Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Collaborative quickest detection in adhoc networks with delay constraint - part I: Two-node network

Collaborative quickest detection is used to detect a certain distribution change in an adhoc network, in which there is no data fusion center and local decisions need to be made at all nodes. A two-thread cumulative sum (CUSUM) algorithm is proposed for a simple two-node network. The corresponding performance, particularly the performance gain induced by collaboration, is analyzed. Numerical results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis.
Children ’ s Comprehension in Mandarin Normal Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Sentences

The present study mainly examines the cleft acquisition of Mandarin children. In our study, we observed learners' performances from four main perspectives, i.e., syntactic complexity effects, cleft types, age effects and developmental effects. The results of this study gave support that syntactic construction was an important factor affecting children's language acquisition. Also, different cleft types affected children's language performances. From this study, it was also evident that children's performances improved as they grow older. In the end, we attested that children went through three stages developmental sequences to acquire Mandarin cleft sentences.
A feature selection and feature fusion combination method for speaker-independent speech emotion recognition

To enhance the recognition rate of speaker independent speech emotion recognition, a feature selection and feature fusion combination method based on multiple kernel learning is presented. Firstly, multiple kernel learning is used to obtain sparse feature subsets. The features selected at least n times are recombined into another subset named n-subset. The optimal n is determined by 10 cross-validation experiments. Secondly, feature fusion is made at the kernel level. Not only each kind of feature is associated with a kernel, but also the full feature set is associated with a kernel which is not considered in the previous studies. All of the kernels are added together to obtain a combination kernel. The final recognition rate for 7 kinds of emotions on Berlin Database is 83.10%, which outperforms state-of-the-art results and shows the effectiveness of our method. It is also proved that MFCCs play a crucial role in speech emotion recognition.
Intelligent Agents for Distance Learning

Distance learning involves a lot of work of human assistants. These assistants need to be connected for answering student doubts and questions. Intelligent agents can do part of this repe- titive work because they can observe students interacting with educational courses, detect learning troubles of these students, and then suggest them some way for overcoming those troubles. How- ever, a design problem appears with this promised possibility: how to connect educational applica- tions with these agents. This paper presents a solution to this problem, in which both the capture of student's intentions and agent intervention for helping students are specified. These two archi- tectural design points are defined as connection points. The first connection point is named student intentions. Student intentions define situations in which agents might help. This connection point depends on the user interface of the educational application that students are using; the agent needs to know the gestures that students could do for interpreting their intentions. The second connection point is named agent interventions. Agent interventions define the context in which agent might as- sist and the type of help that might give, like a suggestion or a warning. This solution is introduced in the context of one specific application for distance learning named SAVER, which is used for
Efficient entity resolution for large heterogeneous information spaces

We have recently witnessed an enormous growth in the volume of structured and semi-structured data sets available on the Web. An important prerequisite for using and combining such data sets is the detection and merge of information that describes the same real-world entities, a task known as Entity Resolution. To make this quadratic task efficient, blocking techniques are typically employed. However, the high dynamics, loose schema binding, and heterogeneity of (semi-)structured data, impose new challenges to entity resolution. Existing blocking approaches become inapplicable because they rely on the homogeneity of the considered data and a-priory known schemata. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for entity resolution, scaling it up for large, noisy, and heterogeneous information spaces. It combines an attribute-agnostic mechanism for building blocks with intelligent block processing techniques that boost blocks with high expected utility, propagate knowledge about identified matches, and preempt the resolution process when it gets too expensive. Our extensive evaluation on real-world, large, heterogeneous data sets verifies that the suggested approach is both effective and efficient.
Detection of Human Parechoviruses from Clinical Stool Samples in Aichi, Japan

