Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Two-dimensional Approximation Coverage

The notion of approximation coverage is developed. It is applicable to first-order declarative programs (e.g., logic programs, constructive algebraic specifications, and attribute grammars) in two dimensions in a natural way. For an attribute grammar, for example, there is a syntactic dimension corresponding to the underlying context-free grammar, and there is also a semantic dimension corresponding to the attributes, conditions, and computations. The coverage notion is based on an abstract interpretation scheme. The paper also develops a generator algorithm for test sets achieving coverage. The coverage notion facilitates testing of declarative programs, and assessment of test sets. The test set generator facilitates automated testing. A language definition based on an attribute grammar specification is used as an illustrative example.
Antifreeze Peptides and Glycopeptides, and Their Derivatives: Potential Uses in Biotechnology

Antifreeze proteins (AFPs) and glycoproteins (AFGPs), collectively called AF(G)Ps, constitute a diverse class of proteins found in various Arctic and Antarctic fish, as well as in amphibians, plants, and insects. These compounds possess the ability to inhibit the formation of ice and are therefore essential to the survival of many marine teleost fishes that routinely encounter sub-zero temperatures. Owing to this property, AF(G)Ps have potential applications in many areas such as storage of cells or tissues at low temperature, ice slurries for refrigeration systems, and food storage. In contrast to AFGPs, which are composed of repeated tripeptide units (Ala-Ala-Thr)n with minor sequence variations, AFPs possess very different primary, secondary, and tertiary structures. The isolation and purification of AFGPs is laborious, costly, and often results in mixtures, making characterization difficult. Recent structural investigations into the mechanism by which linear and cyclic AFGPs inhibit ice crystallization have led to significant progress toward the synthesis and assessment of several synthetic mimics of AFGPs. This review article will summarize synthetic AFGP mimics as well as current challenges in designing compounds capable of mimicking AFGPs. It will also cover our recent efforts in exploring whether peptoid mimics can serve as structural and functional mimics of native AFGPs.
Effects of Artesunate on the Expressions of Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1, Osteopontin and C-Telopeptides of Type II Collagen in a Rat Model of Osteoarthritis

Objective: The study aims to explore the effects of artesunate on insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), Osteopontin (OPN), and C-telopeptides of type II collagen (CTX-II) in serum, synovial fluid (SF), and cartilage tissues of rats with osteoarthritis (OA). Methods: OA models were established. Normal model, artesunate, and Viatril-S groups (20 rats respectively) were set. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, IHC staining, and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction were conducted to calculate IGF-1, OPN, and CTX-II levels in serum, SF, and cartilage tissues of rats. The pathological changes in cartilage tissues were evaluated with Mankin score and Hematoxylin-Eosin staining. Results: Compared with the normal group, the model group showed increased IGF-1 level; decreased OPN, CTX-II levels in the serum and SF; and contrary results were seen in the cartilage tissues. A gradual ascending IGF-1 level and descending OPN and CTX-II levels existed in the serum and SF in the artesunate and Viatril-S groups after 2 weeks. The model group showed the most obvious pathological changes and highest Mankin score compared with the other groups. Higher IGF-1 level and lower OPN, CTX-II levels were exhibited in the cartilage tissue in the artesunate and Viatril-S groups but not in the model group. Conclusion: Artesunate and Viatril-S inhibit OA development by elevating IGF-1 level and reducing OPN and CTX-II levels.
How the Open-Source Development Model Can Improve Medical Software

The current system of proprietary software development for healthcare applications is inadequate to meet the needs of providers, administrators, and patients. A recent advance in the field of Internet programming is the release of large-scale software projects as "open-source". The advantages of this method of development include higher quality, lower cost, and increased adherence to established standards. There are several hurdles to be overcome before the healthcare field can take full advantage of this development model. The implementation of open-source development of medical software could greatly improve clinical and research software and elevate the academic standards of the field of medical informatics.
Fast critical sections via thread scheduling for FPGA-based multithreaded processors

