Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy of Mesenchymal Stromal Cell Therapy for Acute Lung Injury in Preclinical Animal Models: A Systematic Review

The Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) is a devastating clinical condition that is associated with a 30–40% risk of death, and significant long term morbidity for those who survive. Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC) have emerged as a potential novel treatment as in pre-clinical models they have been shown to modulate inflammation (a major pathophysiological hallmark of ARDS) while enhancing bacterial clearance and reducing organ injury and death. A systematic search of MEDLINE, EMBASE, BIOSIS and Web of Science was performed to identify pre-clinical studies that examined the efficacy MSCs as compared to diseased controls for the treatment of Acute Lung Injury (ALI) (the pre-clinical correlate of human ARDS) on mortality, a clinically relevant outcome. We assessed study quality and pooled results using random effect meta-analysis. A total of 54 publications met our inclusion criteria of which 17 (21 experiments) reported mortality and were included in the meta-analysis. Treatment with MSCs, as compared to controls, significantly decreased the overall odds of death in animals with ALI (Odds Ratio 0.24, 95% Confidence Interval 0.18–0.34, I2 8%). Efficacy was maintained across different types of animal models and means of ALI induction; MSC origin, source, route of administration and preparation; and the clinical relevance of the model (timing of MSC administration, administration of fluids and or antibiotics). Reporting of standard MSC characterization for experiments that used human MSCs and risks of bias was generally poor, and although not statistically significant, a funnel plot analysis for overall mortality suggested the presence of publication bias. The results from our meta-analysis support that MSCs substantially reduce the odds of death in animal models of ALI but important reporting elements were sub optimal and limit the strength of our conclusions.
Semi-Automatic Management of Web-Based Software Services

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) offers the promise of modular software, called services, produced and consumed by networked stakeholders, to be combined, ordered and executed to create higher-level functionality. The modularity fosters growth and adaptivity, which caters to the changing needs of its environment. Currently, there are problems in organizing these modular software components because of the distributed nature in which they are created. In this work, the new Semi-Automatic Management of Services (SAMS) architecture is introduced as an overlay to any entity's service execution protocol. I also introduce a syntactical similarity approach to identify relationships between the data provisions of the software services. In addition to evaluating the similarity approach on open services, the architecure was implemented for various SOC applications (i.e. recommendation, service mashup).
Web Service Integration Based on Abstract Forms in XML for End-user Initiative Development

The number of end-users using the Internet has been increasing. End-user initiative development of applications has become important for automation of end-users’ own tasks. In particular, Web applications should be supported by domain experts themselves since Web applications must be modified frequently based on domain experts’ ideas. This paper describes end-user initiative application development by Web service integration. The abstract forms are considered as interfaces of services based on the simple concept that “one service = one form. ” Therefore, Web service integration can be defined as form transformation from input forms into output forms. There are two problems for development of Web applications by Web service integration. One is how to communicate with conventional Web applications. The other is how to merge XMLbased Web services. This paper proposes the Web page wrapping method by the HTML-to-XML transformation and the XML merging methods. In these methods, application-specific processes are described in XSLT stylesheets with visual tools by end-users, and application-independent processes are generated automatically. In particular, the multistage XML merger is introduced for treating complicated business logic.
The role of numeric and statistical content on risk perception in infographics about road safety

Abstract Numbers saturate news coverage and health and risk messaging. But as our expertise in the creation of statistical information increases, the ability to use those statistics in decision making remains frustratingly inadequate. There has been a wealth of research related to how to train people to better use the numbers they interact with on a daily basis. Far less research, however, explores the appropriate way to use numbers in communication. Two experiments explored the role of numbers in risk communication infographics related to road safety while driving. Experiment 1 found that the presence of numbers influence risk perception, but whether those numbers reflect accurate statistics or random numbers does not change their influence. Experiment 2 found that removing all statistics entirely from infographics and replacing them with linguistic gist representations of the numbers (i.e. words like ‘some’, ‘many’, ‘none’) increased risk perception even though people found the infographics to be less informative than the ones containing numbers. The results suggest that the gist representations of the numbers in the context of the infographics are equivalent regardless of their value, such that the very presence of statistics influences judgment and risk perception but not their meaning. They also suggest that people do not always realize how they are using statistical information in their judgement and decision making process.
Virtual firewalling for migrating virtual machines in cloud computing

