedge loaded compact tension (WLCT) specimens were tested to investigate the influence of both crack length and specimen size versus grain size on the fracture toughness of S2 columnar freshwater ice. For one grain size and one specific crack orientation, the crack length was varied as a function of the grain size, ranging over a major portion of the length of the specimen. The crack length effects on the critical energy release rate were studied in this way for three specimen sizes. Two parallel research efforts have already been completed using S2 ice but different loading configurations (Bentley et al 1988; Dempsey et al 1989). These previous studies and the present study allow preliminary observations to be made concerning the influence of specimen size and the comparative merits of the energy approach. The overall objective is to obtain a criterion for the minimum dimension in terms of grain size in order for small scale yielding conditions to apply.
Notices on Method of Thickness Evaluation of TiN Layers on Magnesium Alloys

Widely used in mechanics is the method of surface parameters investigation by indentation of some kind of penetrator into test surfaces and registration of the indentation/load dependence through the whole test duration. A small ball made of hardened steel or diamond pyramid, so-called Berkovich pyramid, is used for penetration. An actuator performing the indentation process is used for displacement enforcement as well as for load measurement. Mainly two types of devices are in use: based on piezoelectric effect or purely electromagnetic LVDT. Knowledge about the penetrator tip is essential for the proper evaluation of the measured parameters and knowledge about the actuation method is also desired for better identification of the whole system parameters when using DSP type algorithms at the stage of experimental data elaboration. In this paper we deal with some kind of DSP elaboration of the experimental data. Our attitude is based on successive digital filtration applied to the experimental data as well as to the intermediate stages of calculation, especially for compliance estimation. Different digital filters have been developed and applied to the experimental data. Some conclusions have been taken out due to the precision of the layer thickness estimation based on data obtained by indentation of the investigated surface with a Berkovich pyramid driven by a piezoelectric actuator. The Boussinesq/Sneddon theory has been used as the basis of our analysis. Titanium azide layers imposed on a magnesium alloy have been tested using PVD method. Obtained results especially due to the hardness/indentation plot allow evaluating the layer thickness, which should be also compared with thickness values evaluated by other methods.
Spectrum detection in cognitive wireless sensor networks based on OFDM

In Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks(CWSN), spectrum sensing which attracts a lot of interest is a significant task, and the OFDM technology provides a good platform for CWSN because of its agile choice mechanism of frequency. This paper introduces a novel spectrum detection scheme for CWSN, which based on energy detection exploits the cyclic prefix (CP) unaffected by the effects of pollution of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM)symbol as well as idle period containing no information symbols. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has a good performance whether it is used in AWGN channels or frequency selective fading channels.
Twin studies of adult psychiatric and substance dependence disorders: are they biased by differences in the environmental experiences of monozygotic and dizygotic twins in childhood and adolescence?

Background. Twin studies have long been used to disentangle the role of genetic and environmental factors in the aetiology of psychiatric disorders. However, the validity of the twin method depends on the equal environment assumption – that monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins are equally correlated in their exposure to environmental factors of aetiological importance for the disorder under study. Methods. Both members of 822 female–female twin pairs from a population-based registry previously assessed for a range of psychiatric and substance use disorders were asked 12 questions assessing the similarity of their environmental experiences in childhood and adolescence. We examined whether the similarity of environmental experiences predicted concordance for psychiatric and substance abuse disorders by both a ‘pair-wise’ and ‘individual’ method utilizing logistic regression. We also examined smoking initiation, where prior evidence suggested a role for adolescent social environment. Results. Three factors were derived from these items: ‘Childhood treatment’, ‘Co-socialization’ and ‘Similitude’. Members of twin pairs agreed substantially in their recollections of these experiences. Compared with DZ twins, MZ twins reported comparable resemblance in their childhood treatment, but socialized together more frequently and reported that parents, teachers and friends more commonly emphasized their similarities. None of these three factors significantly predicted twin resemblance for major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, phobias, nicotine dependence or alcohol dependence. However, co-socialization significantly predicted twin resemblance for smoking initiation and perhaps for bulimia. Conclusion. Differential environmental experiences of MZ and DZ twins in childhood and adolescence are unlikely to represent a substantial bias in twin studies of most major psychiatric and substance dependence disorders but may influence twin similarity for the initiation of substance use.
Candida glabrata Ste20 is involved in maintaining cell wall integrity and adaptation to hypertonic stress, and is required for wild‐type levels of virulence

