Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Zero-crossing analysis of Lévy walks for real-time feature extraction: Composite signal analysis for strengthening the IoT against DDoS attacks

This paper compares the probability similarities between a cyberattack, the distributed denial-of-service, and the mathematical model of probability, Lévy walks. This comparison aims to explore the validity of Lévy walks as a model resembling the DDoS probability features. This research also presents a method, based on the Smirnov transform, for generating synthetic data with the statistical properties of Lévy-walks. This method for synthetic data generation can be utilized for generating arbitrary prescribed probability density functions (pdf). The Smirnov transform is used to solve a cybersecurity engineering problem associated with Internet traffic. The synthetic Lévy-walk process is intertwined with sections of other distinct characteristics (uniform noise, Gaussian noise, and an ordinary sinusoid) to create a composite signal, which is then analyzed with zero-crossing rate (ZCR) within a varying-size window. This paper shows that it is possible to identify the distinct sections present in the composite signal through ZCR. The differentiation of these sections shows an increasing ZCR value as the section under analysis exhibits a higher activity or complexity (from the sinusoid, to a synthetic Lévy-walk process, and uniform and Gaussian noise, respectively). The advantages of the ZCR computation directly in the time-domain are appealing for real-time implementations. The varying window in the ZCR produces more defined values as the window size increases. The changing world of security systems is deeply considered, in an approach for its improvement. This as our society is highly dependent on electronically interconnected systems-of-systems demanding operational robustness and security. The approach proposed for providing a higher degree of security aiming to the development of cognitive security systems.
Yeast Growth Plasticity Is Regulated by Environment-Specific Multi-QTL Interactions

For a unicellular, non-motile organism like Saccharomyces cerevisiae, carbon sources act both as nutrients and as signaling molecules and consequently affect various fitness parameters including growth. It is therefore advantageous for yeast strains to adapt their growth to carbon source variation. The ability of a given genotype to manifest different phenotypes in varying environments is known as phenotypic plasticity. To identify quantitative trait loci (QTL) that drive plasticity in growth, two growth parameters (growth rate and biomass) were measured in a published dataset from meiotic recombinants of two genetically divergent yeast strains grown in different carbon sources. To identify QTL contributing to plasticity across pairs of environments, gene–environment interaction mapping was performed, which identified several QTL that have a differential effect across environments, some of which act antagonistically across pairs of environments. Multi-QTL analysis identified loci interacting with previously known growth affecting QTL as well as novel two-QTL interactions that affect growth. A QTL that had no significant independent effect was found to alter growth rate and biomass for several carbon sources through two-QTL interactions. Our study demonstrates that environment-specific epistatic interactions contribute to the growth plasticity in yeast. We propose that a targeted scan for epistatic interactions, such as the one described here, can help unravel mechanisms regulating phenotypic plasticity.
Neural Systems Underlying the Reappraisal of Personally Craved Foods

Craving of unhealthy food is a common target of self-regulation, but the neural systems underlying this process are understudied. In this study, participants used cognitive reappraisal to regulate their desire to consume idiosyncratically craved or not craved energy-dense foods, and neural activity during regulation was compared with each other and with the activity during passive viewing of energy-dense foods. Regulation of both food types elicited activation in classic top–down self-regulation regions including the dorsolateral prefrontal, inferior frontal, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices. This main effect of regulation was qualified by an interaction, such that activation in these regions was significantly greater during reappraisal of craved (versus not craved) foods and several regions, including the dorsolateral prefrontal, inferior frontal, medial frontal, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices, were uniquely active during regulation of personally craved foods. Body mass index significantly negatively correlated with regulation-related activation in the right dorsolateral PFC, thalamus, and bilateral dorsal ACC and with activity in nucleus accumbens during passive viewing of craved (vs. neutral, low-energy density) foods. These results suggest that several of the brain regions involved in the self-regulation of food craving are similar to other kinds of affective self-regulation and that others are sensitive to the self-relevance of the regulation target.
Mapping the Genes for Susceptibility and Response to Leishmania tropica in Mouse