ABSTRACT Between April 1999 and March 2008, a total of 4,976 stool specimens collected from patients with suspected viral infection through infectious agent surveillance in Aichi, Japan, were tested for the presence of human parechoviruses (HPeVs). We detected HPeVs in 110 samples by either cell culture, reverse transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR), or both. Serotyping either by neutralization test or by nucleotide sequence determination and phylogenetic analysis of the VP1 region and 5′ untranslated region (5′UTR) regions revealed that 63 were HPeV type 1 (HPeV-1), followed by 44 HPeV-3 strains, 2 HPeV-4 strains, and 1 HPeV-6 strain. The high nucleotide and amino acid sequence identities of the Japanese HPeV-3 isolates in 2006 to the strains previously reported from Canada and Netherlands confirmed the worldwide prevalence of HPeV-3 infection. Ninety-seven percent of the HPeV-positive patients were younger than 3 years, and 86.2% younger than 12 months. The clinical diagnoses of HPeV-positive patients were gastroenteritis, respiratory illness, febrile illness, exanthema, “hand, foot, and mouth disease,” aseptic meningitis, and herpangina. Among 49 HPeV-positive patients with gastroenteritis, 35 were positive with HPeV-1 and 12 with HPeV-3, and out of 25 with respiratory illness, 11 were positive with HPeV-1 and 14 with HPeV-3. HPeV-3 seemed to be an important etiological agent of respiratory infection of children. While HPeV-1 was detected predominantly during fall and winter, the majority of the HPeV-3 cases were detected during summer and fall. A different pattern of clinical manifestations as well as seasonality suggested that there are different mechanisms of pathogenesis between HPeV-1 and HPeV-3 infections.
Identification of yeast proteins necessary for cell-surface function of a potassium channel

Inwardly rectifying potassium (Kir) channels form gates in the cell membrane that regulate the flow of K+ ions into and out of the cell, thereby influencing the membrane potential and electrical signaling of many cell types, including neurons and cardiomyocytes. Kir-channel function depends on other cellular proteins that aid in the folding of channel subunits, assembly into tetrameric complexes, trafficking of quality-controlled channels to the plasma membrane, and regulation of channel activity at the cell surface. We used the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model system to identify proteins necessary for the functional expression of a mammalian Kir channel at the cell surface. A screen of 376 yeast strains, each lacking one nonessential protein localized to the early secretory pathway, identified seven deletion strains in which functional expression of the Kir channel at the plasma membrane was impaired. Six deletions were of genes with known functions in trafficking and lipid biosynthesis (sur4Δ, csg2Δ, erv14Δ, emp24Δ, erv25Δ, and bst1Δ), and one deletion was of an uncharacterized gene (yil039wΔ). We provide genetic and functional evidence that Yil039wp, a conserved, phosphoesterase domain-containing protein, which we named “trafficking of Emp24p/Erv25p-dependent cargo disrupted 1” (Ted1p), acts together with Emp24p/Erv25p in cargo exit from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). The seven yeast proteins identified in our screen likely impact Kir-channel functional expression at the level of vesicle budding from the ER and/or the local lipid environment at the plasma membrane.
Image Segmentation Using Hierarchical Merge Tree

This paper investigates one of the most fundamental computer vision problems: image segmentation. We propose a supervised hierarchical approach to object-independent image segmentation. Starting with oversegmenting superpixels, we use a tree structure to represent the hierarchy of region merging, by which we reduce the problem of segmenting image regions to finding a set of label assignment to tree nodes. We formulate the tree structure as a constrained conditional model to associate region merging with likelihoods predicted using an ensemble boundary classifier. Final segmentations can then be inferred by finding globally optimal solutions to the model efficiently. We also present an iterative training and testing algorithm that generates various tree structures and combines them to emphasize accurate boundaries by segmentation accumulation. Experiment results and comparisons with other recent methods on six public data sets demonstrate that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art region accuracy and is competitive in image segmentation without semantic priors.
The Stability of G6PD Is Affected by Mutations with Different Clinical Phenotypes

Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency is the most common enzyme deficiency worldwide, causing a wide spectrum of conditions with severity classified from the mildest (Class IV) to the most severe (Class I). To correlate mutation sites in the G6PD with the resulting phenotypes, we studied four naturally occurring G6PD variants: Yucatan, Nashville, Valladolid and Mexico City. For this purpose, we developed a successful over-expression method that constitutes an easier and more precise method for obtaining and characterizing these enzymes. The kcat (catalytic constant) of all the studied variants was lower than in the wild-type. The structural rigidity might be the cause and the most evident consequence of the mutations is their impact on protein stability and folding, as can be observed from the protein yield, the T50 (temperature where 50% of its original activity is retained) values, and differences on hydrophobic regions. The mutations corresponding to more severe phenotypes are related to the structural NADP+ region. This was clearly observed for the Classes III and II variants, which became more thermostable with increasing NADP+, whereas the Class I variants remained thermolabile. The mutations produce repulsive electric charges that, in the case of the Yucatan variant, promote increased disorder of the C-terminus and consequently affect the binding of NADP+, leading to enzyme instability.
Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray acceleration by relativistic blast waves

We consider the acceleration of charged particles at the ultrarelativistic shocks, with Lorentz factors Γs≫1 relative to the upstream medium, arising in relativistic fireball models of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). We show that for Fermi-type shock acceleration, particles initially isotropic in the upstream medium can gain a factor of order Γs2 in energy in the first shock-crossing cycle, but that the energy gain factor for subsequent shock-crossing cycles is only of order 2, because for realistic deflection processes particles do not have time to become isotropic upstream before recrossing the shock. We evaluate the maximum energy attainable and the efficiency of this process, and show that for a GRB fireball expanding into a typical interstellar medium, these exclude the production of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs), with energies in the range 1018.5--1020.5 eV, by the blast wave. However, we propose that in the context of neutron-star binaries as the progenitors of GRBs, relativistic ions from the pulsar-wind bubbles produced by these systems could be accelerated by the blast wave. We show that if the known binary pulsars are typical, the maximum energy, efficiency, and spectrum in this case can account for the observed population of UHECRs.
Is liver disease a threat to patients with metabolic disorders?

The association of metabolic disorders with liver disease is receiving increasing attention in the gastroenterological community. Cohort studies have shown that advanced liver disease may stem from metabolic disorders, via fatty liver, non‐alcoholic steatohepatitis, cryptogenic cirrhosis, and eventually hepatocellular carcinoma. In both obesity and diabetes, deaths from cirrhosis are higher than expected, mainly in subjects with no or moderate alcohol consumption, but high rates of fatty liver disease have been associated with all features of the metabolic syndrome. Also the risk of hepatocellular carcinoma is higher than normal, being dependent on body mass index (BMI) in obesity, and independent of age, BMI, gender and race in diabetes. Finally, metabolic liver disease may interact with hepatitis C virus infection, increasing the risk of steatosis and liver disease progression, as well as reducing the chances of an effective antiviral treatment. There is evidence that treatments aimed at reducing insulin resistance are also effective in improving liver histology. Although cardiovascular disease remains the major cause of increased morbidity and excess mortality in metabolic disorders, the risk of progressive liver disease should no longer be underestimated, being a threat to millions of people at risk in the present epidemics of obesity and diabetes, and therapeutic strategies need to be tested.
Dynamic Read Destructive Faults in Embedded-SRAMs: Analysis and March Test Solution

: This paper presents an analysis of dynamic faults in core-cell of SRAM memories. These faults are the consequence of resistive-open defects that appear more frequently in VDSM technologies. In particular, the study concentrates on those defects that generate dynamic Read Destructive Faults, dRDFs. In this paper, we demonstrate that read or write operations on a cell involve a stress on the other cells of the same word line. This stress, called Read Equivalent Stress (RES), has the same effect than a read operation. On this basis, we propose to modify the well known March C, which does not detect dRDFs, into a new version able to detect them. This is obtained by changing its addressing order with the purpose of producing the maximal number of RES. This modification does not change the complexity of the algorithm and its capability to detect the former target faults.
Cost-Effective Integration of RF-LDMOS Transistors in 0.13 μm CMOS Technology