Cloud Computing (CC) uses virtualization to provide computing resources on demand via Internet. Small and large organizations benefit from CC because of reduced operating costs and increase in business agility. The migrating Virtual Machine (VM) is vulnerable from attacks such as fake migration initiations, service interruptions, manipulation of data or other network attacks. Hence, during live migration any security lax in VM firewall policy can put the VM at risk. A malicious VM can further pose threat to other VMs in its host and consequently for VMs in LAN. Hardware firewalls only protect VM before and after migration. Plus, they are blind to virtual traffic. Hence, virtual firewalls (VFs) are used to secure VMs. Mostly; they are deployed at Virtual Machine Monitor-level (VMM) under Cloud provider's control. Source VMM-Ievel VF provides security to VM before the migration incurs and the destination VMM-level VF starts securing VM after migration is completed. It thus, becomes possible for attacker to use the intermediate migrating window to launch attacks on VM. This research contributes towards providing understanding of having open source virtual firewall at VM-Ievel for migrating VMs to reduce attack window of VM during the migration. The final contribution is the validation and uptime evaluation of the implemented Packet Filter firewall for VM at VM-level during migration in City Network data center. Such an approach would enable hardened security for overall VM migration.
Translocation of Neonicotinoid Insecticides from Coated Seeds to Seedling Guttation Drops: A Novel Way of Intoxication for Bees

ABSTRACT The death of honey bees, Apis mellifera L. , and the consequent colony collapse disorder causes major losses in agriculture and plant pollination worldwide. The phenomenon showed increasing rates in the past years, although its causes are still awaiting a clear answer. Although neonicotinoid systemic insecticides used for seed coating of agricultural crops were suspected as possible reason, studies so far have not shown the existence of unquestionable sources capable of delivering directly intoxicating doses in the fields. Guttation is a natural plant phenomenon causing the excretion of xylem fluid at leaf margins. Here, we show that leaf guttation drops of all the corn plants germinated from neonicotinoid-coated seeds contained amounts of insecticide constantly higher than 10 mg/1, with maxima up to 100 mg/1 for thiamethoxam and clothianidin, and up to 200 mg/1 for imidacloprid. The concentration of neonicotinoids in guttation drops can be near those of active ingredients commonly applied in field sprays for pest control, or even higher. When bees consume guttation drops, collected from plants grown from neonicotinoid-coated seeds, they encounter death within few minutes.
A least-squares based pseudoinversion approach for non hyperbolic linear systems

A new method to achieve an accurate output tracking for nonminimum phase linear systems with nonhyperbolic or near nonhyperbolic internal dynamics is presented. For the classical methods, developed in the framework of the preview based stable inversion, the nonhyperbolicity represents a rather serious inconvenience because the required preactuation time tends to become unacceptably large. Different stable inversion techniques, developed for SISO systems, are based on a proper redefinition of the desired output trajectory with the aim of canceling the undesired effects of unstable zeros. The main purpose of the new approach is to alleviate some theoretical and practical limitations inherent in the above methods. The desired output is here partitioned into the transient and steady-state components. The desired output to be exactly tracked in steady-state is assumed to belong to the set of polynomials, exponential and sinusoidal time functions. The transient input is “a priori” assumed to be given by a spline function. Once the desired output trajectory has been specified, this allows the computation of the unknown transient input as the approximate least-squares solution of the Fredholm's integral equation corresponding to the explicit formula of the output forced response. The steady-state input is analytically computed exploiting the steady-state output response expressions for inputs belonging to the same set of the desired steady-state output.
MIMIC: An Adaptive Mixed Initiative Spoken Dialogue System for Information Queries

This paper describes MIMIC, an adaptive mixed initiative spoken dialogue system that provides movie showtime information. MIMIC improves upon previous dialogue systems in two respects. First, it employs initiative-oriented strategy adaptation to automatically adapt response generation strategies based on the cumulative effect of information dynamically extracted from user utterances during the dialogue. Second, MIMIC's dialogue management architecture decouples its initiative module from the goal and response strategy selection processes, providing a general framework for developing spoken dialogue systems with different adaptation behavior.
A computational study of the effect of unstructured mesh quality on solution efficiency

It is well known that mesh quality affects both efficiency and accuracy of CFD solutions. Meshes with distorted elements make solutions both more difficult to compute and less accurate. We review a recently proposed technique for improving mesh quality as measured by element angle (dihedral angle in three dimensions) using a combination of optimization-based smoothing techniques and local reconnection schemes. Typical results that quantify mesh improvement for a number of application meshes are presented. We then examine effects of mesh quality as measured by the maximum angle in the mesh on the convergence rates of two commonly used CFD solution techniques. Numerical experiments are performed that quantify the cost and benefit of using mesh optimization schemes for incompressible flow over a cylinder and weakly compressible flow over a cylinder.
Quality Internet Telephony

