Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extended Report: The Implicit Calculus

Generic programming (GP) is an increasingly important trend in programming languages. Well-known GP mechanisms, such as type classes and the C++0x concepts proposal, usually combine two features: 1) a special type of interfaces; and 2) implicit instantiation of implementations of those interfaces. Scala implicits are a GP language mechanism, inspired by type classes, that break with the tradition of coupling implicit instantiation with a special type of interface. Instead, implicits provide only implicit instantiation, which is generalized to work for any types. This turns out to be quite powerful and useful to address many limitations that show up in other GP mechanisms. This paper synthesizes the key ideas of implicits formally in a minimal and general core calculus called the implicit calculus, and it shows how to build source languages supporting implicit instantiation on top of it. A novelty of the calculus is its support for partial resolution and higher-order rules (a feature that has been proposed before, but was never formalized or implemented). Ultimately, the implicit calculus provides a formal model of implicits, which can be used by language designers to study and inform implementations of similar mechanisms in their own languages.
Measurement system for noninvasive dynamic optical topography

We have developed a 24-channel simultaneous measurement system for optical topography that noninvasively obtains dynamic images of brain activity over a measurement area of 90 mm by 90 mm. To evaluate the system performance, we utilized a phantom containing a rotating absorber in a cylindrical scattering medium. In this system, eight incident and eight detecting optical fibers are arranged alternately at points of a square lattice on the phantom. The phantom is illuminated with light of two wavelengths (780 and 830 nm) from each incident fiber. Reflected light is received by the detecting fibers, each of which is connected to an avalanche photodiode. Multiple modulation and lock-in detection are used to enable highly sensitive measurement with negligible crosstalk (less than -50 dB). In the phantom measurement, we obtained topographic dynamic images of the absorber rotating in the medium with a temporal resolution of 0.5 s.
Evaluation of Fibrin-Based Interpenetrating Polymer Networks as Potential Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering

Interpenetrating polymer networks (IPNs) have gained great attention for a number of biomedical applications due to their improved properties compared to individual components alone. In this study, we investigated the capacity of newly-developed naturally-derived IPNs as potential biomaterials for tissue engineering. These IPNs combine the biologic properties of a fibrous fibrin network polymerized at the nanoscale and the mechanical stability of polyethylene oxide (PEO). First, we assessed their cytotoxicity in vitro on L929 fibroblasts. We further evaluated their biocompatibility ex vivo with a chick embryo organotypic culture model. Subcutaneous implantations of the matrices were subsequently conducted on nude mice to investigate their biocompatibility in vivo. Our preliminary data highlighted that our biomaterials were non-cytotoxic (viability above 90%). The organotypic culture showed that the IPN matrices induced higher cell adhesion (across all the explanted organ tissues) and migration (skin, intestine) than the control groups, suggesting the advantages of using a biomimetic, yet mechanically-reinforced IPN-based matrix. We observed no major inflammatory response up to 12 weeks post implantation. All together, these data suggest that these fibrin-based IPNs are promising biomaterials for tissue engineering.
Thrombocytopenia in Dengue: Interrelationship between Virus and the Imbalance between Coagulation and Fibrinolysis and Inflammatory Mediators

Dengue is an infectious disease caused by dengue virus (DENV). In general, dengue is a self-limiting acute febrile illness followed by a phase of critical defervescence, in which patients may improve or progress to a severe form. Severe illness is characterized by hemodynamic disturbances, increased vascular permeability, hypovolemia, hypotension, and shock. Thrombocytopenia and platelet dysfunction are common in both cases and are related to the clinical outcome. Different mechanisms have been hypothesized to explain DENV-associated thrombocytopenia, including the suppression of bone marrow and the peripheral destruction of platelets. Studies have shown DENV-infected hematopoietic progenitors or bone marrow stromal cells. Moreover, anti-platelet antibodies would be involved in peripheral platelet destruction as platelets interact with endothelial cells, immune cells, and/or DENV. It is not yet clear whether platelets play a role in the viral spread. Here, we focus on the mechanisms of thrombocytopenia and platelet dysfunction in DENV infection. Because platelets participate in the inflammatory and immune response by promoting cytokine, chemokine, and inflammatory mediator secretion, their relevance as “immune-like effector cells” will be discussed. Finally, an implication for platelets in plasma leakage will be also regarded, as thrombocytopenia is associated with clinical outcome and higher mortality.
Hardness and Second Phase Percentage of Ni-Ti-Hf Compounds After Heat Treatment at 700C