As FPGA-based systems including soft processors become increasingly common, we are motivated to better understand the architectural trade-offs and improve the efficiency of these systems. Previous work has demonstrated that support for multithreading in soft processors can tolerate pipeline and I/O latencies as well as improve overall system throughput-however earlier work assumes an abundance of completely independent threads to execute. In this work we show that for real workloads, in particular packet processing applications, there is a large fraction of processor cycles wasted while awaiting the synchronization of shared data structures, limiting the benefits of a multithreaded design. We address this challenge by proposing a method of scheduling threads in hardware that allows the multithreaded pipeline to be more fully utilized without significant costs in area or frequency. We evaluate our technique relative to conventional multithreading using both simulation and a real implementation on a NetFPGA board, evaluating three deep-packet inspection applications that are threaded, synchronize, and share data structures, and show that overall packet throughput can be increased by 63%, 31%, and 41% for our three applications.
Competing values framework and knowledge management processes in Malaysian universities

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between knowledge management (KM) processes and organisational culture (OC) between the public and private higher education institutions in Malaysia. Based on the data collected from 594 academics in 3 public and 3 private universities in Malaysia, the empirical results reveal that more than 87% of the respondents have at least some knowledge of KM. The mean scores also suggest that the institutions have somewhat balanced culture which is conducive for KM implementation.All the KM processes exhibit significant positive correlations with all the OC types.The implications are discussed and recommendations are provided in light of the findings.
Movie segmentation into scenes and chapters using locally weighted bag of visual words

Movies segmentation into semantically correlated units is a quite tedious task due to "semantic gap". Low-level features do not provide useful information about the semantical correlation between shots and usually fail to detect scenes with constantly dynamic content. In the method we propose herein, local invariant descriptors are used to represent the key-frames of video shots and a visual vocabulary is created from these descriptors resulting to a visual words histogram representation (bag of visual words) for each shot. A key aspect of our method is that, based on an idea from text segmentation, the histograms of visual words corresponding to each shot are further smoothed temporally by taking into account the histograms of neighboring shots. In this way, valuable contextual information is preserved. The final scene and chapter boundaries are determined at the local maxima of the difference of successive smoothed histograms for low and high values of the smoothing parameter respectively. Numerical experiments indicate that our method provides high detection rates while preserving a good tradeoff between recall and precision.
GenProtEC: an updated and improved analysis of functions of Escherichia coli K-12 proteins

Using more than one approach to characterizing functions of unknown proteins, we now present in GenProtEC (http://genprotec.mbl.edu/) some level of function information for 87% of Escherichia coli K-12 proteins. A new approach that has yielded new information entails assigning content of structural domains and their functions to E.coli proteins. In addition, some earlier methods have been further refined to provide more meaningful data. The process of identifying and separating multimodular or fused proteins into component modules has been improved. As a result, groups of sequence-similar (paralogous) proteins have been refined. Experimental information from recent literature on previously unknown genes has been incorporated. We now use a rich system of characterizing cell roles which accents the fact that many proteins play more than one cellular role and therefore carry more than one designation from our detailed catalog of roles, MultiFun.
Personal Life-Cycle Financial Planning Decision Model

This paper derives the optimal consumption and portfolio choice pattern over the life-cycle for households facing uninsurable labor income risk, ruin risk, stochastic capital markets, and uncertain lifetime. Our model posits a dynamic utility maximized with CRRA and Epstein-Zin preferences that has access to liquid stocks, bonds, and illiquid life annuities. The empirical results of this research indicate that the annuity insurance commodity can hedge longevity risk. The investor would purchase the annuity insurance commodity, enhancing her own level of utility.
Turbo-codes and turbo-coded modulation in CDMA mobile radio systems for short frame transmission

