Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ThinStreams: an architecture for multicasting layered video

Multicast is a common method for distributing audio and video over the Internet. Since receivers are heterogeneous in processing capability, network bandwidth, and requirements for video quality, a single multicast stream is usually insufficient. A common strategy is to use layered video coding with multiple multicast groups. In this scheme, a receiver adjusts its video quality by selecting the number of multicast groups, and thereby video layers, it receives. Implementing this scheme requires the receivers to decide when to join a new group or leave a subscribed group. This paper presents a new solution to the join/leave problem using ThinStreams. In ThinStreams, a single video layer is multicast over several multicast groups, each with identical bandwidth. ThinStreams separates the coding scheme (i.e., the video layers) from control (i.e., the multicast groups), helping to bound network oscillations caused by receivers joining and leaving high bandwidth multicast groups. This work evaluates the join/leave algorithms used in ThinStreams using simulations and preliminary experiments on the MBONE. It also addresses fairness among independent video broadcasts and shows how to prevent interference between them.
Chlordane and heptachlor.

Chlordane and heptachlor were considered together because of their close structural similarity and because technical-grade products each contain about 10–20% of the other compound. These substances were considered by previous working groups, in 1978 (IARC, 1979), 1987 (IARC, 1987) and 1990 (IARC, 1991). Since that time, new data have become available, and these have been incorporated into the monograph and taken into consideration in the present evaluation.
Chapter 2 Optimization of Pumps Driven by Magnetorheological Fluid 2

Micropumps have rapidly expanded microhydraulic systems into a wider range of applications, such as drug delivery, chemical analysis and biological sensing. Empirical research has shown that micropumps suffer most from their extremely low efficiency. To improve the efficiency of micropumps, we propose to employ electrorheological (ER) and magnetorheological (MR) fluids as the hydraulic fluids. This thesis presents two methods: one is a dynamic sealing method to be applied on current micro-scale gear pumps using MR fluids, and the other is a novel design method of micropumps using ER fluids. Using MR fluid with applied magnetic field as a substitute for industrial hydraulic fluids, magnetic chains are aligned within the channel. The parameters, such as magnetic field, viscosity and volume fraction of MR fluid can be balanced to provide optimal sealing performance. Darcy flow through porous media and Bingham flow in a curved channel with a rectangular cross section have been used to model the MR fluid flow exposed to certain magnetic field intensity. Static and dynamic magnetic sealing performance is investigated theoretically and experimentally, which is evaluated by Mason numbers and friction factor. To achieve a higher efficiency and faster dynamic response, a novel design for micropumps driven by ER fluid is demonstrated. Moving mechanical parts are eliminated by applying a periodic voltage gradient. The approach involves exerting electric forces on particles distributed within the fluid and exploiting drag or entrainment forces to drive flow. Variables are explored, such as the dimension and layout of the channel and electrodes. Experiments are also designed to observe the performance of the solid state pump. In addition, a method of characterizing the efficiency of chamber pump is introduced and applied on screw-chamber pump and solenoid-chamber pump with check valve and ER valve. Thesis Supervisor: Karl Iagnemma Title: Principal Research Scientist
Temperature estimation using ultrasonic spatial compound imaging

The feasibility of temperature estimation during high-intensity focused ultrasound therapy using pulse-echo diagnostic ultrasound data has been demonstrated. This method is based upon the measurement of thermally-induced modifications in backscattered RF echoes due to thermal expansion and local changes in the speed Of Sound. It has been shown that strong ripple artifacts due to the thermo-acoustic lens effect severely corrupt the temperature estimates behind the heated region. We propose here a new imaging technique that improves the temperature estimation behind the heated region and reduces the variance of the temperature estimates in the entire image. We replaced the conventional beamforming on transmit with multiple steered plane wave insonifications using several subapertures. A two-dimensional temperature map is estimated from axial displacement maps between consecutive RF images of identically steered plane wave insonifications. Temperature estimation is then improved by averaging the two-dimensional maps from the multiple steered plane wave insonifications. Experiments were conducted in a tissue-mimicking gelatin-based phantom and in fresh bovine liver.
Computing folding pathways between RNA secondary structures