The quality of telephone calls over the internet is of great importance for the acceptance by end users. This paper presents a survey of the factors that influence the quality of VoIP and give an brief overview of some techniques to determine the voice quality perceived by the end users. Also, a overview of VoIP in general and two currently popular techniques are expounded.
BinDCT and Its Efficient VLSI Architectures for Real-Time Embedded Applications

In this article, we present the BinDCT algorithm, a fast approximation of the Discrete Cosine Transform, and its efficient VLSI architectures for hardware implementations. The design objective is to meet the real-time constrain in embedded systems. Two VLSI architectures are proposed. The first architecture is targeted for low complexity applications such as videophones, digital cameras, and digital camcorders. The second architecture is designed for high perform applications, which include high definition TV and digital cinema. In order to meet the real-time constrain for these applications, we decompose the structure of the BinDCT algorithm into simple matrices and map them into multi-stage pipeline architectures. For low complexity implementation, the proposed 2-D BinDCT architecture can be realized with the cost of 10 integer adders, 80 registers and 384 bytes of embedded memory. The high performance architecture can be implemented with an extra of 30 adders. These designs can calculate real-time DCT/IDCT for video applications of CIF format at 5 MHz clock rate with 1.55 volt power supply. With its high performance and low power consumption features, BinDCT coprocessor is an excellent candidate for real-time DCT-based image and video processing applications.
Local feature extraction and recognition under expression variations based on multimodal face and ear spherical map

In unconstrained scenes, the change of expression and pose may lead to mismatching of the human face and ear images, and the recognition rate may also decrease. A method fusing depth and texture information is proposed to deal with the problem. We employ different recognition strategies based on the different characteristics of the spherical depth map and the spherical texture map. The learning to rank approach is applied to select the key points of high repeatability and stability. An improved SIFT method and a LBP-like algorithm are applied in the following process. Sparse representation is used for recognition and then Bayesian decision-level fusion for the improvement of final results. And the experiments prove the effectiveness of our approach evaluated on MARS map.
Spectral Clustering and Feature Selection for Microarray Data

Microarray datasets comprise a large number of gene expression values and a relatively small number of samples. Feature selection algorithms are very useful in these situations in order to find a compact subset of informative features. We propose a redundancy control method for algorithms in the recently proposed SPEC family of spectral-based feature selection algorithms. This method is applied to find relevant genes in order to cluster samples corresponding to three kinds of cancer: lung, breast and colon.
Comparing Two Models of Distributed Denial of Service (ddos) Defences

A Controller-Agent model proposed by Tupakula & Varadharajan (2003) is being compared and contrasted against a Capabilities-Based model Anderson, Roscoe, & Wetherall (2003b) in this paper. The investigation is based on the classification of DDoS attacks and defences proposed by Mirkovic and Reiher (2004). Both models offered interesting approaches, however with the limitations and the assumptions they based on make them impractical for real life implementation. Anyway, their contribution to the DDoS research is valuable for other researchers.
Christian Traxler : Social Norms and Conditional Cooperative Taxpayers

This paper incorporates tax morale into the Allingham Sandmo (1972) model of income tax evasion. Tax morale is interpreted as a social norm for tax compliance. The norm strength, depending on the share of evaders in the society, is endogenously derived. Taxpayers act conditionally cooperative, as their evasion decision depends on the other agents’ compliance. We characterize an equilibrium which accounts for this interdependence and study the impact of tax and deterrence policies on compliance. Our analysis is then extended to the case of a society which consists of heterogenous communities where individual evasion decisions are embedded in a complex social structure. In this scenario, behavior is crucially influenced by the norm compliance among morale reference groups. Within this framework, we discuss the role of belief management and belief leadership as alternative policy tools. JEL classification: H26; Z13; K42.
"Real-time recommendations in a multi-domain environment" by Emanuel Lacic with Prateek Jain as coordinator

Emanuel Lacić is a Software Engineer and Scientific Researcher in the Social Computing division at the Know-Center. Additionally, he is a PhD student at the Interactive Systems & Data Science Institute of Graz University of Technology. He has a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Software Engineering and Information Systems from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb. His PhD focus is on real-time recommender systems in large-scale settings. Apart from that, his research is utilized in several industry and European-funded projects such as Learning Layers, AFEL or MoreGrasp. His main research interests are in the fields of Recommender Systems, Deep Learning, Information Retrieval, Big Data, as well as Social and Complex Network Analysis. For more information please see https://lacic.github. io/
Ultrasonographic Evaluation of Equine Fetal Growth Throughout Gestation in Normal Mares Using a Convex Transducer