Background L. tropica can cause both cutaneous and visceral leishmaniasis in humans. Although the L. tropica-induced cutaneous disease has been long known, its potential to visceralize in humans was recognized only recently. As nothing is known about the genetics of host responses to this infection and their clinical impact, we developed an informative animal model. We described previously that the recombinant congenic strain CcS-16 carrying 12.5% genes from the resistant parental strain STS/A and 87.5% genes from the susceptible strain BALB/c is more susceptible to L. tropica than BALB/c. We used these strains to map and functionally characterize the gene-loci regulating the immune responses and pathology. Methods We analyzed genetics of response to L. tropica in infected F2 hybrids between BALB/c×CcS-16. CcS-16 strain carries STS-derived segments on nine chromosomes. We genotyped these segments in the F2 hybrid mice and tested their linkage with pathological changes and systemic immune responses. Principal Findings We mapped 8 Ltr (Leishmania tropica response) loci. Four loci (Ltr2, Ltr3, Ltr6 and Ltr8) exhibit independent responses to L. tropica, while Ltr1, Ltr4, Ltr5 and Ltr7 were detected only in gene-gene interactions with other Ltr loci. Ltr3 exhibits the recently discovered phenomenon of transgenerational parental effect on parasite numbers in spleen. The most precise mapping (4.07 Mb) was achieved for Ltr1 (chr.2), which controls parasite numbers in lymph nodes. Five Ltr loci co-localize with loci controlling susceptibility to L. major, three are likely L. tropica specific. Individual Ltr loci affect different subsets of responses, exhibit organ specific effects and a separate control of parasite load and organ pathology. Conclusion We present the first identification of genetic loci controlling susceptibility to L. tropica. The different combinations of alleles controlling various symptoms of the disease likely co-determine different manifestations of disease induced by the same pathogen in individual mice.
Event recognition in personal photo collections using hierarchical model and multiple features

With the proliferation of digital cameras and mobile devices, people are taking many more photos than ever before. The explosive growth of personal photos leads to problems of photo organization and management. There is a growing need for tools to automatically manage photo collections. Recognizing events in photo collections is one efficient way to organize photos. The use of textual event labels can allow us to categorize and locate an event without browsing through an entire photo collection. Most existing research on this topic focuses on recognizing events from single photos and only a few studies have examined event recognition in personal photo collections. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical model to recognize events in personal photo collections using multiple features, including time, objects, and scenes. Since some events are more difficult to identify and categorize, ambiguous events require fine event classifiers, while the coarse categories of the events can be sufficiently organized with a coarse event classifier. We evaluate our coarse-to-fine hierarchical model on a real-world dataset consisting of personal photo collections, and our model achieves promising results.
Accelerated Evolution of the ASPM Gene Controlling Brain Size Begins Prior to Human Brain Expansion

Primary microcephaly (MCPH) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by global reduction in cerebral cortical volume. The microcephalic brain has a volume comparable to that of early hominids, raising the possibility that some MCPH genes may have been evolutionary targets in the expansion of the cerebral cortex in mammals and especially primates. Mutations in ASPM, which encodes the human homologue of a fly protein essential for spindle function, are the most common known cause of MCPH. Here we have isolated large genomic clones containing the complete ASPM gene, including promoter regions and introns, from chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and rhesus macaque by transformation-associated recombination cloning in yeast. We have sequenced these clones and show that whereas much of the sequence of ASPM is substantially conserved among primates, specific segments are subject to high Ka/Ks ratios (nonsynonymous/synonymous DNA changes) consistent with strong positive selection for evolutionary change. The ASPM gene sequence shows accelerated evolution in the African hominoid clade, and this precedes hominid brain expansion by several million years. Gorilla and human lineages show particularly accelerated evolution in the IQ domain of ASPM. Moreover, ASPM regions under positive selection in primates are also the most highly diverged regions between primates and nonprimate mammals. We report the first direct application of TAR cloning technology to the study of human evolution. Our data suggest that evolutionary selection of specific segments of the ASPM sequence strongly relates to differences in cerebral cortical size.
Quantitative multiplexed proteomics of Taenia solium cysts obtained from the skeletal muscle and central nervous system of pigs

In human and porcine cysticercosis caused by the tapeworm Taenia solium, the larval stage (cysts) can infest several tissues including the central nervous system (CNS) and the skeletal muscles (SM). The cyst’s proteomics changes associated with the tissue localization in the host tissues have been poorly studied. Quantitative multiplexed proteomics has the power to evaluate global proteome changes in response to different conditions. Here, using a TMT-multiplexed strategy we identified and quantified over 4,200 proteins in cysts obtained from the SM and CNS of pigs, of which 891 were host proteins. To our knowledge, this is the most extensive intermixing of host and parasite proteins reported for tapeworm infections.Several antigens in cysticercosis, i.e., GP50, paramyosin and a calcium-binding protein were enriched in skeletal muscle cysts. Our results suggested the occurrence of tissue-enriched antigen that could be useful in the improvement of the immunodiagnosis for cysticercosis. Using several algorithms for epitope detection, we selected 42 highly antigenic proteins enriched for each tissue localization of the cysts. Taking into account the fold changes and the antigen/epitope contents, we selected 10 proteins and produced synthetic peptides from the best epitopes. Nine peptides were recognized by serum antibodies of cysticercotic pigs, suggesting that those peptides are antigens. Mixtures of peptides derived from SM and CNS cysts yielded better results than mixtures of peptides derived from a single tissue location, however the identification of the ‘optimal’ tissue-enriched antigens remains to be discovered. Through machine learning technologies, we determined that a reliable immunodiagnostic test for porcine cysticercosis required at least five different antigenic determinants.
A novel distributed inter-cell interference coordination scheme based on projected subgradient and network flow optimization