Binary parallel concatenated recursive convolutional codes termed turbo-codes have received great attention due to their amazing error correcting capabilities. Nevertheless, reaching near Shannon limit performance is only possible with very large interleavers prohibiting an application in speech-transmission. This paper presents simulation results for a short-frame data transmission system based on DS-CDMA (direct-sequence code division multiple access) employing turbo-codes. Furthermore, the performance of a turbo-coded modulation scheme is investigated with respect to the typical conditions of DS-CDMA systems. As a result, it is shown that turbo-codes are no longer superior to classical convolutional codes if the same decoding costs are assumed. Additionally, simulation results illustrate that coded modulation schemes are not well suited for the application in CDMA systems. Finally, it is proved that an accurate channel estimation is necessary for allowing high coding gains.
60 GHz SSB SCM QPSK radio over fibre system based on a gain switched distributed feedback laser

A single sideband (SSB) sub carrier multiplexed (SCM) quadrature phase shift keyed (QPSK) 60 GHz radio over fibre transmission system employing a gain switched DFB laser for millimetre wave generation is demonstrated. Error free transmission of a 1.25 Gbaud/s QPSK signal over 25 km of standard single mode fibre (SSMF) is achieved with a low cost laser and low cost electronics. Our research demonstrates a cost effective mm-wave generation and transmission system which is baud rate/modulation format scalable.
Discovery of 2‐(2‐Benzoxazoyl amino)‐4‐Aryl‐5‐Cyanopyrimidine as Negative Allosteric Modulators (NAMs) of Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor 5 (mGlu5): From an Artificial Neural Network Virtual Screen to an In Vivo Tool Compound

Glutamate, the major excitatory neurotransmitter, functions in the brain via activation of ligand gated cation channels and also the eight subtypes of Class C G protein-coupled metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGlus). [1] Selective allosteric modulation of mGlu5 has been shown to have potential for treatment of a variety of neurological disorders[2,3] including anxiety disorders[4,5], Parkinson’s disease[6–8], Fragile X syndrome[9] and schizophrenia. [10–14] The majority of mGlu5 negative allosteric modulators (NAMs) developed to date either contain an alkyne moiety 1–4 or employ the alkyne topology as basis for ligand design,[15] as in 5–8 (Figure 1). Only recently have mGlu5 NAM chemotypes been identified, through high-throughput screening (HTS) campaigns, that are structurally unrelated to the classical acetylenic derivatives, such as 9–12 (Figure 1). [16] Due to the prevalence of ‘molecular switch‘phenomenon in MPEP related scaffolds, our interest focused on the discovery and development of novel mGlu5 NAM chemotypes, by both HTS and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) virtual screens.
Tree Deletion Set Has a Polynomial Kernel but No OPTO(1) Approximation

In the Tree Deletion Set problem the input is a graph G together with an integer k. The objective is to determine whether there exists a set S of at most k vertices such that G-S is a tree. The problem is NP-complete and even NP-hard to approximate within any factor of OPT^c for any constant c. In this paper we give a O(k^4) size kernel for the Tree Deletion Set problem. To the best of our knowledge our result is the first counterexample to the "conventional wisdom" that kernelization algorithms automatically provide approximation algorithms with approximation ratio close to the size of the kernel. An appealing feature of our kernelization algorithm is a new algebraic reduction rule that we use to handle the instances on which Tree Deletion Set is hard to approximate.
Short‐Term Traffic Speed Prediction for an Urban Corridor

Short‐term traffic speed prediction is one of the most critical components of an intelligent transportation system (ITS). The accurate and real‐time prediction of traffic speeds can support travellers’ route choices and traffic guidance/control. In this article, a support vector machine model (single‐step prediction model) composed of spatial and temporal parameters is proposed. Furthermore, a short‐term traffic speed prediction model is developed based on the single‐step prediction model. To test the accuracy of the proposed short‐term traffic speed prediction model, its application is illustrated using GPS data from taxis in Foshan city, China. The results indicate that the error of the short‐term traffic speed prediction varies from 3.31% to 15.35%. The support vector machine model with spatial‐temporal parameters exhibits good performance compared with an artificial neural network, a k‐nearest neighbor model, a historical data‐based model, and a moving average data‐based model.
Local approximation of pagerank and reverse pagerank