The Vickers hardness and second phase precipitation of three ternary intermetallic Ni-Ti-Hf compounds containing either 1, 3 or 5 at. % Hf were compared to 60-Nitinol (55 at.% Ni - 45 at.% Ti). Heat treatment either at 700 C or with a subsequent aging step, hardened the 3 and 5 at. % Hf-containing ternaries to approximately 620 HV (56 HRC). Heat treatment increased the hardness of the 1 at. % Hf compound by more than 25 percent. Average hardness of the 3 and 5 at. % Hf ternaries, though higher than that of the binary Ni-Ti or the Ni-Ti-Hf compound containing 1 at. % Hf, appeared to be fairly insensitive to the different heat treatments. There was a drastic reduction of fatigue-enhancing second phase precipitates for the 5 at. % Hf ternaries compared to the other compounds. These results should guide materials selection for development of aerospace componentry.
Investing in Foreign Currency is like Betting on your Intertemporal Marginal Rate of Substitution (joint with Adrien Verdelhan, BU, forthcoming in Papers and Proceedings JEEA)

Investors earn positive excess returns on high interest rate foreign discount bonds, because these currencies appreciate on average. Lustig and Verdelhan (2005) show that investing in high interest rate foreign discount bonds exposes them to more aggregate consumption risk, while low interest rate foreign bonds provide a hedge. This paper provides a simple model that replicates these facts. Investing in foreign currency is like betting on the difference between your own intertemporal marginal rate of substitution (IMRS) and your neighbor’s IMRS. These bets are very risky if your neighbor’s IMRS is not correlated with yours, but they provide a hedge when his IMRS is highly correlated and more volatile. If the foreign neighbors that face low interest rates also have more volatile and correlated IMRS, that accounts for the spread in excess returns in the data. (JEL: F31, G12)
Projected Changes to the Southern Hemisphere Ocean and Sea Ice in the IPCC AR4 Climate Models

Abstract Fidelity and projected changes in the climate models, used for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), are assessed with regard to the Southern Hemisphere extratropical ocean and sea ice systems. While individual models span different physical parameterizations and resolutions, a major component of intermodel variability results from surface wind differences. Projected changes to the surface wind field are also central in modifying future extratropical circulation and internal properties. A robust southward shift of the circumpolar current and subtropical gyres is projected, with a strong spinup of the Atlantic gyre. An associated increase in the core strength of the circumpolar circulation is evident; however, this does not translate into robust increases in Drake Passage transport. While an overarching oceanic warming is projected, the circulation-driven poleward shift of the temperature field explains much of the midlatitude warming pattern. The eff.
Hybrid Neuro and Rule-Based Part of Speech Taggers

A hybrid system for tagging part of speech is described that consists of a neuro tagger and a rule-based corrector. The neuro tagger is an initial-state annotator that uses different lengths of context based on longest context priority. Its inputs are weighted by information gains that are obtained by information maximization. The rule-based corrector is constructed by a set of transformation rules to make up for the shortcomings of the neuro tagger. Computer experiments show that almost 20% of the errors made by the neuro tagger are corrected by these transformation rules, so that the hybrid system can reach an accuracy of 95.5% counting only the ambiguous words and 99.1% counting all words when a small Thai corpus with 22,311 ambiguous words is used for training. This accuracy is far higher than that using an HMM and is also higher than that using a rule-based model.
Arbitrage and the Expectations Hypothesis