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) scheme. The proposed scheme, which runs in polynomial time, finds a near-optimum dynamic resource partitioning that maximizes a proportional-fairness criterion in the entire network. The proposed scheme is based on primal-decomposition method, where the problem is divided into a master and multiple sub-problems. The master-problem is solved using projected-subgradient method while each of the sub-problems is solved using minimum-cost network flow optimization. Through extensive simulations of four IMT-advanced scenarios, we quantify the gains achieved using the proposed scheme. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves both high cell-edge throughput, that is comparable to frequency reuse 3, and high aggregate throughput, that is at least as good as the aggregate throughput achieved by frequency reuse 1.
Characteristics of a Hailstorm over the Andean La Paz Valley

Abstract. The iconic hailstorm and flash flood episode of 19 February 2002 over La Paz city is numerically investigated in this article. Large scale atmospheric circulation is dynamically downscaled in order to take into account the complex orography forcing and local features. Satellite observations suggests late morning shallow convection over the Altiplano that becomes deep convection in the early afternoon around complex orography. The control simulation captures well the cloud evolution and suggest a two-stage precipitation mechanism. First, early convection occurred around 1200 LST and originated from thermodynamic instability combined with lake breeze and orographic lifting. Rainfall discharge then generated cold pools. During the second stage, cold pools around complex orography were propagated by lake breeze and encountered the La Paz Valley breeze, triggering the deep convection near La Paz city around 1400 LST. We assess the importance of local features through numerical experiments, which include modification of orography, suppression of surface heat fluxes, changes of surface lake temperature and removal of the lake. We show the importance of orographic configuration as triggering mechanism for convection initiation and for mesoscale circulation, the role of lake temperature for frontal breeze and propagation of cold pools, and of surface heat fluxes for atmospheric instability. This study highlights the complex interaction between lakes, surface heating and orography that favour deep convection and hailstorm formation, which is especially relevant around the Titicaca lake region.
Automatic 3 D Face Extraction from Raw Scanned Triangle Mesh

Many state-of-the-art human face digitizing techniques or commercial 3D face scanners output dense facial triangle mesh surfaces. Most of these meshes contain some unwanted outliers, irregular boundaries, or some other extraneous parts, for instance hair, shoulders ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail: zhangly@nuaa.edu. cn, telephone: 86-25-84892570, fax: 86-25-84891501.
Syntactic Compression of Description Logics Terminologies

Description Logics based languages have emerged as the standard knowledge representation scheme for ontology's. Typically, an ontology formalizes a number of dependent and related concepts in a domain, encompassed as a terminology. Usually, such terminologies are manually defined, which may yield unnecessarily large and complex terminologies, with a number of redundant group of literals among concepts. Simplicity has always been seen as a hallmark of good models, as they lead to faster inference and easier maintenance, compared to complex models. However, it is a hard task to manually convert a large and complex terminology, sometimes with about a hundred concepts definitions, to a simpler one. In this paper, we present an automatic refinement method to compress terminologies. The method relies on ideas of sub tree isomorphism to convert a terminology into a simpler one without changing its semantics. Experimental results show that the proposed method successfully returns more compact terminologies while still maintaining the same set of individuals associated to a concept.
Optimal Regret Analysis of Thompson Sampling in Stochastic Multi-armed Bandit Problem with Multiple Plays

Up to now, we have assumed that all arms have distinct expectations. Here, we consider cases in which some arms have the same expectations. Without loss of generality, we assume μ1 ≥ μ2 ≥, . ,≥ μK . Let us call arms with a larger expectation than μL “strictly optimal” arms, arms with the same expectation as μL “marginal” arms, and arms with a smaller expectation than μL “strictly suboptimal” arms. Each arm is either strictly optimal, marginal, or strictly suboptimal.
Scavenger receptor pathway for lipopolysaccharide binding to Kupffer and endothelial liver cells in vitro