The conserved family of fungal Ste20 p21‐activated serine‐threonine protein kinases regulate several signalling cascades. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae Ste20 is involved in pheromone signalling, invasive growth, the hypertonic stress response, cell wall integrity and binds Cdc42, a Rho‐like small GTP‐binding protein required for polarized morphogenesis. We have cloned the STE20 homologue from the fungal pathogen Candida glabrata and have shown that it is present in a single copy in the genome. Translation of the nucleotide sequence predicts that C. glabrata Ste20 contains a highly conserved p21‐activated serine–threonine protein kinase domain, a binding site for G‐protein β subunits and a regulatory Rho‐binding domain that enables the kinase to interact with Cdc42 and/or Rho‐like small GTPases. C. glabrata Ste20 has 53% identity and 58% predicted amino acid similarity to S. cerevisiae Ste20 and can complement both the nitrogen starvation‐induced filamentation and mating defects of S. cerevisiae ste20 mutants. Analysis of ste20 null and disrupted strains suggest that in C. glabrata Ste20 is required for a fully functional hypertonic stress response and intact cell wall integrity pathway. C. glabrata Ste20 is not required for nitrogen starvation‐induced filamentation. Survival analysis revealed that C. glabrata ste20 mutants, while still able to cause disease, are mildly attenuated for virulence compared to reconstituted STE20 cells. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Diagnosis of sensor networks

As sensor nodes are embedded into physical environments and becoming integral parts of our daily lives, sensor networks will become the important nerve systems that monitor and actuate our physical environments. We define the process of monitoring the status of a sensor network and figuring out the problematic sensor nodes sensor network diagnosis. However, the high sensor node-to-manager ratio makes it extremely difficult to pay special attention to any individual node. In addition, the response implosion problem, which occurs when a high volume of incoming replies triggered by diagnosis queries cause the central diagnosing node to become a bottleneck, is one major obstacle to be overcome. We describe approaches to addressing the response implosion problem in sensor network diagnosis. We also present simulation experiments on the performance of these approaches, and discuss presentation schemes for diagnostic results.
One-shot-learning gesture recognition using HOG-HOF features

The purpose of this paper is to describe one-shot-learning gesture recognition systems developed on the ChaLearn Gesture Dataset (ChaLearn). We use RGB and depth images and combine appearance (Histograms of Oriented Gradients) and motion descriptors (Histogram of Optical Flow) for parallel temporal segmentation and recognition. The Quadratic-Chi distance family is used to measure differences between histograms to capture cross-bin relationships. We also propose a new algorithm for trimming videos--to remove all the unimportant frames from videos. We present two methods that use a combination of HOG-HOF descriptors together with variants of a Dynamic Time Warping technique. Both methods outperform other published methods and help narrow the gap between human performance and algorithms on this task. The code is publicly available in the MLOSS repository.
Individual time-dependent spectral boundaries for improved accuracy in time-frequency analysis of heart rate variability

Heart rate variability (HRV) is a major noninvasive technique for evaluating the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Use of time-frequency approach to analyze HRV allows investigating the ANS behavior from the power integrals, as a function of time, in both steady-state and non steady-state. Power integrals are examined mainly in the low-frequency and the high-frequency bands. Traditionally, constant boundaries are chosen to determine the frequency bands of interest. However, these ranges are individual, and can be strongly affected by physiologic conditions (body position, breathing frequency). In order to determine the dynamic boundaries of the frequency bands more accurately, especially during autonomic challenges, we developed an algorithm for the detection of individual time-dependent spectral boundaries (ITSB). The ITSB was tested on recordings from a series of standard autonomic maneuvers with rest periods between them, and the response to stand was compared to the known physiological response. A major advantage of the ITSB is the ability to reliably define the mid-frequency range, which provides the potential to investigate the physiologic importance of this range.
Structure of the transcriptional network controlling white‐opaque switching in Candida albicans

The human fungal pathogen Candida albicans can switch between two phenotypic cell types, termed ‘white’ and ‘opaque’. Both cell types are heritable for many generations, and the switch between the two types occurs epigenetically, that is, without a change in the primary DNA sequence of the genome. Previous work identified six key transcriptional regulators important for white‐opaque switching: Wor1, Wor2, Wor3, Czf1, Efg1, and Ahr1. In this work, we describe the structure of the transcriptional network that specifies the white and opaque cell types and governs the ability to switch between them. In particular, we use a combination of genome‐wide chromatin immunoprecipitation, gene expression profiling, and microfluidics‐based DNA binding experiments to determine the direct and indirect regulatory interactions that form the switch network. The six regulators are arranged together in a complex, interlocking network with many seemingly redundant and overlapping connections. We propose that the structure (or topology) of this network is responsible for the epigenetic maintenance of the white and opaque states, the switching between them, and the specialized properties of each state.
High-Throughput Screening Using iPSC-Derived Neuronal Progenitors to Identify Compounds Counteracting Epigenetic Gene Silencing in Fragile X Syndrome