This paper shows that all traditional forms of the expectations hypothesis can be consistent with the absence of arbitrage if markets are incomplete. A key implication is that the validity of the expectations hypothesis is purely an empirical issue; the expectations hypothesis cannot be ruled out on a priori theoretical grounds. Copyright The American Finance Association 2000.
Anneal-Activated , Tunable , 68 MHz Micromechanical Filters

Tunable, two-pole micromechanical (μmechanical) filters for communications applications, each comprised of a network of interconnected clampedclamped and sliding-support μmechanical beams, are demonstrated with center frequencies from 50-68MHz and percent bandwidths less than 2%, all with insertion losses less than 9dB. The demonstrated 68MHz center frequency represents the highest frequency yet attained by a two-pole filter and was attained by a combination of dimensional scaling and the introduction of two key design features: (1) electrodes allowing in situ localized annealing of devices to enhance resonator Q’s, and thus, minimize filter loss; and (2) additional electrodes flanking the input and output allowing voltage-controlled tuning of each individual resonator frequency to correct for increased process variations in this scaled technology.
Phenotypic commonalities in familial and sporadic Parkinson disease.

BACKGROUND Parkinson disease (PD) is a clinically well-documented neurodegenerative disorder. However, the mechanism or mechanisms of its phenotypic expressions are still unknown. OBJECTIVE To compare phenotypes by examining demographic and clinical features of patients with familial PD and sporadic PD and with or without a family history of PD. DESIGN Historical review of patients with sporadic PD in clinic-based samples and individual patients diagnosed with PD from families whose linkage to mutations or loci has been identified. SETTING Movement disorder clinic in a referral center. PATIENTS A total of 1277 patients with sporadic PD and 40 patients with familial PD. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Clinical features, including distribution by sex, initial motor symptom, location of initial motor symptom, and frequency of asymmetric motor symptoms. RESULTS Despite different etiologic backgrounds, both familial and sporadic PD exhibited several interesting commonalities, including a higher incidence in men, tremor as the initial motor symptom (predominantly involving the upper extremities), and asymmetric parkinsonism during disease course. CONCLUSIONS The increased incidence of parkinsonism in men with familial PD suggests that the sex disparity is more likely the result of a protective effect against development of PD in women than of an increased risk in men that is associated with environmental factors. Phenotypic similarity among familial and sporadic PD indicates that a similar topographic distribution of the nigrostriatal lesion exists in patients with either form of PD regardless of apparent genetic influence.
Production job scheduling for parallel shared memory systems

This paper addresses open job scheduling questions for the challenge workloads that run on the large scale parallel systems at supercomputer centers. Simulation results for six recent one-month job traces from the NCSA Origin 2000 (O2K) system are used to evaluate (I) the experimentally tuned NCSA LSF* policy, (2) the FCFS-backfill policy, (3) the Priority-backfill policy with alternative priority functions and with limited pre-emption to provide immediate service to each arriving job, and (4) the spatial equipartitioning (EQspatial) policy with an optional modification to reduce the maximum waiting time for the largest jobs in the challenge workloads. Measurements on the O2K validate the simulation results for two of the policies. The priority-backfill policy with immediate service and a starvation-free priority measure that favors short jobs is shown to be the most promising if jobs cannot adapt to changing processor allocations at runtime, but EQspatial provides significantly better 95th percentile waiting time.
SAT-Solving: Performance Analysis of Survey Propagation and DPLL

The Boolean Satisfiability Problem (SAT) belongs to the class of NP-complete problems, meaning that there is no known deterministic algorithm that can solve an arbitrary problem instance in less than exponential time (parametrized on the length of the input). There is great industrial demand for solving SAT, motivating the need for algorithms which perform well. I present a comparison of two approaches for solving SAT instances: DPLL (an exact algorithm from classical computer science) and Survey Propagation (a probabilistic algorithm from statistical physics). The two algorithms were compared on randomly generated 3-SAT problems with varying clause to variable ratios.
Changing Emergence of Shigella Sero-Groups in Bangladesh: Observation from Four Different Diarrheal Disease Hospitals