Given an RNA sequence and two designated secondary structures A, B, we describe a new algorithm that computes a nearly optimal folding pathway from A to B. The algorithm, RNAtabupath, employs a tabu semi-greedy heuristic, known to be an effective search strategy in combinatorial optimization. Folding pathways, sometimes called routes or trajectories, are computed by RNAtabupath in a fraction of the time required by the barriers program of Vienna RNA Package. We benchmark RNAtabupath with other algorithms to compute low energy folding pathways between experimentally known structures of several conformational switches. The RNApathfinder web server, source code for algorithms to compute and analyze pathways and supplementary data are available at http://bioinformatics.bc. edu/clotelab/RNApathfinder.
Security in wireless sensor networks: issues and challenges

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is an emerging technology that shows great promise for various futuristic applications both for mass public and military. The sensing technology combined with processing power and wireless communication makes it lucrative for being exploited in abundance in future. The inclusion of wireless communication technology also incurs various types of security threats. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security related issues and challenges in wireless sensor networks. We identify the security threats, review proposed security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks. We also discuss the holistic view of security for ensuring layered and robust security in wireless sensor networks
Research Advances on Pathways of Nickel-Induced Apoptosis

High concentrations of nickel (Ni) are harmful to humans and animals. Ni targets a number of organs and produces multiple toxic effects. Apoptosis is important in Ni-induced toxicity of the kidneys, liver, nerves, and immune system. Apoptotic pathways mediated by reactive oxygen species (ROS), mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum (ER), Fas, and c-Myc participate in Ni-induced cell apoptosis. However, the exact mechanism of apoptosis caused by Ni is still unclear. Understanding the mechanism of Ni-induced apoptosis may help in designing measures to prevent Ni toxicity.
AnonCall: Making Anonymous Cellular Phone Calls

The threat of mass surveillance and the need for privacy have become mainstream recently. Most of the anonymity schemes have focused on Internet privacy. We propose an anonymity scheme for cellular phone calls. The cellular phones form an ad-hoc network relaying phone conversations through direct wifi connections. A proof-of-concept implementation on an Android smartphone is completed and shown to work with minimal delay in communications.
THE PHOTOECCENTRIC EFFECT AND PROTO-HOT JUPITERS. III. A PAUCITY OF PROTO-HOT JUPITERS ON SUPER-ECCENTRIC ORBITS

Gas giant planets orbiting within 0.1 AU of their host stars are unlikely to have formed in situ and are evidence for planetary migration. It is debated whether the typical hot Jupiter smoothly migrated inward from its formation location through the proto-planetary disk, or was perturbed by another body onto a highly eccentric orbit, which tidal dissipation subsequently shrank and circularized during close stellar passages. Socrates and collaborators predicted that the latter model should produce a population of super-eccentric proto-hot Jupiters readily observable by Kepler. We find a paucity of such planets in the Kepler sample, which is inconsistent with the theoretical prediction with 96.9% confidence. Observational effects are unlikely to explain this discrepancy. We find that the fraction of hot Jupiters with an orbital period P > 3 days produced by the star–planet Kozai mechanism does not exceed (at two-sigma) 44%. Our results may indicate that disk migration is the dominant channel for producing hot Jupiters with P > 3 days. Alternatively, the typical hot Jupiter may have been perturbed to a high eccentricity by interactions with a planetary rather than stellar companion, and began tidal circularization much interior to 1 AU after multiple scatterings. A final alternative is that early in the tidal circularization process at high eccentricities tidal circularization occurs much more rapidly than later in the process at low eccentricities, although this is contrary to current tidal theories.
ASSIST: Automated Semantic Assistance for Translators