A new cost-effective concept for RF-LDMOS transistors in a standard 0.13 μm CMOS technology without process modifications is demonstrated. For the integration of the devices only standard implants of the RF-CMOS process are used. The devices have gate length of 0.35 μm and share the 7nm gate oxide of the 3.3 V CMOS I/O devices. A breakdown voltage of 19 V and fT/fMAX values of 25GHz/55GHz, respectively are obtained.
Interface structure and strength in model dental resin composites

Water is known to initiate a tetragonal to monoclinic phase transformation in zirconia particles. Carbonates on the zirconia surface react with water molecules and hence reduces the transformation rate. This study investigates the possibility of inhibition of the reaction between surface carbonates and water in order to increase the transformation rate in the zirconia crystals. It was found possible to limit the reaction by reacting the surface carbonates with alcohols, a thiol and a primary amide prior to reaction with water. It was also concluded that diand trialcohols are able to stabilize the tetragonal phase, probably as a results of induced lattice strain.
A quantitative proteomic analysis of growth factor‐induced compositional changes in lipid rafts of human smooth muscle cells

Signals that promote proliferation and migration of smooth muscle cells (SMC) have been implicated in pathologic growth of hollow organs. Members of the platelet‐derived growth factor (PDGF) family, potent mitogens and motility factors for SMC, have been shown to signal through cholesterol‐enriched lipid rafts. We recently demonstrated that PDGF‐stimulated DNA synthesis in urinary tract SMC was dependent on the integrity of lipid rafts. Despite its known ability to rapidly alter discrete proteins within rafts, the effect of PDGF on overall raft protein composition is unknown. In this study, we employed isotope coded affinity tag (ICAT) analysis to evaluate PDGF‐induced protein changes in lipid rafts of primary culture human SMC. Following acute (i.e., 15 min) exposure of SMC to PDGF, 23 proteins increased in rafts >20%. In contrast, raft localization of only three proteins increased after 12 h of PDGF treatment. Among the proteins that increased at 15 min were the glycophosphatidylinositol‐anchored proteins Thy‐1, 5'‐nucleotidase, and CD55, the cytoskeletal proteins actin, actinin, tropomyosin‐3 and ‐4, and the endocytosis‐related proteins clathrin and β‐adaptin. In addition, eight Rho family members were localized to rafts by ICAT analysis. Collectively, these observations suggest a role for lipid rafts in regulation of PDGF‐stimulated changes in the cytoskeleton.
Identification, characterization and co-localization of label-retaining cell population in mouse endometrium with typical undifferentiated markers.

BACKGROUND The endometrium, lining of the uterus, is a highly active organ that is remodelled periodically during the lifespan. Different studies suggest the presence of an adult or progenitor stem cell (PSC) population in this tissue because of its cyclic regenerative capacity. METHODS In this study, we aim at identifying and localizing the putative PSC population in the murine uterus using the 5-bromo-2'-deoxyuridine (BrdU) labelling method to detect label-retaining cells (LRCs) that cycle slowly. Uteri from BrdU-treated mice were analysed via single and double immunohistochemistry to co-localize them with the markers of undifferentiation already described such as c-KIT and POU5F1 (also known as OCT-4). Finally, we confirmed the presence of the indicated markers at mRNA level. RESULTS We observed the presence and gradual decrease of LRCs in the endometrium during the lifespan of the mice. In adulthood, the LRC population decreased notably and remained in the lower region of the stroma in the murine endometrium. Some of the endometrial LRCs co-localized with c-KIT and POU5F1. PCR and nested-PCR confirmed the presence of these undifferentiated markers. CONCLUSIONS We demonstrated that the murine endometrium possesses LRCs with the features of a putative PSC population localized at the lower region of the stroma.
Développement de nouvelles stratégies de croissance pour réduire la densité de dislocations dans les monocristaux de diamant CVD.