We consider the problem of approximating the PageRank of a target node using only local information provided by a link server. This problem was originally studied by Chen, Gan, and Suel (CIKM 2004), who presented an algorithm for tackling it. We prove that local approximation of PageRank, even to within modest approximation factors, is infeasible in the worst-case, as it requires probing the link server for Ω(n) nodes, where n is the size of the graph. The difficulty emanates from nodes of high in-degree and/or from slow convergence of the PageRank random walk. We show that when the graph has bounded in-degree and admits fast PageRank convergence, then local PageRank approximation can be done using a small number of queries. Unfortunately, natural graphs, such as the web graph, are abundant with high in-degree nodes, making this algorithm (or any other local approximation algorithm) too costly. On the other hand, reverse natural graphs tend to have low in-degree while maintaining fast PageRank convergence. It follows that calculating Reverse PageRank locally is frequently more feasible than computing PageRank locally. We demonstrate that Reverse PageRank is useful for several applications, including computation of hub scores for web pages, finding influencers in social networks, obtaining good seeds for crawling, and measurement of semantic relatedness between concepts in a taxonomy.
Motor-imagery analysis without the use of sensorimotor cortex signals

Using brain signals to produce Brain-Computer-Interaction based-devices provides a novel approach to human-computer-interaction. The applications of such a system are widespread and besides healthy people, such a system can also help to improve the lives of people who may have an impaired physical ability. In this paper we present an approach that is able to classify visual stimulus into brain-signals that can later be retrieved to perform pattern matching and recognition. The novelty of the approach is that it uses alternate scalp channels instead of the tradition Cz channels associated with motor control. The aim is to design a system that can be used for people with a damaged or lesioned sensorimotor cortex.
Characterisation and possible hazard of an atypical asbestiform sepiolite associated with aliphatic hydrocarbons from Sassello, Ligurian Apennines, Italy

Abstract An unusual occurrence of asbestiform sepiolite, filling veins in the antigorite serpentinites of the Voltri Unit exposed in a borrow pit (now reclaimed) in the Deiva forest, near Sassello, NW Italy, was investigated with an in-depth analytical approach aimed at studying its crystal-chemistry and structure and evaluating its possible hazards for human health. Optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (energy-dispersive spectroscopy mode) proved that these sepiolite fibres, apparently up to several cm long, are made up of bundles of thinner fibrils (or laths: average length > 100 µm; thickness ≈ 80 nm), with a composition consistent to that reported in the literature. The dehydration process was monitored through thermo-gravimetric analyses and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, performed at increasing T; the latter, in particular, showed the presence of moderate amounts of aliphatic hydrocarbons – not yet identified thoroughly – associated with the sample. The crystal structure refinement with the Rietveld method showed no relevant difference from the literature models, although a peculiar distribution of zeolitic H2O molecules was observed. The geological context suggests that the Sassello sepiolite precipitated from hydrothermal fluids, which were saturated in Mg and silica by the interaction of the host serpentinites. The same setting favoured formation of abiotic hydrocarbons, by means of the Fischer–Tropsch reaction. The extremely long and flexible fibrils (length/width aspect ratio >> 3) of this sepiolite specimen could represent a serious hazard for human health if air dispersed and inhaled; also, its atypical association with hydrocarbons (only reported once previously) might even favour further fragmentation in thinner units.
Optimization of Cardiac Metabolism in Heart Failure