Background Shigellosis continues to be a public health challenge for developing countries, including Bangladesh. The aim of the study is to demonstrate recent changes in Shigella sero-groups and their geographical diversity. Methods Data were extracted from data archive of four diarrheal disease surveillance systems. A 2% sub sample from urban Dhaka Hospital (2008–2011; n = 10,650), and 10% from urban Mirpur Treatment Centre (2009–2011; n = 3,585), were enrolled systematically; whereas, all patients coming from the Health and Demographic Surveillance System area in rural Matlab (2008–2011; n = 6,399) and rural Mirzapur (2010–2011; n = 2,812) were included irrespective of age, sex, and disease severity. A fresh stool specimen was collected for identification of Shigella spp. Of them, 315 (3%) were positive for Shigella in Dhaka, 490 (8%) from Matlab, 109 (3%) from Mirpur and 369 (13%) from Mirzapur and considered as analyzable sample size. Results Among all Shigella isolates regardless of age, significant decreases in percentage of S. flexneri over time was observed in Mirpur (55→29%; p value of χ2-for trend = 0.019) and Mirzapur (59→47%; p = 0.025). A non-significant decrease was also seen in Dhaka (58→48%), while in Matlab there was a non-significant increase (73→81%). Similar patterns were observed among under-5 children at all sites. Emergence of S. sonnei was found in Dhaka (8→25%; p<0.001) and Mirpur (10→33%; p = 0.015), whereas it decreased in Mirzapur (32→23%; p = 0.056). The emergence of S. boydii was seen in all ages in Mirzapur [(3→28%; p<0.001); (3→27%; p<0.001)]. On the other hand, we saw non-significant percent reductions in S. boydii in Dhaka [overall (25→16%); under-5 (16→9%)]. Decreasing rates of Shigella dysenteriae were observed in Matlab, Mirpur and Mirzapur; whereas, in Dhaka it remained unchanged. Conclusion and Significance Emergence of S. sonnei and S. boydii as important infectious diarrhea etiologies and variations in geographical diversity underscore the need for monitoring, with possible implications for vaccine development.
Research Progress of Landfill Leachate Treatment

The aim of our research was to find the better treatment progress for landfill leachate. It elaborated the source and the quality variation law with time change and harm to human body of the leachate. Listed all kinds of treatment methods, including physical, chemical, biological. Thought the development trends of landfill leachate treatment was the combination of multiple progress.
Brain tissue segmentation with the GKA method in MRI

A novel method will be proposed to automatically segment the tissue of brain in magnetic resonance (MR) images. The core idea behind this method is the mixed use of Gaussian mixture model and K-means Algorithm (GKA). In this paper, the brain tissue of MR images will be segmented into White Matter (WM), Gray Matter (GM) and Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) by adopting the GKA method. Both the classic Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) clustering algorithm and the classic K-means clustering algorithm have its own shortcomings when segmenting the brain tissue. In order to improve the accuracy of segment result, the GKA fusion method has been proposed to obtain the advantages of both GMM and K-means, which is based on the characteristics of brain tissue MR images. The experiments show that the novel method can achieve a better result.
Scaling Laws for the Welding Arc, Weld Penetration and Friction Stir Welding

Abstract This paper presents recent advances in the modeling of welding using scaling laws. Scaling laws based on the governing equations of transport phenomena provide closed form mathematical expressions that capture the essence of a welding process explicitly. The work focuses on the recent development of scaling laws for three distinct welding issues: characterization of the arc welding in GTAW, depth penetration in high current welding, and temperature and extent of shearing in FSW. These three processes involve multiple coupled physical phenomena, such that the determination of the dominant phenomena from the governing equations can involve up to several thousand iterations. For the arc diameter and the velocity of the plasma in the arc welding, a set of scaling laws will be presented and compared to numerical results for a variety of currents in argon and air. For depth penetration during high current arc welding, the corresponding scaling law will be compared to experiments in stainless steel, carbon steel, and two aluminum alloys. Finally, a set of scaling laws for the coupled thermomechanical problem of friction stir welding will be introduced and compared with published data. In all cases, the range of validity of the scaling laws will be established based on a rigorous description of the limits of the asymptotic regimes.
Aquaporin 5 Expression in Mouse Mammary Gland Cells Is Not Driven by Promoter Methylation