H2/O2 plasma treatments offer advantages over other etching processes of diamond as a technique to prepare the substrate's surface prior to homoepitaxial CVD diamond growth particularly in the case of thick films. It allows removing surface defects induced by polishing, thus leading to an improved morphology and limiting the stress within the grown crystal. Nevertheless, this treatment induces surface roughness leading to dislocation formation when CVD growth is initiated. In this paper we combined H2/O2 plasma etching with smoother surface treatment such as RIE-ICP etching or Chemo-Mechanical Polishing and we showed a significant reduction in dislocation density of the thick CVD epitaxial layers.
Interactive Decision Support for Multiobjective COTS Selection

In the past decade component-based software engineering (CBSE) has gained considerable attention from both industry and the scientific community. Obviously, selecting the "best" combination of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components plays a critical role in CBSE. This task becomes demanding, as multiple objectives and constraints have to be taken into account. So far, the selection process has been tackled by such traditional techniques as the weighted scoring method or the analytical hierarchy process. This paper introduces a decision support approach that more properly addresses that challenge. The approach involves first determining (feasible) Pareto-efficient alternatives, then allowing decision makers to interactively explore the solution space until they find the most appealing solution. It not only works without extensive a priori preference information (such as criteria weights), it can also be easily integrated into existing COTS selection frameworks
Interventions to improve water quality for preventing diarrhoea: systematic review and meta-analysis

Objective To assess the effectiveness of interventions to improve the microbial quality of drinking water for preventing diarrhoea. Design Systematic review. Data sources Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group's trials register, CENTRAL, Medline, Embase, LILACS; hand searching; and correspondence with experts and relevant organisations. Study selection Randomised and quasirandomised controlled trials of interventions to improve the microbial quality of drinking water for preventing diarrhoea in adults and in children in settings with endemic disease. Data extraction Allocation concealment, blinding, losses to follow-up, type of intervention, outcome measures, and measures of effect. Pooled effect estimates were calculated within the appropriate subgroups. Data synthesis 33 reports from 21 countries documenting 42 comparisons were included. Variations in design, setting, and type and point of intervention, and variations in defining, assessing, calculating, and reporting outcomes limited the comparability of study results and pooling of results by meta-analysis. In general, interventions to improve the microbial quality of drinking water are effective in preventing diarrhoea. Effectiveness was not conditioned on the presence of improved water supplies or sanitation in the study setting and was not enhanced by combining the intervention with instructions on basic hygiene, a water storage vessel, or improved sanitation or water supplies—other common environmental interventions intended to prevent diarrhoea. Conclusion Interventions to improve water quality are generally effective for preventing diarrhoea in all ages and in under 5s. Significant heterogeneity among the trials suggests that the level of effectiveness may depend on a variety of conditions that research to date cannot fully explain.
Sample size requirements to control for stochastic variation in magnitude and location of allele‐sharing linkage statistics in affected sibling pairs

Typically, genome scans for complex disease have produced linkage peaks which have proved difficult to replicate in additional independent studies. Here we confirm that this may be due to the large variance in magnitude and position of the linkage statistics when maximized across a region. Simulations suggest that for genes of moderate effect (locus‐specific sibling relative risks λsin the range 1.23–1.39), sample sizes of less than 500 affected sib pairs will give unacceptably large standard errors in the magnitudes and locations of significant linkage results. For genes of small effect (λs≤ 1.13), sample sizes in the region of 1000–2000 pairs may be required to achieve consistency of results between different studies. These figures have important implications for our confidence in location estimates for disease genes obtained from linkage studies of modest size. In particular, collection of larger data sets and/or analysis strategies such as conditioning or narrowing the phenotype definition, in order to increase the relative effect size, may be required before embarking on positional cloning.