ABSTRACT It has not been common to perform regular ultrasound examination of the fetus in equine practice, due to the increasing volume of the uterus caused by fetal development. The convex three-dimensional transducer is bulb-shaped and is able to observe wide areas. In addition, its operation is simple, making it easy to create appropriate angles for various indices using a transrectal approach. The aim of this study was to measure Thoroughbred fetal growth indices throughout gestation using a convex transducer and to clarify the detectable period of some indices for clinical use. We demonstrated changes in fetal indices, such as crown rump length (CRL), fetal heart rate (FHR), fetal eye and kidney and the combined thickness of uterus and placenta (CTUP). CTUP increased from 30 weeks of gestation, and FHR peaked at 8 weeks and then decreased to term. CRL could be observed until 13 weeks due to its wide angle, longer than in previous reports. Fetal eye and kidney could be observed from 10 and 28 weeks, respectively, and these increased with pregnancy progress. The present results showed the advantage of transrectal examination using a convex transducer for evaluation of normal fetal development. Although ultrasonographic examination in mid- to late-gestation is not common in equine reproductive practice, our comprehensive results would be a useful basis for equine pregnancy examination.
A modified network querying method based on conditional random fields

There are a large amount of biomelocular networks such as protein-protein interaction networks, gene regulatory networks, and metabolic networks. Network of different species share similar subnetworks. These subnetworks are conserved modules which are functionally similar. The main purpose of network querying studies is to find such similar subnetworks among the biological networks of different species. In this paper, an approach based on conditional random fields (CRF) for network querying is proposed.
Modeling Cutting Process Nonlinearity for Stability Analysis — Application to Tooling Selection for Valve-Seat Machining

1 INTRODUCTION Machining stability, or instability, is a product of the coupling of the machine-tool system structure and the machining process. Efforts to avoid instability/chatter problems during the design of a machine tool often focus on the structure by increasing stiffness and or damping in its various elements, such as the machine tool, fixturing and tooling. Increasing dynamic stiffness, which is affected by both static stiffness and damping, is the main strategy with the spindle, slide interfaces and tool-clamping interfaces as primary targets. However, increased dynamic stiffness usually comes at increased expense through a larger machine-tool structure and subsequently larger spindles and slides, and consequently larger drives to accelerate those higher-mass components. For that reason, there is much to gain by scientifically selecting tooling, at the design stage, that will enhance stability toward relaxing the demands on the structural requirements. Despite efforts made during design, the existence of stability problems in practice are typically not known until the machine tool, fixturing and tooling have been built and integrated in the tryout phase. At that point, a solution must be found quickly and at the least
Epidemiological research on radiation-induced cancer in atomic bomb survivors

The late effects of exposure to atomic bomb radiation on cancer occurrence have been evaluated by epidemiological studies on three cohorts: a cohort of atomic bomb survivors (Life Span Study; LSS), survivors exposed in utero, and children of atomic bomb survivors (F1). The risk of leukemia among the survivors increased remarkably in the early period after the bombings, especially among children. Increased risks of solid cancers have been evident since around 10 years after the bombings and are still present today. The LSS has clarified the dose–response relationships of radiation exposure and risk of various cancers, taking into account important risk modifiers such as sex, age at exposure, and attained age. Confounding by conventional risk factors including lifestyle differences is not considered substantial because people were non-selectively exposed to the atomic bomb radiation. Uncertainty in risk estimates at low-dose levels is thought to be derived from various sources, including different estimates of risk at background levels, uncertainty in dose estimates, residual confounding and interaction, strong risk factors, and exposure to residual radiation and/or medical radiation. The risk of cancer in subjects exposed in utero is similar to that in LSS subjects who were exposed in childhood. Regarding hereditary effects of radiation exposure, no increased risk of cancers associated with parental exposure to radiation have been observed in the F1 cohort to date. In addition to biological and pathogenetic interpretations of the present results, epidemiological investigations using advanced technology should be used to further analyze these cohorts.
The pipeflow approach: write once, run in different stream-processing engines

Recently, some distributed stream computing platforms, such as Storm and Spark Streaming, have been developed for processing massive data streams. However, these platforms lack support for higher-level declarative languages and provide only programming interfaces. Moreover, the users should be well versed of the syntax and programming constructs of each language in these platforms. In this paper, we are going to demonstrate our PipeFlow system. In the PipeFlow system, the user can write a stream-processing script (i.e., query) using a higher-level dataflow language. This script can be translated into different stream-processing programs that run in the corresponding engines. In this case, the user is only willing to know a single language, thus, he/she can write one stream-processing script and expects to execute this script on different engines.