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is the most common form of inherited mental retardation, and it is caused in most of cases by epigenetic silencing of the Fmr1 gene. Today, no specific therapy exists for FXS, and current treatments are only directed to improve behavioral symptoms. Neuronal progenitors derived from FXS patient induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) represent a unique model to study the disease and develop assays for large-scale drug discovery screens since they conserve the Fmr1 gene silenced within the disease context. We have established a high-content imaging assay to run a large-scale phenotypic screen aimed to identify compounds that reactivate the silenced Fmr1 gene. A set of 50,000 compounds was tested, including modulators of several epigenetic targets. We describe an integrated drug discovery model comprising iPSC generation, culture scale-up, and quality control and screening with a very sensitive high-content imaging assay assisted by single-cell image analysis and multiparametric data analysis based on machine learning algorithms. The screening identified several compounds that induced a weak expression of fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP) and thus sets the basis for further large-scale screens to find candidate drugs or targets tackling the underlying mechanism of FXS with potential for therapeutic intervention.
On the Use of Partially Ordered Decision Graphs in Knowledge Compilation and Quantified Boolean Formulae

Decomposable Negation Normal Form formulae (DNNFs) form an interesting propositional fragment, both for efficiency and succinctness reasons. A famous subclass of the DNNF fragment is the OBDD fragment which offers many polytime queries and transformations, including quantifier eliminations (under some ordering restrictions). Nevertheless, the decomposable AND nodes at work in OBDDs enable only sequential decisions: clusters of variables are never assigned "in parallel" like in full DNNFs. This is an serious drawback since succinctness for the full DNNF fragment relies on such a "parallelization property". This is why we suggest to go a step further, from (sequentially) ordered decision diagrams to (partially) ordered, decomposable decision graphs, in which any decomposable AND node is allowed, and not only assignment ones. We show that, like the OBDD fragment, such a new class offers many tractable queries and transformations, including quantifier eliminations under some ordering restrictions. Furthermore, we show that this class is strictly more succinct than OBDD.
Optimal investments in power generation under centralized and decentralized decision making

This work presents a novel model for optimization of investments in new power generation under uncertainty. The model can calculate optimal investment strategies under both centralized social welfare and decentralized profit objectives. The power market is represented with linear supply and demand curves. A stochastic dynamic programming algorithm is used to solve the investment problem, where uncertainty in demand is represented as a discrete Markov chain. The stochastic dynamic model allows us to evaluate investment projects in new base and peak load power generation as real options, and determine optimal timing of the investments. In a case study, we use the model to compare optimal investment strategies under centralized and decentralized decision making. A number of interesting results follow by varying the assumptions about market structure and price response on the demand side.
The function of the spike protein of mouse hepatitis virus strain A59 can be studied on virus-like particles: cleavage is not required for infectivity

The spike protein (S) of the murine coronavirus mouse hepatitis virus strain A59 (MHV-A59) induces both virus-to-cell fusion during infection and syncytium formation. Thus far, only syncytium formation could be studied after transient expression of S. We have recently described a system in which viral infectivity is mimicked by using virus-like particles (VLPs) and reporter defective-interfering (DI) RNAs (E. C. W. Bos, W. Luytjes, H. Van der Meulen, H. K. Koerten, and W. J. M. Spaan, Virology 218:52-60, 1996). Production of VLPs of MHV-A59 was shown to be dependent on the expression of M and E. We now show in several ways that the infectivity of VLPs is dependent on S. Infectivity was lost when spikeless VLPs were produced. Infectivity was blocked upon treatment of the VLPs with MHV-A59-neutralizing anti-S monoclonal antibody (MAb) A2.3 but not with nonneutralizing anti-S MAb A1.4. When the target cells were incubated with antireceptor MAb CC1, which blocks MHV-A59 infection, VLPs did not infect the target cells. Thus, S-mediated VLP infectivity resembles MHV-A59 infectivity. The system can be used to identify domains in S that are essential for infectivity. As a first application, we investigated the requirements of cleavage of S for the infectivity of MHV-A59. We inserted three mutant S proteins that were previously shown to be uncleaved (E. C. W. Bos, L. Heijnen, W. Luytjes, and W. J. M. Spaan, Virology 214:453-463, 1995) into the VLPs. Here we show that cleavage of the spike protein of MHV-A59 is not required for infectivity.