The derangement of the cardiac energy substrate metabolism plays a key role in the pathogenesis of heart failure. The utilization of non-carbohydrate substrates, such as fatty acids, is the predominant metabolic pathway in the normal heart, because this provides the highest energy yield per molecule of substrate metabolized. In contrast, glucose becomes an important preferential substrate for metabolism and ATP generation under specific pathological conditions, because it can provide greater efficiency in producing high energy products per oxygen consumed compared to fatty acids. Manipulations that shift energy substrate utilization away from fatty acids toward glucose can improve the cardiac function and slow the progression of heart failure. However, insulin resistance, which is highly prevalent in the heart failure population, impedes this adaptive metabolic shift. Therefore, the acceleration of the glucose metabolism, along with the restoration of insulin sensitivity, would be the ideal metabolic therapy for heart failure. This review discusses the therapeutic potential of modifying substrate utilization to optimize cardiac metabolism in heart failure.
Design and optimization of double-gate SOI MOSFETs for low voltage low power circuits

With the growing use of portable and wireless electronic systems, design of high performance, low-voltage, low-power digital devices and circuits has become an important concern for VLSI applications. The double-gate (DG) fully-depleted (FD) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFET has an ideal subthreshold slope, high drive current and superb short channel effect immunity, which makes it very attractive in low-voltage, low-power, and high-performance CMOS designs. In this paper, by solving the Poisson equation, we propose a general model which has been verified by SOI-SPICE simulations. Based on this model, DGSOI MOSFETs are compared with conventional single gate FD SOI (SGSOI) MOSFETs, and the design and optimization of DGSOI MOSFETs in terms of circuit delay, power dissipation and power delay product are presented. In our analysis, we focus on FD DGSOI transistors without volume inversion, where the classical method is still valid.
Swellable hydrogel particles for controlled release pulmonary administration using propellant-driven metered dose inhalers.

BACKGROUND Swellable hydrogel microparticle-based pressurized metered dose inhaler (pMDI) formulations allow delivery of small respirable sized particles (1-5 microns), which swell upon the deposition in the deep lung and therefore can elude alveolar macrophage uptake via their larger geometric sizes. In addition, optimized surface chemistry may allow for sustained release of drug for multiple days. METHODS Drug-loaded PLGA nanoparticles encapsulated in PEG/chitosan (Cs) graft copolymer-based hydrogel microparticles were synthesized and characterized. Physical stability of dispersions within Hydrofluoroalkane propellant systems was assessed. The formulations were evaluated for aerosolization performance using a Next Generation Impactor. RESULTS Low density PEG/chitosan (Cs) graft copolymer-based hydrogel microparticles containing drug-loaded PLGA nanoparticles has an average diameter of 1-2 μm. These dispersions showed good compatibility with HFA227ea. Suspension stability was found to vary with the concentration of hydrogel particles. It was typically between 1 to 5 min and was found to be easily redispersible. Aerosolization studies showed fine particle fraction as high as 65% could be achieved. CONCLUSIONS These swellable hydrogel-based microparticle pMDI formulations could be used as potential delivery vehicles for nanoparticle therapeutics.
Significance-linked connected component analysis for very low bit-rate wavelet video coding

A novel hybrid wavelet video coding algorithm termed video significance-linked connected component analysis (VSLCCA) is developed for very low bit-rate applications. In the proposed VSLCCA codec, first, fine-tuned motion estimation based on the H.263 Recommendation is developed to reduce temporal redundancy, and exhaustive overlapped block motion compensation is utilized to ensure coherency in motion compensated error frames. Second, the wavelet transform is applied to each coherent motion compensated error frame to attain global energy compaction. Third, significant fields of wavelet-transformed error frames are organized and represented as significance-linked connected components so that both the within-subband clustering and the cross-scale dependency are exploited. Last, the horizontal and vertical components of motion vectors are encoded separately using adaptive arithmetic coding while significant wavelet coefficients are encoded in bit-plane order by using high order Markov source modeling and adaptive arithmetic coding. Experimental results on eight standard MPEG-4 test sequences show that for intraframe coding, on average the proposed codec exceeds H.263 and ZTE (zero-tree entropy) in peak signal-to-noise ratio by as much as 2.07 and 1.38 dB at 28 kbit/s, respectively. For entire sequence coding, VSLCCA is superior to H.263 and ZTE by 0.35 and 0.71 dB on average, respectively.