We have investigated the interaction of Salmonella minnesota R595 lipopolysaccharide (ReLPS) depleted of Ca2+ and Mg2+ with both Kupffer and endothelial liver cells under serum-free conditions. Specific and saturable binding levels of 125I-ReLPS were similar in both types of cells with respect to divalent cation independence, susceptibility to proteases, and concanavalin A inhibition. By using partial structures of ReLPS, it was demonstrated that acidic 3-deoxy-D-manno-octulosonic acid residues and phosphoryl groups on lipid A are of primary importance in ReLPS binding. The role of ionic interactions in LPS recognition by the cells was further confirmed by susceptibility of the binding to competitive inhibition by polyanions. Both ReLPS and ReLPS partial structures inhibited the specific cellular binding of acetylated low-density lipoprotein (Ac-LDL) by Kupffer cells and Ac-LDL- and formaldehyde-treated albumin by endothelial cells whose cellular accumulation is mediated by a different type(s) of scavenger receptor(s). In contrast, 125I-ReLPS binding to Kupffer and endothelial cells was not competed by Ac-LDL or formaldehyde-treated albumin. Our results indicate the scavenger pathway of LPS uptake by Kupffer and endothelial cells and the primary role of LPS anionic properties in this process.
Severe congenital mitral stenosis in infants.

BACKGROUND Despite current medical and surgical therapy, infants with symptomatic congenital mitral stenosis (CMS) continue to have high rates of morbidity and mortality. Catheter balloon dilation has been successful in relieving symptoms in a few older children with CMS but has not been evaluated in infants. METHODS AND RESULTS We reviewed the records of 85 infants with CMS to assess severity of CMS, associated cardiac lesions, echocardiographic morphological appearance of the mitral valve, treatment, and outcome. There were five valve morphologies identified: "typical" hypoplastic mitral valve with symmetric papillary muscles (SYMM, 52%), supravalvar mitral ring (SVMR, 20%), double-orifice mitral valve (DOMV, 11%), hypoplastic mitral valve with asymmetric papillary muscles (ASYMM, 8%), and parachute mitral valve (PARA, 8%). Of the 85 infants, 31 (36%) were severely symptomatic, requiring intervention within the first 2 years. Balloon dilation was performed in 18 infants (age, 8.7 +/- 5.7 months; weight, 5.9 +/- 1.9 kg) and valve surgery in 13 (age, 10.9 +/- 5.9 months; weight, 6.7 +/- 2.1 kg). Balloon dilation decreased the peak transmitral gradient (LAa-LVED) > 30% in 15 of 18 initial attempts, from 20.3 +/- 8.2 to 10.9 +/- 4.9 mm Hg (P < .001), and the mitral valve area increased from 0.7 +/- 0.3 to 1.0 +/- 0.5 cm2/M2 (n = 10, P = .01). No infants died during the initial balloon dilation, although 2 of 3 died during a repeat procedure for restenosis. Other complications included significant mitral regurgitation in 7 of 18 patients (39%), 4 of whom had SVMR. Of the 18 infants, 8 (44%) had persistent symptomatic improvement at a mean follow-up of 14 months (range, 2 to 32 months). The 2-year survival after balloon dilation was 70%; 40% remained free of repeat intervention. Mitral valve surgery in 13 infants consisted of SVMR resections in 7, mitral valve replacements in 4, and LA-to-LV aortic valved homografts in 2. The operative mortality was 30%. Sustained improvement occurred in 8 (6 with SVMR) at 11 to 62 months of follow-up (mean, 30 months), with a 2-year survival of 60%. CONCLUSIONS Infants with severe CMS have 2-year mortality rates approaching 40% regardless of treatment modality. Balloon dilation significantly reduces the transmitral gradient in the majority, but symptomatic improvement persists in only 40%. Procedure-related mortality was associated with repeat balloon dilation in patients with left ventricular hypoplasia. Balloon dilation of "typical" CMS can provide symptomatic relief in many infants, allowing postponement of valve replacement, although infants with SVMR do better with surgical management.
Delay-dependent exponential stabilization of nonlinear systems with time delay via fuzzy impulsive control

This paper addresses the problem of stabilizing a class of nonlinear systems with time delay using a fuzzy impulsive controller. The class of nonlinear systems with time delay considered is described by a Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model. We develop a systematic technique based on Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional method to obtain delay-dependent fuzzy impulsive controller which guarantees the fuzzy impulsive control system with delay to be exponentially stable. Two simulation examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed fuzzy impulsive controller.