The problem we address in this paper is that of providing contextual examples of translation equivalents for words from the general lexicon using comparable corpora and semantic annotation that is uniform for the source and target languages. For a sentence, phrase or a query expression in the source language the tool detects the semantic type of the situation in question and gives examples of similar contexts from the target language corpus.
Mutations of the Yku80 C Terminus and Xrs2 FHA Domain Specifically Block Yeast Nonhomologous End Joining

ABSTRACT The nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) pathway of DNA double-strand break repair requires three protein complexes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae: MRX (Mre11-Rad50-Xrs2), Ku (Ku70-Ku80), and DNA ligase IV (Dnl4-Lif1-Nej1). Much is known about the interactions that mediate the formation of each complex, but little is known about how they act together during repair. A comprehensive yeast two-hybrid screen of the NHEJ factors of S. cerevisiae revealed all known interactions within the MRX, Ku, and DNA ligase IV complexes, as well as three additional, weaker interactions between Yku80-Dnl4, Xrs2-Lif1, and Mre11-Yku80. Individual and combined deletions of the Yku80 C terminus and the Xrs2 forkhead-associated (FHA) domain were designed based on the latter two-hybrid results. These deletions synergistically blocked NHEJ but not the telomere and recombination functions of Ku and MRX, confirming that these protein regions are functionally important specifically for NHEJ. Further mutational analysis of Yku80 identified a putative C-terminal amphipathic α-helix that is both required for its NHEJ function and strikingly similar to a DNA-dependent protein kinase interaction motif in human Ku80. These results identify a novel role in yeast NHEJ for the poorly characterized Ku80 C-terminal and Xrs2 FHA domains, and they suggest that redundant binding of DNA ligase IV facilitates completion of this DNA repair event.
Chronic low dose UV exposure and p53 mutation: Tilting the odds in early epidermal preneoplasia?

Abstract Purpose: This review addresses how mutation of the TP53 gene (p53) and ultraviolet light alter the behavior of normal progenitor cells in early epidermal preneoplasia. Conclusions: Cancer is thought to evolve from single mutant cells, which expand into clones and ultimately into tumors. While the mutations in malignant lesions have been studied intensively, less is known about the earliest stages of preneoplasia, and how environmental factors may contribute to drive expansion of mutant cell clones. Here we review the evidence that ultraviolet radiation not only creates new mutations but drives the exponential growth of the numerous p53 mutant clones found in chronically exposed epidermis. Published data is reconciled with a new paradigm of epidermal homeostasis which gives insights into the behavior of mutant cells. We also consider the reasons why so few mutant cells progress into tumors and discuss the implications of these findings for cancer prevention.
Dual domain watermarking for authentication and compression of cultural heritage images

This paper proposes an approach for the combined image authentication and compression of color images by making use of a digital watermarking and data hiding framework. The digital watermark is comprised of two components: a soft-authenticator watermark for authentication and tamper assessment of the given image, and a chrominance watermark employed to improve the efficiency of compression. The multipurpose watermark is designed by exploiting the orthogonality of various domains used for authentication, color decomposition and watermark insertion. The approach is implemented as a DCT-DWT dual domain algorithm and is applied for the protection and compression of cultural heritage imagery. Analysis is provided to characterize the behavior of the scheme under ideal conditions. Simulations and comparisons of the proposed approach with state-of-the-art existing work demonstrate the potential of the overall scheme.
Contextual Combinatorial Bandit and its Application on Diversified Online Recommendation