Several studies have revealed that aquaporins play a role in tumor progression and invasion. In breast carcinomas, high levels of aquaporin 5 (AQP5), a membrane protein involved in water transport, have been linked to increased cell proliferation and migration, thus facilitating tumor progression. Despite the potential role of AQP5 in mammary oncogenesis, the mechanisms controlling mammary AQP5 expression are poorly understood. In other tissues, AQP5 expression has been correlated with its promoter methylation, yet, very little is known about AQP5 promoter methylation in the mammary gland. In this work, we used the mouse mammary gland cell line EpH4, in which we controlled AQP5 expression via the steroid hormone dexamethasone (Dex) to further investigate mechanisms regulating AQP5 expression. In this system, we observed a rapid drop of AQP5 mRNA levels with a delay of several hours in AQP5 protein, suggesting transcriptional control of AQP5 levels. Yet, AQP5 expression was independent of its promoter methylation, or to the presence of negative glucocorticoid receptor elements (nGREs) in its imminent promoter region, but was rather influenced by the cell proliferative state or cell density. We conclude that AQP5 promoter methylation is not a universal mechanism for AQP5 regulation and varies on cell and tissue type.
Secure Tera-scale Data Crunching with a Small TCB

Outsourcing services to third-party providers comes with a high security cost—to fully trust the providers. Using trusted hardware can help, but current trusted execution environments do not adequately support services that process very large scale datasets. We present LAST-GT, a system that bridges this gap by supporting the execution of self-contained services over a large state, with a small and generic trusted computing base (TCB). LAST-GT uses widely deployed trusted hardware to guarantee integrity and verifiability of the execution on a remote platform, and it securely supplies data to the service through simple techniques based on virtual memory. As a result, LAST-GT is general and applicable to many scenarios such as computational genomics and databases, as we show in our experimental evaluation based on an implementation of LAST-GT on a secure hypervisor. We also describe a possible implementation on Intel SGX.
Interleukin-1β switches electrophysiological states of synovial fibroblasts.

The role of electrophysiological events in signal transduction of interleukin-1β (IL-1β) was investigated in rabbit synovial fibroblasts using the perforated-patch method. Aggregated synovial fibroblasts occurred in two different electrophysiological states having membrane potentials ( V m) of -63 ± 4 ( n = 71) and -27 ± 10 mV ( n = 55) (high and low V m, respectively). IL-1β affected the cells with high V m; it switched the state of the cell from high to low V m. This effect was strongly dependent on the external potential applied to the cell membrane. Low V m(-30 mV) alone without IL-1β did not switch the state of the cells. Thus a synergistic effect involving the cytokine and cell V m in switching the electrophysiological state of the cell was shown, indicating that electrophysiological changes are involved in signal transduction. Gap junctions between aggregated cells were necessary for the cells to have a high V m and to respond to IL-1β. Gap junction resistance between adjacent cells was estimated as 300 ± 100 MΩ. Our findings suggest that the electrophysiological behavior of synovial fibroblasts is tightly connected to a signaling or intracellular mediator system that is triggered by IL-1β.
Modular Multiprogramming∗

Object-based sequential programming has had a major impact on software engineering. However, object-based concurrent programming remains elusive as an effective programming tool. The class of applications that will be implemented on future high-bandwidth networks of processors will be significantly more ambitious than the current applications (which are mostly involved with transmissions of digital data and images), and object-based concurrent programming has the potential to simplify designs of such applications. This paper shows that many of the programming concepts developed for databases, object-oriented programming and designs of reactive systems can be unified into a compact model of concurrent programs that can serve as the foundation for designing these future applications.