Recommender systems are faced with new challenges that are beyond traditional techniques. For example, most traditional techniques are based on similarity or overlap among existing data, however, there may not exist sufficient historical records for some new users to predict their preference, or users can hold diverse interest, but the similarity based methods may probably over-narrow it. To address the above challenges, we develop a principled approach called contextual combinatorial bandit in which a learning algorithm can dynamically identify diverse items that interest a new user. Specifically, each item is represented as a feature vector, and each user is represented as an unknown preference vector. On each of n rounds, the bandit algorithm sequentially selects a set of items according to the item-selection strategy that balances exploration and exploitation, and collects the user feedback on these selected items. A reward function is further designed to measure the quality (e.g. relevance or diversity) of the selected set based on observed feedback, and the goal of the algorithm is to maximize the total rewards of n rounds. The reward function only needs to satisfy two mild assumptions that is general enough to accommodate a large class of nonlinear functions. To solve this bandit problem, we provide algorithm that achieves Õ( √ n) regret after playing n rounds. Experiments conducted on real-wold movie recommendation dataset demonstrate that our approach can effectively address the above challenges and hence improve the performance of recommendation task. †State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology. Dept. of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Emails: qinlj09@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn, zxy-dcs@tsinghua.edu.cn. ‡Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T. , Hong Kong. Email: sychen@cse.cuhk. edu.hk.
Simultaneous Detection of Neisseria meningitidis, Haemophilus influenzae, and Streptococcus pneumoniae in Suspected Cases of Meningitis and Septicemia Using Real-Time PCR

ABSTRACT A single-tube 5′ nuclease multiplex PCR assay was developed on the ABI 7700 Sequence Detection System (TaqMan) for the detection of Neisseria meningitidis, Haemophilus influenzae, and Streptococcus pneumoniae from clinical samples of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), plasma, serum, and whole blood. Capsular transport (ctrA),capsulation (bexA), and pneumolysin (ply) gene targets specific for N. meningitidis, H. influenzae, and S. pneumoniae,respectively, were selected. Using sequence-specific fluorescent-dye-labeled probes and continuous real-time monitoring, accumulation of amplified product was measured. Sensitivity was assessed using clinical samples (CSF, serum, plasma, and whole blood) from culture-confirmed cases for the three organisms. The respective sensitivities (as percentages) for N. meningitidis, H. influenzae, and S. pneumoniaewere 88.4, 100, and 91.8. The primer sets were 100% specific for the selected culture isolates. The ctrAprimers amplified meningococcal serogroups A, B, C, 29E, W135, X, Y, and Z; the ply primers amplified pneumococcal serotypes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10A, 11A, 12, 14, 15B, 17F, 18C, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 31, and 33; and thebexA primers amplified H. influenzaetypes b and c. Coamplification of two target genes without a loss of sensitivity was demonstrated. The multiplex assay was then used to test a large number (n = 4,113) of culture-negative samples for the three pathogens. Cases of meningococcal, H. influenzae, and pneumococcal disease that had not previously been confirmed by culture were identified with this assay. The ctrA primer set used in the multiplex PCR was found to be more sensitive (P < 0.0001) than the ctrA primers that had been used for meningococcal PCR testing at that time.
Tumor-associated macrophages induce the expression of FOXQ1 to promote epithelial-mesenchymal transition and metastasis in gastric cancer cells

Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the most common malignancies, and is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Macrophages infiltrated in the tumor microenvironment (TME) called tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) are key orchestrators in TME. In GC, it has been reported that infiltration of TAMs is associated with epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT)-related proteins in human GC tissues, but the exactly mechanism has not been clarified. In the present study, we aimed to elucidate the underlying mechanism of TAMs on GC cells. THP-1 cells were used to investigate the effects of TAMs on GC cells. The effects of invasion and migration induced by coculture with TAMs were investigated by Transwell invasion and wound healing assays. The expression of EMT-related genes and forkhead box Q1 (FOXQ1) were examined in MKN45 and MKN74 cells after being co-cultured with TAMs. The density of TAMs and the expression of FOXQ1 were analyzed by immunohistochemistry in GC tissues. Our results revealed that, co-culture with TAMs promoted the invasion and migration of GC cells. Co-culture with TAMs induced EMT in GC cells. FOXQ1 is essential for TAM-induced EMT and metastasis in GC cells. Furthermore, silencing of FOXQ1 blocked the effect of TAM-enhanced EMT and metastasis of GC cells. High expression of CD68 was correlated with positive FOXQ1 expression (r=0.613; P<0.001) in clinical GC samples. Our data provided evidence that TAMs promote EMT, invasion and migration of GC cells via FOXQ1. Therefore, the TAM/FOXQ1 axis may represent a novel target for GC cells.
The Neuropeptide Pigment-Dispersing Factor Coordinates Pacemaker Interactions in the Drosophila Circadian System

In Drosophila, the neuropeptide pigment-dispersing factor (PDF) is required to maintain behavioral rhythms under constant conditions. To understand how PDF exerts its influence, we performed time-series immunostainings for the PERIOD protein in normal and pdf mutant flies over 9 d of constant conditions. Without pdf, pacemaker neurons that normally express PDF maintained two markers of rhythms: that of PERIOD nuclear translocation and its protein staining intensity. As a group, however, they displayed a gradual dispersion in their phasing of nuclear translocation. A separate group of non-PDF circadian pacemakers also maintained PERIOD nuclear translocation rhythms without pdf but exhibited altered phase and amplitude of PERIOD staining intensity. Therefore, pdf is not required to maintain circadian protein oscillations under constant conditions; however, it is required to coordinate the phase and amplitude of such rhythms among the diverse pacemakers. These observations begin to outline the hierarchy of circadian pacemaker circuitry in the Drosophila brain.
The Group I Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor Agonist (S)-3,5-Dihydroxyphenylglycine Induces a Novel Form of Depotentiation in the CA1 Region of the Hippocampus

The ability of activation of group I metabotropic glutamate receptor (mGluR) to induce depotentiation was investigated at Schaffer collateral–CA1 synapses of rat hippocampal slices. Brief bath application (5 min) of group I mGluR agonist (S)-3,5-dihydroxyphenylglycine (DHPG) (10 μm) induced a long-term depression of synaptic transmission or depotentiation (DEP) of previously established long-term potentiation (LTP), which was independent of NMDA or A1 adenosine receptor activation. This DHPG-DEP was observed when DHPG was delivered 3 min after LTP induction. However, when DHPG was applied at 10 or 30 min after LTP induction, significantly less depotentiation was found. DHPG-DEP (1) is reversible and has the ability to unsaturate LTP, (2) is synapse specific, (3) does not require concurrent synaptic stimulation, (4) is mechanistically distinct from NMDA receptor-dependent depotentiation, (5) requires mGluR5 activation, (6) requires rapamycin-sensitive mRNA translation signaling, (7) does not require phospholipase C or protein phosphatase activation, and (8) is not associated with a change in paired-pulse (PP) facilitation. In addition, the ability of DHPG to reverse LTP was mimicked by a long train of low-frequency (1 Hz/15 min) PP stimulation. Moreover, the expression of DHPG-DEP is associated with a reduction in the increase of the surface expression of AMPA receptors seen with LTP. These results suggest that the activation of mGluR5 and in turn the triggering of a protein synthesis-dependent internalization of synaptic AMPA receptors may contribute to the DHPG-DEP in the CA1 region of the hippocampus.
Hydra-mm: Learning Multiple Descriptions to Improve Classification Accuracy

For learning tasks with few examples, greater classification accuracy can be achieved by learning several concept descriptions for each class in the data and producing a classification that combines evidence from multiple descriptions. Stochastic (randomized) search can be used to generate many concept descriptions for each class. Here we use a tractable approximation to the optimal Bayesian method for combining evidence from multiple descriptions. Learning multiple descriptions is very useful when additional data is difficult to obtain. The primary result of this paper is that multiple concept descriptions are particularly helpful for improving accuracy in hypothesis spaces in which there are many equally good rules to learn. Another result is experimental evidence that learning multiple rule sets yields more accurate classifications than learning multiple rules for concepts containing many disjuncts.